Quote from: fivebells on October 23, 2014, 10:26:32 PM

I received the princely sum of 1 satoshi from this account recently. What is the purpose of these tiny transactions? 20000 satoshis for three such transactions to random addresses is going to add up pretty quickly, so it seems unlikely that they're intended to bloat the blockchain.

This is a bot sending spam in the transaction message. Every transaction can have a message associated with it. They randomly send a few satoshis to a collection of addresses. Perhaps other blockchain explorers can hide these dust transactions.
See these threads for more info:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=801364.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=474140.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=806173.0