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Sheep Line Up in Perfect Twitter Formation
Today the sheeps were out in force showing the full power of the sheep. First we had sheep signing up to follow "the cold" of Kevin Rose. Let’s not even talk about how Kevin should be using his own service instead of pushing his competitor’s service and what it must be like to be Leah Culver when her boss is using the competition. The cold of Kevin has nearly 1,000 followers so far. I am looking forward to the Sarah Lacy’s "pocketbook thoughts" account.
The bigger sheep hearding happened with a new ranking service for Twitter called Twitterank. You had one sheep start the chain to the rest of the sheep and then we had a good sheep movement. Adam Ostrow has a good recap of the "sheep effect" in which he explains that the site may have been used to grab passwords for Twitter. The Twitterank developer now states he had no interest in stealing your passwords. Frankly these rating services for Twitter are plain stupid. As I’ve written before a real stats program would show retweeting, outbound links, profile views, ya’know useful stuff.
Louis Gray believes everyone is good and he isn’t afraid to give out his Twitter password to anyone! Louis does mention that even if a malicious hacker got access to his Twitter account, all they could do is make up bad things which would be removed once Louis calls Twitter CEO Evan Williams to remove the nasty tweets.
The bottom line is this – you need to think before you give out your password. Don’t assume that some "friend" on Twitter has verified the service. As Twitter grows in popularity, I can only imagine that more phishing schemes will start to show up. While today’s issue would have only grabbed your Twitter password, what if they grabbed something more important?
So what’s the lesson we have learned today sheeps? Don’t be a sheep! Use your noodle!
sheeps LOL – you should know by now allen that it is the sheeps that keep the social networks and twitter going
Guilty as charged on the TR thing…got the best of me, well, for a second. Someone said people were checking out of vanity, which I think might be for some…others, myself included were more curious than anything. Lesson learned, consider me spanked.
I went for TR as well (94.62 whatever that means) and the moment after I hit send the D’Oh moment happened and I changed my Twitter password.
Hallelujah!
It’s true in any aspect of life, offline as well as on. Sure, gain knowledge and expertise from the people that can offer it – but be yourself and stay true to yourself as well. My parents used to say you wouldn’t jump off a cliff if someone told you to, would you? Same principal applies here.
I seriously don’t think giving out your password to Twitterank is safe. What if Twitterank changes everyones’ password or logins and spams after they’ve got access to a ton of account. I’ll laugh my ass off if that happens.
Plus is it even worth taking the risk for a stupid rank? Me? I’ll pass.
Seriously, Allen! Giving out your password to a 3rd party site is something you should never get use to. Twitter needs to do something about this, and they can:
Twitter should release an official authentication scheme… you know, like Yahoo, MS Passport, Google, Facebook, many more. WIth those services, the user is required to go to the primary domain first (i.e. twitter.com) to give _permission_ to the 3rd party clients. No password is given up. Maybe you’ve done this Flickr at some point.
Right now tthere’s no oversight for these Twitter clients regarding password security, and encouraging users to give out their password like that is a dangerous thing for Twitter to let run rampant.
a) Release a login scheme
b) API ban-hammer on the clients that continue to prompt for usernames/passwords after a few months.
1st Tweets Chart… http://tweetip.us/lkvhi