Jun 30, 2010

Twitter Apps : whom to trust ?

twitter-bird.pngThe huge success of Twitter and the major scale in which people are taking to it is being hailed as the next best thing in the Internet boom . In fact this very thing has now made searches go real time and news to get completely real time from the source . People are networking like never before , the young and the old alike are embracing twitter like it is bunch of hot cakes . All this is good and heartening .But like all the good things in the world , twitter also has a bunch of bad apples that are budding right under this and flourishing now . These are the so-called incredible twitter apps that claim to do a lot of nifty little things for you on twitter , from getting you followers to automatically looking up interesting news and tweeting it to your followers . But beware , all that glitters is not really gold ! You might actually be letting the proverbial cat out of the bag , quite literally there !


My intention is not meant to alarm the reader into unnecessary panic , but do be aware that when you use twitter to authorize any app for to do something for you , you may actually be inadvertently also allowing a marketer sitting somewhere to tweet for you . Don't believe it ? Look at the response from one of my friends on twitter ( my id was @sakthidharan back then)



I was amazed when I saw that in my @replies , I had no idea what tweet He was talking about ! I did not post anything about 300 followers a day at all ! And I am sure that it is one of the apps that I had authorized which was doing work on my behalf . I immediately went to my settings and unauthorized all the apps and authorized only the ones that I trusted . I then went and deleted the tweet from my timeline , I did not want any more of my followers/friends to think that I posted it .I also changed my twitter password for good measure . After all this I started writing this post .


So here are a few things to remember :



  1. Follower count is not everything in twitter , never fall for any tweet that gets you huge numbers of followers , they always have a catch

  2. Ok , a site will get you followers , but is it the followers that you want ?

  3. Be sure which application you are authorizing on twitter

  4. The Twitter OAUTH means that this thing can be you for all practical purposes

  5. Never even CLICK on shady sites that promise fancy things on twitter

  6. Never give out your twitter passwd unnecessarily , that is a big NO NO

  7. Keep changing your Twitter password frequently and like twitter says , be tricky !!

  8. Twitter also monitors accounts tweeting like this and sometimes they get locked out , be careful !

  9. Make an app earn your trust , inquire about it and then use it , don't just jump at it

  10. Be Ye Safe , on Twitter and reap the benefits of it




Technorati : , ,

Del.icio.us : , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment