Is Twitter Worth It?

Posted by Gabe on November 24, 2009 under Twitter, Twitter for Beginners | Read the First Comment

“Getting weird DMs? Probably due to phishing. Don’t go to the links sent in the DMs or give out your login & PW!”

“We’re still seeing phishing attempts; don’t click on strange links! And tell folks who DM you phishing links to reset their password.”

“Someone saying they’ve got 100s of Google Wave invites to give out & you’ve just got to RT & follow them to get one? It’s a scam!”

“General tip: don’t retweet a spammer’s message. You might get suspended accidentally.”

These are tweets randomly chosen from the @spam account on Twitter. (I highly recommend everyone follow this account by the way.)  If you have been reading my posts you will know that I am a huge Twitter advocate.  I’ve never had a bad word to say, at least until this post.  The spammers, scammers, porn bots, phishing scams and whatever else is lurking out there is a huge problem for Twitter in my estimation.  If these were isolated incidents that would be one thing. But they certainly are not. It is getting so bad now that I recently got an @reply by someone who had a pornographic avatar.  Now c’mon people – I have a nosy 11-year-old who is vists me in my home office all the time.  I also get several of these “phishing” DMs a day.  Maybe if you follow a hundred people or so you get fewer, but I bet you still get them.   About six months ago I clicked on one of these links and it corrupted my Twitter account.  I was locked out and someone else tweeted inanities from my profile. That was called the “Mikey” virus. The fix to get rid of it was complicated.  To discover the fix and to implement it took a few hours right when I needed Twitter the most. AAARGHH!!

How that virus was propagated was by clicking on someone’s profile who was infected.  When people discovered that my account was compromised, they all tweeted it. “Don’t click on @KidsAreHeroes – his account is infected!”  Not the publicity that I was seeking at the time.

So now I am smarter. I don’t click on links I don’t trust. I have even gone so far as to turn the switch on in Tweetdeck that allows you to preview the long URL that the short URL represents before you click on it.  Yes it’s an extra step but worth it.  I “report as spam” the obvious accounts, and unfollow many others - I find myself doing that a few times a day at least.  I am vigilant about approving which Twitter lists I appear on as a result of what happened two weeks ago.  When people send me a reply that is spam, it irks me so much that I block them, then have to restart Tweetdeck so that their spammy request doesn’t show on my screen.

My question then becomes, is all this worth it? Why should we put up with all this aggravation when it seems that Twitter has no ability to improve our experience?  For me, yes, it definitely is. I am still making true connections to people I never would have if it weren’t for Twitter.  But I can no longer blindly say that if you want to promote your business, or whatever, you should use it. I can now see where putting up with this kind of silliness does not warrant having a Twitter account for some.  I have a friend who recently moved to the Washington area. She is an amazing photographer who took pictures pro bono for us on Kids Are Heroes Day. She is not on Twitter.  I have recommended it to her highly and I plan to give her a quick hands-on class about it if she wants it.  But I must include this post when I discuss it with her.  Things like this never used to enter the conversation, but now they must.  Maybe it is because as you follow more people you get exposed to it more.

So, are there any steps we can take to minimize the impact of these miscreants?  My last post discussed the pros and cons of protecting your tweets.  I was also since asked to comment on the True Twit Validation tool.  This is a free service that will attempt to tell you by email if the person following you is human or a bot.  When you follow someone who is “protected” by this service, you get an automatic DM (direct message) that asks you to verify yourself by typing in some words via the Captcha service.  Once you do this they get an email stating that you passed their “human” test.  This service does not stop people from following you, it just acts as a tool to tell you if it thinks who is following you is human or not.  It is still up to you to deal with the follower as you normally would.  I have no strong opinions about this, other than the fact that it seems more trouble than it’s worth.  It’s pretty easy to spot a spammer when you check who is following you. I don’t need an email to sift through and match up with.  And I have heard from folks who think it’s insulting to get one of these DMs, and others who flat out say they will not bother with people who use the service.

I just treat all this nonsense as part of what I have to deal with to get the benefit from using Twitter.  At this point I am not jumping ship, but at the same time paying more attention to our Facebook fan page.  We’ve had a recent spike in new fans thanks to a few people who suggested the page to their friends. (Thanks so much to those of you who did that!)  Things seem much calmer on that platform, at least for now.

So what do you think? Would love to hear from people who follow less than 500 to hear if this is still an issue for them. Also love to hear solutions on how Twitter can fix the problems. I myself have always wondered why they don’t make the sign-up process a little more sophisticated so as to weed some of the spammers out from the get go.

Protect your Tweets?

Posted by Gabe on November 22, 2009 under Twitter, Twitter for Beginners | 15 Comments to Read

I saw a tweet posted by someone yesterday that prompted this post.  It read something along the lines of “C’mon people – protecting your tweets is so pretentious!”  The thing that made me laugh is that this guy was being followed by over 6000 people and he followed back only 15! Yes, fifteen people.  So who is the pretentious one?

Anyway, my personal view is that it is not at all pretentious to protect your tweets.  In fact, in some cases I highly recommend it.  @MM4Animals is my daughter’s Twitter account.  Not only do we protect her tweets, but we also discuss who she follows and who can follow her back.  It is usually limited to celebrities she knows and other people that I know.  I recommend to all the other hero parents of young ones that they protect their tweets.  In my mind it gives off a bad impression if these tweets are not protected as there are so many spammers, porn bots and other crazies on Twitter.

Now if you are an adult and want to protect your tweets here are some things to consider.  I would not recommend this action if you are trying to get lots of connections.  When I look at someone’s protected profile I cannot read their tweets, I can’t see what they tweet about, how often they tweet or when their last tweet was.  I usually follow people who are active on Twitter so I have a better chance to engage with them.  More often than not I do not send a request to follow – even when they follow me, because I have been given no reason to follow that person.  The up side about protecting your profile is that you greatly reduce the amount of spammers you have to deal with.  You are also raising the percentage of quality connections among your followers.  I do think you will miss out on some other ones though.

Another point of interest — I checked to see what happens with protected updates in conjunction with the new Twitter lists.  It works as it should, at least in my mind.  If you have protected updates and someone who is legitimately following you puts you on a list, the only people who will see your tweets from that list will be other people that follow you.  And you cannot be put on lists by people who are not following you.  That can be both good and bad. You have more control but will get less exposure.

So how do you protect your updates, anyway?  Go to your Settings page and scroll down to the bottom.  Check the “Protect my Tweets” box.  From now on you will see a list of wannabe followers that you can check out and either Accept or Deny before they can read your tweets.

Would love to hear other reasons why some of you protect your tweets! :)

Update 12/12/09: Since I have written this post I have discovered that many people have found it via Google. No, they weren’t searching for “thought provoking articles on Twitter”.  The real nature of the search was a bit more sinister in fact: “how to read unprotected tweets”.  Since this kept happening over and over I tried Googling the same phrase.  Sure enough, my post was there amid the other results.  And there were other posts that related more to the actual search.  Several methods were published in fact.  I was surprised to find that indeed there is at least one loophole to read protected tweets. I will not divulge how I did it here, but I came across a post, read it, found a person (who I was not following) whose tweets were protected and voila.  The tweets were there out in the open when I followed the directions.  Now if I did it this easily anyone else can too.  So what does this mean?  When you protect your tweets they are not fully protected. You will still have a level of privacy but don’t believe your tweets will be truly private until Twitter closes all the loopholes.