Rest Assured, Your Twitter Account Wasn't Hacked.

 

 

If you woke up to an email from Twitter warning that your account might have been compromised, rest easy. Twitter reported that they mistakenly emailed a mass amount of users urging them to change their passwords, when only a few accounts were actually in danger.

I was one of those users, and received this email this morning: "Twitter believes that your account may have been compromised by a website or service not associated with Twitter. We've reset your password to prevent others from accessing your account."

Yikes!

Luckily, no strange tweets from my handle. Best thing to do is be safe and change your password, even if you don't think your account was one of those actually targeted. But don't lose sleep over it! And, follow these tips from The Twitter Team for the safest tweeting experience!

• Always check that your browser's address bar is on a https://twitter.com website before entering your password. Fake scam sites often look just like Twitter, so check the URL before entering your login information!
• Don't use websites or services that only promise to get you lots of followers. These sites have been known to send spam updates and damage user accounts.
• Review your approved connections on your Applications page at https://twitter.com/settings/applications. If you see any applications that you don't recognize, click the Revoke Access button.

Be Happy! Keep Tweeting!

 

Ever Committed A Twitterror!?

Eeeek! 

That feeling you get when you just hit the Tweet button and you see a glaring mistake in your 140 characters.  Or when re-reading a previous tweet you realize it could be interpreted differently. Or you calm down after a knee-jerk reaction to a snarky tweet and you’ve already let it all out into the Twittersphere. 

Twitter moves FAST.  That's one of its great features.  Just think how Twitter is now a trusted place for real-time news.  But this fact also makes Twitter a huge liability, especially in moments of post-tweet panic. 

What next?  It’s a lose-lose situation.  Deleting the tweet looks sneaky and suspicious, plus the words can live on through screenshots taken by other users.  Leaving the tweet allows it to be retweeted and spread, even if you issue another tweet apologizing.  What’s a tweeter to do!?

Last week, interface designer Oliver Reichenstein proposed a solution to this problem; give tweeters the choice of marking their tweets as “error”.  The original tweet would be edited and the “errored” words would be crossed out - indicating that the tweeter acknowledges the error and has since corrected it, probably in a follow-up tweet. 

This is still just an idea, but social media blogs and journalists have seemed to like it.  The Twitter Design Team, however, hasn’t yet jumped on board.  They think it would only be used by journalists, and aren’t convinced that spending resources on a feature that’s not universally used is a smart choice. 

Have you seen or committed a Twitterror??  Would you want to point out your errors?  Or just let them die in the Twittersphere?