Tuttle/Buttle
I forgot my own advice and pulled a Chuck Olsen last night. While eating enchiladas and waiting for my plane, I noticed Twitterank forcing itself into my pals’ twitterstreams. I glanced at it and made a joke about how it was all a scheme I concocted to gather passwords, make Twitter hurry the oAuth implementation they initiated in the first place, and, as lagniappe, mock everyone’s vanity. It seemed funny at the time. Or, at least, it seemed hypothetically funny to the half-dozen nerds I had in mind.
Tantek retweeted said link with his usual @t compacting of characters. This is all fine, we’re still enjoying a little nerd backchannel at this point. Then Oliver Marks decides to use T’s retweet as the basis of a story on ZDNet. Evidently some people grant ZDNet an aura of journalistic authority, and a meme was spawned. ‘Twitterank is a phishing scam’ spread almost as fast as the app built to hijack your network and replicate itself. Ryo Chijiiwa, who was just hacking up something while waiting for the next good thing to watch on Hulu, now had to defend himself against a joke people were taking for reals. Cluster. Sorry, dude.
By the time I got to Dallas to change planes, I got that people were a little crazy go nuts. Subsequent tweets seemed to do nothing to tamp anything down. By the time I got back to Louisiana I had people calling for the mob to ‘piss on’ me and inviting others to vent their frustration over my ‘hatefulness’. Nice. This must be what Heather Champ’s job is like.
A few things occur to me. One, that all our earnest ‘eat your peas’ jabber over the past year or so about the password anti-pattern hasn’t been nearly as effective as one misunderstanding that scared people into thinking they had been duped into giving out their passwords. Second, that even the people who are building the Web apps you know & love are handing out their passwords to an unknown service. If we, who know better, do this, how do we think more typical folks will act? Really, let’s fix this.
And then it also occurs to me that I have a completely different (outdated?) mental model for Twitter. I think of it as an everyday backchannel. My modes veer from whispering smart aleck things in the back of class to that last-bourbon-I-love-you-man moment of revelation. When Caroline McCarthy used a tweet of mine in a news article, I found it slightly unnerving. As though reporters were hanging out at our table and secretly copying down things to use later. This bit of goofiness last night has me mulling the merits of a locked down Twitter account accessible only to my friends. It’s a hassle to maintain, and I do like ‘meeting’ new people and sharing things. So, who knows? I tend to lean towards open, with all the costs and benefits that pertain. As the De Niro character says, “We’re all in this together.”
nota bene: don’t hand out your passwords like candy
