Archive for August, 2010
Twifficiency, OAuth and You
Aug 18th
Yesterday there was a little Twitter drama centred around a site created by a young web developer who goes by the name of @jamescun. He built a website that rates your efficiency on the social network Twitter. It’s one of those “Who’s the best at Twitter?” things that people want to be top of without really understanding, or caring, what that might actually mean. Twifficiency.com is a measure of ‘mechanical efficieny’, a ratio of how much you point in compared to how much you take out. This has the advantage that it’s not a simple measure of how much you tweet or how many followers you have, so, in theory at least, anyone can “win”. That’s great. It’s a good way to get people interested.
Following it’s wildfire-like spread across the UK side of Twitter many people came out in praise of it. As I understand it James has received web development job offers on the back of it. That’s pretty awesome. James clearly has some coding ability. What he did was admirable in many respects. Getting your website trending is the ambition of many Twitter API users.
However, that’s not to say what he did was right. The problem with the site, and the reason it spread so quickly, was that it tweeted from your account when you authorised it using Twitter’s OAuth API without telling you it was going to. That’s essentially spamming the user’s timeline. What’s more, it’s against the API terms and conditions (Part 2, “Principles”; Section 1 “Don’t surprise the user”; Point b “get the user’s permission before sending Tweets”). Had Twitter wanted to they could have revoked James’ API key on that point. James went on to correct that later in the day.
This highlights, for me, a basic problem with OAuth, and in particular the user’s understanding of what it means. Once you authorise a service using Twitter’s OAuth provider, the owner of that service has pretty much free reign over your Twitter account. The service can post tweets. The service can send Direct Messages. The service can add and remove followers. All this can be done relatively easily, and at any time after you authorise the service. Twitter’s OAuth tokens never expire. Did you sign up to a service a year ago, and forget about it? There is nothing stopping that service spamming your followers today except the owner’s morals.
To that end I tweeted that people who have used Twifficiency.com should pop into their Twitter.com account settings and revoke it’s access (my tweet). I think it hit a nerve. It was retweeted more than 600 times. It drew some attention from James’ admirers too. I’ve had lots of replies telling me that what James made wasn’t any danger, it wasn’t spamming, and that it’s perfectly safe. I know all that. I wasn’t accusing James of any nefarious intent. I was simply advocating good Twitter security – don’t give anyone access to your account without good reason, and if you do in order to give something a try, remember to revoke that access afterwards. Otherwise you might inadvertently hand your account over to someone who’s less upstanding than James.
As for my Twifficiency rating, it stands at 33%. To be honest, I would have thought it’d have been much, much lower.
The Twitter Effect
Aug 2nd
Earlier today I ran out of milk. It happens all too frequently. It’s not very exciting. But that doesn’t stop me tweeting about it. Anyone who follows me on Twitter will be acutely aware of the fact I tweet some incredibly inane rubbish.
Today though, someone was actually reading me tweets. Cravendale Milk, or more likely someone from their internet/PR/social media provider, has clearly set up some sort of listener to watch for people who mention milk, and then they reply with a little advert for Cravendale and a link to an online discount voucher. It’s quite an obvious thing to do but it’s fun and entertaining at the same time. I don’t imagine it requires much capital investment either.
As I was amused by the fact they replied I posted again, this time to tell my followers what they’d done. And that’s when Twitter’s networking effect started to become quite noticeable. There were retweets. And retweets of retweets. And retweets of retweets of retwe.. well, you get the idea. I thought it might be fun to do a little investigation to see just how far Cravendale’s offer of a 50p discount voucher might have spread.
The original message was reposted by 6 people, and then subsequently retweeted by a further 4 people. Adding together the number of follower than I have, plus the 6 people who retweeted me, and the 4 who retweeted from them, gets a total reach of 23,712 Twitter users. This ignores the number of people not following those 10 accounts directly but who would still have seen the tweet on Twitter lists that follow any of the accounts involved.
Of course, that doesn’t mean nearly 24,000 people saw Cravendale’s brand. A percentage of Twitter accounts are dead, some others aren’t viewed regularly, some people will have ignored the tweet, and so on. Conservatively though, it’s not unreasonable to think that Cravendale’s PR team managed to get their message out to several thousand people this morning for the cost of watching Twitter and replying to someone positively (and a 50p voucher).
I still need to go out and buy milk though. Someone should invent a way of delivering it by the internet.
5 (and a bit) Interesting Ideas
Aug 1st
There are millions of completely crazy ideas around the internet. Sites that you see and think “Really? REALLY?”. I’m not going to name names but I see them almost every day. Frequently they fade away without a trace, occasionally they grow to be incredibly successful, and I’m usually left scratching my head thinking “What did I miss?”.
What’s out there at the moment that’s piquing my interest?
Much as I hate blog posts that consist of lists, I’m going to sacrifice that notion to bring some of the ideas I’ve seen recently that I believe are doing great things (or will be doing great things in the future);
GetGlue – http://getglue.com/ – It’s check ins for media. Rather than checking in where you are, you check in what you’re consuming (tv, dvd, books, etc). It’s a great idea. The statistical profile data of who is doing what and how that relates to what other people are doing will be fascinating. There are rivals (Philo for example), but GetGlue seems to be the best one at the moment.
Zong – http://www.zong.com/ – It’s kind of like Paypal for mobile phones. To buy something you just use your phone number. I’ve been talking about the idea of a “walled garden” for mobile sites for a little while now, and I think this sort of service is exactly the kind of thing that needs to be in place before that can happen seriously. There’s another option in the form of Vento, but Zong appears to be a more mature product at this stage.
PlacePop – http://www.placepop.com/ – Another Foursquare “rival”, PlacePop have taken the idea of GPS enabled check in services and applied it more directly to businesses using a “virtual loyalty card” idea. If they can get traction from retailers I imagine they’ll be huge. Another FourSquare alternative that’s looking interesting is SCVNGR ( http://www.scvngr.com/ ). They’re taking the check in model and applying it to gaming allowing users to build games on top of their service rather like geocaching. It’s hard to see SCVNGR failing considering they’re backed by Google. I fully expect to see SCVNGR games appearing in Google Maps and Earth soon.
Hunch – http://hunch.com/ – Hunch takes a list of the things that you like and builds a “taste profile” of you enabling it to recommend other things that you might like too. It’s quite an obvious idea but the graph technology behind the site makes things quite exciting. “Taste engineering” seems to be something that’s cropping up a lot recently. Local start-up and Difference Engine veterans wishli.st ( http://wishli.st ) have something similar running as a beta.
Jumo – http://www.jumo.com/ – Jumo is a site that will, once it launches, aim to bring together volunteers with volunteer organisations. I don’t yet know much about how they’re planning to do it, but it’s definitely worth watching as it’s been founded by Chris Hughes. Hughes was a roommate of Mark Zuckerberg and a co-founder of Facebook and the brains behind MyBarackObama.com, Barack Obama’s online presence during the 2008 presidential election campaign.
Canv.as – http://canv.as/ – This one is a complete mystery. There are no clues to what it is, or will become on the site whatsoever. Like Jumo though, it’s of interest because of the person behind it – Canv.as is the brainchild of Chris “Moot” Poole who founded 4Chan (the site that gave the internet “rickrolling” amongst other things). Poole is clearly good at community building, so I’m keen to see what comes from his next venture.
