ObnoxiousAcorns

Ever heard of Twitter Karma? Or Twitter mutuality? It has been brought up by a lovely lady that Twitter has stopped all API usage that involves deleting people who do not follow you back. For people like me, not having the luxury of having a huge list of those not following me to unfollow deeply saddens me. It limits the number of others I can follow unless I want to spend a few hours going through thousands of followers. So I suppose I will just learn to love you all and follow you when you follow me, right?

I don’t understand the reasons behind twitter doing such. It might be a way to get rid of the API usage and it’ll reduce clutter. From someone having thousands of tweets coming into their stream, to unfollowing all of them, to a different thousands of tweets… imagine if just 10 people do this. Twitter now has to change the flow of tweets to about 100,000 different directions. But there is not just 10 people doing this. Thousand, if not hundreds of thousands of twitter users do this. That’s over billions of tweet flow changes and that can cause the server to crash.

This is a good reason for twitter to do this, so for as much as I would love to mass unfollow those who don’t follow me back, I would rather follow those who don’t follow me than see the fail whale again!

- Nicole Harden (@Obnoxiousacorns)

I received an anonymous question from formspring.me asking me why I have a protected twitter account. I have a public one and a private one. My public one is normal tweets about random, generic things. But after receiving many friend requests on facebook and people trying to get my phone number, I had decided to make a personal, PRIVATE one for only my friends which talks about where I am at that moment, and details about my pregnancy, etc. (Yes, you can be addicted to twitter so much, you need two accounts). A protected twitter account can keep you safer than having a public one where anyone can get your information. Just tweeting to your friend that you’ll meet them somewhere, or even hinting at going to a certain place can get any internet predator looking for you now. Even easier to do when you have your location on your twitter account. I have received texts from people who are not my friends and have since then, resorted to having to give out a new number to protect myself from something like that happening. Because once someone wants to know about you, they can follow any of your friends and get any amount of information about you. This was written hopefully to keep at least one person safe from this!

- Nicole Harden (@Obnoxiousacorns)

I learned not to have a password that is actually a word. Apparently after having my obnoxiousacorn’s account hacked, it was brought up that someone used a machine to randomly put in words to figure out the password. I never thought my twitter was worth much to anyone, but now I know it is!
So here’s what you do… use the caps lock key like you have a problem, use numbers. L33t will work! Anything to keep the machines from figuring out your password.
This is just a quick update to let you all know that it can happen!

- Nicole (@obnoxiousacorns)

Ever get weird e-mails from people you’ve never heard of? They sounds completely normal! Even starting off the e-mail with “Hey! How are you?” and link somewhere? Doesn’t that sound off an alert in your head that maybe this really isn’t a legit person and most likely a spammer? If it doesn’t, you haven’t been on the internet enough and probably have fallen for this a few times.
Now spammers and phishers are using twitter direct messages for the same exact purpose. You follow people who follow you back. That gives them instant access to direct message you. And they send you a link. Will you click on it? Normally a person would because it is not an e-mail. But beware that it is exactly like an e-mail. They are the same links and techniques used since e-mails came out!
Recently, Twitter had a “LOL attack” in which direct messages were sent out saying “lol, is this you” “lol,this is me”, and “lol, this is funny” and would send a link. You click on it and somehow end up filling out your information. Then they get into your account and do it to everyone you follow, etc.
It’s a vicious scam and shouldn’t be opened.
Soon, twitter will need their own anti-spam block on DMs.

Nicole Harden – (@Obnoxiousacorns)

I miss the old day when Seesmic desktop was like TweetDeck! I actually prefered Seesmic over TweetDeck! Now I take it back. It is really flashy and less user friendly. It doesn’t make much sense anymore, and I had to revert to TweetDeck for my multiple twitter account management!
By the way… Power Twitter is still better. haha

-Nicole HARDEN (@obnoxiousacorns)