Wednesday, March 26, 2014

What to do if Twitter account hijacked & sending out spam DM's or tweets

This post was first published Nov. 2, 2009, and has been modified from time to time

Twitter is often plagued with people's accounts being infected, then sending out spam direct messages (DM's) or tweets, such as "is this you", or "Hey somebody is saying really bad things about you", or other things calculated to tempt you to click on a link.

Probably the way you got infected was by clicking on one of those links when you received it, and then doing something at the site to which you were connected.

If this happens to your account:

1. Go to your profile "settings".

2. Change your password to a new password having a different length.

3. Go to Settings >Apps and revoke access to everything you see.

4. Go to Settings  > Account and make sure your email address is right.

5. Exit from Twitter.

6. Clear your browser cache.

7. Exit your browser.

8. Restart the browser, and log in to Twitter with your new password.

9. Go to Settings>Apps again to make sure that there are no apps which still have access.

And in the future, don't ever click on any DM or tweet link unless you're totally sure of it.

If you receive a spam DM or tweet there are basically 2 things to do:

1. if it's an account you don't know, delete the DM or tweet

2. if it's an account you do know, notify them that their account has been hacked (and if you like you can refer them to this article)

It's not a bad idea to visit your Settings > Apps page, from time to time, and see if there are any unfamiliar apps in there. If so, revoke access to them. If you need them in the future, you'll be prompted.

(Short URL for this article: http://goo.gl/0A01eD  )

Friday, March 21, 2014

My next phase in mobile tweeting... iphone with @tweetlist

This is not a review; I am not qualified to judge mobile hardware, mobile software, or mobile anything.

I'm just relating my preliminary views on this next phase on which I'm embarking.

I became active in blogging and social media starting in 2004, although I joined LinkedIn in 2003. The whole time since then almost all of my social networking and social media activity has been on a desktop. I didn't migrate from blackberry until 5 years ago or so, and then I went to a series of Android phones.

I went in the Android direction because I don't like Apple any more than I like Microsoft, and Android seemed to provide a more open world in which to function. But each of my Android phones was a disappointment to me. They seemed to never have battery power whenever I was about to actually use them for something; they seemed to shut off all the time, and act unstably. So, since I take my Twitter seriously, I never really got much tweeting done on the smartphone, instead sticking almost entirely with my desktop, and sort of envying those who could easily travel in both worlds.

The other day I switched to iphone, and found it to be a better machine in a lot of ways than any android I possessed. It's smaller, fits in the pocket; it's faster and more powerful; you can actually shut applications off easily and save power, and set them not to restart unasked. It even feels more solid.

Since Twitter was the thing I was most interested in accessing with it, my big question was which Twitter iphone app to use. For my style of tweeting the key things I was looking for were: (a) the ability to do "classic" or "traditional" or real retweets, as opposed to Twitter's fake pseudo-retweets misnamed "native" retweets (in case you don't know what I'm talking about, it's all explained here); (b) the ability to easily access lists, because I follow a lot of people, and use lists to organize my reading into manageable groups instead of a single timeline that goes by too fast to pay proper attention to people; (c) speed, power, and simplicity, which I have found are 3 different aspects of the same thing in the computer world; (d) flexibility in picking my url shortener; and (e) a long tweet extender.

On desktop I use Twitter's tweetdeck for chrome, which isn't as perfect as the real tweetdeck was, but is ok; it falls short for me because it gives me no real choice of url shorteners, and doesn't support a long tweet extender.


So I tried a bunch of things, twitter for iphone, tweetcaster, tweetbot, hootsuite, ubersocial, and tweetlist. The one that fit my style the best was tweetlist... tweetlist 4, to be exact.

1. It enables me to do traditional retweets; I just have to click "retweet with comment". And it does it in a very elegant way, because once you've clicked that, the "RT" is inserted for you and the cursor positions itself one space to the left of the RT.... i.e., all you need to do is click "send" (and in case you want to add something to the tweet, you're ready to rumble, no need to move the cursor anywhere at all, just type).

2. It's very easy to access your lists, as there's a "TweetLists" icon at the bottom; click that and you're in business on reading your lists. If you swipe to the left or to the right, you move to the next list. [I used tweetlist to create a "sent" column, so I could check my own tweets, like I could on my twitter.com profile page. I did this by making a private Twitter list called "sent", and then, on tweetlist, added myself as the list's only member]

3. The application is very simple, not fancy, and as a result is fast and powerful. When I press the top of the screen to get to the top of a list it's instantaneous.

4. I was able to pick and choose among 6 URL shorteners, including my personal favorite, goo.gl. (If you're particular about your photo service, Tweetlist gives you twelve to choose from; I'm such a newbie at using a mobile device for cool things like sharing pictures, I wouldn't even know which one to pick, but I'm sure I'll eventually come to appreciate the element of choice).

5. I was given the option of auto expanding oversized tweets, and even given a choice of 2 different services with which to do it... twitlonger and twtmore.

So I'm liking Twitterlist 4.

I think it cost $2.99. I'm definitely a satisfied customer.

If you have any wisdom to share on the subject of mobile tweeting, would love to hear it, and will try to soak up whatever I can learn.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Any thoughts on best twitter app for iphone?

I'm getting my very first iphone, and wondering about what twitter app I should try.

I would need something that's fast, that's good for monitoring lists, and which enables 'classic retweets'.

On desktop I mostly use Tweetdeck for Chrome.

I don't care if it's free or paid.

Some of the names I've seen: tweetbot, tweetlogix, twitteriffic, tweetcaster, twittelator, echofon, tweetlist.

Any suggestions for me?