Really, what is the purpose of Twitterank? It's not
like this guy is going to be making money off of the
app, right?
Mana from the heavens for cloud sceptics - on a day a lot of professional photographers lost all their images due to the failure of photo hosting site Digital Railroad which went under - as Twitter users fanned their egos en masse to parade their ‘twitterank‘ to their followers.
Twitterrank has no apparent purpose beyond a sketchy numerical rating, and there are rumors circulating on Twitter this afternoon that it is basically a fishing expedition.
I picked up on this after seeing Tantek Çelik retweet:
@t RT @brianoberkirch Twitterank is a vast conspiracy I created to steal all of ur passwords + shame Twitter into OAuthing. + make u look vain.
At the time of this writing I’m not sure what’s going on with Twitterank, but I have to say it is amazing how promiscuous web app users can be with their security details.
This sort of vanity time wasting harms Twitter’s credibility as a useful collaboration and communication tool and adds credence to many IT professional’s doubts about the security of online transactions.
The ‘Twitterank algorithm is vewy vewy secwet‘ - your login details should be as well!
Have you got your twitterank yet and did you read the FAQ to see how secure this was?
Update: a screenshot of the source code by @nateritter (thanks @flashman for the tweet alerting me to this).
Not the most encouraging of images, might be worth changing your password if you checked your twitterank…
