Today a new service hit the twitter radar as users began sending tweets stating: “I’m now using E to add friends to my Twitter account. More info on http://hellomynameise.com” - myself included! I promptly sent them an @reply on twitter & also in hope that my Tweeple would catch wind of this:
The sites goal is to “integrate your social services and make sure you can share your online identities in real life.” So far, the site/service has managed to receive a prompt back lash due to their immediately trust abuse! Newly obtained members began sending the above twitter status update upon adding their twitter profile as a ’service’ or ‘identity’ to the site.
Performing another quick Summize search turns up some angry Tweeple, and rightfully so:
As predicted, they promptly responded to the issue with a Blog Post simply titled ‘Auto Tweet’:
The auto tweet function was something we implemented to test Twitter service integration. A lot of people liked to share their E usage over Twitter, but we decided to take it out after complaints. It might return as an option. Post your feature requests, feedback and rants to the Feedback pane in E or use Get Satisfaction!
“…implemented to test Twitter service integration” - Really? How professional of you.
At the end of the day I think this is an excellent example to those attempting to leverage site and service API’s as integral components to 3rd party applications. More over, don’t be stupid.
Ironicly, this also touches on my blog post from yesterday, Social Media Reach and The Sphere of Influence, as the clear goal in this exploit was to gain members via each users ‘Social Media Reach’ as they added the service and caused a ripple effect through their followers. As we have learned, this is an example of Reach With Evil Intention!
Upon further review and testing the service I discovered what I feel is a fatal flaw: Your ‘e-ID’ is not a unique personal ID but a random numerical ‘code’ you must hand out per contact trade. It would be much more friendly to have a personal ‘e-ID’ assigned value/code/id for each ‘e’ user. This will enable users to ’share’ their e-ID much like you would share, say, your ICQ number. You can easily memorize an ID and just hand it out.
I posted a GetSatisfaction inquiry on this:
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Comments ( 2 )
Andreas CretenHey guys
I’m the lead developer of E. I just want to write a quick reaction to this post.
We sure made a mistake by switching on the automatic tweeting from your Twitter accounts,
but as soon as we got reaction on the auto-post we removed it.In my opinion you really need to be careful with your login information for social networks, but to integrate Twitter with a service like E we just need to store your username and password. We would love it te be able to use a system like OAuth for our Twitter integration but they simply don’t support it yet. We ask social networks to provide OAuth support instead of the standard HTTP authentification.
Regards
Andreas
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Sep 25 08 at
2:30 pm
SIGEPJEDIAndreas, I appreciate and respect your response.
I agree with OAuth standardization and support, and Im sure twitter is working on moving in this direction. With the majority of their service traffic coming from 3rd party applications it would seem impossible to not be allocating resources to this.
Any thoughts on my GetSatisfaction post regarding e-ID’s?
Thanks again for the reply, and I look forward to further exploring E.
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Sep 25 08 at
6:35 pm