I’ve noticed something very disturbing in the Twittosphere lately. A lot of people are promoting a bunch of insanely dodgy sites that claim to get you tons of followers and let you become a Tweetelite in no friggin’ time at all.

Getting heaps and heaps of followers on Twitter seems to be something that a lot of people desire (I’m also guilty of this) and a select group of these people are so extremely interested in this that that they’re willing to give their password to complete strangers in order to achieve this objective.

Here’s the catch though: A lot of these sites (I’ve linked to a few of them above) promising you to “get a lot of followers for FREE” (or insert- random-bullshit-catch-phrase-here) are generally operated by a bunch of scammers, spammers and down right internet trolls.

What has happened is that a lot of people have signed up for these sites in the quest for hundreds and thousands of new followers. If you take a look at some of the infected accounts, you’ll clearly see that the creators behind these follow-applications have used these accounts (and loads of others) to virally spread the message of their scam application and thus infecting and (potentially) taking control of even more accounts.

Why you should never give your Twitter password to complete strangers 101

Just to explain something here: as soon as you enter your username and password on one of these sites the people behind them can store your credentials, do whatever they like with your account and ultimately, log in to your account and change your account password. Awesome Twitter account be gone!

And that’s not even the worst part. By logging in to your account these people can find out what your email address is, and if you’re like a lot of the people online who have the same password for all their online presences, they can hijack your email account as well.

All you wanted was to get a few more followers and now suddenly you can’t access your e-mail account where you’ve stored a lot of personal information and if you’re unlucky, credit card information and usernames and passwords to other accounts as well. Hey, I might stretch this to the furthest, but it was actually something like this that lead to the leak of 310 or so confidential documents about Twitter.

The solution: Oauth, baby!

Something I think a lot of tweeps aren’t aware of is the fact that you don’t have to supply your password in order to use applications that integrates with the Twitter API.

Twitter has been supporting the authentication protocol Oauth for quite a while, and using this protocol you grant applications access to your account instead of supplying your password. There’s no exchange of passwords whatsoever.

Another awesome thing with Ouath is that you’ll be able to revoke access (and also change read and write permissions) for the applications directly from your Twitter account (Click on the ‘Connections’-tab in the settings section).

If you grow tired of an application, you can just revoke it’s access from there - there’s no need to log in to the third-party application and delete your account and stuff like that. Neat! Basically, the only way to do this using the password-based approach is to change your account password.

My policy

When dealing with third-party applications I have the following policy:

1. Never ever (and ever, and ever…) enter my password for a web-based third-party application. If the people behind the app is legitimate and serious about their application, they’ll authenticate accounts using OAuth. Pretty much how WeFollow, Tr.im and soon-to-be Tweet-o-matic (shameless self-promotion :D) does it.
2. Only supply my password to trusted desktop clients (I haven’t really done a lot of research about this, but the desktop clients are lagging behind in implementing OAuth based authentication).

I might be pretty darn biased, but this seems like a very healthy policy :).

Spread the word

If you’ve signed up to any of these sites, opt-out if that’s possibly or as an ultimate resort - change your password. There will be no warning from the scammers when they’ll suddenly decide to steal and lock you out from your account.

And please spread and RT this post on Twitter if you want to stop people from getting ripped off.

Last week a reporter from one of Sweden’s largest news papers, Expressen, called me and asked me a few questions about Twitter and my Twitter account.

He was working on an article about how companies and politicians are adopting Twitter to extend their reach to potential customers and voters using this very popular medium.

I’m not tweeting for a company and I’m not a politician, so I guess I was chosen to be interviewed because I probably have the most followers on Twitter in Sweden.

The article (the translated version - weird translation though - is available here) talks about companies (Zappos, Chevrolet etc.) that uses Twitter to reach out to new customers and how Barack Obama used Twitter in his presidential campagin. The article also covers a little blurb about me, my Twitter account and how I attracted 23,000+ followers.

If you’re curious about the details on how I got all these followers, be sure to read my earlier blog post ‘10,000+ followers in less than a month - Yeah, it’s possible!‘.

The other day I found Shelfari, an awesome site that enables you to keep track of your books and connect with fellow book lovers.

In my last post, I still suck - just less, I wrote that I was aiming to read one hour each and every day. I haven’t really been able to make this a consistent habit yet, but hopefully with the help of Shelfari I’ll be able to.

Shelfari enables you to add all your books to your own virtual book shelf, keeps track of what you’ve read and your reviews, helps remind you what you’re supposed to read next and it also enables you to connect with people reading the same books as you. Kinda neat, huh?

If you’re into books and if you’re reading the same stuff as I am (there’s a sneak peek embedded to the right), be sure to add me as a friend on Shelfari and we can read a book together or just discuss the principles and ideas presented in some of the books.

So I just realized that I haven’t posted anything regarding my GTD-experiment for over a week - FAIL!

The last week was in some ways a relapse back to what I was trying to get away from. I wasn’t entirely consistent with getting up at 7am and I haven’t been completely strict with cutting down on checking my e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and stuff like that.

But compared to where I started at, I still feel that I’m making a progress towards being more productive. Suckiness, be gone.

Since I haven’t really mastered the whole early riser-thing - or cutting back on Facebooking/Twittering/etc. for that part - I guess I have to focus on these things yet another week before moving on to fully incorporating GTD and the app Things into my life.

To have something productive to do instead of the Facebooking and Twittering I’m going to schedule one hour of reading every day. I purchased something like 100 books a year ago and I haven’t even read 25% of them through and through.

I guess it’s time to get started.