Digg/shelholtz
Flickr/shelholtz
Facebook/Shel Holtz
Linkedin/shelholtz
Twitter/shel
YouTube/shelholtz
Del.icio.us/shelholtz
GMail/Shel Holtz
Technorati/shelholtz
MyBlogLog/shelholtz
Utterz/shel
§ Subscribe
§ Podcast
- For Immediate Release
A weekly podcast for professional communicators from Shel Holtz, ABC and Neville Hobson, ABC.
Podcast Feed
Vote for FIR
§ PR Search
§ Places
- Shel's link blog
- Blogs I read
- Holtz Communication + Technology
- IABC
- Ragan Communications
- Society for New Communications Research
§ Dead Trees
- Tactical Transparency
by Shel Holtz and John C. Havens
- How to Do Everything with Podcasting
by Shel Holtz with Neville Hobson
- Blogging for Business
by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos
- Corporate Conversations
by Shel Holtz
- Public Relations on the Net
by Shel Holtz
§ License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
“Tips” appear in Twitter DMs; could be a sign of very bad things to come
In the process of finalizing the milestone 500th episode of “For Immediate Release” this morning, I sent a Twitter direct message to our regular Thursday correspondent, Dan York, asking when I could expect his report. Here’s the answer I got from Dan:
Curious about why I’d want to favorite a DM, I replied to Dan about what he had in mind. His answer: “Where can you favorite a DM? I don’t see the option either in the Twitter web interface or in Tweetdeck.” When I let him know that the tip had appeared in his DM to me, he replied, “Wow…wacky…I have know idea how or *why* you would favorite a DM.” In other words, the tip hadn’t come from Dan. Somewhere, somebody inserted it.
I did a bit of investigating and found that CC Chapman is also curious about these mysterious tips:
I don’t know that I’d call it spam, exactly, since there’s no link and it’s not promoting anything. But it certainly creates confusion by leading you to think that the tip was written by the person sending you the message. You also have to wonder whether whoever is creating these tips can start using them for more spam-like purposes.
Whoever’s doing this needs to stop. Adding text to somebody else’s private message is a very, very bad idea.
