2009 July, 28th

Liliana Dumitru-Steffens

A new application, called TwitViewer might be a phishing scam, Mashable reports. Many users retweeted today the following message: “Want to know whos stalking you on twitter!?: http://TwitViewer.net.”

TwitViewer.net was registered today through Arizona proxy service. The promised service is free, and like many other Twitter applications all they want from you is your Twitter username and password and then promise to show you the last 200 people that visited your Twitter profile.

However, there is no way for TwitViewer to know who has been visiting your Twitter profile (via Mashable):

It’s unclear that this is phishing, as the site does let you know that it will send out the auto-tweet. It’s almost certainly not doing what it promises though, as there would be no conceivable way for it to know who has been visiting your Twitter profile.

Image courtesy Mashable.

Unfortunately, every time you give your Twitter username and password to any Twitter-based application you actually give it access to your Twitter account. Provided that they are genuine, no harm will come out of such an action, but sometimes these applications become a nuisance to you and your followers. TwitViewer for instance sends the above cited retweet through your Twitter account without your permission.

Twitter published the following update on their Twitter spam watch profile:

If you gave your login and password info to TwitViewer, we strongly suggest you change your password now. Thanks!

The question is how do you know when a Twitter-based application that requires your user name and password is genuine (and they all do) and when not? And how do you make the difference, when there are so many of them? PC World recommends that you do a background research before you toss away such data to any Twitter-based app (or anything on the Internet), but with Twitter this becomes difficult, considering how many applications have already been developed.

Update: an interesting search result from Google.com shows the following message from TwitViewer.net: “Don’t know why all this happened but were shutting down… may be back up on another domain.”

Clicking on the link displayed in the search results, we land on the following page:

Click on the image to enlarge.

The moral of the story: if they are guilty as charge, they will not give up! If however, the business is genuine, why would they need a different domain? The easiest (and most honest) way to go would be to contact Google and defend their case.

• 2009/07/22 -- 105 Twitter Applications for PR Professionals

About the Author

Liliana Dumitru-Steffens is public relations consultant for Pamil Visions PR. She writes for Everything PR since January 2009. Previously she worked for My-tronic GmbH and Unilever Romania. Email Liliana at lsteffens [at] pamil-visions [dot] net.

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