Bloggers are enraged over a day old service called Twply that lets Twitter users forward messages that include their user name to their email address.
The first round of complaints centered on spam, because Twply asks if it can send a Twitter message from your account saying that you’ve tried the service (and lots of people are). Then someone noticed that the service was sold for $1,200 immediately after launching.
Neither of these issues really bother me. The message Twply sends out is a standard practice with new web services, although they aren’t very clear in their description of what’s going to happen when they ask permission: “Support Twply on your first login?” And with regard to the sale, meh. I don’t know or particularly trust the people behind Twply, so it doesn’t matter to me that they’re selling it to yet another unknown person or entity.
But there are other issues with the service that do bother me. First, in the sale listing Twply says that the buyer can generate revenue via advertisements in the emails being sent out: “The site currently has no revenue, but the site could do very well with ads within the emails. The emails with the @replies in them are designed to have html in them where you could add ads.”
I don’t want ads being added to these emails without my permission. And this leads me to the second, and bigger problem, with Twply - there is no way to turn the service off. The only thing you can do on the site is add your Twitter credentials and then let it run. There is no way to turn off the service once you’ve started using it (Update: apparently you can disable it via a screen I didn’t see when I first used it, see comments).
Well, there is one way. That’s by changing your Twitter password so that the service can’t access your account. Lots of people are doing that now, as will I.
This is a reminder that Twitter really needs a third party authentication system so that users don’t need to type their credentials into random sites to try out new services. Perhaps this debacle will give Twitter the push they need to deploy that feature.
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TechCrunch,
Am I to understand that you actually gave your password to this service?
You use your twitter username and password for all the 3rd party widgets, apps, plugins…how else would they access your twitter feed? Magic…
Yes, and I’m amazed that anyone uses any of them.
NOTHING about this service requires sign-on. A simple feed search on tweetscan would produce a list of @replies, which could be transformed into emails more easily than he current scraping method Twply uses.
They wanted the usernames/passwords for one reason: to autopost the marketing message - even if you didn’t optin to posting the marketing message.
@Jeremy
I haven’t used the service but I guess by having access to your account you could get the @ replies from people how have private twitter accounts that you are following and are approved for.
Lots of 3rd-party Twitter services use Twitter authentication for convenience. It’s standard practice, though it is a bit risky.
isn’t that explained in the EULA?
OAuth!
Once logged in, you just click on “disable” button and it supposedly will do just that. Has anyone tried that? Worked for me.
huh. ok, I had to re-sign up for the service and then the logged in screen added the disable button. I have no idea if any of this worked because the service is down right now.
I just blogged about this, citing you and Scoble: http://wrytir.blogspot.com/
Frustrating and infuriating. Twitter needs to fix this now - after hundreds of admonitions.
No, the real problem is people are much to naive in this world. A sucker is born everyday!
With a new Twitter service launching everyday, there needs to be some means of verifying their trust worthiness.
Amen. Exactly my point.
This is why we rely on sites like TechCrunch - to analyze new services for us, talk to the company, and find out if they are legit.
This is a good lesson for bloggers to take an extra second in their due process. Yes, we still need to be accountable ourselves when we have a dodo bird moment, but bloggers also need to hold themselves accountable for putting their audiences at risk.
As I was just looking for your email I wanted to tell you that I personally removed your account from the database, and to add to that the passwords are personally encrypted.
Also you can stop the service at ANY time by
pressing disable ( http://upload3.net//uploads/18.....e5b41e.png )
The site was sold due to our servers not being able to handle the massive traffic and the need for a SMTP Server to handle the email load.
If anyone has any questions please email me at twply1@gmail.com
Yet another ploy to get information from naive people. Avoid clicking any links from or sending any email to this person!!!
Oh, I and I’d bet my paycheck that you passwords are not encrypted as this scammer indicates.
People, don’t be so damn naive!!!
Oh, and another thing; CHANGE YOUR TWITTER PASSWORDS IMMEDIATELY. And for those of you that use a single password for everything, you might want to change the password for your email as well.
to all you people who bitch about sun/msoft/adobe/etc… as having software that you pay to use…
this is what you get when you rely on fly by night free crap. sometimes it works.. most of the time.. it doesn’t!!!
but mike, i’m not surprised that you’re btiching. you tend to sing praises about certain kinds of apps, and then later on, bitch about them, or reverse your opinion…
mike, have you ever built anything technical in your life!!
or are you one of those.. those who can’t, write!! and in some instances, write badly!!!
peace
Amen!
go look up “strawman.” nobody is saying that it’s either payware or “fly by night” crap. You sound like you might be new to computers.
@Twitter your oAuth release cannot come soon enough.
Even Google is asking for Twitter passwords:
http://hitching.net/2008/12/22.....-benefits/
“Both OAuth and the ‘firehose’ feed of public updates are in internal testing and are pending a closed beta. We’ll be experimenting with both after the first of the year.” — Alex Payne, Twitter API Lead, 12/29 (http://is.gd/eo6w)
Spot –A-Dollar.com was designed to help people as well as businesses track their dollar through the entire country. Additionally, a neat advantage is provided on the web page to help you monitor your spending by “Piggy Bank,” a tool design to provide a simple tracking of revenue and expenditure activity throughout the course of a year.
i found it coll im sure you will to
Thank you for sharing.
Remember pattwit.com Mike?
If somebody promises to buy it, I will clone twply functionality for *ONLY*, holds pinky to mouth, $800 right now.
it will only take me about 10 minutes.
I will even throw in the mattinator functionality already in Pattwit
*absolutely FREE*
Pulls Steve Ba11mer used car salesman.
Anybody got $800 bucks?
I got Zend Studio open and I take paypal. My day job pays far more than this, but I am just a poser.
asinine domain name with twi in it *not included*, *sold separately*
I was being greedy.
I don’t really need $800, and I have been blessed with awesome money.
I am going to throw this functionality in Pattwit for FREE.
Right now. I will update this thread when I’m done.
I got an invite to meet a cutie at the Grove in West Hollywood so I gotta jet. I’ll do this when I get back.
Basically add another pattwit table with a foreign key id and a field called “email” and another field called “since_id”.
Run a queue runner function every time the index.php is called which calls this twitter API..
/replies.xml?since_id=12345
for each user that is not null where
OUTER JOIN email ON email.id = user.id
The since_id is updated on every check for each user in the loop. When the next check occurs the since_id is updated.
To mail the updates out simply use the php mail() function.
I gotta jet right this second as weird as that is being a geek, bye.
I fell asleep last night. I am now working on this making some coffee.
Glad to see somebody else made a service. Too bad it isn’t open source. I should be done soon.
Dates with hot women take precedence unfortunately to dumb techcrunch stuff.
I actually had 4 dates this week, and I have another 1 at 2 with a lady that supposedly has DD boobies. She’s a cougar, but who cares.
So that slowed me down a little.
I finally had time this morning
http://www.pattwit.com/about.php
ENJOY, Free of charge courtesy of me.
Forward twitter messages to as many emails as you want. ALL OPEN SOURCE BAAAABAAAYYYY!
So that was actually the wrong URL for the feature list,
This is the correct one and you can download the source code and run it on your own server and customize it.
http://www.pattwit.com/faq.php
I don’t get it. If I wanted people to contact me on my email, I’d share my email address. Right?
Twitter is me broadcasting out or is it now. :-/
I am getting old.
- Sri
Thanks for pointing this out.
The thing in this that sets off the most alarms from me is that whomever is behind twply.com is far from being transparent… Hiding behind an anon reg? No info about the coder, the company… anything?
Yeah - I’m a huge privacy advocate but I’m not about to give my password to someone you can’t even put a face or name to. :\
we also tried twply, to “stop” it, you can also declare the sender as spam on your email server.
but changing your password is more preferable
There isn’t a single twitter service that is anywhere near “necessary” for my daily twitter usage. No way am I giving any third-party my twitter credentials.
Would any of you give out your blog-admin password to install a third party plug-in in the same fashion?
Okay i just looked at what the site does. Wow! There is absolutely no way I would give some site my password out of sheer laziness! How difficult is it to log into twitter and click “@ Replies”?
There is absolutely nothing about this service that should need your password. I had a few spare hours this afternoon and knocked up a site that does the same thing without it: http://replies.twitapps.com/
Would be interested to see what people think.
Personally, I’ve been Twittered to death. I don’t use Twitter much but I like it well enough. That’s not the problem. The problem is if this site doesn’t find something else to focus on besides Twitter I’m taking it off of Speed Dial and forgetting it ever existed. This is a typical TC news day:
5 Twitter posts
2 MySpace posts
3 posts about some fight Arrington is having with someone, or someone he doesn’t like, or someone who doesn’t like him
1 post a week either about or by Jason Calacanis
Boring filler between the rest
Change the site name to TechLunch if this keeps up, since that’s what MA seems out to perpetually. At least AlleyInsider and Valleywag are actually interesting . Snore.
Twitter is a neat messaging system that occasionally helps facilitate the delivery of news in near real-time to the masses. Yippee. It has a ton of problems, spawns a ton of related but equally problematic websites, has no business model, and bores the crap out of me to read about half a dozen times a day. Get off the Twitter-crack already.
Amen.
And ack wrt SAI and ValleyWag.
Twitter.
Core of this problem is openness with little control from provider’s side at the same time being a web user we are opening up for new ideas and services quite fast.
I do understand one thing as a website owner I know I have to make some money by advertisements and use them to offset my cost. Obviously I am providing a free service so I need something in return.
Web is mostly a free world and I don’t mind receiving advertisements in my email if I see the core contents clearly. Same thing goes when I read Techcrunch in my reader and I ignore all advertisements in the feed and I don’t bother to look to turn that off.
Ah, yet another Twitter related post. Last week I saw a few posts in a row about Twitter or Twitter spin offs.
Twitter is like the Spice Girls to me. You know, you can’t wait for its allure to die out so you can stop hearing about so often.
Of about a few dozens or so of the people I know who usually waste a lot of time on social networking websites, I only know of one who uses Twitter and is somewhat active. The rest either doesn’t care or just signed up out of curiosity. Only to realize they have no use for it.
Twitter has its uses for certain niches, but this website blogs about it like Twitter is the only website that matters.
Seriously, does anybody here really care about Twitter’s Authority-based search? I’ve seen like 5 or so posts on that already the past week!
Michael I agree with you on the last part of twitter authorization as far as twiply i simply ignore such services. Said that I agree with you I also wrote an article about it.
Hope you like the idea.
One note - I don’t agree overall that what Twply did was spam. I said allegedly because Robert Scoble ran as quick as he could to his blog and called them spammers. There’s a difference between marketing and spam.
Hi Michael,
We bought the site because it generated a lot of buzz quickly and it could be utilized to gently promote Twellow.com, a site we own. Twellow.com has become an extremely popular Twitter directory and search engine.
All of the concerns you and others mentioned will be looked at once the site is actually on our servers. There are absolutely no plans to add advertisements to the emails and user privacy is obviously very important.
Please give the service a chance again once we have had a chance to make appropriate changes.
Thanks,
Rich Ord
CEO, iEntry, Inc.
richord@ientry.com
This kind of debacle could help increase the rate of adoption of 3rd party authentication (like OpenID). There’s still another step after that, but the ability to keep your actual credentials out of unknown/untrusted hands is essential.
The next step is to have the ability to exclude (or include) sites in your authentication at will.
Someone will do this, it just may take awhile.
- Curtis
http://ShipItOnTheSide.com - Learn to ship profitable software as a side job.
Poetic justice?
Email hawking generic Viagra or counterfeit watches is only slightly less interesting than “rubbing my sore feet” or “my ass feels funny.”
“This is a reminder that Twitter really needs a third party authentication system so that users don’t need to type their credentials into random sites to try out new services. Perhaps this debacle will give Twitter the push they need to deploy that feature.”
Better yet, the Twitter API should block applications that continue to abuse its functionality.
“This is a reminder that Twitter really needs a third party authentication system so that users don’t need to type their credentials into random sites to try out new services. Perhaps this debacle will give Twitter the push they need to deploy that feature.”
Why blame Twitter .
Nat
http://www.halflet.com
This is not Twitter’s fault.
There are tons of services that have popped up, gotten a bunch of account credentials, and then sold. Twollow is just one more example.
Twitter users need to be more cautious about who they give their login credentials to. Just because someone launches a service that offers to do one little thing does not mean you should give them your details.
Instead, everyone is so quick to dole out their username and password to the “next free service”.
I just wish the folks behind Twitter would add some of the functionality of third party sites/apps so we wouldn’t need accounts on a dozen or so sites to get a full featured product.
You can try this service to receive twitter replies by mail :
http://ugotwitt.com/
No spams inside !!!
It looks like there is an alternative :UgoTwitt.
URL : http://www.ugotwitt.com
Yes