Locked OUT
Even though I love it, I haven’t been on Twitter 
much lately. There’s only so much multitasking I can do and all the things I’m trying to keep track of are getting the best of me. Maybe I’ve just been distracted by all the other things going on in my life right now.
So, I was amazed to get messages from twitter friends telling me that I was sending out weird spam messages. When I checked I was embarrassed to find that this was in fact the case. I wasn’t sure what to do at first but apparently changing the password works. I changed it twice and thought all was good. Then I got an email from those nice twitter folks warning me that I should change my password. I didn’t remember when I last changed it so now I wasn’t sure whether I still needed to change it or if I was ok.
I logged on successfully, looked at the Direct Messages I had sent and thought that now my account was probably ok. Unfortunately, I opened TweetDeck. Since it still thought I was using the old password I was now locked out of my account. Finally this morning I was able to log into twitter again but when I tried to log out, change the password on Tweetdeck and log in again it didn’t work. At least this time I could get back into my twitter account through the website.
Why am I letting my Twitter frustrations get to me? Deleting the account and starting over was tempting but I didn’t want to lose all the contacts I was following. I haven’t even been using it much in the last few months. Certainly part of the reason is just the hassle and time it has taken. I’m also worried now that if I try to use the twitter app here on Edublogs I’ll run into the same issues and get locked out again. What about my facebook account? Is there some link there I need to change? What’s worse is the concern about that particular password. Is it lost to me now? Should I rethink any other place where I might have used that password?
Why do people do these weird things? It wasn’t for money. The links posted through my account just went back to a twitter page. The only reasons I can think of are to annoy, to show that it can be done, maybe to scare someone. Obviously some people have way too much time on their hands.
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:31 pm
It was a phishing scheme. No they don’t make any money directly, but the potential is there. If they lure folks into putting in their user names and passwords, they can use that information to get other information, really could make them some money.
If I were you I would not use that password for anything else on the Net, especially any site that has links to personal or financial information.
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November 17th, 2009 at 2:31 am
Hi,
This is really a nice post, you share good piece of information. I appreciate the information, well thought out and written. Thank you
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November 17th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Hello,
Thanks for commenting. You’re very welcome. I still have not gotten back onto my tweetdeck account. In a thread in the forums where I was the first one to complain about he problem many others were relieved to find that they weren’t the only ones.
Someone else there discovered that you could try to log in through tweetdeck but say that you forgot your password. Then you can reset the password to the current correct twitter password. I haven’t tried that yet because I’m still annoyed about the whole thing and am thinking of looking for a different app.
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