A rather interesting internet meme came and went over the past 36 hours regarding a humble new Twitter app called Twitterank. You can find most of the relevant material in this handy Buzzfeed collection, so if you missed out on the freakshow, you may want to check that link out first.
What was interesting about Twitterank actually has nothing to do with the app itself. It was the way people seemed to react to it. Here was a guy how threw together a cute little app (something that we here at Syndeo do all the time), and after a brief period of seeing his work really catch on, he gets publicly mauled for allegedly stealing people’s Twitter passwords. Never mind that people give their Twitter passwords to literally dozens of applications already (or did you just happen to forget about your Twitter desktop app, your Facebook widget, your iGoogle Gadget, your Ping.FM account, your auto-follow script, and any of the myriad other Twitter third-party apps you’ve tried but never really used all that much?).
This ZDNET article for me was the freakshow ringmaster. Incendiary and dismissive at the same time, the author never even bothered to contact Twitterank creator Ryo Chijiiwa before stringing him up for the mob. It even goes so far as to offer a screenshot of the Twitterank source code (and by that, I mean the HTML code, geez) as further proof of Chijiwa’s nefariousness. The guys at Syndeo and I all had a good laugh about that one:
@donevan: “Proof” that Twitterank is stealing your passwords: http://twitpic.com/lfm9. Who’s gullible now?
@jasontorres: “I’m in your account stealin’ your tweets.” LOL!
@helloluis: @donevan Holy crap I hope nobody reads the evil comments in our HTML “source” code!
@donevan: @helloluis I did put some stuff there about alien conspiracies re: searching for human intelligence, and how they’ve failed at it apparently
@helloluis: @donevan Thank goodness I remembered to delete those comments about that underaged girl you met at Mugen. Whew!
@donevan: @helloluis You’ve clearly mistaken me for @monduntu.
It’s this kind of irrational fear-mongering that drives me nuts sometimes. Seriously, what makes you trust Twitteriffic with your password over Twitterank? Both of them are third-party apps developed primarily by a solitary individual. Certainly Craig Hockenberry may have built up a bigger Internet reputation for himself over the past few years, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t be stealing those precious, precious passwords as well.
After some discussion, the guys and I came to the rather oblique conclusion that Twitterank wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near this same amount of flack if Chijiwa had bothered to throw a skin on his work before releasing. People are stupid both ways, after all. They’ll trust you if you’re good-looking, and they’ll distrust you if you’re ugly. Unfortunately, Twitterank erred towards the latter.
PS. If you’re one of those paranoid individuals who changed their Twitter.com passwords upon reading that ZDNET article … it’s not so fun having to change your passwords across all your Twitter third-party apps, huh?