It may be an extreme point of view, but I think that phishing attacks may be the thing that finally tips Twitter in to the pool of, “Well, that was fun while it lasted.”
The phishing attack that happened to Twitter this past weekend has opened the flood gates to a whole slew of new problems, and as much as I love Twitter, I think this may be the beginning of the end. Pete Cashmore of Mashable made a very astute observation this weekend as he also wrote up the attack.
Ironically, this may be a coming-of-age for Twitter: nobody phishes where there are no phish to catch. In other words: while stealing passwords is a vile activity, the fact that such attacks are being embarked upon would indicate that Twitter is now large enough to be a viable target…even if its savvy early-adopter audience may be wise to such scams.
And he was right, it was a sign of coming of age for the service. It wasn’t so horrible that you couldn’t ignore it, it was just fairly annoying, and it kind of made you laugh as every direct message you received from people with the attack in it was like a signal, “Hey, I was stupid enough to fall for the scam!” At least you got a laugh at their expense.
Where I crossed the line into feeling like this was a sign of doom for the service was when I received this following direct message (DM) twice tonight in a 20 minute span.
hey. i won an iphone! come see how here http://helloiphones.com
Folks, the spammers have found us.
One of the things that has made Twitter such a valuable tool to so many is that it was a fairly pristine means of communication. If you got a (DM) it meant that someone was really trying to get a hold of me. I have my DMs set to go to both my cell phone and my email because the volume was low enough that it was never a nuisance to receive them. However, walking through Walmart tonight doing some late night grocery shopping, and having to fish my BlackBerry out of my clothes twice in a short period of time just to find out how I could get a free iPhone, well, that has definitely made me reconsider having those messages go to my phone. This cuts down on the chances people have of getting a hold of me, and it was a nice way of text messaging people without having to give out your cell phone number to everyone and their brother.
If the trust is lacking, what does have Twitter left to build on? If it becomes rife with phishers and scammers, then it loses its place as the golden child of the social media crowd, and they will move on to the next thing. Even the massive outages that led to the infamous Fail Whale being seen on a regular basis were tolerable because you wrote it off as growing pains, but endless iPhone scam messages might very well make people want to just throw the towel in and walk away. How car behind can the Viagra and online pharmacy ads be?
There is an even bigger potential casualty of this whole debacle, and that is the third-party Twitter app companies. These people rely on you trusting them and giving them your Twitter password to make their services work. The number of these has grown so much, we have even seen the launch of a site, Twitdom, dedicated just to keep track of them because there are so many of them now. How will any apps survive when everyone is wondering if they can trust like you say they can.
Chris Brogan made a good point tonight on his blog about how we can end this current round of annoyances by simply stating, “Log Into Twitter And Change Your Password“. It really is just that simple to end this whole mess if everyone goes in and changes the password they just gave out to some untrustworthy site. What about the next time, though? And the time after that? This is not a problem that is going to go away any time soon, I fear that it is hear to stay, and Twitter is never going to be the same because of it.
One of my favorite communication tools now feels dirty to me. I am no longer going to be able to use it as I want to use it because I don’t want to receive a DM text message at 4:00 AM telling me how I can witn an iPhone. Never will I be able to look at the service in the same way, and I fear that I am one of many, and that, my friends, is why this could be the fall from grace of this once mighty networking behemoth.
