Nov 14th, 2008
Nov 14th, 2008
“Fail Whale” honorees: All the Twitter users that got duped into Twitterrank. 
What they did wrong:
On Wednesday a large % of Twitter users gave up their username and password to find out their Twitterrank. It later came out that Twitterrank was likely a phishing scam. It then came out that the site’s creator just used the username and password once to calculate the rank. He did mention however that the next person might not be so nice and they could be in trouble.
What they should have known:
It is never good to give your password out to anyone you do not know and trust. This man could have caused some major issues for people with the information they freely gave him. You should think about these passwords just like the ones you use for email and banking accounts. When others have the ability to act as a representation of you or your company the chances of an online reputation issue skyrocket.
What they could have done better:
Next time you are interested in how your profile “ranks” in comparison to another make sure that you use a site such as Twitter Grader which just requires a username. Better yet, maybe don’t care so much about what a tool ranks you as and think about what you actually get out of the profile you are ranking.
