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The Twitterverse is all a-twitter, as the 140-character TMI site struggles to handle an amazingly awful hole in its security that was posted just a few hours ago on a handful of sites, including Gizmodo.com. Turns out, you have been able to force anyone on Twitter to follow you by doing something as simple as typing into your “What’s happening?” field “accept (username).”
To Twitter’s credit, within a scant few hours of this problem getting press, the site started working on a fix. Unfortunately, that fix began with a poorly announced plan to have everyone’s followers/following display show 0/0. So the tweets have been a-flying, first from people assuming they had been hacked or Twitter was broken, then from people having fun with the problem. It turns out just the counter was turned off, you could still see who was following you and who you were following.
The hashtag #nofollowers seems to have some of the best comments. From @ianspeir: “Yes! No followers! I have been working toward this goal for a long time.” And from @BorowitzReport: “If a tree falls on Twitter but it has #nofollowers does it make a sound?”
According to Mashable.com, Twitter has already fixed the forced-following bug and is now looking to roll back followers, eliminating those added to accounts using this method. The site is also reporting that no private tweets were exposed as a result of the bug.
The speed with which Twitter responded to such a serious error is pretty impressive and makes us wonder what other crises can be solved through the rapid discovery and response made available via social media like Twitter. Can Twitter get the NCAA to change college bowl rankings? Can it get texting-while-driving bans passed at a federal level? Can it get somebody to explain why we needed bagel twists when toroidal bagels seemed perfect to this point? What problem would you use Twitter to solve?
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