Tweeting Your Stumbles and Easily Discover Inactive Twitterers

Just a quick post this time. I just read Twitter FAQ by Caroline Middlebrook and wanted to share some of the methods I learn twittering. Caroline received a lot of Twitter related questions and that’s why she decided to release the FAQ on commonly asked questions. Some of the questions that haven’t been addressed are

• How to tweet your stumbles
• How to purge inactive followers
• FeedTweeter beta invite code

I’ve made a comment on her article about how I work on those two and of course maybe there’s still someone else who come up with better ideas. But for the moment, here’s the method I use.

How to tweet your stumbles

To do it automatically, you can use the Twitterfeed service mentioned on the Caroline’s Twitter FAQ. The first thing you need to do is discovering your stumbles’ feed address. It looks like this: http://rss.stumbleupon.com/user/LouisLiem/favorites. You can just replace my username (louisliem) to yours. Then signup for a Twitterfeed account, enter your SU feed URL and set the time, prefix etc, and your stumbles are all over the twitterverse (among your followers, at least… : )

 

How to purge inactive followers

I’m not sure I know how to do it on auto pilot, but there’s a website that allows you to discover which ones are inactive in a long time on one screen. It also provide you the option to bulk unfollow them.

Go to http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/, enter your twitter credentials and you’ll see a list of your followers. You can view who you’re following, following you, have a mutual with, etc based on the option you choose on the drop down menu. The list displays the twitterers username, following/followed status and their latest update time. If you see “never”, it means they never touch their Twitter account. Or they can say “1 day ago” as well as “250 days ago”. You can bulk unfollow them by marking the checkbox and click on “Bulk Unfollow”.

 

The FeedTweeter service

Currently, FeedTweeter is on its closed beta, so you will need an invite code. Since Steffest allow people to search for the code, I guess it’s freely distributed. At the moment it’s “waterslide”. Like Caroline says, FeedTweeter allows you to twit-plurking or vice versa!

Avoid Twitter Phishing with Flagfox for Firefox

In the most recent article on TwiTip, 33 high profile Twitter accounts (probably more) got hacked via a landing page that resembles Twitter’s login page. Take a look at the screenshot below.

REAL Twitter Login Page – click to enlarge

 

FAKE Twitter Login Page – click to enlarge

 

Twitter’s blog also mention the dangerous excess of this phishing activity and there are also numbers of blogs spreading the word of caution to phishing traps.

Through the screenshot, we can see at least three differences between the fake one and the real login page (see the arrows). They are the URL, the PageRank and the flag icon beside the address bar.

We both know the first two, but what’s the flag icon?

Here I’d like to share another Firefox extension to help you identify the legit website. The flag icon is called Flagfox for Firefox. Flagfox shows the country where the website’s server is located and guide you to the detailed location and information. Just click on the flag ison and here’s what you see for the fake Twitter.

FAKE Twitter Location – click to enlarge

 

REAL Twitter Location – click to enlarge

 

Well, what do you know? They came from China while the real one is in the USA.

Hopefully you can find the extension useful to identify important pages whenever you want to submit your critical information such as bank account or CC number. Happy safe Tweeting!