Mea Culpa: TweetRandomizer-gate

If you’ve ever read Spider-Man or spent any sort of time around the Marvel Universe (movies included) you’ll have no doubt heard the immortal words of Uncle Ben Parker when he told young Pete Parker “with great power comes great responsibility”. Today that lesson has hit home in the form of being called out on the use of TweetRandomizer by Brent Ozar (Blog | Twitter).

I use this quote from ole Ben because as someone who is prominent on Twitter I should be cognizant of the content I put out there, and that includes the use of auto tweet tools and sites such as TweetRandomizer. For those not familiar with this particular site it “chooses” a random follower of yours to be picked as “Follower of the Day” and sends that tweet out from your account. While this tweet only gets sent once, if a bunch of other people in your stream begin using the same service it creates a LOT of noise in your stream and the value of it quickly goes down. Not only that but when spam bots auto follow your account, and you don’t clean them out, they have an equal chance to get “chosen” and, essentially, endorsed by you. I don’t know about you but if @NatalieSpam0103134 gets chosen as your Follower of the Day and there’s a picture of a young lady doing certain un-ladylike actions in the avatar you’re not going to look to good to potential and current followers essentially promoting them. I first started using this particular service out of curiosity after seeing Leo Laporte (Blog | Twitter) use it during one of his shows to choose a random follower for a contest. I enabled the service, pretty much forgot about it and never took into account how annoying it’d be on the other end of the stream. Also I never really got much value of it so I probably should’ve disabled it a few days after enabling it. Long story short I apologize for clogging up people’s streams with crap. Be careful with what you allow into your stream and keep the content under your control. Brent has some good points in his article today about it. Thanks for following along and remember, it could be much worse.

Update: As long as I’m taking responsibility for this mess I should show how to kill it.

Step 1: Sign in to your Twitter account on the website at http://twitter.com

Step 2: Click on the Settings link in the top right-hand corner.

Step 3: Once you’re in Account Settings click on Connections (see screenshot)

Step 4: Scroll down the list and locate the application you don’t want to Tweet from your account anymore and click on the Revoke Access link.

It’s probably a good idea to check this list every so often and make sure only sites and programs you want have access to your account. If there are applications or sites that you don’t use anymore on this list, you should revoke their access.

Update 2: If you’re really interested in who I recommend, check out my Follow Friday Twitter List