Damn those link shorteners!

Hi there

I was caught out on the weekend.  I received a tweet with a condensed link from someone who follows me and whom I follow.  It seemed innocent enough, suggesting a link to a blog that mentioned me.  Having been to the Ice Ideas Conference and catching up with a few friends there, I thought I would check it out.  Nothing happened.  Or so I thought.  I shut down my session on my IPad and went about my business.

About 12/24 hours later I received messages from some people asking if I was a “bot” and to leave them alone.  Oh no.  I then received tweets from friends saying my Twitter account was sending them spam.  Double oh no.  I even received a tweet from someone asking how the heck had I sent them a DM (direct message) and they were about to report me.

So the last 48 hours has been spent apologising, removing software, changing passwords, contacting technical support at Twitter, acknowledging I’ve stuffed up and endeavouring to make things right.  To those of you out there who got rubbish from me; “SORRY!”.

Lesson: Even if you receive a message from a friend, consider carefully any link before you open it, especially those link shortening websites.

Catch you round soon.

Lincoln

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