For most of today, Twitter seemed to have been sporting the "Fail Whale" of over capacity. However, more interesting was the Guy Kawasaki twitter stream. At about 3pm Pacific, users starting seeing some strange tweets.
"How am I in gk's account?"
"I am the all powerful guykawasaki coming to you live via adjix"
"wtg @sswayze ! you're right #friedchicken is the biz. shouts to @kfc_col , @knownhuman, @froggie775 and the rest of the #friedchicken crew."
"http://adjix.com/hhk5
Ad: Free $25 Starbucks Card! http://is.gd/nK6d"
"now that I have
your attention, it would be super if you could help us all trend
#friedchicken it's time has come friedchicken.alltop.com"
By all regards, something unplanned happened or is happening. Clicking one of those short URLs takes you to a blog posting by Mack Collier. Mr Collier even received a comment on his posting, "Have you hacked into Guy Kawasaki's Twitter account? If not you,
somebody who likes you has - multiple links to this post today ??"
A look at
Guy's twitter page confirmed that the suspicious tweets were from a different twitter
client called "Adjix" whereas his normal tweets historically come from
TweetDeck.
Twitter already has a shady history of security issues including an administrator account breach back in January. We will have to wait and see what happens. Until then, most users are just enjoying the Fail Whale.
UPDATE:
According to gawker.com, his account was indeed "hacked" after Kawaski accidentally broadcasted his twitter credentials at Adjix:
Yes, he told me, when I reached him at an airport, his account had been hacked, but it was probably his fault. "I was using a new service called Adjix, and I did something too fast," he told me. "I can't explain it." Sort of like Twitter.
Kawasaki then suggested I speculate that he faked the hacking to get more attention. He added that he loved the hacker's tweets about fried chicken, and would gladly add it as a topic to his website Alltop.com. See? Everything on Twitter ends up being about self-promotion.
Adjix president Joe Moreno, in an email, said that Kawasaki mistakenly broadcast his login credentials over the service, allowing a hacker to take control of his account.
Original Post:
. Add info from Gawker.com
I was really glad that he didn't mind the bit about #friedchicken. The user who did that saw the opportunity and just sort of went for it.
Posted by: Bradley Robb | March 24, 2009 at 01:05 PM