05-10-2010, 11:13 AM
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Confirmed User
Industry Role:
Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Europe
Posts: 1,327
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http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/05/10/...to-follow-you/
Quote:
We’ve been tracking down some of Facebook’s little quirks and flaws lately. But let’s get back to an old favorite. Twitter, which appears to have sprung a leak as well.
Is there a bug in Twitter which literally forces any account to follow you?
The flaw appears when a user tweets this format: “accept [Twitter Username]”. So, for example “accept TechCrunch”. Magically that user appears as one of your followers. [Update: We've just been alerted that Twitter's attempts to squash this exploit is reseting the accounts of anyone who tries this exploit to a follower count of zero. Hopefully they will sort it out soon].
This of course could be quite handy. Suddenly you could boast that some of the world’s most influential followers like Robert Scoble or Barack Obama was following you.
However, there may be a flaw in the flaw, as it were.
Web 2.0 blog Webrazzi has been testing the flaw. They started getting twitter to make inlfuentials follow a fake account, @bugrazzi.
However, when I tried seeing if I was literally following bugrazzi, the bugrazzi twitter profile itself still didn’t register that I was following it, even though I could see it was in my list of followers.
You try the hack and see if you can get it to work. Let us know what happened in the comments.
Update: Twitter has got back to us, saying “we’re on it”. Gizmodo says that this only worked in Twitter’s Web interface, not on third-party apps.
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