Twitter confirms auto-follow bug

Twitter has confirmed the existence of a bug that can force one user to follow another.

The bug appears to have originally been noticed by a Turkish blog, followed by the blog Webrazzi, which successfully tested it out and forced the Twitter accounts of industry luminaries like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Evan Williams to follow a dummy profile. The flaw allowed members to add followers to their own accounts, basically, by tweeting “accept” followed by “@” and any given Twitter user name.

As a result, it’s not yet clear how long the bug had been in existence or whether it could potentially give Twitter users access to the contents of “protected” accounts in which all tweets are private.

But according to the Twitter’s Status Blog, protected updates did not become public as a result of this bug.

Update: apparently the counters of Following and Followers are normal again.

Facebook testing tool to push updates onto Twitter

Social networking site confirms feature is being tested but no word on official launch date.

Facebook and its social networking compatriot Twitter are jointly taking new steps to help users share information.

Facebook, the top social networking site, this week began testing a new feature that’s designed to enable posts on its network to be automatically published on Twitter, Malorie Lucich, a Facebook spokeswoman, confirmed today. She did not discolse when the feature is likely to be officially launched.

Reports have circulated on the Internet that the feature might be released this week, but Lucich wouldn’t confirm those reports.

This new move to help users share information comes just a week after Facebook disclosed that it had revamped the social network’s privacy settings. That move has moved some users and privacy advocates to criticize Facebook. The critics contended that the changes would push more user data onto the Internet and, in some cases, make it harder for Facebook users to protect their privacy.

The new Facebook settings consolidate some privacy options and group them in a single interface. As it stands now, Facebook users can establish a privacy setting for every item they post on the site, using a drop-down menu.

News Suggest by Daniel Almeida

From ComputerWorld.com