I was a little shocked today, when I got an @ reply on twitter to check out my profile on a some new service called twitreferral.com. I landed on an URL that had scraped all my information off twitter and wanted me to sign up.
Not only did they suggest I get an account for something that had stolen, they also stated if I paid them, they would remove the ads.
I have to admit, this made me a little upset. I completely understand that my public information is just that, public, but I put it on twitter.com. Now, some other service scraped all that data and auto-generated a page I didn’t want or ask for. I couldn’t find a way to opt out. This is more than just annoying, it seems crude and dishonest.
The big difference between something like twitreferral and a search engine, is I can prevent search engines from indexing my data via the robots.txt, but this service did this without my permission. This is exactly the opposite of the data portability we all dream about. It actually makes me want to make my twitter profile private, or worse yet, not use twitter at all.
Perhaps I am the lone voice in the wilderness when it comes to stuff like this. I know there have been several other projects that created similar services, but twitreferral seems especially offensive to me. I contacted Whiz Bang Zoom Labs and asked them to remove the information that hey hijacked. We’ll see what they have to say, or if they are just another group of spammers masquerading as a legitimate business and riding on the backs of the skyrocketing twitter.com band wagon.
