Twitter and Twitterank

The Twitter universe suddenly went wild on November 12, 2008 when an application called Twitterank was suddenly unleashed on an unsuspecting world.  Within hours, the application spread virally and consumed so much of the server resources that it was rendered un-workable for a while.  Within a short while, twitterank became the top search term on Twitter Search and it hit the top 20 on Google Trends for searches there.

Suddenly a viral rumor began to spread … ZDNet declared the application to be a phishing scheme and warned users not to give their userid and password to the application.  “Did you check your twitterank? … Change your password!” declared user after user.

If you do use twitter and want to check your Twitter Rank you can visit

http://www.twitterank.com/

… but we do recommend that you change your password, just in case, then change it again after you get your ranking.

The word twitterank is still the most searched term on Twitter search but it seems to be dying down on Google.  If you want to see who said what to whom over the past few days and try to dissect the entirety of this viral social media phenomenon you can find most of the articles and comments here and here.

Bill Austin

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