Did you notice a lot of Twitterank announcements on Twitter yesterday?  Were you one of those broadcasting your rank to your followers?  I can smugly say I wasn’t, but social media star Louis Gray was one of many, and he’s completely unconcerned at having supplied the service with his Twitter login details.  Oliver Marks on zdnet, however, has a less rose-tinted view of the whole affair and links to a screenshotof the Twitterank sourcecode that should make people feel slightly uncomfortable – particularly those of us who use the same username on every site we sign up to and lazily use the same password too…

It’s still not terribly clear, but it seems as though this was a bit of a publicity stunt to promote calls for Twitter to adopt OAuth.  It does highlight how much we can both value and be careless about our online identities, and illustrate the increasingly compelling case for OAuth adoption.

I’m very tempted to say that Twitterank set us up the bomb, but as the US Army apparently believes that Twitter is a terrorist tool, I’ll just keep quiet

Update: Gray is rather less impressed with Twitterank’s leaderboard feature which has some odd results in it, including (currently) twelfth place for the unused account @google.  I still think it’s all a gigantic hoax, but I guess we can only wait and see…