GroupTweet is a service that lets users send private Twitter messages to a group of other users. It’s works great, unless you screw up and accidentally enter your normal Twitter credentials into the site instead of the credentials for a new Twitter account you create for the service.
If you accidentally put in your normal Twitter credentials, the service took all of your private direct messages on Twitter and published them. Twitter user Orli Yakuel and others found this glitch the hard way, and suffered major embarrasement.
After we reported on this on April 23, GroupTweet creator Aaron Forgue shut the service down. Today he relaunched the service with a number of changes that he says will stop this from happening again.
First of all, he disabled all existing accounts. He updated instructions to be more clear. And he also set up the service so that only brand new Twitter accounts can be used – so if you still accidentally put in your normal account, it will detect it and show an error. Finally, the service now only retrieves message for one day.
Assuming all of these new features work properly, GroupTweet is likely safe to use even for the most careless of users.
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