Twitter Phishing Outs Bill O’Reilly/Cool Kids Leaving?

Trotting out the Fail Whale won’t even begin to describe the rampant Twitter phishing attacks that have compromised a number of high-profile accounts. Besides Bill O’Reilly’s “outing,” Britney Spears “revealed” the size of her vajayjay, CNN’s Rick Sanchez “tweeted” a crack-tastic out of office excuse and accounts belonging to Facebook, Barack Obama, the Huffington Post and a number of others have been similarly afflicted with bogus messages.

My buddy Jon Crosby blogged on some of the technical details of the attack in an attempt to clarify how they were not perpetrated and help throw some emotional support over to the hapless folks at Twitter. By all appearances, it looks like it had little to nothing to do with Twitter’s setup and everything to do with a bunch of dumbasses (the actual account owners) not reading their email closely enough.

Regardless of fault, how this will ultimately affect the Twitterverse (Twittersphere? Twitterati?) remains to be seen. I followed a lot of chatter among the social media elite over the holiday break as they started rolling out their predictions for the scene in 2009. While some could be quickly classified as navel-gazing — the social media echo chamber in full effect — a few thoughts were rather interesting. And for a few, the limitations of Twitter and the desire to exercise a greater control over the balance between medium and message has even driven them to take an indefinite hiatus. Most notable among this crowd is Jeremiah Owyang, senior Forrester analyst, social media guru and hands down one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter. (You can read more about his rationale here.) For me, decisions like that are disappointing.

Twitter is a fantastic way of gaining insight into the moment-by-moment thought processes of people that I respect, admire or simply find amusing. For content creators like Owyang, however, I can see that simply maintaining the spokes of their online social wheel (Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, etc.) becoming more time-consuming than maintaining the hub (their blog). Ultimately, it means that as a content consumer I have to work harder to follow people I find interesting. C’est la vie.

Needless to say, every new year brings a myriad of changes to our personal and collective communication paradigm both on- and offline. Before you start thinking of me as too much of an egghead (too late?), I have to concur with Where’s My Jetpack on the ridiculousness of it all (with props to American Copywriter for the link). Click the pic to expand…