Social media harassment from Scheduletwitterposts.com and Twitter scheduling service

I signed up for scheduletwitterposts, a Twitter update service, and paid a minor but very irritating price for it. Without letting me know, they tweeted a post advertising themselves under my name (see the below post). I forbid them from accessing my Twitter account, and issued a statement telling my friends that the last post was a hoax (see the top post).*

* I made a mistake of including their URL again - any public relation is a good public relation, especially to a budding startup. Also, in their marketing pitch "Now I can tweet even I am asleep, so awesome!!!" there are three too many exclamation marks. And the word awesome is redundant. And all the rest.

Now that "create once, broadcast multiple times" is getting much easier thanks to these aggregation services, we need to be careful of being over-generous with our account name and password. This entire blog entry is for warning everybody of scheduletwitterposts and nasty tactics (+ my own stupidity).

That problematic company allow us to schedule Twitter postings, as its name suggests. That function itself worked fine (though you cannot edit a queued Twitter posting). But if you want a scheduled broadcasting, I recommend using Hootsuite instead. I am kicking myself over why I did not use Hootsuite in the first place. Hootsuite's benefit includes:

• Editable queued Twitter posts
• Create once, broadcast in multiple formats including Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin
• Tabbed screen works also for Twitter/Facebook update viewing application
• Absolutely free and web-based
• URL shortening service included (you can use it for other places!)