My Twitter saga - Password loss on twitter side?

Image via Wikipedia

One morning I came into work after a 3 day weekend and started up Hootsuite and received this message:

"The supplied Twitter profile credentials are not valid. If you have changed your Twitter password recently, you may need to update it in HootSuite.Update Now »"

It was displayed in my personal account's Home stream, Mentions Stream, and Direct Messages Stream. I have 2 other accounts I take care of and they were fine. I fired up Seesmic Desktop client (both the AIR app and the .NET app) to no avail. I then went to the twitter website. I couldn't log in to the website either! I got the message that my credentials didn't match. At this point I was afraid my account had been compromised. I wanted to be sure so I went to search.twitter.com and searched for tweets from myself for the past few days. There was nothing out of the ordinary. I have some RSS feeds set up through Feedburner and twitterfeed and they were working fine - go figure. At least there weren't any rogue tweets that I hadn't sanctioned. (I couldn't see the DMs, so there was always the possibility that someone had found a way around my rather complicated/obtuse password and was using my account for SPAM)

I use Cotweet to tweet my company account sometimes to I logged in there and was able to tweet from my personal account as well! I even test tweeted first just to make sure. After a little questioning to the cotweet support group it turns out I used oauth to register there and so was not locked out of my account.

I tried the reset password form on the twitter site, but never received the email. I tried it 5, yes FIVE, times to no avail. I filled out their support form as well. After I had sent in this support form 4 times I finally got an answer to my alternate email address. Twitter support said that all the email that were supposed to go out the previous week did not for some reason and I should try again. If that did not work to respond to the email they sent and a support person would take care of me.

I retried the password reset and did not receive an email, so I responded to the email they send from support and have not received an answer :-(

I'm getting tired of using cotweet for everything. It's a good tool, but not for my everyday tweeting. If I could only reset my password I'd be a happy camper ...

Twitter - Startup #9 - Twitter Clients

Everyone will tell you something different when it comes to what the best way to access twitter is. A lot depends on your personal tastes, the platform you are using (operating system) and what you want to do. Here are a couple of things I came up with to decide what twitter client to use:

• The way in which the organization has decided to use twitter
• Who is going to be tweeting, which includes how many people will tweet on the same account
• How the tweeting will be done
• The time investment which you want to put in or can put in

CoTweet (cotweet.com)

• the twitter client that is the choice of many businesses
• Web based client
• best for use when more than one person is tweeting the same account
• can schedule tweets
• uses "CoTags" to identify person tweeting (^TZ) for Tom Zucker-Scharff
• Integrates bit.ly URL shortener
• can have multiple twitter accounts
  

TweetDeck

• Stand alone Adobe Air client
• Can have multiple accounts
• Can NOT schedule tweets
• does not lend itself to multiple users
• has iphone app that syncs with it
  

Seesmic Desktop

• Stand alone Adobe Air client
• Manages multiple accounts
• Does not lend itself to multiple users
• More Media friendly
• There is a web version of the client called Seesmic Web

Twitter website (twitter.com)

• The way a majority of tweeters use twitter
• must have a browser to use in this manner
• Fewer capabilities than the stand alone apps
• While stand alones access twitter through the site's API which will work many times when the site itself isn't working, if you are using the website it must be working for you to do anything.

Peoplebrowser (peoplebrowsr.com)

• Can be either a stand alone Adobe Air app or a web app
• does many of the things other apps do

•