My Twitter saga - Password loss on twitter side?

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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 #6 - Using Feeds

Some twitter accounts, you will learn to recognize them, use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to automatically tweet new information from designated sources as it becomes available. Beware, there are several pitfalls to using this as your sole approach to tweeting.

• Social Media is meant to be Social, so if you aren't going to interact, maybe your best bet is to go elsewhere, or change how you are approaching this
• The more you fill someone's stream (the replies they see in twitter) with possibly irrelevant information, the less likely they are to be interested in following and interacting with you
• You might get marked as SPAM and your account could be discontinued by twitter.

Any number of tools can be use to do this and new ones are popping up all the time. Here are just a few:

• Yahoo Pipes - This tool lets you aggregate infomation from various sources filter what you want and create an RSS feed from it. This is a powerful tool.
• Feedburner - part of google this tool is a great tool for organizing your feeds
• Twitterfeed - With an account on this site you can name your feeds (best to use feedburner feeds) assign when you want them to search for new information (how often), even assign a twitter account to tweet from and a bit.ly account to shorten links and track from.

Next: Searches