Twitter’s simple code violation… Going viral

Tonight, late at night ad Australians head off to bed, Twitter is facing an annoying problem, that within hours could be something much worse…

If you use Twitter, and use an app (tweetdeck, seesmic, the twitter apps on iPhone or other devices, you won’t know anything, except that some of the people you follow are posting WEIRD messages.

In a client, those messages look like a whole bunch of code. However, if you use twitter.com, you’ll see a block of colour in a friends status update.

Here’s what’s happening. Because twitter automatically turns any twitter words that start with “http” into a link to THAT “word” twitter itself is creating links to an automatic status update.

The link, essentially, uses JavaScript to automatically submit a status update FROM YOU in YOUR tweet stream, that update is an exact duplicate of the one you clicked on.

No harm, essentially, however, when the thugs of the Internet work out what is going on, they’ll quickly make it spread links to crap and porn sites, and you’ll start seeing “virus software” update messages.

This is not going to be easy to fix but essentially Twitter need to switch off the automated link creation system they have. After that, they’ll need to lock down the javascript that controls status updates.

Bring back raw HTML and tables I say, JavaScript and CSS is over-rated.