Twifficiency – Is it a scam?

If you’ve been watching Twitter over the last 24 hours, chances are you’ve seen at least one post from Twifficiency.    

The service analyses your followers, who you follow and your tweet history to generate a “Twifficiency score”.

As you can see from the following Google Trend – the growth of Twifficiency traffic has exploded over the last 24 hours:

Now that so many people have fallen for the novelty, people are starting to have second thoughts about the service – is it secure, could it be a scam, have I compromised my twitter account?

Where Did Twifficiency Come From?

Well firstly, here’s a bit of background on Twifficiency.    It was developed by a (now rather shocked) 17yr old web developer from Dundee in Scotland.   James Cunningham (@jamescun) describes himself as :

“17 year old Coder, designer, gamer and wannabe-entrepreneur. Fascination with random facts. Doesn’t always make sense to anyone other than myself.”

Is it secure?

Looks like it – yes!   According to James, Twifficiency is based around the open source oAuth which means that he has no access to your Twitter password.

If you’ve used Twifficiency and want to remove the connection to your account, use the following page on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/settings/connections 

It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of James and Twifficiency since becoming so popular on Twitter!