Tag Archives: twitter
Tech News August 7, 2009 Podcast
In this edition of TBTR we talk about Google Chrome beta, Google OS and netbook plans for 2010, and the Twitter DDoS Attack from Thursday morning.
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TBTR
Twitter moves towards competition with bing & yahoo!, is it enough for stratosphere acceptance only time will tell.
While Microsoft and Yahoo pounded out a new long awaited partnership, a small company has firmly placed it’s hat into the arena as a Real-time search engine, Twitter.com. Twitter has long been seen as a site for uber geeks, and that thing people do for fun, but today Biz Stone one of the founders of Twitter announced on the Official Twitter blog about the new home page redesign.
It looks like they have made a change for the better or maybe the worst (more about that later). The new design shows a focus on topics that are hot by the minute, day, and month. This is showing up as a fire storm on the internet it’s obvious that twitter is really trying to make money by positioning themselves in a better way to grow and create revenue.
Twitter began as a rudimentary social tool based on the concept of status messages but together with those who use it every day, the service has taught us what it wants to be. From features invented by users to applications built on the platform, we’re still discovering potential. Twitter has moved from simple social networking into a new kind of communication and a valuable source of timely information. Also, it’s fun.
We all know how many companies have failed at trying to change the original concept of having fun while being different from the rest of the pack. Twitter will remain different from Bing.com and Yahoo.com which are both horrible in there own little ways. A head of twitter I see a lot of changes to the culture and pure awesomeness of the site I have come to know and love. You see twitter while a darling in the social world is burning through cash like Netscape was during the Internet Explorer invasion. The only way for twitter to survive and stay a float is to do something that gives them more appeal and makes us all look at them like the kid that got beat up on the playground. You feel sorry for the poor guy, but those who were his friends from the beginning will remain loyal and now tell more friends just how awesome he really is.
The internet has long been buzzing about what twitter can do to start making money, I think this is one of the items on the radar along with paid accounts, which hopefully will give you more capability. I think the problem with twitter coming up with paid capabilities is the fact that most of what they think up will have already been made by a third party app using the Open twitter API.
While it has been a challenge trying to explain what twitter is to a lot of my friends who are not twitter users, this looks like at least I can tell them use twitter when you want to search a topic that is right now Real-time. If a huge news story hits the wire, it’s almost a given it was first reported in 140 characters on twitter. The appeal to a lot of people is the always on and current topics that seem to find it’s way into twitter. Only time will tell if this “Search Engine direction” is a good move or not, we do know this twitter is here to stay and I’m loving every minute of my 140 characters.
Tell me what you think about twitters new direction by leaving a comment
TBTR
I was not surprised by the recent phishing scam that hit twitter over the weekend, were you?
We have hit 2009 and some people started their case for world dominance before me, damn you. Over the past couple of days twitter has been all a buzz over a phishing scam that someone is using. While the scam seem to only be a way to send out spam to your followers again here we go with the what if scenarios.
What is a phishing?
(wikipedia.org description)
Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites.
So now that you know what phishing is let me tell you why it’s gonna be around for a long time. Users are gullible, sometimes we click things we should not, sometime we are curious, sometimes the joke is on us. Gone are the days of sending you to a website that pops up 50 windows and it’s like a duck hunt game trying to shot your way out of the maze. Now what people, thieves, and yes sometimes companies, do is make you think that what you saw was real.
Twitter has a API that has been open for a long time, and the authentication has always been a question to me. Coders have no behind the scenes way with twitter to authenticate with any other way but to have users enter their username and password on an off site.
What makes this phishing scam work is the fact that with all the fail whale, and network issues of the past. When people saw the screen shot below at first glance that thought oh here we go again. Twitter is on the fritz but what most failed to do was to just look at the URL and see that it was not twitter.com that was serving up the page.
Will this ever stop?
Probably not but if you have other sites where you socialize you will notice some distinct things that try to help curb users from falling victim. A lot of other sites that have OPEN API’s allow you one password to log on to that service, then when you want to login or tie your account to another site they give you a alternative password. This helps to ensure that you don’t give out your real login password and shall we say hand over the keys to the house. Twitter knows all about this authentication method, why they have chosen not to implement is beyond me.
I think it’s time twitter give it a second look, other wise I for see some people changing their strategy of using twitter as the first line in micro blogging and move on to something like friendfeed, brightkite, or even jaiku (no one really uses jaiku so I’m only kidding on this one) none of these sites do things much better but when people get feed up they move on to the next ship.
Remember boys and girls your password is a very important thing, I blogged about this here in I wonder how many computers will be infected and I still feel people are sleeping on good passwords for access to their online life. Keep your password in your pants that way no one can steal it, for the most part. But seriously just be aware of whats going on, and remember two things if nothing else in this post.
- No the King of some small country does not really want to deposit 28,000,000 in your account
- You bank will never send you anything online saying change your password it’s been compromised
Twitter get it right or get lost oh and don’t forget to follow us on twitter.com/thebtr
TBTR
Twitter has a new friend in URL shortners, Tweetburner with statistics
Micro blogging has been around for a while now but lately it has taken off growing by leaps and bounds. Can you update your friends and colleges in 140 characters? It’s harder then you think and by no means is it easy when the real estate is so limited. So what happens when you want to save and share a URL link? As we all know some URL links could be 50 characters all by it self. so the shorter a URL is the better that is for you and what you want to say to the world.
Tweetburner lets you track what happens with the links you share on Twitter.
Last week I came across a URL shortner called Tweetburner. Not the shortest name for URL shortners but it ties statistics to those URL’s so you can gauge how many people click the link. It’s always good to know if people are really clicking your links. There are a number of URL shortners on the net, I found a blogger at cusumingexperience.com who created a blog post back in May of 2008 about is.gd called “Shorten URLs via is.gd – free bookmarklet for URL redirection“. Mashable created a post showing “90 of the top URL shortening services”
The reason why I’m talking about tweetburner is two fold, not only does it work but you can create your tweet right from the tweetburner website which will let you login to your twitter account and/or friendfeed to send a post right from the site. Most of the other URL shortners don’t do that cause they were not made with twitter specifically in mind. Give tweetburner a try if you want statistics or give is.gd a try if you just absolutely have to have the shortest URL.
I found a video of Tweetburner which explains a bit and shows you what it does check this out:
Enjoy,
TBTR
