Twitter has been hit by a series of security issues lately. The latest was a hack of 33 Twitter accounts that saw fake message posted on the Twitter accounts of popular Twitter users including Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Rick Sanchez (pictured on the right) and Facebook. You can see some of the hacked account images here on Flickr.
In short Twitter style here are three of the security issues Twitter is facing.
People are giving out their passwords to use third-party tools.
Phising attacks are trying to get people to click on links that take them to websites that try and steal their Twitter passwords.
Twitter was hacked and 33 major Twitter accounts were made to post fake tweets.
Twitter says they do plan to add OAuth which will help with people that want to register for third-party Twitter apps and tools. This won't stop phising attempts and it wouldn't have stopped the hack.
They have discussed the ongoing Twitter phising attempts. Phising may be a real big problem for microblogging sites going forward as there is always a certain level of trust involved when people are sharing links.
The issue where Twitter itself was hacked and fake tweets were posted to Twitter accounts is a more serious issue and it involved a hack of the tools used by the Twitter support team. Since the hack included President-elect Barack Obamas Twitter (although his wasn't the sole account attacked) it does raise the possibility that Twitter could ask the FBI to help them pursue the hackers.
As Paris Lemon points out there's a bitchmeme on Techmeme right now started here by Loic Le Meur about using Twitter authority as a way to reduce the number of results in a Twitter search. Since it has been suggested it will likely soon be created by someone using the Twitter API if it hasn't already been created. Technorati uses authority on its search to show only posts from blogs that have a certain number of inbound links.
Critics of a Twitter authority search say including only Twitterers that have large numbers of followers is unfair and that it will cause people to try and obtain more followers by following more people. It would also tend to favor people who have been on Twitter longer and tend to have more followers. There are a few of other ideas being suggested as alternatives - some can be found in the comments on TechCrunch's post. They are:
Provide a way to limit search results to only tweets that have been responsed to or re-tweeted.
Allow people to search only tweets from people that they follow.
Twitter's search tool already has a few ways (see also search operators) to reduce the number of tweets in a search. You can search a specific person's tweets and you can return only tweets that contain a link. You can also limit searches to tweets by people near a specific place. You can limit the results to tweets only from certain dates. It's clear these tools aren't enough and the Twitter search engine needs more advanced filtering. The more ways available for users to search tweets the better.
Twitter Stock Community Called StockTwits Gets Funding
VentureBeat reports that two-month-old StockTwits has raised a round of funding. The company makes it easy to track discussion of individual stocks on Twitter.
Basically, StockTwits is a sort of social hub for people who want the most up-to-date information on the stock market. You sign up for the site, and any tweet (a Twitter message) that you send out will show up on the site's homepage, provided the tweet has a dollar sign next to a stock symbol. So if you were to tweet "I think you fools are undervaluing $AAPL," that message will show up on the homepage and all the other StockTwit users will see it. They can respond and start following you on Twitter - if you’re good, they might tell their Twitter followers to follow you as well. This way, the site serves a clearinghouse for sharing news articles, investment strategies and other helpful information.
StockTwits also provides information for individual stocks including the latest quote and the most recent tweets. For example, here is StockTwits' page for Google. PaidContent writes that the funding round was $800,000.
There has already been at least one successful business venture that relied on Twitter's API. That is Summize which was sold to Twitter and became Twitter search. Summize was able to sell itself to Twitter but future Twitter-based services will likely have to find success in other ways.
Here's a video that provides an introduction to StockTwits.
An apparently fake Twitter account claiming to be Kanye West came to the attention of Kanye West during Stephen Colbert's plot to knock Kanye West from the #1 slot on iTunes. Kanye West noticed a tweet related to Operate Humble Kanye on the @kanyewest Twitter account and said that's not me on his blog. Rolling Stone reports the @kanyewest Twitter has been removed.
The Kanye West Twitter page has since been taken down. With past Twitters like "and I just keep doing my thing…putting out G.O.O.D. music and cultivating my craft" and thanking America for electing Barack Obama, the page had all the makings of another stump for which West could shout from, except for one major detail: It wasn't updated nearly enough for it to actually belong to West, who posts upwards of ten times a day on his blog.
The fake Kanye is gone but why isn't the real Kanye twittering. Some of his posts are tweet-sized anyway. One would think he could at a minimum at least hook his blog feed up to Twitter.
This is ad was running on Salon today and linked to the Salon Media Twitter. Salon's had the twitter account since late October. In the ad Salon asks "Do You Tweet?" They also say "We do. All day long."
Raw Story is another example of a news outlet pushing its Twitter. They currently have a a button on rawstory.com promoting their Twitter account which is @rawstory.
It's an indication of how important Twitter has become to news organizations. More and more people are receiving news updates on Twitter so major media outlets -- and even some blogs that might be a little late to the party - are now actively promoting their twitters to try and increase subscribers.
You can find more twittering news services here on the Twitter Fan Wiki.
Al Gore Joins Twitter and Quickly Gains Many Followers
Former Vice President Al Gore recently made the move to join Twitter. You can see his Twitter here. Al Gore has amassed nearly 19,000 followers since his first tweet eleven days ago on November 6th, 2008. It's probably the fastest growing Twitter in history although there is no way to verify that. There are sites that list the top Twitter users like Twitterholic and Twitter Counter but none that list Twitter growth records. What's the fastest Twitter to get to 20,000 followers? That's probably going to be Al Gore who looks like he will get there in about twelve days.
The tweet counter from popacular.com has passed the one billion mark. That's a lot of tweets in a relatively short amount of time.
As a comparison Mashable notes that Facebook recently said they now host over 10 billion photos which is over three times more than Flickr's recent 3 billionth photo claim. Photos are not the same as tweets but it does show that Facebook is huge. Now that Facebook has had status updates for a while it will be interesting to see which one gets bigger.
CNET reports that new House rules allow members of Congress to post content on third-party websites such as YouTube or Twitter. This is good because without this rule it made it difficult for members of Congress to take advantage of some of the newer web publishing tools. Of course, some members were using sites like Twitter anyway.
"In addition to their official (house.gov) Web site, a member may maintain another Web site(s), channel(s) or otherwise post material on third-party Web sites," the new House rules read. They also allow members to provide links to or embed outside content on their official sites, provided they include an exit notice indicating the visitor is leaving the House.
The Senate rules also allow for links to be added to official sites. They allow senators to use any third-party site of their choice, but the senators will have an "approved list" of sites for reference.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the change "a significant step forward toward bringing House rules into the multimedia age and allowing for members to effectively communicate with their constituents online."
FCW.com has quotes from a couple other Members of Congress including Twitter user Rep. John Culberson, (R-Texas). Culberson said the new rules are "Truly a victory for all those seeking increased transparency in our government, the use of online video and other online technologies." The new rules were announced on October 2nd. PolicyBeta also has a post about the new rules abtly titled, "Yes... Our Congress CAN Tweet."
CNET's Politics and Law blog also notes that there is now a Capitol Tweets widget that lets you keep up on the latest tweets from members of Congress who use Twitter. You might also be interested in this list of Members of Congress who Twitter.
Below is a video of someone using Twitter to turn the lights off in their room. This might be useful for confusing potential criminals about whether you or home or not. We have seen similar uses of Twitter like the plant that tweets when it needs to be watered and the Laundry Room hooked up to Twitter that tweets when washers and dryers are available. (via Rocketboom)
Mashable reports that Twitter is growing like a weed. The Mashable post cites new figures from Nielsen Online that show Twitter has grew 422% from August, 2007 to August, 2008.
The latest numbers are in, and Twitter is apparently growing at a torrid pace. According to stats just released from Nielsen Online, Twitter recorded 2.3 million unique visitors in August (US-only), an increase of 422% from the same period last year.
Moreover, visitors to Twitter spent 55% more time on the site on average - a total of more than 7 minutes per user. Those numbers point to rather robust growth for the site, especially considering many of its most rabid users access it through a third-party client like Twhirl or Tweetdeck.
It helps when a CNN anchors is incorporating Twitter into his show. It also helps that everytime there is a major disaster somewhere in the world there are immediately stories about how Twitter was the first place to hear about it. Twitter has always been a great way to cover breaking news invents and share information. It's use by news organizations alone should continue to foster growth and let Twitter remain follower central despite spam and uptime issues.
Wallstrip took a break from discussing high-profile stocks to discuss the Twitter microblogging service. They mention some of the microblogging companies including Comcast and JetBlue Airways. They also mention that some users are discussing stocks on Twitter. Twitter has grown 600% since the start of the year says Wallstrip. They also not that you can't invest in Twitter - it's a startup that hasn't even started to monetize yet. Here's the Wallstrip clip.
Twitter does not limit the number of people that can follow you. Limits have been imposed on the number of people that you can follow. These following limits are not fixed - they are as low as 2,000 for some users but much higher (over 10,000) for other users.
Twitterers including @BarackObama, @JasonCalacanis, @Scobleizer, @chrispirillo, @guykawasaki, @twitlive, @bloggersblog (my account), @chrisbrogan and many others follow over 10,000 people. One user named @oozzl is following over 160,000 people. The fact that it varies from user to user is confusing but it is apparently intentionally confusing on Twitter's part so that the spammers they are fighting don't know exactly what they are up to. As Twitter writes here there is no magic number. It's unclear whether this strategy will work effectively - as Online Media Cultist notes spammers that find themselves hitting a limt could simply spawn new accounts. This is a problem but fortunately blogs like TwitSpam.org have been doing a great job of pointing out some of these spammers spawning multiple accounts.
This new limit caused confusion when some blog posts earlier today (and some tweets on Twitter) incorrectly said that Twitter had limited the number of people that can follow you to 2,000. A great post here on Stop Twitter Spam provides a summary of today's confusion. Twitter's Evan Williams had to step in at one point and tweet a correction to a post made by Om Malik. You can see the small blogstorm that erupted over Twitter follow limits here on Techmeme.
A post on TechCrunch asks how many people can a Twitterer seriously keep track of anyway? Loic Le Meur provides some answers in this post. Following a large number of people was a lot more useful before Tweet search engines like Summize (now Twitter search) emerged. Now you can keep up-to-date on a breaking news subject with a quick Summize search. Still, there is advantage to having breaking news come instantly at you if you are in the information business. Following a large number of people means you may be more likely to see the information when it first happens.
David Risley blogs that maybe Twitter could charge users that want to follow more than the limit allows. That's a possibility but Twitter could probably make a lot more money simply by accepting advertising such a featured Twitter section that would appear on everyone's Twitter bar. This would drive traffic to individual Twitter accounts and likely help them obtain followers. Facebook does something similar with its Facebook pages. There's a lot of avenues toward monetization that Twitter could take and they will probably try a variety of them at some point.
Blogging Beijing: List of Olympics Blogs and Twitters
The 2008 Olympics have kicked off in Beijing. The main website for the Olympics is at en.beijing2008.cn. NBC's
coverage is located at nbcolympics.com. The Olympics in Beijing
comes with concerns about human rights, Internet censorship and pollution so there are a wide-range of being issued discussed in addition
to just the athletic competition. Below are some blogs and Twitter profiles covering the Beijing Olympics.
Twitter is Follower Central So Follower Issues Really Sting
The most important feature on Twitter is followers. People's followers/following relationships is what makes the website's simple service work. Despite hot competitors like Plurk and FriendFeed, Twitter is still follower central. They are by far the leading microblogging site and many up-and-coming microblogging services and social networks let you import your Twitter friends. New services pretty much have to use Twitter in this way because Twitter's community is already so large and so active. As more services launch in the future they will also try and get their users to import their Twitter friends. This will help to make Twitter a bigger and bigger player in the social networking world. They are quickly becoming a major friend source like Facebook and Gmail.
Recently, Twitter started curbing the number of followers people could have so they could attempt to reduce spam. However, these following limits unfairly impact Twitter users like @CreativeSage, @PPRLisa, @MarkDavidson and others. You can read more about this follower limit here on ReadWriteWeb.
Twitter's lost follower problems this week may be related to the following limit they recently imposed. Twitter has recovered some of the lost follower data but many users are still missing as many as 10% to 50% of their followers.
Apparently, they are still working on the issue today. They really need to solve it because it is this community that makes Twitter what it is. If the cruicial relationships in this community are disrupted it makes things very complicated for everyone. As Profy.com writes this issue is much worse than Twitter's omnipresent Fail Whale. You can read another post about Twitter's huge follower disruption here on TwitterStars.com.
Ironically, on the same day that the massive Twitter follower distruption occurred Twitter's Ev was blogging about a new service called TwitterCounter that offers follower stats. Twitter knows how important followers are and as you can see by Ev's tweet below they are still trying to solve this latest crisis.
Twitter has been hit by a series of security issues lately. The latest was a hack of 33 Twitter accounts that saw fake message posted on the Twitter accounts of popular Twitter users including Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Rick Sanchez (pictured on the right) and Facebook. You can see some of the hacked account images 
As Paris Lemon 
VentureBeat 
An apparently fake Twitter account claiming to be Kanye West came to the attention of Kanye West during Stephen Colbert's 
This is ad was running on 
Former Vice President Al Gore recently made the move to join Twitter. You can see his Twitter 
Mashable 
Twitter does not limit the number of people that can follow you. Limits have been imposed on the number of people that you can follow. These following limits are not fixed - they are as low as 2,000 for some users but much higher (over 10,000) for other users.
The 2008 Olympics have kicked off in Beijing. The main website for the Olympics is at 
The most important feature on 
