Twitter in China? In Due Time, Twitter Founder Promises

During a New York panel discussion on social media and digital activism held Monday, Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei secured a promise from Twitter creator Jack Dorsey that his company will offer a Chinese version of its social networking service.

Though Dorsey quickly qualified his response by noting that it may be some time yet before the service will be available for the country, due to technical and legal hurdles.

The exchange took place at the Paley Center in New York, in a session sponsored by the ReadWriteWeb Web 2.0 news site.

"Is it possible to provide a Chinese access on Twitter?" Ai asked Dorsey. "I need a clear answer, yes or no."

"I would say yes. It's just a matter of time," responded Dorsey, who participated by teleconference.

Ai called Dorsey's answer "very philosophical," and sighed, "I don't like to hear that."

For Ai, the question was an important one, as he sees Twitter as an essential tool for circumnavigating government oversight of communications; For Dorsey it is a loaded question, especially now that Google is considering pulling its search service out of the country due to Chinese government's demands for the company to censor its search results.

Ai said that the influence of Twitter in China is already great, even though it is blocked for the entire country, with the exception of 50,000 participants.

"In China, we cannot see YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, and very soon, maybe not see Google," Ai said. "Basically it is society that forbids any flow of information and freedom of speech."

There are ways around the Chinese government's so-called Great Firewall, but they take a fair amount of work, Ai said. Users must sign up for the service using another language.

For China, tweeting can be a rich form of communication. "At 140 words, in Chinese, you can really write a novel. You can discuss most profound ideas really to democracy, freedom, poetry," Ai said.

Dorsey said that Twitter is working on rolling out a version of its service for all languages, but translation remains a big issue for the company. For instance, the Web may support the Unicode character set, which can include Chinese characters, but most cell phone SMS (short message services) does not support Unicode.

Dorsey said he also isn't sure how to get the service inside China's firewall, though conceded that translation would be the problem that needs to be solved first.

If Twitter were to try to offer such a service, it may also face pressure from the Chinese government to filter and censor politically-inflammatory material, one audience member pointed out.

Nonetheless, Ai stressed the importance that Twitter could have by establishing a Chinese service. He had noted that he uses the service eight hours a day, after his blog was taken down by the Chinese government.

Ai is a well-established Chinese artist who has had multiple exhibits around the world, as well as served as a design consultant for the 2008 Beijing Olympics "Bird's Nest" National Stadium. He has also increasingly run into trouble with the Chinese government as well.

Last June, a blog he started to tally the number of fatalities in a 2008 Sichuan earthquake was shut down by Chinese authorities.

And in December, Ai reported that his Gmail accounts were among those that were allegedly hacked into by Chinese intruders.

"You will become one of the most important heroes in Chinese political development," Ai told Dorsey.

Read more...

Twitter Warfare against Spammers and Scammers

Twitter has announced that it is to start scanning all tweets for links to sites which may cause harm to its users.

The system, which goes live today, is similar to those used by services such as Gmail and will automatically check link destinations. Links embedded in personal messages will be routed through Twt.li, Twitter’s own URL compressor for added safety.

Del Harvey, director of Twitter’s trust and safety team, elaborated the new policy in a blog posting:

Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.

Since these attacks occur primarily on Direct Messages and email notifications about Direct Messages, this is where we have focused our initial efforts. For the most part, you will not notice this feature because it works behind the scenes but you may notice links shortened to twt.tl in Direct Messages and email notifications.

Users won't notice any difference because the service works behind the scenes, Twitter said. But users may start to see short links using Twitter’s own “twt.tl” URL shortener in direct messages and e-mail notifications.

Phishing scams on Twitter usually involve attackers trying to obtain the login credentials of Twitter users, and then sending spam messages from the stolen accounts in a bid to make money, Twitter said on its blog last month. Twitter also fights phishing scams by watching for affected accounts and resetting passwords, it said.

Phishing attacks ballooned on Twitter last year as the service grew in popularity. Twitter's new link-screening service comes after it last year started using Google's Safe Browsing API to check for malicious content in links posted by users.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/trust-and-safety.html

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/09/twitter-phishing/

http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2259231/twitter-takes-action-spammers

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/03/twitter-phishing-scams.html

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9168378/Twitter_to_begin_screening_some_links_for_phishing
Read more...

Cool, Fancy Features for Facebook & Twitter

Onederr has launched Social Fun Box 1.0, an app for users who want to liven up their Facebook and Twitter posts. The application offers seven very cool, fancy features that bring life to otherwise boring text updates. Users can add symbols, icons and emoticons, as well as share their location, photos and original drawings.

Social Fun Box has one purpose - to increase fun for Facebook and Twitter users. It incorporates colorful and expressive symbols with an easy to use and feature rich interface that allows for the sharing of photos, location maps, gift sending and more. Users can now replace their boring text notes with bright, noticeable posts.

The Social Fun Box app offers seven full features for one low price. With the built-in special keyboard, users have access to social marketing tools that will increase their enjoyment when posting updates to their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Their readers will appreciate the improvements, as well.

Features:
* Amazingly cool symbols and icons
* Selection of 100 emoticons
* Wide range of gifts to post to your Facebook friends
* Shout out your location with a map
* Draw your own artwork and share it on Facebook and Twitter
* Send photos to friends on Facebook and Twitter
* Answer funny questions about your Facebook friends

Account holders can now express themselves just by inserting an emoticon, symbol or icon. There are lots to choose from, so finding the perfect one should be easy, as is dressing up posts to capture attention from readers. Perhaps one of Social Fun Box's coolest features is the neon drawing capability. A user can create a picture by moving their finger around their iPhone screen. Once done, the artwork can be shared with friends.

This application also allows for the sharing of a location map, the posting of gifts and questions. Pretty much everything is covered for a full user experience with social marketing buddies. There's no reason for anyone to continue posting in the same old boring way on Facebook or Twitter because Social Fun Box is providing the solution. It's all in the name of fun and there's plenty of it here.

Pricing and Availability:
Social Fun Box 1.0 is only $0.99 (USD) and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Social Networking category. Promo codes are available for qualified reviewers. Please specify the website or blog you represent when making your request.


Read More

Read more...

Yahoo Announces Twitter Integration

Yahoo today announced a partnership with Twitter to integrate Twitter into Yahoo!’s global network.

This partnership includes three primary elements:

1) People will be able to access their personal Twitter feeds across Yahoo!’s many products and properties, including the homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and others, letting them check in more easily on what’s happening with the people and things they care about while on Yahoo!.

2) People will be able to update their Twitter status and share content from Yahoo! in their Twitter stream, so they can easily share their Yahoo! experiences with their friends and followers on Twitter.

3) Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! media properties like News, Finance, Entertainment, and Sports will include real-time public Twitter updates across a variety of topics. Yahoo! Search users will immediately see real-time Twitter results today; go to Yahoo! and try it out.

The real-time Search integration is available immediately. Other parts of the integration are expected to launch later this year.

Read More



Read more...

Twitter Paid Designer $6 For Its Icon

The bird on Twitter’s home page, familiar to millions, is small, cute and fun, and implies communication and anticipation. One might say it’s the perfect graphic for Twitter. Yet the company paid its designer at most $6, without attribution.




Some designers claim crowdsourcing is evil because it devalues their work by driving down prices, allowing amateurs into the game and forcing people to work "on spec," meaning that they don’t get paid unless their design is chosen. Others see it as a natural evolution driven by supply, demand and technology.

Simon Oxley, the Japan-based Brit who licensed the bird graphic to Twitter for the price of a sandwich, through iStockphoto, sits somewhere in the middle.

"I am not sure [whether crowdsourcing hurts designers]," he said via e-mail. "I believe a designer can only be ‘hurt’ when they stand in line — instead of constantly seeking new inspiration and producing new things with their ever-increasing experiences."

Fair enough. But since Twitter, which now ranks above Digg as the 84th most popular website in the world according to Hitwise, doesn’t sell any merchandise depicting the bird or use it as their official logo (it’s considered a "decorative element"), the company only had to pay Oxley his share of iStockphoto’s licensing fee.

An iStockphoto spokeswoman told wired.com that Twitter paid between $10 and $15 for Oxley’s bird design. Considering that iStockphoto pays 20 or 40 percent to content creators depending on their membership, Oxley made somewhere between $2 and $6 for designing the Twitter homepage graphic. Carolyn Davidson, who famously earned only $35 for designing the Nike swoosh, actually made out pretty well by comparison.

Oxley says didn’t even realize Twitter was using his design until a staffer contacted him about a year ago for permission to animate the bird, which he gladly granted. "I was happy to see the image ‘in-action’ as they say on iStockphoto, back when
Twitter wasn’t well known," said Oxley. "I did ask that a credit be added to the
Twitter page mentioning that I had conceived the bird."

No such credit ever appeared, and according to iStockphoto, Twitter is not obligated to credit Oxley because they’re not using his design in an editorial context.

Still, the father of Twitter birdie enjoys the notoriety his creation has achieved. "It is great to see the bird on the CNN news and BBC site — my family in the UK even mentioned seeing it on the TV news," he said. "I have also had people write telling me they have reproduced the image on the walls of their children’s bedroom, and a girl had it tattooed onto her back quite large."

Twitter’s use of the design is consistent with iStockphoto’s terms, so Oxley doesn’t feel short-changed. Nonetheless the erstwhile start-up’s strategy of paying peanuts for its homepage design could backfire.

Unlike Twitter’s "fail whale" graphic, which the company purchased outright after it appeared on iStockphoto, Oxley’s bird design remains on the site where it can be licensed under the same terms Twitter received. Nothing is stopping people from making sites that ape, mock or build upon Twitter using its own official graphic.

Read more...

Free Fun Photo Utilities from Comeks

Fun Photo Blogger from Comeks is a charming new application that merges mobile messaging with microblogging with images to create little mobile comics. It’s an innovative idea that came from a group of Finns in Helsinki. Comeks allows for visual mobile communication. It’s simple to use. Just download the free application. Create funny comic style images by adjusting your photos, adding stickers and bubbles with text. Software offers different fonts to choose from. You can share them in Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, Tumblr or Flickr or to other phones or email. Use it for invitations, greetings or blogging.

There are two more applications, offered by authors, which can be downloaded from the website. Comeks Shorts, allows to create your own custom avatar and sending the fun Shorts messages. Modify body parts, mood, props and background and type your message in the speech bubble. Thee messages can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and through email, and work on Sony/Ericson phones and iPhone.

Bikini Babe Yourself - iPhone App – for Twitter, Tumblr, and email allows to create funny images by combining your own face with steaming hot bikini babe templates. This application is however not free and costs $0.99 at iPhone App Store.

Home page: http://www.comeks.com/

Read more...

How to Grow ur Business with Twitter

The newest player on the social networking scene is Twitter. Marketing in this venue still relatively new, and for the owners of small businesses especially, this type of advertising is not only cost effective but just plain effective. The great thing about marketing on any social networking site is that you do not have to know much about computers or marketing, and you can still run a really good marketing campaign.

Twitter is a microblogging site. You can send tiny messages of 140 characters or less to whomever you wish. The newest flavor in social networking sites, Twitter can be used to build personal networks or business networks.

Different Ways to Use Twitter Marketing

While there are many different ways to incorporate Twitter into your marketing campaign, some of the more common uses are strictly to share information. Since you can share tiny blurbs of information with a huge number of people at the click of a button, Twitter is great for keeping your Twitter followers updated. It can be used to share public service announcements, news updates, business news and friend and family updates. It is built for disseminating information almost constantly.

Because Twitter is designed to constantly feed current updates to your followers, it is a natural for marketing a business. The proper way to share business information over Twitter is to tweet a link for a website containing the complete information. For business owners sharing their information over Twitter lets your prospects and customers discover you. Twitter does have very strict etiquette when it comes to advertising, and by offending the protocol, you can quickly alienate followers and potentially damage your brand.

Twitter is a great tool for promoting your company’s events. Twitter is designed to share timely news, so promoting today’s lunch special would be appropriate, but tweeting about month old news is not appropriate. Keep your tweets conversational and very personal in tone. Any advertising should be in a ‘by the way’ fashion, not ‘in your face’ advertising.

Twitter Marketing can have Lots of Personality

The more personality that your brand has, the easier it will be to tweet about. A unique voice will make your tweets entertaining. You can always wrap your tweets around a kernel of important information, and then deliver them in an entertaining and conversational manner. Your followers will look forward to hearing from you, and you will be able to get your message out constantly which is a great way to market your small business.

Another place where Twitter is incredibly valuable is with your customer contact. Twitter is designed to be conversational, and it is a great way to keep a dialogue going with your customers and prospects. It’s also useful for catching service problems and getting feed back from ustomers. This is particularly helpful to make sure that you are building a good reputation for your company. Twitter allows you to correct problems and retain customers.

We at Inventateq - SEO Training Institute in Bangalore India will work hard to give our best knowledge and latest information on search engine marketing industry to our blog users, we love to receive ur comments

Read more...

All Social Profiles in One Button: SocialFollow

SocialFollow is a cool new web application that combines all of your other social networking and social bookmarking profiles. You probably as many active bloggers, or just social networks customers, have your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, and many other profiles around the net. It would be nice if your blog visitors will become your followers on one or few sites, where they have accounts as well.

With SocialFollow, you are able to combine all of these profiles into one handy button. These are great for embedding to your blog, sharing in your forum signature, or posting it anywhere around the web!

Through the freely available services, you can create a button that can be embedded wherever you choose on the web, contains personalized links to the social accounts that you use. All your blog visitor has to do is rollover the button to find the links to your accounts. Not only can the accounts that are linked to be customized but the appearance of the button itself can also be changed to some extent. With a Social Follow button, you can consolidate everything one time and not have to think about it again.

You just sign up online and then add the corresponding social links one by one. A string of code will be generated for you to embed at your blog or web page.

Website address: http://www.socialfollow.com/

Read more...

Automatic Twitter in Blogger using Google Feedburner

As you know ,Twitter has become one of the most popular social network recently, and you can get a lot of reader/traffic from this service . There are many tips and tricks to get traffic via Twitter ,one of them is " Tweet" on new post in your website each time it is published .
In Wordpress ,we can use plugin to tweet automatically when publishing a new post ,but in Blogger we can't do that . So this post is a small tip for you to do that using Google Feedburner .

FeedBurner is a free service offered by Google . Most of webmasters/bloggers use this service for providing RSS to readers .So if you are a web master or blogger ,I think you are familiar with it .
In this post ,I just mention to a function of Feed Burner service that allow us tweet automatically in Twitter each time a new post is published in our Blogger blog .
1,Create a feed for your Blogger in Feedburner .
2, Login to your FeedBurner account . Click on your Blogger Feed to go to the dashboard .
3,In the Feedburner Dashboard ,go to Publicize ,click on Socialize .

4,At this step ,you can see the button "Add a Twitter account " ,click on it to add your twitter account into Feedburner system .
5,There are some option for "tweet" message such as adding text ,include category name or not ... You can make it as you want .
5,Click on Active to make this service available .
Ok ,you are done , each time you post a new article in your blogger , a new message will post automatically in Twitter for announcing this .
That's all . I hope this helpful to you ^^





Read more...

Facebook, Twitter top list of weird stories in 2009

BERLIN (Reuters) – From the German town that unwittingly advertised pornography on its website to the American who interrupted his wedding to update his Facebook and Twitter accounts, the world was full of weird stories in 2009.

"Standing at the alter with @TracyPage where just a second ago she became my wife! Gotta go, time to kiss the bride" is how Dana Hanna kept the world posted between "I do" and that kiss.

Cartoon character Marge Simpson made it on the cover of Playboy magazine, two White House gate-crashers celebrated their triumph on Facebook, and the world was fooled into believing a 6-year-old boy was caught in a runaway home-made helium balloon.

Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube proved fertile ground for many of the bizarre stories.

British physicians were advised to ignore amorous advances from patients after some were propositioned on Facebook, Dutch lawmakers were told off for tweeting in parliament and in Canada an MP had to apologize for insulting a rival on Twitter.

In New York, five "restroom ambassadors" got jobs tweeting from the toilets at Times Square: greeting tourists and shoppers -- and then sending short dispatches on their encounters.

Britain's High Court ordered its first injunction via Twitter to stop an anonymous Tweeter impersonating someone else.

The U.N.'s World Food Programme sent text messages to Iraqi refugees in Syria so they could redeem the virtual vouchers for fresh food in local shops. A U.S. survey found that one in five drivers read or sent text messages from behind the wheel.

"The new technologies that help us multi-task in our everyday lives and increasingly popular social media sites present a hard-to-resist challenge," said U.S. motor club head Robert Darbelnet -- a fitting description for the whole year.

FUNERAL HOME GOES GREEN

Swine flu, or H1N1, presented another challenge -- and rich source of weird stories. In Egypt, thousands of pigs were slaughtered even though the United Nations said the mass cull was a "real mistake" because the strain was not found in pigs.

Russian soccer fans were instructed to drink whisky on a trip to Wales for a World Cup qualifier match to ward off the H1N1 virus. In Japan, candidates stopped shaking hands. In Italy an inventor devised an electronic holy water dispenser.

The spread of new media got people in trouble. Dutch muggers were caught with the help of a Google street view camera.

A vain British burglar sent a picture of himself to his newspaper because the wanted criminal said he did not like the police mugshot. A picture of a student urinating on a British war memorial published in a newspaper led to his being charged.

A German student thrown off a train for riding without a ticket got in trouble on his own.

He stuck his backside against the window at railway staff but his trousers got caught in a train door. He nearly died mooning as he was dragged half-naked along the platform, out of the station and onto the tracks before the train stopped.

In India, a mid-air scuffle broke out between pilots and crew of one flight. In the U.S., two Northwest pilots overflew their destination by 250 km (155 miles). They said they lost their bearings while using their personal laptops in the cockpit.

A Saudi court sentenced a man to five years in jail and 1,000 lashes for boasting about his sexual exploits on TV.

Australian horse racing officials were denounced for holding a dwarf racing competition. The race involved men charging down a course with dwarfs dressed in jockey silks riding piggyback.

The Paris tourist board urged locals to do their part to battle a 17-percent plunge in visitors: Smile! S'il vous plait.

In Norway happy cows proved to be more productive. Since new rules were introduced in 2004 allowing the cows to relax for up to half a day on soft rubberized mattresses, officials reported they are producing more milk and have fewer udder infections.

An Irish school told children to bring their own toilet paper to help the school save money while Cuban officials said the country was facing a severe shortage of toilet paper.

Climate change was another big theme in 2009. To save water and electricity in Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez urged people to stop singing in the shower.

Those wishing to be cremated but worried about producing greenhouse gases even after dying learned about a funeral home in Florida that has come up with a greener way to go by dissolving the body using a chemical process.

(Writing by Erik Kirschbaum; editing by Paul Casciato)

source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091229/od_nm/us_year;_ylt=A0LEaohe1jpL8XgAUTSs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTFmcTA2cjlwBHBvcwMyMDIEc2VjA2FjY29yZGlvbl9vZGRfbmV3cwRzbGsDZmFjZWJvb2t0d2l0

Read more...

First Real Time Twitter App for iPhone

Chirp Flow is the first real time Twitter app for the iPhone. It allows users to see 'tweets' on searched topics or users the moment they happen. Chirp Flow is available today on the App Store for free. excited pixel, a web company in Portland, has released the first iPhone app to utilize Twitter's real time streaming API. This allows users to see tweets about topics as they happen.

Chirp Flow can be used to get real time updates at conferences, concerts, protests, meetings and any other event. It allows users to engage in a conversation that, when spoken, might be disruptive if articulated acoustically. Many features are planned for future versions of Chirp Flow including: the ability to tweet, view links within the application and see what is trending on Twitter. 'excited pixel' is committed to meeting the users' expectations in the offered features; an email address on Chirp Flow's website provides users with a direct line to the developers of Chirp Flow.

Garrett Moon, the owner of excited pixel, "hopes to see it being used in innovative ways. If it's used by activists to organize, [he'll] be especially happy. [He] wanted to build something that could be used by the protestors around the world and realized in conversations with others, it had the potential for many other applications."

Pricing and Availability:
Chirp Flow 1.0 is free and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Social Networking category. For requirements, features, screen shots and more information about Chirp Flow, contact Garrett Moon or visit the promotional and support website.


Read More

Read more...

Twitter buys into geolocation

Micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter has expanded its capabilities in the geolocation space with the acquisition of location services provider Mixer Labs.

In a blog posting, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone explained that Mixer Labs has been “working on harnessing the power of local information for a couple years” and recently launched GeoAPI - a new service designed to help developers build geolocation-aware applications.

“When current location is added to tweets, new and valuable services emerge—everything from breaking news to finding friends or local businesses can be dramatically enhanced,” wrote Stone.

“Our efforts in this area have just begun. Today, we're excited to announce a major new step into the location-aware future.”

Stone explained that the newly acquired technology would help the firm continue to combine the “textual relevance of location to tweets”, giving the example that twittering “Earthquake!” would not be as effective as twittering the same message plus current location.

“We will be looking at how to integrate the work Mixer Labs has done with the Twitter API in useful ways that give developers behind geo-enabled apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and others powerful new possibilities,” said Stone.

"We look forward to building features together that will make Twitter even more interesting and relevant to your daily life, no matter where you are.”

The acquisition follows the launch of a new Twitter Geotagging API last month, and the expansion of location support for developers working with the Twitter platform in August, Stone added.

source:http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2255458/twitter-buys-geolocation

Read more...

Birdhouse: A notepad for Twitter

Birdhouse is a simple, well-iPhone App designed to capture your ideas and save them for later use or disclosure, if you are ready. birdhouseapp.com ... iPhone App Apple iTunes App Store application Twitter writing



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8yRaWY1xV8&hl=en

Recommend : Online Books Store Review Shop to Home Online Books Store Lord of The Ring Fan Club Tsunami Memory

Read more...

Twitter buys geo-firm

We know where, just need a why

Twitter has bought Mixer Labs - the makers of GeoAPI - a tool kit for developers of geographically-aware applications.

The over-hyped micro-blogging firm said: "When current location is added to tweets, new and valuable services emerge — everything from breaking news to finding friends or local businesses can be dramatically enhanced."

The example used was a tweet saying "Earthquake!". This would be a lot more useful and informative if it came with some information about where the bleeding earthquake was.

The idea is to integrate the GeoAPI into Twitter's API. Mixer Labs will work from Twitter's San Francisco, Folsom Street HQ.


source:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/24/twitter_geo/

Read more...

Twitter search deals generate big profits

Twitter has made $25m (£15.5m) from deals signed with Microsoft and Google to display its micro-blogging content in search results.

The company received $15m (£9.3m) from Google and another $10m (£6.2m) from Microsoft, according to a report in BusinessWeek citing two people familiar with Twitter's finances.

"The deals were huge," said one of the sources. "A lot of revenue came in."

Twitter announced the deals with Google and Microsoft's Bing in October.

"We have a team focused on delivering value from a search and discovery perspective at Twitter, and they're just getting started," said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in a blog post at the time.

"Twitter is earning a reputation for delivering real-time results to queries about things that are happening right now."

Twitter is a private company, so its financial information is not publically listed and the reports are unlikely to be officially confirmed. Twitter, Google and Microsoft could not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The large profit Twitter has made from the deals is significant because the firm has always had trouble making money, so much so that Stone said last month that he may approach the stock market for funding if the site fails to generate sufficient revenue next year.

However, all recent news considered, Twitter's potential for revenue growth next year looks positive.

The firm has started to announce revenue-generating products, such as Account Verification, as well as venture capital deals and a new advertising strategy that will be rolled out next year.

Evaluations in September valued the firm at $1bn (£620m) after a $50m (£31m) cash injection from Insight Venture Partners.

source:http://www.v3.co.uk/v3/news/2255356/twitter-makes-15m-microsoft

Read more...

Twitter attacker had proper credentials

While Twitter has remained largely quiet on the hour-long hijacking of its domain name, additional information suggests that the attacker had compromised at least one user at the social networking company.

On Thursday, an unknown attacker hijacked Twitter's domain name and redirected visitors to an unrelated site hosting a page claiming Twitter had been hacked by the "Iranian Cyber Army." Evidence indicates, however, that the attackers were able to change the domain-name system (DNS) entries at Twitter's provider, Dyn Inc., said Rod Rasmussen, president and CEO of Internet Identity, an infrastructure security firm which monitors DNS changes.

"First of all the name servers themselves didn't change, so someone was updating things at the provider," Rasmussen said. Because other clients were not showing signs of DNS hijacking, it's unlikely that Dyn itself had been breached, Rasmussen said. "We didn't see anything else at Dyn that indicated signs of that the service had been compromised."

On Friday, Dyn confirmed that the attacker had the proper credentials to log into Twitter's account with the company and change the addressed assigned to various hosts in the Twitter.com domain. While some media reports have called the attack a hack or a defacement against the site, neither term applies, said Kyle York, vice president of sales and marketing for the firm.

"From our point of view, no unauthenticated users logged into the system," York said.

While Manchester, NH-based Dyn maintains a popular consumer DNS service, DynDNS, the company also provides enterprise-level DNS service to about 350 companies, according to York.

Dyn has suspended the use of its automated password recovery system, suggesting that the attackers were able to use the system to change the password on Twitter's account. York would not confirm the connection, but said that all its clients would have to use the company's phone support to change or recover a password.

The popularity of the social networking service has made it a target of hackers and a focus of security researchers this year. In August, a botnet targeted both Twitter and Facebook with a distributed denial-of-service attack. The micro-blogging service has also had to contend with the spreading of worms, the exploitation of a security vulnerability, and the use of its network as a command-and-control channel.

The first evidence of the attack happened at 9:57 pm PT, when the Twitter.com domain was redirected, according to Rasmussen. Following that, nearly 40 subdomains -- including those used by the company's mail servers -- were redirected. Until 11 pm PT, when Dyn reset the domain, visitors to Twitter.com were sent to one of four different IP addresses, Rasmussen said. All of the sites that hosted the defacement message were on legitimate ISPs, he said.

"My guess, looking at the boxes themselves, is that they are virtual servers that are hosting a lot of Web sites," Rasmussen said. "They (the attackers) may have used stolen credit cards to a set up a Web site."

The attacker, or attackers, behind Thursday's redirect claimed to be part of the "Iranian Cyber Army." However, another message -- translated from Farsi by Google's automated translation engine -- reportedly claimed the attack was motivated by the U.S. and Twitter's interference in "my country," suggesting the attacker was an individual.

Twitter is expected to issue a statement with further details late Friday. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed," the site administrators' wrote at 11:28 p.m. PT last night. "We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon."

Dyn is currently working with law enforcement to investigate the attack, Dyn's York said.



source:http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11569

Read more...

Twitter's own account caused blackout, says DNS provider

Twitter's authorized account made changes to DNS records, shunting users to hacker site, says Dyn Inc.

Computerworld - Hackers redirected Twitter.com's traffic to a rogue Web site for more than an hour early today by accessing its DNS records using an account assigned to Twitter, the company that manages Twitter's DNS (Domain Name System) servers said today.

Twitter initially blamed the early-Friday hour-long blackout of its site on changes made to the company's DNS records, which act like a telephone directory to match the twitter.com domain name with the IP addresses used by its servers.

"Twitter's DNS records were temporarily compromised, but have now been fixed," the company said on its service status page at 2:30 a.m. ET. "We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon." The status page has not been revised with more information since then.

Twitter uses a New Hampshire firm, Dyn Inc., to manage its DNS records, which match Twitter's domain name (twitter.com, and numerous others) with the IP addresses of its servers.

Today, Dyn denied that its infrastructure had been hacked. Early Friday, Tom Daly, Dyn's chief technology officer, told the Washington Post it appeared someone changed Twitter's DNS records to point visitors to a different IP address using the proper account credentials assigned to Twitter.

"Someone logged in who purported to be a legitimate user of their [DNS] platform account and started making changes," Daly told the Post's Brian Krebs. "It was not a failing on our systems whatsoever."

Kyle York, Dyn's vice president of marketing, echoed that in an interview with Computerworld. "No unauthenticated e-mail address associated with the account accessed the [Twitter] account," York maintained. "This was not an unauthorized breach of our system."

When asked whether the Twitter account had been used by someone authorized to do so, or if those account credentials had been pilfered by hackers, York declined to answer directly. "You'll have to read between the lines," he said. However, he did point to a tweet on Dyn's own Twitter feed as having the right explanation.

That tweet referenced a story on The Tech Herald, in which reporter Steve Ragan used the clues available, including Dyn's public statements, to theorize that someone compromised a Twitter staffer's e-mail account, presumably via malware that snuck onto the Twitter employee's computer, or through a standard phishing-style identity theft attack.

Once in control of the e-mail account, the hackers then used it to request a password reset for Twitter's account with Dyn, Ragan speculated. "The password reset process is completed, and at this point the person(s) posing as a Twitter staffer gets the reset password via e-mail," Ragan wrote.

That approach makes the most sense, agreed Ray Dickenson, chief technology officer at security vendor Authentium. "That's the most logical explanation," said Dickenson. "If someone obtained administrator credentials for Twitter's account with Dyn, or even if it was inside job, everything worked except the human element."

Dickenson said Dyn's claim that its servers had not been officially hacked is also likely true. "It's very difficult to directly hack a top-tier DNS provider," he said, noting that security at such firms is extremely tight. "You've got to believe that Twitter looked at the options, and made the right choice when it went with Dyn. Twitter's a huge site, and a huge brand."

Also in Dyn's favor, said Dickenson, is the company's contention that only Twitter's DNS records were altered, a fact that York stressed. "The fact that virtually all of Twitter's records were pointing to this defaced site, and that no other [Dyn] customers' records had been altered, corroborates what Dyn's saying."

According to York, Twitter will post a more detailed explanation of the cause of the outage later Friday. "It will fully exonerate us, that's one thing I can say," York said.

Twitter has been on shaky security ground for some time. Last August, determined distributed denial-of-service attacks knocked it offline for several hours. Two months before that, a hack of a URL-shortening service redirected millions of Twitter users to an unintended destination.



source:http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142486/Twitter_s_own_account_caused_blackout_says_DNS_provider?source=rss_news

Read more...

5 Twitter stars you've never heard of

(CNN) -- Sure, everyone knows that Oprah, Shaq and Ashton Kutcher are huge on Twitter. They're famous -- they should be huge on Twitter.

But Heather Armstrong? John Dickerson? Adventure Girl? These people can stroll unmolested through a paparazzi convention, and yet each has more than 1.2 million Twitter followers -- enough to rank them in the top 200 overall and more than Stephen Colbert, Snoop Dogg or Paris Hilton.

To thrive on the popular micro-blogging site, celebrity isn't always enough. You also must have something to say.

"You can't be Moses shouting down the mountain on Twitter," says Brandon Mendelson, a blogger who has amassed almost a million Twitter followers. "You need to be that friend everyone wants to hang out with."

Here's a look at five Twitterers you may not have heard of. They don't show up in the tabloids or on Leno. But they have the power, through the viral effect of their retweets, to make things happen, and maybe even nudge the national conversation a little.

Heather Armstrong: @dooce

If her real name doesn't ring a bell, the name of her blog might. Armstrong launched Dooce.com in 2001 and soon built an audience for her deeply personal, brutally honest posts about married life, kids and a postpartum depression that landed her in a mental hospital.

Some Bay Area friends turned Armstrong onto Twitter in early 2007, but her popularity on the site didn't really take off until this year.

"Since February it's sort of exploded," says Armstrong, who lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, with her husband and two daughters. "I find myself enjoying it more as my audience has grown. I also feel more pressure to do it -- to keep things updated and to keep things interesting."

Armstrong's tweets find sardonic humor in mundane domestic life, such as a recent one about offering to be her resistant daughter's "personal booger servant" by cleaning out her nose.

"It's a different muscle in the brain than the one you use to blog," she says of Twitter's 140-character limit. "And I had to learn how to exercise that muscle." Asked what makes a good tweet, she said, "Something profound. Something very funny. It's an art form, I think, to do it really well."

Armstrong checks Twitter first thing every morning on her iPhone, and often learns of breaking news there before she hears it anywhere else.

Two recent incidents awakened her to Twitter's growing influence. Armstrong spent $1,300 on a washing machine that broke almost immediately. After the manufacturer balked at fixing the problem, Armstrong began ranting on Twitter. The company sent someone to repair the washer within 24 hours.

Armstrong also reached out to her nearly 1.4 million Twitter followers for help in locating her assistant's mentally disabled brother after he went missing last month in Phoenix, Arizona. He was found several days later and identified by people who'd seen the news on Twitter.

"I sort of feel like that's one of my callings now, finding missing persons through Twitter," Armstrong says. "The power of it is really mind-boggling."

Stefanie "Adventure Girl" Michaels: @adventuregirl

This former bikini model branded herself as Adventure Girl and launched a second career as an online travel journalist in the mid-1990s, well before the Internet was in every household. Despite being late to Twitter -- she joined in March -- Michaels has amassed more than 1.2 million followers.

"I pinch myself every morning," says the Los Angeles, California, resident, who was an unemployed magazine writer last fall until she discovered micro-blogging. "I can't believe that even one person wants to hear what I have to say. I really owe everything to Twitter. It changed my life."

Michaels believes she found a niche on Twitter because few people were writing about travel. Her enthusiastic tweets mix travel tips and suggestions with details about her personal life and plugs for charitable causes such as Operation Smile, which provides corrective surgery for children with cleft palates.

Twitter's quick bursts of thought fit Michaels' on-the-go lifestyle perfectly.

"If you can't say it in 140 [characters], you shouldn't be saying it. It's made me a better writer ... because you find a way to get to the point," she says. "People don't have time to read those lengthy, self-serving blogs anymore."

So how did she get so many followers?

"I'm on all the time. When you start doing this all the time, and you engage [with people], and people know you care ... that's when you grow," she says. "It goes viral very quickly. And once you go viral, you're golden."

Michaels posts up to 50 tweets a day, often from her ever-present BlackBerry while she's on the road.

"It's fascinating to take your tweets along with you [when you travel]," she says. "It's like you're never alone."

Brandon Mendelson: @BJMendelson



source:http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/26/unknown.twitter.stars/index.html

Read more...

Twitter hackers appear to be Shiite group

(CNN) -- The popular microblogging site Twitter was hacked briefly by a group calling itself the Iranian Cyber Army, but the site was quickly restored after the incident early Friday. Those who tried to access Twitter were redirected to a site displaying a green flag and proclaiming, in English, "This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army." The group's Web address was provided.

Arabic writing in blue said, "Hezbollah is victorious," and a message on the flag said, "Ya Hussein," referring to Prophet Mohammed's grandson.

The United States and Israel categorize Hezbollah, a political party in Lebanon, as a terrorist organization.

"The group claiming responsibility for the Twitter hacking is previously unknown, but its symbols would be familiar to anyone looking at radical (Web) sites," said Octavia Nasr, CNN's senior editor for Middle East affairs. "The hackers are definitely Shiites, as indicated by the 'Ya Hussein' chant printed on their banner," she said.

"The group also uses Arabic in their text, a clear indication of collaboration with Arabic groups. Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shiite militia with ideological, political and military ties to Iran. The same name is also used by a group inside Iran." Twitter posted a message about 2:30 a.m. ET Friday on its official Twitter page, saying, "Twitter's DNS (domain name system) records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed."

"In the past few years, we've been seeing a rise in desire for hacking by insurgents and terrorist groups," said Nasr. Not only do they hack outside sites, but they hack each other's, she said. "The idea of 'cyber terrorism' and 'cyber insurgency' has been manifested in many ways -- (with) hacking individual sites being the most infamous."

She added, "This week's (revelation of) successful hacking of U.S. predator drone feeds by Iranian-backed Shiite militants adds another level of sophistication toward the hacking effort."

Twitter became unwittingly involved in Iranian politics last summer.

When Iran's disputed presidential election spiraled into bloody protests, the opposition used Twitter and other social networking sites to inform the world. Protesters beamed images from the violent demonstrations at a time when mainstream media were given almost no access to the demonstrations.

Twitter became so fundamental in spreading news of the protests that the U.S. State Department asked the company to delay a planned shutdown for maintenance.

source:http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/18/twitter.hacked/index.html

Read more...

Web Attack on Twitter Is Third Assault This Year

An online attack Friday morning on Twitter was the result of the simplest of security breaches: someone got the password to enter the master directory of Twitter’s Internet addresses and then redirected users to an alternate site instead.

No user information appears to have been stolen in the attack. But the security breach — the third major one at Twitter this year — underscores the continuing weakness of the company’s systems as its micro-blogging service is becoming more important to business and even global politics.

The incident also highlights a basic vulnerability in the way life is lived as it becomes increasingly digital: With so much vital information stored on the Web, people are only as safe as their passwords.

During the assault, which security analysts said began about 1 a.m. and lasted roughly an hour, hackers tinkered with Twitter’s domain name servers, which are hosted by a Manchester, N.H., company called Dyn. When Web surfers tried to reach Twitter’s pages, they were sent instead to a site for the “Iranian Cyber Army,” which claimed responsibility for the attack.

The domain names were eventually fixed and redirected back to the correct servers at about 2 a.m., but because of time the reset took, Twitter’s Web site was not fully functional again until an hour later, according to Rod Rasmussen, president of Internet Identity, an Internet security company, who watched the attacks unfold in real time through a new technology his company is building.

Twitter, which is based in San Francisco, declined to discuss details of the attack, and it was not clear how its security was compromised.

But Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing with the security firm IOActive, said that “in terms of this sort” of domain name server attack, “this is easily one of the most common hacks.” He said that a recent report by Verizon Communications found that 61 percent of Internet security breaches happen through simple password failures.

Security specialists say it will be extremely difficult to determine who was behind the attack. There was some indication that the attack came from within the United States, but authorities are still investigating.

Beth Jones, a senior threat researcher at the Internet security firm Sophos, said the attack did not look very sophisticated and probably was not the effort of a Web terrorist or other professional. “It could have been any number of people doing it,” she said.

Ms. Jones said the incident may have been “hacktivism,” an attack with a social or political motivation. “The point could purely be just to prove the site is insecure,” she said.

Although the attack did not appear malicious, it easily could have been, Ms. Jones said.

“Instead of throwing up a banner to cover the site, what if it had been an exact replica of the home page?” she said. “If this attack had been a phishing page instead, who knows how many millions of credentials they could have gotten?”

The attack was another black eye for Twitter, which had two major security breaches this summer.

In July, the technology blog TechCrunch published internal Twitter documents that had been stolen by an unidentified hacker who apparently figured out an employee’s e-mail password.

In August, unidentified attackers bombarded several social networking sites, including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, with millions of junk e-mail messages in an attempt to block the Web pages of a 34-year-old economics professor who was writing about a skirmish between Russia and the republic of Georgia. The other sites withstood the assault, one of the most common types of Internet attacks, but Twitter struggled with its service for days.

Roel Schouwenberg, a senior antivirus researcher at Kaspersky Lab, an Internet security company in Woburn, Mass., said the latest incident was an embarrassment to Twitter. “Even if it was the fault of the hosting company, Twitter has a track record this year of having weak passwords and being compromised,” he said.

In September, Twitter raised $100 million from investors, adding $55 million it had raised. Despite all that new money, “Twitter still doesn’t seem to invest all that much in security,” Mr. Schouwenberg said.

In a blog post Friday afternoon, Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter, confirmed that the hijacking occurred. “The motive for this attack appears to have been focused on defacing our site, not aimed at users,” he said. “We don’t believe any accounts were compromised.”

Mr. Stone and other company officials declined requests for interviews.

source:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/19/technology/internet/19twitter.html?adxnnl=1&ref=technology&adxnnlx=1261221343-Q7qr1/byCam3pfw/OkxbuQ

Read more...