This past weekend, a trojan mimicked Facebook’s native functionality and sent notifications on the user’s behalf. While Facebook says that the application was harmless, its ability to break through a boundary of trust on the platform alarmed me.
Tag Archives | social networking
Twitter Hacked
Twitter’s home page was replaced this evening by a message claiming to be the work of “the Iranian Cyber Army.” Then most of the site went down. At the moment, it seems to back up, but only sort of–I still can’t get into the status page and blog. You gotta wonder whether Twitter’s doing everything it can to keep the site safe, and whether it’ll give us all the gory details on how this happened…
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Glide: An Amazing (and Sometimes Amazingly Confusing) Web Megasuite
Four years ago, I used my PC World blog to write about Glide, a “Web OS” that I said might be the most ambitious new service of 2005. Glide was trying to move much of a typical user’s computing experience from the PC to the cloud–even though the idea was so new at the time that almost nobody was talking about cloud computing yet. I said that the service was promising, but rough around the edges and frequently confusing. While Glide hasn’t ever become one of the Web’s household names, it’s continued on, adding gazillions of new features and repeatedly reworking its user interface. So I’m overdue for another look.
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Zune Twitter App Censors Tweets
Okay, who wants to make the case in favor of Microsoft’s decision to release a Zune HD Twitter app that censors naughty words out of tweets?
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Starting Over With Facebook
My friend (and blogging hero) Dan Gillmor doesn’t like last week’s changes at Facebook to privacy settings and the default state thereof. So he took a drastic, fascinating step: He decided to delete his account and start over.
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Mysterious Random SMS Tweets: Still Mysterious!
Earlier today I blogged about widespread instances of folks getting random tweets delivered to them by SMS for no apparent reason. TechCrunch’s MG Siegler has written about the same issue, and notes that Twitter has acknowledged the problem. But it looks like Twitter hasn’t yet completely diagnosed the problem–it’s asking for people to post information on the mystery tweets they see, (As of a couple of hours ago, I was still getting them.)
Both MG and Twitter’s items indicate that some people are seeing the tweets online as well as via SMS, and MG says that some of the tweets are from users who have protected their accounts so their items are (theoretically) private. Oops!
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The Mysterious Case of the Random SMS Tweets
It started last Thursday. My iPhone vibrated, and I checked it and saw that I’d just received a tweet via SMS–even though I have Twitter set up so there’s not a single soul whose tweets are delivered to my phone. (I do get direct messages sent via SMS, but this wasn’t a DM, nor did it mention me…or seem to be addressed to me in any way.)
I didn’t think much of it. But then it happened again. And again. At an increasing rate, even–in the past 24 hours, I’ve received a dozen random mystery tweets. They all seem to be from people I’m following, but other than that, I detect no pattern.
When you think Twitter’s behaving weirdly, there’s an easy way to check if you’re right: Ask Twitter. I did, and found a surging sea of confused people wondering why they were getting random tweets via SMS.
San Francisco, we have a problem.
So far, I’ve found plenty of people noticing something odd is going on, but no theories about an explanation: There’s no reference to the situation on the Twitter blog or the Twitter status page, or in the Twitter forums.
I remain mystified, but I’ve contacted Twitter to see if anyone there can tell us what’s going on. If you have any hard knowledge or theories, please chime in…
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New Ways for Local Businesses to Get Social
Google and Citysearch have made announcements that have very little in common except for one big thing: They both involve simple new ways for local businesses to interact with their customers via social sites.
First the Google news: The company is snail-mailing window decals to 100,000 restaurants, stores, and other local spots that are well-reviewed by real people on Google Maps. That’s no huge whoop–Yelp decals already fill the windows of interesting eateries and storefronts, at least here in the Bay Area. But Google’s stickers have QR codes–those square bar codes. Scan one with any phone app that can do the job, and you’ll go to that business’s Place Page on Google Maps, where you can read (and write) reviews, look for coupons, and more. (QR code apps are plentiful: Google recommends beetagg, neoreader, QuickMark and Barcode Scanner.)
Okay, now for Citysearch’s news. The granddaddy of local-information sites is working with Twitter to add tweets to the information it uses to help folks learn about local businesses. People who run such businesses can “claim” their page for free: Among the benefits of doing so are the ability to sign up for Twitter within CitySearch, a feature enabled using Twitter’s new sign-up API, which lets third-party sites enable their users to register as Twitter users. Makes sense for me: As trendy as Twitter is, is there any question that there are far more small business owners who aren’t on it yet than who are?
Citysearch’s Twitter integration also puts tweets about a business directly on its page, and lets visitors tweet about from that page, too. Which is also a logical addition, given that tapping out 140 characters about a business is a far smaller commitment than writing even a brief review.
Citysearch’s restaurant-centric sister site Urbanspoon will also begin pulling in tweets about the eating establishments it covers.
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ExecTweets: A New Place for IT Pros
I’m happy to report that I have a fun second job at the moment, and it involves helping to run a site you may be interested in. I’m the editor/curator/call-me-what-you-will at ExecTweets IT, an expansion of a popular existing site called ExecTweets. They’re both operated by my friends and business partners at Federated Media, and you may remember the splash that ExecTweets made when it debuted earlier this year.
ExecTweets’ original incarnation was aimed at business executives; ExecTweets IT is aimed at the IT pros who make technology work within those executives’ businesses. We’ve hand-picked a few hundred Twitter users of interest to IT pros–CTOs, CIOs, and tech experts of all sorts–and created a unified tweetstream. You can browse by topics (such as Virtualization or Security) or search on the IT-related keyword of your choosing.
We’ve also added some new features aimed at helping IT types share advice and opinions:
- IT Q&A is powered by the nifty Aardvark service, and lets you ask and answer IT question from the comfort of your IM client, e-mail inbox, or Twitter account. You don’t need to sign up for Aardvark to ask questions, but if you’d like to help spread knowledge by answering them as well, sign up for Aardvark and our IT Pros group here (and thanks for doing so!).
Town Hall lets you quickly participate in ongoing discussions about tech topics by tweeting your thoughts. It’s located on the right-hand side of pages such as this one.- IT Expert Blog features IT posts from a bunch of popular blogs: Folks friend Anandtech, Hot Hardware, ReadWriteWeb, Techdirt, and more. Including, come to think of it, me.
We also have an ExecTweets Twitter account that more than 1.1 million folks follow. Join ’em, and you’ll get links to worthwhile info at ExecTweets and elsewhere around the Web about IT and executive stuff.
If you’re an IT pro or other interested party, please check ExecTweets IT out and let me know what you think. We’re just getting started, and are itching to get feedback that can help us make the site even more useful. And here’s FM’s blog post with more information about the whole project.
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A Much Better Mobile Twitter
Twitter launched a new version of its mobile site today at mobile.twitter.com, optimized for WebKit browsers such as those on the iPhone, and Palm WebOS devices, Android, and Nokia S60 phones. And it’s not just better than the old one (which lives on at m.twitter.com) but radically better, with an interface that nicely downscales to phone size while retaining Twitter’s personality and even offering the new, official Retweet feature (but not lists as of yet). I like how much it feels like full-strength Twitter in a more compact form–if Twitter were a Whopper, this would be a Slider.
When I tweet from my phone, I do so using Tweetie, the extraordinary piece of software that’s not only the best Twitter client for the iPhone but one of the best applications of any sort I’ve ever used on any platform, period. (Tweetie author Loren Brichter is in my personal pantheon of interface geniuses.) But if I had a phone without a great Twitter client–and I haven’t found an Android one I like a tenth as much as Tweetie–I’d be all over the new mobile Web version.
Here’s Twitter’s blog post about the new version. And here’s (mostly favorable) chatter about it on Twitter.