Tag Archives | social networking

Something Phishy is Going on Twitter

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 10, 2009 at 11:32 am

If a Twitter user suddenly gushes about an AWESOME site that got him or her TONS of followers, and then provides a link to it, it’s reasonable to be skeptical–especially if that person doesn’t strike you as the type to get excited about such things or make excessive use of ALL CAPS.

And if the Twitter user in question happens to be the host of a network TV show and have close to A MILLION followers already…well, the chances are 101% that something is amiss:

Mr. Stephanopoulos is one of scads of Twitter users who have fallen victim to some sort of scam. Clicking on the links in their Tweets takes you to one of several sites that instruct you to enter your Twitter name and password to get the promises TONS of followers. And given that whoever’s behind all this has hacked into other people”s Twitter accounts to spread the word, trusting him or her with your Twitter password would be a Very Bad Idea.

I’m not sure how the phisher who’s doing this is tweeting from other folks’ accounts–it could be a known Twitter vulnerability, or one that nobody knew about until now. I’d love to hear Twitter explain what it’s doing about security other than telling folks to tread carefully.

One other note: George Stephnopoulos is one of the high-profile twitterers who has a Verified Account. But Verified Accounts don’t mean all that much if you don’t have any confidence that the tweets that emit from them are legit…

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Starbucks Gives Away Ice Cream on Facebook

Posted by David Worthington on July 7, 2009 at 4:41 pm

Starbucks Coffee Company has turned to social media to promote its new ice cream brand. The bean peddler is giving Facebook users complimentary prints of ice cream–provided they install an application to solicit their friends with offers for free Starbucks ice cream.

Starbucks is paying Facebook for ads to promote the application among the social network’s 200 million active users. To be clear, Starbucks is NOT giving away 200 million pints of ice cream; the offer is limited to 20,000 people in the U.S. between now and July 19.

When I installed the application, I was told that there would be no free pints to “surprise a friend” with for about another hour. It did, however, direct me to a Starbucks Web page where I could fill out a form with my personal information to receive a $1 off coupon to redeem at my local grocery store.

Whenever I do something on Facebook, such as install an application, my 500+ ‘friends’ that tune into my event stream are notified. That’s not such a bad reach for Starbucks. In fact, it’s almost viral. If I cared enough about it to send free ice cream to my friends, Starbucks’ frozen concoctions would receive even more exposure.

Could Starbucks become Facebook’s sweet success when it comes to figuring out how to make advertising effective on the service? Starbucks will doubtlessly be monitoring how well its campaign is working.

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You Can’t Buy Friends. Can You Buy Twitter Followers? Should You?

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 2, 2009 at 1:33 pm

Australian marketing company uSocial, which ambitiously (if inaccurately) describes itself as “the world’s premier advertising service,” is offering to find Twitter users new followers for money. $87 will supposedly get you a thousand new followers; $372.75 will get you ten thousand; $3479 will get you an army of 100,000 new fans. The company’s site doesn’t seem to have much in the way of explanation of how it finds followers, but a BBC story on the service says that uSocial identifies Twitter users whose interests seem to line up with that of the uSocial customer in question, then shoots them a message inviting them to follow the customer. It’s up to the prospective follower to decide whether he or she wants to follow or not.

It sounds innocuous in theory, but uSocial’s cheesy Web site doesn’t inspire confidence. Nor does its claim that Twitter followers are worth a dime a month per follower. That’s probably true for some companies that market on Twitter, but it must vary wildly. I’m just short of 10,000 followers myself, and I know I’m not realizing a grand a month from them—even indirectly through ads on Technologizer displayed to people who found the site through Twitter. Which is just fine, since I’m not in it for the dough.

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Twitter Lands in Bing

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 2, 2009 at 1:18 am

Microsoft’s strategy with its Bing search engine seems to be, in part, to be visibly different from Google. Which is certainly the case with a new feature the company launched on Tuesday: embedded tweets in results. Searches for someone’s name that include “twitter” or “tweet,” or searches for someone’s Twitter name, may produce results topped by a little module with that person’s two most recent tweets and a link to his or her Twitter feed.

Here’s a random example:

Okay, it’s not so random. Bing isn’t doing this with everybody–just a few thousand “prominent and prolific” Twitterers. (I assume I fall into the prolific bucket.) Bing’s indexing of Twitter results isn’t truly real-time, but does seem to be reasonably brisk–as you can see in the image above, it found my most recent tweet within minutes. Google finds tweets quickly, too–this tweet’s also in the Google index–but doesn’t have anything like Bing’s Twitter-centric module.

Microsoft doesn’t mention this in its blog post announcing the new feature, but the Twitter module also shows up even if you don’t reference Twitter in your search. Or at least the one for me shows up in results for “Harry McCracken.” It’s at the bottom of the first page of results.

None of this earth-shaking–or, really, a radical improvement on simply using Twitter’s own Find People feature. But I’m looking forward to the day when Google, Bing, and their rivals weave useful tweets into their results in a sophisticated way, and it’s nice to see tangible evidence that Microsoft’s starting to think about the problem. (As, of course, is Google–even if it hasn’t launched anything noticeably Twittery just yet…)

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Tweety Bird No Longer King of the Tweets

Posted by Jason Meserve on July 1, 2009 at 9:37 am

Tweety Bird can say he think he taw a putty cat all day long, but he better be careful of how he uses Tweet as a word. Turns out, Twitter has a trademark on the word used to describe microblog entries on the social networking giant.

The trademark was unearthed after Twitter sent a note to a third-party developer saying it was “uncomfortable” with the UI the developer created in that it was too similar to the Twitter interface. Twitter also mentioned that using the word “tweet” was not kosher either, as it was one of its trademarks, TechCrunch reports.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the company wants to encourage the flourishing ecosystem around Twitter, but that it does have to protect its “marks, logos, or look and feel.”

Trademarks are a tricky area, particularly for words that fall into common lingo. People say they’re going “rollerblading” all the time. But unless they’re using actual Roller Blades, they’re technically “inline skating.” Obviously, a company like Twitter is not going to go after everyone that uses tweet in trademark infringing manner, but those sites that do become more popular will have to watch out what Twitter lingo they adopt.

No word on how this will impact the use of words like Tweetup, Twestival, Tweep and every other “tw-” word that springs up around the Twittersphere.

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Fail: “Social Networking For Grown-Ups”

Posted by Jared Newman on June 30, 2009 at 3:52 pm

My old man really digs Facebook. Days after opening an account, he started a group for his high school classmates and reconnected with college pals. Any time I visit my parents, he posts and tags the pictures. He comments on my best friends’ status updates.

So it doesn’t surprise me that TeeBeeDee, a social network designed exclusively for older folks, is shutting down by July 13. In a note on the site, founder Robin Wolaner said TeeBeeDee “lacked the resources to continue developing the product to meet the needs of our community.”

Translation: The site needs money, but it’s not generating revenue and no investors want to sink more money into it. PaidContent noted that the site, which was riding on $9 million in venture capital, only drew 70,000 unique visitors last month.

It’s not that “grown-ups,” as TeeBeeDee called its user base, aren’t interested in social networking. The New York Times reported in March that females 55 and older are the fastest-growing segment of Facebook, leaping in membership by 175 percent since last fall. Men over age 55 were in second place, increasing their numbers by 138 percent during the same period. The Times story is otherwise packed with anecdotes like the one I described about my dad.

So why would this crowd rather hang out on Facebook than TeeBeeDee? Certainly, word of mouth plays a role. While a niche site like TeeBeeDee has to market itself, Facebook’s userbase practically does that job on its own, be it through friends, family or stories in the media.

But even if more people knew about TeeBeeDee, I’m not sure it would succeed. After all, isn’t social networking on a Boomers-only Web site kind of like checking into a retirement home? It’s just more fun to mingle with everyone you know, even if they aren’t all grown-ups yet.

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Michael Jackson’s Death Shows the Web at Its Best. And Worst.

Posted by Jason Meserve on June 26, 2009 at 12:16 pm

The untimely and shocking death of Michael Jackson is proving to be another milestone moment for the Internet, confirming the medium’s ability to spread news quickly while at the same time steps still need to be taken to handle massive, unexpected spikes in traffic.

For many, including myself, the Internet–most likely Twitter or Facebook–was the first place they heard the news of Jackson being rushed to the hospital followed quickly by the news of his passing. To wit, Twitter reached a 5,000-tweet-per-minute rate on Jackson related items, while Facebook saw triple the traffic to its status updates. For Twitter, the rate of posts reached levels last seen around the historic US Presidential election, co-founder Biz Stone told he the LA Times. Even the Times itself saw record traffic, with nearly 2.3 million page views in an hour, which it says is more traffic than any single hour during its previous peak on Election Day.

In general, online news sites tracked by Akamai saw traffic jump 20% above average as the news broke.

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Twitter: The Fastest Way to Get Informed. Or Misinformed.

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 25, 2009 at 7:04 pm

I spent this afternoon doing what a lot of people did: Watching TV reports about Michael Jackson while also gleaning information from the Web–especially Twitter. When I happened to turn on the TV, MSNBC was still speaking of Jackson having gone into cardiac arrest; the (correct) consensus on Twitter was that he had passed away. Impressive proof of Twitter’s speed and old media’s lethargy, no?

Once TV caught up with the tweets, I spent most of my time watching it. But when I checked in with Twitter later, the Twittersphere was mourning Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and…Jeff Goldblum.

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Facebook Takes Another Page from Twitter’s Playbook

Posted by David Worthington on June 25, 2009 at 4:46 pm

Facebook insiders are reporting that a beta version of the site’s “publisher” allows users to choose whether anyone on the Web can view their status updates. Can you say “Twitter?”

What would be interesting would be to see Facebook separate its events stream from the rest of the site, essentially creating a Twitter clone. It could then focus on letting developers build services that piggyback on top–targeting one of Twitter’s strengths.

Regardless of how aggressive it plans to be, I’ve been continually impressed by Facebook’s ability to evolve itself to remain relevant. It went from being a static social networking site that offered basic messaging capabilities to a site that is focused on actions, events, and mobility. Friendster and MySpace were too late to adapt, and lost their luster.

Earlier this month, Facebook made user names available to its users as a replacement for the random string of numbers that used to represent people. These are all small steps in the right direction that preserve what I like about Facebook while selectively adding what’s best about Twitter.

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The Web Evolves to Reflect the Developments in Iran

Posted by Harry McCracken on June 19, 2009 at 1:21 am

Almost exactly twenty years ago, the Tiananmen Square uprising made history, and the protesters used a then-hot gizmo called the fax machine to coordinate their efforts. This week, something extraordinary is going on in Iran–and whatever happens, it’s clear that social networks and other Web tools will be remembered for the role they played.

Fax machines were hunks of plastic that remained unchanged throughout the drama in Beijing. The Web, however, can adjust itself on the fly to reflect the situation. Or rather the people who make Web services can. Facebook has just launched a version with a Persian interface, based on contributions from more than 400 Persian speakers. Iranians were already using Facebook; now they can use a version in their native tongue.

Similarly, Google has rolled out a version of Google Translate that can translate from Persion to English and vice versa. I’m not sure about how Google goes about adding new languages to the machine-translation service, but it was able to add Persian this quickly from a standing start, I’m impressed.

Meanwhile, Twitter continues to play an important communications role within and outside of Iran, and I hope that each and every people who’s ever sneered at it as amounting to nothing more than boring people sharing what they had for breakfast will reflect on its use by the Iranian protesters. If you’re gonna by snarky about a medium at its worst, it’s only fair to celebrate it as it helps make history, no?

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