Posted 03/11/10 at 09:01:14 AM by Paul Lilly

In a blog post earlier this week, Del Harvey, director of Twitter's Trust and Safety team, said the microblogging service is taking a proactive approach to detect and eliminate phishing scams and malicious links.

"Today, we're launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks," Harvey wrote. "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 to keep that user safe."

As part of this new system, you might see links shortened to twt.ti, but other than that, the service will work behind the scenes. Harvey also said that initial efforts will be put on Direct Messages and  email notifications, since those are the areas the attacks primarily occur.

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Posted 03/09/10 at 08:00:24 PM by Ryan Whitwam

The mood might be a little glum at the Foursquare and Gowalla offices today. Facebook is said to be readying new location sharing features for the popular social networking site. The launch is expected in late April. The user agreement on Facebook was updated in November to include language about the privacy of user location updates. The company also indicated that any location sharing features they might roll out (wink, wink) would be an opt-in service.

Early indications are that the location tools will come in two flavors. First, there will be an integrated ability to share your location via status updates. Secondly, Facebook will create and API for app developers to use to add location awareness to their apps. Advertisers would place high value on locations data for even a fraction of Facebook’s 400 million users.

The usefulness and possible consequences of this feature are still unknown. We hope Facebook will tread softly, having learned their lesson from past mistakes (coughBEACONcough). Though, what about app developers? We all know some apps can be on the shady side. Are you comfortable sharing your exact location with developers?

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Posted 03/08/10 at 09:09:55 AM by Paul Lilly

Well that didn't take very long. In just under four years time, Twitter bolted past 10 billion tweets, serving up its 10 billionth message last week. So what did the milestone message say and who posted it? Nobody knows, as it belongs to a protected user.

Visible or not, the message underscores the continuing popularity of the microblogging service, which doesn't appear to be losing any steam (sorry Google Buzz). According to Mashable.com, Twitter posted its one billionth tweet back in November 2008, and five billion tweets only four months ago.

As it stands now, Twitter says its service pumps out about 50 million messages every day, up from 2.5 million about a year ago, the Wall Street Journal reports.

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Posted 03/02/10 at 07:06:44 AM by Paul Lilly

In a blog post on Monday, Twitter announced it has opened up its full data feed of all public tweets (otherwise known as a "Firehose") to seven new startups, and would like to partner up with even more.

"We are thrilled to announce that Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search join us as partners," Twitter wrote. "These companies range from funded startups to part-time, one-person operations so we cam up with a fair way to license access that scales with their business. If you think there may be a potential partnership involving access to the Firehose, let's start a conversation. Our emails is api@twitter.com."

Twitter has already partnered with a handful of industry heavyweights, including Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. According to Twitter, there are now more than fifty thousand "interesting applications" that are currently using its freely available, rate-limited platform offerings.

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Posted 02/26/10 at 07:09:54 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Facebook users know how it can be. You log in and notice you have a huge number of notifications. You find yourself dismayed as it becomes apparent that most of them are just app notification spam. You know the sort: so-and-so just answered a question about you, or what’s-his-face wants your help in Mafia Wars. Well, hopefully you won’t see quite so much of that anymore now that Facebook has ended support for the ‘notifications.send’ API.

We’re happy to see Facebook take even a small step to keep the service usable. Sure, developers may not like this so much, but Facebook did just give them the ability to request user email addresses for notification purposes. They also have the new games dashboard to play with. It is currently unclear how this will affect the newsfeed. Currently, we are still seeing a few app posts in it, and we wouldn’t mind if that went away.

Overall, this is a good move by Facebook. Even with the massive success Facebook is enjoying, they have to pay attention to the experience of users lest they become the next MySpace. Just think, that would have sounded like a good thing three or four years ago. Internet people are fickle.

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Posted 02/23/10 at 05:41:13 PM by Paul Lilly

We knew Twitter was huge, but what's most staggering is the microblogging service's astronomical growth rate. According to the company's own data, there are some 50 million tweets being posted every day, which works out to around 600 tweets per second.

"Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007," Twitter wrote in a blog post. "By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew by 1,400 percent last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day."

Even more remarkable, those figures don't include tweets from accounts identified as spam.

"Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there's search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network," Twitter added.

No matter how you slice it, that's a lot of tweets, though hardly surprising if you follow our very own Nathan Edwards, who has no doubt contributed to this massive growth in daily tweets.

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Posted 02/15/10 at 01:07:56 PM by Paul Lilly

All the recent buzz may be centered around, um, Google Buzz, but don't go writing Twitter's obituary. The mico-blogging service has attracted yet another high-profile poster - White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.

"I opened it today," Gibbs told the Associated Press. "I was watching a Twitter feed while the President visited the briefing room last week." Gibbs added that he "thought it was fascinating to watch and see what people were thinking, doing, and writing."

And speaking of watching others, Gibbs notes in his bio that his is an official White House Twitter account, and that messages received through such pages are subject to the Presidential Records Act and may be archived.

If you still want to follow him --  and so far, over 18,600 Twitter users do -- you can find his Twitter page here (PressSec).

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Posted 02/12/10 at 03:15:36 PM by Bart Salisbury

KDE has announced the “immediate availability” of KDE Software Compilation 4.4, dubbed “Caikaku”. According to KDE, version 4.4 fixes 7,293 bus and adds 1,433 new features. Probably the biggest new feature is the Plasma Workspace, designed especially for netbook users.

The Plasma Workspace, an alternative to the Plasma Desktop, is “specifically designed for ergonomic use on netbooks and smaller notebooks.” It allows better use of the smaller space available on netbooks, and will be more suitable for touchscreen input. The Plasma Netbook shell has a full-screen application launcher, search interface, and a Newspaper for widgets to display content from the web and small utilities.

There’s also a Social Desktop feature which updates the Community widget. Says KDE: “The new Social News widget shows a livestream of what is going on in the social network of the user and the new Knowledge Base widget allows users to search for answers and questions from different providers including openDesktop.org's own knowledge base.”

A goodly list of other improvements will be found at KDE's web site, along with links for downloading the new version.

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