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 03/08/10 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 03/04/10 at 05:35:42 PM by David Murphy

Listen up, Windows 7 aficionados: This one's for you.  You've no doubt noticed your operating system's lack of location-based functionality.  Unlike Apple's competing OSX, which can triangulate your system's position based on the geographical locations of nearby WiFi hotspots, you can't really... well.  You can't do any of that on Microsoft's platform.  While you might not need to know exactly where your desktop is (hint: your dwelling), it would sure be nice to have this feature for a more mobile system. 

And that's not even in the, "I'm lost in the wilderness and I see a bear help" sense.  Wouldn't it be great to automatically have the weather displayed for your current location on your Windows sidebar?  If you use Twitter (and yes, readers, I realize you hate Twitter), you could just as easily pull up a listing of messages centered around your particular location: "I just ate a great meal here," or "@bear2 There is a silly human wandering around here; I will eat him," et cetera.

Well, Microsoft hasn't come to your rescue on this one--a third-party developer has created an free application that allows you tap into the wonders of geolocation all by your lonesome.  Go fetch your laptop from the other room, then click the jump!

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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 02/23/10 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 02/16/10 at 07:08:56 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Thirty years ago the Commodore VIC-20 was real screamer of a machine. It boasted a 1.02MHz processor and 5KB of RAM. Don’t laugh, that’s over one-million whole hertz of processing power. The VIC-20, introduced in 1980, had its time in the sun until it was discontinued in 1985. Now The Personal Computing Museum is bringing the once proud VIC-20 into the twenty-first century in the least dignified way possible, it’s going to send a tweet.

On February 20th the tape drive of the Commodore VIC-20 will be fed a program called Tweetver allowing it to send out a tweet. The museum says this about making history by getting “one of the lowest-powered personal computers” on Twitter. We imagine it’s more about getting publicity, but we’re cynics.

You are all invited to come to the museum to watch the VIC-20 do its thing. Or if you prefer to catch all the fun from home, the museum’s Twitter feed is technically where all the action is happening anyway.

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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 02/09/10 at 08:17:19 AM by Paul Lilly

It's tough to ignore the success both Twitter and Facebook have had on the social networking scene, so it shouldn't come as much suprise that Google wants in on the action too. But rather than create a new service altogether, the search giant is planning on adding functionality to its existing Gmail service, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Citing "people familiar with the matter," the WSJ says Google will announce the new Gmail feature very soon, perhaps as early as this week. This feature, the WSJ reports, will be a module added to the Gmail screen that will stream updates from whoever a user chooses to connect with.

Sometime down the line, the module will also tap into a connection's YouTube video and Picasa photo accounts and share that content as well, but it's not clear if this will be announced at the get-go or not.

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