Tag Archives: twitter

TechCrunch Posts Leaked Twitter Documents, Twitter Not Happy

Jul 21, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Social Media 4 Comments

Last Thursday, TechCrunch posted a multitude of proprietary information belonging to Twitter. Some 300 confidential documents arrived in the tech blog’s inbox the prior Tuesday, from someone known as “Hacker Croll.”

The documents include employment agreements, calendars of the founders, new employee interview schedules, phone logs and bills, alarm settings, a financial forecast, a pitch for a Twitter TV show, confidentiality agreements with companies such as AOL, Dell, Ericsson, and Nokia, a list of employee dietary restrictions, credit card numbers, Paypal and Gmail screen shots, and much more.

TechCrunch published some of the documents, though they first filtered through them and withheld some that they felt they shouldn’t publish.

Twitter, suffice to say, isn’t too pleased about TechCrunch’s decision to publish said material, much of which is critical to their plans to grow and monetize their business. The microblogging giant is considering filing a lawsuit.

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Twitter Security Goof: “Password” isn’t a Good Password

Jul 20, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Social Media 2 Comments

TechCrunch is reporting that the admin panel for Twitter Search was compromised recently. How? The password for it was “Password.”

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, responding to our email, said “this bug allowed access to the search product interface only. No personally identifiable user information is accessible on that site.”

Included in the Search admin are the Trending Topics settings, and the tool used to remove individual statuses from search results in some cases.

What were they thinking?

This raises the important question: How secure is Twitter, or any other web service? How do we know that they’re even hashing our passwords to protect them if the database was compromised?

TweetBoard

Jul 1, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Social Media 2 Comments

TweetBoard is an interesting new service that sprang up a few days ago. It’s sort of a way of bringing Twitter conversation onto your website.

Tweetboard is a fun and engaging micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near real-time (max 1 min delay), reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting. Conversations that spun off the original conversation are also threaded in-line, giving your site visitors full perspective of what’s being discussed.

As people leave their messages on your TweetBoard, they simultaniously add them to their Twitter account, complete with a link back to the conversation, adding a bit of a viral twist.

The service is currently in public alpha. All you have to do is request an invite, which will be approved instantly, then add the JavaScript to your website, just before the </body> tag.

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What the Twitter API Needs…

Jun 28, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Social Media No Comments

Do you know what the Twitter API is missing? A way to sync the last status you read.

I use a Twitter client on my laptop (Tweetie), and I use another (Twitterific) on my iPod Touch. And sometimes I might use either Twitter.com or Twhirl when I’m on another computer. Every time I move between devices, I lose my place in the stream of incoming tweets. Any good Twitter client remembers the last tweet you read. The only problem is that little bit of information (simply the numerical ID of a tweet) is locked down to one device.

I propose that Twitter add a new API method that accepts the ID of a single tweet, and stores it. Then any Twitter client could request that information and use it to display the tweets from where you last left off.

Something along the lines of statuses/last_read and statuses/mark_read perhaps?

It’s a little thing that bothers me, and something I’d love to see added to the API.

Ow.ly: What’s You’re Take?

Jun 26, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Featured, Social Media 2 Comments

Ow.ly is a URL shortener that has gained a measure of popularity of late. It ties in with the HootSuite service, which allows you to schedule tweets, manage multiple Twitter profiles, and track link statistics. Ow.ly and HootSuite together are sort of like an amalgam of Tweetable, Bit.ly, and TwitterFeed.

But let’s focus on the URL shortener for now. Ow.ly has a clean, easy to use interface. The resulting URLs are along the lines of http://ow.ly/fA3N. As of yet, there is no API available, though one is in the works.

Time for the controversial part.

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Twitter Launching “Verified Accounts” This Summer

Jun 10, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Social Media One Comment

After a recent lawsuit between over a case of somebody posting fake tweets in a public figure’s name, Twitter has decided to implement a method of account verification. The feature, which will be released experimentally this summer, will take the form of a “verified account” seal displayed on accounts that are authenticated in some manner.

Details of what the verification process entails are undisclosed at this time, though Mashable has speculated:

As to how actual verification will work, it seems that Twitter will look to see if an official channel of the person in question links to his or her Twitter account from a place like an official website. This is a perfectly logical way to verify accounts, in our opinion. Details are scarce on the full plan, though.

This seems like a good idea, as people such as celebrities, politicians, and businesses are increasingly subject to whatever adverse effects come from impersonators on Twitter.

Twitter Blog: Not Playing Ball
Mashable: Twitter to Launch Verified Accounts
CNET: Twitter to roll out ‘Verified Accounts’ this summer

Tweetie for Mac: OSX-Native Twitter Client

May 29, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Featured, Software & Scripts 2 Comments

I’ve been trying out Tweetie for Mac lately. It’s a Mac OSX-native Twitter client with a very nice, polished interface. It has many of the features of Nambu, but it lacks the instability that Nambu tends to have from its current “beta” status.

Tweetie supports multiple Twitter accounts, and let’s you switch between them with a cool vertical slide effect. It offers the usual basic Twitter functions (friends timeline, mentions, direct messages) as well as some streamlined search abilities, including the ability to save favorite searches that you frequently track.

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Twitter: The RSS Reader for the Masses

May 26, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Featured, Social Media 4 Comments

I have about twice the number of Twitter followers as I do RSS subscribers.

RSS is an open standard built from the ground up to serve-up new content as it is released. It excells at delivering information and making it readable in a quick and efficient manner. Yet it is still, for the most part, confined to the realms of geekdom.

Despite the strengths of RSS, it hasn’t been adopted by the general public, while Twitter, a proprietary social networking site, has. It’s a bit harder to understand RSS over Twitter, and subscribing to feeds isn’t the easiest thing in the world.

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Tweetable Twitter Plugin For WordPress

May 13, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Featured, WordPress 105 Comments

Yesterday I released my newest WordPress plugin: Tweetable. It helps integrate Twitter into your blog. It tweets your posts as they are published and adds a configurable sidebar widget that displays your latest tweets (with optional follower count). The automatic post-tweeting can be configured to use the URL shortener of your choice, and Google Analytics campaign tags can be included.

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TweetMeme Button Adds “Source” Option

May 11, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Social Media 6 Comments

One of my previous criticisms of the TweetMeme button was that the message it would send to Twitter was along the lines of “RT @tweetmeme blah blah blah.” I wasn’t crazy that it would put @tweetmeme as the source of the find when you clicked the button to tweet a post.

TweetMeme, apparently, has addressed this problem. Now you can set a custom source in the JavaScript snippet, so it RT’s your username.