Written on August 10, 2008 – 12:03 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Last week Techcrunch reported about a possible vulnerability in Twitter which made it possible to force other people to start following you. A user named johng77536 tricked Twitter and got more than 7000 followers in one night. The hack was an obvious spam effort with only two posts in the account, both linking to a site called hotmoda.com. The account was swiftly deleted by Twitter and that seemed o be the end of it.
Now it appears that it is also possible to get more than 8000 followers in one day WITHOUT hacking Twitter. A fairly unknown blogger with Twitter username @manatee woke up on Friday morning and found 15619 follower requests waiting in her Twitter account. She accepted them all, and ended up with 8000+ followers within a few minutes. Considering she only had 5 followers the day before, this would count for a very sharp rise to fame.
Twitter seems to be aware of the issue but hasn’t closed the account which seems to imply that this is more likely a bug than a hack. @manatee is quickly losing followers as people start to find out they have involuntarily started following her. Looking more closely at the blog and Twitter posts it could also simply be the same hacker as before who worked just a little harder on looking like a real person instead of a spammer. There is no author listed at the blog or in the Twitter account and the image of a young and beautiful blond woman could have easily been copied from somewhere.
For now @manatee IS still listed as one of the top 100 most popular people at Twitter, which is bound to attract some new followers. I have contacted Twitter and will add their official reply to this post as soon as I get it.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on August 6, 2008 – 11:58 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Remember the Last.fm graphs I discussed a few weeks ago? It gave a gorgeous and insightful visualization of your music history. The master behind this technology is Lee Byron, read his explanation and motivation on his personal blog. Now another developer, Jeff Clark, has created a Twitter version called StreamGraphs:
The StreamGraph shows the usage over time for the words most highly associated with the search word. One of these series together with a time period are in a selected state and coloured red. The tweets that contain this word in the given time period are shown below the graph.
You can either enter a random search word or your username. Then StreamGraph grabs the data of the 200 latest tweets containing the keyword. See the graph in this post for the visualization of our Twitter account. Check out the launch date of the iPhone to see how accurate the visualization is.
Don’t forget to check out some earlier work of Jeff Clark, as he’s also the man behind TwitArcs and Twitter Spectrum.
Written on July 18, 2008 – 4:08 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
That the Twitter service is choking up every now and then is nothing new. The Twitter team had made numerous attempts to improve the continuity of the service, as they reduced features such as the reply tab, capping pagination and blocking instant messaging from time to time. It seems that all these efforts have not reduced their down-time at all.
Louis Gray mentions that the list of reduced features can be extended once again, as Twitter is tweaking their authenticated API hits again. It seems that Twitter capped API requests down to 100 hits per hour, unannounced. This causes a lot of frustration by many users, but especially with the people behind the many applications that are making use and rely on Twitter for their data. If I was working my ass off to create something valuable for the Twitter community, only to find that Twitter keeps limiting the access to their service, I would be very demotivated to continue Twitter development. It makes me wonder if Twitter realizes the viral effect that third party applications can have.
In other Twitter news, it seems that the homepage showed some new changes to their design for a short while this morning, with the biggest change being that the Twitter tabs have moved to the right of the screen.
It seems that Twitter prioritized their functionality and design over the API and reliability for now. As they made another drastic change on the backend to avoid their service choking up and a sudden change in their layout earlier this morning. Sure, integrating search is a great idea, but many question the priorities that the short message service is taking recently. Or maybe we have to wait until someone takes the job as Operations engineer on their job site to enjoy 24-hour Twitter bliss in our lives.
Written on July 15, 2008 – 7:17 pm
Joop Dorresteijn, Contributing editor
Twitter reports on their blog that they acquired Summize, a search engine that indexes twitter posts.
As Twitter co-founder Biz Stone puts it:
“The folks over at Summize discovered Twitter and significantly improved on this idea of filtering and search..”
Techcrunch reports that Twitter hired 5 of the 6 employees, all of them are engineers. The original founder and CEO moves along to a new project. The Summize API will be merged with that of Twitter and integrated under the Twitter brand. Twitter is expected to add search and related features in the near future.
Nobody mentioned numbers, but Silicon Alley Insider reports a total of $15 million, both in stock and cash.
Written on July 8, 2008 – 12:12 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Belgian artist Jan Leenders is one of those artists who uses new technology to create an exciting art project. He started @twit2art, an idea that revolves around people sending him messages, which he turns into a 18 x 12 cm art piece. Like this one:
That’s an interesting idea, but it’s getting more exciting - as Leenders rewards the people who reacted the fastest, have to pay less. He writes:
“If you’re fast, it’s cheap. The first twit (thus the first painting) costs € 1. The second € 2, the third € 3 and so on. The price includes everything. Material, packaging, shipping, taxes. Everything.
So the people who made Twitter big - the ones who have the guts and the curiosity to try new things - are the ones who have the opportunity to buy a real Leenders for an affordable price. The piece featured in this article for example, was sold for 11 euros. And this one for only 1 euro.
Eventually, Leenders will make some money out of the project. Making him, says Paul Bradshaw, a true punk capitalist. More and more D.I.Y entrepreneurs find new and unconventional ways of making money, some even by making beautiful things.
Here’s my Twit2art. Update: Leenders has sent me a confirmation, it will cost me 45 euros.
Written on July 3, 2008 – 2:50 pm
David Petherick, Next Web WebTipr United Kingdom
This morning, I heard Identi.ca mentioned more than a few times in comments on Twitter, the microblogging service that’s having problems staying reliable as its popularity grows.
Identi.ca is, as the name perhaps suggests, almost identical to Twitter in the way it works. At this stage, it has a few things missing to limit its appeal - you can’t search for other users, you can’t use other applications to monitor it, and it has no current API to hook in and expand it. But a look at the FAQ section on the site reveals some interesting news:
The software we run, Laconica, is still in its early stages,
and many features people expect from microblogging sites are not yet implemented. Some important ones that are expected “soon”:
- SMS updates and notifications
- A Twitter-compatible API
- More AJAX-y interface
- Maps
- Cross-post to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc.
-
Pull messages from Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc.
- Facebook integration
- Hashtags
- Image, video, audio notices
-
Automatic url-shortening
- Multilingual interface (using Gettext)
Behind the service is the Canadian Control Yourself, Inc., whose blog of July 2nd also added: -
…Identi.ca’s underlying software is available under an Open Source license. Identi.ca is also the first service to support OpenMicroBlogging, a standard for exchanging short messages between microblogging sites. Identi.ca also makes public user data available under a Creative Commons license in standard formats.
The key element, in my view, is an Open Source code base, so as more developers contribute to developing that, and with identi.ca could using the de facto microblogging standard, then the scalability issue that Twitter has been struggling to overcome might be more readily solved: Replicate that software, and place the capability ‘in the cloud’. Tweet!
Written on July 1, 2008 – 8:37 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
You may or may not know I’m one of the guys behind Twiddict, a simple service which allows you to keep tweeting even when Twitter is down, by saving your 140-characters or less messages and queuing them up for publication as soon as the microblogging service (sorry, global communication utility) gets back on its feet.
We received an e-mail today from the Office of the General Counsel of the American Red Cross, claiming that we need to stop using a red cross in our logo, because it violates their copyright. I’ll spare you the details, but basically, the only third parties allowed to use the red cross emblem in their logo are the ones that have been doing so since before the year 1905. For some reason, this list of third parties does not include any Twitter mashups.
The letter also says all Twiddict founders (myself, @tijs, @tomklaasen and @atog) are subject to be fined, imprisoned or both. Fortunately, the imprisonment would be less than 6 months in any case (phew).
All kidding aside, the letter provoked the following thoughts in my head, in this exact order:
- “Huh?”
- “Ah well, they kinda have a point, so we’ll change the colour of the logo or something to get them off our backs.”
- “Wait a minute. Does (and should) the American Red Cross actively chase Web 2.0 mashups when they use a generic thing like a red cross emblem in their logos?”
They even included a corny brochure which should make us realize why we’re bad, bad boys for stealing their logo. You can check out the PDF from Scribd, if you’re interested.
The whole thing reminds me of T-Mobile ordering Engadget Mobile to stop using the color magenta, or Red Hat harassing the Data Portability Group for using a slightly resembling logo as Fedora.
I would love your take on this.
Should we comply and change the color to another shade of red (or remove the cross emblem altogether)? Or should we tell them this is kinda ridiculous and tell them to leave us alone?
Share your opinion in the comments, since we honestly don’t know what to do with it.
Update: we have replied to their e-mail with a couple of questions. For the record, we’re not trying to be bullies, we want to understand above all.
On a sidenote: last night, I was contacted by the ’social media lady of the Red Cross’ via Twitter nonetheless, and she pointed me to a section of the Red Cross website where they dive into their social media strategy. As a consultant in this space, I was deeply impressed by how savvy their strategy on this really is.
Update 2: while we wait for a word back from the Red Cross, Tijs has already begun designing alternative logos and he kindly asks for your opinion.
Written on June 24, 2008 – 11:52 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yoono, often referred to as the French Flock, closed a round of funding, led by AGF Private Equity. The score? €2.6 million. The goals? Attracting more users and offering more widgets. Competition is tough, as Flock and Minggl in general terms offer the same service: a social browser experience. Here are the latest numbers on their battle:
Of course, the real deal is the number of downloads. According to Firefox add-ons Yoono has 13,885 weekly downloads (1,354,484 in total). There are numbers available about Flock and Minggle. But these traffic stats give an idea of Yoono’s challenge: take over Flock.
Yoono just got started, and when in private beta - Jason Kincaid from TechCrunch predicted that Yoono would success in its mission to become the most important social browser experience tool - as you don’t have to download a new browser (like Flock requires). A few weeks after that enthusiastic review, Yoono opened its gates to the public.
Yoono’s new sidebar has some new features like, filtering friends into groups, upload pictures and poke to Facebook, send Twitter messages, comment on Friendfeed, comment on Flickr pictures, browse Digg video, chat via Gtalk, and use MySpace.
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