140Char

Inspired by the recent decision of U.S TV star Conan O’Brien to follow just one apparently random Twitter user, Leo LaPorte and his guests on last Sunday’s Twit.tv show (John C Dvorak, Kevin Rose and Clayton Morris) decided to follow suit with an added twist – both the Twitter user that was picked and one random follower will win an Apple iPad.

As a result, @LisaTickledPink was chosen by a search for the phrase ‘I hate technology’, and has shot from 2 followers to 17,428 followers at the time of writing. As a result, she’s turned off email notifications from new followers, but has already been interviewed on radio and TV in her native New Zealand.

Meanwhile the subject of Conan’s attention, @LovelyButton, still has a slight lead with 21,218 followers:

In terms of creating attention, Conan and his 616,177 followers are now up against @leolaporte with 172,323, Dvorak’s 65,656, Morris with 20,899, and of course not only Kevin Rose’s 1,157,702, but also the attention gathered via Digg.

Besides the publicity the two stunts have garnered, it’s interesting to compare the relative pull of a showbiz star vs tech stars, and also that attention and fame on Twitter is still often driven via famous endorsement. Neither of the two subjects are inherently are more or less worthy of following because of the attention they’ve had, but the mix of request/prize/attention has seen both followed by tens of thousands of people.

Upcoming racing game Blur combines two of my interests – microblogging and videogames (As you might guess from the recent launch of Online Race Driver).

When it becomes available on the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, racers will be able to send Twitter messages from within the game. So you can challenge friends to beat your time from within the game, although you can’t send message between the three games and platforms themselves.

It’s another example of something I recently blogged over at TheWayoftheWeb (Yes, I have three sites currently running in my spare time!), on why ‘The time is right for pervasive social gaming‘.

And integration with Twitter and Facebook is one part of this – and will increase as console-based games converge with the new social gaming phenomena.

A belated look at a recent report from comScore which shows Twitter is the fastest growing social network on mobile, with growth of 347% since 2009.

The number of users in January 2010 reached 4.7 million – compared to just over 1 million in January 2009, giving a 4.47 multiple increase. Twitter’s 347% growth compares with Facebooks 112% (But Facebook still rules with 25 million mobile users), and Myspace declining 7%.

But to be 1/5th of Facebooks size and growing 3 times as quickly shows Twitter is looking even more promising on mobile than on the fixed internet.

Over the last week, many people have fallen foul of the latest phishing scam to do the rounds of Twitter. And an unusual number of high profile individuals have been included in the list of users affected, including the Press Complaints Commission, BBC correspondent Nick Higham, the Guardian’s Head of Audio Matt Wells, bank First Direct, and environment minister Ed Milliband.

Environment Minister Ed Milliband caught by phishing scam

Phishing scams have long been endured by most internet users – the traditional mechanism has been via email, but as social networks have becoming hugely popular, they’ve become the vector of choice. And Twitter is particularly attractive as the speed with which messages can spread is combined with the use of short urls, which help to mask the malevolence of the message.

While this is just another example of the huge amount of phishing attempts which exist, the higher profile of these attacks as they affect prominent politicians will hopefully lead to a better awareness and response by governments.

It’s probably a forlorn hope, but for example, here are some things which might change:

• More education about phishing and spam to the ‘general public’ – how about a public awareness campaign?
• More understanding about how normal users can have accounts compromised very easily – for instance, with ‘Three Strikes Rules’.
• More people using offline backups of any content that is valuable or useful to them
• More of a move towards data privacy, and Vendor Relationship Management, to allow users to only share the information they choose with any service provider under strict controls.
• A rethink of the UK Identity Card scheme which includes private businesses taking fingerprint and photos.

Importantly, it should place the risks of Social Engineering alongside those of teenage cyberwarfare specialists taking down defence satellites from their bedroom. If a private company was, for example, storing fingerprint data, you wouldn’t need to target their infrastructure (Although I’m not sure most chemists have a particularly high level of internet security) – you’d use social engineering on their employees via Facebook, Twitter, or offline in person to gain information and access.

Of course, technology can play a part, and I’m sure Twitter will increase their response to phishers in future, particularly as a high profile attack via any platform is never good for PR. But any measures will always be part of a never-ending arms race, and only when every individual is educated enough will there be any noticeable difference…

The fact that Twitter now employs 140 people is a nice little coincidence which probably had to happen sometime…

What’s more interesting is that the company has pretty much doubled in size since last summer. and there are still at least 27 more job openings available at the moment. While things have been quiet for a little while, is this a sign that the core product is going to ramp up in terms of development or is this the cost of dealing with so many users producing so much content, along with increased threats from hackers etc?

With the caveat that it doesn’t cover third party applications, comScore puts visits to Twitter at 75 million – and regardless of the correlation between those numbers and the actual figures, what you can take away is that the graph is still going up and to the right:

It certainly seems anecdotally as if I’m witnessing more colleagues and friends not only using Twitter, but attempting to use it in a fairly sustainable way rather than registering, looking confused and then vanishing again.

Meanwhile the amount of content being produced has also risen – to a whopping 1.2 billion tweets per month according to data collected by Royal Pingdom.

The methodology used to collect the figures was pretty simple:

‘we tracked down a tweet from the first couple of minutes of each month. Using the sequence numbers of these tweets, we could then calculate the number of tweets for each month. Since finding old tweets is more or less impossible with Twitter’s own search engine, we used Google, then verified the tweet time stamp by looking at the tweet itself’

Again, while there could be some debate about the accuracy of the actual figures involved, what’s important is that the overall effect is some consistent and sizeable growth. And that’s in the face of the redesign of Facebook – the next challenger on the list is GoogleBuzz, but so far I’ve found it rather unsatisfactory, even apart from the initial privacy issues.

Councillors in Cornwall, UK, are in trouble after claims a number of them used Twitter during a meeting to mock other members – the same behaviour that takes place in the backchannel of every social media conference.

They could face being reported to the authority’s standards committee and if they’re judged to have broken the code of conduct for inappropriate comments, could face suspension.

The tweets apparently included:

“naughty boy!”

“high level of accidental sexual innuendo in the council today”

“she said phones must be switched off. (I love that we’re completely ignoring that instruction)”

“chairman indirectly instructs us not to tweet from the meeting. Whoops!”

Cornwall Council has said that it is currently developing a social media policy which recognises the potential for social networking tools to communicate and engage with the public, but would also highlight the importance of regulating usage to avoid anything which could adversely affect its reputation.

I think it’s quite surprising there are still Government organisations which aren’t operating with even a basic social media policy in place – but at the same time, we can only hope politicians and councillors remain encouraged to show their human side of social networks rather than being regulated into the same impersonal figures which many people feel disenfranchised from.

Stolen Twitter accounts appear to be commanding a premium amongst hackers sharing details on forums.

Data stealing software is a risk to your details for any site, but according to Kaspersky researcher Dmitry Bestuzhev, he’s seen  a Twitter account with just 320 followers offered for as much as $1000. In this case, the three-letter username may have influenced the price.

That compares with Gmail accounts for $82, Rapidshare accounts for $5 per month, and other sites including Skype and Facebook. Bestuzhev also went on to say Kaspersky had detected 70,000 data stealing programmes in 2009, which is twice as many as in 2008.

Twitter is likely to be a preferred route to spread malware as links can spread in near real-time to hundreds or thousands of followers – each of whom can quickly and easily repeat a malware message to their own network.

Malware messages are also hidden by shortened urls, and with the amount of links spread via Twitter, there’s a good chance people are less suspicious than seeing the same links in an email or IM message.

It’s a reminder to make sure you use a unique password which is a mix of alphanumeric characters, and to change it regularly. Be careful of sharing it with third party sites and tools which aren’t using Twitter’s OAuth protocol, and be careful with links being posted by others – even including people you trust.

(Via Computerworld)

In the past, tweets have been produced on behalf of astronauts, but they were actually posted by someone on the ground…

Now though, that’s changed…

The first tweet to have been constructed and posted from space

So 8.13am on January 22nd, 2010 marked one small tweet for man, and one giant leap for microblogging kind…

If you were one of the people shocked and appalled when it was revealed that President Barack Obama never actually used his Twitter account to chat to his 2 million + followers, then you’ll be happy to know he’s now a published Twitter user.

President Obama ‘pushed the button’ on a message on the @redcross account “President Obama and the First Lady are here visiting our disaster operation center right now.” I’d guess the reason it’s in the third person is that it was probably written by someone else, rather than any bizarre third-person view the President has of himself. The next tweet confirmed the historic event: “President Obama pushed the button on the last tweet. It was his first ever tweet!”

It’s interesting that someone persuaded him to tweet on behalf of the Red Cross and perhaps raise a little more awareness and support for their work dealing with the Haiti disaster – it’s got 50,000 followers as opposed to ‘his’ own account @barackobama with over two million, which surely would have raised more funds?

And before anyone starts getting their hopes up that they’ll be exchanging @ replies and DMs with the President himself from now on – I suspect there are still a number of reasons why we won’t see him regularly tweeting – not least the potential security risk of disclosing his location. Which I guess also rules out Foursquare…

Should Twitter let you post more than 140 characters, include more metadata in tweets, or include embedded images?

Two prominent internet voices, Dave Winer and Robert Scoble have both recently posted their views on how Twitter should improve it’s core product. Dave Winer proposes that using the basis of SMS as a reason for not expanding the core capabilities of the service is wrong, and that Twitter is really SMS 2.0.

Meanwhile Robert Scoble uses the claim Twitter’s web traffic is flat to suggest 14 ways for the service to become more engaging. Number 1 is to remove the 140 character limit and to allow photos and videos in line to ‘communicate something more than the metaphorical equivalent of a grunt.’

The question is whether either of them is right – from a more technical standpoint, I think there’s a valid viewpoint that Twitter could expand the data accompanying a tweet in some way to give more value when it’s referenced by other services.

But I think it’s an incredibly bad idea for Twitter to lose the 140 character limit, and allow inline photos and videos.

For starters, a service already exists for that, called Facebook. Scoble references it as a more entertaining service for that reason, but I wouldn’t agree. Twitter is fun and engaging in creating conversations and quick observations – for both work and pleasure, whereas Facebook is a way to catch up on all the intimate details of your close family and friends.

It also ignores the myriad of ways that people interact with Twitter already – if I want the basic web service on PC or mobile it’s available. If I want greater adaptability, there’s Tweetdeck, Seesmic or many of the other clients. A huge number of clients are available to cater to almost every need – therefore removing the problem of Twitter attempting to do it. Every change made by a major social network is analysed endlessly, and attempting to please everyone results in something which pleases noone.

Increasing the scope of Twitter also infringes on the Twitter ecosystem of third party businesses – embedding images instantly removes the need for the likes of Twitpic, and suddenly increases storage costs for Twitter.

And suddenly you lose a unique network, and instead you have a Facebook also-ran.

So now – I don’t think we should lose the 140 character limit just yet.

British hypnotist Chris Hughes is intending to set a record for the largest online hypnosis session via webcast on Monday, January 4th, at 8.30pm GMT.

Apparently he’ll test those that signed up in a 30 minute session for susceptibility to hypnosis, and then ‘Socialtrance‘ will begin.  Epileptics, pregnant women and those under the influence of drugs and alcohol shouldn’t take part, and the aim is to apparently put people in a good place for 2010 as well as introducing them to hypnosis.

And interestingly, although the webcast itself will be done via audio, so all you need is a net connection, comfy chair and headphones, you need to sign up via your Twitter or Facebook account. Which obviously then sends out a message on your behalf to say you’ve signed up. (Examples)

‘Just registered for #socialtrance, the online hypnosis world record attempt with Chris Hughes. Get involved! http://bit.ly/socialtrance‘

It’s been reported in several places that he’s planning to hypnotis people via Twitter, which obviously isn’t true – but it ties into Twitter hype far better than ‘Hypnotist markets online hypnosis session via Twtter’!

Either way, it seems to be working, with just under 5000 people signed up to attend with a little under 48 hours to go – especially considering he originally aimed for around 2000. Whether or not people will turn up, or indeed fall under hypnosis is another matter, but it’s definitely further proof that unusual events and concepts can market themselves pretty well simply by building in connectivity to Twitter and Facebook – which can then lead to media coverage – which then builds on the Twitter and Facebook marketing.