Twitter

Twitter has issued a statement to its mailing list encouraging third-party developers to cease creating applications that use the Twitter API solely to duplicate the functionality offered by Twitter’s own official clients. Citing an effort to improve consistency of the Twitter user experience, the social networking behemoth is exercising more control over how its service is utilized. Developers who already have an established audience, such as those who create such popular clients as TweetDeck and Seesmic, may continue developing their applications and supporting their user bases. However, developers are encouraged to cease creating new applications that duplicate existing functionality. With 750,000 applications in existence that already use the Twitter API, it is quite clear why Twitter wants to stop the tide of new apps and grab the reins of its users’ experience: it wants to own the user experience. ...

Mashable: The Pew Center is out with a new report that focuses on Twitter usage in the U.S., and it reveals that 6% of the entire U.S. adult population uses Twitter. Young adults ages 18 to 29, minority groups — 13% black and 18% Hispanic — and urban dwellers are among the groups with the highest level of Twitter use. The report reveals that women and those with college educations are also slightly more likely than other groups to tweet. ...

Twitter has seen a phenomenal amount of growth in the past year. In fact, the company claims more than 100 million new accounts were opened in 2010. To celebrate, the startup has created an infographic showing off some of the most notable new accounts from this year. It’s quite a motley crew; celebs such as Billy Idol, Tiger Woods, Sylvester Stalone and Cher rub digital elbows with world leaders, including the Dalai Lama, Donald Rumsfeld and Queen Noor of Jordan. ...

Symantec Connect: We have become familiar enough with malware creators poisoning popular search engine terms through SEO techniques in order to deliver their malicious files to a greater pool of unsuspecting users. Other popular services such as Twitter have not escaped the watchful eyes of the miscreants. This attack involves pumping out many of the same tweets with different accounts to push them into the Twitter trending list. That way more people are likely to see them even if the individual user accounts being used to send the tweets don’t have that many followers. Incidentally many of the accounts used in this attack don’t have that many followers and are quite fresh – meaning they are probably fake accounts set up specifically for the purpose of spamming tweets. ...

Mashable: A large number of messages containing only the link “goo.gl/R7f68” has appeared on Twitter today, redirecting the users to various malware-laden sites. The messages are mostly coming from disposable accounts, but they also appear on some accounts that appear to be genuine, which indicates that there’s a worm spreading and sending the messages from infected accounts. Furthermore, all of the messages containing the link are sent from the mobile version of Twitter. ...

Mashable: The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that took down WikiLeaks as the site published secret U.S. embassy cables over the weekend could be the work of a single hacker, working for his own agenda. The hacker, called the Jester (or th3j35t3r), describes himself as a “hacktivist for good” and posts the message “TANGO DOWN” after a successful attack, together with a link of the sites he takes down. The focus of his attacks, the Jester claims in his Twitter Bio, is “obstructing the lines of communication for terrorists, sympathizers, fixers, facilitators, oppressive regimes and other general bad guys.” ...

THE INTERNET SEARCH OUTFIT without a search engine, Yahoo has announced a package of products that it hopes will make it more relevant again. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Yahoo showed off a host of products that it claimed would deliver to consumers a more “personally relevant Web experience with new social and local features”. You guessed it, more social networking and more experiences than you can poke a stick at. ...

BetaNews: Ping, the social music service introduced as a part of iTunes 10 in September, can now be linked with Twitter, the popular micro blogging service announced Thursday. Starting today, Ping users can connect their iTunes Ping account to their Twitter account and share their listening activity in their Twitter feed. Tweets sent from Ping include the album and artist information, album cover, song preview, and a link to the iTunes store to buy the music mentioned. ...

Mashable: Months ago, Twitter released a clunky tool called Blackbird Pie for embedding tweets in blog posts. Today WordPress has radically simplified and improved tweet embedding with a new feature, also named Twitter Blackbird Pie. Beginning today, WordPress.com users simply need to copy a tweet’s URL and paste it on a line by itself to embed it in a blog post. Pasted URLs are converted into full tweets, which means these embedded tweets look as good as screenshots, but include the link back to the tweet, a link to the source and a retweet option. The new feature will also save users time — letting them avoid the much more manual process of snapping screenshots of tweets. ...

On average, response times and availability of five major social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, and MySpace) has improved this past quarter, according to Web analytics company AlertSite. This is great news given that all of them (save for possibly MySpace) have a quickly growing number of users. Despite a few outages, however, Facebook is still the fastest social network in terms of average response time. In the most recent third quarter (July 1 to September 30), Facebook shaved 0.02 seconds off its second quarter average response time, down to 1.00 seconds. Twitter and Myspace came in the last two spots with average response times of 2.93 seconds and 3.61 seconds, respectively. That being said, Twitter’s performance improved the most over the last quarter among the social networks studied: more than 35 percent. ...