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The First Twitter Worm Surfaces – Plain Passwords to Blame?

Posted on January 3, 2009 by jessestay

Back in March, I reported the occurance of a new worm on Facebook, which surfaced due to a phishing scam, and took over users’ profiles. It would appear that a similar scam is surfacing on Twitter as we speak. The scam comes in the form of a direct message to a user’s followers, stating “hey! check out this funny blog about you…”, followed by a URL. When you click on the URL it takes you to a phished version of Twitter, looking exactly like the original Twitter site, which collects your username and password. I’ve received about 5 of these just in the past hour so it is spreading rampantly. Twitter just reported the incident here.

Asking those that have sent the message, it would appear most of them filled out the form thinking they were logging into Twitter, so it is most likely one person that sent such a message to all their followers, starting the domino effect of spam and password collection. This begs the question, though, which I’ve brought up multiple times in the forums and Chris Messina blogged about today on the urgency of Twitter requiring OAuth or similar Key-based authentication in the API. It would take any application, similar to Twtply, to be sold to a spammer, full of usernames and passwords to set off such a worm. Essentially, any application which collects your username and password right now has the potential to turn its users into Twitter zombie accounts, similar to this worm spreading currently, spreading false information, collecting bank account information, or you name the possibility.

I hope Twitter has this as their number one priority currently – stopping this worm is important, but implementing some sort of key-based authentication such as OAuth should be the next thing on Twitter’s mind, and in my opinion, that should occur even before the new API push they are getting ready to launch. Twitter – it sounds like you need a patch applied to your service!

Check Out My New Twitter Avatar!

Posted on December 25, 2008 by jessestay

If you check out my Twitter Profile, you’ll notice a new, winter-themed, festive Avatar. Yes, it’s animated, and everyone is going to hate me now for revealing how to do this. Check out my post on LouisGray.com to learn how it’s done. Consider it my second gift to you this Christmas!

Are You Addicted to Twitter?

Posted on December 16, 2008 by jessestay

Are you addicted to Twitter? Janet Meiners Thaeler (@Newspapergrl) thinks I am. Guy Kawasaki has a great SocialToo survey asking the question. Janet even gave me an award for it! (and I sincerely appreciate it – I love awards!) I’m not so sure I’m addicted though. Even though I do have near 10,000 updates on Twitter and am active on the service, I think I use FriendFeed much more, and in a much shorter time frame I have near half that in likes and comments on FriendFeed. I think I also use Facebook more – I wrote two books on it after all.

Twitter is a tool, and I use the best tool for the job. This is part of why I left Twitter a few months ago – Twitter wasn’t doing what I wanted it to. When I realized I wasn’t going to get better from other services I came back. Twitter is where I post my thoughts and share things that I can’t post to this blog or elsewhere. This status propagates my Facebook status (through the Twitter App on Facebook), as well as FriendFeed, where more people comment, and I can have more personal, lengthy conversations in those places. Twitter is a tool I use to meet new people, to share thoughts, and build relationships, just like I do on FriendFeed and Facebook.

Could I leave Twitter? You bet. If another service with a much larger network, and just as many opportunities comes along with an actual revenue model and something I could rely on to not delete my followers or data, I’d leave in a minute. It’s part of the reason I have a close eye on FriendFeed, and have built an early hold there to build a strong network. I see potential there. I’m not addicted – I use the best tool for the job. I’m building a network everywhere I go.

The honorable Chris Brogan (if I may call him so) enlightened me back at BlogWorld. He was joking around at the time, and I can’t even remember our conversation that led to it, but his comments were something to the effect of “Listen, TechDork, technology doesn’t solve problems! Humans do!” Oh how right he is. How do you define Social Media? Social Media is about the technologies we use to enable real-life relationships. Emphasis on real-life. If a service isn’t doing that for you in the most effective way, or if you can’t do it with just one service – be prepared to leave. We can’t afford to be addicted to these services. I know I’m not.

Janet had a great idea though. What awards would you offer your Twitter friends? Janet and Larry Weaver have come up with “Social Media Awards” you can create for your friends. Share yours below.

You’re Invited to the First Utah CoWorking Offices

Posted on December 10, 2008 by jessestay

This Thursday, December 11, I will be speaking on a panel at a Tweetup (that’s Twitter-speak for get-together) in the very first Utah Coworking Office. The offices are located in Orem, Utah, and promise a location where everyone can bring their business, pay a shared fee covering only rental costs, and share the company of others as you and your business gets off the ground. It’s unique of its kind for Utah, and should prove popular amongst many entrepreneurs looking for a place to hunker down while they work.

You’re invited! On December 11 from 6:00pm to 9:00pm they are having a Tweetup at the new Cowork Utah offices. All in Utah are welcome, and as part of the Tweetup, me, @ashbuckles, @newspapergrl, @mollermarketing, and @mickhagen; will discuss Twitter, what it is, why it’s useful, why it isn’t useful, and other topics as you enjoy the company of others at the event.

So come on over for some great company, great food, and a great opportunity to see what the new concept of “Coworking” is bringing to Utah as we participate in this event.

The address for the event is:

383 N. State St., Suite 201 (second floor)
Orem UT

You can download the flyer for the event here.

Remember When Your Followers Were Deleted? Twitter’s Done it Again!

Posted on December 3, 2008 by jessestay

Earlier in the year you may remember Twitter “accidentally” deleting a large portion of a majority of their users’ followers and having to spend days restoring those from tape backup due to their mishap. Well, it would appear that Twitter has done it again. This time may not be as obvious to users.

On SocialToo.com I was noticing we were getting “Rate Limit Exceeded” errors for our whitelisted @socialtoo user. Such errors shouldn’t be happening for whitelisted users so I looked into it. Sure enough, on the Twitter development mailing list I noticed an email from the founder of MrTweet, Yu-Shan Fung, stating they too were seeing the same issue with their @mrtweet whitelited user.

Alex Payne, Twitter API Lead, confirmed the issue, stating, “It looks like some database maintenance inadvertently truncated our table of whitelisted users.” He then continued in a follow-up e-mail making the problem seem worse: ‘The updated estimate I’ve just received from our ops guys is “more
than 15 minutes and less than 12 hours”. They have to restore from a
nightly database backup. Said backups are quite large, and take some
time to get through.’ It would appear that Twitter has inadvertently deleted an entire table of all the whitelisted users – this is the table that enables many of the Twitter Apps you use to continue to talk to the API without breaking. This is what we as developers are relying on to work or our Apps go down.

It was the exact issue of database deletion and insecurity of Twitter being competent enough to not do it again that caused me to go on hiatus from Twitter earlier in the year. Problems like deleting an entire table from a database, especially twice in a year, are inexcusable Twitter! I recommend finding someone that can ensure this doesn’t happen again. It’s time to upgrade your Operations team. As developers, we simply can’t rely on this, and it’s why I called my service SocialToo and not TwitterToo.

In the meantime, many of the Twitter services you use until this gets resolved may have issues. This includes SocialToo.com autofollow being down until the table in the Twitter database is up again. I’ll keep you updated on the @socialtoo Twitter account when this comes up again.

Presentations Available With Audio

Posted on December 2, 2008 by jessestay

Just a quick update – I’m posting my Ignite presentation below, dubbed with audio this time. It should be a great primer to get you started in Facebook Development. Also, scroll down and you’ll be able to listen to the panel I joined at Global Entrepreneurship Week Utah 2 weeks ago.

Facebook Development in 5 Minutes[swfobj style=”margin:0px” width=”425″ height=”355″ src=”http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=fb-development-5-minutes-1227159742206508-8&stripped_title=facebook-development-in-5-minutes-presentation” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true”]

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: city lake)

Here is the GEWUtah Panel (taken from http://www.utahpulse.com/featured_article/unleashing-ideas-conference-viral-marketing-secret-weapons-a-down-economy-panel-dis):

[audio:http://www.utahpulse.com/files/GEWViralMarket.mp3]

SocialToo Announces SocialSurveys!

Posted on November 19, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve been talking about the “next new feature” of SocialToo for awhile now. Tonight, in a partnership with Guy Kawasaki of AllTop and Garage Technology Ventures, SocialToo.com announced the release of SocialSurveys, a viral way of polling your followers in a very easy manner. Here’s how it works:

You go to Socialtoo.com and register if you have not done so already – you must provide your Twitter credentials to get the most out of it (other services will be added soon)

Click “Create Survey” to get started

Add your question and some answers

Leave “Send a URL for this SocialSurvey to your Twitter friends” checked if you want to send out an update on Twitter. This posts an update automatically, with the question in the content, followed by the URL to your SocialSurvey to Twitter.

It redirects to the survey – you can then use this URL to send to any other friends you want to see it.

In addition to SocialSurvey creation, you can also subscribe to the surveys your friends create via RSS. To do so, when you log into SocialToo, click on the RSS icon, or the link that says “Click to add (your name)’s surveys to your RSS Reader”. Add that to your RSS Feed Reader and you’ll now get every survey that user posts. It should also be noted that you can post your own surveys to FriendFeed through this method. With all this, SocialSurveys could be compared to “TwitPic, for Surveys”. You can see all my surveys here, and add them to your RSS reader via this link.

SocialSurveys top out an existing feature set that is yet to be beat amongst other individual tool providers. Existing features include:

Automatically follow those that follow you on Twitter and Identi.ca, with no effort or e-mail rules to set up on your part.

Specify users to “blacklist” and exclude from the auto-following
Automatically unfollow those that unfollow you on Twitter – this improves your ratio of followers to following, improving your ranking on sites such as TwitterGrader.

Send direct messages to your new followers on Twitter.

Get daily e-mails with statistics surrounding who follows and unfollows you during the day, including your last Tweet when they followed or unfollowed you, similar to Qwitter.

When you provide your Facebook credentials, YourUserName.socialtoo.com redirects to your Facebook profile, giving you a short, easy-to-remember URL to give your friends to point them to your Facebook profile. You can visit my Facebook profile via http://jessestay.socialtoo.com.

With the launch of SocialSurveys, SocialToo is poised to be at the fore-front of providing all the tools you need to stay on top of the Social Networks you belong to. With current integration points into Twitter, Identi.ca, and Facebook, and plans to add many more in the future, SocialToo is set to be your one-stop shop to being “Your Companion to the Social Web”. Expect more tools and features very soon!

You can see screenshots, and an excellent write-up over at LouisGray.com.

Announcing Follower Messaging and Follow Statistics for SocialToo.com

Posted on October 30, 2008 by jessestay

I’ve been throwing hints on Twitter over the last week or two that I’ve been working on this, and with a little extra time I finally got it together. Today I’d like to announce that, as of this moment, we have some really cool new features for Twitter users on SocialToo.com, all in one place!

SocialToo, which is trying to be “Your Companion to the Social Web”, is seeking to build the tools and utilities that compliment your experience on the social networks you belong to. Up until now, anyone could sign up and automatically get the ability to have it follow all those on Twitter that follow you. The script ran once a day, and would do all the work for you, while also enabling you to blacklist users you don’t want it to follow. This enables you to automate, while making exceptions, making management of your friends on Twitter much easier. In addition, by providing Facebook credentials it would redirect “yourusername.socialtoo.com” to your Facebook profile.

Today, I’d like to announce some new features:

First of all, for those with less than 2,000 followers (this is due to a Twitter limit), we’re now updating your followers up to the hour – as Twitter improves their API I’ll update this to work even more realtime. We’re working with Twitter on getting their API improved to handle this. If you have 2,000 followers or more instead of just once a day, we’re now updating every 6 hours, so even your followers will update faster than before.

Today, we’re adding the ability to add a message that we’ll send to all your new followers via direct message. This can be a great opportunity to thank your followers, or, as a business account, tell them about a unique promotion you are running. However, if you’re just signing up and aren’t already following those who follow you, we recommend waiting until your account syncs up before turning this on, or all those we follow will get dm’d, even if they’re not new followers. This should only be applicable to new accounts – if you have an existing account, check your preferences and be sure to turn this feature on!

In addition, if you have a bunch of people who followed you, you followed back, and then they stopped following you (this is the case for many Twitter spammers), we’ve added the ability to turn on a feature that unfollows those that are not following you back. I think it’s who you follow that matters, so my recommendation is to use this feature sparingly, and turn it off when your account is back in sync. You can use it however you want though.

We’ve got a fresh new design! – okay, I admit, we’re not perfect yet, and were this the golden days I’d say we’re still technically in “beta” (I hate that excuse though), but we got a superstar designer to offer some help on the design for this – thanks so much to our designer!! You know who you are. The new design will come into play much more in the next round of features.

My favorite feature: follower statistics. Not only are we now tracking those that follow you, but we’re also tracking those that stopped following you. You’ll now get an e-mail every night telling you the followers that stopped following you, and who your new followers are (and consequently who you followed). This is turned off for all existing users – go into your preferences to turn this on and find out details about those you’re following and those who may have unfollowed you (and we’ll soon provide other statistics to help you find out why).

As planned, I think we’re changing the game in making your social experience better all in one place with these tools. You may be familiar with other sites that do similar things out there, but you will quickly find that SocialToo.com is easier to set up, more automated, more accurate, and much less hassle than some of the other services out there.

Oh, and there’s one more really big thing. You’ll have to wait a few weeks to hear our next announcement though. Much more on the way!

You can sign up at http://socialtoo.com (that’s T-O-O, like “tool”, or “also”). Follow us on Twitter at @socialtoo for more updates!

Twitter API Lead Changes Priorities With New Book

Posted on October 27, 2008 by jessestay

UPDATE: Be sure to see Alex’s comment below for his view on this.

I am a huge fan of Twitter, regardless of what I say or ever complain about. As a developer of Twitter apps, I want to see it succeed. However, I will sound the warning bell when I see things happen that could detrimentally affect the service. A post on his personal blog today by Twitter’s API Lead, Alex Payne, has me concerned. In the post, he announces that he’s writing a book, and ironically, the book has nothing to do with Twitter development.

In the post, Alex announces he’s writing a book on a new, JVM-based language called Scala. He did a presentation on it awhile back at C4, talking about why he was supporting it and why it was a good language. Alex is a smart guy, and it would seem he’s a very appropriate author for such a book, but in his blog post he mentions nothing about what is going to happen with his work at Twitter – what are his priorities after he begins writing this book?

In development for my own site, SocialToo, I’ve dealt quite a bit with Alex, so I know he’s a hard worker. He’s answered my e-mails in the middle of the night, and even over the weekend. He’s always talking to the Twitter development list and lately seems to be doing a great job interacting with developers.

As an author of 2 books, one of them O’Reilly, I’m a bit worried Alex’s priorities may be shifting. Writing a book is no easy task, and especially not an easy task to maintain a full-time job at a very time-consuming startup that still doesn’t have its API squared away. He should expect to spend several weeks in a row, full-time, writing, editing, and re-editing the book. It’s not very easy to write a book in your spare time – he should expect his focus at Twitter to diminish. There’s no avoiding it – that’s why O’Reilly gives authors an advance, so they can support themselves during the time they are writing the book. O’Reilly has tough deadlines to get books to print in time.

So, seeing perhaps the most important player in Twitter’s API development completely shift their focus after posts like this one last week by Alex himself, I can’t help but wonder where the priorities are at Twitter and who’s actually working. Does this mean we’ll never see them open the firehose? As a Twitter developer, I’m truly worried about this announcement.