Posted 11/06/09 at 09:04:10 AM by Paul Lilly

Some changes are coming to Twitter that the microblogging site hopes will help curtail the amount of spam that flows through its Trending Topics area, the social networking site announced in a blog post.

"As Twitter grows and the number of tweets each day continues to astound us, we’ve noticed an increasing amount of clutter in the public timeline, especially with trending topics," Twitter noted. "Trends began as a useful way to find out what’s going on but has grown less interesting due to the noisiness of the conversation."

Twitter's solution is to start experimenting with ways of ranking retweets, though the service didn't say how this would work. If we had to guess, we'd say it would be based on some kind of algorithm that gauges a user's popularity, among other factors, rather than a manual approach.

According to the blog post, any initial changes will be minor and "the improvement won't be very noticeable at first."

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Posted 10/30/09 at 12:35:46 PM by Paul Lilly

If only spammers had the dough to pay their court-appointed fines, Facebook could make a full-time living in the courtroom. The social networking site slapped Internet marketer Sanford Wallace with a lawsuit alleging he was accessing Facebook accounts without permission and posting fake messages on users' Walls. The judge didn't take kindly to Wallace's actions and awarded Facebook with a little over $711 million in damages.

Not a bad day in court for the social networking site, but Facebook doesn't stand to receive anywhere close to that amount, and it knows that.

"While we dont' expect to receive the vast majority of the award, we hope that this will act as a continued deterrent against these criminals," said Sam O'Rourke in a company blog post.

Maybe it will, maybe it wont.  Last November, Facebook won an $873 million judgment against Adam Guerbuez and Atlantis Blue Capital for a phishing scheme, but has yet (if ever) to collect on that. And therein lies the problems with these judgments.

Getting back to Wallace, the exorbitant fine may not be the only thing he has to worry about. The judge in the case referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney's Office requesting that he be prosecuted for criminal contempt, so it's possible he could serve some jail time.

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Posted 10/21/09 at 08:32:30 AM by Paul Lilly

You and I might call it spam, but small businesses who promote their products on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter call it smart advertising. No matter what you call it, don't expect those product plugs to go away any time soon. In an online survey, Internet2Go found that 45 percent of some 2,400 small business respondents with fewer than 100 employees said they use social networking tools to push their services or wares.

"For these guys, costs was a big factor," said Greg Sterling, an analyst for Internet2Go. "They either need to hire a dedicated person or need more resources and don't have it.

We're talking really small businesses here, as most of the respondents -- 8 out of 10 -- had four or fewer employees and annual marketing budgets less than $5,000. Nearly half of all respondents said they spend less than $1,000 on advertising and marketing, so it makes sense they would flock to Facebook and other essentially free venues.

"We are going to see more and more of this behavior from other small businesses because it's free and you don't have to have expertise to set up these pages," Sterling said.

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Posted 09/24/09 at 06:29:46 PM by Jason Barry

A Twitter phishing scam tore across the micro-blogging site over the past few days. It all started with direct messages sent to Twitter accounts saying “rofl this you on here? http://videos.twitter.secure-logins01.com.” The link leads to seemingly innocuous Twitter login page. However, to the keen observer of the URL you can see that it is obviously not an official Twitter site.

Once on the fake login page, if you entered credentials you were taken to a “Too many tweets page” explaining that Twitter is having technical trouble (is it that hard to believe?).

A day or two later, if you logged into your Twitter account you will have found hundreds of get-rich-quick, earn-money-at-home spam messages sent on your behalf.

If you are a victim, you had best change your credentials to your Twitter account and any other sites using similar login information. If you are a casual onlooker, try not to point and laugh.

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Posted 09/24/09 at 09:34:56 AM by Pulkit Chandna

The world’s leading search engine has made a fresh addition to the Google Toolbar. Called Sidewiki, it is a universal commenting and annotation system. It is meant to supplement, and not supplant, a website’s existing commenting system. Online denizens can freely drop and post comments on any website of their choosing using Sidewiki.

It appears in the form of a window on the left side of the browser. Spam and indecorum are two of the biggest problems afflicting website administrators and readers. The search engine giant firmly believes there is an algorithm for every problem tormenting humanity, including the above-named issues.

“I’m sure some publishers will have some objections to something like this but (at the same time) many traditional publishers also objected to blogs,” Aseem Sood, product manager at Google, told PaidContent.org. He believes Sidewiki will lead to an increase in return visitors to a particular site and so website administrators have nothing to fear from it. He also added that his company has no plans to taint its new comments system with ads. “Right now, our goal honestly is to increase the engagement of users on the web.”

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Posted 09/16/09 at 07:29:32 PM by Pulkit Chandna

The most defining feature of Web 2.0 is arguably its enhanced level of interactivity. But “the very aspects of Web 2.0 sites that have made them so revolutionary” have also made them highly vulnerable to abuse, according to web security firm Websense. The San Diego-based company published its biannual “State of the Internet” on Tuesday.

The report (PDF) reveals that 95% of comments that appear on blogs, chat rooms and online forums fall into two broad categories: spam and malicious content. Cyber scoundrels now seem more focused on targeting Web 2.0 websites with user-generated content than ever before. Many of the most frequented internet properties are sites that tolerate user-generated content. And 61% of the top 100 sites either host malicious content or link to it, according to the report.

Spam and malicious content seem to go hand in hand, for Websense Security Labs found that 85.6 of spam mails in circulation during the first half of 2009 contained links to malicious sites.

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Posted 08/27/09 at 09:08:48 AM by Paul Lilly

According to IBM's semi-annual security report, hackers and other cyber miscreants are spending fas less time phishing as they shift their attention to other technologies to swipe your personal data.

"The decline in phishing and increases in other areas (such as banking Trojans) indicate that attackers may be moving their resources to other methods to obtain the gains that phishing once achieved," IBM said in its Internet Security Systems 2009 Mid-Year Trend & Risk Report.

Trojans, which include downloaders and info-stealers, are now the most commonly used tools of the trade accounting for 55 percent of the new malware seen, says the report. That's an increase of 9 percent over last year. The rise can partially be attributed the existence of "public-available toolkits" that malware distributors advertise as being easy to use.

More info here.

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Posted 08/17/09 at 05:08:50 PM by Andy Salisbury

Twitter has made recent moves to get rid of web promotion company uSocial by claiming that their means of advertising count as spam.

uSocial’s CEO Leon Hill claims that the accusations from Twitter are false. “The definition of spam is using electronic messaging to send unsolicited communication and as we don’t use Twitter for this, the claims are false.” He believes that the claims are because of their service, which allows users to buy followers on the popular microblogging site.

“The people at Twitter who are sending these claims are just flailing around trying to look for any excuse they can, though it’s going to take much more than this if they want us to pack up shop,” stated Hill. “We’re not going away that easily.”

So what do you think? Are the folks at uSocial trying to make a buck in a spammy way, or should the folks at Twitter back off? Make your voice heard in the comments.

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