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 11/04/09 at 11:05:46 AM by Paul Lilly

We suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. In addition to your PC and smartphone, you can now tweet your witty 140-character epiphany using a dedicated Twitter device, courtesy of Peek.

The company has just launched its TwitterPeek, a $99 hand-held gadget (available exclusively at Amazon) with a QWERTY keyboard, color screen, and click scroll wheel. For a single C-note, Peek will give you six months of unlimited service, after which the monthly fee jumps to $7.95. Or drop $199 right from the get-go and receive unlimited Twitter service for as long as you own the device.

Other features include nationwide coverage, a one year manufacturer's warranty, and a 30-day money back guarantee, which will come in handy after you realize "Holy hell, I just dropped a hundred bucks on a Twitter gadget!" In fact, you may want to tweet that before getting your money back. Or keep it and prove us wrong in thinking there's no way this thing catches on.

TwitterPeek will face competition everywhere it turns. Twitter apps are available on just about every smartphone, and you can already update your status with a text message, But it's not just about smartphones and PCs. Digital e-book readers are gaining steam, some of which boast Internet access.

Does TwitterPeek have a chance? Hit the jump and tell us what you think!

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Posted 11/03/09 at 04:55:32 PM by Bart Salisbury

Technology produces a marketplace that is both fascinating and puzzling. The fascination comes with the incredible devices that are rolled out in a constant stream of “wow.” Puzzling in that some of these devices don’t seem to make a lot of sense.

Peek, a New York mobile start-up, has introduced the TwitterPeek. It is a device with the sole purpose of allowing you to post and read tweets. That’s it. Nothing more. And it goes for $100, with an $8 per month service charge after six months. Or you could spring for a life time of tweeting nirvana for $200. (Exactly how long is a lifetime in today’s digital world?)

This isn’t Peek's only foray into mobile messaging. There is also Peek Classic and the Peek Pronto, designed for email and text-messaging, but not for making phone calls.

It would seem that the functionality of the TwitterPeek is available on most smartphones. And certainly handheld WiFi devices, like the iPod Touch, can manage this as well. And better yet, these devices can actually do other things, like make phone calls or browse the web, or listen to music, or watch video.

If there’s a market, then there’s a market. Still, all-in-all, puzzling.

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Posted 10/29/09 at 02:33:59 PM by Bart Salisbury

There’s creepy things afoot on the web, and what’s better to combat them than something crawly? Internet security company Kaspersky Lab has introduced the “Krab Krawler”, an anti-malware tool that can make your Twitter-hungry lifestyle a little bit safer.

Krab Crawler examines every public post that appears on Twitter. The posts are parsed for URLs which, if present, are traced to their origin. (Even shortened URLs are recognized.) The site is then checked for any creepy things, such as the Koobface virus, that might make your day less tweety.

Costin Raiu, a senior malware analyst at Kaspersky Lab, says the Krab Krawler pulls out about half a million new, unique URLs from Twitter posts each day. In these Krab Krawler finds between a hundred and a thousand linked to malware attacks. Raiu also notes that about 26 percent of these URLs link to spam sites, so even if a URL doesn’t pose a deadly threat, there’s a one-in-four chance it leads to an annoyance.

Krab Krawler works on top of Twitter’s own filtering system. The extra layer is useful because of malware’s propensity to undergo code changes to avoid detection. Raiu estimates it takes two to 12 hours to pick up on such changes and properly identify a new malware strain.

In addition to Kaspersky Lab, Trend Micro also monitors Twitter posts for malware. And Finjan offers a free browser plug-in, SecureTwitter, that warns users of URLs of dubious character.

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Posted 10/29/09 at 12:15:44 PM by David Murphy

What a wonderful world that open and closed platforms have created on the World Wide Web. I can have an untold number of features and applications inserted into my Web browser without having to lift much more than a finger to access them. I can take my favorite Web platforms and expand their usefulness by linking them to other Web-based services. I can even download a variant of my Web browser of choice that bridges the best of two worlds under one new roof: new innovations mixed with standard familiarity.

So, what happens when these architectures fight back?

It's a stupid thing to say on its face, because I don't believe that it's up to a particular program or application to breach your defenses and fight its way into your cyber-life. Most, if not all instances of malware, spoofing, and hijacking (to name a few) can be directly traced to user stupidity in some fashion. Either a person leaves the ol' back door unlocked, fails to frisk the guests as they enter the home, or actively invites a heap of trouble to come on over for a party.

Simplified examples, perhaps, but the underlying fact remains a constant: You are the gatekeeper for your PC. Unfortunately, as we begin to adopt an "everyone's allowed" mindset for Web integration, we're only making it easier for the bad guys to do what they do best. Unfriendly, if not downright hostile bits of malware can be pushed back with but a few simple changes in behavior--are you as security-focused as you should be in today's cross-platform world?

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Posted 10/26/09 at 07:43:08 PM by Ryan Whitwam

So, we’re all tired of hearing about Twitter, right? Well, strap yourself in because it isn’t going away anytime soon. It seems that ComScore showed a 6.7% worldwide rise in Twitter visitors in September. This amounts to 58.4 million visitors, and a 949% increase in the last twelve months. That’s a lot of tweets. Curiously, US visits have been flat since June.

None of this data includes applications that only access the API, so these figures may even be underreported. While these numbers seem staggering, they are nothing compared to Facebook, with its 411 million visitors in September.

Twitter’s best bet is the recent deal with Bing and Google to provide its “firehose” of tweets to the search engines. This should drive more hits to the social networking site. Even with the help of Google, can Twitter avoid being crushed by the behemoth that is Facebook?

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Posted 10/26/09 at 04:10:31 PM by Bart Salisbury

Hard times come quickly for social networking sites. One minute you’re on top, popping open bottles of vintage sparkling mineral water and picking up the tab for another round of tofu burgers. The next you are head-in-hands wonder how it all went so horribly wrong. Today’s patient on the couch is MySpace, with parent company News Corp. none to pleased with what’s going on.

Jonathan Miller, who keeps the watcher’s eye on News Corp.’s Internet services, put it pretty plainly: "The thing you see in this space more than anything else is that if you don't keep innovating and moving forward, you get in trouble. You can't stop. And MySpace stopped." MySpace’s stopped and, since being number one in 2006, has been outpaced by more popular alternatives: Facebook and Twitter.

Time, again, to reinvent the wheel, according to Miller, and return to what MySpace does best: music and gaming. MySpace recently purchased the online music provider iLike. And it has announced a new music video service which will allow labels and artists to see how well their music is doing on MySpace.

To expand gaming opportunities, Miller believes MySpace must open up its system to external developers. He also hinted that some paid premium services to be in the offing.

"Everybody in the company is upset that we didn't keep going when we had the real momentum. Regaining momentum is always much harder than keeping momentum going,” Miller stated. That, and keeping an eye on your rearview mirror to see who’s about to overtake you.

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Posted 10/23/09 at 08:25:35 PM by Ryan Whitwam

You are reading this on the Internet, and it wouldn’t be possible without Sir Tim Berners-Lee. You see, back in the 1980s Berners-Lee came up with a little thing called hypertext. Connect hypertext with TCP, and you get the “world wide web”. Now Berners-Lee is trudging through one of the newer areas of his invention; namely, twitter.

Berners-Lee was just about to get on stage at the Web 2.0 summit recently, but apparently decided he didn’t feel hip enough. He joined Twitter on the spot and you can follow him here. The Internet did not spontaneously explode, so we may be out of the woods. Berners-Lee started off using Tweetie and appeared to be unhappy with the interface. Sir Berners-Lee is the director of W3C, a web standards board. If he trashes your interface, you have some explaining to do

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