Koobface, a virus that targets computers via social networking sites, is apparently back and with added sophistication.
A typical Koobface attack – like the one that surfaced on Twitter last month – comes via a link that purports to be an interesting video (i.e. – someone tweets "my home video" with a link to what looks like a YouTube page). Those videos then tell you that you need to upgrade your Flash player – which, many legitimate videos often do too. Upon "upgrading," however, the user is infected with the virus.
For starters, instead of the same short URL showing up over and over again, which would be easy for Twitter to diffuse quickly, the virus is randomizing the short link. Additionally, the links now appear to be directed to a well-designed Facebook lookalike page. On top of that, the message directing people to the video is being randomized, making it a bit less obvious that its malicious.
While this does indeed make it a bit trickier for Twitter to automatically block malicious links, for users, the best advice is to check the actual URL in the address bar before viewing a video after following a link. If it's not Facebook.com, YouTube.com, or another popular video site, odds are it's Koobface.
As we reported last month, Microsoft Office is set to move to the Web in 2010, offering users browser-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. However, it hasn't been exactly clear where that software might live in the vast world of Microsoft websites.
Currently, office.microsoft.com is used to promote the company's desktop Office software, while officelive.com is where Office Live (Microsoft's desktop-to-web sync tool) users go to sign-in and access their documents online. Now, however, it looks like Microsoft has landed a killer domain name for their full online office suite: Office.com.
According to the blog istartedsomething.com, the domain name for Office.com was transferred to Microsoft on August 4th – just two days ago – from a European company called ContactOffice group. Sure enough, WHOIS records now indicate the domain name belongs to Microsoft, and the current Office.com site alerts ContactOffice customers that the company is in the process of moving to ContactOffice.com.
No official word yet from Microsoft that they plan to use the domain name for the web-based version of Office 2010, but it would seem like a safe bet (though the company does have a tendency to come up with bizarre and confusing product names).
There is a lot of software out there for conducting virtual conferences and performing demos: GoToMeeting, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, WebEx, and AdobeAcrobat Connect immediately come to mind. Most of these programs though require software to be installed and are meant for conference meetings rather than team collaboration. They’re not virtual workspaces.
Enter Team Apart (formerly Meetcast), a Y Combinator-funded startup that is now launching its free, web-based workspace application. And it is something to behold: not only does it carry basic virtual meeting features such as demo support and video chat, but it has an array of features that make it a useful virtual workspace.
At first, Team Apart feels like your standard virtual meeting tool. The key feature is the ability to have coworkers or business partners in your room via webcam, audio, or chat. There's also of course a screencast feature (essential for demos) hidden behind the premium pay features of the service.
But then Team Apart starts to differentiate itself. The tool comes loaded with workspace features. For example, the notebook feature allows team members to collaboratively add notes in real-time, ones everyone can see as they are built. This is great for brainstorming, transcribing a meeting, or outlining. Another useful feature is the whiteboard, which allows teams to collaboratively draw and sketch. Chat features also permeate the Team Apart program, and that only touches on the major features. They've produced a video which highlights some of the others:
It still has limits though. Right now, it only supports 4 people in video chat. It’s also still new, so scalability may be an issue. Regardless, holding conferences and team meetings without installing software? We like.
Invites: Team Apart is launching in beta as it tests its scalability. But for the first 100 people to sign up through this link, they will have beta access to the Team Apart application.
Two months ago, Digg announced a lynchpin in its revenue strategy: Digg Ads. The program, an attempt to fix the company’s inability to turn a profit, allows users to vote on specific ads within the homepage feed. The more diggs, the less the ad costs to the advertisers. But if Digg users hate the ad, then their downvotes increase the ad price.
It’s a system to made ads relevant to the user while giving them prime placement. Until now, however, it’s been under construction. That changes soon though, as we we’ve learned that Digg Ads are rolling out this week.
In a short announcement to the Digg community, the social news site stated that it’s implementing a limited rollout of the new advertising system in order to test and tweak the platform. Here’s what Mike Maser, Digg’s Chief Strategy and Revenue Officer, said:
“Over the next few days, some of you will see Digg Ads appear in rotation in various placements throughout Digg. The ads will look and feel similar to the Digg content you see everyday – stories, video trailers, independent product reviews – but will be clearly marked as sponsored.”
Prepare for the Digg Ad revolution … or revolt. Will Digg’s userbase embrace their favorite website’s attempt to monetize? Or will this plan get buried like a bad Twitter story? We’re about to find out. Be sure to let us know if you see them in the wild.
You don’t have to subscribe to the cult of GTD, shave your head and donate all your possessions to David Allen to improve your blogging workflow. Even taking a small amount of time to add some new discoveries to your toolkit now and then can reap long-lasting benefits. Take a look at this list of apps, extensions and other tools that aim to help you save time as a web writer.
Let us know in the comments if you have a particular favorite not listed here that others might want to check out.
Multiple Clipboard Tools
If you frequently write for the web, multiple clipboards is simply a class of desert island app you shouldn’t live without. These programs up the ante from your operating system’s measly built-in single clipping at a time to allow storage of lots of text snippets you can access at once. Some will even let you save very frequently used clips permanently through app and computer restarts. You could stand to save loads of time flipping back and forth between several applications just to bring in a handful of text clippings.
Mac users should check out CopyPaste-X, which offers a free lite version that is fairly robust but does not allow you to save clips through restarts. The full Pro version is $30 and adds permanent clipping storage and a number of other features power users might find handy.
Windows users might want to check out ClipMate or Ditto. And as always, if you have a favorite in the clipboard manager category please share it in the comments.
Blog Right from Firefox with Scribefire
ScribeFire is an add-on for Firefox that lets you post to your blog without even having to leave the page you’re on. Pressing the F8 key will call up the ScribeFire posting interface, attached to the bottom of your browser window. You can drag and drop formatted text into a post, upload images, and even set up posting to multiple blogs. ScribeFire supports a large number of both hosted and self-hosted blogging platforms including Wordpress, Movable Type, Tumblr, Blogger, LiveJournal and more. If you’re new to ScribeFire, here’s how to get started.
Save Typing Time with Text Shortcuts
These tools can help you use less keystrokes to generate frequently used terms, phrases, bits of HTML or even full on template paragraphs or formats. On the Mac side, TextExpander allows you to set up a set of abbreviations that when typed will generate longer strings. You can even include images in the substituted text as well.
On the Windows side give Texter a try. It’s a text substitution application developed in-house by the folks at Lifehacker that runs right from the system tray. Unfortunately the app is no longer in active development, but the source code is freely available if you fall in love with the app and have a hankering to carry the torch.
Firefox Extensions for Working with Text
If Firefox is your browser of choice, there are some handy add-ons that can extend the capability of your plain old copy function or help you massage text into the proper format.
AutoCopy — A simple extension that automagically copies any text you select to the clipboard. Combined with a multiple clipboard tool from above, you’ll have a powerful text manipulation setup at your fingertips.
Copy Plain Text — Copying a bit of reference text from a web page can often introduce all sorts of stray and unwanted formatting. This extension allows you to simply copy the selection in plain text for better portability (for a version compatible with Firefox 3.5, download directly here).
CoLT — This extension adds a contextual menu option when right-clicking on a link: you can copy the link location as usual, or copy the text of the link, or copy the entire HTML code for the link. If you frequently compose in source or HTML view, this one can save you a lot of clicks over time.
Text Formatting Toolbar — This one is helpful for managing the various syntax requirements of different web-based systems. It adds a toolbar that helps you format your text properly for use in blog comments, forums (BBcode), and the wiki syntax used by Wikipedia.
Site-Specific Browsers
Bloggers and web workers are on the forefront of a new epidemic we like to call “Too Many Browser Tabs Syndrome.” Perhaps you’ve already begun exhibiting symptoms: eye strain from squinting to read tiny tab labels, angry outbursts after not being able to find That One Article I Just Read Earlier, complaining to random passersby that you can never find which tab you left your Gmail open in.
Site-specific browsers or SSBs can help dull the pain by creating standalone applications for the web sites and web apps you use most frequently and perhaps keep open all day long. Because they’re actual desktop apps, you can use whatever application manager you work with to switch between them easily instead of trying to hunt through a stack of illegible tab labels. Plus, if an individual site or app crashes, it won’t take your whole browser down with it.
On the Mac we recommend Fluid, or Prism which is a multi-platform SSB from Mozilla Labs that will take care of Windows and Linux users as well.
Keyboard Shortcuts
It might not seem to take a lot of time to move your hand over to the mouse and select text or reposition the cursor, but over time taking your hand away from the keyboard adds up. Getting familiar with the global operating system keyboard shortcuts for working with text, plus the shortcuts in the apps you use most, will save you loads of time in the long run.
Here are some keyboard shortcuts that might come in handy to bloggers and web workers.
Gmail — Speed your inbox processing with these Gmail keyboard shortcuts. If you’ve never used the shortcuts before, you’ll have to enable them in the General tab of your account settings.
Google Reader — If you use gReader as your feed reading app (or one of your feed reading apps) you can process your feeds faster with these keyboard shortcuts.
Edit Images Right In Your Browser
Sometimes even the time it takes to launch another app is just too much. And if you just need to quickly crop or resize an image and don’t need the full-fledged features of a professional photo editing app, why not just edit images right in your browser? These sites can help you do just that.
Picnik — The free version of this web-based image editor could easily be all you need to whip an image or two into shape now and then. For more pro effects and advanced editing you can also subscribe to the Premium service.
Phoenix — Part of a larger suite of web-based creative tools from Aviary, Phoenix is a simple app that nonetheless delivers many of the key features you’d look for in a desktop image editor.
flauntR — If you’re looking to add some more creative effects or processing to your images, check this one out. It’s actually a suite of several tools allowing you to add text or other elements to your photos as well as providing the basic editing functions.
There are actually many more web-based image editing tools out there including lots of decent ones and some extremely ad-slathered apps that aren’t the easiest to use. Let us know in the comments if you have a particular favorite we didn’t mention that others might want to check out. And of course, if you know of any great tips or tricks for enhanced blogging productivity, let us know as well!
Everybody’s still regrouping after today’s Denial of Service attacks against Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, and other social media websites. Now, however, some further details about what happened and who might be behind it are coming to light.
According to Bill Woodcock of Packet Clearing House (a nonprofit organization tracking Internet traffic), the attack wasn’t a traditional DDoS attack using automated bots, but one conducted through a wave of spam email messages that hit Twitter, LiveJournal, and other websites. On top of that, it looks like YouTube was targeted.
The security expert spoke with The New York Times and gave his assessment of the situation:
Bill Woodcock, a research director of the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit technical organization that tracks Internet traffic, said Thursday's attack was an extension of the conflict between Russia and Georgia. It was not clear who initiated the attack, he said, but likely "one side put up propaganda, the other side figured this out and is attacking them."
Instead of using a botnet, or a network of thousands of malware-infected personal computers to flood a site with traffic, Mr. Woodcock said this particular attack consisted of a wave of spam e-mail messages, which began infiltrating Twitter and other sites at 10:25 a.m. Eastern time. "It's a vast increase in traffic that creates the denial-of-service," he said.
YouTube and LiveJournal were also affected, Mr. Woodcock said, although "Twitter was definitely hit the hardest." YouTube said it had not noticed any problems with its service.
In short, cyber warfare may be to blame for the attacks on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Livejournal, and others, though that hasn’t been confirmed by any of the companies targeted. However, Bill Woodcock is a respected Internet research expert, so his words likely have some merit.
If the attack was related to cyber warfare, then we could be seeing a lot more of this. Still, it’s tough to understand how these social media sites would be of any strategic value to either Russia or Georgia. Today’s events are certainly getting even more complicated, though.
The unfortunate thing about commenting on blogs is that it’s all too often basically a silo: your message lives in one place, requires a specific login for that site alone, and can be difficult to share out if you feel you’ve been particularly insightful.
Systems like Disqus (which we use on Mashable) have been developed to start addressing the silo problem, providing a unifying login for sites that employ it and a way to track and distribute the conversation more widely on the web.
Today marks another attempt to solve that problem: the arrival of the public beta of the Echo comment system from the folks at JS-Kit, featuring a number of new innovations in distributed conversation that help make your online identity and the comments you author more portable.
The Echo comment form takes a cue from email, with From and To fields that let you associate multiple digital identities (your Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, even your personal blog) with your comments. The To field then allows you to share your comment with multiple “recipients” — sending it to Facebook, Twitter, Google or Yahoo. This effectively makes the comments form distributed in both directions: your other networks travel with you, and your comments can be easily sent back out along them as well.
An aggregation feature also brings in responses to the post left on other services and incorporates them directly into the comment thread (note that this feature is actually not part of the free core service, but is available in the Echo Live paid tier). Much like Twitter will include a blurb that denotes the source of the tweet (web, txt, TweetDeck, etc.) or Facebook will display the source of a status update if it’s from an app, Echo will display where that particular comment came from (see illustration above).
Echo also supports integrated multimedia, allowing you to include a YouTube video right inline with your comment. You can also upload images from your desktop and display those inline too. In order to keep tracking the conversation over time, Echo allows you to subscribe to the thread by email or RSS.
JS-Kit is offering the Echo product under a freemium business model, with the core functionality available to web publishers at no charge. Three additional tiers of Echo Live, Echo Pro and Echo Enterprise are available with increasing feature sets such as real-time updating, aggregation from other services and white label options.
Embedding doesn’t seem to be enabled but you can check out a few screencasts about the Echo features on the JS-Kit site. If you’d like to check out some implementations of Echo feel free to head over to a few of the sites that participated in the private beta: Guy Kawasaki, LaLaWag, Brian Solis or of course, the JS-Kit blog itself.
Are you thinking of implementing any of the tiers of Echo on your own blog or site? Let us know in the comments.
Also, we’re proud to have local Ford Fiesta Movement agents at each event offering rides and transportation. First come, first served.
Mashable’s Summer of Social Good will conclude in NYC on August 28th with our Social Good Conference, a one-day educational event celebrating the finale of the Summer of Social Good, featuring presentations from well known and respected organizations and professionals.
Sponsor opportunity: we are looking for one local sponsor per city. Please contact hyatt4good at Mashable dot com for more information.
“Demand Media is a leading Internet company with a unique combination of breakthrough content creation capabilities, enterprise class platform technology and a comScore Top 25 U.S. network of premium online brands—an unmatched combination of capabilities that makes it possible for more than 77 million people each month to create and engage with media like never before. Founded in 2006, the company is based in Santa Monica, CA with offices in Austin, Bellevue, New York and London.”
“Dot Eco is establishing a new .ECO top level domain to fund the environmental movement and to promote policies that fight the deterioration of our climate. Dot Eco has committed to donate over 50% of their profits toward environmental causes and has partnered with former US Vice President Al Gore, the Alliance for Climate Protection,the Sierra Club, Surfrider and a variety of other organizations. Together with these groups and individuals, Dot Eco is leading the fight to protect and defend the planet with the .ECO top level domain.”
SocialMediaMarketing builds social media campaigns that increase traffic, generate leads, positively promote a brand, and maximize ROI.
“Visible Measures is the independent third-party measurement firm for Internet video publishers, advertisers, and viral marketers. The company provides its customers and partners with unprecedented visibility into their online video audiences and how they engage with both content assets and advertising placements.”
A Special Thanks to Hyatt
“Hyatt Hotels Corporation, headquartered in Chicago, is a leading global hospitality company with a proud heritage of making guests feel more than welcome. Thousands of members of the Hyatt family in 45 countries strive to make a difference in the lives of the guests they encounter every day by providing authentic hospitality. The company's subsidiaries own, manage or franchise more than 380 hotels and resorts under the Hyatt®, Park Hyatt®, Andaz™, Grand Hyatt®, Hyatt Regency®, Hyatt Place® and Hyatt Summerfield Suites™ brand names and have additional locations under development on five continents. For more information, please visit www.hyatt.com.”
A Special Thanks to the Ford Fiesta Movement
Each location will have local Fiesta Movement Agents at the event and will offer rides/transportation. First come, first served.
“The Ford Fiesta Movement is driven by 100 digital storytellers from across the web. During the month of August, all 100 drivers are donating their time and some money to non-profits and charities in their area. In addition, The Fiesta Movement has partnered with Mashable to support their Summer of Social Good – our drivers will even be in attendance at local events to offer transportation. Follow the Fiesta Movement at FiestaMovement.com.”
Thanks to Skype for the Giveaways
“Skype is software that enables the world's conversations. Millions of individuals and businesses use Skype to make free video and voice calls, send instant messages and share files with other Skype users. Everyday, people everywhere also use Skype to make low-cost calls to landlines and mobiles. Skype will be raffling off a FREETALK wireless stereo headset and a 3 month Unlimited World subscription at each event.” Reviews: Mashable, Skype
We now know that Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal were all victims of Distributed Denial of Service attacks that crippled each of their services for several hours today, with intermitted problems still being reported on all of them.
Now, a source close to the situation tells us that Twitter, Facebook, and Google – all rivals in the realm of social networking – are working together to determine the root of what has been exposed as a deliberate and simultaneous attempt to take down some of the web's most popular social media sites.
Although we haven't heard reports of Google sites being targeted in today's attacks, as the Web's biggest distributor of traffic, it would make sense for them to lend a hand in investigating the issue. As of yet, there's no indication of who might be behind the attacks, though it certainly seems like all those impacted will do their best to try and figure it out.
For more on today’s events, check out our earlier coverage:
Prior to this week it had a been awhile since we’ve had anything newsworthy to report about Delicious. The Yahoo owned social bookmarking site appeared to be relatively ignored on a development front, but now we’re starting to see new additions breathe life back into it.
Just a few days ago we learned that Delicious had started integrating Twitter-related features into their homepage with their new Fresh Brookmarks tab. Less reported, however, is the fact that the social bookmarking site has copied a page from Yahoo’s other social property, Flickr, which just got an update, and given Delicious Search a much needed feature upgrade.
The new Delicious Search, already live on the site, now includes filters for time and tags, as well as a trends graph, search suggestions, and Flickr thumbnails to make search results much more customizable and insightful. To view the new search options, simply search as normal and then click the button under the search bar to expand and open the filters panel.
The new filters are pretty sophisticated, but also very user-friendly. Time filters, for example, let you filter your search results based on different time frames like one day, one week, and one month. You can use the right-hand panel above the new trends graph to click time frames and toggle between different views of results.
That trends graph is also a new addition and gives you a visual representation of spikes in saved bookmarks over time, based on your query. You’ll also notice a new filter by tag box which gives you a quick way to click tags and narrow your results accordingly. Just as convenient are the type-down search suggestions on the left-hand side. Delicious will recommend search queries based on your original search, as you type, and you can use their suggestions to refine your results.
Given that Yahoo owns and operates Delicious and Flickr, it makes since that the two search experiences would overlap, and thankfully Delicious has decided to do just that. Now, instead of being just a part of bookmark lists, Flickr thumbnails will also be integrated in search results. They’ve also included playable audio files, and started using SearchMonkey to show enhanced search displays and incorporate Wikipedia info, YouTube videos, Yelp reviews, as well as Yahoo! Local and CitySearch info.
The new Delicious Search originally made its debut with the Fresh Bookmarks announcement, but we think the search experience to be so far improved that it warrants a closer look. The question still remains as to whether or not Yahoo ignored Delicious for far too long, and whether or not these changes will significantly impact the user base, but we certainly approve of the improvements.
Yesterday we covered the news of the George Sodini blog that foretold of his plans to commit the LA Fitness killings. Today Sodini’s web presence is once again in the news as it was discovered he had a YouTube account to which he posted a video called “Hide from Emotion” a year ago.
The picture the video paints is of a man in unstable emotional state, but Sodini also outlines his goals for the next 20 years, suggesting he had no plans to harm himself or others a year ago.
What do the video and blog teach us about social media? Everything and nothing. The medium is so prevalent now that we end up with murderers who blog and post YouTube videos. As with the so-called “Twitter rape” allegations, social media has become one of society’s most popular communication tools; in the coming months, the fact that a major news story is embroiled with a social media site will be as remarkable as knowing that criminals use telephones.
According to a Facebook spokesperson "Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users. No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users. We're continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they've come to expect from Facebook."
In other words, we're in the midst of a deliberate attempt to take down two of the world's most popular social media sites: Facebook and Twitter. Additional reports indicate that popular blogging community Live Journal has also been having service issues today – most likely, not a coincidence, though we don't yet have confirmation from them (Update: LJ acknowledges they are also victim of a DDoS attack).
Are you seeing downtime at any other popular social media sites? Let us know in the comments.
This morning civilization almost ground to a halt as Twitter was hit with a DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service Attack and went down for over two hours, with intermittent outages continuing even as they got the situation more under control. So what exactly is a DDoS attack?
The goal of any Denial of Service is to take out a specific online resource and make it unavailable to its users. Targets are typically hugely popular destinations with a lot to lose, and with Twitter’s explosive growth comes its emergence as a juicy target for hackers and miscellaneous enemies or pranksters.
DDoS attacks often involve sending a flood of external communication requests to the site that at first glance may appear just like legitimate traffic. The intent is to overwhelm the service’s resources to such a degree that it can’t respond to real requests for real users, effectively rendering the site unreachable or so slow to respond as to be impossible to use for some period of time.
Denial of Service: Nothing New
Denial of Service tactics are nothing new. Such malicious takedowns have a history stretching at least as far back as 2000 with DDoS attacks targeting some of the Internet’s most popular sites: Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, and others experienced protracted outages over several days, with an estimated impact of as much as $1.7 billion in lost revenue and damages.
It’s also worth noting that these attacks are extremely difficult to protect against, and tough to handle even once they’re identified. Over time the methodologies have become sophisticated enough to make stemming the floodgates of incoming pings tricky even after a DDoS pattern is discovered. In other words, unlike during Twitter’s earlier days when it was popular to complain about its downtime due to a difficulty scaling to meet demand, this time it’s hard to blame the site for being a victim of malicious attack.
It’s unclear when or even if we’ll find out who perpetrated today’s DDoS-related downtime, but we certainly hope those responsible are eventually brought to justice.
Twitter’s extended downtime today, now lasting almost 2 hours, has a malicious cause. Twitter has revealed that it’s defending against a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS), in which the target is typically saturated with so many fake requests that the victim is unable to return legitimate ones.
Knowing that the cause is a malicious attack does take Twitter off the hook to some degree – it may have been assumed that the site was simply failing to scale properly, as had happened in the past. DDoS attempts are difficult to defend against even for some established sites.
As to who might have it in for Twitter: the site is so large and visible that the attacker could be anyone…from a lone prankster to a more organized outfit.
Twitter down today? Yup, so of course the social media addicts head on over to Facebook, which is experiencing outages of its own, although fortunately less frequent ones. Mashable staff are experiencing everything from “Network Errors” (below) to a good percentage of pages simply failing to load.
Mashable commenters add that they’re also struggling with Facebook, the likely cause being a flood of Twitter traffic hitting the site.
Is Facebook failing for you? Let us know in the comments.
Buzzd, a location-based social city guide and application for mobile phones, is actively interested in your mobile lifestyle. In order to study your mobile behaviors — presumably to improve their app — the company surveyed 1,027 of their users on mobile etiquette, lifestyle, and sexual activity in today’s economy.
We’re guessing Buzzd users are a candid bunch, because the survey results are pretty interesting. Timed with the announcement of their updated BlackBerry app, Buzzd has released the results of their survey and it turns out that 68% of respondents are guilty of drunk texting, while 21% of respondents claim to be having more sex in the economic downturn.
We’re not exactly sure what Buzzd wanted to discover from their eclectic questionnaire, or how representative their respondents are of the general population, but here are some other interesting findings from the survey:
- 33% say it’s ok to use cellphones without impunity while being in a bar/club
- 60% of respondents drunk dial
- 30% report that they have lost their mobile phones at least once after a night on the town
- 85% use word of mouth recommendations to find out about places to go and things to do
Of course, this is probably a clever ploy to get people talking about Buzzd v1.2 for BlackBerry. As such, we’ll humor them with some info on the new BlackBerry app, which is available now in the BlackBerry AppWorld. The app got a slight makeover with UI improvements, added profile photo uploads, improved search results with more filters, and now supports users adding their own venues to the app.
Twitter is currently experiencing extended downtime: a 30 minute outage that’s one of the longest in recent months. Back in 2007 and 2008, Twitter downtime was relatively frequent: this year the site has been far more stable and its early outages have been largely forgotten.
In the last 5 minutes, Twitter has acknowledged the downtime on its status blog, but adds that it’s unsure of the cause:
Site is down. We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.
We can’t help noticing, however, the top trending topics right before the downtime (top right).
The moves haven’t been missed by Chris Ahearn, President of Media at AP rival Thomson Reuters. This week he responded with a blog post comparing AP to the lawsuit-happy music industry, saying that the incumbents “haven't been keeping up” and encouraging news leaders like AP to “stop whining”:
Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works.
…I believe in the link economy. Please feel free to link to our stories — it adds value to all producers of content. I believe you should play fair and encourage your readers to read-around to what others are producing if you use it and find it interesting…
Let's stop whining and start having real conversations across party lines. Let's get online publishers, search engines, aggregators, ad networks, and self-publishers (bloggers) in a virtual room and determine how we can all get along.
It’s a refreshing take that’s winning plaudits from bloggers; we’ll be interested to see if Reuters’ actions match their words.
24% of Tweets are created by automated bots, not humans, according to a recent study. Meanwhile, it was found that 5% of Twitter accounts generate 75% of Tweets.
The “Inside Twitter” study, conducted last month by Sysomos, surprised researchers when they discovered that such a small number of accounts were generating so much of Twitter’s content. Now, they’ve published in-depth data looking more closely at that highly-active 5% of the userbase.
The findings of the report are intriguing. For instance, many of these most active users are actually automated:
We found that 32% of all tweets made by the most active Twitter users were generated by machine bots that posted more than 150 tweets/day. The actual percentage of machine-generated tweets among the most active users is probably higher than 32% because there many bots that update less than 150 times/day.
Based on its previous “Inside Twitter” study and this most recent report, Sysomos concludes that in total, 24% of Tweets are created by bots.
Not All Bots are Spam
However, that’s not to say that 24% of Tweets are spam; far from it.
Sysomos is quick to point out that many of these high volume, automated accounts provide useful data, like the top stories on social news site Digg, or the most recent popular bookmarks on Delicious. Accounts like @CombatSI, which provides realtime updates from the virtual world of Second Life, generate over 2,000 updates per day. Another highly active automated account, @dogbook, provides updates on what dogs are doing via the Dogbook Facebook app.
In other words: just because Tweeting isn’t solely a human pursuit, that doesn’t mean bots are all spammers.
Active Twitter Users: More Fascinating Stats
While the data about bots and “Twitter addicts” is perhaps the most accessible, it’s well worth digging into the report to absorb some of its nuances. In the blog post about the findings, Sysomos quotes these key facts:
–Among the most active Twitter users with more than 50,000 followers, we find singer Tyrese (@tyrese4real), actress Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano), celebrity Tila Tequila (@officialtila), tv host Jonathan Ross (@wossy) and evangelist Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki).
–60.6% of the most active Twitter users live in the United States, while 6.9% are located in the U.K, 4.7% in Japan, and 4.3% in Canada.
–The split between genders among the most active Twitter users is fairly balanced with 54% male, 46% female.
–88% of the most active Twitter users have never missed a day without making at least one update, while another 2.1% have only been inactive for one day.
–48% have more than 100 followers, compared with 6.3% for overall Twitter users.
–33.7% of the most active Twitter users have joined Twitter this year, compared with 72.5% of overall Twitter users who have signed up this year
–The most popular keywords within bios of active users are Internet marketing, music lover, Web designer, video games, and husband/father.
The full “Inside Twitter” report is available as a PDF [warning: PDF link].
Feeling overwhelmed by Twitter? You’re not alone…although you probably aren’t trying to follow messages from over 100,000 people. Social media addict Robert Scoble was, and decided to unfollow them all at once.
Scoble’s situation is somewhat unique. Until recently, he was auto-following everyone who followed him, a practice that was accepted in Twitter’s early days but eventually led to a lot more spam in the system (users could set up spam accounts to follow people knowing some accounts would auto-follow them back). For Scoble, this led to a situation where he was following over 100,000 people, most of whom he didn’t know. Worse, some were spam accounts that filled his Twitter DM inbox with junk.
Twitter doesn’t allow you to mass unfollow natively, so Scoble had an automated script written to do it for him. He writes of the experience:
On Monday I unfollowed 106,000 people on Twitter. The reaction so far has been quite interesting. More than 7,000 accounts have unfollowed me back. They did that so fast that I assume they are just bots that are looking to increase their follower numbers. I knew I'd lose them, but that's sort of why I did it. People who are following me just to get another count on their follower numbers are just plain, well, lame.
But it's worse than that. When I unfollowed everyone all my spam just stopped. Dead. No more spam. Not since Monday. Twitter is actually quite enjoyable. Not a single DM spam. Not a single piece of spam has come through the home page.
Much like MySpace, it seems, users are learning that having 100,000 “friends” you’ve never met is much less valuable than connecting with a select number of people you know well.
Remember Friends Reunited? The social network, once a leader in the UK market and acquired by ITV in 2005 for £175 million, has been sold to Brightsolid, a subsidiary of Beano comic book publisher DC Thomson, for £25 million.
Surprisingly, that’s good news: we’d previously reported that ITV was considering an offer of £15 million, which would have meant a 91% loss on their original purchase price.
Brightsolid, which runs ventures including Find My Past, has acquired all the assets of Friends Reunited, including a dating operation, genealogy business and social networking site.
For Brightsolid the most attractive part of the business is Genes Reunited which has millions of members, is still growing and has a solid revenue stream through subscriptions.
Do you still use Friends Reunited? Let us know in the comments.
Despite the fact that Apple and the iPhone application store are under investigation for banning Google Voice, developers are still churning out iPhone apps at a rapid pace. They don’t seem to care that their app could be subject to bizarre rejections. Heck, if the latest numbers are any indication, the number of iPhone apps is only going to increase exponentially.
According to July stats provided to us by Flurry (a mobile analytics firm we’ve previously reviewed), the iPhone App store is only becoming more crowded. While it had 25,000 apps in January, that number has more than doubled: it now has over 65,000 applications. With another five months to go in 2009, we should see the app count break 100,000. Seriously, think about how large that number is.
On top of tracking iPhone Apps, Flurry has also been analyzing the Google Android platform. It seems that the iPhone isn’t the only mobile app platform that’s gaining momentum. According to the analytics firm, more and more developers are starting projects on Android – outpacing app development growth on even the iPhone. The number of new app projects started on the Android platform has doubled since January when compared to Apple projects:
One last interesting stat: Flurry estimates that there are about 3 million active users of mobile eBook applications. That strong number begins to place the iPhone and iPod Touch in competition with the market leader: the Amazon Kindle. Here’s a graph of the rapid growth:
Could the mythical Apple Tablet heat up the eBook competition by utilizing the iPhone 3.1 OS? These numbers point towards that possibility. Mobile apps are growing faster than ever though. This market’s not slowing down anytime soon.
Koobface, a virus that targets computers via social networking sites, is apparently back and with added sophistication. 
As we reported last month, 
There is a lot of software out there for conducting virtual conferences and performing demos: 
Two months ago, Digg announced a lynchpin in its revenue strategy: 
You don’t have to subscribe to the cult of 
If Firefox is your browser of choice, there are some handy add-ons that can extend the capability of your plain old copy function or help you massage text into the proper format.
Everybody’s still regrouping after today’s 
In short, cyber warfare may be to blame for the attacks on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Livejournal, and others, though that hasn’t been confirmed by any of the companies targeted. However, Bill Woodcock is a 
The unfortunate thing about commenting on blogs is that it’s all too often basically a silo: your message lives in one place, requires a specific login for that site alone, and can be difficult to share out if you feel you’ve been particularly insightful. 
Mashable’s 
Local Sponsor: A big thanks to 
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Each location will have local Fiesta Movement Agents at the event and will offer rides/transportation. First come, first served.
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We now know that Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal were all victims of Distributed Denial of Service attacks that crippled each of their services for several hours today, with intermitted problems still being reported on all of them. 
Prior to this week it had a been awhile since we’ve had anything newsworthy to report about 
Yesterday we covered the news of the 
The social media world is under attack. Earlier this morning, 
This morning civilization almost ground to a halt as 
Twitter is currently experiencing extended downtime: a 30 minute outage that’s one of the longest in recent months. Back in 2007 and 2008, Twitter downtime was relatively frequent: this year the site has been far more stable and its early outages have been largely forgotten. 
The Associated Press has been making controversial moves in the online space recently, including a plan to charge 
Blaming the new leaders or aggregators for disrupting the business of the old leaders, or saber-rattling and threatening to sue are not business strategies – they are personal therapy sessions. Go ask a music executive how well it works.
However, that’s not to say that 24% of Tweets are spam; far from it.
Feeling overwhelmed by Twitter? You’re not alone…although you probably aren’t trying to follow messages from over 100,000 people. Social media addict Robert Scoble was, and decided to unfollow them all at once.
Remember 
Despite the fact that Apple and the iPhone application store are under investigation 
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