Its a great value add to search, but not everyone is a Google+ user and not everyone likes to have personal search results. Instead, you might want to bring back the Twitter search results. If you’re among those, you’re lucky, coz a Chrome Extension lets you do exactly that.

Sidebar for Google Search modifies your Search results by placing a customizable sidebar on the right. You can choose to display results from Twitter, Wikipedia, Wikitionary, Youtube, and more.

Not only the Twitter search results are accurate, they are nearly realtime. All the top search results are shown. However, they are rarely ordered by relevance. But in most cases, it serves the purpose well.

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Within a week of its launch, it managed to get 5 million+ users (unofficial number), and have engaged users like never before. It happened to me aswell, where I never spent more than couple of minutes on Facebook, ended up spending hours on G+. For some users its a goodbye to Facebook, (and for few twitter too), but the reality is, it won’t happen that soon.

Every social network needs some time to evolve, grow on user base. So till the time Google Plus gains its full potential, I don’t mind cross-posting my status to Facebook, twitter & other social networks.

Sync Google+ status, post with Facebook / Cross-post to Facebook

1: Open Facebook mobile on your desktop browser and get your personalized email address which is used to post via email.

2. Go to Google+ Circles, click “add a new person” and enter the personalized email address and create a new circle drag this to a new circle name it “FB share” or “Social share” or whatever.

3. (optional) Change the privacy settings for this circle to “not visible to public”, You can do all privacy settings about circles by going into the Privacy options in Google+.

4. From now on,  include your hidden circle “FB share” that contains the Facebook email and check the box which says ‘Also emil x people’. Since your facebook email is not using Google+ so your status will be sent to facebook via this email. You are all set.

How to Cross-post from Google+ to Twitter, other Social networks

Use Ping.fm to crosspost the same status message to multiple Social networks using your profile’s unique ping.fm email address, just like you did for facebook. You can now Sync your Google+ status/posts with almost any social network.

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Twitter has now announced that whenever an account that you follow mentions you, you’ll immediately receive a notification. You’ll know who is talking to or about you on Twitter, and you’ll be able to continue the conversation in real-time.

To get started with free sms on your phone, turn on SMS notifications by going to twitter.com/devices and tick mark all options under “Text message notifications” and select your carrier along with your phone number.

Note: To activate, you will have to send a Text message to a defined number with shown text.

You can customize sms notifications to anything that suits you: like what time of the day, and things like “set mentions all’ to turn on notifications for @mentions from everyone, rather than just those whom you follow.

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Its now as easy as that with a a Firefox extension called Firesheep which can  hijack a person’s current user-session over an open Wi-Fi connection.

Firesheep is a work of  Eric Butler who made the proof oc concept public after after presenting at a Security event. The purpose of the experiment was to showcase the security risks associated with session hijacking, aka sidejacking.

So what all can be hacked with Firesheep? Nearly  26 online services, which includes all popular online services: Amazon, Facebook, Foursquare, Google, The New York Times, Twitter, Windows Live, WordPress and Yahoo.

The extension is so flexible that it can be customized to allow a hacker to target other Websites not listed by Firesheep.

While Firesheep sounds scary, its not as scary as it may sound first. Even though the extension is downlaoded more than 100,000 times, there’s nothing to be scared of.

How Firesheep works

Firesheep is basically a packet sniffer that can analyze all the unencrypted Web traffic on an open Wi-Fi connection between a Wi-Fi router and the personal computers on the same network. The extension polls around network for someone to log in, when someone does, browser’s site-specific cookie communicates with the site and contains personally identifying information such as your user name and an site specific session ID.

As victim’s browser swaps cookie information back and forth with the Website, our packet sniffer can capture this information and hijack the session. Coz cookies has no password information and it  has session timeout, it does eventually. But on a serious ote, even temporary access to the account can bring havocs.

How to use Firesheep

Install WinPcap on windows (Mac Os doesn’t need this) and get the Firesheep extension and then open it up by clicking on View>Sidebars>Firesheep. Click the button that says “Start Capturing.”

Once you click the button, it starts snooping. Then onwards all sessions that are captured are automatically displayed

How to Bypass Firesheep Hijacks?

1. If you feel your account has been compromised, immidiately logout. As soon as you do that, hijacked cookie becomes invalid, and no longer can be mis-used.
2. Use A VPN: Try using a Virtual Private Network client such as the free version of HotSpot Shield. This piece of software basically creates a secure tunnel for your data that runs between the Wi-Fi router and your computer.
3. USe HTTPS Everywhere: If you’re a Firefox user you can also use extensions such as HTTPS Everywhere built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This extension forces certain Websites to use a secure SSL connection for your entire browsing session instead of just the login.
4. Use Strict Transport Security (STS): Strict Transport Security (STS) is a relatively new security feature that is starting to appear in some browsers. STS automatically forces your browser to make a secure connection with every Web page that supports SSL encryption. Once you start using STS, you will not be able to use an insecure connection ever again when connecting to a specific site such as Facebook or Amazon. Chrome has supported STS since Chrome 4, and Firefox 4 will include STS when the official version launches in the coming months.
5. Encrypt your home/office network:  Use the strongest possible encryption on your Home and office Wifi connections.  WPA2 is much better than WEP.

So, if you wanted to see the CES (Consumer Electronics show) Tweets in context of the timeline, you will be able to see them on Google. (At present the service has archived tweets back to February and is working on the rest.)

How to Try it: You can try it now by selecting ‘options’ on the search page and selecting ‘updates’, You should then see the timeline updates for your chosen topic.
In this example below Google shows us how it will look like when you search for your chosen topic. You can test drive the new function on this special link.

The inclusion of timeline based tweets will prove a valuable archive to understand more about what was said, by whom and when. That kid of information would be invaluable for analysts or even end consumers. in understanding the importance of certain topics and events and also offer understanding of key influencers.

Google will display a timeline of tweets by day, broken down into topics.

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While researching proper ways, I came across this service called BackTweets and really found it simple, yet helpful. These days, almost everyone owns a website or at least a blog and back tracing/Tracking tweets makes sense as it would help one in estimating Reader’s response from across the world.

Here’s what it looks like for Taranfx (screen-shot showing the untraceable ones alone)

Its notable that BackType, UberVU also accomplish similar stuff but, its not always trustworthy. With Billions of pages to crawl every day, these services fail to fulfil the purpose, that’s exactly where BackTweets shines.

Going further you can combine the output with Tweet Stats to give better analytics of all kinds of tweets. And here is for Taranfx:

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They already have there presence in a similar service called FunMail, that allows iPhone and android users to embed their text’s context  into places, fun graphics, and appropriate images with your original text.

FunTweet will turn text in Tweets into a matching image. By using the service, you can convert all your timelines, or a HashTag, Trending topics, or even a friend’s timeline into visual Tweets.

The concept is cool and can be used to Visualize almost anything on the web. And the next time someone tweets about a product or a thing that you never heard of before, you don’t have to google for it, its there in front of your eyes.

The next step in visual tweets could be streaming Photos instead of regular “text” Tweets.

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Twitter will soon release new set of features that would “make you forget” desktop clients, as claimed by Alex Payne’s Tweet sent out today:

If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)

Uh, everything I like that’s on the employees-only beta site is actually *built* on public API methods we’ve already given developers.

I just mean that our web client team is building cool stuff. It’s going to inspire desktop app developers. Same data, new perspectives.

On one side Seesmic web is a perfect example of how this is possible, on the other, it worries the Desktop client developers. However, one thing I hate about TweetDeck or any other desktop client is time-polls and related delays. It fetches tweets after every few seconds (say 40s) but is  never realtime.The Twitter’s web interface will let us overcome this issue with intelligent and frequent AJAXy refreshes which have no API limitations present in desktop clients. (coz the mainstream web implementation would not use APIs)

Twitter.com has added a number of new features over last year, they all had been slow but nifty. They could use HTML5 and if they do, it would be first mainstream implementation, and we can get GeoLocation, local storage, and what not.

The upcoming Twitter Ads are said to be built around Twitter search, so that’s one more monetization necessity for Twitter to force people to adopt web client.

More to come, stay tuned. We write about Twitter, Open Source, Programming, Web, Apple, iPhone, Android and latest in Tech@taranfx on Twitter or by subscribing below:

If you recall, we’ve seen a lot of business propositions for Twitter that could possibly one way or the other. But, at the end of the day people concluded that Twitter doesn’t need one. But, Twitter owners claim “having one won’t hurt us”, so true.

As per the latest from MediaPost, Twitter’s adoption of an ad platform is “imminent”.

Anamitra Banerji says that “we are working on an ad platform, but it’s only in the test phase.”
Banerji assured MediaPost that Twitter would make it “explicity clear” that a post was from an advertiser and not a regular users.
So it could work the way normal adverts like Magpie [it's great], sponsored tweets already work on Twitter. by using tags like  #spon, #paid, and #samp. But  Twitter might take a different approach which makes it more clear.
These ads won’t comeup from user’s tweets, but rather from Twitter’ web interface just like Google’ adsense.

“We don’t think of ourselves as a Web site — essentially it’s a platform,” Banerji said. “We don’t really control the ads or the way the tweets are viewed and then consumed. We are completely open around other people innovating around us. Ultimately, publishers should have choice. But the one area of concern for us — and that’s if bad ads get identified in Twitter — it’s a problem for us in the long term. So, we should do whatever we can to encourage positive behavior.”

While the article says we should see signs in about a month, we can only wonder how long it will be. Twitter might announce this, officially, around the beginning of next month. There are even reports that claims that Twitter may launch the ad network during South By Southwest Interactive, which begins in Austin on March 12.

I laready like the concept and effectiveness of Magpie, just wondering if ads via web-interface would capture equal audience. May be they need to make it smarter. We’ll get to know.

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Serving Millions and billions of tweets everyday is all to hard for a normal web application. Twitter is built on some scalable programming architectures that makes it work with a charm.

Here is a brief video of How Twitter was created highlighting contribution of each developer and Programming language/platform. (Credits to Ben Sandofsky)

Evolution of Twitter

Legend:

Ruby, JavaScript, Scala, HTML/CSS/Images, Misc, TestCases

Remember to Switch to HD (720p)

Related: YouTube is world’s most popular Video portal. It serves around 1 billion views and several Terabytes of data everyday which accounts to 11,574 views per second . Find out What Powers YouTube

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So what exactly are people talking about?

(image credit)

Nearly, 25% of the tweets are all about emotions. 20% of tweets go towards announcements, support. And nearly 13% are RTs.

During 1998, twitter grew 752% and in 2009 1382% year-on-year. If we look more closely on the month-over-month growth, it reduced in the trailing months of 2009.

As per the latest data statistics from HubSpot, Twitter’s growth is slowing down dramatically. As they report, in October 2009, Twitter’s growth rate had fallen to 3.5%. But among the users who were active, they now spend more time with Twitter, which means there is more horizontal growth than vertical.

They have published a full report from which more analytics can be obtained.

Only 18% of all Twitter users have more than 100 followers. A total of 81% of all users are currently also following less than 100 people for which it used to be 40 6 months ago. Following graph shows no. of users with no. of followers.

Twitter users now include bios (54%), links (65%) and location data (41%) in their profiles.

On the interesting front, most no. of tweets happen not on weekdays or even fridays but ratehr on thursday.

The popular micro-blogging may need to become macro or atleast raise the upper limit as more and more people are utilizing the max characters (140) in their tweets. How many times did you feel that you are running short of characters?

During the September 2009 to Jan’10 timespan, the per month increase in U.S was almost negligible while for developing countries, it still grew at a good pace.

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In simple words, it was nothing but a DNS hijacking attack in which Twitter’s DNS records were altered. That means surfers trying to reach the website directly via name resolution services were redirected to a fake domain, while the Twitter servers were running. As a result,  applications that depended upon Twitter’s API - such as TweetDeck or mobile phone apps - were unaffected by the attack. Hence, Twitter servers were never hacked!

Rik Ferguson, a security consultant at Trend Micro, explains that this type of DNS hijacking usually involves compromising the systems at the registrar responsible for the DNS records of the victim company before altering the relevant DNS records, in a blog posting here.

This kind of DNS hijacking usually involves compromising the registrar responsible for the DNS records of the victim company, the attackers then make unauthorised changes to the DNS records. These changes mean that when someone types a address into browser, we are directed Not to the real web site but to a second site, set up by the hackers, in this case the “Iranian Cyber Army”. This has the net effect of making it look like, in this example, servers belonging to Twitter were compromised when in reality that was not the case.

When it comes to attacking high profile targets it can often be that the registrar is the most vulnerable point in the security armour. In fact Zone-H, the defacement archive, has previously noted that registrars have been “one of the main aims of the past months”. Once a Registrar is compromised, it becomes very easy to alter DNS records, updating NameServers alone does the trick.

As Hacking as a Service Prevails, DNS attacks had been common. DNS has had several vulnerabilities in the past, these sorts of attacks are usually limited to hacktivism activities. Companies should be monitoring their DNS resolution on several servers to become aware as early as possible when this kind of attack takes place.

Twitter has encouraged and helped so many businesses grow. Who can forget that dell made millions of dollars by just promotions on Twitter. Thankfully, the good news is here, Twitter has developed new features that will enable Business users to collaborate better than before. The new features are available to few of the business already and it would open out to the rest of the world as soon as it becomes more mature.

The first thing that we’ve come across is the Contributor’s Feature

The Contributor’s feature, as per Twitter is “one of several in development; some of them will be visible to regular users and some of them will not.”

That tiny glimpse wasn’t good enough, so we dug a little deeper and found that Starbucks is one of the brands in the hand-selected bunch. Brad Nelson, who tweets on behalf of the mega coffee retailer, has the inside scoop on Twitter Contributors, and he sent a few screenshots our way that highlight how the feature works, what it looks like and even demonstrate additional features we can expect in the immediate future.

As Mashable reports, a regular user sees the following when an account with the new feature tweets from the web:

However, Administrators of multi-user accounts will now see a more powerful concept: a toolbar that makes for easy toggling between accounts:

As you can see above, contributors now have 2 levels: Enhanced Access and Partial Access. Enhanced Access will give contributors the ability to view the account dashboard.

This may look trivial, but we expect possibility of  including advanced analytics and stats around Twitter activities to grow business better. Here’s a Video from NBC which discuses this:

Probably, you have come across each one of them. And a question dangles in your mind – “Wait a minute, what are those commands, you referred to”?

Twitter has a list of commands operatable via web interface that let you get more out of Twitter.

These commands are pretty easy to grasp. e.g. commands like Whois, stats, track, follow are self-explanatory.

The most important ones that you might find useful in your daily addictive-life:

Note: All these commands are case-insensitive.

User related:

• FOLLOW username: You can follow a user directly with this command
• LEAVE username: Stop following a specific user and SMS notifications.
• WHOIS username: Get User’s short Bio.
• STATS: Some basic stats like no. of followers, following.
• SET LOCATION placename: Sets your current location. (the new Geolocation feature) e.g. SET LOCATION
• d username + message: Sends a person a private message, better known as Direct message.

Targeted Tweets:

• GET username: Gives out all the Latest tweets for that user
• STATS : Some basic stats like no. of followers, following.
• TRACK term/ UNTRACK term/ UNTRACK all:  Subscribe/Unsubscribe to tweets containing term regardless who posted it.
• TRACK: Ask twitter to return a list of all currently tracked terms.

Notifications:

• ON username: Turn ON notifications for a specific Twitter User.
• OFF username: turns off notifications for specified user.
• OFF, STOP, QUIT or Unsubscribe - Turn Off all Notifications

And Of course there’s one more command that each one of you have have already used.. RT username. The command was added pretty late by Twitter, but I guess users are smarter.

What are your favorite commands?

[via: twitter, techiebuzz]

Don’t worry there are Twitter bots all over the internet that will save your day.  They incorporate ways to alert  you of the unfollowers on a periodic basis so that you can know the evil truth and concentrate on better things.

Follow @goodbyebuddy
Follow @goodbyebuddy on Twitter and stop worrying, this bird is watching for you. The robot will automatically send you a direct message whenever someone unfollows you. This is ofcourse not real time, but alerts often happen within a days time.

Follow @tless
@tless is another Twitter robot, which does pretty much the same job. It is periodic, gives users with a daily scoop of the new followers and unfollowers.

Friend or Follow
Friend or Follow is a service which allows you to see which users on twitter are your friends, which are followers and who are not following you( similar to Twitter Karma). What is more, it can be used to track loss of followers.

Nutshell Mailon

Nutshell mailon takes care of multiple social accounts like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, more based on which it sends periodical newsletter which consists information such as followers gained, followers lost, latest tweets, direct messages and more.

The Next Contendor: @Unfollow Alert

Well, I’m writing one Twitter Bot that will does exactly this and much more. I’m planning on the capacity coz as capacity grows, it can under-run. The current Implementation I’m working on will handle 30,000 followers easily. But I need more scalability. I should be ready sometime before Christmas. Stay Tuned!

Now, a startup open source project called Status.net. They are offering two solutions:

1. Hosted solution. (takes time to activate)
2. Open Source download

I went ahead and tried the second one. The code is written in PHP and MySQL and is  fairly easy to install, took couple of seconds. And this is the result: DEMO

The application looks fairly looks like Twitter feature wise. You can give it a try by signing-up there.

Let us know what you think.

Here comes something that changes the Horizon of Twitter, again: TweetWave.

Tweet Wave is a Twitter 3rd party app that allows your message to be exposed to a potential 1 million users in a ‘wave’ like effect through members of the site re-tweeting your messages, guaranteeing your Tweet substantial exposure.

Sounds impossible? You will have to believe it, it works. It is developed by a UK based firm “Need Creative” who has already shown us some marvelous apps like Twitter Me and TwitMoan.

Tweet Wave is his latest venture and by looking at the average amount of followers its users have, means at it’s current state, it can offer a reach of 988,927 users. (and it’s grown higher by the time you read this)

The CEO of the company believes that 0.01% click on a tweet and 0.0001% of users go on to make a purchase could work great for an ad campaign.

Getting started:-

The service offers 3 free credits after which you will have to buy more credits.

However, there is a cutoff line, you must have at least 1000 followers to be a member. The restriction,as per the company, has been set to tackle spam. But I guess the threat stays no matter what.

The message you send individually is will be sent in the form of a RT to everyone registered within Tweet Wave to be approved, before being sent on by those users.  However, it will automatically be sent after 24 hours if it hasn’t been  moderated.

For affiliates and bloggers, this exposes a great opportunity. Will you grab one?

or perhaps, Follow us on Twitter below, we will give you good content for sure.

But what if I don’t have access to any of those and just web. I don’t like Twitter’s Web interface coz it’s not Realtime. There may be few websites that let you do that, but I thought of making one for my own to make it accessible, anywhere and the best part, it can be integrated to a Blog, website or a portal without a glitch.

You can get the Glimpse of the Application here -> Twitter Live (searches “Chrome” every 3 seconds) and Twitter Live (without query string, Searches “Taranfx” every 10 seconds)

It wasn’t written from scratch but rather inspired from an existing one. Basically, this JQuery based AJAX script Queries Twitter JSON Search API using http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=

The JSON response is parsed for message text, profile images, profile IDs, links, and formatted, animated using JQuery to get an attractive UI. To add to it, The demo you saw above takes GET query strings from user Possible combinations are:

1. q = Your search terms (use HTML format for special characters). Defaults to 'taranfx'
2. interval = Refresh Interval in milliseconds e.g. 3000 for 3 seconds. Defaults to 10 seconds
3. max = Maximum items that collect on screen till they are removed. Defaults to 30

As far as the source code is concerned, you can head over to demo and “view source” over there. You can bookmark that page for your quick usage, it’s going to stay there forever.

Related: Google Chrome 4 Extensions: How To Create – Twitter Client [Download] [Tutorial]

Time and again, I create new stuff, don’t forget to subscribe below.

Microsoft announced back in June that it will add live updates from micro-blogging service Twitter to its search engine: Bing. However, it is now ready for going live, details described here. Following that, Google too announced plans for live Twitter updates integration in its search engine.

Microsoft mentioned about its public access to public Twitter feed and also got Bing Twitter search beta; only for U.S. residents as of now. Google promised to roll out Twitter integration in its search engine “in the coming months”.

Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online services group, said, “We are going to get access to all of the public Twitter information in real time.” Bing will also get the Facebook status feed at a later date. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer, Facebook, said, “We are giving Bing a feed of data made open to everyone. No money exchanged hands. We are not trying to make money on data.”

Bing Twitter search grabs text of a Twitter update and any shortened links with it. However, Bing-Twitter search throws up results after indexing only a week’s Twitter updates. However, good part is Protected and deleted Twitter updates won’t be displayed into Bing-Twitter search.

Evan Williams and Biz Stone, founders of Twitter,  had acquired Summize.com to integrate the search engine to show it as Twitter Search. A few months later, we get to see real-time content pulled into mainstream search. There is one clear conclusion, Twitter holds the Key.

Though there is one major concern: Mass SPAM. A new kind of Twitter attack can bring down the quality of Search result, Everywhere.

On the positive side, if there’s a Twitter update: Apple Releases new iPhone 4G Lineup .. Google and Bing will have those instantly.

I use the Twitter, like many others, for getting latest stuff from around the world on technology.

One of the good things about Twitter is that people can make recommendations for other members whom you might be interested in following. Best example is: on Friday with the #FollowFriday or #FF trending topic, this list of a few users is a good way for you to say that these people post good stuff. The bad part is that this practice is really a mess to aggregrate or organize.

Twitter needs a new way of organizing things: Thanks to a new sevice called TweepML, its now easy to follow people of your interest in a single go. TweepML allows you make a list of Twitter users to recommend to others to follow.

IT’s easy to use, within couple of minutes I was able to create a group called “Top Technology updates” that has plenty of popular and un-popular  Twitter users that post good Technology-based content. Check it out.

Top Technology Twitter Updates

You can also view this list at http://tweepml.org/Technology-Updates/, which will show you the collection of Twitter users that you can add to your Following list in one click. There are a number of pre-configured TweepML follow lists available on the TweepML website.

Additional options include site links and HTML buttons that can be made with the lists that are created. I think this makes Twitter member aggregation a lot easier. What do you think?

TechRadium has sued Twitter for patent infringement.

The company says it didn’t care about Twitter when it was watching the tweets of generic social media like Celebs, musicians, politicians and news outlets. But then TechRadium began seeing promotional materials and news accounts of companies, school districts and local governments using, or considering adopting, the microblogging service as their emergency notification system – muscling into TechRadium’s wheelhouse.

“Honestly, that’s what got us the attention of Twitter,” said Shawn Staples, TechRadium’s attorney. “We don’t really give a damn about social networking. TechRadium is concerned that it developed these patents by extending a lot of time and money and is protecting its market.”

Now the lawsuit, filed August 5 in a Texas federal court, could become a financial thorn in Twitter’s side that endangers killing it. Heavily venture-funded, the free 3year-old microblogging service is working to find a business model.

Here is the Patent from TechRadium -

Patent law is complex, and legal experts interviewed by Threat Level declined to predict the outcome of the lawsuit, but they agreed it’s not a frivolous claim. TechRadium appears to have some legal legs to stand on in the nation’s first lawsuit attacking Twitter’s tweeting protocol.

In fact, TechRadium has already used its patents to win a licensing agreement in a separate infringement case.

That case, also in Texas, targeted rival mass-notification company Blackboard of California. The lawsuit was dropped after Blackboard agreed to license the same three patents (.pdf) at issue in the Twitter case.

Blackboard at first claimed that the patents, dating to 2006, were invalid. But Blackboard did not produce evidence of “prior art,” or demonstrate that the patents were obvious. Now, experts say, the Blackboard settlement bolsters TechRadium’s case against Twitter. (.pdf)

“That settlement becomes evidence of some weight of the non-obviousness of the patent,” said Jordan Sigale, a patent attorney and partner with Loeb & Loeb in Chicago.

Blackboard’s general counsel, Matthew Small, confirmed that the company licensed TechRadium’s patents as part of a June out-of-court settlement. He added that TechRadium also licensed a patent (.pdf) from Blackboard. “We cross-licensed one another,” he said.

Because of a confidentiality agreement, terms were not disclosed. The case was settled in the Eastern District of Texas, a patent-friendly court and magnet for patent infringement cases.

That said, patent attorneys caution that, sometimes, patents become invalidated, even after their owners have received licensing fees from them. So even with the licensing agreement with Blackboard, TechRadium’s patents could still be attacked. And it’s unsettled whether they even apply to Twitter.

The stakes are high, not just for Twitter, but for its vast and growing user base.

Twitter Today

Twitter has about 20 million users, and to true fans, a world without the 140-character microblogging service is akin to a world without oxygen. And while Twitter may not be making money, it has given rise to a cottage industry around it — from URL shorteners and makers of background skins, to iPhone apps that can feed a Twitter junkie’s habit on the go. This fledgling industry piggybacks on Twitter’s allegedly infringing protocol.

Twitter did not respond to repeated e-mail and phone messages for comment. It must respond to TechRadium’s complaint by month’s end.

Patent attorney Sigale says he thinks TechRadium isn’t seeking to put the unprofitable Twitter out of business. He said the lawsuit amounts to “asking for a license agreement.”

Win or lose, Twitter has an expensive legal battle ahead of it. But its popularity could give it an edge that Blackboard didn’t have; the company has already obtained some free, outside counsel of sorts. Two weeks ago, Article One Partners of New York, an online community of lawyers, scholars, scientists and others, began scouring for evidence that TechRadium’s intellectual property was not as unique as the Sugar Land, Texas company claims.

Cheryl Milone, Article One’s chief executive, said its community has forwarded more than 100 submissions in the study’s first week alone — all in an effort to debunk the patents. The submissions have yet to be reviewed.

“We select studies that we think will be of interest to our community,” Milone said. “Because we are a crowd-sourcing community, there’s a clear synergy between the Article One community and the Twitter community,”.

TechRadium’s patents concern its emergency notification system IRIS, the Immediate Response Information System, which has dozens of paying clients. The system, TechRadium clams, “simultaneously delivers uniform, reliable and verifiable emergency messages to an unlimited number of contacts within seconds, across all means and devices of communication.”

Its customers include the military, schools, utilities and local governments. Among them are the U.S. Army,  Littleton Police Department, QWest Communications, Lincoln University, San Antonio School District, American Red Cross, United Way and others.

Twitter breaches the patents, according to TechRadium, because Twitter’s messaging system also is carried across various “means and devices of communication” – including texting, websites, cellphones and RSS feeds.

At first glance, the similarities between IRIS and Twitter are clear:

They each allow a messenger to send a single message to a select group via multiple technological platforms. But that also seems like a ridiculously obvious use of modern technology. Apparently it was novel when TechRadium began applying for its patents ahead of its first one granted in 2006 — novel enough for patent examiners, anyway.

Some of the specific claims in TechRadium’s patents are less Twitter-like. According to TechRadium’s patents, message recipients prioritize where their messages should be sent, so an alert might first be sent as a mobile text message, and then, if unacknowledged, transmitted in a voice phone call.

The patents also describe the chosen device sending a response back automatically to the sender to confirm that a message was received.

None of that squarely applies to Twitter.

“That’s going to be a big deal as to whether or not there’s infringement,” Sigale said. “Who’s side would I rather have here? Boy. I think there’s arguments to be made on both sides.”

Staples, TechRadium’s lawyer, countered that the company must prove that one of the elements in its patents apply to Twitter.

“Every claim in a patent stands on its own. To infringe the patent, you only have to infringe one claim.”

George Borkowski, chairman of the intellectual property practice at Venable LLP in Los Angeles, suspects TechRadium has plenty of other litigation targets in its sights.

That’s because mass-notification companies now number in the dozens. Their ranks began increasing in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, which left the student gunman and 32 others dead in 2007.

“It’s part of the patent-enforcement strategy: You see who is possibly infringing and you make a list of people to go after,” Borkowski said. “I’m sure they’ve made an assessment.”

Staples, when asked if more companies are likely to fall into TechRadium’s legal crosshair, replied: “I think there are some out there.”

source: wired

A security researcher has found that hackers are using Twitter as a means to distribute instructions to a network of compromised computers, a.k.a botnet.

The traditional way of managing botnets was IRC or different honeypots.  But with changing times,  botnet owners are continuously working on finding new ways of keeping their networks up and running, and Twitter seems to be the latest trend among the tricks.

Twitter came to know about this from an account that it recently suspended. What was it doing?  It was being used to post tweets that had links to “commands or executables” to download and run, which would then be used by the botnet code on infected machines.

“I spotted it because a bot uses the RSS feed to get the status updates, the account, called “Upd4t3″, is under investigation by Twitter’s security team, according to Nazario. But the account is just one of what appear to be a handful of Twitter command and control accounts,” Nazario, a security researcher, wrote.

As for the original bot in question that fetches the updates, here’s the VirusTotal analysis, where you can see it’s detected by 19/41 (46.34%) AV tools under evaluation. We can look at the status messages and discover more nefarious activity; the bot’s hiding new malcode which is poorly detected this way. The original link from the malcode came from a ShadowServer nightly link report, which they make available to folks. Many thanks to them.

Botnets can be used to do several things like send spam or carry out distributed denial-of-service attacks, which Twitter itself became the victim of last week. The botnet Nazario found is “an infostealer operation,” a type that can be used to steal sensitive information such as login credentials from infected computers.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, in a blog post confirmed the attack.

“Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users,” he said. “We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.”

Though they have  put in fix to prevent similar kinds for future, but a little different can bring Twitter down again.

What is DDoS?

A  distributed denial-of-service attack is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root name-servers. -Wikipedia

A DDoS involves bombarding a Web site or server with more traffic than it can handle, effectively causing online gridlock. Often such attacks are distributed, meaning that multiple computers, usually compromised by malware, send data to the target site in unison.

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.

Twitter was knocked offline about 9:15 a.m. EDT. Pingdom, a online Site Tracker, indicates that Twitter was offline for about 2.5 hours.

The Twitter availability has been restored. The site’s last significant unplanned downtime occurred on May 30 following a software error.

According to Netcraft, Twitter runs on an Apache Web server hosted by Verio. With the restoration of Twitter, tweets have resumed, many of them about the outage.

Denial of service attacks are relatively common. Earlier this week, Gawker Media sites were hit with a denial of service attack. And last week,AT&T blocked notorious Internet forum 4chan because, it said, the site was undergoing a denial of service attack.

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.

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.

Now users can use Bing to find the latest Twitter tweets. The Intial move comes as startups CrowdEye, Collecta and others are propagating the Web with real-time search.
In a surprise move. Microsoft July st1 added the ability for users to search Twitter tweets with its Bing search engine, the company’s latest attack on Google’s search stronghold. Bing has has started integrating real time Twitter search results into its results. This is definitely a first by any major search engine out there and will obviously be a feather in the cap for Microsoft.

Bing will only Index a certain subset of Twitter users as of now based on their follower count and tweet frequencies clarified a blog post on the official Bing Blog. Also, it is interesting to note is that instead of tying up with Twitter, they seem to have just used the public API of Twitter to their advantage. Brilliant move, without doubt. But again, no innovation in Bing.

This gives Bing a feature that archrival Google doesn’t seem to have as of now. Google, however, does have “almost” real time updating ability as is evident from its fast News Indexing capabilities. On the search front however, what currently happens with Google when we search for a Twitter user, what is displayed is usually a direct link to the users Twitter page. It also shows some old, random posts by that user. Bing, on the other hand, will give real time updates by the user.

The feature is being rolled out in phases and some users might not notice its arrival till it’s implemented fully. There’s more to cheer for Microsoft, although this one has nothing to do with the recent Twitter search integration.

In all, Bing seems to be in a favorable position to be one of the main contenders to snare off some market share from the undisputed leader in search – Google.

However, the original fact is, modern search engines were not programmed to account for such immediacy; high-tech reporters have been complaining for months that search engines don’t index real-time search data from Twitter and other content sources. Bing’s move changes that, as Sean Suchter, general manager of Microsoft’s Search Technology Center noted.

But as always, Microsoft had NO Innovation, this comes from the fact, How Microsoft Built Bing. And now, they just used Twitter API for search, any kid can do that. what is the hype then ?

“Today we’re unveiling an initial foray into integrating more real time data into our search results, starting with some of the more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres. This includes Tweets from folks from our own search technology and business sphere like Danny Sullivan or Kara Swisher as well as those from spheres of more general consumer appeal like Al Gore or Ryan Seacrest.”

Suchter said Bing is not indexing Twitter in its entirety just yet; this is a gradual rollout. “We picked a few thousand people to start, based primarily on their follower count and volume of tweets. We think this is an interesting first step toward using Twitter’s public API to surface Tweets in people search.”

Microsoft is hardly the first to crack this nut.

“What other people do with the API will be interesting to see. You’ve seen CrowdEye, Collecta, OneRiot and Topsy rushing into the real-time search space because Twitter has popularized this concept. We’ll see if it totally gets coopted by the big guys or if it emerges as a separate category that can be won by somebody smaller.”

However, in the grand scheme of things, real-time search may not mean much, It’s just a hype and should not be considered a Big thing to the Bing. It never served it’s basic purpose of search. “Decision engine” is still a fair joke, and Bing still sucks.