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Twitter acquires antimalware company Dasient

Fei — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:00:18 +0000

By John Ribeiro
January 25, 2012

BANGALORE- Twitter has acquired Internet security firm Dasient, the Sunnyvale, California startup said on its blog on Monday.

Dasient, which describes itself as a cloud-based Web antimalware technology company, introduced in 2010 a service to protect advertisement networks and publishers from malicious ads.

“Over the last year, we have been very active in securing the ads and content of the some of the industry’s largest ad networks and web sites,” Neil Daswani, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said in a blog post.

Before that in 2009, the company launched its web antimalware platform, capable of scanning URLs (uniform resource locators) and websites for the presence of harmful content.

The acquisition fits with Twitter’s plans to expand revenue from advertising including promoted Twitter messages and accounts.

By joining Twitter, Dasient will be able to apply its technology and team to the world’s largest real-time information network, Daswani said. The Dasient team is joining Twitter’s “revenue engineering” team, he said.

Twitter said in a message that “Dasient is joining the flock!”, and referred to Daswani’s blog post. Financial details were not disclosed. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for information on how it plans to use Dasient’s technology and services.

As part of the merger, Dasient is winding down its business and is no longer able to accept new customers. The company, which was founded in 2008, was funded by Google Ventures among others.

Twitter acquired earlier this month Summify, a startup that summarizes content in people’s Google, Facebook and Twitter feeds and delivers a daily digest through email, on a website or to a user’s iPhone.

How to Embed Tweets on Your Website or Blog

Fei — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:00:48 +0000

By Angela West

January 9, 2012

SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter has had a busy past three months, launching a redesign, an open-source Android security tech, and Tweetdeck as a Web application. Now it’s offering a way to make your website or blog more interactive with easy-to-embed tweets that require using just one line of code or a link to add.

This new method will let your visitors to your website interact with embedded tweets, and view details such as replies and retweets. This can improve your website while requiring a minimal amount of coding. Here’s how to how to embed the new code and get started.

What Embedded Tweets Look Like

In the example at right, the new embedded tweets appear on a senator’s website. Note that you’ll have to click on the date/time stamp in the lower left corner of that module to get information on the tweet, and you’ll need to have access to the redesign of Twitter to see favorites, retweets and replies. Otherwise, you’ll just get the usual permalink.

One really cool feature is that any tweets with a photo will embed that photo within any text in the tweet, as in the example below. The catch: The tweet that you’re embedding needs to have the picture uploaded to pic.twitter.com in order to show up in an embedded tweet. Photos uploaded to any other service won’t work. If you want to make your photo tweets easier to share in light of this, you may want to start uploading your pictures to Twitter’s own service.

First, the New Twitter

Icons for Home, Connect, and Discover should be at the top left of your profile if you have the new design. If your account isn’t yet active on the new Twitter design, you won’t be able to get the code to embed tweets. If your Twitter profile doesn’t have the features announced here, you’re not on the new design yet. If you’ve downloaded the new version for Android or iPhone, you’ll get earlier access to the new Twitter when logging in on your PC’s browser. A Twitter representative confirmed that the new version of Twitter.com is still in progress.
Get the Embed Code and Find the Permalink

If your account already appears with the new Twitter design, then you’re in business. To get the embed code, you’ll have to go to your tweet’s permalink page. There is no obvious spot on a tweet, even in the new redesign, to get your permalink. Instead, the permalink is hidden within the timestamp on the tweet. Click the timestamp (see the image below), and you’re there. From your tweet’s permalink page, click on “Embed This Tweet”. Copy and paste the code you’re given into your website or blog where you want the tweet to show up, and that’s it.

Embeddable Tweets Make Your Content Permanent

Now, more than ever, you’ll need to think before you tweet. While people can still take a screenshot of your incriminating tweet (ahem, Kenneth Cole?) and post it to a website, now they have the option of embedding tweets as well. Deleting a tweet does not make the content of the tweet go away if it’s been embedded in a website or blog. If your business has been posting tweets live without any vetting process, you may want to change your habits. Although a screenshot takes extra effort to create, an embedded tweet could now easily end up anywhere on the Web.

Internet Famous: 6 Twitter Tips From the Pros

Fei — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 23:00:53 +0000

By Sarah Jacobsson Purewal
July 8, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO – Twitter is the perfect social network for today’s ADHD world–messages are short, sweet, and constantly pouring in. But how do you make yourself known when your 140-character tweets of genius are constantly supplanted by other people’s inane thoughts? Here are some tips on how to gain legions of Twitter followers.

Find Your Niche

The Internet is a big place, and you’re just one person. That doesn’t mean you can’t change the world (or whatever), but it does mean that you won’t enjoy mass appeal from the get-go. So find your niche and stick with it.
“The best thing about the Internet, and Twitter, is that if you are truly passionate about something–anything–there’s a place for it,” says travel writer Stefanie Michaels (@adventuregirl).
Michaels was already an established travel journalist before she joined Twitter in March 2009–but even so, she attributes much of her success to finding the right niche at the right time.

“When I started tweeting, I was basically the only person out there tweeting travel deals,” she says in a phone conversation, “I was already a well-known travel editor at two now-defunct travel magazines, so I basically went from being unemployed to walking red carpets. It’s pretty surreal.”

Michaels has about 1.5 million followers on Twitter.

Tweet Often

Twitter users who tweet often are more likely to keep their audience and followers engaged. So you should try to tweet as much as you can, without forcing it.
“When I tweet, I have to feel it. It must be ‘real,’” says Shannon Seek (@shannonseek), “I don’t preplan tweets or have a protocol of any kind. It is an intuitive experience.”
Still, Seek admits that the more frequently she tweets, the more followers she gets. “When I amassed 30,000 followers in one month, I was tweeting like 180 times a day,” Seek says in an email message, “I was recovering from surgery at the time, and it was a way to stay connected.”
Seek currently has about 49,000 Twitter followers.

Interact With Others

Twitter shouldn’t be an infinite auditorium where you stand at the lectern and release your existential (or not-so-existential) thoughts to the Internet. Rather, it should be a place where you connect with other people–because, after all, every follower is a real person. Except for the ones who are bots.

If you want more followers, try to interact with people as much as you reasonably can. Interactions show people that you’re listening, and observing your interactions with people over Twitter will help convince others that you’re worth following.

According to Kinsey Schofield (@KinseySchofield), social media strategist and part time entertainment reporter, it’s a good idea to create a social media presence by starting with people you actually know in real life. This generates fun exchanges online that other people like to see and read.
Of course, while Schofield advises you not to make your Twitter presence a one-sided conversation–because you “don’t want to look like an issue of Sky Mall”–she acknowledges that you “don’t have to answer ALL replies, but answer as many as you can…that are relevant.”

“Although ignoring can alienate some followers, answering ‘How are you?’ four times a day is unnecessary and could turn away other followers,” Schofield writes in an email message.
Schofield currently has about 44,000 Twitter followers.

Be Controversial

Earlier this year, British reality TV personality Kenneth Tong (@MrKennethTong) became a trending topic on Twitter for promoting what he called the “Size Zero Pill.” According to Tong, women should strive for “managed anorexia,” and he was going to release a pill that would let you go from a size 12 to a size 6 in three weeks.
Needless to say, Tong was criticized across the globe, by such popular Twitter users as Rihanna and Katy Perry. Tong went from 9000 followers to 25,000 in less than a week.
The catch? It was all a hoax. Just one week after Tong began his “Size Zero Pill” tweets, he admitted the campaign was a hoax–he’d bet a friend that he could become a trending topic in less than a week, and, well, he won.
What we can learn from this, of course, is that, assuming you’re willing to deal with the consequences, being controversial is an excellent way to become (in)famous on Twitter. Tong points out that “fame” on Twitter can be measured in one of two ways: by your number of followers or by whether you are a trending topic. “Whilst the obvious ‘celebrity’ will have millions of followers,” Tong says in an email message, “Very few of them will ever trend. I on the other hand managed to be a globally trending topic, my name, for eleven days.” In Tong’s view, achieving that trending status was “a much greater feat than simply being famous,” though he admits that “my fame is more of an infamy.”

Tong currently has about 17,000 Twitter followers.

Be Famous Elsewhere

The top ten most-followed Twitter users, according to Twitter Counter, are Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry, Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres, Taylor Swift, and Shakira. I think it’s safe to say that these Twitter users got their followers the old-fashioned way–by being famous elsewhere.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you need to be a singer, actor, reality TV star, or President of the United States to get famous on Twitter. “Being famous elsewhere” could just mean milking your MySpace account for all it’s worth.

Chloe Tong (@dirtyaddiction), a fashion designer and Kenneth Tong’s younger sister, says she got most of her followers from her MySpace fanbase. “When MySpace started to die, I spammed the bulletin board with my Twitter like crazy,” she says by email. “Now, most of my ‘fans’ find me via my other social networking sites, such as YouTube, Facebook, and Model Mayhem.”
Tong currently has about 2000 Twitter followers.

Take It Offline

Ultimately, social media is about connecting you with people–real people. Not only should you force your Twitter handle on everyone you meet, try engaging in a little real-world guerrilla marketing, as Schofield did: “I took out ads on the back page of Village Voice Media’s weekly publications. I asked people to Friend Me or I would cancel my 22nd birthday party. Write your Twitter handle in the dirt on people’s car windows. Write it on dollar bills. Put it on a T-shirt and wear it to a Lakers game.”

Go forth, get Twitter-famous, and remember to thank me when you make your virtual Oscar speech.

Twitter-to-Facebook: Hello?

Fei — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 23:00:07 +0000

By Ted Landau
February 21, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO – Last week, I briefly mentioned that I could no longer get my Twitter feed to post to my Facebook wall. Many others reported the same symptom. What happened next was sufficiently convoluted and frustrating that I decided the story was worth a “full” column.

I was using Twitter’s official Facebook app. Its webpage claimed that my two accounts were still connected. The option to “allow Twitter to post updates to Facebook Profile” was enabled. But nothing was happening. I disconnected and reconnected the two accounts. No change. I searched online for advice. Nada.

A few days later, I rechecked Twitter’s support site. This time I noticed what appeared to be a new entry. It covered my precise symptom: “My Tweets suddenly stopped showing on Facebook! They’re not on my Wall!” Bingo!
I dutifully followed all eight steps listed on the Twitter page. Doing so required navigating to some fairly obscure settings options for both Twitter and Facebook. It didn’t help that Step 3’s instructions—to “visit your Applications Settings” in Facebook—offered no advice on how to get there. It turned out to be considerably more involved than I expected. From the Account menu on the Facebook site, select Privacy Settings. From the page that appears, locate the Apps and Websites item on the lower left side and select “Edit your settings.” Next, click the Edit Settings button for “Apps you use.” From here, select Edit Settings for the Twitter app. At last, you can click “Remove app” (which is Step 4). Whew! This is not what I would call an efficiently-designed user interface.

Making matters worse, as I worked through the eight-step program, Twitter occasionally balked, dumping me to the “fail whale” screen. When I repeated the failed action, it eventually worked. But this was not inspiring any confidence. Skipping over several further hassles, here’s the punchline: It worked! When I was done, Twitter was again posting to my Facebook wall.

Until the next day. When the Twitter-to-Facebook connection stopped working. Again.

I tried to contact Twitter support directly, to inform them of this new failure and possibly get further advice. Unfortunately, figuring out how to send an email to Twitter support (assuming it’s even possible) proved to be a task beyond my now limited patience. I gave up.

My next tack was to switch to a different Twitter-to-Facebook app. After assessing an assortment of third-party programs, I settled on SupaSync. No luck. Whatever was causing the work stoppage, it was not limited to a specific Facebook app. Rather, it seemed to be a general failure of Twitter and/or Facebook.
At this point, I abandoned the search for a solution, deciding I would rather go without seeing my Twitter feed on Facebook than waste any more time on the matter.

That would have been the end of the story. Except… the next day… without me doing anything at all… my Twitter posts began to appear on my Facebook wall. It’s all been working perfectly ever since. Go figure.

That’s the end of the story. For now. Given that I have no idea why the Twitter postings stopped or why they started again, I’m not at all convinced that we’ve seen the last of this bug.

[A big “thank you” to Lex Friedman, Chuck Joiner, Neal Pann, and Tom Schmidt. We were all victims of this bug and worked together to try to solve it.]

Post Twitter Updates from the Firefox Address Bar

Fei — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 23:00:47 +0000

By Rick Broida
November 15, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – Do you still go to Twitter.com every time you want to tweet something? That, my friends, is one colossal waste of time (not to mention a hassle).

If you’re a Firefox user, you can tweet right from your browser’s address bar. All you need is the fiendishly clever TwitterBar add-on.

What’s so fiendish about it? TwitterBar makes tweeting so easy, you’ll probably end up doing a lot more of it–and, if I may gently remind you, no one cares what you had for breakfast today. Not even your mom.

Anyway, TwitterBar adds a “tweet” icon to the tail end of the Firefox address bar. Just type your update, then click the icon–or mouse over it to see how many characters you have left. (As with all tweets, you’re limited to 140.)

If all you want to do is tweet the address of the site you’re viewing, there’s no typing required–just click the TwitterBar icon. Like I said: clever!

If there’s a faster way to tweet, I haven’t found it.

New Rules for Online Living

Fei — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 23:00:16 +0000

By Robert Strohmeyer

October 12, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – By this point in history, everyone should have a reasonably strong grasp of the basics: Don’t TYPE IN ALL CAPS, don’t forward chain e-mails without checking Snopes, and don’t leave your ringer on in a movie theater. But technology keeps advancing, creating new social dilemmas and potential faux pas. Here now, as a public service, are 25 new rules for modern living.

1. Unless you’re under 12 or just being ironic, keep a lid on the Internet slang. (Especially “clever” alternative spellings like “gurl,” “w00t,” and “fanbois.”)

2. Never use your Facebook wall to show off your engagement ring. It’s bad luck, and we can spot Cubic Zirconia even at low resolution.

3. You are not your kids. Don’t use the latest cute snapshot of them as your profile pic.

4. Whether you’re an empty-nest ex-hippie treehugger or an empty-nest ex-hippie teabagger, not everyone on your friends list shares your mind-crushing anxiety about wireless radiation or immigration enforcement. Take it down a notch, Dad.

5. No matter how off-the-hook last night’s party may have been, commenting about it on the party host’s wall afterward merely invites disaster. Chance are, not all of the host’s friends were on the guest list.

6. You are not your spouse, child, or BFF. So why are you posting comments from their Facebook or Twitter account? Get your own account. They’re free.

7. “Send to a friend” links on Websites can be convenient for the sender but annoying for the recipient. Ever heard of copy-and-paste?

8. One-word tweets: Don’t.

9. Try reading at least the first paragraph of any blog post before crafting a hot-headed screed about how dumb it is.

10. Never post a comment shorter than your signature.

11. Leaving the default “Sent from my iPhone” or “Sent from my BlackBerry” signature in your phone’s e-mail app should be a punishable offense. Those companies get enough free advertising as it is.

12. Using your e-mail app’s built-in “stationery” feature has never been a good idea. It was annoying in the 1990s, and it’s deplorable now.

13. If you haven’t posted an update to your blog in months, don’t bother logging on to put up a post apologizing about it. Nobody cares–not even you, apparently.

14. There’s no excuse for spamming everyone in your contacts list with 20 megabytes of vacation snaps. That’s what Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa are for.

15. When sharing pics on social sites (see number 14), take a few minutes to weed out the blurry shot of your left index finger. And we don’t need 72 nearly identical shots of Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower, either.

16. Ringback tones are hereby banned. We don’t want to hear a badly compressed clip of 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” every time we need to call you.

17. We shouldn’t have to tell you that playing music loudly on your phone while riding a train or waiting for the bus is just plain jerky. Get some headphones, dude.

18. Got a personal message for a friend or relative? Send a message. Facebook walls are not private.

19. When you get an e-mail that you think is particularly amusing or wise, delete it immediately without forwarding it to anyone.

20. If you tag me in a picture on Facebook, I better look damned good.

21. A little short-form banter on Twitter is fun, but take it to e-mail or direct messages after three tweets.

22. Ostentatiously flaunting your new iPad/iPhone/Droid in public isn’t impressing anyone. You know that any fool can buy one of those at the store, right?

23. We know good domain names are scarce these days, but Camelcamelcamel.com is not an acceptable option. For that matter, Dimdim.com doesn’t inspire confidence either.

24. Some terms make more sense online than IRL. Saying “Let’s take this ‘offline,’ because we don’t have the ‘bandwidth’ for it right now” at a meeting just makes you sound like a dork. For that matter, saying “IRL” is pretty lame, too.

25. Useless acronyms FTW.

Of course, we know these 25 rules aren’t nearly enough to counter every annoyance and irritation of modern life. If you’ve got a few you’d like to enact, let us know in the comments.

Share Web Pages, Kindle Notes, and Books

Fei — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 23:00:31 +0000

By Rick Broida
August 19, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – You found something cool on the Web–say, a photo or incredibly helpful Hassle-Free PC tip. Now you want to share it with friends, and maybe add a few comments to what you’re sharing.

Check out Bounce. This slick little Web app takes a screenshot of any page, lets you add comments to one or more parts of that page, then share it via Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail.

To get started, copy the URL of the page you want to share. Then head to the Bounce site, paste in the URL, and click Grab Screenshot. In a few moments, you’ll see the page you captured, but with a simple Bounce toolbar across the top. Now click and drag a box around any area you want to spotlight, then add some comments in the area below it. Repeat this process as needed.

Finally, click the red Save button up in the Bounce toolbar. That’ll generate a custom URL you can copy and paste into an e-mail. Alternately, you can click the Facebook or Twitter icons to share this “feedback” (that’s what Bounce calls your comments) on either service.

Bounce is totally free, and it doesn’t require any kind of registration. Nice!

Copy Kindle Notes and Bookmarks to Your PC

If you’re a Kindle owner, you’ve probably discovered the device’s enviable ability to bookmark pages, highlight passages, and add notes (aka annotations).

What you may not know is how to do anything useful with that data. For example, students might want to include annotations in a school paper. And if you’re part of a book group, your might want to share those bookmarks and notes in, say, a Word document.

Either way, it’s possible–it’s just a small matter of copying that stuff to your PC. Here’s how.

Connect your Kindle to your PC. Open My Computer (or just Computer if you’re on Vista or Windows 7), then look for Kindle in your list of devices. Double-click the Kindle icon, then open the Documents folder. Look for a file called My Clippings.txt. Copy it to your desktop (or folder of choice), then open it in your favorite word processor.

You’ll see that the notes are sorted by book and by date–very handy.

Manage, Share, and Discover Books With Shelfari

I’m an avid reader. And the older I get, the harder it becomes for me to remember every book I’ve read. At the same time, I want to get recommendations from sources other than Amazon: friends, people who share my tastes, and so on.

Shelfari is a free service that lets you build a virtual bookshelf of stuff you’ve read, see what your friends are reading, discover popular titles in specific genres, and join discussion groups.

After signing up for Shelfari, you can browse or search its library to find books to add to your virtual shelf. For any book you choose, you have the option of rating, tagging, and/or reviewing it. You can also mark it as something you’ve read, are reading, or are planning to read. All this requires just a few easy clicks.

Shelfari is also heavy on community features, stuff like which books got the highest ratings and most comments for the day, members who added the same books as you, and group categories ranging from Authors & Writing to World Literature & Culture.

Of course, Shelfari is by no means the only bibliophile site of its kind. Another popular destination is Goodreads, though I find that site’s interface much less intuitive and attractive.

I do wish Shelfari offered some kind of integration with Facebook and/or Twitter. Even so, it’s a great destination for anyone who loves books. If you want to “friend” me on the service, look for user justrick.

Is Best Buy Making its Own Tablet?

Fei — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 22:59:01 +0000

By Brennon Slattery
August 11, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – Best Buy’s chief technology officer Robert Stephens recently posted photos of a prototype tablet on his Twitter feed, fueling speculation that Best Buy is creating its own in-house branded tablet computer.

Best Buy has been making re-branded products with the Rocketfish label for a while now, but seeing as how Best Buy is the only major U.S. retailer (besides Apple Stores) with a contract to sell the iPad, is it shooting itself in the foot? And can the relatively unknown Rocketfish brand produce a decent alternative to the slew of soon-to-be-released tablets?
The photos Stephen posted are the only information available about the potential Best Buy tablet. The photos are only form factor representations without guts inside, according to Stephens. He did hint at the possibility of using Android as an OS when he tweeted “the question is: Is 2.2 ready for the tablet interface?” — a likely reference to Android 2.2, or Froyo.

The New York Times points out the Best Buy tablet’s physical similarities to the Hewlett-Packard Slate — a tablet that was heavily hyped by Microsoft in January, but then quietly disappeared, with all indications that HP plans to use its newly-acquired Palm WebOS instead of Windows 7.

Rocketfish is known (but not well known) for manufacturing rebranded products, such as AV cables, computer parts, and GPS chargers. These products get disappointing reviews that hover around the 2.5 or 3 stars mark (out of 5 stars) on Best Buy’s own Web site. While Rocketfish products are nothing more than cheaper alternatives to name brand accessories, their apparent subpar quality doesn’t paint a promising picture for a more complicated product, such as a tablet.

Other in-house brands sold by Best Buy are Geek Squad, Insignia, Init, and Dynex. Best Buy has been pushing its in-house branded items lately, as the competition to sell cheap alternatives to name brand devices heats up. Investopedia notes: “In focusing on its house brands, Best Buy seems to want to accomplish what Sears Holding has done in developing a strong customer brand loyalty through Sears brands such as the Kenmore appliances and Craftsman. Best Buy is competing with Wal-Mart and Amazon by developing better quality products using customer feedback and analyzing consumers’ needs and wants.”

What do you think? Can Rocketfish make its mark on the tablet market? Will the Best Buy tablet suffer the same fate as the JooJoo tablet, which had a lot of hype, horrible reviews, and really embarrassing sales (only 90 pre-orders … and 15 returns)? Will Best Buy’s continued sales of the iPad seriously hurt its own tablet’s chances?

Refreshed MySpace desperately seeks users

Fei — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 23:00:07 +0000

By Barbara Hernandez
July 19, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – MySpace is showing off today its new, polished look, which is a far cry from the hodge-podge of textboxes featuring strippers and porn star “friends.” The “clean new profile” was announced by CEO Sean Percival who revealed his profile page in stark black and white (although won’t we kind of miss that passionate purple?)
Like competitor Facebook, MySpace has put the profile on the left and created a MySpace Stream, similar to Facebook’s newsfeed, and uploads Twitter status updates.

It makes more sense as to why MySpace is buying Threadbox, a social messaging service that replaces email and instant messenger accounts, and is incorporating it into their site. MySpace’s heyday of 2007 is gone and it seems to be a sinking ship of irrelevance against the onslaught of Facebook, so it has to do something revolutionary to woo back a generation.

MySpace began losing users in 2008, when Facebook started muscling in its social network territory. By May 2009, Facebook’s unique visitors outstripped MySpace 70,278,000 to 70,255,000 and has never stopped, according to data provided to PC World from comScore. As of June, Facebook’s numbers were double those of MySpace — 141,638,000 to 66,633,000. In other words, since last year when both social networks were neck-and-neck, MySpace has dropped 5 percent while Facebook has grown 50 percent.

Shouldn’t that be a sign the users have spoken?

While MySpace showed some slight upticks in a few months, most notably in March 2010 when users jumped to 70,136,000 — likely due to its revamp and “Discover and be Discovered” campaign, numbers slid back down in April and still lower in May and June.

So far, user comments on the new interface have been positive, unless you’re one of those cynical folks who thinks that Percival might be editing out the negative comments on his profile page:
“How much longer do I have to wait to get this profile style. I don’t mind testing it!” net.xero wrote.

“I like it. Less cluttered. Hope to see many more improvements,” wrote Hockey BLADES.

I expect MySpace’s modern-looking user interface and may woo back more visitors, but if history is any indicator, it’s more likely that its numbers will be another quick rise and settle into a slow but inevitable sink.

Twitter catches Cybercriminals and Google foots the bill

Fei — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 22:59:10 +0000

By Barbara Hernandez
July 12, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO – Google is paying for research to shut down spammers on . . . Twitter and Facebook?
By using dozens of Twitter accounts, researchers at Texas A&M University are creating “honeypots,” or fake accounts that are supposed to lure spammers, who are eager to spread malware or phish for information, to social networks. And their work is being partially supported by a research grant from an unlikely source — one of Twitter’s online competitors, Google. From the Technology Review:

The honeypot accounts, like http://twitter.com/tayBourne, automatically post updates drawn from a collection of 120,000 real tweets harvested from Twitter. The team has also deployed honeypots on MySpace, and created software that uses dummy profiles on both networks to learn about spammer tactics. “We have a bot monitor who contacts our profiles,” says [ Kyumin ] Lee. “It looks at what they put in their messages and also accesses their profile to see their demographic information and past updates.”

So far, Lee says, “Our 61 honeypots tempted and collected 30,867 spammers on Twitter.”

The fake accounts try not to mimic a real person and are allocated to a dark address space and legitimate users are segregated from the spammers.

Lee said that most of the spammers pretend to be (surprise!) college-age females from California and (shock!) target men. Why is it so prevalent on social network sites? Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are extremely vulnerable to phishing, because users tent to trust their social networks more and due to the widespread use of URL shorteners.

Google funding research isn’t new. Its Google Research Blog chronicles most of the projects it funds, including a book on text processing, human-computer social interaction and other computer science research. Ridding the world of spammers is obviously a necessity for anyone using a computer and definitely for Internet entrepreneurs, so Google’s money is well-spent — even if it also helps its competitors.