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Russian cybercriminal forums offer batches of 1,000 Twitter accounts for less than $200.

Hacked Twitter accounts are selling briskly on Russian cybercriminal forums, with fraud artists and spammers paying between $100 and $200 for batches of 1,000 accounts, depending on number of followers the accounts have, according to a Russian security researcher.

Credit: Twitter

In many cases the buyers are conducting a lucrative trade by hawking phony antivirus products via tweets sent through these accounts. “The technique of stealing account credentials and posting malicious links on Twitter is more and more popular,” and has surged in the past two months, says Costin Raiu, director of the global research and analysis group for the Moscow-based antivirus company Kaspersky Lab. “Cybercriminals are recognizing that social networking sites can be abused very efficiently for their needs.”

Even one successful hacked tweet from the account of a trusted user can have serious repercussions, especially if the bogus tweet is “retweeted” by followers to still more people. Typically, between 10 percent and 20 percent of people will click a link sent by a trusted source.

The illicit Twitter trade is being conducted on Russian-language, members-only cybercriminal forums, Raiu says. No aggregate numbers of stolen accounts are available. But based on the fact that accounts are offered in batches of 1,000, it’s reasonable to conclude that tens of thousands or more accounts might be for sale worldwide, Raiu says. Twitter has more than 75 million members, of which about 10 million to 15 million send out tweets regularly.

In one common scam, clicking the link of a hacked tweet infects the recipient’s computer with advertisements for a phony antivirus product. The infection produces a pop-up notice that announces an infection and offers the “full version” of the antivirus solution for $50 or more. One in 100 people likely end up paying for this, Raiu estimates, roughly a 50 to 1 return on investment.

The Twitter scam is built on the theft of login credentials through long-established tricks including password-stealing viruses, called Trojans, and through spam e-mails that trick recipients into entering their credentials into a fake version of Twitter.com. Once access to an account is obtained, the hacker probably gets only a few shots at sending a fake tweet before the owner notices and changes his credentials.

Tweet scam A message sent through a compromised Twitter account by a hacker (highlighted in red). The message includes a link that leads to malware. Credit: Twitter

Twitter advises that users who see unauthorized tweets issued under their name should change their password immediately (if it hasn’t been changed by the hacker) and to revoke access for any unrecognized third-party application. It also offers advice for safe tweeting on its forums. The company did not immediately reply to a question about the Russian black market or the number of compromised accounts.

The discovery by Kaspersky Lab comes one month after reports surfaced that Facebook was facing similar problems. Verisign’s iDefense Labs said it had found a website peddling 1.5 million compromised Facebook accounts, offering them for $25 per 1,000 accounts with 10 friends or less, and $45 per 1,000 accounts that have more than 10 friends.

The hacking of Twitter accounts represents a change in strategy by Twitter scam artists. Earlier this year, the trend among spammers was to create Twitter accounts from scratch, try to gain as many followers as possible, then attempt to sell them, with prices listed on Russian cybercriminal forums of between $500 and $1,000.

But this strategy found few customers, and proved difficult to maintain. Twitter fought back by blocking accounts that gathered followers too quickly–a sign that a spammer was behind the account. Scammers next built automated programs to slowly build up followers and post realistic-looking tweets copied from other Twitter users.

“It was a lot of work for them,” Raiu says. “Probably the cybercriminals discovered earlier this year that it’s easier to steal logins to people’s Twitter accounts than create them from scratch.”

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/web/25297/page2/

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Some quitting Facebook as privacy concerns escalate

(CNN) — Concerns over Facebook’s new privacy policy and the online social network’s recent efforts to spread its information across the Web have led some of the site’s faithful to delete their accounts — or at least try to.

On Wednesday’s episode of a podcast called This Week in Technology, host Leo Laporte, a well-known tech pundit, said he had to search wikiHow, a how-to site, to figure out how to delete his Facebook account permanently.

After finding the delete button, which he said is hidden deep within the site’s menus, Laporte proceeded to delete his account during the online broadcast.

“That’s it. It’s gone,” he said during the show. “And I think that’s the right thing to do.”

It’s unclear how many people have chosen to delete their Facebook accounts in recent weeks. The popular social network doesn’t publish statistics on how many people quit the site.

But there has been much uproar online about Facebook’s alleged lack of concern for the privacy of its users’ personal information, and its clear that some people have become so upset that they’re leaving the networking site, which has more than 400 million members.

Still, the account deletions likely aren’t numerous enough numbers to affect the site’s overall size. Facebook spokeswoman Annie Ta said in an e-mail that Facebook has grown by more than 10 million active users since late April.

iReport: Are you done with Facebook? Read more

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What Facebook’s Open Graph Means for Your Business

Brenton Gieser is the President of ConvoSpark, a social media development agency focused on building socially engaging technology on Facebook, mobile devices, and other social media platforms. You can find him discussing the intersection of social media and entrepreneurship on his personal blog, BrentonGieser.com.

All the buzz about Facebook’s most recent changes has left marketers scrambling to get a grasp of what these new products and features mean for their business. For marketers, keeping up with the entire social web is a job in itself, and Facebook()’s constant evolution doesn’t make it any easier.

To sum up the recent announcements, it is appropriate to simply state that Facebook has moved one step closer to creating the semantic web — that is, a human-powered web — and positioning itself at the center of this new universe.

Facebook’s Open Graph protocol will help cultivate richer and more useful data in an attempt to make “social” the new default of the web. Still, the looming question is: What does this mean for businesses that have invested so much in Facebook marketing? If any of Mark Zuckerberg’s audacious F8 presentations come to fruition, businesses should start optimizing their Facebook presence now more than ever.

What Was Introduced at the F8 Conference?

There were three primary items that were announced at F8 that will work in conjunction with the rest of the web to make it more social:

• Social Plugins: Social plugins are the easiest way for anyone to integrate Facebook’s social features on their website. By adding a few lines of code to your site, you will give visitors the ability to engage with both your website and your Facebook presence. The focus is on the “Like button.” Clicking it places content from that web page in your Facebook stream. This differs from the Facebook “share button,” as you now receive updated content from that web page directly in your feed.
• Open Graph Protocol: The Open Graph is less of a feature or product and more of the overarching concept of what Facebook is employing. The foundation of the Open Graph protocol lies in having website owners identify their pages as “objects” (examples: a movie on IMDb or an athlete on ESPN.com). This allows Facebook to establish a connection to those objects, optimizing the website’s presence across Facebook and setting up two-way channels between the web pages and Facebook.
• Open Graph API: This is the actual API that developers will be working with to integrate websites with the Open Graph. At F8, Facebook’s product team stressed the simplicity of implementing the API, perhaps after seeing the mass adoption of the Twitter() API and its ease of use.

Integrating Facebook Into Your Web Presence Will Be Easier

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 If there was one message that Bret Taylor, Facebook’s Director of Product, wanted to hammer home at F8, it was that the Open Graph protocol will be extremely simple to implement. Any website that has pages representing real-world things can utilize the Open Graph to create a more social experience for visitors.

One of the purposes of the Open Graph protocol is to simplify the sign-in or profile linking process between Facebook and websites. In many instances, logging into the website through Facebook will be unnecessary. If a visitor is logged on to Facebook through their browser, they will still be recognized by that website without any authentication through Facebook Connect. To go a step beyond that, Facebook is adopting OAuth, which will make it easier and safer for users to authenticate their Facebook log-in through third-party websites.

Facebook has also made it easier for developers to incorporate new features on websites. As I stated before, a few lines of code can create dynamic social web integration. This is great news for websites that are looking to avoid the complexities of the Facebook Connect API and to provide a big upgrade from simple Fan Page plugins.

By reducing the cost and time it takes for websites to become a part of the Facebook platform, Facebook has created a win-win proposition for many companies hoping to market on the network. Websites will be able to provide a constant flow of content to the people who “like” what they publish online, while Facebook becomes one of the primary aggregators of social data across the web — not a bad deal.

Community Pages Connect the Web Via Common Interest

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You may have noticed that the majority of Facebook’s user profiles have been changed recently. Interests, movies, and other descriptives on a user’s profile page are no longer just inanimate text. Rather, those objects are synced up to Community Pages. This new feature stems from the Open Graph protocol and Facebook’s move to gather the web’s socially generated data.

Community Pages have the ability to organically group people together based on what they like. Whether you clicked “like” on the LeBron James ESPN.com web page, or you have him listed in your interests, you will be connected to the LeBron James Community Page and everyone else who has done the same. Gathering people together based on interest is not a novel idea, but doing so from a pool of over 450 million people means vast amounts of people-powered information.

Since Community Pages are built actively and passively by users, companies need to make sure to monitor pages related to their brand in order to manage their identity within Facebook and the rest of the social web. Marketers who recognize Community Pages as a great place to engage with their enthusiasts will see early benefits. Sparking conversations with these individuals and asking for feedback on your company’s products and services may help shape public opinion of your business and improve sales on the whole.

What Are the Effects on the Current Model?

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Since the Open Graph protocol will reshape how the rest of the web is connected with Facebook, what does that mean for the current method of connecting?

The new social plugins offer your website a rich feature set very similar to that of your Facebook Fan Page. But hundreds of millions of people continue to log-in to Facebook every single day. You still need to maintain a strong presence within the site’s walls. Your Fan Pages will remain valuable to your social media marketing efforts, and syncing them to your websites will be a viable option moving forward.

Facebook applications may become an even more intriguing option when it comes to packaging a viral marketing message on Facebook. With access to the new API, developers may find ways to better leverage data and create an even richer social experience.

Facebook Connect is probably the biggest question mark of the bunch, as it seems likely to be thrown by the wayside. With the addition of the Open Graph API and the social plugins, much of what Facebook Connect offers will be obsolete. Still, there are some questions about how exactly developers are supposed to accommodate these changes.

What Should Your Business Do Next?

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It’s no secret that Facebook is making a huge push to lock down their top spot on the social totem pole and they hope that the users will follow their lead. In Facebook’s case, it’s safe to say both users and marketers will stay on board. With Facebook’s size and reach, if you are not keeping up with the changes, you are going to be left in the dust.

Businesses will need to build their web presence with the Open Graph in mind. Moving forward, Facebook-enabled websites will become an essential piece of lasting success in the digital space. Content dissemination will occur more often and be more relevant to users, and applications will take on many new forms.

Social optimization is to 2010 as SEO was to 2005. Facebook, along with other important social platforms are now giving you the tools to optimize your social media presence based on the quality of social engagement you create. As Mark Zuckerberg said, the web is defaulting to social. It’s time to act accordingly.

Source: http://mashable.com/2010/05/05/facebook-open-graph-business/

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Social media opens new door to cyberattacks, panel says

E-mail attachments are no longer the attack of choice of computer hackers and other individuals intent on gaining access to government and industry systems, security experts said today.

As increasing numbers of people adopt social media, those sites are becoming the new attack portal of choice and malware is now the No. 1 threat, panelists said at the FOSE 2010 trade show in Washington, D.C.

Two or three years ago, the No. 1 vector for viruses was through e-mail, primarily attachments. But today those attacks account for “the low end of single digits,” said Bob Hansmann, senior product marketing manager at Blue Coat Systems.

“The vast majority of attacks actually come through the Web, and yet it is amazing how few people actually scan their http or https, their secure connections to Web mail,” he said. Read more

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Analyzing the connections between sites could help spot Web attacks.

Over the past couple of years, cybercriminals have increasingly focused on finding ways to inject malicious code into legitimate websites. Typically they’ve done this by embedding code in an editable part of a page and using this code to serve up harmful content from another part of the Web. But this activity can be difficult to spot because websites also increasingly pull in legitimate content, such as ads, videos, or snippets of code, from outside sites.

Wicked web: FireShark finds potentially malicious servers by determining which ones are serving up content to multiple websites. Credit: Websense

Now a researcher at Websense, a security firm based in San Diego, has developed a way to monitor such malicious activity automatically.

Speaking at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco last week, Stephan Chenette, a principal security researcher at Websense, detailed an experimental system that crawls the Web, identifying the source of content embedded in Web pages and determining whether any code on a site is acting maliciously. Read more

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West meets East: Facebook to open office in Hyderabad

Mumbai, India: Popular social-networking site Facebook will open an office in India, joining a long list of international firms that have looked to tap a skilled workforce that provides support services at relatively cheap wages.

Facebook’s office in Hyderabad will support users, advertisers and developers in India and around the world, the company said in a statement on Monday.

Hyderabad also houses other foreign firms, including Internet powerhouse Google and software giant Microsoft, whose Indian employees work on everything from writing software codes to providing customer services at cheaper salaries than in developed nations such as the United States.

Facebook, which lets users connect and share information with friends online, has emerged as one of the Internet’s most popular destinations, challenging established players like Yahoo Inc and Google. Facebook counts around 400 million users and has had large investments from Microsoft and from Russian investment company Digital Sky Technologies.

More than 8 million of Facebook’s total users are in India, the company’s director of global online operations, Don Faul, said in a post on the Facebook blog. Seventy per cent of the people using Facebook are outside the United States and are accessing the service from more than 70 languages, he said.

Facebook’s office in Hyderabad will supplement operations supported out of Palo Alto, California, Dublin, Ireland and a recently announced location in Austin, Texas. “By having multiple support centers in a variety of time zones, we can provide better round-the-clock, multi-lingual support,” Faul said.

Facebook has increased its focus on its financial performance. In September, Facebook said it had become free-cash-flow positive — meaning that the company makes enough money to cover the costs associated with running the service — ahead of schedule. Internet search engines run by Google and Microsoft are increasingly interested in incorporating the growing trove of user-generated content from social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter into their search results in a bid to boost online advertising revenue.

Facebook will initially recruit a small team in India, and anticipates further growth as the office expands. It is hiring people to join the online sales and operations teams that it is forming in the Hyderabad and Austin offices, Faul said.

Source: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/west-meets-east-facebook-to-open-office-in-hyderabad/111556-11.html?from=tn

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Can Twitter Make Money?

At the microblogging company Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, in the sixth-floor conference room, founder Evan Williams was declining to tell me anything about the company’s strategies to earn revenues when, suddenly, his cofounder Biz Stone blurted, “Whoa!” It was 10:10 a.m. on January 7, and it would prove to be the latest Twitter Moment, showing how far the service has moved beyond its early status as an amplifier of personal minutiae and confession. A minor earthquake had just struck: a magnitude 4.1 temblor centered 45 miles to the southeast. Throughout the Bay Area, thousands of Twitter users seized their smart phones or PCs to peck out 140-character-or-less tweets–updates in the form of text messages, Web-based instant messages, or posts on Twitter’s website. Quake-related tidbits coursed through the company’s servers at the rate of 296 per minute, according to tracking done by the U.S. Geological Survey.

The quake was felt more strongly in Mountain View, the site of Google’s headquarters–which was metaphorically appropriate. In the first seconds and minutes after the quake, anyone tapping “earthquake Mountain View” (or the name of any other nearby municipality) into Google’s search field found that the only hits pertaining to the new quake were … tweets. While the Google results page included direct information feeds from the USGS and a slick Google Maps display of recent temblors, none reflected the latest event. Official USGS-confirmed data on the quake wouldn’t show up until 10:20 a.m. But at 10:12 a.m., the sixth-highest search return was a rolling scroll of tweets posted “seconds ago”: Wow, that was an earthquake jolt in Mountain View!

The elevation of such observations to the main results page of the Web’s dominant search engine was more than just a coming-of-age for the nearly four-year-old service. Twitter’s performance as a communication channel during the Mumbai terror attacks in November 2008 and the Iranian election protests last year, its emergence as a political organizing tool during the 2008 U.S. presidential election, and its unexpected role in assorted emergencies (There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy) had already planted Twitter in the zeitgeist. What the Google hits really represented was the first significant opening of the revenue spigot. Google had recently agreed to pay Twitter for a real-time feed of all tweets; this deal, and a similar and earlier one with the Microsoft search engine Bing, were reportedly worth $25 million combined, making Twitter profitable for the first time. That was big. “I sent a text to Ev the day that we closed the [Google] deal, and I said, ‘I’m going to throw up,’ ” Stone says. “He texted back, ‘I know.’ ”

With the deals, Google and Bing were acknowledging Twitter’s power. The company has helped define a new development: the real-time Web, in which information is generated and consumed almost instantaneously, with social networks, blogs, and other news sources operating in increasingly interlinked ways (CNN Breaking News, for example, has nearly three million followers on Twitter). “Twitter has provided a new building block for the social Web,” says Jonathan Zittrain, cofounder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University (see “Twitter and the Real-Time Web”). “Amidst the clamor of ‘Just had a great bowl of soup’ and other trivialities there can be mined some amazing information.”

But the question remains: how can a simple technology that’s become a crucial part of the Internet be turned into a cash cow? Last September, the company reportedly gained more than $100 million in new funding, atop earlier rounds totaling around $60 million. (Returning investors included Benchmark Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, and Spark Capital; the new players joining them included T. Rowe Price and Insight Venture Partners.) “It definitely feels like there is a shift occurring on the Web–and we think it’s a multibillion-dollar opportunity,” says Brian Pokorny, a partner with SV Angel in San Francisco, which has invested in Twitter and other companies involved in the real-time Web.

But to make any business model succeed, Williams says, Twitter must keep attracting new users–and prove that tweet-borne information is actually useful. “We are honestly still focused on ‘How do we create more value?’ ” he says. “We have all of this content talking about what’s happening in the world right now, and we think there is a lot more value to be gained by users, giving them the right content at the right time. That will lead to advertising and revenue possibilities, but those are completely dependent on people getting value out of it and businesses getting value out of it. But we don’t think we are there yet.”

The deals with Google and Bing were, therefore, crucial first steps–not only toward find a viable business model (see “Social Networking Is Not a Business,” July/August 2008). As Williams suggests, the path to technology commercialization is rarely an obvious one. It wasn’t Google’s search technology but its success in selling ads based on keywords that fueled the company’s growth. “We always think of these companies as taking a direct line from A to B to C,” Komisar says. “But if you look closer, what you see is how crooked the line is that they have to navigate.”

Before Twitter’s birth nearly four years ago, Williams’s big score was his creation of Blogger, a simple-to-use blog hosting service that Google bought in 2003. Blogger was not the original idea but, rather, a by-product of a complex project-management tool for the Web that Williams was trying to develop at a startup called Pyra Labs (see “What Is He Doing?” November/December 2007 and at technologyreview.com). Similarly, Twitter itself was born at Odeo, a Williams-founded startup that was trying to develop a way to distribute podcasts. There, an engineer named Jack Dorsey created a messaging tool–the genesis of Twitter–that he thought would be good for dispatching bike messengers or emergency services. After Apple crushed Odeo’s audio ambitions by offering comparable services on iTunes, Dorsey, Williams, and Stone bought the company and eventually spun out Dorsey’s tool as Twitter. (Dorsey is now Twitter’s chairman; Williams is CEO.)

And Twitter itself is evolving. Consider the original question a tweet was meant to answer: “What are you doing?” This early emphasis on the personal and the trivial changed as news started to break on Twitter–earning it intense interest from the mainstream media–and as people began using it to network with potential colleagues and keep abreast of the thinking and activities of politicians, stock traders, celebrities. Then users began to redistribute news from media organizations, and the news organizations themselves started to tweet: Twitter became a river of news. The evolution is bound to continue. “Twitter is a tool so basic that it doesn’t suggest how you should use it,” says Amy Bruckman, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech. “I guarantee that in a few years we will look back at how we used Twitter and laugh.”

Indeed, with the help of Twitter’s application programming interface (API), which enables outside developers to access its content, constellations of applications and startups have already expanded the service’s reach (and some have begun selling advertising). StockTwits, for example, provides an easy way to sift through any tweets that discuss stocks. TweetDeck helps twitterers find categories of tweets to follow. Bit.ly creates shortened versions of Web links that can fit inside tweets. TweetMeme aggregates links found within tweets. Twitpic offers photo distribution. (Most famously, it carried a close-up photo of the US Airways jet adrift in the Hudson, passengers huddled on its wings. The shot was captured by ferry passenger and twitterer Janis Krums.) And so, in November, Twitter ditched “What are you doing?” Now tweets answer the question “What’s happening?”

A shifting Web
The change in Twitter’s prompt reflects a shift in the nature of the Web itself. Not only has the medium grown far more social, but online social networks increasingly trade in important real-time information. Adding to the cacophony are proliferating blogs, reports from news organizations, reader comments, and feeds from various other sources. Data feeds, search engines like Google, and easy-to-use widgets–those little on-screen tools that do things like display stock prices or news headlines–can provide instant access to much of this information. “In 2009, we saw this incredible shift of users–and of their attention and focus–to the real-time Web,” says John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks, an Internet media company in New York City that has invested in or launched startups including Bit.ly, TweetDeck, and Summize, a Twitter search tool bought by Twitter in 2008. “It represents a whole new round of innovation, disrupting the way people do the fundamental things they do online.” And, he adds, sites like Twitter and Facebook–which has 350 million account holders–are increasingly the first stop for people seeking real-time news.

Of course, that’s easy to say–but it’s hard to measure and document. Twitter will not share numbers, and third-party measurement of Web audiences has long been dodgy (see “But Who’s Counting?” March/April 2009 and at technologyreview.com). Measurement is hardest of all with media such as Twitter, because the most common unit of Web usage–page views–doesn’t really apply. Tweets, after all, aren’t pages; they’re the units that make up data streams moving across many platforms and being consumed in myriad ways. As people spend less time on pages and more time sampling streams of data, tracking their behavior becomes extremely difficult. “The majority of what goes on with Twitter doesn’t happen on our website,” Williams says. “Quantifying Twitter is really hard. That is part of why we don’t share numbers, because they are always misleading. We are getting better at it, but it kind of drives us crazy.” Still, one proxy–Web-address shortening–gives a sense of how much Twitter and the real-time Web have grown. The number of times people clicked on Bit.ly addresses to open them exploded last year; in December, people did this nearly 2.3 billion times.

In this evolving world, Twitter stands out in many ways. In contrast to communications within many online social networks, tweets by their very nature aim to report something to the world at large. (Facebook posts have long been private by default, but the company is trying to encourage more public posts through changes in its privacy settings.) RJMetrics, a business analytics firm in Camden, NJ, estimates that Twitter has 75 million accounts and that 15 million are responsible for most traffic. Though Facebook’s membership dwarfs those figures, “in terms of relative availability of data, Twitter is number one with a bullet,” says Eric Marcoullier, a cofounder of Gnip, a company based in Boulder, CO, that aggregates available information from sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Digg for other websites and companies.

As a result, Twitter has “enormous opportunities” to sell data for commercial use, says Brad Feld, a managing director at the venture capital firm Foundry Group, also in Boulder, CO (it is not a Twitter investor). A local restaurant might want to be notified if Twitterers are saying something negative; Toyota might want data on mentions of its products–as well as competitors’ products–to adjust a sales pitch or a product feature. Packaging and providing such data, for a fee, is clearly something Twitter could start doing, Feld says. He adds that the company could eventually sell keyword-based ads as well.

Tweet Rank
Though Twitter aspires to be the planet’s pulse, its own physiology is a bit weak in some areas. The company has no apparent ownership rights to the basic technology for microblogging; its only real assets are its brand and user base. And while Twitter data in theory should be salable to companies, the marketplace is still skeptical. A recent survey by Kognito, a business intelligence firm, found that only 14 percent of market research companies surveyed had immediate plans to mine social-networking data at all.

Twitter needs to win more eyeballs, motivate users to tweet more, and make sure the most useful tweets reach people who might benefit from them. The company understands this. “We are coming out of a year, 2009, which was really about scaling up,” ­Williams says. “We’ve gotten really good about getting [employees] in here and showing that there is interesting scale to work with here. Just like people who are thinking about using Twitter, people coming to work at Twitter thought it was some trivial thing–’What are you having for lunch?’–not a global real-time way of finding out what is happening right now. As people learn that it fills a role we actually need filled, we will attract more engineering talent and more users.”

The deals with Google and Bing made Twitter profitable. But they are also a means to another end: Twitter skeptics might well be won over if their Web searches start turning up useful tweets. By the same token, a tweet that lands high in Web search results will encourage the person who sent it to keep making timely and useful observations, says Dan Weld, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle. “When people are able to search tweets more effectively, it will change the content,” he says. “People’s behavior will be affected. But this will require real-time distribution and highly effective search.”

Making real-time search effective is tricky, though. It’s not enough just to give searchers the newest tweets that happen to contain a requested keyword. The reputation of the twitterer means something; if you want fresh information about the Haiti earthquake, for example, you’d like to hear it from responsible sources, not just from anyone who happened to include the word Haiti in a tweet. As a first step, Google evaluates tweets in part with a technological analogue to its PageRank technology, which analyzes the link structure of Web pages to judge their relevance. Generally speaking, the more links to a page–and the more pages linked to the linkers–the more relevant Google’s search engine considers it. Similarly, Google concludes that the more people who “follow” a Twitter user–and the more people who follow those people–the more credible and relevant his or her tweets probably are.

But such efforts are only the beginning. Consider a real-time search for “iPod.” An engineer doing such a search might be seeking insights into its software, a high-school student might be most interested in friends’ opinions or whether the gadget’s retail price has dropped, and a music executive might want to look for trends in what kinds of music people are downloading. Finding out what specific people want might require some analysis of their social networks, their past tweets, and the tweets of the people they follow, says Eugene Agichtein, a computer scientist at Emory University who is doing research on social search.

The location from which a tweet was issued can be an enormous help. Messages from mobile devices with GPS receivers can include location information. Twitter began allowing such information to be attached to tweets last summer, and Google and others are exploring ways to use this data to provide more relevant real-time results. “If you follow me and know that I work in Mountain View or live in Menlo Park, you just assume that when I publish something–’I saw five fire engines’–you know it’s in the general Bay Area,” says Dylan Casey, Google’s product manager for real-time search. “But that comment would become even more powerful if you knew the exact geolocation.”

Twitter itself recently refined its home page’s “Trending Topics” feature–a compendium of the most common phrases appearing in messages–to allow s to see what subjects are being discussed where they live. (Twitter determines the location partly on the basis of twitterers’ IP addresses or their reported home cities.) The new feature, called “Local Trends,” is the next logical step in making real-time search more relevant and interesting. “Search isn’t just a box and a button; it’s about serendipity,” ­Williams says. “It’s about hopefully, and ideally, surfacing information to you that you, as a twitterer, didn’t ask for, but wanted–and right at that moment. In the world of real-time search, the Holy Grail is that you anticipate what the user wanted. Our opportunity and challenge is solving that problem–thinking of how users behave in the ecosystem. It gets you much quicker to realizing the value of Twitter.”

There is no one magical algorithm that provides serendipity without spam, relevance without rubbish, to all people in all places. But Twitter and other companies see tremendous opportunities in the ocean of tweets–and, more generally, in mining the social Web for information that people want. “What’s really important here is the notion of the social Web and using your social network–people that you trust–for information discovery,” says Feld. “We’ve got a long way to go here, which is really exciting for any entrepreneur playing in this domain.” Even if the future business model of Twitter is not certain, the fast-changing nature of the Web itself provides evidence enough that one will emerge–and might even represent the next seismic shift in the Internet industry.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/24555/page4/

David Talbot is Technology Review’s chief correspondent.

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Fortune 500 companies using social media to reach customers

Last year, United Airlines found a new way to use Twitter to reward customers and fill empty seats. In May, the Chicago-based airline began offering a limited number of Twitter-exclusive fare deals, or “twares,” to domestic and international destinations. The last-minute specials are sent out once or twice a week and typically expire within one or two hours. Most sell out in seconds, a United spokeswoman says.

“We want to give our followers something special that no one else can get,” she says, while allowing the airline to fill seats that might otherwise go unoccupied.

Harnessing social media tools to boost sales, connect with customers and increase brand recognition has become standard operating procedure in Corporate America. More than 60% of Fortune 1,000 companies with a Web site will connect to or host some form of online community to build customer relationships, according to Gartner Inc., a Connecticut-based information technology research company. The flip side is that more than 50% will fail, Gartner says, ultimately eroding customer and company values.

The numbers among small businesses are more dire. A recent survey conducted by New York-based GfK Roper Consulting Group found that 76% of small-business owners say social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are not helpful in generating business leads or expanding their operations. Eighty-six percent say they have not used social networking sites to get business advice or information.

That, experts say, is a mistake, because even for those consumer-oriented businesses well-versed in social media, the effort can be surprisingly effective, bringing in unexpected demographics and customer loyalty.

Northfield-based Kraft Foods Inc. launched its iFood Assistant application for iPhone and iPod touch users in November 2008 to help consumers locate Kraft products and prepare meals using them. One year later, the company reports that 22% of iFood Assistant users are men, higher than its traditionally female-heavy demographic, and 99% are first-time users of a Kraft Web site or Web-based tool.

In addition, six months after their initial download, more than 60% of users are still engaged with the application, according to the company. In comparison, some industry experts say that typically less than 5% of users are still involved with a downloadable app after two months. And while they won’t release the number of iFood Assistant users, Ed Kaczmarek, Kraft’s director of innovation and consumer experiences, says the company hit its three-year projection within the first month of introduction.

“We hit the sweet spot of finding what utility you can provide your consumers and what they consider to be of high value,” Mr. Kaczmarek says.

To be sure, legal, privacy and other constraints mean some business segments — financial services and health care among them — may not readily lend themselves to the practice. But even there, social media tools can play a key role in building customer relationships, says Elizabeth Neumaier, creative director at White Gazelle, a Chicago marketing and advertising consultancy.
“Companies can use online tools to create feedback loops and get ideas to improve products or services from customers who are using your brand,” she says.

Business owner Jim Schreiber is among those not impressed. He started Shui Tea Co. in September to import and sell 18 types of blended, loose-leaf and pressed tea online. He’s been promoting the Lisle-based company on Twitter and Facebook since its launch, with little success. Using Google Analytics to monitor traffic, he found that people coming to his Web site from Twitter and Facebook spent on average only eight seconds on the site. “That’s useless to me,” Mr. Schreiber, 24, says.

While he’s not closing his Twitter account, “I know personal interaction works,” he says, so “why not spend my time on that?”

Online marketers say that businesses that haven’t hit social media pay dirt may have jumped in without a clear idea of what they’re trying to achieve. Others may not give their campaigns enough time to catch on with customers, partners or prospects. That’s a mistake: Unless you’re a household brand, they say, developing relationships, especially online, takes time.

“You need at least six to 12 months to get people following and participating in a dialogue about your company or your products or services,” says Joel Warady, principal of Joel Warady Group, an Evanston marketing consulting firm. “But once they do, they will tell you everything,” he says.

Here are some other ways to connect:

Start with a plan. Determine your goals and objectives and what role social media will play in an overall marketing campaign. Then find ways to share content and bring communities together. Market and promote your company’s blog, Twitter contacts, fan pages, YouTube channels and any other media to targeted prospects and clients. “It should be strategic vs. ad-hoc,” says Ross Kimbarovsky, co-founder of crowdSpring LLC, a Chicago-based online marketplace for creative services, and a social media blogger.

Identify which social media sites your customers are using. Search for your brand name, your competitors’ names, key words or industry. On Twitter, tools such as Advanced Search, Twitter Grader and Twellow can help you find people who may be interested in what you have to say. Join Facebook, Flickr or LinkedIn groups relevant to your business and become part of the conversation.

Register your brand name on as many social media sites as possible, whether or not you plan to use them, and use the same name on each. Web sites such as KnowEm.com and UsernameCheck.com will check availability on a large listing of social media sites at no charge.

Don’t chase technology. Social media changes rapidly and it’s hard to keep up. Don’t worry, says Andy Sernovitz, CEO of Chicago-based marketing consultancy GasPedal LLC. “If your customers aren’t already there, there’s no reason for you to be there,” he says.

Instead, commit to one or two social-media sites and work on creating regular content. Readers, viewers and search engines will better recognize your expertise if you’re consistent. And you can very quickly overextend your capacity by being in too many places and not doing it effectively. “The goal is not to be a technology innovator,” says Mr. Sernovitz, author of “Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking.” “It’s good old-fashioned target marketing. Find your customers and jump in with them.”

Determine what you’ll say and who will be in charge of saying it, including responding to positive and negative comments. Guidelines should spell out what kind of information employees can and can’t share. Make sure you are in compliance with Federal Trade Commission rules that went into effect Dec. 1 and cover testimonials, bloggers and endorsements. (Go to ftc.gov/opa/2009 for more information.)

Generate compelling content. Based on user feedback, the Art Institute of Chicago found its social media followers enjoyed watching behind-the-scenes videos of the new Modern Wing as it was built and of recent exhibitions as they were installed. In November, the museum announced that it was posting its last podcast to shift its focus to video. “Our sense was that the long-lead format of the podcast was not taking advantage of the technology that’s out there,” says Erin Hogan, the museum’s director of public affairs and communications. “We want to focus on shorter pieces and post more of them to places such as ArtBabble, YouTube and Facebook,” she says. “People really want that insider’s view.”

Post regularly and frequently, says Laura Watkins, marketing and communications coordinator for Chicago’s Green City Market, a non-profit supporting and promoting local, sustainable agricultural practices. But avoid empty automated tweets or computer-generated messages, even if they seem more efficient. Ms. Watkins says she posts on social media sites including Facebook up to five times a week and often sends Twitter posts five times a day, focusing on topics that appeal to her followers such as trends in sustainable farming or preparing holiday meals with locally grown food. As a result, 15% of visits to the market’s Web page come directly from social media outreach. “You’re not creating a conversation if you’re staying silent,” she says.

Hold the sales pitch. The goal is to foster conversation, not push products. “It’s not that people don’t want to buy; people don’t want to be sold,” says Kevin Masi, principal at Torque Ltd., a marketing, design and advertising agency in Chicago.

Recognize that social media has changed the nature of customer communication. “The dialogue sometimes is critical and you have to be prepared for that,” says Jim Andrews, senior vice-president and editorial director at IEG LLC, a corporate sponsorship and consulting firm based in Chicago. “But if you’re going to play this game, that’s part of it.”

Source: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/article.pl?articleId=32875

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After an attack that required staggering skill and resources, the company threatens to quit China.

Google’s threat to withdraw its operation from China has shed more light on a remarkably sophisticated computerized espionage network originating from the country, experts say.

Last night Google announced that it would no longer participate in government censorship of the Chinese version of its site, Google.cn, and threatened to shut down its operations in China altogether. In a blog post, David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer at Google, wrote that the decision was taken in response to a series of Internet attacks against Google and other companies, as well as covert Internet surveillance of human-rights activists.

Though Google has not disclosed the exact nature of the attacks, Drummond wrote: “In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google.” He added that the company has gathered evidence that 20 other large Internet, finance, technology, media, and chemical companies were also attacked.

In Google’s case, the attackers tried to get into Gmail accounts belonging to Chinese human-rights activists, Drummond said. The company believes that the efforts were not successful, but that hackers have been targeting human-rights activists based in other parts of the world through a range of hacking techniques.

Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva, a data-security company based in Redwood Shores, CA, says Google probably called the attack “highly sophisticated” because the hackers got into the heart of its database and password list. “The intellect and resources required to pull off such a surgical attack are staggering considering the defenses Google has put in place to protect digital assets,” he says.

The hackers probably used “social engineering” techniques to breach Google’s defenses, suggests Nart Villeneuve, chief research officer for the Canadian company SecDev.cyber, and the director of operations for a censorship circumvention tool called Psiphon. Read more

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Share on Facebook After an attack that required staggering skill and resources, the company threatens to quit China.

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