Twitter tops 145 mn users
September 7, 2010 by raj
Filed under Social Media Marketing Strategy
WASHINGTON: Twitter has over 145 million registered users and more people are using mobile devices to access the microblogging service, according to co-founder Evan Williams.
Williams, in a post on the Twitter blog, also said that nearly 300,000 third-party applications have been developed around the service, which allows users to pepper one another with messages of 140 characters or less.
“These new services help people get the most out of Twitter, contributing to user growth and new business opportunities — both of which are critical to the long-term viability of the ecosystem,” Williams said.
The Twitter chief executive said the number of people using Twitter on mobile devices had jumped 62 percent since mid-April and 16 percent of new users start on mobile, up from five percent in April.
Forty-six percent of active Twitter users regularly use a mobile device, he said.
Twitter acquired a third-party mobile application called Tweetie in April and turned it into the official Twitter program for Apple’s iPhone.
Applications also exist for using Twitter on Research in Motion’s Blackberry and devices powered by Google’s Android mobile operating system.
Williams also published figures on the top 10 applications people have used to access Twitter during the past 30 days.
Seventy-eight percent used the official Twitter.com website, 14 percent used Twitter’s mobile website m.twitter.com, eight percent used SMS, eight percent used Twitter for iPhone and seven percent used Twitter for Blackberry.
Other applications in the top 10 were TwitPic, a program for uploading photos, TweetDeck, Echofon, Google Friend Connect and UberTwitter.
Twitter said the numbers add up to more than 100 percent because people often use more than one application to access the service.
Read more: Twitter tops 145 mn users – Social Media – Tech – The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Twitter-tops-145-mn-users/articleshow/6491129.cms#ixzz0ypLA2srt
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Share on Facebook Twitter tops 145 mn usersApproach could help software learn how to identify fake accounts with less honorable intentions.
July 11, 2010 by raj
Filed under IT News, Social Media, Social Media Marketing Strategy
By Tom Simonite
It’s not unusual to have user profiles on multiple social networks, or even separate accounts on sites like Twitter–one for work and one for play. But Kyumin Lee at Texas A&M University has 60 Twitter accounts, and not because he’s popular.
Lee’s accounts are “honeypots,” designed to attract the attention of the spammers that increasingly use social networks to spread links to malware and phishing Web sites. Software developed by Lee monitors messages sent to the honeypot accounts to learn the tactics used by spammers.
“The concept of a honeypot is well established at the network level,” says Lee. Usually it takes the form of unprotected computers used to monitor spam e-mail or network-based attacks. “We decided to apply it at a higher level to learn about spam in social networks.” Lee is carrying out the project with A&M colleagues James Caverlee and Brian David Eoff, and with Steve Webb at Georgia Tech University. The work is partially supported by a research award from Google.
The honeypot accounts, like this one, 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 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 data gathered by those bots can also be used to train “classifier” algorithms to identify spammers that haven’t yet contacted a honeypot. A classifier trained using the Twitter honeypots proved capable of correctly identifying spam profiles more than 80 percent of the time. A public Web service is being built from the trained model that will allow people to look up which accounts it considers spam, and submit corrections for any that are misidentified, says Lee.
Spam and phishing attacks delivered over social networks are a growing problem, says Don DeBolt, director of threat research for IT software firm CA Technologies. For example, a phishing scam operating over Twitter recently stole the iTunes accounts of some users. “People immediately trust these applications because it is how they communicate with friends,” DeBolt explains. “Because people are sending much less text than an e-mail, and URL shorteners are often used, it is harder for people to realize a message may not be real.”
DeBolt’s team maintains honeypot profiles of its own, and monitors them manually to look for new spammer tactics. “We have to take great care, though, in curating them as research profiles that don’t impersonate a real person,” he says.
The fact that social network honeypots must be part of a community is a fundamental difference from the conventional approach, says Azer Bestavros, a networking specialist at Boston University who has, in the past, worked on analyzing blog spam. A honeypot computer on a network is typically allocated to “dark” address space so that they would never legitimately be contacted by another machine.
“Other users could consider our honeypot a real person,” Lee acknowledges. “But we do not have friends or contact other people, and on Twitter our profiles posted random messages so a normal user would not think to contact us.”
Some messages and friend requests sent to a social honeypot may be from legitimate users, so information collected from them needs to be treated carefully, says Bestavros. Lee and colleagues are experimenting with varying the output and demographic characteristics of their honeypots to find out what most attracts spammers–for example, varying the dummy user’s age and location, or the frequency of their updates. “Most of the spammers present themselves as college-age females,” says Lee. Data from MySpace honeypots shows that most claim to be located in California, and so far it seems that college-age males are the preferred target.
Lee and colleagues are also interested in trying the approach on the world’s largest social network: Facebook. “It is a more private network, but if we were able to get permission from them it would be interesting to try it there,” he says.
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Share on Facebook Approach could help software learn how to identify fake accounts with less honorable intentions.Microsoft, Google more trusted than Facebook, Twitter: Poll
June 22, 2010 by raj
Filed under IT News, Internet Marketing (SEO & SEM)
Americans trust technology heavyweights such as Apple, Google and Microsoft more than social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, according to a new poll.
Nearly half of 2,100 adults questioned in a Zogby Interactive survey said they trusted the big three technology firms “completely” or “a lot,” compared to eight percent for Twitter and 13 percent for Facebook.
But all of the companies rated higher than traditional media.
John Zogby, the president and CEO of Zogby International, said big companies have had the time to build brand equity, while Facebook and Twitter do not have the corporate identity.
“They dont have the brand equity,” he added in a telephone interview.
Young adults aged 18 to 29 had slightly higher trust levels in Facebook with 20 percent and Twitter with 15 percent compared to the levels of adults of all ages which were seven percent lower for both companies.
When asked how important online privacy was to consumers, Zogby said it was huge.
“I think to a great degree, its all about privacy,” he explained.
Google has been criticized by some privacy regulators for its Street View cars which collected some private information from unencrypted WiFi networks while roving the streets taking photographs for its online mapping software.
Facebook recently changed its privacy policies to give users more control over how much information from users profiles is public following protests from some users and privacy watchdogs.
The traditional media received little sympathy from the public with only eight percent of all adults and six percent of young adults saying they trusted the media.
http://www.hindustantimes.com/Apple-Google-more-trusted-than-Facebook-Twitter-Poll/H1-Article1-561440.aspx
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Share on Facebook Microsoft, Google more trusted than Facebook, Twitter: PollTwitter warns of possible traffic outages
June 12, 2010 by raj
Filed under Social Media, Social Media Marketing Strategy, What Works In Internet Marketing
WASHINGTON: Twitter, which has suffered a series of outages this week, warned Friday that there could be more problems amid heavy World Cup traffic.
Jean-Paul Cozzatti, a Twitter engineer, said on the Twitter blog that the micro-blogging service’s problems this week were due to an internal network being over-capacity.
Cozzatti said Twitter was doubling capacity and rebalancing traffic on the network to redistribute the load.
When Twitter goes down, a picture of a whale — known as the “fail whale” — appears on Twitter.com and Cozzatti said his engineering team was hoping for fewer appearances by the creature.
“You may still see the whale when there are unprecedented spikes in traffic,” he said.
“For instance, during the World Cup tournament — and particularly during big, closely-watched matches — we anticipate a significant surge in activity on Twitter.
“While we are making every effort to prepare for that surge, the whale may surface,” he said
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Share on Facebook Twitter warns of possible traffic outagesTwitter buys Web analytics company
June 12, 2010 by raj
Filed under IT News, Social Media, Social Media Marketing Strategy, What Works In Internet Marketing
WASHINGTON: Twitter said it had bought Smallthought Systems, a small Web analytics firm. “As we grow, analytics becomes an increasingly crucial part of improving our service,” Kevin Weil, the head of analytics at the micro-blogging service, said in a blog post.
Weil said the San Francisco-based Twitter was particularly interested in a tool from Smallthought called Trendly, which allows users to sort through analytics data from Google.
The four-member team at Smallthought “will focus on integrating ideas from Trendly into our current tools and building innovative realtime products for our future commercial partners,” Weil said.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.
Twitter has made a number of purchases recently including Cloudhopper, a small SMS technology company, and Atebits, a company that developed an iPhone program for Twitter.
Twitter, which was launched in March 2006, allows users to exchange 140-character-or-less messages known as “tweets.”
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Twitter-buys-Web-analytics-company/articleshow/6036418.cms
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Share on Facebook Twitter buys Web analytics companyTwitter hits two bln tweets a month
June 12, 2010 by raj
Filed under IT News, Social Media, Social Media Marketing Strategy, What Works In Internet Marketing
LONDON: Micro-blogging site ‘Twitter’ has reached yet another milestone, two billion tweets every month, the website has announced.
According to the company’s chief operating officer Dick Costolo, around 65 million tweets are sent on ‘Twitter’ each day, equating to around 1.96 billion tweets every month.
Twitter reached 15 billion tweets at the end of last month, three months after it broke the 10 billion count, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ reported.
Costolo also said the service sees around 135,000 new registrations each day, though it is not clear how many of those are individuals rather than businesses.
The increasingly influential company announced on Monday that it is hiring a Washington liaison to manage relations with the White House.
In an interview last month, Costolo had earmarked Los Angeles and New York as the bases that would probably be next on the expansion list, and then the UK and Japan, where the site’s growth is “massive”.
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Share on Facebook Twitter hits two bln tweets a monthTwitter to use own Web link shrinker
June 11, 2010 by raj
Filed under IT News, Social Media, Social Media Marketing Strategy, What Works In Internet Marketing
SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter plans to start using its own Web link shortener on addresses that users include in tweets.
Starting this summer, Twitter will use its new “t.co” domain name to shorten links that users post directly on Twitter.com or through applications such as TweetDeck. That will help the posts stay within the service’s 140-character limit. The company is currently testing its linking technology with some employee accounts.
Users won’t always see their links displayed as “t.co” addresses, though. If you get Twitter updates sent to your phone via text messaging, a link might show up as a “t.co” address. But you might see the full address or the Web page’s title when looking at that same post on Twitter.com.
“Ultimately, we want to display links in a way that removes the obscurity of a shortened link and lets you know where a link will take you,” Twitter spokesman Sean Garrett wrote on Twitter’s blog
Garrett said that this method of packaging links is meant to improve user safety and will help Twitter gather data for its “promoted tweets,” which are Twitter posts paid for by advertisers to appear in search results on the site.
He also noted that in March, Twitter started using its own “twt.tl” address to automatically channel links that users sent in messages directed specifically at another user. That was a way for Twitter to spot and cut down on the spread of malware and other unsavory content that links can lead to; Twitter can simply disable a “twt.tl” address if it led to a questionable site.
Twitter used to automatically shrink links on tweets as well — first using TinyURL, later using bit.ly — but the site doesn’t currently do so. So if you want to share a long link with friends, you’d have to go to TinyURL, bit.ly or another service to shorten the link first.
Even after Twitter implements “t.co,” Garrett said that users will still be able to use link shorteners of their choosing. This means you should still be able to take advantage of traffic analysis and other features that come with those services. But those shortened links will be converted into a “t.co” address.
The effect of Twitter’s move on existing link shorteners is likely to be small. After all, they are also commonly used in e-mails, Facebook posts and other settings.
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Share on Facebook Twitter to use own Web link shrinkerRussian cybercriminal forums offer batches of 1,000 Twitter accounts for less than $200.
May 18, 2010 by raj
Filed under IT News, Social Media, Social Media Marketing Strategy, The Latest Web News
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.
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| 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.
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| 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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Share on Facebook Russian cybercriminal forums offer batches of 1,000 Twitter accounts for less than $200.What Facebook’s Open Graph Means for Your Business
May 6, 2010 by raj
Filed under Social Media, Social Media Marketing Strategy, The Latest Web News, What Works In Internet Marketing
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
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
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?
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?
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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Share on Facebook What Facebook’s Open Graph Means for Your Business5 Tips for Quick Social Media Success
April 25, 2010 by raj
Filed under Social Media Marketing Strategy
You started a business blog, created a Twitter profile and developed a Facebook page–now what? Sure, you can start publishing updates and sending friend and follow requests, but those communications are just the preliminary steps to social media marketing success.
Here are five tips that anyone can apply to their social media marketing efforts today and start seeing positive results almost immediately.
1. Make it easy and non-threatening for your audience to participate.
Not only does your content matter on the social web but your personality matters, too. In other words, you need to be accessible and approachable in all of your social media marketing communications. Don’t talk at people, talk with them, and do so in a manner that makes it clear that you want them to join the conversation.
This applies to your employees as well. Your employees are your best brand advocates. Make it easy and non-threatening for them to talk about your business on the social web by providing simple guidelines for them to follow. You can find an excellent directory of well-known company social media and blogging policies here, which you can benchmark in order to develop your own business’ guidelines.
2.Write share-worthy content.
The more amazing content that you publish online through your social media profiles and branded destinations, the more people will want to share it with their audiences. That leads to far more online exposure for you, your business
and your brand than you can get on your own. Of course, not every piece of content that you publish on social sites has to be share-worthy, but you should try to publish as much amazing, share-worthy content as possible. Not just to broaden your exposure, but also to add value to the online conversation.
3. Acknowledge and recognize your audience.
The power of social media marketing comes from the relationships you develop with your online audience (who will become brand advocates and will talk about your business, champion it, and defend it against naysayers). With that in mind, you must acknowledge people when they reach out to you.Would you ignore a person who walked up to you at a networking event and spoke to you? Hopefully, your answer to that question is, “no.” No one likes to be ignored, and social media conversations shouldn’t be treated differently from in-person conversations. Many of the most successful marketers make a point of responding to every e-mail, blog comment, tweet and so on that is directed at them. So recognize your audience, and make them feel important.
4. Integrate all of your marketing efforts.
All of your marketing efforts should work together to present consistent brand messages and lead to your ultimate marketing goals. You should also cross-promote your various marketing efforts. For example, feed your blog content to your Twitter and Facebook profiles using a tool like www.Twitterfeed.com. Promote your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles by including “Follow Me” buttons in your blog’s sidebar that link to your profiles. Include your Twitter ID in your printed ads and link to your blog and social media profiles in your e-mail signature.The key is to surround your audience with branded experiences and let them select how they want to interact with your business and brand. Give them options and make it easy for them to join the conversation in the way that they choose.
5. Don’t try to keep up with the Jones’.
Just because your competitor is doing something on the social web doesn’t mean that you need to do the same. By blindly following your competitor’s path, you’re marketing scared and without purpose. Plus, it’s probable that your competitor’s initiatives won’t help you meet your goals at all. While it’s essential that you monitor your competitor’s social media marketing activities, you should analyze them against your own goals before implementing any of them yourself.
Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/marketing/marketingcommunicationscolumnistsusangunelius/article206306.html
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Share on Facebook 5 Tips for Quick Social Media Success
