Imagine a system for delivering only high-value information via Twitter. That’s what PostRank has built with its new PostRank Twitter Newsroom. The system finds the most engaging blogs on various topics, then automatically pulls the most talked-about posts from those blogs and now delivers those links to you via Twitter.
It’s normal for BitTorrent users to be a tiny bit paranoid, since their activities aren’t always popular with everyone. But imagine musing via Twitter that your favorite movie isn’t on torrent sites yet and the next thing you know the studio is in direct contact with you, asking you not to pirate the movie – and giving you a free ticket in return.
Twitter Web might not be safe anymore and users may want to consider only tweeting and surfing through third-party applications for the time being. Yes, I know, there are all kinds of issues with using a third-party anything. And while I use and love TweetDeck and many are raving about Seesmic Desktop, you still need to give your Twitter user cred
Mikeyy Mooney, the 17-year-old creator of StalkDaily.com, has admitted responsibility for a worm that rapidly spread through Twitter. Twitter users were infected by simply visiting an infected users Twitter page. Following being infected, users began tweeting about stalkdaily.com. “I usually like to find vulnerabilities within websites…”
If you’ve been tricked into visiting StalkDaily.com (whatever you do, don’t do it now), even without registering or logging on to the site it somehow infects your Twitter profile with a hack of some site that will make you auto-tweet recommendations to the site all day long. It did it four times for me before I noticed.
CurtMonash writes “Twitter was hit Saturday by a worm that caused victims’ accounts to tweet favorably about the StalkDaily website. Infection occurred when one went to the profile page of a compromised account, and was largely spread by the kind of follower spam more commonly used by multi-level marketers. Apparently the worm was an XSS attack, exploiting a vulnerability created in a recent Twitter update that introduced support for OAuth, and it was created by the 17-year-old owner of the StalkDaily website. More information can be found in the comment thread to a Network World post I put up detailing the attack, or in the post itself. By evening, Twitter claimed to have closed the security hole.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader alerts us that an outfit called Magpie is paying Twitter users to tout advertisers’ products. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb has identified a number of household-name companies — among them Apple, Skype, Kodak, Cisco, Adobe, Roxio, PC Tools, and Box.net — whose products are hyped by identically worded, paid Magpie tweets. But comments to Kirkpatrick’s post, including one from a Box.net spokesman, make it sound likely that these shills were paid for not by the companies themselves, but by affiliate marketers. That may not matter. In the same way that Belkin recently got burned paying consumers to write complimentary online reviews about the company’s products, the makers of products and services touted through Magpie may find themselves tainted in the backlash from this new form of astroturfing. Kirkpatrick concludes his post: “So there’s the Twitter-sphere for you! Bring on ‘real time search,’ bring on a globally connected community, bring on vapid, vile, stupid shilling. It all seems pretty sad to me.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
We were disappointed when a browser script showed us a a Magpie redirect behind a shortened link in a Skype testimonial today. Then we used a search on the service BackTweets to find out who else is buying fake Tweets on the service. It’s so revolting and pitiful that it’s kind of sad.
Alex writes “On April 6, 10,000 protesters organized in Moldova against the nation’s Communist leadership by utilizing new media like Twitter and Facebook, demonstrating the ever-increasing potential of the Internet as a democratic and liberating tool. But in the current Boston Review, Evgeny Morozov critiques the view that the internet will inevitably democratize autocratic regimes like China, Russia and Iran. He argues that the Net’s democratic effects are not inherent, and that autocratic regimes have been successful in controlling electronic media to disseminate their ideology. Will the net ultimately spread American democracy, or just American entertainment?”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Domainsquatting is one thing, but what about Twittersquatting? Domain search tool Domain Pigeon is now showing users which usernames are still open.
