Twitter looks to start making some money

Twitter Inc.’s co-founders say the rapidly growing online communications company will eventually charge fees for its services, but it’s unclear which ones and what will drive revenue.

“There will be a moment when you can fill out a form or something and give us money,” said Evan Williams, co-founder and chief executive officer.

“We’re working on it right now,” Williams said at The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference.

Williams and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone mentioned possible revenue-generators, including a service that would authenticate the source of information. For example, Dunkin’ Donuts could pay to make sure that impostors don’t send messages under its name.

Still, after nearly one hour of questions from journalists Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher and from the audience, the co-founders gave no clear picture of Twitter’s business model. Stone demurred when asked what would be the company’s key revenue driver in two years.

Williams said he wasn’t opposed to banner advertising but was unenthusiastic.

“I think it’s probably the least interesting thing we could do,” he said.

Williams said one of his top priorities was hiring more people to help grow the company but he didn’t give a headcount target. San Francisco-based Twitter has 43 employees, he said, double its count in January.

Twitter allows anyone to write about what they’re doing or what’s on their mind in messages sent through the Web or cell phones, also known as “tweets,” which are limited to 140 characters. The unconventional, free service has attracted millions of users.

The co-founders said they know the hype surrounding Twitter won’t last forever.

“If you pay attention to it too much, you can run yourself off the rails,” Stone said. He added, “Pretty soon, everybody’s going to hate us.”

The privately held company has been a subject of buyout speculation by a big technology company, but Williams said he believed Twitter would remain independent.

There are plenty of ways, what about looking into the business models of the other websites that allow free access for its users? like Facebook, Myspace or Shareapic

Twitter proposes TV competition series

Twitter, the Web site that asks what everybody's doing, says it wants to be doing a TV series.

The social-networking service said Monday it has teamed with Reveille productions and Brillstein Entertainment Partners to develop an unscripted series based on the site, which invites 140-character postings from members around the world.

The show would harness Twitter to put players on the trail of celebrities in an interactive, competitive format.

The producers call their proposed series the first to bring the immediacy of Twitter to the TV screen.

"Twitter is transforming the way people communicate, especially celebrities and their fans," said Reveille managing director Howard T. Owens, who expects the new project to "unlock Twitter's potential on TV."

No further details were made available on the show's format or when it might hit the air.

Reveille's scripted entertainment includes "The Office" (NBC), "Ugly Betty" (ABC) and "The Tudors" (Showtime), plus reality programming that includes "The Biggest Loser" and "American Gladiators" (both NBC).

Brillstein Entertainment's credits include "Real Time with Bill Maher" (HBO), "The Sopranos" (HBO), "According to Jim" (ABC) and "NewsRadio" (NBC).

The San Francisco-based Twitter, which was founded in 2007, is one of the Internet's fastest-growing sites. A recent Nielsen report found that unique visitors to Twitter skyrocketed from 475,000 during February 2008 to 7 million a year later.

Twitter gone to the cats

500,000 follow cat on Twitter comic

He's one of the most popular users on Twitter. More than 500,000 follow his growing celebrity, his every adventure and, well, his cat naps.

Meet Sockington. Twitter's latest star is a microblogging cat who regales more than half a million with his musings on meal time, personal hygiene and the view from the top of the stairs.

Sockington, or "Socks" for short, is the cat of Jason Scott, a 38-year-old computer historian and computer administrator from Waltham, Mass. Since late 2007, Scott has been tweeting from Sockington's perspective — and finding a "Socks Army" of followers. (Many of his followers are pets, too.)

Dogs and cats in social media isn't anything new. Many have made Facebook pages (there are applications for both "Dogbook" and "Catbook") and Web sites for their pets.

The difference on Twitter is that the running thread of Sockington's feline commentary takes on the dimension of a comic strip. Scott has created a character with a particular voice by tweeting messages from Sockington's point of view like: "I must say no comment to the whole dining room incident. No questions please."

"He's kind of functioning like a 'Garfield' comic," Scott says. "He's like the 21st-century Garfield."

There's the risk that a tweeting cat will only further the impression that Twitter is a flash-in-the-pan success in a sea of online time-wasters. But in a way, Sockington is a parody of Twitter, where even a kitty cat's life — his daily trips to the litter box, his insignificant household travails — is beamed out to the world.

"Everybody wants this social media bubble. They want something where we're all chattering so much that we all get rich," Scott says. "And this cat makes everybody look like fools because he's got hundreds of thousands of followers. And he doesn't tend to follow anyone but other animals."

Scott's Sockington feed has benefited from being one of the accounts recommended to new Twitter users when they sign up. But the growth of the Socks Army has been gradual over the last year and a half.

Now, it's starting to potentially generate revenue. T-shirts are for sale with Sockington wisdom printed on them and Scott acknowledges he may one day accept larger, impossible-to-refuse offers to offset his credit-card debt.

"I'm happy that at the heart of it all is a funny little cat, and that's why all the attention is happening," Scott says. "There are much worse reasons to get this kind of national attention."

If you'd like to become a follower, Sockington's Twitter link is located here

Clickjacking: Hijacking clicks on the Internet

What if you reached to grab a newspaper out of a news stand and you found a rock in your hand instead? How about opening the front door to a grocery store and ending up on a boat?

This sounds like a Matrix movie, but the virtual equivalent of this is real and poses one of the most serious new risks on the Internet, according to Jeremiah Grossman, chief technology officer and co-founder of Whitehat Security.

"Most exploits (like worms and attacks that take advantage of holes in software) can be patched, but clickjacking is a design flaw in the way the Web is supposed to work," Grossman said. "The bad guy is superimposing an invisible button over something the user wants to click on...It can be any button on any Web page on any Web site."

The technique was used in a series of prank attacks launched on Twitter in February. In that case, users clicked on links next to tweets that said "Don't Click" and then clicked on a button that said "Don't Click" on a separate Web page. That second click distributed the original tweet to all of the Twitter user's followers, thus propagating itself rather quickly.

At the time, Grossman called it a "harmless experiment," but the potential for harm by an attacker who isn't just having fun is huge.

In a demo at CNET offices, Grossman showed how someone could launch a clickjacking attack using Flash to spy on someone by getting them to turn on their computer Web cam without knowing it. (Grossman also appeared on CNET Live to talk about clickjacking.)

Like the name suggests, clickjacking is the hijacking of your click, unbeknownst to you. A victim may not even know that the click has been redirected, which means there could be clickjacking attacks going on that no one knows about yet.

Clickjacking attacks are accomplished by creating something called an iFrame that allows a browser window to be split into segments so that different items can be shown on each. This code is inserted into the target Web page and is invisible to the end user. When the end user's cursor clicks on the section of the page where the malicious iFrame is hiding, the attack is launched to do whatever the attacker desires.

An attacker could hide an iFrame under any innocent link on any Web page--a headline on The New York Times or a "digg this" button on Digg, for instance--and when the victim clicks on the link, the cursor is actually clicking on the hidden iFrame.

In the Web cam demo, the iFrame created contains a Flash pop-up window that asks the user to grant permission to have the Web cam turned on. When the victim clicks the link, the Web cam is turned on and secretly begins recording everything the user does in front of the computer.

One of the scariest things about clickjacking is the potential for abuse. An attacker could spy on you by turning on your Web cam or microphone, direct you to a Web page with malicious content that is downloaded onto your computer, or even rig it up so you end up clicking "buy" instead of "cancel" on an e-commerce site.

Another thing that makes clickjacking so serious is that there really is very little that end users can do to protect themselves, Grossman said.

In the Web cam scenario, the best defense is probably to put a post-it note or other item over the Web cam lens and to disable the microphone in the software, he said. Flash Player 10 provides some protection by preventing anything from obscuring the security permissions dialogue box, he said.

Web site owners optimizing their sites for Internet Explorer 8 have the ability to prevent pages from being framed in, which means visitors to their site will be safe, only on that site and only if they are using IE8, Grossman said.

People using Windows and IE should disable JavaScript to help protect against clickjacking, he said. Firefox is safer; the NoScript add-on for Firefox not only lets people selectively block scripts, but it has a ClearClick feature designed specifically to protect against clickjacking, he added.

People should also log out of Web sites, like Facebook and Twitter, when they are done using them for the time being. "You can't be forced to do something on the site if you are not logged in," Grossman said.

More details are in a white paper on the technique, written by Grossman and Robert Hansen of SecTheory and published in September 2008. Grossman and Hansen coined the term in that document.

The authors canceled their talk on the subject at the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) conference that month at Adobe's request because their proof of concept revealed a bug in Adobe's software, according to IDG News Service.

Twitter Porn Names Scam

Social networking site Twitter's current top trending topic (things that are twittered the most by user members) has a security hole. The hole is no technical snafu, rather it traces back to human error or sneaking social engineering.

The "twitter porn names" game is a fun distraction that gives you and your friends something to tweet about. However it is actually nothing more then a disguise to get users to publicly post answers to your own online security questions. With that information Web scoundrels can hack into your personal online accounts.

The current game has a few variations but the information it illicit is all the same. To find your "porn name" you are asked to take the name of your first pet, combine it with the street you grew up on or your mother's maiden name. Yep, all of these are common security questions to access your online accounts and bank information.

Be wary of this and other combinations of the game that might entice you to reveal potential answers to your security questions. Be sure to pass along the information to your friends if they have been unwittingly providing answers to their security questions.

If you have publicly revealed answers to your online security questions delete the post, change your passwords, and updating your security questions.

Did the internet predict Swine Flu before it happened??

Weeks before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization alerted the public to a growing number of swine flu cases, a startup out of Seattle's suburbs already had a hunch something was up.

Veratect Inc., a 2-year-old company with fewer than 50 employees, combines computer algorithms with human analysts to monitor online and off-line sources for hints of disease outbreaks and civil unrest worldwide. It tracks thousands of "events" each month - an odd case of respiratory illness, or a run on over-the-counter medicines, for example - then ranks them for severity and posts them on a subscription-only Web portal for clients who want early warnings.

The idea fueling Veratect and similar companies is that blogs, online chat rooms, Twitter feeds and news media and government Web sites are full of data that public health agencies could use to respond faster to problems like outbreaks of swine flu.

Veratect attracted attention in recent days by publicly posting a timeline of the outbreak and publishing short reports on there Twitter page, where more than 4,000 people signed up to receive updates.

But skeptics question whether these companies can reliably detect meaningful signals from all the noise online or whether they are mainly good at spotting patterns in hindsight. Complicating the picture, the companies are reluctant to disclose their sources and methods.

Veratect's chief executive, Robert Hart, says the company alerted clients to a potentially severe outbreak before the general public learned of swine flu. Veratect's computer systems, which troll the Web for reports that seem out of the ordinary, unearthed clues, and a team of about 30 analysts, many of them multilingual holders of public health degrees, chased down the ones that seemed most alarming.

Veratect says it posted a report to clients on April 6 describing an unusual number of respiratory illnesses in the Mexican state of Veracruz, then sent an e-mail on April 16 to the Centers for Disease Control pointing to an outbreak of atypical pneumonia in Oaxaca state, after officials there issued an alert.

A key clue came in Mexican media reports on April 6 indicating a Veracruz community called La Gloria - now considered a swine flu hot spot - was starting to point fingers. Local residents blamed waste from a nearby pig breeding farm for the respiratory illness, while health officials pinned it on a fly.

"Playing the blame game is one of those indicators" that something unusual is going on, said Dr. James Wilson, Veratect's chief scientist. When the company posted the La Gloria information, it treated the incident as a matter of "moderate severity."

To be sure, not everything Veratect turned up was related to the outbreak. Veratect told its clients of a Canadian lawyer hospitalized in late March after a trip to Mexico, but on Tuesday the company said he has since tested negative for swine flu.

Even with the flaws, clients like World Vision, the large Christian humanitarian organization based in Federal Way, Wash., pay Veratect for its intelligence.

Recently, World Vision shifted resources - water purification tablets and education staffers - to areas Veratect thinks might see cholera outbreaks, said Brian Carlson, the head of technology for World Vision's global relief efforts.

A 10-year-old Veratect rival, Annapolis, Md.-based iJet Intelligent Risk Systems, also tracks Web reports and uses analysts to interpret the data. Marty Pfinsgraff, iJet's chief operating officer, said it monitors emerging health risks, civil unrest and issues such as telecommunications outages. He said iJet advised clients to cancel unnecessary travel to Mexico and to activate pandemic plans last Friday, before health officials weighed in. Pfinsgraff said the CDC is among iJet's paying clients.

Other efforts focus more narrowly on disease. ProMed, a system designed by the Federation of American Scientists, lets human, animal and plant specialists share infectious disease information. A site called HealthMap compiles data from ProMed, the CDC, the World Health Organization and other sources. A volunteer-built site called FluWiki has tracked bird flu since 2005, and last year Google Inc. launched Flu Trends, which gauges U.S. flu conditions based on increases in flu-themed Web searches.

Specialists in disease outbreaks acknowledge that unscientific, community-level information can be valuable. For example, when a parasite slipped through Milwaukee's water treatment system in 1993, the first sign of trouble came in reports to city health officials that drugstores were selling out of diarrhea medicines.

But some public health experts say it's not possible to draw firm conclusions from online tools or reports from companies like Veratect.

"They are considered interesting, unofficial, instructive, imaginative, and then I would go back and emphasize unofficial," said Dr. William Schaffner, a public health expert at Vanderbilt University and a spokesman for the Infectious Disease Society of America.

Dr. Scott Dowell, who heads the CDC's international swine flu team, said the agency looks at reports from Veratect and other companies in the course of monitoring outbreaks around the world. Veratect is often useful, Dowell said, and can be very sensitive to emerging threats.

"It also generates a lot of noise," he said.

Others add that it's risky to act on early signals. Without positive lab tests, reports of new cases are unreliable, in part because mystery illnesses prompt uninfected people to think they have the symptoms.

Even now, when some of Veratect's findings appear to be bearing fruit, the focus on La Gloria as a disease epicenter may turn out to be off-base.

Dr. Philip Brachman, an Emory University professor who for years led the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service, said the scapegoating of the pig farm Veratect detected might stem from an existing local grudge.

"The town probably doesn't like the pig farm," Brachman said, "because of the odor."

Move Over, Craigslist: Twitter Gets Prostitution Ads!

from the didn't-see-this-coming dept....

Craigslist has been catching a lot of flack, but Twitter might be next in line for the blame game. A British tabloid discovered that a brothel in England was using the site Twitter to advertise its services, and got a quote from a member of parliament labeling it "cynical and inappropriate".

It's hard to imagine that this is the only business of its sort using Twitter to stay in touch with its customers, and it just goes to show that whatever media emerge -- from printed flyers to web sites to social-networking sites -- they'll be used to promote any sort of business, including sex-based ones.

The brothel's response to the newspaper article is pretty amusing, though: a Twitter coupon, using the paper's name as the discount code. In the meantime, expect to see law enforcement officials start attacking Twitter for "enabling prostitution" in 3... 2... 1....

R.I.P. Geocities

Maybe you’ve already heard by now that, But Yahoo is shutting down Geocities. Yes, the same Geocities it paid $3 billion dollars for a mere 10 years ago for.

Yahoo has shut down the Geocities website. Geocities was a free website service and online community. It was one of the hottest properties on the internet during the late 90s. Yahoo overpaid for the service in 1999, paying a whopping $4.9 BILLION for it in a stock deal.

CNET calls Geocities a "relic of Web's early days." PC World says "So Long, GeoCities: We Forgot You Still Existed."

The Geocities website now contains the following message.

After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year. We'll share more details this summer. For now, please sign in or visit the help center for more information.

Yahoo has also posted a faq about the closing. "Yahoo will be closing Geocities accounts by the end of the year". The faq states, "Later this year we will be closing all GeoCities accounts and web sites. We'll send you more details this summer."

It remains to be seen whether the failure of Geocities is a lesson for today's ultra hot web communities like MySpace and Facebook.

The first thing I thought about when I heard this news was MySpace.

Before you laugh out loud, I’m not talking MySpace the darling amongst teens and music artists today, I’m talking about MySpace 10 years from now. Take a ride in your time machine to the year 2019 because it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if by then MySpace has met the same grim fate. A lot of MySpace pages are nothing more than Geocities type over-busy pages with sound. The major difference is MySpace is more ‘social’ whatever that means.

There will be something cooler than MySpace within the next 10 years and the inevitable shut down will follow. That’s not to say MySpace is a complete waste of time today so don’t think I’m trolling here but I think the sobering news about Geocities being here today gone tomorrow within 10 years – a lifetime on the internet, BTW – should be a wake-up call for MySpace users.

What do you think, am I wrong? Will MySpace have more longevity than Geocities? If you need another example of a waning giant, look at eBay vs. Craigslist. It’s tough staying relevant, popular and cool online. For that matter, what about Facebook? it's not really all that hot as it was back just a few years ago is it? (I still don't get what the big deal is) or for that matter, Twitter, whats THAT all about? will we be reading about these in the cyber obituaries a decade from now? remembering back to what life was like when these "giants" were around?

Thoughts?

Top 10 Reasons your company should NOT Be "tweeting"

Mainstream media is in an orgiastic frenzy of coverage about Twitter. Everyone's Tweeting these days it seems, from celebrities to CEOs according to CNN, The View, Today, the NY Times, the Wall St Journal and just about everyone else. Each of them covers Twitter like it's some overnight phenomenon that came out of nowhere, although Twitter has been gaining traction for three years and now has over 14 million members.

So, Should your company be on Twitter? Not necessarily.

Top 10 reasons not to join Twitter:

1. every Tweet has to be approved by legal. Twitter is a social network where conversation is fast and interconnected. If you have to wait a day, or even a few hours for your 140 character Tweet to gain legal approval, Twitter will be the wrong platform for you.

2. you plan to use Twitter like a giant RSS feed, broadcasting nothing but headlines, deals. People follow people they find interesting. If all your Tweets are a one-way street: Block!

3. you think using Twitter is a social media strategy. It's a tactic, a tool, not a strategy. It works if you already have an online following who'll view your Tweets as a way to interact with your company on a human level

4. you think it's a good idea to have someone tweet as if they are the president of the company. Authentic and transparent are the keys. It's fine if someone besides the CEO tweets for your company, as long as they say that's what they're doing

5. you are not going to respond when people direct tweets at you. Twitter is like the new watercooler. If you walked out to the water fountain and talked non-stop to people gathered there, they'd certainly be happy when you left. Ditto for Twitter.

6. you think paying for followers might be a good idea. Followers are earned on Twitter. Be interesting, make only every 10th Tweet about you and you'll gain and keep a following.

7. you think all that matters on Twitter is getting a lot of people to follow you. Quality trumps quantity.

8. you want to protect your updates. If people have to ask permission to see what you're posting on Twitter, you're defeating the purpose - which is conversation.

9. you plan to track Twitter with Google Analytics. Google Analytics won't give you true tracking. You need to track the urls you post with a service like budurl or bit.ly and use one or more social media tracking tools so you can get real-time stats on Twitter

10. You think you can market to people with whom you have no relationship Listen first. Monitor what's being said about your brand, your industry, your products. Then join the conversation and become part of the community. Then your occasional marketing messages will be accepted, or at least tolerated because you also add value to the community.

Twitter accounts of Obama, Britney Spears hacked

The Twitter accounts of President-elect Barack Obama, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, Britney Spears, Fox News and 29 others were hacked Monday according to the microblog site, leading to false and inappropriate messages being posted on their accounts.

First Fox News Twitter followers read a false message about Bill O'Reilly's sexuality Monday morning after hackers launched several attacks.

Then came the attack on pop princess Britney Spears private parts.

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez, who uses Twitter on his TV show to interact with the audience, also fell victim to the scam, when a hacker posted about drugs on his account.

Twitter is a social-networking blog site that allows users to send status updates, or "tweets," from cell phones, instant messaging services and Facebook in less than 140 characters.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the site's blog that the accounts were compromised after a hacker accessed tools the support team uses when a Twitter user can't remember or wants to reset their login info.

"We considered this a very serious breach of security and immediately took the support tools offline," Stone said in the blog post. "We'll put them back only when they're safe and secure."

Jennifer Dargan, Director of Public Relations for CNN confirmed Sanchez's account was compromised.

"As a result, some Twitter users may have received offensive messages attributed to Rick when the breach occurred," she said. "This is annoying, though such breaches are not uncommon when using social networking sites."

"Rick has notified Twitter of his account's breach and taken some basic steps to secure his account's access. Rick enjoys communicating with viewers via Twitter and he and many others at CNN find social networking a valuable tool in their shows. Rick will continue to use Twitter -- along with MySpace and Facebook -- to engage CNN's audience."

The attacks came after Twitter suffered a vicious phishing scam over the weekend, during which everyday Twitter users may have been tricked into logging on to a page masquerading as the Twitter front page, according to the site.

Instead, users were actually giving out their login information. The fake link was then passed along to anyone following that user.

Twitter posted a small notice on the page of each user warning them about the attacks.

But some users, concerned about the attacks, began messaging Twitter employees.

"So you're OK with a status quo where any Twitter [application] is potentially a phishing scam?" Twitter user "Aral" posted on the account of Alex Payne, a developer at Twitter. According to his Web site Payne is in charge of working with programmers who develop their own applications that work with Twitter.

"I'm certainly not happy with the security status quo. I just want people to understand the different threats. We'll get there," Payne responded.

The attacks are the first known security issues with Twitter, which has grown as a popular social networking site during the last year.

The attack on Twitter indicates hackers may see social networking sites as a good place to try and steal passwords and account information from the most people.

While many of the accounts were fixed quickly by resetting passwords, the attacks are a reminder for Twitter that with increasing popularity comes more security risks.

Those risks have kept employees at Twitter working quickly to try and fend off attacks and fix compromised tools.

The company's CEO Evan Williams echoed that sentiment with a post on his Twitter account this morning.

"Mood at Twitter HQ the first work day of the year: Focused Anxiety."