tweets - TheWayoftheWeb

Feed your blog RSS to multiple microblogs: Ping.fm and Twitterfeed

April 7, 2010 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Popular tool Ping.fm lets you distribute your content to a variety of microblogs and social networks – and it can now include your blog content to be shared automatically.

It’s a real-time feed powered by Superfeedr, which pumps out feed in XMPP or PUbsubhubbub formats. At the moment you can only list one RSS feed, but support for multiple feeds is coming in the near future for Ping’s 700,000 users.

If you’re considering the options for RSS autofeeding, Twitterfeed has been the main choice since the early days of Twitter, and also publishes to other networks including Facebook. In March they announced they have over 500,000 publishers sharing more than 1 million feeds.

The advantage of Ping.fm is that integrating the automation into your regular posting service means you’re perhaps more likely to keep it updated and compliment it with non-automated posts, whereas Twitterfeed can encourage a ‘fire and forget’ mentality, where your RSS feed becomes your entire Twitter stream. One solution to this is to create specific identities for your RSS streams. For instance, I tweet at @badgergravling, but also have @thewayoftheweb, @140char_com and @onlinedriver for each of my sites (Please feel free to follow all of them!)

Buffer

Filed Under: Tools, twitter Tagged With: automating, autoposting, distributing, ping.fm, rss, sharing blog posts, tweets, twitterfeed

The growth of Twitter – now 50 million messages per day

February 23, 2010 By Dan Thornton 2 Comments

If you want evidence of the sheer amount of content and data being created by Twitter, look no further than the evidence provided by Twitter analytics team member Kevin Weil on the official Twitter blog.

In 2007, Twitter users were tweeting 5,000 times per day.

In 2008, Twitter users were tweeting 300,000 times per day.

In 2009 Twitter users were tweeting 2.5 million per day, and it grew 1400% to 35 million per day.

And in 2010? Twitter users are tweeting 50 million times per day, which works out at 600 tweets per second.

Kevin goes on to mention Tweet deliveries as a much higher metric, and also says that the team will make time to share more info on ways to measure and understand the information network.

50 million messages is an interesting figure considering the measurements of web-based Twitter usage are pinned at around 55 million, and several studies indicate there’s a high churn rate of new users and a high proportion of dormant accounts – it indicates those that ‘get’ Twitter tend to share a pretty high amount of information. Which isn’t unusual, considering the same curve correlates with the amount of bloggers regularly updating, for example.

It also reinforces why tweets are becoming integrated into search tools from Google, Bing and many more.

Buffer

Filed Under: statistics, twitter Tagged With: content, information, metrics, tweets, tweets per day

Another round of spam phishing hits Twitter

February 22, 2010 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

Twitter has become one of the prime targets for phishing and spam attacks, due to both it’s huge growth in user numbers, but also the each with which messages can spread (partly due to the inherent weakness in using short urls).

The latest example is the BZPharma ‘LOL this is funny’ attack, as detailed by security firm Sophos. Messages include ‘Lol. this is me??’, ‘lol , this is funny’ and ‘Lol. this you??’, and include a link which looks like ‘http://example.com/?rid=http://twitter.verify.bzpharma.net/login’ –

with the example.com element varying between a number of addresses.

There’s a handy Youtube video with details of the problem. Links are appearing in both private Direct Messages, and in public feeds – plus some third party services allow DMs to be made public, sharing the phishing attack more widely.

Click on the dodgy link and you’ll go to a fake Twitter login page, which replicates the Fail Whale when you attempt to login, and then redirects you back to the real Twitter page to make you believe your account hasn’t been hit. The same technique is also being used to phish Bebo accounts.

And after the first wave of attacks compromised accounts, there’s now a wave of spam selling herbal viagra, with messages including “Get bigger and have sex longer. go here”

So besides double-checking you’re on the real Twitter site before logging in, keep an eye on your sent messages for any clue your account has been compromised, and also watch out for messages being sent by even trusted friends.

You can also take a look at the full Sophos update on the attack.

Buffer

Filed Under: twitter Tagged With: attack, direct messages, microblogging, phishing, porn, scam, tweets, viagra spam

Twitter growing in visitors and content

February 17, 2010 By Dan Thornton 1 Comment

With the caveat that it doesn’t cover third party applications, comScore puts visits to Twitter at 75 million – and regardless of the correlation between those numbers and the actual figures, what you can take away is that the graph is still going up and to the right:

It certainly seems anecdotally as if I’m witnessing more colleagues and friends not only using Twitter, but attempting to use it in a fairly sustainable way rather than registering, looking confused and then vanishing again.

Meanwhile the amount of content being produced has also risen – to a whopping 1.2 billion tweets per month according to data collected by Royal Pingdom.

The methodology used to collect the figures was pretty simple:

‘we tracked down a tweet from the first couple of minutes of each month. Using the sequence numbers of these tweets, we could then calculate the number of tweets for each month. Since finding old tweets is more or less impossible with Twitter’s own search engine, we used Google, then verified the tweet time stamp by looking at the tweet itself’

Again, while there could be some debate about the accuracy of the actual figures involved, what’s important is that the overall effect is some consistent and sizeable growth. And that’s in the face of the redesign of Facebook – the next challenger on the list is GoogleBuzz, but so far I’ve found it rather unsatisfactory, even apart from the initial privacy issues.

Buffer