Daily Bits

Twitter

We Are Now Posting 50 Million Tweets Daily

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Funny how a short post on the Twitter blog could spark an online discussion that even led to the long-standing Twitter vs. Facebook war.  Yesterday, a post on the Twitter blog announced that we, Twitter users are now sending 50 million tweets into the Twitter-sphere everyday. Now, how’s that for another issues that says Twitter is not growing?

But anyway, yes Twitter has just grown to 50 million tweets a day. Up from 5,000 times a day in 2007, 300,000 in 2008 and 2.5 million in 2009. Right now, it’s at a 50 million per day or 600 tweets per second. If you won’t call that exponential growth, I have no idea what else you can call this phenomenon.

And that doesn’t include spammy tweets. Twitter has removed tweets from accounts that were identified as spam.

Now, the issue that were raised by some analyst is whether Facebook has all the reason to be afraid of Twitter’s growth. Facebook updates were last reported at 60 million per day.  That means that Twitter is fast catching up. But that is in terms of daily updates. When it comes to total number of users and even monthly page views – Twitter is still far inferior to Facebook.

I really think that there is no point of comparison here and we should all try to pause for awhile and rethink how we view Twitter vis-a-vis Facebook. I’m more inclined to think that Twitter compliments Facebook. Facebook is more of a social networking site while Twitter is more of a real-time online communication tool.

But then, who am I to change this predominant mindset, anyway?

Twitter Asked Some Users to Reset their Passwords

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Right after we posted about Sophos study on the security risk posed by social networks, here comes a buzz regarding some Twitter users getting email from Twitter asking them to reset their passwords.  Thankfully, I’ve not received such email so I’m assuming that my Twitter account is safe, as of the moment.

But for those who received the Twitter email, you should heed Twitter’s call and change your password immediately. Although Twitter has not officially released a statement about it, Digital Inspiration inquired about the issue and received a reply from Twitter that says:

As part of Twitter’s ongoing security efforts, we reset passwords for a small number of accounts that we believe may have been compromised offsite. In one case, a number of accounts posted updates indicative of giving their username and password to untrusted third parties. While we’re still investigating and ensuring that the appropriate parties are notified, we do believe that the steps we’ve taken should ensure user safety. We’ll continue provide updates as warranted at @safety and @spam. We do, as always, encourage our users to read our help pages on what to do if your account is compromised: http://twitter.zendesk.com/forums/10713/entries/31796 and how to stay safe on Twitter: http://twitter.zendesk.com/forums/10711/entries/76036.

So, there you go folks. That confirms that news of this new Twitter attack. If you didn’t get the email, there’s a slight chance that your account might still be attacked. So the best thing to do is to change you password anyway. I just did. Now, when will this ever stop really?

WordPress.com Now Allows Posting and Reading via Twitter

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post-view-m2The folks at WordPress.com are really working doubly hard these days to improve on the services they offer to loyal users of the free WordPress hosting site. After the geotagging and emails subscription features, here’s another better and more useful feature – posting and reading via Twitter API.

The new feature is supposed to work with mobile Twitter applications which use the Twitter API. Of course, it was tested on an iPhone application, particularly Tweetie 2.0. But the feature should work on any third party app that allows you to set a custom API URL.

To enable posting and reading to your WordPress.com blog via Tweetie 2.0, you need to add your WordPress account to Tweetie just like you are adding another Twitter account.  To make it work, you need to add https://twitter-api.wordpress.com/ to the API Root field before adding the account. Once your information is verified by Tweetie 2., you can then start posting to your WordPress.com blog using your iPhone’s Tweetie 2. app.

If you’re having problems setting up your account, full details can be found here.

Twitter’s New Mobile-Optimized Site Might Kill Third-Party Apps

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A post at the Twitter blog  has just just revealed a surprising fact – there are still many Twitter users who access their account on their mobile phones using Twitter’s mobile site.  So, to make their experiences more pleasant Twitter has just revamped its mobile browser-optimized site. m2-medlyIt was really surprising that there are still many Twitter users who access their account through the old mobile site despite the fact that there are several third party Twitter apps available. Whether you are using an iPhone, Android phone, Nokia S60 and Palm Web OS phones, you will surely find one or two Twitter apps that you can download for free or for a minimal fee.

Anyway, the new Twitter mobile browser-optimized can be found by pointing your phone’s browser to http://mobile.twitter.com. And one thing I can say about this new site is that it’s an all new look – almost similar to how Twitter apps look and feel like.

Feature-wise the new mobile site offers just about the basic stuff that you can do on Twitter – post tweets, view DMs, Retweet tweets and more. What it won’t allow you to do is to access multiple Twitter accounts at the same time. But if you’re just using one Twitter account, the new mobile site has enough features to please you.

This made wonder whether Twitter is hitting on the third-party apps that have kept the interest of mobile users into using Twitter on their mobile phones? Like I said, the new Twitter mobile site is as good as what you can get from those third-party apps.

So, if you haven’t downloaded any third-party Twitter app, would you be using this new mobile site instead?

Twitter introduces public and private lists

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If you’re a Twitter fan and still use twitter-team-listthe web interface a lot, you may be interested in the new “lists” feature that’s being rolled out across accounts.

The concept is very similar to the sort of contact management you’ll find in many third-party Twitter applications, except with the added feature that you can make lists public, so other people can follow those people all in one go.

For the uninitiated, lists are useful when you have a lot of contacts but would like to separate them into more manageable sets.

Say you follow family members, work colleagues, celebrities, some bloggers, and then others you’ve had some kind of conversation with online. Instead of having to wade through a single feed with everyone’s tweets on, you can select to view just the tweets of a particular group, by putting all of those people in a list.

Lists can be made private, if you don’t want others to see them, or public.

I still think for power Twitter users, using a desktop client for reading and tweeting is the best option, but for keen Twitter users who like the web interface, lists can add just a little bit of clarity to an otherwise cluttered tweet space.

What do you think of Twitter lists?

Publish Your Facebook Pages’ Updates to Twitter

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Whether they admit it or not, there is an underlying rivalry between Facebook and Twitter. Both are gaining followers and increasing their site eyeballs daily. Also, both are silently competing in the real-time search arena.  So it is but surprising to know that Facebook would encourage its users to use Twitter by letting them share Facebook Pages’ updates as Tweets. [Read more…] about Publish Your Facebook Pages’ Updates to Twitter