Someone tweets on Twitter – “Earthquake”. What sense does it make to you? May be it was retweeted to you after 15 levels of RTs. This tiny bit of information leaves you asking the ultimate question – WHERE? If you know the tweet was made from Afghanistan then you know where the Quake occurred, or most probably did.

Twitter has been trying to address this issue for a while now. Recently they acquired Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI. Mixer Labs has been around for some time and recently made news with their GeoAPI service. It has been of great help to developers developing application around geo location specific data and responses. With support from Mixer Labs manpower Twitter hopes to make its tweet API streams still more informative. They had announced initiatives in this direction in August. Acquisition of GeoApi only proves how seriously they are taking this project.

This service from Twitter will directly influence other third party apps built around Tweet streams and geo location data. So Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro will the beneficiaries. Yeah we too.

Geo API (src - geoapi.com)

A day before Twitter Home page was hacked by some organization calling itself Iranian Cyber Army. Twitter has a clumsy reputation with security issues. Even TechCrunch reported that one of their Admin Interfaces has ‘password’ as the password. This is what the hackers left on the home page.

Twitter was not the only target. There are other anti-government (Iranian Govt) websites operating from within or outside Iran that were hacked too. Yes, of course it’s a Iranian Government handiwork. This is how the attack was carried through.

Unlike most cases of home page defacing the hackers did not gain access to any thing on the hosting server of twitter. Rather they managed to get break into Twitter’s account details on their DNS* provider’s site. Using the registration email they managed to reset the administrator password for the DNS account on Dynect. After that it’s a fairly easy job. All they needed to do was redirect the site to some other hosting provider. In this case it was redirected to some anonymous TOR account.

Hackers also tried to disrupt the twitter apps by manipulating its sub domains too. Normally it takes some where between 30 mins to 4 hours to completely effect a DNS change. But Twitter could fix the issue in less than an hour so most of the changes were not completely effective. Plus app users prefer to use direct IP address rather than domain names so these DNS thing mean nothing to them.

This is a fairly easy way of hacking websites. You need not find loop holes in the technology. You need to exploit common human errors. In this case it was slack email identity protection.

Biz Stone clarified the situation on Twitter blog.

During the attack, we were in direct contact with our DNS provider, Dynect. We worked closely to reset our DNS as quickly as possible. The motive for this attack appears to have been focused on defacing our site, not aimed at users—we don’t believe any accounts were compromised. If you’re concerned that your account could have been affected in some way, feel free to contact us, accountsafe [at] twitter.com.

*(DNS of domain naming service is a established technology of naming an host address like 205.12.23.43 to some thing like mydomainname.com which makes it easy to type and remember.)

Recently twitter chief Biz Stone had announced strong revenue models based on business accounts or paid twitter accounts. Now they announce the beta testing of a paid tweeting system called “Contributors”. This feature will allow brands to add some personal effect and credibility to their updates.

Twitter has been a massive hit among business houses. As Anamitra of product team at twitter outs it – “For some time now, businesses of all sizes have been using Twitter to deepen their engagement with customers”. Mostly companies using twitter accounts to promote products or to stay interact with customers keep their company name as the account name. The real people behind the company face is not known. Hence to add a personal touch to business efforts over twitter, the contributor feature was coined.

Let me explain how this would work. Say we have our official blog account @mashyep. Of course our blog cannot tweet for itself. It has to be either Greg or Rooturaj (me) who have to do the actual posting. Now using this new contributor feature Mashyep can invite both of us to tweet on its behalf. From now on all tweets form Mashyep will feature either @gregosuri or @rooturaj as a byline in every post. This way the followers know who the real people behind this blog are. This is particularly beneficial to the PR guys. They do all the nice work but public hardly knows them on twitter.

Great feature in my opinion, though I am not very enthusiastic about it being a paid feature. May be they will let Tech Bloggers have the feature for free. (Source – Twitter Blog)

Twitter has launched an all new website for our good old mobile browsers. They just announced on their blog that Twitter’s mobile development team has developed from scratch a spanking new website to be used from webkit mobile browsers. The idea is to bring more of the main sites look and feel to the mobile version without its overheads.

You might ask what about m.twitter.com. It will have to go. It was good but Twitter now offers some thing better. For those who don’t use a third party app for tweeting mobile.twitter.com is the best bet. Twitter has built it using only its own APIs. The new website will replace m.twitter.com in phases.

Here is how m.twitter.com looked like.

And this is how mobile.twitter.com will be. I tried it on my HTC using Opera mini and got the full blown twitter website.  When I tried the same on internet explorer for of windows mobile 6.1 I got m.twitter.com. Probably some tweaking going on. Twitter provides the following views.

The Twitter Influence (src: dailygalaxy.com)

Google is perhaps the most powerful internet company on earth now. Google influences everyone who uses internet to a small or large extent. There are a few companies that can influence the mighty Google in its own areas of expertise. One them is Twitter.

Google could have pulled rugs from under the feet of other internet giants like Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple but when it comes to twitter it looks like it cannot do without it. Google had made a desperate bid to buy it even. While social media is said to be the future of internet this is not an area where Google has made serious inroads. The current leaders Facebook, MySpace, Twitter are far ahead of Google’s Orkut.

As things start to centre themselves around social media Google core business – the search technology is all set for a drastic change. Real time search could be the future. Google does not have a instant solution handy for this yet. It has to seek the help of one of the Social Media Giants for the Real Time feeds. Facebook said not to Google long time ago as Yahoo and Microsoft are its partners. Rupert Murdoch is not very happy with Google and they have their own little war to fight. So no MySpace support for Google either. Only big option available is Twitter. Finally Google and Twitter did have a real time search deal.

Now here is another instance of Twitter’s growing influence over Google. Google announced support for twitter login credential on its popular Friend Connect widget. Friend connect is very popular across Blogger blogs. But lately Facebook Connect is beating Google at this. Further Yahoo declared deep integration of Facebook Connect across all its portals. Google retorted with a Twitter alternative. In all it’s a Twitter victory.

Well I never thought this could be as bad as Telegraph reports about young gangsters coordinating fights on twitter. As per the words of Gang Intelligence department of New York police, the situation is ‘horrible’. This comes into lime light as a New York teenager was shot in the legs as fallout of spat between a popular gang and its rivals.

(img credits - modculture.typepad.com)

One of them, that is most notorious on twitter is OYG or the Original Young Gangsters of harlem. A simple search on Twitter returned raised eyebrows. Well that’s not because of some threatening tweets or Gang Messages but rather packed full of spammers who have got the scent of the keyword and want to capitalize on it.

The members of such gangs use protected twitter accounts to follow the gang conversations and arrange fights. Police is of opinion that there are public profiles as well and they are constantly tracking them to check violence before it may occur. Even some organizations in New York that work to ease tension between gang members and maintain peace are also actively tracking at risk teenagers and adults.

Detailed News on Telegraph here.

In a recent development, Twitter has come forward with a brand new revenue model. Every bit of news about Twitter is big news by default these days but this one is slightly bigger. We have been hearing co-founder Biz Stone and CE Evan Williams talking about charging premium users. But this development was unexpected, at least for now.

Honey! Its all about Money (img src: tradebit.com)

Twitter is actually going to charge us ( yeah you and me) for accessing premium accounts. What exactly is “premium” has to be fathomed. For the time being we see them as accounts dishing news and original images. It also includes links to external sites from such accounts. These will be in form of micropayments and can range between $1.15 and $11.60. The value depends on the owners of the premium accounts. Twitter’s share is 30 percent of the booty.

They have planned out a bunch of option to enable us to make the payments. ( by ‘us’ I mean Japs for now and rest of the twittering world soon enough). You could pay by credit card or ask you Telecom provider to include it in your monthly bills. Yeah, these will be monthly subscription. Or you could buy prepaid coupons.

I guess the News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch will be the happiest. He has been insisting since long that we pay for the news we read. It would not be a wonder if News Corp’s accounts go premium at the first opportunity. But, what about readership? Say some particular account before going premium had a million members ( like @CNN ) would the same number remain when you ask them to pay? Assuming 25 % to remain you are losing 75% traffic. To what extent will this be successful? Let’s wait and watch.

Orange subscribers in United Kingdom can now enjoy photo sharing through twitter. This was launched along with Oranges SMS service for Tweeting form Phone. You can tweet important stuff even if you are not connected to internet but have basic phone coverage. So next time you see an UFO in the forest, just SMS to tweet the breaking news and do not wait till you get home to your broadband. Still better click a picture of the UFO and MMS it to Twitter.

Here is how to do it?

1. Take a photo on your Orange mobile phone
2. Select ‘Send via MMS’ or ‘Send multimedia message’
3. Send it to 86444

Orange UK has a dedicated site for this now, called Snapshot.

(img src : snapshot.com)

We had recently reported that Twitter is in plans to allow the retweet functionality for its users on its site.

Well, looks like its finally here. I had a pleasant surprise today when I logged into my twitter account to find out I was part of the beta testing group to receive this feature.

However, there is a catch. Twitter will be allowing you to retweet only from those users whom you follow. I believe this is quite a disadvantage when compared to more efficient tools such as Tweetdeck which gives the freedom to retweet posts from any user.

Anyways, it would be a good start to have this feature up and running. Hopefully, Twitter will lift the restrictions it is laying currently.

Also, Twitter will be carrying out a maintenance window today which might result in a downtime of the website. You will find interesting statistics on the history of the uptime of the twitter website on pingdom.

While answering a question about restricted use of twitter in China President Barack Obama has revealed that he has never used Twitter. He was interacting with Chinese youth at the Shanghai Town Hall. Well we knew that all those tweets were definitely not from the account but it definitely comes as a stunner to know that the Prez has never used the service at all.

The official and verified account @barackobama has more than 2.6 million twitter followers worldwide. We never thought the tweet “humbled” from his account after being awarded the Nobel Prize was not a direct reaction form the President. So it was not the president who was actually humbled? Who then? Probably some smart White House staffer.

The account has been around his Senator days and social media + internet was seen as a huge factor behind his ascension to the Presidency. He has been always surrounded by tech savvy people and they seem to have pulled off a perfect job till date.

About the big question of restricted use of internet in China, it’s a big debate. The Chinese netizens cannot even search Google freely. Now the scanner is on twitter as it grows to be a popular live search portal as well.