Checking In?
Tweeting your location and using the Social Game App Foursquare is all the rage in recent months and is quickly gaining steam. For those of you who don't know, Twitter is a social site to "Let your friends know what you're doing now." Foursquare has a similar premise; to let users "check in" to venues around there city in order to unlock badges, gain points, become "mayor" (the person that visits a certain venue the most times), and see who else is at the venue with you. These aren't meant for any malicious purposes, but for entertainment... but could it be used for something bad?
Please Rob Me
The website Please Rob Me, is intended to raise awareness about privacy. Please Rob Me is a dressed up twitter search page which searchers and displays who check's in using Foursquare. Are you giving an open invitation to be robbed? Can you trust that person you just met during the last "tweetup" you attended? Although chances are slim, sites like this demonstrate how easy it is for anyone to use the information that you post publicly to the world against you.
Twitter Apps: Web
Until recently, the primary way I accessed Twitter was through the official website. Thanks to @trekkieb47, I have signed up for a service called Hootsuite. What makes this service so special? Hootsuite allows you to work with columns and tabs, making it easy to group various activities together. On twitter.com, to see @ Replies and Direct Messages, you would have to navigate away from the page you are on. Hootsuite eliminates this by allowing you to have all of these in separate columns on one page. You can create tabs for virtually anything (I have a tab for news and created a column under that with various tweets from several new agencies and a column for tech news). Creating columns are easy with the ability to type the name of the twitter accounts you want shown, dragging and dropping them into the column, having search terms displayed, among other options.
If you have multiple twitter accounts or you are a business with multiple people sending out tweets, this service is right up your ally. You can create multiple users via the settings options and add multiple accounts. Hootsuite allows you to choose the twitter account you want to tweet from or you can send the same tweet to all accounts at once. Another handy feature is “Send Later” which allows you to enter a tweet and select a time and date to send it... later. Every business likes to have statistics. Hootsuite allows you to track the links you post (Note: the statistics are only avilable for tweets using their url shortener Ow.ly).
For more information please check out their website @ http://hootsuite.com or check out their youtube video tour embedded below!
Twitter is Under Attack!
Update 08/12/09: It appears that the DoS attack was targeting 1 user, @Cyxymu. He suggests that it was Government censorship... Read more on C-Net's site. Link Here.
Update 11:55am ET: Twitter is back up for me via web and Sprint Mobile. C-Net Article alludes to a possible connection between several recent DoS Attacks and the annual Defcon hacker convention. Link Here.
Update 11:45am ET: A BNET blog basically mirror's my suspicions of a link between Twitter's DoS Attack and Facebook. Link Here.
Update 11:15am ET: Twitter's status says site is back up, but still defending against attack. As of now, I am still unable to access Twitter.
At about 8 o'clock this morning I had access to Twitter. Then around 9 I was receiving a page load error. A few minutes ago I checked Twitter's Status Blog where it said it was defending against a Denial-of-Service Attack. This acording to Wikipedia is "an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users."
Recent Twitter Blog Post
Although I do not have any confirmation, I am also having issues with Facebook. At this time I continue to receive errors and lagging when trying to post Status Updates and Links to my Wall. If there is any link to the Attack on Twitter, I will let you know and update with more information about the DoS Attack.
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