Yahoo Extends Twitter Integration in Search Engine

Yahoo will begin inserting Twitter posts directly into its general Web search results page on Thursday, expanding on an initial integration of Twitter into its search engine.

"Tweets" will now appear in a Twitter-labeled section within Web search results for queries related to what Yahoo algorithmically determines are hot topics at any given time, said Larry Cornett, vice president of consumer experience at Yahoo Search.

"This is showing that we're continuing to bring this real-time information to the search experience, but also directly integrated into the Web search page itself," Cornett said.

Last month, Yahoo added a Twitter tab to the "shortcut" boxes it sometimes displays at the top of Web search results for breaking news topics. Other tabs in those news shortcut boxes include photos and video clips.

All major search engines have been scrambling to incorporate feeds from social media sites like Twitter, which lets people and organizations post public text messages online. In aggregate, these posts offer a pulse about what's on people's minds at any given point. Marketers have also embraced Twitter and other similar microblogging and social networking services as effective tools to promote their goods and services. Thus, demand has grown for tools that let people search through public Twitter posts, a field that has become known as real-time search.

Although Yahoo plans to outsource Web crawling and indexing to Microsoft's Bing when the companies' search deal gets finalized, Yahoo will continue developing front-end enhancements, such as this Twitter integration, for its search engine.

7 декабря Google представила поиск данных в реальном времени и технологию Goggles

7 декабря Google представил новые технологии для своей поисковой системы. Теперь самый популярный поисковик может обнаруживать данные в режиме реального времени - последние новости, записи в блогах и даже в Twitter, а также и прочий контент, который обычно не индексируется поисковыми системами.

Поиск в режиме реального времени уже доступен пользователям, в том числе и мобильным - обладателям iPhone и Android-смартфонов.

Google Labs также представила новую технологию Goggles - поисковую функцию, оптимизированную для смартфонов, которая позволяет обнаружить в Интернете информацию по фотографии какого-либо товара, снятой камерой смартфона. С помощью этой технологии можно найти сведения о характеристиках данного продукта, Goggles даже может распознавать отснятые тексты и штрихкоды.

Воспользоваться Goggles смогут обладатели смартфонов на Android, от версии 1.6 и выше, а также iPhone и, возможно, BlackBerry. Вообще представители Google заявили, что эта технология разрабатывается для "наиболее популярных моделей смартфонов", пишет Electronista.

10 valuable Twitter utilities for business users

One of the biggest reasons for Twitter’s growth and success is that the Twitter team allowed the service to be morphed and re-shaped by the user-base from the very beginning. We saw it happen in the way that the Twitter community instituted replies, retweets, and #hashtags.

But the real kicker was the fact that Twitter released an open API for developers. That allowed programmers to extend Twitter in lots of different directions and experiment with different tools and utilities to improve Twitter.

In 2007, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told ReadWriteWeb, “The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas.”

This is part two of my three-part series on Twitter. Here are links to the other two parts:

• Part 1: A quick Twitter guide and glossary for business users
• Part 3: Directory: 100 technology experts on Twitter

Today, over three years after Twitter originally launched, there are now thousands of different tools developed from the API, and many of them are extremely useful. Below is my list of the top 15 most useful Twitter tools for business users.

1. Bit.ly

This URL shortener not only shrinks links down to about 20 characters, it also keeps track of your links for you and provides some basic analytics to see how many people click and retweet the links and where those users are coming from.

2. Twitpic

The most popular tool for sharing photos on Twitter is Twitpic, which allows you to take a photo on your mobile phone and email it to a customized Twitpic email address. You simply type your tweet into the subject line of the email. (See also: Flickr2Twitter)

3. Tweetscan

If you’ve ever used Google Alerts, then you’ll understand Tweetscan. It scans Twitter for your keywords and sends you a daily or weekly email of all instances where your keywords were used. This can be especially helpful for tracking brands. However, the service is not free. It costs $20/year.

4. Twitterfeed

Twitter is great for promoting blog posts and other types of content. If you have a blog and you want to automatically send out a tweet every time there’s a new post, then Twitterfeed can do it for you. It also has some nice customization options.

5. TwInbox

If you live in Microsoft Outlook — like many business professionals — and would prefer to interact with Twitter from there, TwInbox integrates Twitter into Outlook. And, the product is free. It was formerly known as OutTwit.

6. CoTweet

CoTweet provides an entire business workflow for companies that are serious about using Twitter for business. CoTweet allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts, it allows multiple users to access a single account, it can assign tweets to employees for follow-up, it can monitor keywords and trends, it can track clicks to links, and it can allow employees to schedule tweets out into the future. This is not a free tool. (See also: HootSuite)

7. TweetStats

This site provides statistics for individual Twitter users. Simply plug in the person’s Twitter username and you’ll get a plethora of stats, such how often a person tweets, when the person tweets the most, who the person replies to most often, who the person retweets the most and which interface the person used the most to post on Twitter. (See also: TwitterGrader)

8. Twuffer

This free tool allows you to schedule tweets out into the future. For example, I like to post an inspirational quote of the day on Twitter. But sometimes when I’m looking up quotes I’ll come across with several good ones at a time. So, I use Twuffer to spread them out over several days.

9. Twtpoll

One of the most useful things to do on Twitter is to crowd-source a question or ask a quick straw poll. Twtpoll is a tool that makes it very easy to officially do a poll. (See also: StrawPoll)

10. Twendz

If you want to see watch how a keyword has been viewed over time, Twendz provides a very simply and useful chart. The chart is updated in real time. (See also: Twazzup, Twist, and Twittercounter)

For more Twitter tools, check out these resources:

• Twitdom
• 100 Twitter tools to help you achieve your goals
• 99 essential Twitter tools and applications
• 50 useful Twitter tools for writers and researchers
• Twittermania: 140+ more Twitter tools

For more insights on technology, you can also follow my Twitter stream: @JasonHiner

Twitter API ripe for abuse by web worms

A security researcher is warning that the Twitter API can be trivially abused by hackers to launch worm attacks.

The red-hot social networking/microblogging service has been scrambling to plug cross-site scripting and other Web site vulnerabilities to thwart worm attacks but, as researcher Aviv Raff points out, it’s much easier to misuse the Twitter API as a “weak link” to send worms squirming through Twitter.

Raff, well-known for his research work on browser and Web application vulnerabilities, points out that a single vulnerability on any of the third-party services (Twitpic, etc.) that use the API can trigger the next Twitter worm.

Raff writes:

An example for this threat is a vulnerability I found a few weeks ago in Twitpic.com website. Twitpic imports the profile information from Twitter, and displays it on the Twitpic.com profile page. While twitter.com (finally) sanitizes and encodes HTML tags in the Twitter profile information (name, URL, bio, etc.), Twitpic.com failed to do so and by that allowed injecting scripts to the twitpic user profile page. This is a very simple persistent XSS, which can be easily abused to hijack twitpic.com user accounts. However, because twitpic.com also uses the Twitter API to automatically send twits on behalf of the user, whenever the user uploads a picture or comments on another user’s picture, it can also be easily used to create a Twitter worm.

Raff created a demo attack that automatically comments on a random picture on Twitpic.com, whenever a user visits the twitpic.com profile of the user he created – “twitpicxss.”

Anyone who visted that profile page while logged in to the Twitpic service would automatically send a tweet to Twitter with the content he (Raff) set in the comment.

The content contained a link to the “twitpicxss” profile, which could have made other users, who follow the victim, to click on that link, be exploited, and keep spreading the worm.

Raff also showed me additional examples of cross-site request forgery (CSRF) problems in third-party Twitter services that could lead to worms.

Twitter’s ongoing search for software engineers to focus specifically on application and infrastructure security is a great first step but unless security gets baked into the way the API is used, the service will continue to be plagued by worms.

More links:
Twitter API ripe for abuse by web worms
Twitter being used to distribute malware
Twitter hit by multiple variants of XSS worm
Sourse of articles
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Ryan Naraine is a journalist and security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab. He manages Threatpost.com, a security news portal.

Facebook Connect launches desktop and iPhone integration

I think Twitter is so useful because it has many ways of updating: text message, desktop apps, web interface. Starting today, you can update your Facebook status via Seesmic’s desktop AIR app.

Interestingly enough, Seesmic owns Twhirl, so why wouldn’t they make it look just like the Twitter version?

I probably won’t use this desktop app because of the duplicate content on Twitter. A lot of people feed in their Twitter to Facebook status.

Look at Seesmic for Facebook and Twhirl for Twitter side by side:

Now your iPhone apps can have “friends”.
For example, Tap Tap Revenge 2 uses this new feature. You can play against friends, view social leaderboards, and post to your news feed. A few more games are launching with this new Facebook Connect (techmeme) for the iPhone, so keep an eye out.
UrbanSpoon is going after Yelp with their new iPhone Facebook integration. When you share your thoughts on the UrbanSpoon app, it broadcasts that to your Facebook friends. As you browse UrbanSpoon, you can also see what your friends like.

Flixster’s new iPhone app allows you to discover new movies that your friends like, find friends that want to see a movie, and keep track of what you want to see.

The web has made us way more social.

The new Facebook homepage redesign is hard to get used to, but believe me, it’s more interactive. The Twitter-like news feed updates automatically, so you can just sit there all day and see what you friends are up to.

Facebook Connect is the absolute best way to unite a community. You can goto a site with Connect installed, login with your Facebook credentials, and not only comment on the blog, but also have the story published back on your Facebook page. The social web just feels more natural because of Facebook.

Having to login with your Facebook credentials feels safer to people. TechCrunch, since installing Connect, has had more unique comments than ever. Geni has over 9 million family trees because of Connect.

Facebook also is working directly with Apple to make iPhoto more usable with Facebook.

Right now, Facebook is limited technically, but there is a fix. You can only have 5,000 friends, but you can have unlimited fans. And fan pages look like profile pages now.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a perfect example. His brand Wine Library TV has a fan page, and I bet that’s a better page for him to guage his audience because it’s unlimited.

Keep your eye on Facebook because it’s a bunch of young people doing really interesting things. They are moving away from this “walled garden” to a more open platform.

Andrew Mager is an associate technical producer at CBS Interactive Business. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Source

Is privacy dead, or just very confused?

Personal information is a form of currency. Privacy is not a substance. It’s not something you can trade, or give up. People are willing to trade a little bit of privacy for a better user experience.

Why would anyone want to use Twitter? Who cares what you ate for breakfast?

Marwick says some CEOs say they will not hire people unless they have a Facebook profile. There is social value in taking part in the conversation. If you’re not participating in this conversation, you are missing out. Lots of people also use social media to reach out and get help.

The more information you put out there, the more data is out there for marketers. These are my favorite books on Amazon, my favorite songs on Last.fm, my favorite books on GoodReads, etc.

All of this information is aggregated, and this was not possible 10 years ago. Once you make the info public, should it be available for anyone to use?

Online, history is the equivalent of the body. You have many public “faces” online. With Twitter and Facebook, you have such a huge audience, and you have to form your message very specifically.

How can we start to develop technologies that give ourselves a mirror of ourselves? We also need to figure out to design online spaces so you can tell how private it is, says Donath.

In the 1970s, Americans at every level were deeply concerned about their rights as citizens and consumers. There was a movement to protect personal information from abuse from the state. It’s illegal for the FBI, for example, to share personal information of yours with the NSA without first informing you.

It’s important to have a historical perspective to see what’s normal. Years ago, no one had privacy. People lived in huts and they knew everything about each other.

Every social context has it’s own flow of information. Your doctor can’t disclose personal information with their best friend. New technologies allows these contexts to flow into each other.

Pro tip: if you put a lot of stuff online, people think you’re actually putting everything online. Then you can hold back and kinda have a private life.

Should the default for information sharing be opt-in or opt-out. Good article in NY Times about that yesterday.

You should be in total control of your online presence. It’s your data, but more and more, companies like Google and Facebook are so overbearing that you feel like they own it.

We need to sit down and make laws and norms that even people with no former knowledge of digital data can know control their data.

We don’t live in a world in which we are immediately faced with living in an environment where if you say something wrong, the government can put you away. But there are many places like that in the world.

Panel: Siva Vaidhyanathan (UVA), Alice Marwick (NYU), Judith Donath (MIT), Danah Boyd (Microsoft)

Andrew Mager is an associate technical producer at CBS Interactive Business. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Source

Adobe: хакеры активно распространяют псевдо-Flash Player в социальной сети Twitter

Adobe Systems выпустила предупреждение для пользователей о том, что неизвестные злоумышленники в интернете активно распространяют злонамеренное программное обеспечение, якобы представляющее собой популярный плагин Adobe Flash Player.

В Adobe настоятельно советуют избегать загрузок данного ПО. По информации компании, злоумышленники активно размещают ссылки на "новый Flash Player" в различных социальных сетях и форумах. "Если вам предлагают скачать Flash Player с незнакомого сайта или ip-адреса, следует насторожиться", - говорят в компании.

"Adobe уже несколько раз в течение этого года обновляла плеер, причем также из соображений безопасности, поэтому для пользователей может и не показаться слишком странным выход еще одной версии", - говорят в Adobe.

Напомним, что все подлинные версии софта доступны на сайте adobe.com, все загружаемые файлы имеют действующую цифровую подпись. Все сертификаты, присутствующие в программных компонентах, выписаны на Adobe Systems, Incorporated.

Одновременно с предупреждением Adobe, в Лаборатории Касперского сообщили, что хакеры активно распространяют псевдо-Flash Player в социальной сети Twitter.