Posts Tagged ‘twitter’

Forget Monitoring, Just Check Twitter!

Tonight Facebook seems to be having some issues. It has been resetting connections from my browser and is almost as reliable as my workout schedule. How do I know it’s not just me? I searched Twitter, of course, and seem to have found a significant amount of others having similar problems. At the beginning of this month, Gmail had a fairly major outage and Twitter was alive with comments about Gmail being down as well.

This concept really isn’t all that new, but it’s amazing how much visibility one can have into what’s going on in the world. The last two issues that I’ve experienced with large services, I found out that thousands of others were having problems within moments. Of course, that’s only the tip of the iceberg of things that Twitter can be useful for. Being able to see what’s being said about your product all the time is incredibly useful as well. I suppose the system works, however, only until Twitter breaks down and we have to find some out-of-band tool to check on it (which, given Twitter’s track record, we may need that fairly often).

Update: Ha! Just after posting, I had problems logging in to my Adsense account. Guess where the first place I looked for and found others having the same problem? :)

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 19th, 2009

Why I left my RSS reader for Twitter

Okay, so Twitter and RSS are not in any way competing technologies or services, but I’ve used Twitter to replace my RSS reader. While I can’t fully replace an RSS reader with Twitter since some blogs have Twitter, but almost all have an RSS feed, I have been able to get a majority of the ones I care about. If you have a blog and a Twitter account, but don’t have them merged, I’d highly suggest you do. There are plenty of tools out there like the Twitter plugin for Wordpress.

While I have given up a bit of freedom in not being able to get feeds to every blog, I do gain in being able to also see posts that the author of a blog that I follow also finds interesting, but didn’t necessarily want to write a blog entry about (i.e., microblogging :) ). It also allows me to see updates from my friends as well as updates from blogs, sites, or organizations that I am interested in without having to go to several different places around the web. It also helps to have a desktop application for Twitter so you get notifications when there’s new activity. I use Tweetie on my MacBook and really like it for its simplicity, but there plenty of others to choose from.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jul 13th, 2009

Once Again, Social Engineering Proves Much Easier Than Real Engineering

Whatever Twittercut was or wasn’t, it does seem to have proved an already-known fact once again surrounding computer security: sometimes it’s easier to just ask someone for their username/passwords than to try to steal them. Twittercut was a service that has been called a worm by several blogs and other methods because of its use of viral social techniques for spreading its popularity. The service was supposed to help one receive a large amount of Twitter followers after you entered your Twitter username and password into their service. This is no different than a lot of services out there for Twitter. However, when it started posting tweets in accounts, people got a little freaked out. Right or wrong, that’s what happened.

What’s important here, though, is the lessons learned. People, for some reason, seem to be all loosey goosey about their credentials to services such as Twitter. This is okay as long as one isn’t terribly concerned about those credentials being stolen. However, if one maintains a single password for all (or even a majority of accounts online) this can be a devastating problem. Once inside your Twitter account, a “thief” can get your email information. Once again, not a huge deal unless you share your password with your email account. If that is the case then things get interesting. Access to one’s email can potentially be key to breaking into other accounts that you hold. Why? Most online services allow you to fill in your username and send a password reset link to your email address.

Okay, so I took that much further than it was taken in this case, but often some of the most devastating worms are just that simple. Hopefully people who found themselves caught up in handing out usernames and passwords like they’re candy can get a little reality check after this scare.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : May 27th, 2009