• Apple to Developers: No Location-Based Ads for You http://ow.ly/16vg92 #
• Congress Asks NBC Why Hulu Blocked Boxee http://ow.ly/16vdC0 #
• Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Models + Live Video = One Sexy Stream http://ow.ly/16v9mA #
• Betty Goes Boop: Cc: Betty To Be Reborn As Threadbox http://ow.ly/16v9mB #
• How Social Media Helps One Small Business Connect with Fans http://ow.ly/16v5Aq #
• Apple’s iPad: Will it Improve the Web? http://ow.ly/16v2tt #
• AppFund Launches To Seed iPad Apps http://ow.ly/16uZ4o #
• Sneak Peek: Monster’s Super Bowl Social Media Blitz http://ow.ly/16uZ4n #
• iPhone Apps Get Web Previews http://ow.ly/16uVRC #
• Happy 6th Birthday, Facebook! http://ow.ly/16uQ3z #
• Cognitive Match Secures Another $2.5m For Realtime Matching http://ow.ly/16uQ3A #
• Symbian OS Goes Open Source http://ow.ly/16uNTV #
• AppsFire Draws In Some French Angels To Bankroll Mobile App Recommendations http://ow.ly/16uJSD #
• New post Twitter Updates for 2010-02-03 http://twurl.nl/vh64ja #

• Hovercards: Twitter Launches New Profile Preview Feature http://ow.ly/16uHUE #
• SAP Launches a Google Wave for the Enterprise http://ow.ly/16uFws #
• Factual Raises $1 Million Seed Round From Andreessen-Horowitz, Idealab, And Angels http://ow.ly/16uBmL #
• Los Twitteros: Mexico Eyes Legislation to Regulate Twitter http://ow.ly/16uBmK #
• Amazon Buys Touchscreen Company for Its Kindle Division [REPORT] http://ow.ly/16uxNM #
• Textbook Publishers Embrace iPad Apps for Education http://ow.ly/16uuBa #
• Mark Cuban May Hate News Aggregators, But He Also Wants To Invest In Them http://ow.ly/16urel #
• 11 Outstanding Online Resources for Web Developers http://ow.ly/16urek #
• Facebook Trends: Goodbye Doppelganger, Hello Urban Dictionary Week http://ow.ly/16uo56 #
• Acacia Awarded $12.4 Million In Patent Infringement Case Against Yahoo http://ow.ly/16uhTq #
• Windows 7 Reaches 10 Percent Market Share http://ow.ly/16ufEh #
• Online Video Ad Network BrightRoll Raises $10 Million http://ow.ly/16ubCN #
• Everybody Forgets The Readers When They Bash News Aggregators http://ow.ly/16ubCO #

• Music Consumption Faceoff: Subscription Vs. Ownership http://ow.ly/16u9uD #
• Add Private Notes to Tweets and Group Emails With Bccthis http://ow.ly/16u7dT #
• Video: Android’s New Pinch-To-Zoom Multi-Touch In Action http://ow.ly/16u2WA #
• Google's two-front war with Apple and Facebook; who are the winners and the losers? http://ow.ly/16u2WB #
• 10 Fabulous Valentine’s Day Gifts for Your Beloved Geek http://ow.ly/16u2Wz #
• Google Nexus One: Now With Multitouch http://ow.ly/16tZmN #
• Glue Introduces a New Way to Target Influencers http://ow.ly/16tWeJ #
• So who is going to purchase the new iPad? #
• Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch Defends Flash, Warns That HTML5 Will Throw The Web “Back To The Dark Ages Of Video” http://ow.ly/16tSI1 #
• Prop 8 Trial Re-enactments Circumvent Supreme Court’s YouTube Ban [VIDEO] http://ow.ly/16tSI0 #
• Does Facebook’s Doppelganger Week Violate TOS? http://ow.ly/16tPuR #
• Twitter Under Phishing Attack? http://ow.ly/16tMAC #
• New post Apple iPad, because I read in color. http://twurl.nl/2gfbgm #
• Twitter Asks Users To Reset Passwords After Possible Phishing Attack http://ow.ly/16tK01 #
• New Android From Motorola is Called Devour http://ow.ly/16tHR1 #
• Ustream Raises $75 Million in Funding http://ow.ly/16tFRe #
• Don’t Think Chrome OS Will Compete With iPad? Watch This Video. http://ow.ly/16tDGv #
• New post Twitter Updates for 2010-02-02 http://twurl.nl/cv8cgc #

• iPad Hardware Reveals Potential Slot for Camera http://ow.ly/16tBFK #
• Google to Launch App Store for Google Apps [REPORT] http://ow.ly/16tzy4 #
• Rumor: Apple Has Another Tablet In The Works. More Like A Mac Than An iPhone. http://ow.ly/16tvCh #
• Zune Phone and Windows 7 Mobile to Debut This Month [RUMOR] http://ow.ly/16tvCg #
• Mashable’s Social Media Week San Francisco Closing Party: This Friday http://ow.ly/16ts2j #
• Amazing, Extraordinary, Tremendous: The 3-Minute iPad Keynote [VIDEO] http://ow.ly/16tpiN #
• Target’s Facebook Campaign Combines the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day http://ow.ly/16tm9L #
• Facebook Now Has Yahoo In Its Sites, Already Bigger In Pageviews (ComScore) http://ow.ly/16tm9M #
• Microsoft’s Tag Links the Physical World To the Internet http://ow.ly/16tgbW #
• Nokia, Pearson Set Up Digital Education Joint Venture In China http://ow.ly/16tdrZ #
• Social Networks Are Becoming a Security Risk [SURVEY] http://ow.ly/16tdrY #
• Steve Jobs Is Not Happy With Google, Adobe http://ow.ly/16tb76 #
• Does Foursquare Have A Douchebag Problem? http://ow.ly/16t6Y2 #

In this edition of TBTR we talk about Google Chrome beta, Google OS and netbook plans for 2010, and the Twitter DDoS Attack from Thursday morning.

TBTR

Spammers

Looking over my friendfeed today I came across a post from Lockergnome that simply said “Spammers Harvesting Sorrow From Twitter“.
The post talks about how spammers could be harvesting email addresses
directly from your own steam on twitter.  Lockergnome referenced the
article from ZDNet “Spammers harvesting emails from Twitter – in real time”
And while the article talks about a script that can be run to harvest
the emails in real time, we further get a understanding of the Twitter
TOS (Terms of Service).

You are solely responsible for your conduct and any data, text, information, screen names, graphics, photos, profiles, audio and video clips, links (“Content”) that you submit, post, and display on the Twitter.com service.

- meaning your on your own if you tweet something you didn’t like

After reading the ZDNet article I decided to do my own test with tweetgrid.  If you do a little bit of search for things such as “email me at” you can see all kinds of addresses.  A sample search on search.twitter.com using gmail.com OR hotmail.com OR “email me at” Weather these email addresses are valid or not is a whole other story but look at the image below.

Savvy internet users who have their own domains know you can create a temporary address such as info@mydomain.com.  Send that out as a tweet and then after they are done, delete that address.  Situation solved and over in my opinion.  Although for people just coming to twitter and the internet for that matter a little help with this is understandable.  Some people were posting in comments on those blogs that “Well your stupid if you tweet your address.”  While I understand why they say that, most people forget we all come to the internet with limited skills and over time we understand more and more.

Just know this email harvesting is not new, but with twitter gaining warp speed traction in some of our everyday lives we are opening up to those who want to do harm with the info we tweet, always be cautious.

TBTR

((Video attached))

Over the weekend twitter was exposed to what they dubbed the “Stalkdaily worm.”  I got wind of this worm as a tweet from one of my followers on twitter then I followed up and found the techcrunch.com article also twitter talked about it on their blog http://blog.twitter.com/ this weekend.

Next I talked about Smallaa which is a new site that was launched by CEO Tim Lai here is how they describe the service at http://www.smallaa.com

Smallaa helps you bring relevancy to your social interactions by enabling you to follow the most interesting aspects of your friends. The feeds in your multiple social networking sites are combined at Smallaa. Everything you post at Smallaa will automatically goes to those websites. When you and your friends post to different topic of interests, you get to pick and follow what really interests you from them. Friends will in turn want to post more things about your interests.

Last but not least I talk about the Dasher Project this is one of the coolest things I have ever seen, In my opinion the applications for this project are endless, not to mention immobile, and paryalized individuals can type with limited movement using this application here is a youtube video showing how it works. At first it’s confusing, but continue to watch you will get it I swear.  If you want to test for yourself make sure you go to this (java applet) link it’s an awesome product.

Comments are appreciated, enjoy

TBTR

Blackberry App World was launched on 4/1/2009 we tell you some of the detailed info about the service. Tweetgrid is another tool in the arsonal of twitter applications/websites you can explore. Seesmic desktop launched on 4/6/2009 and seems to have put everything in the application including the kitchen sink.

Leave a comment or email at thebtr[at]gmail.com

Enjoy

We have hit 2009 and some people started their case for world dominance before me, damn you. Over the past couple of days twitter has been all a buzz over a phishing scam that someone is using. While the scam seem to only be a way to send out spam to your followers again here we go with the what if scenarios.

What is a phishing?

(wikipedia.org description)
Phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites.

So now that you know what phishing is let me tell you why it’s gonna be around for a long time. Users are gullible, sometimes we click things we should not, sometime we are curious, sometimes the joke is on us. Gone are the days of sending you to a website that pops up 50 windows and it’s like a duck hunt game trying to shot your way out of the maze. Now what people, thieves, and yes sometimes companies, do is make you think that what you saw was real.

Twitter has a API that has been open for a long time, and the authentication has always been a question to me. Coders have no behind the scenes way with twitter to authenticate with any other way but to have users enter their username and password on an off site.

What makes this phishing scam work is the fact that with all the fail whale, and network issues of the past. When people saw the screen shot below at first glance that thought oh here we go again. Twitter is on the fritz but what most failed to do was to just look at the URL and see that it was not twitter.com that was serving up the page.

Will this ever stop?

Probably not but if you have other sites where you socialize you will notice some distinct things that try to help curb users from falling victim. A lot of other sites that have OPEN API’s allow you one password to log on to that service, then when you want to login or tie your account to another site they give you a alternative password. This helps to ensure that you don’t give out your real login password and shall we say hand over the keys to the house. Twitter knows all about this authentication method, why they have chosen not to implement is beyond me.

I think it’s time twitter give it a second look, other wise I for see some people changing their strategy of using twitter as the first line in micro blogging and move on to something like friendfeed, brightkite, or even jaiku (no one really uses jaiku so I’m only kidding on this one) none of these sites do things much better but when people get feed up they move on to the next ship.

Remember boys and girls your password is a very important thing, I blogged about this here in I wonder how many computers will be infected and I still feel people are sleeping on good passwords for access to their online life. Keep your password in your pants that way no one can steal it, for the most part. But seriously just be aware of whats going on, and remember two things if nothing else in this post.

1. No the King of some small country does not really want to deposit 28,000,000 in your account
2. You bank will never send you anything online saying change your password it’s been compromised

Twitter get it right or get lost oh and don’t forget to follow us on twitter.com/thebtr

TBTR

Wow the internet is a buzz today with so many stories from godaddys meltdown to the apology from apple’s mobileme service.

I found a post from www.scripting.com’s Dave Winer titled “Identi.ca implements the Twitter API” Identi.ca is another twitter clone that has come along recently that looks and feels very much like twitter.

I gather this means that the other apps that have been built for twitter can now be ported over to identi.ca with very minimal changes to your code as a developer.

It will be interesting in the coming days and weeks to see how much of a foot hold identi.ca can really get with this new news.

TBTR

Twitter the social micro-blogging site that helps you make online friends, promote your business or just have fun has a new helper service. Less friends is a cool little site that helps you find out who’s following you. When you first start using twitter it’s easy to know who follows you all you have to do is look at the number your following and the number of followers if they are close then most likely most of your friends are following what you say. As your status and friends grow on twitter it becomes very hard to keep up. In comes less friends I was a little leary at first to sign in to see if this works, but I used an account that I don’t always login to and thus not to worried about it.

WOW it really worked I was able to notice about 16 people that follow me but I was not following them. The number on my twitter page showed me following 46 people and 60 followers, that means when I’m done adding them I’ll be at about 62 i think. I would tell you it works perfect but I’m not sure the guys at Less Everthing that made this are kwel in my book. Here is a link to the Less friends blog

TBTR

It seems that lately I have written more stories about twitter then my normal technical subjects. As I noticed this I had to ask myself why have I been so eager to blog about twitter. Could it be the fact that it’s slow, or the fact that it’s rated the worst social site for downtime by pingdom. I think all of this came about because I really LIKE…No shall I say…LOVE twitter. We have been dating since November 2007 and it seems as of late we have a kind of love hate relationship.

Twitter has been a productivity killer since my first post, it really went down hill when I expressed my LOVE for her. There were days where all I did was twitter in to the hours of the night, knowing damn well I would miss her until the next morning. My twitter love goes deep I have caught myself waking up at 3AM just to pick up my crackberry (blackberry) and check whats going on through my installed crackberry application twitterberry. I love her never mind that I have taken away from my daily activities at times OH how I have taken away.

I even had a twitter romance dubbed twittermance, don’t worry the domain is mine and your never gonna get it. With this love hate relationship I have noticed that there have been times where I hate her or just wished her gone. Like the time I deleted my account thinking I could just put her down like a smoker quits cold turkey. That little stunt backfired and with in 24 hours I added my account back (it took longer and I had to get the twitter folk involved but after a week my account was back up Yea!)

For now I just wanted to tell Twitter that I still LOVE her and hope she is doing OK, even tho we don’t talk everyday anymore.

Stay tuned

TBTR

I got wind of a story about twitter today while I was viewing some articles in my google reader (da bomb btw). The story stated that the company Pingdom.com has been monitoring the up-time of social networking sites. Well it should come to no one’s surprise that Twitter.com is the worst out of all the sites listed. The downtime is to the tune of about 37 hours so far this year. The stats have only been recorded since January 2008. As I keep saying Twitter needs to get on the ball and fix the issues at hand cause we the users are feed up at the spotty sometimes unreliable stability of the system. I mean we are already subjected to 140 characters to say what we are doing, just make sure I can post when I want to please powers that be…. Someone at Twitter has to take the position of “Yes…I give a damn” and fix the issues, and while I’m talking about that, can the people who make changes to twitter stop doing things over the weekend that affect my usability. Maybe a couple of apple engineers from the UI department can help us with a better pleasing interface that does not change on a whim. One day I know they will get it right I just hope that happens before we start jumping ship….Please for the love of (Politically correct) who ever you think is the higher power in your life, not letting the other powers that people can thank of down.

TBTR

I ran across an article on Crankygeeks.com about Ruby on Rails. Warning this post might get a bit technical and thus not really interest you, but hear me out for a moment. I heard about ruby on rails, oh 2 or so years ago. Just like some of the other programming languages it has it’s good and bad points. Some would say it takes less time to code in RoR but others would argue your sacrificing something. If you have ever run code, or created code you know the computer systems have a hand in the speed. Sometimes people create code on the slowest computers and never try to upgrade the systems for lack of money, bloated code, or lack of expertise. As many of you know that Twitter has been very slow at times and while that is a burden when your trying to follow a conversation it also gives you a hint to get back to work instead of killing your productivity.

A week or so ago I saw a post from someone saying that a key employee at twitter was fired (The Guy on the Far Left) and no longer working with them. As my understanding this guy had been brought in to help with the spotty and unreliability of twitter in the past few months. To know the guy got fired was a bit dis-hearting to say the least, I mean I didn’t know the guy but for someone who was bought in at the beginning of the year and to be fired already says a lot to me. (btw his twitter account still works)

Twitter sucks as a company has the potential to be a great company and while I don’t live in San Francisco or California for that matter. I wonder if management is jumping to conclusion already about there new hires? Its plain to see that if you hire someone in January and fire them in March or April something didn’t mesh. It could have been a culture shock for both employee and employer but what ever the case. When someone is fired fairly fast it means something just ain’t right. I hope that twitter get a hold of the reigns it seems money is starting to talk and starts to pull in the issues they have on their plate at this time. If management does not get a hold of the issue at hand when the next darling comes along we will all jump ship. Don’t doubt that people won’t jump, look at the Lifecasting relm justin.tv, ustream, and others we jumped for features and reliability this could definitely happen to twitter if the parts don’t start to assemble properly.

Conclusion Ruby on Rails is great…RoR+Twitter=jury still out…twitter management might just need an enema before they lost traction.

Just my two cents (with run on sentences, misspellings, incorrect punctuation, and procrastination laced)

TBTR