I blank out when it comes to writing intros, so I’m diving into my thoughts straight ahead. Everyone talks about Google’s “far into the future” vision and how it’s one of the most brilliantly run companies ever. Reading the latest news about Google Goggles, Favorite Places, image search advancements and so on, got me thinking: I am imaging that a few Google employees sat down one afternoon, just before Christmas 2004 and one of them said:
“We’re Google. Let’s create a new market that no one can follow us into!”
And that’s what they’ve been doing for the past 5 years; creating a new market share that no one can compete with them at. Think about the timeline:
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It is often neither security loopholes nor password cracking that allow people access our private information on Facebook without our approval. It’s actually our own human nature: the trust of a friend’s name.
Don't add just any person as a friend
Whether you like Facebook or not, the truth remains that Facebook is one of the best mainstream websites around when it comes to providing options with which you can protect your privacy. Every time anyone discovers a new method for hacking private information, the guys at Facebook patch it the next day. What their security engineers cannot do though is teach the users to tell a social engineer apart from a friend.
And that’s why you need to be aware of this: the easiest way to hack Facebook today is by borrowing a chapter from psychology class. Hackers are not hacking as programmers anymore, they’re hacking as social engineers.
Huh?
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During the past few months, we have noticed a couple of bugs/issues with the popular real-time micro-blogging platform, Twitter. You can learn how to post a tweet longer than 140 characters, or how Twitter has been losing users’ tweets during the past few weeks. Today, I noticed a new bug – I’m not the first to do so, but it’s still worth talking about - it’s the block/unblock bug.
There is a new Twitter “gambling” game called Bet Your Followers that exploits this bug. Their elevator pitch is that “Bet Your Followers is a Twitter game that lets you gamble your followers as currency“, and the block/unblock bug is one of the reasons this game was possible to create in the first place. The part where they force users to follow you if you “win” still puzzles me, though – if it works of course.
What is it & how to do it?
Twitter's Block-Unblock Bug
I have a few annoying followers that I keep filtering out every time I try following back all those who follow me. So every time around, I have to keep an eye out for those users and make sure I do not follow them back by mistake. At the same time, I do not want to negatively affect these users’ accounts by blocking them indefinitely. At the end of the day, this maybe how Twitter determines and terminates spam accounts. The Twitter issue I’m referring to as the Block/Unblock bug simply eliminates this problem by forcing this follower to unfollow you without the need to hack their account to unfollow yourself ;). This is done by simply blocking and unblocking the user.
To do it yourself, just do the following:
- Go to the Twitter profile page of the user that you’d like to force to unfollow you. This should be like http://twitter.com/annoyinguser
- Locate the “block @annoyinguser” link and hit it. Now neither you nor @annoyinguser follow one another.
- Unblock him now using the same link on his profile page – unless he’s a spammer of course!
- That’s it – his “following” count just dropped one!
Final thoughts…
It’s not the first time I hear about bugs, security issues and unexpected downtime of platforms around the Web. So, should we trust Twitter and Facebook (…etc) with our data and the protection of our privacy? Is it a mistake?
A good chunk of a blogger writings is usually based on fresh news stories that are making the headlines. The fresher the story, the higher the chance for the blogger to make an impact. We, Thoughtpickers, are carrying a social media blog which aims to bring a variety of informative and interesting discussions and topics about social media. As a part of our job, we have to deliver you our perspective and commentary on fresh social media news, and thus we were inclined to figure out how to get that chunk of fresh news as soon as it is reported.
Y! Pipes Screenshot
A brief about news sources:
Our experience and research led us to the following 4 sources of fresh news, and the ways to obtain them as they develop:
One-way broadcast news sources (Web 1.0 style):
- News agencies and news networks which operate in the real world. The best news aggregator we found is Google News. It aggregates many of the main news sources including AP, Reuters, CNN, NYTimes, …etc. It is also categorized which, in turn, allows us to pick the category that interests us the most – tech news in our case. In addition to that, it also offers alerts via emails or RSS feeds.
- Press releases issued by companies around the globe. Press releases are covered partially by Google News if a company issues frequent press releases and is listed as a news source by Google. Some of the top press release distribution services we found are: prweb.com, prnewswire.com, businesswire.com, pr.com, marketwire.com. Moreover, one of the best press release search engines we stumbled upon is EurekAlert which also sends alerts – as the name suggests. But again, after a lot of hours spent clicking around and comparing different services, we believe that Google News covers press releases in a reliable and fast way, so there is no need to consider other sources for press releases.
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Are you a Twitter addict that happens to be stuck in China, the U.A.E., Iran, or even the White House? Then chances are that you won’t be able to get your Twitter fix, but worry not for as long as there is an internet connection then there is way. We will be going through some of the ways to bypass the blockage of Twitter and help you get your fix.
Bypass Twitter's Blocking and Censorship
1. Use your instant messenger: If you are using Gtalk, Msn or Yahoo add the user “imified@imified.com”. As soon as you start chatting with that user(bot) you will be provided with a menu and it will create an account for you on imified. Select the “My Account” from the main menu by typing 4(default) and you will be redirected to the imified website and there you can add the Twitter widget and add it to your account menu. So when you access it you will be able to get notification and update your status. This will allow you to easily update your Twitter timeline from anywhere you can access your IM, even on a phone. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what you can do with imified!
2. Use your email: Browse to twittermail and enter your Twitter credentials and they will supply you with an email address. By using that secret email address you will be able to send and receive tweets using your email account, the message body of the email sent will be the tweet.
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In May, I noticed that a person can tweet longer than 140 characters, and blogged about it. About a week ago, Brian Caulfield of Forbes wrote and published an article claiming that Forbes reporter Taylor Buley (@taylorbuley) posted a 247-characters tweet claiming it was the longest tweet ever. A few days later, Terrence O’Brien of Switched.com wrote a post about the same tweet entitled “Man Claims to Have Written Longest Tweet Ever (247 Characters)”.
I would like to reclaim the longest tweet ever with the following 250-character tweet that I just posted. Can anyone beat this with a 251 character tweet?
This is the longest tweetever at 250 characters
I’m just doing that for fun – so I’m posting this under the ‘Offbeat’ category. :) If you like this post, why don’t you follow me on Twitter @amerkawar.
Update (30 minutes after publishing): As soon as I tweeted about this, I started getting the question “How to do it?“, so, here you go:
Method 1: Load twitter.com. Disable Javascript, reload the page. You’ll notice that the character counter disappears. That’s it!
Method 2: A more geeky approach using Linux command line: curl -u username:pass -d “status=your long tweet…” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
Update 2 (15 July): So, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) tweeted about this post a few hours ago, and it drove more than 20k visitors to our blog! Don’t forget to subscribe to our feed to be notified as soon as I post the blog stats of “The Kutcher Effect“. (It’s online now here)
