How to hide secret messages in your Twitter updates

Twitter offers a surprising freedom of expression within 140 characters, but what if you want to hide a message in plain sight — say, to get around censorship? Well, it’s now as easy as pie. Matthew Holloway has built a web tool that uses steganography (that is, hiding messages within other content) to put secret phrases inside your tweets. The technique replaces letters with similar-looking characters that hide a second message you can only reveal with the right decoder.

Holloway is quick to stress that this isn’t cryptography. Since anyone can use the tool, your hidden meaning is fair game to anyone who tracks down his website and pastes in your text. It’s also patently obvious that this isn’t an ordinary post, so suspicious types will know that something’s up. Still, if you ever want to enjoy a degree of obscurity on Twitter — or just want to mess with your followers — you can check out the utility at the source link.

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Via: Ars Technica

Source: Twitter Secret Messages

Twitter improves password-reset options, cracks down on suspicious logins

Almost a year after rolling out two-factor authentication for verifying your logins, Twitter is announcing another welcome security update. This time, it’s an improved password-reset process and a smarter system for identifying suspicious logins. The new password-reset process is especially useful; now, when you forget your login and need to create a new one, you can specify which phone number or email address where Twitter should send your reset information. If you don’t have access to the number or email on file, the social network will give you the option to enter new ones. This feature is especially helpful for those traveling abroad, who may not have access to their usual gadgets. It will definitely come in handy for anyone who hasn’t updated their email on Twitter, too.

Hopefully, you won’t need to take much advantage of the second half of the site’s security update. Twitter will now analyze information such as location, device and login history to help identify suspicious logins. So even when someone knows your password, if they’re signing in from an unfamiliar computer, their attempt would likely be flagged. If Twitter deems a login suspicious, the social network will ask a question about your account (something only you would know, in theory) and send you an email notifying you of “unusual activity.”

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Source: Twitter Blog

UK’s National Archives now saving tweets and YouTube videos as historic media

Already home to the UK’s most iconic national documents from the last millennium, The National Archives is expanding its digital collection by going social. It’s begun archiving tweets and YouTube videos published by the UK’s ruling parties over the last decade, permanently preserving them as the official public record. Unlike in the US, where the Library of Congress has set about archiving all of America’s tweets (and has already collected more 170 billion messages), the National Archives’ sights are firmly set on government accounts. While that may include mundane social updates from the Forestry Commission, HM Revenue and Customs and the Office of Fair Trading, the Archive will also preserve moments of national pride: events including the 2012 London Olympics, the birth of Prince George and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee have all been saved in the digital vault. Right now, the collection includes 7,000 YouTube videos and more than 65,000 individual tweets — it has the capacity to collect 3,200 tweets at any one time, though, allowing you to trawl announcements of past environmental heath issues, premium bond interest rates and possibly a future British Wimbledon winner at your leisure.

[Image credit: National Archives]

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Via: National Archives (PDF), The Telegraph

Source: UK Government Web Archive

Stanford turns to Twitter to track earthquakes

It’s easy to tell when an earthquake hits an area full of Twitter users — there’s frequently a rush of panicked tweets within seconds of the ground shaking. If Twitter and Stanford University have their way, though, those posts could be useful for more than just alerting friends. They’ve conducted research showing that geotagged tweets can help model the effects of a quake while it’s happening. When you combine geological data with the volume of related tweets within a given radius, it’s easier to determine the intensity of tremors and accurately track how they spread.

There aren’t any immediate plans to use these social network updates for creating earthquake maps. If they’re ever implemented, though, they could cut the modeling time down to a matter of minutes. That could be a big help to governments that want to deliver relief both quickly and effectively. Tweet volume could even represent the primary data source in areas where there are few recording stations. In other words, don’t be afraid to use that #earthquake tag when things start moving — it could eventually save lives.

[Image credit: New Zealand Defence Force, Flickr]

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Via: TechCrunch

Source: Twitter, Stanford University (PDF)

Twitter’s working on a ‘Whisper mode’ to make conversations private

When sharing gossip on Twitter, there’s always that moment when you have to boldly announce that the conversation will have to continue over DM. Sadly, as well as killing the mood, it means that group discussions get broken up in favor of individual messages behind the veil. It’s a problem that Twitter boss Dick Costolo is aware of, and told Bloomberg that the company would look to build a “whisper mode” that lets you grab whole conversations with friends (plural) and make them private at the push of a button. Naturally, an off-hand by a CEO can’t be taken as gospel, and we don’t know if this is instead of, or beside, the long-mooted private messaging app that would break out Twitter DMs to another platform. Given the rise in real-time messaging platforms like WhatsApp and the anonymity afforded by apps like Secret, however, it looks as if Twitter’s going to muscle up so that we never again have to type “Let’s take this to DM, k?” ever again.

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Via: The Next Web

Source: Bloomberg

Twitter seeks to soar despite slowing adoption

When Twitter released its first earnings report earlier this year, one of the more distressing trends was that the company’s user growth is slowing, and has been for the better part of a year. That’s certainly not the kind of results you’d want from a firm that just filed its IPO a couple of months prior.

Fast forward a few months however, and it seems Twitter has recovered. In its first quarter earnings report for 2014, the social media firm says it’s grown its monthly active user count to 255 million, which is a 5.8% growth from last quarter. Earnings are also up — it made $250 million in Q1 this year, which is a whopping 119% growth from this time in 2013. Twitter is leveraging its TV partnerships as well, stating that 92 percent of users have taken action like tuning into a TV show after seeing a related tweet, and even Nielsen has found a causal relationship between TV watching and Twitter activity. So everything seems pretty rosy, right?

Well, not quite. The company is still operating at a loss (around $132 million) and that 5.8% user growth number is still really low — far lower than expected, and not as high as the 10% growth Twitter enjoyed just a year ago (Contrast that to Facebook, which just surpassed over a billion monthly users recently). To investors, that’s a worrying number, which explains why Twitter’s shares dropped by as much as 10% in after hours trading.

But it’s not as if the website isn’t popular. CEO Dick Costolo made a case in its earnings call earlier today that Twitter is actually incredibly mainstream. “We had 3.3 billion views of tweets just about the Oscars in the 48 hours after the show,” he said. He continued that if you put that number in the context of a popular YouTube network which gets about 3 billion views in a month, it’s a huge success. Twitter also saw a 26% increase of retweets and faves this last quarter, which Costolo said is a sign that new users are just as engaged as existing ones. There was also strong advertiser demand during live events like the Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl, which indicate that users flock to the social media site in those momentous occasions.

Therein, however, lies the rub. The company needs more than just the occasional event or television show to attract users to its flock. The Oscars don’t happen every day, and the Olympics and World Cup only come every four years. Twitter needs to be a place where people can just, well, chat about everyday things, much like how Facebook is for a lot of people. For that to happen, Twitter needs to be friendlier and more accessible. The company is already taking steps towards this with redesigned user profiles, reducing steps in sign-up and enhancing push notifications to encourage discussion and conversations. In the earnings call, CFO Mike Gupta said that user experience is still the guiding factor for the company, which we applaud, if only because that’s one of the key ways to get more users.

“We think of Twitter as this companion experience as to what’s happening in the world,” said Costolo. Now it’s time to encourage everyone else in the world to think the same.

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Source: Twitter