Wednesday Twitter Headlines: Security, XLIV, Space, Teens

No! No celebrity news this week! Not one blip about Fall Out Boy or Lady Gaga. Not one!

Unsecured Twitter?

But this week Twitter did say: "I's been haxed!

"A red flag was first raised on Twitter's end when it noticed an abnormally high number of followers for certain accounts. This prompted the company to investigate and eventually reset the passwords for anyone following those suspicious accounts. Twitter noted that although torrent sites have been around a while, this is the first time it's seen an attack using this angle."

It was a custom-built, torrent site back door, password reset phishing scam. W00t! As always, Twitter kinda has it under control.


Beer! I Mean Super Bowl XLIV

And if you've been waiting with baited breath to see what's going on with tweeting and Super Bowl XLIV, your wait is over: Super Bowl XLIV Earns an Official Twitter Hashtag: #SB44. I'd give you a blockquote on this one but that's the whole story. Not that this is actually news. I went to a conference this past December where a half dozen of us tweeted the event. We had a hashtag too.

Note to media: A hashtag is not earned. You don't have to file with the IRS or anything. You just make it up, let people know, and start using it.


Um, Teens and, um, Twitter

And I also noticed an abnormally large number of stories covering the fact that teens still aren't showing Twitter the love that they show Facebook. Also, this is not news, just like it wasn't news last August when I talked about it.

Maybe I need to start a blog on Twitter headlines that aren't news.


Not Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

And this one's a little older than a week, but: Tweets From Spaaaaaaace!

NASA has set up an impressive wireless connection that provides astronauts on International Space Station with Internet access so they can surf the Web, e-mail their friends and family back home, and even send Twitter messages.

Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer started using the connection this morning by sending the first tweet originating from the space station.

Sweet. Question: Is a tweet that you're going to the bathroom more interesting if you're going in a suction-powered space toilet on the ISS?

Answer: Yeah!


So what did you learn from Twitter this week? I'm always happy to read your feeback!

Twitter Wed: 2009 Trends, Chris Brown, Contributors, Games?

So in 2009 --

Beat Down n Quittin'

No, sorry, let's just get this over with. Chris Brown quit Twitter. He flipped out online at Walmart when he didn't see his album. It looked like this:

im not biting my tongue about [expletive] else… the industry can kiss my [expletive].
 … yeah i said it and i aint retracting [expletive]

Oh noes! Boo hoo! Perhaps beating the snot out of Rihanna wasn't the right publicity move.
</celebrityGossip>

So in 2009...

Twitter's main trending topics for the year have been released. People topping the list were Michael Jackson, Susan Boyle, Adam Lambert, Kobe, and that guy we already talked about above. In topics, Swine flu picked up two slots in the top ten thanks to the hash tag and Iran-related pulled three, including the #1 spot. Harry Potter beat out New Moon in movies (hehehe), "Super Bowl" took sports, and "Google Wave" took the tech category.

Twitter Contributors

Twitter's branching out to business appeal by testing a contributor feature where multiple users could be included under one corporate or business entity. They've had teams of bloggers on one blog for years now. Not entirely surprising it's coming to microblogging. But Mashable has some great screen shots to round out the experience.

In a completely unrelated yet equally unsurprising move, Facebook is prepping to allow public updates to go to Twitter. Um, Linkedin went dual wield over a month ago, Tweetdeck already hooks me into Facebook, Linkedin, and MySpace, and Ping.fm is the one ring to rule them all. Is this really news?

Game Killers - this was going to be bold until I realized it really just fit into the same category. Again, unsurprisingly, your favorite annoying genre of Facebook games is coming to you through Twitter. Great. Maybe now I can get Farmville from both sides. W00t!


So that's it for this week's headlines. What Twitter news have you heard? Let me know your fav's and I'll probably use them next week. Have a great day!

Really?: In Memoriam

Having been born of its cousin decades ago, Really? had been used as a one-word, sarcastic commentary as a foreshortening and akin to such phrases as "Are you really going to wear that?" and "Is that really your answer to this situation?" for over a decade but had received an injection of sarcasm in fringe popular culture that recently bled into mainstream popular culture.

It is uncertain whether the filming of the Lowe's commercial featuring massive abuse of Really? or Eric Marschall's mother's use happened first, but it is suspected that both occurred in a single, monumental synchronistic moment that stretched its little heart too far. Too far indeed.

Really? passed away quietly in its home sometime last week. Overexertion is the suspected cause of death.

Really? is survived by its cousin, really, a modifier that - despite constant and extreme overuse - has survived throughout the ages and even increased itself in exposure.

It could be said that Really? would be missed, but we'd be lying. Any future attempts to resurrect the single-word phrase from this point forward is considered a foolish attempt at both wit and humor and should be put down immediately. A moratorium has been called for in respect for this loss.

Really?, we wish you well.

The Techno-Drudge Myth-Fraud

I'm not purporting to be staging a coup, though if I were I would do it upon a humongous ottoman as it would be more comfortable. I'm not making a political issue over Matt Drudge's site content. Very simply, I have seen what I would call fraud and need to pull the aside the curtain for a moment of clarity on what numbers you may run across actually mean.

And yes, this is important. Because it's news media and because it's technology (or technology hacked). This is deceptive practice on the main stage.

What's the issue?
Every so often, Matt Drudge's The Drudge Report reports on how much traffic he's received, generally with some tasty braggadocio. The latest report (PDF) puts him just under Google News, CNN, and the Weather Channel.

The first clue that something's rotten in Denmark would be that Drudge's 1+ (sometimes a secondary "developing") page is pulling 2.14% traffic compared to CNN's many, many pages taking in only 3.15%. (NOTE: These percentages may not appear large, but it is market share of ALL news and Media websites that exist.)

This is relatively preposterous when you look at the number of potential visitable pages: 1 vs. hundreds. Is the single page site really that popular?

In a word: NO.

What's a Visit?
The report that's being touted is from Hitwise, and they state in the first paragraph: "Note - the Hitwise data featured is based on US market share of visits..."

A visit is defined as every time someone accesses the site. Sometimes it is separated into new (or unique) visitors and return visitors. In this case, every time someone accesses www.drudgereport.com, it is counted as a visit.

So what's so hinkey?
If you've ever visited The Drudge Report, if you were there for more than 3 minutes, you may have noticed that the page will reload by itself. Every time it does that, it should hold to reason that, because you are again accessing the site without clicking on another link on the site, it tags another visit. Leave it open in a tab for a couple hours while you mean to get to it? You get the picture.

(As a comparison, every time you visit CNN.com, if you click 50 different links to read those stories, it still counts as a single visit.)

Why does Drudge's site refresh automatically like that? It's a simple bit of JavaScript that goes like this:

var timer = setInterval("autoRefresh()", 1000 * 60 * 3);
function autoRefresh(){self.location.reload(true);}

This means that if you're carefully reading through the headlines and it takes you 15 minutes, you are registering 5 visits even though you've only visited the site once.

What else?
The Drudge Report website is a single page with dozens of links, almost all of which link to stories on other sites. None of the link text uses the target="_blank" anchor attribute, meaning when you click a story link, it takes you to another site. But you would like to see what other stories they have on the site, so when you are done reading that story, you click the back button. You've just logged another visit.

Conclusion
It is impossible to calculate the actual number of people accessing The Drudge Report in any given month without more data, like unique visitors. But the data that is being pushed as proof of popularity is deviously misleading as the pairing of the site structure auto-reload and necessity of the Back button lead to an enormous number of Visits by its very nature. Caveat Emptor.

Again, this is not a political opinion, but information based on web analytics knowledge and source code research. I visit The Drudge Report several times a week. But I know what's going on behind the scenes. I generally take a quick scan, CTRL-click the stories to open them in separate tabs, and close out of the main one.

And I just thought you should know.

Any ideas or thoughts are always welcome in the comments.

Stock Photos: Yea or Nea?

I've recently been through a couple experiences that have made me question the use of stock images. A month or so ago I heard from one of my clients that they would not use stock images because of a recent study that showed that people are recognizing stock images. I took it under consideration, but still used (and continue to use) some stock images when helping my clients put their sites together. Then, two weeks ago, I was grabbing images from another client's suggested list when I saw the image above at iStockPhoto. My first thought was: [That first client] was right!

The above image, as mentioned, was pulled from iStockPhoto, as is obvious from the watermark. But as soon as I saw it, I recognized it as the home page (and some ATMs) photo of Fifth Third Bank.

They've recently made some changes to their home page, but I saw that kids with umbrella image on the ATM display no less than 2 days ago.

So what are your thoughts on whether or not people should use stock photos? At one level, people are not stupid; they realize that they are looking at idealized representations of what you are creating or selling. On another level: FAKE! And on a third and most realistic level, web budgets can handle a couple, professional stock photos. Can they handle a photographer?

I'd love to hear what you think. Hit me in comments.

ESPN360 as a New Model?

No ESPN360 for Cincinnati

Here's the rundown: Almost every online subscription service on the internet works with one basic mechanism. If you want the extra or platinum or gold or fancypants content, you get out your credit card and pay some sort of structured fee to access that content. It works that way with streaming video, radio archives, Ancestry.com, and porn. So I hear.

Well, ESPN360 is going by a different route. They are charging the ISP to access the content. For example: I connect through Time Warner's Roadrunner internet service. If Time Warner doesn't want to pay ESPN360, I can't see that content. If they do decide to pay for it and pass the buck as a jump in my internet bill, I pay whether or not I access ESPN360. It's basically the Cable TV model.

So is this a gimmick? A fad? A threat? The end of the internet?

Let me know what you think.

(Much more at Wired Epicenter)

Nielsen Online Search Share Numbers

Last week, Nielsen Online came out with the search share numbers for December 2008 (PDF).

Guess who's on top?

% share of total searches
Google - 62.9%
Yahoo - 16.8%
Microsoft Live/MSN - 9.8%
AOL - 4.1%
Ask - 2.0%

While the number of searches overall jumped 19.6% from December '07, the only one of the top 5 above to lose out was Microsoft, dumping at -15.5% from the previous year.

I can't say I'm surprised. Ever since Microsoft slowly and cripplingly attempted a crossover from MSN to Live and dumped resources into mirrors of Google apps (that no one wanted because, hey, Google's already got an app for that), I've been watching the steady, systematic decline of what can only be looked at as: as X approaches infinity, Y approaches zero. We will never reach infinity in reality just as Microsoft will never reach zero. Because they're Microsoft.

Which provides a long, slow tail in which to enjoy Google walk away with their numbers like a thief in the night.