Babble of the Twits

By Xah Lee. Date:

my twitter babble today:

Facebook twit today

A comment by me on http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2693.

hum… was wondering if lang log has blogged bout reddit, if so, i haven't reddit. (just did a search thru the search box here, didn't seem to find it.)

a quick google found me:

few meanings are apparent: i've read it; i've submitted to reddit.com; i've read it on reddit; i am doing something on reddit.

am thinking, tweeted might be twitted or twittered. Need a google fight here.

so… these days i might have stumbled upon a article, reddit, tweeted/twitted/twittered it, buzzed, get slashdotted, im'd, or skyped.

…though, i have a feeling that none of these would stick for good. Personally, i really find “read” to be a problem, and am at a lost how i should fix it with my brazen english-rectification style. “Readed” looks good in form but sounds awful -- too much like “re-did”. While “red” is worse a solution, cause of the homograph and homophone, besides carrying on the illogicality.

my other personal problem is “women”…

Some interesting highlights of Wikipedia Twitter reading. Quote:

San Antonio-based market research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the US and in English) over a 2-week period in August 2009 from 11:00a to 5:00p (CST) and separated them into six categories:[40]

In August 2010, South Korea tried to block Twitter due to the North Korean government opening a Twitter account.[117] The North Korean Twitter account created on August 12, @uriminzok, loosely translated to mean "our people" in Korean, acquired over 4,500 followers in less than one week. On August 19, 2010, South Korea's state-run Communications Standards Commission banned the Twitter account for broadcasting "illegal information."[118] According to BBC US and Canada, experts claim that North Korea has invested in "information technology for more than 20 years" with knowledge of how to use social networking sites to their power[119] This appears to be "nothing new" for North Korea as the reclusive country has always published propaganda in its press, usually against South Korea, calling them "warmongers."[119] With only 36 tweets, the Twitter account was able to accumulate almost 9,000 followers. To date, the South Korean Commission has banned 65 sites, including this Twitter account.[118]

Twitter is ranked as one of the 10 most visited websites worldwide by Alexa's web traffic analysis.

Twitter is mainly used by older adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, says Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. "Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years," he said.[49] According to comScore only 11% of Twitter's users are aged 12 to 17.[49] comScore attributes this to Twitter's "early adopter period" when the social network first gained popularity in business settings and news outlets attracting primarily older users. However, comScore as of late, has stated that Twitter has begun to "filter more into the mainstream", and "along with it came a culture of celebrity as Shaq, Britney Spears and Ashton Kutcher joined the ranks of the Twitterati."[50]

According to a study by Sysomos in June 2009, women make up a slightly larger Twitter demographic than men -- 53% over 47%. It also stated that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all activity, and that New York has the most Twitter users.[51]

According to Quancast, 27 million people in the US used Twitter as of 09/03/2009. 63% of Twitter users are less than 35 years old, 60% of Twitter users are Caucasian, but a higher than average (compared to other Internet properties) are African American (16%) and Hispanic (11%); 58% of Twitter users have a total household income of at least $60K.[52]

The Industry Standard has remarked that Twitter's long-term viability is limited by a lack of revenue.[56] Twitter board member Todd Chaffee forecast that the company could profit from e-commerce, noting that users may want to buy items directly from Twitter since it already provides product recommendations and promotions.[57]

The Twitter Web interface uses the Ruby on Rails framework,[61] deployed on a performance enhanced Ruby Enterprise Edition implementation of Ruby.[62]

From the spring of 2007 until 2008 the messages were handled by a Ruby persistent queue server called Starling,[63] but since 2009 implementation has been gradually replaced with software written in Scala.[64] The service's application programming interface (API) allows other web services and applications to integrate with Twitter.[65][66]

On January 5, 2009, 33 high-profile Twitter accounts were compromised after a Twitter administrator's password was guessed by a dictionary attack.[86] Falsified tweets -- including sexually explicit and drug-related messages -- were sent from these accounts.[87]

Twitter launched the beta version of their “Verified Accounts” service on June 11, 2009, allowing famous or notable people to announce their Twitter account name. The home pages of these accounts display a badge indicating their status.[88]

In May 2010, a bug was discovered by İnci Sözlük users that allowed Twitter users to force others to follow them without the other user's knowledge. For example, comedian Conan O'Brien's account which had been set to follow only one person was changed to receive nearly 200 malicious subscriptions.[89]

In response to Twitter's security breaches, the Federal Trade Commission brought charges against the service which were settled on June 24, 2010. This was the first time the FTC had taken action against a social network for security lapses. The settlement requires Twitter to take a number of steps to secure users' private information including maintenance of a “comprehensive information security program” to be independently audited biannually.[90]

“MouseOver” exploit

On 21 September 2010, an XSS Worm became active on Twitter. When an account user held the mouse cursor over blacked out parts of a tweet, the worm within the script would automatically open links and re-post itself on the reader's account.[91] The exploit was then re-used to post pop-up ads and links to pornographic sites.

The origin is unclear but Pearce Delphin (known on Twitter as @zzap) and a Scandinavian developer, Magnus Holm, both claim to have modified the exploit of a user, possibly Masato Kinugawa, who was using it to create coloured Tweets.[92] Kinugawa, a Japanese developer, reported the XSS vulnerability to Twitter on August 14. Later, when he found it was exploitable again, he created the account 'RainbowTwtr' and used it to post coloured messages.[92]

Delphin says he exposed the security flaw by tweeting a JavaScript function for “onMouseOver”,[92] and Holm later created and posted the XSS Worm that automatically re-tweeted itself.[91]

Accounts affected by the virus included Sarah Brown, wife of former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Security firm Sophos reported the virus was spread by people doing it for “fun and games”, but noted it could be exploited by cybercriminals.[93] Twitter issued a statement on their status blog at 13:50 UTC that “The exploit is fully patched”.[91][94] Twitter representative Carolyn Penner has expressed that they will not be pressing charges over this incident.[95]