It’s time for 2-Factor Authentication on Twitter.

Ridiculous day on wallstreet. The Dow Jones Industrial average dropped around 125 points in minutes. Then it recovered just as quickly. It turns out there was a fake news report sent from the Associated Press @AP Twitter account.

 

In reality the account was hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army. See their Twitter account below @official_SEA6. 

 

It was the third high-profile corporate account to be hacked in recent months. In February, Burger King’s Twitter account was hacked, the company’s logo was replaced by a McDonald’s logo and rogue announcements began to appear. A day later the Twitter account for Jeep was also attacked.

I think it’s time for Twitter to do two things. 

1) Stop screwing around with new services like Twitter Music and Twitter Cards until the site is password secure. 

2) Go to two factor authentication to stop password hacks. 

New LinkedIn Mobile App for the Everyday Professional

LinkedIn wants to give its mobile app a spark, and the social network is doing so by simplifying and customizing it to individually fit each of its users.

The business-focused social network rolled out the major app update late Wednesday night. The updated app features an overhauled design and minimized build that’s intended to let users access as many features as possible with as few finger taps as necessary.

“We designed with one key core principle in mind: having all the stuff you care about one tap away from you,” said Tomer Cohen, a LinkedIn senior product manager and mobile phone lead.

This is LinkedIn’s first major mobile app redesign in more than a year and a half, so the company said it wanted to give users the best experience.

Twitter To Promote Music

This was interesting: http://music.twitter.com/

 

 

LinkedIn Adding Threaded Mentions

Start a Conversation with Mentions on LinkedIn from LinkedIn

To make it easier for users to connect LinkedIn has added a way to start conversations, share knowledge with others and ultimately become even better at what you do.

How does it work?

- Begin by typing the name of a connection or a company in your status update box or a comment field on the Homepage.
- Select someone from the list of your connections that appear in the drop-down, complete your status or comment and post it.
- The person or company you mentioned will receive a notification alerting them that they have been mentioned.

In addition to first-degree connections, you can also mention other LinkedIn members engaged in conversations in the comment sections of posts on the LinkedIn Homepage. Mentions will make it easier for you to start conversations with your network while also enabling you to respond in real-time when someone begins a conversation with you. My question is what happens to InMails? Should users even pay for the service?

Facebook Home: A Social Network’s Bid For Mobile

Home, available on a new HTC phone and for download to a half-dozen other HTC and Samsung phones starting April 12, is a suite of Facebook apps that will load as soon as the phone is turned on. It provides a new Facebook-focused home screen that puts instant messages, news feed updates, and photos front and center on the smartphone home screen.

YouTube shutting down or April Fool’s?

YouTube has posted a hilarious 2013 April Fools’ Day video about picking the best video on the site since the first upload back in 2005. Featured in the fake contest are hits such as Charlie Bit My Finger, Kids React to Grumpy Cat, David After Dentist, and more! The video winner, according to the video, will not be announced until 2023 when the site goes back live. Just love the way they made the video seem so real.

Facebook rolls out threaded replies and comments

After testing the threaded replies feature for months, Facebook is rolling out threaded replies and comments for pages and profiles with more than 10,000 followers. Threaded comments and replies will allow users to reply to specific comments in a thread. The most liked and replied to comments on a post will push their way to the top, while comments that are not replied to or are marked as spam will remain at the bottom. The feature has been in beta since November last year.

The new comment and reply feature should give page owners a great new way to connect with followers. This upgrade opens up more possibilities for page managers. For example, Reddit-style Q&A sessions will now be possible on Facebook pages. Page managers can simply reply to comments instead of posting a whole new one. Following the stream of a conversation should now be easier. The only thing I am wondering is why it too so long to roll out threaded replies.

What you “like” on Facebook shows who you are.

This should be no surprise to Facebook users but a new study confirms that Facebook ‘likes’ can reveal information about who you are.

Research released Monday shows patterns from these Facebook preferences can provide surprisingly accurate estimates of the user’s race, age, IQ, sexuality and other personal information.

The researchers developed an algorithm that uses Facebook likes which are publicly available unless a user chooses stronger privacy settings to create personality profiles, potentially revealing a user’s intimate details.

These mathematical models proved 88 percent accurate for differentiating males from females and 95 percent accurate distinguishing African-Americans from whites.

The algorithms were also able to extrapolate information such as sexual orientation, whether the user was a substance abuser, or even whether their parents had separated.

This data can be used for advertising and marketing, but it also could make users cringe because of the amount of personal data revealed, the researchers said.

“It’s very easy to click the ‘like’ button, it’s seductive,” said David Stillwell, a psychometrics researcher and co-author of the study with colleagues from Cambridge University and Microsoft Research.

“But you don’t realize that years later all those likes are building up against you.”

Stillwell said that while Facebook data was used in this study, similar profiles could be produced using other digital data including Web searches, emails and mobile phone activity.

Read more:

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-facebook-likes-20130312,0,181730.story

Twitter hack brings Burger King 60K new followers

It’s amazing but true. Burger King saw a surprising upside after its Twitter stream was recently compromised: Tens of thousands of people began following its account.

The company had about 50,000 followers before the hack, but that number shot up to more than 110,000 after the incident. “Interesting day here at Burger King, but we’re back!” Burger King tweeted. “Welcome to our new followers. Hope you all stick around!”

Twitter promotes its platform as a tool that companies can use to reach out to customers. But this incident turned that model on its head: Outreach efforts led to embarrassment with the hack, but then the apparent security breakdown aided outreach by generating new contacts with potential customers.

At one point, Burger King’s profile message said that the company had been sold to McDonald’s.

McDonald’s denied involvement, tweeting, “We empathize with our @BurgerKing counterparts…. We had nothing to do with the hacking.” It was unclear who was responsible.

In early February, Twitter said its servers had been breached by “extremely sophisticated” hackers who may have made off with the names and passwords of 250,000 users.

Happy Birthday: Facebook turns nine years old

Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site turned nine on today. With well over 1 billion users, it’s hard to believe that the site has only been around for nine years. The site was started on 4 February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg when he was a sophomore at Harvard University.

Zuckerberg launched an initial version of site, then known as Facemash in 2003. However, Harvard authorities shut the site down because the student information used on the site was obtained by hacking into administration records. Since 2004 Facebook has come along way…