I saw a people mention last night that Twitter has a new front page but I didn’t see any changes. This is because it’s only for those who aren’t signed in.

The new home page looks more like a search engine than anything else and lists the most popular topics being discussed below a standard search box.

What do you think of the new home page?

Twitter announced yesterday that UK o2 customers can now twitter via SMS for free.

Full, two-way interaction with Twitter over SMS is now available for everyone who uses O2, the largest mobile operator in the UK. There are no extra fees associated with Twittering over SMS on the 02 network—standard or in bundle rates apply for updating your account and receiving tweets over SMS is free so Tweet your heart out!

To Twitter over SMS with your iPhone or any other mobile, head over to your account settings and activate your device. The Twitter shortcode in the UK is 86444 if you want to save it in your address book. Twitter started with a strong focus on texting and we continue to provide SMS access around the world.

Hopefully other UK operators will follow suit. I’m currently with Orange so I still need to pay to receive texts from Twitter. Thankfully, this won’t be a problem in 5 months time when I get a new contract with unlimited internet.

Do any readers use Twitter on their phone via SMS?

A new website called Tweet Your Prayers has been created to help Jewish people carry on an old tradition of writing prayers on notes and playing them on the Western Wall. All you need to do is send a private message to @TheKotel and the owners will print put the message, print it out and place it in the wall.

The Kotel Twitter’s account allows you to practice the old tradition of placing notes with your prayers in between the stones of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Israel, also known as The Kotel. All you need to do is to tweet your prayers and wishes, and they’ll be printed on real paper, cut down to small notes, and placed in the Wall. All this with respect to your privacy, from wherever you are and whichever device you are using.

The service is currently free though it does appear as if the creator is being overwhelmed with requests right now so maybe they will charge in the future.

I am not too familiar with Jewish traditions though this does seem like a great example of how modern technology can help people from places all over the world carry on their traditions.

Link : Tweet Your Prayers

I was reading an article today from PC World about Hacker Croll, the French hacker who broke into Twitters Google Applications and stole around 300 private documents.

The scary thing is that the hacker didn’t use some specialist software to do this or exploit some security hole. He simply gathered tons of information on Twitter employees and then looked at a way to exploit it.

Hacker Croll started by building a profile of his target company, in this case Twitter. Basically, he assembled a list of employees, their positions within the company, and their associated e-mail addresses. After the basic information was accumulated, Croll built a small profile for each employee with their birth date, names of pets, and so on.

After Croll had created these profiles, he just went about knocking on doors until one fell down. That’s exactly what happened when he did a password recovery process for a Twitter employee’s personal Gmail account. Croll discovered that the secondary account attached to this person’s Gmail was a Hotmail account. The problem was that Hotmail account had been deleted and recycled due to inactivity — a longstanding policy on Hotmail. Now, all Hacker Croll had to do was reregister the Hotmail account for himself, go back and do the Gmail password recovery, and then Gmail sent the password reset information straight to the bad guy.

But it’s not over yet. Gmail asked Hacker Croll to reset the password of the Twitter employee’s personal e-mail account, which he did. But now the original user was locked out of their account, which would send up an obvious red flag. So all Croll did was search the Gmail account itself for passwords from the person’s other active services. Then he entered a commonly used password he’d found, and waited to see if the person began using their account normally. Croll now had access to the Gmail account from behind the scenes, and was able to access information undetected. Making life even eaiser, the Twitter employee used the same password on her business and personal accounts, so the hacker now had access to both, and the rest was history.

The story is quite scary because this could clearly happen to any one of us. I don’t think it’s practical to use different passwords for every site you sign up so I would like to see more OpenID like security sign ins to stop this kind of thing from happening.

The staff at Twitter have not had a great week. Just a day after Twitter personal accounts of staff were hacked, they reported that internal business documents were stolen and were being sent to various blogs and news websites.

Most refused to publish them online however TechCrunch decided to show them, first the revenue reports and a document which detailed Twitters marketing and development strategy over the next year.

I have to say that I’m a bit surprised that TechCrunch decided to publish these private documents. These documents were stolen from Twitter. The fact that they didn’t steal them themselves is neither here nor there.

I wonder how Mike Arrington would feel if his site was hacked and internal information was made public?

What do you think, given the circumstances, should TechCrunch have published these documents?

Kevin

A few months ago someone posted a 247 character tweet, way larger than the usual 140 limit. Amer from ThoughtPick worked out how they did this and decided to break the record with his own 250 character tweet.

Amer spoke of two ways to achieve this:

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 geekier approach using Linux command line: curl -u username:pass -d “status=your long tweet…” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

I’m a bit surprised that Twitters 140 character limit can be broken so easily. I wouldn’t be surprised if they fixed this in the future so if you want to write a very long Twitter message, now’s the time!

Link : Reclaiming the Longest Tweet in History at 250 characters!