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?

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?

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

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.

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

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!

According to Time Magazine, the negative reviews on Twitter could have cost the producers of Bruno $20 million due. It did make just over $30 million in it’s opening weekend however early signs were indicating that it was going to make $50 million or more.

Word of mouth can be the making or breaking of a movie. In the past it took a few days or a few weeks for word of mouth to spread but Twitter seems to accelerate this process.

Just goes to show how influential Twitter has become. I’m sure that movie producers will start paying attention to Twitter more in the future and may dedicate more money to promoting their films through it.

Here is the full list for all of you Google fanatics

General

twitter.com/Google – our central account
twitter.com/Blogger – for Blogger fans
twitter.com/GoogleCalendar – user tips & updates
twitter.com/GoogleImages – news, tips, tricks on our visual image search
twitter.com/GoogleNews – latest headlines via Google News
twitter.com/GoogleReader – from our feed reader team
twitter.com/iGoogle – news & notes from Google’s personalized homepage
twitter.com/GoogleStudents – news of interest to students using Google
twitter.com/YouTube – for YouTube fans
twitter.com/YouTubeES – en Espanol
twitter.com/GoogleAtWork – solutions for IT and workplace productivity

Geo-related

twitter.com/SketchUp – Google SketchUp news
twitter.com/3DWH – SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse
twitter.com/Modelyourtown – 3D modeling to build your favorite places
twitter.com/EarthOutreach – Earth & Maps tools for nonprofits & orgs
twitter.com/GoogleMaps – uses, tips, mashups
twitter.com/GoogleSkyMap -Android app for the night sky

Ads-related

twitter.com/AdSense – for online publishers
twitter.com/AdWordsHelper – looking out for AdWords questions and tech issues
twitter.com/AdWordsProSarah – Google Guide for AdWords Help Forum
twitter.com/GoogleAnalytics – insights for website effectiveness
twitter.com/GoogleAdBuilder – re building display ads
twitter.com/GoogleRetail – for retail advertisers
twitter.com/TechnologyUK – for U.K. tech advertisers
twitter.com/InsideAdWordsDE – for German AdWords customers
twitter.com/GoogleAgencyDE – for German ad agencies
twitter.com/AdSensePT – info for Portuguese-language publishers
twitter.com/AdWordsRussia – AdWords news & tips in Russian
twitter.com/DentroDeAdWords – Spanish updates from the Inside AdWords blog
twitter.com/AdWordsAPI – AdWords API tips

Developer & technical

twitter.com/GoogleResearch – from our research scientists
twitter.com/GoogleWMC – Google Webmaster Central
twitter.com/GoogleCode – latest updates for Google developer products
twitter.com/GoogleData – Data APIs provide a standard protocol for reading and writing web data
twitter.com/app_engine – web apps run on Google infrastructure
twitter.com/DataLiberation – our initiative for complete import/export of all data
twitter.com/GoogleMapsAPI – about using Google Maps embedded in websites
twitter.com/GoogleIO – Google’s largest annual developer event

Culture, People

twitter.com/googletalks – notes from our @Google speaker series
twitter.com/googlejobs – the voice of Google recruiters

Country or Region

twitter.com/googlearabia – news from the Google Arabia Blog*
twitter.com/googledownunder – Google activities in Australia & New Zealand
twitter.com/GoogleDE – Google in Germany
twitter.com/GoogleLatAm – Latin America (en Espanol)
twitter.com/GooglePolicyIt – Notes on Google policy issues in Italy

The question now is how do they recoup this investment. They recently released a TweetDeck iphone application which proved to be very popular, however it was released for free. Perhaps future versions of the software will have advertisements integrated. i wouldn’t be too surprised if they used the money to invest in a premium version of the script to sell to businesses and professionals.

Considering how often Twitter is reported in newspapers and television, it really isn’t a big surprise. Though it does show the overwhelming growth of the site in the last year.

Elaine Higgleton, from Dictionary company Collins , told the Daily Mail:

Hardly a day goes by when you don’t see some Twitter-related article. Hence I find it entirely unsurprising that this year we have not one Twitter-related entry in the dictionary, but three.

Source : Twitter gains entry in dictionary