Twitter

An online security firm F-Secure revealed that botnets of compromised machines are now used by cyber criminals to issue units of Bitcoin virtual currency.

Perpetrators used the ideas in distributed computing practiced by the SETI project. Cyber criminals programmed their botnets of zombie machines to farm Bitcoins.

"The bots are created with a generator," writes Mikko H Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure. "Generator sets a specific Twitter account to be the one which can be used to control the mining botnet."

Twitter will soon allow bigtime advertisers to customize, automate and publish their ads in bulk directly to the website of the microblogging service, as reported by the sources aware of the situation.

Advertisers will be given an application programming interface, or API, to deliver big amounts of ads on Twitter. Access to the API will be rolled out initially as a pilot test for a restricted number of advertisers.

Talking to journalists at the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, chairman of Google Inc Eric Schmidt said that the company is open to more co-operation with social-media giants Facebook and Twitter, and believes there is room for multiple social networks as it is launching its another social media project.

Schmidt noted that Google will cooperate fully with U.S. antitrust regulators but will not let the formal probe launched last month distract or disrupt its strategy.

As a result of a compromise of a FoxNews.com Twitter account on Monday by hackers people were reported that US President Barack Obama died. Six false tweets were sent from the media source account informing that Obama had been shot dead, prompting an investigation by the Secret Service.

"Hackers sent out several malicious and false tweets that President Obama had been assassinated," Foxnews.com said in a statement about the latest in a wave of high-profile cyber security breaches around the world.

American Express OPEN announced the launch of YourBuzz service that allows small businesses to manage their online presence and learn what is being said about them and their rivals in the social networking sphere. YourBuzz aggregates conversations across such sites as Yelp and CitySearch as well as Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter. YourBuzz ensures listings are accurate, builds customer relationships, and mitigates the damage that can be done from poor reviews.

A Facebook backed social networking browser RockMelt secured financing of $30 million from two investors. Accel Partners and Khosla Partners joined existing investor Andreesen Horowitz in this latest round, the company and investors said. Accel's Jim Breyer and Khosla's Vinod Khosla will take observer roles on RockMelt's board.

Multiple sources report that Twitter is planning to launch its own built in Twitpic competitor. Observers believe that photosharing is a logical next step for Twitter’s expansion.

Recently Twitter spent $40 million on power user client Tweetdeck which represents 13% of its userbase.

It remains unknown what the photosharing URL shortener will look like if any and what the service Twitter for Photos itself will be.
 

NTT DoCoMo Inc has partnered with US social networking service Twitter Inc to jointly develop a location based alert service for smartphone users based on tweets, according to the report in the Nikkei business daily.

The paper also reported that the two firms have signed an agreement under the terms of which Twitter will provide its databases to DoCoMo and the services will be launched this winter.

However, Twitter will remove data that could identify users, before using the stored tweets for this service, the business daily said.

US prosecutors should be required to get a court warrant to get the IP addresses of Twitter users linked to WikiLeaks according to a court brief filed this week by a group of reputed security experts.

Spam tweets that offer links to a sex dating service were recently sent by an official Twitter account, according to the finding of security researchers.

Twitter’s Carolyn Penner posted some statistics about the microblogging website on the company blog. In three years, two months and one day after the launch users wrote one billion tweets. Now they send one billion tweets a week.

Penner wrote that on March 12th alone 572,000 accounts were created which is up from 460,000 accounts on an average day last month. Besides, Twitter’s seen a 182 percent increase in mobile users over the past year.

An Internet social network for professionals LinkedIn is launching its own newspaper that will include articles being shared by the members. The social networking website announced that it creates a customized online newspaper from what the 90 million users are reading online.

Dubbed LinkedIn Today the new service will display excerpts of the most popular articles in various industries, in a move that the company hopes will spur users to interact more on its website.

According to LinkedIn, more than one million messages are shared by members of the network every day.

According to the report made by the Wall Street Journal who cited sources familiar with the matter Google Inc and Facebook Inc among others are talking to Twitter executives over possible takeover of the microblogging company.

Executives at Twitter have held "low level" talks with executives at Facebook and Google in recent months about a possible takeover of Twitter, reports the WSJ on its website.

Other companies are also negotiating with Twitter, as noted by the Journal.

People are not very happy about the marketing on the social media, according to a new research from ExactTarget and CoTweet. 91% of consumers have discarded at least one brand on Facebook, email or Twitter because they found it boring or irrelevant.

“Consumers remain willing to engage with marketers via the inbox, Facebook and Twitter,” said Jeff Rohrs, principal of ExactTarget’s Marketing Research and Education Group.

In a move to help people in Egypt stay connected to other world and be heard Google has launched a special Twitter service, as the government has banned all Internet connections.

"Like many people we've been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground," read a post on Google's official corporate blog on Monday.