Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0
Twitter updates: Japanese launch, possibly privacy invasions
There are two interesting Twitter stories making the rounds this morning. First up is the launch of a localized version of Twitter for Japan. The fact that the microblogging service is branching out to other countries isn't particularly surprising. But what is significant is the fact that the Japanese version of Twitter features advertisements, something which the English language version of the site lacks.It's likely that Twitter will roll out English ads at some point. The site has no other source of revenue. But whenever you roll out an ad-free service and then start placing display ads on the interface, people will complain. So it's probably a smart move to include advertisements from the get go in Japan.
In other news, an apparent Twitter privacy breach turned out to be a bit of a false alarm. But only a bit. Blogger and Twitter user Orli Yakuel discovered that many of her Twitter direct messages, which were supposed to be private communications between two users, were showing up on her public timeline. This is basically the same thing as posting your private emails on your blog. Not good.
It turns out that Twitter probably wasn't responsible. Rather, Orli was testing a new service called GroupTweet, and entered her account info instead of setting up a new account. But this raises another issue. There are a huge number of third party tools for Twitter. And many require you to enter your login information. While we've been pretty happy to do this in the past, figuring the worst that could happen would be that someone would start sending out Tweets in our name and we'd delete our account, the possibility of our private messages being made public hadn't really occurred to us. There really needs to be a better way for third party applications to access your Twitter data without requiring your username and password.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
zkam said 11:35AM on 4-23-2008
... the worst that could happen would be that someone would start sending out Tweets in our name and we'd delete our account ...
If some had your login info, couldn't they change your password, thereby preventing you from deleting your account? I suppose you can try to reach support via the "Contact us" links, but I wouldn't expect a quick response.
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