Madness

Wednesday March 25, 2009 at 11:44

Permalink ∞ | Tags Twitter

Twitter cupcakes - lomo:

Ginga Blah » Tweet Sweet

This post was reblogged from caramel*tumblr.

Friday March 06, 2009 at 15:30

Permalink ∞ | Tags Twitter

Tweet Stats: If the first 6 days of March are any indication, I’m on record pace this month on number of tweets. The graphs over at TweetStats tell an interesting story about my Twitter use. Over the past month, since switching to a 3G iPhone, my Twitter use has really jumped. It’s become one of my favorite sources of news and information, as well as, a place to meet and connect with people. Go find out what your Twitter trends look like.

Sunday February 22, 2009 at 19:23

Permalink ∞ | Tags Twitter

Twitter Growth
I was curious how fast Twitter was growing, so I spent a few minutes just now digging into some data (it’s raining and I’m bored). Twitter assigns sequential IDs to each post on their site. By analyzing those ID numbers in relation to the time elapsed between two posts, you can estimate the total number of updates made by all Twitter members. The chart above shows the total number of post IDs that were assigned each day over the last year or so. While it’s possible that some IDs are generated for posts that were deleted or by hiccups in their system, I imagine this is a fairly accurate view of their post volume and growth trends. A few interesting highlights:
Twitter is currently generating almost 4 million post IDs per day on average.
Post growth increased significantly towards the end of last year and Twitter has been on the hockey stick curve since then.
The spike you see in early November is election day, which was a huge day for Twitter.
Twitter is still relatively small compared to status update volume on Facebook. Facebook publically disclosed that at least “15 million users update their statuses at least once each day”.
Interesting data. Twitter has clearly passed some sort of tipping point, but can they catch up to Facebook?

Twitter Growth

I was curious how fast Twitter was growing, so I spent a few minutes just now digging into some data (it’s raining and I’m bored). Twitter assigns sequential IDs to each post on their site. By analyzing those ID numbers in relation to the time elapsed between two posts, you can estimate the total number of updates made by all Twitter members. The chart above shows the total number of post IDs that were assigned each day over the last year or so. While it’s possible that some IDs are generated for posts that were deleted or by hiccups in their system, I imagine this is a fairly accurate view of their post volume and growth trends. A few interesting highlights:

Twitter is currently generating almost 4 million post IDs per day on average.

Post growth increased significantly towards the end of last year and Twitter has been on the hockey stick curve since then.

The spike you see in early November is election day, which was a huge day for Twitter.

Twitter is still relatively small compared to status update volume on Facebook. Facebook publically disclosed that at least “15 million users update their statuses at least once each day”.

Interesting data. Twitter has clearly passed some sort of tipping point, but can they catch up to Facebook?

This post was reblogged from joe lazarus.

Friday February 06, 2009 at 9:16

Permalink ∞ | Tags Twitter HOWTO

Create your own Twitter Badge

I’ve never been a big fan of the Badges created by Twitter. Though custom themes are possible, you have very little control over exactly what gets displayed. Fortunately, Twitter has a full API that makes accessing your public timeline realitively simple. Just remember, this will not work if you have set your updates to Private.

I’ve been playing around with the Twitter API for a while now, creating a full backup of all my posts, and posts of users I follow for faster off line viewing. When Fail Whale sitings were common place, this allowed me to keep up with stuff, even when Twitter was down. It never really occured to me, to use this same type of method to create custom Twitter Badges. I have tried several of the official Badges in the past, with varying levels of success. My biggest complaint, is that the Javascript is often too bloated, and when Twitter is down, the page would take forever to render. By calling the JSON directly, the page will continue to load, and the Twitter element will not be displayed unless it can successfully read and parse the JSON.

So, enough about why, here’s the how. Tumblr doesn’t lend itself to effectively presenting code, hence the link.

Monday January 05, 2009 at 16:03

Permalink ∞ | Tags Twitter hacks

Twitter’s Cookie Fiasco - Authentication the Wrong Way

Twitter has come under attack the last couple of days because of a phishing scam. After looking at this scam, and thinking about how Twitter maintains a user’s session, I decided to play around a little bit with my account.

First, I’m using Safari on OSX, but all browsers have the same problem, it’s just easier to explain with Safari. When you log into Twitter, it sets several cookies. Each of these are tied to your account. Fortunately, the cookie ID, though the same in each of them (first x digits) is not your user id. However, after taking a closer look, I realized that since all of these are stored in Cookies.plist in the user’s Cookies directory, it would be very simple to modify the plist with a plist editor. Getting the right combination is actually very difficult, and since my goal was not to hack another user’s account, I decided to test my initial theory. Since Twitter does not re-authenticate the user with each session, and instead relies on cookies, what if I copied my Cookies.plist and saved it for later? I made a copy, removed all my cookies, and went back to Twitter. It correctly asked me to log back in. Closed the browser, over-wrote Cookies.plist, and re-opened my browser. When I went to Twitter, it believed I was already logged in, and therefore didn’t ask for any credentials.

Test one was a success, or a failure depending on your point of view.

The second test is a bit more scary. Since I have this Cookies.plist file, what if I changed my password? So, I went into Twitter, changed my password, logged out, deleted my cookies, and closed the browser. I then copied my Cookies.plist file back (a file with a different password authentication) and started over again. To my horror, when I went to Twitter, it believed I was logged in, even though I had changed the password. Now granted, in order to change the password you have to know your password, but this got me thinking. I don’t have to know anything to change my email address. I changed my email address, and then changed my password. I deleted my cookies again, and went back to Twitter. I proceeded to ask Twitter to send me my password, since I no longer knew it. In a couple of minutes, I got my password, at the new email address I had set up.

Conclusion, until Twitter changes the way in which users authenticate, no compromised account is safe.

-Update: In order for this to work, you must check the “Remember Me” box when you log in the first time.

Tuesday July 22, 2008 at 16:25

Permalink ∞ | Tags Twitter quotes

“Remember when Discovery Channel had science shows?” is the new “Remember when MTV played music videos?”

— Twitter