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Twitter Blog Trust And Safety


Tuesday, March 10, 2010

As Director of Twitter's Trust and Safety team, a big part of my job is focused on the detection and prevention of spam and abuse. A couple weeks ago, Biz explained how Twitter users were being victimized by phishing scams spread primarily through links in Direct Messages. Basically, people click the link and bad things happen. My team can only detect these scams after malicious links have already been sent out.





Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we'll be able keep that user safe.





Since these attacks occur primarily on Direct Messages and email notifications about Direct Messages, this is where we have focused our initial efforts. For the most part, you will not notice this feature because it works behind the scenes but you may notice links shortened to twt.tl in Direct Messages and email notifications. Special thanks to @wfarner and @ram for building this service and helping keep us all a little safer!

Posted by @delbius at 4:34 PM



Enabling A Rush of Innovation

Monday, March 01, 2010

Even before Twitter was officially a company, we opened our technology in ways that invited developers to extend the service. Before long, Twitter became a platform and an ecosystem of innovation began to grow. Recently we’ve announced partnerships with Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft. These Web leaders gained access beyond our free offerings—we licensed them the full feed of all public tweets. This “Firehose” of data is made possible by our Streaming API developed at Twitter by John Kalucki and team. There is a lot of useful information in this stream of data.





Full investment in this ecosystem of innovation, means all our partners should have access to the same volume of data, regardless of company size. More than fifty thousand interesting applications are currently using our freely available, rate-limited platform offerings. With access to the full Firehose of data, it is possible to move far beyond the Twitter experiences we know today. In fact, we’re pretty sure that some amazing innovation is possible.





Today, we’re happily turning the Firehose on for some new partners focused mainly on exploring the incredibly rich field of real-time search and discovery. We are thrilled to announce that Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search join us as partners. These companies range from funded startups to part-time, one-person operations so we came up with a fair way to license access that scales with their business. If you think there may be a potential partnership involving access to the Firehose, let's start a conversation. Our email is api@twitter.com.

Posted by @rsarver at 1:08 PM



Avoid 'Phishing' Scams

Friday, February 26, 2010

Over the past few days, Twitter has been helping folks victimized by a phishing attack. Phishing is a deceitful process by which an attempt is made to acquire sensitive information such as Twitter usernames and passwords. The bad guys masquerade as someone you trust and may send you a Direct Message (DM) with a link. This DM may say something along the lines of, "LOL that you??" followed by a link to a fake Twitter login page. If you enter your credentials on that fraudulent page, the phishers can sign in as you and trick more people.



Anatomy of A Phishing Scam



Generally a phishing attack against Twitter users breaks down to a three-part process. First, accounts compromised in the manner described above send out messages to all accounts following them. Second, accounts that are newly compromised send out more messages. Third, the scammers behind the phishing attack make an attempt at monetization by sending out spam links instead of links to a fake login page. We fight phishing scams by detecting affected accounts and resetting passwords. However, it's better to stop them before they start.



Avoiding Phishing Scams



We designed the Direct Message system so that you could only get DMs from accounts that you choose to follow—this cuts way down on spam and attacks. Our Trust and Safety team identifies and deletes spam accounts every day. Still, we recommend against indiscriminately following hundreds or thousands of accounts without having a look first. To learn how you can avoid falling victim to a phishing scam or if you have other questions about keeping your Twitter account secure, please read Keeping Your Account Secure at our help site.



For regular status updates on related issues. please follow @safety and @spam. There is also a Twitter status blog that we update regularly. For a lot more information about Phishing, check out this article on Wikipedia.

Posted by @Biz at 9:45 AM



Expressing Great Joy Or Excitement

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

In other words: Yahoo! People want to discover and share tweets everywhere ranging from SMS and TV, to apps and the Web. For a global network of 600 million people, Yahoo! represents the Web. Similar to the partnerships we have made with other large internet companies, Yahoo! will receive what has been dubbed "Firehose"—a full feed of public tweets sent to Twitter and our partners every second of every day from all around the world.



Through this arrangement, people will be able to find relevant tweets in Yahoo! Search as well as other popular products and properties, including the Yahoo! Homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and more. Yahoo! will also be able to build unique Twitter clients into their properties making it easier for folks to tweet wherever they feel comfortable within the Yahoo! network.



From our perspective, this partnership represents a big opportunity. Tweets may be short, but they have proven over and over again to contain valuable information. As the Twitter information network grows and expands, it becomes more valuable for everyone who participates. Our open approach helps us get closer to providing universal connectivity to a global network of immediate information.

Posted by @Biz at 9:37 PM



Open Engineering

Hi, I'm the other @evan, and I'm the infrastructure manager at Twitter. I want to tell you about the steps we've taken to make our engineering division more open and transparent.



First, we've created an open source directory for the entire company. This lists all the public software that the engineering teams have created or contributed to. Much of Twitter's success has been enabled by open-source software, and we want to give back. Everyone is welcome to use this software for their own projects, and if the project is Twitter-related, so much the better.



We've also begun posting to our new engineering blog, which focuses on day-to-day engineering challenges. Subscribe to it if you're interested in the development of Twitter internals. We'll try to sample the full range of software development issues we face at a fast-moving company like Twitter. We already have posts about how local trends are organized, how we attack capacity problems, and how you can use our translation libraries.



Finally, we've updated our job descriptions to better reflect our company culture and the skills we're looking for. My team is looking for performance, systems, and Ruby engineers, but the company is hiring across all groups, so check out our full listings.



To keep up with all these developments in one convenient place, just follow @twittereng on Twitter itself.

Posted by @evan at 1:02 PM



Measuring Tweets

Monday, February 22, 2010



As a member of the Twitter analytics team, part of my job is to measure and understand growth. The graph above tells a story of how we've grown over the past three years in terms of number of tweets created per day. Please note that tweets from accounts identified as spam have been removed so the counts in this chart do not include spam.



Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)



Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there's search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network. Tweets per day is just one number to think about. We'll make time to share more information so please stay tuned.

Posted by @kevinweil at 12:30 PM



Hello, Haiti

If you have been following the events in Haiti since the devastating quake last month, then you know of the initial bursts of compassion. International dialogue now shifts from lifesaving relief to long term restoration. Officials are saying this may take ten years at a cost of billions.



Post-disaster needs assessment is underway and there will be an international donor conference late next month in New York City. In the meantime, there are ways to stay involved in sustained efforts such as the WFP's monthly donation program.



Kevin Thau and our mobile team have recently arranged free SMS tweets for Digicel Haiti customers. To activate the service, mobile phone users in Haiti can text follow @oxfam to 40404. Accounts are created on the fly and any account can be followed this way.

Posted by @Biz at 9:47 AM



Are You Following The Olympics?

Thursday, February 18, 2010

We experience events like the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and the State of the Union address together by watching them on television—it's the next best thing to being there for most of us. I (@ChloeS) collaborate with our media partners, and have enjoyed watching them weave together new ways of experiencing these events that are even more engaging and interactive.



CNN's recent State of the Union experiment and MTV’s Video Music Awards effort are recent examples. For the Olympics, NBC worked with Stamen Design to produce a Twitter Tracker capturing Olympic highs and lows—the joy, the disappointment, and the humor. Check out the shift in attention on Wednesday night from Shani Davis' speed skating gold run to the halfpipe antics of Shaun White (during his "Double McTwist 1260," Stamen tracked over 1,000 tweets per minute about Shaun):









The NBC Olympics Twitter Tracker showcases reactions with an authenticity and passion that can only come straight from the fans and athletes.



So many of us want to experience the full richness of an event, television show, or news story. Increasingly, this means participating in it, and then seeing that very participation reflected in the event itself. We’re only just scratching the surface of this opportunity but we're pretty excited about more experiments like this in 2010.

Posted by @ChloeS at 9:51 AM



Super Data

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

My name is @kevinweil and I'm on the analytics team at Twitter. The convergence of sports, brands, and culture around the Super Bowl makes for a particularly fascinating set of tweets to follow. Fans of the @NFL watch the Super Bowl for the football and others enjoy the spectacle for the commercials. We were curious to understand how these groups interacted with Twitter as the game unfolded.



We categorized each incoming tweet as about the Super Bowl itself, about the brands or the commercials, or neither. Dividing each group by the total volume of tweets, we produced the graph below which represents a minute-by-minute reflection of people's thoughts and emotions during the game.



The horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis is a percentage: the blue line is the percentage of tweets, relative to the total worldwide tweet volume, that were about the Super Bowl each minute, while the red line is the percentage of tweets that were about brands or commercials. Click the image for a more detailed version.





You can see excitement spike with the kickoff at marker A. Everyone watching was geared up for the first commercial break at marker B, hoping for funny or memorable ads; as soon as the first commercial break began, viewers were immediately tweeting about it. The first @DoritosUSA ad at marker C caused the largest per-minute volume of commercial-related tweets -- for the minute following the ad, related tweets were 19% of all tweets we saw, eclipsing even the chatter around the Super Bowl itself for a brief period. Back in the game, excited or dismayed tweets following the first @Colts touchdown at marker D formed nearly 40% of all tweets that minute. The second half began with a bang as @TheSaints recovered a surprise onside kick, and for the next minute 44% of all worldwide tweets were about football. Chatter around brands had meanwhile dropped to much lower levels until @Google's Parisian Love commercial sparked viewers once more. Excitement around the game grew steadily with large peaks following scores and turnovers up until the final moments. As the game ended, one out of every two tweets on Twitter was about the Super Bowl!



Every day millions of people interact with Twitter to share and discover what's happening now. Major events like the Super Bowl focus people around a few common topics. There is real value in being able to measure the reach and influence of those topics in real time, and we in the analytics team are looking forward to a lot more where this came from. On to the Winter Olympics...

Posted by @kevinweil at 11:19 AM



Flying Around With Hovercards

Wednesday, February 03, 2010



Because many of you use twitter.com to read and write tweets, we've been spending some time focusing on ways to improve your experience on the site. Today, we're introducing a feature called Hovercards that will be a handy way to interact with the folks behind each tweet.



On any timeline, as its namesake suggests, Hovercards are cards which appear when you hover over a username or avatar. The cards display additional information about the person and allow you to interact with them while staying within the context of your page.







One way we've found these cards to be useful is to find out more about retweeted people and follow them right there. You can also see more information with an expanded view of the card.



Sending direct messages to people you follow will also be possible with Hovercards so you can interact with tweeters without having to move off the page.



Hovercards will be rolled out in stages so not all of you will be seeing them right away.

Posted by @jennadawn at 6:00 PM



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▼ 2010 (17)

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Trust And Safety

Enabling A Rush of Innovation

► February (8)

Avoid 'Phishing' ScamsExpressing Great Joy Or ExcitementOpen EngineeringMeasuring TweetsHello, HaitiAre You Following The Olympics?Super DataFlying Around With Hovercards

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Offical Twitter Developer Conference, Chirp!Now Trending: Local TrendsHope for HaitiThe Power of SuggestionsA Persistent and Urgent QuestionHealing HaitiTweet Appreciation

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