The Balloonboy story on Twitter

October 15, 2009 by niallhannon 1 Comment

Twitter was taken over by the “ballonboy” story this evening, so much so that twitter crashed a number of times. The story was about a young boy who apparently climbed into a large homemade balloon which subsequently broke free from its tether. The balloon had been seen drifting thousands of feet in the air, travelling at up to 25mph.

It eventually landed but it was discovered the boy was not inside. As of this point in time the story is still developing and the boy is still missing.

The power of social media and twitter in particular is again something to admire. Literally thousands of “tweets” per second were pouring into twitter. Many were from people just following the story but some people posted up very useful links. For example, one person posted a link to a live audio feed of the Colorado State Patrol where you can listen to live updates of the search for the missing boy between the various police units.

Some sample tweets….

Balloonboy story on twitter

Balloonboy story on twitter

This is what “Web 2.0″ is all about and it will be interesting to see how this progresses over the coming months and years both from a personal and business point of view. Do not get left behind!

Filed under Social Media, twitter Tagged with ,

Twitter Users – Be careful what you sign up to!

June 22, 2009 by niallhannon Leave a Comment

phishing

phishing

Twitter is quite a useful tool and there is a lot of media hype about it. There are also a lot of other websites that provide useful services for twitter users. For example, http://twitterfeed.com/ is something I use to automatically push links from my blog onto my twitter page.

In your height of enthusiasm in using twitter you need to be careful about other sites that you are signing up to. These sites that provide additional functionality with twitter may not always be what you think.

It would be very easy for someone to set up a nice looking website that innocently asks you to enter your twitter username and password. Once you do that you have compromised your security. Worse still, if you are one of the many who use the same password for your email, ebay, O2\Vodafone accounts etc then you are suddenly open to a whole world of problems. This approach to gathering usernames and passwords from legitmate looking sites is called “phishing”, pleas be aware of it!

Have a read of these two links for some more info….

http://blog.twitter.com/2009/01/gone-phishing.html

http://news.cnet.com/twitter-phishing-scam-may-be-spreading/

Filed under phishing, security, twitter Tagged with , ,