CDC Tweets About Swine Flu

The CDC, otherwise known as the Centers for Disease Control, is using Twitter to get the word out about the swine flu. In case you’ve been holed up in a barn for the past three days, somehow pigs are infecting us with the swine flu.

I don’t quite understand how pigs are doing this and how concerned I should be, but luckily the CDC is on Twitter @CDCEmergency to keep everyone in the know.

Twitter has been all a buzz about the swine flu since its initial outbreak in Mexico. Of course that also means there’s plenty of misinformation about the swine flu out there as well.

So do us a favor and make sure you follow @CDCEmergency for all your latest updates and cautions about the swine flu and don’t trust that guy that claims to be a swine flu expert. He’s probably just a bacon fan.

You Tube Tweeter

Twitpic is the best way to share photos on Twitter. If only it were as easy to share You Tube videos on Twitter. That’s the problem that YouTube Tweeter tries to solve.

When you go to youtubetweeter.com you enter your Twitter username and the YouTube URL of the video you want to share. It then creates a short URL link and allows you to tweet your video by sending you to Twitter and automatically entering the tweet for you.

Now here’s where the magic of YouTube Tweeter comes in. When someone clicks on the URL you’ve tweeted, rather than sending them to You Tube, it overlays your video on your own Twitter page and displays a count of how many views your video has received from your tweet. Pretty slick!

Who do we have to thank for this magic? A guy by the name of Kevin Sherman who you can follow @bubbleguru.

Word On The Tweet 3 – We Were Here Before Oprah

Jeff Parsons and Fred Abaroa are joined by Lynnelle Wilson of Bold Vision Consulting, Chris Cavillari of filmosity.com and createconsumedelete.com and by Maggi Blue of magpiecreative.com and dyelotcollective.com to discuss the Twitterverse, covering Twitter news, tools, celebs and more.

Show Notes:

• Twitter popularity soars in March
• How retail is using Twitter to generate foot traffic
• The 5 worst tweets ever
• Twitter Tool: Troy’s Twitter Script
• Tweep Picks: Fred: @fashionbitch, Chris: @robblatt and@theambershow, Maggi: @steve_buschemi, Jeff: @redsoxcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 56:39 — 26.0MB)

@CostaVidaFred In Twitter News Story

Word On The Tweet’s very own Fred Abaroa, better known in the Twitterverse as @CostaVidaFred, was the subject of a news story on WCSH 6 last week about utilizing social media for business. Boy did they pick the right guy!

Video is below, and you can read the article on WCSH’s website as well.

Protestor Arrested For Threats On Twitter

Twitter is a great tool to get your political views or message out to the masses. That is unless you make threats against the governement. Then it becomes a great tool to get you arrested.

52-year-old Daniel Knight Hayden was angry about the tax situation in Oklahoma City, and like so many people who are angry with the government, he tweeted all about it leading up to tax day under @citizenquasar. One of his 47 followers must have tipped off the FBI, because they arrested him after this tweet:

Locked AND loaded for the Oklahoma State Capitol. Let’s see what happens.

Not what you want to be tweeting from the city that was the location of the worst domestic terrorist attack in United States history.

He’s at a halfway house now pending trial.

Tweetie For Mac OS

Full disclosure right off the bat here. I don’t own a Mac. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to own a Mac. In fact as soon as this piece of junk HP Pavillion that I’m pounding this post out on dies, the first place I’m headed to is the Apple store.

I do however own a first gen iPhone and have downloaded the Tweetie app for it. I heard all the buzz about this amazing app for the iPhone so I figured I’d cough up the $3 and give it a spin. I wish I could get my $3 back. Not because I didn’t like it. It’s a great app. It’s just that I already had all the features I wanted that Tweetie offers in the free Twitterfon app. Free always wins with me. (Or cheaper, hence my HP Pavillion)

Now Tweetie has arrived on the Mac and the buzz appears to be back again for the desktop version. It’ll set you back $15 or you can get the free ad supported version.

It’s a feature rich app that takes up very little screen space. The feature that I would enjoy most is the ability to drag and drop images into the posting window for upload to photo sharing services like TwitPic. I can add pictures in my favorite client, Tweetdeck, but I’m lazy and love a drag and drop option.

Since I can’t actually use the app with the HP logo on my lid, I highly recommend the review over at The Apple Blog.

If you’re on a Mac and have tried the app out, let me know what you think about it in the comments. Feel free to tell me all about the virtues of a Mac while you’re at it. If you’d like to float me a small loan, I’ll be happy to learn those for myself.

Get Tweetie for Mac

David Letterman’s Twitter “Rant”

Why can’t David Letterman get a weekly 10pm show instead of that no talent Leno? I think his level of comedy is so much higher than Leno’s.

Take for example his recent “rant” about the Twitter craze. He totally makes fun of it even going to the point of SAYING he’s making fun of it like everyone else because he doesn’t understand it.

Still amazes me that with talent like this, he got screwed over by NBC all those years ago.

Word On The Tweet 2 – Jumping The Shark

Jeff Parsons and Fred Abaroa are joined by Kara Matuszewski of  WLBZ-TV, Monica Wright of HMG Search Marketing, and Nichole Davis of WGAN-AM to discuss the Twitterverse, covering Twitter news, tools, celebs and more.

Show Notes:

• Has Twitter jumped the shark with the mainstream popularity it has
  received?
• How is broadcast news utilizing Twitter?
• Tom Davenport calls Twitter a “fad”
• Twitter Tool: Seesmic Desktop
• Tweep picks: Fred: @miltmafia, Monica: @doverbey, Kara: @etanowitz and @newmediajim, Nichole: @ricksanchezcnn and @ohnewsroom, Jeff: @GinnyMarvin
• Celebrity Tweet of the Week: @courtneylover79

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 48:46 — 22.3MB)

Man Builds Chair That Tweets Passing Gas

This could very well be the most assinine (pun intended) use of Twitter ever. Although, if the iFart iPhone app can make $10,000 a day in the iTunes app store, why wouldn’t people want to build their own chair that tweets (or should that be toots?) everytime its occupant passes gas.

I’m not quite sure this even works, as it just seems so much easier to make a Twitter account for your chair and claim that it’s tweeting your gas. However if you REALLY want to try an build the real thing, instructables.com has the…uh… instructions.

If you’re just don’t have the skills and are more interested in following a farting office chair, you can do that too @OfficeChair.

Give it a week and soemone will make a toilet that tweets every time you flush.

17-year-old Creates Two Worms That Infiltrate Twitter

Twitter had a rough weekend thanks to a 17-year-old kid who said he was bored. He was so bored he claims to be responsible for two worms that spread quickly through the Twitterverse.

In an interview with CNET, Michael Mooney, a high school senior from Brooklyn said he created the worms to draw attention to the flaw in Twitter. Well, mission accomplished kid.

The two worms are named StalkDaily and Mikeyy.

StalkDaily takes adavantage of Twitter allowing users to post not just text, but script in their bios. After creating several accounts with the malicious code, Mooney would then follow  people enticing them to view the profiles he had created. After 3 seconds of viewing the profile, the code requests the Twitter cookie and username from the browser and creates and authentication token allowing the script to execute any API functions, like sending Tweets out under the victims account. It also takes the liberty of changing the bio of the victims profile making them a host of the script. You can see how quickly that can spread.

Twitter patched the flaw that StalkDaily utilized, but our young friend had another trick up his sleeve and he called it Mikeyy.

Mikeyy used the same exploit as StalkDaily and posted messages under user accounts such as:

Twitter please fix this, regards Mikeyy
Man, Twitter can’t fix sh*t. Mikeyy owns.
Dude, Mikeyy is the sh*t!

The good news is that the script isn’t malicious, just damn annoying.

Things got even more annoying for the coders at Twitter as every time they patched a hole, another attack began. Four seperate worms infiltrated Twitter from Saturday to early Monday morning. Mikey hasn’t claimed responsibility for the other two.

Biz Stone blogged about the first attack on Sunday:

The worm introduced to Twitter this weekend was similar to the famous Samy worm which spread across the popular MySpace social-networking site a while back. At that time, MySpace filed a lawsuit against the virus creator which resulted in a felony charge and sentencing. Twitter takes security very seriously and we will be following up on all fronts.

Look out Mikey. I’m betting the Twitter police will be knocking on your door before you know it.

If you think your Twitter account might have been compromised by these attacks, Twittercisim has instructions on how to find out if you were infected and what to do if you were.

So what does Mikey want to be when he grows up? A security analyist. Kinda like robbing a bank in hopes of becoming a vault designer isn’t it?

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