Twitter Adds Email Security to Ward Off Cybercriminals

To cut down on fake email scams and ploys to steal your passwords, Twitter has added an email authentication security measure to prevent malicious attacks on user accounts.
The company announced on Thursday it has started using a new technology DMARC, which aims to prevent cybercriminals from sending emails to users with a fake Twitter.com address.

"We send out lots of emails every day to our users letting them know what’s happening on Twitter," Twitter said on its official blog. "But there’s no shortage of bad actors sending emails that appear to come from a Twitter.com address in order to trick you into giving away key details about your Twitter account, or other personal information, commonly called 'phishing'."

Although the news comes just days after high-profile Twitter accounts such as Jeep and Burger King were victim to hackings, Twitter said it implemented DMARC earlier this month.

DMARC provides a way for email providers such as Gmail and Yahoo! Mail to block incoming mail from forged domains.

"While this protocol is young, it has already gained significant traction in the email community with all four major email providers – AOL, Gmail, Hotmail/Outlook, and Yahoo! Mail – already on board, rejecting forged emails," Twitter said in a statement. "We hope to see it gain more coverage for our users as even more email providers adopt it, and that it gives you more peace of mind when you get an email from us."

Image via iStockphoto, bluestocking

Tweets With URLs Shortened To 118 Characters

From today, tweets containing URLS will be limited to 118 characters.

https links will be limited even further on Twitter: to 117 characters per tweet.

The change, which was first announced in December last year, takes into account the extensions made to the maximum length of “t.co wrapped links from 20 to 22 characters for non-https URLs, and 21 to 23 characters for https URLs.”

Essentially, condensed t.co links will now consist of a few more characters than before, taking up more space and reducing the character limit left for commentary.

This equates to a drop of two characters per tweet.

Although many won’t welcome the change, everyone was given plenty of time to adapt to it: last December’s announcement revealed today as the date the changes would come into effect, and asked all users to “ensure that [their] application is prepared to handle this change”.

Will this change to t.co links affect your tweeting?

Twitter Will Decide the Value of Your Tweets

Twitter is about to start attaching value ratings to users' tweets.

The value judgements will be assigned to the public metadata of tweeters' posts, and used by Twitter's streaming API to help developers more selectively curate massive amounts of status updates.
Designations of "none," "low" and "medium" will most likely debut on Feb. 20, according to a post by developer advocate Arne Roomann-Kurrik on the Twitter developers' blog. A "high" value option will be rolled out sometime after the initial batch.

How exactly tweets will be ranked is not entirely clear, but Roomann-Kurrik says "medium" — and, later — "high" value posts will be roughly analogous to the "Top Tweets" results you get when you search a word or hashtag on Twitter.com. That likely indicates tweets drawing high engagement or coming from users with large followings.

Boiled down, the idea is to make Twitter's streaming API more useful for developers, who can tweak applications to specify what types of tweets they would like surfaced on a given subject or subjects. Roomann-Kurrik gets into more technical specifications of how this will work in his blog post.

That's mostly a positive for users, as the change should help surface better content. It's definitely a positive for Twitter, which will have the power to designate "high" value tweets (in some cases, perhaps, for a price) and possibly experiment with new ways of displaying tweets. On the other hand, judging the value of tweets is a significant and unprecedented step for the company. Some could find it a bit invasive and, well, judgmental.

In the same blog post, Roomann-Kurrik also announces another impeding tweak to the Twitter API that will give developers the option of language-specific tweet curation.

Are value ratings for tweets more useful or annoying? Let us know what you think in the comments.