Read an article on Zscaler Research about how more than a million URL’s that were shrunk with TinyURL or Bit.Ly and other URL compression services were analyzed to see how many led to malicious sites.  The result of the test showed that only 0.06% of the shrunk URL’s actually led to malicious content and this seemed to downplay that URL compression services are secure and this is a low risk.

Twitter and the URL Shrinking services themselves do scan the links to see if they lead to malicious content, but clever designers can write code to send valid content to a scanner and different content to someone actually coming from Twitter as a referrer.  Still, according to the research you are far more likely to end up on a malicious website from a Google Search than following a link send to you over Twitter that has been compressed.

It is still a good idea to go to the TinyURL or Bit.Ly site and expand the URL you would be clicking to see where you end up.  Many Twitter clients have this functionality built in, you know in Tweetdeck you can click on a Bit.Ly URL and it will expand a window to show you where the link would end up before it actually opens the site.  This is a good feature just to be sure, and the best rule of thumb is don’t click on links from people you don’t know or trust, they are far more likely to be spam.  (You can gauge a link if it is from a twitter user that has little to no followers, and either has little to no people following or massive amounts of people it is following with a very low follow back rate).

Seems a little obvious doesn’t it, don’t click links from people you don’t know or trust, but if you do know that there is a 0.06% chance it will lead to something malicious if it was a link on Twitter.

-Dragon Blogger

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Twitter officially announced their integration of paid advertisements in the form of “Promoted Tweets” which will allow advertisers pay to have organic tweets created and appear at the top of relevant search results when you search on twitter’s website. You can read more about Promoted Tweets directly from Twitters blog, but here is the gist of the first phase.

Advertisers can purchase a message (promoted tweet) that will appear at the top of a search result on Twitter. This tweet will be identified as a promoted tweet and look like below:

The promoted tweet will function as any other normal tweet in that it is subject to retweets, reply’s and a valid account had to have created it.

Twitter mentions that they will potentially pull “promoted tweets” that don’t garner public interest or resonate with readers, so advertisement tweets that don’t generate enough retweets, clicks or replies may be pulled from the system, while ones that do gather interest and responses will remain longer.

This is a wise first step for Twitter to introduce sponsored content into the Twitter stream without force blasting advertisement tweets to subscribers who don’t follow the advertiser which many people fear may eventually come.

Personally, how detrimental is it if Twitter were allowed to blast no more than 1 paid advertisement to your twitter profile per day? Would you find this highly intrusive, any more so now than the DM spam that plagues all twitter accounts? What about twitter implementing a small space on twitter profile pages for advertisement banners?

How do you feel about Twitter trying to monetize the network?

-Dragon Blogger

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Twitter is rolling out the new Retweet function and my account is one of the beta accounts that was able to test out the new retweet functionality.  First of all, to even know if your account is able to use the new retweet you must use the twitter.com homepage as at the time of this article HootSuite, Twaiter and Tweetdeck don’t yet support the new Twitter Retweet function.

The first thing you will notice is that when you look at someone who you are following you see the new “Retweet” symbol which looks a lot like a recycling symbol.  This symbol indicates you will see all retweets in your timeline from this users.

The next thing you will notice (when the new Twitter Retweet fully rolls out and your account has it) is that there is a new “Retweet” button on each of the tweets in your friends timeline and you hover over it to “reply, DM or fave” but the biggest change will be the new retweet symbol you will see in some of your timeline messages.

Now when somebody retweets a message you will no longer see a RT @username RT @username anymore, instead you will see this retweet symbol and the original persons tweet. No matter how many people retweet the message, the original message will always remain intact and there won’t be any prepended RT @username added to the retweet.

This will start making peoples tweets show up in your friends timeline even if you are not following them, so if one of your friends Retweets one of their followers you will see that persons tweet even if you aren’t following them. This may be confusing at first but if you look at the tweet, there is a new message at the bottom that tells you who the person was who retweeted it that was in your friend list.

These changes are dramatic enough that I think most twitter programs will have to do some serious recoding to figure out how to implement, they will need to add these little retweet logo’s into the tweet stream and have additional options to show who tweeted them. I hope Tweetdeck and Hootsuite will fully support the new Retweet functionality by the time it goes fully public.

I personally think this will be excellent for original tweet creators, their tweets will never be altered when retweeted. This also means though when you retweet an article you are only retweeting the original person who created the tweet, and the other people who retweeted won’t be included as happens with the RT @username RT @username…etc, which may means that you will not likely be as noticed for performing retweets and retweets will truly be more about promoting the original persons tweet instead of tagging long for the ride.

What do you think of the retweet functionality, let me know your opinion.

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Twitter recently rolled out a list feature where you can create public or private lists under your profile and add users to your lists. When viewing your list you will only see tweets from people who were added to your list. This works similar to creating groups in TweetDeck or Hootsuite but now this feature is built in by default to Twitter Web Site and it works very well.

Unlike the groups/favorites you set in Twitter Management Programs, your lists can be made public and when public anyone can hit the URL’s and see just what your list network is saying on twitter. Lists make it much easier to segment out your personal and professional twitter affiliations and even allow you to group companies and users into separate categories.

I see lots of potential for this feature, especially once Tweetdeck and Hootsuite update their software to be able to display lists as columns.

-Dragon Blogger

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