Twitter to block malicious links

Twitter is launching a new service designed to stop users of the social-media site from getting duped by phishing links that steal their login credentials and other attacks.

The company will route all links submitted to the site through a filter created to catch links that lead to malware, the company said on the Twitter blog on Tuesday.

"A couple weeks ago, Biz [Stone, Twitter co-founder] explained how Twitter users were being victimized by phishing scams spread primarily through links in direct messages," the post said. "Basically, people click the link and bad things happen. My team can only detect these scams after malicious links have already been sent out."

With the new filtering service, even if a bad link is already sent out in an e-mail notification and somebody clicks on it, the user will be safe, according to the post.

The filtering will focus on links sent via direct messages and e-mail notifications about direct messages since the attacks occur primarily in those communications.

Twitter won't have ads in 2009, says Biz Stone

TWITTER has no plans to put advertisements on the popular microblogging site this year, cofounder Biz Stone says.

Mr Stone said Twitter was "pretty good right now" with regards to funding. He said the company's immediate focus was on improving and introducing new features, including an upgraded search function and paid-for commercial accounts.

"Any kind of approach toward advertising is going to be a while. We're not thinking about that just yet," Mr Stone said at the 140: Twitter Conference in Los Angeles.

Privately held Twitter has received plenty of venture funding, but Mr Stone declined to disclose the amounts or valuation.

TechCrunch recently reported that a new round of funding would value Twitter at $US1 billion ($1.14 billion).

Still in its infancy, the fledgling company has become a cultural phenomenon – but Twitter and other social networking websites have yet to show investors how they will start earning a profit.

To that end, Mr Stone said Twitter would aim to sell premium features to commercial users this year.

"We wanted to show people that we're here to stay and here we are making money," Mr Stone said.

Those features could include "light analytics" tools that allow commercial users to gather data on their followers, he said.

Twitter is 40 percent 'pointless babble'

Surprise! A full 40.5 percent of posts on Twitter--or tweets, as they're called--can be classified as "pointless babble," according to a new study from Pear Analytics. Coming in second was "conversational," which the company says makes up 37.55 of all tweets.

Pear Analytics published its investigation, which was conducted through a series of random samplings from the Twitter public timeline, into the different species of tweets on Wednesday. That means that only public tweets were indexed; the numbers could be different if friends-only accounts were taken into consideration as well. (Obviously, that would be much tougher to analyze.)

There's some interesting stuff in there. Despite some Twitter critics' insistence that the microblogging service is loaded with self-promoters, Pear Analytics only classified 5.85 percent of tweets as "self promotion."

The other categories were "news" (3.6 percent), "spam" (also lower than I'd expect, at 3.75 percent), and "pass-along value" (8.7 percent). Granted, sometimes there's plenty of gray area (is linking to a blog post you wrote "pass-along value" or "self-promotion"? shouldn't tweeting about breakfast too often be considered spam?) but it's pretty cool regardless.

"We thought the news category would have more weight than dead last," the report read, "since this seems to be contrary to Twitter's new position of being the new source of news and events."

That might be a bit of a buzzkill for Twitter's team, which is pretty vocal about wanting the service to be a ubiquitous communication standard. Regardless, the news about the relatively low levels of spam is interesting--for some perspective, about 90 percent of e-mail is spam.