Twitter invites its own disaster with 9/10 announcement

Wildly popular microblogging site Twitter.com could be headed for disaster after yesterday's announcement that it would begin to allow advertising on its pages, which attract more than 45 million visitors monthly. The two-year old service, which allows legions of users to post messages of up to 140 characters, does not charge for access and has been looking for ways to turn its burgeoning popularity into profitability. "We leave the door open for advertising," founder Biz Stone said Thursday on the San Francisco-based company's official blog, according to the Reuters international news service. "We'd like to keep our options open, as we've said before." Until now, Twitter has been funded with venture capital, Reuters said. To accomplish the change, Twitter revised its terms of service to include the phrases "The services may include advertisements, which may be targeted to the content or information on the services, queries made through the services, or other information. The types and extent of advertising by Twitter on the services are subject to change." Users also are now required to concur that "in consideration for Twitter granting you access to and use of the services, you agree that Twitter and its third-party providers and partners may place such advertising on the services." Industry analysts were skeptical of the change, contending that advertising rarely succeeds on social networking sites and that advertisers would be reluctant to link their products with the unpredictable and often offensive chatter on the site, Reuters said. But advertising is the primary financial engine that drives free Web service, Reuters said.

Cyber attack on Twitter, Facebook was much ado about little

Sure, it was annoying to be kept off the Twitter microblogging site for hours on Thursday. But unless it was your responsibility to keep Twitter and at least two other social networking sites -- Facebook and LiveJournal -- free from so-called Denial of Service attacks, you weren't harmed in any way. So why all the outage outrage? According to the Cable News Network CNN), some users of the social networking sites reacted with "near-panic" to being unable to use the services. Such sites have proved themselves extremely valuable for promoting businesses and causes, and for finding and keeping in touch with long-lost and newfound friends, but what explains the odd reaction or, rather, overreaction? Okay, this probably was the first time most Internet users have dealt with such an attack on a site they use, but this is part of the new world of the Web. Everyone tries to protect their computers from being compromised cyberthreats that were unknown a decade ago; even Twitter, the target of the attack, understood that this was part the risks inherent to such enterprises. "Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told CNN in an e-mail. "We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we defend and later investigate." That's right. It's part of the business, and hunting down the perpetrators is part of that, too. No surprise, no panic. Computer users should remember that the ubiquitous Internet is a relatively recent phenomenon and that there were plenty of things to do before social networking, and still are. The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team told CNN that it is impossible to fully prevent such attacks but said computer users should keep their antivirus software updated and their firewalls properly maintained.