twitter

After spending the better part of a day offline -- following a hacking and fake tweet incident that caused a violent hiccup in the stock market -- the AP Twitter is back up and tweeting -- albeit, to far fewer followers.

The main Associated Press Twitter feed had almost 2 million followers Tuesday morning. That was before the Syrian Electronic Army apparently got hold of the account and tweeted the "breaking news" that a bomb had gone off in the White House, injuring President Obama. The hoax was almost instantaneously called out -- the formatting and channel used to send the tweet weren't consistent with AP standards. Also, it didn't go unnoticed that a live press conference happening at the time in the White House was uninterrupted by a bomb blast in the building.… Read more

Do you like music and want to know what the hottest music-related stories are? A new TV show that features the top trending music topics on Twitter hopes to have you covered.

Known as "Trending 10," the new show is being produced for music-oriented cable TV network Fuse, in partnership with Twitter and gum company Trident.

The idea, the companies said in a release, is to build "Trending 10" around the Top 10 music-related Twitter topics of the day. Those stories will be selected based on Fuse's "heat tracker" algorithm, a system that … Read more

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After the Associated Press' Twitter account was hacked into on Tuesday and the accounts of CBS News programs "60 Minutes" and "48 Hours" were hacked over the weekend, it's been made clear that Twitter needs to boost security. But, it may be doing just that.

According to Wired's Mat Honan, the social-networking site has reportedly been working on creating a two-factor authentication for user password verification. Honan writes that the company is currently carrying out internal testing before rolling out the new security control.

This isn't a huge surprise considering Twitter posted a job advertisement … Read more

Twitter's had a bad couple of weeks.

First, the Boston marathon bombings and subsequent manhunt led many (including me) to question the role of fast-moving, potentially inaccurate real-time Twitter reporting and its effect on mainstream news.

Then today, a false tweet from a hacked Associated Press Twitter account claimed that the White House had been bombed and that President Obama had been injured. The news caused a sudden plunge in the stock market (and, one can probably assume, some massive profit-taking by the hackers).

Twitter has always had an accuracy problem. It's a lot of voices, its information … Read more

Twitter is having a tough day. First, parts of the service were having performance problems, and then the @AP Twitter feed got hacked, causing the stock market to tank nearly 150 points before recovering.

Twitter has vastly improved in the last few years in keeping the site up, but the hacks are escalating. The Twitter accounts of CBS News programs  "60 Minutes" and "48 Hours" were hacked over the weekend, with bogus messages going out, such as "The US government is hiding the real culprit of the Boston bombing." In February, an estimated&… Read more

The White House has NOT been bombed, folks, despite what you might have seen on the Associated Press Twitter account.

Hackers apparently got ahold of the wire service's Twitter feed and tweeted out "breaking" news of a White House bombing that injured President Barack Obama.

Not so, say the Twitter feeds of AP corporate and some employees.

When the tweet went out, Twitter immediately erupted with notes from sleuthing tweeps who noted that the suspicious tweet did not use the normal all caps style for BREAKING news, and was sent from the Web, which is unusual for … Read more

Twitter experienced some hiccups early Tuesday.

The company said today there were service issues that were affecting some users. The message was posted to its Tumblr blog at about 7:30 a.m. PT. By 8:50, Twitter updated the post saying the issue was resolved.

The outage appeared to be affecting parts of the site. The main feed was working for some, while the connect and discover pages were down.

"Our engineers are currently working on this issue," the company earlier said in its post.

Update, 10:05 a.m. PT: The service appears to be back … Read more