Facebook Cuts Off Friend-Finding Access to Vine, Twitter’s New Video App

Don't go and try to add your Facebook friends to your new VINE app, expecting to be able to share your videos, Facebook has shut off the API hose to Vine, is this because of Twitters relationship with Facebook?

That was fast!

Within hours of Twitter launching its Vine video-sharing application on Thursday, Facebook has cut off access to Vine’s “find people” feature, which
lets used to let Vine users find their Facebook friends using the Vine application.

What does that mean? It’s basically an annoyance, a hindrance on an easy way to connect with all your existing friends using the service. It would have been a good way to jump into a new product, rather than manually trying to find all of your friends using the app.

No comment from Twitter beyond the error message we’re seeing pop up when we try to use the Facebook friend finding feature in the app, and no immediate response from Facebook as of yet.

But the cutoff isn’t exactly surprising, given Instagram recently snipping Twitter cards integration, and Twitter cutting off access to Instagram’s “Find your Friends” feature. Welcome to the new, competitive landscape of social tech companies.

The loser in all of this? Sorry, user, but it’s you.

Please check out our other blog postings:

7 Blunders to avoid when starting your own blog in 2012

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Vine: Twitter’s New App for Adding Six-Second Videos to Your Tweets

Tweeting Video!

They say a photo is worth a thousand words and a video is worth a lot more. By that math, six seconds of video should be worth a whole lot more than 140 characters of text or a Tweet.

And that seems to be the point of Vine, an app launched by Twitter today that allows you to add short video Clips to your tweets. The app, which as of now is  available only for the iPhone, is really simple to use and works a lot like Instagram. (Many have been calling it the Instagram of video.)

Sign in with your Twitter account or via email, hit the video camera button and press down on the viewfinder to record video. Release your finger and the recording stops, so you can easily move to record something else, but you only have six seconds of space (or tape).

Watch your video and then share it with others on the service. There are options to then share it on Twitter and Facebook too.

The Twitter tie-in is the big one though. When you tweet from Vine it embeds your looped video — or what looks like an animated GIF — right in your tweet.

iPhone 4 Recall? Truth or Trash?

     The Daily Mail reported this morning than an iPhone 4 recall is underway, but don’t believe it; the UK publication’s source was a tweet from a fake Steve Jobs Twitter account. Apple hasn’t announced any plans to recall its new phone.

     The Twitter account @ceoSteveJobs is a parody account — it even says so in the profile bio, and even if you don’t read the bio, it should have been obvious from the tweets, which include lines like “Be careful not to leave your #iPhone4 at the Genius Bar on the way out of the store. Gizmodo might pick it up,” and “I heard the CEO of AT&T got married recently. The service was great but the reception was terrible.”
The Daily Mail has pulled the original story, which began with a claim that a recall was coming and a quote from the fake Twitter account, and then continued to explain the issues users have had with signal loss when the iPhone 4 is held a certain way.

     It’s hard to imagine that Apple didn’t know about the signal issue. The engineers at the company probably decided it was a worthwhile trade-off for otherwise improved reception, so don’t expect a recall for that reason.

     Though you might surprised that The Daily Mail ran a story based on a tweet from an account that is so obviously fake, it’s not the first time something like this has happened. That’s why Twitter implemented a system for verifying the accounts of important people and publications.

Twitter Gets Targeted Again by Worm-like Phishing Attack

Twitter Gets Targeted Again by Worm-like Phishing Attack

Twitter users have been tricked into divulging their login and password details to a Web site that then spammed their contacts.

The culprit is a Web site called TwitterCut. Some Twitter users began getting a message that appeared to be from one of their friends and included a link to the TwitterCut Web site. The message implied they could gain more Twitter contacts by following the link.

At one time TwitterCut looked quite similar to the real Twitter login page, said Mikko Hypponen, chief research offer for the security vendor F-Secure.

If a person entered their login details, TwitterCut would then send the same message via Twitter to all of the victim's contacts, a kind of phishing attack with worm-like characteristics. No malicious software is installed on a user's machine, Hypponen said.

Although TwitterCut probably holds the login details for many accounts, it doesn't appear those accounts have been used to spam out links to more dangerous Web sites.

TwitterCut's Web site has been reported to services that blacklist potentially harmful Web sites, although it is still active. In a warning message now on TwitterCut, the site's operators said they didn't mean to phish people.

Instead, they say they were trying to create a so-called Twitter Train, which are sites that purport to quickly give Twitter users lots of followers. They said they bought the login script on their site for US$50.

"We were not phishing Twitter accounts whatsoever," the message said. "We're shutting down this site."

Hypponen said Twitter should be on the lookout for signs of spam, such as when an identical message appears hundreds and hundreds of times across users' profiles that isn't a "retweet," or the intentional reposting of other content.

Twitter could also screen URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) to make sure they're not already blacklisted for security issues, Hypponen said. Many Web browsers as well as search engines will either warn about or block suspicious Web sites.

Most URLs posted in Twitter have been shortened using services such as TinyURL in order to fit in the 140-character message length that Twitter imposes, obscuring the real destination and making users dependent on the trustworthiness of their friends when clicking links. The service was hit by other worms earlier in the year.

Twitter acknowledged the phishing problem late Tuesday night.

"We are currently pushing a password reset on accounts we believe may have been caught in a phishing scam," the company said. "Please exercise your best judgment when thinking about releasing your username and password to third parties."