Trust And Safety

Enabling A Rush of Innovation

Avoid ‘Phishing’ Scams

Over the past few days, Twitter has been helping folks victimized by a phishing attack. Phishing is a deceitful process by which an attempt is made to acquire sensitive information such as Twitter usernames and passwords. The bad guys masquerade as someone you trust and may send you a Direct Message (DM) with a link. This DM may say something along the lines of, “LOL that you??” followed by a link to a fake Twitter login page. If you enter your credentials on that fraudulent page, the phishers can sign in as you and trick more people.

Anatomy of A Phishing Scam

Generally a phishing attack against Twitter users breaks down to a three-part process. First, accounts compromised in the manner described above send out messages to all accounts following them. Second, accounts that are newly compromised send out more messages. Third, the scammers behind the phishing attack make an attempt at monetization by sending out spam links instead of links to a fake login page. We fight phishing scams by detecting affected accounts and resetting passwords. However, it’s better to stop them before they start.

Avoiding Phishing Scams

We designed the Direct Message system so that you could only get DMs from accounts that you choose to follow—this cuts way down on spam and attacks. Our Trust and Safety team identifies and deletes spam accounts every day. Still, we recommend against indiscriminately following hundreds or thousands of accounts without having a look first. To learn how you can avoid falling victim to a phishing scam or if you have other questions about keeping your Twitter account secure, please read Keeping Your Account Secure at our help site.

For regular status updates on related issues. please follow @safety and @spam. There is also a Twitter status blog that we update regularly. For a lot more information about Phishing, check out this article on Wikipedia.

Expressing Great Joy Or Excitement

In other words: Yahoo! People want to discover and share tweets everywhere ranging from SMS and TV, to apps and the Web. For a global network of 600 million people, Yahoo! represents the Web. Similar to the partnerships we have made with other large internet companies, Yahoo! will receive what has been dubbed “Firehose”—a full feed of public tweets sent to Twitter and our partners every second of every day from all around the world.

Through this arrangement, people will be able to find relevant tweets in Yahoo! Search as well as other popular products and properties, including the Yahoo! Homepage, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Sports, and more. Yahoo! will also be able to build unique Twitter clients into their properties making it easier for folks to tweet wherever they feel comfortable within the Yahoo! network.

From our perspective, this partnership represents a big opportunity. Tweets may be short, but they have proven over and over again to contain valuable information. As the Twitter information network grows and expands, it becomes more valuable for everyone who participates. Our open approach helps us get closer to providing universal connectivity to a global network of immediate information.

Open Engineering

Hi, I’m the other @evan, and I’m the infrastructure manager at Twitter. I want to tell you about the steps we’ve taken to make our engineering division more open and transparent.

First, we’ve created an open source directory for the entire company. This lists all the public software that the engineering teams have created or contributed to. Much of Twitter’s success has been enabled by open-source software, and we want to give back. Everyone is welcome to use this software for their own projects, and if the project is Twitter-related, so much the better.

We’ve also begun posting to our new engineering blog, which focuses on day-to-day engineering challenges. Subscribe to it if you’re interested in the development of Twitter internals. We’ll try to sample the full range of software development issues we face at a fast-moving company like Twitter. We already have posts about how local trends are organized, how we attack capacity problems, and how you can use our translation libraries.

Finally, we’ve updated our job descriptions to better reflect our company culture and the skills we’re looking for. My team is looking for performance, systems, and Ruby engineers, but the company is hiring across all groups, so check out our full listings.

To keep up with all these developments in one convenient place, just follow @twittereng on Twitter itself.

Measuring Tweets

As a member of the Twitter analytics team, part of my job is to measure and understand growth. The graph above tells a story of how we’ve grown over the past three years in terms of number of tweets created per day. Please note that tweets from accounts identified as spam have been removed so the counts in this chart do not include spam.

Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second. (Yes, we have TPS reports.)

Tweet deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Then there’s search and so many other ways to measure and understand growth across this information network. Tweets per day is just one number to think about. We’ll make time to share more information so please stay tuned.

Hello, Haiti

If you have been following the events in Haiti since the devastating quake last month, then you know of the initial bursts of compassion. International dialogue now shifts from lifesaving relief to long term restoration. Officials are saying this may take ten years at a cost of billions.

Post-disaster needs assessment is underway and there will be an international donor conference late next month in New York City. In the meantime, there are ways to stay involved in sustained efforts such as the WFP’s monthly donation program.

Kevin Thau and our mobile team have recently arranged free SMS tweets for Digicel Haiti customers. To activate the service, mobile phone users in Haiti can text follow @oxfam to 40404. Accounts are created on the fly and any account can be followed this way.

Hope for Haiti

Photo courtesy Agência Brasil.

Since President René Préval and others issued appeals for humanitarian aid, there has been a massively coordinated global response to begin rebuilding Haiti. In addition to governments and organizations doing their part, technology has played a meaningful role. Donations accepted via SMS, Facebook attracting and educating thousands of concerned individuals, Google providing satellite imagery tools to relief workers, iTunes and Download to Donate converting everyday purchases into emergency funding—software augments humanity in a meaningful way and the arts unite us.

We’re thrilled to have been invited to join a stunning assemblage of industries and individuals who are combining forces to raise proceeds for Haiti and make certain that the life cycle of this particular humanitarian mission extends long after the initial burst of compassion. Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief will be the most widely distributed telethon in history both internationally and across all media platforms. This broadcast marks the first US based telethon to air in China as well. On the evening of Friday, January 22, 2010 global citizens will come together in support of those in need.

The lineup for this program includes more than one hundred of the biggest names in film, television, and music. Proceeds from the telethon will go to The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, United Nations World Food Programme, Oxfam America, Partners in Health, the Red Cross, UNICEF, and Yele Haiti Foundation. This effort can be a testament to the positive global impact we’re capable of achieving when we focus on a common goal. Tune in however you like and contribute if you can. We’ve curated additional resources and suggestions at Hope140.org.

Healing Haiti

International relief efforts are underway in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, after yesterday’s devastating magnitude 7 earthquake. The atmosphere at Twitter HQ is heavy today and based on the Trending Topics an overwhelming number of Twitter users feel the same.

Easy Ways To Help
Many of us are wondering how we can contribute to the healing process. A few simple but effective ways to help have emerged.

• The American Red Cross allows anyone in the US to text HAITI to 90999 as an easy way to donate $10 to the recovery effort. The money is billed to your mobile phone account.
• Musician Wyclef Jean’s Haiti-focused organization, Yele is also accepting text-message donations. To donate $5, text Yele to 501501 or visit the foundation’s web site.
• Oxfam International has also set up an earthquake response fund. You can visit their web site to make a donation to this fund.

To follow each of these recovery efforts as they progress, we can follow @redcross, @wyclef, and @oxfam. The Huffington Post, CNN, and The New York Times have spent time curating special lists to track events related to Haiti.

Super Data

My name is @kevinweil and I’m on the analytics team at Twitter. The convergence of sports, brands, and culture around the Super Bowl makes for a particularly fascinating set of tweets to follow. Fans of the @NFL watch the Super Bowl for the football and others enjoy the spectacle for the commercials. We were curious to understand how these groups interacted with Twitter as the game unfolded.

We categorized each incoming tweet as about the Super Bowl itself, about the brands or the commercials, or neither. Dividing each group by the total volume of tweets, we produced the graph below which represents a minute-by-minute reflection of people’s thoughts and emotions during the game.

The horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis is a percentage: the blue line is the percentage of tweets, relative to the total worldwide tweet volume, that were about the Super Bowl each minute, while the red line is the percentage of tweets that were about brands or commercials. Click the image for a more detailed version.


You can see excitement spike with the kickoff at marker A. Everyone watching was geared up for the first commercial break at marker B, hoping for funny or memorable ads; as soon as the first commercial break began, viewers were immediately tweeting about it. The first @DoritosUSA ad at marker C caused the largest per-minute volume of commercial-related tweets — for the minute following the ad, related tweets were 19% of all tweets we saw, eclipsing even the chatter around the Super Bowl itself for a brief period. Back in the game, excited or dismayed tweets following the first @Colts touchdown at marker D formed nearly 40% of all tweets that minute. The second half began with a bang as @TheSaints recovered a surprise onside kick, and for the next minute 44% of all worldwide tweets were about football. Chatter around brands had meanwhile dropped to much lower levels until @Google’s Parisian Love commercial sparked viewers once more. Excitement around the game grew steadily with large peaks following scores and turnovers up until the final moments. As the game ended, one out of every two tweets on Twitter was about the Super Bowl!

Every day millions of people interact with Twitter to share and discover what’s happening now. Major events like the Super Bowl focus people around a few common topics. There is real value in being able to measure the reach and influence of those topics in real time, and we in the analytics team are looking forward to a lot more where this came from. On to the Winter Olympics…