Update: Klout seems to be listening. On December 2, CEO Joe Fernandez posted “What Does Klout Measure?” on Klout’s blog. You can find the link below.

At the end of October, Klout changed its standard for measuring influence. The Klout score is a 100-point scoring system that gives marketers, employers and users of social media the opportunity to surmise from a single number someone’s ability to drive action on the social Web. Recently, Klout changed the way it arrives at this score, resulting in dramatic changes for many of its users. Some scores went up while others went down.

Originally established as a scoring system for influence on Twitter, Klout now measures influence on a dozen social networks, including Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and Google+. More networks are being added, and the company’s CEO Joe Fernandez predicts the total will reach 20 by the end of 2011.

A person’s Klout score is based on three subscores: True Reach, Amplification and Network. How these scores are calculated – Klout’s PeopleRank algorithm – is Klout’s secret sauce, and on October 26 the ingredients changed. With the additional number of networks and the increase in data – over 2.7 billion pieces each day – the company realized it had to change its algorithm so that scores would more accurately and transparently reflect a person’s entire social influence.

Earlier in the year Klout had stated that the addition of networks to a person’s profile would create an “additive affect” and would not detract from one’s total score. But overnight, Klout scores changed dramatically. Many influencers saw large drops, leaving them wondering how Klout could have gotten it so wrong before. Mine dropped 30%, from 70 to 49. My true reach went from 10K to 2K, my Amplification went from 53 to 5, and my Network went from 71 to 18.

Since its earliest, Twitter-only days, I’ve been intrigued by the Klout system of scoring and have extolled its utility to my clients, and so the abrupt change in Klout’s “standard” came as quite a surprise. There was an outcry throughout the Klout ecosystem. I joined in as journalists, social media pundits and practitioners reached out to Klout for an explanation. We were referred to the Klout blog, which offered only a palliative post, at the end of which I expected to see a smiley face. Why would a company striving for more transparency not be more transparent with its users?

I began researching influence online, and very quickly one thing became resoundingly clear: influence is what’s wrong with social media.

The Larger Context of Influence

“Our friendships and professional connections have moved online, making influence measurable for the first time in history,” reads the first line of Klout’s About page. Klout would have us believe that our online connections represent the sum total of the measureable population of people who influence us, and that for the first time in history what constitutes influence in our lives is, in deed, measurable. If only hubris were measurable.

Quite simply, only a fraction of influence in social media is currently measured. Influence can only be approximated based on the very individualized uses – by millions of people – of hundreds of social media channels. Klout measures about a dozen channels and then distills that measurement into a single score.

But the real issue isn’t how or whether we’re able to measure influence. What concerns me is that social media influence is following the pattern of other forms of influence that have had pivotal effects recently on our society.

I don’t occupy anything these days, except perhaps my office. But I share the growing concern that America has done little to curtail the influence of our financial industry over Washington. I bring it up to illustrate a point about influence. It was influence, for instance, that facilitated the 1999 enactment of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a law that repealed the restrictions of the Glass-Steagall Act on commercial bank participation in investment banking activities. Influence again kept the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating derivatives. The result was the creation of the financial industry’s securitization conveyor belt that led to the mortgage lending crisis, which has pushed about 50 million Americans to the poverty level while creating a top 1% that in 2007 took in over 23% of the nation’s income, conditions we haven’t seen since 1928, just before the Great Depression.

Could an online class system form from social media influence? When we look at the evolution of social media influence, we begin to see distinct divisions.

During Social Media 1.0, some of our existing offline relationships moved onto the Web. (It would be more accurate to say bits and pieces of these relationships were copied over to the Web.) We connected with some of these friends on networks like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. And then during Social Media 1.5, we expanded our social graphs by adding people we hadn’t seen or heard from in years – old friends from high school, grade school, our childhood neighbors – people we hadn’t thought about much over the years. We even began adding people to our social networks based on relationships we had in our existing graphs. Friends of friends became first connections.

During Social Media 2.0 we began seeking even more friends, fans and followers, taking advantage of weak connections to build out our social graphs and engage larger and more influential numbers of people. While social media theorists and practitioners maintain that quality of engagement is more important than quantity of connections, none will dispute that there is a positive correlation between influence and number of friends, fans and followers. Size matters.

Klout currently scores over 100 million people, most of whom have not signed up for a Klout account. The company uses information from individuals’ public channels like Twitter and private channels like Facebook to build its data. More than 3,500 companies use this data to reach influencers with targeted marketing. In May, 2011, Fernandez told Forbes reporter Kym McNicholas that certain hotels in Las Vegas look up your Klout score when you check in to see how influential you are so that they may determine whether you should receive preferential treatment. The better they treat you, the hotels reason (if you have influence), the more likely you are to rave about your experience to your online community.

In social media, anyone with a small number of friends – at any level of engagement – does not have absolute influence. They can’t check in to a hotel in Las Vegas and be treated with privilege. Their numbers don’t cut it in Vegas.

And so at the end of Social Media 2.0, we face a new greed, one with the same unpleasant characteristics and ill effects of financial greed.

Social Greed

Not that influence is a bad thing, particularly when it’s formed and used in the aggregate. Even instances of individual ability to drive positive change are favorable when that change sincerely reflects the desires of many. But influence in social media is being co-opted by the second-comers to social media – marketers – whose interests aren’t necessarily those of the community.

An individual becomes an influencer in social media because her interests are well aligned with those of her online community. An accretion of friends, fans and followers occurs around this influencer, in some cases exponentially, as word spreads of the value offered by this individual. Marketers identify such influencers and engage them on various social media in order to reach their communities with a message engineered to slip seamlessly into the conversation. No harm, no foul, particularly if the marketer’s interests are genuinely aligned with those of the community.

But as gamification and award-based practices (like those of the hotels in Vegas) become rife in social media, the behavior of the influencers changes through incentive. Badges, mayorships, leaderboards and free orders of fries can cause someone with influence to act less in the interests of their friends, fans and followers and more in the interests of the marketers offering these rewards.

As badges build and connections accumulate and Klout scores climb, and as more and more people buy into the idea of engaging influencers to build their own influence, the ecosystem skews toward the interests of the few. And so the interests we find at the top of the influence pyramid once again are out of alignment with the interests of the many. Influence at one time may have been organic on the social Web, but no longer. As with a lot of things these days, social media influence is for sale.

Social Good

Where’s the social value in engaging only with influencers? Where’s the responsibility? A representative from Klout offered insight into Klout’s point of view when she answered my email questioning the drop in my score:

The reason you may have seen a drop is that we’ve improved our ability to take into account how *much* you influence someone. For instance, if I rarely like or comment on anyone’s posts, but choose to do so to yours, that is more meaningful than if I like 60 posts a day. For users whose engagement primarily comes from others with high activity, you may see a drop in your Score. [sic]

What part of the secret sauce is it that tastes really bad here? If I’m in the middle of an Arab revolution, and I retweet updates at a rate of 60 a day or I like 60 related posts a day, will that reduce influence? Do I care? I just want regime change.

Hotel rooms and French fries are one thing, or shopping for shoes online, or asking where to rent a bicycle for the day. But what if I want to learn about an emerging presidential candidate in a party other than my own? If I begin asking around in various social media, I’m led to destinations online that have been Liked, commented on, retweeted or otherwise shared by people in my social graph. My results are skewed because of our aligned interests – we’re members of the same political party, for instance. The results are further skewed if the activity of my social graph includes Likes, retweets, comments or shared objects that have been strategically inserted into their online conversations by influencers wishing to spread political messages that unfavorably portray this opposing candidate.

I wonder if Klout will ever see the need for a new badge: Trusted Objective Observer. Or if they’ll ever come up with a score that indicates how un-influenced a user is. Perhaps that score already exists, and that at some point soon instead of striving for a higher Klout score, we should strive for a score of 1.

Update: Klout’s reaction to these and similar concerns: “What Does Klout Measure?”

HootSuite has climbed to the the top of the heap of social media management tools for individuals and teams who use Facebook and Twitter for business or organization purposes. Last week, HootSuite won Mashable’s Best Social Media Management Tool award, an award based on community votes and a testament to user loyalty. Mashable is a leading social media and tech news source with 30 million views each month.

In a further sign of its commitment to its growing legion of loyal users, yesterday HootSuite announced its Affiliate Program, which lets premium plan holders earn commissions by referring friends, colleagues, and clients to HootSuite Pro and Enterprise plans as well as HootSuite University. (See the ad, ahem, in our sidebar on the right.)

So what makes HootSuite so great? It’s the owl! The company’s wise little mascot consistently coaxes me into the plethora of features added frequently to this robust management system.  A quick Google search for “HootSuite vs [Your Favorite Twitter Client Here]” reveals account after account of people switching from popular services to HootSuite.

But to call HootSuite a Twitter client is a misnomer. The number of social media management features and the ease with which the uninitiated can discover and implement them is unlike any other tool I’ve tried. And the features keep coming. To see Hootsuite’s whirlwind 2010, check this out from their blog: http://ht.ly/3CyIL.

And with its freemium business model, the company continues to offer a free service to 95% of its users while monetizing its service with its heavier users.

I don’t mind. It’s worth every penny. Arrayed before me currently are 17 accounts that I manage. Tabs for these accounts appear across the top of the window, and within each are streams of social media updates from Twitter, Facebook and Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, Foursquare, WordPress.com, and other social media platforms. I can easily monitor @mentions and Facebook wall updates in a single glance, and with the team workflow capability, I can communicate directly with my clients and make assignments for responding to a particular update or social object.

Features like the easy importing of RSS feeds, the browser applets and the smart phone application make this an indispensable tool for my work.

Congrats and kudos to Ryan Holmes and the HootSuite team for their accomplishments, and many thanks for their continued innovation.

Do you use a Twitter client? What about a social media management system?

Which feature most appeals to you:

• Mobility?
• Scheduling your updates?
• Real-time stats?
• Managing multiple accounts and teams?

Please leave a comment below.

…

Twitter has several known issues that its team of engineers are working diligently to correct. Some of them have existed for an extended period of time and are beginning to affect users’ Twitter scores and metrics. Largest among these are the lost mentions, @replies and tweets.

Many users have come to rely on scoring systems created by companies such as Klout, PeopleBrowser, Radian6, and Twitalyzer for identifying influencers. Whether for personal purposes or commercial ones, decisions made by users based on scores from these services become increasingly important as more and more people start using Twitter to interact with other users who have common interests.

These services are created using using the Twitter API. So if Twitter doesn’t provide complete data, these scoring systems are compromised.

As I look into this, it appears thousands of users’ scores and metrics may be affected by Twitter’s known issues. I’m communicating with some of the scoring services mentioned above and will let you know what I learn.

I’ve also corresponded with Twitter several times about the issue of lost mentions and @ replies. Recently, I escalated my inquiry. In fairness to Twitter, they have responded quickly with personalized emails, but all of them have directed me to the Known Issues page that, among other things, asks me to provide a “direct link to the reply/mention(s) which are missing from your Mentions timeline.” How can I? They’re missing.

I’d like to hear from you.

Have you lost any of your mentions, @replies or tweets? Please leave a comment below. (No comment box? Click on the title of this post and scroll down.) Please tell us:

• What are you missing: Mentions? @replies? Tweets?
• When did you started missing them?
• How many times has this happened to you?
• Any comment you may have related to the effect this issue may have on you.

We will not put your email on any of our lists.

Thanks for taking the time.

In August, I wrote that the future is moving toward us faster than at any other time in history, that the changes we are seeing in communications are evolutionary. The world ahead can potential be one “less of individual strategy than of collective reasoning” as new forms of communications open new pathways for opinions and understanding and empathy and compassion and facts. In the post-cyber age we will have greater opportunities to globally address time-sensitive and relevant social issues.

The extent to which we seize these opportunities has a lot to do with how well we protect ourselves online, and this depends a great deal on how well we control what we share about ourselves and how we deal with what others have shared about us.

In this interview from episode 5 of Brian Solis’ (R)evolution series, Michael Fertik, founder of Reputation Defender speaks about the need for tools that allow users to protect their reputations and privacy and to control their digital profiles. From students applying to colleges to professionals for whom reputation impacts success, the Internet is often a dubious partner. In this interview, Fertik and Solis take a look at our current state of online privacy and discuss ways in which privacy can be engineered and taught moving forward.

Twitter’s founders say it best: “… we’ve learned something since starting Twitter—life doesn’t always fit into 140 characters or less.”

On Tuesday night, the company gave a small percentage of registered accounts a sneak preview of the new Twitter, a re-engineered version of the micro-community that will provide its 145 million registered users — and non-users — with an easier, faster and richer experience.

The new design features a cleaner timeline and a two-panel layout for instantly viewing additional content referenced in a Tweet, including embedded pics and video. When you click a Tweet, you’ll see information about the author, the content and, in the case of geotagged Tweets, a map of where the Tweet came from. Other features include infinite scrolling and mini-profiles similar to the ones found on social media dashboards like Hootsuite.

Real-time search has changed how we find what we’re looking for online. Last December, Google rolled out Google Real Time search, a feed of updates – including Tweets, content from Google news, blogs and recently added webpages – embedded on the first results page for hot topics, finally addressing its users’ needs for more recent results instead of results based only on historical usefulness.

The new Twitter will likely break the barrier of triviality. In spite of its close to 150 million registered users, the technology is just becoming mainstream. Advertisers display “Follow Us on Twitter” icons in most media, but there are no accurate numbers on how many of the registered users are indeed active. In June, the New York Times’ associate managing editor for standards, Philip Corbett, pointed out that the word “tweet” is a colloquialism, a neologism and jargon, the type of word the paper’s writers should avoid using unless they are talking about birds. Many people use Twitter, he said, but many don’t.

But this improved rich version of the technology promises to push Twitter further up in the ranks of search options. Google is number one, YouTube is number two. What will the immediacy of Twitter’s new interface do for the little engine that could?

Brian Solis, a thought leader in new media (with over 65,000 Twitter followers), believes Twitter “is a stream of collective consciousness that fundamentally changes the way we learn, discover and share.”

He writes:

Twitter execs, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Dick Costolo, have long stated that Twitter is not a social network; it is instead intended to be experienced as “consumption environment.”

In Williams’ words: “We’re trying to get people to understand that they don’t have to Tweet if they want to get value out of Twitter.”

Twitter has always been full of promise. Once the new Twitter is completely rolled out, more people will understand why its most dedicated users have been so full of praise.

The gap between my teeth was generational.  I was not yet seven, so I was years away from the tight teeth of my father. He had busied himself for months in our basement building a radio through which he would tap out Morse code night after night, sometimes connecting with a lone signaler several landmasses away. He would grit his teeth as he worked hard to remember his dots and dashes in real time; it was important to accommodate the experienced traveler on the other end.

A year later he would be the smallest business owner in the U.S. to install the IBM System/3, which was as large as a Manhattan kitchen and less powerful than an iPod Nano. A decade later he would bring home the Apple II, which originally sat on the kitchen table because furniture designers were not yet aware of the revolution.

In recent decades, I have witnessed the evolution of his PCs at work and on his desk at home and have found myself included in them as a folder. I occupy several rows in spreadsheets on family finances, and I hang childless from a digitally generated family tree.

Today, there is a gap between my niece’s teeth, but it’s narrower than mine was. Almost eight, she watches with envy as her older brother, ever occupied by his new cell phone, taps away with blurry thumbs to connect with friends several blocks away. Like Morse code, his language can be easily understood by a skilled reader. But unlike the rigid Morse, my nephew’s language evolves daily to include an increasingly private collection of acronyms and abbreviations and made-up words unique to him and his friends.

My niece doesn’t know it yet, but one day soon, when she begins to speak with her thumbs, if she likes she’ll be able to communicate in a language even her brother can’t understand.

The future is moving toward this generation more quickly than any other in history. We’re witnessing another of the great leaps forward, when human evolution is sign-posted by advances in communication. The emergence of modern human languages 50,000 years ago, Gutenberg’s creation of the modern printing press a short 560 years ago, and the capability to self-syndicate any social object – text, symbol, graphic, picture, video – have marked departure points for greater collective knowledge and awareness and have allowed for the brushing aside of barriers and the building of a new modernity.

The changes we’re seeing in language circumvent literacy, a step toward this new modernity. The clever arrangement of alphanumeric characters to form emoticons or to create some gr8 and efficient alternative representations returns symbolism to language and creates, indiscriminately for all, a visual context for thought and ideas.

For the youngest texters, cognitive abilities within a first language are still developing, so the playful use of a derivative language, an unrestrictive and imaginative language communicated on platforms that encourage innovation and deviation, is more than social. It’s evolutionary. Idioms are compressed into symbols, humor is understood earlier, syntax is not, and so semantic development occurs seemingly lawlessly among a population that will one day write and rewrite the laws that will govern more than just language.

There are many who don’t take comfort in this, and they are typically at the other end of this generation gap. They are the generation who were taught by their parents that language stood still, that neologisms were to enter language slowly if at all and to remain capitalized or hyphenated, and their daily usage was often challenged by a parent or a teacher who regulated attempts at evolving language by pulling from the shelf a dust-free dictionary.

Now the dictionary has become a lagging indicator. It is more often accessed from online spell checkers than slid from shelves. Increasingly, we dispense with words when they present barriers, and turn instead to symbols. The speed with which symbolism imparts understanding is amplified exponentially by the fiber that wraps the globe, and so in this connected world derivative language fills the communication gap. Through the added use of symbols, communication happens faster and more often, and missed meaning is made up for in repetition.

Much of this repetition is recorded for the ages. The younger generation is the first that will find it difficult to lose touch with their friends along the way. Digital breadcrumbs will keep it connected, good or bad, and it will never know what it’s like, for instance, to lose track of siblings during wartime, as happened with my grandfather who was separated from his two brothers for seven decades. Thanks to the Salvation Army, they were reunited, and a fanfare played out in newspapers across England.

The world ahead for the young generation will be one less of individual strategy than of collective reasoning as derivative language opens new pathways for opinions and understanding and empathy and compassion and facts. This generation will define the post-cyber age by globally addressing time-sensitive and relevant social issues.

My father and I still communicate the old-fashioned way, through email. He has a Facebook page and a Twitter account, two PCs and a Blackberry. We text each other occasionally, but our patterns and methods of communicating with each other are pretty much set. Still, we’re both amazed at how recently we marveled at the utility of punch cards and dots and dashes.

In April, Twitter bought Tweetie and tweaked it. Now they’re releasing it as simply Twitter, the only official Twitter application in the app store. And they dropped the price from $2.99 USD to free. Tweetie fans are already calling it Tweetie 3. Yesterday, Tweetie 2 was removed from the app store, raising speculation that the new version could be released sometime very soon. There are reports the app is currently available on the New Zealand App Store. TechTree.com was lucky enough to get several screen shots.

Favorite on-screen moments of the Governator include one in the 1977 documentary “Pumping Iron” where the master employs a little psychology on a young Lou Ferrigno by telling Ferrigno’s coach, who happens to be Ferrigno’s father, that the amateur shouldn’t make so much noise as they work out together in preparation for a competition. Others include just about any scene from the original “Conan the Barbarian” – what a hoot – and of course the Terminator series. And now this moment. In this short clip, Arnold thanks the people of Col-i-forn-ee-a for their tweets on how to deal with the state budget crisis.

There has been some discussion among the ranks about Twitter and how to best use it. Of course, there is no consensus. Twitter is a micro-blog with a feature set that gets richer by the day, so it becomes increasingly difficult to place in the same cubicle any two people who are using Twitter the same way. But we’ve been able to pin down a few facts that inform our own tweeting.

First, it simply isn’t true, categorically, that size doesn’t matter. While the number of people following you does often represent a vanity measurement, if those followers are targeted and if you keep them engaged, then size matters a lot. In his piece “The Science of ReTweets,” social media and viral marketing scientist Dan Zarella points out that it only makes sense that the more followers you have the more retweets you’ll get. Number of retweets is an important metric in determining Twitter influence and clout. Zarella does point out, however, that the correlation between number of followers and retweets is weak, but it is still a positive one.

Various ranking services list number of followers as their first measurement. Twitalyzer.com presents “Impact” as its first of several key metrics, and listed first under this metric is number of followers. And on Grader.com’s “Algorithm Factors,” the first measurement is, yep, number of followers.

So size matters. But not in a vacuum. To borrow from Twitalyzer, engagement, referenced citations, influence, generosity, clout, and velocity all contribute to overall Twitter rank, and more importantly to achieving your objectives with your Twitter campaigns. Here is a simple set of steps to remember:

• Target the people you follow. Look at bio information to see with whom you may easily engage, and search on terms and hash tags of interest to you or your organization.
• Unfollow anyone who hasn’t followed you back in three days (unless of course you simply love their tweets).
• Make your tweets engaging, and use keywords and links.

Another part of the discussion among the ranks deals with actually being able to read all of the tweets of the individuals you follow. What you see is less than what you get. Let’s face it, once you follow more than 50 people, and if you’re tweeting for your company or organization hopefully your sites are set much higher than that, you’ll never see all their tweets on your home page. This is why our friends at Twitter created lists, which allow us to categorize and group together those individuals we wish to keep up with by carving them out of Twitter’s rushing stream.

Okay, okay. Size isn’t everything. What matters is that you get from Twitter that which you enjoy. And that could come from a single follower.

Oh, please retweet this!

One thing Twitter isn’t is unpopular. It grew over 1400% from June of 2008 through June of 2009, one of the fastest growing services of all time on the web. And an expanding feature set is attracting even more users to this micro-blogging oddity. Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of people. So many, in fact, reluctant adopters are often left asking, “What is Twitter?”

Twitter Isn’t a Little Black Book
Once you have over 50 followers, and depending on how generous some of them are with the minutiae of their lives, you can’t read all of their tweets. This is the first lesson of Twitter. So it doesn’t matter how many people you follow, or how few. Twitter is different for everyone, but the number of people you follow doesn’t have to be constrained necessarily to the number of people you can realistically follow. I follow people whose tweets interest me those whose bios contain information indicating they may be useful to me in some way. Do they share my interests? Are they near me? Are they in my industry? Potential clients?

Follow to be reminded, search to read. If I’m interested in a person’s tweets, I follow them. They’ll appear in my list of followers and when I peruse that list I’ll be reminded to visit their Twitter page from time to time. If I’m interested in what people are saying about a particular topic, I search on that topic.

But forget about trying to read every tweet that comes in on your main feed.

Twitter Isn’t Slow
Twitter, with its shortened URLs and users with huge follower lists, is the perfect medium for responding to information and disseminating information quickly to a large number of people. It can come in handy when you want to quickly get in on a conversation in social media. This is why it’s important to have targeted followers and followers who are influencers, and as many of these types of followers as possible. If they like your tweet, they might retweet, helping you to spread your message quickly.

When a tweet is retweeted often, it’s important to a particular group. A tweet that goes viral is recent, and the social signals it generates are now. If that tweet is about you or your organization, it’s good to be able to respond quickly, particularly if it happens to be a complaint.

Twitter Isn’t a Newspaper, a Book or a Magazine
Twitter is a micro-blog. It spits out tweets 140 characters at a time that contain useful words and phrases that are easy to search and that give a good indication of what’s on people’s minds. Lots of people, not just a handful who sit on an editorial board.

Twitter Isn’t Feckless
By midday on January 12, 2010, the top ten Twitter topics were related to Haiti or earthquake relief. On June 17, 2009, the State Department asked Twitter to hold off on scheduled maintenance to its servers to avoid disruptions in what had become a useful source of information coming out of Iran during its election. Twitter pushes social signals into the mainstream and helps make much of what’s important to us a little more transparent.

Twitter Isn’t a Technology That’s Going Away
The Twitter syntax is so simple and effective Facebook has adopted parts of it. Type the @ symbol followed by a letter in Facebook and you’ll see friends’ names appear. And it’s search capabilities are so strong Google began including live Twitter rolls on its search pages for timely topical searches.

Historically, search engines have determined the importance of web pages and delivered to us the most relevant ones based on our search terms. But it takes time to determine the relevancy of a web page. What about recent results? This is where Twitter soars. It gives us recent results, many of which are relevant. We’re beginning to see content authority changing, and Twitter is at the root of this change. Today, for instance, Google launched Google Buzz, a set of Twitter-like social networking features within Gmail.

Twitter is building up a feature set that has for many become indispensable. Whether Twitter the company will be around for long is to be seen, but the company is valued at around $1 billion at the time of this post, and its technology will most like be around whenever you read this.

If you’re ever asked in an email from Twitter to change your password, think first and then do this. Do not click on any links in the email. Go to your web browser and sign in to Twitter as you normally would. Click on Settings in the upper right, then click on Password. This is the only safe way to change your password.

Should you change your password if you receive this email from Twitter? I would say yes, even if you think the email is not from Twitter. Password protection is the weakest point of entry on the Web, so strong passwords that are changed frequently are the best way to protect your goods online.

The Twitter API has allowed developers to create thousands of Twitter tools and applications that help us make even better use of Twitter, and these tools require that you log in to your Twitter account off site. In these cases, your username and password are protected.

But because we can sign in so easily from other places, Twitter users are easy targets for phishing attacks. And quite a few have accompanied Twitter’s rapid growth in the last 18 months. If Twitter were to ask you to change your password, most likely they would tell you the same thing: go to your Twitter account and do it there.

Can you offer any warnings on Twitter attacks you’ve encountered?

http://trendsmap.com/
Wee loved it when it debuted, but it was glitchy on the two different platforms we tested it on. But no more. And it keeps getting better. A great tool for monitoring social signals coming through Twitter.

“Trendsmap.com is a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world. See what the global, collective mass of humanity are discussing right now.”

http://twendz.com/
Twendz is a service that helps you measure sentiment and brand impact on Twitter. Sentiment is a measure of how people feel about a particular topic, and it’s an important metric in Social Media. This is a great service for companies who want to see what’s being said about them or their products.

Loving this one. I’m watching the sentiment rating of the movie “Nine” as tweet updates roll by me in real time. Not quite as exciting as the movie, though.

http://oneforty.com/
They say it best on their homepage: “oneforty is your Twitter outfitter, with tons of resources for all things Twitter. Currently tracking 1912 apps that make Twitter even better.” Wee agree with this statement, though the number of apps is likely to increase. That’s right: even more Twitter critters.

http://tweetdeck.com
If you kinda get Twitter, then you already know about Tweetdeck. One of the better desktop Twitter interfaces. Follow thousands, but view them in groups instead of on a single feed. Too much good stuff to describe here. Check it out.