Twitter has just announced some photo news, as rumors circulating over the Memorial Day holiday weekend hinted it would. The big reveal isn’t exactly a new photo-sharing or photo-storage service – Twitter will not be hosting the photos you Tweet now. But that doesn’t mean that today’s announcement is irrelevant or unimportant.

Today’s announcement actually has two part: one dealing with search and one dealing with photos. It also involves two new partners for the company: Firefox and Photobucket.

Twitter says that it’s rolling out an updated version of its search today, one that will not just give you “more relevant tweets” and that will show related photos and videos on the results page so you needn’t leave the site to view them.

Twitter is partnering with Firefox in these improved search efforts – at least as part of today’s announcement. With a new version of the browser, users will be able to type a hashtage or a @username into the Awesome Bar and go directly to the search results page. There’s also an add-on that will give this same functionality. This makes Twitter search function much like any other address-bar-based search engine. (Well, except that it bypasses both Google and Chrome, of course.)

Twitter also announced that it has partnered with the photo-sharing and storage company Photobucket, which will be responsible for hosting these tweeted photos. In coming weeks, Twitter says, users will be able to upload a photo and attach it to a Tweet directly from the Twitter.com website. This will also be available via Twitter’s mobile apps, and the company is exploring ways to Tweet photos via SMS.

Just as the new photo-sharing service will be unveiled over the coming weeks to users, it appears as though developers will also have to wait for more information about the new “‘Tweet-with-photo’ API.” But as there are a number of companies who’ve staked their claim on providing just this sort of service – namely Twitpic and YFrog – the future of Twitter photo-sharing still appears cloudy.

Three and a half years ago, Google made what seemed to be a pretty big $100 million acquisition: FeedBurner. You remember that company, right? They’re the ones that dominated RSS management before all of that real time tech came along and rendered it obsolete for many people. Today, Google is putting the real time paddles to FeedBurner’s heart in an attempt to rivive it.

If you visit FeedBurner today, you’ll see a “Try out our NEW (beta) version!” message in the top menu. Clicking on this will take you to the new version. So what’s new? The entire look and feel has been revamped. The new Home screen is loaded up with overview stats and alerts for the sites you run. But the real key, of course, is in the Feeds area.

Here you’ll see a completely new way of looking at your subscribers and data. In a move that should surprise no one, it looks a lot more like Google Analytics. But the key is what’s going on behind the scenes. As Google notes:

The real story is what’s new under the hood, however: the new interface provides real time stats for clicks, views, and podcast downloads, which means you can start seeing what content is drawing traffic from feed readers, Twitter, and other syndicated sources as it happens.

In fact, Google mentions Twitter a couple times in their post about the update — more than they mention their own RSS reader product, Google Reader. Clearly, they see where the future of content consumption is heading.

And it’s interesting that Twitter is so vital here. One of FeedBurner’s co-founders and CEO was Dick Costolo — yes, the same man who is now the CEO of Twitter.

Costolo left Google in July of 2009 after he had already moved on from the FeedBurner team. It seemed pretty clear to many of us that after the acquisition, Google wasn’t putting the resources it should have into the product. And its time at Google has been filled with bugs, problems, and a general growing disinterest from most users.

Maybe that will change now. Hopefully.

Researchers from Indiana University have devised a method for predicting changes in the Dow Jones Industrial Average through the analysis of Twitter updates. Using two mood-recording algorithms, the Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) and OpinionFinder, the researchers analyzed 9.7 million tweets posted between March and December 2008. They found that correlations between the calmness index, one of the six “moods” measured by GPOMS, could be used to predict whether or not the Dow Jones Industrial Average went up or down between two and six days later.

According to MIT’s Technology Review, head researcher Johan Bollen and his team are announcing this news at Indiana University today. Says Bollen regarding the discovery, his team found “an accuracy of 87.6% in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.”

As MIT notes, that’s an incredible result. Maybe too incredible. The article then questioned some of the methodology involved with this project. For example, tweets from around the world were used instead of just U.S.-based ones, which seems an odd choice given that the intention was an analysis of the U.S. stock market. However, during 2008, Twitter’s user population was largely American, so this factor alone does not entirely discount the study.

What’s interesting about this analysis of Twitter moods is that out of the six states GPOMS measures – happiness, kindness, alertness, sureness, vitality and calmness – it’s the last one, calmness, that’s most useful in predicting stock market changes. None of the other indices, including OpinionFinder, a more general positive/negative sentiment indicator, reflected any stock market changes.

The researchers admit that they don’t know why or how this selection of Twitter.com user feeds was able to make predictions so accurate, and they say more research is needed.

Using Twitter to track the stock market is nothing new: StockTwits, for example, is an online community of investors where users sign in with their Twitter account to keep track of stock-related news. The service pulls in tweets tagged with a $ before a stock symbol (ex.: $AAPL). Competing service FINIF Financial Informatics, does something similar – it gathers sentiment reports in real-time from SEC filings, news headlines and Twitter. FINIF scans all recent Twitter updates that reference a stock symbol and then measures the sentiment using a custom word list to create the “sentiment score” for a given stock.

However, neither service purports to offer stock predictions on this level based on either the news or the fluctuating “moods” of the Twitter user base. In the future, perhaps, that may change, as this sentiment analysis research continues.

Google TV

Earlier this morning, Google unveiled a new standalone portal for its upcoming Google TV platform, which will be landing in living rooms this fall. In addition to providing a pretty thorough walkthrough of Google TV’s interface, Google is also showing off additional functionality that’s being developed by third parties.

In its blog post, Google says that it’s “been overwhelmed by interest” from third parties, and that Google TV will be shipping with at least the following applications: Netflix, Twitter, CNBC, Pandora, Napster, NBA Game Time, Amazon Video On Demand and Gallery. Some of the big ones, like Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand, were already briefly mentioned during Google TV’s debut at Google I/O last May. Others are new, and it’s clear that Google TV is seeing adoption from both web companies, like Pandora, and the content creators themselves. Unfortunately third party developers will have to wait until next year before they can deploy their own Android Apps to Google TV, but this should give the platform a solid start.

You can see some of the apps in action in the video below.

Partners are beginning to post further details about their applications. Here’s some detail on what you can do with the Twitter app:

The application has most of the features and functionality that you’d expect from Twitter. It makes it easy to look through Tweets, @mentions, and favorites. When you click on a Tweet, you can reply, retweet, favorite, or share it. You will also see additional options depending on the content of the Tweet. For example, you can visit a URL or click a hashtag to search for it on Twitter. If a user is mentioned, you can visit that user’s profile to see their Tweets or follow them. And if there is a link to a photo or video, you can see a thumbnail version. Clicking the link will take you to the site so you can see a larger version of the photo or watch the video.

And here’s one from the Pandora app:

With Pandora for Google TV you can easily tune in to the personalized stations you’ve created on the web or on your phone, listen, and rate songs with a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. You can even create new stations right on Google TV. It’s great for parties too — as you listen, the screen updates with big beautiful album art and information that illustrates what’s playing – a great conversation piece for you and your guests.

In addition to these native applications, Google is also showcasing web applications built by content owners, including VEVO, CNN, New York Times, and Cartoon Network (the TNT shot below is of a web app, the rest are for native apps). These are interesting for a few reasons. Google TV promises access to the full web though its integrated web browser, but, as we’ve discussed previously, the Internet is not optimized for the ten foot experience — Google needs these publishers to rework their sites the way they have for mobile, and it seems to be having luck.

A second, less obvious implication: this is good news for other TV-based platforms that come with a web browser, like Boxee. Right now Boxee does some interesting technical gymnastics to make web video play nicely on your TV — web apps should make their job a lot easier.

It’s finally here. Digg, the social link sharing site that has watched its once-meteoric rise to popularity level off over the last couple years, is relaunching today as it attempts to surge to greater heights — with an added focus on making the site better for publishers as well as users. Digg v4 will be rolling out over the next few hours, and brings some major changes that could totally change the dynamic of the site. Plenty of invites have been distributed over the last couple months, and many sites posted previews, but for most people this will be the first time they’ve experienced ‘New Digg’ for themselves.

The biggest change to come in Digg v4 is the increased emphasis on social. When you first sign in, you’ll be walked through a flow inviting you to begin following other users, both from a series of lists curated by Digg and from friends on your Facebook, Twitter, and Google accounts (which you can easily connect with). Once you’ve done this, you’ll get to the real meat of Digg. Which, as it happens, looks a lot like the old Digg.

The new Digg.com!

As with the Digg you’re used to, you’ll see a stream of recent stories filling up most of the page, with ten top stories in a sidebar on the right. But there’s one key difference: each of these stories has been Dugg by one of your friends (or sponsored by an advertiser). Likewise, the stories on the right hand side of the screen represent the stories that have been dugg most by your friends over the last day or so.

But fear not, Digg diehards — the Digg you’ve come to know and love is still readily accessible at the top of the page, via the ‘Top News’ section. Clicking this tab will transition over to a version of Digg that’s much more like the current version, with recent news and Top News as submitted across all of Digg.

Other key changes include the link submission process, which is much more straightforward than it used to be. Before now if you wanted to submit a link to Digg, you had to provide an image and description to go along with it. Now these will be automatically added, the same way they are when you add a link to Facebook.

Another view of the new Digg.com!

Of course, there’s still one big question: will it work? At this point I’m skeptical, but it won’t be clear for some time. In order for this to lead to the resurgence Digg needs, user behavior will need to change, especially among casual users. The site has long been dominated by power users who account for many of the stories that hit the front page — now there’s much more emphasis on what your friends have shared. Which assumes, of course, that you friends are actually sharing things on Digg, which is hardly a given at this point.

This launch has been a long time coming — it was supposed to launch back in 2009. In April, Digg founder Kevin Rose took over as CEO, replacing Jay Adelson — at the time we were hearing that he was unsatisfied with the progress of New Digg, which had already been much delayed.

Big changes are coming to Twitter links. In a post just published on the Twitter blog, the company has announced that it will soon be using a new official link shortening service t.co to wrap all links shared on Twitter. Starting some time this summer, every time you share a link through either the Twitter web client or a third-party, it will be wrapped in a link with the format t.co/******.

So what does this mean for the Twitter ecosystem? Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman says that the feature serves three purposes. First, it’s going to help Twitter crack down on spam, as the service will be able to accurately monitor the distribution of each link, and it can warn users when it thinks a link may be malicious. Second, it will allow users to better understand where links are going (more on that below). And third, it will help Twitter with analytics, which is related to its Promoted Tweets. Goldman says that Twitter is pre-announcing the feature, which is currently only active with three accounts, to give the developer community a heads up for what’s coming.

The confusing part about t.co is that many users won’t really be aware of it. That’s because Twitter is including metadata with each tweet that allows clients to display the link’s original URL, even when the link is being routed through t.co first. For example, if I shared a link to AndrewSaysHello.com, the link in my tweet would still show up as http://www.andrewsayshello.com, despite the fact that users were being silently routed through t.co before they arrived at their favorite tech blog.  One other thing to note: while users will now be seeing expanded links show up in their tweets (which could be quite lengthy), each link will only count as twenty characters against the 140 character maximum. That’s because all t.co links will be exactly twenty characters long.

Goldman says that the “goal is not to build a brand around t.co”. Instead, it’s to increase the transparency of links that are being shared on Twitter.

This isn’t good news for link shorteners like bit.ly, but it isn’t necessarily their death knell either. Goldman says that bit.ly’s value-added services, like analytics and custom shortened domains, will still work properly with t.co, and users can obviously still use bit.ly for more general link shortening purposes. Thing is, most people sharing links through services like bit.ly are doing it because it’s what their Twitter clients do by default — they don’t need analytics or custom domains. For these users there’s now no obvious reason to use these services, because Twitter will be handling the shortened links itself.

Today’s news doesn’t come as a surprise — back in March, Twitter began routing direct messages through a new link shortening service as an anti-phishing mechanism. It didn’t take long for users and developers to question whether Twitter would soon be broadly launching a link shortening service, and Twitter confirmed that it would in April.

Twitter Logo

Twitter has announced that it will soon update its Terms of Service for developers and prohibit third-party advertising networks and developers from inserting ads into a user’s stream. This could mean the end of a number of third-party advertising networks like Ad.ly and 140 Proof, both of which created their business around in-stream ads. According to Twitter’s COO Dick Costolo, the company decided to take this step in order to “preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created” and ensure the “long-term health and value of the platform.”

Twitter argues that it wants to create “a platform of enduring value.” To do so, Costolo says, Twitter has to ensure that the platform remains valuable for its users. In-stream advertisers, however, are only interested in near-term revenue opportunities – which come at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform.Costolo also argues that these in-stream advertising networks are simply not innovative enough and “the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization.”

The real reason for banning in-stream ads, however, becomes obvious after reading this paragraph:

It is important to keep in mind that Twitter bears all the costs of maintaining the network, protecting the Tweet stream against spam, supporting user requests, and scaling the service. Indeed, Twitter will bear many of the support costs associated with any third-party paid Tweets, as Twitter receives support emails related to anything a user sees in a tweet stream. The third-party bears few of these costs by comparison.

Twitter simply doesn’t want to bear the cost of supporting these advertising networks that don’t bring the company any direct value and revenue. Prohibiting in-stream ads isn’t so much about fostering innovation and preserving the integrity of the platform. Instead, it’s about ensuring that advertisers flock to Twitter’s own Promoted Tweets.

It will be interesting to see how third-party developers will react to this. Just a few weeks ago, Twitter began launching its own official Twitter clients and now the company has prohibited the most obvious method of monetizing unofficial clients. Instead of being able to insert ads into their users stream – the most natural place for these ads – developers will now have to show ads outside of the stream. As Costolo puts it, “there will be all sorts of other third-party monetization engines that crop up in the vicinity of the timeline.” Starting today, however, the stream itself is off-limits for all advertisers besides Twitter itself.

A spamming botnet known for keeping a low profile has been hammering hundreds of Websites — including the CIA, Chase, Mozilla Labs, Twitter, SANS, Google Chrome, and the FBI — during the past week with an unusually conspicuous amount of phony traffic that has researchers rushing to analyze its next move.

The Pushdo botnet, a.k.a. “Cutwail” and “Pandex,” has been flooding those sites with bogus SSL connections that stop short of requesting anything from the Website. The infected bots begin to initiate an SSL connection with some “junk” traffic and then disconnect, according to The Shadowserver Foundation. Shadowserver and other researchers have been monitoring the activity, which increased traffic by several million hits across several hundred thousand IP addresses, according to Shadowserver.

The botnet hit the ZeusTracker Website, for example, with hundreds of thousands of different IP addresses within a 24-hour period. “This is a lot of bots generating a lot of traffic,” blogged Steven Adair, a researcher with Shadowserver. Recent code changes to Pushdo resulted in its bots generating the “junk” SSL connections to the 315 Websites, he said.

So what is Pushdo up to? Joe Stewart, director of malware research for Secureworks, says the botnet is making fake SSL connection attempts: Malformed packets cause the server to return an SSL negotiation error. “By adding the initial header of an SSL conversation, they may be attempting to avoid closer scrutiny by less vigilant inspection devices,” Stewart says. “And by sending a flurry of these connections to a number of legit ‘decoy’ sites, it helps the Pushdo C&C [command and control] traffic blend in and remain undetected in some cases,” he says.

It’s unclear thus far whether this is a test-run for phony SSL connections gone amuck that ended up exposing this Pushdo traffic, or something else. Stewart says it’s possible there could be more to the latest activity, such as the botnet’s rotating its target lists. “It’s hard to say,” he says.

Blending in has traditionally been Pushdo’s trademark: Although it’s one of the top five spamming botnets, it’s also one of the more under-the-radar botnets around. But this latest activity has researchers wondering how this massive surge of traffic, which resembles a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, would ultimately help its traffic blend in and become less detectable.

Shadowserver says the traffic is technically an attack, even though it doesn’t appear to be trying to knock the sites offline like a DDoS does. “We find it hard to believe this much activity would be used to make the bots blend in with normal traffic, but at the same time it doesn’t quite look like a DDoS either,” Adair says.

Secureworks’ Stewart says he has witnessed botnets sending traffic via SSL or port 443, but this phony SSL connection attempt is a first. “The Pushdo C&C protocol now also uses similar packets to encapsulate its encrypted/compressed phone-home requests,” he says. “Port 443 is commonly being used to proxy all kinds of non-SSL traffic by legit applications and bots alike, so it stands to reason that a heuristic one might look for suspicious or firewall-policy-violating traffic connections over port 443 that aren’t using SSL.”

The surge in traffic from Pushdo could cause problems for Websites with limited bandwidth and that typically get only a few hundred to a few thousand hits daily, Shadowserver says.

You’ve probably read or heard about KOOBFACE malware propagating through social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. A lot of analysis is available online through blogs or malware descriptions. But I bet most of you probably still do not know some or all of these things about KOOBFACE.

1. KOOBFACE knows: KOOBFACE has the capability to steal whatever information is available in your Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter profile. Profile pages of these social networking sites may contain information about one’s contact details (address, email, phone), interests (hobbies, favorite things), affiliations (organizations, universities), and employment (employer, position, salary). So beware, KOOBFACE knows a lot!
2. KOOBFACE doesn’t just know you through your profile information, they also know what you look like!: Not only does the botnet steal profile information, it also makes sure to put a face to the name by getting one’s profile picture as well.
3. URLs leading to KOOBFACE malware are either in compromised or free Web hosting sites: Yep, call them cheap but the guys behind KOOBFACE are making good use of compromised and free Web hosting sites in spamming KOOBFACE-related URLs. These URLs are spammed in social networking sites with catch phrases like “funny video,” which lead to a fake YouTube or Facebook site, which then leads to KOOBFACE malware.
4. KOOBFACE zombies are made into Web servers on top of being social networking site spammers: KOOBFACE installs a Web server component into infected machines, which effectively makes the infected machine part of the malware’s distribution network. Infected machines serve fake YouTube or Facebook pages, which then lead to the KOOBFACE malware.
5. KOOBFACE zombies are able to distribute repackaged versions of the malware: KOOBFACE Web servers are able to use UPX, a popular executable packer program, to pack (compress) the KOOBFACE binaries they serve.
6. Half of KOOBFACE infections occur in the United States: This is not surprising since majority of the social networking site users reside in the United States.
7. KOOBFACE is able to block IP addresses: Probably in an effort to protect itself against takedown or snooping by curious researchers, KOOBFACE implemented a blockIP routine where traffic coming from a particular IP range is blocked.
8. KOOBFACE is able to defeat Facebook’s spam filtering: Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter have recently implemented a spam-filtering mechanism where known spam URLs are blocked. KOOBFACE tries to circumvent this by first testing if a KOOBFACE spam URL is blocked by Facebook or not.

So there, some things you may not know about KOOBFACE. If you would like to read some more about KOOBFACE, check out the article over at Wikipedia here. So while you may not have been one of the ones to be infected by it, there is a good chance you have come across it before either from a friend’s infected account or just some random person who happened to target you after getting infected themselves. While it isn’t the nastiest worm out there, it is defiantly doing some damage so if you get some weird link from a friend on a social networking site, play it safe and please do not click on it!

Twitter has been spammed, DDoS’ed, and knocked offline, and now it has been used as the command center for a botnet. A researcher last week was looking for clues about the massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Twitter found a Twitter profile that was being used to send updates and malware to bots in an unrelated case of abuse of the site. “This is the first time I’ve seen in the wild botnet commands being pushed on Twitter — it won’t be the last,” says Jose Nazario, manager of security research for Arbor, who first spotted the botnet’s tweets. Nazario says there are probably other bot herders doing the same on Twitter.

“It looks like this guy is updating existing bots. I’ve seen and blogged malicious Twitter accounts in the past that spam links, using lures like ‘follow this band!’ that link to malcode,” he says. But this is the first time Twitter has been used to send commands to bots, he says.

Nazario says Twitter has since disabled the profile, but he says the same user, “upda4t3,” also has an account on Google’s Jaiku, the search engine giant’s microblogging service akin to Twitter. Joe Stewart, director of malware research for SecureWorks, in his Twitter update today said he had found “a newer version of the Twitter Bancos botnet — this one uses another microblogging service as a backup C&C [command and control].”

Botnet operators are always looking for ways to more stealthily communicate and update their victimized machines — some use peer-to-peer communications and HTTP to cover their tracks. Twitter is an ideal venue for them because it’s flexible, noisy with all of its communiques, and doesn’t have the anti-spam controls of other sites, Nazario says. And the anonymity of the URL shorteners also helps them send malicious links under cover, he says.

“They continue to innovate, and Twitter is likely to be yet another new channel to get updates out,” he says.

So far, the botnet seems to be all about stealing online banking information from bank customers in Brazil: Nazario found a couple hundred bots based in Brazil, but he says it’s difficult to get a real count. “To get that estimate, I went by who checked the update links on bit.ly [that] the bot was pushing via the Twitter updates,” Nazario says. “The malware came from somewhere else — we don’t know yet where. The Twitter status updates contain links to new downloads, more malware, and stuff to update and evade AV detection.”

Symantec researchers, meanwhile, are also dissecting the malware associated with the Twitter botnet. The Twitter status posts on the upda4t3 account were sending out new download links to malware that Symantec calls Downloader.Sninfs. The downloader reads a specific Twitter RSS feed once, according to Symantec. “The RSS feed is simply a text file similar to other RSS feeds found on other Internet sites. The RSS text file contains information as to where Downloader.Sninfs can find additional threats to download onto the compromised system. In this way the RSS file acts like a config file for the malware,” Symantec researcher Peter Coogan blogged. The malware downloaded by the Trojan is an existing Bancos password-stealing Trojan, according to Symantec, that poses as the interface at some Brazilian banks in order to steal passwords and other data off the victim’s computer.

Before I get started with this article, I would just quickly like to apologize for the lack of updates the past few weeks on the site. I have been in the middle of moving into my new location and it seemed that  the apartment complex was still trying to get the internet all setup when they let me move in. But everything is back to normal now so things should resume like normal! So here we go…

The tr.im link shortening service was shutdown by operator Nambu Network on Sunday after the company failed to find a buyer for the service.

“We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed,” the company wrote on its home page. “No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.”

The tr.im service was one of a number that will convert a conventional URL into a shorter alphanumeric string. When the tr.im URL is kicked the service redirects users to the original URL. The services are primarily designed for Twitter users who face a 140 character limit in messages they send although can be used in any application.

In closing down the service Nambu Networks said it had approached a number of people in the Twitter development world about buying the service but “nobody wanted it in exchange for a token amount of money. No one perceived any value in it, or they wanted to operate a shortener under a differently branded domain name.”

Nambu was also critical of Twitter’s preference for the bit.ly link shortening service and the effect that had on business and growth potential.

“There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but anointed bit.ly the market winner,” the company wrote. “Twitter has all but sapped us of any last energy to double-down and develop tr.im further. What is the point? With bit.ly the Twitter default, and with us having no inside connection to Twitter, tr.im will lose over the long-run no matter how good it may or may not be at this moment, or in the future.”

URL shortening services have recently been in the spotlight because of use by criminals to trick people into visiting phishing or illicit Web sites. The shortened URLs provide no hint as to their actual destination making it easier to fool people into clicking and visiting malicious Web sites.

Tr.im is no longer accepting new URLs although said it would continue to redirect links until at least the end of this year. Even though there are a good number of these websites out there, people always seem to have favorites and stick to the one they like best. This only means that fans of tr.im will have to look for a replacement URL shortner to take its spot.

Shortened URLs are great for character-conscious Tweeters, marketers who want to track Web site visitors, and even perhaps an opportunity for venture capitalists who are investing in companies such as Bit.ly.

But they are also providing a boon to spammers.

MessageLabs, a division of Symantec, said today the presence of shortened URLs in spam had skyrocketed over the last few days and now appears in more than 2 percent of all spam.

The company says that the dozens of new URL-shortening services are allowing spammers to evade anti-spam tools that aim at Web domains known for sending spam. The services also inadvertently help spammers trick Internet users who would normally be wary of domain names like, say, Spammy.ru.

Spammers have long relied on redirecting services to mask their URLs. However, the URL-shortening services, which are free and require no registration, save them from having to register for a redirect site and, in some cases, solve a distorted-word puzzle (commonly called a “captcha”) to mask their domain name.

Matt Sergeant, an anti-spam technologist at Message Labs, said the culture of Twitter — with people urgently retweeting links, often without even clicking on them — is sure to contribute to the spam problem in the months ahead. “The entire trust model of clicking on the URL is completely broken,” he said. “You can’t trust any URL on there.”

It’s a long weekend and you’re happy because you’ll get to spend the next three days with your family. You left the office in an excited mood but as the cab was approaching home, you suddenly realized that you forgot to shut down the Office PC. Oops!

It’s a sinking feeling because there’re so many confidential documents on the computer and since most of your trusted colleagues have also left for the day, there’s no point calling them for help.

So what do you do? Drive back to Office? Well that’s not required – just take out your cell phone or switch on the laptop at home, send an email (or an SMS or a tweet) and that will instantly lock your Office workstation. And if you share the same computer with multiple people, you can use another email command to remotely log off or even shut down the computer from anywhere in the world.

There’s no magic here, it’s the power of TweetMyPC utility that lets you remote control your computer from a mobile phone or any other Internet connected computer.

It works like this. You first install the free TweetMyPC utility on any Windows PC and associate your Twitter account. The app will silently monitor your Twitter stream every minute for any desktop commands and if it finds one, will act upon it immediately. The initial version of TweetMyPC was limited to basic shutdown and restart commands, however the current v2 has a far more robust set of commands, enabling a far more useful way of getting your PC to carry out certain tasks especially when you’re AFK (Away From Keyboard).

Before we get started, it may be a good thing if you can set up a new twitter account for remote controlling your desktop and also protect the status updates of this account to ensure better security. Protecting the account means that you prevent other users from reading your tweets which in this case are email commands that you sending to the computer. To protect your Twitter profile, log in to Twitter with the credentials you want to use, click Settings and check the box next to “Protect my Updates”.

Let’s get started. Install the TweetMyPC utility of your computer and associate your Twitter and Gmail account with the application. It will use Twitter to receive remote commands (like shutdown, log-off, lock workstation, etc) from while the email account will be used for send your information (e.g., what process are currently running on your computer).

Now that your basic configuration is done, it’s time to set up a posting method. You can use email, SMS, IM, web or any of the Twitter clients to send commands to the remote computer.

By Email: Associate you Twitter account with Posterous (auto-post) and all email messages sent to twit...@posterous.com will therefore become commands for the remote computer.

By SMS: If you live in US, UK, Canada, India, Germany, Sweden or New Zeleand, you can send associate Twitter with your mobile phone (see list of numbers) and then control your remote computer via SMS Text Messages.

By IM: Add the Twitter bot – twit...@twitter.com – to your list of Google Talk buddies and you can then send commands via instant message.

By Web: If you are on vacation but have access to an internet connected laptop, just log into the Twitter website and issue commands (e.g., shutdown or logoff) just as another tweet.

Now we will look at how to download Files, capture remote screenshots & more… While the TweetMyPC is pretty good for shutting down a remote computer, it lets you do some more awesome stuff as well. For instance, you need to download an unfinished presentation from the office computer so that you can work on it at home. Or you want to download a trial copy of Windows 7 on the Office computer while you are at home. Here’s a partial list of commands that you can use to remote control the PC – they’re case-insensitive and, as discussed above, you can send them to Twitter via email, SMS, IM or the web.

Screenshot : This is one of the most useful command I’ve come across after the shutdown command. Want to know what’s happening within the confines of your PC when you’re not around? Just tweet screenshot and TweetMyPC will take a screenshot of your desktop and post it to the web (see example).

ShutDown, LogOff, Reboot, Lock : The function of these useful commands is pretty obvious from their names.

Standby, Hibernate : Don’t want to shutdown the remote PC? Save power by entering standby mode with this command. Or hibernate your PC with a tweet, thereby saving even more power.

Download <url> : You can download any file from the Internet on to the remote computer using the download command. For instance, a command like download http://bit.ly/tCJ9Y will download the CIA Handbook so you have the document ready when you resume work the next day.

GetFile <filepath> : The Download command was for downloading files from the Internet onto the remote computer. However, if you like to transfer a file from the remote computer to your current computer, use the GetFile command. It takes the full page of the file that you want to download and will send that you as an email attachment. If you don’t know the file page, use the command GetFileList <drivename> to get a list of file folders on that drive.

GetProcessList : This is like a remote task manager. You’ll get a list of programs that are currently running on the remote computer along with their process IDs. Send another command kill <process id> to terminate any program that you think is suspicious or not required.

Conclusion:

TweetMyPC is a must-have utility and you never know when you may need it. And if you have been trying to stay away from Twitter all this time, the app gives you a big reason to at least create one protected account on Twitter.

That said, there’s scope for improvement. For instance, the app will wait for a minute to check for new messages in your Twitter stream so it’s not “instant”. The developers can actually increase that limit because the Twitter API now allows upto 100 checks per hour. And since the app is dependent on Twitter and Gmail, it will not work during those rare fail-whale moments.