Two Visualization Tools for Twitter

Two visualization tools for Twitter are introduced here: mentionmapp and twiangulate.


Mention Map is a Twitter visualization tool that displays the connections to a Twitter account. The tool is being upgraded but the original version is still available (click on the "classic link" at the bottom of the page.)

Twiangulate is another Twitter visualization tool that enables you to compare two or more Twitter accounts. The end result is a Venn diagram of commonalities as well as a table of the top followers.

Security Breach on Twitter

Twitter has now confirmed that there was unauthorised access to its administration interface. The French blog Korben has published screen-shots which show details of the accounts belonging to Ashton Kutcher, Lily Allen, Britney Spears and Barack Obama.

See more detail at Twitter blog and here.

Twitter Attacked by (XSS) Worm

A twitter nowadays does not eat worm? How about a worm is attacking twitter?


Twitter has confirmed the attack and closed a vulnerability on last Saturday (Apr 11, 2009). Over Saturday, a worm which uses a cross site scripting flaw in Twitter profiles has been tricking users of the social networking service and directing them to stalkdaily.com.

The worm consisted of JavaScript code hidden in the "Bio" section of the Twitter profile. A user would be sent to view another users profile which contained the script. The script would wait three seconds and grab the user name and twitter cookie for the user. It then used the Twitter API, with the users credentials to modify that users profile, adding the worm and sending tweets about stalkdaily.com.

Twitter users should check their profile's biography field to see if it has changed and if so, reset it. Twitter has reset the password on a number of affected accounts and those users will need to request a new password to regain access.