The GOP chairman from Virginia has recently joined Twitter, and amidst a major struggle for control of the state Senate, he Tweeted the following:
I really don’t know what to say … it’s hard to imagine what, aside from common sense, could have prevented this.
He’s, essentially, flabbergasted.
Flabbergasted that newbies are being newbies. He’s talking about the Internet newbs at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
They both wrote up stories about the 25 things meme that’s going around on Friendfeed and Facebook. If you’re somehow unaware of what I’m talking about, it’s a meme where you and your friends are encouraged to make a post detailing 25 random facts about yourself that might not otherwise be common knowledge (I fell prey to this meme here).
Here’s what Adam says:
Hate to be the one to say this, but the 25 things meme is not news. It is simply what the social web does. If national media (yes, national media - NYT, USA Today, even TIME) are going to write up note-tagging on Facebook and that is the best web culture reporting they can come up with - that’s just sad.
[…]
Really? This is so mysterious? Wow, I could have sworn people have been doing this since we could email each other.
I may be in the minority, but do you find this mundane coverage by national outlets trying to report on the absolute least interesting things in the social web uncomfortable to read?
He talks about it as if this is something unpredictable – this ‘news’ coverage of what we who’ve been on the Internet for 15 years have seen for a long time.
But as the social web goes truly mainstream, people are going to be exposed to this stuff for the first time. And some of these folks in the mainstream are going to be journalists for mainstream publications. And as NBC used to say about their re-runs, “if you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you!”
How are these newbs getting stuck on the Internet beat, anyway? Well, it’s a matter of perspective and complexity. Most of the Internet is about social interaction these days – and as anyone who’s ever taken a sociology course can tell you, this stuff ain’t rocket science.
It doesn’t take much of an intellectual to be an “expert” in social media, particularly when you have such well known experts like Robert Scoble, Seth Godin and Chris Brogan paving the way with all you need to know in layman’s terms. To analyze the stuff takes an astute mind, but it doesn’t take an experienced one.
Thus these newbs are given a beat at a mainstream publication, these journals of record, to talk about what’s going on here like it’s sliced bread.
And the rest of us get to laugh at them.
The original story was on DarkReading on February 3rd, entitled: “Twitter Clickjacking Hack Released.” In the piece, Kelly Jackson Higgins not only described the attack type in great detail, but had (for a time) a link to where the hack itself could be downloaded and tested.
Padolsey's Twitter clickjacking attack (click here to experience it if you're a Twitter user) basically positions an iFrame over a button that's linked to Twitter's "Status" function. While logged in to Twitter, the victim clicks the button on the demo page and, voila, his Twitter status gets changed by the attack to a harmless update the user, himself, had no control over: "Yes, I did click the button!!! (WHAT!!??)"
"This is a pretty harmless example, but I can imagine it being used for more sinister endeavours," Padolsey blogged. "Clickjacking is a dangerous, malicious technique -- take it seriously."
Essentially it’s just a CSS layer placed over a button, which opens an iFrame and uses your cookie that you have set that leaves you logged into Twitter. It bypasses the API altogether.
There really isn’t any defense around this – except for a problem with the hack that Steven Hodson and I found. If you dig around, you can find the source code for the hack still in Google’s cache, as I did (almost all of the working hacks mentioned in the security articles have been taken offline now).
Steven and I both tried utilizing the cached and live versions of the hack in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer, and both browsers seemed to be patched against the exploit (hence why I only talked about it on the linkblog, instead of a more in-depth article like this). In essence, the hack didn’t work.
So, essentially, it’s not that big of a deal (even though @ev says there’s a fix going out now).
Yet another app falls to the identity juggernaut of Facebook Connect today – Brightkite has now implemented the ability to log in to the service using your Facebook account.
Aside from the added convenience, the benefit really goes to Brightkite here, with the ability to get the viral spreading common to Facebook apps. Soon after logging on with FC on Brightkite, you are asked to “Discover Friends,” which allows you to bring in your friends from Facebook, GMail, Twitter and Yahoo Mail.
If you want to connect with me on Brightkite, here’s my profile.
Yahoo’s blog, Yodel Anecdotal, couldn’t help from trumpeting the news as well. Yahoo was chosen to be the default homepage provider for the inflight service.
Yahoo provided a bit more information in their release:
They’ve equipped one aircraft with Internet connectivity (via Row 44) and plan to add three more before the end of March. Yahoo! has teamed up with Southwest to build the free inflight homepage (here’s a larger screenshot), where passengers can find a host of things to either help them wile away the hours or bone up on their destination city.
Pretty cool stuff. There’s no word on the cost for the in-flight service I’ve seen anywhere. I enjoy the concept of being able to turn on Internet as soon as I get on the plane (and by most accounts, it works relatively flawlessly). It was an option on the last American Airlines flight I was on, but I couldn’t justify popping $15 for using the web for only 45 minutes of being in the air.
Of course, the most successful memetrackers have tended to be closed sites like Blogrunner and Techmeme, and all the sister sites associated with that. It’s this that makes such an intriguing company to watch, and something that most bloggers would absolutely love to either try out or take a run at implementing it into their workflow.
That’s why it’s not surprising that OneSpot has taken a $4.2 million series A from Silver Creek Ventures (as well as Mike Maples and Pat Horner).
Subscribe to the Video feed here.
Download the MP4 directly.
The money is going to further develop the product and give them a runway towards profitability and growth, but the event served as a great launchpad for discussion last week when Matt Cohen was gracious enough to sit down and talk with me about link journalism, memetracking and the ideas of content creation versus content curation.
Matt and I had some great conversational threads in the interview (so much so, that we put off the actual discussion of the cash infusion until the end of the show). I could go through and catalog the discussion, but I’d rather you watch it with the thought in mind that Matt’s discussion on the aim of what he calls a “Pandora for content” has caused me to reconsider the long term plans for this site, with less of an emphasis on more writers and an additional emphasis on using his aggregation service to augment my own content creation.
While the rumor doesn’t seem to be holding much water at the moment, I have to say that I have much the same reaction that most folks seem to have – it’s a bad idea.
On the one hand, it seems to fit into the general spirit of other tools at Yahoo like Flickr and Delicious. On the other, Yahoo already has a number of lifestreaming products that aren’t doing a whole lot, like the ill-fated Yahoo 360 and floundering profiles system.
I’m not sure, at this point, what Yahoo can do to rehabilitate it’s own community. The most successful thing it has going at ths point is it’s email and the partnership with AT&T that sets folks homepages to My.Yahoo.com. To try to turn that into a community would require integrating other services in their arsenal (like, say, Flickr and Delicious) into that fold. Bringing another lifestreaming service with no discernable business model doesn’t bring them any closer to displacing Twitter, the theory that Duncan Riley and Owen Thomas seem to be advancing.
It’s difficult to imagine that driving user engagement being the path to community is something that Yahoo doesn’t understand, having been in this game this long. Furthermore, it’s not something you can buy and plug into a larger userbase – it’s something you need to organically cultivate.
