Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve seen heat maps from Foursquare before, but we haven’t seen anything from Twitter in a while. However, the micro-blogging service showed off a handful of heat maps today that map out all geotagged Tweets that make the maps look like a blue-and-white blotch of paint that spilled onto a canvas.

The maps are of Europe, as well as populous cities like New York, Tokyo, and Istanbul. What’s perhaps most impressive is that the maps are only comprised of small blue dots for each Tweet, meaning that all those Tweets merely outline the city by themselves, and you can clearly make out roads and coastlines.

The maps incorporate every geotagged Tweet since 2009, which Twitter says are in the obvious “billions,” with every dot representing a Tweet, the more Tweets there are, the brighter the blue is. The maps are really neat to look at, and they give you a sense at just how many Tweets have been sent over the last five years or so.

Twitter has a ton more of these heat maps on their Flickr page, including cities like Sydney, Boston, Seoul, Seattle, San Francisco, and Moscow, as well as the entire US and all of Puerto Rico, which are perhaps even more impressive. If you live in one of these big cities, be sure to check it out, because it’s always fun to see your hometown lit up by Tweets.

Twitter splays out heat maps with geotagged Tweets is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo spoke at the D11 conference today and discussed a wide range of topics involving the social media serivce, including Twitter’s new two-factor authentication that they just recently started rolling out. Twitter was one of the few big services to play catch-up with the security feature, and Costolo knows it.

Costolo says that the company takes security issues “super seriously,” and he notes that Twitter has a “responsibility to helping these organizations that people view as authorities.” Of course, he’s referring to the recent hackings of high-profile Twitter accounts, like the AP, which a bogus tweet was sent out onto their feed.

Costolo says that security is “going to be an ongoing challenge,” saying that Twitter has “a bunch of security people working diligently on it.” He also admitted that the company hasn’t “moved quickly enough there,” pointing to the goal that he wants to improve Twitter’s security team and prevent further hacks in the future.

Costolo admitted that Twitter was extremely late to the game when it came to rolling out two-factor authentication for the social media service, but he says that he wants to do more about Twitter’s security. He didn’t say what things that he wanted to get done nor what the expect from the company in the future, but we can guess that Twitter will soon become more secure as time goes on.

Accounts getting hacked certainly isn’t anything new, and it happens on all popular social media services, but Twitter has seen an alarming number of account hijacks recently, with popular brands getting hacked, as well as authoritative news outlets, including BBC and CBS. Jeep, Burger King, and Fisker also had their Twitter accounts hacked recently.

SOURCE: AllThingsD

Twitter CEO on security: “we haven’t moved quickly enough” is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Finding over 10,000 illegally dumped pigs in Shanghai’s largest river and main source of drinking water? Disgusting. Poking fun at the scandal by “floating” a huge inflatable pink pig on China’s largest social messaging site? Priceless!

As tipped late last month, Twitter has begun rolling out two-factor authentication. This will allow users to require both a password and a verification code that gets sent to them via SMS on their mobile phone. The feature is disabled by default, so you’ll need to go into your account settings in order to enable it.

All you do once you’re in Account Settings on Twitter is checkmark “Require a verification code when I sign in,” and then click on “add a phone.” From there, you’ll enter in your mobile phone number. Once that’s done, you’ll always be sent a six-digit code that you’ll use to sign in each time to Twitter. This is to prevent other people from logging into your account, even if they know your password.

Any existing applications that you have connected to Twitter will continue to work after you’ve enabled two-factor authentication, and you shouldn’t have to allow access to them again. If you want to sign into Twitter on multiple devices or sign into Twitter in third-party apps, you can generate a temporary password to log in and authorize such devices and apps.

Twitter finally joins the ranks of other online services using two-factor authentication, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Dropbox. If you haven’t yet enabled two-factor authentication for these services, you should probably go ahead and do yourself a big favor by enabling it for that services that you use. You’ll most likely thank yourself later.

SOURCE: Twitter Blog

Twitter two-factor authentication rolling out now is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Twitter announced today that they have been granted a patent for the popular pull-to-refresh gesture that you see in many mobile apps. However, as a part of the company’s new Innovator’s Patent Agreement, Twitter agrees only to use the patent for “defensive purposes.” Otherwise, the company will need Loren Brichter’s permission, the man who invented

Read The Full Story