Twitter got hit with a little security incident this afternoon we’ll call the “StalkDaily Worm”. I have no clue if the StalkDaily site was actually associated with the worm at this point or if it was simply a misdirection. I believe it to be the latter. At around 3:43pm PST this afternoon I noticed some odd updates from a couple of my friends regarding the StalkDaily site. I then saw this tweet from @JoeCascio: ...

In the interest of making profile search more available to interested Twitter developers, I’ve added XML and JSON-formatted output to TweepSearch. Shown below is a simple example that allows you to query TweepSearch from any site using JSON callbacks. This is available free of charge for the time being, but if usage exceeds my current hosting capabilities I may start charging a small fee. See the TweepSearch Help page for information on other search operators. ...

Tweetie has become my exclusive application on the iPhone for Twitter usage. Between multiple account support, saved searches, and a quick, simple interface it replaced the few other apps I had to use simultaneously to achieve all of these. As part of the Twitter application stats I maintain over at TweetStats, I would notice Tweetie usage increasing on the weekends. My assumption is that mobile use rises on the weekends as people are not on their work computers. ...

I just realized I never posted here about my recent Twitter Bio Search Tool, TweepSearch. I guess I’ve just been a little heads down lately. I’ve been busy with various Twitter apps, work, and I’ll be heading to Boston tomorrow for the SOURCE con and to visit with friends and family. Anyway, TweepSearch - the original idea of the site was to allow somebody on Twitter to search the bios of their followers. It was inspired by a tweet from @SethSimonds and you can read more on the About page. However, once I started building it, I realized I was creating a more generic Twitter bio search application. I just updated the application yesterday and it now allows you to login (non-SSL, I’ll be fixing that eventually) and (un)follow directly from the interface, searches all Twitter profile fields by default, and allows you to search your friends and followers. Some examples: ...

Have I mentioned I like poking through data before? Maybe a few hours ago? Well I do. And while reviewing a book this evening on how to build applications with the Twitter API, I was motivated to take a look at usage of the “Favorites” feature on Twitter. Below is a graph showing the count of favorites across approximately 135,000 Twitter users. As expected, the majority of users have below 5,000 favorites. ...

As part of a recent project, I’ve been digging into some pretty cool data using Tableau. One of the instant deciders somebody on Twitter makes when they’re followed by a new user is their friends/followers ratio. If a user has lots of friends, but few followers, they’re not likely to be very interesting or can even be spammy accounts. As part of their attempt to combat spam, Twitter initially limits the number of people you can follow to 2,000. Once you have been vetted by other users in the form of them following you, you can add more friends. This creates an interesting distribution when you start analyzing the friends to followers count. Taking a look at the image below, there are several things to note. ...

I get very bent out-of-shape when people post inaccurate or misleading statistics. TechCrunch just recently had a post on the Top 20 Twitter Applications in which they used traffic to the applications’ web sites to determine the top 20 apps. While they admit it’s not the best, they left out one of the top Twitter clients (which didn’t make Loic happy, of course) and the data really is not representative of the truth. ...

Several years ago, when I was in high school, my father gave me several … motivational quotes. I recall building a desk with him in my bedroom out of an old door. Six feet long, it was an area where I could spread out and both study, as well as work on my computer. On top of the desk was a sheet of glass, underneath which were these various quotes. I don’t recall if I put them there or he did, but these water-stained, sun-faded pieces of paper hang in my kitchen to this very day. ...

Approximately 17 hours ago, I received a tweet from @KymPossible regarding an app to pull your Twitpics out of your timeline. Apparently, @donttrythis wanted to pull all of his TwitPics out of his Twitter timeline. Always one for a challenge and with a fond love of one-liners, I whipped up this quick hack that pulls TwitPics out of your Twitter timeline and sticks them in an HTML file. It’s ugly, it can be factored, it’s invalid HTML and the API barfs more often than returning the correct data…but it works. For the sake of sharing, here’s the little “script”. ...

For those wanting to wipe out DM’s on Twitter after the recent phishing issue, feel free to make use of the DM Whacker. Depending on how little sleep I want to get, I will add functionality in the near future Functionality has been added to delete tweets with certain text in them. For the geeks out there, regular expressions are even supported! Please leave any comments on the original blog post.