I personally don’t see any point to using Twitter. For anyone not familiar Twitter is a service that acts a “mini-blog” and you can update it from text messages or its web interface and its updates are published to your Twitter feed. People can follow your updates and you can can get updates on the people you want to stalk. A lot of high profile bloggers throw their twitter feed into their widgets on the side of their blog.  Because you know, a blog within a blog is exactly what everyone needs.

Regardless of what I think, Twitter is a big deal and has caught on like wildfire. It raised 22 million in venture capital and does not run ad services on its website. It also turned down a $500 million buyout offer from facebook. So its another one of those

• Step 1) Draw traffic
• Step 2) Dispense ungodly amounts of bandwidth
• Step 3) ???????
• Step 4) Profit

websites like youtube/digg which actually lose money on paper but somehow are worth millions on the market. Its not taking the web by storm or on its way to the top by any means.

What really gets me here is, Twitter got so far with such a flawed security system. They did not throttle wrong password attempts or force account lockouts when a bad password was entered a few too many times. Come the fuck on now, this is as basic as security gets. Let me guess the Twitter staff uses the same account name and passwords for their email and their bank account right?

To take the idiocy a step further they made it so regular Twitter accounts also acted as administrative customer support accounts… sharing the same front end login interface.

Now it was dumb luck that one of these accounts got hacked but really it was only a matter of time. Who knows how long hackers have had easy access to regular accounts with no wrong password attempt throttles. Follow how an 18 year old hacker had a field day with a compromised twitter support staff account. The list of compromised accounts include President Elect Obama and Britney Spears.

Sadly, unlike the Sarah Palin email hack debacle it doesn’t look like 4chan was to blame for this one. They did claim the hacked macrumorslive feed from Macworld which was pretty hilarious.