Today we have been made aware that Twitbin, the twitter client for firefox (we wrote about twitbin here ), fails the most basic password security tests. The problem is that it stores your username and password in plain text in a browser cookie. This is very bad practice.

Thanks to YABFOG's post for making us aware of this.

It is recommended that you uninstall Twitbin until such time that they provide proper security for your credentials.

Thanks to Wired for this update on twittering the fires of California:

"Twitter users Nate Ritter and Viss have been busy posting rapid-fire updates of the current wildfire situation in Southern California. Both of them are on the scene in San Diego, and they are doing an excellent job of providing information and news about evacuations, meeting points and anything important that local residents would need to know. Viss is also on Flickr and he's posting photos.

Nate and Viss are using the hashtag #sandiegofire. Twitter users can enter "track sandiegofire" in SMS or IM and receive notifications whenever a tweet goes out with that tag in it.

Here's an excellent real-world example of the usefulness of Twitter's limited scope and feature set -- Reporting breaking news quickly. They're certainly filing updates more frequently than most mainstream media outlets."

The original article is here.

Update:  The LA Times is also twittering the fires here http://twitter.com/latimesfires 

Today the Guardian.co.uk posted an article about twitter .  Jemima Kiss met with Mr. Williams in London and they talk about the twitter service, where it is, what it is for and where it is going.  Mr. Williams still can't get his mother to use twitter but there are 350,000 other users happily using the service it appears. 

One of the interesting tidbits is this quote:

"Rather than attach advertising to a personal communication channel," says Williams, "we want to make it a benefit so that there are people or entities you want to follow. We think those things have potential, so as the userbase grows we'll flesh out which of those things work and the business model and revenue will fit in." 

Quite counter-startup thinking I would say but I guess you can afford to work on the business model later if you have a lot of users, money in the bank and investors that believe in you.  Good on them for being able to have the luxury of working that way!

Go check out the full article "Twitter of success" here . 

Twittown reader Curt Hopkins has sent in some twitter based events and surveys that we thought you might be interested in.  From Chris:

"Hi Folks: I created twitter.com/imwiththepress , to aggregate MSM use of
Twitter. I did a survey, which was covered by the Guardian and
Cyberjournalist, and the results of which were covered by the Guardian.
(Still gathering info on this survey.)

Now, I'm doing two more events. The first is next week, "live Twittering"
the IndieGamesCon:
(twitter.com/garagegames)

The second's next month, called Twitter4Kareem , to commemorate the 1-year
anniversary of the unlawful imprisonment of an Egyptian blogger:
(twitter.com/cpb)"  

Twitter Inc. has launched a new feature that is pretty crafty.  Basically, you can now pick any subject and find out what is being said in people's tweets, in real time.   It means you can "follow" topics or phrases that people talk about in (public) twitter.   Cool!

So lets say that you want to know when anyone talks about mountain bikes.  You can set twitter to "track mountain bikes" and you will be updated when anyone talks about that subject on twitter.   You can track as many subjects as you like and also unsubscribe whenever you like.

It looks like that now that twitter is stable and coping with its growth, the team at twitter Inc is getting some new features out.  We look forward to see what is next!

For more info on the commands to do tracking, you can see the Tracking Twitter blog entry on the official twitter blog.  They are also listed below for your convenience:

track yoursubject  -  starts to track yoursubject
untrack yoursubject  -  turns tracking off on yoursubject
whois username  -  find out more about the person that sent the message
track  -  get a list of the subjects that you are currently tracking
track off  -  turn all tracking off for your account

Have fun!

Sean Ammirati at ReadWriteTalk.com has done a nice long and detailed interview with the co-founder of twitter, Biz Stone .  It is a must read for anyone interested in twitter, microblogging an / or start up technology and Internet companies. 

There is a podcast that you can listen to and there is also the transcript listed there for you reading pleasure.  Below are are a couple of quotes from the interview to get you started, but go on over and listen / read for yourself. 

"So, I think, really the biggest thing is to ask yourself: Do I love this product? Do I personally want to use it everyday? Because that ends up just being what makes you want to wake up and run in to work and work on your stuff. It sounds sort of silly because it’s so obvious but I think a lot of people find themselves doing something for money or doing something because they think it’s a really good idea. They just don’t necessarily want to use it themselves. I think that’s a bad scenario to be in."

"Biz Stone: Yeah. The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas, and build things like Twitterrific, which is just a beautiful elegant way to use Twitter that we wouldn’t have been able to get to, being a very small team.So, the API which has easily 10 times more traffic than the website, has been really very important to us. We’ve seen some amazing work built on top of it from tiny little mobile applications like an SMS timer that just allows you to set a reminder over SMS to call your mom or something like that, to more elaborate visual recreations of Twitter like twittervision.com which shows an animated map of the world and what everyone’s doing around the world with Twitter. Twitter is popping up from Spain and Japan and United States.And that’s very, sort of like, “Look at that!” It’s like staring at a fish bowl or something – an aquarium. You just find yourself getting lost in it. The API has really been a big success for us, and it’s something that we want to continue to focus our efforts on, looking forward."