Customer service software provider Zendesk announced a security breach that affects users of Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr. Zendesk said that the hacker downloaded email addresses of users who have contacted those three websites for support, as well as support email subject lines. Tumblr and Twitter have notified affected users (see below), while Pinterest is expected to the same. A report on… → Read More
Do you cash out or stick to your guns? Twitter co-founder Ev Williams says you should only sell your company if the offer captures the upside, there’s an imminent threat or you personally want to. “Any of them will suffice,” but Twitter didn’t have any, says Williams. → Read More
Twitter announced via its blog today that it has begun using DMARC, a security protocol designed to cut down the number of fake emails that users receive from companies pretending to be Twitter itself. The move should help cut down on phishing scams, where third parties try to get users to give up their login details via false requests for password verification or other personal info. → Read More
Tech companies try to stay lean. They don’t want to hire too many sales people, and they can’t build the perfect advertising tool for every buyer. So following in Google and Facebook’s footsteps, today Twitter and in November LinkedIn launched ads APIs. They set up a powerful value exchange: “Help us sell more ads, and we’ll give you a cut.” → Read More
Twitter just announced via blog post that it has launched an advertising API, which will allow brands to run ad campaigns through the company’s API partners, rather than having to buy them through Twitter itself.
This confirms a report by TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden saying that Twitter would launch its ads API sometime in the first quarter of this year. At the time, Ingrid noted that Twitter’s… → Read More
Vine has just opened up a few new positions for the NY-based engineering team, as tweeted by co-founder Colin Kroll.
As it would appear, there are six positions available to work alongside the three-man team currently developing for Vine. Notably, one of the positions is for an Android developer, which could mean that we’ll see the video-sharing app on Google’s platform relatively soon. → Read More
Twitter is testing a new ad unit that gives direct marketers a way to generate leads directly from tweets.
You can see an example of the unit in this tweet promoting Twitter’s small business guide. Not only is there a small image promoting the guide, but if you’re logged in, it also shows a “Get it now” button. When you hit the button, you don’t get asked for a phone number or email address —… → Read More
About 40 minutes ago hackers took over the official Burger King Twitter account, changing the branding to feature McDonald’s fish nuggets prominently on the top and noting that Burger King “just got sold to McDonalds because the whopper flopped =[ FREDOM IS FAILURE℠.” → Read More
Did you happen to get an email from LinkedIn recently, which congratulated you on having one of the most popular profiles on the site? Then, good news – you’re special. Just like millions of others. The campaign, which ran this month in celebration of LinkedIn’s 200-million-users milestone, involved these ego-boosting emails sent to the network’s “top” users, which urged them to share the good… → Read More
It was just a matter of time before Twitter shut the blogging platform Posterous down, after acquiring the company last March. The team had already been folded into the flock, but this means that nobody has to worry about pesky service interruptions of keeping the service’s diminishing number of users happy. The site will be shutting down on April 30th, but it’s not a completely sad… → Read More
Twitter and search sound like two peas in a pod, but it’s actually not the marriage made in heaven that you’d think it is. When you think of search, you think of a search engine, like Google, where the world’s information is seemingly at your fingertips. You feel confident that when you Google something, you won’t miss the important information. The secret is that… → Read More
Twitter surprised some folks when it acquired a mobile analytics firm called Crashlytics, but it’s clear that Twitter has an idea of what it would like to do with the firm. Step one since acquiring the company is opening up all of its enterprise features to developers for free, with no limits. Here’s what the company posted on its developer blog: You may know that a couple weeks ago… → Read More
Amex has extended its Twitter sync feature to enable customers who have synced their Amex account information with Twitter to also pay for certain products by tweeting purchase hashtags. Amex launched its original Twitter Sync feature last March — to allow customers get discount deals by tweeting offer hashtags. Now the card company has gone a step further by integrating payment into Twitter. → Read More
Twitter released the details of a new study about its “primary mobile users,” or those who engage with Twitter more on mobile devices and on the mobile web than on the desktop. The study, commissioned by Twitter from Kantar Media’s Compete, revealed that Twitter’s mobile-first users are more engaged than mobile users in more ways than one, skew younger, and tend to be more receptive to branded… → Read More
After this year’s Super Bowl, there were a number of articles proclaiming that Twitter had “won” the event thanks to the general explosion in usage, as well as the prominent use of hashtags in many of the TV ads. But today Facebook is sharing some numbers of its own — and yes, it’s still an enormous source of conversation around big events. → Read More
In an obvious move to position the company towards a planned 2014 IPO, Twitter has today enabled LOLcats translation capabilities for its user profiles.
The translation of the sometimes obtuse service into the tired but still kind of funny LOLcats meme is meant to serve as a stepping stone in the startup’s efforts to eventually please the fickle financial markets. This is the latest in a… → Read More
Going into the Super Bowl, folks who care about such things probably knew it was not only going to be the Most Social! Super Bowl! Ever!, but also a big win for Twitter on the ad side. Now the company has published a blog post quantifying some of the ad-related activity that it saw.
Twitter says that of the 52 national ads that ran during the game, 50 percent included hashtags (to give credit… → Read More
Twitter has announced a much-needed update to its search product today, which will be available on all mobile devices: iOS, Android and mobile web. The company boasts that the update will help you find relevant tweets, trends and people to follow in a single stream. This is very similar to the experience that we’re starting to see make its way to the website. The update allows you to search… → Read More
Vine, the Twitter-owned video sharing iOS app which lets users knit together snippets of video to create six second loops, has had its user age rating increased to 17+. The increase was bundled in a v1.0.5 app update which requires users to confirm they are “at least 17 years old” before the download begins, and warns of “frequent/intense sexual content or nudity”, among other warnings. → Read More
On the heels of impressive engagement around around this past weekend’s Super Bowl football championship, Twitter today officially confirmed that it has purchased Bluefin Labs, a social TV analytics service. The deal had been reported first yesterday by Business Insider. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed but BI notes that it’s Twitter’s biggest acquisition to date. → Read More
According to Twitter, it was hacked and 250K accounts were affected, so they received emails from the company to change their password. This is not the first time this has happened, but this time it was a real hack, rather than a blend of real hacks and “false alarm” blast of emails like last time. Way to start off our weekends, Twitter. Who knows if you’ll even get the email… → Read More
Twitter is sending out emails to 250,000 users it says may have had their accounts compromised in the last week as the site experienced “unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data.” Twitter tells TechCrunch that this is “not related” to the widespread, but intermittent, outage the site saw yesterday. → Read More
For this week’s Ask A VC episode, we sat down with Foundation Capital’s newest partner Anamitra Banerji, who was just promoted from entrepreneur in residence to investment partner at the firm. We chatted about Banerji’s decision to become a VC vs. founding a startup, and how being an entrepreneur in residence helped him come to that decision. → Read More
According to KeyHole analytics, Vine is twice as popular as the next biggest video-sharing app on Twitter, SocialCam, even after being removed from Apple’s featured section after a slight porn incident.
Almost half of the videos on Twitter in the last week came from Vine — approximately 243,000 of them, to be more specific. The next app with video links on Twitter was Socialcam, with… → Read More
Twitter is currently experiencing a widespread service outage that appears to be intermittent, according to our checks with the web client, third-party apps and website service status checking tools. Other TC staff are able to access the service on and off every few minutes, but it seems like the stream is interrupted, and third-party clients like Tweetbot still appear to be having trouble… → Read More
Twitter has announced a couple of updates for its web service today, designed around media sharing. There’s a new interface for viewing photos, which provides a larger look at pictures without forcing users to leave the page thanks to a lightbox overlay, accessible when you click a photo from a profile page or in search results. And video from Vine, YouTube, Vimeo, and any other partner whose… → Read More
Vine, Twitter’s latest foray into video sharing, seems to be having some service issues at the moment. We’ve been trying to access and use the app here at TechCrunch with no progress, and Vine has tweeted to confirm the service issues. Vine launched last Thursday and has had a whirlwind of a week. Though relatively buggy for an app launched by a major company like Twitter, Vine was… → Read More
Twitter today acquired crash-reporting tool Crashlytics. Numerous companies use Crashlytics to find out when their apps crash on consumer devices, as well as what the root cause of it was. The apps currently using the service are Twitter, Vine, Yelp, Kayak, TaskRabbit, Walmart, Groupon and Waze, the team says. This is a pretty big group of iOS heavyweights and it will be interesting to see how… → Read More
While Apple hasn’t made a peep yet about Vine’s slight porn problem, the App Store has removed the video-sharing app from its Featured Section.
The app launched on Thursday, and found itself in the Featured section of the App Store by Friday. Since, it’s swung to the top of Social in the App Store, and has climbed to the number four free app overall.
But this morning, many new Viners woke… → Read More
This morning, new Vine users woke up to quite the treat. Twitter’s new video sharing app launched a NSFW, porn clip called “DildoPlay” to the top of the Editor’s Picks section of the app, a place where users can browse the latest and greatest vines.
Vine only launched last week, and has already been reported as having a small porn problem. Searching the hashtag #porn within the app will give… → Read More
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