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April 23rd, 2013 
It’s becoming increasingly clear that Twitter needs to follow Google, Microsoft and Apple in providing two-factor authentication sooner rather than later.
(Credit: Twitter)
Twitter was having a tough day yesterday. First, parts of the service were having performance problems, and then the @AP Twitter feed got hacked, causing the stock market to tank nearly 150 points before recovering.
This phony tweet was sent out by hackers who had commandeered the AP’s Twitter account.
(Screenshot by Dan Farber/CNET)
Twitter has vastly improved in the last few years in keeping the site up, but the hacks are escalating. The Twitter accounts of CBS News programs 60 Minutes and 48 Hours were hacked over the weekend, with bogus messages going out, such as “The US government is hiding the real culprit of the Boston bombing.” In February, an estimated 250,000 Twitter account passwords were compromised in an attack on the service.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that Twitter needs to follow Google, Microsoft and Apple in providing two-factor authentication sooner rather than later. Such a system isn’t foolproof, but it requires an extra level of identification information to authenticate with a service.
In addition, Twitter can do more to provide features that can help diminish the adverse impact of tweets and retweets that present erroneous information, such as some of the tweets that were sent during and following the Boston Marathon bombings. Twitter spawned millions of tweets as the events unfolded, including tweets that identified innocent people as the bombers and that were retweeted this, passing the misinformation along. It’s part of how Twitter works, but Mat Horan of Wired has recommendations about how Twitter could deal with bad tweets:
Twitter could add a function, similar to a retweet or favourite, that let you edit and correct a tweet after it had been posted. Those tweets then show up in a timeline as having been corrected — again, they could be flagged like favourites or retweets. Click on a tweet marked as edited, and it uses Twitter’s Cards function (the same system that lets tweets embed images, videos and text) to show the original.
Horan also suggested that the original author should have the capability to notify everyone who retweeted his or her tweet that there is a correction, which could also be displayed at the top of their timelines.
We asked Twitter for comment, but had received no reply at the time of writing.
Via CNET.com
Source Article from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CNETAustralia/~3/JCA3IENpYvo/a-bad-day-in-twitterland-339344060.htm
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