UPDATE Sept 9th, 9:35am: My personal account @DanielleMorrill looks like it is up again, I just sent a test tweet to see.  Right now my following/follower counts are both zeros and while I hope they’ll remove any cruft from those lists (I’ve noticed a lot of latency with updating my relationships) I definitely hope I don’t have to rebuild my network entirely.

UPDATE Sept 9th, 9:25am: It appears this has impacted a lot of other people as well, and TechCrunch is reporting that suspensions may be related to tweets about the Gov 2.0 Expo: read the full story here… and now there are rumors that it may take as many as 30 days to reinstate accounts.

About an hour ago I logged onto Twitter, or tried, only to find that my personal accounts and the account for my company were suspended.  I quickly checked Twitter search to make sure no tweets had been sent from those account that I didn’t know about (which you might expect if the accounts were hacked) and also checked Google Reader since I figured they might have already removed any offending content from the public timeline.  I found nothing, and sent requests to Twitter for each of the accounts to be unsuspended.

Now Twitter itself appears to be down, and not just with the “Fail Whale” but with a real 503 error, which I asked a friend about that explained that error is often served by a load balancer when the load is more than the server can bear.  Sounds like a potential DDoS attack.

So, I’m glad in a way that our accounts are suspended because I wouldn’t want any spam coming out of them — but this has me reflecting on just how dependent I’ve become on Twitter and Twitter search to feel connected to my network.  Ironically, just tonight I posted on Facebook that I’d decided to delete Whrrl from my phone and return to the Facebook community.  Hopefully this is just a temporary hiccup and Twitter will have things figured out in the morning, I don’t envy them the task of dealing with this and frustrated customers (like me).

I was going through my list of Twitter followers tonight to see who I needed to follow back and weed out some of the less interesting people, when I noticed a change:

See how the number there is now a big integer, instead of a page number like 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.?

Why This Matters to Spammers & Hackers

Have you ever visited the Twitter page of one of your major competitors (company, personal brand, whatever) and noticed that they have a big chunk of their following list that closely resembles who is following you?  Odds are, if they’re smart, they went and followed a lot of the people who you were following (or were following you depending on what they’re trying to accomplish).  They game the system by simply unfollowing anyone who doesn’t follow them back, “purging” people who are uninterested if you will to keep the ratio of followers to following balanced.

Despite the fact that it is generally frowned upon as bad Twitter ettiquette, a lot of services are selling exactly this so it will be interesting to see how they innovate around this change.  The reality is that Twitter probably should have included obfuscation of all ordered pages long ago to prevent spam and auto-mated scripting on their site outside of the API.

How Much Does it Really Slow Spammers Down?

You can still page through a person’s following or followers manually, and it looks like the page numbers are not dynamically generated so running a script to click the “Next” button and collect the page IDs for a user who you want to scrape relationships from wouldn’t be that hard.  But it is interesting to notice these small changes Twitter is making to enhance security by making it a bigger pain in the ass to scrape than it was before.

I have been working a ton and loving it, Kevin is now here and we had our 2 year wedding anniversary yesterday.  It was very low key because i had meeting until 8pm but we did walk a couple blocks to Chez Papa and when you have a good and reasonably priced French restaurant in the neighborhood it is perfect.

When I say Kevin is here, I mean that he is in San Francisco WITH ME and we are sleeping in the same bed every night indefinitely… his Mom is out of the hospital (for the moment) and we’re trying to have a normal life based out of our little room in our little corner of Potrero Hill.  I’m writing this and thinking of all the people who are reading it and thinking “what – you say you’re so busy wbut how do you have time to write a blog post?”  Let me tell you, these posts these days are a one take deal (with the exception of correcting spelling errors) so I’ve got a ton of drafts on topics that need more thought before they can be posted.

Tonight, though, was exciting because Kevin and I demo’d TOGETHER TweetToCall.com to the Twitter Developers Meetup Group down at Google in Mountain View.  I’ve never been a presenter before and I guess in a way this little product is a startup of its own, although it took us a total of 80 hours combined to build it over the course of the last week.  I managed to say “fuck” in the presentation which was live streaming on Ustream (yay!) and just so you know the context for that was that the use case for Tweettocall is that situation where you have all these direct messages going back and forth with someone on Twitter, and eventually you think “ah! just fucking call me!” because 140 characters aren’t enough.

It was fun.  Also ran into Jason Preston, a familiar face from Seattle who is one of the organizers for the upcoming Twitter conference 140TC in Los Angeles, CA and I’m thinking we might launch TweetToCall officially at that event.

I’ll be in Los Angeles most of next week for Internet Telephony Expo and I’d love to catch up with friends and connections who are in that area, it has been about 4 months since I’ve been in Southern Cal so it will be nice to catch up although I’m sure I won’t be able to pack everything into the 72 hours I’m there.  If you have any desire to connect definitely let me know.  Okay, I am literally falling asleep typing but Dad I know you read this I love you and I love all the people who I know I am neglecting for the sake of my singular passion for making cool stuff that people want to pay for.  I’ll see you all soon!

Last night I hung out with some of the most active individuals in the “new PR” industry of social media, if you can call it an industry. Some are self-declared gurus, others “hireable” (read: unemployed), and many are just dipping their toe in the waters of “social media” for the first time. We heard from Rob Glaser, CEO of Real Networks, about their new media player, Real Player SP. I’m not a big fan of Real Networks, considering the amount of theft they accomplished in the name of the law with Microsoft (and subsequent destruction of wealth) during their anti-trust proceedings in 1998. So I admit, I heckled a bit.

It didn’t help that Rob alluded to examples that revealed he hadn’t really come out of his cave since the election, including his abysmally low number of tweets (but he has a DAY JOB!), reference to played out Sarah Palin jokes, and a YouTube video of a dog attacking itself that was at the height of its popularity over a year ago. It was clear to me that he hadn’t be properly prepped for this audience of neophiles, who snub anything that isn’t hyper-recent (like – TODAY!)

On a more serious note it did also make me wonder if Real is also living in the past, well behind trends such as the iPhone, which arguably boasts the same features as their new media player AND the fantastic distribution model of the iTunes store.  Since content distribution is the name of the game, and we had to sit and watch as the Youtube video uploaded to the phone via USB cable, I couldn’t help but feel like this was missing the mark with too many steps for the user to carry out.

Seattle 2.0 TV Gals & iPhones Unite!

I love this photo by Randy Stewart (@stewtopia) of me with Shauna Causey of Seattle 2.0 TV

Shauna experiemented with a new Ustream channel – her own! – and broadcasted a lot of event live from http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ShaunaCausey

You Can’t Fight the Tako Truk

It was a hard sell for me, since my feet were hurting enormously by the time they kicked us out of the Lake Union Cafe.  We did end up driving the 10 blocks to Tako Truk (@takotruk), which is a trendy little spot hosted outside of 14 Carrot on Eastlake.  Rumor has it the man running this covert operation was previously an employee of Tom Douglas, and the gourmet tacos (3 for $5) attested to that!

Today I had the distinct pleasure of dining with a dozen other active Twitter users from the Seattle area as we tried out the new lunch menu of El Gaucho Bellevue, which opened last November for Taste & Tweet.  The event is an ongoing social media marketing experiment to raise brand awareness for the restaurants involved.  We had a lot of fun and I ended up know about half the people there, including one woman who was the nurse at my high school and has since reinveted herself!

The highlight of the event was taking a tour through the kitchen, hosted by GM David Sherling.  I was able to capture the experience on video using Qik on my iPhone.  Check it out!

You think your problem is bad, but mine is even worse… at the rate you’re all going the number of wedding presents I am going to need is growing exponentially!!!

Thanks xkcd for the laugh.

My friend Brian is probably one of the funniest people I know, both on camera and off. In this video, he does an excellent job of showing us how to practice in flight safety on Alaska Airlines. Make sure to watch through the 2 minute mark, and see his excellent improvisation of the Alaska Airlines Visa sign-up. Love the wonderfully funemployed at Seattle SM Profiles for providing this video!!!

I was doing some “research” – actually I was surfing YouTube and got the genius idea of seeing if any of the half-baked games (this thing where you come up with crazy product pitch ideas and try to get people to vote on yours) were on video.  Imagine my surprise, when I found myself in the second result.  Mostly posting this here for myself (it’s got hardly any views).

The idea was that you could blow up your engagement ring to as many carats as you needed.  We abused pretty much every “don’t do this in a pitch” rule we could, including having a skit AND having a child in it.  Yeah, fun.