Many of you reading this will be Twitter users, and so you will already know that the whole microblogging experience can sometimes be spoiled by followers which you really don’t want - spammers.

They could be offering anything, and they usually do - although the majority of the time it seems to be nubile young ladies asking you to click on their link for a dating websites.

Well, Twitter has put in a new feature which will hopefully make a big difference - a one click option to report a questionable profile as being spam.

Under the sidebar at the right of a Twitter profile, you will see a button where you will be able to report the offending profile as being spam - happily named ‘report [user] as spam’.

Twitter says that this will bring the profile to the attention of a ‘Trust and Safety’ team who check out what needs to be done, while the profile will be automatically be blocked from following or replying to you.

Twitter emphasised that this is not an automated response, so it can’t be used to bring the ‘force of Twitter doom’ on an account which you might just not like.

This is an important step by Twitter, as the increasing amount of spam accounts was beginning to spoil the whole user experience. Hopefully people will also use this wisely, and get rid of the spam accounts which really need to be deleted.

Also Twitter apps will also be soon designed with some sort of spam filter in mind too, because this is where many people pick up, read and reply to tweets rather than the Twitter website.

If the compromised accounts were strangled at birth, then we may less see incidents of worms propagating or links to phishing sites after our details.

It wasn’t really that important enough for a news story we believe (even though the Telegraph and the Washington Post covered it) - but Google headquarters in Victoria burned! - well for about an hour.

Just rang the Google press office where the lady told me that there was an incident on the roof terrace where a fire started, it was connected to a barbecue, and the Fire Brigade were called in. Staff were evacuated, and it was all sorted out in an hour.

Like usual nowadays Twitter was the first to report it. First I heard of it was in the process of researching a security story about Twitter funnily enough - from this blog post.

That’s it really. I do have a number of questions though. Having a barbecue in the middle of the day? - lucky for some. I thought Google had things to do, like you know, work. (Although I do understand its work/ play ethos).

And, well… I thought Google had some of the brightest minds in the world. They hire the best and brightest, but yet, they couldn’t handle a barbecue? Or at least do one without burning a building.

They should have got my dad. Or any dad for that matter, they are all pretty good at making a few burgers and sausages. Nothing like a good charred piece of meat.

Although you’d think they were big rivals, Facebook said it has listened to people who have asked that it work better with Twitter when it came to sharing its content.

Facebook is releasing a new feature that allows administrators on Facebook Pages (which are used for businesses and organisations), to publish their Facebook updates to Twitter automatically.

It’s been possible for a long while for Twitter users to copy their posts to Facebook profiles, but not the other way round.

However it doesn’t go as far as allowing normal users to copy their statuses to Twitter. Some have speculated that Facebook are worried about losing out to Twitter, especially when it has its own version of real-time updating.

It comes quite soon after Facebook bought the feed aggregating app Friendfeed, which allows users to bring all their social networking sites together.

It’s been offline for the last ten or fifteen minutes.

Currently investigating.

It says:

HTTP Server Error 503

No available server to handle this request

UPDATED: The website is now back online. Did it just crash under the weight of users?

I think perhaps Twitter may need to iron out some of these issues before its going to make any money…

It’s a very British thing to complain, and of things to complain about the NHS is often quite high on the list.

Dirty hospitals, long queues, poor pay for nurses, big money spent on computer systems that don’t work - the NHS usually gets a good kicking.

But when we complain about something, it’s us who complain -  we have a mentality where we really don’t like outsiders suggesting that something is wrong with our country.

This seems to have been what has happened with the sudden popularity of the NHS on Twitter and social networks, with even figures like Gordon Brown and David Cameron joining in to defend and praise it.

The background

It really all started when the nationals reported on how some Americans (particularly the Republican party) were waging a campaign against President Obama’s moves to transform their healthcare system.

There’s opposition to the plan -  fair enough - it’s a big change and the Americans should decide for themselves.

However, the British started to pay attention when it was found that the Republicans were using the NHS as an example of a ’socialist’ system with waiting lists and treatment rationing.

Among the ‘failures’ of the NHS included an ‘Orwellian’ financial cap on the value of human life, and of leaving elderly people untreated.

The British fight back

Understandably, the British weren’t happy about this. In the Guardian story that I first read about the Republican campaign it reads 916 comments and still counting. Most indeed were saying that they wouldn’t swap the NHS for an American system of private healthcare.

However, it was Twitter that was really the catalyst for a concerted NHS PR campaign that really did work - money could not buy the type of good publicity that the NHS has been getting.

The Twitter NHS campaign

The ‘welovetheNHS’ tag has been one of the top trending topics in the last few days, with it seems thousands of people giving their support to the NHS system and praising it - including government leaders

Dennis publication The First Post said that one of the prime movers behind the campaign was Graham Linehan, comedy writer behind Father Ted and the IT Crowd.

The Republicans may have bitten themselves on the ass with this one as the debate has now penetrated the blogosphere - people are talking about it, people are trying to figure it out - people are trying to make their own judgements.

Instead of trying to reply against the propaganda with expensive advertisements, it is by the means of a social network where the NHS has been defended in a way nobody could have expected

It also shows how powerful something like Twitter is becoming as a tool to motivate the masses - it wasn’t that long ago that Twitter was a big factor in creating a movement against the Iran elections.

I was reading a blog post from our very own security expert Davey Winder about the recent incident where Twitter documents got published by the US website TechCrunch.

He made the very valid point that this wasn’t actually Twitter which got hacked this time - it was an employee’s Google Docs account!

However, like Davey says PRs and the press seems to got into a tizzy about Twitter security when in fact this time it had nothing to do with it!

It was the security of Google Apps that this time is in question. But then is it really?

It looks like the problem was actually a password. An employee was silly enough to use one which was guessable  - one non-unique password on multiple services.

That’s a web wise problem - not necessarily the fault of the companies.

There are so many reports and predictions to really gauge what will happen in the future when it comes to media and technology, but much of the time it isn’t really targeted at the youngsters who really matter - the ones who will actually be taking over as the bosses of the future.

This looks to changed with a report published by Morgan Stanley of a 15-year old summer work intern called Matthew Robson, who described how he and his friends consumed media, and what this could mean in the future.

Probably the most interesting and perhaps controversial part of it is where he said teenagers didn’t use Twitter. Although many signed up to the service most weren’t going to update it because of the cost, and ‘tweets’ were pointless because nobody was viewing the profile.

It’s been a fair while since I was a teenager, but this makes complete sense to me. There are many useful ways to use Twitter, but as a social network along the lines of Facebook and MySpace it isn’t very useful. Personally if you haven’t got something to say or promote then its difficult to mix with the community, and from what I’ve seen users aren’t really in the teenage age range.

I can understand teenagers using Facebook though, because you can grow a community who actually might know you (as well as share pictures and whatnot - don’t ever underestimate the importance to this for youngsters) . And ever since Facebook implemented real-time status updates its trodden on Twitter’s turf if teens so happen to want to update friends regularly.

For me as well, there’s something inherently geeky and ‘look at me’ about being on Twitter, whereas Facebook is populated by normal people who I know in real-life. This is of major importance to teens. If they are going to make or keep friends on the net they still want a real-life social aspect to it. Twitter just doesn’t have that - maybe  ‘tweet-ups’ but mostly that seems to me more of a marketing ploy rather than anything else when those kind of things are arranged.

That’s not to say Twitter isn’t useful. For many reasons it is right now. However, if I was 15 again I would have no reason to use it. Nobody I wanted to tweet to and nothing I needed to promote and share. But will this change as they get older?  - that’s a question that nobody has answered yet.

It was getting late and I was surfing around the web on my Macbook as I usually do, and suddenly i picked up a few tweets that concerned Michael Jackson…

It was probably the first time I’ve really been involved in using social networking to see up a news story progress to such a degree. I’ve written before on the power of social networking when it came to events in Iran, I’ve used Tweetdeck to pick on the odd news story, and I’m in charge of looking after our Twitter feed.

But yesterday was different. It was TMZ.com that first picked up on Michael’s death at 5.20pm, and it took a while for the internet to fully comprehend and confirm that he did indeed die.

Of course it was Twitter that had the buzz as people tried to figure out what was going on from various news tweeters,and Twitter users used each other to find out what was actually going on.

As confirmation and more info came out then Facebook started to get buzzy as people I knew suddenly came out with real-time status updates about how they felt about what was going on and commented one each other’s statuses.. Exactly what Facebook was looking for when it first implemented real-time.

Then it was the news websites like Guardian and BBC, which you couldn’t help notice seemed very behind, as of course it’s easier to come out with a one-line statement than to confirm and write copy, especially that late at night.

Being the security hound for IT PRO I also noticed that the security tweeters were also coming out with their usual ‘beware of Michael Jackson spam’ - before they actually came out with confirmation of his death!

I’m not naming names and I’m not your biggest MJ fan, but I thought that was a little low. Maybe wait a bit longer to push your anti-spam agenda? In my head it seemed they were doing exactly the same thing - trying to promote themselves on the back on somebody’s death.

Anyway personal feeling? I felt sadder when Heath Ledger died because he was young and it was like potential was snuffed out. Michael Jackson had his time and we will always have his legacy. Of course, any death is tragic.

The vast majority of Twitter’s growth - 93 per cent of it -  occurred this year, according to research from Hitwise.

UK Twitter traffic has increased 22-fold over the last year, and in May Twitter was ranked as the 38th most visited websites, and fifth most visited social network.

In May 2008, Twitter was the 969th most visited website and 84th most visited social network - quite a bit of growth then!

Robin Goad, director of research at Hitwise, said: “Media coverage of the site has escalated significantly this year and high profile celebrity endorsements, by everyone from Stephen Fry to Ashton Kutcher - has occurred during 2009.”

He also said that these figures could be the tip of the iceberg - it doesn’t have data on people accessing Twitter accounts through mobile phones and third party applications.

Hitwise also said that Twitter is becoming a key source of traffic for websites, but media ones rather than online retailers. Over half is sent to content-driven online media sites, but only 9.5 per cent is sent to transactional websites.

Goad said: “Given that Twitter has yet to settle on a business model that will take advantage of its huge, loyal user base, this is an issue that needs to be addressed by those running the company if they are to make the service a financial as well as a popular success.”

Find some time to follow the IT PRO Twitter feed - Just past the 6,500 follower market.

If you’ve followed IT PRO for any length of time, you’ll probably know that Twitter has been suffering security wise all year.

The latest attack that became public on the weekend was first believed to be a cross-scripting worm, similar to the worm that a 17-year old managed to unleash on the Easter weekend.

However on closer inspection this isn’t all there is to it, according a post on Kapsersky’s Viruslist blog.

When clicking the link to tweets reading ‘best video’, a connection is quietly made to another server resulting in a malicious PDF being downloaded, which contains several exploits.

However, instead of a worm being downloaded with a successful exploit, a fake program will be downloaded, advertising fake anti-virus software.

The researcher couldn’t find any worm-like component, although the alert made it look like there was worm activity.

An explanation for this could simply be that the criminals behind the attack were using the stolen credentials of accounts which had been phished a week ago.

The blog said : “The attack is very significant. It would seem that at least one criminal group is now exploring the distribution of for-profit on Twitter.

“If the trends we’ve seen on other social platforms are any indicator for Twitter then we can only expect an increase in attacks.”

Twitter seems to be regularly hit with some sort of security scare, ever since January when a teenage hacker managed to take over high-profile accounts, while even celebrity twitterer Stephen Fry fell victim to a phishing attack.

We’ve also seen how a security researcher has said that Twitter’s API, used to make third party applications, is inherently flawed.

IT PRO has constantly tried to get in touch with Twitter simply to have some kind of statement, but has so far just come across a brick wall.

So what’s Biz and co gonna do? You can’t make money on something which is inherently unsafe (or can you?).