Twitter officially disabled Basic authentication this week, the final step in the company's transition to mandatory OAuth authentication. Sadly, Twitter's extremely poor implementation of the OAuth standard offers a textbook example of how to do it wrong. This article will explore some of the problems with Twitter's OAuth implementation and some potential pitfalls inherent to the standard. I will also show you how I managed to compromise the secret OAuth key in Twitter's very own official clien..   show all text

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People are increasingly sharing different types of information on Twitter. For example, Tweets point to web pages, photos, videos, hashtags, people, check-ins, and more. Exploring Tweets is a great way to discover new and interesting information. And with devices of all shapes and sizes connecting to the Internet, we’re constantly looking for new ways to make this easier. To date, we’ve created applications for a variety of mobile phones, giving you instant access to Tweets and grea..   show all text

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Facebook is in what’s called a recruiting sweet spot right now. Out of control growth in users and revenue and a nearly certain IPO run in the near future. That’s when employee growth expands at the greatest rate for a company as it grows from hundreds to thousands and then tens of thousands of employees. And with low priced private stock as currency, companies in that position can generally get anyone they want. Yahoo of course does more than its fair share of feeding the beast, bu..   show all text

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When it comes to seed investing, New York City is becoming a hotbed. And now TechStars, the incubator that began in Boulder. Colorado and has spawned nearly 40 startups, is coming to New York. This will be the fourth (and supposedly last) city TechStars expands to, according to CEO David Cohen (the other two are Boston and Seattle). TechStars is accepting applications for the New York City Class of 2011, which will start in January. TechStars provides a little bit of cash ($6,000 per founder fo..   show all text

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Today we're launching our fifth channel, ReadWriteHack. Sponsored by the Intel Atom Developer Program, ReadWriteHack is a resource and guide for developers. In this channel we will outline best practices for designing and developing applications. We will also provide examples of hacks and how they work, to inspire you and show you what's possible. ReadWriteHack will be authored by two talented developers, Jay Cuthrell and Ben Barden. Jay is a strategic technology consultant from North Carolina ..   show all text

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If you live in San Francisco and you haven’t tried UberCab yet, do it. The service, which we first covered in July, eliminates everything bad about a taxi experience. In my order, that’s flagging one down, finding the cash to pay, and being in a sometimes disgusting car. For bonus points, I always enjoy negotiating whether or not I get air conditioning in the summer in NY. UberCab contracts with black car services – mostly Towncars and Escalades. There’s a lot of unused ..   show all text

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Posted by Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer People tell us all that time that they’re getting more and more mail and often feel overwhelmed by it all. We know what you mean—here at Google we run on email. Our inboxes are slammed with hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day—mail from colleagues, from lists, about appointments and automated mail that’s often not important. It’s time-consuming to figure out what needs to be read and what needs a reply. Today, ..   show all text

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Email overload has finally met its match. Tomorrow, Gmail is rolling out a new feature called Priority Inbox that is going to be a Godsend for those of you who dread opening your email. In short, Google has built a system that figures out which of your messages are important, and presents them at the top of the screen so you don’t miss them. The rest of your messages are still there, but you don’t have to dig through dozens of newsletters and confirmations to find the diamonds in ro..   show all text

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Mostly the young are interested in letting others know their physical location. Others are reticent for safety reasons, or against providing too much information.

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I am posting this as a MBA Mondays post. But I did not learn this little lesson at business school. I learned it from a very experienced venture capitalist early in my post-MBA career. I was working on a CEO search for one of our struggling portfolio comapnies. We had a bunch of them. I started in the venture capital business just as the PC hardware bubble of the early 80s was busting. Our portfolio was a mess. It was a great time to enter the business. I cleaned up messes for my first few year..   show all text

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Cisco has made an offer to acquire Skype before they complete their IPO process, says one of our more reliable sources. We have not been able to confirm this rumor one way or another via other sources, which isn’t surprising. A company in lock down during the IPO process is usually even more tight lipped than normal. But if true this would be one very big acquisition. Skype insiders are hoping for an out of the gate valuation of $5 billion or so, we’ve heard. Presumably Cisco would ..   show all text

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Success in Silicon Valley, most would agree, is more merit driven than almost any other place in the world. It doesn’t matter how old you are, what sex you are, what politics you support or what color you are. If you idea rocks and you can execute, you can change the world and/or get really, stinking rich. For the most part I’ve sat on the sidelines over the years during the endless debates about how we need to do more to encourage more women to start companies. What I mean by &ldqu..   show all text

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This is a guest post by Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) who conducted a survey of 500 Foursquare users to better understand their check in behaviors and motivations. His obsession with Foursquare is unrelated to his day job leading the consumer product team at YouTube, although he did at one point hold the Mayorship of their San Bruno headquarters. Have you noticed “Off the Grid” [OTG] appearing in your Foursquare feed recently? No, it’s not the latest trendy West Hollywood club or ..   show all text

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If you want to take a good look at what's happened to America's middle class, read Third World America, by Arianna Huffington. It's not pretty, but it's real. A few politicians, over eight years, created an economic Pearl Harbor. Still, I see a lot of vitality in the American middle class. America's response to Pearl Harbor reminds us that Americans can do anything, and we can rise above the current situation and come out ahead. Me, I've signed up for twenty years of this, a kind of voyage, to ..   show all text

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An interesting paradox in the technology world is that there is both a shortage and a surplus of engineers in the United States. Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives? The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, en..   show all text

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On my second day at Twitter, I was writing documentation for the systems I was going to work on (to understand them better), and I realized that there was a method in the service’s API that should be exposed but wasn’t. I pointed this out to my engineering mentor, Steve Jenson (@stevej). I expected him to ignore me, or promise to fix it later. Instead, he said, “Oh, you’re right. What are you waiting for? Go ahead and fix it.” After 4 hours, about 8 lines of code, ..   show all text

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Psychological research on Twitter reveals who tweets, how much, what they talk about and why. There are now 190 million Twitter users around the world producing 65 million tweets each day. 19% of US internet users now say they use Twitter or a similar service to share updates about themselves—double the figure from the previous year (Pew, 2009). So who tweets? Why? What are they talking about? And what is so engaging about all those little textual transmissions? Since Twitter didn't exist..   show all text

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The marketer settled charges that it had employees write positive reviews of games in the Apple iTunes store.

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Last week the words of science fiction writer William Gibson ran rampant over the Twitter back channel at the inaugural NASA IT Summit when a speaker quoted his observation that "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." That's a familiar idea to readers of the O'Reilly Radar, given its focus on picking up the weak signals that provide insight into what's coming next. So what does the future of technology hold for humanity and space flight? I've been reading the ficti..   show all text

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On May 22 this year 300 hackers converged in New York at TechCrunch Disrupt for a day and half long hack day before the conference itself started. At least one of the projects created at the hack day has now become an actual business, and has raised an angel round of funding from top tier investors. GroupMe launches today. What is it? It’s a dead simple way to create a private SMS group with your friends. Just go to the site and type in your mobile number (U.S. phones only at this point)...   show all text

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Some companies keep a playbook of product tips, tricks and trade secrets. Zynga has an internal playbook, for instance, that is a collection of “concepts, techniques, know-how and best practices for developing successful and distinctive social games”. Zynga’s playbook has entered the realm of legend and was even the subject of a lawsuit. SCVNGR, which makes a mobile game with real-world challenges, has a playdeck. It is a deck of cards listing nearly 50 different game mechanic..   show all text

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