Twitter in Denial of Service Attack

For those of you who searched for Twitter today & found that it wasn't there, the site was taken down by a denial of service (or DDOS) attack.

"On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack," said company co-founder Biz Stone on the company's blog.

It is estimated that there are over 45 million users of Twitter, making the service on of critical importance for people, businesses and Internet Marketing companies alike.

"Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users." said Stone.

UPDATE:

The Register reports that the attack was the result of a JoeJob spamming campaign.Joejobs are spam messages that are designed not to push Viagra but to induce someone to click on a link in the hopes of harming the site being linked to. Essentially, millions of people get an email that says something benign like "Please click the link to my blog"; the link points to Twitter rather than the blog & people clicking on it are not aware of the harm that they're causing.

Increase your Twitter following

There are myriad tools on the market that can increase your Twitter following. Some of these tools are better than others, some are free & some cost a lot of money.St James Systems have tested a large number of Twitter tools over the last 12 months with varying degrees of success. Many were excellent but only one could tick all the boxes. This was Tweet Adder.

The features that we are after as Internet marketers may well be a useful benchmark for those who are looking to build their Twitter profile & following. We are particularly interested in the following:

• The ability to use multiple accounts quickly and simply
• The ability to follow users who have mentioned a particular keyword or phrase in their tweets
• The ability to follow users who mention keywords in their biography
• Follow people within a certain distance of a geographical location
• Automate the process of following people who are relevant
• See statistics on the effects of this automated following in order to find the most successful following techniques over time.
• To cease following when the following/followers ratio gets too high.
• Automatically unfollow.
• Maintain a 'Safelist' of users who are never to be unfollowed.
• Send posts.
• Schedule posts.

The results of using TweetAdder were impressive and the speed at which a following could be built up, when compared to the risk that the user was taking in following unrelated people was exceptional.

St James Systems were able to build up a following of 2,623 followers in under 2 months with an 18.3% conversion rate of following to followers.

For more information, visit the TweetAdder site: www.TweetAdder.com