After a not-so-secret limited beta, Twitter has released a new feature called Lists. It's quite simple, yet powerful at the same time. You can now create custom lists of other Twitter users, which others can follow with a single click. The topic of the list is up to you, and there are all sorts of great lists already.
Mashable reports that the Twitter Phishing Scam is on the run again. It shows up as a Direct Message that says "you're on this vid", "haha, that u on here?", or "lol this is funny" with a fake link to log into Twitter. It's pretty easy to avoid this type of thing by following a couple simple steps:
An interesting site has popped up recently called Tweets for Boobs. At first glance it may sound a little immature, but it's actually a charity being run through Twitter! They're working with the Susan G. Komen Foundation to raise money for breast cancer research.
Twitter is planning to add location data to each and every tweet, instead of the Location field you can update currently. This definitely takes real-time to a new level, since twitter apps and mashups will no longer have to guess where you are based on that one field, although it is not going away. Some people just like to use it as a generic profile field, saying "I live here!"
Here's the skinny on the updates, provided at the Twitter Conference in LA:
What a confusing week in the world of link shortening!
You may have heard that tr.im is closing shop by the end of 2009, but they have changed their minds several times. First they said they were closing the service immediately, and turning link forwarding off at the end of 2009. Then tr.im explained how costly it was to operate a URL shortener, and revealed that they had chosen to continue the service (due to the user backlash) while quietly approaching select businesses to buy their assets.
News broke today that Twitter will officially support retweeting (abbreviated RT), both on Twitter.com and through the Twitter API, which is what all Twitter apps use to interact with the service. Although the screenshots gave most people the impression that this was a simple user interface update, it is a much bigger deal!