It's been a rough start to 2009 for Twitter. The microblogging platform was first slammed this week with a major phishing scam so serious that Twitter posted a warning on every user's main page. Hot on the phishing scam's heels, Twitter's admin tools were hacked, allowing hackers access to 33 high-profile Twitter accounts like US President-elect Barack Obama, CNN's Rick Sanchez and even Britney Spears. Widely reported both within the blogosphere and within popular print media, the two incidents have given Twitter a bit of a black eye, right at the start of the year when the service is, according to co-founder Evan Williams, set to turn a profit.

Definitely not a great way to start a new year, especially for a service that still has yet to present a firm plan for monetization. Still, though, there's a silver lining or two to be found if you look at it just right. For example: the user response to the phishing scam. As widespread as the scam seems to be, the response to the scam in the twittersphere is significantly larger, which I suppose should be reassuring - to some extent, at least, Twitter seems to be self-correcting.

On the other hand, the phishing scam left many users worried about the integrity of their twitter credentials and left bloggers and analysts alike wondering if the proliferation of Twitter applications hasn't created a "perfect storm" for - Twitter users have become accustomed to typing their credentials into all sorts of different sites and applications and there is a lack of an official, centralized tracking system for these services - making Twitter a tantalizing target for hackers, phishers and general spammers.

The most recent admin hack, which left some less-than-tasteful Tweets on some very important Twitter accounts, is a different story. Although Twitter was forthcoming in informing users about the hack on their Twitter Blog, they weren't as forthcoming about how hackers managed to penetrate their security in the first place. With the twittersphere all abuzz about the potential for Twitter to monetize by offering twitter as in internal corporate collaboration tool, the hack raises questions about the microblogging service's readiness for enterprise-class implementation.

The good news is, every hack makes the victim eventually stronger - Twitter could, if they wanted to, spin this incident into a far-sweeping security audit and overhaul and try to add a positive footnote to the situation. Fortunately this time the hackers seemed more interested in jokes and lewd comments than in actual malevolence; there's really no telling what might happen the next time - if, that is, there will be a next time.

Mike Butcher wrote today on TechCrunch about the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sports (DCMS) and their apparent inability to adequately grasp the challenge of making the internet child-safe. Although Butcher's arguments are sound, a tiny paragraph at the end of the article raised our collective eyebrow:

Writes Butcher:

Interesting. Although we've read about squatting on Twitter names in the past, Butcher's brazen admission of the act (coupled with the evidence, Butcher's fake Burnham twitter page) bring this issue into a very public forum - the blogosphere.

Just what is Twit-Napping, or Squitting (as it's also known), anyway? Essentially it's a simple concept - people go onto Twitter and register an account with a famous name - say, for example, Shaquille O’Neal. That's exactly what happened this year to the world-famous basketball player when his sports agency called him to congratulate him on his fan outreach. Problem was, O'Neal hadn't started reaching out - yet. The ballplayer's response to discovering that his name and image had been hijacked was simple and straightforward - he started his own REAL Shaquille O'Neal twitter account to set the record straight and give his fans a taste of the real thing.

It wasn't the first case of Twit-Napping, and it certainly won't be the last. In fact, since Twitter's inception, dozens of personalities have been twit-napped, and squitters are, even now, sitting on hundreds, probably thousands more. This is nothing new - over the last decade and a half we've seen domain name squatters raise millions of dollars by beating big name figures and corporations to the punch and registering their domain names.

Here's the thing, though - misrepresenting your identity on a social network just became a very, very sketchy proposition. When Lori Drew, infamous perpetrator of the Myspace social engineering hoax that left a high school girl dead, was charged earlier this year under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act with a felony count of gaining unauthorized access to Myspace's computer systems, things got serious. The justice department, seeking to slap Drew with something harder than a misdemeanor, considered creating a fake Myspace account to be "gaining unauthorized access to Myspace's computer systems," thanks to the wording in Myspace's Terms of Use. For months the internet was abuzz with debates and arguments about whether it was a good or bad application of the law.

What does this all have to do with Twit-napping and squitting? Well, depending on how Twitter crafts its Terms of Use, that could mean that Mike Butcher and every other Twit-napper out there could be faced with more than a cease-and-desist letter - they could end up holding a subpoena.

It's not just the name that matters - there could be dozens of Andy Burnham's out there, and they all deserve a shot at being the first to register that twitter name. What DOES matter, however, is the picture of Andy Burnham that Mike Butcher has uploaded to the Twitter account - thereby completing the "impersonation" and making it into a Lori Drew-type of scenario.

A wave of change is cresting, with the internet and the blogosphere at the tip of it. The ability to misrepresent ourselves has never been greater than it is now, and the stakes have probably never been higher. Although Twitter does suspend falsified accounts, they're keeping pretty closed-mouth about it, and with good reason - the Lori Drew fiasco drew more negative press to Myspace's name than they've ever received before.

Bottom line, then - what are the perils of Twit-Napping?

For Twitnappers and the Mike Butchers of the world, it means that they need to wake up and pay attention - squatting on Twitter names, even if it is for a joke, or to make a point, may one day amount to gaining unauthorized access to a computer system, and could land you with a fat fine or worse.

For regular folks, it means that they need to keep a closer eye than ever on their online presence; Googling ourselves is no longer the last vestige of the desperately self-absorbed, it's become a necessary part of maintaining our identities. With a little basic information and some rudimentary social engineering, it can be pretty hard to prove that the Twitnappers aren't who they say you are.

Here's a little video courtesy of the folks over at Six Jumps, the folks responsible for the Sociable Facebook Connect Plugin for the Wordpress blogging platform. As we mentioned last week, this is one of the first plugins to take advantage of Facebook's new data availability feature, Facebook Connect.

You can see the functionality of this plugin fairly clearly in the video. So far the only remarkable problem with the plugin is that the Facebook Connect box is a fixed width and doesn't expand / contract according to the length of the username - but that seems like a simple fix that'll be right around the corner.

Currently the best Wordpress plugin out there for Facebook Connect integration, this is the app to watch if you want your Wordpress blog users to be able to login with Facebook and post comments to their profiles.

Since the recent launch of Facebook Connect, Facebook's new data availability feature that lets users link up their Facebook profiles with other websites around the internet, developers have been working overtime.

The result? Facebook's new Facebook Connect Plugin Directory, currently the central repository for Facebook Connect plugins, widgets and applications. As of today the roster of supported platforms includes Movable Type, Wordpress, Discus, MediaWiki and others.

Most of these plugins are a quick and easily installation - and enable varying levels of integration. The simplest allow users to login in and comment on blogs and websites using their Facebook ID's, while the more complex plugins, such as Sociable's Facebook Connect Wordpress Plugin, enable more advanced functionality including inviting friends, showing recent visitors, and sharing comments on Facebook.

Our prediction? This is the tip of the iceberg. By the spring we expect to see a Facebook Connect plugin for every major content management system out there. By the summer there'll be a front-runner for each platform, and by this time next year we'll all take it for granted that blogs are integrated into Facebook. What does this mean to users? Among other things, it means that they'll have to exert more control over what shows up on their wall if they don't want to see all of their friends' activities throughout the internet and blogosphere.

Facebook launched its long awaited Facebook Connect feature this month - to an initially underwhelmed audience. The feature, which allows users to bridge the gap between their Facebook identities and their identities on Facebook Connect Partner sites, went relatively unnoticed by the majority of Facebook users.

The reason? You'll be hard-pressed to find Facebook Connect mentioned anywhere on your Facebook page. What you might notice, however, is an increasing amount of activity on your landing page showing things your friends have been doing on Facebook partner sites like CNET, TechCrunch and NetVibes. This is half of the Facebook Connect equation - allowing user activity on other sites to affect your status and activity on Facebook.

The other half of the equation happens on the partner sites. Different sites implement Facebook Connect in different ways. For example, logging in to CNET with your Facebook ID will allow you to do a few things differently:

• Post a comment to a CNET article without registering with CNET (because we ALL hate those registration forms)
• See your contributions to CNET articles reflected on your Facebook Wall

Says Rafe Needleman of CNET: "That's basically free advertising for CNET."

And that pretty much says it all - Partner sites stand to gain because links to their own sites will appear on potentially millions of Facebook pages, and Facebook stands to gain because they'll have new sources of nutritious content for their own site, not to mention some snazzy logo placement.

But the real name of the game is analytics. Needleman writes:

"Facebook also now gets monetizable information about the Facebook-registered CNET users. Not necessarily what the users do on CNET, but what they do elsewhere--valuable behavior data. The convenience of using Facebook log-ins has a price for both CNET and users: Facebook knows a lot more about you now."

Different sites will implement Facebook Connect in different ways, but one thing we can say for certain: at the moment, Facebook's data accessibility feature seems set to pose a major challenge to Myspace's recently launched MySpaceID, their own take on what is becoming known as "data availability."

With Facebook Connect less than two weeks old, no one's quite sure yet how things will turn out, but all eyes are on the prize: the so-called "Socialization of the Web." Just as long as I don't start getting (lil) Green Patch invites while I'm reading TechCrunch, I don't care which side "wins" - users will win either way.

Speaking at the Churchill Club a few hours ago, Twitter CEO Evan Williams gave twitter fans a tantalizing glimpse of great things to come for the fledgling microblogging network. According to the Twitter cofounder, the site will soon feature the traditional friending and grouping features common to most social networking sites. Until now, organizing your twitter friends into groups required the use of a 3rd party service such as Yahoo! Pipes.

Here's a quote from a CNET Article about Williams' comments during the Churchill Club event:

"Speaking of expansion, there are several projects on the books. Williams said that the top feature requested on Twitter is grouping, and that it's in the works. This will enable users to segment their Twitter friends into sub-networks to send specific groups certain posts. It will also make Twitter a more useful tool in business."

That last comment, the one about twitter being useful in business, is particularly important given Twitter's lack of revenues and hints that the site, until now free to all users, will monetize in the form of selling enterprise-class services to corporate accounts. This isn't the first time that twitter's top minds have suggested that social networking features are in the works. It is, however, the first time that they have made firm confirmations and been this definitive about what features users will be seeing in the near future. 

Williams' comments weren't restrained to Twitter's upcoming feature upgrades. The Blogger cofounder also gave firm information about when he expects Twitter to turn a profit: Q1 2009. This signals an abrupt shift from Twitter's original plan to monetize in 2010, a shift like fueled in large part by the recent downturn in the world economy and a rapidly evaporating pool of available credit.

The proposed friends and groups features would allow users to send tweets to specific groupings of friends or followers, giving the service a very real, very practical logistical application for businesses and corporate clients. Indeed, one tasty tidbit Williams revealed at the Churchill Club was that Twitter is "in talks with large consumer packaged good companies" - although we're still not sure whether it would be to market their products to Twitter users, monetize their Twitter pages, or to sell internal services. Based on the widespread rumblings about Twitter monetizing through corporate accounts, the latter possibility seems the most likely.