A security flaw in micro-blogging service Twitter allowed hackers to wreck havoc on Tuesday by redirecting thousands of users to third-party sites, including hardcore pornography.

Lord Sugar and Sarah Brown were among thousands of Twitter users who found themselves redirecting other users to pornographic sites. Twitter users complained that when the moused over posted links on Twitter.com, third-party websites would pop up on the page even if they didn’t click on them.

nsurance price comparison site Confused. com has warned that users of the social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter could face hiked home insurance premiums.

The site said that location-sharing features of the social networking sites could jeopardize the security of the homes by providing anti-social elements with information regarding the whereabouts of the owners of the homes.

Those who are in the habit of sharing their travel plans on Facebook or Twitter makes it easy for hi-tech robbers to raid homes in their absence.

Spammers hijacked the Twitter account of celebrity Kirstie Allsopp to direct her large swarm of followers to a scam page, which claimed to be allocating iPads for free.

On Sunday evening numerous messages from TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp's Twitter verified account advertised free Apple iPads, misleading Kirstie Allsopp's more than 47,000 Twitter followers.

Kirstie Allsopp is a TV presenter for the Channel 4. She hosts sever acclaimed real-estate shows including 'Location, Location, Location', 'Kirstie's Homemade Home' and ‘Relocation, Relocation’.

More than half of British employees acknowledged keeping posted their personal Twitter, Facebook and MySpace silhouette while at work, whilst a third expressed they exhausted half an hour a day by means of the websites.

Two million people or six per cent of Britain's 34 million brawny workforce acknowledged slaying more than an hour every day adding up friends, uploading pictures and videos and tweeting.

The consequential plummet in workers' efficiency might be costing British businesses as much as £14 billion a year, according to an analysis by a network of jobs websites.

Stephen Holmes, who has been followed by US rapper Kanye West on his Twitter account since last Saturday has fed up with fame.

Mr. Holmes from Coventry in the UK started attracting huge attention ever since Kanye West chosen him to follow on the social networking site. The number of Mr. Holmes's followers on the site has jumped from mere 60 to more than 1,500.

Mr. Homes he was very happy to be followed by the rap superstar, but now he started feeling pressure with soaring number of tweets on the site

US rapper Kanye West had been avoiding following anyone on social networking site Twitter until Saturday, when he started following Stephen Holmes from in the UK.

The US rapper started his Twitter account only a week ago, and quickly attracted thousands of followers.

Mr. Holmes sent a tweet to West to thank the rapper for following him. West tweeted back: "You are the chosen one dun dun dun."

In the previous one-week period, West received as many as 400,000 followers, roughly 399,999 of whom straight away got awfully annoyed asking why he had not picked them as the "chosen one".

Even though, the 20 billionth messages on Twitter was not a very big deal, it still spoke volumes about the huge popularity and rapid growth of Twitter, across the world. It has become one of the most popular platforms and is continuing to grow in popularity and usage.

The 20 billionth tweets came from a user in Japan. Twitter has been growing at an exponential pace in Japan in the last one year. Twitter estimates that Japanese people send 8 million tweets every day. This is nearly 12% of the global tweets and just a shade less than the U. S.

The popular Twitter client Tweetdeck has just celebrated its second birthday, releasing some figures that state its grand success over the past two years.

UK-based founder Iain Dodworth claimed that the desktop app has been downloaded 15 million times since its launch, which makes the Adobe Air-based app the most popular Twitter desktop client in the world.

Dodworth also claimed that around 4 million tweets, status updates along with Google Buzz messages are sent via Tweetdeck app per day, plus as many as 30,000 images are uploaded on a daily basis.

Twitter has launched a new Early Bird account @earlybird. It is meant for sharing news and promoting special time-bound deals, sneak-peeks and events. Principally, it is Twitter's own bargains’ alert service feed.

Launched in partnership with select advertisers, the offers would be crafted only for the Twitter user base. The conditions of offers in terms of availability, price, product and others, would rest completely in the hands of advertisers.

Twitter will earn money 'through relationships with their advertisers'.

Twitter is set in motion trying to get into the online shopping business or maybe it can be said that it is pointing to places where deals can be done.

The firm’s new service, which has correctly been named as @earlybird, is an official Twitter account that the corporation plans to feed with deals at both online and offline sellers, as well as brief information about everyday events.

People who follow the tweets will see them to be similar as the usual ones.

While it might seem to be a trivial offer, @earlybird is prominent since Twitter plans to monetize it.

Old computers such as ZX Spectrum shouldn’t be considered as rubbish.

The National Museum of Computing hosted the inaugural of vintage computing festival at Bletchley Park this weekend, revealing the history of computer in Britain.

At the festival, the ZX Spectrum, one of the classic 80s computers, had been hacked to use Twitter. Twitter on ZX Spectrum became the centre of attraction at the festival, which was first of its kind in Britain.

The series of outages, breakdowns and viruses, which have limped Twitter for the past week and a half impelled the corporation to release another apology and clarification for its technical miseries on Tuesday afternoon.

In an official blog post, Twitter recognized prime factors, which have added to the hitches, like a surge in usage due to the World Cup and the detection of bugs, whilst carrying out both short-range and long-standing system improvements and upgrades.

On Tuesday, Twitter has added a 'Places' feature, though that may be of little comfort to those who have had problem using the service.

Twitter accounted a sequence of outages on Monday night, because of what the website dubbed a botched improvement of a new tactic to timeline caching, Twitter said on its status blog.

Twitter said, “Our infrastructure and operations engineers are currently working to resolve this. We'll update you soon with an ETA”.

Micro-blogging site Twitter once again failed to provide service on Monday at about 10:20 p. m.

The site suddenly stopped responding, which the company said was due to some networking problem. This deficiency in providing adequate service also created problems for Brightkite. com, who’s APIs are running on Twitter.

Moreover, the company does not give any clue about when the service would again be provided.

Apart from that, Twitter has now introduced a new application for its users. They can now find out the location from where their friends and other people are tweeting from.

Twitter on Thursday publicized its deal with Smallthought Systems. It revealed that it has bought the Web analytics application Trendly which will help the Tweeple (users of Twitter) to go through their Google records.

Kevin Weil, the Analytics Lead at Twitter said, "As Twitter is the world's largest Ruby on Rails-based web service, we are impressed with [Smallthought's] frequent contributions to the Ruby and Smalltalk development communities".