Today, through the acquisition of my company Dasient, I have joined the flock at Twitter (they love bird metaphors). I am a proud new member of Twitter’s revenue-security team, and I’m excited!

Until I heard about Twitter’s interest in acquiring Dasient, I was only a light Twitter user. I didn’t really get it. And when I talk to some of my friends about Twitter, they don’t get it either. Let me share what I learned about Twitter that enlightened me.

Twitter helps me find and follow information I can’t get any other way

Just by looking at my Tweets, you can’t tell I’m a power user, because I don’t Tweet much. But I am a power user because I use Twitter to access information I can’t get any other way. Here’s two personal examples of how Twitter helped me within the past couple of weeks:

(1) ATM outage

Last week at Bank of America every ATM was out of order and the bank lobby was closed. Strange.

In the days before smartphones I would normally drive around town looking for another ATM. But now I have a smartphone and understand the value of Twitter. Searching for “bank of america outage” on Twitter revealed 4 tweets from the past hour reporting Bank of America ATM outages all across the United States.

Bank of America outage on Twitter search

No need to look for another ATM; the entire system was down.

Now that I get Twitter, I know how to find that kind of real-time information. But what would I have done if I hadn’t been a Twitter user? When I got back to the office, I did a little experiment. I tried looking up the ATM outage on Google. I searched the news, blogs, BofA’s own site, and the Web at large—and found nothing.

Twitter was the only medium that had the real-time information I needed.

(2) Algorithmic-complexity attacks in the wild

The primary topic of my graduate research at Harvard and MIT Lincoln Laboratory was algorithmic-complexity attacks (AC attacks), a particular type of denial-of-service (DoS) attack, which I have blogged about before.

While surveying the literature, I searched far and wide for public discussions of these attacks occurring in the wild. I found nothing. I felt sure they actually happened in the wild, because of their appealing features from an attacker’s perspective. I just couldn’t find any discussions. In my research paper describing my novel defense against such attacks, I couldn’t mention the occurrence of any real-world AC attacks in the wild because I was unaware of any.

My negative experiences researching AC attacks without Twitter sharply contrasts my recent positive experiences researching AC attacks with Twitter. Specifically, several AC vulnerabilities were recently announced on the web. These particular vulnerabilities represent a subgenre of AC vulnerabilities, known as HashDoS vulnerabilities. Discussions of the vulnerabilities emerged on Twitter using the #hashDoS hashtag. There is even a @HashDoS account on Twitter, which moderates and promotes such discussions.

Within minutes of beginning my search on Twitter, I found the gem I’d been searching for for years: a report of an AC attack against StackOverflow.com by an employee.

Keep in mind: I am an expert on AC attacks, I am a Google power user, and I am a newcomer to Twitter.

To top it all off, now that I know who the other researchers are in this area, I don’t have to search anymore. I just follow them and their insights get pushed to me automatically.

Flock

I think most people are like me; they consume information more than they produce it. Subsequently, thinking of Twitter as just a microblogging platform grossly understates its value. If you are not already, become a Twitter user and have the world’s real-time status at your fingertips.  Join the flock and follow me @MichaelNGagnon.