What a verified Twitter account looks like.
(Credit: Twitter)They're here--sort of. Twitter has launched the early beta phase of its "verified accounts" program, a background-check for celebrities and other prominent users of the service to weed out impersonators and fake accounts. If they pass the test, they get a graphic "badge" much like a PayPal verified account's.
"We're starting with well-known accounts that have had problems with impersonation or identity confusion," an explanation from Twitter read. "We may verify more accounts in the future, but because of the cost and time required, we're only testing this feature with a small set of folks for the time being. As the test progresses we may be able to expand this test to more accounts over the next several months."
Twitter's team is rolling this out a bit prematurely because there are some powerful people breathing down their necks: the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals has filed a lawsuit against the service after someone started using it to impersonate him. There have also been embarrassing snafus involving a fake Dalai Lama account and a prankster who impersonated the Austin, Texas police department. By rolling out even a very bare-bones verification program, Twitter at least looks like it's doing something about the problem.
Right now, Twitter's verified accounts are mostly well-known ones (like @mashable), which suggests that the verification process thus far hasn't been particularly high-maintenance.
Here is the curious part: Twitter is currently only offering this service to individuals, not businesses. That raises the question of whether account verification will eventually be part of a paid "Twitter for business" account service that's rumored to be in the works. The presence of lawsuits, however, may have derailed plans to charge for account verification.
Either way, I suppose, you could get caught up in the debate over individuals who are businesses (Robert Scoble, anyone?), but that's a blog post for another day.
As anticipated from last week's Facebook company blog post, the company has rolled out a redesigned directory of applications that has been tweaked to better show off verified applications. The company has also trimmed the number of categories down to just seven from a list that had grown to 22.
Verified applications are those that have gone through Facebook's new annual verification program, which costs $375, or $175 for students. Facebook vets these apps to make sure they conform to the company's standards both in content and in API usage.
Apps that have been verified get a little green check mark next to their name, along with a large badge that goes on their description pages. With this move it also nets verified apps more exposure within the directory. They're now shown off in a new featured section that goes on top of all the other applications in each category.
While users can choose to only view verified apps in each category, one area where verified apps do not have as much importance is with Facebook's search. If you do a search for an app, it does not tell you whether it's been verified or not within the results, something that Facebook could change as an additional incentive for developers to pay up to get verified.
The new Facebook apps directory is a little more trimmed down, and highlights applications that have been verified with a little green check mark.
(Credit: CNET)
Facebook has announced a revamp of the way it lists and catalogs its directory of third-party developer applications, according to a post on its developer blog, and the most notable update is the debut of the "verified apps" program.
This was first announced in November. Basically, for a $375 fee, Facebook will review developer apps to make sure they fit security and transparency standards, and will award a graphic badge to apps that make the cut.
Security on Facebook has been making headlines in the past few weeks, in the wake of several prominent phishing attacks that have hit the social network. While most have been quickly mitigated, and most did not involve third-party apps, getting the verified apps system in place may help with some image issues for the massive social network.
"Ensuring that applications are trustworthy, meaningful (whether for entertainment or utility value), and easy to find is paramount to developer success, user engagement, and helping the ecosystem as whole to thrive," Facebook's Jerry Cain wrote in the blog post.
Verified apps are also ranked higher in the directory, which is a big deal considering it now contains more than 52,000 applications. The directory has also upgraded its category system so that you can find what you're looking for more easily.
This will all be rolling out in the next few weeks, Cain wrote.
Data visualizations are a great way to make something complex more easily understood from any spreadsheet or table. Verifiable, a free visualization tool does just that, by quickly organizing uploaded data sets into charts that can be customized and manipulated using a drag and drop control scheme that feels a lot like making a playlist in iTunes.
What's interesting here is that the service is putting both the charts and the data in the same place, so you can go behind the curtain to double check to see the source numbers. The other day when we wrote a follow up on the TechCrunch50 and Demo conferences and showed what was live and what was dead, we included charts, but in order to back everything up we had to drop the source spreadsheet in there, too. With Verifiable, the source data would have been there, but only seen when users clicked on the charts.
There are number of ways to get your data onto the service. You can upload from your hard drive, or paste the data by pasting it into a text box. However my favorite is by linking it up to Google Docs and Spreadsheets which lets you suck in your data from the cloud. You can even narrow it down by what part of the spreadsheet you want to get the numbers from.
I'll be honest here, I don't have a whole lot of use for this in my daily routine, but compared to some other data comparison services like Tablefy, iCharts and Swivel, Verifiable's Web app feel seems more attuned to folks who need to remix and re-order data they already have.
Here's a sample chart. To see all the fun data behind it, you'll have to click on it.
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