Another great article by Mashable. Please leave me a comment below if you enjoyed this post.

Update: Title updated to reflect this is in-stream advertising platforms, more at the foot of the post.

In a lengthy post, Twitter has just announced it will ban all third party ad platforms that inject advertising into users twitter streams. This technically means the end of Ad.ly and potentially the just launched (as in today at TechCrunch’s Disrupt) Tweetup.

Tthe significant part of Twitter’s announcement is below:

As our primary concern is the long-term health and value of the network, we have and will continue to forgo near-term revenue opportunities in the service of carefully metering the impact of Promoted Tweets on the user experience. It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem. For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly.

This is huge! Is Twitter trying to push out any ad competition in this move? What do you think? Leave a comment below…

[img credit: Markus Bollingmo]

My comments: Does this surprise anyone? (now of course, WE don’t do any of these things…right everyone?)

A new study from security firm Barracuda Labs provides some interesting insights into the state of the Twitterverse. Unfortunately for the microblogging startup, the stats say that most of its users aren’t very active.

The study looked at around 19 million Twitter accounts (PDF) in order to figure out how people are using Twitter (). It started with one assumption: an active or “True” Twitter user has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people, and had tweeted at least 10 times. By that definition though, only 21% of Twitter users are active users.

There’s a great deal of interesting data in the breakdown. Only 26% of Twitter users had 10 followers or more by December 2009, while only 40% were following 10 people or more (in fact, a majority of Twitter users, 51%, were following less than five people).

As Director of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, a big part of my job is focused on the detection and prevention of spam and abuse. A couple weeks ago, Biz explained how Twitter users were being victimized by phishing scams spread primarily through links in Direct Messages. Basically, people click the link and bad things happen. My team can only detect these scams after malicious links have already been sent out.

Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.

Since these attacks occur primarily on Direct Messages and email notifications about Direct Messages, this is where we have focused our initial efforts. For the most part, you will not notice this feature because it works behind the scenes but you may notice links shortened to twt.tl in Direct Messages and email notifications. Special thanks to @wfarner and @ram for building this service and helping keep us all a little safer!

By no means are Twitter and Facebook perfect: You might wish that Facebook made it more intuitive to hide FarmVille or certain status updates. Or, maybe you wish that Twitter would introduce a new feature like nested tweets. Good news: For many of these website tweaks or suggestions, there’s likely to be a script you can download to fit the bill.

Here are my top eight picks for Facebook and Twitter add-ons. Many of these solve common user gripes (such as not knowing to what site shortened URLs will bring you on Twitter). Some, like “Facebook Fixer,” enhance the site and allow you to customize it beyond standard options. Do note that most of these scripts require that you first download Greasemonkey, and not all are compatible with every browser, so be sure to check the requirements before you download a script.

1. Facebook Fixer.

This script lets you customize your Facebook account and offers many features that are enabled by default, but can be enabled or disabled independently. Some of these features include: larger profile and album pictures; homepage customization where you can hide independent sections such as pokes, suggestions and “connect with friends”; and calendar integration, which includes a link on each profile that synchs birthdays with Google Calendar, or the option to export a file with all your friends’ birthdays, which can be imported into sites such as Google Calendar, Yahoo, Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook and more.

2. Facebook Purity.

The Facebook Purity script cleans up your homepage and removes all newsfeed items from third-party games such as Mafia Wars and FarmVille, and zaps announcements on who’s become friend with who, who’s attending a certain event, who joined a group and who became a fan of something. Optional items you can block include: comments on a status, photo, photo album or link; tags in a photo or photo album; and event postings.

3. Unfriend Finder.

According to hated-by-Jason Calacanis, comScore, 30.8% of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January 2010, which is 8.3 points more from one year ago. Facebook grew 112% in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347% jump.

11.1% of all mobile phone users accessed a social networking site via mobile browser – an increase of 4.6 percentage points from the previous year. Unsurprisingly, much of this growth has been driven by smartphone owners – while 30.8% of smartphone users accessed social networking sites, only 6.8% of feature phone users did so.

In the same period, Facebook was accessed by 25.1 million, MySpace by 11.4 million and Twitter by 4.7 million mobile users. Best of all, these figures don’t include access of the social networking services by the nearly 6 million users who do so exclusively through mobile applications.