jump-tweeting to conclusions.

I’m repeatedly amazed how, when the subject is Twitter, writers and readers will jump to all kinds of conclusions from any scrap of information, however suspicious or specious.

The latest came in the form of a Wall Street Journal blog entry titled Is Gen Y Tweeting?, which immediately was linked and retweeted throughout the Twittersphere. But looking at this article about the most fictionalized modern generation shows there’s less than meets the eye, and makes one question the common sense of serial RTers.

The headline conclusion found the oversimplified group known as Gen Y just isn’t that into tweeting, as only 22% of 18- to 24-year-olds used Twitter. Well, sort of. According to one study. And one with a laughably small sample size. A marketing firm partnered with Pace University’s business school on the study, and polled the 200 Generation Y-ers — mostly Pace students — on their social-media habits, according to the story.

Hang on. Is 200 a sufficient sample size to categorize the habits of millions? Moreover, such a homogeneous group mostly at one college? (Not to get too deep into statistics, but the margin of error for such a small, uniform sample would provide a very low confidence level of interpolating the result to such a large population.)

Remember that Twitter, like any social-media manifestation, is viral in nature. Most of us start using it because others we know use it. Malcolm Gladwell, in his much-read The Tipping Point, notes that for anything to go viral, you need mavens — who discover and share information — to interact with connectors, who spread the word to others. This cultivation of any movement, including Twitter, varies by location and introductory forces.

Example: Until I showed a Music Business class on our campus about Twitter, I knew of no students who tweeted. Some of those students started using Twitter, told friends, who told their friends and now I see a lot of our students on Twitter. It’s quite possible colleges with more mavens and connectors have double the Pace user base, while others may be well lower. But to draw conclusions on one isolated geographical population is to ignore what we should know about social media and how actions spread.

In a related development, I discovered the Wall Street Journal is on Twitter, so I can confidently interpolate that 100% of print publications have Twitter accounts. Seems just as valid a conclusion.

saturday night unspecial: stalkdaily worm hits twitter.

Is it possible to create a viral script that can invade your account just by mousing over a link? Having encountered the StalkDaily virus, I’m sorry to say the answer appears to be yes.

Happened earlier this evening as I visited accounts of new people who had started following me on Twitter. One thing I look for in a profile is whether the user has a blog, and I saw that one (a fellow Mariners fan; hasn’t she suffered enough) had her home page listed as http://www.stalkd…; (with a character limit). Curious what kind of blog name that may be, I moused over it, which usually reveals a link name in the bottom left of my Firefox browser. No name appeared. That should have been my first indication something was amiss.

I returned to my Twitter page and after a refresh saw that my account was listed as telling other people to visit StalkDaily[-dot-]com. Repeatedly. I was confused. So I clicked onto my profile page and saw that this address was now listed as my Web home page. Somehow, just by the mouseover enabling some Javascript function (if that’s the right word; I’m not hardcore technical at all), my listed home page changed and some kind of feed bringing these messages through my Twitter account had become enabled. The simple and insidious nature of the invasion struck me as quite breathtaking.

To mitigate, I deleted those tweets, changed my Web page back, created a new password and logged out. I found other sites that recommend clearing your cache and your cookies as well, so I complied as best I could. The Twittercism blog gives more information, and TechCrunch says it appeared to be an XSS attack. Great. New acronyms to fear.

Interesting that the viral attack was counterattacked via viral marketing, as a few Tweeps started warning everyone about it and then the information was retweeted (RTed) around the Twitterverse. If there are heinous folks out there figuring out ways to infect us when we merely mouse over a link — until now not a harmful maneuver — it’s good to know that the human desire to help and warn one another is as strong as ever.