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“Every day, a growing number of people log in to Twitter. Usually these login attempts come from the genuine account owners, but we occasionally hear from people whose accounts have been compromised by email phishing schemes or a breach of password data elsewhere on the web,” product security team member Jim O’Leary wrote in a blog post.

“Today we’re introducing a new security feature to better protect your Twitter account: login verification,” he said.

The new feature comes in the wake of a string of widely publicized hacks of visible Twitter accounts, including those owned by news outlets like the Financial Times, the Guardian and others. Most recently, when the Associated Press account was hacked, a single alarmist tweet was enough to send U.S. stock markets into a tailspin, plunging the Dow by upward of 150 points in a matter of minutes.

For months, many have called for Twitter to introduce such new security features to remedy the ongoing hacks.

The process is much like other two-factor authentication services across the Web. When a user tries to log in to his or her profile, they’re asked to provide a cellphone number. Twitter sends an SMS message to that phone, and you’ll be asked to enter the code into your browser to continue the login. The new feature is optional, and must be turned on inside the settings menu.

Basically, it’s a way of locally identifying that you are, indeed, who you say you are. If someone is trying to hack into your Twitter account from another location, odds are they don’t have your cellphone as well to snag the verifiable code. It’s a service that other major Internet companies — like Facebook and Google — have provided for quite a while.

While added security measures help, they also potentially complicate the gears for folks who share Twitter accounts — namely, those run by brands and agencies, whose social media presences are managed by multiple people in different places.

This is likely why Twitter said in a recent email to publishers that only one computer should be designated for tweeting; it’s less secure to spread the account access across multiple systems.

Still, brands and publishers can choose not to turn on the feature — they’ll just have to practice other safe account measures like good password hygiene and limiting the number of people able to use the account.

Frankly, even if Twitter’s new feature is optional and far from a cure-all, it’s about time it showed up.

Base image: Shutterstock / rvlsoft

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Today marks a year since Facebook’s rough-and-tumble IPO.

Since that disappointing day, Facebook has gone to great lengths to assure Wall Street that yes, it will one day be the social ad spinning, money-making machine that Wall Street hopes it will be.

The biggest potential, Facebook maintains, lies in what executives consider “long-term investments,” products with grand ambitions to change the way we interact with Facebook — if not the world — on a regular basis.

Therein lies the problem. Meaningful change won’t happen soon.

Consider Facebook Home, the mobile project years in the making that aims to shift the way we interact with our mobile devices, anchoring users within the Facebook experience. The potential for success with Home, if widely adopted, could be big. More time spent inside of Facebook’s products means more ads served by default — especially when Facebook finally brings ads to Cover Feed, one of the key features of Home.

And yet by many measures, Home has stumbled hard directly out of the gate. More than half of its user reviews on Google Play are scathing. And as of last week, just over one million people had installed the product, a trifling amount compared to the 1.1 billion users on Facebook’s network.

What Facebook really wants from Home is to catch on overseas. Create a mobile-focused product to capture developing world markets — where the phone is a person’s primary computing device — and you’ve got potential to spur growth. Home, however, runs only on certain higher-end Android devices, hardware that won’t be ubiquitous or cheap in developing countries for at least a few years.

Home isn’t the only long-term bet. Look at Graph Search, Facebook’s search product rolled out earlier this year. Almost immediately came calls saying “watch out Google!” from the public. Perhaps Google’s stranglehold on the search market could be upset by a social form of discovery.

But Graph Search is possibly in an even more nascent phase than Facebook Home; Graph Search has only been rolled out to a select amount of users, and Facebook has oodles of work to do if it wants to curb the way people make Web search queries and focus them on people, places and things inside of the Facebook network.

Granted, Facebook has made serious moves in the past year to spur profitability further, releasing a slew of new ad products, revamping its gaming platform partner ecosystem and pushing, however slowly, into online retail with Facebook Gifts. It has consistently hit its numbers in the company’s quarterly earnings calls. And as the Wall Street Journal’s Evelyn Rusli wrote, the company made significant internal shifts over the past year that have made more teams responsible for Facebook’s revenue.

And still, the needle hardly moves on Facebook’s stock ticker; it closed at around $26 per share on Friday, well below the $38 it opened at one year ago. For all of Facebook’s long-term posturing, the Street remains cautious.

“We don’t build services to make money,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his company’s S-1 prospectus before Facebook’s Nasdaq debut. “We make money to build better services.”

Hopefully, for the sake of the shareholders, Facebook can do both.

On May 9, a day after the company posted its first-ever quarterly profit, the stock exploded higher in heavy trading. Ms. Baiynd, a full-time short-term trader since 2006, pounced. From her home office in Charlotte, N.C., the 48-year-old says she scooped up shares at $67.15 and sold them on Monday for a 31 percent gain.

The very next day, Ms. Baiynd changed tack, she says, successfully betting Tesla would head lower on a day when the shares finished down 14 percent from their intraday high.

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The official Twitter account of the Associated Press was hacked on Tuesday morning, according to an AP spokesperson, sending out a disturbing message that gained immediate traction across Twitter, spurring upward of 4,000 retweets within minutes of the initial tweet.

The hackers were able to send only a single tweet before Twitter suspended the account, merely minutes after the tweet was sent.

The tweet in question was disturbing. “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured,” the fake tweet read.

But the rest of the world reacted quickly. Stocks on the DJIA dove briefly by about 130 points on the news, before sharply recovering to roughly where they were before, around 14,700.

The news comes after a weekend of similar hacks on news organizations, including some CBS News accounts. The Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility for the attacks. Earlier this month, a number of NPR’s Twitter accounts were hacked, and last month saw hacks to the Human Rights Watch website.

According to a tweet sent from “@officialSEA_6,” the AP hack could also have been carried out by the Syrian Electronic Army. “Ops! @AP get owned by Syrian Electronic Army! #SEA #Syria #ByeByeObama,” the tweet read.

Something worth noting: AP reporter Michael Baker tweeted that the hack “came less than an hour after some of us received an impressively disguised phishing email,” which may explain how the hackers gained access to the AP Twitter account.

“The (at)AP twitter account has been hacked. A tweet about an attack at the White House is false. We will advise on acct. status,” said the Associated Press, via a tweet from its other verified account, @APStylebook.

“The president is fine,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said at a regularly scheduled press conference on Tuesday morning. “I was just with him.”

As is standard operating procedure, Twitter declined to comment on an individual account, citing privacy and security reasons.

While Apple’s stock declines, Google’s stock keeps zooming the other way.

If you go back six months, changes in the two companies’ share prices seem to be almost in lockstep, but heading in opposite directions. Overall, Google is up 20.6 percent, while Apple is down 37.8 percent.

As of today, at a market cap of $400 billion, Apple is no longer the most valuable company in the world. Google, meanwhile, hit an all-time high of $822.84, closing the day at $821.50 for a gain of 1.9 percent.

P.S. Explaining stock fluctuations over months-long periods is a messy game, so let’s not go there, but there was a nice bit of discussion over the weekend about open vs. closed — and to some extent Google vs. Apple — here, here and here.

The social-networking company’s IPO was one of the most anticipated in years, and the technology errors that plagued the Nasdaq Stock Market that morning were widely considered a blow to investor confidence.

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Less than five months after going public, Groupon’s stock is trading at more than half-off.

Today, the daily deals company’s shares slid another 3.2 percent, or 48 cents, to close at $14.54 a share. That’s less than half the $31.14 that some investors paid at the stock’s high point, just after it went public in early November.

At today’s close, the company’s stock hits a new low, though it slumped to similar levels at the end of November.

The stock has not recovered since last Friday, when Groupon revised its results for the fourth quarter due to higher-than-expected return rates during the holiday period.

Today, lawyers announced that multiple class actions have been filed against the Chicago company. The law firms, however, don’t have a lead plaintiff, and are looking for someone who participated in the company’s IPO and suffered financial losses. The complaint charges that certain officers issued materially false and misleading statements regarding financial results.

As part of the announcement on Friday, Groupon reaffirmed its guidance for the first quarter, and is still expecting revenue of up to $550 million, and net income from operations of up to $35 million. The company will release its first-quarter results on May 14.

Apple Inc.’s success selling consumer gadgets has pushed its share price above $500, cementing its place as the U.S.’s largest company, with a market capitalization of $475 billion. But its gargantuan size is making it difficult for Wall Street to get a big-picture view of the earnings and margins for other American corporations.

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Since participating in a $112 million funding of Web darling Airbnb Inc. in July that valued the online room-rental company at more than $1 billion, Mr. Andreessen said his venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has “taken a step back.”

With some deals for private companies “definitely on the expensive side” amid a choppy stock market and concerns over a European debt crisis, Mr. Andreessen said he is looking to invest in fast-growing tech start-ups that aren’t as well known and where “pricing is still under control.”

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In a move likely to ripple across the stock market, Nasdaq OMX plans to announce Tuesday a rare rebalancing of its Nasdaq-100 index, which will reduce the big weighting of Apple Inc. The company currently makes up more than 20 percent of the index.

The rebalancing was driven in part by the seemingly unstoppable rise in Apple shares, which are up more than fourfold in the past two years. The tech company’s big weighting means that a change in fortune for the maker of iPhones, iPods and iPads has a huge impact on one of the most heavily traded indexes in the market. After the rebalancing, which takes effect May 2, Apple will make up 12 percent of the Nasdaq-100.

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ON THE CREEPY LINE
“There is what I call the creepy line.The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”
–October 2010

ON BRAIN IMPLANTS, WHICH WOULD CROSS THE CREEPY LINE
“I would argue that implanting something in your brain is beyond the creepy line–at least for the moment, until the technology gets better. As far as I know, we do not have a medical lab working on implants … As far as I know.”
–October 2010

ON PRIVACY:
“Streetview, we drive exactly once. So you can just move, right?”
–October 2010

ON CARS:
“It’s a bug that cars were invented before computers.”
–September 2010

ON THE BORG:
“What we’re really doing is building an augmented version of humanity, building computers to help humans do the things they don’t do well better.”
–September 2010

ON EXTENDING GOOGLE’S MISSION TO YOUR BRAIN:
“With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
–September 2010

ON YOUR FACEBOOK PHOTOS
“Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don’t have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You’ve got Facebook photos!”
–August 2010

ON FINANCE:
“One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”
–March 2010

ON YOUR NEEDS:
“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
–August 2010

ON PRIVACY:
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
–December 2009

ON M&A AND “ADULT SUPERVISION”:
“One day Larry and Sergey bought Android, and I didn’t even notice. Think about the strategic opportunities that has created. Sergey found Google Earth one day while he was surfing on the Web. And then he walked into my office and told me he bought them. “And I said, ‘for how much, Sergey?’ And it turned out to be a few million.”
–October 2009

ON ‘DON’T BE EVIL’
“‘Don’t be evil’ is misunderstood. We don’t have an ‘Evilmeter’ we can sort of apply–you know–what is good and what is evil….The rule allows for conversation. I thought when I joined the company this was crap…it must be a joke. I was sitting in a room in [the] first six months…talking about some advertising…and someone said that it is evil. It stopped the product. It’s a cultural rule, a way of forcing the conversation especially in areas that are ambiguous.”
–June 2008

ON THE ‘EVILMETER’:
“We actually did an evil scale and decided not to serve [China] at all was worse evil.”
– Jan. 2006

ON EVIL:
“Evil is what Sergey says is evil.”
–-December 2002

ON IDIOTS:
“People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they’re idiots.”
–Date Unknown

ON RUNNING GOOGLE:
“Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!”
–-January 2011

The software maker forecast first-quarter earnings of 54 cents to 59 cents a share on revenue of $1 billion to $1.05 billion. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters expect earnings of 51 cents on revenue of $992 million for the current quarter.

In after-hours trading on Monday, Adobe shares were up 4.5% to $30.48 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

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“As you can see from the unedited interview, my comments were made during a fairly long back and forth on privacy. I clearly misspoke. If you are worried about Street View and want your house removed please contact Google and we will remove it.”

– Google CEO Eric Schmidt on his suggestion that folks concerned about the company’s Street View service “just move“

PREVIOUSLY:

• Google CEO’s Advice to the Street-View Shy: The Video
• Schmidt: Don’t Like Google Street View Photographing Your House? Then Move.

• Google CEO’s Advice to the Street-View Shy: The Video
• Google CEO Apologizes For Street View Quip

“The problem with Google is that Eric Schmidt is creepy….The industry is filled with eccentric CEOs–billionaires who, say, wear a wardrobe that consists of nothing but identical black shirts and Levi’s 501 jeans, or who dress as a samurai warrior, including swords, at their home. But Schmidt doesn’t seem eccentric (or at least not merely so). He seems creepy.”

– John Gruber, Daring Fireball

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says the company’s “policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” And while that may be true of Google, it’s clearly not true of Schmidt, who lately has been happily high stepping across the creepy line like the grand marshal of the Tone-Deaf Technocrat Parade.

In the past year alone he has:

• Addressed criticisms of Google’s stance on privacy by saying, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
• Claimed people want Google to “tell them what they should be doing next.”
• Said of Google, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
• Said this: “One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”
• Suggested name changes to protect adults from the Web’s record of their youthful indiscretions.
• Said this: “What we’re really doing is building an augmented version of humanity, building computers to help humans do the things they don’t do well better.”

Nice selection of remarks with which to begin a Bartlett’s Unsettling Quotations From Powerful CEOs, right?

And Schmidt’s far from done. Appearing on CNN’s “Parker Spitzer” program last week, he said that people who don’t like Google’s Street View cars taking pictures of their homes and businesses “can just move” afterward to protect their privacy. Ironically, he said this on the very day that Google admitted those cars captured more than just fragments of personal payload data.

Interestingly, CNN has since edited that quote out of Schmidt’s segment. Did Google ask CNN to remove it? Who knows. Perhaps the company has finally realized that Schmidt’s penchant for indulging in this sort of pedantic dorkery doesn’t do much for its public image.

Freaking people out with asinine power-tripping pronouncements might be great fun for Schmidt, but it isn’t a wise PR strategy, particularly when Google is a company about which the public and government are increasingly concerned.

Schmidt really should know this.

Actually, it’s hard to believe he doesn’t.

Which is just…creepy.

UPDATE: Here’s Google’s official comment on Schmidt’s “just move” remark as given MarketWatch: “The point Eric was making is that our Street View service provides only a static picture in time, and doesn’t provide real-time imagery or provide any information about where people are. Of course, we also allow users to request that their home be removed from Street View.”

UPDATE: CNN says Google did not ask that Schmidt’s remark be removed from the broadcast version of the show. “Producers routinely make editorial decisions about what sound bites to include in their shows,” a spokesperson told me via e-mail. “In this case, the clip was posted on cnn.com and disseminated to other media outlets and was widely available.”

When I wrote this the Dow Jones Industrial Average had already come roaring back from 6,600 to 9,865 so it was certainly against conventional wisdom. It eventually closed at 11,204 in April before sliding back to 10,000 as I sit here and type. My fears haven’t abated, so I’d like to offer my current thinking on the economy and what it portends for the VC industry and fund-raising for entrepreneurs. I have a vested interest in being wrong about tough times ahead, but as the old saying goes, “hope for best, plan for the worst.”

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