Image courtesy of Ed Wheeler

A lot more is known after Thursday's DDoS attack on Twitter, Facebook and Livejournal.

It is now confirmed that the attack was directed against Georgian blogger Cyxymu.  He himself blames the Kremlin for the attack.  Russian officials were unavailable for comment on this.

Cyxmu himself apologized for what happened, even though he was a victim of all this.

Meantime, Twitter is still experiencing problems.  Attacks still continued into Friday, with the intensity and nature of attacks shifting.

In an LA Times interview, Twitter's service provider explained why Twitter was so vulnerable to the DDoS attacks.

Interestingly, the non-tweeting world thought it hilarious that Twitter users had nothing to do while the DDoS attack occcurred.

• Previous posts on this topic:  DDoS Attack Hits Various Social Media Services

Thursday US time, around midnight to 1:30am Australian Eastern Standard Time, Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal and a few other services were hit by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack.

It's now 1:35pm on a Melbourne Friday and Twitter is still showing some signs of being affected.  Facebook, Blogger and a few others have running without as much trouble, but it's making social media difficult today.

It seems the attacks have been targetting one person, a pro-Georgian blogger, across every service he uses.

It's also led to a new symbol of Twitter downtime, the Dead Twitter Bluebird, instead of a Fail Whale (courtesy of iStockPhoto.com)

At the same time, there's also a wave of scam/spam adding to the confusion.

UPDATE 4:40pm AEST:  Some conflicting reports on whether to do with pro-Georgian or pro-Abkhazia activist, also some conflicting theories on what exactly the attack was from a technical point-of-view.

UPDATE 6:00pm AEST:  It is now confirmed that the attack was indeed targetting one man.  Facebook security chief explains.

Last weekend, Twitter did a cleanout of spammer accounts.

The most immediate effect was that most peoples' follower lists dropped a bit as the spammers following them were purged from the system.  For most, that was a good thing, giving them a more accurate representation of their real influence.  After all, it's the amount of real followers that tells you your true worth to your Twitter community, not spammers.

I would like to hope most people were glad to see the spambots gone.  But I'm sure there would have been one or two who thought that having a big list of followers, regardless of its real-to-spambot ratio, meant something.  I feel sorry for such people because a list with the majority of followers being spam really isn't any value at all.

Me?  I prefer a list where almost all the followers are real, where they converse with me, where they and I share jokes and funny news iterms.

Anyway, it wasn't totally effective.  New spammers seemed to still pop up in the days since, with some interesting things noted about this latest batch.

I've found, on my own follower list, that there's a discrepency between the numbers, depending on what client you're viewing the list through.  Then there's spammers showing up on a third-party client like Tweetie-for-iPhone, but not showing in the Twitter web version.

The other thing I've noticed this week is that the ratio of spammer new followers to real is getting out of hand.  I counted a small amount of new REAL followers.  The rest of my new followers, which made a clear majority, were spammers.

I'm now wondering if Twitter is reaching the point where its getting less and less new real people.

It's like what happened with Yahoo groups a few years back.  Groups were great as long as there were more real people there.  But eventually there got to be too many spammers, spambots and pornbots.  Before long, there were hardly any real people in most of the groups.

Twitter is still a good service, but its been hit by a few security issues this past year.  It needs to be a  bit tighter on security, verification and a couple of other  things.  If it gets that right, then everyone's experience will be that much better.  But if it doesn't take the security and spammer issue a bit more seriously, it runs the risk of being overtaken by services which solve the spammer issue.

While I'm being a bit critical, I've often pointed out that Twitter Search really needs to be able to show ALL one's tweets all the way back, not merely one month, and in one's ordinary account rather than having to access the API to go back further than a month.

Seriously, if you want to be considered a contender to Google, you have to be able to index as far back as possible.

That said, I'll kick myself off my soapbox.  Have a great weekend