I received an email from Twitter this morning letting me know that I’d recently changed the email address associated with my account and asking me to click a link to confirm. Only one problem. I didn’t recently change the email address associated with my account. Fortunately, I’m savvy enough to be suspicious about any email I receive, even when they look legit, but how many people get emails like this and automatically click the attached link, exposing themselves to all manner of viruses, providing their passwords to thieves, or setting themselves up for identity theft? The sad truth is it’s lots of people.

Here’s a screen shot showing the exact email I received and at first glance I’m sure the average computer user would assume it was actually from Twitter. After you take a look, I’ll point out a couple obvious and a couple not so obvious ways to tell that this email didn’t really come from Twitter.

Although the first clue seems obvious because it’s glaring in my screen shot, the problem is that many email clients don’t show the full header information and many people would not see this one. Take a look at who the email is from. I’m pretty sure no one from Twitter would be sending an email using JACLYNLANG@hotmail.com as their email address.

The next clue is the subject, “Confirm the password twitter”. Maybe “Confirm your Twitter password” would have made more sense and sounded like it came from Twitter instead of someone with poor English skills? And they do it again after the Hi Hugh part, “Confirm the password twitter, click this link:”

The last obvious clue is pretty funny, but they used a Hotmail account to send the email and Hotmail adds a tagline to the bottom of the email asking me to sign up. Does anyone actually believe that Twitter would send an email using Hotmail?

Finally, the best clue of all, and it’s not immediately obvious, and that’s the URL. It looks legit, doesn’t it? It shows that it indeed came from twitter.com, right? Wrong. Depending on what email client you use, finding out what email address this was actually sent from may or may not be a simple matter. For me, I simply need to mouse over the URL and my program pops up a window alerting me that the actual host is different from the listed host.

Fewer people would be affected by phishing emails if they just took the time to think before they clicked a link out of reflex, but as long as most computer users continue to do things out of habit or remain ignorant to the simple things they need to do to protect themselves, this is going to continue to be a problem.

Loic Le Meur is one of my favorite people and one reason is his constant and never wavering positive attitude. As the CEO of Seesmic, developer of both stand alone and web-based Twitter apps, as well as one of the best Twitter apps for Android phones, one would think he’d have a very good reason to be depressed right now, considering the latest news from Twitter. Apparently Twitter has finally gotten smart and decided to start adding functionality to their website they should have added long ago, and has also started releasing “official” Twitter apps for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android phones.

But, that’s not the way Loic is wired. Rather than moping around complaining that Twitter screwed him, he’s still optimistic about the future and will just put his efforts into developing apps that Twitter won’t be producing in-house. And who knows, maybe Twitter will buy his Twitter app instead of developing their own. Frankly, I hope they do, because I love Seesmic for Android.

If you’re serious about Twitter you’ve probably changed your background and instead of using one of the standard backgrounds, you’re using a photograph or some artwork or maybe even a custom background promoting your business. Good for you. One question. Do you know what your background looks like on different size monitors? What’s that you’re saying, you thought it looked the same to everyone? *Insert game show buzzer sound here.*

The problem with Twitter backgrounds is that they aren’t centered even though the main tweet area is. The backgrounds remain anchored to the left side of the screen, unlike most blog backgrounds that are set to remain centered no matter what size they are viewed at. Depending on the viewer’s monitor resolution more or less of the background can be visible on either side and most importantly, anything that’s on the right side might show and it might not. To illustrate this point I’ve created some sample screen shots of what some backgrounds look like at two common monitor resolutions and how you can compensate for what happens on the right side. The images on the left are as they appear at a resolution of 1280 x 1024 and on the right, the way they look at 1600 x 1200.

I’d like to point out that there is no perfect solution and even if your background looks great on any monitor larger than 1280 pixels wide, the left side may be partially covered on small laptops and notebooks, but to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, you just can’t please some people.

The image above illustrates a fairly common practice, which is to run a logo vertically up the right side. Looks great at 1280 but the image would be covered by the main tweet area on a larger monitor. The solution? Repeat the image so that if the first one is covered, the second one becomes visible. This is not a perfect solution because of intermediate size resolutions, like 1440, in which case you’d probably see some of both image, however, it’s an effective solution for most situations.

Some people like to have a photo collage on the right side. Again, if you line all your photos up so they look really nice on a 1280 wide monitor they’re probably going to be covered up on larger monitors. The solution is to include enough photos so that some of them show at any size.

The two examples above illustrate another popular technique of showing a realistic arrangement of items; strewn on a desk or pinned to a corkboard, for example. The important thing to consider when doing this is that the overall image is large enough and there are enough objects so that at least some of them are visible on any size monitor.

I used Chris Brogan’s background to highlight another thing I can tell a lot of you didn’t think about when you created your background or uploaded a photo. Many of you forget that not everyone has a big 20″ desktop monitor. Many have smaller monitors or view your Twitter profile on a laptop with a widescreen monitor which may have a maximum height of 800 pixels. By the time they add a few browser toobars they may only see 600 pixels or less of your image. For that reason I try to avoid putting anything important any lower than about 550 pixels down from the top of the graphic.

There are certainly many other factors to consider when you’re creating a cool custom Twitter background or picking a photo to use as your background but these are two of the most common mistakes I see. Now go change the photo you put on your background that shows you on the left and your girlfriend on the right so your friends know you’re still dating her.

Shameless plug: If you would like a custom Twitter background and just don’t have the skill to do it yourself and don’t have a graphic designer on staff, please check out Social Identities. We also customize Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr and most social networks and blogs.

There are several companies set up specifically to buy and sell ad space on our Twitter accounts. In most cases you sign up and agree to let them feed their pre written ads into your Twitter stream. What they are willing to pay you for that privilege depends on how popular you are and how often you tweet. It was recently reported that Kim Kardashian receives as much as $10,000 for some paid tweets even though she denies the claim.

The screen shot below illustrates why you’ll want to be very careful about what service you use if you decide that this seems like a good way to make some extra cash. Most of the services I’ve checked out provide a way for you to select general categories that you’ll accept ads from but don’t provide a way for you to specifically choose the advertisers.

I’m quite sure the person who’s account this tweet was sent from didn’t actually send the tweet. For one thing, the account holder is male and his Twitter page is used to provide information about online marketing, it’s not a typical spam account that you would expect to see this type of thing from. My guess is that he’s using an advertising service to insert paid ads into his Twitter stream and in this case, the ad does not fit his audience and actually linked to a porn style dating site.

My guess is that he’ll be hearing complaints from his followers, probably lose several, and will shortly be posting an apology if he’s smart. If he’s real smart, he’ll dump the ad service and find other ways to make money.

Once again I’ve managed to come into possession of some earth shattering information (paparazzi photo) that has yet to be leaked to the press (don’t ask me how) and although it’s possible Tiger Woods is just a huge fan of Twitter, I’m wondering if I’ve got a scoop here and Tiger is about to announce a major new endorsement deal. It sure looks like it’s something Tiger doesn’t want anyone to talk about.