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Social Media News Brief: Feb. 3, 2010

From Twitter scary e-mails to Twitter records, get up to date on what’s happening in the social media world with iePlexus!

We start with hundreds of Twitter users who received suspicious looking e-mails from Twitters’s headquarters this week, asking them to change their password immediately.  Late Tuesday night, Twitter confirmed they sent out these e-mails to avoid a phishing attack.  Recently, Twitter administrators discovered a surge of followers to some suspicious accounts, and decided to investigate. They discovered that a number of accounts were compromised through an intricate attack involving torrent-related sites and forums.  Twitter is reminding users that you should never use the same e-mail and password combination on multiple sites.

Sticking with Twitter, they saw breaking records numbers in the month of January.  First more than 1.2 billion tweets were sent out, that’s more than any other month ever.  And after months of declining new users, more than 9.4 million people joined the social network.  For the past few months lower number of people have been joining the site, but some experts say news of the Haitian earthquake helped those numbers go up, because Twitter became  a form of communication.  The last time there was a spike in users was immediately after the death of Michael Jackson.  If you want to see your own personal Tweet statistics be sure to visit tweetstats.com

And finally, we have two viral videos to tell you about this week.  First after the late night battle between Conan O’Brien, Jay Leno, & NBC has ended, some of Conan’s fans have created this video.  They created his face, but get this, it’s made entirely out Cheetos.  It took about 50 bags and nearly 2,000 individual cheetos to get his face just right.  Oh, pretty crazy stuff..  And then this England Public Sevice Announcement hit the web last Friday and already has more than 125,000 views.  The message is to wear your seat belt and to embrace life.