Twitter continues to become more and more mainstream these days. Being talked about by a variety of celebrities as well as being mentioned in more and more commercials every night it seems. The question is whether or not it’s got a trick up its sleeve that you may not have thought of before now.

You’re probably well aware of the twitter 140 character limit that was established to work with the limits set by mobile phone carriers for SMS text messaging. Did you know that you can take advantage of twitter and use it as a free texting distribution service for people to use who may never know what twitter is or use it themselves.

Anyone with a cell phone can "subscribe" a twitterer’s updates. If the person twittering uses those updates to communicate news and instructions to that group of people, twitter can provide just that tool.

All you need to tell people to follow your updates is the following:

From their cell phone have them send a text to 40404 with the message "follow yourusername". They’ll then receive the following message response back:

Welcome to Twitter. Please confirm by replying with your name. Standard message charges apply, ’stop’ to quite or ‘help’ for help.

In actuality that will then create them a twitter account with the name they text back. It appears twitter will add a number to the name to make it unique if it already exists. For example in testing for this post I now exist at jasonbean1 and bnpositive1 on twitter. I’m still testing to see how I might get access to those accounts if I ever wanted to start truly using twitter.

After creating your account you’ll receive the following text message:

Hi, Jason Bean! Have friends send ‘follow JasonBean1′ to this # for your updates. ‘help’ for more. What are you doing?

When you follow someone you’ll receive the following message response:

You’ll receive a message every time Bnpositive updates. To silence, send ‘off bnpositive’. For more commands, send ‘help’.

Did you catch all that? Free text messaging tool using twitter. Obviously it comes with all the other benefits of twitter too.

eWeek had a great article/annoying slide show about the top 10 security risks that your users pose to your organization. One interesting thing I noted was with all of the increases in security (firewalls, IPS/IDS, NAC, password hardening, etc) in today’s organization, most of these are not even looked at.

Think about the easy of someone to walk out with their laptop and have it lost on the train (with not encryption)… Or someone with P2P software on their machine (that is sharing out their entire C drive)… Or worse yet, wifi (without separating it from the rest of the network) that isn’t secured with WPA2… Oh the horror!

1. USB Flash Drives
2. Laptops
3. P2P
4. Web Mail
5. Wi-Fi
6. Smart Phones
7. Collaboration Tools
8. Social Networks
9. Unauthorized Software Updates
10. Virtual Worlds

What are some of the other security risks you can think of that companies face?