In the eye of recent hacking attempts on the micro-blogging site, Twitter today introduced an added layer of security to its login page. Twitter calls it the ‘two-factor authentication’ system, which uses one’s mobile phone as an added way to verify if it is genuine login attempt.

To enable this optional security system, a user has to visit the accounts settings page and select the ‘Require a verification code when I sign in.’ Once selected, you will have to register your phone, and henceforth every time you login, you’ll be asked to enter a six-digit code that will have been sent to the phone via a text message.

Twitter’s product security head Jim O’Leary has warned that just applying the two-factor authentication system is not enough, and users have to set a strong password and follow the steps mentioned by Twitter to keep the account secure.

The micro-blogging site has been working hard to boost its security ever since it was a victim to a massive cyber attack in February, which saw hackers gaining access to nearly 250,000 accounts including usernames, email addresses and passwords.

Google’s Glasses were the topic of discussion on Thursday at Google I/O as the search giant announced as many as six new apps for its wearable device, Reuters reports. These apps or ‘Glassware’, as Google calls them, include the likes of CNN, Elle, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Evernote.

These apps aren’t simply mobile apps ported to the Glasses, but completely built from ground up keeping in mind the smaller sized display and the way the device is used as compared to smartphones.

For instance, the CNN app allows users to choose what kind of news alerts they want to receive and at what time of the day. They can then read or listen to an audio clip or even choose to watch a short video clip. Fashion app Elle lets users read features and short blogs about their favorite fashion topics.

On the social network front, in addition to the already available Google+, users will now also be able to use Facebook and Twitter. Facebook lets users share photos taken through the Glass, while Twitter lets users tweet using their voice. Tumblr, on the other hand, lets users select the kind of updates they want to see, while Evernote allows you to send specific notes like the grocery list to your Glasses, so you can access them when you need.

In what is the first of its kind event, TV channel Comedy Central will be holding a five-day comedy festival on Twitter. The festival will centered around the #ComedyFest hashtag and will include American comedians like Mel Brooks and Amy Schumer posting jokes and video links on Twitter and video-snippets of their acts on Vine, NYT reports.

The festival will start by live-streaming a discussion, wherein a lineup of comedians and Hollywood director Judd Apatow will try to convince technology-averse Mel Brooks to join Twitter. The discussion will be followed by comedian Steve Agee hosting a ‘Vine-Dining’ party, where he will post six second stories and jokes on Vine followed by the #ComedyFest hashtag.

To further cater to a growing number of online audiences, Comedy Central is also set to launch a mobile app called CC:Stand-Up. The free app will offer videos of stand-up acts and will also use an algorithm similar to the one used on Amazon to help users discover new comedians. “One of these days we will be ambivalent about where people watch Comedy Central,” Steve Grimes, the company’s senior vice president for digital media, told the NYT. The app is expected to be launched sometime next month, but for now there’s no word on what platforms the app will be available on.

Twitter has officially announced its iOS app for its music service which is known as #Music. The basic idea is that the service is going to surface music on the basis of twitter activity. It will reflect new and emerging artists in addition to popular tracks that are trending on the social network.

The app will also highlight musicians who are on Twitter and users will be able to go to their profiles and listen to what an artist is listening to. Users will be able to also tweet out songs from the mobile app.

In its current avatar the service sources music from three services – iTunes, Spotify and Rdio. This also means that users in India will be unable to use the service as streaming services like Spotify and Rdio are not active in India. The app itself is not coming to India and will be available only in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

If one wants to listen to music from their favorite artists then one just has to type #NowPlaying, and all the music shared by artists followed by the user will be available.

Users can also gain more information about artists they are following using the app. Users will also be able to search for music using the search bar on the top right hand corner of the app.

As one, discovers more music one can even share music to ones followers by tapping the spinning disc in the lower left hand corner.

Twitter is saying that it will activate the web interface music.twitter.com in the next few hours and it will roll out the Android app later. It also stated that it wants to bring the app to more countries over time.

Twitter has updated its mobile Android and iPhone apps and along with this it has also updated its mobile website. The major updates have been reserved for the Android app which was in dire need of some UI refinement. Twitter says, the new app reflects the native Android experience.

There are now wider and taller timelines that fill the screen and there is a flat navigation bar on the top. Users can and tap and hold for more contextual menus. Users can also swipe between taps, when one types out a tweet or searches one will see username and hashtag suggestions.

Besides all this, both the mobile apps and the mobile website now show more types of content in expanded tweets such as photo galleries, apps and product listings. Users will also be able to see links from other mobile apps like Foursquare or Path. This way users will be able to directly download or open the app directly from the tweet.

Twitter has been quickly improving upon the mobile experience, only a few days ago it introduced Twitter cards for developers that will allow them to integrate photos, article summaries, videos within a single tweet. Apart from this there are a number of under-the-hood refinements that Twitter has added to the apps that will improve upon the daily experience.

Twitter Cards is a feature that allows developers to integrate things like photos, article summaries, or videos within a single tweet. At an event on Tuesday, Twitter invited developers to introduce them to the new features it has added to Cards that will allow developers to add even more information to a tweet.

When Cards was first introduced, Twitter had given the developers three types of card to play around with— summary, photo, and player/video. Now it has introduced three more types of cards to the list, called App, Product and Gallery.

App Cards will display specific information like name, icon, price and rating of the app directly from the App Store or Google Play. The Product Cards will display an image and description of a particular app, which can be combined with the App Card to show most of the information about the app that you normally see on the Stores. Finally, the Gallery Cards will show an album or collection of photographs through a preview of the photo gallery.

In addition to the above, Twitter also introduced a new feature in Cards, called ‘Mobile App Deep-Linking’. With this feature enabled, a user will be able to tap a link to either view content directly in the app, or download the app, depending on whether or not the user has the app installed.

These new features are already available for developers and some big name developers such as Foursquare, Path, Angry Birds, Etsy, Flickr and SoundCloud have already signed up.

Normally, movie trailers tend to hit websites like Apple Trailers or TV channels like MTV, but this time around Disney has chosen Twitter’s latest 6-second video app to reveal a short 6 second snippet of Wolverine which is releasing on July 26. Frankly, 6-seconds literally reveals hardly anything about the plot, but the way the snippet is package would does get a sneak preview to what we expect to be an action packed Wolverine adventure.

The Vine was tweeted out by James Mangold, the director of Wolverine. For those who prefer something more lengthier, then the official 20-second teaser is hitting Apple Trailers on iTunes and will be premiered on MTV in US tomorrow, or March 27.

The tweaser. vine.co/v/bDExaiMjJ1F

— James Mangold (@mang0ld) March 25, 2013

After revamping the Twitter app for Windows Phone users last month, Twitter has now released its app for Windows 8 and Windows RT. Along with common features like Home, Connect, Discover, and Me tabs, the app on Windows 8 also gets certain unique features.

To start off then, Twitter on Windows 8 supports Live Tiles, so you can get all the latest notifications right there on your homescreen. To allow quick tweeting no matter where you are in the OS, Twitter has a feature called the ‘Share charm’. You can also search for people or tweets using the ‘Search charm’ feature, by just swiping from the right edge of the screen.

Twitter also gives you a lot of flexibility on this platform on how you want the app to fit on your screen. Using the ‘Snap view’ feature you can stick the app to the left or right side of the screen and then start using another app. When in landscape mode, you can also adjust the size of the app to one-third, two-thirds or full screen.

Twitter for Windows 8 and Windows RT can be downloaded from the Windows Store. You can also view the app in action in the video below.

Twitter had announced sometime back that it was working on way for its users to archive their tweets. Previously, this capability was introduced for only English users. Now the company has officially announced via a tweet from its official account that this capability has now been enabled in multiple languages including Hindi.

Other languages that are supported include Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish and Dutch. Users can request their entire Twitter archive by going inside the settings menu and requesting for the same. Once done, Twitter will send a mail to your account notifying you about the file when its ready to be downloaded.

Twitter has released another update on the Play Store and App Store, as well as its mobile web version. Twitter has lately been actively adding as well as improving features on its portal. It has now added a new dimension to its recently released update on searching for and listing older tweets.

This update improves the search feature and filters search-related tweets with the most relevant tweet on the top tagged as the Top Tweet. This tweet is the best match for searched item and is separated from the rest of the resulted tweets in accordance to its relevance and importance to the search topic. Further to this, the user can also look for more tweets from any time period of the top tweet by just one tap on the “View more from this time” option given right below it. This will result in older tweets from that time period.

Apart from this there are some other additions of features done specifically for Twitter for iPad and iPhone users. This new features links the web browser within the app to the searched tweet in the timeline. This will place the selected link of the tweet right below the built-in web browser, allowing users to browse while simultaneously accessing the selected tweet, replying to it or more. One can also chose to remove the tweet from that page by tapping the page to slide away the tweet from view.

Also it now comes with auto-complete suggestions while searching for something in the search bar which gives suggestions for hashtag, topic and username related to the searched topic.

Instagram has announced to have touched the 100 million monthly users mark, becoming one of the most used photo-sharing social service online. This indicates a good 10 million user increase since its last update on user-base released accounting 90 million users in total in January this year.

Ever since its launch about two and a half years back, Instagram has been riding high on the popularity chariots and is gaining popularity amongst the socializing enthusiasts over the Internet. It allows clicking as well as easy photo-sharing within the app as well as on other partnered platforms like Facebook.

Instagram has had been in the news when Facebook acquired it last year while also intensifying its ongoing competition with Twitter which replaced Instagram services on its platform with Flickr. The milestone is crucial, especially after Instagram changed its terms of service that led to users fleeing the service.

As far as the user base is concerned, Twitter still has almost double the user base than Instagram. However, with Facebook working as a catalyst in this instant gain in the user number, Instagram surely seems like a big threat.

Firefox OS has been creating a lot of buzz at MWC. In fact, it has already managed to canoodle Sony into making a phone based on the new OS, but now it’s sounding the battle cry to developers and actively courting them.  It has managed to snag a big one in Twitter, which will have an app ready at launch at the Firefox Marketplace.

Twitter says that the app will be similar to its app on other mobile platforms. However, there will also be support for a Firefox OS feature called web activities. This feature will allow users to tweet out images out of any app that supports web activities.

The only hope from our side is that, Twitter does not undercut on features. We have noticed this especially in its Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10 versions and this can be a deal breaker for many.

Twitter has improved its ‘Search’ and ‘Discover’ tools on its mobile apps for iOS and Android smartphones as well its mobile website that users access from mobile web browsers. The main motive of the update is to provide content in a single stream per tab, so that the information is easier to find and it does not get lost in the noise created by the people on Twitter.

The Discover tab for instance now includes Tweets, Activity, Trends and suggestions of accounts to follow all in a single stream. Users can also jump into Activity and trends for new previews at the top of the Discover tab. The search feature more importantly now throws up more relevant content by combining a concoction of tweets, photos and accounts in one single stream. There is a new search button for Android and iPhone users. This button has already been available to iPad users. There is also a new magnifying glass button right next to the compose button.

The new Twitter apps also make interactions simpler. In the connect tab, ‘Interaction’ is now the view by default which allows the user to keep a track of mentions, follows and re-tweets in a single interface. Of course, if one is just interested in mentions, then one can select the mentions only button.

Twitter has also made it easier and faster for users to open links from the mobile app. Previously, there were two steps to open a link, but now that has been shortened to a single click. So content in your stream gets reflected twice as fast.

App developers Dots & Lines have released Carbon, a third-party app for Twitter for Android smartphone users. Initially scheduled to be released back in July, the app was delayed and after a long-wait is finally available on the Google Play Store for free.

A ‘Holo’-themed Twitter client, Carbon lets you have all your Twitter content neatly stacked on one screen. The app lets you add multiple Twitter accounts and also allows for timelines, lists, favorites, searches, trends, and profiles to be on a single screen.

The features in a nutshell:

• Tilt Timeline to Refresh.
• Power Scroll: Scroll/Swipe up or down using two fingers to jump to top or bottom of Timelines.
• Tap+Hold on Tweets to make everything clickable right on the Timeline.
• QuickTimeline, home screen quick Timeline for Lists, Searches, Trends, etc.
• Timelines with full inline images and videos.
• Rich and HD style for User Profiles.
• Rich and fun Conversation View.
• Threaded Direct Messages.
• Background updates with quick actions for Jelly Bean, per account.
• Username Autocomplete.
• Filters for Hashtags, Users, and Keywords.

The app is currently not available for the Android tablets. For Android phone users, the app can be downloaded here.