According to the official Twitter blog, this past weekend Twitter was hit by a virus similar to the famous Samy worm which spread across MySpace a little while ago. The attack started Saturday morning with the creation of 4 Twitter accounts which compromised 90 accounts and then later that afternoon another worm hit which compromised an additional 100 accounts.

Every time we battle an attack, we evaluate our web coding practices to learn how we can do better to prevent them in the future. Everything from how it happened, how we reacted, and preventative measures will be covered. In addition to making Twitter stronger and more secure, we will share the information we have learned with our friends at other popular web based services so they can make sure they have the right systems in place for dealing with the same kind of malicious activity.

Have you checked out the Twitter service from AllYourTweet.com? It can potentially help you make a more effective Twitterer – below are some of the services they offer.

We’ve stepped into the Twitter Backgrounds space and have launched a brand new site called BackTwounds.com. With Twitter being one of the hottest applications on the Internet right now and growing at a blistering pace we thought it would be useful to add some uniqueness to Twitter by helping design Custom Twitter Backgrounds (or what we like to refer to them as: Back Twounds) for businesses and individuals.

For only $40 USD we will design you a custom Back Twound to help you build your brand, generate leads and look cool in front of all your friends. In addition to our custom backgrounds you can download one of our Free Twitter Backgrounds in JPG or PSD versions.

Follow @BackTwounds to get updates on BackTwounds.com

The “Blending the Mix” blog has come up with a very extensive list of the 100 Most Popular Twitter Applications. The list is based on the most bookmarked applications on Delicious. The top 10 most popular Twitter applications are listed below but do check out Blendixing Mix’s blog post for the entire list.

1. twittervision: A real-time geographic visualization of posts to Twitter. You must have a location and an image defined to appear on the public feed.
2. twitterfeed: twitterfeed can post directly to twitter, identi.ca, custom laconica installations, and via Ping.fm, simultaneously to the many services supported by Ping.fm.
3. twhirl: twhirl is a desktop client for the Twitter microblogging service. Most of the features available on the Twitter website are accessible through twhirl, too. Plus, a lot of usability enhancements have been added.
4. tweetscan: Tweet Scan searches Twitter, identi.ca and other Laconica-based sites with more being added all the time.
5. twistori: this is the first step in an ongoing social experiment, based on twitter.
6. twitter-search: There is an undeniable need to search, filter, and otherwise interact with the volumes of news and information being transmitted to Twitter every second. Twitter Search helps you filter all the real-time information coursing through our service.
7. tweetdeck: TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application that is currently in public beta. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.
8. twitpic: TwitPic lets you share photos on Twitter. You can post pictures to TwitPic from your phone, our API, or through the site itself.
9. hellotxt: As you engage with more and more networks, it becomes difficult to maintain meaningful involvement with any of them. People need a way to communicate with all of their networks at once, and HelloTxt solves this problem.
10. twitterrific: Twitterrific is a fun application that lets you both read and publish posts or “tweets” to the Twitter community website. The application’s user interface is clean, concise and designed to take up a minimum of real estate on your Mac’s desktop.