Graham Cluley is wryly blaming the new digg.com for the face that he only got 4 [now 10, 7 hours later] diggs for his coverage of the Twitter Worm; the thing is that even as he wrote that the story was already over.

Look at this graph:

…to a first approximation that is the entire progress of the worm, killed rapidly because of its dependence on Twitter as a vector and Twitter’s ability to take central action against it.

Compare this to the Internet Worm of 1988 which took days to kill and we can see that in spanning 5 to 6 hours the Twitter onMouseOver Worm is tiny by comparison, even if probably impacted way more people.

Sidebar: the flipside of this observation should be a lesson for cloud evangelists; robust technologies are distributed ones, and those with a central point of control are potentially brittle. The question you must ask yourself is whether your favoured cloud provider is truly distributed, or in some sense has a fragile, central fulcrum which could be blocked to kill your service.

At peak the “onMouseOver” trending topic maxed 1.05% of all tweets; that’s quite a lot although that number will also account for diagnostics and warnings; those can’t have been too many however, because the #twitterworm hashtag spiked and died so quickly that it never trended properly:

…although it is now enjoying a meta-uptick as people wonder what all the johnny-come-lately media coverage is all about.

So it’s pretty dead, and the lesson is learned, and all that remains is for the meeja to pore over the topic and try to find a few more stories after the fact.

The worm was a real worm because it was enabled by a bug in Twitter’s web interface which permitted anyone to poke just a teeny bit of HTML so as to provide “active content” to someone else, and propagation was by that means; to my mind it was also not a real worm because a single fix to a single service in a single place killed it prettymuch instantly. As worms go, it suffered monoculture syndrome very badly.

Gray (again) is being quoted as saying:

Twitter needs “much tighter control” over what users can put in a tweet to prevent similar problems in the future.

…but that’s wrong; what Twitter needs to do is exercise greater self-control so that when someone gives them a tweet message, they don’t let bits of it dribble out into their own HTML medium…

But he probably knows that. I suspect the BBC “didn’t get it”. It’d be a damned shame if Twitter start censoring what kind of stuff people can put into Tweets.