Twitter is sort of notorious for being a big pot of complaints with a few compliments and the odd non sequitur. But after Facebook’s big IPO on Friday, perhaps folks will look a bit more closely at the way Twitter can be used to gauge audience reception as a whole. The fine people over at DataSift recorded nearly 100,000 interactions on Twitter and found that the ebb of conversation seemed to indicate where Facebook’s stock would soon be going.

In case you weren’t entirely caught up on Obscure Sports Quarterly, stone skimming is not a sport to be taken lightly. There’s even been rules against using artificial stones in competitive arenas due to potentially skewing results. But that’s all changed with the coming legality of artificial stones. I’m completely serious.

Word on the digital street is that GameStop is going to start selling Steam gift cards next week. Reports come from Kotaku, who heard the news from a GameStop source. The cards are expected to start going on sale on May 15th, and will open the wide world of the Steam Marketplace to anyone who doesn’t have access to a credit card or any other digital payment options. Alternatively, it might allow those of us who can’t control ourselves to preemptively set up a system where we’ll only binge on Steam sales in $50 bursts.

It’s a tale as old as time. Or at the very least, as old as the Apple App Store. Whenever an incredibly successful application manages to hold the top of the chart, Zynga chases them until they own the company responsible or have made their own watered-down clone. In the case of OMGPOP’s Draw Something, however, this may have turned out to be a grievous mistake.

Pretty much from the start of video gaming, but particularly since games like Doom, there’s been a big hubub about violence in video games. Critics seem to believe violent video games are sure to cause aggression in children who play them and – despite the fact that video games, like movies, are not all made for children — that video games should be subject to additional taxes or covered with fallacious warnings as a result. A new study from researchers at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, however, suggests even the most violent of video games actually promote cooperation and encourage gamers to control their aggression.

In the past few decades, a lot of things have changed: the way you keep in touch with people, the way you shop, the things you do with your phone. One thing that hasn’t really changed is powering electronic devices. You still just plug them in and go. Sony thinks there are some improvements to be made here, which is why it’s working on a smart outlet which would allow not only for intelligent, dynamic power management, but also for you to be charged money for your power directly by the outlet.

In case you’re curious, this is what happens when professional paintball players get bored with shooting each other: They come up with a game where you shock the ever lovin’ heck out of your opponents with stun guns. Invented by Leif Kellenberger, and apparently not an elaborate hoax, the “sport” uses a large, artificial turf field, a two-foot diameter ball, and seven teammates armed with stun guns. Hilarity ensues.

Ever since what seems like the beginning of time, or at least the beginning of widespread digital piracy, groups like the RIAA and MPAA have been projecting their losses by assuming that every illegal download was actually a legitimate purchase lost. While the problems behind that logic may be clear to you or me, the fallacy persists in a lot of anti-piracy arguments. A new study, Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales, has shown that BitTorrent has not had any actual effect on U.S. box office earnings and that a large percentage of losses due to piracy abroad may, in fact, be the movie industry’s own fault.

YouTube just keeps getting more and more viewers. As of today, Reuters reports that YouTube now gets 4 billion pageviews per day, up from 3 billion last May. As if that weren’t enough, YouTube users are now uploading one hour of footage each second, just edging out the previous record of two full days every minute. That’s a new norm of 60 hours uploaded per minute to the old 48 hours uploaded per minute for any of you out there who didn’t feel like solving that little word problem.

After a noteworthy lack of action on during the SOPA blackouts on January 18th, it seems that Anonymous is springing back into action in response to the federal takedown of MegaUpload and the subsequent arrest and likely extradition of Kim Dotcom. Just hours after the news that the U.S. federal government took down MegaUpload alongside an indictment on piracy charges, Universal.com and Justice.gov have gone down, and a prominent Anonymous affiliated Twitter account is claiming responsibility.