If you’re in an industry where social media matters (read: suddenly all of them) you may know about a thing called Klout. Using a series of, some might argue arbitrary, formulas and black magic, Klout assigns you a number that tells you exactly how important you are in your social networks. Klouchebag is its evil twin from a dark, sarcastic parallel universe. Klouchebag will assign you a number carefully calculated to tell you how much of an “asshat“ you are. Its words, not mine. As you can see above, I am a bit of a prat. It’s up to you to decide which score, on the whole, is worth more, or less.

Anyone on Twitter who made the mistake of saying something like “iPad” in a tweet knows that there are spammers out there, and they are legion. For the most part they just fire sketchy links at you, offering a bevy of free goods, and clogging up your mentions page. But no longer, if Twitter has anything to say about it. Although its arsenal of anti-spammer security precautions manage to blast some of the spambots out of the twittersphere, there are some that still get through, so Twitter is breaking out a new super weapon: The shining, golden fist of Law.

If you ever felt like your Twitter account amounts to nothing, now you can get it printed on paper! Paper that you’ll use to clean up feces and then flush down a toilet! How (possibly) appropriate. Shitter is an app from Collector’s Edition that will let you turn your Twitter feed into a roll of toilet paper. Four, actually. All you have to do is log on with your Twitter account and set up the order. At $35 a set or roughly $9 a roll, it’s a little bit more expensive than your average bathroom tissue, but if you’ve got a few rolls of this, you’ll never get stuck reading the back of a shampoo bottle again.

This digital age makes it painfully easy to connect with others. Social networking can help you stay in touch with your family across the globe, hunt down old friends, make new ones, and tweet really insulting things at celebrities. I don’t know about you, but that last one is my favorite by far. In celebration of Twitter’s 6th birthday, Jimmy Kimmel arranged for a few celebrities to come on TV and read a few offending tweets aloud. I’ll leave you to watch how it unfolds on your own, but let’s just say those tweets get de-fanged pretty easily.

In this day and age, your presence on a social network can be of the utmost importance, especially when you’re running a small (or not so small) business. Although it may seem superfluous, and social networking may not be your personal cup of tea as a fancy-pants entrepreneur, you and your company can live and die by social media, especially Twitter. If you don’t want to immerse yourself in that particular culture’s habits and practices, but you don’t want to become a social media laughing stock, there’s a Rube Goldbergian solution you can try. Tweet Angel will keep an eye on Twitter for you and notify you — by the old-fashioned method of telephonery — if anyone is talkin’ smack.

Iconic singer Whitney Houston was found dead, reportedly in a bathtub, at age 48 over the weekend. The sad news was confirmed by the Associated Press on Twitter with a tweet sent at 4:57 pm that said Houston’s publicist confirmed the death. Interestingly, the news was found in a tweet sent 27 minutes earlier from an account that, at the time, only had 14 followers. At the that time, the tweet was only retweeted once, compared to the Associated Press’ tweet, which was retweeted over 10,000 times. However, news then came to light that yet another small Twitter account reported the news first, 15 minutes before the first small account.

Tweeting is great, right? You bet it is. There’s a reason we have Tweetosystem over there; we’re addicted. That may sound a little extreme (and maybe it is, at least in our cases) but a new study suggests that Twitter and social media addiction isn’t quite as ludicrous as it sounds. A recent experiment headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University’s Booth Business School shows that urges to tweet are extremely hard to resist, harder to resist than urges to drink, or smoke, for example.

On a few separate occasions, people have endeavored to use Twitter as a way to track our collective mood across the globe. A team at the University of Vermont have decided to get in there and take another look. Their findings? Everyone is getting sadder. Woo. The way this kind of analysis works is by snagging tweets from the public timeline and taking stock of their emotionally charged words. Said emotionally charged words were determined by volunteers who rated the 10,000 most common ones on a scale of happy-slappy to bummer. Words like “laughter” and “food” are happy words, “greed” and “terrorist” aren’t. After the whole analysis, however, it can be seen that the overall saturation of happy words is going down.

By this point, we all know that tweets are more than just inane, 140 character messages — they have a lot of power to actually change things, for better or worse. That being the case, Twitter has decided to launch Twitter Stories, a site that will focus on the positive effects tweets have had on some people’s lives.

Now, it’s not just stuff like “Oh hey, some guy tweeted at me and it made my day,” we’re talking serious effects. For example, a few of the stories at launch include a guy who tweeted an offer to buy burritos for anyone who patronized his mom’s failing bookstore and created a huge influx of business, and a guy who tweeted that he needed a kidney and then actually got one.

Syfy television show Haven, starring everyone’s favorite voice actress who collected Nathan Drake’s tears in a jar because she loves him, Emily Rose, will be integrating Twitter into the show and using it as a main plot device starting in the episode airing this Friday. The episode will feature two of Haven’s characters joining Twitter in a contest to see who can gain the most followers. As anyone who watches the show won’t be surprised to discover based on the description of the contest, the two characters joining Twitter are Vince and Dave, the town of Haven’s resident wise, bickering journalist, possibly paranormally skilled brothers.

The integration goes further than two fictional characters having Twitter accounts on the real-life service, as “strange” tweets will appear, which will supposedly help drive the plot for the next seven episodes of the series. Fans of the show will be able to follow the tweets at @VinceHaven and @DaveHaven, with fans watching on the East Coast able to follow the tweets in real time on Twitter as they get tweeted out on the show.