Chalk up another victory for the devious insurgents whose terrorist actions killed millions aboard a single Imperial space station just last year. The Rebels have published leaked documents stolen from under the noses of our brave, honest Imperial troops, possibly through the reported use of one “little droid.”

Seditious citizens have been perusing the data, announcing egregious findings as they encounter them with the hashtag #wookieleaks.

We have reproduced some of the most shocking revelations below, so that you might avoid them in their entirety.

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Despite a one-time big money content search deal with Google and Bing and some inroads made into sponsored Tweets and trending topics, Twitter is the poster child for Web 2.0 services that have had a much trickier time monetizing than they have building up a huge audience. The latest results of a study by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism will do little to dispel that perception: According to its 2010 Digital Future Study, zero percent of users would pay to use Twitter. Ouch.

“Investigative reporting” or creeping, you decide: To show Guardian reporter Leo Hickman was able to track down a woman selected at random with her Foursquare account, recent tweets, and personal details acquired from Google searches, including a photo. Needless to say, Louise was quite “unnerved” when a reporter showed up at the central London pub she was in.

Twitter: As every hack comedian knows, it’s a medium that is exclusively used so people can tell each other what they just had for lunch. But developer and designer of “Internet-based things” Tom Taylor has found a simple, genuinely frightening use for the service: Alerting you whenever an object passes within 0.2 astronomical units, or 18.6 million miles, of Earth. This happens several times per week.

Researchers at Northeastern and Harvard have used the wealth of data available on Twitter to paint a picture of our national mood throughout the day. Running about 300 million tweets through a system called Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW), which assigns a positive or negative emotional value to words, they were able to unearth some surprising trends.

Before Twitter existed to pique our dreams, before the Fail Whale surfaced to break our hearts, there was the Fail Elephant. Australian designer Yiying Lu devised the ancestor to Twitter’s current uh-oh indicator way back in 2002: Originally titled “Lifting a Dreamer,” it was meant to be “a visual greeting” to the overseas friends of a designer who was constantly on the go. Lu tells LTL Prints that the pictures symbolized “this giant wish [to see her friends and family] that is so heavy (the elephant), and the birds represented my free spirit and good wishes.”

How, then, did it morph from elephant to whale? It involved a pun:

The trouble at Twitter Inc. (Valleywag)

Tweet. (McSweeney’s)

Hmm: Vaseline’s Indian skin whitening app (Styleite)

Tesla on death rays (Letters of Note)

Geeky My Little Pony mods (Boredville)

iPad alternatives: Where are they now? (TechCrunch)

6 Boring New England locations made awesome by H.P. Lovecraft (Topless Robot)

(title image via Great White Snark)

Yup, that sounds about right.

Click to see Robert Cadena’s Cthulhu/Twitter homage fully sized.

(via Super Punch)

A July report published by a Chinese government-affiliated think tank denounced U.S. and other Western authorities for using social networking sites like Facebook to incite political unrest, and recommended that such sites be investigated more closely.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) cited unnamed U.S. officials who reportedly said that social networks are an “invaluable tool” for overthrowing foreign governments. Yet for all its unnecessary paranoia over covert cyber foreign policy tactics, the report titled “Development of China’s New Media” also made some interesting observations about user privacy and viral marketing that echo many Internet users’ same fears: that the Big Brother of the future may not be our governments, but private corporations.

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NBC Universal’s Oxygen Media recently conducted a survey, asking 1,605 women versed and immersed in social media about their habits with Facebook, Twitter and other such services. And while you would expect there to be some level of addiction there, the results are actually quite staggering.

Of the over 1,600 women surveyed, 34 percent stated that they check Facebook literally first thing in the morning, before going to brush their teeth.