With each subsequent big event, we continue to see Twitter’s tweets per second record rise. Super Bowl XLVI was yesterday, and one can assume that Twitter was pretty active. If you didn’t see the people you are following spamming your feed to death with extremely informative tweets like “!!!” or “omg,” you still probably wouldn’t be surprised to know that Twitter was quite active during the game, especially during the last three minutes, which is when the tweets per second count was at its highest. During the last three minutes of the game, a count of 12,233 tweets per second was reached. This eclipsed last year’s Super Bowl tweets per second record of 4,064, but didn’t come close to an annual Japanese screening of Castle in the Sky, which hit 25,088 tweets per second.

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.

Why would you ever want to post to Twitter with a telegraph key? Because it is one of the coolest things you could possibly do. At least that’s what Martin Kaltenbrunner seems to think, and I’m inclined to agree. He holds no illusions about how practical the pursuit is though, calling it “an open design exercise in interface archaeology” or as I’d translate it “hooking up cool old things to cool new things because it’s cool.”

Leigh Van Bryan, a bar manager from Coventry, England, was planning on having a very good time during his trip to these United States last week. In a series of tweets, he announced his intention to party his ever-loving brain out while in the U.S.. His words were, perhaps, a little a crude, but Van Bryan could not possibly have imagined the furor his flippant tweets would earn him. When his plane landed at the Los Angeles International Airport, Van Bryan and his companion Emily Bunting were arrested. For tweeting.

Twitter pushed out a home-brewed recruitment video yesterday and, friends, it’s awful. But it’s also fantastic. In it, you’re taken on a completely self-aware, magical journey through all the perks of working for Twitter, while simultaneously lambasting the many tropes of terrible corporate-made videos. Is there awkward, forced conversation? Yes. Terrible green-screening? You bet. You might be wondering what exactly that has to do with a dry erase portrait of Twitter CEO Dick Costolo with superimposed lips ala Clutch Cargo. You’re just going to have to watch it and find out. See the video, after the break.

Twitter has gained something of a reputation as being a tool for social change, after its prominence in the disputed Iranian elections in 2009, the Arab Spring of 2011, and as a growing piece of the political discussion in this country. Key to this has been Twitter’s universality; a Tweet from Tehran or Cairo can appear to anyone around the world. Now, Twitter has announced new changes that will allow them to hide tweets in countries with differing interpretations of “freedom of expression.” Yeah, that pretty much sounds like censorship.

When I first read that the Wikipedia blackout was happening, I wished that I could just pull a up lawn chair on the Wikipedia homepage and spend the day watching the bewildered faces of everyone who had no clue what was going on as they lashed out in anger, fear, and frustration. Now, thanks to @herpderpedia, I can. And so can you.

With the culmination of the SOPA hearings conveniently postponed until sometime in January, the tech world gained a little bit of time to prepare and execute some anti-SOPA demonstrations. Wikipedia had been considering a protest blackout that, as of yet, has not come to fruition and, according to reports by CNET, other Internet giants including Google, Twitter, and Facebook may be considering the “nuclear option” as well. The reports are derived from a quote by Markham Erickson head of the NetCoalition trade association that calls the aforementioned companies members.  ”There have been some serious discussions about that,” Erickson says. “It has never happened before.”

In neat and showy PR stunt, or maybe a hearkening back to paganistic tribute to the gods, HP is going to send a whole bunch of Twitter wishes into the sky attached to balloons. It works like this, go to the HP TwitterWisher and tweet out your wish along with the Homestar Runner-esque hashtag #Everybody2012. Once you do that, HP will release your wish on a balloon from their headquarters in Dubai sometime between 11am and 4pm Dubai local time. HP also has a mechanism set up by which you can confirm that you’ve found one and help to make a crazy balloon-landing map.

Within this amusing infographic that simply compares Twitter statistics to real-life bad statistics lies a bunch of morbidly hilarious comparisons. Did you know that for every 1,700 tweets, someone in the world dies? Or that one tweet is equal to smoking 60 cigarettes? How about how for every single tweet, we spend about 75 cents on a weight loss programs? If you want to see how Twitter stacks up to everything that is wrong with the world, click on past the break, and make sure you have your Twitter client’s global tweet button handy.