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.

During the halftime show, Twitter recorded a peak of 10,245 tweets per second, as well as a span of five minutes that stayed above 8,000 tweets per second. This year’s Super Bowl’s record sets the tweets per second record for  sports-related event, though isn’t even half of the all time record.

For comparison, Twitter says people send around an average of 2,900 tweets per second. As time goes on, the tweets per second for events continues to rise, which isn’t exactly shocking, due to Twitter’s growth, increasing relevancy, and the urge users get to blab away about nothing in particular.

Also, no, I don’t know what was up with that halftime show.

(via W. R. Berkley Syndicate)

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The study involved 205 people between the ages of 18 and 85 in the German city of Würtzburg. The participants were given Blackberrys and questioned seven times over the course of a 14 hour day, for seven consecutive days, about their desires. They were to report any desire they were currently experiencing, any desire they’d experienced in the past 30 minutes, the intensity of any desires, whether the desires conflicted with any others, and whether or not they resisted it. Over the course of the study 10,558 responses and 7,827 desires were reported.

Of these responses, researchers found that desires to use social media, like Twitter, were the least-resisted desires. This means that when someone had the urge to Tweet, they almost always did it. Similarly, desires to work were very rarely resisted, although I must say I feel like the use of the term “desire” here complicates matters a little because who ever desires to work? One typically needs to work, but the results still stand.  Reported desires to smoke, drink, or engage in sexual activity, on the other hand, were less frequently reported and more frequently rebuffed. The full study is due to be published in upcoming issue of Psychological Science.

Now does this mean Twitter is more addictive than smoking or drinking? Not neccessarily, for a few reasons. First, this is all self-reported so the results depend on how much you feel like you can trust any of the people involved in the study. After all, that’s quite the laundry list of information they were asked to give per desire. Second, tweeting — or any other social media interaction for that matter — has a significantly lower cost than a lot of other urges. You wanna have a smoke? You might get cancer or you have to shell out for a pack. You want to have a drink? You have to drive later. You want to have your mistress’ husband killed? Good hitmen are hard to find. Tweeting, however, has an extremely low per-instance cost: A few seconds of your time.

Granted, that low per-instance cost can really add up if you start feeling and succumbing to that urge all the time, and that’s probably the most dangerous part of social media “addiction.” It’s a low cost (free, really), low consequence behavior that’s easy to indulge in increasing quantity. Kind of like smoking, for people in the 30′s and 40′s anyways. Hopefully we won’t find out later that social media causes cancer or something. I probably smoke at least a pack of tweets a day.

(via The Guardian, Image credit CarrotCreative)

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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.”

The Tworse Key Arduino-powered and performs its singular purpose with questionable efficiency and an abundance of style. Unlike other Telegraph-tweeting devices — yes, there are others — Tworse key is a standalone. All you need to do to tweet with it is plug it into an Ethernet port and hammer away. Granted, it might help to know morse code, but that’s only necessary for coherence.

Schematics are available if you want to build one of your own, and if you’re so inclined, I hope this inspires you to come up with some other insanity. I want more from the bizarre world of “interface archaeology;” I’d love to type text by keying in ASCII codes on a rotary telephone dial or something.  If only I had the know-how to rig that up myself.

(via Hack a Day)

Other unusual things that tweet

• This Roomba
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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.

And what were the content of Van Bryan’s horrific tweets? A plot to overthrow America, or a secret string of key words cracked by a team of investigators at Homeland Security? Prior to leaving the U.K., the Daily Mail said Van Bryan tweeted:

Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?

He also threatened some of our most valuable landmarks in a different tweet, curse redacted by the Daily Mail:

3 weeks today, we’re totally in LA p****** people off on Hollywood Blvd and diggin’ Marilyn Monroe up!

The law enforcement officers that detained Van Bryan and Bunting apparently lacked a sense of humor, or at least common sense enough to realize that this pair was completely innocuous. Van Bryan says that his attempts to explain his comment about “destroying America” simply implied that he intended to party extremely hard while in the country. Not only did investigators not believe him, they also weren’t fans of the American television program Family Guy, from which the comment about exhuming Marilyn Monroe comes.

Instead, investigators took the tweets completely seriously. Their luggage was searched, Van Bryan saying that investigators were looking for “spades and shovels” with which to dig up the long-dead American icon. They went on to accuse Bunting of intending to play the role of lookout at Monroe’s tomb (she has a tomb?) while Van Bryan did the deed.

After spending 12 hours in custody, the pair was put on a plane headed to Paris. They were told that they would have to apply for visas from the U.S. embassy if they ever intended to visit the United States in the future. The Daily Mail quotes the charge sheet for Van Bryan:

He had posted on his Tweeter website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe. [...] Also on his tweeter account Mr Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.

This bizarre and infuriating series of events highlights the continued struggle within U.S. law enforcement to not only understand modern culture and modern communication, but to apply the zero tolerance policies enacted after the tragic events of 9/11. Though that struggle must surely be difficult for enforcement officers, why they felt it was worthwhile to waste their time on so obviously innocuous tourists is simply beyond me. The argument that any and all threats must be taken seriously is often applied when these kind of accidents occur. However, if anyone — including U.S. officials — believe that these tweets were a serious threat, then they are clearly not competent enough to perform their jobs.

Perhaps the greatest irony in this affair is that earlier this month, President Barack Obama called for increased U.S. tourism and the official White House twitter account began listing great sites within the U.S. that foreigners might want to vist. If the reception Van Bryan and Bunting experienced is what would-be visitors to this country should prepare for, perhaps the President’s office should rethink their tourism campaign as well as the function of Homeland Security.

(image and story via Daily Mail via BoingBoing)

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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.

(via Giz)

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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.

In their blog post announcing the changes, Twitter takes pains to paint this as an inclusive effort that still retains their stated views on freedom of speech. Starting today, Twitter will be able to hide tweets that break local speech laws, but those tweets will still appear globally. From Twitter:

Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.

These withheld tweets will be specially marked, and the sender will be notified that their tweet will not be visible.

Though these changes seem to be an awkward fit alongside Twitter’s aspirations for a free and open exchange of ideas, the company is taking great pains to portray the new censorship powers as a positive move forward. The fact that withheld tweets will still be viewable globally would, it seems, sidestep attempts by governments to keep unpopular news from leaking to the rest of the world. It would also, however, severely hamper Twitter’s role as a future organizer for mass meetings and protests as it was in Tehran and Egypt.

Furthermore, there is a sense from the announcement that having a limited Twitter is better than no Twitter at all. By having this system in place, Twitter can now expand its business to new areas, bringing more people into the conversation. And perhaps the removal of tweets will be so rare as to make the power to do so moot.

To illustrate the kinds of speech laws Twitter will be able to respect, the company points out laws in France and Germany that prohibit pro-Nazi speech. While that is a benign example, there are other countries with far stricter and far more restrictive speech laws. Forbes points out:

Twitter is now in a position to enforce, like Thailand’s ban on anything deemed insulting to the king, or Turkey’s similar prohibition on defaming its national founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Speaking of Turkey, it outlaws any discussion of the Armenian genocide, while France just passed a bill making it a crime to deny the genocide happened. So now Twitter can now, in theory, be asked to observe both laws.

Twitter obviously believes that this is a worthwhile exchange, and it is no doubt going to be good for business. Google, for instance, was finally able to expand into the growing and lucrative Chinese market only after it agreed to make major concessions on what appeared in search requests. For its part, Twitter will have to negotiate new territory as an arbiter of free speech, walking a line between concession and encouraging communication. Meanwhile, users in countries with highly restrictive speech laws will probably continue sidestepping censorship with Tor and other proxy networks.

(via Twitter, image via Steve Rhodes)

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The hero behind @herpderpedia is performing a simple but important public service: Trolling the trending topics, something I am loathe to do, and retweeting bewildered responses to the Wikipedia blackout, ostensibly the best ones because they are getting more hilarious by the minute.

Of course, there’s a little more to it than pure tourism. For one, it’ll raise your blood pressure a little because so many people not only don’t know what’s going on — which is fine, that’s why Wikipedia decided to do this — but because so many people go and ask about it on Twitter instead of reading the very unsubtle splash page on Wikipedia itself. Although in their defense, Wikipedia requires you do the arduous task of clicking a link and then reading if you want to know what’s going on.

On the lighter side, the @herpdepedia stream is a game of sorts. So many of the tweets cut so close to the bone as to read as parody. Admittedly, some of them actually are parody. 99% of the ones mentioning soap, for instance. Depending on how cynical you are, it’s a game of varying difficulty to guess which ones are real and which ones you need to believe are fake in order to keep your faith in humanity. Basically, it’s like reading down any given trending topic. All that being said, I posted some of my favorites below to give you an idea. Heads up: Hilarious profanity ahead.

Why do they have to delete Wikipedia?!

— Ivana ♔ (@Justin1DAustin) January 18, 2012

WTF!!!!!!!!!!!! Wikipedia and this blackout!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Now I have to read this shit in another language!!!!!!!!!!!!!! — Cherry (@LoveRhonda) January 18, 2012

OH MY FUCKING GOSH, I HAVE HOMEWORK, AND WIKIPEDIA’S DEAD. DSIJOGPIOSFNGPISJDFNGIPOBSFO — Ninad(@TheNinTen) January 18, 2012

this new internet ban bullshit is going to shut down wikipedia and craigslist WTF??!!!! FUCK YOU OBAMA!!!!!!! — Ali Dia (@lushi_dia) January 18, 2012

I think Wikipedia planned this shit. — Daniel Ornelas (@DenngDanny) January 18, 2012

(via @herpderpedia)

• Redditors probably know why reddit is down
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That seems to be where the evidence of such consideration begins and ends, however. Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales was pretty vocal about the possibility a few weeks ago, but that discussion has since gone relatively quiet and as far as I can tell, none of the companies listed as members at NetColition have so much as uttered the word “blackout” except perhaps behind closed doors. All of them have been engaged in various statements and petitions expressing their vehement opposition of SOPA, yes, but none of them have threatened or suggested blackout, yet.

If this were to come to pass, however, it could really shake up and invigorate the entire anti-SOPA movement. I don’t think I have to explain the implications of a day without Google or Twitter or Facebook to any of you. Even a simple click-through splash page without an actual blackout behind it could have drastic effects. Of course, it’s exciting to think about the potential from these Internet behemoths joining in solidarity against a common evil, especially after the loud, yet somewhat ineffective boycott that made GoDaddy change their stance on SOPA. But for the moment, it’s nothing more than wishful thinking. Still, I’m going to sit here and keep wishing for it.

(via CNET)

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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.

Not surprisingly, HP isn’t saying anything about the likelihood that your wish will come true or whether or not flying it up into the sky on a balloon will increase that likelihood. More surprisingly, from what I can tell, there isn’t a single mention the environmental impact of this little celebration. In this day and age, you would expect there’d at least be a statement saying “It’s OK, they’re biodegradable,” or something, but the TwitterWisher website seems to be ignoring the matter entirely. I’m no fortune teller, but I can tell you that if your wish for 2012 is fewer popped balloons littering the area surrounding Dubai, it’s probably not coming true.

(via The Next Web)

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(via AllThingsD)

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Instructions below.

The workaround is clever. You may not be aware of it, but you can post to Twitter via standard text message. Siri can send standard text messages. See where this is going?

Step 1: Make a new contact on your phone with the first name “Twitter.” Set the phone number to 404-04, Twitter’s SMS shortcode.

Step 2: Send a text message to your new Twitter contact that only says the word “start.” It will trigger a reply with instructions on how to log into Twitter via text. Once logged in, you can send tweets anytime via text message using that contact.

Step 3: Now, just like you’d send any regular text message with Siri, you can send them to Twitter with Siri as well, which, voila, is a tweet. Simply “Tell Twitter [enter your message here],” and Siri will compose your command as a text message and send it off to Twitter. Easy peasy.

Clean up: Now that you set up Twitter on your phone through SMS, Twitter will be set up by default to send you texts about Twitter things, such as retweets and whatever else Twitter likes to make people aware of. To fix that, head over to Twitter’s mobile settings and uncheck some boxes.

Now go put Siri to work! Just make sure you speak very slowly and are in a room that no noise can ever enter.

(via Macworld)

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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.

Now, if you’re going to try and extrapolate this study’s findings — that there is now a lower concentration of “happy words,” as determined by volunteers, in tweets than there were before — to an overall statement about the actual happiness of the world, you’re going to have a little trouble. I mean, you have to consider the bias of who uses Twitter, and the bias of what Twitter users tweet about, and the problem of sarcasm and irony and about a million other things. Still, it’s interesting to see that the little line is going downwards, even if that doesn’t really mean much in the grand scheme of things. I think the real lesson to be learned here is that everybody needs to start tweeting about their food more. Like, a lot more.

(via Gizmodo)

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In a weird but awesome move, Sweden has started a campaign where its official Twitter account, @sweden, will be taken over and operated by a different Swede every week. The project is called “Curators of Sweden” and operates under the idea that “No one owns the brand of Sweden more than its people. With this initiative we let them show their Sweden to the world,” as said by Thomas Brühl, the CEO of the national tourism agency VisitSweden. That’s a nice sentiment, right? But surely they must assert some level of control over each operator. In short, no. In long, nooooooooo. And it’s glorious.

From a quick look at the feed, you can see that the operators pretty much given free reign to say what they like. Profanity isn’t forbidden, and neither is lambasting tourist traps.

The current operator is Jack, a writer and marketer based in Stockholm, and those in line after him promise some variety. You can look forward to a priest, a lesbian trucker, and presumably everything in between. Being from the U.S., it’s hard to imagine that this could have any positive effect at all, but it seems to be doing quite well. The idea behind the campaign is to try and stir up some interest and curiosity about Sweden, and I think it’ll do a good job. Of course, not everyone thinks it’s a great idea, but I definitely just got 100% more interested in Sweden.

(via The Next Web)

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Japan Trends reports that Castle in the Sky is shown on television every year around this time, around which a social networking custom has grown. Not just a slight bit over Beyonce’s record, the Castle in the Sky viewing absolutely destroyed all previous records, hitting 25,088 tweets per second. For comparison, Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement back in August reached 8,868 tweets per second.

As Twitter grows, obviously, more people will be using it, so it only makes sense that a new tweets-per-second record is set every few months. However, this record was a humongous jump compared to the previous jump. As mentioned above, Beyonce’s pregnancy recorded 8,868 tweets per second, not even a 2,000 tweets-per-second leap from the Women’s World Cup soccer final, which logged 7,196.

Castle in the Sky’s 25,088 is clearly a gigantic jump, and probably won’t be broken anytime soon, or at least, won’t be broken by something as commonplace as an annual viewing of a movie that released in 1986.

(Japan Trends via The Verge)

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Twitter recently gave its web interface a much-needed redesign, and it’s actually a pretty good one. But some people might object to how the stream of new tweets suddenly jumped from the left side of the page to the right. Thankfully, for those of you that are scared and confused, there’s a quick and easy fix.

True to their name, the guys over at How-To Geek have developed a useful little Chrome extension that does the flipping for you. All you need to do is install it, and hey-presto, new tweets will appear on the left.

For those of you using Firefox, the extension’s creators advise installing Greasemonkey first. All other browsers are probably out of luck.

Now, software isn’t eternal, and at some point this little extension may not work so well, due to changes in the Twitter site design or what have you. Or maybe you’ve decided that you’re less afraid of change and can live without artificially flipped content. Fortunately, Chrome has an extremely easy to use extensions manager. Simply click on Window>Extentions, or click on the little wrench in the corner and then Tools>Extensions. From there you can deactivate or remove the “Fix Twitter” extension.

If you’re so inclined, head over to How-To Geek and start downloading.

(How-To Geek via LifeHacker)

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Franco tweeted a couple of things during the case including:

“The coffee here sucks”

“Court. Day 5. here we go again”

“Choices to be made. Hearts to be broken… We each define the great line.”

As you can see, they’re mostly inane. That last one is a little bit more iffy, sort of emotional, and more questionably related to the court case. In any event, none of these have anything to do with the details of the case, so what does it matter, right? It matters a whole lot. In response to the tweets, Dimas-Martinez’ lawers appealed the conviction on the grounds that Franco had gone against the judge’s explicit prohibition of discussing the case on the Internet or on a mobile device, of which Franco did both.

The judge of the inital trial denied the motion for a new trial. Franco argued that his tweets said nothing of the details of the case nor did they suggest he’d already made up his mind, which was apparently good enough.

Arkansas Supreme Court however, does not agree and has overturned the conviction. Associate Justice Donald Corbin put it this way:

“Because of the very nature of Twitter as an… online social media site, Juror 2′s tweets about the trial were very much public discussions…Even if such discussions were one-sided, it is in no way appropriate for a juror to state musings, thoughts or other information about a case in such a public fashion.”

And he makes a good point, although the fact that juror was musing about things like coffee and an Underoath album makes it kind of tough to swallow. Dimas-Martinez’ defense lawyers expect this to bring about new, much-needed rules about juror social media interaction during a trial. His defense lawyers also claim one of the jurors fell asleep during the proceedings. Not the best bunch, apparently.

The Supreme Court has recommended a retrial. The attorney general says the state has yet to decide what course of action it will take.  Erickson Dimas-Martinez probably won’t get completely off the hook because of this, but he’ll definitely get a second shot at not being sentenced to death, at least. So next time you’re on jury duty just remember that it’s serious business and that you shouldn’t do things if a judge explicitly tells you not to do them. Oh, and also remember not to be an idiot, but you should do that all the time.

(via BBC)

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Though Twitter only recently released the dual-column redesign, they’re at it again, this time cleaning up the interface quite a bit, and focuses on four key elements of the service: Home, Connect, Discover, and Me. Don’t worry, the core of the service still stands, and if you use a Twitter client like the rest of the world tends to do, just set up the universal tweet key command and you won’t even have see the new stuff if you prefer to stick to your old, curmudgeonly ways.

The Home section is what you may expect: A collection of tweets from the people you follow, complete with videos and pictures embedded directly into the stream. This is your basic Twitter. The new Connect section is pretty much your ego station, displaying who has followed or mentioned you, as well as anyone who has retweeted or favorited one of your tweets. The new Discover section is probably the most interesting addition, as it will display tweets based on your location and interests, rather than forcing you to dig through search terms. Like most learning-based services, the more you use Discover, the better it’ll become at knowing what you like to see. Finally, the Me section is simply a more organized profile page, allowing you and other users to see your lists, followers, favorites, and everything else that would normally go here.

On top of these organizational changes, Twitter will be rolling out a new way to embed tweets, which will allow users to reply and follow the tweeter without having to leave the page on which the tweet is embedded.

Along with the main website redesign, the mobile Twitter apps are getting the redesign as well, with the iOS version located here, and the Android version located here.

Below, check out a video introducing the new redesign. What do you all think? Welcomed changes, or would you prefer people to get off your lawn and stop listening to that darned rock music? Those punks.

(via Twitter)

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This was a two step scheme. First, the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra asked its Twitter followers to send them tips for keeping warm this winter. Then, they arranged those tweets to the tune of O Fortuna, possibly the most dramatic piece of music ever put to paper. Then they performed the piece, for your pleasure. 

As wonderful as this is, it pales in comparison to this ad which is quite possibly the best use of O Fortuna since Carl Orff arranged it.

(via Neatorama)

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In their ad, the companies say that though they support new tools to take down websites that solely provide copyright infringing activities, they are concerned that the legislation as it stands would greatly harm their ability to do business and would hamper the continued growth of a highly profitable sector of the U.S. economy. Specifically, they voice concern over the elimination of so-called “safe harbours” created by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. This gave protection to companies that acted in good faith to remove infringing content from their services.

(via BoingBoing)

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Last Friday was November 11, 2011, otherwise known as (Skyrim‘s release date) and 11/11/11. Twitter paid attention on the numerically pretty day and posted the above clip, which shows everyone talking about the date on Twitter. The visualization shows that the right half of the world began talking about it first, because they live in the future and got to experience it before the rest of us who failed to contemporize and are still living in the past. Each “1″ in the visualization represents a location at which the date is mentioned, with the scale of the “1″ representing the volume of tweets. God, talking about an aesthetically pleasing date is so three days ago.

(via Twitter Blog)

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According to the UK Guardian, investigators were probing Wikileaks’ release of footage that showed Reuters reporters being fired upon and killed by US helicopters in Iraq. As part of their investigation the US Justice Department subpoenaed Twitter, requesting that the microblogging service hand over the IP addresses of Jonsdottir and others associated with Wikileaks. In addition to IP addresses, investigators also sought mailing addresses, bank information, and user names.

Jonsdottir called the decision, “a huge blow for everybody that uses social media.” The Guardian quotes her as continuing:

“We have to have the same civil rights online as we have offline. Imagine if the US authorities wanted to do a house search at my home, go through my private papers. There would be a hell of a fight. It’s absolutely unacceptable.”

Disconcertingly, the Justice Department sought the information without a warrant using a 1994 law called the “stored communications act.” Further upsetting privacy advocates was the fact that the individuals under investigation had no knowledge that their accounts were being targeted. The issue only came to light after Twitter challenged the subpoenas given to the service.

Those challenges apparently did not survive judicial scrutiny, as Thursday’s ruling sided with the Justice Department. Judge O’Grady concluded that not only was the information relevant to the investigation, but that because Twitter users voluntarily gave Twitter their IP addresses when signing up for the service, their IP addresses were not private information. Again, from the Guardian:

“Petitioners knew or should have known that their IP information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy,” Judge O’Grady wrote.

While the broader implications of case are yet to be known, the case is sure to turn heads across the world and around the web.

(UK Guardian via Techmeme)

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• Our original reporting of the story, from January
• Iceland is using social media to write its consitutions

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.

Of course, not all the stories come from the heart-warming, chicken-soup-for-the-social-network angle; some of them are just stories of ingenuity or “oh neat,” like Japanese fishermen who use Twitter to arrange the sale of their fish before they get back to port and a lady that tweets recipes.

Twitter Stories isn’t anything mind blowing, but it does look like it’ll be a center for interesting stories about the way social media is changing the world as we know it. Granted, it’s run by Twitter, so don’t expect to hear any stories about “the tweet that ruined my life,” but still, who doesn’t like a good human interest story with a ridiculous hook. As you might expect from the makers of a 140 character service, the stories tend to be bite-sized, which is perfect for a quick perusal if you want to feel stupid about the way you’re using Twitter for a few minutes. I just hope to one day see a story about someone whose life was saved by a misspelled, uncaptialized hashtag game.

(via The Twitter Blog)

Relevant to your interests

• Twitter played a big role in the Egyptian protests
• But also in the London riots

The biggest thing seems to be the ability to “open” tweets in the Timeline, or expand them if you will. By opening the tweet, you get access to all replies right there in your timeline, so you can presumably catch up on a threaded conversation easily that way. It’s hard to tell if that goes both directions, that is to say, whether opening a mid-conversation tweet will expand the whole discussion out backwards and forwards in time.

Opening a tweet also seems to expand media, so you can see pictures right there. No word on whether it applies to videos as well, but one can only assume. In the realm of weird changes, the retweet, favorite, and reply links have moved to the top of the tweet instead of the bottom. Not a big deal, but I can’t imagine the rationale behind that. All in all, the new features look to make the web interface way more usable. Might get me back from third party apps, some of the time at least.

(via TechCrunch)

Relevant to your interests

• You can buy a sweet poster of your tweets, or someone else’s
• A visual history of Twitter
• It seems like working for Twitter would be pretty boss

Got a whole bunch of tweets you hold near and dear? Not happy enough to just look at them online? Like having a picture of yourself in your house? Have a creepy stalker-crush on a celebrity or just somebody with a public feed? In any of those cases, a Firebox tweet portrait might be right for you. All you need is a Twitter account with at least 230 tweets (or someone else’s) and 25 bucks.

When you enter a username, Firebox goes out and grabs the most recent tweets from the public timeline and colorizes them to match your profile picture. The posters are 24″ by 24″ and are written in 18pt font, so they’ll be readable from a ways away, but still look remarkably like your profile picture.

It’s sort of a neat idea, but I really can’t decide how I feel about it. Hanging a poster of your own words on your wall is sort of self-absorbed, even more so if they form a picture of you. Then again, if you were to alter your picture for a day to be something else, it might not be so bad. The fact that you can order a celebrity’s poster, or just some random guy’s, is also a little unsettling. Who is that into Lady Gaga. Okay, bad example. On the other hand, there are some “celebrity” accounts that would be perfect for this. Who could pass up a beautiful poster of @horse_ebooks tweets, or maybe the all-caps, word-salad stylings of @BARTSIMSON_REAL.

All in all, while neat, I think this idea is kind of silly with the potential to be either frivolus or really creepy. I’ll just continue to think that for the next few weeks or so, until I finally break down and order a horse_ebooks one. I’m already starting to think about where I might hang it.

You can try it out and see some previews here.

(via Ubergizmo)

Other novelty accounts that might make for non-creepy posters

• The tweeting roomba
• Big Ben

At a Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo made known that Twitter has gone from 90 million tweets per day in September 2010, to 100 million tweets per day at the beginning of this year, to 250 million tweets per day currently. Over the course of four or five days, Twitter is home to one billion tweets. At the beginning of this year, Twitter had 30 percent of its 100 million users active each day, which has grown to 50 percent today.

Though signups for Twitter have increased threefold with the recent Twitter integration into iOS 5, Costolo feels that the one fourth of a billion tweets per day means there is a wealth of content that new users should be able to find relevant to their interests, and that Twitter has to figure out how to “capture the volume at the same time as separating the signal from the noise.” Costolo also mentioned that Twitter feels they can be on two billion devices around the world, and the way to do that is through simplifying, which’ll be interesting to see, considering Twitter is already fairly basic.

(via TechCrunch)

Relevant to your interests

• Charlie Sheen’s Twitter was the fastest account to hit one million followers
• The Women’s World Cup Soccer final set a new Twitter record for tweets per second
• Until Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement smashed it

(ResumeBear via Mashable)

Relevant to your interests

• Check out this visual history of Twitter
• Visually learn how Google makes its money
• Infographically learn about the most disruptive companies in tech

Twittad, strangely, is an advertising company which pays users to Tweet advertisements for pay. They’ve used the word “tweet” as part of their slogan “Let Your Ad Meet Tweets®.” Though Twitter maintained in court that it was Twitter, not Twittad, that made “tweet” famous, it has seen little action on that front. However, the two sides agreed to settle their differences over a mutually beneficial exchange: Twitter would restore Twittad’s Twitter account and drop a lawsuit against the ad company, in exchange for Twittad transferring the “tweet” trademark to Twitter.

There’s no word if money has changed hands, but the episode serves as an object lesson to aspiring tech entrepeneurs: get your terms trademarked, tout suite!

(WSJ via Mashable)

Relevant to your interests

• Twitter toker @qwikster tousles Netflix
• The politics of tweeting
• TP ticker taps tweets

(via Mashsable)

For years, researchers have suspected that moods on the whole tend to swing from happy to sad and back again in concert with with variables like amount of sleep, amount of daylight, and length of the work day. Seems pretty intuitive, right? Well until now, researchers didn’t have too many good ways of actually verifying this theory. The options available tended to be very subjective and have relatively small scopes which made it hard to get any sort of conclusive evidence that was global instead of very specific.

Now, by using Twitter, researchers at Cornell were able to find a solution to that problem. By tracking 2.4 million people in 84 different countries over the course of two years, Scott Golder and Michael Macy were able to analyze trends globally and publish their results in a paper called “Diurnal and Seasonal Mood Tracks Work, Sleep and Daylength Across Diverse Cultures.” They didn’t read the tweets themselves, of course, but rather fed them through software designed to analyze the tweets and were able to finally pick out some universal, global trends.

They found that every day had two peaks where there was a concentration of positive tweets: Early in the morning and then again towards midnight, suggesting that working tends to displace positive feelings, pushing them to before and after the work day. On the weekends, there were similar peaks, but the morning peak occurred, on average, about 2 hours later because who doesn’t like to sleep in, right?

These spikes weren’t exactly the same across the globe though. Obviously, they rolled along time zones, but there were also some cultural differences that affected the placement. In the United Arab Emirates, for example, the weekend tweet pattern was still present but happened on Fridays and Saturdays because the work week there tends to be Sunday through Thursday.

The pair also took a look at the way daylight correlated with the number of positive tweets to see if the perception of “winter blues” is a real thing. It sort of is. While the data didn’t show any strong correlation between absolute amount of daylight (folks in sunnier parts aren’t particularly happier than people in darker areas) they found that the relative amount of sunlight did have a correlation. So more sunlight might not translate into happiness, but increasing amounts of sunlight do. Likewise, it’s harder to be cheery when the days are shortening in front of your very eyes.

In a lot of ways, the results make perfect sense, but they also raise some questions. How likely are people to tweet about certain feelings and activities? Are people really just as likely to tweet their positive feeling as their negative ones? If it swings either way, it might skew the entire study’s results in one direction or another. In a way, this whole study is built on the idea that people everywhere are sharing their true feelings all the time and borderline over-sharing. Whether or not that is a reasonable assumption is up for grabs.

The study itself is here, but behind a paywall.

(via PhysOrg)

It wasn’t too long ago that Twitter got involved in the advertising business by announcing promoted tweets and plugging them into your stream whether you followed the source account of not. Now, in an effort to explain their advertising horizons, Twitter is announcing a new variety of promoted tweets: Political ads.

You’ll be able to tell what tweets are political promotions based on the little arrow in the bottom right corner. If it is purple, it’s political. Orange is commercial. A number of campaigns have already hopped on this opportunity including, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Mitt Romney. The Washington Post reports that the promoted tweets will come as search results, but also in the timeline of users who follow a political campaign. Let’s hope Twitter is smart enough to narrow down the appropriate party to promote to a given account.

It’s not only about promoted tweets, although that does seem to be the basic unit of advertising available. Other options, presumably available for higher amounts of money, include promoted trends (which aren’t really trends then, are they?) and promoted accounts that will show up in account search results.

It seems like Twitter is totally on the up and up about indicating exactly what is promoted, by whom, and whether or not it’s political or commercial, and that’s a good thing. The question is, with the crazy political advertising concentration that always occurs in an election year, will these promotions serve to clog up what is already the most spammy of social networks? We’ll find out, and pretty soon too.

(via Washington Post)