There are a lot of things Siri can’t do — understand anything anyone says if it is only slightly noisy in the background, for one. However, Siri not being able to post to Twitter, even if you speak very slowly and loudly and in a room void of noise, isn’t something that defines Siri anymore. It’s a workaround more than Siri actually being able to just post to Twitter itself, but the workaround is a quick setup and configuration, so those that really can’t be bothered to open up their Twitter app and type out a tweet now have a quick and easy way to tell the world what their sandwich is like in 140 characters or less.

Instructions after the break.

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.

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.

Move over Beyonce’s pregnancy, you no longer hold the tweets-per-second record. No, that honor goes to, oddly, an annual television viewing of Hayao Miyazaki’s 1986 Castle in the Sky.

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.

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.

Convicted murderer Erickson Dimas-Martinez owes his life to Twitter. Dimas-Martinez, in 2010, was convicted of killing a 17-year old and subsequently sentenced to death by lethal injection in the state of Arkansas. Luckily for him, one of the jurors on the case, Randy Franco, tweeted about the subpar quality of the courthouse coffee so now he gets to live. No, but really.

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. Details and a video of the new redesign after the break.

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. 

Yesterday, a group of nine of the biggest online companies took out a full page ad in the New York Times to voice their concern over two pieces of legislation in congress that could greatly affect the way America uses the Internet. In the letter, Google, Facebook, Mozilla, Zynga, eBay, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and AOL ask that their point of view be heard regarding the Protect IP and the Stop Online Piracy Act.

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.