Seriously, it was a matter of time before a news story like this appeared.  The co-writer of Pulp Fiction has landed in prison and is now - allegedly – tweeting.

Roger Avary, one half of the “Pulp Fiction” writing staff (the other being Quentin Tarantino), got one year of prison for vehicular manslaughter and drunk driving. Now it looks like he is tweeting from behind bars with gems such as this:

“Nightly, every few hours like clockwork, a guard’s flashlight beam strikes #34’s face, perhaps to ensure lack of proper rest and exhaustion,”

or

“Night falls, and the only real activity is an endless recounting of the terrible and pointless events that brought us all to this sad place,”

We don’t know if this is real or not, but if it a famous person is sitting in prison, tweeting away, I would have to wonder if they are somehow creating a security risk for themselves.  Assuming this is real, it could be one interesting read over time…

The past June, when Iran was experiencing a huge uprising over the outcome of the presidential election, Twitter played a role in providing protesters with a means of communication.  The State Department felt the service provided a vital service to the Iranian people that it contacted Twitter to postpone system upgrades.

Confirmation that the U.S. government had contacted Twitter came as the Obama administration sought to avoid suggestions it was meddling in Iran’s internal affairs as the Islamic Republic battled to control deadly street protests over the election result.

…

“We highlighted to them that this was an important form of communication,” said a State Department official of the conversation the department had with Twitter officials.

Yay!  Freedom for the Iranian protesters!  Yay!  Let those voices be heard!

Apparently that only applies to people in countries the United States considers an enemy. The FBI arrested and charged a New York man with hindering prosecution after he allegedly utilized Twitter in order to help protesters at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh evade the police. What is hindering prosecution, you ask?

a person “renders criminal assistance” when, with intent to prevent, hinder or  delay  the discovery  or  apprehension  of,  or  the  lodging  of a criminal charge against, a person who he knows or believes has committed a crime  or  is being sought by law enforcement officials for the commission of a crime, or  with  intent  to assist a person in profiting or benefiting from the commission of a crime, he:

1. Harbors or conceals such person; or
2. Warns such person of impending discovery or apprehension; or
3. Provides such person with money, transportation, weapon, disguise or other means of avoiding discovery or apprehension

Here is the big assumption – and potentially the big risk prosecutors will run into – how will the government prove the intent of this individual?  He was communicating publically available information, and unless he was specifically stating protesters should commit a crime or avoid being arrested for a crime someone committed, how could he be tried for hindering prosecution?

For the record, I don’t agree with the people who were staging protests at the G20; however, if you agree or disagree with the G20 protesters  should have no impact this situation. It is flat out wrong for the U.S. to promote others to continue their protests (especially in governments they do not agree with) and then treat U.S. citizens – regardless of their political views – as if they are criminals for doing the exact same thing.

The only conclusion I can arrive at is the U.S. government is acting in a hypocritical fashion. If the United States truly stands for freedom for all then the United States needs to hold that view in all situations, both globally and locally.

Ah, yes… the world is a twit about twitter.  It’s on CNN, people who’ve never used technology are talking about it, and I’ve heard stories that some teachers are using it to assign homework to their class.  Well, I think that Twitter has jumped the shark.  You know, that time when something becomes so at odds logic and reason.

Why do I say that?

I give you Celebwitter, a website that follows Celebrities who are on Twitter.  I’m not knocking them, they have a great idea. Pull everything together so others don’t have to sign up to each celeb, but still…it just goes to show (for me) that Twitter has jumped the shark.

I know it is hard to admit but just about any government in the world is spying on its citizens. Sure, we have a false sense of security that we are “protected” and such a thing would never happen but it has become very clear that it seems to be a common thing these days.

Technology is helping drive the events in Iran right now. People are using Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites in order to send messages, inform others about events, and help organize protests, all the while mobile phones show the rest of the world video of what is happening on the streets of Tehran as people send video in near real time to YouTube.

Just as the protesters are using technology, so is the Iranian government.

But Nokia Siemens says the product is only being used, in Iran, for the monitoring of local telephone calls on fixed and mobile lines.

Rather than just block traffic, it is understood that the monitoring system can also interrogate data to see what information is being passed back and forth.

A spokesman described the system as “a standard architecture that the world’s governments use for lawful intercept”.

Oh, yea, to pop your security bubble:

“Western governments, including the UK, don’t allow you to build networks without having this functionality.”

So much for freedom of speech.

My use of Twitter has dropped significantly, practically to nothing. I enjoyed communicating with my friends and family, even though the topics centered on daily fluff. I could easily know what was going on in the world simply by check the latest tweets. I also gained some amount of pleasure from following totally random people. From news to humor, I was able to pick up a lot of useful information. One day that changed.

It was roughly a month ago when I woke up to find myself disheartened with the whole Twitter phenomenon. What was acting as a source of pleasure and enjoyment literally turned into a bother overnight. I don’t know exactly why. Gone was the intrigue of following random thoughts, the humor seemed to be less and less, and the overall useful information appeared to be diminishing.

My perception of twitter followed this evolution:

Novelty -> Communication Tool -> Information Intake Point -> Static and Noise -> Bother

Maybe this is the natural order of product development and delivery in a social networking, on demand, world. I don’t know. I feel, in many ways, Twitter lost me in the Information Intake stage. It was in this state when I felt the quality information I had once depended on twitter for was gone. Maybe this is due to the rapid growth the company is experiencing or maybe it is also due to the people I follow. All I know is the single to noise ratio became so great the service no longer provided a value for me.

I will still use Twitter; however, the usage will be on a limited basis. I am going to experiment with ways I can return to the communication tool/information intake point stages in hopes of removing the sensation of “wow, this is a bother” that I seem to have now because, as of right now, it feels like the love is gone.

NOTE: If you are looking for what “Rate Limit Exceeded” means, click here to pass the fluff.

My initial use of Twitter was simply to let family and friends know what I was up to, as well as inform them of blog updates, however, I am increasingly enjoying what Twitter has to offer.  

Communication with completely random strangers, most of which have something interesting to say, is much more enjoyable that I would have expected.  Not only that, I’ve picked up so many useless nuggets of knowledge along the way – you know, stuff that you find really interesting but the rest of the world could care less about – that Twitter quickly became a method of finding new information on a daily basis.

The largest complaint I have with Twitter is the lack of threading.  If one obtains an @ reply, pages and pages of messages may need to be viewed before ever seeing the message.  Such behavior, while designed specifically to function in that manner, makes Twitter less user friendly.

Enter TweetDeck.

TweetDeck is an application that attempts to take your Twitter feed and break it down into multiple topics (such as your @ replies, direct messages, favorites) by utilizing the Twitter API.  The TweetDeck developers have done so in a rather impressive fashion.  

Overnight, Twitter simply became a service for me – almost a protocol – and TweetDeck became my interface of choice. Now I actually can use Twitter with ease and I can do so in the manner of my choosing.  The best part – there was no major limitation that would prevent me from using the application. Well.. There is no major limitation with TweetDeck but there is ONE major with Twitter.

About 20 to 30 minutes into using TweetDeck this evening, I noticed the application kicking back a nasty little “Twitter Status” message saying “Rate Limit Exceeded”

How Odd I thought… I didn’t send too many many messages, what was going on?  

The Twitter API only allows external applications to make 100 “calls” during a 60 minute period.

“Clients are allowed 100 requests per 60 sixty minute time period, starting from their first request.  The rate limited is applied to both authenticated and unauthenticated requests. “

What exactly is a “call” to the API anyway?  Just about anything that communicates to Twitter constitutes a call, except when a user posts and update (or direct message).  Don’t get sneaky and think that you can have multiple applications open in order to sidestep the limit, you cannot.  The limitation is on YOUR ID and not on a specific application.

As for ways around the API limit…. I don’t believe there are any.  I wish there was, but that does not appear to be the case.  The entrepreneur in me wonders if this is a potential source of revenue for Twitter or does the company set the API call at 100 per hour to keep system integrity stable.  

While I am quite happy with TweetDeck thus far, I’m sure I will find application specific limitations eventually.  Just know the “Rate Limited Exceeded” has nothing to do with the application and everything to do with the Twitter service.

Yesterday Twitter was hacked in a major way. If you do not follow one of the 33 people who happened to have their account hacked, or if you do not follow technology news, you may never have known it happened. Who happened to be the targets of the attack?  Celebrity Twitter Users.

Thanks to TechCrunch, we have screen shots of the hacks.

How did this happen? Twitter explains…

These accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the email address associated with their Twitter account when they can’t remember or get stuck. We considered this a very serious breach of security and immediately took the support tools offline. We’ll put them back only when they’re safe and secure. 

It almost sounds like a person successfully pulled of a SQL injection attack on tools intended to be used by Twitter employees.  What this shows is that the Twitter is not yet ready for the big time.  No matter what the attack was, Twitter has not taken steps to secure data within the organization. If they cannot secure the most basic of information, how can the service be trusted if they start offering pay services?

I wonder if the hacker actually could SEE the password information, or simply have the ability to change.

I’ve wondered how useful a Twitter search engine would actually be, and I would have to say (much to my surprise) it’s quite useful!  

Twithority ranks search results by highest ranking users first and by most recent tweets by the top 10,000 Twitter users. I ran a few test and found a number of things I wouldn’t have expected, nor ever would have thought of to search for in the first place.

Kinda sweet.

You a twitter addict?  

A self-proclaimed “microblogger” maybe?

Here are the top 3 Twitter tools I have/do use in order to integrate Wordpress and Twitter.  Why only three? Well, with so many plugins out there doing the same thing I focused on the “best of the best”.  I could have simply listed a number to Twitter/Wordpress plugins but what good would that do for you?

So, here we go..

Twitter Tools

This plugin alerts Twitter every time you update your Wordpress blog.  It’s a great tool if you only use Twitter for your microblogging.  If you use other networks I would suggest you look at the PingPressFM plugin.

TwitThis

Nice little plugin that allows your readers to create a Tweet of your posts and sends it off to their contact list.  Even takes care of creating the shorter URL.

Twitt-Twoo

An Ajax based plugin (Yay!  No page reloading) that shows your latest Twitter status right in your blog’s sidebar.  It’s nice to see someone developing in AJAX when it comes to Wordpress.

Please let me know if there are other Twitter related plugins I should be looking at… I’m always open to new things that could improve the blog.

With news that Pownce, a social networking and micro-blogging service, was sold to Six Apart and will be shut down on December 15th, a number of individuals starting asking the age old question yet again – how will social networking make money?  Tack on Twitter turning down a $500 million dollar offer from Facebook and people started asking “Forget social networking in general, how will Twitter generate revenue?”

Speculation over potential revenue models has been out in the media for some time regarding the popular messaging service.  Give people a set number of tweets per day and charge after that, go after the enterprise market and sell a business service, and sell access to the Twitter API were all suggested as potential ways for the company to pull in money.

All along the company has remained silent, and now the CEO says the revenue is coming… but is being a tease about it.

“We will make money, and I can’t say exactly how because…we can’t predict how the businesses we’re in will work.” As he has before, he hinted at generating fees from sales-related Twitter content and from corporate users.

 

But as the conversation went on, one got the impression that Williams actually has a plan. He revealed that the company is in talks with large consumer packaged good companies, and whether that’s to sell the company internal services or to help the company monetize its own Twitter feeds, it’s promising.

Either the company has an idea as to what they will do, and they are attempting to protect their “trade secrets”, or they have no clue and Twitter is flying by the seat of its pants.  Knowing the history of start-ups, a number of people could easily say there is no real plan – I will bet differently.

Why?

Evan Williams, the CEO of Twitter, was a co-founder in the popular blogging service “Blogger”, who ended up selling his service to Google.  Obviously past performance does not guarantee future success, but he does have a track record I would bet on at this point.