She is on Twitter, at least; not only does she follow the Google CEO on her @teflonblondie account, but the Burson Marsteller flack also tracks him on the much more selective @momnet, where he joins Demi Moore as one of just five followed accounts. We've been told the @momnet account is Simon's, and that seems obvious enough: It's owned by "marcy" and Simon retweets its content the very instant it goes online.

Her relationship with the nominally married Schmidt, whether professional or something more, does seem to be humming along again: Our tipster says the pair were spotted together in Los Angeles, at the opening of The Little Seed, the organic cosmetics company co-owned by Punky Brewster actress Soleil Moon Frye, who Simon and Schmidt both follow on Twitter.

As interesting as Simon's make-up shopping may be, we're more intrigued in the bridal jewelry retailer she's become a fan of on Facebook. A client? A friend's shop? Or is something more interesting brewing? We might feel uneasy asking such a personal question if this wasn't totally innocent, public information (per Facebook), and if virtuous people like Simon had any use for secrets (they don't, per Schmidt).

Like other blogging networks, Twitter is nothing if not a massive judgment machine, and users pounced on the chance to render a verdict on Ross, a mommy blogger and avid social networker: Her tweeting was inappropriate; her tweeting was a natural way to seek comfort; and, inevitably, her tweeting caused the death. The last is the thesis most prominently advanced by writer Madison McGraw, who tallied 75 tweets from Shellie on the day of the death, prior to her son slipping into the pool:

Anyone that has ever spent any time on Twitter knows that answering replies and sending out messages can literally eat up your time... her son... might still be alive if Military_Mom interacted with her son like she interacted with people on Twitter.

Of course, this is the sort of thing people have always whispered behind one another's backs in even the smallest, most tightly-knit of communities. Now people will just scream these accusations in your face, online. It's enough to make you nostalgic for the old biddies.

(Pic via)

The real news is horrible enough without the added layer of internet deception. During what police described as a domestic dispute with his wife fiancée, Henry tried to jump into the bed of a pickup truck in which his wife was driving away. He fell and was later found lying on the road and rushed to the hospital. He died at 6:36 am ET this morning.

But Henry was reported dead approximately 12 hours earlier on Twitter. Real and fake deaths were bound to bump up against one another on the microblogging service sooner or later, by sheer chance. Twitter supplies a steady stream of misinformation, including most prominently the prematurely reported death of actor Patrick Swayze, outrage over an Amazon gay book ban that never existed, and the false news that California courts had overturned a gay marriage ban.

The Henry death scam was, as these things go, relatively sophisticated, perpetrated by a scammer who went to the trouble of changing his screen name to "Gerry," calling himself a "Sports Reporter for Dallas Morning News," and attaching a picture of real-life Morning News columnist Gerry Fraley, plus a link to Fraley's page on the newspaper's website. With Cincinnati Bengals receiver Henry known to be in the hospital following a car accident, it would be easier to pass off fake news:

These reports were flatly denied by one of the supposed "sources," and the fakester was even outed by the real Gerry Fraley as fake. An enraged Twitter turned ferociously against the scammer (except for a few people who later insisted he'd been proven his correct, despite the 12 hour gap between his false tweets and the actual death):

The Dallas Morning News must be thrilled with all the people who still think the scammer worked for the paper. Welcome to microblogging, printies!

Facebook's 350 million+ users are being greeted by the dialog below, an "Important... Privacy Announcement" that "simplifies" and "adds" privacy controls:

But like Mark Zuckerberg's "Open Letter" last week, this is just the smiley pro-"privacy" wrapper around the real agenda, which, as Peter Kafka at All Things D wrote, is quite plainly to get you to abandon your privacy. Rival startup Twitter has taught Facebook that there's big growth in public internet sharing.

Thus — Ta Da! — these new default settings, which suggest users share their posts and information with the whole world. From Kafka (click to enlarge):

Inside Facebook's Eric Eldon got similarly liberal suggestions:

To make this scheme a bit more defensible, Facebook will now allow users to set their privacy level — i.e. to reverse the default choices — on a post-by-post basis, a feature long requested by users. Thus, Facebook will become an endless series of privacy decisions and dilemmas. It's enough to make you rush into the open arms of Twitter. Because while microblogging about your lunch might be narcissistic and pointless, it's definitely less narcissistic and pointless than deciding who should get to see the post about what you had for lunch.

Facebook: Asking you questions you don't want to have to answer about content no one cares about. Isn't social networking a joy ride?

We're seeking out the laziest journalists on Twitter. And, yes — irony alert! — we're open to your help. But in the meantime, we've compiled a shortlist of candidates.

Well, actually, no, we didn't so much compile it ourselves as receive it basically whole, over email, from a friendly, fed-up journalist. But we did helpfully copy and paste said tipster's examples, for your benefit, below. This is what it is called the process journalism. Anyway. On to the lazies!

Doug MacMillan (@dmac1), BusinessWeek. Tipster: "When not pimping out his recent BW 'OMG have you seen the iPhone?!' cover story from a few weeks ago, [MacMillan] has taken the time to master the 140-character source request." As you can see below, that's true, although in fairness MacMillan sometimes issues requests on behalf of other lazy reporters. A sampling of his "work:"

Priya Ganapati, Wired (@pgcat): Were the Palm Pre support forums and blogs too hard to navigate, or something?

Jessi Hempel, Fortune (@jessiwrites): Too lazy even to finish typing her full, lazy request.

Jessica Vascellaro, Wall Street Journal (@JVascellaro): At least this is for a conference thing instead of her real job.

Julia Allison, TMI Weekly (@juliaallison): Can't even come up with her own questions. (Not a journalist, you say? Newsweek begs to disagree.)

Associated Press "Climate Pool" (@AP_ClimatePool): What's? With? All? The? Questions? We'll tell you about the climate: The climate is uncertain. If you can figure out how you feel about that, maybe you can contribute to the AP's "collaborative editorial."

Gawker (@gawker): Our tipster didn't point this one out, but you've probably noticed that we, too, try to crowdsource a lot of reporting, and even speculation. Lazy! But at least our headlines are more fun?

Being lazy, we're so done surfing painstakingly around Twitter, looking for further lazy journalists. If you've been doing that, and have come up with some other names, do let us know.

(Top pic by Tony Delgrosso. What, you thought we were going to take it?)

Schmidt once dismissed Twitter as a "poor man's email system." But as the microblogging service has picked up more users, more activity and more search traffic, Google has been forced to take it more seriously. Today, Schmidt's engineers announced that Twitter-style "real-time" searching of tweets would be integrated into Google's core search service. I guess that's what you'd call a Poor Man's Real Time Search Engine, mmmm? Whoops.

Even worse, Schmidt's attempt to join Twitter itself proved something of a disaster this morning. He first logged on with the handle "eschmidt0", prompting a cyber-diss from high-profile New York tech executive Anil Dash:

Oh, snap! Surely a big-time CEO wouldn't let a zinger like that get under his skin right?

Except that within a few hours Schmidt had duly changed his handle and moved over his old content:

It looks like Schmidt also received some help from the Poor Man's Email Service's Rich Man's Identity Authenticator, because he's now got a "Verified Account." Throwing his (semi-)celebrity weight around at Twitter Inc.? Schmidt's starting to get the swing of things. Now just tweet about your next lunch choice, Eric. We promise not to mock. Too hard.

Jack Dorsey is no longer a day-to-day executive at Twitter, but he used to be CEO of the microblogging service and is widely credited with coming up with the idea for brokering 140-character status updates. Those updates, in turn, now carry a large amount of local news and commentary of which papers like the Chronicle, which is losing circulation and money most months, were once the main suppliers.

Which is why it's more than a touch ironic that Dorsey is leasing space in the Chronicle building for his new credit-card processing startup Square. Joining him will be two tech "incubators" that promise to nurture technology as disruptive as Twitter. This is sort of like renting space inside your body for one of those creatures from Alien. It will explode out of your stomach and devour you someday. Look out, Chronicle!

[via BayNewser]

(Pic by Esther Dyson)

That, we admit, is just our shameless, cynical speculation. Facebook wants people to share their content with everyone, like on rival hot-startup Twitter, but most people are content just sharing with their regional networks. So why not kill the regionals and push users to share with the world by default?

Paranoid? Maybe. But this conspiracy theory happens to fit snugly with what facts are known:

• Many users now restrict their content to regional networks like the city in which they live.
  
• Facebook recently introduced a feature allowing people to share their content even more widely, with everyone, Twitter style. But, frustratingly for Facebook, most people don't use this, as TechCrunch points out.
• When it kills the regional networks, Facebook will introduce new privacy "controls that we think will be better for you." Read: "We'll be making decisions of various sorts on your behalf."
  
• Zuckerberg encourages everyone to "read through all your [privacy] options and customize them for yourself." This implies you don't have to do that, if you're comfortable with Facebook's new privacy scheme and whatever default decisions the company has made.
  
• Even if you do customize your privacy settings, Facebook will "suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy." Read: If you're sharing with your regional network, we'll probably suggest you share with the world.

This wouldn't be the first time Facebook ham-fistedly pushed users into oversharing; the social network is still infamous for Beacon, the spammy advertising scheme that automatically sucked up data from outside websites, ruining engagement proposals and holiday gift surprises and eventually prompting a lawsuit. Facebook finally shut the thing off in September.

Unlike Beacon, which users could not opt out of at launch, this new "privacy" scheme will immediately be customizable by users. Zuckerberg has thus avoided a major mistake this time around. What's more, his "open letter" shows a newfound appreciation for the power of PR gestures, even softball PR gestures painfully short on actual details (those will come in the "next couple of weeks," says Zuckerberg).

But, smiley-face posturing aside, users should never forget that Facebook remains, at heart, not a community but a Silicon Valley startup, always hungry for exponential growth and new revenue streams. So be sure to review those new privacy "options," and take Facebook's recommendations with a huge grain of salt.

(Pic: Zuckerberg, by Silverisdead on Flickr)

The whole incident was, naturally, promptly uploaded to YouTube; you can bask in its full matrimonial glory in the clip above. Bride Tracy Park had no idea Hanna was going to do this, according to TechCrunch, which is just as well, since now she can claim innocence in this ultimate monument to techno-narcissism.

At least it was intended as sort of parody. We hope.

The most annoying thing about TweetBookz isn't that it's spelled with a Z (which is pretty annoying and should be reserved for Liza), but that it has lowered the bar for the already suspect phenomenon of giving people an analog medium for their digital brilliance. But at least the publishing world does us the favor of finding the best of the bunch to give annoying Twitter-based books. Just like companies that will self-publish anyone's crumby novel for a service fee, now any 14-year-old girl (or the parents of any 14 year-old who think their kid is the Confucius of microblogging) with a keyboard and/or a smart phone can enter the realm of publishing. This is going to be the first thing I write about on @StuffIHate.

TweetBookz only charges $30 for a hardcover and $20 and it is comprised of as few as 40 pages with one tweet on each page or as many as 200 tweets. That's only 10 cents a tweet, which means that is now official market value for these internet outbursts. Thanks, TweetBookz, for placing an amount on them. Now to get a $10,000 advance for the @StuffIHate Twitter book, we're going to have to write write 100,000 dispatches. That's way too much work!

Today, the Times runs a trend(ing) piece in the business section on how Twitter users are making serious cash Tweeting ads. Like, serious cash. How much?

Meet John Chow, a guy who makes money telling people how to make money online with his blog. Basically, imagine an infomercial about making infomercials. That's this guy, who's described as a "blogger and Internet entrepreneur." Watch, he makes money:

Mr. Chow treated his 50,000 Twitter followers to a photograph of his lunch (barbecued chicken and French fries), discussed the weather in Vancouver and linked to a new post on his Internet business blog. Then he earned $200 by telling his fans where they could buy M&M's with customized faces, messages and colors...In October, Mr. Chow's income from Twitter ads was around $3,000. "I get paid for pushing a button," he said.

$200 bucks. For telling people about M&Ms. Since the Times doesn't, let's take a look at what that Tweet looked like:

He's got the designation of it being an ad in two characters, four if you count the parenthesis. He puts the designation of it being an ad after he places the link, so visually, your awareness doesn't come into play until you've been given the chance to get to/click on whatever's being sold. And four characters out of 88 comes to about 4.54% of the message. It looks subversive to me, and I know it's an ad, but then again, I'm not dumb enough to follow this guy in the first place.

Yet advertorial content is a time-honored tradition in all kinds of publishing formats! Including this one, where we place "sponsored ads" everywhere. But these look like out-and-out endorsements, followed by the designation of it being an ad. And if you attach them to hashtags and @feeds, you can more or less just harass and molest the flow of information coming in to Twitter. Just like when you could see HOT XX NEKKD AMATEURS being attached to Twitter messages that were coming out of Iran after their elections a few months back, by automatic spam bots. Brilliant.

So: what's the defense for completely subverting and messing with the user experience on Twitter? Enjoy this:

"We don't want to create an army of spammers, and we are not trying to turn Facebook and Twitter into one giant spam network," said Joey Caroni, co-founder of Peer2. "All we are trying to do is get consumers to become marketers for us."

Kind of sounds like the way vampires work, right? Once you're done with getting your blood sucked, you become one of them because you need more blood. The reason people left MySpace en masse (besides the fact that Facebook offered a cleaner interface and unanimously better user experience) was because of the gross, nonstop barrage of advertising, which Facebook has thankfully kept to a tolerable minimum. What's to stop your Twitter feed from becoming just one, long, advertisement if the people and trending topics you follow are being turned into ad-vampires left and right? And do people even really care that much?

One problem is that many Internet users eschew the idea of these ads, saying they commercialize authentic dialogue and undermine people's credibility. "It interferes with your relationship with your friends and your audience," said Robert Scoble, a technology blogger with more than 100,000 followers on Twitter, who says he "unfollows" people on Twitter who send him ads.

Exactly. So who's to blame for all of this, really? When Twitter goes to shit, and like a bad strain of drugs, everything you touch comes from the same gross source lacing it with their nasty advertorial additives? This assclown, snake oil salesman Mr. Ted "The Murphman" Murphy, he of Pay Per Post, a company basically everyone in Silicon Valley regards as straight-up evil.

They're not wrong. Pay Per Post was having users sell other users on products with no disclosure that they were ads. Whoops! The Times article catches up with Murphy, who's now doing Izea. Which is how Julia Allison ended up shilling for Sea World. But Murphy's reformed! He's better now! He knows he made a mistake!

Ted Murphy, the C.E.O. of Izea, now a 30-person business backed by $10 million in venture capital, said the company initially "made a big mistake" by not setting disclosure standards for publishers and advertisers. Today, ad networks promote their standards; Izea's ads on Twitter are typically demarcated with signifiers like "#ad" or "#sponsor."

Right. Except, whoops, not all of them:

The Times piece wraps up like so, as they chat with people running Likes.com, which, I don't even care to know what it is, really. All of these people are gross and lecherous. Here:

"We are trying to limit it, to prevent people from losing their following," said Bindu Reddy, a former Google product manager who started the company with her husband, Arvind Sundararajan, a former Google engineer. "We know people are queasy about this."

Right! But probably not as much as Twitter is, or should be. It doesn't appear that they're doing anything to even take a cut of the product being moved under their hood. Amazing that the most money being made on Twitter isn't by Twitter. Their product goes down in value to them because it's becoming an ad network.

But who's even dumb enough to follow Julia Allison and John Chow? Won't they catch on to the con being run on them? Well: the same people who watch bad TV, for one thing. Philo Farnsworth probably thought his invention was going to make the world a way better place, too.

Meanwhile, spambots and assclowns like Ted Murphy's zombie army who're getting small bucks will attach themselves to hashtags and your @feed like leeches. Big brands won't care whether this hurts what people think of their product—however much we want it to, or however marginally it will—because this creates awareness. And to think, it's all because of a guy who likes like Ted Murphy. Look again. Right?

Nothing gold can stay, Pony Boy. Unless we can get everyone to do this:

In short, Twitter's new slogan reflects the microblogging service's evolution from a venue for self expression into a forum for conversation, according to Welsh linguist David Crystal. Crystal seemed an ideal expert to consult on Twitter's new phrasing: he has written or contributed to more than 100 books on language, including on internet linguistics, and examined the text-messaging culture from which Twitter was born in his most recent work, the appropriately-titled Txtng: The Gr8 Db8.

Here is what Crystal emailed us about the significance of Twitter's change in phrasing:

I'm not surprised. Twitter has become steadily more discursive, with people maintaining threads and introducing a great deal more interaction, rather than posting isolated tweets. As a result the focus has shifted from the individual to the group, and a more open question is required to capture this emphasis. What-doing looks inward. What-happening looks outward. It's a natural development, it seems to me.

So Twitter's users have, at the very least, moved beyond mere navel gazing and into arguing. Way to go, narcissists!

(Pic: Crystal, via DavidCrystal.com)

Not that we begrudge Sara Morishige, Ev Williams' glamorous and chic spouse, her design flourishes. After all, she did the interior for Twitter's last new office and was brought back to do this one, meaning, at the very least, there was no staff revolt about her prior work. And on balance, the level of quirk seems appropriate for a company whose unlikely success was built on the world-changing potential of 140-character status updates. (You can take the full official tour here.)

But the new batch of pictures, compiled by VentureBeat's Kim-Mai Cutler, contain the same sort of oddities as the last one, with its toilet-stall vanity mirrors and dining room DJ booth. And Cutler drops words that Morishige, seen yesterday decorating hubby's office, had a hand in the overall design. Highlights:

These sleigh chairs meld old-fashioned rocking chairs with a modern Ikea seats. Weird. Also, we want one. Via Twitter on Flickr.

Where have we seen these green, toy-soldier-esque deer before? Oh right, at the old office, which Morishige also designed. They became almost iconic. But not to the commenter who wrote, under this picture on Flickr, " this is what happens when you give the interior decorator a budget and no guidelines along with it. ;P " Zing! Via Twitter on Flickr.

The deer theme has been extended, with a hunting-and-death twist. Via Twitter on Flickr.

Not only does Twitter have a DJ booth, it also has a house DJ, apparently. Or maybe "Chief Wax Officer" would be a better term. Via Twitter on Flickr.

The very nice view from 795 Folsom St.

It's hard to blame them. Still, some of the pictures compiled by TechCrunch — from Twitter, naturally — have us scratching our heads. Click on any of the first three items in the gallery below to see what we mean.

The mirror in the toilet stall. Bill Farner, who took this shot, is confused about this oddly-located "vanity" mirror's purpose. Can't say we blame him!

The lone "at" symbol on this wall. Wouldn't "@wall" be more appropriate? Or "@couch!"By Ryan King.

The DJ booth in the dining room. It's not just lunch, it's a party! By @caroline.

DJ booth in context (it's in the back). By Bill Farner.

This isn't one of the "weird" things, but it's noteworthy because of the subject: That's Ev Williams' wife Sara Morishige. So this, presumably, is the CEO's own office. Anyone know what the "795" is about? In any case, it's generous of the new mom and longtime designer to handle the interior of her husband's office. That's going to be a crowded wall, judging from the density of what's up so far. By @caroline.

Obama just said the following in China, according to TechCrunch and various other news outlets:

"I have never used Twitter but I'm an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access."

Some of the Twitterati are taking it hard. Just WHO have they been Following??

@netWire "Shocking, given that his account with 2.6 million followers has even been "verified" by Twitter headquarters' !!!

@BuzzEdition "WHOA...I thought Obama HAD used twitter...so sad now....."

@Amadeus3000 "I thought he used his account himself in early campaign days.."

@funuhu "Shocking! I am sad."

The rest of us can take solace in the fact that the most powerful man in the world knows he has far bigger issues on his plate than cranking out tweets. The only person who should be embarrassed is his ghostwriter, who is averaging less than two tweets per day. HOPE needs to spread faster than that!

When someone supposedly dies on Twitter, there are nothing but questions that aren't "Is this person actually dead?" Because who gives a shit if they're actually dead. There are issues here:

Do people actually trust Twitter?
Who do they trust?
Why? It's just someone with a Twitter.

But they do! And sometimes, that information is valid, and all it takes is one Tweet for Twitter to be the needle in a haystack screaming to be found. But Twitter, like the people who use it, is weird.

Which would explain part of the answer to the question, What do Kanye West, Lil' Wayne, Rick Astley, Britney Spears, Harrison Ford, Jeff Goldblum, Miley Cyrus have in common with Morrissey? They've all been "killed" by Twitter. But not the other questions they present:

Who starts the _____ is dead rumors? Anyone and everyone! It can be some high school junior, or, as is this case, the New York Times The Moment blog, trying to crowdsource information. If you suggest someone who isn't dead may be dead, you've started a ____ Is Dead meme.

Why did they start the _____ Is Dead memes? For all kinds of reasons! Said high school junior who, bored and stoned in his US Government Honors class, decides that John Bolton, who has a funny mustache, is dead. He can then raise his hand and start a discussion about John Bolton being dead! Or maybe someone hears something and decides that they need to know more, because they actually care about this person's impact in their lives (as is, possibly, the case with Moz and The Moment). But mostly, the impulse to declare someone dead who isn't has to come from a place of mischief. Having to explain that you're not dead, you're just waiting to be seated at Pastis, could be a serious inconvenience for you and your publicist. Or if you're not a publicist or don't have one, a "normal" person who has to go out of their way to call their parents and explain that the stress they just went through was for naught.

What would be considered a "successful" ______ is dead meme?

A+: Getting a mainstream media outlet to report on the death, or rumors of the death. Newspapers, newspaper's websites, breaking news websites or Twitter accounts (like Drudge or BNO), CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, etc. If you can get someone to say something on the air about someone who's dead that isn't dead, without it being a denial, you've done an awesome job.

B+ to B: A personal denial. Get someone to admit that they're not dead through someone who isn't their publicist, either because their publicist's credibility was called into question, or because they weren't picking up the phone when they should've.

B-: A publicist denial. Fucking up a publicist's day isn't nearly as mischievous as fucking up Miley Cyrus' day, but still equally satisfying.

C+ to C-: High-profile news-denial. If a news outlet has to report and quell the rumor, at least you got it out there to the right people.

D+ to D: High-profile gossip denial. These people sort out death rumors professionally, and if yours is smart or obscure enough to make their job tough, decent, but otherwise, you're throwing them something slow and down the middle.

D- Subversive gossip and or news crowdsourcinng for an answer (see above, also, here), but add one grade notch for every 50,000 viewers they get a day.

F: You get re-tweeted a few times. That's it.

So, how do you do it correctly?

1. Pick your target correctly. Find an obscure figure who isn't exactly "popular" amongst Twitter's celebrities. Make sure they're not on Twitter, or Twittering when you put the rumor out there. This would be an example of a "Twitter Death Meme Fail":

They can't Twitter their reaction, and they can't have people with them who could Twitter a denial. A really great pick is someone who you didn't even know was still alive. Marian Seldes would be decent, so would Kathleen Turner, because then, you can get a bunch of insane Broadway gays to start freaking out and asking questions. Which brings us to the second step:

2. Find someone to help corroborate your story. Make sure to find someone with decent cred and mix of followers with mixed interests.

You need someone to breathe on the burning embers to get a flame, right?

3. Stay silent. Don't say anything else, especially when people ask you where you heard that. Tip off a few gossip blogs, or blogs that are in the periphery of gossip and/or news blogs.

4. Wait. Teach a man to fish, he'll be set for life. But teach a man to fish without telling him that screaming "BE CAUGHT, YOU FUCKING FISH" won't help, and he's screwed. Stay calm. Wait for this thing to erupt. Once you've put it out there, unless you have multiple accounts with lots of followers to help corroborate your own story, all you can do is see what happens. You've set a line out there, enjoy the natural course it's going to take. Maybe go for a walk, work out, play with your dog. Enjoy the time you have before you get back to your computer to find out from P-Nasty himself that one of the Baldwin brothers had an aneurysm while grilling tandoori chicken skewers.

5. Celebrate correctly. Twitter provides for all. Once you've successfully "killed" someone via Twitter, you should respect and honor their not-dead-ness with a seance. A Twitter seance. Or, a Tweance.

And there you go! How to kill someone with Twitter, correctly. Now, go out there, and get your death fetish on. And please report back to us with your best results.

Oh, and by the way: Morrissey isn't dead. We think. Nice work.

Under the old rules of Twitter tradition, you "re-tweeted" another user by placing the letters "RT" before the quote and after any commentary you yourself added, like so:

If you use the new built-in re-tweet system, the original tweet would be copied into your stream under the byline of the original tweeter, like so:

The obvious problem: You lose the ability to actually say anything about what you're quoting if you use the new system. Also, all your followers are going to get a strange and potentially confusing avatar of someone they're not subscribed to in their stream.

On the bright side, this system is great for Twitter Inc. "Retweets potentially reveal very interesting data," Twitter CEO Evan Williams writes in a blog post about the new re-tweeting feature. Indeed, the feature offers a metric with which to rank tweets and thereby the results of Twitter searches and Twitter users themselves. Twitter could sell this data, provided free by its users, to the richest and most favored bidders, just like the microblogging startup did with the actual content of tweets.

The feature also helps Twitter's celebrity power users. Writes Williams:

RTs can actually be easily faked, which has become a form of spam, wherein well-known people are shown to be promoting something they never twittered about.

But, hey, if you don't like this new re-tweet thing that is so awesome for celebrities and Twitter Inc., you can always opt out. As Williams writes (emphasis from original), "you can turn off Retweets for everyone you follow (individually)." So just click "OFF" 200 times? Sounds super-easy!

(Top pic: Twitter co-founders Williams and Biz Stone, by Mathieu Thouvenin.)

British writer and analyst Charles Leadbeater, and researcher Annika Wong, have put together a report called Cloud Culture to be published by the British Council next year. Their statistical study, provided to me by Leadbeater, is based on figures from the social media analytics company Sysomos. It shows that such a tiny proportion of Iranians are on Twitter that any stories about a new movement based on the social network are meaningless. The figure they provide, by they way, includes the thousands of foreigners who changed their Twitter location to Tehran when the 'Iranian internet revolution' story struck after the elections in June and Facebook and Twitter were afire with Iran sentiment. So the likely figure is even lower.

The report adds that only one third of Iranians have internet access at all. And because opposition supporters are young, and on the internet, and Ahmadinejad supporters tend to be older and rural, the picture on the ground is likely skewed by any analysis that relies on tweets.

Leadbeater and Wong also compile a series of hyperbolic quotes from a variety of media sources at the time of the protests:

• "Twitter has become a key information conduit as the authorities in Tehran have cracked down on reporting by traditional media." Chris Nuttall and Daniel Dombey, Financial Times.
• "After disputed election results and massive street demonstrations in Tehran, Iran, information is flooding out of the country – on Twitter." Ashley Terry, Global News.
• "This is it. The big one." Clay Shirky of NYU.
• "We've been struck by the amount of video and eyewitness testimony... The days when regimes can control the flow of information are over." Jon Williams, BBC World News editor.

The meme was just too tempting, it seems, for anyone to dig into its veracity. The media — this site included — loves to write about Twitter, and loved doing so even more in summer when it was even newer and shiner. The storyline also fit the fact that Iran is a young country, and chimed with the heartbreaking YouTube video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan.

The solidarity that thousands, even millions of Americans showed with the people of Iran during June's elections and the subsequent protests was admirable. It was also potentially dangerous. I was at the UN protests against President Ahmadinejad earlier this fall. Several young men were wearing dust masks they had purchased from hardware stores. I asked one why. "I am wearing it because I have to go back to Iran," said a softly-spoken and shy 28-year-old student who gave his name only as Mohammed. "I return next year and this is for safety, in case they are watching," he added, pointing to his mask. "It could be the best $3 I ever spend."

If Mohammed is picked up despite his dust mask, the fact that the protests in Tehran were partly fomented by Western support based on a false story about Twitter will be of no consolation. It's probably not much comfort to these people either.

A spot on the microblogging service's Suggested User List of accounts for new users has helped Daniel Brusilovsky reach just under 120,000 followers. He's also been officially "Verified" by Twitter Inc., lest someone impersonate the powerful 16-year-old. His influence at the microblogging startup apparently runs deep: he's meeting with Twitter's COO, right now.

At TechCrunch, he's a writer who dabbles in events and business development. He's also the young face of video-casting service Qik and CEO of his own TeensInTech.com. Oh, and he advises at least two other companies.

Brusilovsky's quick ascent contains lessons for the more aged and less accomplished:

• Don't fit in? Perfect! Brusilovsky was "the only one who needed his parents to pick him up from" a tech conference last year, according to GigaOM. The intervening year has only brought more mainstream success, like joining TechCrunch in June and getting the Twitter stamp of approval.
• Form a community of similar misfits. TeensInTech is a site for young people as terrifyingly ambitious and energetic as Brusilovsky. They're coming for us all. Soon.
• "Don't give up." That one's from Brusilovsky. And we do not question Brusilovsky.

Let's just hope this promising kid finishes school and goes on to college. Just because Bill Gates, the founders of Google, the founders of Twitter and the founder of Oracle all dropped out of school doesn't mean it pays, kid.

(Pic by Andrew Mager)