Big TV events are becoming an increasingly popular catalyst of activity on social media, with sporting events being at the top of the list. Many of us can no longer enjoy a Super Bowl without checking Twitter every three seconds. Last year, there were several moments during the Super Bowl that set records for the most tweets per second during a sporting event, with a high of 4,064 TPS. Of course, the highs during the Super Bowl were no match for New Years Eve 2011 in Japan, which saw 6,939 tweets per second.

A year later, the Japanese continue to be avid tweeters, as the premiere of Japanese movie “Castles In The Sky” set the all-time record in December for tweets per second, at 25,088.

The TPS record has since been held by Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement at the MTV VMAs, at 8,860 tweets per second, which surpassed the U.S. women’s soccer team’s game at 7,196 Tweets per second. Among other notable Twitter events: Steve Jobs’ death at 6,049, Bin Laden’s death at 5,106 TPS, the day of the Japanese earthquake and Tsunami in March at 5,530 TPS, and the Royal Wedding in England in April at 3,966 TPS.

Clearly, we are getting a glimpse of the increasing relevance and popularity of Twitter during important events, as Twitter’s official Twitter account (head explosion) announced tonight that, in the final three minutes of Super Bowl 2012, there was an average of 10,000 tweets per second. Obviously, this is less than half the tweet frequency (I’ll coin the “TF” acronym) of the Castles In The Sky premiere, but by all accounts this is the record for TF during a live sporting event.

No doubt the 2012 Olympics in London, and 100 other events will give tonight’s Super Bowl a run for its money, but, for now, let us revel in tweet history.

Twitter will no doubt be sharing more on the activity during the Super Bowl, which we will include as soon as we have it.

In the final three minutes of the Super Bowl tonight, there were an average of 10,000 Tweets per second.—
Twitter (@twitter) February 06, 2012

While we nerds may best remember LeVar Burton as a VISOR-clad Starfleet officer, he also spent much of the 80s and 90s instilling in children an appreciation for reading. In fact, Burton is still stuck to the idea of encouraging childhood literacy — he launched a new company called RRKidz this past September that’s currently working on (among other things) a “disruptive” new iPad reading app.

But when the time came to set up the all-important Twitter account to provide “the latest info on the upcoming relaunch of [Reading Rainbow] as an app,” he found that someone had already laid claim to the @readingrainbow handle. What’s more, the account owner hadn’t so much as made a peep in the last three years. Being a nice guy, Burton tried reaching out to the account owner but was apparently met with silence.

So what’s a geek icon like LeVar Burton to do? Why, call on his fans of course. Burton tweeted the following last night to his 1.74 million followers and the official Twitter account:

Dear @twitter I'm trying to contact the individual who's sitting on @ReadingRainbow but he hasn't Tweeted in #3YEARS Can you help? Thanks!

—
LeVar Burton (@levarburton) February 01, 2012

Ultimately, over 700 users ended up retweeting Burton’s call for help, which apparently prompted the folks at Twitter to leap into action. The @readingrainbow account ended up in Burton’s control within just over two hours of his initial plea. It’s a pretty impressive turnaround time considering some folks faced with similar situations have had to wait days before Twitter managed to make things work in their favor. Then again, most people can’t claim to have spent time debugging the warp core on a Galaxy-class starship.

I crack me up.

Incredibly lame pop culture references aside, Burton’s story isn’t exactly a new one. Though Twitter representatives declined to offer specific numbers when it comes to instances of name squatting, they lay out a clear stance against the practice in their (aptly named) Twitter Rules.

It’s a potentially huge problem for Twitter — with growth still on the uptick, more and more people look at Twitter as a crucial source for real-time news and insight into other people’s lives. Squatters, be they inadvertent or not, have the potential to mar brands and personal reputations, and Twitter will have to keep their collective guards up if they want people and companies to keep up all that sharing.

Twitter has posted a seriously awful/hilarious recruiting video to YouTube, which the company says was the product of last week’s “Hack Week.” During this time, employees were able to take time away from their day-to-day work to collaborate on new ideas. Although it was only posted on Friday, the video has already seen over 400,000 views at the time of writing. Why so viral? Because it’s parodying the entire genre of startup recruiting videos by purposefully being bad. Really, really bad. So bad it’s funny. Or at least that’s the hope.

The video has everything: amateurish effects, cheesy music, stilted speech, bad acting, poor production quality, and sayings like: “Man this is a sweet job. But working at Twitter isn’t just a sweet job, it’s a way of life – a way of life that’s like a sweet job.”

Yeah, you pretty much have to watch this one.

Credit/blame for the video goes to Ian Padgham and Twitter video producer Jeremy Briggs, and it even features a cameo from Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO. (As well as a version of him as a drawing with talking lips.)

The inspiration for the video clearly comes from Saturday Night Live’s “Laser Cats” skits, a series of digital shorts that feature Andy Samberg and Bill Hader pitching a similarly disinterested Lorne Michaels their low-budget movies involving cats with lasers strapped to their heads.

Swap in Costolo for Michaels, and you end up with this:

While you’re watching, look for the Easter egg among the list of available jobs that scrolls by too fast to see. I won’t spoil it for you, but that particular job sounds seriously awesome.

Hat tip: AdWeek

Editor’s Note: Richard Fontaine, a Senior Advisor at the Center for a New American Security, is the co-author of Internet Freedom: A Foreign Policy Imperative in the Digital Age. Follow him @rhfontaine.

Twitter has taken fire in recent days from activists and bloggers who fear that the company’s new censorship policies will muffle online freedom. News reports recall the ways in which protestors have had made use of Twitter to oppose dictatorships, and dissidents express concern that their ability to communicate will be harmed. The more immediate issue, however, may lie elsewhere. Twitter’s new policies demonstrate vividly the complicated relationship between Internet freedom and democratic government.

The complications take on greater importance in light of America’s global Internet freedom strategy. The U.S. government began an active policy of promoting Internet freedom in the second George W. Bush term, and its efforts have accelerated in the Obama administration. The State Department devotes tens of millions of dollars to support technology and training for online dissidents, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has given a series of major speeches highlighting the issue. In one, she invoked Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s famous four freedoms, added a fifth — the “freedom to connect” — and observed that “the spread of information networks is forming a new nervous system for our planet.”

It is easy to imagine two sides locked in pitched battle over Internet freedom: The democracies, embracing the freedom to connect for all, and the dictatorships, who censor, monitor, and disrupt. Indeed, pressing the cause of Internet freedom has thus far generally meant taking on autocracies, like Beijing and its Great Firewall, the Mubarak regime when it shuttered Egypt’s Internet during the 2011 protests, or Iran as it systematically monitors domestic dissidents. But it has become increasingly clear that autocracies alone do not challenge Internet freedom; democracies do as well.

In the blog post explaining its new policy, Twitter hit on this truth, noting that the company will be active in “countries that have different ideas” than the United States “about the contours of freedom of expression.” All democracies restrict speech to some degree, and the forms of banned expression vary, ranging from child pornography (which is illegal virtually everywhere) to hate speech (banned in Europe and other places but not the United States) to country-specific expression (such as criticism of national heroes or monarchs).

America, however, is an outlier. The United States recognizes some limits on free expression – slander, perjury, “fighting words” and certain other forms of expression are illegal online or off – but its commitment to free speech is nevertheless the most absolute of any major country. This puts it in potential conflict with fellow democracies about what constitute legitimate restrictions on online expression. Given Washington’s role as the world’s most active proponent of Internet freedom, it also complicates its efforts to rally fellow democracies behind the cause.

The examples of differing democratic practice abound. Witness, for example, the recent request by Indian telecommunications minister Kapil Sibal to Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others that they remove content deemed insulting to leaders of the Indian Congress party. Mr. Sibal pledged that his government would take unspecified steps to act if the private sector would not. This month, during a hearing on a related case, an Indian high court justice said that, “like China,” the government could block websites entirely if their hosts do not remove offensive content. Turkey banned YouTube for two years because it refused to remove videos that Turkish courts deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Germany and other countries prohibit Holocaust denial online, and France bans the sale of Nazi paraphernalia over the Internet. Governments in Britain, Italy and Germany have established lists of blocked websites – generally those containing child pornography, hate speech, or online gambling platforms – even though those lists are not always transparent.

The differences arise not only in national policy, but in international law as well. A number of European democracies, including Denmark, France, Slovenia and Switzerland, have signed an additional protocol to the European Convention on Cybercrime, which requires them criminalize such acts as using computers to distribute xenophobic material or insult people because of their race, religion, or ethnic origin.

The United States faces its own potential contradictions. Secretary Clinton used one of her major addresses on Internet freedom to explain why the notion did not apply when Wikileaks published thousands of classified cables online. A district court recently ruled that, as part of its lawful intercept authorities, the Justice Department can seize Twitter feeds. And then there is the tremendous debate that has emerged over the Stop Online Privacy Act.

The truth is that the U.S. government will always enforce some limits on free expression, and our political system will continually wrestle with where the limits should be drawn. But we should not allow this to undermine the important cause of promoting global Internet freedom. Authoritarian governments will inevitably attempt to shield themselves from criticism and pressure by pointing to democracies that ban online expression. Denying them the opportunity to do so successfully will require the United States and other to articulate, publicly and consistently, the critical distinction between the restrictions placed on online speech by democracies and the repression favored by many autocracies.

The distinction rests not only in the kind of banned speech, but also in the process by which the decision to restrict it is made. True democracies bar forms of expression based on law and regulation, and they make decisions to do so in accordance with due process. Their pronouncements are generally transparent, with decision makers accountable to the law, to legislatures, and ultimately to the people, who can turn them out of office in periodic elections. There is a world of difference between a democracy banning speech on “security” grounds when the citizens know what the decision is, who made it, and how to change it, and a dictatorship banning its own “security”-infringing speech by autocratic fiat.

It is crucial to make that distinction clear. Doing so can benefit America’s diplomatic effort to promote Internet freedom, and it may also help guide policymakers at home. Resolving tough new issues often involves complex considerations of technology, law, and fundamental principle. In remembering what makes a democratic approach to the Internet distinctive, we might avoid falling prey to measures that would suggest we are otherwise.

Yesterday’s announcement that Twitter would be selectively censoring tweets based on country was not well-received. But part of that announcement was the assurance that the process would at least be transparent. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

They also mentioned that they were working with Chilling Effects to make notices and orders sent to Twitter publicly available. At the time of the post yesterday, the site wasn’t up yet, but you can now browse it at chillingeffects.org/twitter.

It’s a good thing, certainly, though not quite a successful saving throw versus the localized-censorship piece. The database has several thousand DMCA takedown requests right now, but is not quite up to date — it isn’t clear at what rate they’re updating the database, but there aren’t many from this month so it seems to be something less than weekly.

Browsing the listings is a good way to waste 15 minutes, looking at the different ways people tend to provoke a DMCA takedown request. There’s a lot of cricket being linked to, apparently. And there are the inevitable copyrighted avatars.

What’s interesting to me is that there are a number of requests that in themselves request dozens of tweets to be taken down; this one, for example, points out a number of pirated movies being linked to, and the accounts are clearly bots. The DMCA request is only for the movies the rightsholder is concerned with — which is at once both correct and perverse. The account only exists to link to copyrighted material and has done so thousands of times, but everyone involved would rather snip out individual tweets one by one. Talk about a Sisyphean task.

Presumably this database will also house the official requests by governments who wish to restrict tweets based on content. While most won’t agree with Twitter’s decision to accede to these repressive entities’ wishes, it can at least be hoped that it will be done so with maximum transparency. The best thing Twitter users can do, perhaps, is to make sure this database is up to date and reflective of the restrictions being placed on tweets. Until a solution comes along, reducing the harm this new policy does and making sure it’s well understood should take priority.

Twitter has announced in a blog post a glorious new ability: “the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world.” At last!

There are two ways of looking at this new “ability,” one optimistic and one pessimistic. One is that Twitter is now more able to effectively tailor itself to the needs of certain countries. The other is that Twitter is now more able to effectively tailor itself to the needs of certain countries.

In a way, it’s a good solution: countries where it is forbidden to speak ill of God or well of Hitler will now be able to extend those restrictions to Twitter. But, on the other hand, countries where it is forbidden to speak ill of God or well of Hitler will now be able to extend those restrictions to Twitter.

Of course, they were always able to, in a way: a tweet that fell afoul of restrictions could be removed globally. Not an ideal solution, as people in countries without official limits on free speech would be unable to hear what was being said. Now the censorship will be limited to the bounds of the country that requests it.

The problem is that in a way, that is worse. Twitter, and the net in general, are by nature a global communication platform. National conflicts on the internet (for example, an album being released in October in the UK and December in the US) are strange and illogical. Before this announcement, Twitter was a global platform on which something was either said or not said, on a global scale. Now, Twitter’s new power to enforce censorship depending on your country both legitimizes the blocks and concedes international territory specifically to countries that “have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression.” This diplomatic casting of the restriction of speech, from a company that is built around the idea of free communication, is troubling.

Unfortunately, it’s a logical step for a platform that wants to be accepted worldwide. Some companies have to make serious concessions in the way they do business in order to satisfy the whims of local business magnates, secret police, and religious leaders. Twitter has just made one of these concessions; perhaps they think of themselves as the willow, bending that it might not break. As the new method has not been applied yet, it is difficult to say exactly how complete, or perhaps how merely symbolic, the block will be.

A meta-national community like Twitter must both transcend and respect its constituent parts, and that requires some tough decisions. Let’s hope they made this decision with the promise of better global communication in mind.

There’s no shortage of novel things you can strongarm Siri into doing for you these days, but sometimes it’s the little things that get me excited.

While not as innately flashy as being able to start a car, a new (and currently nameless) tweak from developer InfectionFX does something that Siri should have been able to do from the beginning: tweet for you.

Sure, it’s already technically possible to do this — setting your Twitter account to accept tweets via text gets the job done, but its reliance on a mobile network means that illicit Siri users with iPod Touches can’t join in the fun. With this new tweak though, any user with a jailbroken Siri-friendly device will soon be able to verbally tweet with reckless abandon.

InfectionFX — also known as Grooveshark employee and part-time iOS hacker Tyler Nettleton — whipped up the tweak late last night after asking his Twitter followers if they wanted to see it happen. The demo videos that have since popped up show it that it works like a charm even in its pre-release state, as Siri remarks that the tweet was sent and the sound of a sweet little bird can be heard punctuating her announcement. Pay no mind to the displayed text though — the tweet seems to go through just fine even though Nettleton hasn’t yet changed her text response.

The Siri tweak isn’t available just yet though, but it should find its way into the third-party Cydia app store by the end of the week.

Hat tip to Phil Synowiec of iOSVlog for the video!

In preparation for a ramp up of its monetization efforts and its first beta phase of self serve ads, Twitter has bought security startup Dasient, which specializes in malware and fighting spam. The team will be integrated into “revenue engineering,” a.k.a the ad product team under directors Kevin Weil and Alex Roetter.

From the Dasient blog:

“Since its inception, Dasient has been focused on solving web-scale security problems involving malware and other types of online abuse. In 2009, Dasient launched its web anti-malware platform, capable of scanning URLs and websites for the presence of harmful content. In 2010, Dasient launched the industry’s first anti-malvertising service to protect ad networks and publishers from the scourge of malicious ads. Over the last year, we have been very active in securing the ads and content of the some of the industry’s largest ad networks and web sites.”

Twitter advertising’s most likely use of a full staff trained in anti-spam and anti-malware strategy is to protect a product (like Twitter’s self-serve ads for example) from fraud and attempts at abuse. It was a large acquisition according to sources, in terms of sheer size of the team.

The last acquisition Twitter “revenue engineering” made was AdGrok, back in June, and curation tool Summify just got snapped up by a different Twitter department last week. Dasient itself was founded by Googlers Neil Daswani, Ameet Ranadive and Shariq Rizvi and backed by over $4 million from Google Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures, Floodgate, Radar Partners and others pre-acquisition.

Sometimes the nicest of people, when faced with the pressure of competition, make evil stupid decisions. That’s pretty much what happened to Google when it realized that Facebook was about to eat its lunch with regards to social data on the web — so it started doing dumb things, like building Google Buzz, Wave and most recently rolling out “Search Plus Your World” which to the rest of the world just looks like “Search Plus Google+.”

Now a bunch of Twitter and Facebook and Myspace engineers (I love it when nerds grow a pair) are gently reminding Google of its original priorities with the ingenious Focus on the User, a bookmarklet that attempts to get Google users their “real” social results. Focus on the User uses Google’s own algorithms to serve up relevant social sites, you know, instead of all Google+ all the time. I’ve tried it, it works, let’s eat.

The best part, and the part that cuts through all the PR bullshit, is this in the FAQ:

Q: I thought Google needed a deal and more info from social sites to integrate them into its new social features?

A: This is clearly not true. The bookmarklet never accesses any server or API outside of google.com. The information has already been indexed and ranked by Google.

You can fool some people sometimes …

Japan-based UC Technology Corp. [JP] has developed a wireless sensor that can automatically post data like temperature, humidity, illuminance, or radiation levels to Twitter. The so-called “Tsubuyaku Sensor” [JP, PDF] is mainly designed for use in food warehouses, plants, or wine cellars.

The data can be checked remotely on Twitter (the account can be set to private or public). UC Technology says that the sensor has a battery life of a year when it posts data once per minute.

The company explains:

You connect this device to the Internet and plug in the AC adapter. You can also connect a slave unit, so you have a wireless sensor that measures temperature, humidity, and sunshine. This sensor makes the wireless connection automatically, and sends its data each time. The connection range is about 40 m, but if you want to make measurements even further away, there’s a relay unit as well. That’s used by plugging it into a wall socket and it extends the range to 60 m.

This video, shot by Diginfo TV in Tokyo, provides more insight (in English):

UC Technology plans to start selling the sensor in Japan this month (prices: US560 for the base unit, US$286 for each sensor).

If Twitter continued to sell its firehose to Google, fewer searches would occur on Twitter’s internal search engine where the microblog platform can serve its own ads. That’s why sources familiar with the negotiations tell me Twitter wouldn’t renew the data access deal at any price, or at least set a ludicrously high price to sink the deal. Cash and increased visibility on Google Search was more valuable to Twitter in 2009 when it was still trying to gain serious traction. But by July 2011 Twitter was more established and ready to try monetizing without Google. A firehose deal would have impeded this, so it’s understandable why Twitter walked away.

There are a lot of conflicting reports on exactly how negotiations went down, stirred up by the launch of Google Search plus Your World (Search+) which favors Google+ results. Regardless of the exact details, the underlying fact is that it the inclusion of tweets in Google Search wasn’t the best thing for Twitter.

[Update: As Liz Gannes points out, Twitter did do a firehose deal with Bing. However, Twitter may have seen Microsoft and Bing as less of a threat, and viewed exposure to Bing's early adopters as more advantageous than exposure to Google searchers.]

Actually, I think backing out of the Google firehose deal was a courageous move for Twitter. It showed the company was willing to bet on continued growth and making Promoted Tweets, Accounts, and Trends work as a major revenue stream. Since these sponsored content types are artificially injected into Twitter Search results and the home page, they wouldn’t have appeared in Google Search.

Unfortunately for the end-user, no deal means Search+ isn’t quite as useful as it could be, as Steven Levy describes. Google has the ability to point to relevant Twitter accounts in its People and Pages Box since they’re not strapped with rel=nofollow, but doesn’t currently. Maybe Google will change that soon in the name of offering the most relevant results. Maybe it will change that years down the road due to pressure from the FTC or Justice Department. By then Google may have weathered the monopoly paradox and accomplished its goal of using its natural dominance in search to grow Google+. We’ll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, Twitter Search still needs a lot of improvement, particularly around surfacing relevant older tweets. Hopefully with time it will come to encompass functionality Google Search could have provided.

As John Battelle says, the politics surrounding data access make it very complicated for anyone to offer comprehensive personalized search. So for now, real-time search remains fragmented and less effective than it could be, but Twitter has a chance to stand on its own two little bird talons.

The Republican Primaries are underway, with two states already in the rearview mirror. The second primary, New Hampshire, wrapped up last night. Mitt Romney took home the most votes from New Hampshire voters, winning just about every county and beating out Ron Paul, who came in second, followed by Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum, rounding out the pack.

With social media playing an increasingly important role in spreading political messages and news, Crimson Hexagon, a company that specializes in social media analytics, delved into the Twittersphere to find out which of the candidates is being discussed most positively online.

Although Romney has already taken home two victories, it seems that Ron Paul is still the most discussed — and most positively discussed — candidate. From January 6th through the end of the New Hampshire primary, Ron Paul was the more actively discussed candidate, 26 percent to 22 percent and edged out Romney in the number of positive mentions on Twitter by a margin of 3 percent.

Today, in the aftermath of last night’s results, Paul continued to both be more actively discussed, receiving more positive mentions on the social network than Romney — 14 percent to 12 percent.

Somewhat ironically, although each of the Republican candidates’ Twitter accounts were alive and well, on the day of the New Hampshire primary, President Obama still managed to outdo the posse in terms of volume of tweets, firing out 4 more tweets than Rick Santorum, the most active republican tweeter, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Of course, Obama’s Twitter account is run by his campaign staff, as are most politicians’. And number of Twitter followers won’t win you an election, although it can certainly help spread the message.

Below you can see the full breakdown of the Twitter discussion of the top two finishing Republican candidates. Though Ron Paul lost last night, his supporters have been active over the last week; his second place finish last night and top spot in positive discussion on Twitter may be, at the least, a moral victory going forward.

So if you’re Ron Paul, just based on the numbers, it’s time to turn that attention to Twitter, especially over Facebook, where Mitt Romney both has more “Likes” and is being more actively discussed than Paul.

More below:

I love it when tech companies start acting like bickering exes. This morning Google announced that it was gasp going to start mixing its chocolate  Google+ results into your peanut butter normal search results, optionally of course. Twitter wasn’t happy with this because Twitter and Google were totally dating for a year and nine months until they broke up last July.

Feeling threatened (because these Google+ results will inevitably drive valuable traffic back to Google’s own properties), Twitter was all like,”We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

Google was then like, “Wait a minute, weren’t you the one to leave first?” or more accurately with this (verbatim) statement on Google+ “We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.”

As far as I can see, this is the first time that either company has blamed the other publicly for the non-renewal. According to one source Twitter just put a number on the new deal that was “too ridiculous” (under $100 million but still “a lot.”), so from Twitter’s perspective, it could look like Google wasn’t accepting its terms.

Twitter hasn’t responded to Google’s response yet. I hope it’ll be through a tweet.

This morning, Google began rolling out a major change to its core search engine that intertwines results from Google+ (and Picasa) with the ‘normal’ algorithmically-generated results we’ve come to expect. There have been plenty of critiques of the news, including John Battelle’s discussion on how this isn’t actually integrating ‘Your World’, as Google calls it, but rather just its own social network.

And now there’s another critic that’s coming out swinging: Twitter.

Earlier today the company’s General Counsel Alex Macgillivray, who was a top attorney at Google prior to making the jump to Twitter, called it “A bad day for the Internet”, and stated that some of his former colleagues were likely upset by the decision to “warp” Google’s results. And now Twitter itself has followed up with a statement denouncing the feature — and rather than relying on the wishy-washy PR speak big companies are fond of, it’s very direct.

Here’s the full statement:

For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.

Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we’ve seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.

We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.

Now, some context. Google used to have a deal with Twitter whereby Tweets would appear as part of Google’s real-time results. These would sometimes appear baked into the results page for a timely query on Google, about, say, breaking news or a sporting event, and were also accessible by going to a dedicated real-time search section. That partnership terminated in July 2011, and was not renewed.

Twitter is obviously upset about today’s launch for a few reasons. For one, it made money off of its deal with Google. It wants Google to need its data. And there’s the potential that today’s launch may incentivize publishers and users to pay more attention to Google+ when it comes to sharing breaking news — after all, it’s the only service that’s going to pop up in Google search results. Which would reduce Google’s reliance on Twitter.

Bad day for the Internet. bit.ly/Am5bqz Having been there, I can imagine the dissension @Google to search being warped this way.

—
Alex Macgillivray (@amac) January 10, 2012

As for Twitter’s assertion that with these changes, finding information will be “much harder for everyone”: if people are looking to access the real-time data that is shared on Twitter (which, to Twitter’s credit, is definitely more likely to include breaking news than most of the stuff being shared on Google+), then they can obviously still head to Twitter’s own search product. Which could potentially be a very popular search portal itself, but, in my experience, is still pretty cruddy.

But Twitter does have a point: people trust Google to serve up the most timely, relevant information possible. And without Twitter’s data, it’s going to have a hard time doing that. Of course, Google probably already has its own answer to this drafted, and I suspect it reads something like, “if Twitter wants people to find tweets in Google, they can open up their API.”  I’m reaching out to them for their official response now.

Update: Google just posted this response to its official Google+ Page:

We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.

Top image by Eldh on Flickr

Twitter has just announced a new partnership with three music data services, The Echo Nest, Gracenote, and Rovi are, to help scale the distribution of Twitter account data for musicians for integration in consumer-facing apps. Via the pilot program, Twitter developers can now work with partners to integrate Verified Account @handles from thousands of musicians and Tweets into their music and entertainment services.

For example, the Echo Nest will connect Twitter Verified Accounts to its Rosetta Stone service to allow developers to integrate Tweets from musicians directly into their apps. The Rosetta Stone service helps music services “speak the same language” on a data level by translating unique identifiers across various services. The Echo Nest’s music intelligence platform offers over 5 billion data points on over 30 million songs and over 2 million artists. Over 220 music applications have been built on its platform to date. The startup actually powers Spotify Radio.

Gracenote, which powers music data for Apple iTunes, HTC smart phones, Ford SYNC and Sony BRAVIA TVs, will integrate Twitter Verified Accounts for musicians, actors and other artists into its database of music and video information, which includes metadata for millions of artists, albums and movies. .

Via the partnership, Rovi, whose database also includes reviews, artist bios and music clips, and is used by manufacturers and services providers, will allow home entertainment companies a way to add Tweets directly from Verified Accounts into their services.

We can expect to see Twitter announce similar partnerships in the entertainment space. Twitter’s Jason Costa writes that the company plans to add more partnerships to the pilot program, which will extend the Twitter experience to a new set of devices and applications. Clearly, there are a number of potential ways that Twitter could expand this partnership to actors and actresses, as well as visual artists and more.

Update: Tickets are now sold out. Be sure to keep your eye out for ticket giveaways and for when we release our next batch of tickets.

The nominations have been tabulated and the votes are in. Over 300,000 nominations were calculated across 20 categories. Along with our partners GigaOm and VentureBeat, we are very proud to announce the finalists for 2011′s best in technology. Voting begins now.

For 2011, we’ve added some new categories. Best Location App, Best Cloud Services and Biggest Social Impact join the Crunchies ranks this year. You’ll also find Best Social App, the NYC-dominated category of Best Shopping App, Best New Startup and the year’s best VC’s and Angel Investors. Newcomers like TaskRabbit’s Leah Busque and Keith Rabois for his angel investments (Airbnb, LinkedIn, Yammer, Path, YouTube) made the list of finalists, as well as industry favorites such as Marc Andreessen, Jack Dorsey, Mark Pincus and Ron Conway.

There are some pretty good match-ups this year. Google+ is up against Facebook Timeline for Best Social App, along with the New New Twitter, Instagram, and Path 2.0). The Kindle Fire is competing with the iPad 2 for Best New Device. And Pinterest, Turntable.fm, Nest, Fab, and Codecademy are all vying for Best New Startup (even though two of those were complete pivots). LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman is up for Angel of the Year. His seed investment in Zynga is worth 160 times what he paid for it. But AngelList founders Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi are also finalists in the category for helping to democratize angel investing, along with Conway, Rabois, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham, and Kevin Rose (who has a killer portfolio that includes Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga, and Square). Who will win?

Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote. The rules state that you may vote once per day, per award category, until voting closes on Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 11:59pm PST. There are 20 award categories open for voting, recognizing the top accomplishments across a variety of fields and roles. If you are one of the finalists, create a badge and get your community excited about this honor and get them to vote for you. Winners will be announced on January 31, live at the Crunchies.

In addition to today’s announcement of the Finalists, we are happy to release our next batch of tickets through Eventbrite. The release begins now, so act fast and get them while you can.

Here are your Finalists:

Best Technology Achievement (2010 winner: Google Self Driving Cars)
Lytro (Related posts)
NFC (Related posts)
OnLive (Related posts)
Siri (Related posts)
Tesla Flat Pack Battery (Related posts)

Best Social Application (2010 winner: DailyBooth)
Facebook Timeline (Related posts)
Instagram (Related posts)
Google+ (Related posts)
The New New Twitter (Related posts)
Path 2.0 (Related posts)

Best Shopping Application (2010 winner: Groupon)
Birchbox (Related posts)
Fab (Related posts)
Gilt Groupe (Related posts)
Lot18 (Related posts)
Warby Parker (Related posts)

Best Mobile Application (2010 winner: Google Mobile Maps for Android)
Evernote (Related posts)
Flipboard (Related posts)
Pandora (Related posts)
Spotify (Related posts)
Square (Related posts)
TaskRabbit (Related posts)

Best Location Application (New category for 2011)
Airbnb (Related posts)
Foursquare (Related posts)
Grindr (Related posts)
RunKeeper (Related posts)
Uber (Related posts)

Best Tablet Application (2010 winner: Flipboard)
djay (Related posts)
Eventbrite At the Door (Related posts)
Fotopedia (Related posts)
GarageBand (Related posts)
Netflix (Related posts)
StumbleUpon (Related posts)

Best Design (2010 winner: gogobot)
Gojee (Related posts)
Orchestra (Related posts)
Path 2.0 (Related posts)
Pinterest (Related posts)
Quora (Related posts)

Best Bootstrapped Startup (2010 winner: addmired)
Github (Related posts)
Imgur (Related posts)
Instapaper (Related posts)
Onesheet (Related posts)
Tap Tap Tap (Camera+) (Related posts)

Best Cloud Service (New category for 2011)
Asana (Related posts)
Box (Related posts)
CloudFlare (Related posts)
Dropbox (Related posts)
Okta (Related posts)
Twilio (Related posts)

Best International Startup (2010 winner: Viki)
Badoo (Related posts)
Klarna (Related posts)
Peixe Urbano (Related posts)
Rovio (Related posts)
SoundCloud (Related posts)
Wonga (Related posts)

Best Clean Tech Startup (2010 winner: SolarCity)
Alta Energy (Related posts)
Array Power (Related posts)
EcoATM (Related posts)
EcoMotors (Related posts)
Hara (Related posts)

Best New Device (2010 winner: iPad)
Galaxy Nexus (Related posts)
iPad 2 (Related posts)
iPhone 4S (Related posts)
Kindle Fire (Related posts)
Nest (Related posts)

Best Time Sink (2010 winner: Cityville)
Modern Warfare 3 (Related posts)
Quora (Related posts)
Skyrim (Related posts)
Turntable.fm (Related posts)
Words With Friends (Related posts)

Biggest Social Impact (New category for 2011)
Charity: Water (Related posts)
Khan Academy (Related posts)
Kickstarter (Related posts)
Practice Fusion (Related posts)
Twitter (Related posts)

Angel of the Year (2010 winner: Paul Graham)
Ron Conway (Related posts)
Paul Graham (Related posts)
Reid Hoffman (Related posts)
Keith Rabois (Related posts)
Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi (AngelList) (Related posts for Naval) (Related posts for Babak)
Kevin Rose (Related posts)

VC of the Year (2010 winner: Yuri Milner)
Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz (Related posts for Marc) (Related posts for Ben)
Matt Cohler (Related posts)
Vinod Khosla (Related posts)
Aileen Lee (Related posts)
Yuri Milner (Related posts)
David Sze (Related posts)

Founder of the Year (2010 winner: Mark Pincus)
Leah Busque (Task Rabbit) (Related posts)
Brian Chesky (Airbnb) (Related posts)
Jack Dorsey (Square, Twitter) (Related posts)
Susan Feldman & Ali Pincus (One Kings Lane) (Related posts for Susan) (Related posts for Ali)
Drew Houston (Dropbox) (Related posts)

CEO of the Year (2010 winner: Andrew Mason)
Dick Costolo (Twitter) (Related posts)
Daniel Ek (Spotify) (Related posts)
Phil Libin (Evernote) (Related posts)
Mark Pincus (Zynga) (Related posts)
Jeff Weiner (LinkedIn) (Related posts)

Best New Startup of 2011 (2010 winner: Quora)
Codecademy (Related posts)
Fab (Related posts)
Nest (Related posts)
Pinterest (Related posts)
Turntable.fm (Related posts)

Best Overall Startup of 2011 (2010 winner: Twitter)
Dropbox (Related posts)
Instagram (Related posts)
Gilt Groupe (Related posts)
Spotify (Related posts)
Square (Related posts)
Tumblr (Related posts)

5th Annual Crunchies Awards
Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall
201 Van Ness Ave.
San Francisco, CA

7:30pm – midnight – Awards Ceremony and After Party
A night of celebration with festive attire.

Our sponsors help make the Crunchies happen, if you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities during the ceremony or after-party, please contact Jeanne Logozzo at jeanne@techcrunch.com.

For press credentials, please fill out this request form and confirmations will be sent separately via email.

Following media mogul Rupert Murdoch‘s arrival on Twitter this week, wife Wendi Deng (@wendi_deng) showed up shortly afterwards, tweeting alongside her husband, flirting with comedian Ricky Gervais, politely declining to engage with the man who attacked Mr. Murdoch with a pie, pushing @rupertmurdoch to take down a questionable tweet (which he did), and generally being a spicy character worthy of a Twitter follow.

Only one problem: that wasn’t Wendi Deng Murdoch.

According to the @Wendi_Deng Twitter account this morning, she was just having “a bit of fun” and is “definitely not married to Rupert Murdoch.” In other words, it was a parody account. She (he?) says she’s a nobody, not even an aspiring comedy writer.

While parody accounts are a dime a dozen on Twitter these days, what made “Wendi Deng’s” notable is that it actually passed through Twitter’s verification process somehow – the process that determines that an account on Twitter is maintained by the person who it’s claiming to be, then given a checkmark indicating its verified status. This is generally used to verify celebrities, politicians and other public figures, like the Murdochs.

Somehow, “Wendi Deng” fooled Twitter – at least for a day. This even concerned the account’s holder, who says “…you have to wonder why Twitter verified this account for a full day. I never received any communication from them about this. I was surprised – and even a little alarmed – when I saw the Verified tick appear on the profile. You might ask ‘why didn’t I tell them?’ But surely Twitter should be checking out its Verified status more carefully? No?”

It is indeed a little worrisome that “Wendi Deng” slipped through the cracks in Twitter’s verification process – a process that’s always been sort of mysterious, to be quite honest. For celebrities with a web presence, Twitter will often use the star’s official home page as a source for the verification – if there’s a link to the Twitter account posted there, it’s legit. But in the case of public personas, it appears that Twitter trusted the numerous media reports claiming the account’s legitimacy instead.

We’ve reached out to Twitter to confirm if this was the case.

Update – Here’s Twitter’s statement:

“We don’t comment on our verification process but can confirm that the @wendi_deng account was mistakenly verified for a short period of time. We apologize for the confusion this caused.”

Obviously, that’s not a valid means of verification – the media can be wrong. And they clearly were. Which just goes to show, you can’t believe everything you read on the Internet, even if Twitter tells you it’s true.

And you have to wonder even more why Twitter verified this account for a full day. I never received any communication from them about this.

— Wendi Deng Murdoch (@Wendi_Deng) January 3, 2012

Hello Twitter. As News International has finally come to their senses, it’s time to confirm that yes, this is a fake account. I’m not Wendi.

— Wendi Deng Murdoch (@Wendi_Deng) January 3, 2012

(And I’m as mystified as all of you as to why Twitter reopened its apparently closed Verified Account program for ‘Wendi’ and Rupert.)

— Wendi Deng Murdoch (@Wendi_Deng) January 3, 2012

And in case you missed Murdoch joining Twitter entirely, here’s the news, NMA-style:

And that, friends, is what we call seizing the moment. (Meme-ment?)

For those left wondering why Geico suddenly forgot how to type coherently, here’s the context. The TL;DR version: one brazen marketer got a bit too cocky in his (typo-riddled) responses to a customer, word spread, and the acrid wrath of the Internet rained down like hellfire. Geico jumped at the opportunity to juxtapose their PR style with a little jab, and the Internet fired a mountain of love (in the form of retweets and Reddit posts) in their direction for it.

This is how Twitter should be done. For the companies out there somehow still trying to wrap their head around this whole Twitter thing: just do what Geico does. Have a real human responding (preferably someone who considers the Internet their second home), and give them the flexibility to respond like a real human would. Let them be funny. Let them make little inside jokes. The Internet hivemind will appreciate it.

Update: And for those looking to get a few more laughs out of this fiasco, there’s already a user-made Cheezburger sub-site dedicated to it.

In case you haven’t noticed, it’s a new, new Twitter world out there and we’re just living in it. The new Twitter interface is very, for lack of a better word, “appy” and although the desktop apps are abysmal, the website is pretty strong and interesting. This week Erick and I take a closer look at this improvement and assess its value in our lives.

Changing a web interface is a big deal and it seems that companies are no longer squeamish about mixing things up. It’s interesting, as well, to see Twitter head towards the tablet-style interface as more and more Tweeters head off the desktop and go mobile.

We’re still working to confirm this, but it looks like someone has finagled their way into Lady Gaga’s insanely popular Twitter account. That, or the pop icon really did just offer free iPad 2s to all 17 million people that follower her (through the shadiest looking website in the world, no less.)

There’s been at least two tweets so far. The first went up just under an hour ago, promising Macbooks for all of her followers “in the spirit of the holidays”. All they needed to do to grab theirs? Just visit some shady link, fill out a few details… and then sign up for a bunch of offers and tell your friends to do the same. That one got pulled almost instantly.

Just a moment ago, however, a second one went up: same promise, except with “free” iPad 2s instead of Macbooks. This one has yet to be deleted.

Interestingly, it looks like whoever’s found their way into Gaga’s account (assuming that Gaga isn’t making the ridiculous jump from blasting out number one hits and selling out tours to slinging slimy affiliate redemption deals on the Internet) knows full well whose account they’re in, suggesting that it’s not just some generic automated malware that struck gold. Each of the tweets refers to those reading it as “Monsters”, as that’s how Lady Gaga addresses her fan base.

I shouldn’t have to say it, but just in case: don’t click the links, folks.

Update #1: For the curious, the bitly stats page for the link suggest that around 7,000 people have clicked it. Bit.ly has just updated the link to warn incoming users that it is “potentially problematic”.

Update #2: Same thing seems to be going on with Nelly Furtado’s account:

Update #3: They’ve pulled the second link down.

Update #4: Heh. Within 2 minutes of the second link being pulled, a third one has gone up.

Update #5: Gaga confirms the hack, and assures her followers that it’s now over.