Twitter is up for sale and it's a $10billion battle between Google and Facebook to buy out the social networking site.

Both companies are in talks with Twitter and the suggested offers on the table vary between $6 and 10bn. Observers claim that is far in excess of its earning potential - it made a revenue of $45million last year for example.

Twitter has been hugely popular and created a great social service, but has failed to monetise and suffered from a lack of vision at the top.

[via WSJ]

Tweetdeck is known as one of the best web apps for Twitter, but could the handy service actually start to rival the social network that it provides a conduit for?

Well possibly and it looks like it's taking on Twitter on one of its strengths - the 140 character limit that has proved so popular.
Among other features Dreck.ly will bust that open - letting users post and read tweets right up to half a million characters.

People who are accessing Twitter through another interface will see a curtailed version of the tweet and a link to the full post on Dreck.ly.

This is a softly-softly tweak to the service rather than a sabre-rattling announcement, but in many ways what Dreck.ly creates isn't just a tweak to Twitter but almost a rival service. Building on the original Twitter community it creates a kind of instant blogging platform cum social network that could really take off. There will also be a search engine for all posts stored on the Tweetdeck platform.

Expect software updates next Monday after some testing this afternoon, with Facebook support coming soon.

It is a smart move for Tweetdeck to start doing something new because if Twitter starts developing more of its own native apps for itself - as it has for iPhone and now for Mac, it will wipe out the whole ecosystem of 3rd party twitter apps.

[info from FThub via the TNW]

One of the nicest features of Twitter is the way it lets you meet and interact with people that you wouldn't meet IRL. It goes further than Facebook because there's an open culture of following and chatting to people you wouldn't meet in real life. And an Amsterdam developer has just taken that one step further.

Anthony Maës has just made a little Twitter bot which matches up random tweeters in a simple but kinda cute way: by pairing people who are happy with people who are sad.

Called HeartDroid, it scans Twitter for tweets revealing either happy or sad emotions then matches up the two tweeters and suggests that the happy one cheers the sad one up.

Anthony says "it's just a tiny script I made in a couple hours last Wednesday night" and it comes from his interest in robots that can feel. Yes. Feel.

We did a quick interview with him to ask about what HeardDroid does and why:

Q: I like that it's a way of bringing people together. Why did this idea come to you?
The idea of feeling-capable robots has haunted me since my early interests in programming when I was a teen.

One year ago, as I joined the milieu of start-ups and augmented reality with Layar, I opened a Twitter account and I discovered all the bots living on the platform. I also discovered that a lot of users expressed their feelings openly; and I was stunned the day I found We Feel Fine.

The other day, as I was showing xkcd to a non-nerd friend, I stumbled upon this comic.
Then I thought of a bot that would find sad people on Twitter and try to be nice to them.
The day before I had discovered Amazon's Mechanical Turk; showing care and support is clearly a task a computer can't do. Thankfully, Twitter is also full of happy people who surely wouldn't mind sparing a minute or two for a good cause.

Even though I had never programmed anything for Twitter, it turned out to be fairly simple. I skimmed the documentation and in a couple hours the first version of HeartDroid was up and cheering. I couldn't have gone to bed before it was done anyway :)

Q: How does it work?
Yes, it's automated. The frequency of the tweets is partly random, I wanted the time of the next tweet to be unpredictable. At the moment, on average, 1 tweet is sent every 40 minutes.
The software looks for somebody happy and somebody sad, using Twitter's tweet search feature. I do a keyword search and then filter and rank the results. I change the keywords from time to time to achieve better results. In the first version, I was naively looking for "sad" and "happy"; tweeting "happy birthday mum!" or "sad kitteh is sad xD" made you eligible for a mention.

Q: Have you had any feedback on it?
I check http://twitter.com/#!/search/heartdroid often to see responses.
I don't get much feedback except from my close array of friends; most of them don't use Twitter but get the point. About one in 10 users answers. Most of them are like "Awww", "Thank you" or "LUL WTF", but I've seen 3 or 4 pairs establishing contact, like this one: http://bettween.com/calmur321/ruinmymoonlight

----
In conclusion, I'd say that the phrasing could do with a few little tweaks to make people feel more surprised and joyed by these random connections, and perhaps not so surprised. But it's a cute idea using a bot to match people up who could be compatible. I expect to see more of this kind of thing.

A footballer for British club Liverpool is facing disciplinary action from the Football Association over a tweet where he criticised a referee.

Ryan Babel posted a picture of Howard Webb with a Manchester United shirt photoshopped onto him after Manchester beat Liverpool in a game where Man U was awarded a penalty. The Football Association are now charging Babel with improper conduct.

He is the first footballer to be charged over a tweet, though the most famous case of a tweet landing someone in hot water came last year where Brit Paul Chambers was fined £3000 for threatening to "blow up" Nottingham Robin Hood airport.

The footballer is going down like a hero though, tweeting till the end, see the screengrab above. And gathering a lot of support on Twitter.

Comment on this coming soon, in the meantime - what do you think about this?

The new app store for Mac has lots of positive features, but it's likely that the centralised Apple store and it's specially optimised Twitter app for Mac will kill off the ecosystem of third-party Twitter apps that have sprung up. And top among them is Tweetdeck.

Well, only among Mac users at first of course, but if Windows ever extends its app store to PC, then that could be the final blow for great applications like Tweetdeck, as manufacturer software usually gets priority.

It's just like when Apple introduced a custom app for iPhone and it killed off the various iPhone apps that had sprung up as Twitter clients...

The Twitter app for Mac is free on iTunes

The BBC have drawn our attention to a list of celebs on Twitter who have been flirting with each other publicly on that little social network.

Well, nothing like the example of a famous person to make you try something out and if Shane Warne can do it, so can we, the people.

Five Reasons to Chat Someone Up on Twitter

1) everyone likes an @ reply on Twitter

2) it's a public display of affection. They'll get all the kudos of looking popular

3) you'll already kind of know what they're interested in cause you've been following their tweets

4) the BBC say that the thrill of flirting in public on Twitter is the same as you got in school when passing notes around. Apparently that makes it better.

5) you can always unfollow and block them if it all goes horribly wrong

Five Tips on Chatting Someone up on Twitter

1) Aim high, but be realistic, we think that quite a lot of young women have already expressed interest in Justin Bieber

2) You know the fine line between a breezy chat up line and a creepy stalker message? Stay on the right side of that line.

3) Chances are they'll click on your profile after receiving your @ tweet so maybe you want to make sure your latest 10 tweets display you as a normal fun person.

4) Go in subtle with a little joke, the direct approach doesn't ever work very well.

5) Reply to something they said - shows an interest, doesn't it... And make it easy to reply back to - maybe a question? There's no comeback to a pearl of Confucian wisdom

Sure you can see what the people you follow on Twitter are saying about Christmas, but one little app will show you what everybody is saying on Twitter.

It's pretty cute and it's all done up in whizzy visuals. That means you can see what most people on Twitter want for Christmas, how most people are feeling about Christmas - divided into positive and negative) and what people are saying about Whamm! (the band), Jesus and Starbucks.

Facts they have discovered include:

>> iPad (1st) is trouncing the Kindle which is only 10th in the gifts department...even socks are higher at no.9

>> Facebook is first in the top 40 brands being talked about, while Jesus at no 3 is beating both Apple (4) and Microsoft (7)!!

>> Call of Duty is miles behind Barbie and LEGO for favourite gifts this xmas

>> Top three sought after gifts are Apple products

>> Xbox (6th) is far way ahead of Playstation (24th) at the moment

It's fun, though perhaps not quite as graphical as I'd hoped. Essentially as it shows up popular search terms and then the tweet stream for things tagged with them.. We like the comparison of Family tweets and Money tweets though. And it's interesting to have our suspicions confirmed about the number of people tweeting about iPads.

Have a play around on A Christmas Tweet.

We knew Twitter weren't too sure what direction they want to go next, but wine-making seems like a curve-ball.

However they've been there, they've done that and there is now a Twitter wine. It's called Fledgling and you can enter in an auction to win it along with some face-time with Twitter founder Biz Stone. An ideal Christmas present if you're into your wine and social media kingpins.

Twitter wine is a charitable project. The vintage has always been made to support a literacy programme called Room to Read which helps volunteers specifically in Uttarakhand, India.

If you fancy kitting yourself out with more Twitter merchandise, check out the Twitter sneakers...

So Twitter CEO Dick Costolo may have admitted he "doesn't know what Twitter is for" but his users do, and one of the best uses they have put the social networking site to is posting pictures of snow.

We've had snow up and down the country, and twitpic is full of photos of the United Kingdom under snow. Here are ten of our favourites.
[Add your own links in the comments!]

An inteview where the new Twitter CEO admitted he felt the company was low on vision and a story on Netizen claiming that Twitter "was kneecapped by its poverty of vision" just got me thinking that maybe Twitter doesn't need vision. Not for its users' sake anyway.

Third parties have been quick to jump in to do cute things with Twitter. The fact that the core company just sits there and lets creative outsiders knock up great stuff like Tweetdeck is actually positive. Twitter apps will do anything from mapping snowfall to psychoanalysing your tweets, to helping co-ordinate rescue missions in emergencies.

It's fun, it's social, and the fact that the core company sits back and just provides an open platform is core to its appeal.

In these "oh Twitter isn't going anywhere" articles, they often get compared to Facebook. But while Facebook is phenomenally successful, stunningly ambitious and always driving through change, it's nice that Twitter is more open, more relaxed and lets face it, a bit less scary. I admire Mark Zuckerberg, but thinking of him having complete control of a lot of a lot of my personal data is just well, a bit freaky.

What will he do next? I don't know...

Also Facebook's rapid development always favours its own innovations over any from creative third parties.. so while Facebook's third party apps (apart from the odd game here and there) have never been useful, Twitter's really are. In the long run I think that third party innovation is more fun.

So Twitter's lack of vision may be a problem for the company and the investors, but for the users it's really, just fine. We like it the way it is, Dick, honest.

Related: Top 20 Twitter clients, apps and add-ons

Is Twitter founder @Ev Williams leaving because his tweets are just really dull?

Some tweets are so good it's a shame to see them get lost in the ebb and flow of Twitter stream. Sometimes they're so good, they're worth embroidering them on a teatowel.

Well thanks to Tweet Towel, you now can.

This is a really sweet idea from WeAreWhatWeDo a social pressure group who aim to make the world a better place through cute little ideas like this. All profits from their £10 towels go towards one of their projects

Type your own message in the bottom and they embroider it on and send it out to you. It shows a selection of tweets people have s

TweetTowels £10 from WeAreWhatWeDo.org

Some people like to read Twitter on the web, others prefer apps like TweetDeck or Seesmic, but surely the cutest way to receive updates from your friends on Twitter is to have a 10 inch desk-robot reading them out to you. Especially if that robot is the shape of a bear.

It's from Japan, of course, where it's called a "murmer doll" or Charatter in English. It uses a dedicated iPhone app to pull in your feed from Twitter then verbalises it in a sweet little robotic murmur. Okay so it only talks in Japanese so far, you can see it doing so here.

The manufacturers say this makes it easier to follow twitter while in the car or moving around the house, though of course, links won't be the same.

Here's what a sample ShinyShiny tweetstream would sound like....

"Our CMS and IE have formed an axis of evil :( <- I LOL'd. And winced in sympathy....A tag cloud of Ray Ozzie's memo - cool analysis http://bit.ly/dqZcWz...#subway #fail no other bread left than white.this is going to hurt!...7000 people out of power in Elgin #ChicagoStorm... Grrr my uggs have died and I want new ones uggs despite knowing they are the most impractical boots ever"

Just imagine that murmured by a robot.

We're not sure if it speaks English or not and whether it can keep up with a really fast updating twitter, but it is just $25 here.

[via Dvice]

TopShop isn't just a high-street darling, it has social media down too - coming up as the biggest UK brand by number of followers on Twitter.

The clothes shop has an incredible 100,000+ followers on Twitter, far ahead of the second biggest brand, Burberry.com which has just over 64,000, according to the survey of the Top Brands on Twitter by Sutro Digital.

Okay so some brands just won't have their demographic online - I can't imagine that people who shop at uh Jigsaw being quite so tech savvy. And some brands just wouldn't be very interesting on Twitter - PoundStretcher, Heinz, Prit Stik.. (or maybe they would be, what do you think?)

The key to the sucess of @Topshop_Tweets seems to be being nice and chatty, having a great site to post info off, and lots of pictures of good clothes.

The Top Five are...
1. TopShop
2. Burberry
3. ASOS
4. Comparethemeerkat.com with Aleksandr Orlov
5. O2

See the full list on Sutro

If George Osborne wants to know how the UK economy will react to his harsh spending cuts, the place to look is Twitter according to research from some scientists in Indiana University.

Running a mood analysis on tweets proved 90% accurate in predicting the stock market in an experiment by Professor Johan Bollen. By scanning 9.8 million public tweets in the US for emotional words like "friendly", "happy" or "panicky", they were able to gauge the mood of the American public - and they discovered there was a striking correlation between the mood on Twitter and the rise and fall of the Dow Jones.

Prof Bollen explained that Twitter acts as a barometer of public mood and confidence which in turn affects society and thus the economy.

"There are so many people using these online social networks now that we think they have become a major factor in shaping public sentiment, and as a result in shaping our society and our economy."

Checking Twitter is certainly easier than understanding economic models, so Osborne might want to check this theory out...

[via Metro]

If there's one thing better than the police wandering around solving crime and taking stray dogs off motorways, it's the police wandering around solving crime, taking stray dogs off motorways and tweeting about it.

Because then we all get an insight into the crazy shit that goes on from the comfort of the Tweetdeck interface.

I am very pleased to say that several UK police forces have started tweeting about their daily activities. The Greater Manchester Police force are the torch bearers here with several of their local police forces tweeting on the following accounts: @gmp24_1, @gmp24_2 and @gmp24_3. Sadly this is just a 24hr exercise in public relations but we hope that it will become more widespread and regular.

Because it's great! This the sort of stuff that would appear in the odd news section of a local paper, if local newspapers still existed/published news. Or perhaps the sort of stories that you'd hear from the local village gossip if you lived in a village and actually talked to your IRL neighbours.

There are gems like this:

@gmp24_1 Report of man holding baby over bridge - police attended and it was man carrying dog that doesn't like bridges #gmp24

Though most of the tweets are just a summary record of calls received:

Call 853 - Suspicious men demolishing a wall in South Manchester #gmp24
Call 858 - Collision between lorry and car in Tameside. No injuries #gmp24
Call 862 Elderly man collapsed, taken home by police in Trafford #gmp24
Call 855 - Silent 999 #gmp24

Not thrilling in themsleves, but kind of interesting because they let you know what the police actually get up to in their offices and provide a kind of list of the incidents that make up the daily life of an area.

There's quite a serious rationale behind it all too, Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable Fahy said on the website:

"Policing is often seen in very simple terms, with cops chasing robbers and locking them up. However the reality is that this accounts for only part of the work they have to deal with. A lot of what we do is dealing with social problems such as missing children, people with mental health problems and domestic abuse. Often these incidents can be incredibly complex and need a lot of time, resource and expertise. I am not saying that we shouldn't deal with these types of incidents, far from it, but what I am saying is that this work is not recognised in league tables and measurements - yet is a huge part of what we do."

Hope to see a lot more of this...

Nothing like psychoanalysing your Twitter account. Tell web app TweetPsych your Twitter name, it analyses every tweet you've ever written and assigns you personality traits like positivity and interest in sex. It parses your Twitter for key words related to areas like the "need for control" or "emotions" and builds up a little picture of you, comparing you to everyone else on Twitter

Were we surprised that we tweet about sex 227% more than the average user? Well, to be honest no....

Try it out here at TweetPsych - unfortunately, it can turn up a no result if you don't use enough unique words. Can anyone beat 227% for a preoccupation with sex? post in the comments...

Related: Who do you write like? Web App matches you to the famous writer who has your style

We're not saying that is definitely the reason that co-founder of Twitter Evan Williams has decided to step down from the big job of CEO. I mean people are floating ideas of creative differences, a new direction for Twitter, and allowing more hard-headed business people in at the top, but I think the source of the problem can be found by visiting @Ev's Twitter page.

Tech visionary he may be, but a wit he is not. Maybe it just got too embarrassing to have tweets like this at the top levels of new media's coolest most-happening brand:

or like this piece of earthy wisdom:

Colleagues remember other gems from @Ev like: "eating a croissant while I wait for a breakfast meeting". Somehow the developing visionary just didn't get the what makes the "good chat" side of Twitter.

Evan Williams founded Twitter with Biz Stone five years ago and is now ceding place to Dick Costolo @dickc who scores slightly better on the amusing tweets front with no glaringly bad ones on his homepage though several about baseball. We think it's a step forward.

PS: Please don't take this too personally Ev and close our Twitter accounts - we still think you're an inspirational entrepreneur... :)

Scheduling posts on a blog is quite normal - but scheduling tweets is a social no-no according to media commentator Steven Waddington and his Twitter followers.

He doesn't mean auto-tweeting off an RSS when some new content is posted on your site (thankfully, we are so guilty of that) but when you prepare a "conversational" tweet a bit in advance then set it to post out at certain time. Apps like FutureTweets allow you to do this..

Why do people schedule tweets?
Social media companies do it sometimes to catch the American audience who are up and on Twitter at times when most Brits are in bed.

Apparently some people do it when they are going to be off on holiday or otherwise away from Twitter/internet but want for some reason to keep feeding their Twitter audiences their tweets.

FutureTweets suggests four other reasons..
1) Have an alibi...
2) Automatically wish your friend a wonderfull day each morning
3) Remind yourself each friday evening to quit work early and go for the friday evening drinks...

The general consensus is "No, don't do this, it's creepy."

Why it's creepy
I guess it's the difference between preparing a speech/presentation and preparing comments for use in a casual conversation. Preparing and scheduling longer stuff like blogs is fine, but scheduling what is supposed to be spontaneous and of the moment just comes across as weird.

Also! you don't know what will have happened by 3pm - what if you're not having a nice cup of tea? What if all the trains have been cancelled? What the other football team actually won? this is a recipe for sounding like an idiot.

When being creepy can be quite funny
I'm not saying I'll never use this function though. Hell, I *like* being creepy sometimes. The whole scheduling thing could be used to disconcerting effect for tweets like: "I'm asleep now", "I'm still asleep btw" or "I hope the world hasn't ended by now". Little things like that.

Using it too much though does undermine the core of Twitter's authenticity and appeal - that it is *real-time*. So don't do it guys!

[via sarahhartley]

Many people are staying away from Twitter today because a bug (the OneMouseOver Security Flaw) has posted heaps of dangerous links which can infect your computer without you even clicking on them. It doesn't affect anyone on a third party app but still sounds like it might be wise to give that social networking a miss for the afternoon.

Here are five alternative things to do...

1) Go on Friendster. Remember what social networks used to be like? Pretty bad, yeah. Logging in here will at least make you realise that Twitter isn't so bad after all and also what music you liked in 2001. That always surprises me.

2) Talk to your friends and loved ones (colleages will do). Share your thoughts, opinions and comments with them but through the medium of speech like we used to in the old days.

3) Complain about Twitter being down - on Facebook, Blogger, comment boards...

4) Flash bright lights in your eyes and get people to say disconnected sentences to you. It won't fully replicate the wonder of Twitter, but you will get some of the adrenalin rush... of a fast moving tweet stream

5) It's time to try out another micro-blogging service: Tumblr anyone? see a list here

A worm in the new Twitter has affected thousands of users including celebrities like Sarah Brown. The bug only affects people using Twitter on the Twitter.com website, not those on third party apps like TweetDeck.

The bug makes users inadvertently post malicious links which open up new windows showing either porn or dubious software. The particularly dangerous bit of the bug is that you don't even need to click on the links for the windows to be opened up, it's enough to simply roll the mouse over them. The attacking software is known as OneMouseOver and redirects users to hardcore Japanese porn.

According to various sources, the problem arises because users are able to post chunks of Javascript program code inside tweets - and because Twitter has not disabled this, the Javascript can become active when a mouse is rolled over it. Originally just used for fun by users to change the colour of their tweets (known as rainbow tweets), it has taken a turn to the dark side with criminals hijacking the javascript to redirect users to dodgy sites.

Advice is to use Twitter clients not the main webstite until the flaw is cleared.