Once again, it needs to be addressed that what you say on twitter can be used against you in a courtroom. Hundreds of defamation cases have been filed against individuals and companies for their tweets. There is no legal precedent for defamation cases involving twitter which makes it extremely difficult for a judge. This is why most cases are settled out of court.

There have been many high profile defamation cases on twitter. Recently, an AP reporter was sued for his comments about a few players during a basketball game. Another more notable case was Courtney Love, who was forced to pay a substantial amount after her rants on twitter.

Just remember this, just because you do not mean harm or malice, does not mean that you cannot be sued. Don’t say anything on twitter that could damage someone’s reputation. Twitter is meant to be a fun way to communicate with people, not a breeding ground of rants and harmful comments.

Did you know that there are approximately 200 tweets about the weather every minute. That’s 12,000 tweets per hour and 288,000 per day!

Because of the high demand, twitter has teamed up with the weather channel to provide live weather updates to over 200 U.S. cities. Each day the weather channel will post the local forecast for cities so that you can stay up to date about your weather and its impact on your day.

There are some other weather related twitter accounts that are worth following as well. They include:

@ReedTimmerTVN – Reed is a tornado chaser from the show Storm Chasers and he highlights his team’s success and failures.

@AlRoker provides some humorous weather news and updates each day.

@JackatNWS is a weather channel administrator who tweets daily about major weather events across the US.

@wunderground tweets and retweets major and minor weather events around the world.

These are a couple of twitter accounts to look into following but there are plenty more. The weather is extremely important to know and understand so make sure to follow up and see if anything major will be happening in your area from these helpful people on twitter.

Twitter has announced a few activity stream feature to help users more easily discover what is happening on twitter in relation to them. The activity stream contains “@username” and then “activity.”

The @username tab is meant to replace the mentions tab and twitter said it is mainly a personal notifications dashboard. The activity tab is meant to show retweets, favorites, and follows.

A representitive of twitter released the following statement, “It provides a rich new source of discovery by highlighting the latest Favorites, Retweets, and Follows from the people you follow on Twitter – all in one place.” They later added, ” It’s easier than ever to explore Twitter, connect with people, and discover what’s happening around the world.”

This looks to be very similar to facebook’s setup both in design and goals. It is a cool new feature and I personally will take advantage of it to explore twitter further.

Have you ever wanted to send someone a direct message on twitter but couldn’t because they are not following you? Well, now you can. With a new program called twitgram, you can direct message anybody, regardless of whether or not they are following you, with no character limits.

Essentially, you go to twitgram.com, enter the twitter username you want to message, and send them a message. You then send them a tweet letting them know you sent them a message.

Twitgram is not directly associated with twitter, which is why it is important to tweet the user that you sent them a message. The user then logs in twitgram with their twitter login and can view the message.

Twitgram describes themselves as a combination of twitter/email. It looks to be a fun alternative and should provide some hilarious messages to our beloved celebrities, politicians and athletes.

As earlier mentioned, all twitter users have now been forced to start using the “new” twitter version. It was announced early last week that the old version would be phased out this weekend.

This was not a big deal for most people, considering an overwhelming majority of people had already switched to the new version. There was no reason not to switch because the new twitter layout is much cleaner, faster, and easier to navigate.

If the folks at twitter do see this, then please listen. You do not need to update your layout every few months. Do not be like facebook and make annoying changes to our profiles every three months. It’s extremely annoying and most of us do not like it. Twitter is perfect the way it is.

A large group of twitter users are organizing themselves in order to help cleanup the streets of London after almost a week of massive rioting. A twitter account @riotcleanup was started just two days ago and already has 70,000 followers.

Last week, a peaceful protest was started after a man was shot and killed by police. However, anarchists and looters soon seized the opportunity presented to them and began pillaging the streets, burning police cars and wrecking stores.  Damage is estimated to be in the tens of millions of pounds range.

Currently, the twitter account is organizing groups of volunteers to clean up specific spots of the city to take the burden off devastated business owners and people. With no end to the rioting in sight, the cleanup will most likely take days. Hopefully, police can finally take control of the situation so that peace and order can be restored to the streets of London.

A massive phising scam has been exploding all over twitter within the last 48 hours. The direct message has been sending twitter users the following message, “You look like you lost weight in the video.”

There is a link after the message that will redirect you to a fake twitter login page. If you try to login it will fail and you will have been phised. The hackers can then access your twitter account and send more spam or viruses to other unsuspecting users.

If you have clicked the link and entered your login details, immediately change your password. Make sure to use a strong password composed of both numbers and letters. Also, make sure you check the applications tab in account settings to remove any suspicious applications that you did not give permission to access.

Twitter has officially requested that any direct message that seems suspicious to be reported as spam to let their spam team handle the situation.

In a company tweet, twitter announced that it will be killing the old version of twitter. This comes after Twitter announced in early June that the old version would be “phased out.”

This really is not much of a big deal considering most users have already phased over to the new version of Twitter. There are very few holdouts that haven’t made the switch and I doubt there will be many complaints from this group of twitter users.

In case you have not made the switch, you should know that the new version of Twitter looks much cleaner then the old version. The interface is much easier to navigate and overall seems more organized then the original version.

Now that everybody will finally phase over to the new version, I wonder when the next version will come out. Social networks constantly seem to change their layouts so it’s only a matter of time before the next version is released. When do you think the next version will come out?

In a recent blog post, Twitter has confirmed that they have indeed received a “significant amount of funding” let from venture firm DST Global. There were several reports over the last month that have speculated that Twitter received funding but up until now nothing was confirmed. Supposedly, Twitter is looking to receive this new funding to put the company at a value of $8 billion dollars.

The DST chief Yuri Milner made a statement:

“Twitter is one of the few companies that has truly changed the world. Twitter’s astonishing growth is a testament to how important it is becoming to more people every day, and why we couldn’t pass up the chance to be a bigger part of its future.”

This is just one of the many things that will help Twitter’s growth into an even bigger social network. Things certainly are looking good for Twitter right now. Twitter also just announced that it has opened an office in New York City.