When is your Twitter account (or Facebook or other social media account) not your Twitter account? At what point does your work-related use of your social media account convert that account to your employer’s intellectual or other property? Noah Kravitz is being sued by his former employer, PhoneDog, over what is now, in theory, Kravitz’s personal Twitter account. An account which he says he converted to his own use with PhoneDog’s blessings, only to have them turn around and bite him in the back. Kravitz used Twitter while he worked for Phone Dog – using the Twitter handle @PhoneDog-Noah – and when he stopped working for PhoneDog he changed his Twitter ID to @noahkravitz – but it was the same account, with the same followers – 17,000 followers – and PhoneDog now claims that Kravitz’s Twitter account is actually their intellectual property, and that a Twitter account by any other name is still theirs. But there is way more to this story.

“TWITTER: Someone has a crush on you!” the subject of the email says as it announces that someone has a Tweetcrush on you. “You have been sent a Twitter Crush,” it goes on to say. Bologna. It’s a phishing scam, pure and simple. But, it’s a pretty compelling one, given how ‘authentic’ the site, which is hosted at ktwitteri.com, looks, where they steal your Twitter username and password.

Arab spring, flash mobs, and last week’s riots in England. What two things do these have in common? Well, first, they have a people ready to be incited to action – be it for the cause of democracy, for a flash mob, or for chaos, mayhem, and lining their own pockets with ill-gotten goods. And second, social media has contributed to the lightning speed with which each of the groups coordinated and coalesced.

Twitter has been the vector for a flood of work-from-home scam spams this week, as followers of hacked accounts found dozens of copies of the “I snagged $217 in just a few hours online. learned how to do it from {link to scam}” type of spam coming at them via direct message. The link goes to a faked NBC article that touts “How did this stay at home mom make $13900+/Month.. We Investigate..” and that cleverly makes note of the geographic location (geolocation) of your IP address and customizes the article to make it seem as if the single mom is from your own town.

Last month Social Intelligence Corp. received official approval from the Feds to monitor and search your social network status updates and other information that is publicly searchable online. So just what is Social Intelligence doing with the results of their social network search? They are providing them to the people who pay Social Intelligence Corp. for those results: prospective employers. Anything you say or post online in a public forum can and will be used against you, including remarks that can be construed as racist, photos that can be considered explicit, or anything that can be taken as evidence of illegal activity such as drug use, to name a few. Suddenly the drunk posting of a status update on Facebook from years ago can come back to haunt you and cost you that job that you really want.

U.S. President Barack Obama will go down in social media history as the first president to hold a virtual Town Hall meeting, when today he took questions via Twitter, and sent out the first presidential Tweet ever. Using the hashtag #AskObama on Twitter, President Obama’s Whitehouse team has been collecting questions for the President, through Twitter, since last Thursday. By the day of the meeting, more than 60,000 messages (Tweets) on Twitter had referenced the #AskObama hashtag. The first official presidential Tweet was a question for the President’s Twitter followers: “In order to reduce the deficit, what costs would you cut and what investments would you keep? BO”

You’d think (and hope) that someone like an elected official would know better than to play the nasty with women, online. You’d think (and hope), but you’d be wrong. Again. This time it is New York Representative Anthony D. Weiner, who, for at least a week, claimed that the raunchy and inappropriate communications sent by him to women online were the work of hackers, and who earlier this week finally admitted that he was the one who sent them. The photo that brought it all tumbling down was a picture of his own plumped weiner (encased in his jockey shorts), which he allegedly sent to Washington State college student Gennette Cordova. The picture was in the Yfrog.com account associated with Weiner’s verified Twitter account; his Yfrog account is now devoid of any pictures.

You may have noticed that the Internet is all a-Twitter (pun intended) over super-injunctions (a/k/a superinjunctions), but despite that, it may well be that you have no idea just what a super injuntion is, nor why you should care. If you are from the U.S. you’re even less likely to know, and so if you are asking yourself “What is a super-injunction?”, well, we’ll explain.

People are asking “why are people who I don’t follow showing up in my Twitter stream?” If you are noticing that the tweets of people whom you don’t follow are showing up in your Twitter timeline, here’s why.

Even though Twitter added location-based information services (“Twitter with Location”) to Twitter a few months ago, Twitter is only just now advising Twitter users that they can opt in to the new Twitter Location feature (it’s turned off by default, so you don’t have to opt out of Twitter with Location). Here’s how to use – and why you should, or shouldn’t use – Twitter’s Location based Tweet information.

Do you use Twitter? If so, every single message you send out publicly – every single Tweet – is being archived by the United States Library of Congress. Observers say that this is a move by the Library of Congress to preserve for posterity the current culture as it is being expressed through voices on Twitter, both famous and unknown

Now, there’s something you might think you’d never hear: that the President of the United States has a Twitter account, let alone that it got hacked. But it’s true. Well, it’s nearly true, as in reality Barack Obama does not, himself, man a Twitter account (so far as anyone knows). But there is a “BarackObama” Twitter account that is manned on behalf of the President of the United States by the organization known as Organizing for America, that calls itself “the grassroots organization for President Obama’s agenda for change”, and that account was hacked.

Google news has started mining Twitter to flesh out their latest news headline results, including displaying your tweets as “latest news” mixed in with the news headlines, in a rolling marquee that does an auto-refresh much like a Facebook page does. A perfect, albeit sad, example is today’s news that actor Andrew Koenig – son of Walter Koenig, who played Checkov in the original Star Trek – was found dead of an apparent suicide, in a park in Vancouver. As thousands tweeted about the sad event, their tweets started showing up in Google News along with news headlines about Koenig.

SocialToo offers various Twitter-based services, such as automatically sending a message to someone who follows you, emailing you daily with a list of key terms mentioned on Twitter and, until today, automatically unfollowing someone if they unfollow you. We say “until today” because, according to SocialToo CEO Jesse Stay, Twitter has asked them to disable the automatic unfollow service. But why?

Amazon Associates rejoice (or not) – Amazon just added a “Share on Twitter” link to the Amazon affiliate toolbar that appears at the top of every Amazon product page, with the Amazon associate’s Amazon affiliate tag (i.d.) already embedded in the link, so that when you hit the “Share on Twitter” link, the Amazon link to whatever product it is goes out to all of your Twitter followers with your Amazon associate i.d. already embedded within the link. We’re just surprised that it took Amazon so long to jump on this bandwagon! (Ah, the downside of the inertia of an enormous, publicly held company.)