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.

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”

Twitter is aflame with calls for boycotts of Rupert Murdoch, his ‘News of the World’, ‘News of the World’s’ parent company, ‘News International’, and other Murdoch holdings, as the investigation of News of the World’s using a private detective, Glenn Mulcaire, to hack into the telephone voicemail of several young girls who had been murdered in the U.K. in 2002, and that of their families, moves into Parliament. The families of Milly Dowler, Holly Wells, and Jessica Chapman have all been informed by police that each of their telephone voicemail accounts may have been hacked, each within days of each girl’s disappearance, and each by Mulcaire, trying to get a scoop for News of the World. Among other things, Mulcaire is alleged to have hacked into Milly Dowler’s voicemail on her mobile phone, and deleted some messages, which caused Milly’s family to continue to hope that she might be found alive when she had already been murdered, and which interfered with the police investigation. Calls for Rebekah Brooks, head of News International, and a personal friend of British Prime Minister David Cameron, to step down are escalating, putting the Prime Minister in an awkward position, particularly as his Communications Director, Andy Coulson, also formerly of News of the World, has already been forced to resign his position with the Prime Minister.

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.

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.

Yes, Twitter really is coming to television. But unlike the Twitter reality television show that was touted last year, but that never came to pass, this Twitter tv show is really set to happen. Starring William Shatner, the Twitter television show is based on the real-life Twitter account and Twitter feed of Twitter user Justin Halpern, who publishes stuff that his father says under the Twitter name “Shit My Dad Says” (really). Halpern also just published the book, “St*ff My Dad Says”, based on his Twitter feed. While Halpern is the Twitter helmsman, it is really his father, 73-year old Sam Halpern, played in the show by William Shatner, who is the star of the feed, the book, and the show, which, according to reports, is to be called either “Stuff My Dad Says” or “Bleep My Dad Says”.

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.

Twitter has finally openly released their first Twitter ads product, called “Promoted Tweets”.  So what are Twitter Promoted Tweets? Twitter Promoted Tweets are Tweet ads that are sent out by businesses as regular Tweets, but which the businesses have paid to have show up at the top of search results on Twitter (think Adwords for Twitter).

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.

In an effort to clean up after a phishing attack on Twitter, Twitter is targeting some Twitter accounts as “possibly compromised”, and proactively disabling the current password for the account, and sending a “Please change your twitter password” email, which asks you to “please create a new password by opening this link”. While we give them a great deal of credit for being so proactive, the irony is that the email Twitter is sending looks just like the phishing efforts that lead to this problem in the first place! So, if you get a “Please change your twitter password” email, what should you do? Read on.

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.)

Twitter down? Hey, it happens, and sometimes it’s even planned! Twitter may be down for planned maintenance tonight – Tuesday, November 17th – sometime between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. Pacific time (2:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. Eastern). That said, Twitter isn’t actually planning to be down that entire time – it’s more that they are planning maintenance, and so Twitter could be down at some point during those hours.