The fake Gary Glitter debacle only just failed to eclipse the weirdness of discovering in the very early hours of New Year’s day that Rupert Murdoch had joined Twitter.
Something happened between those two events that helped the OfficialGlitter account to appear to be really run by the shamed popstar and garner over 15,000 followers. What happened was that Twitter suspended official verification, which meant that there was no real way of knowing whether the account was real or not. Actually twitter has turned verification into a money-making exercise, available only to advertisers and partners.
The Daily Mail, ITN and The Sun all added fuel to the fire with articles about the supposed social media comeback. Column inches were even devoted to the announcement of a tour and new album. This would surely not have happened if the official process was still in place.
If you search OfficialGlitter on twitter you’ll see that a huge amount of unnecessary upset was caused by the so-called social media experiment. The idea that social networks fuel child abuse is arrant nonsense. Parents do need to be vigilant about who their kids associate with, on the wed as elsewhere but this isn’t about government regulation. It was Gary Glitter’s infamy linked to the notion that it could actually be him that created the problem here.
Twitter should bring back official verification. #verifyback
It began with a conversation in the Blackdog Ballroom with Dom Burch. He is about to take a six month sabbatical from his role as Head of Corporate Communications at ASDA and he has a new twitter profile to mark the occasion. I then saw on twitter that the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg is moving to ITV and will therefore cease to be @BBCLauraK; re-emerging in the autumn as @ITVLauraK.
Lady Gaga is the first entity to gain 10 million followers on Twitter. Although teen idol Justin Bieber is gaining followers at a faster rate, 23,000 a day against Gaga’s measly 22,000, he still has around 300k to go before he crosses the line.
Amidst all of the buzz around Twitter’s $50 million bid for Tweetdeck, a new app for the iPhone is launched today. To date the iPhone version has been something of a compromise; a big box solution squeezed into the narrower confines of a handheld device.
It began in earnest with Trafigura but the freedom to publish now means that the superinjuction, a form of gagging order in which the press is prohibited from reporting even the existence of the injunction, or any details of it, is now almost impossible to enforce.
Earlier today San Francisco web developer Joe Johnston launched his contribution to the social web with a small post via his twitter account @simple10. It said simply “connect.me beta sign-up launched 
Users of the popular Blackberry Twitter app UberTwitter found themselves locked out this weekend when the famously open social network decided to crack down.
