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

Not content with that, the schedulers at the favourite channel of the UK establishment have lined up three short stories themed around Twitter.

The first in the series ‘Between the Tweets’ is broadcast today at 3.30pm.  A TV star’s reputation comes under fire when an anonymous woman accuses him on Twitter of having an affair with her.   ‘Reputation manager’ Bella is called in to deal with the situation.  The story was written by Jojo Moyes, author, journalist and a regular tweeter herself.

Self styled comedian and UK Uncut supporter Jonnie Marbles (pictured here) was tweeting live from the culture media and sport select committee session immediately before the bizarre attack on Rupert Murdoch with a foam filled paper plate having enquired about the order of appearance he tweeted at 15.01 “I’m actually in this committee and can confirm: Murdoch is Mr. Burns.”

At 10 to 5 just seconds before the incident he tweeted; ”It is a far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before #splat”.  He hasn’t tweeted since.   I think that’s a bit suspect.

The shock closure of the ‘News of the World’ might be seen as a major PR offensive designed to bring the debate on the phone hacking scandal to a close but it could well be an opportunity for Murdoch junior to kill several birds with a single stone.

Those that think that twitter is one of the birds in question would be guilty of an oversimplification.

The closure certainly seizes the news agenda at least for a time.  It changes the direction of the media storm and perhaps is intended to give Rebekah Brooks some breathing space but dig a little deeper and there’s another angle.

It was reported well before the latest storm broke that the were management mergers at the top of the Times and the Sunday Times but also at The Sun and the News of the World.  Rebekah Brooks was on record saying “We will take a comprehensive look at where there is common ground across our titles …where there is common ground we will find ways of implementing efficiencies to editorial systems and processes and, where appropriate, we will find ways of introducing seven day working.”

Tellingly the web addresses sunonsunday.co.uk and .com were both registered two days ago by a UK individual using the name Mediaspring and who opted to have their address omitted from the registration.  Would it be too cynical to imagine that Murdoch has used the situation to cut costs at Wapping and retain an integrated Sunday red top tabloid using the Sun brand?

The border lines in social networks are commonly understood if sometimes blurry.  Facebook for friends and frivolity,  LinkedIn for work and Twitter…well for either, or a bit of both, or neither.  Twitter is nothing if not versatile but if you tie your twitter account to one aspect of your life, in this case your working life, then you may find yourself in need of multiple on-line personalities.   The other downside is that if your circumstances change you’ll lose the network of followers that you have lovingly built.

For journalists, their personal following online is becoming more and more important.  Speaking in Cannes this week Piers Morgan claimed that a single tweet added up to half a million viewers to an interview he conducted with Charlie Sheen on CNN.  The value of a personal online network is not solely the preserve of the press.   So I guess we have to decide.  We can have different accounts for the different aspects of our lives or we can have an account that reflects the varied aspects of who we are and what we do but isn’t tied to any of them.  The choice as they say, is yours.

It’s only two years since the biggest account on twitter had just a million people hanging on to actor Ashton Kutcher’s ever 140 character missive. His @aplusk account narrowly beat CNN breaking news @cnnbrk.  Before that @BarackObama had been the number one account.  Gaga’s milestone confirms a number of observations:

• On-line and off-line popularity are pretty much the same thing.
• Twitter is a broadcast channel.  It is not the only thing it does but 10 million is pretty broad (even if they’re not all following every utterance).
• Twitter is also a highly effective news feed – lots of traditional news media have large follower numbers. Create a list and you have a customisable news channnel.
• Twitter is now firmly part of the celebrity PR portfolio.

@JustinBieber is gaining on @LadyGaga but her twitter account was the first to hit 10 million followers and at the current rate it may be several months before the teenage Canadian crooner captures the twitter topspot.

Version 2 is not an update; it’s more of a re-imagined mobile version of the uber popular (pun intended) twitter client.  It’s faster, better looking, has more features, is considerably more intuitive and it feels like it has been designed for the iPhone rather that simply engineered to fit.

Improved aspects of iPhone TweetDeck include more effective swiping between columns, better navigation and an add column flow button.  Using the “pinch” move on a column provide options to add new feeds into a column.   V2 is also OS4 compatible so as well as retina-quality graphics there is multi-tasking support.  Best of all it’s still free – for now at least.

In the case of Trafigura The Guardian reported that it had been prevented from covering remarks made in Parliament by a superinjunction from libel lawyers Carter Ruck.   The Guido Fawkes blog identified that the question related to the allegations of waste dumping in the Ivory Coast by oil trader Trafigura.  Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian tweeted about it and Stephen Fry played a key role in spreading the story via twitter.

In recent weeks superinjunctions have been used by actors, TV presenters, bankers and footballers to prevent papers from revealing stories about their private lives.  A quick search for the word superinjuction on Twitter or using Google Realtime search and you will see the names of many of the alleged protagonists.   When I began my career in PR you needed to have good contact in a national newsroom to get the sort of information that never made it into print, now you just need a rudimentary knowledge of how to use a search engine.

He doesn’t have a huge following but within hours the twittersphere was buzzing and some high-profile people were registering connect.me profiles without actually knowing what was on offer.  Secrecy seemed to be at the heart of the launch strategy; “We’d love to share more” said the site “but we’re in ninja stealth mode and would regrettably have to kill you.”  Part of the sign-up process seems to have involved (personally I wouldn’t touch it without knowing more) granting access to your social networks with the promise “We’re a better way to manage your connections and a better way for online communities to discover and connect”.

I don’t know about you but it seems pretty asymmetric to me to grant access to your social graph with zero information on offer as to why or what for.  However the desire to register your user name seems to be a big driver as many people did just that.

It looks like connect.me has found ways to get various types of data, particularly from Facebook once the user has provided a one-off authentication.  It will also call on data from Twitter and LinkedIn.   That might provide an exciting way of linking your social networks but equally it seems pretty scary granting that kind of access without knowing why.

Twitter has claimed that UberTwitter was in breach of policies and trademarks. Specifically they cited the use of the tweet-elongation service tmi.me which allows people to post  more than 140 characters, and significantly the use of the name UberTwitter.  The service has now been changed to UberSocial with immediate effect.  Tweetdeck which recently introduced Deck.ly to allow longer tweets must be watching with interest and concern. DestroyTwitter is also presumably on the radar.

Apart from the obvious inconvenience to users of the service Twitter has raised the suspicions of commentators by turning off the Blackberry application without notice and promoting their own Twitter for Blackberry service at the same time.

UberTwitter is owned by UberMedia which was recently bought by Bill Gross, who has raised $17.5m to build the Twitter platform.  Gross played a key role in building Google’s revenue mode and he’s applying a similar strategy with UberMedia and applying that to Twitter.  Potentially he has a  better way to make money out of Twitter than Twitter does and this is bound to cause concern for the micro-blogging service.

At the time of writing Twitter has not responded to the speedy changes and UberSocial remains unapproved ad offline.