The Twitterverse is still recovering from the sudden departure of Courtney Love and her daughter.   Courtney Love has closed down her Twitter account just days after her daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, went after Ali Lohan — Lindsay’s sister — on the micro-blogging service. Mother and daughter are both tweet-obsolete for the moment.

Love is dealing with a defamation claim after tweeting disgust at a fashion designer, and Demi Moore and Perez Hilton were also exploring legal action after their war of 140 characters or less with each other last month.

The law on what you can and can’t say on Twitter hasn’t been refined yet by a court, but assuming it follows the general defamation book, it’ll be hard to win a defamation lawsuit. But that won’t stop many plaintiffs from trying.

Tweet Delete: Celebs Exit Twitter – ABC News.

A court in the UK is allowing a law firm to serve an injunction via Twitter. According to the BBC, “the injunction – known as the Blaney’s Blarney Order – is due to be served at 1930BST and will include a link to the text of the full court order.”

The BBC adds that in the UK, injunctions can already be served by email, so it’s not completely out of left field for the court order via Twitter to be allowed. Nonetheless, it’s an innovative move by the court, and one we could see in the future as public figures look to protect their identity and brand on the social web.

You’ve Been Served … A Court Order, Via Twitter.

The folks at MySpace, always keen to jump at new emerging technologies, have finally opened up their platform to talk to Twitter.   Facebook did this about a year ago, about the same time I decided that MySpace was no longer useful.

So about a year ago I changed my status on MySpace to say “Find me on Facebook”.   I turned off all email notifications and said goodbye to that platform.

But now they’ve made it simple to link your Tweets to MySpace…perhaps injecting a digital amphetamine into MySpace’s arm.   I’ve hooked my Tweets up to WordPress (I use a plugin called Twitter Tools).   So, when I publish this message, a notification goes out to Twitter…and, theoretically, it should go to MySpace.

For Facebook, I use the RSS import function and import each blog entry as a Note.   I’ve found that linking Facebook status updates to my Tweets is a bit annoying because while my followers on Twitter are not always the same as my Friends on Facebook, enough of them overlap that I think they’d get tired of the redundant updates.

But MySpace….sure…bring it on!

Someone went to great lengths to target the Internet identity of one man: a 34-year-old blogger and economics professor in the Republic of Georgia named Cyxymu.

Attackers first unleashed a wave of spam email and then a distributed denial of service attack aimed at sending huge amounts of traffic to the professor’s Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites, causing many to buckle and some to break under the strain of the traffic.

The motive is still a bit unclear,  seemingly something to do with a Georgia / Russia territorial dispute?   Anyway, I’ve been on the receiving end of a DDOS once and they’re not very easy to defend against.

Professor Main Target of Assault on Twitter – NYTimes.com.

Cybraphon is an emotional musical instrument robot comprised of 60 robotic components playing: a Farfisa wind organ, a Shruti box, a snare, a tom, a cymbal,  12 chimes, a dub plate and 10 other percussion items amplified through vintage gramophone horns.

Apparently Cybraphon has some sort of a rudimentary AI that processes emotions based on feedback from its online presence on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

Cybraphon wants to be popular. Just by going to its website you will affect its mood and the kind of music it plays. Cybraphon regularly checks its MySpace page, worries about how many fans it has on Facebook, looks up its website stats and obsessively Googles itself to see what people are saying about it.

It’s so very cool but unfortunately I may have to travel back in time to destroy it before it destroys us all.

Cybraphon | Autonomous Emotional Robot Band.

Robot Band Plays Music, Obsesses About its Online Followers – Wired Magazine

So we have finished the first phase of Tweet3po with 9 neighborhood watch droids deployed, covering the bulk of Greater Orlando.

At present, we have the following neighborhood bots available for the City of Orlando Crime Watch / Citizen Reporter automated tweet bot:

• Baldwin Park, Orlando FL

• College Park, Orlando FL

• Colonial Town South, Orlando FL

• Delaney Park,  Orlando FL

• Downtown Orlando FL

• Lake Eola Heights, Orlando FL

• Lake Lancaster, Orlando FL

• Parramore, Orlando FL

• Thorton Park, Orlando FL

Anyone can subscribe to the Twitter Feed of the above Droids and they will receive Tweets of Orlando Police Department Dispach calls, creating a near-realtime online police scanner.  Followers who are Followed back by the Tweet Droid can send Direct Messages to the neighborhood Tweet Droid which will be Re-Tweeted automatically.

How do you get the Tweet Droid to follow you back?  I guess you just have to ask it?

Future plans include dashbord reporting console.   Dave and I were actually discussing this very feature in front of his house when 2 OPD cruisers approached the curb and asked if we had called them.  We hadn’t and Dave asked what address they were called to.  The officer said 850 E. Livingston.  Dave commented that there is no 850 E. Livingston.  And there is not.

But Dave was more concerned that he hadn’t seen a tweet for any calls to that address.  I confirmed I had not seen one either.  Had the great Tweet3PO system failed us right before our very eyes?

5-10 minutes after the OPD cruisers left, the Tweet finally did show up.  There’s a built-in 10 minute delay from the OPD Active Dispach Calls website reporting the data. But we have actual first-hand proof that it works.

We’re working on adding other cities now.  And reports.

I did notice this disclaimer on the city website regarding the Police Active Calls Data:

Disclaimer: Calls For Service are the result of a person contacting the police department and an officer would respond, but not necessarily complete a report due to the nature of the incident.  Reported Calls are those that the officer documented the incident as a criminal or possibly criminal act.  These reports are not all-inclusive and does not represent all types of calls. Due to public records laws; specific information may not be released.  However, if there are any questions or concerns, please contact the District 4 OPD Liaison Officer at james.young@cityoforlando.net.

So I was bored and playing around with Twitter search.  I type in “orlando” as my search term.  One of the results is this feed:

http://twitter.com/orlpol32801

I click on it:
Name: OrlPolice 32801
Location” Orlando, Florida

1. residential b&e at 221 E Colonial Dr, Orlando, FL 3280119 minutes ago from web

2. domestic disturbance at 100 S Hughey Ave, Orlando, FL 32801about 1 hour ago from web

3. man down at 300 E South St, Orlando, FL 32801about 1 hour ago from web

The content appears to be some sort of automated (damn-near realtime) Twitter feed of calls to Orlando Police Department in a certain zip code (in this case, 32801).  It had about 100 followers but wasn’t following anyone so it looked typical of an automatically generated feed.  But from where?

so I typed in http://twitter.com/orlpol32806

And sure enough…there was one for my zip code too.   Pretty slick.  In the Twitter profile of each of these feeds I noticed a website link:

http://web.chad.org/projects/orlando-crime/

Which brings up a fracking mashup of the Google Maps of Central Florida and all of the recent calls to OPD?!?!

Yeah…pretty cool, huh?   or just get the XML feed (nice) here:  http://web.chad.org/projects/orlando-crime/orlcrimedata.xml

So at the bottom of this page it says (get ready for this)

A project of Chad Miller. Copyright 2009.

Who the FUCK is Chad Miller?????????

So I do a little digging.   Of course, Chad owns chad.org.

Chad is 33 and lives in Orlando. He’s got a wife and kids.

This is Chad Miller’s “Work Blog” where he blogs primarily about MySql:  http://karateandvoodoo.blogspot.com/

This is Chad Miller’s “Personal Blog” where he recently blogged about experimenting with nootropic drugs: http://web.chad.org/blag/

Chad is the founder of Science Cafe, a “monthly gathering of scientific experts and interested lay community in a pub or other non academic setting. They explore the latest ideas in science and technology, using plain language. Admission is free, and you need no reservation—just come ready to listen and contribute. Please join us!” Heck…read all about it yourself: http://cafesciorl.com/

This was part of the discussion at #140Conf, especially by Ann Curry of ABC.

Some employers are either so afraid of the platform or so disdainful about its journalistic potential that they’ve tried to bar their reporters from even accessing Twitter in the workplace.

MediaShift . Rules of Engagement for Journalists on Twitter | PBS.

I’ll be there…will you?

“When I built the cast of characters, I wasn’t looking for the people with 500,000 followers,” Mr. Pulver told The Observer. “I was looking for people who had something interesting to say or people who were having an impact on other people. There was no rating system used.”

via Why Is Jeff Pulver Hosting a Conference About Twitter? | The New York Observer.

I’ve been looking at Twitter for about 6 months now, and I’ve discovered a few things.   It’s an odd beast, and marketers can’t quite wrap their mind around it.

If you’re not getting Re-Tweets…and you’re not getting @Replies…then no one is listening.  And in the Twitterverse, no one listening is a bad thing. 

The problem with Twitter is that it actually takes a real person to keep it going.  It’s very hard to automate Tweets without it looking like you’re automating Tweets.  But marketers try, nonetheless.

If you have a business…how do you decide how to use Twitter?  My suggestion is to be a real person.  Treat Twitter like you would treat a phone call, an email or a visit to your website…don’t treat it like it’s a billboard.    Engage your customers with valuable information and personal service and you’ll find Twitter much more useful.

Top 10 Reasons Why People Don’t Care About Your Brand on Twitter ( | re-engineering antonio.