Webware

Iran's elections topped Twitter's list of most popular topics of 2009, according to the microblogging site.

"Among all the keywords, hashtags, and phrases that proliferated throughout the year, one topic surfaced repeatedly," the company wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "Twitter users found the Iranian elections the most engaging topic of the year. The terms #iranelection, Iran and Tehran were all in the top-21 of Trending Topics, and #iranelection finished in a close second behind the regular weekly favorite #musicmonday."

The fact that Iran's elections rose to the top on Twitter is noteworthy because Twitter itself became a tool for organizing post-election demonstrations in Iran.

In the category of top news topics on Twitter, items related to the Iranian elections and swine flu took five of the top six spots for the year. They were followed by Gaza, AIG, and President Obama's inauguration.

A look at the top trending topics of 2009 on Twitter.

(Credit: Twitter)

Among the most-discussed people of the year, Michael Jackson took the top spot. He was followed by singing sensations Susan Boyle and Adam Lambert, respectively. Kobe Bryant, Chris Brown, Chuck Norris, Joe Wilson, Tiger Woods, Christian Bale, and Alex Rodriguez rounded out the top 10 most-discussed people of the year on Twitter.

"Harry Potter" was the most engaging film of the year for Twitter users, followed by "New Moon," "District 9," "Paranormal Activity," and "Star Trek."

"American Idol" was the top television show on Twitter, followed by "Glee," the "Teen Choice Awards," "Saturday Night Live," and "Dollhouse."

On the tech side, it was Google Wave that engaged the most Twitter users, followed by Snow Leopard, Tweetdeck, Windows 7, and CES.

Twitter is working on a fix for a problem that has caused some of its users to receive tweets in their timelines that were meant for other parties, the company announced on its status page Wednesday.

The issue started earlier this week, when Twitter received some reports from users saying that tweets were cropping up in their timelines that didn't seem intended for them. Twitter asked for help from users on Tuesday on its Known Issues page. The company requested that users experiencing the tweet misdirection issue include their username, the "stranger's" username, and a link to the stranger's tweet.

A look at some of the issues users are having.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

The issue seems rather widespread. The post is littered with comments left by users that have been affected by the problem. Even those with protected accounts have received misdirected tweets.

For now, Twitter has yet to find a solution to the problem. The company wrote a quick entry on its status blog on Wednesday, saying "some users are seeing tweets (that aren't retweets) from users they do not follow." It pointed users to the Twitter issues page and said it is "working on fixing the underlying cause."

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If you're experiencing the misdirected-tweet problem, you can let Twitter know here.

We'll update this space as we learn more.

Those who say that Twitter is nothing more than a place where people share inconsequential experiences in their lives might want to listen up. Dell told Bloomberg on Tuesday that it has earned an estimated $6.5 million in sales of PCs, accessories, and software, thanks to promotions on Twitter.

Dell's vice president for the company's online unit, Manish Mehta, told Bloomberg that over the past three months alone, the number of people who have started following Dell's tweets has risen 23 percent. The company's DellOutlet account, which is home to most of the vendor's sales announcements, currently has almost 1.5 million followers. But unlike some companies, Dell has made Twitter an integral part of its operation. Bloomberg reported that "more than 100 employees send out the tweets" to customers.

"It's a very vibrant channel for us and it's growing aggressively," Mehta told Bloomberg, referring to Twitter. "It's not just our reach and growth that has progressed, it's that it's happening globally."

Mehta told Bloomberg that its Twitter accounts are followed by people in 12 countries. Brazil users alone spent $800,000 in the past eight months, he said.

TweetDeck now doubles up profile pics on retweets to give original poster's credit.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Seesmic's Twitter reader app for Mac and Windows is looking at some serious renewed competition from TweetDeck.

The newly updated TweetDeck 0.32 (and AIR app for Windows and Mac,) packs in a host of changes that should make the desktop app more attractive to power tweeters. Chief among these is new behavior for retweeting, when users share a contact's tweet with their own list of followers in just a click. TweetDeck supports two formats, the "new style" that spits out an identical post and displays both your photo and that of the original tweeter, and the "original" style that lets you edit before you post the duplicated message. We like that TweetDeck can remember your preference, or that you can do nothing and choose fresh each time.

(Credit: TweetDeck)

The new TweetDeck also incorporates Twitter Lists for the first time, a grouping feature that Twitter launched about a month ago. Just as you can manage individuals on TweetDeck, you can also manage lists and omit people on them that you don't directly follow. You're able to create new lists from scratch or from a list you already have.

In addition, tweets that include geolocation information now pop up with a yellow pin at the bottom of the message. You can click the pin to expand an embedded map. We haven't seen any of these show up in our lists yet, but the concept of convenience is similar to what Yahoo Messenger already does when it embeds photos and videos into chat windows. We hope that's next here, too.

Adding and expanding on Twitter features isn't TweetDeck's only move. The update also pulls the LinkedIn social network onboard, which means you can now read status streams from LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace in TweetDeck's column view, in addition to tracking streams from various Twitter accounts.

The version 0.32 update also makes its mark with a reorganized Add Column screen that replaces previous menu items with redesigned navigation for maintaining your Tweeting dashboard. The new TweetDeck includes numerous bug fixes as well; here's the changelog for more details.

Professional networking site LinkedIn's platform, previously a closed offering for select partners, has opened up to developers at large, according to an announcement Monday on the company blog.

Well, sort of. Building an embeddable widget on LinkedIn, unlike Facebook's, still requires a stringent application process. But LinkedIn's own code has now been opened up so that developers can integrate it into their own sites. It's launched a developer site for those interested in features that let site users access their LinkedIn profile and contacts externally. They still have to request a key to get into the platform's application program interface (API), which means that LinkedIn widgets likely will not be coming to office prank-calling Web sites any time soon, despite that they could make it much easier to robo-call your boss and ask if his refrigerator is running.

One of the first participants, for example, is desktop Twitter client TweetDeck, which says that it will soon allow users to plug in their LinkedIn contacts' status updates alongside Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace contacts.

LinkedIn has about 50 million users as of last count.

Stateless Systems, the creators of BugMeNot and PDFMeNot, have a new tool called Trendsmap that hasn't been designed to solve any productivity problems. Instead, it does just the opposite and serves as entertainment. It tracks trending Twitter topics by geographical location by combining data from Twitter's API and What The Trend. It then sticks it onto a Google Map where users can sort by city or general region and see trending topics in real time.

All of this information is organized into something resembling a tag cloud, which floats around without any specific, or pinpointed location within each city. Clicking on any of them pops up a small info box that aggregates the latest tweets, local and global seven-day histories of that trend's popularity, as well as some top-related news links that change depending on what's trending.

Trendsmap gives you a birds-eye view of trending topics on Twitter, per city, region, or worldwide.

(Credit: CNET)

Where the site shines though, is in letting you dig even deeper by giving each city its own trends page. Here you can cruise through info boxes without first having to find each tag, as well as see all of the trending charts stacked up against one another--something I think makes for a better experience. It also collects all of the related media like photos and videos in one single section (try giving it a spin for Las Vegas).

One thing the service doesn't do very well though, is serve smaller towns. This wasn't a big deal killer for me since I'm based in San Francisco, but if you want to use it for somewhere that's outside a major city, you're out of luck. This may simply be a limitation of how deep the data set is, but it keeps you from seeing trends starting up in smaller towns, which can be more interesting than in major cities.

See also Palm's Trendtracker, which lets you see trending topics not only geography but by time of day as well. We checked it out last week.

The new 0.30 version of TweetDeck, due out Wednesday, supports MySpace. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's my demographic. But who the heck cares about MySpace?

The MySpace addition to TweetDeck, though, shows how much CEO Iain Dodsworth wants TweetDeck to become, in his words, "a browser for the real-time Web."

I like TweetDeck a lot. I use it and Seesmic Desktop in equal proportions. But I'm not sure I want my Twitter client to get all fancy and over-ambitious. Twitter is hard enough to manage even with a good, clean client. If TweetDeck adds support for other real-time feeds--Dodsworth mentions Last.fm, Songkick, and Doppler, for example--then I worry about the clarity of TweetDeck's Twitter experience getting murky.

Although there are some integrations that can work. I welcome TweetDeck 0.30's improved Facebook support. It now supports photo streams and makes it easy to update Facebook directly from Twitter, among other features. While Twitter and Facebook have different feature sets that make mixing the two networks in one application a little weird, in TweetDeck they run in separate columns and stay nice and separate. (Seesmic Desktop can merge streams from Twitter and Facebook in a single column, quite successfully.)

TweetDeck 0.30 has MySpace support (not shown, because who cares?).

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Other improvements in the new version of TweetDeck include even tighter Bitly integration, down to the app's automatic and instant conversion of long links to short ones as you type them (cool) and the capability to drag photos directly into TweetDeck to post them to Facebook (also cool). You can also click on a hashtag in a tweet to kick off a new search column for that tag.

TweetDeck also gets a new list of recommended Twitter accounts for users to follow, and the way you add users is particularly elegant: you can add a whole collection of Twitterers in a topic, like "Journalists," and TweetDeck creates a new column in the interface to follow just those accounts. Unfortunately the process for getting accounts on to the TweetDeck recommended lists is opaque or "editorial" at the moment, although Dodsworth does say he'll move to a crowd-sourced model shortly.

The new version's user interface appears to be cleaned up. However, it's really that some options are now hidden in second-level menus.

And still missing is an option to get a notification sound only on @replies or direct messages. Sometimes I run Seesmic Desktop just for that one feature.

In sum, version 0.30 is a decent upgrade to TweetDeck, although the app is approaching feature overload with its continuing addition of new services.

Previously: New versions of Tweetdeck, Seesmic square off

The National Football League has had a love-hate relationship with social media.

Some teams tweeted to fans while choosing players at the NFL draft back in April. But then last month, a few NFL teams told players they couldn't tweet or text-message during a team function.

On Monday, the league announced that it had modified its social-media policy to limit Twitter and social-networking use by players, coaches, league officials, and even the media.

The NFL said that it will let players, coaches, and other team personnel engage in social networking during the season. However, they will be prohibited from using Twitter and from updating profiles on Facebook and other social-networking sites during games.

In addition, they will not be allowed to tweet or update social-networking profiles 90 minutes before a game and until post-game interviews are completed.

The rules even extend to people "representing" a player or coach on their personal accounts.

The NFL didn't just stop with the league itself, though. The organization also said that media attending games will be prohibited from providing game updates through social networks.

"Longstanding policies prohibiting play-by-play descriptions of NFL games in progress apply fully to Twitter and other social media platforms," the National Football League said in its statement. "Internet sites may not post detailed information that approximates play-by-play during a game.

"While a game is in progress, any forms of accounts of the game must be sufficiently time-delayed and limited in amount (e.g., score updates with detail given only in quarterly game updates) so that the accredited organization's game coverage cannot be used as a substitute for, or otherwise approximate, authorized play-by-play accounts."

The fact that the NFL won't allow tweeting during games isn't new. The league instituted the policy for players after they started using technology in touchdown celebrations. But the updated regulations now extend to just about anyone who is remotely involved in the game.

Why the NFL decided to change its policy now is unknown. But it might have felt compelled to update it after Bengals wide receiver Chad Ochocinco said in a recent Ustream chat that he plans to circumvent the rules and tweet while playing.

It could have also had something to do with Donte Stallworth's Twitter account. The player was suspended by the NFL after he was charged with DUI manslaughter and served 30 days in jail. His Twitter account features tweets discussing his suspension and incarceration.

Still, if Ochocinco or any other player tweets during a game, it might be difficult for the NFL to enforce the rule. And since players can create accounts that the NFL might not even know about, it's doubtful that the league will be able to monitor all social-media activity. We'll just have to wait until the season starts next week and see what happens when someone breaks the rules.

Look for Ochocinco to test them first.

I'm always intrigued by backup tools for Web services that don't really need backup. TweetSaver is no exception. This paid service backs up (almost) everything you've ever posted to Twitter, along with private messages and replies from other users. It then adds an extra layer of utility on top of it, like a search tool that's limited to just your messages, simple sharing options for each message, as well as a way to assign a tag to each tweet for categorization.

Of course the usefulness of all of this hinges on Twitter being down and/or somehow losing all of your data. However, based on Twitter's uptime over the past year, you have to ask yourself if it's worth the cost of $20 a year. That's pretty steep considering there are some free Twitter backup solutions like TweeTake and TweetBackup that do many of the same things.

It's also worth pointing out why you wouldn't need this service for some of the features it's advertising. For one, Twitter's search tool can be limited to just your tweets if you use the from: operator. TweetSaver is also only capable of retrieving your last 3,200 tweets, so if you've got more than that, they're not going to be archived. This in itself is a limitation of Twitter's API, but should be noted if you have 40,000 tweets and think it, or any other service, is going to be able to grab them all.

I do like the idea of tagging tweets though. Crafty Twitter users have already found subtle ways to tag their Tweets by using hashes (#'s), although there's no way to go back to old messages and add them in. It can also be impossible if you're running out of space in an outgoing tweet. Below is a demo of how it works. I'm getting access later tonight and will update if it's got any hidden goodies that make it worth the price: