Twitter does a pretty good job locking things down. With the exception of the (embarrassing) brute-force password hack of one of their admin accounts earlier this year, the fledgling micro-blogging platform has a remarkably good history, with only a few exceptions. The same cannot be said, however, of the various applications that have been written to access Twitter's API.

Twitpwn is aiming to change all that, one day at a time, every day this month. Starting July 1st, TwitPwn launched their MoTB (Month of Twitter Bugs). Each day, the blog's author will post a vulnerability or set of vulnerabilities affecting either the Twitter service itself (none so far) or a third-party Twitter application. To be fair, the author notifies both Twitter and the third-party developers 72 hours ahead of time and gives them full details about the vulnerability. After that, it's fair game.

Earlier this week we came across an interesting article on TechCrunch about the use of the word "Tweet" by Twitter application designers. The post seemed to imply that Twitter has grown increasingly concerned with the use of the word "Tweet" in applications and websites. The conversation centered around an email conversation forwarded to TechCrunch blogger Robin Wauters between the Twitter API team member and a third party developer.

A quick quote from that blog post:

It wasn't long before Twitter responded on their Twitter Blog, adding a very interesting layer of perspective to the issue.

Twitter has apparently filed trademarks for the word "Tweet" (which they probably should have done, I dunno, two years ago), but assures the Twitter community that they're not going on a Twitch-hunt over use of the word.

For a service that seems to take pride in being adamantly inflexible, Twitter's had some big changes this week. The microblogging service unveiled a re-amped "Following" and "Friends" view, designed to make the web-based interface more friendly and emulate some of the most popular Twitter client's functionalities.

The new Followers list shows you, at a glance, who's following you, and whether or not you're following them. You can choose to view the list as a very basic, compact, one-line follower list, or as a larger block-based list view that also shows you each user's most recent Tweet.

The largest change to the UI, however, is the addition of a very convenient "Actions" button, which allows you to "Mention" (@) a user, Direct Message (D) a user, Follow (if you're not already following), Unfollow (if you are already following) and Block a user.

It's been a rough week for celebrities. With last week's passing of Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and Billy Mays, Twitter has been slammed with RIP messages and general discussion about the life and times of some of the world's most famous celebrities. Sprinkled in with the legitimate death reports, however, have been plenty of fake ones, culminating today in a hack-attack on the microblogging platform that comprimised the accounts of Diddy, Britney, and Ellen.

Lately, it seems like just about everyone wants to tell you the RIGHT way to use Twitter. They want to tell you how often you should tweet, what services and applications you should use, what kinds of people you should follow and how you should go about getting your own Twitter followers.

Thing is: they're all wrong. Well, not "wrong," persay. But they're wrong in assuming that there is one, single, "right way" to use Twitter. One of the things that makes Twitter such an amazing service with so much potential is the fact that everyone seems to use it in a different way. With a few exceptions (like #hashtags), there are very few hard and fast "rules" of how to use Twitter correctly. Some strategies that work well for one particular user will be completely meaningless for a different kind of user.

Just because there is no one "right" way to use Twitter, though, doesn't mean that there is no "wrong" way to use it. There ARE, definitively, a few tactics that unsavory Twitter users are using which are not only unsuccessful, but which can hurt a business' brand and even draw the wrath of the Twitter admins - leading, eventually, to the termination of your Twitter account.

Here's a few examples of some Twitter "Bad Behavior" that you would do well to avoid:

After long years of speculation, it seems that Twitter has FINALLY given some details on how they plan to make money from what has become arguably the world's second-largest social network. As more and more third-party services have cropped up to fill in the blanks between the demands of Twitter users and the plans of the developers, much speculation and discussion has come to circulate around the microblogging platform. This week some of that speculation was put to rest when Twitter co-founder Biz Stone sat down for an interview with Bloomberg's Kristen Schweizer to discuss Twitter's plans for monetization in the near (and far) future.

Here's the meaty bits for your perusal:

Trends come and go - that's the nature of them. One of the great things about Twitter is that they show on, on the homepage and accessible through the Twitter API, the top ten "trending" topics on Twitter. Sometimes the trending topics are hashtags, and sometimes they're just words that keep popping up over and over again in people's tweets. Oftentimes their meaning and significance isn't immediately obvious; by clicking at trending topic, you can view the stream of tweets containing that topic and try to figure out what it's all about.

WhatTheTrend clears all of that confusion up, and how! The site has a listing of almost every topic that's trended on Twitter, along with an explanation of the reason for the trend's rise in popularity. It's a great service, and it must require either a herculean awareness of popular culture or a very dedicated researcher and developer (you can follow @WhatTheTrend on Twitter) for a feed of URL's leading to trend explanations.

If you've been on Twitter anytime in the last week, you've probably noticed more and more green twitter avatars showing up in people's tweets. That's because people who support the protests over the disputed elections in Iran, and who support Iran in general, are turning their Twitter avatar icons green to indicate their support.

You might ask what a post about government matters is doing on a social media site. Well, as a social media and Internet user, it is important for us to know about this.

The NSA is routinely examining large volumes of American's domestic domestic email messages without court warrants. Read that again please. Ok, got your attention? Scary isn't it?

So what are the implications of this? Does it only affect American citizens? If so, how do they determine who American citizens are?

Anyone who uses Twitter a lot knows that downtime happens - in fact, it's predictable. Twitter takes the site down frequently to perform scheduled maintenance, which can take anywhere from one to three or four hours. Twitter always schedules these updates to occur when their largest user base, the United States, is mostly asleep.