Whiney Matheson is a journalist who writes the Pop Candy blog at USA Today. A while ago, her tweets were converted into artwork by several artists, for the 2008 Comic-Con. Some of you might have seen this.

So anyway, these are comics created using text that were originally tweets. It’s interesting because Tweets themselves translate very well into comic panels. After all, each one is only 140 characters max and that fits well as caption to explain one picture. It makes me think about what other mediums tweets could be mashed into… soon enough, we’ll see the world’s first Twitter-powered movie. That would be rad.

Here’s another cool use of Twitter. Orbiting Frog has created several Twitter feeds that use data to determine when the International Space Station (ISS) and Hubble will be visible over your part of the sky. When the time approaches for them to move over your city, you will get a 30 – 45 minutes tweet beforehand so you can go out and check it out. Tweet alerts will also only show up when the weather is good enough.

We know all the value of Twitter when seeking recommendations for specific products or feedback. It’s invaluable to get comments from people of all walks of life, especially when its all arriving in real time. It’s very useful when you’re unfamiliar with what you’re talking about and need more personal info from people you trust. The cool thing is that your Twitter posse is a virtual collection of friends that are accessible anytime, anyplace.. as long as you have an internet/mobile connection.

Did you know that clicking on an innocent link on a webpage while logged into Twitter allows a malicious cracker to update your Twitter status without you knowing? This links is usually invisible or placed under a commonly used button.This is known as click jacking.

An example of clickjacking on Twitter was revealed by James Padolsey who also recommended that one install the NoScript firefox addon as a method of protection. See his article to get an example of clickjacking in action.

Picture by Tony Gigov

As you probably know, Twitter has a limit of 140 characters for each ‘tweet’ and this forced brevity not only reduces the amount of time to make a tweet but encourages users to tweet often in regular intervals. Sometimes you might encounter the problem of having too much to say: at this time, the character limit stops from you expressing yourself fully. Learning to work within Twitter’s character limit is one of the ways to help you enjoy the service, while making sure that your points are carried across.

There are 3 ways of doing so:

Twitter angst! From the Joy of Tech webcomic. Do you get annoyed or upset when someone unfollows you on Twitter?

Twittersheep is a neat tool that allows you to create a tag cloud from the ‘bios’ of your Twitter followers. Why is this interesting? Because it gives you an instant snapshot of the type of people that you are following you. It’s handy because you don’t have the time to click through on every single profile to check the bio, an impossible task when you have a few hundred/thousand followers.

Here is a fascinating use of Twitter. David Griner discovered a diary by his great-aunt from 1937-1941 and decided to create a Twitter account (@Genny_Spencer) to post the daily diary entries. It’s cool to see the new protocol that is Twitter being used as a method to archive pre-Internet era information. Would be great to see more people pursuing something similar.

Do you cuss on Twitter? Do the people you follow do it? Some people don’t mind it but others are instantly offended if a word like ‘fuck’ shows up on their Twitter stream.

I had a lotta fun checking out Cursebird, a real-time feed of people swearing on Twitter. On top of streaming tweets with cuss words in them, it gives you a 7 day overview of the top swear words. ‘Fuck’ is currently no.1 with a 51.33% occurence, while ‘Shit’ and ‘Bitch’ follows with 35.15% and 8.46% respectively.

Just came across the Twictionary, a dictionary while compiles terms commonly used on Twitter or by Twitter users. It’s great to see the community coming together to collaborate on documentating the urban language of Twitterverse (that’s one of the terms listed).

Anyone can edit, so go contribute if you’re interested!