Twitter has asked a New York state judge to throw out a subpoena that would require the social networking company to hand over messages posted by an Occupy Wall Street protestor accused of disorderly conduct.

The social networking site is looking to quash a New York state court order which required it to hand over the deleted message history of a New York-based activist.

Twitters' urging comes following a failed subpoena attempt by activist Malcolm Harris to block the court from viewing his Twitter feed.

"The order surprisingly holds that Mr Harris has no right to challenge the District Attorney’s subpoena for his own communications and account information on Twitter," said Twitters lawyers in a motion submitted to the New York state courts.

"The analysis, based on the assertion that Mr Harris has no proprietary interest in the content that he submits to Twitter, contradicts Twitter’s Terms of Service and the express language of the SCA."

Harris stands accused of purposefully disobeying a police order which called for New York protestors not to march across the Brooklyn Bridge.

The court believes that Harris's Twitter feed would prove that he knew of the police decree before he took part in the 700-strong protestor march last October.

Harris, @destructuremal, originally tried to block the subpoena himself, but was denied on a technicality that stated Twitter owned his tweets.

Twitter believes that assumption is incorrect and points to its terms of service as proof. 

A company spokesperson told V3: "Twitter's Terms of Service make absolutely clear that its users own their content. Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users."

Forget 15 minutes of fame, researchers at Google have concluded today's stars don't dim quite so quickly, thanks to sites likes Twitter.

A group of researchers from Google, eBay and Berkeley University have been studying the famous and wanted to know how fame had changed over the past two and a half centuries.

They suspected that thanks to social media and 24-hour rolling news, fame today would be far more fleeting.

But how to set about measuring fame? The researchers, led by Alex Fabrikant of Google Research, alighted upon a pair of measurements: the likelihood a reader might read a news article at random and find their name mentioned in it; and the period around which that name continues to appear in news stories.

They also accounted for those that appeared genuinely famous – either by a large volume of mentions or a long-lasting series of mentions. Luckily for them, to help with this they had access to Google's digitised news archive, which stretches back 250 years.

The researchers then set about using tools to pick out people's names from this vast archive – some of which is stored as digital content, while a huge proportion is generated from optical character recognition tools being applied to microfilm.

Up until the 1940s, the researchers predictions appeared to be correct: there was a gradual decline in the length of time people stayed in the news.

But following the Second World War, the researchers detected a complete volte face.

“Over the course of 70 years, through a world war, a global depression, a two order of magnitude growth in (available) media volume, and a technological curve moving from party-line telephones to satellites and Twitter, both of our fame duration metrics showed that neither the typical person in the news, nor the most famous, experienced any statistically significant decrease in fame durations," the report explained.

What's more, after 1940, those people that were famous appeared to stay famous for a longer time than previously.

Which is great news for Peter Andre, but probably bad news for humanity.

As any ardent tweeter knows, you can pack a lot into 140 characters. Enough indeed to land you in jail for nearly two months, as Swansea University student Liam Stacey has found to his cost. Those that think the micro-blogging platform provides any semblance of anonymity should sit up and take note.

Stacey was found guilty of posting racially offensive comments on the site, relating to Bolton Wanderers footballer Fabrice Muamba, after he collapsed on the pitch during a recent FA Cup match with Spurs.

Police were knocking on Stacey's door to question him about the comments within days.

While there's been near-universal revulsion at Stacey's comments, the 56-day sentence imposed underscores the hard line taken by the authorities over what gets posted on social media.

Earlier this week, a cross-party committee of MPs published their report into privacy and injunctions, in the wake of numerous online breaches of court orders, often by people posting under a pseudonym on Twitter.

As the MPs noted, Twitter will readily unmask its users and hand over all account information when presented with a court order.

Stacey isn't, of course, the only person to appear in court because of comments made on social media.

Last year, two men, Jordan Blackshaw and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, were jailed for four years for inciting riots on Facebook.

And Paul Chambers' case has become something of a cause célèbre, after his tweet about blowing up Robin Hood airport landed him with a hefty fine.

Anyone viewing Twitter as just a repository for throwaway comments should think again.  

While the world worked itself into a frenzy over Facebook's IPO earlier this month, the other social media giant Twitter has said it will postpone plans to go public for years because it is not ready to disclose its earnings to the market, according to reports.

In an email obtained by CNN, Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo told staff last year that the firm will not be taking the same path as Facebook in making an initial public offering (IPO) anytime soon.

"We don't want to be public until we have very predictable quarterly earnings growth," Costolo wrote in his August email, according to CNN.

"We're not ready to be a public company for a couple years."

For the last year, Twitter shareholders have been banned from selling more than 20 per cent of their shares.

The reason for this is that if companies have more than 500 shareholders owning one class of equity shares the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) mandates the business to disclose financial results.

Twitter told V3 it could not comment on the email.

The firm has been discussing possibilities of an IPO route to revenue growth since 2009.

In related news French president Nicholas Sarkozy has joined Twitter. The president has not always shown a liking for emerging technologies and the social web, particularly when the new technologies come into conflict with traditional media establishments.

It remains to be seen if he proves as sensational as some of the other recent converts to the micro-blogging service, most notably Rupert Murdoch who has already hit out at Google on the service.

ORLANDO: With IBM beating the drum on the use of social tools and collaborative software, its chief information officer Jeanette Horan, outlined the firm's own work in these areas, to show it practices what it preaches.

With almost half a million full-time employees (currently around 450,000) IBM has a huge workforce using a vast array of tools, both internally and externally and the figures she revealed are truly astounding:

•    On average 360,000 staff use the firm’s instant messaging platform every day.
•    This generates a staggering 50 million instant messages per day.
•    There are 198,000 members of staff on Facebook.
•    A much smaller 20,000 are on Twitter.
•    LinkedIn Is the most popular platform, though, with 281,000 users.
•    20,000 members of staff run their own internal blog on the firm’s Connections tool.

She also revealed its willingness to shake things up by explaining it runs a reverse-mentoring system in the company where some of the youngest new staff members teach its most senior executives how to use the latest social tools.

However, one area the firm admitted it is still addressing is the growing issue of what should happen to employees' Twitter accounts after they leave the company.
 
Carol Sormilic, vice president global workforce and web processes, explained to V3 that it is an area the firm is currently debating internally, but has yet to reach an answer.

One area where the firm is up and running, though, is letting staff bring their own devices to work after the end of a two-year pilot that involved feedback from 20,000 members of staff, which actually equates to just five per cent of its workforce.

This led to the creation of a set of policies that include an enforced eight-digit password for each device to access the corporate network and Horan revealed that she herself uses her own personal BlackBerry phone as her work device.

On the issue of cloud computing, Horan explained that IBM operates six datacentres to help it run a private cloud computing network as the size of the firm makes this a viable return on investment.

“We have the scale to be able to see the benefits of managing the cloud behind the firewall,” she added.

As well as a fascinating insight into the day-to-day IT demands of a firm the size of IBM, its willingness to embrace new trends and give staff the power to take advantage of new tools may give IT leaders in other, smaller, firms the courage to go forward with their own plans in these areas.

VIENNA: HP has said it expects to see 50 zettabytes of data being created every year by 2020 as a growing number of online users generate huge amounts of content on sites like Twitter. A zettabyte is one billion terabytes.

Prith Banerjee (pictured above on stage), head of HP Labs, said at the firm's Discover event that the number of online citizens across the globe will soar to four billion by 2020, driving huge growth in data creation.

"By 2020 there could be as many as four billion online interacting on social networks. While now there are 250 million tweets per day this will rise to tens of millions," he said.

"There's also going to be a huge increase of sensors on the network measuring everything from temperature to heart monitoring. We expect there to be one trillion sensors by 2020."

Banerjee added that HP expects a whopping 30 billion mobile phones to be in use by 2020, which is a fairly terrifying thought.

Clearly the claims have been made to underline the theme of the Discover event that businesses need to get better at managing structured and, crucially, unstructured data. The key launch of Autonomy's Idol 10 platform at the show could be seen as the centrepiece to this.

The predictions from HP also vary from those produced by IBM, which said in 2010 that it expects 35 zettabytes of data to be created annually by 2020, and business intelligence vendor SAS, which put the figure at 15 zettabytes by 2015.

Whichever firm is right, there's clearly no doubt that data is going to grow hugely, and that businesses need to think carefully about how they use this avalanche of information.

Ever since the riots that swept the UK in August there's been much debate and hand-wringing over what should be done with social media sites during times of unrest, with the government even threatening to shut down sites like Twitter.

Thankfully, Thersea May and co. seem to have come to their senses and said they will not be seeking additional powers to block sites. There was a timely reminder that these services can benefit law enforcement agencies on Thursday when it was revealed that over 600 police officers are now on Twitter.

Speaking at a Westminster Forum event, Paul Reilly, a lecturer in media and communications at the University of Leicester, noted that since the riots the number of police officers on Twitter had grown to 632.

"Every territorial force now has a Twitter feed as part of steps being taken to use this tool to engage and provide accurate information and stop rumours circulating," he added.

"Police in Northern Ireland have been particularly proactive in the use of social media and received praise for this and other forces are using these tools more effectively now but there has been a degree of caution among some too."

He added that this number had grown significantly since the riots as more officers out on the streets look for ways to engage with their community.

Furthermore, not only does Twitter offer engagement but it also offers a wealth of information that police forces can access, as Justin Crump, the chief executive of security intelligence consultancy firm Sibylline, explained.

"Social media is open source intelligence on steroids. It moves at a hell of a pace and can be very biased and you have to be very disciplined to deal with it but if you integrate people, processes and technology you can gain benefits," he said.

Indeed, V3 spoke with South Yorkshire Police in October who are using Twitter to increase engagement with the community and track potential disturbances, as police across the land prove that shutting down social media sites would be a disastrous decision.

Twitter is now an established corporate social media tool, and many companies have policies on its use and encourage staff to exploit it as a way to interact with customers, create brand loyalty and drive traffic to their sites.

However, it's still a medium that can cause problems, as that bastion of wire-breaking news, Associated Press (AP), discovered this week when two of its journalists covering the removal of Occupy protestors in New York were arrested.

Staff at the firm immediately posted this breaking update about the arrests on Twitter. But they were subsequently reprimanded for not putting it on the wire first, thereby undermining the value of AP's service and making Twitter the first source of the story.

However, Reuters' social media editor, Anthony de Rosa, questioned AP's warnings to staff, arguing that it is more important to adapt to the use of new tools than doggedly stick to old working practices.

"To bury our head in the sand and act like Twitter (and who knows what else comes into existence next month or five years from now?) isn't increasingly becoming the source of what informs people in real time is ridiculous," he said on his blog.

This difference in opinion on how Twitter should be handled by two of the world's leading digital media wires highlights the thought that all businesses must put into how they want staff to use social media, especially Twitter.

As we've reported on more than one occasion the service's instant, non-stop, real-time ethos can catch out those unaware of just how dangerous posting without thinking can be.

Furthermore, in an update to the story, AP's executive editor, Kathleen Carroll, told journalists that releasing such information on Twitter can put colleagues at risk.

"Even in the US, it's not outlandish to think that a tweet that's taken by someone in authority to be opinionated or sarcastic could lead to one of our staffers being held longer than necessary," Carroll noted.

"Imagine you're that staffer. Would you want to be kept behind bars by a colleague's thoughtless tweet?"

There aren't going to be many firms that have to worry about whether a message on Twitter could lead to a member of staff being banged up for longer than necessary, but it shows that you've got to think of all the possibilities in this brave new world of social media.