Twitter May Have Peaked

These folks know how to make 140 characters count

(NEWSER) - Fast Company surveys the world of Twitter and suggests 10 people worth following based on their creative tweeting. Full list here, along with samples . A peek:

1. Dawn Danby, @altissima : She a "sustainable design strategist" who covers her own field, often in haiku-like form.
2. Padmasree Warrior, @Padmasree : Cisco's chief technology officer tweets about the tech world.

Total posts up from 1B a year ago, 5B just 4 months ago

(NEWSER) - Twitter isn’t growing as explosively as it used to, but the volume of traffic on the microblogging site is still expanding fast enough that it should hit 10 billion total tweets in the coming days. That’s up from a billion about a year ago, and 5 billion just 4 months ago. Gauging the progress is quite simple, Mashable reports; just look at the number tag at the end of a tweet’s URL. A recent one read 9917803012, and the site produces about 50 million a day. More»

Hamza Kashgari, 23, tweeted that he wants to talk to Mohammed as a 'friend'

(NEWSER) - Islamists are calling for the execution of a young Saudi Arabian who tweeted last week about the Prophet Mohammed. "I have loved the rebel in you, you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me," Hamza Kashgari, 23, wrote in a tweet addressed to Mohammed. But "I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you,” he added. "I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more." His tweets triggered more than 30,000 responses in a single day, many of them from enraged Saudis calling for his death. Kashgari has since deleted his Twitter account, and apologized, but his home address was posted on YouTube and vigilantes have been hunting him at his mosque, reports the Daily Beast . More»

It involves whining about a sandwich

(NEWSER) - How to be an ace tweeter? Megan Garber at the Atlantic pores over a new study and starts her lesson with what not to do. This would be "The Most Annoying Tweet Imaginable":

• "BREAKING: Last week I had a #sandwich that was SO HORRIBLE, it made me want to #scream. Seriously, why can't they make better #sandwiches?"

Move represents major policy switch

(NEWSER) - Twitter has apparently decided corporate relations are more important than content. Company officials have announced that they will voluntarily restrict Twitter content in specific countries to comply with government limits on what citizens are allowed to read. "As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression," Twitter wrote in a blog post yesterday . "Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world." More»