Not that we begrudge Sara Morishige, Ev Williams' glamorous and chic spouse, her design flourishes. After all, she did the interior for Twitter's last new office and was brought back to do this one, meaning, at the very least, there was no staff revolt about her prior work. And on balance, the level of quirk seems appropriate for a company whose unlikely success was built on the world-changing potential of 140-character status updates. (You can take the full official tour here.)

But the new batch of pictures, compiled by VentureBeat's Kim-Mai Cutler, contain the same sort of oddities as the last one, with its toilet-stall vanity mirrors and dining room DJ booth. And Cutler drops words that Morishige, seen yesterday decorating hubby's office, had a hand in the overall design. Highlights:

These sleigh chairs meld old-fashioned rocking chairs with a modern Ikea seats. Weird. Also, we want one. Via Twitter on Flickr.

Where have we seen these green, toy-soldier-esque deer before? Oh right, at the old office, which Morishige also designed. They became almost iconic. But not to the commenter who wrote, under this picture on Flickr, " this is what happens when you give the interior decorator a budget and no guidelines along with it. ;P " Zing! Via Twitter on Flickr.

The deer theme has been extended, with a hunting-and-death twist. Via Twitter on Flickr.

Not only does Twitter have a DJ booth, it also has a house DJ, apparently. Or maybe "Chief Wax Officer" would be a better term. Via Twitter on Flickr.

The very nice view from 795 Folsom St.

It's hard to blame them. Still, some of the pictures compiled by TechCrunch — from Twitter, naturally — have us scratching our heads. Click on any of the first three items in the gallery below to see what we mean.

The mirror in the toilet stall. Bill Farner, who took this shot, is confused about this oddly-located "vanity" mirror's purpose. Can't say we blame him!

The lone "at" symbol on this wall. Wouldn't "@wall" be more appropriate? Or "@couch!"By Ryan King.

The DJ booth in the dining room. It's not just lunch, it's a party! By @caroline.

DJ booth in context (it's in the back). By Bill Farner.

This isn't one of the "weird" things, but it's noteworthy because of the subject: That's Ev Williams' wife Sara Morishige. So this, presumably, is the CEO's own office. Anyone know what the "795" is about? In any case, it's generous of the new mom and longtime designer to handle the interior of her husband's office. That's going to be a crowded wall, judging from the density of what's up so far. By @caroline.

Obama just said the following in China, according to TechCrunch and various other news outlets:

"I have never used Twitter but I'm an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access."

Some of the Twitterati are taking it hard. Just WHO have they been Following??

@netWire "Shocking, given that his account with 2.6 million followers has even been "verified" by Twitter headquarters' !!!

@BuzzEdition "WHOA...I thought Obama HAD used twitter...so sad now....."

@Amadeus3000 "I thought he used his account himself in early campaign days.."

@funuhu "Shocking! I am sad."

The rest of us can take solace in the fact that the most powerful man in the world knows he has far bigger issues on his plate than cranking out tweets. The only person who should be embarrassed is his ghostwriter, who is averaging less than two tweets per day. HOPE needs to spread faster than that!

Under the old rules of Twitter tradition, you "re-tweeted" another user by placing the letters "RT" before the quote and after any commentary you yourself added, like so:

If you use the new built-in re-tweet system, the original tweet would be copied into your stream under the byline of the original tweeter, like so:

The obvious problem: You lose the ability to actually say anything about what you're quoting if you use the new system. Also, all your followers are going to get a strange and potentially confusing avatar of someone they're not subscribed to in their stream.

On the bright side, this system is great for Twitter Inc. "Retweets potentially reveal very interesting data," Twitter CEO Evan Williams writes in a blog post about the new re-tweeting feature. Indeed, the feature offers a metric with which to rank tweets and thereby the results of Twitter searches and Twitter users themselves. Twitter could sell this data, provided free by its users, to the richest and most favored bidders, just like the microblogging startup did with the actual content of tweets.

The feature also helps Twitter's celebrity power users. Writes Williams:

RTs can actually be easily faked, which has become a form of spam, wherein well-known people are shown to be promoting something they never twittered about.

But, hey, if you don't like this new re-tweet thing that is so awesome for celebrities and Twitter Inc., you can always opt out. As Williams writes (emphasis from original), "you can turn off Retweets for everyone you follow (individually)." So just click "OFF" 200 times? Sounds super-easy!

(Top pic: Twitter co-founders Williams and Biz Stone, by Mathieu Thouvenin.)

British writer and analyst Charles Leadbeater, and researcher Annika Wong, have put together a report called Cloud Culture to be published by the British Council next year. Their statistical study, provided to me by Leadbeater, is based on figures from the social media analytics company Sysomos. It shows that such a tiny proportion of Iranians are on Twitter that any stories about a new movement based on the social network are meaningless. The figure they provide, by they way, includes the thousands of foreigners who changed their Twitter location to Tehran when the 'Iranian internet revolution' story struck after the elections in June and Facebook and Twitter were afire with Iran sentiment. So the likely figure is even lower.

The report adds that only one third of Iranians have internet access at all. And because opposition supporters are young, and on the internet, and Ahmadinejad supporters tend to be older and rural, the picture on the ground is likely skewed by any analysis that relies on tweets.

Leadbeater and Wong also compile a series of hyperbolic quotes from a variety of media sources at the time of the protests:

• "Twitter has become a key information conduit as the authorities in Tehran have cracked down on reporting by traditional media." Chris Nuttall and Daniel Dombey, Financial Times.
• "After disputed election results and massive street demonstrations in Tehran, Iran, information is flooding out of the country – on Twitter." Ashley Terry, Global News.
• "This is it. The big one." Clay Shirky of NYU.
• "We've been struck by the amount of video and eyewitness testimony... The days when regimes can control the flow of information are over." Jon Williams, BBC World News editor.

The meme was just too tempting, it seems, for anyone to dig into its veracity. The media — this site included — loves to write about Twitter, and loved doing so even more in summer when it was even newer and shiner. The storyline also fit the fact that Iran is a young country, and chimed with the heartbreaking YouTube video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan.

The solidarity that thousands, even millions of Americans showed with the people of Iran during June's elections and the subsequent protests was admirable. It was also potentially dangerous. I was at the UN protests against President Ahmadinejad earlier this fall. Several young men were wearing dust masks they had purchased from hardware stores. I asked one why. "I am wearing it because I have to go back to Iran," said a softly-spoken and shy 28-year-old student who gave his name only as Mohammed. "I return next year and this is for safety, in case they are watching," he added, pointing to his mask. "It could be the best $3 I ever spend."

If Mohammed is picked up despite his dust mask, the fact that the protests in Tehran were partly fomented by Western support based on a false story about Twitter will be of no consolation. It's probably not much comfort to these people either.

Today, rumor has it that the first gag order has been issued; Mashable says Dreamworks inserted an anti-Twitter clause into Mike Myers and Cameron's Diaz's contract for their work on the fourth installment of the Shrek series, committing them, we presume, to keep all details of the upcoming cartoon off the social networking platform.

At first glance, the notion that anyone on Twitter would give a damn about details of Lord Farquaad or the talking donkey backstage hi-jinx seemed delightfully self-absorbed and misguided of Dreamworks. But on closer examination, with football games scores and weather news regularly trending on the site, perhaps viral media has reached such a saturation point that even fourth installments of over the hill children's cartoons are in danger from the new world. Can TMZ Girl be far behind?

On the other hand, Hollywood, is such a Draconian zero-tolerance approach really the best way to stir up excitement for a franchise that should have been put out of its misery several films ago? Maybe unfettered Twittering about Princess Fiona's wardrobe malfunctions are the one hope you have of stirring up a little enthusiasm.

There are a far-sighted handful of people in Hollywood who see the marketing potential of the micro-blogging tool, but the Hollywood Reporter writes today that the backlash has begun in earnest, with Twitter-controlling contracts being inserted into contracts across the ranks of showbiz.

They write:

A recent talent contract from Disney includes a new clause forbidding confidentiality breaches via "interactive media such as Facebook, Twitter, or any other interactive social network or personal blog."

Over at DreamWorks, a writer's deal cautions not to jump the gun on studio press releases via "a social networking site, blog or other Internet-type site." An agent spotted a talent deal with a stricture that forbids bashing any element of a production with social media.

The only question we have is why didn't this crackdown come sooner? Since DW Griffith first stepped off the train, Hollywood has devoted itself to one cherished goal that it has always kept close to its heart: making sure actors never, ever speak directly to the public. Since the first days of entertainment, no "talent" has ever opened their mouth without a phalanx of handlers on hand to craft their every word and prepared to lower the muzzle at the first sign of truth telling.

In recent times few celebrity interviews are conducted without a volume of "conditions" and "parameters" laid down in advance and a publicist in the room or on the phone line prepared to step in should a conversation show any signs of actual life.

With its Stalinesque vise over the media, stars and executives in Hollywood communicate in Orwellian newspeak, reciting a handful of approved phrases. "He was such an inspiration to work with," "It's a thrill to play a different kind of character" and "I've never been on a set where everybody had so much fun" marking the parameters of acceptable speech.

The industry, being staffed exclusively by teenage girls, loves rumors and gossip more than anyone, but nowhere in media is the ratio of what reporters know but can't report to what they can more out of whack. Any hints of conflict, malfeasance or turmoil are strictly buried in the official press, left for bloggers like Nikki Finke to guess at through the glass darkly from the placed tidbits of her official sources.

And then comes Twitter, and suddenly the entire structure of communication goes out the window. Stars having obscenity laced cat-fights with each other, revealing their contract negotiations to the whole world, directors joking about work stoppages on the set...

But on the brighter side, this is the one area where the old media news industry has led the way, having long since issued stern warnings to their employees that their Twitter lives are subject to the same absolute censorship and editor-controlled domination — aka "Zone of Trust" as all their other forms of speech.

Madison, a 41-year old self-described anarchist, attended the recent G-20 protests in Pittsburgh and, like a good 21st century rabble-rouser, used Twitter to direct his comrades around the mayhem.

Coppers didn't like that so much, so now they've arrested him for hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime, which we can only imagine means the police radio found in hit Pittsburgh hotel room, and not Twitter, which is everyone's.

Investigators are taking this thing super seriously: they raided Madison's Queens apartment and removed antiquated items, like "newspapers," an "address book," whatever that is, and a picture of Lenin. Anarchists are so predictable.

Yes it was. In the summer, the coastal elites hailed Twitter's brilliant simplicity for allowing the microblogging service to route around authoritarian sensors and transmit poignant messages that made otherwise apathetic Americans really care about Iranian activists, as evidenced by their willingness to turn digital avatars green.

But now they're starting to fret that Twitter and its social networking brethren, like Facebook, are not so much simple as simplistic; reductive media that distill a complex debate like universal health care down to its most emotional, televisable sideshows. Of course, we've seen this flip flop before: Hollywood celebrities fell in love with Twitter as a free marketing channel, then despised it as a haven for uncouth and often unchecked imitators; earnest liberals loved what social nets did for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, but hated the eternal platform they have given birthers.

Of course, this dysfunctional, love-hate relationship is basically endless. The brands might change from year to year, but the practice of ultra-concise and often crude networked communication is only going to become more common. The lessons for the future are, as always, in the past; it was the current president who showed there was an emotional and reductive way to package online the candidacy of a novice black politician with a Kenyan father and a liberal political platform. There's got to be a way for him to similarly distill the health care debate. He could start by asking Michael Moore for tips.

Earlier this year, Love and former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl sold Cobain's likeness to Activision for use in Guitar Hero, and former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl and bass player Krist Novoselic signed off on the use of the band's music. But once it became clear that the game lets people make Cobain sing Bon Jovi songs, puppet-like, Everett True, the Melody Maker writer who mythologized the Seattle scene in the late 1980s and introduced the world to Nirvana, called foul via Twitter:

Love, as you might expect, went crazy, replying that she didn't authorize the likeness, and colorfully implicating Grohl:

Here's Rolling Stone, by the way, on Love's participation in the Activision deal:

Naturally, Love did have some concerns. Namely, Cobain's physique, Riley reveals. "Courtney supplied us with photos and videos and knew exactly what she wanted Kurt to look like," he says. "She picked the wardrobe and hair style, which turned out to be the ‘Teen Spirit' look, then we went back and forth over changes - some subtle, some not so subtle." In column B? Love's reference to the Greek God Adonis, whose youthful good looks made the male deity an object of desire. "She certainly had a physical image in mind," says Riley. "She wanted him to have that sort of athletic definition but not overly so." And while Love has long had a reputation for being difficult, Riley's experience was anything but. "She was actually great to work with," he says. "She got back with comments pretty quickly."

Our sister-site Kotaku confirmed with Activision that Love signed a contract giving the company the right to "use Kurt Cobain's likeness as a fully playable character in Guitar Hero 5."

Anyway, Courtney love then unleashed 214 Tweets over a six-hour period—or roughly 1.7 Tweets-per-minute for six hours straight—about True, crystals, Margaret Atwood, and all the people who are out to get her, which is absolutely not the sort of obsessive behavior that someone under the influence of methamphetamine would exhibit.

UPDATE: We thought we'd share this nice note from Steve Martin of the appropriately named Nasty Little Man publicity, pointing out that Grohl didn't have anything to do with whoring out Cobain's likeness for a video game—he only whored out the music:

correct this you assholes:

"Earlier this year, Love and former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl sold Cobain's likeness to Activision for use in Guitar Hero."

DAVE GROHL HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SALE. AND IT'S DISRESPECTFUL THAT YOU DON'T EVEN MENTION KRIST NOVOSELIC WHO CO-FOUNDED NIRVANA.

He followed up with this statement from Grohl and Novoselic:

This is a statement regarding Nirvana, Guitar Hero and the likeness of the late Kurt Cobain.

We want people to know that we are dismayed and very disappointed in the way a facsimile of Kurt is used in the Guitar Hero game. The name and likeness of Kurt Cobain are the sole property of his estate – we have no control whatsoever in that area.

While we were aware of Kurt's image being used with two Nirvana songs, we didn't know players have the ability to unlock the character. This feature allows the character to be used with any kind of song the player wants. We urge Activision to do the right thing in "re-locking" Kurt's character so that this won't continue in the future.

It's hard to watch an image of Kurt pantomiming other artists' music alongside cartoon characters. Kurt Cobain wrote songs that hold a lot of meaning to people all over the world. We feel he deserves better.

Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl

We've updated the post above to reflect the distinction, but not the difference.

About as well as any other scenario in which Silicon Valley geeks attempt to play tastemakers, which is to say, wretchedly. The company's co-founders, Web nerds Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have implicitly conceded as much, announcing plans to recommend feeds on a new basis: the tastes of other users who live nearby, or who have similar interests. What, middle America isn't going nuts Twitter-pimped content from Dell Outlet, Guardian Tech or geek-friendly bloggers like Veronica Belmont and Pete Cashmore? Who would have thunk it!

(Pic: Stone, by Joi Ito)

The common thread to these stories is a desire to keep secrets off Twitter. Sports officials are worried that indiscreet tweets will fuel a frenzy of gambling, while the Germans don't want voters improperly biased against perceived losers, or against turning out to vote for perceived shoe-ins.

But why not let the information run wild? Player tweets will feed free publicity in sports blogs; the better stories will make it up into the big media. Political parties, meanwhile, can spin online exit polls in such a way as to increase voter turnout, for example by saying the opposing candidate is suddenly doing better than expected, or that a lead might fizzle without a strong last-minute showing. Gamblers and voters, meanwhile, will have to guess which Twitter leaks are legit and which ones intended to deceive them. In the end it will mostly be a lot of confusing sound and fury, twisted for various self-promotional agendas. Just like the rest of Twitter.

(Pic: spike55151 on Flickr)

Apparently on leave from the heavily-armed governor's compound, Arnold Schwarzenegger visited Twitter's San Francisco HQ today for a webcast meet-and-greet. During his visit, the Republican casually mentioned that 90 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health care, that reforms perhaps should focus on a disgruntled minority of maybe 5 percent, and that the state's education crisis can be solved in part by seeking volunteer P.E. instructors.

In response to this political red meat, the watchdogs hanging out on Twitter asked a series of questions amounting to, "Why are you so awesome?" as seen in the attached clip. The third question was whether the state should tax something it's already taxing (legalized gambling). Then the governor received a t-shirt and went home. The tee might not fit very well — perhaps for his wife, CEO Evan Williams offered — but microblogging, with its magnetic effect on the star-struck and the bored, would appear to suit the governor quite well.

That Twitter would describe Hollywood royalty as a "distraction" just shows the enormous cultural gap between the San Francisco startup and its associates in Southern California, where such a broad putdown of celebrities would be unthinkable at a company meeting. Notes obtained by TechCrunch show Twitter staff even called Diddy "not so strategic... Diddy values his contribution higher than we do... [Let's] get a group of people rather than concentrate on Diddy."

But Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is now spinning the incident like a veteran Tinseltown flack, declaring in an interview with VentureBeat's Kim-Mai Cutler, "we were super impressed with how savvy [Combs] was... He has stayed relevant for so long, and how does he do it? He's constantly reinventing himself." Stone himself has staged something of a reinvention, calling up celebrities to apologize and to "tell them that these notes didn't reflect anything." Apparently Hollywood was a bit more strategic than geeky Twitter wanted to admit, and Stone will probably have to spend months groveling like this as a result.

Take Houston, Texas' anonymous "Bloggess;" the Houston Chronicle columnist just can't understand why Shatner blocked her account, following posts like these:

• "Dear @ WilliamShatner: I need you to come to my house to save my marriage. No sex involved."
  
• "Unless you *want* to have sex. Which is totally fine."
  
• "But not with me though because I'm married. Please bring your own hooker."
  
• "Oh my God, what am I saying? I am the worst hostess ever. I will totally provide the hooker if you just come to dinner."
  
• "I need to know your preferences though or else I'll just default to hot Asian cheerleader."
  
• "Fuck. Dear @WilliamShatner. Please ignore my last several tweets. I'm a little drunk. And dangerously close to paying too much for travel."
  
• "Please come to my house and save me from myself."
  
• "Please give me a sign."
  
• "Victor: GET OFF TWITTER. I'VE BEEN STABBED." (Not addressed directly to Shatner)

Actually, we don't get it either: We'd rather read about hookers, Robert Scoble murdering rabbits and some crazy lady's husband getting stabbed than about 95% of what's on Twitter already. Then again, we don't have a wholesome Christmas song to pimp, and no one's going to write a tabloid story about us if we ignore a fan who writes "save me from myself" and then does something stupid.

(PIc via Bloggess)

As for Williams, he's been silent for a few hours, presumably holding his wife's hand and coaching her breathing, but it's a virtual guarantee that one or both of them will be updating their Twitter feeds during the labor and delivery process. Here's hoping everything goes well.

Pic via Sara Morishige's blog

[via VentureBeat]

A U.S. Strategic Command source tells Wired.com's Noah Shachtman that social networking sites made it too easy to spread "scams, worms, and Trojans" among the Marines. So the U.S. is now in the peculiar situation of deeming social networks safe enough for its teenaged girls, but too perilous for Marines, in active war zones. The Marines will remain completely safe from movie quizzes, virtual jello shot requests and online snowball wars for one year.

Horizon Group Management's complaint says the claim of mold is false — though it offers no evidence — and seeks $50,000 plus court costs. Unlike the "first" Twitter libel suit, against Courtney Love, this one involves no other social networking services (the Love suit also involved MySpace postings), and only a single tweet. Our adorable microblogging service is growing up so fast! The offending tweet:

[Chicago Now]