Twitter Inc. is being sued by Cooper Notification, a subsidiary of Cooper Industries Plc. Cooper Notification is based in Sarasota, Florida and the reason that they are suing Twitter is because of patent infringement.

“Cooper has suffered, and will continue to suffer, and is entitled to be compensated” stated Cooper in a complaint to the federal court in Wilmington, Delaware. Cooper Notification sends security alerts to the community and employees.

Twitter is not the only company that Cooper is going after. Cooper Notification is also suing Rave Wireless Inc. and Everbridge Inc.

100. Chris Rauschnot
http://themacwizard.com/
Las Vegas, Nevada USA
Chris Rauschnot is a web 2.0 and social media expert. He also has been an Internet Entrepreneur for over 10 years and is a certified apple tech. He has over 24,000 followers and sent out over 10,800 tweets.

99. Ruth Zoarets
http://twitteranalyzer.com/
Tel Aviv, Israel
Ruth Zoarets is a co-founder and the VP of marketing at TwitterAnalyzer.com. She engages very often with her followers and is a frequent retweeter. She has over 22,000 followers and sent out over 24,800 tweets.

98. John Battelle
http://battellemedia.com/
San Francisco, California USA
John Battelle is the Chairman, Founder, and CEO of Federated Media Publishing. He is also the executive producer of the Web 2.0 conference and is a “band manager” with BoingBoing.net. Before that he was a co-founding editor at Wired Magazine. He has over 24,000 followers and sent out over 3,400 tweets.

97. Jason Fried
http://www.37signals.com/
Chicago, Illinois USA
Jason Fried is the co-founder of 37signals. Fried often speaks at conferences about start-ups and motivation. He has over 21,000 followers and sent out over 2,000 tweets.

96. Chris Sacca
http://www.whatisleft.org/
San Francisco, California USA
Chris Sacca is a Twitter investor and advisor. He is the former head of special initiatives at Google Inc. and is an associate fellow of the Said Business School at Oxford University. He has over 1.1 million followers and has sent out over 6,200 tweets.

95. Steve Rubel
http://www.steverubel.com/
New York City, New York
Steve Rubel is the SVP/Director of Insights for Edelman Digital. He also is a columnist for Adage and is a lifestreamer. He has over 34,000 followers and sent over 8,800 tweets.

94. Paul Force
http://forces2.blogspot.com/
Horseheads, New York USA
Paul Force is a PC technician and consultant. He is also a “Security Dude” and likes to brighten your day with recycled jokes. He has over 25,500 followers and sent out over 14,700 tweets.

93. Molly Wood
http://cnet.com/buzzreport
Mollyy Wood is a host at CNET TV. She is a self-proclaimed “minor Internet celebrity and part-time bouncer.” She has over 25,000 followers and sent out over 4,700 tweets.

92. Walt Mossberg
http://walt.allthingsd.com/
Washington D.C. USA
Walt Mossberg is a tech columnist at AllThingsD. He is also a principal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Mossberg worked at The WSJ since 1970. He has over 28,000 followers and sent out a little over 500 tweets.

91. Ryan Block
http://ryanblock.com/
San Francisco, California USA
Ryan Block is a co-founder of Gdgt.com and is an editor. He is also a former editor and editor emeritus of Engadget. Block has over 27,000 followers and sent out over 2,800 tweets.

90. Wayne Sutton
http://socialwayne.com/
Raleigh, North Carolina USA
Wayne Sutton is a social media evangelist, technology evangelist, podcaster, video blogger, and entrepreneur. He is very responsive to his followers. He has over 27,000 followers and sent out about 26,000 tweets.

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Orange UK has added a photo sharing feature to their service in the form of SMS and picture messages (MMS) through Twitter. Through a website that Orange UK created called Snapshot, Twitter users in the UK can share photos using MMS and SMS. To use the service, take a photo using your Orange phone, select the Send via MMS or Send multimedia message option, and then send the photo to 86444. Twitter will not charge extra for the service, but carrier messaging rates apply. Send the word “START” to 86444 to get started with the service.

Neil Patrick Harris (NPH) has joined Twitter [Twitter profile link]. Some of you know him as Doogie Howser M.D. and some of you know him as the car thief in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. NPH can also be spotted as Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother and as the main character on Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, an Internet musical.

On NPH’s first day on Twitter, he has gained over 67,000 followers. The number of people that are following him on Twitter is skyrocketing. Currently NPH is following Mr. Teller of Penn and Teller, Nathan Fillon, Felicia Day, Dodd Vickers, and Chris Hardwick.

Just like any new Twitter user, he seems to be struggling with the 140 character limit. His last tweet from two hours ago said “Prfkt. Thx 4 L th advyc evry1. This s a way ezr way 2 cmuNik8. Un42n8ly, itz takn me 3 hrz 2 ryt, but itz much pre4d 2 gtn cut off lyk i u.” Give him a follow if you haven’t done so yet.

President Barack Obama was doing a tour in China this week. On one of his stops, he was at a town hall in Shanghai. The town hall meeting was streamed online and one of the questions he was asked was about Twitter. Twitter was blocked in China since this past July.

A student asked the U.S. President “Do you know about the great firewall and should we be able to use Twitter?” The President replied: “I have never used Twitter but I’m an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access.” That must be a disappointment to some of the President’s 2.6 million followers that actually believed Obama was sending out some tweets.

In actuality, it was staff members at The White House that were sending out the tweets. There is a difference in opinion regarding the President not sending out tweets himself. Some believe that it is wrong that Twitter verified his account and some believe it is a good thing that the U.S. President is not sending out tweets. I am going with the latter.

The U.S. President has a lot on his plate to deal with on his plate. Between the struggling economy, the war overseas, depletion of natural resources, financial bail-outs, automotive bail-outs, etc. — I think that should give the President enough to do every minute of his day.

Why do people tweet? For networking purposes. Why should people network? To gain respect and authority. Who has the most authority in the United States? The President. What more can the President gain by interacting with Twitter followers? I’d rather see him spending time ensuring a positive economic future than retweeting Ashton Kutcher.

When signing up for Twitter there is a list of recommended users to follow that appears. Those who were fortunate enough to be on that list of people instantly received hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers. Jason Calacanis, co-founder of Weblogs Inc. and Mahalo believed that the suggested user list was so valuable that he offered $250,000 to be on it.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said that the company is currently exploring alternative ways to introduce prominent users to new members of the micro-blogging community. Some of the prominent users include politicians, news outlets, sports athletes, actors, and actresses.

“That list will be going away,” stated Stone when talking to reporters in Putrajaya, Malaysia. “In its stead will be something that is more programmatically chosen, something that actually delivers more relevant suggestions.”

It even got to the point that politicians started criticizing the list themselves too. Some Republicans said that Democrats are heavily favored in the suggested user lists than Republicans. Twitter employees say that they choose the suggested users list based on who posts messages often and engages with followers. Currently Twitter has about 54 million users.

With all the tweets that are being sent out by the web, mobile devices, toilets, airplanes, and from outer space you would figure that at least a million were being sent out per day. Pingdom quantifies that exactly 27.3 million tweets are being sent out per day as of right now.

The sample dates for that average is between October 21 and November 11. There are fluctuations of between 567,000 and 1.8 million every hour depending on major events taking place. When extrapolating that average, it comes out to over 10 billion tweets per year. While this is a large number, Yahoo! members send out 100 billion e-mails per month according to TechCrunch.

In terms of communication preference, Twitter will not be able to replace e-mail but it can come darn close.

In the video above Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman discuss the partnership between the two companies. It is cool that LinkedIn is getting a real-time status update boost with the help of Twitter but comparing it to peanut butter and chocolate just seems off-putting. Especially as they look at each other in the video when they make the comparison. To Stone’s credit, I did enjoy his interview with Stephen Colbert.

Twitter has launched a Lists feature for all users. This feature was available on TweetDeck for quite a bit of time but Twitter has rolled it into their own service. Twitter user Nick Kallen confirmed the news in a tweet. The service was only available to a set number of users but expanded to everyone today.

Not only can you create your own list, but you can also find out what lists you are on for different users. List descriptions will be added in the next few weeks according to TechCrunch.

This is good news for those who update Twitter from the web and log in regularly. Personally I stick to using TweetDeck for updating Twitter so I’m not sure how much I’ll use the Lists feature. But it is still an awesome feature to have nonetheless.

HTC sent out a tweet about 18 hours ago that said “The rumors are true! Hero will be getting an Eclair update. We ask for your patience as we update Sense for the fancy new Android OS.” Eclair is the code name for the second version of the Google mobile operating system.

Some of the new Android 2.0 features include:
- Multiple email and contact accounts (including Microsoft Exchange).
- Combined inbox for browing multiple e-mail accounts on one page.
- Search functions for SMS and MMS messages
- Auto delete old messages when limits are reached.
- Digital zoom, scene mode, white balance, color effects, and macro focus for photos
- Multi-touch keyboard support
- Smart dictionary that learns word usage and suggests even contact names
- Thumbnails of web pages in the bookmarks section of the browser
- Double-tap zoom support
- HTML 5 support

Josh Elman was the former platform manager at Facebook. But now Elman is joining another California based social networking slash micro-blogging firm Twitter.com. Elman is joining Twitter at a time where the micro-blogging company is receiving a lot of interest from third party developers.

TweetDeck is one of the most used Adobe AIR applications and Tweetie is one of the most downloaded applications on the iPhone. When Elman worked at Facebook, he was responsible for Facebook Connect. Elman was also responsible for cleaning up the design of the social network after applications made Facebook look very cluttered.

Elman has also previously worked for LinkedIn, Zazzle, and RealNetworks. Louis Gray broke the news of Elman’s hire after spotting the Twitter official list of employees. Twitter has about 113 employees.

Earlier this month Twitter made a deal with Bharti Airtel. Airtel is one of the biggest telecommunications companies in India with about 100 million subscribers. The company launched an SMS service where users in India can update their tweets from mobile phones. The SMS tweets are a free additional service which inevitably will increase the popularity of Twitter in the Asian subcontinent. In order to promote the new service, Airtel is airing three new commercials that lets their customers know about the service. After the jump are the three commercials:

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Last night I was sitting at the Good Time Charley’s bar watching the Michigan State vs. Iowa University football game in Ann Arbor, Michigan. All of a sudden I notice that a large crowd started gathering outside of the bar. When I walked out I saw smoke and fire spewing from the top of a building about one block down from where everyone was standing. The roof, the roof, the roof was on fire of a building that used to be known as Pinball Pete’s.

While the firefighters were battling the heat, students were busy taking pictures and updating their Twitter accounts. A couple of people next to me sent out some TwitPics immediately. Shortly after the pictures were taken, a video was uploaded on YouTube [embedded above] and Flickr user moto1986 uploaded a stream of pictures from the event.

When I was standing there watching all of the students sending out tweets and updating Facebook statuses while the firefighters were battling the fire, I couldn’t help but think about how far technology has brought us. Just imagine if this event took place about 10 years ago. Our friends would rely on how well we could describe the fire rather than having the ability to see our pictures on Twitter and our videos on YouTube.

Some of the tweets that were sent out are displayed below [click the image to enlarge]:

[Photo credit: Emma Bumstead]

[Photo credit: Kristen Oltersdorf]

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has made a deal with Twitter and Facebook. The deal is non-exclusive. Facebook and Twitter will both integrate real-time feeds of status updates and tweets into the Bing search engine service. Twitter hit about 5 billion tweets yesterday and Facebook has the most number of status updates than any other service. Facebook sends out an estimated 40 million status updates per day.

Microsoft Bing’s market share will benefit from this deal as real-time news is becoming a preference for people. Traditional news agencies are suffering from this and are cutting staff and newspaper circulation. Google will have to step it up if they want to retain their customer base.

Facebook users will be allowed to decide whether they want their status updates to be public or not. The financial details of the deal are undisclosed, but it is expected that the Redmond-based software company will be paying both Facebook and Twitter millions of dollars along with revenue-sharing deals. Microsoft owns about 1.7% of Facebook through a venture capital deal and has an exclusive advertising partnership with the social network.

About a year ago, Twitter had processed about 1 billion tweets total. That was around the same time that the service struggled to stay online and kept showing us the “fail whale.” Within one year later the company processed an additional 4 billion tweets more. The statistics of the tweets being sent are processed by Gigatweet. The 5 billionth tweet was from Robin Sloan who sent out the tweet “Oh lord.”

Twitter had served 1.6 billion tweets up until this past April, indicating that 3.4 billion tweets were sent out in the last 6 months. Five billion tweets requires a lot of processing power and bandwidth. Its a good thing that Twitter has $155 million in venture capital to keep the servers running. Twitter was co-founded by Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, and Evan Williams in 2006.