It is widely known that law enforcement agencies are turning to social networks to monitor citizens but one UK Twitter user saw a joke tweet land him in hot water, as he was detained by Homeland Security in Los Angeles, interrogated and barred from the US, The Sun reveals.

Before Leigh Van Bryan and his friend Emily Bunting embarked on a holiday to Los Angeles, Van Bryan tweeted that he was going to “destroy America,” boasting that he would try “digging up Marilyn Monroe” during his trip across the pond.

If someone tweets they would “destroy America,” you would expect it to alert law-enforcement agencies. However, in the UK, “destroying” can also be used as a term for partying or having a good time.

When Van Bryan and Bunting arrived in the US, they were immediately detained by officials at Los Angeles International Airport, held by armed guards and questioned for over five hours before they were “handcuffed, put in a van with illegal immigrants and locked up overnight.”

Twelve hours later, after being held in separate cells (Van Bryan shared his cell with Mexican drug dealers), the pair were released and put on a plane home.

Twine is a wireless module tightly integrated with a cloud-based service. The module has WiFi, on-board temperature and vibration sensors, and an expansion connector for other sensors. Power is supplied by the on-board mini USB or two AAA batteries (and Twine will email you when you need to change the batteries).

The Spool web app makes it simple to set up and monitor your Twines from a browser anywhere. You set rules to trigger messages — no programming needed. The rules are put together with a palette of available conditions and actions, and read like English: WHEN moisture sensor gets wet THEN tweet "The basement is flooding!" We'll get you started with a bunch of rule sets, and you can share rules you create with other Twine owners.

Because the hardware and software are made for each other, setup is easy. There's nothing to install — just point Twine to your WiFi network. Sensors are immediately recognized by the web app when you plug them in, and it reflects what the sensors see in real time, which makes understanding and testing your rules easy.

Copy the URL or tweet ID for a tweet, and the script will send it to Aaron's Twitter Viewer

Add the Follow Button to your website to increase engagement and create a lasting connection with your audience.

I mentioned in my earlier post, that Kim Kardashian is being paid $10,000 a tweet to promote sponsors on her Twitter account. But what are those sponsors paying for? Because, while she clearly has influence over a certain community, and her Twitter page says she has about 2.7 million followers, I think the reality is obvious: Nobody has a million followers on Twitter.

Does that mean Twitter's follower counts are lying? No. Instead, Twitter accounts that have over half a million followers listed actually represent (at most) a few hundred thousand people who've chosen to become organic followers of someone, along with millions who are passively along for the ride. Some of them are inactive users, some are spammers, some just ignore the noise of the accounts that don't interest them, like spam in an email inbox. But they can't count as "followers" in any meaningful sense.

I made this little program so you can view and link to a whole conversation from Twitter in context. Just enter a Tweet's ID to get started (it's the number in the URL of an individual Twitter page):

Great way to search only those you follow on Twitter.

Twitter officially disabled Basic authentication this week, the final step in the company's transition to mandatory OAuth authentication. Sadly, Twitter's extremely poor implementation of the OAuth standard offers a textbook example of how to do it wrong. This article will explore some of the problems with Twitter's OAuth implementation and some potential pitfalls inherent to the standard. I will also show you how I managed to compromise the secret OAuth key in Twitter's very own official client application for Android.

OAuth is an emerging authentication standard that is being adopted by a growing number of social networking services. It defines a key exchange mechanism that allows users to grant a third-party application access to their account without having to provide that application with their credentials. It also allows users to selectively revoke an application's access to their account.

Twitter has become hugely popular and is only getting bigger. Some users don’t understand that the formatting and content of their tweets has a huge impact on how well or poorly they are received as individuals, and by extension, how likely they are to be followed.

I participate extensively on Twitter with my personal account: @danielpunkass, and my company account: @redsweater. One of my applications, @marsedit, also tweets with a mind of its own.

I have strong opinions about what works well on Twitter, and what doesn’t. I decided I would start writing down these opinions so that I can easily reference them in the future. This advice is as much a memorandum to myself as to any readers who might feel that I am preaching to them. I violate most of these recommendations on a regular basis, but I hope that writing this guide helps me to do so less often.