ReadWriteWeb

When protests broke out in Egypt earlier this week, microblogging service Twitter was the first thing to go. The country quickly blocked the service to avoid seeing repeats from other Web 2.0-centric revolutions, such as the recent upheaval in Tunisia or 2009's protests in Iran.

Today, Twitter has come forward and with a pledge to "keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content."

New data from stat-tracking firm Experian finds that U.S. Twitter users are now spending two hours and 12 minutes per month on Twitter.com reading and replying to tweets. That's up from one hour and 51 minutes last year. However, the time spent during any given Twitter session has declined. In November 2010, a typical Twitter session was 13 minutes, 12 seconds, down from last year's average of 15 minutes, 12 seconds.

This suggests that users are "seeking more frequent quick hits," says Experian, "rather than spending longer periods of time reading through posts."

Twitter is in the process of testing its self-serve ad platform with a few advertising agencies, according to a preview in MediaPost.

One of the beta testers is Clix Marketing Founder David Szetela, whose clients using the new ad platform include investor Guy Kawasaki, who's using the service to promote his forthcoming book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions.

Update: According to Twitter spokesperson Matt Graves, what's described in the MediaPost story is not the company's new self-serve platform. "While we have previously discussed plans to offer a self-serve offering for advertisers in 2011, this isn't it," says Graves. Rather, this is part of the Promoted Products offering, and involves working with an in-house sales rep.

As the effects of the Tunisian protests roll out across the Middle East, those who are not going up in flame are going out on the streets.

Today, Egypt has seen tremendous anti-Mubarak protests. In retaliation, the Egyptian government is doing what governments all-too-often do, blocking, cutting, filtering. Specifically, Twitter is blocked in Egypt.

Twitter's revenue from advertising may hit $150 million this year, according to estimates from eMarketer, a figure that certainly goes a long way to answering one of the company's perennial questions: "what's your revenue model?"

eMarketer says it's "cautiously optimistic" about Twitter's new ad products and predicts that the microblogging platform may see a threefold increase in revenue this year from the $45 million it brought in in 2010, the first year it sold advertising.

What's better on a Friday afternoon than an infographic that dissects the so-called "Twitterverse"? A clickable version of that self same thing, that's what.

The Twitter ecosystem of third-party applications can be a wonderful and confusing thing, so the folks over at Twitter app bazaar OneForty have put together a clickable infographic that helps navigate nearly 150 of the more than 3,500 available apps.

When you watch TV, do you watch with a smartphone in-hand or a laptop by your side, so you can keep up with what everyone is saying on Twitter? One TV show, more than the rest, has captured the attention of the Twitterverse and its popularity has implications for both Twitter and television.

More and more, Twitter is becoming a side dish for prime time entertainment and, as the networks catch on, it's becoming a tool for bringing the audience back from the land of DVRs and time-shifted television into real-time viewing. But how?

The first in-depth user research study on the usage of the "Location" field within Twitter profiles has just been published by the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). With a sample size of 32 million English language tweets in hand, PARC summer intern Brent Hecht selected a group of 10,000 active users to study. Remarkably, he found that 34% of Twitter users do not provide a valid geographic location on their Twitter user profiles. Instead, some of these users co-opt the field to make jokes, express their love for a particular celebrity or to shout back at Twitter that their location is "NON YA BUSINESS!" Others, meanwhile, provide no location information at all.

For any related service or other research study that leverages this field to determine Twitter users' actual location, the implication is obvious. Without first parsing the tweets to remove those that don't use the location field as intended, the sample data could be corrupted. PARC already found one study where that was the case.

Twitter announced this afternoon that it is adding its seventh language to its arsenal - Korean. According to the blog post (which is entirely in Korean, but which Twitter provided to us separately in English), South Korea has been one of the fastest growing regions for the microblogging company.

"As of today, Twitter will be even easier for Koreans to use," writes the company. "Among other updates, Twitter.com and Twitter's mobile web site are now translated into Korean."

"Free speech" is one of those things that can cost you. For professional soccer player Ryan Babel, that price is nearly $16,000. Babel was recently fined by the soccer league's regulatory committee over a tweet, reports the BBC, and warned not to do it again.

This isn't the first time we've heard of someone being fined over the contents of their tweets and certainly not the harshest punishment, but it's a reminder that 140 characters can get you in some legitimate trouble.