ReadWriteWeb

This year wasn't the first time any of us heard about the impact of social media on television. People have talked about TV shows on Facebook and Twitter for about as long as those social networks have existed, and the trend has only accelerated as social media usage in general has exploded.

Last year, chatter on Twitter helped the MTV Video Music Awards boost its audience to the biggest it had been in eight years. In 2011, services like Twitter and Facebook served as the virtual water cooler for just about every major news story and broadcast media event. It may not have been invented this year, but 2011 was pivotal for social TV.

The $300 million secondary investment Twitter confirmed Monday morning comes from a key figure in a region where Twitter is experiencing some of its fastest growth.

Never mind that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi investor whose Kingdom Holding investment firm has stakes in Apple, Citigroup, and now, 3% ownership of Twitter, isn't a big user of the service himself (Prince Alwaleed follows just 25 users with his account - including Fox News and Barack Obama - and he hasn't tweeted since Oct. 6 when he sent out RIP condolences to Steve Jobs).

Arabic is the fastest growing language used on Twitter and the company has gotten credit for playing a role in the Arab Spring uprisings in Northern Africa and the Middle East earlier this year, and that makes Prince Alwaleed's investment significant.

Twitter is far and away my favorite social network, but it does have its downsides. The 140 character limit? Nope, I actually enjoy the challenge of crafting meaningful messages in limited space. The problems come in when you have users who don't quite understand the way Twitter is supposed to work, or when people or companies abuse the service.

You might balk at the idea that Twitter is "supposed" to work in any particular way. While Twitter doesn't have a written set of social guidelines (excepting its Terms of Service, of course), it does have a pretty well established set of unwritten guidelines that users should observe. Here's a few things you might want to consider when tweeting.

Facebook's new Timeline profile feature is great, even if it is a little strange. It's narcissistic, but that's a big part of the fun of it, and I'm not sure that other peoples' timelines are nearly as interesting as mine is to me.

It's an incredibly feature-rich new type of social network profile. It's a re-imagination of what a profile can be. It makes me want to use Facebook more, to share more data with Facebook so that it can be preserved and displayed so nicely, years into the future. While other Facebook features have pushed users into posting publicly by default, or posted their activities from other places they didn't understand would become part of the public record, I think Timeline is a genuine value add to incentivize users to share more. I think it's great.

Storify has just released its compilation of the top 10 tweets of the year. The number one tweet was Bill Gates' farewell post to Steve Jobs. Second place was Sohaib Athar's observation of a helicopter over Abbottabad, Pakistan, which turned out to be the first report of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

Storify is a tool for curating conversations that take place on the Web. Its recent redesign turned Storify into a front-page news site of the social Web. This year, Storify has played an instrumental role in documenting the news unfolding live on social media, such as the Occupy Wall Street protests. Storify users quoted nearly 3 million tweets this year in their embeddable social media stories.

Analysis by the social network analytics company Orgnet.com shows how rumors fueled a run on Swedish-owned banks in Latvia over the weekend.

Banking officials are calling it the world's first ever social media-fueled run on banks, and officials say that the misinformation campaign may have been a deliberate attempt to destabilize Latvia amidst the ongoing European debt crisis.

Is someone sitting on the Twitter handle you want? Is it someone with 0 followers who registered in 2008 and never tweeted once? Yeah, that was me, too. At least, it was yesterday. This morning, Twitter Trust & Safety turned over to me the account I've been after for years.

The trick is to file an impersonation claim. That's the only one Twitter responds to in a timely fashion. This means you have to make a credible case that you or your brand is being impersonated, and the account has to have violated Twitter's inactive account policy. But if you have your ducks in a row, you can have that account in your hands in under a week. Here's how.

Social media is supposed to be all about engagement and authenticity, but sometimes it can feel so distributed and overwhelming that conversations get lost. A new web app called Engag.io has tackled this classic problem and offers a pretty good solution that I think you'll want to check out. It's in private alpha right now but we've got an invite code at the bottom of this post. That someone is making an app like this gives me hope that there are still great ideas that can be built on top of the most basic building blocks of the social web.

Engag.io, which gets its name from being the place for your online engagement input and output, is like an inbox for all your conversations on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Foursquare and blog comments. It's an inbox with analytics. It's built by the team behind content curation company Eqentia. Eqentia is ambitious but a little too complicated; Engag.io is very simple and the value of it will be immediately obvious to many people.

How much is one picture worth? Would you believe $20,000? This year, fast food purveyor KFC will provide that amount to one high school senior, who has until tomorrow to Tweet a link to a photo. Entrants must follow @kfc_colonel and use the hashtag #KFCScholar. The photo should illustrate why the student exemplifies Colonel Sanders' commitment to education and enriching communities.

Last year, KFC started the first-ever Twitter scholarship where students had to tweet why they deserved the money in 140 characters or less. The winner was California high school senior Amanda Russell, who won with this tweet: "Hey Colonel! Your scholarship's the secret ingredient missing from my recipe for success! Got the grades, drive, just need cash!" She is now attending UCLA.

Students have to have a minimum cumulative high school GPA of 2.75 and plan to pursue a bachelor's degree next fall. Only US citizens or permanent residents can apply. So get out your cameras today and start posting! If you aren't artistic and want another chance to win, you can enter online here at the KFC Scholars website before February 1 for one of 75 separate $20k scholarships.

Twitter's recent redesign had many buzzing about whether or not the micro-blogging platform had aspirations to become a full-fledged social network. Of course, many say Twitter's been a social network from the beginning, but either way, the redesign, along with their new brand pages, indicates a big shift from simply pushing out a 140 character message to your followers. Hameed Azar, a ReadWriteWeb community member, suggested we pose the question to the rest of the community.

With the #NewTwitter, is Twitter projecting itself as another social network and not a complicated micro blog?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and we used Storify to present it all back to you. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.