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A U.S. Federal Court in Virginia caused quite a stir among digital privacy advocates last week when it ordered Twitter to grant the Justice Department access to private data from the accounts of three suspected WikiLeaks supporters. That data includes IP addresses, session times and relationships between other Twitter users.

Normally, requests for this type of information are not particularly controversial, but in this case a warrant was not required and the subjects of the data inquiries have not yet been charged with any crimes. The government is able to make such warrantless requests thanks to a 1994 law known as the Stored Communications Act.

Whether you think the protestors camping out in various city parks around the world is justified or not, it is interesting to see this analysis published in Technology Review today. They used a tool from SocialFlow that examined a pile of Twitter data. Did you know the first use of their hashtag was in a July 13 Adbusters blog post?

Today Sprout Social has come out with v2 of their social media management service. It adds personalized dashboards, multi-user account management, an iPhone app, and dozens of other features. We covered their launch last year here.

We written frequently about corporate microblogging tool Yammer and today they have made the digital equivalent of the Louisiana Purchase. This is a major land-grab for the company and an example of how wide they can extend their service into a variety of other nooks and crannies of our online lives. The announcement concerns six new partners and three new features.

Twenty months after joining Twitter as the company's VP of Communications, industry veteran Sean Garrett just announced (on Twitter) that he's leaving the company.

What's next? "No plans yet," he Tweeted. "Free agency. After creating and fulfilling a killer sabbatical list (suggestions welcomed)." Garrett has worked in PR for over twenty years, first for California Governor Pete Wilson.

Good news for Twitter, for Firefox & for Firefox users.

Firefox 8.0 was just announced for download and one of the biggest changes that users will notice is that Twitter search has been added to the default search options in the top of the browser. Answers.com and CreativeCommons are out (ouch) and Twitter is in.

The implementation is nothing special, it just drops users off on Twitter's own search page, but for the hundreds of millions of people in the world who don't know how to navigate to Facebook other than to search for it in their browser search bar - those people will now be one step closer to seeing what Twitter can do.

Twitter is cutting deals with third-party providers of services that re-syndicate Tweets online, the company announced today, and the first one is Austin, Texas-based Mass Relevance. Mass Relevance has access to the full Twitter fire hose and offers its customers a filtering, curation and display technology to add Tweets about a TV show, political campaign or other event to their web pages.

The potential for syndicated Tweets is big, but hopefully Twitter won't go after everyone else in the world who puts Tweets on other websites as a part of their business. The company doesn't seem to be welcoming interested parties to license those rights either. We've asked Twitter for comment on the prospect of enforcement of the prohibition against unofficial resyndication of Tweets (who said this stuff was free as the wind?) but haven't heard back from the company yet. (Update: Twitter's comment below.)

As we wrote about earlier this week, Klout has reworked its algorithms, and your scores have changed. Some have gone up, some down. Despite claiming more transparency with their algorithms, they are still mostly opaque and mysterious. As one of our readers commented, "Klout just pulled a Netflix, taking trust off the table."

So while they tinker with their code, you might want to explore other alternatives that can help you measure your social media effectiveness. We have come up with 17 different services, some free, some fairly expensive. I have tried most of them and will give you my impressions so you can have a head start with your own explorations.

The history of nerds automating their potables goes back a long way, even before claims about who invented the Internet. The latest chapter has been written by the geeks from RedPepper. They have invented Beeri, the first Siri interface for pouring a beer. Or, as its creators say, "the thought leader of beer pouring." This is just the latest dream job for Siri, it seems.

That social media is having an impact on television is hardly breaking news at this point. For a few years, Twitter and other social networks have served as a sort of digital, real-time water cooler where viewers convene and discuss TV shows as they're broadcast.

This behavior has emerged more or less organically. Just as with major sporting events and breaking news stories, people naturally gravitate toward services like Twitter and Facebook to post their thoughts about television shows.