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PostPost, a powerful, noise-reducing search tool for Twitter, has pushed out some updates that make it even more useful. When we first covered PostPost in April, we were struck by how easy it made sifting through one's Twitter timeline. To do that, it indexes your last 3,200 tweets and then narrows your stream down to the most important 200 users and indexes the last 800 tweets posted by each of them.

Since then, PostPost has been updated to handle searches far more effectively. First, it switched its default search operator from OR to AND, which improves the results for queries containing multiple words. It also now uses a link: operator to let you search for links to specific sites or pages. Searches for multimedia content now return more specific results as well. Instead of searching broadly for videos or photos, you can drill down to just YouTube or just Instagram.

Earlier this month, we reported on AT&T's internal Twitter-tracking technology which is used by its social media support staff to listen for customer complaints regarding service issues. Tweet about a bad 3G signal or a dropped call on your iPhone, and AT&T is listening. A social media team of about 21 people across the U.S. reads and responds to those Tweets as they flow in.

However, AT&T doesn't just focus on the "customer service" aspect of Twittered complaints - it also watches Twitter posting volume to look for red flags. 

Yes - sometimes actual outages are spotted thanks to Twitter. And did you ever wonder what that looks like?

Earlier this month, Twitter announced that it would begin showing inline ads on select third-party Twitter clients.

Today, those inline ads have been spotted on TweetDeck, a column-based Twitter client popular among power users.

A Dutch design and development firm Conceptables noticed some odd behavior regarding Google's use of the Twitter API during their development of Mopinion, an online feedback tool. It appears that simply repeating the same tweet over and over was having an impact on the actual Google search results.

To test this theory, the developers created several fake Twitter accounts tweeting out generic buzz words like "social media," "client interaction" (in Dutch) and "feedback" along with links to the Mopinion website. The result? The Mopion site moved up in the Google search results.

Apparently, they say, it pays to spam Twitter. However, the experts we consulted said that's not necessarily true.

While the Kodak Theater in Hollywood typically plays host to actual celebrities at the annual Academy Awards, last week's 140 Characters Conference in Hollywood brought together a different set of notable names: the Twitterati. Jeff Pulver's first event in a series taking place around the world drew together entertainment folks, journalists, poker players and even police chiefs, all talking about how they use Twitter to spread information, market themselves and connect with a new audience.

In some ways, it's a miracle that anyone had a face-to-face conversation at the event, which was organized as a quick-fix series of 15-minute panels, what with everyone firmly looking down, typing and texting away to record the two-day event in real time.

Did you know that your tweets have an expiration date on them? While they never really disappear from your own Twitter stream, they become unsearchable in only a matter of days. At first, Twitter held onto your tweets for around a month, but as the service grew more popular, this "date limit" has dramatically shortened. According to Twitter's search documentation, the current date limit on the search index is "around 1.5 weeks but is dynamic and subject to shrink as the number of tweets per day continues to grow."

What that means is something tweeted prior to a week and a half ago can never be retrieved via search.twitter.com. That's bad for users and it's definitely bad for data-mining. Unless Twitter corrects this issue on its own, we have to find another solution for archiving tweets ourselves. Here are 10 ways to do so.

At its peak, a search for "Iran" on Twitter generated over 100,000 tweets per day and over 8,000 tweets per hour. The plot just below shows the growth in volume of information in the number of tweets per hour.

How does an Internet junkie, news organization, or political operative monitor rapidly evolving real-time events, from the crucial details to the bigger picture? More importantly, how can a data stream be turned into real-time action, reaching the people who need it, when they need it, and in a form they can easily digest?