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Five years from now brands could spend $10 million on promoted tweets during the Super Bowl, according to an industry observer.

But first, brands need to learn how to use Twitter and avoid Sunday night's Toyota disaster, in which the car maker ended up spamming people who used game-related hash tags.

Sleep, sex and...Twitter?

A new study suggests that people are more likely to give into the urge to check email and their Twitter account than they are to smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol. While the study headed by Wilhelm Hofmann of Chicago University's Booth Business School was limited in size, covering just 205 people between the ages of 18 and 85, it seems to confirm what many of us have suspected for years.

News agency Reuters launched Social Pulse, which it describes as a "social media hub" that will display "the most talked-about news, companies and influencers across the Web."

The site is unique in the news-curating space in that it uses trends from the Twitter accounts Reuters and its journalists follow to arrange headlines: in effect, the news agency is automating editing and story selection and putting it in the hands of "everyone from Nouriel Roubini and Jenna Wortham to John McCain and Rachel Sterne."

If you aren't happy with scheduling your Tweets and analyzing the sentiment of your social networking accounts, a new service from Gremln.com is available today that might be a better alternative. The company has been part of the St. Louis-based Capital Innovators startup accelerator/incubator program that we wrote about yesterday.

Twitter's sponsored tweets and sponsored hashtags are cropping up more often as the social network places a heavy focus on advertising. As with any new advertising offering, we'll learn how to use it effectively by watching the efforts of others. Advertising on a social network offers up opportunities for engagement that can't be found elsewhere, but that opportunity comes with significant risk.

Sponsored hashtags can blow up in your face, they can be stolen by a competitor and they can be surrounded by risky UGC. But they can also very quickly achieve some great attention for your brand. Choosing to advertise on Twitter is a risky move, ripe with opportunity and danger. It shouldn't be undertaken lightly or without serious thought.

In 1959 (as I recall), my mother, an acclaimed professional artist, had entered a handful of her oil paintings into an annual art show. Someone attending the show noted that one particular work, the face of a peasant boy, strongly resembled a photograph that had appeared in Life magazine. Well, there was no coincidence about it: Mom had studied precisely that face, and her work was based on that photograph. (The card tacked to the wall actually said so, if anyone had bothered to read it.)

So it was that the local newspaper "exposed" my mother as a fraud, a counterfeiter. It ran a story with the painting next to the Life magazine photograph itself. Thus began a lifelong dialog that became one of the threads of my life: a case study in fair use that fueled endless debates in the Socratic method between Mom and her art students for the next four decades. It began with the delicious irony of the newspaper having reprinted the Life photograph without Time-Life's permission, and embraced the lovely fact Mom eventually sold the painting for many times the original price.

The creator, Michael Shirley, describes it like this: "The device is triggered by a reed-switch sensor that monitors magnetic proximity. The signal is sent through an Arduino board to a Processing sketch, which tells the computer to snap a webcam photo of Peterson and upload it to Twitpic with a saying chosen from a pool of prewritten zingers. The Twitpic post is immediately loaded to the BossTracker5000′s Twitter feed. Voila! A chair that tweets." Most importantly, it also updates when the boss is away.

Google's Blogger has found a way to handle local government takedown requests similar to the way Twitter now does. It will now start redirecting readers to country-specific top-level domains (TLD) instead of the usual blogspot.com domain. It does so based on the location of the user's IP address, just as many other Google services do. This gives Google the "flexibility" to comply with removal requests according to local laws.

But don't start your knee-jerking just yet (as so many did with Twitter's local compliance policy). This is a way around censorship. Would you rather Blogger and Twitter be blocked in some countries outright? As Google Operating System (the original purveyor of this fine story) points out, the content at the "blogspot.com" domain will continue to exist. "Content removed due to a specific country's law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD," Google explains in its support document.

Contrary to an Associated Press report implying otherwise, teens are not shutting down their Facebook accounts in favor of Twitter.

Emil Protalinski has a much more thorough analysis of what is happening, which includes the Pew Research report AP used, as well as a July 2011 Pew report that focused solely on teens and social media use. His conclusion? Teens are definitely using Twitter more, but they are not giving up their Facebook accounts to do so.

Tout got a big boost when Shaquille O'Neal announced his NBA retirement in one of the service's 15-second video clips. Before then, few people had heard of the service, which allows users to easily link the videos to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Prior to O'Neal's unsolicited endorsement, Tout, which just launched in April, was largely unknown. After Shaq's quick message thanking fans, however, interest in the service exploded. "We got lucky with him being so involved with it," said Melissa Breen of Tout.

But since then, interest in Shaq may have risen thanks for Tout.