ReadWriteWeb

It's time for the US Open tennis tournament and inside the players' lounge, there's an ominous sign posted by the event's Tennis Integrity Unit warning of the dangers posed by Twitter.

Snapped quickly and posted online by CNBC sports business reporter Darren Rovell, the posted sign and policy are an amusing reminder of what happens when the exciting world of social networking and the exciting world of tennis come together under the watchful eye of people who could care less about the Twitter part. There are many, many things that could be done with Twitter to make the tournament even more engaging. No doubt some of those things will be done. But the Tennis Integrity Unit would like to warn you, players, about what not to do. Check out the sign below.

Bit.ly, the URL shortener and analytics service from New York incubator Betaworks, has developed a software developers kit (SDK) that leverages the forthcoming deep Twitter integration in iOS5. The SDK will enable app developers to automatically share links on Twitter using branded URLs. ReadWriteWeb, for example, shares short links on Twitter automatically using rww.to. Employing the Bit.ly SDK our iPhone app will automatically do the same with the new Twitter iOS features.

The SDK is only available to developers who have signed an NDA with Apple, but it's available to check out on request. It's enough to make a person wonder what other kinds of APIs and SDKs will be built on top of the new Twitter features in iOS5. Twitter is a great platform, but there's no reason to believe that multiple layers of platforms will be placed on top of iOS, Twitter, location data, URL shorteners and more.

If you want to build a vibrant and successful Facebook community for your business, it might pay to take a moment and look at Praetorian Group's FireRescue1 page here. Praetorian is the publishing arm for the trade associations that represent public safety workers. Clearly, their social media strategies are on fire. But the reasons for their popularity and reach of their Facebook and Twitter sites are so simple, you won't need to summon an EMS to implement them in your shop.

The recently-departed co-founders of Twitter - Ev Williams, Biz Stone and Jason Goldman - now working together again under the old Obvious Corporation name, announced their latest product today, a stealth alpha app called Lift. It's described as a way to help users achieve their goals through positive reinforcement.

It sounds like Twitter in its simplicity and from what I've seen it looks a lot like Twitter too, but with more structure. What's called Lift today was apparently called Mibbles just weeks ago and was described then as "a very simple tracking and encouragement tool." GetMibbles.com now redirects to Lift.do. What was Mibbles all about? Lift has disclosed almost no details about how it works, but you can find a number of hints about it if you look at the previous iteration of the project. It looks like a really interesting idea, too. (Lots of other coverage of corporate background etc. is here.)

On August 15, Twitter turned on its t.co link wrapper for all links longer than 19 characters. The t.co URL shortener was first announced in June of last year, and it was implemented on Twitter.com this June. Eventually, Twitter plans to wrap all links, regardless of length. Prior to that, it will increase the link length to 20 characters to accommodate the 's' that will be added as Twitter moves to secure HTTPS service by default.

From the user's perspective, t.co links appear as the first 19 characters of the real URL, without the HTTP or HTTPS visible, and they trail off into ellipses. When everything's working properly - unlike several periods of time today - users won't see an obscured t.co shortlink but rather the actual linked domain. One problem this aims to solve is the concealing of malicious links behind external URL shorteners. Twitter checks all shortened links against their list of malicious sites. But t.co also solves another less visible problem: it reveals Twitter's true influence as a referring traffic source.

Knowing when to post content to the Web can feel like a black art. It's always procrastination time somewhere. But understanding one's audience can yield simple and scientific insights about the best times to reach it. Balancing work and scheduling is still a lot of work, though, so Web services have cropped up to handle that effort algorithmically, letting publishers concentrate on publishing.

Buffer, a service that stacks up one's tweets and publishes them at the best times for engagement, has analyzed its user data and found some promising results. Buffer's developers report that clicks on tweeted links increased by 200% on average after two weeks of using the scheduling app, and retweets doubled.

It's a little discussed but widely-known fact that Twitter is bigger outside the United States than it is inside its home country: it's huge in Brazil, Japan and the Philippines, for example. It turns out Twitter's pretty hot in the Spanish speaking world, too.

Rebecca Villaneda of HispanicBusiness.com points out some interesting numbers in an article tonight: the official Spanish Twitter account @Twitter_Es now has half a million more followers than the official global Twitter account in English, @Twitter. That's pretty remarkable; according to Twittercounter.com, @Twitter_Es just took the lead earlier this Summer. Twitter en español amassed its bigger pile of followers in less than half the time, too.

Twitter has just announced the rollout of user galleries for tweeted images. Galleries will show images shared using all the major services supported by Twitter, including yFrog, TwitPic, Instagram and Twitter's new native images. Galleries can be found on the user's profile page through the Web interface. They will display up to 100 recent images in chronological order. They won't display video, nor will they show images tweeted before January 1, 2010.

Twitter profile pages will now display thumbnails of the user's four most recent tweeted photos on the right sidebar, right under their vital Twitter statistics, and clicking 'View All' opens the user's gallery in the current window. This is the first new feature Twitter has built upon its native image sharing, which launched this summer. Until that launch, third-party services handled image sharing on Twitter. The new user galleries will support those services, but the galleries themselves will only be available from Twitter's website.

Twitter has had a complicated relationship with its sprawling developer ecosystem but made a big move this morning to provide independent developers a fast, lightweight, attractive and consistent tool-kit that can be used to implement the front end of web applications.

It's called Bootstrap and the company said today that it "uses some of the latest browser techniques to provide you with stylish typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation and everything else you need in a super tiny (only 6k with gzip) resource." Initial developer reaction appears generally positive.

Last week the latest viral craze brought about the end of an experiment by a programmer, Jonathan Stark, who works for Mobiquity, who wanted to make it easier for folks to get free coffee. Over the course of several weeks, Stark shared a scanned image of his Starbucks stored-value card online, so that anyone could download the image and use it to pay for coffee at most Starbucks. He also set up a Twitter feed to report on the current value of the card, and showed the processes that he used to set the entire experiment up. Let's look closer at the whole situation, examine some lessons learned for corporate app developers, and also try to set the record straight. We have a Storify page that puts all the links in context if you would rather go there.