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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.

In June of 2009, leading up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, the Chinese government blocked access by its citizens to Twitter, Flickr and a number of other US-based websites. Social media being already widespread throughout the country, perhaps the Chinese government feared the possibility of events like unfolded elsewhere 18 months later, in what became known as the Arab Spring.

Two and a half years later, Twitter remains blocked in China, though many people find ways to make use of it none the less. China isn't the only country that's related to Twitter's announcement last week that the social network will now selectively censor messages country-by-country when it receives "a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity." Debate went on throughout the last week about the policy, but I think there are at least three big questions that remain unanswered.

Last month the White House struck upon a particularly effective idea: using the #40dollars hash tag on Twitter, they asked voters what $40 meant to them. That, the Obama administration said, was the amount of money that would have disappeared from an average middle class paycheck if Republicans allowed a tax cut to expire.

The move was so popular, Republicans are trying it for their election-year digital strategy. Ahead of last night's State of the Union address, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and other Republicans started tweeting using the hashtag #1000days to accent the amount of time since Senate Democrats passed a federal budget.

Just a week after Twitter's acqui-hire of Summify, the company has done it again. This time Twitter is grabbing Web security firm Dasient and winding down the Dasient business. Instead of servicing the old customer base, the Dasient team is going to work on Twitter's revenue engineering team. Wait, what?

You might think that Twitter would be looking to snag Dasient in order to curb problems with spam and other attacks on the platform. Instead, it looks like Twitter is hoping to use Dasient's team to prep the platform for self-serve ads that might be launching later this year.

The folks at Flowtown have put together a quick reference guide to six different social media services. Called the SMB Social Media Cheat Sheet, it contains basic stats on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr and Digg. What, no LinkedIn? That is perhaps the biggest missing service, but otherwise the infographic, reproduced below, is worth bookmarking for those noobs in your company that are looking to learn more about each service.

This week Topsy Labs Inc. released a report claiming its model was able to predict a drop in Netflix's share price after it decided to split its DVD rental and streaming video services by tracking phrases like "just canceled my Netflix subscription."

It's arguable whether investors really needed a sophisticated sentiment measuring analyses to predict Netflix's shares would drop after what has been called the worst business decision since the introduction of "new" Coke in 1985. But social media sentiment analysis is growing more sophisticated and may soon become a key component investors look at before making a decision to buy or sell stock.

So far I have been skeptical about how much of a role social media buzz has been playing in the presidential primaries, particularly when it comes to "predicting" winners. But of the three primaries to date, Saturday's race in South Carolina may have been the one that was most influenced by Twitter.

Traditional polls still did a better job of predicting the outcome of Saturday's South Carolina primary, but a backwards look at Twitter may show why and how Newt Gingrich scored such a decisive, 12-point victory over national front runner Mitt Romney. And in some regards, social media was able to tell a story in South Carolina that polls could not.

News.me deserves credit today for some start-up agility and helpfulness. Yesterday, Twitter bought Summify, a service that crunched down links from one's Twitter feed into a need-to-know email digest, and it will be shut down. Loving users freaked out. News.me, which provides a similar service, heard those cries for help, and it has redesigned its homepage and launched new features to welcome those Summify users in.

News.me got popular with its iPad app, but it also offers an email digest with Summify-like functionality. Today it's announcing a slew of new features: Facebook support, time zone support, and control over the number of articles and sending time for the email digest. News.me also wants to know what features Summify users want.

Pro-Internet freedom Americans aren't the only ones who got pumped up about this Wednesday's Internet blackout day.

The L.A. Times reports that Chinese Internet users praised American Internet users for taking action against their own government. Wen Yunchao, a prominent Chinese blogger and government critic who left the mainland for Hong Kong, says that China's Great Firewall, which was initially about stopping online piracy and pornography, quickly became about Internet censorship of websites and content. Critics of SOPA/PIPA say that it would, in effect, do the same thing to the Internet in America.

Twitter has acquired Summify, a service that digests the links in one's Twitter feed and produces a daily email of the most relevant stories. The developers will join Twitter's Growth team, and their work will still "explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news." As Twitter nears 500 million users, it needs new ways to teach them how the service works.

It's hard to learn to use Twitter, and users give up easily if they don't get it. Summify can help Twitter show new users why they should use the service. Twitter's latest changes are all about discovery of new people and content. Summify isolates the most meaningful stuff in one's Twitter feed, which helps users get value out of it.