Britain's incoming government would be well advised to purge all starry-eyed cyber-utopians - like Gordon Brown's "social media guru" - from its roster of advisers.

Writing on his blog, Graham Cluley of security firm Sophos said: "This raises the astonishing thought that a vendetta against a single user caused Twitter to crumble, forcing us to ask serious questions about the site's fragility."

But does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two most recent events, oversell the technology? Skeptics note that only a small number of people used Twitter to organize protests in Iran and that individual text messaging, old-fashioned word of mouth and Farsi-language Web sites were more influential. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/weekinreview/21cohenweb.html

Yet while the Twittering classes were bending over backward to find more information and connect to more people in Iran -- going so far as to provide proxy servers for Iranians being blocked from the Internet -- CNN and other cable news outlets were busy running evergreen documentaries and Larry King reruns. http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/09/06/15/iran-twitter-and-cnn-fail

The social networking trend of "twittering" has reached the fiction spectrum, as videogame characters are being made to take up the pasttime; simply showing the devotion that some people have invested into these figures.