​Anthony Weiner, the sext-loving, dick-pic tweeting, disgraced former congressman, used some $13,000 campaign money for damage control.

The Daily News says that Weiner paid private detectives to investigate the bogus claim that his Twitter account had been hacked, before he owned up to sending the porny photo and resigned.

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The Status Atlas at 10 a.m. (Midwood = vibrator)

​Ricky Robinett, the tech brain behind FakeGirlfriend.co (which, by the way, he's offering up for sale to none other than Kanye West), has unleashed a new app with the help of Brian Wrightson. It's called The Status Atlas, and it's a "Twitter + Brooklyn mashup" compiling the tweets of Brooklyn to tell you which neighborhoods are tweeting which words the most. (Click on the lines of the map for neighborhood names.) How you might use this data is up to you, but as Robinett says, "It's a fun way to visualize things. In Williamsburg, one time the word was 'women.' When it's raining, you see a lot of shit and fuck."

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​Guess who's on Twitter, now!? Yeah, you, me, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Rupert Murdoch, that guy we broke up with 100 years ago who still insists on creeping into our everyday virtual reality, and, yes, Michelle Obama! The First Lady! We are so excited! Whatever will she say?

Well, upon her Twitter account launch 7 hours ago, she said, "We're excited today to launch @michelleobama as a new way for you to connect with First Lady Michelle Obama and the President's campaign." Hm. That doesn't seem very revealing, or even really from Obama herself. Upon a closer look, we see the fine print -- "This account is run by #Obama2012 campaign staff. Tweets from the First Lady are signed -mo." Oh.

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​Scientists from the University of Vermont have undertaken an in-depth, extremely thorough examination of the emotions of the Twitterverse, and they've found that happiness is...decreasing. In the journal PLoS ONE, they write that "a gradual downward trend" is evident over the first half of 2011, following a gradual upward trend in 2009. What does this mean? "It appears that happiness is going down," said Peter Dodds, lead author on the study. Ouch. That's a bummer. However, the researchers' methodology and learnings are fascinating.

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​In a sign of the times, Newsweek is using Twitter as a handy resource for...baby names! Particularly, baby names for their deputy managing editor, Paula Szuchman, who is expecting a girl rather soonish.

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​The Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie is an enthusiastic tweeter. He often prompts his followers to play games like "Literary Smackdowns" (Joan Didion vs. Susan Sontag, for example), and today he started a new one: blasting Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook deactivated Rushdie's page, thinking it wasn't real. Rushdie sent in a copy of his passport to prove it was him and Facebook reinstated the page with his first name, Ahmed, instead of Salman.

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​Earlier today EV Grieve posted about a Twitter campaign against Jakobson Properties, which owns numerous buildings in the East Village (you've probably seen their no-fee ads around town and on Craigslist). This isn't a campaign to take down Jakobson, exactly, though "slum lord" is flying around on the Tumblr -- it's to keep them accountable for the various issues going on in the apartments, says the tenant who began the campaign. Anonymous for obvious reasons, he told us, "I'm actually a more atypical tenant: my apartment is nice, I like it, and I have not had a lot of problems. At the same time, ever since I moved in, I have heard all the horror stories from my neighbors. Then, recently, I've had a few bad experiences with the maintenance crew and started to see what everyone else was complaining about."

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"If you have a cell and can txt, you'll never be bored again...EVER!" Keep in mind that this is from 2006.

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via John de Guzman

​Everyone was freaking out about this photo, tweeted by the New York Post, last night. And, yeah, it is beautiful, and haunting. Only problem: It wasn't taken last night, which the Post and others, initially indicated. (Those are in fact 10,000 migrating birds trapped in the lights, a situation we wrote about last year on this blog.)

After John de Guzman, who took the picture in September of 2010, realized it had been picked up by another Twitter user from his Flickr account and posted to that person's Twitpic account, then picked up and tweeted by the New York Post, he engaged in Twitter battle to get the rightful date and credit acknowledged, with folks coming to his aid. This morning, @MichelleMalkin tweeted a credit to Guzman, which the Post retweeted. The paper later tweeted a direct link to de Guzman's Flickr account, with the corrected date.

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​Yesterday we wrote of Rhodri Marsden's bad date tweet, a tweet that spawned some next-level seriously epic bad date tweets -- a sharing circle, if you will, now being housed at crapdate.com -- all the better to reflect upon your own bad dates and feel either better or worse, or just laugh, which generally does make a person feel better, at least temporarily. We got in touch with the London-based Marsden, who also happens to be a writer ("Mainly for The Independent") and a member of the band Scritti Politti (and others), to ask him what he thought of the fervor that's ensued from his initial tweet.

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