Alan Cleaver

Twitter messages, obviously, are public. That's the point of social media: to share, to broadcast. But one of the reasons people continue to tweet -- and to post incriminating photographs of their youthful kegstands on Facebook -- is the illusion that they have some measure of control over what they're putting out there. They can take it down, if they choose to, or rest secure in the knowledge that when they've posted enough new tweets the old ones will recede beyond the event horizon of Tweets Lost To The Ages.

Of course, all that is an illusion. As Judge Matthew Sciarrino ruled yesterday, your tweets aren't actually your tweets. Sciarrino was ruling on motions in the case of Malcolm Harris, the managing editor of The New Inquiry, charged in connection with last September's Occupy Wall Street march on the Brooklyn Bridge. You might also remember Harris as the guy behind last fall's Radiohead concert hoax.

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​Map enthusiasts and social media aficionados, rejoice! A website and iPhone application that is officially launching today is taking the concept of mapping to a whole new interactive level that might forever change your physical and virtual existence as a New Yorker.

In all seriousness, though, this thing's pretty cool -- CityMaps, a one-stop shop map site and iPhone app, integrates hyperlocal data with all kinds of social media functions so that users can browse around and make plans based on real-time information coming from across the city.

Here's how it works: The map, which aims to include the name and location of every storefront on every block, is connected to Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and all the other cool networking sites kids are using these days. CityMaps users can browse what's around them, find out what other people have said and are saying about these establishments, and get info on what kinds of deals or events these businesses are having at that moment. All in a user-friendly, visually-intuitive format!

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UPDATE: Looks like Ghetto Hikes is a parody account -- and an unfunny one at that. According to a just-released tweet, Men's Humor and Ghetto Hikes were registered by the same person. Runnin' Scared will try and figure out the deal.

Meet Mr. Cody, author of Ghetto Hikes, a tumblr/Twitter meme in the making.

"I HAVE A FULL TIME JOB LEADING URBAN KIDS (OF ALL RACES) ON NATURE HIKES. I SIMPLY WRITE DOWN SHIT THEY SAY," writes Mr. Cody -- who gives no other identifying info.

Some of the kids' observations?

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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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Twitter says that it's not censoring content even though it's clearly censoring content.

But let's back up a bit. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said Monday night that the microblogging site -- which has a rep for spreading revolution, disobedience, and Brits' bad jokes -- can basically filter tweets in countries with restrictions on free speech, so that offending posts don't break these nations' (prickish) laws, according to PC Magazine.

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Someone needs to give the U.S. Customs Department a lesson in Humour 101.

Last Monday, two British tourists were denied entry into Los Angeles after one of them said on Twitter that he was going to "dig up Marilyn Monroe" and "destroy America" in two separate tweets. (The latter tweet was apparently British slang for partying.)

The pair, Leigh Van Bryan and his friend Emily Bunting, told the Daily Mail that agents from the Department of Homeland Security searched their luggage for spades and shovels on the assumption that Bryan was serious about digging up the body of our famed, white-clad starlet. Customs then held them in a detention facility overnight before sending them back to the U.K.

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More on the bizarre saga of Rupert Murdoch on Twitter. He has gone on the offensive for SOPA, he has, for a period of time, followed this blogger for some still unknown reason, and now he's answering questions about snagging younger women. Screenshot after the jump.

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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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Minhee Cho, who is the Communications Manager for ProPublica, just tweeted a photo of a receipt from a Hamilton Heights Papa John's with her name listed as "lady chinky eyes." The picture, which can be seen in full after the jump, is from an in-store order placed last night. This looks to be part of the worst trend ever.

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Sweden has started a new policy of allowing one of its citizens to take over its official Twitter account every week. The policy is basically a marketing move, as expressed by the CEO of the country's tourism agency in The Next Web's writeup: "No one owns the brand of Sweden more than its people. With this initiative we let them show their Sweden to the world."

They have quite the lineup planned:

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