Microsoft got themselves in some hot water after a small PR account for Xbox told followers to remember the deceased musician Amy Winehouse by purchasing her last album on the company’s entertainment marketplace, Zune.

Maybe not the best of ideas. After about an hour of retweets with comments that showed that people did not appreciate the tweet, the account tweeted a follow up, apologizing.

According to a rumor, Twitter will be launching its own image service, which will be an equivalent to Lockerz, TwitPic, Yfrog and other services that are commonly used. It could arrive as soon as tomorrow. We don’t know yet what if any differences we can expect over those other services.

This might be all about revenue. Twitter encourages promoted tweets but has little direct monetization of its own. A self-run image service could change that by launching ads with the million of images shared every day. Best of all this wouldn’t disrupt users’ feeds.

Good news for Twitter users who also use a Blackberry. Twitter for BlackBerry version 2 Beta is now available in the BlackBerry Beta Zone. RIM will do things differently this time, offering more frequent beta versions with features added and the current version 2 of the Twitter app brings a simplified navigation bar at the top.

It puts the Search, Find People, and Popular Topics screens into one Single Search Screen in addition to integrating with the Universal Search feature. It also offers a new Black Chrome color scheme and the Compose Tweet button is accessible and allows you to tweet from anywhere in the app. Sounds like some useful improvements.

Do you use Twitter everyday? Takara Tomy wants to make your experience a cute one, by using Twimal. It must be the Pokemon that got away. Just plug it into your Windows machine using USB and it will read your tweets.

It comes in blue or white with male or female voices and can read all kinds of tweets like replies, lists, etc. in Japanese only. It will hit Japan on March 31 for ¥2,480 or about 30 of your hard earned dollars.

Twitter has just announced that they will be offering an optional “always on” HTTPS setting to its users. So if you use Twitter on unsecured internet connections like free public WiFi and are worried about people stealing your login details, you should be enabling the option on your Twitter settings page.

Enabling the HTTPS setting doesn’t force mobile browsers, so if you’re using the Twitter website on your phone, go to https://mobile.twitter.com/ for now. Also if you use a third-party client, check the settings to sure that it offers HTTPS.

Facebook has some smartphones, so you might think that Twitter would jump on the wagon, but no. Not gonna happen. During a keynote speech at MWC, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo dispelled any notions that the company is working on Twitter-branded cell phone. Even though he says that 40 percent of all tweets originate from cell phones.

The CEO said that Android phones currently allow users to quickly send a photo they took to their Twitter followers and he’d like to see more of the same in other platforms. He’d also like more single sign-on experiences and more apps that allow tweeting directly without going to another app. Hey, we’d all like that.

Twitter fans will love this cute desktop peripheral that is capable of reading all your incoming tweets. It’s called the Charatter. He synchronizes to your Twitter account and reads all your incoming tweets out loud. The device comes from a company named WiZ who claims that sales of this critter have been explosive.

It works with a simple application installed on your PC or iPhone, where all of the tweets are translated into sound and sent to the Charatter bear who speaks the words verbally. The Charatter will cost you $28.

If you are interested in the patterns of social networking, then check this out. An entire wall devoted to tweeting. This Tweet-O-Meter Wall measures tweeting activity in nine major cities. It can be found at British Library’s Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis.

The purpose of the wall is to study the social dynamics among Twitter users around the world. Probably the only thing we get from this is a twitter timezone effect, where you can estimate the time of any given city just by monitoring the Twitter usage. Still, it’s pretty cool.

A 17-year old boy from Australia claims to be responsible for that Twitter security flaw yesterday. He might have accidentally set the whole thing off. According to reports, he might have exposed the security flaw by tweeting a piece of code related to the onMouseOver JavaScript function that caused a pop-up to appear when a user moved his mouse over the message.

The code was quickly modified to perform all kinds of unsavory tasks, some malicious. He claims that he modified the idea from another user (a Japanese developer) who used the code to make his tweets colored. Twitter had been notified of the flaw before, and it was patched, but a recent update caused the flaw to rear it’s head again.

If you’re a Twitter user, the site has been exposed to a serious JavaScript exploit. The JavaScript onMouseOver exploit happens when you hover your mouse over a tweet. It will then redirect your browser to a website that contains malicious code, or adult websites. Apparently it also creates messages that you didn’t write.

The flaw currently only affects twitter.com, so if you’re tweeting using third party programs, you’re fine. Twitter has been working on a fix and apparently it has just been patched.

The Flemish. If anyone can get a tree to talk to the world, it’s them. This talking tree was found in Brussels. This collaboration between EOS Magazine and Happiness Brussels has a 100 year old tree outfitted with a dust meter, ozone meter, light meter, weather station, webcam and microphone. They all report back to Twitter, Flickr, Soundlcoud, and Facebook, as well as talking-tree.com.

This is convenient because the last time a tree talked to you it involved psychoactive drugs and purple bunnies. This has got to be better, right? Video below.

Twitter fans will love this one. Twitter is trending twitter tonight. Here’s a glimpse at the updated Twitter user interface. It draws heavily from the iPad version of Twitter, giving you a two-column design and making navigation easier. That’s not all. Photo hosting sites like Flickr, TwitPic, Yfrog, and video hosts like Ustream and YouTube will now be able to have their content embedded in a format that’s friendly to both computers and tablets.

An infinite scroll feature will load older updates on the fly instead of having to manually click for them. The updated page is going live tonight as part of a limited preview, so not everyone will see it. Everyone should be able to access the updated site over the next few weeks though.

If you can’t stop tweeting and retweeting, this Twitter Bird Plush Toy is for you. He’s a cuddly and soft 3D version of the famous Twitter bird. This is one of the most popular versions of the bird and if you know anything at all about old school rock you know that the “bird is the word”.

You can pick up the 8″ high Twitter Bird Plush Toy from Crefun for just $12.99. Squeeze him, hug him, put him on your desk. It’s all good. At least until they make a fail whale toy, which will eat this little guy.

If you are really addicted to Twitter, this is the mug for you. It won’t tweet or anything, but it will allow you to show off your inner geek, while showing off all the people you follow on Twitter.

So what if it doesn’t tweet. Neither does your current mug. You can make your own Twitter Mug over at CrowdedInk. Just enter your Twitter username and pay $15 bucks. Not bad right?

Do you have a bunch of people sneaking around that you want to not only catch, but expose to the world? If so, then this laser tripwire project is worth a try. You have to hook up a laser pointer, a photoresistor, and a webcam all together, and voila, you have a laser tripwire that will capture a photo of the intruder and upload a link to the photo on Twitter.

Think of it as a basic home security system. In fact it would be great if more security systems used this while the home-owner is away. The cops and Twitter would have a picture of any perks who break in.