Now, Dorsey has shown just how dedicated he is to getting Square everywhere with the announcement that even a coffee shop inside rival social network Facebook’s campus is fair game.

The @Philz_Coffee in Facebook’s new HQ now accepts Square: twitter.com/Philz_Coffee/s…

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) February 23, 2012

Just last December, Dorsey announced that Square had over 1M active merchants using its service, and later that month T-Mobile became the first carrier to begin offering the Square payment devices. An interesting factoid for you, Square was originally called Squirrel and made of wood, but all of that changed after a lunch with Scott Forstall at Apple one day.

By the way, Philz Coffee is superb, I’d highly recommend you try it if you ever can. You can pick up a Tesora medium sweet for me.

Last week, very few people had probably heard of Khader Adnan, I’ll admit myself included. The Palestinian prisoner was on hunger strike for over two months, when efforts by Twitter users brought his story into the spotlight via Twitter’s trending topics.

Accused of being a member of the Islamic Jihad, Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan was detained, without any charges brought against him. He was not tried, and up until yesterday, did not know how long it would be before he was released. All of that has changed, with the announcement that Adnan will be released by mid-April, and that he has ended his 66-day hunger-strike.

Adnan’s story was all but ignored by mainstream media, until a group of online activists decided to take to Twitter to bring it some much-needed attention. A search on Google News shows the story getting no attention whatsoever at the beginning of February, and peaking to over 300 sources at the height of the campaign.

The online protest took the form of a hashtag a day, with the aim of making that hashtag trend. The prisoner’s name, #KhaderAdnan, was the main hashtag used in the online campaign, along with various phrases that changed on a daily basis. The hashtags included #respect4khader, #dying2live and #HungerStrikingfor65Days, all of which were used in an effort to publicize Adnan’s story.

The campaign achieved its goal with the hashtag #KhaderAdnan making its way into the trending topics a couple of days ago, and has been tweeted over 54,000 times up until now.

Celebrating the fact that his release had been announced, Twitter users were once again able to bring Khader Adnan into the trending topics with the hashtag, #KhadersVictoryforPalestine.

We spoke with Leila Saleh, one of the organizers behind the campaign to find out what inspired the movement, and why Twitter was chosen as the medium. She told The Next Web:

“Because of the lack of coverage on Palestine in mainstream news, a lot of activists indulge in social media sites like Twitter in order to find information. A lot of unnoticed stories usually end up online from activists, or citizen journalists if you will, who are on the ground in Palestine. This is very vital for cyber activists like us.

So because of reasons like this, a lot of us were aware of Khader Adnan’s story. Around the 40th day of his hunger strike, many activists were trying to contact the media to cover him but we had no luck. I know I contacted a few of my journalist friends for help but was unsuccessful. I was distraught because I thought Khader, by the 45th day of his hunger strike, was at the end of his road and wouldn’t live very long. I, along with many others, became desperate. So we just did what any cyber activists would do – brought attention to Khader ourselves. Having seen how powerful the Internet is with Arab uprisings, we decided to try our luck.”

Leila, together with Palestinian Twitter user @sshusma, chose the hashtag, #Dying2Live, and set about, with the help of other activists, seeing to it that it became a trending topic.

“The next day, that’s exactly what we did and to our surprise #Dying2Live not only trending but caught a lot of attention of the media and human rights organizations. We didn’t want the attention to die down. We decided to broaden our horizons and make it a daily thing. We created an unofficial Twitter account for Khader, set up a Gmail account, and a blog for solidarity posts from people all over the world to send to his wife, Randa. It became very big in a matter of days.”

By then the group had major media outlets including Al Jazeera, BBC and CNN reporting Adnan’s story, while the momentum was taken offline as well, with protests outside Adnan’s hospital.

“This was all from a daily tradition, if you will, of informing the public on Twitter. Because that’s all that was missing from Khader’s story. The passion, the anger, the frustration was there – all he needed was the attention – and Twitter gave us the platform to give him the attention he needed.”

If it weren’t for Twitter, Adnan’s story may not have been swept to the forefront of mainstream media as quickly. Leila explains

“Without Twitter, I do think it would have been a little more difficult but the idea was there…and we most likely would have found another way to mobilize. But it definitely helped out a lot. A few of us have connections with friends who have connections with others and so on and so forth…and this wouldn’t have been possible, for me at least, if I hadnt made a Twitter & connected with these people.”

And it would appear that they have a second awareness campaign in the works, bringing attention to imprisoned Bahraini human rights activist Abdul Hajii Al Khhawaja, serving a life sentence, and who has been on hunger strike for two weeks:

We need way more followers to trend tomorrow #FF @KhawajaStrike to bring attn to Abdul Hadi Khawaja, 2 weeks into his hunger strike #Bahrain

— sshusma (@sshusma) February 23, 2012

This is not the first time we’ve seen Twitter being used in the region as a tool of online protest or to raise awareness. In October, Egyptian activists began tweeting about Maikel Nabil, Egypt’s first blogger to receive a prison sentence following the uprising last year, as a way of bringing attention to his cause. Nabil, who was on hunger strike for four months, and has since been released.

Khader Adnan’s story shows that, Twitter’s trending topics, while more often overrun by Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber fans or swept into one meaningless Internet meme after the other, have a real role to play in the activist’s arsenal of tools.

At The Next Web, we’ve written at length about Twitter’s role in journalism, and how it has affected and changed the mainstream media landscape, both in positive and negative ways. Our own Paul Sawers wrote about the impact social media has had on journalism, and how while social media is usually first to a story, readers wait for confirmation from reliable mainstream media sources.

In the case of Khader Adnan, there was a clear role reversal, with Twitter users leading the way, and mainstream media following their trail.

Did you know that the French President Nicolas Sarkozy had opened a Twitter account? Its opponents certainly do, as several parody and critical accounts have been suspended by Twitter over the last days, generating accusations of censorship.

This led the micro-blogging platform to publish a post on its French blog today. While it doesn’t directly mention the controversy, it is dedicated to clarifying Twitter’s policy with regard to parody and spam.

As you may expect, the company affirms its desire to engage and promote public debate, as long as users respect a certain set of rules.

One element will particularly interest anyone who’s running a parody account. According to the company, “parody tolerated and encouraged on Twitter, as long as it respects not some, but every condition set out publicly in [Twitter's] guidelines on parody accounts”.

This may seem like a detail, but many users were assuming the list implicitly included “either/or” between each item – thinking, for example, that using the word ‘fake’ either in the account name or in the bio was acceptable. It is now very clear it is not the case, which means the conditions are much stricter than they initially appeared:

Guidelines for Parody, Commentary and Fan Accounts

In order to avoid impersonation, an account’s profile information should make it clear that the creator of the account is not actually the same person or entity as the subject of the parody/commentary. Here are some suggestions for marking your account:

• Username: The username should not be the exact name of the subject of the parody, commentary, or fandom; to make it clearer, you should distinguish the account with a qualifier such as “not,” “fake,” or “fan.”
• Name: The profile name should not list the exact name of the subject without some other distinguishing word, such as “not,” “fake,” or “fan.”
• Bio: The bio should include a statement to distinguish it from the real identity, such as “This is a parody,” “This is a fan page,” “Parody Account,” “Fan Account,” “Role-playing Account,” or “This is not affiliated with…”
• Communication with other users: The account should not, through private or public communication with other users, try to deceive or mislead others about your identity. For example, if operating a fan account, do not direct message other users implying you are the actual subject (i.e., person, band, sports team, etc.) of the fan account.

However, the use of the word ‘suggestions’ means that these rules are somewhat flexible – an impression confirmed by the following paragraph, which mentions role-playing accounts. While it suggests adding a clarification to the user’s bio, it doesn’t refer to the Twitter name itself.

Yet, recently suspended accounts  reportedly included @_nicolassarkozy, but also @mafranceforte (Sarkozy’s motto), @sarkocensure (“sarkozycensorship”) and @sarkozycestfini (“sarkozyitsover”).

As you can imagine, this ambiguity fueled criticism, and gave birth to the hashtag #sarkocensure; did Twitter take action because of political pressure?

Twitter now wants to set the record straight, and clarify that it didn’t go out of its way to please the French President, who is also candidate to his reelection.

Instead, the company declares that it did what it would have done for any user; as detailed in its guidelines, anyone can complain about a parody account and ask Twitter to take action.

This ‘anyone’ includes Sarkozy’s staff, who admitted having made a request against some accounts, but shouldn’t give them any privilege – when deciding whether or not to suspend an account, Twitter promises it will “treat everyone as equals”.

On the other hand, suspended users also get a chance to comply with Twitter rules and get their account back. This is what @_nicolassarkozy apparently did; its account has been back online since yesterday, but its account name now reads ‘Nicolas Sarkozy fake’.

As for other suspended accounts, Twitter implies without saying that they were suspended for violating its spam policy, rather than its parody guidelines. It now remains to be seen whether this veiled clarification will put an end to the controversy.

Storify is today announcing a brand new app for the iPad, bringing its drag and drop curation of Tweets, videos and other web links to the tablet. The experience looks smooth and carries over the core features of the web app.

Storify is a service that lets you combine links from Twitter and other sharing services at large into cohesive stories, something that we love to do here at The Next Web, as we did with the story surrounding the death of Steve Jobs. It’s a great, and fast, way to collate a bunch of links, bits of media and Tweets into something coherent and fluid and much easier to read.

“Whether you’re at a conference or at home, you can mix social streams to create simple, beautiful stories to share and remember the moments in life that matter,” said Xavier Damman, Storify co-founder and CEO. “You now have storytelling at your fingertips.”

The iPad app keeps the process of creating new stories simple, allowing you to pull from five specific and very popular services including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Flickr, as well as the web. Once you fire up a story, you choose a service on the right and flick your way through items that are divided out into easily grabbable sections.

To build a compilation, you just grab an item on the right and drag it over to your story on the left. It actually feels quite a bit like you’re an editor preparing an edition of a magazine or newspaper, moving, organizing and curating content to craft your story. It’s a pretty interesting experience and one that actually makes a lot of tactile sense.

With easy access to the various services you can grab video of an event, your Facebook friends’ shots, your own Instagram shares and Tweets around the event’s hashtag to whip together an easily shareable experience that you can publish out to Storify. It’s honestly a far better experience for me than the Storify web app.

Yes, the iPad version does lack some of the granularity of the web version, and it doesn’t have all of its features, but it delivers the core experience well. It also gives you one additional feature: the ability to Tweet right from inside the app.

As with the standard version of Storify, once you’ve finished your story you can publish it out to the website and choose to share a link on Twitter or Facebook. You can also notify anyone mentioned in the story that you’ve used something that they’ve posted or said.

There isn’t a way to grab embed code here, so if you’re looking to quickly Storify something and then post it right to your blog in an iPad app you’ll need to jump out to the web interface to grab it.

The process is smooth and has a satisfying feel, but there are a few niggling issues with the interface that will hopefully be worked out soon. I would really like to see a slightly lower activation time when you tap and hold an item, so that grabbing and dragging feels more immediate. There is also a bit of pane confusion at times when moving back and forth between various sections. This has to do with the way that Storify layers a browser pane on top of a tapped link. I’d also like to see the web pane stay on the last page you were looking at, rather than defaulting to Google.com.

Having links remain live in your story view would also be nice, as it would allow you to bounce around through linked pages within Tweets. There also seems to be no reason why the app makes you grab an item by the right edge to change its order, grabbing an item directly as well would be a good option to have. But these issues are comparatively minor when compared to the rest of the app.

The iPad app’s focus on a select number of services and direct sharing to Twitter and Facebook are indicative of the company’s desire to make Storify something that ‘regular’ users, not just social media addicts or bloggers, use regularly. It’s making itself into something that you might use to easily share all of the various bits of media from your vacation in one cohesive story form with friends or relatives.

Storify for iPad is a great first step towards expanding the service outwards from its niche service position and it’s a highly polished first effort. Whether you’re creating stories around tech news or your favorite foods, Storify wants to be your tool. It will be interesting to see if this effort pays off in the long run, but even this initial stage of the plan it’s well worth trying out.

Storify for iPad is available now on the App Store.

Last week, we took a look at a report that showed that the most popular pages on Google+ were becoming more consumer-focused. Now, according to a recent report from Socialbakers, those brand pages are growing faster on Google+ than on Twitter. The analytics site is measuring that growth by the number of followers a page has gained in one month.

Google+ introduced brand pages in November, while Twitter made the move, in an official manner in December, albeit limited to a few heavy hitters. But Twitter’s official brand pages are really a moot point here, because marketeers took to Twitter, capitalizing on the existing audience long before Twitter afforded them unique features that enhance the brand experience. In reality, Twitter has been home to brands far longer than Google+.

The fact that Google+ brand pages have only been around for four months could be part of the explanation as to why the growth has exceeded Twitter’s. On Twitter, out of the top 5 growing brands, H&M has seen the most growth with over 88,500 new followers in one month.

On Google+, H&M snags the second spot, after having added 287,000 new followers. The fastest growing brand on Google+ is Angry Birds, adding over 350,000 new followers in one month.

Continuing with H&M as an example, looking at the total number of followers, on Twitter, the company has just over 816,000, while on Google+ the number sits just over 530,000.

There appears to have been a surge in growth on Google+ in December, according to a report published a few days ago by BrightEdge Social Share. As Simply Zesty point out, none of these brands have hit the 1 million follower mark despite the significant growth of 1,400% in the past couple of months.

There are certain factors that always need to be taken into account when looking at these figures. For example, could it be that the very same people who already follow H&M on Twitter are heading over to follow them on Google+? The fact that Twitter has been around longer means that the growth may have plateaued a little in comparison to Google+, a relatively new social network.

Looking at the Bright Edge report, we also see that most of the growth has been among the top 10 brands. H&M, Samsung, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Sony, Intel, eBay, Google and Amazon together account for more than 3 million of the 3.1 million fans following the top 100 brands.

More importantly, however, is the matter of engagement. All the followers in the world aren’t really much use if they’re not coming back to your page, or aren’t engaging with your brand.

The H&M Twitter account fields a lot of questions, and as seems to be the trend on Twitter, it is serving more of a customer service function. On Google+, on the other hand, there are photo albums of the latest collections, contest announcements, and videos from launch parties. Some of these links have been posted on Twitter but are lost in the midst of replies and retweets. Users don’t need to follow the brand account to get the most out of great customer service on Twitter.

On the other hand, it’s far easier to look at a Google+ page and see the number of shares, +1s and comments a post has received. On Twitter, good luck trying to find all of the manual retweets or replies. The only thing you’re going to find with any ease are Twitter’s native retweets – and H&M isn’t getting any. The most recent posts on Google+ are getting between 40 to 70 +1s, 10 to 30 comments and around 10 shares.

The nature of Google+ is far more in line with what a brand may expect when it comes to interacting with users, and so should the real comparison here be with Facebook? If that’s the case, taking a look at Socialbakers’ figures, there really is no comparison. According to the BrightEdge report, “Google+ still has less than 1/100th the number of total consumers interacting with the top 100 brands that Facebook has.”

The fastest growing brand on Facebook, Angry Birds, gained a whopping 4 million new fans in one month. And looking at H&M’s own growth on Facebook, the page has added 730,000 fans in the past month, for a total of 9.9 million fans. As far as engagement is concerned, the numbers follow the same trend, with interaction with brands on Facebook far exceeding anything seen on their Google+ counterparts.

In a deal that surely gives the middle finger to Google, Twitter has signed a deal with Russian search giant Yandex to provide access to its full feed of public tweets — its Firehose — allowing the company to deliver tweet search results in its Blog Search results.

Similar to Google’s Social Search — before it was dropped after Google refused to license Twitter’s full data feeds last year — Yandex will also deliver a dedicated Twitter search engine at twitter.yandex.ru, showcasing messages posted in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Kazakh, and top feeds in any other language in its results.

“With more than 250 million tweets a day, Twitter is a valuable information source and the fastest way to find out what’s happening in your world,” said April Underwood, Twitter Director of Business Development. “Through this partnership, Yandex and Twitter will work together to make it easier for Yandex users in Russia and elsewhere to find real-time content about the people and things they care about most.”

Google disabled its Twitter-focused Realtime search results in July 2011, with the search giant stating that its deal with Twitter to display tweets in realtime search results had expired, leading to the temporary shutdown of Realtime.

It said at the time:

“While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that’s publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google.

Our vision is to have google.com/realtime include Google+ information along with other realtime data from a variety of sources.”

Twitter continues to share data with Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, renewing the deal in September 2011, as Google tailored its service to deliver Google+ focused results and move away from other social networks.

Yandex yesterday announced the launch of its ‘social search program’ (note: links to page in Russian), allowing it to inject content and account information from a from a wide array of social networks into its search results.

Today’s deal is the start of the company’s attempts to introduce international social services, helping “enhance its search engine’s quality”. The company is already processing over two million people searches on a daily basis, although roughly half of those are apparently reserved for celebrities.

The huge amount of searches for people has prompted Yandex to roll out its ‘people finder’ service in beta. This enables Yandex users in Russia to access and filter all public profiles of a person with accounts on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, VKontakte, LiveJournal, Odnoklassniki and other social networks.

According to some reports, Twitter will be breaking through the 500 million user mark next Wednesday. Put on your party hats, drinks all around!

Actually, hold your birds. Color us healthily skeptical.

First of all, the 500 million users claim is being made by Twopcharts, which makes a set of tools for searching Twitter and tracking usage based on location and regularly publicizes these estimates to drum up interest about its services.

Twopcharts says it is able to estimate the number of registered Twitter users based on assumptions that rely on the correlation between observed registration dates, publicly available numerical Twitter account IDs and stats that were shared openly by Twitter at various points in the past.

But even Twopcharts itself will warn you that their estimates are “based on limited information and interpretations and may or may not be accurate”.

For one, they don’t take into account profiles that have been deleted by users, which I think is essential in determining how popular a service really is.

And indeed, I’m not the only one who’s skeptical about their estimations.

More importantly, Twitter will gladly tell you that it has ‘more than’ 100 million active users if you care to actually ask or poke around its website a little. Active users are, of course, what really matters. You can also have a debate about what constitutes an ‘active user’ exactly, but we’ll keep that for another day.

It should be noted that even the above stat is a little old: Twitter made this announcement back in September 2011, so that number is likely significantly higher today, especially with the integration in iOS 5.

That’s why you won’t see Twitter brag about how many users the service has attracted as much, if at all, because it would rather talk about how many tweets it’s seeing per day, how many real-time searches it handles, and how many advertisers it has attracted for its promoted products to date, and things like that.

Last time Twitter shared the number of registered users for the service was in April 2011, when they announced that more than 200 million people had signed up. You can try to make me believe that they’ve added 300 million new users in the past 12 months, but I don’t think you could pull it off even if you’d offer me copious amounts of mind-expanding drugs and heavy alcohol.

That’s not to say Twitter hasn’t experienced significant growth since the beginning of last year, because this is most certainly the case, but I’m holding out for hard facts before putting a number on it.

And just for the record: I’ve asked Twitter whether Twopcharts has it right, but they haven’t gotten back to me so far. If and when they do, don’t expect them to share the actual user stats though. Here’s to hoping they do, or at least share them openly at some point in the near future.

Until then, please, let’s take all growth calculations made by outsiders with a sizeable grain of salt.

Update: Twitter declined to comment on whether or not the methodology employed by Twopcharts is a good way to determine how many total accounts the service has, and also declined to share the number of registered users.

Facing a prison sentence as a result of statements made on Twitter seems to have become the norm in Kuwait.

Kuwaiti Twitter user Mohammad al-Mulaifi could be joining the ranks of Nasser Abul and Mubarak al-Bathali who both served prison sentences because of their tweets.

Today, reports have emerged that Mohammad al-Mulaifi was detained by the Kuwaiti secret police over a week ago, with the public prosecutor detaining him for 21 days pending investigation. Al-Mulaifi has been accused of insulting the Muslim Shi’ite minority, which in al-Bathali’s case led to a three year prison sentence.

While al-Bathali was ordered to serve 3 years in prison, for insulting the Shi’ite sect and threatening national unity, his sentence was later commuted to six months. He has since been released and is once again active on Twitter. In the case of Nasser Abul, he spent 3 months in prison for criticizing the Bahraini and Saudi royal families on Twitter.

According to al-Mulaifi’s lawyer, the charges are similar to those that al-Bathali faced – insulting the Shi’ite faith, as well as spreading false news and undermining Kuwait’s image. His lawyer added that al-Mulaifi denied the charges.

Twitter has become something of a minefield in the Middle East. While tweeters have served prison sentences, Saudi Journalist Hamza Kashgari could be facing a far more serious sentence due to statements he made on Twitter. The Saudi journalist fled the country, fearing for his life, after a series of poetic tweets he posted were deemed blasphemous. Amidst public outcry, Kashgari was deported from Malaysia, and sent home, where he could face the death sentence.

Kashgari’s fate remains unknown, with the writer still detained. He has reportedly ‘repented’ for his tweets, while human rights lawyer Abdulrahman Allahem has taken on his case.

Like Kashgari, al-Mulaifi has apologized for his statements, while some of his critics are calling for the revocation of his Kuwaiti citizenship.

Just the other day an email dropped into my inbox asking me if I wanted to buy 10,000 followers on Twitter. The message, which assured me that the price would be “competitive” and that I wouldn’t need to hand over my account details, is part of a growing trend to harvest and sell Twitter followers to give users of the service more credibility.

The bigger your number of followers, the more important you are – that’s the theory at least. And it has spawned an industry that creates thousands upon thousands of ‘fake’ accounts, all of which can give your figures a boost if you are prepared to pay up for the priviledge.

In reality, buying followers is the worst way to build a presence on social media, yet many misguided folks go down that road, and their number reportedly includes the now passed king of pop Michael Jackson, who is alleged to have shelled out for 25,000 followers.

Most people realise that the real way to get noticed online takes time and effort, and is done  through content and personality — but that’s a topic worthy of its own post. If you’re short on ideas, take inspiration, but do not necessarily imitate, this example from a Japanese man who showed that a creative idea can gain attention, it just has to be unique.

Unique is certainly one way to describe the challenge that the president of Japanese firm Omocoro posed to one of his employee Sebuyama. The Web marketer’s goal was to get one of his tweets to be retweeted by at least 1,000 people, a number that is half of his 2,000 followers, as Japan-based blog Kirainet explains.

As anyone who has ever used Twitter can tell you, engagement levels from followers are usually very low — a 5 percent response rate would be notable, for example — so Sebuyama had his work cut out to pass the challenge.

Choosing to stay late at the office in his attempts to reach his goal, Sebuyama began experimenting with a number of tweets, as his write up in Japanese shows, one of which garnered a promising 50 retweets..

Finally, after hours of tweets that were far short of his target, including a number of him photographed nearly naked — which he seems to have a penchant for — he finally struck gold. The message that got him past the 1,000 mark saw him pledge to attach a clothes peg to his body for every retweet he received.

【拡散希望】リツイートされた数だけ身体に洗濯ばさみをつけて写真をアップする！

— セブ山 (@sebuyama) January 30, 2012

Here’s an action shot during the, presumably painful, exercise in viral marketing:

His efforts generated considerable interest in Japan, with retweets coming in from across the country, and even other parts of the world too.

While the events are unlikely to get other marketers pegging themselves in the hope of RTs, a couple of interesting conclusions can be drawn.

Firstly, it is clear, once again, that Twitter is hugely popular in Japan. The country holds the record for the most tweets per second on the service, and Twitter has mainstream adoption there — growing faster than Facebook – despite the fact that the country is traditionally a closed market for overseas firms and services.

It is also clear that originality is key to making a splash on Twitter. Whether it is breaking news early, providing a unique insight or just being different, these approaches can help users stand out. Furthermore, the more genuine followers a user has, so the chances that their retweets and attention will assist in reaching a larger audience.

What lengths would you go to in order to go viral on Twitter?

If you’re an every day user of Twitter’s official mobile app you may be noticing some inconsistencies when it comes to displaying photos that your followers post.

Basically, every now and then when you view a tweet that has a photo hosted by Twitter by way of its partnership with PhotoBucket, the photo won’t display and when you tap the link you’re taken to the mobile web version of Twitter and asked to log in. When you log in, you’re simply taken to your stream and that’s it. No pic.

I’ve noticed it happening with some photos hosted on Twitpic as well. After a few of use noticed the issue, Twitter was quick to respond, and its CEO Dick Costolo promises a fix with its next build:

@thatdrew on it. Should be fixed in the next build.

— dick costolo (@dickc) February 19, 2012

While we’re not sure when that build is coming, we’ve heard rumblings that it might be sometime this week. If there are glaring issues such as this, the next version might come out sooner than we think.

Along with Costolo’s direct response on the issue, a member of Twitter’s mobile team also reached out for some follow-up questions:

@brooke @thatdrew @mariobatali Can you email me at sunghu at twitter dot com with details? Will take further look. cc @dickc

— Sung Hu Kim (@sunghu) February 19, 2012

The issue doesn’t seem to be presenting itself on the desktop version of Twitter and isn’t happening in any other third party mobile Twitter apps. It’s great to see Twitter acting quickly on an issue like this and there’s no telling how many people have experienced the annoyance. If you have, let us know in the comments!