On Sunday, a report published by Le Journal du Dimanche (in French) caused quite a social media storm over in France, as it suggested that the use of realtime social networks could ‘undermine the integrity’ of the upcoming presidential elections and even potentially lead to straight-up cancellation of the election.

The author of the article asserted that using Twitter, Facebook and other realtime social networking and information distribution channels to spread exit poll results before the voting stations close on Sunday April 22 (first round) is against French election laws, which traditional media must abide to avoid getting fined.

Under current rules, French media are prohibited from publishing polls or exit poll results between midnight on the Friday preceding election day until all voting stations have closed on Sunday, in order not to influence voters with early results.

The problem is that France’s polling commission has publicly stated that social networks like Twitter and Facebook fall within the legal definition of ‘media’, which means that the law applies to those services as well.

Considering that the last presidential elections in France were in May 2007, when Twitter and Facebook were still in their infancy, this wasn’t an issue until now.

Franck Louvrier, head of communications for current French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, told Le Journal du Dimanche that “there is a very real risk here” and that they are “facing a media environment that has no limits”.

No word on how social media can also benefit them.

Most of the tweets you read on Twitter are forgettable, at best. Some of them are pure gold and worth memorializing in some fashion. But how? A favorite? A retweet? Emailing them to a friend?

How about printing them out on toilet paper and wiping your butt with them? Amazing idea right? It’s now possible thanks to a service aptly named “Shitter“.

If you say that you don’t read while you’re taking care of business, you’re probably lying. Now you don’t have to take your copy of “War and Peace” into the loo with you, simply read a few tweets from your newly printed toilet paper and consider yourself caught up with your feeds. Here’s how the service describes itself:

Shitter will take one or more feeds from your Twitter account and turn it into four rolls of toilet paper, delivered straight to your door.

All you have to do is log into Shitter with your Twitter account and choose what type of tweets you’d like to print out onto a roll of toilet paper. You can choose your own tweets if you’re self loathing, your favorites, tweets from lists, or a feed of someone that you follow. Yes, you could even print out a roll of tweets from your favorite technology blog:

The cost is a mere $35 plus tax and shipping, which is a small price to pay for the raddest toilet paper you’ve ever placed in your bathroom. It’s also an amazing gift for anyone who considers themselves a “social media guru”. Show them how you really feel by printing their tweets onto something worthy of your ass!

If you’d like to blame praise someone for this outstanding idea, reach out to the guy who made it, David Gillespie. We here at The Next Web certainly salute him!

➤ Shitter

Today Twitter gave us some more stats to go along with the ones it had already given us. The total number of Super Bowl 46 related tweets are astronomical:

The crazy part is that those 13.7M tweets were just from during the game alone. Imagine if the company had released how many Super Bowl related tweets there were since the two teams competing in it were known.

There’s no doubt that Twitter has become a huge part of how we communicate about entertainment, even though the ads during the game itself didn’t reflect that.

What does reflect Twitter’s impact is that the network that aired the Super Bowl took to the platform to make this announcement:

NBC Sports: Super Bowl XLVI is the most-watched television program in U.S. history and the highest-rated Super Bowl in 26 years!

— CNBC (@CNBC) February 6, 2012

How deeply can Twitter integrate itself into pop culture and what we do every day? After yesterday’s impressive usage, and up-time, the sky seems to be the limit for the micro-messaging service. As Dick Costolo said, 2012 is the “Twitter election“, so once the Presidential debates start, keep an eye on the service for more record-breaking achievements.

Live events are always a hit on Twitter, with people tweeting throughout Presidential speeches or during a television show. One vertical has done extremely well when it comes to Twitter, and that’s sports.

This Sunday during the Super Bowl, you streams will be turned into a play-by-play and blow-by-blow of everything that happens in the biggest NFL game of the season. If you’re not a sports fan, this day sucks big-time for you.

We’re assuming that Twitter will be ready for the rush of tweets that will flood its servers, so it’s the best way to keep up with the game, even if you’re watching the game. The micro-blogging service makes it feel like you have thousands of people in your living room, chatting about every aspect of what happens on the field.

If you want to keep up with the most interesting tweets about the Super Bowl, Twitter has put together two accounts that are spitting out “Top Tweets” algorithmically, from each teams respective lists.

The accounts are @GiantsTweets and @NEPatriotTweets and you’ll find tweets from players, coaches, media, and the team itself.

As part of the Super Bowl fun, Twitter also announced an initiative that will let you vote on your favorite Super Bowl Ad:

Of course, it wouldn’t be the Super Bowl without the creative ads, and this year we’re introducing a Twitter twist. Immediately after the game, you can replay all of the ads that aired during the game and Tweet votes for your favorites on adscrimmage.twitter.com. We’ll announce which ad dominated the post-game Twitter conversation on Feb. 12, a week from Sunday.

Twitter is doing a really good job at injecting itself into major events with fun promotions like this. The company knows that people will be tweeting about the commercials anyway, so harnessing them to help build a set of data that they can flip into a bigger story is genius.

The “official” hashtags for the Super Bowl are #SB46 and #SuperBowl, and the game will of course be a trending topic and a featured story on the Twitter “Discover” page throughout the day on Sunday so get your tweets ready!

A report by SD Times yesterday tried to call attention to a suspected practice by Twitter to label users as “anti-social”, thus removing their tweets from search results on the site.

In the article, SD Times says:

Is this an egregious abridgement of free speech, or simple way of making Twitter less abrasive? One thing’s for sure, there is no rhyme nor reason to what Twitter feeds are being deemed “anti-social,” and that is the real source of concern here.

I reached out to Twitter on the matter and it turns out that there is no official practice of labeling users as “anti-social” as I suspected. However, Twitter says that they absolutely do remove certain content from search results and the reasons why are publicly posted on its terms of use.

The response from Twitter was:

We do have search best practices — outlined here. And, users who are not in compliance with those best practices may not show up in search results. There’s also a page on how to contact Support if you believe your account is mistakenly not showing up in search.

For whatever reason, people think that an open box on a website means that they can say or do anything with little or no repercussions. That is most certainly not the case, and I applaud Twitter for taking actions to clean up its search results.

In case you’re wondering, here are the reasons why your tweets might not end up in search results:

We caution against aggressive behaviors and suggest that you stay away from:

- Repeatedly posting duplicate or near-duplicate content (links or tweets)
- Abusing trending topics or hashtags (topic words with a # sign)
- Sending automated tweets or replies
- Using bots or applications to post similar messages based on keywords
- Posting similar messages over multiple accounts
- Aggressively following and un-following people

Twitter may automatically remove accounts engaging in these behaviors from search (or even suspend in some cases) in order to ensure the best experience for everyone.

Go ahead and drop your conspiracy theories, folks. There’s nothing to see here but a well thought out practice of keeping Twitter search results clear of garbage. If you think your tweets aren’t showing up in search and you’re wondering why, just contact Twitter support.

Even though Instagram, foursquare, and Twitter let you find all of the activity going on around you no matter where you are, one app brings local content from all three services together.

App.bg is a fairly basic app, in that it grabs your current location through your desktop or mobile browser, and then pulls in all local Instagram photos, foursquare tips, and tweets. If you move around a lot during the day, it’s actually pretty neat to see everything local on one page. For example, if you work from different coffee shops and offices or travel a lot, this would be a perfect app to keep open throughout your day.

I’m a big fan of single-serve apps that don’t require me to log into the actual services that it pulls data from.

Sit down, open your laptop, refresh the page

Once you allow the app to gain access to your location, all you have to do is refresh the page or tap the icon in the top right if you move along to somewhere new.

Since App.bg’s design is so simple, it’s perfect for use in mobile browsers as well. You won’t have to fire up any of the three apps to see what’s going on around you, and that’s a pretty sweet time-saver. The foursquare tips alone break out a great part of the service that doesn’t require you to check-in or sign up.

It’s a web app, so no installation or download is required, just call up http://www.App.bg on any device.

Even if you’re not an avid user of Instagram, foursquare, or Twitter, this is a quick way to see what’s going on around you, no matter what device you have with you at the time.

➤ App.bg

If you’re both a Twitter and a Google+ user, you know that sometimes you want to post things in the same place. Or while you’re using one service, you think of something to post on the other. Switching tabs isn’t exactly strenuous, but it can take up a few minutes of your day if you add it up.

In steps G+Twitter for Google+, a chrome extension that will turn Google+ into a fast and beautiful Twitter client, that’s probably better than Twitter’s own website.

Here are the features you’ll get with G+Twitter for Google Plus for Chrome:

• Realtime Timeline + search
• Tweet inside Google+ with link support (auto-shorten)
• Dynamic tracking of keyword/tag
• Enable/Disable your timeline
• hover cards with follow/unfollow button
• Share friends G+ posts on Twitter
• View conversations
• Answer, RT, Old RT

If your stream wasn’t busy enough already…

Beware, if you follow a lot of people on Twitter, this extension will turn your Google+ stream into an unreadable real-time mess. However, if you’re someone who enjoys keeping up with what everyone is saying, this is for you.

Once you install the extension, all you have to do is authenticate it with your Twitter account. Once you do that, you’re sent to your Google+ stream, and the real-time mashup begins.

As you can see, tweets that get pulled into your stream are highlighted in grey, while Google+ posts are white. This helps you tell the difference between the two.

Posting on Twitter is simple, as the extension turns Twitter into a circle that you can add to any Google+ post. It’s pretty handy, it’s like adding Twitter as a CC: in an email.

Your tweet shows up on Twitter just as you’d expect.

On the right hand side of Google+, you’ll be able to toggle Twitter on and off, as well as add search phrases to pull into your stream.

The more you add though, the more your stream begins to look like a river.

Julien Noleau, the developer behind G+Twitter for Google+, promises us that multi-account support and filters are on the way.

I’m currently using it, and I’m finding that following Tweets passively in a Google+ real-time stream is almost a better experience than how I follow tweets usually, on Twitter’s website.

➤ G+Twitter for Google+

Following politicians on Twitter can be as boring as watching paint dry on some days, but a new app pulls together tweets from both parties, and shows a whole host of trends about what they’re tweeting about.

PolitickerUSA is a simple app that displays tweets from every politician that uses the Twitter platform. At the very least, the service is the best social list of every U.S. Senator and Representative on the web.

You can watch tweets fly by in real-time, or you can filter them by your favorite politico.

One Nation, Under Tweets

PolitickerUSA is extremely well designed, and splits politicians on the homepage by their political party affiliation. The tweets flow in, and you can click them to drive you straight to Twitter.

Where PolitickerUSA gets really interesting is with the trends that it puts together into a cloud, based on mentions of words and phrases in the politicians’ tweets.

You can check trends by party, or by individual politician. These features make the site extremely useful, especially around voting time. If you’re not sure where a politician stands on important matters, getting a 50-100 tweet snapshot of what they’re talking about will give you a good idea.

You’re given a drop down of all of the politicians listed on the PolitickerUSA site, so you can literally spend hours going through all of the data. The clouds definitely help with displaying the important sentiments, thus skipping the boring process of actually reading the tweets.

One the homepage, you can do a filter search if you have a specific interest, and you’ll be shown the matching tweet from each side of the political fence. If you’re super into politics, or you’re trying to pay more attention, PolitickerUSA will be your best resource for up-to-the-minute political information.

With Tumblr helping us make phone calls to our Representatives about the “Stop Online Piracy Act”, this app can help us tweet to them about it too.

➤ PolitickerUSA

In his first tweet, Media Mogul Simon Cowell has announced that he has joined Twitter, in the typical grand fashion we’re used to.

Recently, X Factor announced that you could now vote for your favorite contestants on Twitter. With the show focusing on the 140 character sharing social network, Simon Cowell appears to be doubling down by joining the service himself. We know it’s him, because his account is verified.

Simon Cowell was very public with his dislike for Twitter until now, and this is a sign that the company is becoming more and more relevant in mainstream media. Marketing firm Mass Relevance just grabbed the keys to the Twitter firehose kingdom to provide stats and data to support Cowell’s XFactor show.

Cowell has such a following, that he could easily become the fastest Twitter user to a million followers ever, surpassing Charlie Sheen.

Update: 40 minutes after his first tweet, Cowell already has 23,092 followers.

Follow Simon Cowell’s Twitter Stats here.

The service pulls in the avatar of every person who is tweeting in real-time, and places it as one pixel on the Fluxels.com.

By scrolling down the screen, you’ll see more pixels added second by second.

The project, “Pixels in Flux“, shows beautiful colors, and if you click on one of the pixels you’ll go right to that person’w Twitter profile.

If you spend enough time on the site, maybe you’ll find yourself on it!

➤ Fluxels