When it hits AT&T stores next week, the Nokia Lumia 900 could be the best smartphone on the market. If Apple released a piece of hardware as sleek and beautiful piece as the Lumia 900, the world would bow at its feet and marvel at Cupertino's latest masterpiece. But that is not going to happen with the Lumia 900.

The key phrase here is "could be." As it turns out, the Lumia 900 is not actually the best smartphone on the market. Sure, there are tons of things to like about the device - the raised screen, its perfect size, the one-piece polycarbonate body, the sweet camera - but there is something that holds the device back that is hard to get over. This should have been Nokia's Hero Phone. Sadly, it isn't.

Putting the Lumia 900 Through Its Paces

So we understand exactly what we are talking about, the Lumia 900 has a 4.3-inch screen on the diagonal with a 1.4 GHz processor, 4G LTE from AT&T, Wi-Fi, an 8-megapixel back camera and a 1-megapixel front camera. Its body is .45 inches thick, 2.7 inches wide and 5.03 inches tall. It weighs 5.6 ounces and promises 300 hours of stand-by time on 3G and seven hours of talk time.

The hardware itself is what puts the Lumia 900 in the discussion as the best phone on the market - especially the well-engineered polycarbonate body. Nobody makes smartphone bodies like Nokia, and this may be the device's biggest competitive advantage. Thin and compact with just enough weight and solidity, it's a joy to hold. Compared to the plastic backs of many Android devices, the Lumia 900 feels like a Swiss watch. If you have held a Lumia 800 (not likely if you are in the United States), you know what we are talking about.

The next greatest aspect of the Lumia 900 is its 4G LTE service. Say what you want about AT&T, Verizon or any other U.S. wireless carrier, LTE as a standalone technology is amazing. Properly implemented, as it is in the Lumia 900, LTE's speed makes apps and websites extremely responsive and sends even large email attachments almost instantly.

(We did experience one hiccup with AT&T's LTE. We tried to download the game Plants vs. Zombies over the data connection but were told that the file for the app was too big to download over a data plan and must be downloaded over Wi-Fi. We could not override the prompt and had to connect to a Wi-Fi network. This is not something you see often from Google Play or the Apple App Store. It is hard to tell where that restriction is coming from. It could be directly from the Windows Phone Marketplace or a parameter instituted by AT&T.)

Both cameras on the Lumia are impressive. There is a button on the side of the device that can be dedicated to the camera and acts as a de facto shutter. That is not a new feature for a smartphone but it is well implemented on the 900. Here are a couple of test shots:

Those shots were taken in sunlight. The Lumia 900 doesn't handle low light conditions quite as well, which makes us wonder about the receptor. The front-facing camera, meanwhile, is completely adequate for what it is. Here is an example of the front facing camera in nominal lighting conditions:

Now for the screen. As a piece of hardware, there is nothing wrong with the Lumia 900's AMOLED ClearBack glass touchscreen, raised above the body ever so slightly. It fits in well with the polycarbonate body and is one reason the device feels so nice to hold. Yet, if the eyes are the windows to the soul, the screen on the Lumia is the window to ... Windows Phone.

Implementing Windows Phone

For any smartphone, the hardware needs to be able to support the operating system. For the most part, this is not a problem for the Lumia 900. The LTE helps apps and websites run fast and render well. Location services such as the preloaded "Local Scout" accurately find your position and recognize nearby businesses.

Microsoft learned from the follies of early versions of Android and realized that if different OEMs are going to produce Windows Phone devices, then the design needs to have guidelines and be streamlined. The "Hubs and Tiles" of Windows Phone have a standard ratio, and all app and device design is centered around the tiles concept. Microsoft's design principles make the experience consistent from one device to the next.

Nokia and Microsoft worked very closely together to mesh the operating system to the hardware. It is often difficult to tell where Microsoft starts and Nokia ends, much to the credit of both companies. Nokia runs its own version of maps and location services while Microsoft's Bing is the default search engine. AT&T also gets in on the act with several "bloatware" applications such as AT&T Radio and U-Verse, but these can be easily uninstalled by the user.

The fundamental question to ask about the Lumia 900 is if the hardware supports the operating system to the satisfaction of user expectations. The answer to that is an unequivocal yes.

The Response Test

Whenever we get a new test device, one favorite test is to hand it to people and see how they interact. Can they find the on/off button? How do they react to the home screen? This works best with a range of consumers over a period of several days to get different levels of reaction. One day it might be a group of developers that know exactly what they are looking at and go to key areas of the device. The next day we'll get reactions from a local bartender who is not technologically savvy. After that it's time to give it to a friend who is familiar with various smartphone operating systems but may not fall in the realm of enthusiast.

The developers who looked at the phone marveled at the form factor and then went on to pick out various flaws with Windows Phone. The uninformed bartender held the phone and said, "Wow, this is really cool," and proceeded to click on all of the tiles. The knowledgeable friend played with it for a couple of minutes, handed it back and mumbled, "Why would I give up my iPhone for this?"

It's a legitimate question. Perhaps even the most important question.

The answer is that unless you are absolutely in love with the Windows Phone interface, there is little reason to dump an iPhone or a high-end Android device for the Lumia 900. Exceptional phones make people want to switch carriers just to get their hands on them. The iPhone is such a device; the Galaxy Nexus is another.

The Lumia 900? Not quite.

Instead, this beautiful piece of hardware is the quintessential Windows Phone device. At $99, AT&T will sell plenty to consumers looking for great hardware at a reasonable price. Is anyone going to ditch a new Android or iPhone for it, though? Not likely.

This is the reason that the Lumia "could" be the best smartphone on the market right now. It has all the elements of a Hero Phone and is the key to Nokia's salvation and re-entrance into the U.S. market.

But while Windows Phone looks cool and is functional, the smartphone-buying populace of North America has been conditioned toward the apps-plus-home-screen design shared by iOS and Android. Windows Phone's "Hub and Tiles" seem strange and uncomfortable to many people. Overall, the best smartphone on the market is the one that people actually want to use. And that smartphone does not run Windows Phone.

So, the Nokia Lumia 900 could be the best smartphone on the market. If it was running Android. If it was running iOS. But running Windows Phone, the Lumia 900 is just another piece of stunning hardware.

Both companies promise that the service Posterous users know and love will continue operating as it always has, at least for the time being. But what's clear from the language of Twitter's announcement is that the acquisition was made for talent more so than technology or products.

"Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption," reads the announcement. "We'll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we'll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks."

So, in other words, Posterous will be available to you now, but we'll let you know if we plan on shutting it down. That must be a fairly likely scenario to warrant that language being included in the initial announcement of the acquisition.

Of course, it's possible that this won't be the outcome, and if it is, it's not like Twitter is going to shutter Posterous Spaces overnight.

The move presents a potential leg up for Tumblr, which already dominates the short-form blogging space and could soon see one less competitor if Posterous is taken out of commission.

For that, such a scenario doesn't sound imminent, but it couldn't hurt for active users to take some preemptive measures.

It's not clear how well that will help Chinese users in the mainland, since the service has been banned since 2009. It may not make much of a dent at all in Twitter's hopes to capture the hearts and minds of Chinese-language users of the microblogging platform.

China already has Sina's Weibo, which claimed in March of this year that it had already surpassed 100 million users. That service is used extensively outside of China, as well as within the country, giving it an advantage over any move Twitter might make to take over that territory.

However, there are other countries where the Chinese language is used in microblogging. Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong come to mind. But even taken all together they don't amount to the estimated 485 million Internet and mobile Web users in China.

Twitter has had some success with its Translation Center, with 200,000+ translators across all languages. It's hard to beat inherent scale, though.

The service currently hosts over 28 million blogs, which are used to publish tens of millions of posts each day. The site's total posts hit 10 billion earlier today, according to the company's "about" page.

Light blogging services really started taking off last year, with Tumblr leading other players like Posterous, Soup.io and Noovo. The craze has caught on with traditional media outlets like NPR, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and a host of others, who have set up blogs on Tumblr as a way to help grow their audiences, engage readers and drive traffic back to their original content.

Earlier this year, Tumblr even surpassed Wordpress in terms of pageviews and money, although it still has fewer total bloggers and visitors.

The New York-based startup has raised $40 million in funding since being founded in 2007. The service is estimated to receive about 3 billion pageviews per month.

The Rustock botnet was responsible for a great quantity of the world's spam during the time it was active. The operators of the botnet are wanted for various criminal activities including counterfeit advertisements and violating the trademarks of Microsoft and pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer. With Rustock out of the picture, the world's spam levels are at their lowest levels since 2008. Do you know anybody associated with Rustock and looking for a reward?

Microsoft has filed a civil suit against the operators of Rustock with the defendants named as "John Doe" until their true identities can be ascertained. The notice of a reward is an attempt by Microsoft to determine the names of the defendants and is posted exactly four months (March 18 to July 18) after the initial complaint was made in U.S. District Court in Western Washington based in Seattle.

Microsoft believes the operators of Rustock to be of Russian decent or based in Russia and has taken out notices in Russian newspapers to notify the Rustock operators of the civil suit. Anyone with information on Rustock can contact Microsoft at avreward@microsoft.com.

"Microsoft has already been gathering strong evidence in our ongoing investigation and this reward aims to take that effort a step further," wrote Richard Boscovich, the senior attorney with Microsoft's digital crimes unit, on Microsoft's official blog. "We will continue to follow this case wherever it leads us and remain committed to working with our partners around the world to help people regain control of their Rustock-infected computers."

Search on Bing for the phrase "fly to..." and the name of a major destination city and you will now see an automatic display of the best dates to fly from where you are to that place, with the lowest price for a round trip ticket and advice about whether the price is likely to go up or down if you waited to buy the ticket later. It's really cool.

I don't know if I'm going to change my travel dates or destination based on a difference of a few dollars, but this is at least fun. It's really fast and easy to see cheap flights and dates at various places. Click through the results and you'll see even more, much of it powered by Microsoft's very wise acquisition of airfare prediction company Farecast in 2008.

Google has a big travel search acquisition of its own in the works of course. It's looking to buy ITA Software, but that deal is super controversial and faces regulatory challenges due to concerns about monopoly power.

Presuming Google can buy ITA, it will be interesting to see what it can come up with to wow users performing travel searches. That is ultimately, after all, what it's all about in the end.

Online payment company PayPal has opened up its micropayment solution to "game developers, media publishers, or anyone interested in selling digital content on a global scale." The solution was first announced last October when the company said that the upcoming feature would offer "a competitive fee structure for micropayments, with pricing at 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under $12."

Today, PayPal's two-click micropayment solution has gone public and it has the potential to change how publishers and other online merchants interact with their customers.

The major hurdle for micropayments is getting the consumer through the process with as little friction as possible. The more a consumer has to do to make a payment, the less likely they are to do so. This is PayPal's answer to that problem.

When consumers pay for online content, PayPal for digital goods allows them to pay in as little as two clicks without ever leaving a publisher's game, news, music, video or media site. It's the online equivalent to dropping a quarter in the slot to buy a gumball.

Based on PayPal's existing security, the service offers a faster, safer and more cost-effective way to send and receive micropayments. PayPal for digital goods still has competitive fees for micropayments pricing of 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under $12. This is actually lower than fees typically charged by payment processors in the DG industry. As an extra perk, publishers and merchants are paid automatically and given immediate access to their funds, every time a customer purchases digital goods.

So, how could this change things? The digital publishing space is on a never ending search for a way to get readers to pay for content on an a la carte basis. According to PayPal, online magazine Autosport.com saw a 75% increase in new customers signing up with the beta version of the micropayment system.

The next step, of course, is to do what's shown in the screen shot above - get users to pay for things 25 cents at a time.

It's amazing to think that, as WordPress mobile project developer Isaac Keyet writes, "each day thousands of posts are written and posted using nothing but a wee phone keyboard and a built-in camera." Move over, Gutenberg!

Keyet says that WordPress has two platforms in their scope and Nokia was one of them. Nokia, while largely ignored by much of the tech crowd, still has more than 1.3 billion users worldwide and 40% of the smartphone market runs on Symbian, according to numbers released at the last Nokia World 2010 event in September. According to at least one forecast, Symbian still has a couple of years left at the top before Android comes in and takes the top spot.

That's all to say that, while we focus on the iPhone, Android and Blackberry platforms - all of which WordPress has apps for - coming out with a Nokia app is good news for a lot of people and will hopefully help to propel the world of mobile blogging.

WordPress for Nokia will allow users to "write and edit posts and pages, manage your comments queue and keep an eye on your blog's statistics". The app is available for download from the Nokia Ovi Store and from the WordPress for Nokia site.

As for that other platform, we imagine that WordPress for Windows Mobile is likely on the way, but in the meantime, take a look at WordPress's classy, sweet morning jazz look at its new app:

As we've noted before, there are a couple of problems with selling cheap digital goods. For consumers, it's a matter of time and hassle, while merchants often have to contend with high transaction fees and lost sales. According to the release, "the new solution offers PayPal's competitive fee structure for micropayments, with pricing at 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under $12".

A number of companies have already signed on, including Facebook, Autosport.com, FT.com, GigaOM, Justin.tv, Ooyala, Plimus, Tagged, Tyler Projects and Ustream.

"The decision to purchase digital goods and content usually happens on impulse, so the act of paying needs to be as quick as that impulse," said Sam Shrauger, PayPal's vice president of global product strategy

When we first examined PayPal's proposed solution earlier this summer, there was one feature that was said to be integral to its plan - the consumer would not be required to pay each time, but rather they would spend up to a certain point before receiving a bill. We haven't seen this in today's release, but this might be the "two click" transaction PayPal mentions.

Posterous, the minimalist blogging platform, may have allowed users to post to their blogs via email, or even the specially-formatted Posterous for mobile devices, but now it's gone that one extra step. Posterous for the iPhone is here, allowing users to post, manage their settings, upload media and even geo-tag their updates.

The Posterous iPhone app does everything you want, from what we can see, aside from text formatting - but that's a relatively recent feature addition to Posterous that really took it beyond its roots anyways.

The app allows users to post publicly or privately to any number of different Posterous sites they control. In addition to multiple sites, the new app will let you choose whether or not you want to auto-post your content to 26 different sites, from Facebook to Twitter to Flickr to YouTube and more. Posterous can even be an entry way to a Blogger or Wordpress site.

I downloaded the app and was up and running in under five minutes. Take a look (and a download) for yourself.

While the partnership may not be "official", it is yet another vote of confidence in the Twitter-alternative and the open Web.

According to Dan Patterson, the digital platform manager for ABC News Radio, the partnership is not yet official because the two companies haven't done the "lawyerly dance", among other things. In his explanation of why ABC chose to work with StatusNet, Patterson writes a mini-treatise for an open, distributed Internet.

As the web continues to change traditional media, we see two different and equally strong paradigms emerging. The emergence of sites like Twitter, Tumblr and the social web has been mirrored and tempered by the growing prominence of closed systems like the App Store and Facebook. Now, we like and use all of these platforms.

But we think it's equally important for brands and individuals to control their content and interactive experience with the social graph (Fail Whale, anyone?). To that end StatusNet provides a glimpse at the future of a distributed internet.

StatusNet also allows us to do some fun things with our content and experiment in ways that provide flexibility for errors (read: bugs!) and experimentation.

For now, Patterson says the site will be used for news distribution and audience engagement - the typical use of systems like Twitter and StatusNet - and will be available at abcnewsradio.fm. Earlier this summer, StatusNet received a push in the form of $2.3 million and just recently the company introduced an iPhone app. The decision of a major media outlet to use their service is, in our eyes, a major vote of confidence in something other than the norm.

There are a couple of problems with selling ultra-cheap goods online. First, on the consumer end, the time it takes to fill out an online form credit card details and billing information can be worth more than what you're buying - especially if it's something like a single article or a song. On the merchant end, the transaction fees paid to online payment systems can cut such a large chunk out of the sale that it makes it not worth their while. Services like PayPal have worked to solve these issues, offering quick checkouts and lowered fees for smaller transactions, but a bigger problem still exists - the consumer is often pulled out of what they're doing to complete the transaction.

PayPal vice president Scott Thompson told the Associated Press that this would be the main issue the service hopes to tackle with a new micropayment offering - a more seamless integration.

"The whole intent is to keep you in the experience, don't force you to do anything else ... and keep it economical for all parties," he said.

The micropayment space has been heating up lately, as virtual goods such as online media and in-game items continue to gain popularity and old media look for new ways to make money online. In June, we reported on NewsPass, Google's entry into micropayments for media websites. Another company, Flattr, has made a splash recently, offering a micropayment system that allows users to designate a starting amount and then divide that among any number of content creators - an interesting idea that may take hold in some circles, but certainly not in others. Even Facebook has been getting into the action with its Facebook Credits, which the company has been working to redefine lately.

The big deal here, of course, is that PayPal is a name that has become synonymous with online payments, and if it can succeed in making micropayments more viable, then we could see a lot change in how media outlets and other content creators offer their wares online. Rather than putting content in walled gardens behind paywalls, we may begin to see feature articles and other media offered on an a-la carte basis.

The key to PayPal's plan is to make it so that the consumer doesn't have to leave what they're doing in order to make purchases by "compiling consumers' transactions." That is, the service would allow users to purchase up to a certain amount, $10 for example, before settling up and sending them a bill. Many systems already offer services like this, but when you buy $10 of credits with that company, you're stuck spending it there. With PayPal and other similar services, the benefit would be that consumers could spend the money on any site that accepts PayPal.

According to Twitter, nearly a quarter of all tweets include a link and, until now, they have been shared using third-party services or by "copying and pasting, link shortening, and bouncing between browser tabs" which the company calls "just too much work".

The Tweet button looks to make life easy for users and publishers alike, cutting down both on the time and effort it takes to share content as well as to include retweeting functionality onto a site. The button has gone live on a number of major websites, including entire the entire WordPress blogging network, sharing widget ShareThis and YouTube, and the company expects that "more than a few sites will join the above in the hours to come."

For the user, the Tweet button will bring up a pop-up window with a suggested tweet and a shortened link, identifying both the full link to be shared and the URL shortener used. After tweeting, users may also see a list of suggested Twitter accounts to follow, as designated by the site they're visiting.

On the developer end, the new button takes only a few lines of code and allows the publisher to decide the suggested tweet text, who the tweet should be attributed to and the list of suggested Twitter accounts to follow. The Tweet button API does not, however, appear to include a way for publishers to choose a preferred URL shortener. It seems likely that the move is a precursor to Twitter's long-awaited analytics, as it may be difficult to lure publishers away from third-party URL shorteners that already offer such statistics. When Twitter launched native URL shortener t.co in June, it signaled that eventually all links would be wrapped in t.co as a way to protect users and keep track of links to determine if they are "relevant and interesting".

Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead said in a blog post today that the TweetMeme team "will be assisting Twitter with the technical challenges involved with the button", for which it has likely faced many. TweetMeme had recently grown to share more than 750 million daily retweet button impressions. Tweetmeme is recommending publishers use the official Twitter Tweet button, but is continuing to offer its button as well.

Blackberry may arguably not be as cool as other smart phones anymore, but the people who use them tend to do so in an enterprise context. Their concerns are more around efficiency, ease and profitability than cool. Hootsuite's Blackberry client may offer them more than the device's native Twitter app.

The ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts and social networks, as well as multi-user accounts, blog integration and scheduling features, all from the handheld you're already used to employing may prove a load off of die-hard Blackberry users.

Their new social relationship and support tools indicate Hootsuite's depth of commitment to enterprise, as IntoMobile reminds us.

In addition to fun and games, this function allows social networks and their users the capacity for a bit of extra meaning. The history of annotation is a long one, stretching from classical times through the latest dial-twirling on microblogs. With a drawing function, partners in a network can save space by not having to quote the piece of information they're commenting on.

The three-year-old, Italy-based company, whom we wrote about a year ago, have distinguished itself in a crowded market that includes Hootsuite and Seesmic, with this interesting innovation. It will be interesting to see if any of its competitors pick up on it.

We're not the only entity to think so, apparently. A scrum of investors lined up behind the company, including Kima Ventures, whose co-founder, Xavier Niel, recently bought what is, arguably, France's best-known newspaper, Le Monde.

Like TwitterTim.es, Paper.li harvests a user's Twitter account for links, then presents hints of what they link to in an interactive broadsheet format. New "editions" are generated every few days. It seems to be a remarkably able expression of the concerns and interests of a user, a kind of intellectual and social snapshot of what the user is doing and thinking. (Apparently this reporter is a reasonably steady reader of his own news site. But he also digs comedians, Berlin, business and is keeping an eye on the Gulf oil spill.)

The investing team is filled out be German group Econa, Jeremie Berrebi and a handful of angels.

The company says it was caught flatfooted by what it called an immediate and sudden uptake in users that it has spent time on stabilizing the back-end. It will now turn to "generic new functionalities" and to supporting new languages.

What's the new trend among legacy media? Why it's none other than Tumblr.

For those unfamiliar with the service, Tumblr is a blogging platform that lets users curate images, videos, quotes, and other forms of media onto minimalistic personalized "tumblelogs." Much like Twitter, there is a one-way follow function that lets users view a stream of entries from others of their choice. The quick ability to comment, favorite and "reblog" others posts makes the service incredibly social.

As noted in a Business Insider article Friday, several outlets of traditional print media (newspapers and magazines) are suddenly popping up all over Tumblr with their own pages. Newsweek seems to making great use of the platform by posting mainly photos, and quotes - two of the most shared forms of media on Tumblr. The New Yorker also recently joined the service, sharing mainly videos and photos, including high-resolution images of their popular artistic covers.

The venerable New York Times has even jumped in the mix, though its account is so far empty, save for a single post announcing more content is "coming soon." The Business Insider article lists several other traditional media outlets providing sharable content with fans on Tumblr, including Life Magazine, The Travel Channel, The Today Show, Elle, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and several others.

If anything, these new additions to the Tumblr ecosystem provide a human face through which the various outlets can communicate more freely with their readers. Newsweek has been discussing rumors about its impending purchase on the Tumblr, and many of the sites seem perfectly content with posting material would think would be found objectionable on the main homepage or in print.

So is Tumblr the next big thing for traditional media outlets? From the looks of it, the large media outlets seem pleased with the service and the kinds of interactions it allows for. It would not be surprising to see Tumblr become the third common place aside Facebook and Twitter for media organizations and corporate brands to further reach their audiences.

In many ways, Micromobs takes the best parts of other popular services and serves up a new and easy way to communicate.

According to the company, which was founded by Startup Roots creators Ajay Kamat and Himani Amoli, "Micromobs is designed to fill the gap for a simple, stand alone group application that connects people with the groups they communicate with the most".

For those who've become accustomed to the stream of activity seen in Facebook, Friendfeed, Twitter and any number of other Web applications, the format will feel familiar. Everything occurs in a threaded, microblog-style activity stream. The primary difference, however, is that Micromobs starts by organizing what you say and what you read according to social stratification, or "mobs". These mobs can be public or private and can be organized around its members or even simply a topic. Anyone can create a mob, and, if set as private, they can designate who can participate in that mob.

If you're looking for yet another place to blast out status updates or have ping.fm connect to, this is not it. Micromobs is decidedly about communicating, not shouting your message to the masses.

While it appears that Micromobs intends to fill a niche as a utilitarian communication tool, its users are already using it as a way to organize conversations in a familiar format around topics such as the TV show LOST or "Bay Area Foodies".

As opposed to Facebook or Twitter, the default here is not to blast your message at everyone on the site, but to send specific messages to specific mobs. Unlike email, messages are not isolated but instead kept together on that mob's individual page, much like a Google Group. Micromobs incorporates that forum-feel by allowing discussions to assemble around topics, not just social strata.

The site is currently only available on the Web, but Kamat told us that they are working on mobile and SMS versions of the site, which they look to release once the site continues to grow.

The service breaks down the changes into four categories in a tour of the new site - shorten, share, track and manage.

The company says that it has redesigned the site from the ground up and the "new release (which we've been affectionately calling fugu) provides enhanced features for searching through your links, more easily shortening links through a variety of means, and an increased emphasis on sharing your personal link feed with others."

Shortening links is as easy as it ever was - just cut and paste a long link and bit.ly gives a short and easily shareable link. Beneath the shortener, the site offers a history of links with a brief set of statistics and options for each.

New sharing features, which now includes Twitter and soon Facebook, come primarily in the form of a new bit.ly sidebar. The sidebar makes it simple to share links using the service and offers instantaneous statistics on how many people are retweeting the same link and how many people have clicked on yours.

For those of you who use bit.ly often, the tracking and analytics features may be your favorite new feature. The tracking section allows you to compare how links you share fare compared to that same link shared by everyone else using bit.ly. It also offers all of the standard statistics you might expect, such as referrer domains, locations and basic click data organized by different time periods.

The final new feature, managing links, pulls all of these features together, providing you with a single page to examine all of the links you've shortened and shared using bit.ly and giving basic statistics on each.

Bringing together heavier analytics with easier and more integrated sharing might be a smart move for the URL shortener, especially after much speculation in recent weeks that Twitter would be adding URL shortening to its ever-growing list of features.

Despite having over 100 million registered users, it's still small beer compared to other services. Facebook, for instance, has over 400 million. What's surprising are the ways people, companies and organizations find to use the service. And who those folks are. Here are five Twitter accounts you might find surprising.

Library of Congress. Although the LoC has upwards of 53,000 followers, they themselves only follow one. The Law Library of Congress. They have books down pat. Not sure about electronic communications.However, as ReadWriteWeb reported earlier today, they've acquired the entire Twitter archive, so maybe they'll pick up a thing or two.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. Not too surprising that it's the Press Office that's Twittering. Fox Mulder might be off-putting to some, though possibly not as much as J. Edgar Hoover. At least these folks follow, although only a tenth as much as they are followed.

NASA. Lori Garver, deputy director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Twitters. And she does it right, mixing NASA news, issues of interest to space buffs and personal information. Well, mostly right. Honestly, Lori, there's no one worth following but for two other NASA Twitter accounts? NASA as an organization Twitters its brains out.

The Tower Bridge. Inanimate objects Twittering is non-hilarious. This account, for a busy draw bridge in olde Londone towne seems on the level. However, it makes up for the unexpectedness of the account by the sheer almost operatic boredom of its Tweets. To wit: "I am closing after the Maintenance lift has passed upstream." We can tell from the few accounts it's following that the bridge has a real telescope fetish, though. Unseemly.

Ivy Bean. Ivy has one unusual quality that makes her an unexpected Twitterer to most. She's 104. Yes, years old. Participation of the elderly in social media communications is not that unusual. The young and the old are less fearless than the middle aged in experimenting with different ways to communicate. But 104. Holy Toledo. Some have suggested Ivy's account was originally set up by journalists seeking "Digg bait." Who cares? Ivy rocks the keyboard a year after her "story" was first reported. I hope I'm 104 when I'm her age.

For more, check out ReadWriteWeb's Twitter coverage. Of course, there's always @rww.