Twitter is just too showy sometimes, isn’t it? With celebrities and Twitterati and Klout scores and all kinds of visual queues signaling where one stands in the Twitterverse.

Imagine you couldn’t see any of that (not the backgrounds or the bios or anything) and all you could see were the tweets. Sound interesting? It’s actually kind of cool, once you get past the disconcerting uncertainty that is Uncertain Rainbow.
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Twitter moved into its new headquarters in San Francisco this June – and we’ve been wondering what they would do with the fantastically large space ever since.

Thanks to Katie Couric, we now get a glimpse inside (and a few snippets from her about using Twitter as well).
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Social media helps the world stay connected, but what about those folks who aren’t connected to the world?

A new study has revealed that Twitter and Facebook are helping homeless people stay in touch with friends and family, liaise with support networks, and find food, shelter and job services.

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In an announcement last week, Twitter joined the Linux Foundation as a Silver member, throwing its hat in with other major tech companies as a supporter of open source software.
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Customer service is an integral part of any business’ operations. Answering complaints, fielding questions and providing feedback can make or break your reputation. And Twitter offers a prime two-way communication channel for any business, whether bootstrapping or budgeting billions.

This infographic from ZenDesk explores how companies use Twitter for customer service – and how their customers feel about their efforts.
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Did you know that more than one third of all links shared on Twitter are images?

Indeed, throughout social media sharing photographs and other visual content is the number one way to engage with fans and followers. On Facebook, photos generate twice as many Likes as text updates, and videos are shared twelve times more than links and text posts.

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Have you ever wondered how the largest restaurant chains in the USA stack up when it comes to social media?

Well, muse no more, as we’ve got a lip-smackin’ infographic that ranks all the chains by popularity of Likes, followers, subscribers and score on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube and Klout.

And your overall winner? That would be Starbucks, whose social following puts them at number one in four of these six platforms.

Wait… Starbucks is a restaurant?

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Need a little weekend reading? We’ve compiled our top ten Twitter stories of the week, which includes a look at the growth in corporate social media, how social media leads to social change, a checklist for social media addiction, news that Twitter has cutoff Tumblr and how your Twitter posts can help you land or lose a job.

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A new study has revealed that just 5 percent of employees list Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts as their biggest cause of wasted time in the office.

Sure, this likely flies in the face of what many bosses think, and what workers say they do and what they actually do are often worlds apart, but let’s take this at face value. Indeed, you might get more on-side when I reveal the winner. Because according to a survey of 300 employees who use computers as part of their daily job, the single biggest cause of time wasting in the office is good, old-fashioned gossiping.

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Social media dashboard HootSuite recently celebrated its four millionth user, and the company has launched a new infographic that reveals more about its data graph, including a couple of statistics that might surprise you.

More than one billion messages have now been sent using HootSuite, with the platform now popular throughout the world, although the bulk of its database remains the USA.

Overall, some nine million unique social profiles have been added to the dashboard, and even though most people think of HootSuite as a Twitter platform, almost half of all these profiles are Facebook.

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