The Shorty Awards were handed out last night at the Times Center in New York, with award winners including New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg for Foursquare Mayor of the Year; Justin Bieber for music; and Occupy Wall Street for activism.

Hosted by The Daily Show‘s Samantha Bee and hubby IRL Jason Jones (left). According to the couple, they were happy to host and “honored to be away from their kids.”

A list of all the winners is available here and photos from the event have been posted on Flickr. (Separate from the awards themselves, this awful thing happened after “The Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl” won. Shameful and disgusting.)

Still not sure what all the fuss is about? Click through.

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A big financial backer for Rick Santorum’s presidential campaign, Foster Friess, went on MSNBC today, started talking about sex, and then said “gals” in his time would put Bayer aspirin between their knees as a means of birth control. Seriously, I can’t.

And neither could Andrea Mitchell, who didn’t manage the next question she was reeling so from that blast of cuckoo.

Business Insider notes that, after some Googling, they couldn’t find any past connection between Bayer aspirin and birth control, though the company does make birth control pills.

The comment was followed by jokes on Twitter and the addition of Foster Friess to the list of trending topics on the social network this afternoon.

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While we were away, the Golden Globe awards happened. Glamour, glitz, Madonna made a funny!

While we were casually flipping back and forth between the awards and the Australian Open, others were tweeting with purpose about all of the goings on in Hollywood. According to some new numbers, there were more than 822,000 tweets from nearly 300,000 unique users. The most retweets were for the one at left from Zooey Deschanel. Others who had the Twitterverse all fired up were the host, Ricky Gervais, Perez Hilton, and Game of Thrones. TweetReach tells the tale in the infographic here.

While the tweeting reached an all-time high, the ratings did not. It beat other programming on at that time, but fell short of last year.

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Michelle Obama is tweeting. Actually it’s the President’s campaign staff that will be doing most of the tweeting. But any posts with the “-mo” attached will come directly from the First Lady. This is the similar policy for the President’s account.

The President introduced Michelle to the Twitterverse this morning (so cute, these two!), and the account will serve as a way to connect to voters and Obama supporters. Her Twitter handle has launched in the wake of discussion surrounding the new book The Obamas, which, based on media accounts, seems to focus quite a bit on the First Lady. Michelle Obama made an appearance yesterday on GMA to talk about her image.

“I just try to be me, and my hope is that over time people get to know me, and they get to judge me for me,” she said.

[via TheWrap, Washington Post, New York Times]

A lawsuit filed in July 2010 raises a new question about how companies should handle their social media presence.

An Oakland, CA writer, Noah Kravitz, left his job with PhoneDog.com in 2010 after four years of service. While working there, he tweeted under the name @Phonedog_Noah, gathering 17,000 followers. And once he was gone, he says the company asked him to tweet on behalf of Phonedog every now and again. Once he was gone Kravitz changed the Twitter handle to @NoahKravitz. Eight months after leaving the position, Kravitz was sued by Phonedog, the company claiming that the handle’s followers are a customer list. The company wants $340,000, or $2.50 per follower per month.

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Looks like some people are still in a holiday-induced daze. An account that had been given the Twitter verified seal of approval as Wendy Deng, wife to News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch, has been declared a fake. But not before news outlets around the world reported on “her” wacky tweets over the past few days.

@Wendy_Deng began tweeting on New Year’s Day and since then commented on how hot Ricky Gervais is, cautioned her hubby to delete a tweet, and blamed her nails for all the misspellings in her postings. News of the new Twitter account has appeared in AllThingsDigital, The Guardian, and other outlets.

But despite the verification and after some confusion even on the part of the folks at News Corp., the handle was declared a fake and the spoofer came clean.

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The relationship was only announced in September, but Twitter and Edelman have already decided that it isn’t going to work out.

Ad Age is reporting that the two have parted ways. “It wasn’t material for our [West Coast] operations, let alone Edelman. It would not have a been a large account for us or for anyone other than a very small boutique. It was less about the money than the opportunity to work with Twitter,” an Edelman exec tells the magazine.

Ad Age says executive changes may have played a role in the split. The story also says there are no seemingly no plans right now for a replacement.

It was only a few weeks ago that Weber Shandwick and Kellogg split after just a few weeks.

Stories about companies and celebrities making major Twitter gaffes have become legendary, but less newsworthy mistakes are made every day, even by established users. A panel of magazine editors and social media managers offered Twitter pitfalls and pointers based on their own media brands’ experiences at the MPA Digital: Social Media conference in New York on Wednesday.

Hashtag obsession: While hashtags help your brand or event to be found on Twitter, their use should be limited. Allison Dempsey, social media editor at Parenting, outlined the downside of using too many hashtags in one tweet. “It’s like bolding every word in a sentence, and then nothing pops.”

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If you’ve been watching Twitter over the past hour or so, you’ve seen the tweets about Alec Baldwin being booted off of an American flight either because he was using an electronic device or because he was rude to an attendant.

His spokesperson Matthew Hiltzik has cleared it up.

“Alec was asked to leave the flight for playing ‘Words with Friends’ on his iPad, while parked at the gate. Alec is so in love with ‘Words with Friends’ that he would risk getting thrown off a flight to play. He’s already been re-booked on another American Airlines flight,” he said in a statement, which  has also been tweeted.

Baldwin has been booked on another flight. American has no comment. Alec Baldwin has plenty to say. Also, free publicity for Words With Friends!

*Update: Did we say free publicity for Words With Friends? Their statement after the jump.

[via MSNBC.com]

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TED, the nonprofit behind the wildly popular and always insightful conferences hosted online and in person, has a special series dedicated specifically to women.

TEDxWomen took place on Thursday in New York and Los Angeles. This year’s event, divided into four areas, looked closely at how women come back from serious setbacks; the ties that bind women to their communities; women’s health during their later years; and how women and girls can make a difference in the world.

Click here for an overview from TED, and click through for the highlights and top tweets of the day from our guest writer, Lippe Taylor VP Sloane Berrent.

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