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Reports that Twitter would launch an official advertising platform within the next month or so have spread after comments made by Anamitra Banerji, the head of product management and monetization at Twitter, at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting, which was reported in a story on Media Post.

However, in a cryptic clarification with Techcrunch’s Erick Schonfeld, Banerji said:

“Speculation = timing, imminence, details. Truth = thinking, planning, eventuality.”

The reason for the confusion appears to be the question put to Banerji, asking whether the company would “likely in the next month or so offer Twitter owned and operated ads”, to which Banerji replied “That’s right”. Banerji has noted that he said explicitly that the timing statement was completely inaccurate, and a post by conference moderator Seth Goldstein has included an apology to Twitter for anything inferred by his reference to a statement from back in November by Twitter COO Dick Costolo about advertising being in the works.

GigaOm has referred to a media source which suggested that the platform may launch at South by Southwest which beings on March 12, and that Twitter has been working with several launch partners from both traditional and new media, but plans are still tentative.

The fact that Twitter has been working on an advertising service for months isn’t a secret, but the reason interest is so high is that no-one is sure what form it will take, and most importantly, what affect it might have on user numbers if advertising annoys them. Twitter is probably more vulnerable than most to a backlash by users as those most productive members at the top of the power curve are still proportionally high social media and digital types amongst the celebs with huge follower numbers.

If you want evidence of the sheer amount of content and data being created by Twitter, look no further than the evidence provided by Twitter analytics team member Kevin Weil on the official Twitter blog.

In 2007, Twitter users were tweeting 5,000 times per day.

In 2008, Twitter users were tweeting 300,000 times per day.

In 2009 Twitter users were tweeting 2.5 million per day, and it grew 1400% to 35 million per day.

And in 2010? Twitter users are tweeting 50 million times per day, which works out at 600 tweets per second.

Kevin goes on to mention Tweet deliveries as a much higher metric, and also says that the team will make time to share more info on ways to measure and understand the information network.

50 million messages is an interesting figure considering the measurements of web-based Twitter usage are pinned at around 55 million, and several studies indicate there’s a high churn rate of new users and a high proportion of dormant accounts – it indicates those that ‘get’ Twitter tend to share a pretty high amount of information. Which isn’t unusual, considering the same curve correlates with the amount of bloggers regularly updating, for example.

It also reinforces why tweets are becoming integrated into search tools from Google, Bing and many more.

Twitter has become one of the prime targets for phishing and spam attacks, due to both it’s huge growth in user numbers, but also the each with which messages can spread (partly due to the inherent weakness in using short urls).

The latest example is the BZPharma ‘LOL this is funny’ attack, as detailed by security firm Sophos. Messages include ‘Lol. this is me??’, ‘lol , this is funny’ and ‘Lol. this you??’, and include a link which looks like ‘http://example.com/?rid=http://twitter.verify.bzpharma.net/login’ –

with the example.com element varying between a number of addresses.

There’s a handy Youtube video with details of the problem. Links are appearing in both private Direct Messages, and in public feeds – plus some third party services allow DMs to be made public, sharing the phishing attack more widely.

Click on the dodgy link and you’ll go to a fake Twitter login page, which replicates the Fail Whale when you attempt to login, and then redirects you back to the real Twitter page to make you believe your account hasn’t been hit. The same technique is also being used to phish Bebo accounts.

And after the first wave of attacks compromised accounts, there’s now a wave of spam selling herbal viagra, with messages including “Get bigger and have sex longer. go here”

So besides double-checking you’re on the real Twitter site before logging in, keep an eye on your sent messages for any clue your account has been compromised, and also watch out for messages being sent by even trusted friends.

You can also take a look at the full Sophos update on the attack.

With news that William Shatner is to star in the first TV show to be created from a Twitter account, it appears that microblogging is now the source of choice for media content.

It wasn’t so long ago that traditional blogs were all the rage as a source for book and TV deals – probably the most notable was Belle du Jour (who recently had her real identity revealed), whose Secret Diary of a Call Girl became first a book, and then a popular TV Show.

But now Shit My Dad Says has not only landed a TV deal which was signed last November, but with William Shatner reportedly set to star it’s been greenlit for a pilot episode on CBS, with the creators of Will & Grace on board as executive producers.

With over 1.1 million followers, there’s definitely a fanbase for the show – but will any of the humour survive considering how much adult language is involved?

The fact that Twitter now employs 140 people is a nice little coincidence which probably had to happen sometime…

What’s more interesting is that the company has pretty much doubled in size since last summer. and there are still at least 27 more job openings available at the moment. While things have been quiet for a little while, is this a sign that the core product is going to ramp up in terms of development or is this the cost of dealing with so many users producing so much content, along with increased threats from hackers etc?

With the caveat that it doesn’t cover third party applications, comScore puts visits to Twitter at 75 million – and regardless of the correlation between those numbers and the actual figures, what you can take away is that the graph is still going up and to the right:

It certainly seems anecdotally as if I’m witnessing more colleagues and friends not only using Twitter, but attempting to use it in a fairly sustainable way rather than registering, looking confused and then vanishing again.

Meanwhile the amount of content being produced has also risen – to a whopping 1.2 billion tweets per month according to data collected by Royal Pingdom.

The methodology used to collect the figures was pretty simple:

‘we tracked down a tweet from the first couple of minutes of each month. Using the sequence numbers of these tweets, we could then calculate the number of tweets for each month. Since finding old tweets is more or less impossible with Twitter’s own search engine, we used Google, then verified the tweet time stamp by looking at the tweet itself’

Again, while there could be some debate about the accuracy of the actual figures involved, what’s important is that the overall effect is some consistent and sizeable growth. And that’s in the face of the redesign of Facebook – the next challenger on the list is GoogleBuzz, but so far I’ve found it rather unsatisfactory, even apart from the initial privacy issues.

Twitter has been making some more hires recently – first up is Robin Sloan, who joins to handle media partnerships. Sloan previously worked as a strategist and executive at Current TV. During the first presidential debate of 2008, Sloan built an application to overlay tweets on the bottom of the screen. Spookily he was also the author of Twitter’s 5 billionth tweet.

Also joining is user experience designer Mark Otto, who worked at ZURB, an interaction design firm whose listed clients include TinyPic and CC:Betty. And finally Dan Webb, the London web developer behind Twaudio, which brought MP3s to Twitter through direct uploads or recording.

(Hat tips to Venturebeat and Louis Gray)

Louis estimates the total number at Twitter to be around 158 following a regular weekly pattern of hiring. It seems as if the desire to evolve and most importantly monetise, will be the main drivers. After all, the user experience of the Twitter website hasn’t changed in great detail for some time (The main added features have been the new Retweets and Location), and meanwhile 3rd party clients are constantly finding new ways to improve on the default experience.

Beyond the UI for consumers, this could really be about improving the experience for the monetisable advertisers, marketers and customer service teams. Big businesses are generally used to working with well-polished, expensive systems, and polished controls/dashboards for business use will add to the draw for mainstream business.

Councillors in Cornwall, UK, are in trouble after claims a number of them used Twitter during a meeting to mock other members – the same behaviour that takes place in the backchannel of every social media conference.

They could face being reported to the authority’s standards committee and if they’re judged to have broken the code of conduct for inappropriate comments, could face suspension.

The tweets apparently included:

“naughty boy!”

“high level of accidental sexual innuendo in the council today”

“she said phones must be switched off. (I love that we’re completely ignoring that instruction)”

“chairman indirectly instructs us not to tweet from the meeting. Whoops!”

Cornwall Council has said that it is currently developing a social media policy which recognises the potential for social networking tools to communicate and engage with the public, but would also highlight the importance of regulating usage to avoid anything which could adversely affect its reputation.

I think it’s quite surprising there are still Government organisations which aren’t operating with even a basic social media policy in place – but at the same time, we can only hope politicians and councillors remain encouraged to show their human side of social networks rather than being regulated into the same impersonal figures which many people feel disenfranchised from.