Jack Dorsey, the chairman and co-founder of the popular microblogging service Twitter, shared far more than his site’s 140-character message limit when he offered himself up to a public psychoanalysis.

As part of an exhibition at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City, Mr. Dorsey subjected himself to a Jungian analyst. “I thought it was an awesome experiment,” Mr. Dorsey said after his session. “It’s not something I had done before.”

The Rubin Museum is currently showcasing renowned Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung’s previously unpublished Red Book, a tome which has been referred to as “the holy grail of the unconscious” and has been hidden away from the public by Mr. Jung’s family for decades.

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Twitter went down last week, and the world got very quiet. People didn’t know what do with themselves; they wanted to tweet the news that Twitter was down, but that was out of the question. Entire overheard conversations went unremarked upon, and mini-reviews of recent episodes of “True Blood” withered on the vine.

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Twitter Inc., the fast-growing microblogging service, was inaccessible Thursday morning, struck by a “denial-of-service” attack, the company said on its status blog.

“We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly,” the company said in a blog post shortly before 11 a.m. EDT, Thursday.

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Twitter quietly started checking the URLs that its users post, a security measure aimed at weeding out links to known malware sites.

As online security firm F-Secure points out, the microblogging service “is increasingly targeted by worms, spam and account hijacking” and can easily filter links posted through it.

Twitter hasn’t announced this initiative and didn’t respond to a request for comment about it.

Now, when posting a link to a fraudulent site, it deletes the tweet and flashes the message “Oops! Your tweet contained a URL to a known malware site!”

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Twitter said Thursday that changes it is making to reduce spam accounts and resolve “data inconsistencies” will decrease follower numbers for some users.

“No legitimate followings should be affected,” it said in a post on its status account.

Hardcore Twitter users pay close attention to their follower counts. Some say it matters–others don’t.

The news has lots of people talking on the microblogging service, as the phrase “spammers perish” and “how many followers” ascend the trends ranking.

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Twitter may encourage a culture of shorthand and 140-character thoughts, but it may also make Twitterers better spellers in the real world. That’s according to a new study that indicates that Twitter users are worse at grammar. Or is. Or Are. WhteVr.

The crowd-sourced editing site gooseGrade.com surveyed 100 random English speakers on Amazon’s (AMZN) Mechanical Turk website who identified themselves either as “users” or “non-users” of the microblogging site.

Study participants had to write 100 words about what they did that day and were graded for spelling, grammar and punctuation.

Twitter users made about 20 percent more grammar errors than did their non-Twitter counterparts. But Twitter users were only about half as likely to make spelling mistakes as those who didn’t tweet.

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Do you hear that? It’s the sound of Shakespeare, rolling over in his grave.

That’s because Penguin Classics is publishing a Cliff’s Notes-style book about literature by two University of Chicago freshmen in which they summarize the great literary works — writing entirely in tweets.

That’s right. A book about literature, written in 140-character blips. It will be called Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less.

According to the book’s Web site, 19-year-old authors Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin wanted to combine the two “grandest ventures” of their generation — namely, high-minded literary works and the social microblogging site Twitter.

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With the Iranian government blocking and limiting the use of social networking sites, cellphone signals and Internet connections, Twitter has proved to be a crucial tool for embattled Iranian protesters to alert the rest of the world about the nation’s post-election conflicts.

But now it’s also a trick up the sleeve of spammers who aim to capitalize on Twitterers’ interest in reading tweets about Iran. As more and more attention has been cast upon Twitter’s role in reporting news from Iranian demonstrators, spammers are attacking the microblogging site to setting up false accounts and spread misinformation about goings-on in Tehran, or to trick users into clicking on money-making scam sites.

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As voting protests in Iran devolved into violence, and communications remained sporadic, Internet users in the country are calling for proxies they can use to stay online unmonitored. Twitter, a hub of activity since the rallies began, saw its own protests as users begged the microblogging service to postpone a maintenance period that is scheduled tonight.

Proxy servers help Web surfers browse the Internet anonymously and have been used in places such as China, so that citizens there could reach Web sites that have been censored by the government. In Iran, where cellphone and text-messaging services have been on the blink, and some sites have been blocked (though at least one person in Tehran was posting videos to YouTube), requests for proxies came via Twitter, blogs and other channels.

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As the Iranian election aftermath unfolded in Tehran–thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to express their anger at perceived electoral irregularities–an unexpected hashtag began to explode through the Twitterverse: “CNNFail.”

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A question: If you have 347 followers on the Twitter microblogging service, what are the chances that they’ll click on the same online ad you clicked on last night? Advertisers are dying to know.

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In August 2008 we reported on 18 chief executives who use the microblogging application Twitter to clue customers in on new services, help them with questions about their products, and generally get a little bit personal with customers, business associates, and the public.

Not even a year later, we bring you nearly 50 CEOs who find tweeting a personal and professional delight.

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Techmeme is on fire this morning with discussion of Rafe Needleman’s CNet post about Twitter’s supposed plans to index the content of links shared over the microblogging service. Ex-Googler turned Twitter exec, Santosh Jayaram, said as much last night, as well as mentioning plans to rank search results by the reputation of the author.

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Back in the day, if your favorite TV show was on the network chopping block, your only real option for hoping to get it saved was organizing a massive letter writing campaign.

But in the era of blogs, social networks, and microblogging, fans of endangered shows can quickly organize and protest, and in some cases, even guilt network execs into giving them at least a bit more of their favorite programs.

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