When a natural disaster strikes, normal lines of communications are often the first thing to fail. So when the Sendai earthquake hit Japan back in March, huge numbers of people in Japan turned to Twitter to let their loved ones around the world know that they were okay.

Who would have thought that Twitter, a place for so many people to muse about their lunches and rant about their boring lives would actually be used to help triangulate bombing targets in Libya? Yes, NATO is now including Tweets as part of its "intelligence picture" in an attempt to locate Gaddafi and his nefarious forces.

It's pretty common for people to include photos with their tweets on Twitter, even though they have to go through a third party hosting service to do so. That won't be the case for long, as Twitter is set to roll out new photo integration in the coming weeks.

Twitter, which already allows celebrities to communicate what they had for breakfast to an irrationally interested public, is now also a robot testing ground. A research project called Socialbot has recently shown that robots have no trouble creating, or destroying, social network communities with cleverly disguised fake tweets.