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“We saw more than double the normal tweets per second the moment the news broke—the biggest increase since the US presidential election (and Twitter has grown tremendously since then),” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told the New York Times.

Around 15 percent of Twitter searches Thursday centered on Jackson, according to Harvard University.

The deluge of Twitter messages about Jackson’s demise prompted the San Francisco, Calif. startup to remove a search function from users’ home page following a noticeable slowdown in response time.

Another result of the domination of Twitter conversations on recent celebrity deaths: tweets about the Iranian election fell to 10th place, knocking it from a two-week trending lead, according to Gawker.

For Twitter, the response to the celebrity news highlights two issues: people are turning to the social-networking service for news, but a potential flaw in the company’s brightest prospects: search.

“The troubles don’t bode well for Twitter’s prospects as a ‘real-time’ search engine, which many believe is likely the service’s most valuable feature,” PaidContent wrote.

(Photo credit: Robert Couse-Baker)

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“It is increasingly difficult for an authoritarian government to maintain control of all of these communications that available to its citizens,” Gates said Thursday. Gates said there is “no question” such technology led to the collapse of the former Soviet Union, according to Stars and Stripes.

Gates admitted the military is way behind the technological curve, noting Twitter is often used by younger members of the U.S. military to communicate. The U.S. Defense Department is not the only government agency realizing Twitter may play an important role in foreign policy.

Earlier this week, during the height of the Iranian election controversy, the U.S. State Department urged Twitter to delay a scheduled downtime to allow dissidents within the Islamic country to send messages about election protests.

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For the glass half-full crowd, the numbers from Internet measurement firm comScore equate to 30.1 million searches in May, beating Time Warner Cable’s 22.2 million searches during the same period. However, the skeptical will note Twitter fell behind even AOL’ s 3.1 percent of the search market and nowhere near Google’s dominating 65 percent of U.S. searches.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone downplayed its fractional search position. “Comparing Twitter to web search is interesting but not necessarily how we would measure success,” Stone told AllThingDigital’s Peter Kafka.

There is a valid dispute over whether comScore is comparing apples to oranges. While Google or Yahoo searches are mostly conducted on either google.com or yahoo.com, many Twitter searches happen via a Twitter client rather than twitter.com, creating a possible undercounting.

“I’m sure that Twitter’s real search numbers are going to be several times higher than comScore’s number, at the very least,” Kafka wrote.

However, the push to monetize Twitter’s vast audience is quickly heating-up. A year after paying $15 million in 2008 for the Summize search engine, the startup put search on the homepage of every Twitter user.

In a sign Twitter sees a future confrontation with search giant Google, the startup poached former Google search manager Santosh Jayaram as its new vice president of operations.

Not to be outdone, in June Google took measures to co-opt Twitter search indexing Twitter messages for inclusion in the Internet company’s massive search database. If Google wasn’t enough pressure, former Microsoft search head Ken Moss Friday launched CrowdEye, described as an easier way to sift through Twitter messages.

With so much firepower being brought to bear against Twitter Search, interest in finding a business plan for this 140-character phenomena could quickly move from apathy to urgent.

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Despite media declarations that Twitter has become a vital pipeline for Iranians reporting on the ground, one third of 79,000 messages are re-tweets, according to a Parsons The New School for Design social network researcher.

“There is this romantic notion that the people tweeting are the ones in the streets, but that is not what is happening,” Mike Edwards told BusinessWeek.

The retweet ratio is vastly higher than for other news stories. Just 1-in-5 swine flu messages were retweeted, for instance.

Earlier this year, Moldova protests were also pronounced a Twitter ‘revolution.’ Only 200 of the 700 people Twittering about those events were inside Moldova, according to Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society researcher Ethan Zuckerman.

Although some Iranian insiders may mask their identity to protect against any government backlash, only about 8,600 Twitter profiles indicate they are Iran-based, BusinessWeek cites Toronto research firm Sysomos.

Another factor to remember: access to technology could color the Iranian messages sent via Twitter. Along with Twitter’s inability to support Farsi, a language more common in the rural areas, smartphone usage and knowledge of Twitter proxies able to circumvent government roadblocks is more available to urban Iranians. Reportedly, Mousavi’s major support is urban-based while Ahmadinejad has rural fans.

The Iranian Twitter ‘revolution’ is perfect for Western media that has fallen in love with the technology. One wonders how much attention the protests would have garnered if the conversation was limited to SMS messages or person-to-person meetings.

The current uprising is often compared with the Iranian revolution against the Shah. In that case, Khomeini launched his revolution from a Paris apartment, aided by a few cassette tapes and people shouting from the roof-tops.

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Over the past year, we’ve seen a steady decline in the percent of people who visit Twitter.com to post their 140-character messages, according to Fortune. The figure has slipped from 56 percent in April 2008 to 30 percent in February of 2009 to 24 percent in June.

Add to that the Nielsen numbers reporting 60 percent of Twitter users don’t return after one month and there is little wonder a Twitter blog noted “The idea of taking money to run traditional banner ads on Twitter.com has always been low on our list of interesting ways to generate revenue.”

After reportedly turning down a $500 million buy-out offer from Facebook, Twitter is increasingly counting on selling services to businesses to generate revenue. However, enticing businesses to go beyond simple Twitter marketing won’t be easy.

“Many may still need a lot of convincing and coaching to jump on board,” noted the article by Mike Schaffner.

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“With all the buzz over Twitter, and all the obsessed Twitterati who pack San Francisco tech-sector events, it might seem hard to believe that a large fraction of Twitter members are pretty passive users,” commented VentureBeat’s Paul Boutin.

Among the study’s findings: 55 percent of Twitter users never write a single 140-character message. Even fewer – just two percent – “retweet” or recommend another’s tweet. Despite all the media hype over Ashton Kutcher, Oprah and CNN amassing millions of followers, 55 percent of Twitter users are not following anyone. Another 53 percent of Twitter users are talking to the wind with zero followers, according to the HubSpot numbers.

“If new users aren’t really engaged, should it really be considered growth?,” Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, said.

Like the Harvard study, HubSpot found the average Twitter user sent one message per day and 119 overall.

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Like Summize, Twitterfeed represents an enhancement for the micro-blogging service. The real-time nature of Twitter has made it an ideal outlet for publishing blog headlines. As RSS helped increase readership of blogs, Twitterfeed may spur greater involvement by Twitter’s users. Recent Harvard research suggested Twitter is more of a one-to-many broadcasting metaphor rather than a peer-to-peer social network.

In the never-ending search for monetization, closer integration with Twitterfeed could also provide a new revenue source for Twitter.

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New numbers point to Twitter’s meteoric rise slowing in May to single digits, the micro-blogging startup no longer eclipsing more established network players. Visits to Twitter last month rose just 1.47 percent to 19.7 million, according to Internet metrics service Compete. That’s a far cry from the 83 percent growth spike Compete reported for April.

Facebook, which had endured also-ran status recently, partially regained the social-networking spotlight, registering 8.54 percent growth in May with more than 113 million visits – six times that of Twitter.

The news comes as Twitter reacts to a lawsuit by St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa and a Harvard Univ. study casting doubt on Twitter’s image as a widely-used social network.

Monday, Twitter announced it would begin testing an Authorized Account feature that could reduce the amount of fake accounts posing as actual celebrities. The move followed a lawsuit by LaRussa claiming a Twitter impersonator misappropriated his name and likeness.

Potentially more damaging, however, was Harvard research finding 90 percent of Twitter messages come from the top 10 percent of users – seeming to reject the notion of communal peer-to-peer conversations. “This implies that Twitter resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service,” the study’s authors said.

That study buttressed an earlier Nielsen report that found more than 60 percent of Twitter users never return.

All of this prompt concern that Twitter – a startup that launched numerous other after-market services – could implode or simply fade back into the background. Like the just-released movie, the startup may be finding most Internet users “just aren’t into” the service.

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