For some do-gooders, today isn’t just Thanksgiving. It’s also the second annual TweetsGiving, the culmination of a 48-hour global effort to raise money online for a school in Arusha, Tanzania.

Participants are encouraged to share what they are grateful for – and donate money, of course - through Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and of course, 2009’s new media darling, Twitter.

The project is the brainchild of a U.S. nonprofit called Epic Change. Last November, Epic Change’s efforts raised $11,000 in 48 hours through hundreds of small donations, which the organization used to help build a classroom at the Tanzania school. Epic Change dubbed the students the “Twitter kids of Tanzania” and encouraged users to send tweets to them via their #Twitterkids blog.

This year, Epic Change had hoped to raise $100,000 by midday Thanksgiving to build the school a dormitory, library, cafeteria and more classrooms. As of Thursday at 11 a.m. ET, however, the effort had raised only about $26,000 – a possible victim of the worldwide recession.

If you still want to donate, however, it's not too late.

If Twitter has taught the world anything, it is that less is more. Echoing that trend of keeping it simple, here comes TwitterPeek, the first handheld device solely focused on Twitter.

E-mail, music, phone service and text messaging are notably absent on the TwitterPeek. The device does allow for sending an unlimited amount of tweets and direct messages, and comes with a color screen to view Twitpics and access to friends, companies and celebrities' Twitter feeds.

“We have the same philosophy as Twitter,” says Lauren Hahn, an executive at Peek, the company behind the new device. Peek first produced a product that only provided e-mail and text functionality. They like to keep it simple, fun and most importantly, available to the masses.

TwitterPeek has raised questions on how people use Twitter and other devices that fit into pockets. For one, Adam Ostrow, editor in chief of the social-media blog Mashable, is skeptical.

“I think it has limited appeal considering all of the choices for mobile Twitter apps,” Ostrow said. “But for those that have no intention of buying a smartphone and still want to use Twitter on-the-go, it may be an option.”

Further, 60 percent of users only access Twitter via a computer, according to a survey conducted by Crowd Science and eMarketer.com in August 2009. Three percent only use Twitter via mobile devices, while another 38 percent of tweeters use a combination of computer and mobile.

There currently seems to be an escalating competition to cram more social networks, songs, moves, cameras and applications onto a phone. But Peek points to the Flip Camera, PSP, and iPod as evidence people like devices that do one thing only.

The TwitterPeek costs $99.95, including six months of unlimited Twitter service. After that, using the device costs $7.95 per month. Hardcore tweeters may prefer the second option: Paying $199.95 for the device and a lifetime of unlimited Twitter service.

Hahn believes there is a misconception about how many Americans use, and can afford, smartphones. “Everyone seems to have a smartphone, but that not true,” she told CNN. “The vast majority of Americans still hold feature phones (voice and text).”

Hahn believes her target audience is not someone in New York, Washington, D.C. or San Francisco, where smartphones seem as common as traffic jams and people are willing to spend more money on devices that do everything.

“It is the rest of America that cannot afford the massive convergence devices, but still want to follow Lance Armstrong or Oprah on Twitter,” she said.

A new WiFi-enabled scale from Withings encourages users to lose weight by sharing their body weight, lean & fat mass, and calculated body mass index (BMI) on Twitter.

WiFi scale shares results with Twitter.

Personal metrics have been shown to help people reach their fitness goals. And Wired.com recognizes new devices like the Nike+ can get people moving.

Noone is now running four times a week and just did her first 10-mile race ... And she attributes much of her newfound fitness to the power of data. "I can log in to Nike+ and see what I've done over the past year," she says. "That's really powerful for me."

But will sharing embarrassing weight-fluctuation info help dieters in the same way fitness data has encouraged runners?

A press release from Withings confirms that the scale will not share your information without your consent. "By default, the Twitter feature will not be activated when you purchase your scale ... Only the users that enable this feature will benefit from the online peer motivation."

Engadget is not impressed with the scale's social abilities:

Not only does this bad boy register your weight, body fat, and BMI, but you can now configure it to send your stats to "the Twitter" either daily, weekly, monthly, or each and every time you weigh - and your followers will start dropping faster than even you could imagine.

What do you think? Would you be willing to share your weight-loss struggle with the Twitterverse if it could inspire you to become the next Biggest Loser? Or is this one Fail Whale you would prefer to keep private?

Twitter may lack a business strategy, but it does have a wine strategy - and it does not come in 140 grapes.

The microblogging service, valued at $1 billion and known for its 140-character "tweets," announced Thursday it's launching a wine label: Fledgling Wine. Twitter is partnering with Crushpad, a custom winemaking service in San Francisco, to produce the wine; a portion of the proceeds will go to Room to Read, a non-profit supporting reading programs and libraries in Asia and Africa.

Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams wrote on the Fledgling blog, “The Fledgling Initiative embodies two things that are at the core of Twitter's mission: providing access to information and highlighting the power of open communication to bring about positive change.”

The first two wines, a Pinot Noir and a Chardonnay, will be released in August 2010 and can already be pre-ordered online. Each bottle will cost $20; Room to Read will receive $5 per bottle. The grapes, picked by the Twitter staff, are being fermented.

Crushpad executive Noah Dorrance is bullish about the new label and has ordered extra grapes. When asked if each bottle will have only 140 grapes, he laughed and said, “I wish! There are approximately 800 grapes per bottle.”

Twitter on Thursday also launched a Japanese edition, its first foray into tweeting in a foreign language. No word yet on whether sake is next on the Twitter drink menu.

UPDATE 9 a.m.: Drew Carey tells CBS he's willing to bid $1 million on the @drew name if he gets 1 million followers by the end of the year. (More on this from Mashable).

In his continued effort to raise money for cancer research, cancer patient Drew Olanoff, or @drew on Twitter, has announced he will auction off his Twitter name to the highest bidder.

He plans to give the proceeds to the LIVESTRONG organization.

So far, the highest bidder is Drew Carey, the host of the "Price is Right," who has bid $25,000 on the name but has indicated that he will go as high as $100,000, according to The Telegraph, out of the UK.

The auction ends on November 9, Olanoff's birthday.

From Olanoff's blog:

All proceeds going to LIVESTRONG - the organization who has been there for me from Day 1 of diagnosis.  Bidding ends on November 9th (My Birthday), and the highest bid gets it.  Just tweet your bid with the hashtag #drewbid.I made sure to ask Ev at Twitter about it first, because I didn’t want to go against any Terms of Service.  Since no personal financial gain was being made, it’s a donation to a non profit, all was well.

Who would buy it?  Maybe Drew Barrymore, Drew Carey, Drew Brees, Drew Curtis, Drew Gooden?  Or a non celebrity Drew who wants the great Twitter name.  All IN the name of charity and Cancer Crushing.

Drew Carey currently goes by @DrewFromTV on Twitter.

Drew Olanoff created an Internet meme called "Blame Drew's Cancer" when he set up a Twitter hash tag where people blame Drew's cancer for everything that's going wrong in their lives. More on that from the Blame Drew's Cancer Web site:

On May 20th, 2009, Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer.

Ever since that day, Drew has blamed everything on his cancer. Losing his keys, misplacing his wallet, Twitter being slow, the Phillies losing, etc.

Why? Because you have to beat up on Cancer to win… and you can help out.

Blame Drew's Cancer for anything you want by tweeting with the hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer and it'll come here. When Drew beats Cancer we hope to have sponsors that will donate a dollar for every participant to our partner, LIVESTRONG.

The role of online social networks in disaster situations is being called into question after two girls in Australia got lost in a storm drain and, instead of calling the police or their parents, posted a message on Facebook.

Things worked out OK for the girls, ages 10 and 12, since a friend saw the post, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. But authorities are worried about the girls' preferred means of emergency communication. They should have called 000, Australia's version of 911, a fire official told the news service:

Glenn Benham from the [Metropolitan Fire Service in Adelaide, Australia] says it was fortunate a young friend was online at the time and was able to call for help for them.

"It is a worry for us because it causes a delay on us being able to rescue the girls," he said.

"If they were able to access Facebook from their mobile phones, they could have called 000, so the point being they could have called us directly and we could have got there quicker than relying on someone being online and replying to them and eventually having to call us via 000 anyway."

The incident, which was reported Monday, is weirdly timed with a new U.S. awareness campaign on the use of social networks in emergency situations. The Safe America Foundation, an Atlanta-based non-profit, reportedly is working with the U.S. government to promote alternative means of communication - Facebook, Twitter, text messages - for use in disasters and emergencies where other lines of communication might be cut.

As Mashable points out, this isn't the first time someone has used a social network to call for help. In May, an Atlanta city councilman was worried his mobile phone battery might die and posted to Twitter instead of calling the cops about a woman he found in distress. Mashable says he posted this message: “Need a paramedic on corner of John Wesley Dobbs and Jackson st. Woman on the ground unconscious. Pls ReTweet”.

There also was a U.S. student arrested in Egypt last year who summoned help via Twitter. And, according to VentureBeat and the Industry Standard, there's been talk of an emergency broadcast service using that micro-blogging platform.

What do you think? Are social networks useful tools during an emergency?

Do you need more than 140 characters to express yourself? Are tweets too short to describe that delicious Qdoba burrito you had for lunch? Did the wrap-it-up music cut you off while you were accepting your Oscar?

You may want to consider Woofer. This macro-blogging site offers a Twitter-like interface without any pesky character limits. In fact, your Woof must have at least 1,400 characters before it can be posted.

If you think the 1,400-character minimum is a bit excessive, you are probably right. Woofer admits it is a parody site and not a Twitter competitor:

This is a website for parody purposes only. Twitter neither endorses nor is affiliated with this website or company in any way.

We are huge fans of Twitter, and think it's an amazing concept.

Woofer pulls information from Twitter but does not require a password, so most posts, so far, are celebrity impersonations. Other users are posting copied text to reach the 1,400 mark.

Woofer may not serve any purpose at the moment, but I probably would have felt the same way about Twitter back in 2006. Does this anti-Twitter have a future? Or will this parody be gone tomorrow?

Warm and fuzzy.  That’s how I felt after attending Gnomedex in Seattle for the first time. Those are words you generally wouldn’t associate with a tech conference.  In case you’ve never heard of Gnomedex, it’s an annual gathering  for self-proclaimed geeks, like myself, organized by tech enthusiast Chris Pirillo.

Full disclosure here – I came to know Pirillo when I started working with him on his quirky video segments for CNN.com Live.  We stream them each Thursday at 5:30 p.m. ET.

This year’s theme at Gnomedex 9.0 was human circuitry – the intersection of humanity and technology.  Pirillo sought speakers who would share personal experiences that would inspire others.

I was uplifted by the fact that this year’s conference attracted the most number of female attendees for any Gnomedex.  Why?  “Stories,” Pirillo told me, as we were listening to Amber Case, a cyber anthropologist, share strangely alluring tales about human beings and prosthetic culture.  “Putting the word ‘human’ in there was like, ‘Oh, so it’s not a geek’s conference as much as it is about people,’ ” said Pirillo.

Emotional talks from Drew Olanoff and Mark Horvath also elevated the ‘H’ factor at Gnomedex.  Olanoff, recently diagnosed with cancer, started a campaign on Twitter inviting others to blame everything in their lives on his cancer – by using the hashtag #blamedrewscancer.

Olanoff became emotional on stage while describing the radical shift his life took since he was diagnosed in May.  His story touched the audience – as evidenced by the prolific updates on FriendFeed and Twitter.  One person there tweeted, “I #blamedrewscancer for all the tears in the audience. #Gnomedex”  Olanoff wrapped up his session by embracing two attendees who had also been diagnosed with cancer.

Horvath, another inspiring speaker at Gnomedex, uses his vlog Invisiblepeople.tv to raise awareness about the plight of homeless people.  Once homeless himself, Horvath is currently touring 25 cities to put a face on the problem by bringing real stories to life.

Horvath’s words had immediate impact.  The word ‘homeless’ briefly trended on Twitter during his session, and someone in the audience passed around a hat, raising $1800 for a tent city in Seattle called Nickelsville.

Pirillo told me he thought he wouldn’t be able to top Scott Maxwell’s standing ovation from last year’s Gnomedex.  Maxwell’s job is pretty much the envy of all geeks: he drives the Mars Rover.  This year, the audience stood up twice – once for Olanoff and once for Horvath.

If you didn’t know any better, you’d assume the audience at Gnomedex was more interested in surfing the Web than in the conversation unfolding on stage.

“This is a conference where a lot of people have their laptops open,” said Pirillo.  “We can always tell which speaker has lesser impact when the bandwidth spikes,” he chuckled.

But the online activity is also a sign of a deeper engagement – a real-time feedback loop between speaker and audience.  During sessions, Pirillo monitors his Twitter stream #gnomedex to gauge what’s resonating with the audience and what isn’t.

“That’s where you learn when you’re doing good content or bad content.  If they’re talking about what’s happening you’re OK,” said Pirillo.

Pirillo made me promise to mention Mona Nomura, whom he credits for pulling 98% of the conference together in a mere two months.

“I’m not a female, and I’m not taking away from birth but every year, it’s like giving birth,” said Pirillo about the challenges of putting on Gnomedex each year.

“Now we have nine beautiful children.  Some are a little more beautiful than others, some are a little ugly,” he laughed.  What about this one, I asked.  His reply: “This one was very beautiful.  There’s a couple of pockmarks, but I find perfection in imperfections."

One question has been nagging at Twitter for years: How to make money?

A piece of the answer to that question was revealed this week as Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told VentureBeat that Twitter plans to start charging for a premium service.

“Twitter will still be free for everybody and we’ll still tell them to go crazy with it,” Stone told the blog. “But we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit.”

As of now, the popular micro-blogging site doesn't charge for its service. It also doesn't run ads.

Some of the services the company reportedly will charge for:

• Site analytics, which tell businesses about how people are using their Twitter feeds
• A "commercial layer" for the social network to be rolled out this year, VB says
• Certified accounts, so you can know for sure a person or company is who they say they are

There aren't many details about the services available. The interview comes on the heels of the release of a Twitter 101 business guide. And it's another indication Twitter is catering to the business crowd (read: people with money).

But what do you all think? Would you pay for extra Twitter services? Do you use Twitter for business? Feel free to discuss in the comments below.

Any baseball fan is familiar with MLB's frequent reminders not to rebroadcast a game without "the express written consent of Major League Baseball." But did you ever consider that your Facebook, Twitter or blog posts could be targeted by overzealous media regulations?

Can the SEC prohibit fans from sharing pictures similar to this iPhone shot of a Braves game I posted to my Facebook profile? Should they even bother trying?

According to current policy, Southeastern Conference (SEC) fans cannot "produce or disseminate (or aid in producing or disseminating) any material or information about the event, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information."

Adam Ostrow, of Mashable.com, translates that to mean "no Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TwitPic, or any other service that could in any way compete with authorized media coverage of the event."

The SEC media-credential policy also states that violations may result in "ejection from the Event and prosecution for criminal trespass."

Conference spokesman Charles Bloom told the Charlotte Observer there are plans to loosen the restrictions, but the current policy forbids tweeting from the stands.

While speaking with CNN, Attorney Evan Brown questioned the legality of the SEC policy. Brown equates a ban on social media in state-sponsored schools to a violation of the First Amendment and a form of prior restraint.

Media-coverage rights to sporting events have always been expensive and, consequently, heavily policed (this year the U.S. Open banned all cameras and phones) but can social media possibly be restrained?

Could social media ever compete with authorized media coverage in a way that would threaten profits and rationalize SEC's media policy?

Bloggers Adam Ostrow, Evan Brown and Steve Raquel discussed the SEC policy today on CNN.com Live (Watch Video).

Update:

This afternoon the SEC released a revised version of its media policy (pdf). The revision provides exemptions for noncommercial updates and personal messages.

The new policy reads:

No Bearer may produce or disseminate in any form a “real-time” description or transmission of the Event (i) for commercial or business use, or (ii) in any manner that constitutes, or is intended to provide or is promoted or marketed as, a substitute for radio, television or video coverage of such Event. Personal messages and updates of scores or other brief descriptions of the competition throughout the Event are acceptable.