As you can imagine, panic ensued! All sorts of emergency services were mobilized, Denver airport was closed and even the army sent a UH-58 Kiowa helicopter and the mighty Black Hawk to assist! Live pictures were streamed across the American airwaves with most of the major networks following the story and the world was captivated.

With the instantaneous nature of Twitter millions jumped on the story with people expressing their shock while hoping for happy ending! Balloon Boy enveloped Twitter and much of the social web within an hour or so! And in what must be a Twitter first, the story was trending on Twitter under 8 separate tags such as Balloon Boy, #ballonboy and Colorado! Everywhere I went it was the same thing, the same story! It was quiet amazing to see.

After a 50 mile race through the skies the inevitable happened, Balloon Boy crashed. Tweet Tears were shed and shock set it! Was Balloon Boy dead? Injured? Traumatized? Well actually, none of the above! In fact Balloon Boy was actually never Balloon Boy at all! In fact he was actually at home, 50 miles away hiding his attic after receiving a scolding from his father! Mother f**cker!

The boy’s father, Richard Heene, said the family was tinkering with the balloon Thursday and that he scolded Falcon (Balloon Boy) for getting inside a compartment on the craft. He said Falcon’s brother had seen him inside the compartment before it took off and that’s why they thought he was in there when it launched.

It didn’t take long for a tone of viral videos, jokes and even T-Shirts to hit the web. You can now buy your own Balloon Boy T-shirt on Zazzle if you’re interested! Of the lot, CollegeHumour have one of the best videos out there on 50 mile chase across the skies!

[collegehumor 1923183 425 380] httpv://www.collegehumor.com/video:1923183 -> [collegehumor 1923183]

Today rumours have started to circle the web that the whole thing was one big hoax! And there might be some truth to the rumours with an interview on CNN raising all sorts of questions. Asked why he didn’t respond to his family calling his name, Falcon says, “you guys [his parents] said we did this for the show.” His parents, seemingly stunned by the answer, quickly try to change the story. Watch it for yourself!

The problem only seems to affect the actual “Home” page. All @ messages do arrive but the problem is also spreading to third party apps like TweetDeck! So the question remains, “what the hell is going on now?”

There’s nothing on the Twitter blog as yet to suggest what the answer is! Social media chaos predicted!

Update : An update from Twitter posted at 1:50 Eastern time said the company was “deploying fixes to solve the problem.” And as of now all is hunky doory again!

With Twitter now firmly embedded in social activity online, TweetDeck has become the primary way of interaction for many. According to Twitstat, the British start-up is now second only to Twitter itself when it comes to methods of accessing Twitter. It’s a truly remarkable success story for the company that was founded only two years ago.

The team behind the scene seems to be under no illusions about what they need to do to stay at the top. There are a number of competitors out there such as Hootsuite and Seesmic looking to topple TweetDeck from its perch, so TweetDeck need to keep their users satisfied if success is to continue. Thus, this month the app got a host of shiny new features to whet the appetite of the social media enthusiast.

So what’s new?

With the release of TweetDeck V.0.30, there were a number of small and not so small updates to the service. The TweetDeck directory is one of the major new extensions to the app. The new service is basically Tweet Deck’s way of showing you users and tweets in categories that are of interesting to you. You can search categories such as News & Politics, Business, Technology and Travel. From there you can select a subcategory. If you like the topic, you can then add the ‘Group’ to your TweetDeck app. The one problem that I have with this is that you’re never told that by doing so you are actually added as a ‘follower’ to all those currently in the group. There’s no notice/warning that this is going to happen until you see visually all the people being added. It would work much better if they simply added a column to the app with all group members and then I could choose who I wanted to follow. That’s a big Fail in my book TweetDeck!

Photographic tweets made easy!

One of the other updates that caught my attention was the photo upload feature. You can now simply click and drag any picture on your computer and drop it into the comment area on TweetDeck.  After you do this you get an image preview, and then you get the option to upload it to a TweetPhoto, TwitPic or YFrog.  It’s an extremely fast and efficient method of adding photos to tweets! For now the default upload service is TweetPhoto, but this can be changed to TwitPic or YFrog via the settings. How other providers are going to react to TweetPhoto being elected as the default is yet to be seen but after the saga that happened over at Tr.im earlier this year when Bit.ly was made default URL shortner, someone is bound to be unhappy with the developments.

MySpace! Really?

With the new release, to my surprise, came the integration of MySpace. The first question that came to mind when I saw it was be frank, why? MySpace has been for some time, and still is, lagging way behind the rest of the Web2.0 social web. It’s been struggling to keep up with the lightening fast growth of Facebook and Twitter and is now thought of in a somewhat negative light. It’s become known as a place for aspiring musicians to upload their songs and try getting a following more than a place for social interaction, an association TweetDeck could do without.

Good idea, bad idea

There are two other, small updates to TweetDeck with V.0.30. The first involves the extremely important URL shortening. You now have the option to auto-shorten you’re links immediately rather than waiting until after you send the tweet. Before this addition the problem of dead link often occurred. You’d write you your tweet and add a link to the shortening area below. Then when the link was added if there wasn’t enough room you’re link would become a dead one leading to nowhere. It’s something that was both annoying while also looking unprofessional. Now thankfully you can see the length or your tweet with a link before you ever send it.

The other change to the service is one that has created a new annoyance for some, while being embraced by others. It’s to do with the minimization of TweetDeck to the taskbar on our computers. Before, when you clicked the ‘X’ to close the app it actually closed fully. Now when you do so, instead of closing the app minimizes itself to the taskbar. Why the development team decided to introduce such a feature is questionable, but why they haven’t included an option to over-right this through the settings is inexcusable. Plenty of apps work in such a fashion, but 99% of them allow you to change it to your liking. Annoying users won’t do them any favours now will it!

I do like TweetDeck!

Looking back at what I’ve just written, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that I don’t like TweetDeck. Not true! It’s an app that I thoroughly embrace and use in my daily activity. It does have some minor flaws but you can put this down to its ambition and constant evolution as it strives to better itself. For anyone out there new or old to Twitter and social media, TweetDeck is a must get that will simplify your life!