Congress Fail Whale (Photo: blogspot.com)

API Rate Limit Exceeded Back in April of 2010, the Library of Congress promised to add every tweet up to that date to its famous archives. But like anyone following too many people at once, it's just caused one big mess. The library now has an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets totaling to a compressed 133.2 terabytes. Now the librarians of Congress are planning to work with Gnip, the company currently organizing all of the data, to develop a plan for archiving all of the tweets.

Apparently there have already been more than 400 access requests to the Twitter archives from researches doing work on citizen journalism and political communications. Someone needs to teach the librarians how to make lists as soon as humanly possible.

Schools Get Cash The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has just pumped a bunch of cash into New York's tech universities. It has awarded a total of $15 million to Columbia University, the Polytechnic Institute of New York University and High Tech Rochester to create three Proof-of-Concept Centers dedicated to helping inventors and scientists turn their high-tech, clean-energy ideas into successful businesses. Columbia will form a new accelerator, several upstate schools will work together on a new development center, and NYU-Poly will work with CUNY to create PowerBridge, an applied science research institute that focuses on challenges specific to an urban environment.

Drop The Ball, Up The Traffic The customized mobile site publisher Onswipe had lots of reasons to pop champagne on New Year's Eve. The company says that it has reached 44 million unique visitors in total for 2012 and now is reaching more than 10 million monthly active uniques on iOS devices. The publisher also saw a huge bump in traffic after people opened their gifts on Christmas morning. Most notably, in the two days after the holiday, total unique visits on its sites jumped 22 percent and Kindle Fire unique visitors increased 75 percent.

Get Glasses, Give Glasses Diane von Furstenberg is teaming up with the insurance company VSP Vision Care to run a contest on Pinterest to help benefit the NYC Mission Society. Every time an image gets repinned from the VSP Pinterest Board, a gift certificate for an eye exam and glasses will be donated to the New York City Mission Society. These repinners are in luck too--when a user repins that image, they are automatically qualified to win a pair of DVF sunglasses and a $500 DVF.com gift certificate.

Move, Drop, Shake Unpakt, the site that lets you compare movers, continued its “Innovators on the Move” series. It features tech entrepreneurs reflecting on recent moves in their lives. This week's video features VHX founders Casey Pugh and Jamie Wilkinson talking about the move to its first offices in Brooklyn.

Innovators on the Move: Casey & Jamie from Unpakt on Vimeo.

Baby You're A Firework (Filter) The favorite photo sharing app of the Williams sisters, Mobli, just celebrated 2013 in the best way they know how--by adding two new filters to its app. Both of them are New Year's Eve themed. One has a fireworks overlay, while the other has "2013" glittering in gold. Siiiick.

Live Like 'Countdown' Just last month, Gojee was the site to go to for recipes based on what's in your pantry. But it's recently launched a slew of fashion verticals which include landing pages for lingerie, heels, dresses, jewelry and handbags. The recipe sites are still up, so there's no need to panic about your dinner just yet. This makes living your best Beyonce life ("All up in the kitchen in my heels, dinner time") all that much more possible.

More Style Buying Speaking of buying clothes based off the pretty images you find on Tumblr and Pinterest, there's now StyleSays -- a new fashion image sharing community that connects users’ favorite style images to purchasable content. It tags pictures of pretty outfits with links to purchasable items. Some might be the exact product and it could give you an affordable alternative.

AT&T Sucks If one of your New Year's resolutions is to ditch your phone provider once and for all, consider making a switch to T-Mobile. The company is now touting the results of its $4 billion commitment to improving service and says its reception in New York is better than ever. Neville Ray, the CTO for T-Mobile, said in a blog post that NYC customers "can also bring their unlocked AT&T smartphones to T-Mobile and experience a significant speed boost on our network with most devices, while also saving up to $50/month compared to AT&T."

Old dog learning new tricks, etc. Bluefin Labs, the social TV analytics company for advertisers, just added an important employee to its team. Scott Grunther, a former Nielsen executive, is joining the Bluefin team in 2013 as a senior vice president. He will also be the general manager of media products out of the company’s New York office. He's been in the industry for 20 years.

(Photo: Getty)

Perhaps it's time for a burner phone? The New York Times reports that the NYPD has begun quietly and methodically accumulating heaps of call logs and putting them into a searchable database called the Enterprise Case Management System.

It works like this: When someone has their cell phone stolen, the NYPD frequently subpoenas the call logs for that phone, hoping that if the thief used the phone, the recordings will provide evidence that can help track him or her down. But instead of deleting the logs after closing the case, they continue to exist in the NYPD's database, and could "conceivably be used for any investigative purpose."

Worse, because the subpoenas typically cover all calls made on the day the phone was stolen, calls made by the actual victim can be included in the database. This means that the NYPD call log database not only includes information about criminals, but also about innocent victims.

Of course, subpoenas only work if the cell phone provider is willing to give up the data, and companies like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile appear all too eager to submit to the NYPD's requests.

"With these carriers, the police do not generally seek the victims’ consent," writes the Times. "In fact, the subpoenas are executed without the victims’ knowledge."

Hey, wantrepreneurs: looks like someone needs to disrupt the telecom industry, stat.

(Photo: David Shapiro)

T-Mobile, the only major carrier in the U.S. that doesn't sell iPhones, can't afford to shy away from an aggro advertising strategy. In August, Untethered.com got a hold of an internal memo to T-Mobile employees to aggressively "sell against the iPhone," starting today. (The blog also noted the drawback in performance for iPhone users who switched T-Mobile's network, as evidenced by leaked internal documents.)

Nevertheless, more than a million users are already using unlocked iPhones on T-Mobile's network. To grow that number, earlier this month, the company launched its "unlocked and unlimited" campaign to encourage more iPhone owners to use T-Mobile's cheaper plans instead. AllThingsD compared it to a BYOB party--where the alcohol is your iPhone.

Just as Verizon attempts to change the definition of the word unlimited, T-Mobile is touting the opposite. However, switching over could mean a return to the days of 2G, notes AllThingsD:

Its network isn’t yet all that iPhone-friendly given that its high-speed network has historically run in a band of spectrum not supported by the iPhone. T-Mobile is in the process of shifting around its network so that Apple phones can run at full speed, but for now, nearly all customers will be running at far slower 2G speeds.

Of course, that part wasn't mentioned on this street ad that David Shapiro, Betabeat's favorite smartphone fiend, noticed a outside the T-Mobile store in the Fulton Street Mall yesterday. Considering the amount T-Mobile invests in negging AT&T's network, the only thing that surprises us is that they didn't use a bigger font for "versus AT&T."

Has anyone seen my iPhone?

The Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit today to block AT&T's $39 billion takeover of T-Mobile, attempting to abort the marriage of the first and fourth largest mobile carriers in the nation, respectively. AT&T was hoping to acquire T-Mobile's spectrum (i.e. the bandwidth that mobile data travels on), which would help AT&T improve its notoriously spotty network.

Bloomberg broke the news: "AT&T’s elimination of T-Mobile as an independent, low- priced rival would remove a significant competitive force from the market," wrote the DOJ.

AT&T feigned surprise: "We have met repeatedly with the Department of Justice and there was no indication from the DOJ that this action was being contemplated," Wayne Watts, AT&T’s general counsel, said in a statement. “We plan to ask for an expedited hearing so the enormous benefits of this merger can be fully reviewed.”

Number three player Sprint, meanwhile, applauded the move. “The DOJ today delivered a decisive victory for consumers, competition and our country. By filing suit to block AT&T’s proposed takeover of T-Mobile, the DOJ has put consumers’ interests first. Sprint applauds the DOJ for conducting a careful and thorough review and for reaching a just decision – one which will ensure that consumers continue to reap the benefits of a competitive U.S. wireless industry. Contrary to AT&T’s assertions, today’s action will preserve American jobs, strengthen the American economy, and encourage innovation.”

A win for consumers, ironically, is also a loss for consumers. More competition might mean cheaper prices, but also worse service, for the tens of million of Americans on AT&T.

In NYC, we got some of the slowest AT&T speeds, and least-reliable AT&T connections, of all the cities we tested. Even little MetroPCS is both faster and more reliable than AT&T in the Big Apple.

But, if you're not under contract, there are other options:

The good news is that you have a bunch of faster choices. New York has always been a Verizon town, and Verizon's new 4G LTE network is the fastest in the city. But we also saw peak speeds on Sprint 4G and T-Mobile topping 8Mbps, and MetroPCS turned in an impressive performance given its very low prices.

Only two spots were tested in Brooklyn and Queens, versus eight in Manhattan, but Astoria won out best overall speeds thanks to "just the right combination of relatively low-rise buildings, but dense population to deliver great wireless signals." Something Nate Silver did not take into account when he ranked it only the 11th most livable neighborhood in New York.

But not everyone is so patriotic.

Anil Dash was quick with the monopoly joke: "On the plus side, it'll be fun to watch the government break up AT&T again in a few years. Keeps re-forming like the T1000 in Terminator 2."

As was Tim Wu, an authority on the subject: "AT&T seems to have been reading [my book about how information companies trend toward monopolies] the Master Switch."

On CNN, Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan also made monopoly noises, noting that the deal is especially bad because it takes one of the cheaper carriers out of the equation. Even worse, he says, the deal is likely to go through because the idea of widespread 4G LTE coverage is “catnip for regulators.”

Peter Rojas of GDGT had a list of parties for whom the merger will be negative, including consumers, phone makers and Sprint, speaking as a current T-Mobile subscriber. “Once this deal closes,” he writes, “I don't expect to continue to pay as little as I have been, or to keep my unlimited data plan, and I suspect AT&T (and Verizon!) will be happy to see a low-priced competitor out of the market and will find it easier to raise or maintain prices.”

Dave Tisch and Ben Lerer took a light-hearted approach to the whole thing, with the following respective Twitter postings:

"FTC should really look into this... Now AT&T will have a monopoly on shitty phone service..."

"Does this mean myAT&T iPhone will be able to make actual phone-calls now?"

MarketWatch’s Brett Arends denounced the merger in fairly extreme terms, urging concerned citizens to write their representatives in Congress. “Oh, and get ready for 'merger misery,'" he wrote, "These deals are always bad for the consumer. Think of Sprint and Nextel. Think of FedEx and Kinko’s."

And, finally, Peter Kafka pointed out that those recent T-Mobile ads may be a little awkward given the new partnership.

Stay tuned for more pessimism, and merger developments.