Twitter's new look.

Remember when Twitter was a mere fringe hobby, beloved by early adopters but mystifying to everyone else? Well, today we got a clear-as-a-bell reminder that those days are long gone, when the company took to the Today Show to introduce a new look.

Users can now add a header photo, and recent images have been relocated into their own snazzy box.

"What we've heard over and over again from our users is they want to bring more of their personality to the profile pages," explained CEO Dick Costolo. "So today's changes are all about bringing that personality forward, more media forward, more photos forward, so it's much easier to see these media experiences and flip through them."

Mr. Costolo was in the no-doubt rare experience of being sandwiched in between Justin Bieber's mom and a concert by Pink.

The announcement itself was preceded by a brief tour of the Twitter offices, guided by a reporter identified as hailing from E! News and introduced with the song "Rockin' Robin."

Interwoven with employee interviews and footage of the company cafeteria (which is apparently called the @birdfeeder) was an explanation of just what the company does and how ubiquitous it's become. The Biebs uses it! Obama and Romney use it!

"The draw is working on something that matters," Mr. Costolo explained, when the free snacks came up.

Once the brief office tour wrapped up, it was on to the unveiling. Mr. Costolo emerged from the green room to join Matt Lauer, Ryan Seacrest and that woman who isn't Ann Curry on the couch, in front of some strange red flower arrangement.

But not so fast--first, Mr. Lauer wanted to hear about Twitter's purpose in the long term. (You and me and everyone in the tech press both, Matt.)

"Twitter brings you closer," he said. "We see this over and over again from our users. It brings them closer to the action. It brings them closer to their heroes. Ryan's got--" and here he gestured to Mr. Seacrest, seated mere feet away--"8 million followers on Twitter. It's because he pulls them into everything he's doing. and brings them closer to everything he's doing."

Sounds to us like media might be winning the tug-of-war for Twitter's soul.

Finally, at the end of the segment, it was time to actually debut the new look.

He also added that the company is debuting an iPad app redesign, which is "all about letting people flip through photos and videos more easily."

Twitter explained the changes in more detail on the company blog, adding that, on mobile, you'll also photo streams below a person's most recent tweets.

Word came yesterday that image hosts were the next third-party services to get the boot, and from the new look it's easy to see why--a big part of this redesign appears to be standardizing the photo browsing experience. So as you consume your mid-morning coffee, you might want to take a moment to pour one out for yfrog and Twitpic.

Like the sailor he resembles, Mr. Corona has learned to read the sun. (Photo: Twitter)

From bouncy balls as desk chairs to an app that automatically tweets your weight once a week, it's no secret that tech entrepreneurs are rather eccentric. They seem to operate in their own special universe, one where meetings are held at sushi restaurants and dogs roam the office freer than test engineers.

But TwitPic CTO Steve Corona appears to have penned what is truly the reducto ad absurdam of CTO blog posts. Mr. Corona, so enshrouded in his own self-made bubble, has decided to literally eschew time. Someone has been reading The Sound and the Fury recently, hasn't he?

Nevermind that for everyone besides Dr. Who, time is an escapable reality that moves in only one direction and governs our social contract with other humans. Luckily, Mr. Corona has learned to read the sun, so hopefully he will not be waking your family with the jingle of a ringtone in the wee morning hours.

After three months of living time-free, Mr. Corona still uses his iPhone calendar to remind him of appointments, though he apparently only takes one appointment a week. Wonder if our editor would be okay with us showing up to the office when the sun hits a pleasing point in the sky? As one Hacker News commenter put it:

You've fallen into the trap of reading about something that is written by someone who has no real boss and thinking that you could apply it to yourself.

Living 'without time' is a great idea and is ideal for how we, as humans, have developed. Unfortunately, in the real world, the rest of us need to use time to make sure we do things on other peoples schedules. Whether it be the boss, the airline, the doctor, the kid's school or whatever, we need to make sure we're aligned.

For our next act in this absurdist play, we expect to see a blog post by a CTO who has also given up on breathing, and lets an app do it for him.

Mr. Corona might want to log back into this mortal coil, since his company is teetering terrifyingly close to the precipice of becoming obsolete.

Yesterday, BetaBeat learned that the TSA screener who slipped a note into Feministe blogger Jill Filipovic's TSA-screened bag—which read "GET YOUR FREAK ON GIRL," was posted on TwitPic, and promptly went viral—was removed from federal service. Filipovic recently got back to BetaBeat with her response on the matter.

Over email, she noted (emphasis ours):

It’s easy to scape-goat one individual here, but the problem with the note is that it’s representative of the bigger privacy intrusions that the U.S. government, through the TSA and other sources, levels every day. The invasion is inherent to the TSA’s mission, regardless of whether a funny note is left behind — the note only serves to highlight the absurdity of all this security theater.

As much as this is a funny and titillating story, when I put the note on Twitter for what I thought was a relatively limited audience I was hoping it would open up a bigger conversation about privacy rights (or lack thereof) in post-9/11 America. It unfortunately hasn’t done that, and instead has turned into a media circus. I would imagine that the TSA agent in question feels the same way I do at this point: I just want this story to go away.

The note was inappropriate, the agent in question acted unprofessionally when s/he put in in my bag, there should be consequences and I’m glad the TSA takes these things seriously. But I get no satisfaction in hearing that someone may be in danger of losing their job over this. I would much prefer a look at why ‘security’ has been used to justify so many intrusions on our civil liberties, rather than fire a person who made a mistake.

Forbes' technology-privacy blogger Kashmir Hill weighed in on the story yesterday:

I’m torn on whether this is a fire-able offense. In reaction to 9/11, flying has become an incredibly irritating and invasive exercise. Disrobing. Patdowns. Body scanners. Bags inspected. It’s all the new normal....The note was the officer remarking on something we’re all supposed to pretend doesn’t happen — that the TSA ends up encountering intimate things about us, and that it’s embarrassing. This officer did abuse his or her access to the contents of Filipovic’s bag to make a joke, or to harass her, but the bigger issue is that we regularly have people going through our bags in the first place.

Last night, we wrote about the TSA screener who was reviewed for disciplinary action after placing one of the TSA's customary notices in Feministe blogger Jill Filipovic's bag with the words "GET YOUR FREAK ON GIRL" written on it. Ms. Filipovic posted the note to TwitPic, and then blogged about it. The TSA announced today that the screener was fired.

From the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Public Affairs:

TSA completed its investigation of this matter, and has initiated action to remove the individual from federal service. Like all federal employees, this individual is entitled to due process and protected by the Privacy Act.

During the removal action process, the employee will not perform any screening duties.

This might not be the first federal employee canned explicitly because of something that was posted on the internet, but it's very likely the first time a TSA employee has been fired because of something that went up on Twitter (when asked if this was the case, the TSA declined to comment). Ms. Filipovic is a prolific and widely read blogger, and her Tweet was actually linked by the TSA's official blog when explaining the screening agent's removal. But in the blog post she wrote on the matter for Feministe, she noted:

This is what TSA will do when they inspect a bag you checked and find a, um, “personal item.” Total violation of privacy, wildly inappropriate and clearly not ok, but I also just died laughing in my hotel room.

Yesterday, she blogged on Feministe that she's still "fairly shell-shocked (and not in a good way)" by the experience and the attention the story has received, noting:

I just want this story to go away. The note was inappropriate, the agent in question acted unprofessionally when s/he put in in my bag, there should be consequences and I’m glad the TSA takes these things seriously. But I get no satisfaction in hearing that someone may be in danger of losing their job over this. I would much prefer a look at why ‘security’ has been used to justify so many intrusions on our civil liberties, rather than fire a person who made a mistake.

We've reached out to Jill Filipovic to get her take on the firing; she did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As Jill captioned the photo, which has been seen by 126,250 people:

Just unpacked my suitcase and found this note from TSA. Guess they discovered a "personal item" in my bag. Wow.

Today, the TSA's blog not only acknowledged the note and where they saw it—going so far as to link it—but also report the action they've since taken:

Earlier this week, a passenger found a highly inappropriate note scrawled on a "Notice of Inspection" that TSA places in checked bags if they are required to be searched. She tweeted a photo of what she found and we soon learned of the incident. TSA quickly launched an investigation and identified the employee responsible. That individual was immediately removed from screening operations and appropriate disciplinary action has been initiated.

The handwritten note was highly inappropriate and unprofessional, and TSA has zero tolerance for this type of behavior. Agency officials have also reached out to the passenger to personally apologize for this unfortunate incident.

Yes, the link was theirs.

Surely, the note provoked plenty of outrage in the comments and responses to the Tweet. But maybe the TSA didn't see how Jill felt about it in longer form, when she blogged it on Feministe:

This is what TSA will do when they inspect a bag you checked and find a, um, “personal item.” Total violation of privacy, wildly inappropriate and clearly not ok, but I also just died laughing in my hotel room.

The TSA apparently didn't think it was so funny. These are the same people who take their Anti-Snow Globe signs very, very seriously. While this can't be the first time a TwitPic has gotten a government employee in trouble—or the first time the internet has resulted in the TSA being scrutinized—it has to be the first time it's resulted in such a directly acknowledged fracas by the TSA.

Let alone one that's linked-up well.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

While most of these photos are grainy, blurry and over-filtered, there are some time-pressed members of the news profession who might be tempted to grab them for repurposing on some blog. Or for marketing and distributing through a wire service, as Agence France-Presse did with some iconic photos of the Haiti earthquake taken by professional photographer Daniel Morel and uploaded to Twitter with the third-party client TwitPic.

AFP argued in court that Morel gave them license to use his photos by uploading them to Twitter.

Nope, says a judge in New York's Southern District, TwitPic and Twitter's terms of use protect copyrighted photos from greedy wire services.

"AFP's position was a stretch, and it's nice to have some clarity that uploading content into the Twitter ecosystem does not grant third parties a license to use that content outside the ecosystem," writes tech attorney Venkat Balasubramani. Subtext: Take your own photos, AFP—isn't that like, your job?

If you post photos to Twitter and don't want them repurposed, check the terms of service of the photo-posting app you use. A cursory, non-legalistic look shows Foursquare seems to prohibit all content from being reused; Instagram initially used stock legal language that gave away photographers' rights, but changed its terms after Instagrammers complained.