Dear the Express. Please look at the right twitter a/cs when discussing the BBC's followers. That is all.

UK national newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow - but the rate is getting slower and slower, according to the latest figures for the 129 accounts I'm tracking. November to December growth was just 6.6%, down from 17% earlier in the year.

I've really begun to loathe Twitter's new retweet function. Here's why:
Pictures of people I don't follow, unclear menu options and not being able to see who is retweeting stuff.

On top of the new Twitter retweet feature, I also seem to have got the new web-based method for alerts about new new tweets from people you follow. These changes are all bringing the functionality of the web interface for Twitter closer to the various desktop clients.

Despite having to wait ages for lists and Google wave, I seem to have Twitter RTs early. I haven't actually seen a live one yet ... And I don't really like the sound of them as I like to comment on RTs. But maybe that's just me.

Newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow - but at an ever slower rate, according to the latest figures for the 130 accounts I'm tracking. October to November growth was just 8.3%.

Want to get your Twitter page doing better in Google for a search on your name? Here's a way to get a link off the BBC to your Twitter URL.

It was oneletteroffmovies day on Twitter on Saturday - turning Top Gun into Top Gum, and Pirates of the Caribbean into Pilates of the Caribbean etc. My contribution was "BT - one alien's struggle to get broadband so he can email home". And then BT started to tweet me ...

Is Google using signals from Twitteras part of its ranking decisions. You could see why it want to - seeing which pages people are passing around on Twitter would help it work out which pages are relevant for 'newsy' search terms (those where there is a big surge in searches for particular keywords).
The evidence

Testing such a thing would be a nightmare - how could you set up 2 different, but similar, pages and get loads of people to tweet one and not the other? I managed to set up this test by accident - here are the results.

Update According to Google, at 2.45pm, Jan Moir is the 42nd most popular search in the last hour. The Mail must be loving the traffic they are getting. So, why don't you try contacting the ...

National UK newspapers had 1,665,202 followers of their Twitter accounts at the start of October - an increase of 193,266 on September 1st (when they had 1,471,936).

The rate of growth has slowed, however. This is a monthly increase of 13.1%, compared with 17% from August 1 to September 1, and also from July 1 to August 1.

National UK newspaper accounts had 1,471,936 followers at the start of September, an increase of 213,892 or 17% on August 1 (when they had 1,258,044 followers).

You can see the September figures in the table.

Search for cottage hire birmingham, and Google shows you a map of bethlehem in pennsylvania. Huh?

Twitter appears to be down. How do we tell people? Maybe it's just me. Here are some ways to find / work out what to do:

Short and to the point. But @guardiantech reached 1 million followers early this morning.
It benefits massively from being on Twitter's suggested users list. But impressive nonetheless. You can see more UK newspaper twitter numbers here.

If you liked the list of user-experience twitterers that Done Bright put together, you may have wished, like me, that you could see the bios / description of each account. Well, I've played around with the Twitter API, and now you can!

With 981,359 followers, @Guardiantech is closing in on a million, as I reveal the latest figures for UK newspaper Twitter accounts. @GuardianTech has jumped 150,000 followers in a month. @TimesFashion (29,190 followers) has moved up one place to 2nd, overtaking @GuardianNews (27,802) which is now 3rd.

Ofcom has revealed that people don't get the broadband speeds they pay for. Well, duh. Here's a timeline of how we already know that. Their research isn't groundbreaking or new or revealing something for the first time, as is being claimed. What we need is action: ISPs should be forced to publish a typical range of speeds rather than an upto speed that no one can get.

Other people have tweeted (or retweeted) the Guardian's URLs 328,288 times over the last 4 months - way more than any other UK newspaper.

The FT and Times have more followers on Twitter than the Telegraph and Mail - but they're not tweeted about as often. The Telegraph is in second place: 120,731 tweets have included a link to one if its URLs. The Daily Mail is 3rd with 95,851.

Do people realise that anyone can see their profile unless they lock it? Here are 10 tweets about the person's boss from the last week - they're all from accounts with more than 50 updates, so they should have worked out what's going on ...