Here are our top 10 Twitter stories of the week.

1. Twitter Cuts Off Instagram: Is This Sour Grapes Or Will We Soon Face A Difficult Choice?

Are you fond of connecting with Twitter followers on Instagram? Well, unless you already synced up your accounts and followed everyone you wanted to, you’re out of luck. Twitter no longer allows Instagram to access its API and pull in “friends from Twitter.” The move does not bode well for apps seeking frictionless sharing with the platform in the future.

2. The Psychology Of Social Networking [INFOGRAPHIC]

With 90 percent of U.S. internet users having signed up for at least one social network, and one out of every eight people on the planet active on Facebook, social media has come a long, long way in a very brief period of time. Indeed, one in every five minutes online is now spent using these social channels, a figure that has more than doubled since 2007. In each and every minute, we generate some 694,980 Facebook status updates and write 532,080 tweets. And 80 percent of those posts are about our favourite person – ourselves.

3. On Twitter, Men Are Retweeted Far More Than Women (And You’re Probably Sexist, Too)

Social media is dominated by women, and Twitter is no exception, but it appears that when it comes to sharinginformation on our favourite micro-blogging network, men are far more likely to be retweeted than women. Yep, that’s right. Twitter has a gender bias. And there’s every chance that you have one, too.

4. The Current State Of Social Networks 2012 [INFOGRAPHIC]

Did you know that Twitter is the social network with the strongest growth rate in 2012, ahead of LinkedIn, Pinterest and Reddit? Facebook? That didn’t even make the cut. Still, when you’re closing in fast on one billion users, your annual growth rate does tend to slow down a smidgen. Still, don’t shed a tear for Mark Zuckerberg – save those for the owners of Digg, Bebo, Friendster and, of course, MySpace, who are the four social networks most in decline, reminding us that success in this space can be both dramatic and fleeting.

5. 10 Helpful Twitter Lists for Social Media Marketers

Twitter lists allow users to categorize their followers into different segmented lists based on a particular subject or theme. For instance, Twitter users can create a list of their friends or favorite brands to follow. Lists can also be made private or public; if they’re public then other Twitter users can subscribe to the list and see the tweets of members included on that list without having to follow each individual member of that list. This presents an opportunity to follow curated lists of experts on a variety of subjects.

People all around the world are going crazy on Facebook for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. Thanks to the wide availability of data, we can see just how crazy. Olympics fans can play games, use applications to gain more information about their favorite athletes, like an Olympian’s Facebook page, or simply mention them in a status update. So what have been the most popular apps and who have been the most popular athletes so far?

Athletes’ Facebook pages

The most popular athlete on Facebook isn’t even competing in London. English footballer David Beckham has more than 20 million Facebook fans, but he was not chosen by Great Britain to play on his home pitch. Oddly enough, Beckham has never competed in the Olympics. Statistics from AlchemySocial, an Experian company, show that American basketball star Kobe Bryant is the most popular athlete on Facebook who is actually playing

By Conrad Black

It has been a learned joke for 40 years that long-serving Chinese premier Chou En-lai, when asked the principal consequence of the French Revolution, replied: “It is too early to say.” As events unfold in this rather dismal election year in the United States, that does not now seem such a jokey comment. The Revolution in France was carried out in successively more radical stages in the name of Reason, culminating in the bloodbath of the Terror of Prairial in 1794 under the Committee of Public Safety headed by Maximilien de Robespierre. Robespierre menaced the National Convention; he was deposed, declared outside the law, and executed without trial. The calm of Thermidor ensued and there followed pell-mell in the next 165 years a cavalcade of directory, consulate, empires, restorations, republics, and occupations.

The central struggle, in France and in most of the West, was over the role of the state, and more generally, over the cohabitation in Western civilization of the forces of Faith and the forces of, broadly speaking, Reason. (Between 1793 and 1871, one archbishop of Paris fled, one was publicly guillotined, one executed by firing squad, and two were assassinated — pretty rough treatment for normally serenely eminent pillars of society; yet, at intervals, the Church was exalted.) This naturally unstable balance, as the sage Chinese statesman realized, is unresolved, even in America. Most of the leaders of the American Revolution were not religious men; of the six principal founders of the United States, Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and Adams, only Adams was a practicing Christian. Washington managed the vocabulary and rites occasionally, as when he prayed at Fort Necessity in 1754 (as well he might, after effectively starting the Seven Years’ War with France and being in a desperate military siege), or when he recommended, for war profiteers in the Continental Congress, a higher gallows than Haman’s in the Old Testament (reckoned to have been 50 feet tall). Jefferson was a deist but managed to refer to “Nature’s God” and Man’s “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence.

By W. Michael Cox & Richard Alm

Economic change unleashes powerful forces. We can stubbornly resist them and cling to the status quo, but at best, that ushers in a slow but inevitable decline. A better approach lies in understanding the forces that periodically remake the economy, so we can seize the emerging opportunities they bring. This strategy has worked in the past, and it will work today.

A significant force in recent decades has been globalization. It has brought with it a surge in outsourcing, the shorthand term for businesses’ cutting jobs in the United States and moving production overseas to gain access to lower-cost labor. Many Americans view this development as a scourge, meaning the business practices of Mitt Romney’s private-equity firm, Bain Capital, have become fodder for the presidential campaign’s mudslinging.

Outsourcing makes for perfect political posturing — a quick-jab sound bite, serving up big business and foreign workers as villains and unemployed Americans as victims. But the economic reality of outsourcing isn’t so black and white. The issue goes far beyond the simple fact of job losses and touches on the broader realities of trade, basic human rights, and economic progress.

In economic terms, outsourcing jobs differs little from importing goods. Both involve using labor abroad rather than at home — so there’s no logical consistency in cursing one while tolerating the other. In 2011, America imported $2.6 trillion in goods and services, suggesting that outsourcing has just a tiny share of the effect foreign trade overall has on American jobs.