LeBron James has made at least one decision, just not the one the basketball world had been waiting for.

The most sought after NBA free agent of 2010 has joined the social networking site Twitter under the moniker ‘kingjames’, his publicist Keith Estabrook confirmed with Reuters on Tuesday.

More than 84,000 people have signed up to follow James as speculation mounts as to where he will play next season, even though he has not yet made a single posting.

Good grief.

Here are some of my favorite tweets from the account:

• • OMG This isss ridciulsus. playing a drinking gamee where we drink a shot everytme we seeee an oily birdddd!!! LOL! so wasted!!11
• • We are very upset that Operation: Top Kill has failed. We are running out of cool names for these things.
• • What a gorgeous day! The ocean is filled with the most beautiful rainbows!
• • If Top Kill doesn’t work, we’re just gonna toss a giant “Get Well Soon” card into the gulf and hope for the best.
• • Sadly we can no longer certify our oil as Dolphin Safe.
• • Catastrophe is a strong word, let’s all agree to call it a whoopsie daisy

Hopefully it is easy to see why the account has become very popular, very quickly.

Today, Leroy Stick, the man behind the account spoke out. In a piece over at Street Giant, Stick outlines why he started the fake BP account and offers the company some advice:

Do you want to know what BP should do about me? Do you want to know what their PR strategy should be? They should fire everyone in their joke of a PR department, starting with all-star Anne Womack-Kolto and focus on actually fixing the problems at hand. Honestly, Cheney’s publicist? That’s too easy.

[...]

You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand. Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions. Lead the pack! Evolve! Don’t send hundreds of temp workers to the gulf to put on a show for the President. Hire those workers to actually work! Don’t dump toxic dispersant into the ocean just so the surface looks better. Collect the oil and get it out of the water! Don’t tell your employees that they can’t wear respirators while they work because it makes for a bad picture. Take a picture of those employees working safely to fix the problem. Lastly, don’t keep the press and the people trying to help you away from the disaster, open it up so people can see it and help fix it. This isn’t just your disaster, this is a human tragedy. Allow us to mourn so that we can stop being angry.

The best part about the whole thing is that Stick is taking his message far beyond Twitter. @BPGlobalPR is selling “BP Cares” t-shirts and donating all of the profits to healthygulf.org.

When Twitter recently announced they were purchasing Atebits’ popular Twitter application, Tweetie, many critics wrote off all 3rd party apps, including Twitterrific. Well, we’re here to say that not only is Twitterrific alive and kicking, but it’s being actively developed with love by the Iconfactory. There are some exciting changes coming to the ‘Little Blue Bird that Could’ and we wanted to give you a wing up.

Twitterrific fans have waited patiently and watched as we released version 1.0 of the software for the iPad as well as subsequent 1.0.1 and 1.1 updates. Although the surprise announcement of the iPad put our iPhone and Mac plans on temporary hold, the diversion turned out to be well worth it. Twitterrific for iPad has been hailed as the best version of the application since its original launch. The app is simple, easy to use and covers all the bases when it comes to Twitter functionality. Developing for the iPad with its short deadline, forced us to take a hard look at our design decisions and streamline the app for the better.

Be sure to check out their “big picture” vision, a sneak peak at v 3.0 for iPhone, and a look at designing apps for the iPad.

If we keep monkeying with the way we treat content (blurring lines between advertising and news, cutting newshole way down, burying important yet unsexy stories, etc.) because we think the content is responsible for the lack of money made in our industry, we are dooming ourselves. I am not saying that the way we do content is perfect or doesn’t need work. I am saying that it’s possible — nay, likely — that in a better economy (that didn’t also hit at the same time as a total paradigm shift in information transmission), we would not appear to be in the throes of death. Because people would be advertising as robustly as ever, people would have extra cash to spend on internet experimentation, our space wouldn’t be shrinking and therefore making it look like we don’t have things to put into the paper, etc. etc. etc.

Looking to social media and its cheerleaders to make up for and fix what we have lost AND take us forward to a better place? Absolute madness. And, mind you, this is coming from a person who is all over the social web and has actively campaigned for greater newsroom attention to and interaction with the useful parts of social media. But let’s keep some perspective and not treat social media or its mavens as the publishing panacea, okay?

She’s right. Journalists need to focus on journalism. And that can’t happen in a measly 140 characters. Newspapers need to figure out how to survive in a world with iPads and email news alerts. Whatever they put in place, in-depth content has to be at the heart of it — not a flimsy social media plan.

Content and social media don’t have to mutually exclusive, but sadly they often are at newspapers where budgets — and staff — are shrinking rapidly. And content isn’t winning.

I want everything I touch to be socialized. Why doesn’t Outlook know anything about Facebook? Why don’t my photos automatically get pushed to Flickr? Why don’t I have a news app on my desktop that brings in Tweets from Twitter? Why aren’t notifications built into the system at a deep level?

[...]

Why can’t my Xbox be a Windows 7 PC and vice versa? Does the world really need separate devices for all these features?

While his “we don’t need separate devices” makes sense to me, the bit about the desktop becoming more social doesn’t. What Scoble is describing almost exists today. The good thing about today’s implementations of social media on the desktop is that it’s optional. I can quit Tweetie, and I decide what photos to publish on Flickr.

I view social media as a way to shape my public image. I only post my best photos on Flickr and only update Twitter or Facebook with the messages I want people to read. Having an always-on, always-updating social media mindset muddies the water too much for my taste.

Bill O’Reilly is gay (Jan.) // Rick Sanchez is high on crack and might not be coming into work today (Jan.) // Britney Spears is dead (March) // Pork gives you swine flu (April) // Google is buying Twitter (April) // Apple is buying Twitter (May) // Prop 8 was overturned (May) // Steve Jobs is dead (June) // Sarah Palin is getting divorced (Aug.) // Kanye West is bisexual (Aug.) // Jeff Goldblum is dead (June) // Zach Braff is dead (Oct.) // Microsoft is buying Twitter (Oct.)

If you have to be told that untrue things can be circulated via social media, you probably shouldn’t be using it.

Here are a few examples I’ve come across over the last few days:

The comments and views shared on this or any other site are not shared by Apple or any affiliated parties…They belong to me and Apple can and should not be held responsible in any way for my postings on this site or any other.

And:

The comments and views shared on my Twitter are not shared by Apple or any affiliated parties. They are my own personal opinions and views and Apple can not be held responsible in any way for my postings on this site. Thanks!

Think of this what you will. During my time in Apple Retail, I wasn’t allowed to blog about technology and once was refused permission to write a piece for our local newspaper on digital photography.

A few months ago, Twitter added bit.ly support to its homepage, effectively making it the most popular URL shortener out there.

It didn’t help rival tr.im:

tr.im is now in the process of discontinuing service, effective immediately. Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward. However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected.

We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed.
No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount.

There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening — users won’t pay for it — and we just can’t justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner. There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep.

In short, tweets will survive, but the links in them will probably die at the end of the year.

While it’s always sad to see players in a market disappear, tr.im’s death does serve as a reminder that URLs shortened for ease of use cannot be considered permanent. Heck, even normal URLs can change with easily and without end users being notified, but when tr.im goes under, expect some disruptions.

The head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales is concerned that excessive use of emails and mobile phone text messaging is creating shallow friendships and undermining community life, according to an interview published on Sunday.

Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, also said that popular social networking sites led young people to form “transient relationships” which put them at risk of suicide when they collapsed.

[...]

The Archbishop, 63, said too much use of electronic information was “dehumanizing,” leading to a loss in social skills and the ability to read a person’s mood through their body language.

Furthermore social networking sites encouraged children to place an excessive importance on the number of friends they had instead of the quality of their relationships, he said.

There’s some good points in there, actually, but the suicide angle is taking it to an extreme. I hope.