The fastest new trending topic on Twitter this morning has morphed the story of NASA’s live moon crash today into ‘NASA bombs the moon’.

It’s a funny demonstration of how close Twitter comes to recreating work place or pub banter as popular stories catch on and get twisted for effect.

Therein lies the real power of micro-blogging – it’s a firehose of breaking, realtime news, the first place Twitterholics go to alert their mates and the Twitter community at large, which econsultancy think will reach 18 million users by the end of 2009.

For once, Google is behind the curve while its chief competitors, Bing, Yahoo & Facebook are integrating Twitter in their searches and social media options. For that reason there’s speculation on Mashable today that Google may want/need to buy Twitter very much indeed.

Meanwhile a whipping, snaking, spitting firehose of NASA nonsense blasts around the twittersphere.