Microblogging | featured news

Twitter has bought TweetDeck, the desktop and mobile application for organising tweets in handy columns, for more than $40 million in a cash and stock deal, CNN Money reports citing sources close to the deal. But there’s no confirmation from either player in this game: “For all those who might be curious, we continue not to comment on rumors,” Twitter’s global PR account tweeted earlier this morning. There were no tweets at all on the matter from TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth.

Sina’s Weibo has nearly 8 times more users than Twitter. In 2010, Twitter had approximately 17 million users in the US, according to an Edison Research report called Twitter Usage in America 2010. Even if Twitter doubled in size this year, which is unlikely, its Twitter account numbers would be dwarfed by Sina accounts alone.

When Adorian Deck was home sick from high school, he entertained himself like countless other teenagers have in recent years: He started a Twitter account. Unlike other teenagers, Deck's account became a sensation. Deck, under the handle (at)OMGFacts, tweeted random bits of celebrity gossip and quirky trivia. In less than a year, he had attracted more than 300,000 followers.

A computer programmer, startled by a helicopter clattering above his quiet Pakistani town in the early hours of the morning Monday, did what any social-media addict would do: he began sending messages to the social networking site Twitter.

Twitter has released a slew of statistics in recent months, from how many tweets are sent per day to the number of accounts created per day.Here's another one that's been more elusive: the number of users Twitter actually has.

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Twitter is in talks to buy TweetDeck, the popular Web and mobile app generally associated with Twitter power users.

How Twitter's owners and top executives say Twitter was founded is different than how Twitter was actually founded. Mainly, the official version leaves out the role of a major cofounder. Some early Twitter investors also wonder if it also leaves out a scandal.

UberMedia, which owns several popular applications that interface with Twitter, is outlining plans to build a social network that could compete with that popular microblogging platform, said three people who were briefed on the plans.

The U.S. government's new system to replace the five color-coded terror alerts will have two levels of warnings - elevated and imminent - that will be relayed to the public only under certain circumstances for limited periods of time, sometimes using Facebook and Twitter, according to a draft Homeland Security Department plan obtained by The Associated Press....