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The U.S. Marine Corps has banned Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites from its networks, effective immediately.

The microblogging service fears the social network could put it out of business.

It’s tough to argue against the perception that Facebook’s been on a Twitter emulation spree. In the last month alone they announced public content sharing, profile fans, real-time search, and brand new privacy changes. All of this seems to be an attempt to directly confront the Twitter threat.

Google are expected to unveil a social-networking mobile phone today, which integrates online-sharing sites Twitter and Facebook and Flickr into its software.

Seeing the explosion in growth of Twitter right now, it's pretty clear that the hot trend on the web is to have a service which acts as a central hub for information, and allows third party sites and services to built on top of it.

Charter reservations are sailing in for Free Spirit Yacht Cruises this year despite the turbulent economy, and co-owner Angela Motola-Donofrio attributes it to a social media push.

Facebook made a number of announcements today about changes to its home page, profile pages, and activity streams. Taken together, these represent a concerted response to the rise of Twitter as a real-time message broadcasting system that goes beyond members' personal circle of friends.

One of the biggest changes is that it is getting rid of the distinction between private profiles and public pages. The 5,000-friend limit will be dropped from the public pages.

Watch out Google and Facebook. Twitter has no revenue and no business model, but it could soon be highly disruptive.

When President-elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office, it will arguably be the biggest live social-networking event ever ...