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Despite a few outages in the past few months, Facebook continues to zip along as the fastest social network in terms of average response time for the site, according to a report by web analytics company AlertSite.

The top 25 U.S. newspapers - according to the number of Twitter followers, as recorded by Journalistics a bit over a week ago - is below. Sitting very comfortably in first place is The New York Times with 2.6 million - and they are the only news source on the list that has more followers than print circulation. The Wall Street Journal is number two with 464,591 followers, and The Washington Post comes in at third with 204,514. The Chicago Tribune, however, if you count both of its Twitter accounts, including @ColonelTribune, totals a second-place 879,490. 1. @nytimes – 2,668,948 2.

JustSpotted plans to sift through people’s tweets to identify those that claim celebrity spottings, and then to place those celebrities’ whereabouts on a map in real time. It would be similar to the now-defunct GawkerStalker, but it would be faster. (It’s not a novel idea. Last year, start-up OMGICU proposed to do the same thing, supported by text messaging and tweets, except its service requires active user participation rather than data-mining the whole Twitter community like JustSpotted will do.)

Facebook is down and has been experiencing outages since about midnight Eastern Time tonight, Oct. 5, 2010.Many Twitter users are reporting the outage, with hundreds of tweets appearing about it in minutes. DownRightNow.com confirms the downtime, with the first widespread problems starting about 11:52 p.m. EST.

Sometime in the past few hours, Twitter made a subtle, but not insignificant change: their Promoted Trends are now appearing at the top of the Trends area on Twitter.com.

I'd like to believe that if Facebook changed the order of "Developers" and "Careers" in the footer of their site, it wouldn't lead to a huge user backlash. But history suggests otherwise. Okay, maybe I'm slightly exaggerating, but I'm honestly not sure. It seems that if Facebook does anything to change their site, it's grounds for user backlash.

Twitter is now selling its "Promoted Tweets" for $100,000, according to an article in this morning's Wall St. Journal. "Promoted Tweets," which allow companies to buy the top spot on Twitter's Search results page, is just one of the microblogging network's new advertising initiatives as of late. The idea behind these digital ads is that the service allows companies to associate themselves with a certain trend or keyword.

A controversial Twitter user has been challenging South African authorities by alerting thousands of followers to speed traps set by traffic police.

Thousands of Twitter users have been hit by an apparent security flaw that can cause pornographic content to appear on the site unintentionally, according to a researcher at the security firm Sophos.

A redesign is part of the Web site’s plan to regain momentum as it has lost ground in a crowded field that includes Facebook and Twitter.