Twitter, Internet | featured news

In its heyday, ICQ was one of the most popular instant messaging networks. Today, you will probably have a hard time finding your friends on ICQ. Nevertheless, almost two year after the release of ICQ 6, ICQ just released a new version of its IM client. ICQ 7 now integrates updates from Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Flickr and YouTube.

We’ve seen a host of deals recently in the Twitter app space, but here’s one that we now know didn’t happen: TwitPic selling out for north of $10 million.

Beyond talking about how fast it was growing, one of the hottest topics surrounding Twitter in 2009 was “how does it make money?” Perhaps that was the wrong question to be asking, though, because as it turns out, Twitter already makes money.

Hackers briefly blocked access to the popular Internet messaging service Twitter, steering traffic to another Web site where a group reportedly calling itself the "Iranian Cyber Army" claimed responsibility.

Twitter’s U.S. traffic rose by a little over 100,000 visitors, to 19.37 million unique visitors from 19.24 million unique visitors in October. It’s no surprise that Twitter’s U.S. growth is stalling as the numbers have indicated this pattern for some time.

Google turned on real-time search on its main site this morning with little fanfare, after a huge announcement and demo earlier this week.

Google will supplement its search results with updates posted each second to sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter spam and scams: We know that they have been appearing more frequently and have become more dangerous. And it’s been a problem since relatively early on for Twitter.

Yahoo Inc. is jumping on the Twitter bandwagon in its latest attempt to get people to use its Internet search engine more frequently. Beginning Thursday, Yahoo will mine the short messages posted on Twitter to find fresher information about hot topics. Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. had earlier announced plans to incorporate Twitter messages into search results, but Yahoo said it will be the first among them to include such "tweets" on its main search results.

Newspapers should become "radically open" if they want to make money in the online world, the co-founder of Twitter says.