Internet, Micro Blogging | featured news

Twitter has reached nearly 200 million users who post 110 million tweets per day as of the January 1, 2011, Twitter spokesperson Carolyn Penner tells me. That’s up from 190 million users as of June 2010 and 95 million tweets per day as of early December — steady, but not explosive, growth. That’s why the company is now focused on building out its international presence.

So many people love Justin Bieber. They love him so much, that this year Twitter changed the way it counts its most tweeted-about topics to effectively exclude him....

The car manufacturer is rewarding those who purchase a new Toyota by January 3 with a $500 debit card for tweeting about it.

Evan Williams, Twitter's co-founder, says he understands Facebook's reluctance to let Twitter users look up friends on Facebook or send Facebook posts to Twitter. But the two companies are still talking.

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.

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.

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.

Tweeting your favorite stories may be getting a little easier. Twitter introduced Thursday a "tweet" button that websites can place alongside their content. The button serves as an invitation to Twitter's legion of users to share what they're reading without having to copy and paste the Web link.