Social Media, Micro Blogging | featured news

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.

If you're a frequent Twitter user, you've probably noticed that the microblogging site has been crashing repeatedly this week.

Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle e-reader is getting access to Facebook and Twitter, along with several other enhancements, as part of a software update being sent wirelessly to the devices.

In a posting on Amazon's site, the company says the new software will let users share book passages on their Twitter and Facebook accounts. The update will also let people sort books and documents into collections and lock their Kindle with a password. There also will be larger font options and the ability to zoom in on PDF documents.

A 25-year-old unemployed Frenchman has been arrested for hacking into the Twitter accounts of President Barack Obama and Britney Spears, the pop star.

A Conan O'Brien Twitter account surfaced this evening under the name @ConanOBrien and it is growing rapidly.

So did Conan O'Brien just join Twitter?

At first, it wasn't certain, but just an hour and a half after the inaugural tweet, Twitter added a "verified account" stamp to the page.

Conan's first tweet, posted at approximately 6 p.m. Feb. 24, 2010, said: "Today I interviewed a squirrel in my backyard and then threw to commercial. Somebody help me."

It seems as though Twitter is finally ready to get down to business. Following search deals with Microsoft and Google that put the company at break even for 2009 and the recent hiring of a CFO, Twitter is now said to be readying the launch of its long-rumored ad platform.

Twitter just announced that it now sees 50 million non-spam messages every day. That's interesting but it means more when you look at it in context.

As soon as this week, Google might be rolling out a "Twitter-killer" feature for Gmail users, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

It was the upstart rock star of the Internet in early 2009, roaring out of relative obscurity to become one of the most exposed -- some would say overexposed -- services on the Web.