Micro Blogging, Social Networking | featured news

Google agreed to settle an FTC complaint that it used "deceptive tactics and violated its own privacy promises" with the launch of its social network, Google Buzz, which automatically shared information in Gmail address books.

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.

Twitter has raised a big new round of venture capital, $200 million, valuing the company at $3.7 billion.

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.

Evan Williams may embody a classic Silicon Valley type: the entrepreneur with good ideas for a start-up, but not the leader to execute a sophisticated business strategy.

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.

What was meant to be an announcement from the Whitman campaign heralding the candidate's endorsement by the San Diego Deputy Sheriff's Association inadvertently became an endorsement of a much different nature due to a URL error.

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.