Twitter

During the trial of an Arkansas lumber supplier In February, one of the jurors tweeted his buddies that they should stay away from that product: "It's bad mojo," he thumbed, "and they'll probably cease to exist, now that their wallet is 12m lighter."

During a four-month-long political corruption trial in Philadelphia earlier this year, one juror was found to have been updating his Twitter account almost daily, at one point posting: "Stay in touch for a big announcement on Monday everyone."

Twitter, the messaging web site that has become an Internet sensation, is nearing a deal to close as much as $100 million of new funding from as many as seven investors, according to people familiar with the deal.

The investor group includes mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price and private-equity firm Insight Venture Partners, which are new investors to Twitter. The $100 million investment is about twice as much as Twitter was reportedly expected to haul in this latest round of fund-raising.

One of Microsoft's big bets when it decided to challenge Apple's iPod in 2006 was a feature known as Zune-to-Zune wireless sharing -- or "squirting," as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dubbed it. People could use the built-in Wi-Fi to send a full song to another Zune device nearby, for as many as three playbacks.

If you watch Twitter for long enough, you're bound to score some information you were never meant to see. For a few minutes this morning, that was John 'PC' Hodgman's cellphone number.

He quickly deleted the message, following up: "Clearly that was designed to be a DM."

The problem is one that's tricked Twitter users old and new: Accidentally sending a tweet as a public message instead of as a private, direct message. For most people, this is no big deal. But for a celebrity of Hodgman's stature, or a politician, something like this could get annoying (or worse) fast.

Former Google exec and the cofounder/CEO of RSS service Feedburner Dick Costolo is Twitter’s new chief operating officer, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Costolo, who sold Feedburner to Google for $100 million in 2007, left Google in July. We’d heard he was looking to start a new company, but obviously Twitter swooped in and grabbed him.

This guest post is written by Geoff Cook, cofounder and CEO of social networking site myYearbook. Everything about Twitter is looking up these days, except for a few pesky uptime issues of course. But a number of recent reports also suggest teens are one demographic that just doesn’t seem to be embracing Twitter like the rest of us. So while I’m excited to see Robert Scoble proclaims that Twitter is worth a cool $10 billion, it might be a good idea to analyze a little data to try to understand why teens just don’t think Twitter is as rad as the rest of us.

Twitter had been in talks to acquire FriendFeed before the start-up of ex-Googlers decided to sell the company to Facebook last week.

“If that’s where they wanted to end up, that’s the right move for them,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in an interview with VentureBeat, acknowledging that the company approached FriendFeed several times and would’ve considered buying it at its reported sale price of $50 million in cash and equity.

A little more than one month ago, we discussed how Google was asking regular people to give their thoughts about the National Broadband Plan. Now, the FCC's doing something similar, with a fresh blog and Twitter account apparently intended to reach out to the public.

The Twitter account will perhaps be a sort of general-purpose thing, as it goes by the handle "fccdotgov" rather than anything broadband-related. Still, since there have been three tweets in the five or so hours since the account went live, the FCC's done a good job of keeping it updated so far.

British troops are being encouraged by the Ministry of Defence to use Twitter and Facebook to keep in touch with family and friends.

In a "liberalisation" of its social networking policy, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said that British troops are no longer required to seek permission to use the sites but asks personnel to use common sense over the amount of detail revealed.

A Russian activist blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial of service attack that led to the site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive.