The microblogging service Twitter has announced that it will not allow any third party to insert advertisements in user timelines. The company has also upgraded its Terms of Service in regard to use of Twitter API.

According to the blog post, there are two key reasons. “Firstly, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created…”. Secondly “the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization.”

After the notification, its own Promoted Tweets will no longer have any competition from the third-party ad networks. Also, this ban is only meant for paid-for-tweets inserted in the user timelines, not against the ads shown on the Twitter timelines.

Somedays, it seems like Facebook Connect is slowly taking over the web. It's becoming so ubiquitous that it's more surprising now to find a site that doesn't allow you to log-in with your Facebook credentials. Seeing this, Google has been taking steps to make its own similar platform, Friend Connect, more social. And today they've quietly launched a pretty big feature: Twitter integration.

Starting immediately, if a site has Friend Connect installed, a user can log-in using either their Google account or their Twitter account. And if they've logged in with their Twitter credentials, their username and profile picture are passed through OAuth back to Friend Connect. More importantly, it means that you can easily tweet with the click of a button (to invite friends to check out the site). And any comment they leave on that site can be automatically tweeted out.

In a bizarre case involving teen YouTube sensation Justin Bieber and a riotous crowd of his fans, a record exec from Island Def Jam Records was arrested Friday for, among other things, failing to Tweet when told to by authorities.

When the Beiber event at Roosevelt Field mall became unruly (video below), police appealed to the artist’s label to send a Tweet telling the crowd to leave. When that allegedly didn’t happen, police arrested James Roppo, a senior vice president of Island Def Jam Records, for “endangering the welfare of a minor and obstructing government administration”.
An Associated Press feed reads:

Police arrested a vice president from Bieber’s record label, Island Def Jam Records, saying he wasn’t cooperating with attempts to disperse the crowd. James Roppo, 44, of Hoboken, N.J., was charged with a series of misdemeanours, including endangering the welfare of children and obstructing governmental administration.

Speaking to a group of Chinese students in Shanghai, US President Barack Obama said he’d never used Twitter because he’s too clumsy to type on the phone.

The question he was asked, however, was far more important than his typing skills. In China, many of the services we use everyday – Twitter, Facebook, MySpace – are either heavily censored or completely blocked. One of the Shanghai students asked Obama “Should we be able to use Twitter freely?”

“Well, first of all, let me say that I have never used Twitter. My thumbs are too clumsy to type in things on the phone,” Obama replied. Fair enough, although as an avid BlackBerry user, he should be able to use Twitter without problems; we reckon lack of time is to blame rather than typing problems.

Twitter has just activated the retweet button a small number of accounts, according to a blog post. The new retweet functionality was originally announced back in August.

As we’ve written in the past, Twitter has been tweaking this new functionality for a while, making a pretty significant change to the API prior to launch. Previously, Twitter was requiring third party developers to check whether a tweet has already come in or not in any users’ stream to see if they should collapse it under the new retweet structure.

Now, Twitter has built its own mechanism to check for those duplicate tweets into the API. This will ensure that only the first tweet is shown and the retweets go under it automatically.

This guest post is written by Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg and the cofounder of Revision3 and Pownce. Kevin, who has over 88,000 followers on Twitter (making him the second most followed after President Obama), also “bloggs” at kevinrose.com. He is an investor in Twitter.

Ten Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers:

1. Explain to your followers what retweeting is and encourage them to retweet your links. Retweeting pushes your @username into foreign social graphs, resulting in clicks back to your profile. Track your retweets using retweetist.
2. Fill out your bio. Your latest tweets and @replies don’t mean much to someone that doesn’t know you. Your bio is the only place you have to tell people who you are. Also, your bio is displayed on Twitter’s Suggested Users page. Leaving it blank or non-descriptive doesn’t encourage people to add you.

 

Twitter passed the one billion tweet mark back in November of last year. It took them less than a year to quintuple that figure: according to Gigatweet, Twitter has now passed the 5 billion tweet mark. Wow.

CNet reports that the 5 billionth tweet was delivered by one of Twitter’s (Twitter) initial loyal users, which seems fitting. Robin Sloan’s famed 5 billionth tweet read simply, “Oh lord.” It was apparently an unintentional, yet appropriate, religious moment.

Placing this milestone on the Twitter timeline makes the 5 billionth tweet appear all the more impressive, considering the service was only up to 1.6 billion at the end of April this year. That means about 3.4 billion tweets have been sent in about the past 6 months. Again, there’s a word for that: wow.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers.

Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Micro-blogging is defined as a quick update usually containing a very limited number of characters. It is a popular features of social networks like Facebook where you can update your status, but it has become best known because of Twitter.

Symantec warned computer users to watch out for these e-mail headers; Twitter Guru Reveals All On Video; Use Twitter To Make Money; and Teenagers Are Playing Online And Making Grundles Of Money.

For Twitter, it said, the spammers creatively evade antispam filters by obfuscating e-mail messages with legitimate content.