As if Twitter hasn't grown fast enough, its cofounder Biz Stone plans to speed up the process with new tools to help users discover other users with similar interests and sensibilities. To support further growth, Stone is also planning to increase his workforce from 65 to 100, and even start making money by the end of the year by offering premium services for businesses. These will likely include an "analytics dashboard" and verified corporate accounts.

AOL's AIM instant message service is now letting users read Facebook news feeds and send status updates back to the site. Users can now read their friends' status updates, view their photo albums, comment on them, and leave a status update from within AIM. The move follows AOL's earlier moves to create a new breed of social services, including a Meebo-style chat toolbar that lets you talk to friends on Web sites around the web. More recently, AOL released versions of its desktop app that let you read information from Facebook and Twitter but not send information back.

Despite rumors of a Steve Jobs appearance, Apple's product presentation today in San Francisco is being overshadowed by news of Palm's new Pixi smart phone. With its tiny webOS-based handset, the Palm Pixi is expected by many to revolutionize mobile Web usage -- much like Apple's iPhone has done to date.

Popular Twitter client TweetDeck launched it latest version today, with additional Facebook functionality and MySpace integration. Also on offer is a TweetDeck Directory, which serves as a catalog of Twitter accounts worth following. An eight-person company, TweetDeck recently began expanding from a Twitter console to a browser for consumers' various social networks. The startup secured $300,000 in funding in January, led by New York-based firm Betaworks, with a new round in the works.

The Times chronicles soldier bloggers, and the military's ambivalent support of them. Seeing it as a good PR opportunity, civilian officials and top generals are encouraging the practice, but also doing their best to monitor the floor of content for potentially damaging and sensitive information. The Department of Defense now plans to issue a new policy that is widely expected to set department-wide restrictions on access to social networking sites from military computers -- a move that could limit access to social media sites.

Once thought to have the most complimentary relationship in the business, Google and Apple are increasingly at odds on ever more fronts. The Business Insider outlines seven of them beginning with mobile and Google's Android platform, which not only gives an edge to Apple's rival phone makers, but diverts the attention of application developers. There's also the matter of Google's Chrome going up against Apple's own operating system, and, most recently, YouTube planning to challenge iTunes with a movie "rental" business. It's no wonder that Google head Eric Schmidt recently resigned from Apple's board of directors.

More than any humanitarian cause or security threat, Google's attempts to catalog the world's liberties are aligning the interests' of sovereign nations. Following Germany's warning to U.S. lawmakers that Google Books could have international implications on copyright law, privacy, and the rights of authors, France has written to a U.S. court urging it to stop a $125 million settlement between Google and US book publishers. The perceived danger is that Google will have unfair control over European works and a "monopoly (on) digitising European orphan works without permission." In the spirit of damage control, Google is promising to consult European …

In a move that's likely to secure the service's foreseeable mobile future, Flickr has launched what appears to be a pretty sweet iPhone app. Until now, the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing service required mobile users to rely on a proprietary Web site, which led many third-party app developers to bridge the gap themselves.

Preempting perceived legal threats from Microsoft, a group of companies using the Linux computer-operating system are preparing to acquire a set of patents formerly owned by software giant. The Open Invention Network, a group made up of Microsoft competitors and Linux advocates, say it's close an agreement to buy 22 patents that Microsoft sold to another organization earlier this year.

Social media marketing is hardly a science, but any advertiser should know that rules of engagement exist. First and foremost is the concept of transparency, which, when ignored, can have disastrous results. Take the case of Honda's new Facebook Page, which was created to promote their soon-to-be-released Accord Crosstour. Basically, the only thing consumers hated more than the car's design, was the car maker's concealed efforts to steer conversation about it.