Between China-based cyber attacks and the E.U.'s continued unrest over Google's books project, you'd think the search giant had enough foreign drama. Yet, to make way for its own national email service, Iran's telecommunications agency has gone and put Gmail on a permanent suspension. It's still not clear what effect the order will immediately have on Gmail services in Iran, but Google is confirming a sharp drop in traffic. "We have heard from users in Iran that they are having trouble accessing Gmail," a Google spokesman said in a statement. An Iranian official tells The Wall Street Journal …

Poor MySpace. Once a digital darling courted by industry kings, the site has since lost its way under the reign of Facebook. In what many are interpreting as another nail in its coffin, News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller has fired MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta -- brought on less than a year ago to revive the drifting network. "While News Corp. tried to paint the departure as more mutual in its official statement, it was most definitely not, as problems among top execs finally came to a head today," assures BoomTown's Kara Swisher. "Among …

Flying in the face of mounting speculation over Twitter's slowing growth, new research from Royal Pingdom finds that the microblogging platform is -- as of December -- processing over one billion tweets per month. In particular, January surpassed 1.2 billion, averaging almost 40 million tweets per day. This is significantly more than Twitter was processing just a few months ago. For Twitter's part, its CEO Evan Williams said on January 12: "Across all metrics that matter, yesterday was Twitter's highest-usage day ever." Additionally, after creating a chart that shows the number of tweets per month back to …

Disney has big plans for the iPad. Among other forthcoming integrations, says CEO Bob Iger, the world can look forward to an iPad companion to ABC's Lost, an ABC News app, a Disney digital books app, an improved version of the ESPN Sports Center app, and Marvel apps. According to paidContent, some of these products might be adapted for the iPad, while some will be created from scratch. According to Iger, the iPad platform will "enable us to really start distributing product that is different than the product you typically see."

Google's Android platform is showing huge gains in U.S. mobile market share, according to new comScore numbers. The data, which covered mobile usage from September to December, showed that Google gained a significant 2.7% of the market, moving from 2.5% in September to 5.2% in December. Palm, meanwhile, fell markedly from 8.3% to 6.1% over the same period. RIM and Microsoft each lost 1% of market share, with RIM dropping from 42.6% to 41.6%, and MS from 19% to 18%. Apple, for its part, gained 1.2%, from 24.1% to 25.3%. According to VentureBeat, "Google's significant gains can …

Don't call it a backlash, but USAToday.com has some purely anecdotal evidence to show that at least some consumers have had it with social networks. "Their reasons run the gamut from being besieged by online 'friends' who aren't really friends to lingering concerns over where their messages and photos might materialize," the publication says of those potentially pioneering souls who've consciously unplugged from the Facebook revolution. "If there's a common theme to their exodus, it's the nagging sense that a time-sucking habit was taking the 'real' out of life." One byproduct of these digital dissenters is the …

Potentially pitting itself directly against the cable and telephone companies, Google is getting into the broadband business with the deployment of a fiber-optic network to at least 50,000 homes and as many as 500,000. The search giant guarantees that its new network will deliver faster Internet speed (up to 100 times faster) at a competitive price. Google isn't saying how much the "experiment" is likely to cost. In 2006, Google began operating its own wireless network in Mountain View, Calif., where it is headquartered. Two years later, it bid unsuccessfully for wireless spectrum in auctions held by …

A day after Google debuted Buzz -- integrating a slew of social and local features into Gmail -- early reviews and analysis continue to roll in. On the news, The Times concludes that Google and Facebook are on nothing less than a "collision course in the increasingly competitive market for social networking services." Rather than a "me too" social media product, blogger Tim O'Reilly believes that Google "has taken the social media lessons of Twitter and applied them to their own core products." "At the high level, …

For social networks and other online communities, the next stage of innovation may be services like recommendations, "self and group awareness," and other features made possible by software developers building on top of the huge mass of data that Web 2.0 made public. That's according to various researchers digging deep into the social innards and inner workings of Facebook and other networks, and just profiled by ReadWriteWeb. Ex-Apple engineer Pete Warden, for one, runs a company named Mailana, which uses "social graph analysis" to help us better understand, navigate, and dissect complex online social environments.

With e-readers on everyone's mind, one way to predict where both Amazon and Apple are heading next is to keep a close eye on their respective jobs boards. Amazon, for one, is actively seeking a senior "hardware display manager," with experience in "the LCD business," who must know the "key players in the market." The Kindle maker is also looking for at least two experts in wireless technology. "And you know what that adds up to, particularly when you remember Amazon also just bought a touchscreen manufacturer?" asks Fast Company. "Amazon looks like it'll be giving the next …