In several blog posts this week, Twitter addressed its ongoing service outages, including one on Monday that left many users unable to sign in or update their profiles. Now, reports CNet, the popular microblogging service said it plans to open a "new, custom-built" data center near Salt Lake City, Utah, later this year. "Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs," the company's engineering blog noted. "Importantly, having our own data center will give us the flexibility to …

Hard as it is to believe, the World Wide Web is on track to run out of Internet addresses in about a year, according to John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers. As ReadWriteWeb notes, "The same thing was also stated recently by Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist." According to these experts, the Web is about to experience a data explosion, the likes of which we've not seen before, and a direct result of what ReadWriteWeb calls "sensor data, smart grids, [radio frequency identification tags] and other Internet of Things data." …

The New York Times Magazine gives Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, nearly 7,000 words to consider how consumers should be living their lives in a world "where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing." From the British teen who was fired for complaining on Facebook, "I'm so totally bored!!" to the Canadian therapist who was bared from entering the States after a Web search unearthed his '60s L.S.D. experiments, the dangers of increasingly connected information networks are ever more obvious. Rosen also suggests that most people are still unaware of the degree to …

Forget about those mobile hardware issues, continued concerns over 'closed' networks and operating systems, and the threat of ad network-related antitrust regulation. From the Valley to the Alley, huge third quarter earnings and revenue made Apple the toast of the industry on Tuesday. "Runaway sales of iPhones and iPads -- as well as a surprise surge of Macintosh computer sales -- gave Apple record-breaking revenues for its third quarter," reports Mercury News. "Apple is now benefiting from what we are dubbing a 'Cascade of Cool' -- three strong, synergistic product cycles -- iPhone, …

Trada -- a crowdsourced solution for creating keyword-based pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns -- has raised another $5.75 million in funding led by Google Ventures, along with the Foundry Group. The Boulder-based startup lets small businesses and large ad agencies run search marketing campaigns across Google, Yahoo and Bing with the help of its community of paid search experts. Trada presently boasts over 500 total search experts, and says another 300 are on a waiting list to participate, according to ReadWriteWeb. Meanwhile, over 200 business and agencies currently use Trada -- 55 of which signed up just last …

Google on Tuesday issued a response to the Federal Trade Commission's staff discussion draft on potential recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism. "It's a wonderful document that takes the FTC -- and the news industry -- to school on the First Amendment, copyright, fair use, antitrust, media history, business, and technology," according to BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis. "The government and publishers should be embarrassed to need such remedial education." In one section of the response highlighted by Jarvis, Google writes: "The large profit margins newspapers enjoyed in the past were built on an artificial scarcity: Limited …

It may have been competing for attention with Apple's Q3 earnings, but the industry was abuzz Wednesday about a new social news iPad app named Flipboard. For anyone who's familiar with Twitter clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic, news readers like NewsGator and Google Reader, and news aggregators like Techmeme and Google News, blogger Robert Scoble insists, "You've never seen [anything] like this." What does Flipboard do? "It turns your Facebook and Twitter account into something that looks like a magazine," Scoble explains. "It also lets you build a custom magazine, either by choosing from Flipboard's pre-built curated …

As expected, Facebook signed up its 500 millionth member this week -- up from about 100 million just two years ago -- the social net said Wednesday. Facebook has amassed 100 million new members since February alone. And, as USA Today notes, the statistics only get more startling from there. On an average day in Facebookland, 115 million "friendships" are confirmed, while members post about 400,000 events. To date, Facebook users have uploaded 50 billion photos, and tagged 15 billion of them. Meanwhile, about 70% of Facebook's users now live outside of the United States, with the …

In a sure sign that our consumer culture has passed the digital point of no return, Amazon on Monday said sales of e-books have surpassed hardcover sales. In fact, e-books took the lead three month ago, since which time Amazon says it's sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books. What's more, leaving their physical counterparts in the proverbial dust, e-books have outsold hardcovers at a rate of 180-to-100 over the last four weeks. The news marked "a day for the history books -- if those will even exist in the future,"

Social travel planning site Kukunu has launched in public beta, The Next Web reports. "Instead of having endless notes piling up, Kukunu gives you a collaborative area where you and your travel partner(s) can pick hotels, suggest attractions and share ideas," it reports. The startup also said that it's raised $400,000 from Seedcamp, Jaina Capital, and Kima Ventures. "Of course, there are other sites out there that let you collaborate remotely ... However, to this point we've not yet seen one that focuses onto a single subject, and that's where Kukunu really excels." Facebook and Twitter sharing are built …