Twitter this week quietly acquired social analytics startup BackType. "We'll be bringing out team and technology to Twitter's platform team, where our focus will be on developing tools for Twitter's publishing partners," BackType explained in a blog post. BackType's BackTweets product helps companies, from AOL to Microsoft, understand the influence of their 140-character messages. The company is also working on a project called Storm, a data-processing tool that it calls the "Hadoop of real-time processing." As PCMag points out, "There has been buzz in the past that Twitter would eventually build its own analytics tool. The BackType acquisition could …

Calming concerns that ad rates would decline as inventory surged, Facebook tells Bloomberg Businessweek that prices have held up even after the addition of new ways for marketers to promote products on the social network. "Rates for so-called self-serve ads, which are sold through an automated auction system and account for most of sales, are unchanged since March, when the company completed a redesign to add promotions under photos and increase the number of spots on some pages to as many as five from three," according to Bloomberg Businessweek. "We have hundreds of thousands of advertisers around the …

Along with the rest of the human race, mobile advertisers can breathe a bit easier knowing that scientific evidence is pointing away from a link between cellphone use and brain tumors. "A major review of previously published research by a committee of experts from Britain, the United States and Sweden concluded there was no convincing evidence of any cancer connection," reports Reuters. "It also found a lack of established biological mechanisms by which radio signals from mobile phones might trigger tumors." According to experts in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives: "Although there remains some uncertainty, the trend in …

Could consumers soon have access to a wholesale, net-neutral 4G-LTE network, which combines with satellite to provide nation-wide broadband wireless access? To make that dream a reality -- and help accelerate the wireless Web revolution -- a company by the name of LightSquared just raised $265 million, reports TechCrunch. "The company says that the capital was raised from both existing investors as well as new investors in the company but declined to reveal ... new investors," it writes. Current investors include Spectrum Assets and Harbinger Capital Partners, which, over the last 12 months, have helped LightSquared raised over …

A developer is claiming that Facebook has blocked his tool, which he designed to let people extract the information that their friends have shared with them. "Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends," blogged Mohamed Mansour, developer of the Facebook Friend Exporter, a Chrome extension that automates the data extraction process. The tool lets people save their contacts' e-mail addresses, birthdays, phone numbers, and other information into a text file or to directly import them into Gmail. "That makes it much easier for Google account holders to rebuild their contact network at …

A week has gone by since Google debuted its "+" social network, but the analysis and conjecture keeps on coming. For instance, while Google isn't exactly synonymous with enterprise software, GigaOm suggests the new network will be a hit in the workplace. "While Facebook and Twitter have been massively successful in the consumer space, they're not really suited for use in the workplace, as they make it difficult to keep personal and work-related information separate," it writes. "Google, however, has produced an app that's much more suited for use in the workplace by building Google+ around its Circles …

Apple will become the world's biggest notebook vendor in 2012, beating Hewlett-Packard to first place with a commanding slice of the mobile computing market, according to Chinese-language publication Digitimes, citing "industry sources." Global shipments of tablet PCs are expected to top 60 million units in 2011 with shipments from Apple likely to total 40 million units for a 60% share. What's more, "some market research firms have predicted global tablet shipments are to top 80 million units [in] 2012 with iPads accounting for 60 million units." Additionally, Apple is also likely to ship 15 million MacBooks in 2012, …

Also this week, Google began rolling out a redesigned Gmail platform. It "has Google's signature coloring all over it, and looks sneakily similar to the insides of Google+," according to Msnbc.com, referring, of course, to Google's just-debuted social network. "The test theme comes ... in two flavors," Msnbc.com explains. "'Preview' (dense) looks like a cleaner version of the 'Classic' Gmail theme; 'Preview' gives you the full treatment, with broader tabs and message panes and all." MSNBC warned, however, that these are still test versions of the new look, so some features may end up looking "a little odd." …

In its mission to offer the perfect news service -- and, in turn, further displace rivals from Yahoo News to The New York Times -- Google News has been making strides to help user delve deeper in particular news events. "Last month, Google News tweaked its interface to make it easier for users both to scan for stories that might interest them and to dig deeper conce they've found them," The Nieman Journalism Lab explains. "The Top Story on Google News at any given moment is now expanded -- which is to say, visually contextualized, with clustered links …

In other Twitter news, its users are now sending 200 million tweets each day, the company reported this week. "That figure becomes quite impressive when one considers that in January 2009, 2 million tweets were sent per day," CNet writes. A year ago, the daily tweet tally stood at a measly 65 million a day. Meanwhile, looking at the most-popular topics during the first six months of the year, Twitter found that pop singer Rebecca Black was the top topic in pop culture, followed by Britney Spears' album "Femme Fatale," and Charlie Sheen. Swine Flu, Hosni Mubarak, and Easter all …