In an effort to combat phishing and spam, which has been an unsolved issue for Twitter for the past years, the micro-blogging platform yesterday said in a blog post that they have rolled out its own URL shortener called Twt.tl to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we'll be able keep that user safe.

(and counting) While the micro-blogging site Twitter won't continue to gain in popularity forever, it has certainly shown us that a site can become big. And I mean BIG. How big? Well, the 10 billionth tweet has been posted by an anonymous user who protected his tweets.  To keep track of how many tweets have been posted, I recommend you use GigaTweet. It isn't exact, it only predicts how many tweets there are based on the current amount of tweets being posted, and Twitter have played around with the tweet numbers a few times.

British comedian and author Stephen Fry revealed in an interview with .net magazine how he frequently takes down sites with around 3,000 requests per second as a result of him tweeting a link to his massive 1.3 million followers. "When I tweet a link it usually gets around two or three thousand requests a second. Especially if I word it in a way where I really want people to go to a site," he said in the interview. In an effort to prevent websites from crashing due to the sheer volume of traffic generated by his large number of followers, he first try to warn site owners to get prepared for the worst by purchasing extra bandwidth to withstand the sudden spike in traffic. "I just have to be very specific, and say: 'Please go to your web guys and your host and tell them this is the kind of traffic you could get," Fry explains. "Fifty per cent of the time the site is down in seconds – even when we've contacted site owners and they've told us everything will be fine. It's often an unprecedented amount of traffic, and they don't have the required capacity."

Just last night Twitter and Yahoo confirmed their partnership. Yahoo, a search engine that is slowly dying (in my opinion). Google is taking over. The deal between Twitter and Yahoo is to be more exclusive than the one between Bing and Google. Bing and Google have had real time Twitter updates included in their updates for months now. This will be the first integration from Yahoo.More integrations coming this year.

Windows Live Messenger is set to receive a major revamp, and "social" will be its main highlight. With social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter getting more popular than ever, it appears that the Windows Live team at Microsoft will integrate these social sites and blogging platforms such as Wordpress into its upcoming Windows Live Messenger, beyond its current chat functionality. The latest leaked screenshots of Windows Live Messenger 2010 Beta or better known as Wave 4 have started surfacing on the web showing its improved interface and some new impressive social features. From the screenshots taken by Chinese site cnbeta, the "Social" view allows users to "connect" to Windows Live and Facebook, including Twitter and Wordpress. As both Twitter and Wordpress do not support IM services, it is too early to determine how Windows Live Messenger will be "linked" with the two platforms. It could be similar to the current Web Activities after all.

According to the 2009 Forbes list of the "The World's Billionaires", the world now has 793 billionaires, a far cry from 1,125 a year ago. They may be rich with deep pockets but most of which aren't following the social networking trend. Many celebrities around the world head to social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to connect with their fans online. But as for most billionaires especially those tech-savvy executives such as Warren Buffett and Lawrence Ellison (Oracle), they say "NO!" when it comes to setting up a profile on Facebook or Twitter. Here's one obvious reason why they choose not to use these websites. Social websites don't help them make money at all! They feel that it's a waste of time to connect with people around the world on Facebook or Twitter which doesn't help them boost their wealth significantly.

By default, Twitter doesn't allow users to post direct messages to multiple accounts due to users misusing it as a tool to send spam to others. But what if you've no such intention and merely want to thank your friends who have sent you birthday greetings via public tweets? Well, there's a handy tool out there that helps you do so. Created by a South Korean guy named Chris Kwon, TweetGuru enables you to message up to 12 Twitter users with one go. To start, simply head over to the site and authenticate the app with your Twitter account. Punch in the usernames of people (separated by commas) and your desired message in the respective fields, and you're good to go!

Of course Al Qaeda's founder Osama Bin Laden neither has a genuine Facebook page nor a Twitter profile page. If we ordinary citizens were to know about it before the United States Counter-terrorism committee freezes all his social networking accounts, then it would be doomsday for the Obama administration. Anyway, a United Kingdom man with the YouTube name fellonthedoorproject imagines what will Osama tweet about if he were to own a Twitter account, and puts his ideas into an awesome video clip. It's quite funny though. Enjoy! (Watch the video after the break)