Cody Taylor

Kevin Thau, a Twitter user for nearly a year, joins the microblogging company as director of mobile business development. Now how about a revenue plan?

Here’s the only thing about Twitter that might be more frustrating than encountering the Internet darling’s curious limit on the number of searches one can conduct on the site: Trying to get an explanation from the company as to why it finds this annoyance necessary.

The TiVo senior programmer from San Jose spent a week modifying his 25-year-old washing machine to send a message to Twitter when his laundry is ready.

twitter writes “Ever wonder why schools still use Windows? Boycott Novell has extracted the details from 2002 Microsoft email presented in the Comes vrs Microsoft case and other leaks. What emerges is Microsoft’s desperate battle to ‘never lose to Linux.’ At stake for Microsoft is more than a billion dollars of annual revenue, vital user conditioning and governmental lock in that excludes competition, and software freedom for the rest of us. Education and Government Incentives [EDGI] and “Microsoft Unlimited Potential” are programs that allows vendors to sell Windows at zero cost. Microsoft’s nightmare scenario has already been realized in Indiana and other places. Windows is not really competitive and schools that switch save tens of millions of dollars. Because software is about as expensive as the hardware in these deals, the world could save up to 0 million each year by dumping Microsoft. Now that the cat is out of the bag, it’s hard to see what Microsoft can do other than what they did to Peter Quinn.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There’s little doubt that Twitter was one of the most talked about startups over the past year. But just how much did it grow in 2008? The final numbers are in, and according to Compete, they’re astounding: 752%, for a total of 4.43 million unique visitors in December.

DragonFire1024 writes with this story from Wikinews that says “access to the Chinese Wikinews website has been blocked in China. Wikinews can also confirm that the English version of the website is still available in China. … Users using the social networking site called Twitter have reported that the site was “blockade[ed] today by the mainland” of China. Others, writing on the Wikimedia Foundation’s mailing list also state that the Chinese version of Wikinews is blocked in major Chinese cities such as Beijing.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Grant Robertson from Download Squad has proposed to his girlfriend Christina Warren (TUAW and Download Squad) on TWITTER. That’s right. On Twitter. Social networking has come a long way.

Jack Spine writes “Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has confirmed both to ZDNet UK and Wired Threat Level blog that a dictionary attack was used to hack Twitter. After the hacker distributed details on the Digital Gangster forum, celebrities such as Britney Spears and Barack Obama had their accounts defaced. Wired spoke to the alleged hacker, while ZDNet UK got in contact with someone who had been on the Digital Gangster forum at the time.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An 18-year-old hacker with a history of celebrity pranks has admitted to Monday’s hijacking of multiple high-profile Twitter accounts, including President-Elect Barack Obama’s, and the official feed for Fox News.