A networking equipment malfunction has disrupted Twitter, causing the microblogging site to become unavailable to users for hours on Wednesday and forcing company engineers to shut down key features to perform the repairs.

Twitter has is banning third-party advertisements on its site in a move to control the monetization and integrity of the micro-blogging service. The company is spinning the move, saying it's building a firewall that blocks out advertisements that tarnish Twitter's coherent "timeline." But the real issue here is money, as always. Twitter wants your dough to support its Promoted Tweets platform, rather than allowing every straggler into the party.

Microsoft plans to start a small-scale pilot of a microblogging service aimed at business users that it has been experimenting with in Office Labs.

A vast majority of Twitter users are mainly interested in ... well, themselves.

NewsGator's Social Sites, an enterprise social-networking complement to Microsoft's SharePoint Server 2007, now features Twitter-like microblogging capabilities tailored for workplace communications.

Little more than a week after Nambu Network said it was shutting down URL-shortener tr.im, and just days after the service was reactivated, its founder announced he would take the code open-source and give up the attractive URL.

If Twitter decides to sue Web sites and bloggers that published information pilfered from its systems by hackers, the company could be diving into murky and largely untested legal waters.

This past weekend, something strange happened in the U.S. media landscape: Twitter helped shape coverage of the Iranian elections protests.

Twitter's popularity may have exploded over the past year, but its feature set continues to evolve at a seemingly glacial pace. New users quickly realize that they need to shop around in the Twitter developer ecosystem for add-on software and Web-based services that fill in missing features and address the annoyances that the microblogging service's deficiencies present.