New media: Internet, mobile media, újmédia, etc.

San Francisco-based Twitter has achieved the Silicon Valley dream, going from an obscure start-up to global sensation. Everyone from Barack Obama to MC Hammer is Twittering, sending out messages of 140 characters or fewer to friends and followers.

Job-seeking in this 21st century recession may just have gone viral and mobile.

A new Twitter study by San Antonio Web data analytics firm Pearanalytics confirmed what many talk show hosts have been joking about: there’s a lot of pointless prattle going on in the microblogging sphere.

A small new survey from Nielsen about the five fastest growing "member community destinations" in the U.S. reveals what we all kind of knew already: Twitter is at the top. From February 2008 to February 2009, it clocked in at a whopping 1,382 percent growth rate. That's to be expected, considering the amount of press the still-without-a-business-model microblogging service has gotten in recent months.

The Web is littered with examples of promising but ultimately value-destroying acquisitions, they wrote, citing deals such as AOL’s $4.2 billion acquisition of Netscape, and eBay’s $4.1 billion acquisition of Skype.

The analysts said that monetizing Twitter “would be difficult at best and likely unsuccessful.” People who sign up for free services tend to resent a company for trying to wring revenue from the business later. Subscription fees are out of the question, they said, and advertising-based revenues don’t seem to have yielded enough cash flow to make a Web 2.0 property viable.

Reports suggest that social networking is now more popular than email. Twitter in particular grew 33% in only a month according to Compete data. Skittles increased its own traffic by 1332% in one day after a campaign that sent Skittles.com directly to a Tweet-stream (the site has since moved to different strategies of a similar nature like a Facebook page and currently a Wikipedia entry, which is in itself another interesting story).

As previously reported, Facebook is set to launch changes to its news feeds that will give it more Twitter-like functionality. The changes are set to launch next week, and will update feeds in real-time.

- Android-based phones, new Web advertising initiatives, a customized Web browser -- it's sorely neglected its account on one of the Web's most up-and-coming communication platforms: Twitter, or the "YouTube of real-time search," as suggested by John Battelle.