Webware

Twitter has had quite a year. Not only has it attracted worldwide attention and millions of new users, "Twitter" has been named the top word in the English language for 2009.

According to the Global Language Monitor, which examines language usage across the world, "Twitter" beat out "Obama," "H1N1," "stimulus," and "vampire" to take the crown. Interestingly, "2.0" came in at sixth place.

"In a year dominated by world-shaking political events, a pandemic, the aftereffects of a financial tsunami, and the death of a revered pop icon, the word 'Twitter' stands above all the other words," Paul JJ Payack, president of Global Language Monitor, said Sunday in a statement. "Twitter represents a new form of social interaction, where all communication is reduced to 140 characters. Being limited to strict formats did wonders for the sonnet and haiku. One wonders where this highly impractical word-limit will lead as the future unfolds."

To compile its data, the Global Language Monitor uses its proprietary algorithm, called the Predictive Quantities Indicator. According to the company, the algorithm "tracks words and phrases in the media and on the Internet." It also monitors blogs and social media. Word frequency, contextual usage, and "appearance in global media outlets" contribute to a word's popularity.

Click here to see a full listing of the top words, phrases, and names of the year--and of the decade.

Facebook is changing the structure of its company stock to a dual-class system, a move that hints the company may be looking toward an initial public offering--even though it says it has no plans to do so yet.

Here's how it works. Existing Facebook shareholders currently have Class A stock. That'll be converted to Class B stock, which has 10 times the voting power of Class A. Should those shareholders sell their stock when Facebook goes public, they'll be converted back into Class A stock--otherwise, they'll stay the way they are.

The story was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which added the detail that this stock structure change will give founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg more power unless he opts to sell stock during an IPO. But while Zuckerberg and other executives have said that they eventually plan to take Facebook public, they continue to say that there are no concrete plans for it. Two years ago, Zuckerberg said that it was "years out."

"This revision to the stock structure should not be construed as a signal the company is planning to go public," a statement from Facebook read. "Facebook has no plans to go public at this time."

Professional networking site LinkedIn's platform, previously a closed offering for select partners, has opened up to developers at large, according to an announcement Monday on the company blog.

Well, sort of. Building an embeddable widget on LinkedIn, unlike Facebook's, still requires a stringent application process. But LinkedIn's own code has now been opened up so that developers can integrate it into their own sites. It's launched a developer site for those interested in features that let site users access their LinkedIn profile and contacts externally. They still have to request a key to get into the platform's application program interface (API), which means that LinkedIn widgets likely will not be coming to office prank-calling Web sites any time soon, despite that they could make it much easier to robo-call your boss and ask if his refrigerator is running.

One of the first participants, for example, is desktop Twitter client TweetDeck, which says that it will soon allow users to plug in their LinkedIn contacts' status updates alongside Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace contacts.

LinkedIn has about 50 million users as of last count.

Twitter's geolcation API in action.

(Credit: Twitter/Birdfeed)

Twitter has now launched the geotagging API, or application programming interface, that it announced in August.

Users now have the option to opt-in to geolocation by clicking a box in their settings menu, according to Twitter. For now, the company said, the impact of geotagging will be in third-party apps. Users won't see a difference to Twitter.com just yet.

Twitter contends that including a user's location when he or she tweets could significantly add to its microblogging service. The company wrote in a blog post that the new feature should allow users to "better focus in on local conversations."

Several third-party tools, including Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, and Twittelator Pro are already supporting geolocation, Twitter said. It should be interesting to see how other developers will incorporate location-based information into their apps.

Offerpal Media, one of the companies at the center of a bitter dispute over misleading advertisements on social networks, on Thursday launched a revised policy designed to "forbid any offers that are misleading, deceptive or otherwise objectionable."

Companies like Offerpal are enlisted by many of the big gaming companies built on social networks like Facebook; they help those companies make money by letting game players earn points and virtual goods by completing offers and surveys rather than paying real money.

They make a lot of money doing so. So do the game companies, like Zynga and Playfish (recently acquired by Electronic Arts), which in turn advertise heavily on the likes of Facebook to recruit new players.

But then the negative press started to emerge: many of these "free" offers and surveys actually had hidden costs attached to them that weren't adequately disclosed. Some companies like Zynga started backtracking and going so far as to ban offers altogether. Facebook and MySpace, the two biggest social-network platforms, made very public revisions to their policies. But the controversy continued, and both Facebook and Zynga were named as defendants in a federal class-action lawsuit.

Offerpal, which replaced its CEO amid the controversy, has now come out and said that while it's setting a basic standard for advertisement quality, game makers and publishers enlisting Offerpal's services can opt to be even more stringent. "Offerpal will rate all offers by quality and allow its partners to select a quality level of compliance ranging from 'Level 1' for minimal restrictions to 'Level 5' for highly conservative restrictions," a release explained.

Will the new restrictions keep angry bloggers and consumers--not to mention lawmakers--at bay? More importantly, are they going to amount to anything more than smoke and mirrors? We'll see.

YouTube might still reign supreme in online video, but the big surprise coming out of Nielsen's VideoCensus release on Thursday is that Facebook is now the world's third most popular place to view video online.

According to Nielsen's latest VideoCensus numbers, which look at the number of video views in October, YouTube serviced over 6.6 billion streams. In a distant second, Hulu offered up over 632 million video streams. But it was Facebook with over 217 million streams in October that easily beat out Bing, Yahoo, and several other online sites. In September, Facebook was ranked tenth in total streams.

In October, Facebook placed second in total number of unique viewers: over 31.5 million. YouTube had almost 106 million unique viewers during October. Hulu placed fifth with 13.4 million viewers.

According to Nielsen, the amount of time Web users spent viewing videos on social-networking sites increased 98 percent year over year. In October 2008, users watched 503.8 million minutes of video; they watched 999.4 million video minutes in October this year. That growth far outpaced growth in number of online video streams as a whole, which grew 26 percent year over year.

Facebook has moved its way up to third place.

(Credit: Nielsen)

"During the past year, online video viewing has become central to the Web experience," Nielsen Vice President of Media Analytics Jon Gibs said in a statement. "In conjunction with this increase, we are seeing remarkable growth in video viewing on social networking sites and it is only natural that these two trends would converge in consumers' minds, making sites like Facebook and Myspace.com, increasingly important distribution points for both consumer and professionally generated video."

But it was Facebook, not MySpace, that led the way in video streams on social-networking sites, nearly tripling MySpace's 85.2 million streams during October.

According to Nielsen, the "total time spent viewing video on Facebook" grew by 1,840 percent year over year. The number of unique viewers grew 548 percent over the same period. Total streams increased by 987 percent year over year.

"Facebook's rapid growth in online video during the last year illustrates the site's evolution from simply a communications focused tool to a media portal," Gibs said. "Social networking sites are evolving from a venue for catching up with friends to a platform for personal expression, allowing consumers to share their experiences in the full variety of content formats available online."

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced on Thursday that the familiar, "What are you doing?" tag line that has sat atop the service's status update box since its launch has been replaced with "What's happening?"

"Twitter was originally conceived as a mobile status update service," Stone explained on the company's blog. Therefore, Stone continued, it made sense for Twitter to make it easy for users to receive "short, frequent answers to one question, 'What are you doing?'"

But as Twitter grew, that question's importance waned. As Stone pointed out, "people, organizations, and businesses quickly began...ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, 'What's happening?'"

Realizing that, Stone said that Twitter has decided to ask users what's happening to reflect the real nature of tweets. It makes sense. While there might be those who still answer questions related to what they're doing, the vast majority of users are, as Stone pointed out, "witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more."

By changing Twitter's question to "What's Happening?", Stone doesn't expect anyone to use the site differently. But it is a major step for the company.

For years, "What are you doing?" has been a staple on Twitter as it grew from a niche community to a major social network. At the same time, Twitter's users have largely ignored it. And so, if Twitter insists on asking a question for users to answer in their status update box, maybe it really is appropriate for it to ask "What's happening?"

What do you think? Are you happy with Twitter's modification? Let us know in the comments below.

CheckMySite, a company that monitors uptime of Web sites, announced on Thursday that Twitter still has some serious performance issues.

CheckMySite continually monitored Twitter's uptime over the past 12 months and found that Twitter wasn't able to maintain an effective uptime rate during that period, though it did perform better in some months rather than others.

CheckMySite's report found that Twitter's best uptime between October 2008 through the end of October 2009, was in December 2008, when the site was up 99.97 percent of the time. During Twitter's worst month, August 2009, the its site was up just 99.15 percent of the time.

Without any comparison, Twitter's figures probably won't mean much. Realizing that, CheckMySite compared the social network's uptime to Facebook and MySpace. According to CheckMySite, both Facebook and MySpace "have an uptime of 100 percent, meaning there is virtually no occurrence of frustrated access among visitors."

"Any company that has an uptime statistic of less than 99.9 percent should definitely work to improve the situation," Andrew Stock, CheckMySite's international sales director said in a statement.

Twitter has suffered from uptime issues almost since its founding. For a while, it was so bad that some postulated that it could lead to the site's downfall. In recent months, Twitter's uptime seemed to improve, though it experienced a few snags along the way. Evidently, things haven't been as good as some thought.

Twitter did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Twitter might be a great way to communicate, but the default options for the profile background aren't all that nice. That said, the Twitter background is a fine way to promote your company, tell the world a little something about yourself, or to enhance the beauty of your profile.

Several tools across the Web let you find unique Twitter backgrounds. Some services are certainly better than others, but I've found a few that should satisfy your desire to improve your profile.

Spice up Twitter

FreeTwitterDesigner: If you're looking for an easy way to create a nice background for your Twitter profile, FreeTwitterDesigner will fit the bill.

When you get to the site, you'll need to decide if you want to log in with your Twitter account or use the site's tools as a guest. In either case, you can develop the background that you want. The site lets you start out with a blank slate or to change up some of the themes available on the site. If you choose to sign in as a guest, you'll need to download your background and upload it to Twitter. It's much easier to offer up your Twitter credentials, so the site can add it automatically when you're all set.

I liked FreeTwitterDesigner. It provided a simple, yet useful tool for creating a background. It's worth trying out.

FreeTwitterDesigner helps you create interesting themes.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Tweet Scenes: If you run a company that's concerned about how its social presence will be construed by clients, Tweet Scenes might be the kind of service you're looking for.

Rather than create a Twitter background yourself, Tweet Scenes' professional team of graphic artists will do it for you. In order to use Tweet Scenes, you need to upload an image, enter into a form what you want on the background, and submit it to the company. Within three days, Tweet Scenes delivers a design for you. It costs $109, which is a little costly, but if you're looking for a sophisticated, professional background, the site might be what you're looking for.

Tweet Scenes is designed for the professional user.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)