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When Twitter users go to post a new tweet, they have in the past used a button that says "update" (at least from Twitter.com…that varies when you get into all the different apps Twitter users use). Now, that button says "Tweet".

We’re not sure exactly when the change was made, but it appears to have been very recently, as there is quite an outpour of Tweets from users mentioning that they are now seeing the "tweet" button. Perhaps this is Twitter way of asserting some kind of ownership of the word and the brand that it carries.

Twitter made "retweeting" an official feature last year, after the community-born practice grew to mainstream use.

Interestingly, Retweet.com just sold for $250,000 this week.

The tweet button isn’t the only new thing going on with Twitter’s website this week. Twitter is currently in the process of rolling out geolocation features on the site, after having had such capabilities available via the API since November.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams will be speaking at SXSW early next week (WebProNews will be there covering it). We may get more interesting news from the company there (some expect an ad platform to be announced).

Update: Looks like some have noticed this for at least a couple days.

Last fall, Twitter started including geolocation information in its API, but it was not available through Twitter.com. That appears to be in the process of changing now.

This week, Twitter has been rolling out (it appears to still be in the process) geolocation info on tweets at Twitter.com. Various reports from users have been circulating, with those who have access to the feature pointing to a little blue icon by the tweet source on individual tweets, which when clicked, shows location information on a Map (powered by Google Maps).

The feature (as most new Twitter features do) is already receiving some criticism from users who have access to it. For example, Kim-Mai Cutler with VentureBeat says Twitter’s geotagging is "far from what Twitter needs to be a real player in location."

Cutler adds, "First, the new maps feature isn’t turned on for Twitter’s search results. The whole point of location-based search is to be able to find what’s actually happening around you right now. Instead, Twitter tosses a few such tweets into a wash of noise…"

Earlier this week, news of Facebook readying location features surfaced. The company is expected to launch something along these lines at its f8 conference in May. Location players getting the most buzz currently are Gowalla and Foursquare. They you have Google, of course. This may be the most interesting space to watch as the year progresses. It will be quite interesting to see how mainstream location sharing becomes when it comes to consumers.

Are you seeing the geolocation information showing up at Twitter.com? Do you intend to share your location when tweeting?

Over the years, there have been more than a few arguments about whether online news sites are killing newspapers.  Now, due to some almost startling comments made by the president of CNN, it looks like the next round of old media-new media disputes might concern social networks and cable news organizations.

According to the AFP, Jonathan Klein’s remarks on this subject were in no way ambiguous.  He said at Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s 2010 Media Summit New York, "The competition I’m really afraid of are social networking sites.  That’s an alternative that threatens to pull people away from us."

Klein then explained, "The people you’re friends with on Facebook or the people you follow on Twitter are trusted sources of information. . . .  Well, we want to be the most trusted name in news.  We don’t want the 1,000 people you follow in Twitter to be the most trusted sources for you. . . .  So I’m far more worried about the 500 million people on Facebook than I am about two million people watching Fox."

That’s an interesting take on the power of social networks.  It implies – at the very least – that CNN anchors are going to spend a whole lot more time referencing Facebook and Twitter from now on.  An ad campaign and new apps could follow, too.

On a broader scale, Klein seems to be saying that social networks’ users can easily – even unwittingly – make or break major corporations.

Clicking on links that different people send can often be a cross-your-fingers experience, considering that there are malicious tricksters, unknowing victims, and hijacked accounts to watch out for.  So Twitter’s attempting to make the experience less dangerous by checking (and sometimes rewriting) the links found in direct messages and email notifications.

Del Harvey, Director of Trust and Safety at Twitter, explained on the official corporate blog, "[W]e’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."

Harvey later continued, "For the most part, you will not notice this feature because it works behind the scenes but you may notice links shortened to twt.tl in Direct Messages and email notifications."

This move is bound to ruffle a few users’ feathers – changing the text in private messages is a sort of bold step – but on the whole, it should prove welcome enough.  A safe environment is in just about everybody’s best interests, from regular users to marketers to Twitter itself.

Let’s just hope the new feature works well and doesn’t create a false sense of security.

I have once shared a few ways to check Twitter comments about any page but what if we need to keep an eye on all Tweets around some domain? All the three tools listed here have three things in common: (1) They will list all the aggregated Twitter updates related to the domain (home page + all Tweeted subpages);(2) They…

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

3 Ways to Find Tweets Around Any Domain

Facebook and Twitter access via mobile browsers has grown by triple-digits in the past year, according to the latest research from comScore.

More than a quarter (30.8%) of smartphone users accessed social networking sites via their mobile browser in January, up 8.3 points from 22.5 percent one year ago.  Access to Facebook via mobile browser climbed 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter soared 347 percent.

"Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web," said Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president of mobile.

"Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the center of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser."

In January, 11.1 percent of all mobile phone users accessed a social networking site via mobile browser, an increase of 4.6 percentage points from the previous year. Much of the growth is due to smartphone owners accessing social networking sites on their mobile browsers. Just 6.8 percent of feature phone users accessed social networking sites on their mobile phones.

Access to the most popular social networking sites via mobile browser continues to see significant growth.  In January, 25. 1 million mobile users accessed Facebook, up 112 percent from the previous year.  MySpace attracted 11.4 million users about half that of Facebook during the month.

Facebook’s mobile browser audience surpassed MySpace in February 2009, three months earlier than the Facebook audience climbed past that of MySpace on the PC-based Internet in May 2009.

Twitter, which has experienced solid growth in both mobile and PC-based visitation, attracted 4.7 million mobile users in January, up 347 percent over the previous year.

Twitter is expected to launch an ad platform this month (some have speculated this will happen at SXSW). While this hasn’t been confirmed, the industry has been waiting for quite some time to Twitter to launch such a monetization model.

That’s not to say the industry has been sitting on its hands as it’s waited. Third-parties have taken it upon themselves to offer services for Twitter, that Twitter itself doesn’t offer. That includes apps of course, but it also includes Twitter ads. 140 Proof is one such company, and it calls itself the "first scalable ad solution built exclusively for Twitter."

"The Proof network aggregates the Twitter client and application ecosystem (roughly 100+ million Twitters users) and then segments users into a dynamic audience that advertisers can buy the same way they buy keyword advertising," a representative for the company tells WebProNews. "Advertisers are excited to final have a mechanism for extended their conversations on the Twitter social network and the Twitter ecosystem is eager to have a targeted, non-obtrusive advertising solution that allows them to monetize their applications while still respecting  the ethos of the Twitter community."

The 140 Proof Network features hundreds of advertisers, who the company says are reaching their target markets on Twitter. "Some are large well know brand names that everyone is familiar with and some are small businesses that are trying build their presence on Twitter or advertise in a very local or targeted manner," the rep says.

We asked the company if they think Twitter’s ad platform has a chance to damage businesses like theirs and others that have been making a business based on sponsored tweeting (Sponsored Tweets from Izea comes to mind).

"We welcome Twitter to the advertising world," the rep tell us. "Clearly we think that their entrance in the marketplace is a great validation of what we are doing, but we also believe that the market is large enough to support many major players. Further, we feel that our experienced advertising and engineering team, our advantage of being fully operational for months, and our patented, proprietary technology will give us an advantage over all competitors."

Quite a display of confidence from 140 Proof – an advantage over Twitter at Twitter ads? What do you think?

Each month, we look at Twitter’s growth based on total tweets and new user registrations. This data is supplied by Matthew Daines, the lead developer for our own Twitter app Twellow.

In February, the number of new registrations fell, compared to the previous month, and tweeting in general rose, but the growth in the amount of tweeting slowed. "New registrations are down for February by 12.2%. Total tweets for the month rose slightly over January at 7.4%, the slowest pace since August," says Daines. "Tweets per user registration remained almost constant, dropping only 8 tenths of 1 percent."

"I did run a survey last month of 9,995 random Twitter IDs and found an estimated 20% of accounts were listed as suspended or not found, so actual registered user numbers probably run at about 80% of the numbers shown, which would be 94.8 million for February," he notes. "Tweets per user registration would be about 20% higher, which would be 14 for February."

Daines notes that he had to make slight adjustments to the past two months. "I had to revise the tweet numbers for December and January down due to a flaw in my calculations for those two months, but the tweets were still up by 16% and 19% for each month respectively."

This month Twitter is expected to launch an advertising platform, and it should be interesting to see the numbers after that. Twitter is also rumored to be readying some new features that have previously only been available via third-party apps.

The Internet is now the third most-popular news platform, behind local and national television news and ahead of national print newspapers, local print newspapers and radio, according to a new survey out today.

The survey of 2,259 U.S. adults, conducted jointly by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the Project for Excellence in Journalism, found 59 percent of respondents gets news from a combination of online and offline sources on a typical day.

The Internet and mobile technologies are at the center of how people’s relationship to news is changing. One-third (33%) of cell phone owners now access news on their mobile phones and more than a quarter (28%) of Internet users have customized their homepage to include news from sources and topics that are of interest to them.

Nearly forty percent (37%) of Internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or shared it via postings on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

In addition, people use their social networks to filter, assess, and react to news. They use traditional email and other tools to exchange stories and comment on them.  Among those who get news online, 75 percent get news forwarded through email or posts on social networking sites and 52 percent share links to news the same way.

The survey also found the typical online news consumer routinely uses just a handful of news sites and does not have a particular favorite. Overall, Americans have mixed feelings about this "new" news environment. Over half (55%) say it is easier to keep up with news and information today than it was five years ago, but 70 percent feel the amount of news and information available from different sources is overwhelming.

"Americans have become news grazers both on and offline – but within limits," said Amy Mitchell, deputy director for the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

"They generally don’t have one favorite website but also don’t search aimlessly. Most online news consumers regularly draw on just a handful of different sites."

Twitter engineer Alex Payne tweeted over the weekend, "If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)" Some took that to mean that Twitter was working on some new features for its own site, that would essentially render some popular third-party clients all but obsolete. The question is whether this is a legitimate concern for developers, or it has just been blown out of proportion. It could possibly be a combination of the two.

Technology blog TechCrunch took the tweet and ran with it, speculating that Twitter "appears to be on the verge of some big changes," and noting that the company recently hired a new "UI guru" (that’s User Interface) from LinkedIn. Following this story, Payne quickly reacted through his Twitter account, downplaying the threat to third-party developers, saying things like, "I just mean that our web client team is building cool stuff. It’s going to inspire desktop app developers. Same data, new perspectives," and "It’s all stuff that’s available in the API, just a different view of it." He also retweeted more than one tweet mocking TechCrunch’s reaction, such as this one from another Twitter employee:

Still, TechCrunch’s MG Siegler may not be completely off base. Just because Twitter isn’t taking anything away from developers, doesn’t necessarily mean that users of certain third-party apps won’t just as soon use Twitter.com instead, when the features they enjoy start being integrated there. If nothing else, such features could keep new users from worrying about looking for apps that do these things, because their needs will already be filled.

That’s not to say Twitter would be wrong for doing so. User retention has been a problem for the company in the past, and anything that makes Twitter more usable has to be good for usage. Twitter is expected to announce its new ad platform/monetization model this month (finally), and while nobody knows exactly how that’s going to shake out yet, it’s likely in Twitter’s best interest to have users going through Twitter itself.

Twitter has not been shy in the past about taking ideas that were born from the community, and integrating them into Twitter.com (the retweet feature comes to mind). The much larger Facebook has certainly been happy to borrow ideas from Twitter, so if Twitter wants to secure a stable future in this social networking/microblogging space, it is going to help if it looks at the ways users use the service through third-party apps, and utilizes some of these functionalities on its own.

As far as the developers are concerned, the more ideas Twitter takes for itself, the more innovating developers are going to have to do to keep their own apps relevant, and that can only be good for the Twitter community at large.

On a sidenote, Payne’s original tweet on the matter appears to have been deleted (the URL linked to by Siegler, now goes to a "sorry that page doesn’t exist!" page).