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It's been a while since we last reported on Twitter. The service hasn't been experiencing any of its previous turbulence and has begun to shed its spotty reputation for service uptime. While the site's reliability has improved, one functionality has remained on the "things that are broken on Twitter" list: IM. Previously IM functionality was spotty at best, but folks like Robert Scoble found this feature to be one of the best ways to manage Twitter. Tonight the company has taken the time to clear things up about the status and future of IM functionality on Twitter.

During the Olympics, Microsoft's Silverlight technology was installed on over 20 million computers. Oprah uses Silverlight and Microsoft has partnered with HP to have Silverlight shipped on HP computers in the future. Microsoft seemed dedicated to spreading Silverlight 1 as far as possible this year.

Now rumors are swirling that Microsoft may be ready to release Silverlight 2 as early as next Monday.

With all the talk of the financial turmoil that the U.S. economy is experiencing, some industries are hoping that they can escape the heat unscathed. In fact, a small portion of the tech industry practically bragged that they wouldn't encounter the same damage as Wall Street by attempting to recruit jobless stock brokers for their start-ups. This week may have put the tech industry on alert with the rest of the U.S. as two relatively high profile tech companies made grand changes to their staff.

It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the product side this week, Google said it would provide RSS feeds of search results, Yahoo updated its calendar app using Zimbra, Mozilla released Geode, Microsoft integrated its Live search into Facebook, and more. On the trends side, we looked at Google stats from recent political debates, investigated the trend of social shopping, and explored the latest in the Mobile Web world - including a RWW Live podcast on the topic, plus an in-depth look at mobile social networks. We also brought you the latest from our new Enterprise Channel.

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ChunkIt is a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer that wants to help you speed up your online research. To do so, ChunkIt preloads and searches through all the links on a given page and displays the search results in a large sidebar on the left side of your browser window.

The idea behind ChunkIt is that this will help you get to relevant search results faster, as you get to see your search terms within their context and not just in a short excerpt on a search engine.

Upcoming.org founder Andy Baio and Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter have released a project called Memeorandum Colors. It's an easy-to-install Greasemonkey plug-in that shows the political bias of past linking behavior on blogs aggregated by Memeorandum, the political sister-site of tech aggregator Techmeme.

In this heated election season, Memeorandum is a huge asset for following politics online, but it's hard for the casual observer to get the most out of the conversation by merely visiting the site. Memeorandum Colors adds a whole new layer of clarity and sophistication to the site by color-coding algorithmically categorized liberal and conservative blogs.

In downturns there is a "flight to safety". Typically you would put Venture Capital (VC) at the risky end, with something like a Money Market Fund at the safe end. Well today even the safest stuff is looking scary, thanks to the games that the financial engineers have been playing. So maybe investing in a real business that disrupts the old order with a fundamentally new value proposition is actually the safest thing to do. That is "Real Venture Capital (RVC)". But RVC is very, very different from "Momentum Venture Capital" (MVC). MVC is under a significant threat.

Social networking platform Ning announced support for the OpenSocial standard today. Thanks to this, developers can now easily create applications for the Ning platform. At this time, Ning already features 30 applications that users can embed into their profile pages, including support for file sharing with Box.net and poll creation from Polldaddy. One of the highlights of Ning's implementation of OpenSocial is that the widgets automatically adapt themselves to the branding and design of the individual networks.

Admit it. You don't always read the EULAs when you install software on your computer. You just click "I Agree." The same goes for the web. Most of us don't read the privacy policies that accompany our favorite web sites and services (myself included, apparently). But our failure to do so has some researchers suggesting that it's time the Federal Government got involved. According to these researchers, today's privacy policies are long and hard to read. Instead, they think it may be time for the FTC to step in and read the privacy policies for us.