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There were reports of widespread outages of Twitter's main Web site Saturday, with speculation centering on the problems stemming from a flood of New Year's greetings.

We asked Twitter for comment and will update as soon as we hear back. "Our engineers have identified the issue and Twitter is now almost fully recovered," Twitter spokesperson Carolyn Penner said in an email at 4:30 p.m. ET Saturday.

By 2:50 p.m. ET, MSNBC was reporting that the site was "slowly coming back online" and there seemed to be few problems with accessing the site and posting messages by 4:15 p.m. ET. The only official indication from Twitter that something was amiss came Saturday morning, when the company posted "Users may currently be experiencing some site issues; our engineers are working on resolving this issue" on its status microblog.

If the site goes down again -- particularly as you hope to send out your New Year's tweets as the calendar turns in your part of the world -- try using an app or the mobile site. Some users reported success posting messages using clients like HootSuite, TweetCaster and Twitter's own TweetDeck during the earlier outage.

Social media, types of media where everyday people can publish and subscribe to what one another publishes, have changed the world. At least in the United States, though, their rapid expansion through acquisition of new users may be over.

Facebook specialist Eric Eldon published a compilation of statistics from around the web this week on TechCrunch that pointed towards US and Canadian market saturation this past year for Facebook. Surely Facebook represents the forward line of all social media. Academic and tech industry analyst Vivek Wadhwa posted a set of predictions for 2012 in the Washington Post last night, starting with a prediction that the period of rapid growth for social media is over. In the future it will be a feature, not a product, he argues. To startups and investors, Wadha says "It's time to jump on the next bandwagon, folks."

Burning Man is, in some ways, a virtual world. It's not unlike Second Life: a flat, empty plane onto which creator/participants build a temporary society however they can, making every decision into a work of art. Indeed, Second Life founder Philip Rosedale is a longtime Burner himself, and the Burning Man organization now holds an official event there. But there are also stark differences. Burning Man's principles emphasize participation, immediacy and face-to-face encounters. Plus, it's an awfully dusty place to bring your iPad.

Waiting for a Google Plus invite? Google is rolling out the service in waves and you can expect it to become a ubiquitous social option in the coming months. We have been playing with the service since getting invites yesterday and there are a lot of things to like about Google's new social initiative.

Unlike Google's last big invite-only rollout of a social initiative - Google Wave - users will not be confounded on just what the heck you are supposed to do with the service when signing up for the first time. From Friendster, Friendfeed, MySpace and Facebook, users are familiar with how a social platform is theoretically supposed to look. At its core level, Plus is not that much different. Yet, there is so much more. How do you get started with Google Plus? Let's break down the nuts and bolts.

Computers keep getting closer and closer to making people obsolete. The latest step towards human obsolescence? Dropbox Automator, a Web-based tool for setting up actions that happen as soon as you put a file in a Dropbox folder. It’s not flawless just yet, but it might provide a useful service for many Dropbox users.

The service is powered by Wappwolf, an online “action store” that features a set of Web actions that can process files. For example, it has ready made actions to encrypt and decrypt files, extract text from PDFs, convert documents to PDF, generate QR codes and manipulate images.

We all know that cyberspace can be a nasty place, but a new study from Bitdefender shows exactly how easy it is to compromise personal information across social media. The study found 100 people at random that fit into two categories - professional IT security workers and hackers - and used a phony social media account to gain each individual's trust over a period of weeks. Sadly, both groups gave out all sorts of information, including their password strategies, mother's maiden names, family details and address.

The answer is to moderate our use of and dependence on social media, especially Facebook.

Frictionless sharing, the act of passively notifying social media of all manner of activity, scares the hell out of me. Not just because of the obvious privacy implications. Frictionless sharing turns up the volume on useless information and simultaneously threatens user privacy and control of online identity. Not only is Facebook becoming too central to our online discourse, it's becoming too crapified to even be useful. We have a social media problem, and the time to turn back is now. And the answer isn't regulating Facebook.

An intern once asked me, what's the difference between a "journalist" of my day and a "blogger" of his? I laughed and told him my day ain't over yet. Then I followed up by saying that journalism is something I do on a blog, and there are many other things one can do on a blog, only a few of which I'll allow.

The thing journalists still do today is extract and present the viewpoints of people who matter more to the business they cover than the journalists themselves. Here now in living color are a handful of the most revealing, poignant, and on occasion, truthful statements made to ReadWriteWeb journalists in the year about to pass.

At the end of this discourse, to borrow a phrase from my hero, Edward R. Murrow, a few people may accuse this reporter of fouling his own comfortable nest. But if you've seen this nest recently, you know that if it was fouled to any considerable degree, it might not look all that different anyway.

At one of Microsoft's sessions on HTML5 and CSS3 a few weeks ago, the lead program manager for Internet Explorer 10, John Hrvatin, was introducing Web developers to the basic concepts of layout. These were folks who held up their hands to show they've built Web sites for a decade or more. And for many of them, this was the first experience they ever had in considering the following elements: Column flow. White space. Gutter adjustment. Pagination. Visibility at a distance. Symmetry.

Over the past week I read Kevin Kelly's latest book, What Technology Wants. It's a highly ambitious and expansive book, which looks at technology from an evolutionary perspective. Over 350 pages, Kelly outlines and explores technology as a living system, akin to humanity's biological evolution. The title alludes to this - 'What Technology Wants,' as if technology is a living, breathing thing.

Kelly's book is a must read for technologists and anybody interested in the future of the Web. In this post I'll explore a few of the main themes of the book, in particular as they relate to the evolving Web. (there won't be any spoilers, for those of you in the middle of reading it or if you haven't yet read it!) Two of the main themes are how technology will evolve and how we - humanity - can guide it and make the best use of it.