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Today, Google's Gmail service experienced a system-wide outage that affected regular Gmail accounts as well as enterprise users. In the course of the afternoon, the service came back up for a little while, but as of now, there are still a lot of users who can't access their accounts (Update: looks like Gmail is now up and running again). Google is updating users through a forum on Google Groups. A lot of frustrated Gmail users used Twitter to voice their grievances, which, surprisingly, handled this sudden spike in traffic extremely well.

This week we've discussed how Social Media Marketing and Online Video is being used in the Beijing Olympics. It's now 8.08am on Friday 8th August 2008 in Beijing and some Chinese Web fans have launched a campaign to celebrate and support the opening of the Beijing Olympics, using (you guessed it) Twitter!

Monitter is a browser based Twitter search engine that is a bit reminiscent of TweetDeck, the popular desktop Twitter client. One of Tweetdeck's most interesting features is that it can display a number of Twitter searches in parallel to each other, which is a great way of keeping track of a certain topic as it makes its way through Twitter. Monitter takes a similar approach and displays three constantly updated keyword searches parallel to each other in your browser.

Twitter Anti-Spam Bot Punishes Community Managers and Causes Follower Counts to Drop

Did you notice a big drop in your Twitter follower numbers yesterday? It seems that the Twitter team recently decided to step up their Twitter spammer detection, and, in typical Twitter fashion, their algorithm sent the service haywire, leading to yet another sighting of the Fail Whale while the issue was resolved. Meanwhile, Twitterers everywhere were in an uproar over their lost follower counts.

Yesterday, the big news for the identi.ca crowd was an answer to their wishes: Identi.ca is now supported in the AIR app Twhirl. Why is the support for this open-source Twitter clone so important? For one, it makes Identi.ca that much more of a useful service, but it also shows how quickly Twhirl can adapt to add the latest and greatest online communities to its service. More importantly though, Twhirl's support for Identi.ca means you can now tap into a full, real-time social stream all from one application.

Tapulous, the developers of the highly popular Tap Tap Revenge game for the iPhone and iPod touch, released a native, location aware Twitter client for the iPhone tonight. Twinkle (iTunes link) already existed as a native application on jail broken iPhones before, but Apple only added it to the official iTunes store tonight. While there are some oddities in the way Twinkle works, the location awareness makes it a worthwhile addition to the ever growing pool of Twitter clients.

Enterprise 2.0 is a rapidly growing trend that takes the concepts and tools of social media (social networking, RSS, wikis, blogs, etc.) and re-purposes them for business use, wrapping them up into applications that make the tools at work seem more like the tools we use in our day-to-day lives. While these enterprise 2.0 apps give us that web 2.0 feel, it's rarer to see actual Web 2.0 services like Facebook or Twitter used by businesses. And although we've seen many people promoting the business use of Twitter, we had not yet heard about anyone actually going so far as to integrate Twitter into a non-consumer focused application. However, that's just what Joint Contact has done. Their PM tool now shows how tweeting can actually be a productive activity.

Since Twitter's introduction into the tech community at SxSW, Twitter has gone through a ton of ups and downs. Twitter's downtime has been the talk of the community for several months now. Now, with a lot of heavy hitters on the team, Twitter seems to be on the right track getting its act together.

The Paris-based Twitter search engine and meme tracker Twitscoop rolled out a live tag cloud for Twitter today. While a tag cloud was always a major part of Twitscoop's design, having it update in real-time makes it a lot more interesting to follow. Twitscoop is also a very capable Twitter search engine that can hold its own against Summize.

Micro-blogging darling Twitter and the charming aggregation site FriendFeed are missing one huge thing that most users don't mind overlooking: profiles. While, it really isn't a big deal profiles can be helpful when determining whether or not to add someone as a friend. So if you've been missing those features, here's a way to add a profile to FriendFeed and extend your Twitter profile.