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Way back in December of last year, Facebook released its connections map. FlowingData.com recently released an inverse of the Facebook friendship map, showing where in the world people don't use the social network. Facebook has not been able to adequately penetrate the non-Western markets of China, Russia, South Korea and Japan.

Mobile device usage has spread across the globe. In terms of mobile penetration, the United States is actually on the lower end of the worldwide spectrum, with only 77% cellular device ownership. That seems counterintuitive to the way the U.S. views itself as the heart of mobile acceptance and innovation. It is China and other Asia-Pacific countries that really lead in mobile adoption.

Research firm Forrester released a study last week showing global mobile usage trends. In almost every mobile usage aspect, metropolitan China and other Pacific Rim countries lead the way. That includes mobile social usage, work usage and multiple device ownership. Mobile is near an inflection point, changing the way people interact with information around the globe.

Because several weeks have passed without a TWiOT update, I am making this one a straight-ahead digest, listing the latest piece of news first.

Egyptian blogger receives International Press Freedom Award. The Canadian Journalists for Free Expression awarded Mohamed Abdelfattah the award for his work coverage of Khaled Said, a young man who was brutally beaten and killed by Egyptian police officers in Alexandria in June of 2010.

Burma unblocks websites. The Burmese government unblocked international media sites as well as websites run by Burmese exiles.

American Web tech companies trying to gain a share of the massive Chinese market bend too easily to government authorities, who demand tighter censorship and self-policing on the Internet, say analysts in a new report.

Voluntary attempts to conform to government demands while maintaining the freedom of speech found in their originating culture, have proven unsuccessful for companies like Google, Cisco, Microsoft and Yahoo, who have made the push into China and other rigidly-policed tech environments. The analysts say the problem is getting worse.

Mobile Roadie, a self-service app development platform for brands and music, launched its system in a crowded but fragmented China platform ecosystem today.

The China mobile application market is characterized by confusion right now. Already-strong local players like Tencent have launched mobile app platforms to sell apps for Android and iOS. But those platforms depend on partnerships with companies in Europe and the United States.

Mobile Roadie is tearing up that formula. It's a Western company that's letting local developers make apps for themselves.

Everything's easier in China, even managing the end of your relationship. Users of the eBay-like site Taobao managed by Alibaba are making a killing on outsourcing their breakups to complete strangers in exchange for a little bit of dosh.

You met someone and thought it would turn into a great relationship, only to be disappointed later on by the harsh reality that they just are not that into you. Well, for a few yuan (eight yuan roughly equals a dollar), you can hire someone to be the emissary for this hardest of all social missives.

Twitter will support Chinese language in the coming weeks, according to a research report published today.

It's not clear how well that will help Chinese users in the mainland, since the service has been banned since 2009. It may not make much of a dent at all in Twitter's hopes to capture the hearts and minds of Chinese-language users of the microblogging platform.

Lashou.com could become China's first daily deals site to launch an IPO in the United States, pitting it against major challenger Groupon, according to a report by Bloomberg.

But the news could be all bluster and roadshow theatrics. The China-based site is also looking to replace Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the IPO-backing banks, the report said. Groupon recently pushed back its impending public market launch due to swings in the market.

With mobile tech, Siemens helps torture a new generation, this time in Bahrain. Siemens was instrumental in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there as they murdered millions of Jews, along with Gypsies, trade unionists, leftists, homosexuals and others. Serving as one of its engines of genocide, Siemens provided the German Reich with, among other things, slave labor factories located next to concentration camps. Apparently, Siemens thinks that it has been good enough for long enough and that this Internet thing has made a sense of history a thing of the past.

Bloomberg reports that Siemens AG and its joint venture, Nokia Siemens Networks, has made it possible for Bahraini secret police to intercept and generate transcripts of text messages and other mobile communications made by protesters in that country's troubled version of the Arab Spring.

If a tyranny bans a song, you want to believe the song will be a tower of power, a cry for freedom, a scream of defiance or a gob of spit in the face of God. Unfortunately, China's latest pop song blacklist puts paid to that idea.

In its supposed quest to bring "order" to the Internet music market, China has created a list of 100 songs that are now banned in that country. (Well, if history's any guide, it's less a quest for market order than for orthodoxy.) And man are they awful.