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One year ago this month, the best iPhone app for finding out what's happening around the world, fast, launched to the public. Breaking News Online (BNO), the incredible team lead by Dutch then-teenager Michael van Poppel and funded by revenue from van Poppel's bizzarre sale of an Osama Bin Laden video to mainstream media outlets, built the sophisticated app to deliver push-notification alerts of breaking news with Iowa based development shop BitMethod.

The app was a favorite of news-junkies and reporters around the world. Even members of the RedCross said they used it to find out about natural disasters before any other channel alerted them. Then in November, Breaking News announced that it had sold control over its wildly popular Twitter account to MSNBC. Today the organization announced that its iPhone app will be shuttered. BNO will now sell access to its news exclusively to the corporate media clients it had originally disrupted with its innovative nearly-free service to consumers.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that BreakingNews.com was opperated by the same people who started the @breakingnews Twitter account.

MSNBC announced this morning that it is buying the BreakingNews.com URL from a company called PV Media Group. This follows November's purchase of @breakingnews and its 1.4 million followers. The two companies were not connected before MSNBC's acquisitions of their various projects.

When we profiled @breakingnews founder Michael van Poppel in July, the company was just about to release its iPhone app and had over 800,000 followers on Twitter. That number is now over 1.5 million.

BNO News, the news wire service famous for publishing breaking news stories through its @BreakingNews Twitter feed, just announced that it plans to launch a new news wire service early next year. In order to focus on this project, the BNO team will hand over the management of the @BreakingNews feed to MSNBC.com. According to BNO News, MSNBC will provide 24/7 breaking news headlines via BNO's Twitter feed, which will include updates from the new BNO wire service and other news organizations.

MSNBC.com just announced that it has acquired EveryBlock, a 'hyperlocal' news and information site that has been publishing and aggregating data and news stories for 16 American cities for the last two years. EveryBlock aggregates local news stories, but it also makes publicly available information like data about restaurant inspections and crimes available in an easy to read format. EveryBlock had been funded by a two-year grant from the Knight Foundation. This is MSNBC.com's second major acquisition, having bought the social news site Newsvine in October 2007.