ReadWriteWeb

Twitter has announced its long-awaited Web analytics dashboard. At last, website owners will be able to clearly see how Twitter drives attention to their content. The Twitter Web Analytics panel shows how content is shared across Twitter, how much traffic Twitter refers, and how much engagement a site generates with the integrated tweet button.

"Twitter Web Analytics will be rolled out this week to a small pilot group of partners, and will be made available to all website owners within the next few weeks," the announcement says. "We're also committed to releasing a Twitter Web Analytics API for developers interested in incorporating Twitter data in their products." Just like Google Analytics, Twitter's dashboard will be free for publishers.

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.

Today Socialcast has announced the beta of Strides, its first big launch since VMware acquired them earlier this summer. Just connecting everyone on an internal social network isn't enough - everyone has to actually use the network for their work activities. And Strides is bringing a lightweight Web 2.0 form of project management, layering it on top of the social networking tool.

Our original WikiLeaks timeline, including every story we had written about the organization, spanned a period of almost three years, from February 18, 2008 to December 29, 2010. It listed almost 70 posts.

The WikiLeaks story has yet to end, despite the fact that some have theorized it soon will. So here is a second part to the timeline, covering all the stories from December 30 of last year down to the present.

There are now 100 million people actively using Twitter, the company announced today.

If this news sounds vaguely familiar, it's because the five-year-old microblogging service reached 100 million user accounts awhile ago. These new numbers refer to active users, which CEO Dick Costolo defines as people that sign into Twitter and use the site at least once a month.

Engineers at Twitter are busy plugging away at the microblogging service's latest outage, which appears to be preventing many users from seeing replies and mentions from others.

Twitter's support team confirmed the issue at 11:42am EST, but have not updated since, leaving many users frustrated and unsure of why they can't see replies. Among the flustered is American actress Felicia Day, whose tweet about the outage garnered a number of replies that she, ironically enough, cannot see.

It's time for the US Open tennis tournament and inside the players' lounge, there's an ominous sign posted by the event's Tennis Integrity Unit warning of the dangers posed by Twitter.

Snapped quickly and posted online by CNBC sports business reporter Darren Rovell, the posted sign and policy are an amusing reminder of what happens when the exciting world of social networking and the exciting world of tennis come together under the watchful eye of people who could care less about the Twitter part. There are many, many things that could be done with Twitter to make the tournament even more engaging. No doubt some of those things will be done. But the Tennis Integrity Unit would like to warn you, players, about what not to do. Check out the sign below.

Bit.ly, the URL shortener and analytics service from New York incubator Betaworks, has developed a software developers kit (SDK) that leverages the forthcoming deep Twitter integration in iOS5. The SDK will enable app developers to automatically share links on Twitter using branded URLs. ReadWriteWeb, for example, shares short links on Twitter automatically using rww.to. Employing the Bit.ly SDK our iPhone app will automatically do the same with the new Twitter iOS features.

The SDK is only available to developers who have signed an NDA with Apple, but it's available to check out on request. It's enough to make a person wonder what other kinds of APIs and SDKs will be built on top of the new Twitter features in iOS5. Twitter is a great platform, but there's no reason to believe that multiple layers of platforms will be placed on top of iOS, Twitter, location data, URL shorteners and more.

If you want to build a vibrant and successful Facebook community for your business, it might pay to take a moment and look at Praetorian Group's FireRescue1 page here. Praetorian is the publishing arm for the trade associations that represent public safety workers. Clearly, their social media strategies are on fire. But the reasons for their popularity and reach of their Facebook and Twitter sites are so simple, you won't need to summon an EMS to implement them in your shop.

The recently-departed co-founders of Twitter - Ev Williams, Biz Stone and Jason Goldman - now working together again under the old Obvious Corporation name, announced their latest product today, a stealth alpha app called Lift. It's described as a way to help users achieve their goals through positive reinforcement.

It sounds like Twitter in its simplicity and from what I've seen it looks a lot like Twitter too, but with more structure. What's called Lift today was apparently called Mibbles just weeks ago and was described then as "a very simple tracking and encouragement tool." GetMibbles.com now redirects to Lift.do. What was Mibbles all about? Lift has disclosed almost no details about how it works, but you can find a number of hints about it if you look at the previous iteration of the project. It looks like a really interesting idea, too. (Lots of other coverage of corporate background etc. is here.)