Twitter, the micro-blogging platform, has been in the news quite a bit lately (in particular for VC funding and rescuing a US blogger). This has helped drive US Internet visits up further to the increasingly popular service. Year on year, Internet visits to Twitter.com are up 8 fold. In the past three months, visits have more than doubled and traffic continues to climb, up 60% in the past month.

San Francisco - Twitter, the microblogging service that limits posts to 140 characters, has raised "either $15 million or $20 million" in new funding from undisclosed investors, a source familiar with the deal tells CNET News.com.

Facebook has had an update feature similar to Twitter for a while. Now Facebook has a feature that lets users add feeds from other web services like Flickr and del.icio.us — just like FriendFeed. From a technology perspective, Twitter and FriendFeed are now reducable to Facebook features. Even if those two apps are currently more robust than their equivalent Facebook features, there’s nothing to stop Facebook from copying them in their entirety.

San Mateo, Calif. - Qik, a platform for streaming live video via mobile phones, announced this week that it has raised a $3 million second round of venture capital financing.

San Francisco - Seesmic, a provider of webcam video distribution services, announced on Friday that it has acquired Twhirl, an application that connects with Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and other "microblogging" services.

If last year's SXSW was Twitter's coming out party, this year it achieved utility status. A utility is something that is always on, and essential. To lose it would be to thrust yourself into the dark ages. Water, electricity, gas ... and Twitter. Sound like an exaggeration? Not for anyone who has spent the last few days watching the incessant live twittering at SXSW. Because not every reader is as tricked out in extreme geekdom as those at SXSW, here's a brief description of Twitter:

For those who are fans of Guy Kawasaki, there is a phenomenon he is fond of calling "Guy's golden touch." It is his own trademark reversal of a well known saying, where he likes to note that "everything that turns to gold is what Guy touches." One site that is definitely gold right now is Twitter, riding a wave since it's popularity at SXSW last year, the site steadily seems to be getting more and more users.

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Marlow, England - SpinVox on Thursday announced the launch of a new service that allows users to post content to their Facebook profiles, as well as on blogging services Jaiku and Twitter, via mobile phones through its voice-powered service. Using U.K.-based SpinVox's service, speech is automatically converted to text and posted on the respective sites.

A few weeks ago Chris Brogan published a list of the 100 blog topics that he wished people would cover. One of them was, "How Twitter Improved My Blog," and I accepted the challenge to write something along these lines. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with Twitter, you can read "The Tao of Twitter," "Newbies Guide to Twitter," or "Ode to Twitter.") Here is my answer to Chris's request.

On the surface, capturing what you are doing on daily, hourly or even minutely (double meaning intended) basis seems like a useless activity.  Who has the time to send these incessant "tweets" all day long?  As it turns out, lots of smart folks with respectable jobs, but that's besides the point.  Driven by Mark Simon's dismissal of Twitter and my hectic travel schedule of 5 cities in 5 days last week, I decided to give Twitter a real test run and become an active user of my dormant account I created several months ago but never really used. 

Ok, maybe not so great - but over the next week I am going to become an active Twitter user.  I have not been a huge user of Twitter, though I have written before about seeing the potential for using it for marketing.  Recently, there have been several other folks also speaking out about how it could be useful for marketing - some in response to Mark Simon's recent article in AdAge calling Twitter "asinine." 

San Francisco - Twitter, a social networking and blogging service that uses mobile phones, instant messaging and e-mail, said that it has raised an undisclosed sum in funding, from Union Square Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and angel investors including Marc Andreessen, Dick Costolo, Ron Conway and Naval Ravikant.

New York - Podcast aggregation site Odeo announced on Thursday that its assets have been acquired by SonicMountain, a provider of digital media hosting and search services.

Since around the time of SxSW and perhaps earlier, the buzz on Twitter has gone through the roof.  Collecting groups of text messages and emails from people cataloguing "what they are doing now" might seem like a colossal waste of time, but it has found a devoted following from bloggers and those actively engaged in social media because of the immediacy and real time appeal of sharing your thoughts. 

San Francisco - Obvious Inc. announced that it has put its audio podcast aggregation site Odeo up for sale, so that it may focus more on Twitter, its social networking start-up.