Twitter has launched a Lists feature for all users. This feature was available on TweetDeck for quite a bit of time but Twitter has rolled it into their own service. Twitter user Nick Kallen confirmed the news in a tweet. The service was only available to a set number of users but expanded to everyone today.

Not only can you create your own list, but you can also find out what lists you are on for different users. List descriptions will be added in the next few weeks according to TechCrunch.

This is good news for those who update Twitter from the web and log in regularly. Personally I stick to using TweetDeck for updating Twitter so I’m not sure how much I’ll use the Lists feature. But it is still an awesome feature to have nonetheless.

HTC sent out a tweet about 18 hours ago that said “The rumors are true! Hero will be getting an Eclair update. We ask for your patience as we update Sense for the fancy new Android OS.” Eclair is the code name for the second version of the Google mobile operating system.

Some of the new Android 2.0 features include:
- Multiple email and contact accounts (including Microsoft Exchange).
- Combined inbox for browing multiple e-mail accounts on one page.
- Search functions for SMS and MMS messages
- Auto delete old messages when limits are reached.
- Digital zoom, scene mode, white balance, color effects, and macro focus for photos
- Multi-touch keyboard support
- Smart dictionary that learns word usage and suggests even contact names
- Thumbnails of web pages in the bookmarks section of the browser
- Double-tap zoom support
- HTML 5 support

Josh Elman was the former platform manager at Facebook. But now Elman is joining another California based social networking slash micro-blogging firm Twitter.com. Elman is joining Twitter at a time where the micro-blogging company is receiving a lot of interest from third party developers.

TweetDeck is one of the most used Adobe AIR applications and Tweetie is one of the most downloaded applications on the iPhone. When Elman worked at Facebook, he was responsible for Facebook Connect. Elman was also responsible for cleaning up the design of the social network after applications made Facebook look very cluttered.

Elman has also previously worked for LinkedIn, Zazzle, and RealNetworks. Louis Gray broke the news of Elman’s hire after spotting the Twitter official list of employees. Twitter has about 113 employees.

Earlier this month Twitter made a deal with Bharti Airtel. Airtel is one of the biggest telecommunications companies in India with about 100 million subscribers. The company launched an SMS service where users in India can update their tweets from mobile phones. The SMS tweets are a free additional service which inevitably will increase the popularity of Twitter in the Asian subcontinent. In order to promote the new service, Airtel is airing three new commercials that lets their customers know about the service. After the jump are the three commercials:

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Last night I was sitting at the Good Time Charley’s bar watching the Michigan State vs. Iowa University football game in Ann Arbor, Michigan. All of a sudden I notice that a large crowd started gathering outside of the bar. When I walked out I saw smoke and fire spewing from the top of a building about one block down from where everyone was standing. The roof, the roof, the roof was on fire of a building that used to be known as Pinball Pete’s.

While the firefighters were battling the heat, students were busy taking pictures and updating their Twitter accounts. A couple of people next to me sent out some TwitPics immediately. Shortly after the pictures were taken, a video was uploaded on YouTube [embedded above] and Flickr user moto1986 uploaded a stream of pictures from the event.

When I was standing there watching all of the students sending out tweets and updating Facebook statuses while the firefighters were battling the fire, I couldn’t help but think about how far technology has brought us. Just imagine if this event took place about 10 years ago. Our friends would rely on how well we could describe the fire rather than having the ability to see our pictures on Twitter and our videos on YouTube.

Some of the tweets that were sent out are displayed below [click the image to enlarge]:

[Photo credit: Emma Bumstead]

[Photo credit: Kristen Oltersdorf]

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has made a deal with Twitter and Facebook. The deal is non-exclusive. Facebook and Twitter will both integrate real-time feeds of status updates and tweets into the Bing search engine service. Twitter hit about 5 billion tweets yesterday and Facebook has the most number of status updates than any other service. Facebook sends out an estimated 40 million status updates per day.

Microsoft Bing’s market share will benefit from this deal as real-time news is becoming a preference for people. Traditional news agencies are suffering from this and are cutting staff and newspaper circulation. Google will have to step it up if they want to retain their customer base.

Facebook users will be allowed to decide whether they want their status updates to be public or not. The financial details of the deal are undisclosed, but it is expected that the Redmond-based software company will be paying both Facebook and Twitter millions of dollars along with revenue-sharing deals. Microsoft owns about 1.7% of Facebook through a venture capital deal and has an exclusive advertising partnership with the social network.

About a year ago, Twitter had processed about 1 billion tweets total. That was around the same time that the service struggled to stay online and kept showing us the “fail whale.” Within one year later the company processed an additional 4 billion tweets more. The statistics of the tweets being sent are processed by Gigatweet. The 5 billionth tweet was from Robin Sloan who sent out the tweet “Oh lord.”

Twitter had served 1.6 billion tweets up until this past April, indicating that 3.4 billion tweets were sent out in the last 6 months. Five billion tweets requires a lot of processing power and bandwidth. Its a good thing that Twitter has $155 million in venture capital to keep the servers running. Twitter was co-founded by Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, and Evan Williams in 2006.

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump will soon be married. Jared is the son of real estate mogul Charles Kushner. Jared recently acquired The New York Observer for $10 million. The New York Observer bought Very Short List from IAC in June. Ivanka is the daughter of real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump.

Since the wedding between Jared and Ivanka is coming up, the couple has been planning away on how to set it up. Ivanka decided to turn to Twitter for help in choosing a wedding song.

“Need some help picking a wedding song…send me your thoughts,” tweeted Ivanka. Some of the suggestions Ivanka received includes Ella Fitzgerald’s “At Last” and Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be (Your Crying Shoulder).”

Personally I’d suggest The Apprentice theme song The O’Jays – For The Love Of Money. Between the two, that is a lot of stuff that they will be inheriting so it makes sense in my head.

Jack Dorsey is the creator, co-founder, and chairman of Twitter. He had actually built the Twitter service in about 2 weeks. Now he is working on a new project and a source with Engadget has found out what it was. Dorsey is supposedly working on an iPhone and iPod Touch application that uses a dongle for being able to process credit cards. This allows anyone to accept credit card payments on the spot.

The venture has been given the code name “Squirrel.” In the screenshots that Engadget has about the Square system application, there is a domain name on the receipt called squareup.com. After doing a domain name WHOIS search on Squareup.com, there is a registered office in San Francisco listed. And the contact e-mail address is “billing@paybysquirrel.com.”

NASA announced that they are hosting their first space shuttle launch tweet-up. A tweet-up is when a group of Twitter users around the same area of residence meet up. The Atlantis shuttle has been moved to its launch pad earlier this week. The Atlantis plans to launch on November 12. Atlantis will be delivering goods to the International Space Station.

Who gets to see the shuttle lift off? The first 100 NASA Twitter followers that sign up for the Kennedy Space Center tour. The registration begins later today.

NASA astronauts have been tweeting for quite some time now including Michael Massimino. I’m sure the event will be memorable. If anyone reading this ended up attending the event, let us know about your experience.

The number of mobile phone users in India is massive. The population in India is about 1.1 billion and many of them have mobile phones. People in India communicate very often with SMS and text messages. Now if Twitter connected their services by allowing people in India to tap their accounts into SMS and text messages, there would be a major increase in use. Twitter just made a deal with Bharti Airtel to make this happen. Bharti Airtel is the largest telecommunications company in India with 100 million subscribers.

Bharti Airtel customers will be allowed to receive SMS tweets for free and send tweets through a text message at the standard rate. The reason why Twitter shut down their SMS service last year in many other countries is because of the charges that telecommunication companies wanted from Twitter. Twitter has been trying to find the middle ground between telecommunication companies from now on.

To get started using Twitter on Airtel, customers need to send a text message saying START to the number 53000. After that Twitter confirms that you are willing to send and receive SMS tweets.

Meghan McCain, the daughter of former presidential candidate John McCain uploaded a photo on TwitPic that caused some controversy. After uploading the TwitPic, many Internet trolls left very negative comments. Many of the comments used the word “slut” in it. I reposted the picture because I believe there is nothing wrong with it. I just see a picture of a girl that likes to read.

The picture has been deleted from her account in the last few minutes. Before it was deleted, the picture was seen at least about 160,000 times.

Meghan is wearing a low cut black tank top and is holding a book about Andy Warhol by Arthur C. Danto. Below are some of the tweets that McCain sent out after reading the reactions by Twitter users:
-so I took a fun picture not thinking anything about what I was wearing but apparently anything other than a pantsuit I am a slut, this is
- why I have been considering deleting my twitter account, what once was fun now just seems like a vessel for harassment
- I am going to take some more time to think about it but seriously I was just trying to be funny with the book and that I’m a dork staying in
- when I am alone in my apartment, I wear tank tops and sweat pants, I had no idea this makes me a “slut”, I can’t even tell you how hurt I am
- ok I am getting the f**k off twitter, promise not to delete my account until I sleep on it, thank you for the nice words supporters
- I do want to apologize to anyone that was offended by my twitpic, I have clearly made a huge mistake and am sorry 2 those that are offended.

Miley Cyrus made a rap video about quitting Twitter. The video received over 3 million views in 3 days. The video was just asking for a parody to be made and Jimmy Fallon jumped on it quickly while tapping his inner Billy Ray Cyrus. Miley Cyrus’ dad Billy Ray still uses Twitter and so Jimmy Fallon made a song about that. Above is a video embedded of the video.

Miley Cyrus is a celebrity that currently has the Midas touch. Every tweet, video, and song that she puts together becomes media gold. Last week I reported that Cyrus quit Twitter because her rumored boyfriend recommended it. However Cyrus made a rap video embedded above that reports the real reason why she quit. That reason is because of tabloids. The tabloids take her tweets and sometimes make reports on them that are out of context. This reasons does seem like a logical, but it is a blow to her fans nonetheless that follow her religiously.

The rap video above hit 3 million views in about 3 days. If Cyrus did not like the attention, then why would she put up a video which she knew would put her back in the spotlight? “I want my private life private,” raps Cyrus. “I’m living for me.” Of course Cyrus wants the attention, but only at a moderate level.

Miley Cyrus does make a good rapper for a Caucasian tween girl. But I still think Taylor Swift’s performance with T-Pain was more upbeat and fun. Beyonce has the greatest video of all time though.

The co-founders of Twitter are currently discussing ways to integrate video tweets in their service. This would enable people with video capable mobile phones to upload clips to their profiles. However this would consume a large amount of bandwidth which Twitter is struggling to deal with already.

There are are a couple of third party video websites that have this type of feature already such as Twideo and Tweetube. But these two video websites have not gained as much traction as the Twitter photo-sharing third party website TwitPic.