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After news about the landing of US Airways 1549 in the Hudson first broke on Twitter in January 2009, the microblogging service quickly captured the imagination of a new group of potential users. Throughout the first months of 2009, Twitter grew at a rapid pace, peaking at a growth rate of 13% in March 2009.

In its heyday, ICQ was one of the most popular instant messaging networks. Today, you will probably have a hard time finding your friends on ICQ. Nevertheless, almost two year after the release of ICQ 6, ICQ just released a new version of its IM client. ICQ 7 now integrates updates from Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, Flickr and YouTube.

We’ve seen a host of deals recently in the Twitter app space, but here’s one that we now know didn’t happen: TwitPic selling out for north of $10 million.

The debate over distracted driving ramped up a notch on Thursday as Ford Motor Co. announced technology to let computers read their Twitter feeds to them while they're driving.

The buzz around realtime search of social networks has mostly surrounded Twitter and Facebook. Collecta, OneRiot and the search giants, including Microsoft, Google and Yahoo all tap into Twitter (and Facebook too) to capture the realtime stream of content. But MySpace is also getting into the game, recently releasing a set of real-time APIs that both OneRiot and Google will be tapping into to provide content from the social network. Today, real-time search engine Collecta has launched a search platform that offers a real-time view into MySpace.

Beyond talking about how fast it was growing, one of the hottest topics surrounding Twitter in 2009 was “how does it make money?” Perhaps that was the wrong question to be asking, though, because as it turns out, Twitter already makes money.

Hackers briefly blocked access to the popular Internet messaging service Twitter, steering traffic to another Web site where a group reportedly calling itself the "Iranian Cyber Army" claimed responsibility.

How do you measure influence on Twitter? While follower count is perhaps the most obvious metric, other activities, like the numbers of times you’re retweeted, provide a bit more insight.

Twitter’s U.S. traffic rose by a little over 100,000 visitors, to 19.37 million unique visitors from 19.24 million unique visitors in October. It’s no surprise that Twitter’s U.S. growth is stalling as the numbers have indicated this pattern for some time.

Google turned on real-time search on its main site this morning with little fanfare, after a huge announcement and demo earlier this week.