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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.

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.

Just last week, Aol celebrated its re-emergence as an independently-traded company. But it's one main advantage is that it still commands a large audience, and in fact was the fourth largest Website in the U.S.—until last month. ComScore data for November, 2009 shows that Facebook surpassed Aol with 102.9 million unique visitors in the U.S., versus 99.7 million for Aol.

Facebook's new privacy controls remain a work in progress a full 24 hours after release and months after they were announced.

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

A large pop-up box will greet Facebook users logging on to the social-networking site on Thursday, asking them to modify their privacy settings.

Google will supplement its search results with updates posted each second to sites like Twitter and Facebook.

"Realtime" is the hot buzzword right now, and Google and MySpace appear set to further it along with a new agreement that will see Google serve up search results from MySpace in realtime. What these means is that all publicly available data that's on MySpace will be available to Google within seconds, we've learned.