Twitter traffic has multiplied by 27 over the last year, and this is only the main site. It doesn’t take into account access via third party applications or mobile phones.

Twitter has also reached the number 7 spot in terms of top social networking and forum sites in the UK. Check out this chart for the top ten:

Twitter is being overshadowed by another player in Singapore however. In that country, microblogging site Plurk is dominating Twitter. You can see how traffic to that site has spiked over the course of a year:

"Blogger was the leading source of traffic to Plurk, accounting for 13.9% of upstream traffic, week ending 7 February 2009, and was also the main point of difference in referrals between Plurk and Twitter (difference of 11.9%)," says Hitwise Asia Pacific Senior Analyst Sandra Hanchard. "The strong influence of traffic referrals by Blogger is underpinned by its ranking as the 7th most visited website overall by Singapore Internet users."

Twitter is getting a lot more attention around here today, as co-founder Biz Stone has talked about a possible business model for the service. Also, some have predicted Twitter’s demise at the hands of Facebook’s status API launch, though plenty of people can give you reasons why that won’t happen.

"As with all our new edition launches, the English-language Singapore edition is tailored to provide a mix of locally relevant news as well as globally important events," says a blog post at the Official Google News Blog. "We hope that our readers in Singapore can now reach the best news destinations on the Internet even faster, and that news publishers in Singapore can connect to news readers even better."

Google notes that this is just the latest in the company’s efforts to have more of a presence in Asia. I talked a bit about this back when Google bought the Korean Blog Company TNC.

"At the start of 2008, we had nine editions in Asia: India (English and Hindi),Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, Israel and an Arabic edition for the Middle East," says the post. "Now, a year later, we have almost doubled our coverage by adding seven and a half editions in Asia: Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Pakistan, India (Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam) and Turkey. Why the half? We’ll take partial credit for Turkey since it’s in Europe as well as Asia."

Of course, Google also points out that any English-language news publishers in Singapore, and can’t find your site in Google News, you can contact the company and request inclusion.

"The mainstream media did its job of trying to play down the most shameful part of the incident. It is a blow to Singapore’s image as being efficient," Seah Chiang Nee, a political commentator and former Singapore newspaper editor, told Reuters. "The more Internet savvy would not depend on the mainstream media for news of what’s happening in the country, they would go to the Internet," said Seah.

Mas Selamat bin Kastari, the alleged leader of the Singapore cell of al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiah, a group thought to be responsible for the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people, escaped last Wednesday from the bathroom of a detention center.

The escape was an embarrassment for the country, which touts high levels of security.  The escape led to a large manhunt and an apology from the government who called it a "security lapse."

Cherian George, a former Straits Times journalist, wrote online that the Singapore media had not answered the question of how Kastari escaped. " The question is so natural and so obvious that you’d think anyone barely paying attention would ask it. Unless, apparently, one worked for the national news media," George wrote.

George said the lack of government details surrounding the escape was due to state controlled media that would eventually drive readers to other sources.

Patrick Daniel, editor of the Straits Times, said the paper took its responsibility to readers seriously and that George was "utterly wrong"  about its journalists not asking about how Kastari escaped.

"If Cherian had checked with us, we would have told him that we asked that question, and many others too, many times," he said.

"I think that there was tacit understanding between the government and the media," Catherine Lim, said, a well known local author and political commentator.

Another obvious patent gets paid off by Apple. Apple has agreed to pay Burst a $10 million payment for infringing on its 1990 streaming video technology patent.

Singapore officials have a smash rap video hit on YouTube. It has been views over 80,000 times over the last five days alone. It goes to show that it is much easier to get famous than rich with web video.

There is a growing concern over so-called in-text ads according to an article in BusinessWeek. These are the ads where words in articles are double underlined and mousing over them causes a temporary pop-up. The problem is that these ads are not part of the intended editorial context of the journalist writing the article. Personally, I think these ads are highly annoying and distract from reading the article. You won’t find them here at WebProNews anytime soon.

The looming advertising recession could actually increase targeted Internet ad spending. When sales are down advertisers want to get the biggest bang for their buck and that means more search and niche Internet ad buys.

New features are coming to Microsoft’s IM according to a leaked report. Features include a SPIM reporting feature that helps users fight IM based phishing and spam.

A post by Rand Fishkin’s father outlines why the original Google PageRank forumla is flawed. It is an insightful piece with lots of diagrams too!

The game contains " a scene of lesbian intimacyas such the game has been disallowed," the deputy director of the Board of Film Censors said. The board is a division of the Media Development Authority (MDA) Singapore’s media watchdog.

Video games sold in Singapore cannot "feature exploitative or gratuitous sex and violence, or denigrate any race or religion," according to the Board Film of Censors. Mass Effect will be launched globally next week.

Microsoft, maker of the Xbox console said it understood the MDA’s action. "We strictly adhere to the laws, regulations and norms of the markets we operate in,’ it told the AFP. The MDA says that a new video game ratings system will be put in place next year that could allow video games like Mass Effect to be sold in Singapore.

Other video games that have been banned in Singapore include "God of War II" for nudity and "The Darkness" for violence and religiously offensive words.

It’s not that eBay is dying – far, far from it.  eBay’s just not the wunderkind that it once was, and in an interview with Julie Sloane, the company’s spokesman acknowledged, “About a year ago, the leadership of the marketplace business got together and took a hard look at what had been a successful business for 11 years.  The (buying) experience hadn’t kept up with what people expect when they go online.”

So eBay introduced a host of upgrades that were intended to enhance users’ experiences and keep them interested.  The company’s also planning long-term – in the past three months, we’ve seen it acquire a German auction management software company and talk about moving into Singapore and the rest of Southeast Asia.

These efforts may not have paid off yet – Compete statistics show an up-and-down rollercoaster that doesn’t follow any clear pattern.  Still, eBay’s currently up 2.2 percent for the month, and 2.5 percent for the year, so it would appear that the company’s doing something right.

A glance at eBay’s stock is less encouraging, but still lands us in a “wait and see” mode.