Update: Well Daines was right in that Twitter has surpassed 100 million users. At the company’s developer conference today, Twitter announced that it has 105,779,710 registered users, as well as that it gets about 300,000 new users a day, receives 180 million unique visitors a month, and 75% of traffic comes from outside of the Twitter website.

As we reported last week, some significant news was announced regarding the open web, and the direction social networking is headed in. Cliqset and Status.net announced that for the first time ever, the users of two independent, public web entities are able to communicate with each other, without being on the same service as the person they are communicating with.

It appears that Twitter may have a significant redesign in the works. It has been discovered that Twitter’s Creative Director, Doug Bowman has posted a partial screenshot.

Bowman’s exact comment on the screenshot is, "Working on what may end up a significant redesign. Not final yet. What we can show without giving away the farm."

Pete Warden, a former software engineer at Apple, who is now working on his own start-up, posted an interesting story about how Facebook threatened to sue him for crawling the social network. I reached out to both Warden and Facebook for more details, but so far have only received response from Facebook, who calls  the incident as "violation of our terms."

What’s the next big thing in social media? Is it Google Buzz? Is it Chat Roulette? Is it Foursquare? Is it Gowalla? Is it something you won’t hear about until tomorrow, next week, or next year? While it is certainly a good idea to be aware of trends, it’s also important for businesses not to get to fixated on them, and go rushing into things that may or may not make sense for them.

Shiny Object Syndrome

Twitter is testing a new home page, aimed at showing more of the information that "flows through Twitter."

"This builds on a series of changes starting last year when we redesigned the homepage to make search and trending topics more visible and easily accessible to everyone," says Twitter Designer Doug Bowman. "With that version, we brought the power of search.twitter.com to the homepage and let people explore the value of Twitter without an account."

Cliqset shared some pretty interesting news with WebProNews today. They say that for the first time ever, the users of two independent, public web entities are able to communicate with each other, without being on the same service as the person they are communicating with. Cliqset and Status.net have accomplished this using Salmon, but this isn’t just big news for these two services. It’s big news for the open web.

Yahoo has begun rolling out what the company calls its "next milestone" in Facebook integration. Yahoo Mail users can now update their Facebook status right from their inbox, and they can see their friends’ Facebook profile photos in emails received in Yahoo Mail.

Small businesses are getting more and more opportunities to get some real use out of Facebook. For example, AT&T’s Buzz.com has created a way for brick and mortars to get some positive recommendations through Facebook users’ news feeds.

In case you were wondering, Twitter is not killing blogging. No matter how many times this is said, there is still this notion out there that blogs aren’t needed when you can simply express what you’re feeling to the audience who is interested through Twitter (or Facebook or other social networks). The fact of the matter is, yes – you can do this with Twitter or Facebook, but blogs exist just the same, and the blogs and social networks frequently complement one another.

When Twitter users go to post a new tweet, they have in the past used a button that says "update" (at least from Twitter.com…that varies when you get into all the different apps Twitter users use). Now, that button says "Tweet".

MySpace launched a new gaming experience at myspace.com/games today. The company says it empowers developers with new tools, analytics, and opportunities for driving usage and revenue.

Update: I finally got word back from Facebook, who confirmed that the feature is indeed only a test. "The "Promote" feature is just a test and is unrelated to our Promotions Guidelines," the company says. They  did not give any specifics about a possible full launch.