Twitter is serving more than 800 million search queries a day, according to Biz Stone. “That’s over 24 billion searches per month, more than Bing (4.1 billion) and Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) (9.4 billion) combined,” Fast Company chirps. Big deal.

Pasadena, Calif.-based TweetUp has acquired both Twidroid and popurls to help beef up its search and advertising platform that identifies the best tweets on the web. Terms of the deals were not disclosed. Twidroid is one of the most popular Twitter clients on Android, having generated more than 250,000 downloads…

Advertisers now have a new way of advertising on Twitter. While ad messages—in the form of “promoted tweets”—previously only showed up when someone made a search for a specific term like “Starbucks” on the site, Twitter is now including ad messages in the trending topics that show up on the…

Twitter is zeroing in with its location plans. The company says in a blog post that users will now be able to tag their tweets as coming from a specific location—like a soccer stadium or restaurant—instead of just a general neighborhood or city. The feature will also tie-in to check-in…

Twitter is buying analytics startup Smallthought Systems—an acquisition which it says will help it build “innovative realtime products for our future commercial partners.” That’s likely a reference to Twitter’s forthcoming paid premium accounts, which the company has said will include additional features for businesses, including analytics. Twitter said in mid-April…

Twitter will soon automatically shorten all links shared on its service—a move that may once again pit it against startups that have built their business around the site. The company says in a blog post that beginning this summer “all links on Twitter.com or third-party apps will be wrapped with…

Less than a year after joining Twitter as its first director of search, Doug Cook is leaving the company, the company tells TechCrunch. TechCrunch says Cook’s departure is related to an internal restructuring of the company’s search team —but it’s not clear what drove it. A spokeswoman confirms the departure…

Back when Twitter announced its own Promoted Tweets plan, COO Dick Costolo hinted it would “prohibit” third-party alternatives. Now it’s making good on the promise… In the second recent threat to Twitter’s developer-friendly reputation, Costolo announces in a blog post that: “Aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any…

Less than a year after taking a $2 million investment, desktop and mobile Twitter app Tweetdeck has gone back to its investors for a $3 million second round. Betaworks leads this round, just as it did last time. Ron Conway, Danny Rimer, The Accelerator Group, Roger Ehrenberg and Howard Lindzon…

Doesn’t look like Twitter’s decision to introduce an ad platform of its own is getting in the way of fundraising efforts by startups building alternate ad models around the site. Ad.ly, an ad network that matches popular Tweeters with advertisers, has raised $5 million in a first round of funding,…

The best way you can spend 48.24 minutes today: watch this video of Conan speaking at Googleplex last week.

Twitter has acquired Cloudhopper after working with the startup for the past eight months to manage the billions of text messages it sends worldwide. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. On Twitter’s blog, it said it processes close to a billion text messages a month worldwide, and has bought…

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) is apparently still going full-force with its Twitter competitor, Yahoo Meme. The company has now bought up the oh-so-clever domain name, Me.me, from the .ME domain registry, which is based in the country of Montenegro. No word on how much Yahoo paid. Yahoo, however, calls the purchase…

Twitter COO Dick Costolo laid out the details of Twitter’s new ad platform at the company’s Chirp conference this afternoon. What we didn’t know before: Once the ad platform—which gives extra play to a Tweet of an advertiser’s choice—expands beyond Twitter’s own site, Twitter partners—like a third-party Twitter client—will be…

Twitter’s purchase of Twitter iPhone client Tweetie last week, along with its launch of a Blackberry app, have raised concerns among developers who believe the company could soon crowd out their own creations. CEO Evan Williams’ response at Twitter’s Chirp conference: “I know this is a controversial decision because there…

Twitter has always been mum on some key stats about its service—like how many people have actually signed up to use it. But at its Chirp conference Wednesday, co-founder Biz Stone finally made public some numbers. He says the site now has 105,779,710 registered users—and is adding 300,000 new users…

With Twitter’s big announcement of how it plans to make money with Promoted Tweets out of the way, the micro-blogging service’s COO Dick Costolo took the stage at the Ad Age Digital Conference to sell the idea. “We needed to launch a platform that went everywhere tweets worked, such as…

Forget about all those clever headlines about “hole-filler” filling its own funding hole. With no discernible business model, and very tough to serve ads against random uploaded pics, these Twitter-based picture sites do deserve to sink down the hole. But don’t let that hold VCs back from funding them. TweetPhoto,…

After months and months and months of speculation, Twitter is finally unveiling its long-awaited business model. Starting tomorrow, the company will sell ads—called “Promoted Tweets”—that show up at the top of the results when a user searches on Twitter for a specific keyword. The ads, which themselves are Tweets, will…