There is little doubt that TweetDeck is among the best, most fully-featured Twitter apps for the iPhone, but one reason why I've favored Echofon (formerly TwitterFon) these last few months is the number of bugs in TweetDeck. Specifically, I had a problem with it randomly crashing out of the app.

So, I was anxiously awaiting the update to TweetDeck 1.1 in hopes that it would cure the problem and let me switch back to using it as my main mobile Twitter client. Unfortunately, the release seems to have gone the other way, so much so that it has been pulled from the app store until the app-crashing bugs can be cleaned out of the application. Fortunately, we shouldn't have to wait too long because a new version has already been submitted to Apple for approval. (Check out new features in TweetDeck v1.1.)

9 Free iPhone Twitter Clients

"Google to buy New York Times." It is a rumor that has circulated ever since the newspaper industry began teetering on the brink of extinction. The rumor heated up earlier this year when Scott Galloway, a Harbinger appointee on the New York Times board, put out a feeler to Larry Page, co-founder of Google. And the rumor has circulated as recent as this week, when it surfaced on CNBC's Squawk on the Street.

But according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, it's just not happening, at least, not any time in the future. In an interview with Neil Cavuto on Fox Business, Schmidt admits that Google took a serious look at the New York Times along with other content companies and decided that Google wasn't a content company. It simply wasn't something they were good at doing.

"It is highly unlikely we would get into the content business. It is fundamentally better for us to be the supplier of platforms and monetization and revenue and advertising and subscription services to all of these players. We desperately need the newspapers, the magazines, the media companies to be successful because we need their content."

Of course, Google may have been thinking about some of the backlash that occurred when they announced Google Knol. Even though Google Knol is a platform rather than a content service, similar to YouTube and other Google holdings, many bloggers felt that it was a step in the direction of becoming a content company, which would put Google in a position to boost its own rankings with its most popular asset: the Google search engine.

But for now, it seems that Google is content with just battling it out with Apple with its Android OS and putting the nail in Microsoft's coffin with its Chrome OS. They'll let other people report on the outcome of those battles.

Photo © Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

One of the neat things that has really driven Twitter is how it has grown organically, with many features being taken directly from the community. For example, hashtags were originally used as a community-based convention in order to tag a tweet for easier searching, but when they took on a life of their own, Twitter made them official by turning them into links.

Twitter Lists, which were rolled out last month, has been one of the most requested features for a while now. With many other Twitter clients like TweetDeck supporting Twitter groups, it was only a matter of time before Twitter rolled out some type of official grouping. And, in typical Twitter fashion, they enabled individual lists to be followed.

Now comes Twitter retweets, with Project Retweet being rolled out as we speak. The rollout consists of adding profiles in bunches, so not everyone can retweet, but as they add more users, it should cover everyone in the coming weeks. The Retweet link will be located right beside the Reply link, which appears when you hover your mouse over an individual tweet.

Retweets will have their own icon, will show how many people retweeted the message and will even allow your to undo your retweet if you made a mistake and retweeted the wrong message.

Confused by the Twitter Lingo? Check out the Twitter Glossary.

In the war to bring social features to the entire web, Facebook Connect has the upper hand, especially with many new iPhone applications using it as a gateway to the social web. But Google won't go down without a fight.

Google is bringing personalized features to Google Friend Connect to match the ads shown on the site to the visitor's interests.

The new features also include the ability for people to send private messages to each other, so if a visitor finds another user with similar interests, they can send a message via their Friend Connect profile.

Read more about the new features