People who want to both help children and get tipsy have, until now, usually needed to keep those interests separate.  But Twitter’s lending a hand, as it intends to sell branded wines and donate the proceeds to Room to Read.  According to Maya Baratz, bottles will cost $20 each ($5 of which will go the charity), and you can reserve them starting today.  Or you can just buy a six-pack of good old Guinness and send some money wherever you like, of course.

A new rumor indicates that Twitter may be attempting to acquire or partner with a company called Oneforty.  Oneforty calls itself a “Twitter outfitter,” or, if you like more straightforward descriptions, “a better way to discover Twitter apps.”  It’s pretty obvious that having an official Twitter app store would benefit both Twitter users and developers, so even if you shouldn’t hold your breath for this to occur - official confirmation is definitely lacking - keep your fingers crossed.

A company called GetJar may help Facebook obtain a considerably bigger foothold in the mobile market than it would have managed otherwise.  Tricia Duryee reports, “The service does this by alerting users to the fact that a mobile application is available for download when they go to the company’s web site from their phone’s browser.”  And apparently, Facebook “has seen an additional one million downloads a week, or about 8.5 million in total during a two-month trial period.”  That’s impressive stuff.

People who still think Twitter’s just for a few geeks in Silicon Valley would have been shocked to see the Twitter Conference in L.A.  About 400 people showed up to talk about Twitter, including celebrities like LeVar Burton, Dr. Drew Pinsky, and Tony Hawk.  The ways in which businesses can use the site were also discussed.  All in all, the conference proved to be a nice affirmation of Twitter’s ever-increasing reach and importance.

It’s time today to cover another Twitter-related legal development.  As with the last one, though, there’s no cause for anybody to panic.  Twitter was sued by natural gas distributor Oneok because someone other than the corporation had taken control of the “Oneok” handle on Twitter.  But Twitter transferred control of the account to the gas distributor and suspended a couple of related accounts, as well.  So everybody’s favorite microblogging service won’t have to face down an army of lawyers right now.

Hulu made its name as the best place online to legally find free professional content.  Now think hard: would you still love Hulu if some things were behind a pay wall?  Chase Carey, the COO of News Corp. (which is a part owner), said according to James Callan, “Ad-supported only is going to be a tough place in a fractured world.  You want a mix of pay and free.”  So while change is far from a definite thing, Hulu users might do well to appreciate the free content while they can.

If you don’t access Facebook using your cell phone, well, odds are that you will before long.  Facebook released stats today indicating that the use of Facebook Mobile has more than tripled in the past eight months (20 million to 65 million people), and there’s no end in sight.  Henri Moissinac, a member of the mobile team, wrote on the Facebook Blog, “[W]e are continuously making updates to our mobile products and working with some of the biggest names in mobile to make sure that Facebook is available on the latest devices and mobile operating systems.”

People put a whole lot of personal information on Facebook, and a lot of unfortunate stuff could happen if it fell into the wrong hands.  As what’s hopefully a proactive measure, then, Facebook’s announced a new focus on privacy.  Much of the effort deals with awareness - getting people to recognize what privacy options exist and actually tinker with them.  Otherwise, there will be new limits on what third-party applications can do in order to seal off a major source of “outside” leaks.

Fear not, Twitter users - it’s doesn’t look like you’ll have to alter your vocabulary for the sake of the microblogging site’s lawyers.  Although Twitter applied to trademark the term “tweet,” the application has been refused, and so all manner of sites, apps, or indeed, tweets, can freely incorporate the five-letter word.  This isn’t, perhaps, a huge deal - Twitter wasn’t actually threatening a lot of folks with lawsuits - but it’s made more than a few onlookers feel satisfied.

We’ll be honest: at least in the short term, it won’t matter at all to the average MySpace user what happens with regards to the site’s executives.  But if they all leave, it will probably say a lot about the site’s future, and another one did indeed bail recently.  According to Nicholas Carlson, Vice President of Engineering Wilf Russell has quit, which may mean that the war with Facebook isn’t going all that well.

There’s good news and bad news about Twitter this morning.  The good news: some downtime problems aren’t its fault.  The bad: well, Twitter has suffered from outages and slowness, and the site’s actually under attack.  As we’ve said before, Twitter will have trouble growing if it can’t be reliable, and if it proves to be a favorite target of hackers, marketers are liable to take their time (and cash, if Twitter would ever monetize) elsewhere.

The average Facebook or Twitter user may soon be seeing - or producing - a lot more stuff about shooting zombies or aliens.  A new Nintendo DSi update has introduced Facebook photo uploading, and Twitter and Facebook applications for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 are supposed to be out before Christmas.  This may go a long ways towards making social networks an even more regular and accepted part of daily life.

Facebook doesn’t want to cater exclusively to early adopters with expensive smartphones.  The social network is going to take a shot at embracing everybody, then, by letting users upload pictures and videos from anywhere they have email.  Users can just visit the Facebook Mobile page, obtain their personal upload email address, and then send content to their accounts from all sorts of cell phones.  Expect to see a lot more candid late-night and vacation photos as a result.

A new study from the Nielsen Group makes official what we’ve known all along: we waste more time on Facebook than any other website. In their compilation of U.S. Internet usage data for June, 2009, Nielson ranked by hours the amount of time that the Internet user spends on a website in one month. These are the top ten websites that take our time and consume our workday. At the very top, outstripping the next in-line by nearly an hour and a half was Facebook.com. Next in line was Yahoo, followed by Google, and Microsoft, respectively.

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Firefox users who haven’t been fast to upgrade to the latest version are getting a reminder courtesy of Twitter.  Jason Kincaid writes that Twitter’s showing some people banners promoting Firefox 3.5.  Apparently these aren’t paid-for ads - think of them more as PSAs - but they may represent a step in that direction.  Twitter’s going to have to make money sooner or later, after all, so its execs could be using the Firefox promo to test users’ reactions.