Nope, just the effect of the unfortunate nether-region photo tweet by Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner, which has apparently caused others on Capitol Hill to stop posting as much to the microblogging service.

We all know how much pols love to raid the social media space these days, to garner more attention and, presumably, votes.

But, according to stats compiled by tweetcongress.org in the lovely chart below, titled “The ‘Weinergate’ Effect on Congressional Tweet Frequency,” tweets are down 27 percent by Republicans and 29 percent by Democrats.

Enjoy the number-crunching (click on the image to make it even larger):

With the mobile payments space rapidly heating up, we thought it would be a perfect time to add the person most responsible for that current disruption–Square CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey–to the speaker roster at the ninth D: All Things Digital.

By the way, Dorsey is the same man who also invented a little thing called Twitter, the groundbreaking microblogging service–where he also now serves as Executive Chairman and now its product guru once again.

In other words, Dorsey is just the kind of person Walt Mossberg and I are thrilled to have onstage at D9–a perfect entrepreneur to talk about the innovative product vision that has made tech in Silicon Valley so powerful.

Dorsey started Square in 2009, after serving as CEO of Twitter until 2008. A software engineer by training, he previously worked as a programmer at a bike courier dispatch service.

Just this week, Square made news by launching a new cash register for merchants and a new mobile wallet for consumers to make paying for retail goods extremely easy.

This is a quick development from the start-up’s original Square dongle and app, which allows consumers to use their smartphone or Apple iPad to accept credit card payments.

Square has distributed 500,000 of these dongles, which click into the headphone jack, and has recently said it is processing $2 billion in gross payment volume per month.

The new innovations should increase that if they catch on and Square can best a plethora of competitors, including a new digital wallet entry by Google (whose Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt will also be at D9 onstage demoing it too).

As Tricia Duryee wrote about Square’s latest effort:

It starts with the user’s card case, which must be set up in advance with a user’s credit card information. From the card case, the user will be able to see the menu of the restaurant, cafe or spa they are visiting. Users can click to order. When they go up to the register to pay, the consumer doesn’t hand over anything but their name.

Consumers and retailers will have to believe that using Apple products can be as safe and secure as big enterprise-grade systems that everyone is accustomed to seeing.

Square will also have to go up against a ton of other providers coming down the pike, including solutions from [eBay's] PayPal and payment giants such as Visa, MasterCard and American Express.

The San Francisco-based start-up recently received an investment from Visa.

Given that the future of the massive, badillion-dollar industry is at stake, it should make for a great interview session at D9.

Jeff Jordan, the president and CEO of OpenTable who unexpectedly stepped down from his job today at the online restaurant reservation leader, is set to take a job at a major venture firm in Silicon Valley.

Sources said Jordan has spoken to several major VCs about moving to their firms recently.

While Benchmark Capital was a big funder of OpenTable before it went public in 2009, sources said the likeliest home for the well-known Internet player–Jordan has also been a major exec at eBay–is Andreessen Horowitz.

The move would be a coup for the firm, which has been busy adding partners since its founding only a few years ago by Web icon Marc Andreessen and his longtime business partner Ben Horowitz.

Jordan’s announcement that he was leaving OpenTable today during its first-quarter earnings call caused the stock to decline precipitously today, even though he said he would remain active as executive chairman.

CFO Matthew Roberts was named as his replacement.

Explaining the move, Jordan said:

“I’ve been managing Internet businesses since 1999. That’s 12 years of being in the tornado, and it’s pretty exhausting. I’ll be looking at the next challenge, but in terms of operating an Internet business, I’ve scratched that itch very well.”

It’s an itch that he will be scratching as a VC apparently and likely at one of tech’s hottest firms, which has investments in everything from gaming phenom Zynga to social buying service Groupon to microblogging start-up Twitter.

A spokeswoman for Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment and Jordan has not responded to an email query.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone took time off from his myriad of witty talk show appearances to slap around a just-published Fortune cover story that was titled–get it?–“Trouble@ Twitter.”

Wrote Stone, in part, on his personal blog in a post titled “The Trouble Bubble”:

We founded Twitter, Inc. in March of 2007 and while we have long said it’s about the users, not the service, we have nevertheless enjoyed favorable media coverage. What took so long for somebody to write the article that says we are falling apart? The normal press cycle is to put a company on a pedestal and then knock it down. It’s much more interesting that way. Twitter has had so many ups and downs you’d think we would have had more negative press. To me, it’s like watching the movie Rocky–he’s up, he’s down, he’s out, he wins!

He correctly points out Fortune’s reliable proclivity–see Google, Facebook–to write a wildly positive piece about the latest tech phenom, followed by a smackdown, followed by a they’re-back! tome.

Now, it is the San Francisco microblogging company’s turn.

(In Fortune’s defense, you try selling a magazine these days without a hookish cover line! Hence, the hit-you-over-the-head wounded bird motif here.)

But vegan-y, nice dude that he is, Stone ends on a positive note:

“For a long time, we refused to hire a communications group and now that we have one, I’m having fun teasing them about this Fortune article but the truth is, we’re long overdue to be knocked down by the press.”

While it must be pointed out that Rocky suffered from brain damage in the last installment of the famed movie franchise, BoomTown awards a Stone-cold win for Mr. Biz-boa!

Here’s the full post:

The Trouble Bubble

We founded Twitter, Inc. in March of 2007 and while we have long said it’s about the users, not the service, we have nevertheless enjoyed favorable media coverage. What took so long for somebody to write the article that says we are falling apart? The normal press cycle is to put a company on a pedestal and then knock it down. It’s much more interesting that way. Twitter has had so many ups and downs you’d think we would have had more negative press. To me, it’s like watching the movie Rocky–he’s up, he’s down, he’s out, he wins!

Fortune magazine finally stepped up to knock us down with a cover article, “Trouble@Twitter.” Here are some examples of how this works. After mostly positive coverage of Facebook, Fortune finally published an article in April of 2009 titled, “Is Facebook Losing Its Glow?” However, later that year they published, “What Backlash? Facebook Is Growing Like Mad.” Google received similar treatment. In July 2010 Fortune published, “Google, The Search Party Is Over.” Later that year, they published, “Google Continues To Gain Search Marketshare.”

We’ve had lots of positive press from Fortune in the past. In July of 2010 they published an article titled, “Twitter’s Business Model: A Visionary Experiment.” The article ended with, “Facebook might want to take notes.” It may seem odd, but from my perspective, this means we are being taken very seriously. Twitter is an important company and it’s under scrutiny from journalists–this is exactly how it’s supposed to work. Now it’s our job to prove the reporters wrong so they can write an article later about how we have made dramatic progress.

The Twitter team is an incredibly dedicated group of people who truly believe they are doing the most meaningful work of their lives. It’s also a very small group of people when compared to the other companies Fortune is investigating. We still have under 500 employees–many of them working weekends and nights to fulfill a potential that is palpable. For a long time, we refused to hire a communications group and now that we have one, I’m having fun teasing them about this Fortune article but the truth is, we’re long overdue to be knocked down by the press.

Late last month, BoomTown posted about a huge venture funding effort by the high-profile and even more highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, Flipboard.

Today, its co-founder and CEO Mike McCue confirmed the $50 million round at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, in a wide-ranging interview at the start-up’s Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“We’re obviously thrilled, because we think it confirms our focus that people want a beautifully designed way to interact with content and to share it,” he said. “And there is a lot more to come–on a scale of one to 10, we’re just at a two or three.”

The bulk of the new second round of funding–Flipboard had previously raised $10.5 million–came from New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

Insight’s Jerry Murdock said in an interview that he was excited about the idea of “social endorsement” that Flipboard was pioneering.

“We back great entrepreneurs and Flipboard is that and also in an obviously unique position to solve a problem of media consumption in the digital age,” he said. “The sky is the limit. Or more precisely it is the best environment to consume curated real-time content for Twitter and Facebook, because of the user experience and social endorsement integration with the content.”

Insight is also an investor in Twitter.

Also stepping up in the new Flipboard round is Comcast’s venture arm, as well as previous investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Twitter co-founder and product guru Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

“From a Comcast perspective, we’re intrigued with Mike and what he’s doing with content aggregation,” said Amy Banse, Comcast Interactive Capital’s new head. “We think we can learn from him and he from us.”

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

The elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In its current offering, there are pull-quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on a social networking or microblogging site.

McCue said the new giant pile of cash will be used to increase its 32-person staff to about 50, international expansion, small acquisitions and more product development on more platforms.

The next in the arena will be the iPhone version of Flipboard, said McCue, followed by one for the Google Android mobile operating system eventually.

Left unsaid, of course, was the need for funding to fight the likelihood of increased competition in the hot space for delivering both professional and social content to consumers on a wide range of devices.

Rivals are varied, such as Silicon Valley’s most adorable news reader start-up Pulse and also Zite, a news reader which was recently sued for copyright infringement by a group of major publishers.

There are bigger potential players, such as Google, which is trying to find various ways to move into the social space.

In fact, said several sources, Google and others have made acquisition approaches to Flipboard, which has instead opted for raising more funding and staying independent for now.

McCue declined to talk about that, but did note that he is not surprised by publisher interest, especially of the worried and wary kind, in the arena.

“Anyone not respectful of others’ content is going to get in that kind of trouble,” he said, noting Flipboard has struck deals with 17 big publishers so far, including this morning’s announcement about a partnership with Oprah Winfrey’s and Discovery’s OWN cable network. “There is not one half to this equation.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

McCue said advertising will be the key to Flipboard’s business plan in the future, although it’s not clear if the company will ever sell advertising itself.

Rather, it will partner with publishers seeking better distribution in the explosive tablet and smartphone market, where Flipboard has been gaining traction quickly.

But until that is sorted out, there is now $50 million more in the Flipboard kitty to figure it all out.

“With this funding, we can grow at the right pace and have a lot of flexibility to get the product right,” said McCue. “And, that’s the most important thing.”

On some level of journalism, I guess anything could happen.

At least that’s according to a recent article by Business Insider’s Henry Blodget about an alleged “mole” at Twitter who was allegedly spying for Google, specifically about an exec the microblogging service was trying to poach from the Silicon Valley search giant.

In a decidedly splashy, hello-traffic, ALL-CAPs headline–THE SEARCH FOR THE “TWITTER MOLE”: All Eyes On John Doerr“–Blodget pointed his J’accuse finger at the legendary venture capitalist as the culprit.

Based on…

Well, based on nothing, it appears, except rank speculation and what appears to be no attempt to get Doerr to comment.

And, while it’s not my cup of tea, whatev, I suppose.

Except when I read down to the bottom and landed on this gem:

We have talked to several sources familiar with aspects of the situation. Thus far, we have not been able to confirm either assertion.

First, no one has even confirmed that Google was tipped off in advance of Twitter’s poaching effort, much less by a Twitter mole.

This doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

And later still:

So we haven’t been able to confirm the “high-level mole at Twitter” story. And we think there’s a good explanation for why there might not be a mole at all.

Secondly, we have talked to no one who has any evidence other than the logic above that, even if there is a Google mole at Twitter, the mole is John Doerr. One insider we spoke to, in fact, dismissed the idea out of hand.

Say what?

It’s kind of like thinking that a sparkly Civil War-era vampire falling in love with a moody chick in the Pacific Northwest and flying through the pines all day and mooning over their cruel fate was real.

Okay, that was a Hollywood movie called “Twilight,” but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen!

Thus, Doerr–a tough customer to be sure, capable of all kinds of sharp-elbowed behavior–is guilty until proven innocent?

Or just not guilty at all, but let’s just say he might be anyway, without a shred of evidence, because it could have happened!

(Courtroom confession: It was All Things Digital‘s Liz Gannes, who did it on the blog with scoop on the Twitter talent raid effort of Sundar Pichai!)

Speaking of evidence, less than a week later, Javert–oops, I mean, Blodget–was back in another kangaroo court performance with another terrifically loud headline:

“The Guy Who Says He Owns 50% Of Facebook Just Filed A Boatload Of New Evidence–And It’s Breathtaking.”

Breathtaking, I guess, if you are in that fantasy teenaged girl mode, but deeply suspect if you are anyone with a modicum of journalistic responsibility.

It is perfectly fine for Blodget to dredge up the copious emails from a man named Paul Ceglia–who alleges he possesses a contract that he struck with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg at the time of its creation–and analyze them.

And it is certainly notable that a credible law firm, DLA Piper, has taken on the case for Ceglia and it does seems unlikely that it would have done so without doing some level of due diligence.

In fact, in an interview with Am Law Daily, DLA partner Robert Brownlie, international co-chair of the firm’s securities litigation, said: “At first I shrugged it off as incredible. I would not have gotten involved and DLA would not have gotten involved if we had any doubts about the facts or evidence in the case.”

That was, of course, countered by Facebook’s lawyer Orin Snyder at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, who said in a statement that the Ceglia allegations were part of “a fraudulent lawsuit brought by a convicted felon.”

By the way, in fancy-lawyer parlance, that translates to a liar-liar-pants-on-fire defense.

So, microwave the popcorn and get ready for the drama, because no question, it is clearly going to be juicy all around with a whole lot of social networking poking!

In fact, such a case is tailor-made for Blodget, who has always been a very gifted writer with a nose for sharp-edged analysis.

It’s too bad, then, that he did not hone his knife to such an edge when it comes to Ceglia, giving him much too much credibility based on what could be fake emails, especially since they come from a man with a history of fraud.

History, in fact, that Ceglia is depending on in this case, since Zuckerberg most definitely has one in regards to partnerships gone bad.

Thus, Zuckerberg has been sneaky before, ergo he’s sneaky here.

That’s no surprise as a legal tactic, of course, and I threw in the “ergo,” since I too want to play Perry Mason in a blog.

But. More to the point, while Facebook was certainly hard-nosed in dealing with both protracted and high-profile legal challenges from the Winklevoss twins and also Eduardo Severin, I don’t think I have ever seen the company explicitly say evidence was completely fabricated, as it is alleging Ceglia’s emails are.

As I said, I have no idea if they are or they’re not, but I do know this: While those emails are certainly bombshell in nature, they are designed to be so precisely because it is a lawsuit in which the principal is trying to shame Facebook into settling.

None of that seems to concern Blodget, who concludes at the end of the post:

“In short, to us at least, the emails don’t read ‘fake.’”

In short, to me at least, that’s for fake-email experts and the courts to decide.

The real fact of the matter is, who knows? I certainly don’t, although I do know it’s terrifically easy to file a lawsuit and claim just about anything you like.

And the same seems to be true–more and more these days and not for the good–for blogs too.

As for me, I need to get back to my goal of proving that sparkly vampires do exist.

People’s Daily, which Reuters reported Monday may be planning an initial public offering in Shanghai this year, launched a microblogging service last year and a search engine in December called Goso.com, appointing the former head of Google’s research institute in China as its chief scientist last month. Xinhua launched its own search engine, Panguso.com, in February in partnership with China Mobile, and CCTV has been operating an online video platform CNTV since the end of 2009.

“We cannot rule out the possibility that Panguso, like Goso, is a government tool to tighten control of the information search field,” an Internet user said on a Baidu online forum, under the name iaspecjack.

“Google studied how to find information … Baidu later studied how to find only parts of the information … Goso came in the latest and it studies how to not find information,” a user from Guangdong wrote on Chinese microblogging service Sina Weibo.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Andreessen Horowitz has invested more than $80 million in Twitter via purchasing stock in private secondary markets.

When called about it by BoomTown, a spokeswoman at the high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm confirmed the purchase.

To be clear, Twitter does not get this money–early investors and employees able to sell their privately held Twitter shares do.

Buying into the secondary markets–which have recently attracted some controversy and regulatory scruntiny–has become a common way for VCs to invest in a hot start-up without a complex and competitive funding bake-off.

The move is an interesting one, since Andreessen Horowitz was not part of the recent $200 million round of venture funding at the San Francisco microblogging company, led by Kleiner Perkins at a $3.75 billion valuation.

Sources said that the firm made the move because it is already deeply invested in other key companies in the social space, including gaming giant Zynga, location-focused Foursquare, local discounting phenom Groupon and general social networking behemoth Facebook.

Apparently, Twitter makes it a full basketball team.

The investment by the firm gives more perceptual boost to Twitter, which is still trying to create a lucrative business model for itself, focused on advertising.

It needs to, if it want to stay independent for the long haul.

While an IPO is a possibility, so is an acquisition. Several months ago, while it was doing its funding round, Twitter had incoming interest from Facebook, which lobbed in a $5 billion soft offer, as well from Google.

As promised, after posting highlights last week, here’s the full video from an interview I did with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo at our D@CES event at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Costolo is one funny dude, and he also said a lot about what’s up at the San Francisco microblogging service.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110117/full-dces-interview-video-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110110/dces-highlights-video-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-%c2%a1ole/ http://allthingsd.com/20110110/dces-highlights-video-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-%c2%a1ole/#comments Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:01:17 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39346

Yes, like a digital Heidi Klum, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo did declare that BoomTown’s outfit was “matador casual” at the start of an interview I did with him at D@CES last Friday.

The event, which we did in cooperation with the Consumer Electronics Show, was only three sessions in one afternoon. It was followed by a lovely party, all at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

Here’s a longish highlights video of my interview with Costolo, during which we talked about a wide range of issues facing the San Francisco microblogging service, as well as his take on my fashion choice.

But let it be said, while I did not comment on his sartorial selection at the time, as you will see below, Costolo really did pull off a very smart approximation of an Ellen DeGeneres look himself.

Here’s the highlights video of Costolo–the full video will be up in a week.

The other highlights videos at D@CES will also be posted this week, with the full videos next week: Microsoft Internet Explorer head Dean Hachamovitch on Wednesday, and Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on Friday.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110110/dces-highlights-video-twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-%c2%a1ole/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110108/twitter-courts-googles-sundar-pichai-to-be-its-head-of-product/ http://allthingsd.com/20110108/twitter-courts-googles-sundar-pichai-to-be-its-head-of-product/#comments Sun, 09 Jan 2011 02:49:46 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=2133 Sundar Pichai, the man in charge of Chrome and Chrome OS at Google, is being aggressively courted by Twitter to be its next head of product, according to sources with knowledge of the situation.

However, added sources, Google is fighting hard to counter the Twitter offer, so Pichai could easily stay with his current employer. At Google, which he joined in April 2004, Pichai is a VP of Product Management.

If successful, the hiring of Pichai would be a major raid for Twitter, and mark its place next to Facebook as an up-and-comer in the race to entice away top Google executives.

More importantly, Twitter could use the product help.

The San Francisco microblogging company, which just raised a massive funding, has done relatively little product development recently, in large part because its focus has been absorbed by overwhelming growth and infrastructure problems.

Pichai certainly fits the bill as a head of product for Twitter, given his job at Google. The well-regarded tech exec heads the Silicon Valley search giant’s high-profile Chrome browser and Chrome OS efforts.

Pichai was front and center at an unveiling of Chrome OS plans in November, and touted the Chrome browser’s 40 million users only a year after its debut in 2009.

But not everyone is so sanguine. Paul Buchheit, founder of Gmail (and FriendFeed) predicted a very short life for Google’s still-in-beta Chrome OS, noting–on Twitter in December–that he thought the product would be axed or fused with Android in 2011.

As Mobilized’s Ina Fried wrote at the time:

Google originally hoped to have Chrome OS-based computers for sale this year, but has run into some delays. Last week, the company released a beta version of the software and distributed to testers an unbranded laptop running the operating system. However, it’s worth noting that in doing so, Google has hardly made the strongest hardware case for the operating system, using a relatively bulky netbook with a reliable, but hardly power-sipping Intel Atom processor.

The idea of merging the two operating systems has some merit. Doing so would pair a top-notch browser with an ecosystem that already has a lot of applications and developers.

For now, the operating systems are distinct, with Android running hundreds of thousands of applications and used largely on phones, along with a few tablets, such as Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. However, Google VP Andy Rubin confirmed after his appearance at last week’s D: Dive Into Mobile that the company is working on a new version of Android, known as Honeycomb, that is geared exclusively to tablets. (The full video of Rubin’s onstage appearance was posted on our site earlier today.)

Acer and a couple of other hardware makers have said they plan to do Chrome OS netbooks next year once the software is ready.

If hired, Pichai would fill an open spot left by the departure of longtime Twitter VP of Product Jason Goldman, who stepped down at the beginning of December.

The attempt to bring on Pichai to lead product brings into question former CEO Evan Williams’s role at the company. When he stepped down as CEO, Williams said it was in order to focus on product strategy, and when Goldman gave up his position, many assumed Williams was the natural substitute.

While Pichai would be a strong choice for the job, he has not been an active user of the product.

Until recently, that is.

Pichai’s own Twitter account has a grand total of 118 tweets, with about a third of them posted in the last month.

Yesterday, in an interview with BoomTown’s Kara Swisher at D@CES, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said some product goals for Twitter included a better experience for passive users and a more “agnostic” experience across platforms.

Costolo also mentioned a new zero tolerance policy for infrastructure problems, and said that Twitter does not consider itself a “platform company,” but rather one that has APIs.

The Google-Twitter connection is strong, and not just on the we-want-to-buy-you front–Google has often cast its acquisitive eyes at Twitter and still does.

And many Twitter employees were formerly Googlers, although not all in the same era or area.

Costolo himself came to Twitter after being at Google, which had acquired his last start-up, FeedBurner.

Other former Googlers include many on Twitter’s product team, such as Othman Laraki and Elad Gil, who were product managers at Google Mobile Maps and Google Toolbar before joining Twitter through its acquisition of their geo start-up Mixer Labs.

In addition, last year, Twitter nabbed Google lawyer Alexander Macgillivray as its general counsel.

And, of course, Twitter co-founders Williams and Biz Stone had worked at Google after it bought Blogger. They created Twitter after they left the company.

It’s possible that Pichai leaving Google might have something to do with the company favoring the Android mobile operating system over Chrome OS, but seems more likely that the Twitter role would just be a compelling opportunity for him.

Twitter declined comment, and Google has not responded to an inquiry about Pichai.

Until this nail-biting talent raid has a resolution, here’s a video of Pichai talking at the Web 2.0 Summit in 2009:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110108/twitter-courts-googles-sundar-pichai-to-be-its-head-of-product/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110108/twitter-responds-to-wikileaks-document-demand-by-feds/ http://allthingsd.com/20110108/twitter-responds-to-wikileaks-document-demand-by-feds/#comments Sat, 08 Jan 2011 08:25:16 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=39304

Twitter has been ordered by a U.S. federal judge to turn over documents related to several people involved with WikiLeaks to the Justice Department.

Tonight, a Twitter spokeswoman responded to a request for comment on the situation:

“We’re not going to comment on specific requests, but, to help users protect their rights, it’s our policy to notify users about law enforcement and governmental requests for their information, unless we are prevented by law from doing so. We outline this policy in our law enforcement guidelines.”

In an onstage interview I did with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo at a D@CES event last night in Las Vegas, he referenced the issue, but would not give any specifics.

While he said he could not talk about WikiLeaks specifically, he indicated that he disliked government mandates to keep things quiet and reiterated Twitter’s desire to connect people with useful information.

“We’re going to lash out at things that prevent us from doing that, as aggressively as we can,” said Costolo, who also used Twitter crackdowns in China as an example.

It might be a Herculean task to fight the federal government, which is aggressively going after WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange.

Some Web companies, such as eBay’s PayPal unit, have cut off WikiLeaks.

On the other hand, Twitter took legal action to unseal the court order, which allowed it to inform those involved, giving them 10 days to object. Otherwise, the San Francisco microblogging service would have had to turn over information without the knowledge of these users.

There will surely be more of these to other Web companies, with obvious candidates being Google and Facebook.

The order from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is ordering Twitter to fork over subscriber names, user names, screen names, mailing addresses, residential addresses and more of several people involved with WikiLeaks.

But you can read for yourself–here is the court order, as well as the unsealing order:

twitter1

twitter2

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