On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.

It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links.

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A little over a week ago Facebook reached a major milestone: 300 million active users. The fastest-growth region continues to be Asia, but growth in other overseas regions such as the Americas and Africa have also been strong. Currently reaching only 1% of potential users in Asia and Africa, Facebook has barely scratched the surface in both regions.

Growth in the U.S. remains fastest among those age 45 and older, and the share of those users is higher in the U.S. than overseas. In other regions recent growth tended to be more evenly divided among age groups. One notable exception has been the teen group in Asia, which grew over 80% in the last 12 weeks.

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Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by companies running social networks.

Whether you’re a street demonstrator or a business analyst, you may well have come to depend on Twitter. We may have been willing to build our virtual houses on shaky foundations might when they were temporary beach huts; but now we need to examine the ground on which many are proposing to build our virtual shopping malls and even our virtual federal offices.

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There’s a lot of excitement about ebooks these days, and rightly so. While Amazon (AMZN) doesn’t release sales figures for the Kindle, there’s no question that it represents a turning point in the public perception of ebook devices. And of course, there’s Stanza, an open ebook platform for the iPhone, which has been downloaded more than a million times (and now has been bought by Amazon.)

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If you care what I think, you know that Twitter is just about the best way to learn what I’m paying attention to. I pass along tidbits of O’Reilly news, interesting reading from mailing lists and blogs I follow, and of course, tidbits from the twitterers I’m following. These are all the things I could never find time to put on my blog, but that I spray via email like a fire hose at editors, conference planners, and researchers within O’Reilly. A lot of my job is, as we say, “redistributing the future”–following interesting people, and passing on what I learn to others. And twitter is an awesome tool for doing just that.

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In my talks this year, I have been outlining some of the world’s great problems, highlighting some of the things that are being done by technology innovators to solve them, and urging my listeners to “work on stuff that matters.”

We are in unprecedented times. And folks, I’m sorry to say that the current financial meltdown is not the worst of it. Political instability around the world, wars over access to resources, and yes, terrorists, are all in our future. Scientists who’ve studied global warming agree that we’re heading towards decades of extreme environmental stress, leading to even more severe economic disruptions than we have seen to date. Meanwhile, we have an aging population with ballooning healthcare costs, an unfair economy in which some people receive outsized gains while others fall behind, an educational system that is not preparing children for the future, and deficits that require an increasing percentage of our tax dollars to service debt to other countries. Even if there is a short-term recovery, huge problems loom in the years ahead, problems we can no longer pass off to our children and grandchildren.

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In my keynote at Web 2.0 Expo New York, I made the comment that, cool as Dell Ideastorm is, the fundamental supply-chain approach behind dell.com is actually a better example of how Web 2.0 applies to the enterprise. I also made the provocative assertion that WalMart is a Web 2.0 company (or at least a model of how Web 2.0 principles apply to the enterprise.) Based on questions I’ve heard since, I thought I should explain further.

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