Techmeme is on fire this morning with discussion of Rafe Needleman’s CNet post about Twitter’s supposed plans to index the content of links shared over the microblogging service. Ex-Googler turned Twitter exec, Santosh Jayaram, said as much last night, as well as mentioning plans to rank search results by the reputation of the author.

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Techmeme is one of the sites that Robert Thomson, managing editor of the The Wall Street Journal, presumably thinks is a “parasite” or “tech tapeworm in the intestines of the Internet.”

The Web site aggregates links to stories. Along with the links is a short description of the news. Thomson and others in the newspaper industry say it’s unfair and unlawful for Web sites to profit from their content without compensating them. On the same day that Thomson made his comments, William Dean Singleton, chairman of the The Associated Press, sized up how many in print journalism feel about sites that aggregate news: “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore.”

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This week Microsoft (MSFT) didn’t get much hype for its three major announcements. Certainly it didn’t stay on top of TechMeme as long as, say, if Steve Jobs gets a sniffle. But don’t miss what they did.

1. On day one of the PDC, they announced Azure, which is a set of cloud services that competes with Amazon’s S3 and Rackspace’s Mosso and will radically change enterprises’ acceptance of cloud services for a whole lot of reasons.

2. On day two of the PDC, they showed off Windows 7, which is getting high praise from my blogging friends who were lent laptops with it on there (I didn’t get Windows 7 yet).

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It hasn’t even been a month since Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a German blog that growth, not monetization, was the priority for the social-networking site. In fact, he even went so far as to say that he didn’t see a revenue plan coming into play for three more years.

But now, as TechCrunch digs up info on Facebook’s financials, it appears that Facebook may not even make it to 2011 unless they can drum up more cash–either through an accelerated revenue model or more investment dollars before the entire global economy erodes further. In response, Facebook basically responds by telling VentureBeat that it’s doing just fine–thank you very much–while other sources say that something must be wrong with the Techcrunch calculator.

Recognizing that advertising on Facebook has offered “dismal” returns, some bloggers (Techmeme) are suggesting that maybe a subscription model–nothing too crazy, mind you–might be in order. At least one has said that the only thing holding Facebook back from imposing fees is a lack of guts.

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Early every morning, I open my Web browser and load up a half-dozen “aggregator” sites: Techmeme, Memeorandum, Real Clear Politics, Google News, the Drudge Report, and the Huffington Post. This is my first sortie into the day’s news, the way I orient myself to what’s going on in the world now that I no longer subscribe to a print newspaper. After picking clean the smorgasbord of links, I dip into a second set of sites, these pulling in quirkier tales from around the Web: Digg, BuzzFeed, Fark, Hacker News, Boing Boing, and Kottke as well as my personalized Web aggregators at Friendfeed and Google Reader. During the course of the day, I repeat this process often; in my manic hunt for the freshest stuff on the Web, I reload some of these sites 10 or 20 times each.

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In its first major upgrade ever, Google Blogsearch just relaunched and looks radically different. Instead of the blank page look of Google.com, Blogsearch now looks like Google News (but uglier)–with the hottest topics from the blogosphere aggregated on the front page. Readers can drill down in 11 different categories, including technology, business, sports and entertainment. Google says you can use Blogsearch to see what the world is talking about.

The user interface isn’t nearly as nice as leading tech blog memetracker Techmeme, but the new Blogsearch has some major advantages.

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Yesterday evening I took a quick look at Techmeme and saw that the top two posts at that point in time were Tim O’Reilly and my responses to Mike Arrington’s Yahoo post. I clicked through to see Tim’s post and noticed that Tim had done the same thing that I had done; simply cut and paste the comment I had left on Arrington’s post onto my blog. It was interesting to see that the top two posts on Techmeme at that moment in time were in fact comments to another blog post.

I then twittered that thought and went to dinner.

Here’s the thing. I get comments every day on my blog that are as good as any blog posts I see on the Web. And they are stuck behind the comments link. They need to be on the front page, not on the back page.

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I just switched all my home pages off of Techmeme to FriendFeed.

I find that Techmeme has become a Google News killer. All I see on it is big media companies (including me, who works at Fast Company).

On top of my FriendFeed right now are people I don’t know. No A-listers. I’m not there.

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We received an interesting email today from Business Wire, a press-release wire service that Warren Buffett bought in March 2006. Currently Business Wire is ranked about No. 32 on the Techmeme Leaderboard, which puts it above some top tech blogs (but not ReadWriteWeb, which is ranked No. 6 currently). The email claimed that companies and marketers can use Business Wire to bypass journalists and bloggers to get into key news sources like Techmeme and search-engine results too. Is this true? I think it’s a fair claim–and there’s no reason why Business Wire shouldn’t feature in Techmeme if it is “breaking” news stories or is being linked to by bloggers. In fact it does indeed route around blogs that simply regurgitate PR–which is a good thing in my book!

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