Twitter recently announced that it has acquired Tweetie, the very popular and highly polished Twitter application for the iPhone . The application will now be called “Twitter for iPhone” and will drop from $2.99 to free, with developer Loren Brichter  joining the Twitter mobile team. Twitter also plans to launch Twitter for the iPad, which Brichter will be involved with.

Twitter also launched an official Twitter for BlackBerry application, so another mobile application shouldn’t come as much of a shock. And yet, the iPhone is a platform where Twitter has a very strong third party presence, and Twitter has no doubt been benefiting from the contributions of these developers. Tweetie is extremely polished and is arguably the best, but there are plenty of other quality applications that are getting hung out to dry. Still, a move like this seemed inevitable.

Careful analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes AppStore revealed massive room for improvement. People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they’re not finding one. So, they get confused and give up. It’s important that we optimize for user benefit and create an awesome experience.

This all comes less than a week before Twitter’s developer conference, Chirp, where the company will try to steer developers down a path that they won’t be paving over any time soon.

Though,Twitter’s post does not mention anything about the Tweetie desktop application, which is available exclusively for the Mac. Don’t be surprised if this becomes ‘Twitter For Mac’ eventually.

NASSCOM Foundation recently organized a ConnectIT workshop for government officials in Sangli. ConnectIT is a national level programme of NASSCOM Foundation as part of its efforts towards building IT capacity among government officers and non-profits. The programme is supported by Microsoft and NASSCOM.

At the two day ConnectIT workshop, the government officers were introduced to various communications technologies such as video conferencing, email practices and social media tools including Twitter, Facebook and blogging. They were introduced to advanced applications in Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and their usages. The workshop also included various interactive sessions on eGovernance where the participant officers were encouraged to share their experience in e governance projects.

Security experts at eSacn have warned against opening emails or their attachments with subject lines such as “You have received A Hallmark E-Card!”, “Your friend invited you to twitter!”, “Thank you from Google!”, “Jessica would like to be your friend on hi5!” and “Shipping update for your Amazon.com order 254-71546325-658732″. These emails also carry zipped attachments which have been found to contain new variants of the malware in the wild.

The “You have received A Hallmark E-Card!”, spam email comes with postcard.zip or similarly named attachment. The payload in the zip file contains malware that has the capability to mass mail message(s) with the built-in SMTP client engine to the email addresses harvested from the local computer. The payload also contains a malware with the characteristics of Vundo (aka VirtuMonde/VirtuMundo), a trojan horse that cause popups and advertises rogue antispyware programs.

Vundo can infect a system when a browser just visits a Web site link contained in a spammed email. It is known to add itself to the startup registry, create a DLL file in the Windows system32 directory and inject it into system processes winlogon.exe and explorer.exe. The malware can also send downloads/requests to get other files from Internet and spread quickly by itself in a network.

Another email doing the rounds is taking advantage of the popularity of the social networking sites such as “Twitter” and “Hi5″ to spread itself. These spam emails carry a deadly payload of a variant of the Buzus worm that is network aware bot creating trojan. On infection, it creates a startup registry entry and modifies the host files to prevent access to security websites. It can also send spam mail to the email addresses harvested from the local infected system and try to spread itself.

The malware spreading spam also had subject lines such as “Thank you from Google!” and  “Shipping update for your Amazon.com order 254-71546325-658732″ and were found to be with  attachments that had typical names such as Invitation Card.zip or Postcard.zip or Shipping documents.zip or CV-20100120-112.zip. Any unsuspecting user who opens the files gets infected immediately and the malware then tries to infect other systems in the network by sending the same malicious emails to addresses harvested from local address books on the infected computers.

Socialwok, a product that adds a social layer to Gmail and other Google products, has just integrated as a partner in Google’s recently launched Google Apps Marketplace.

Last year Socialwok launched its enterprise-friendly, FriendFeed-like layer for Google Apps. The web-based application was praised for launching a social network that better than the unsocial Google Apps.And the startup recently launched a gadget to allow users access to all the features of Socialwok without leaving Gmail.Socialwok is becoming more than just a collaboration platform; the startup is integrating with Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and RSS feeds to allow users to tap into their outside social networks within Socialwok.

Socialwok is a full-fledged Twitter client and allows users to Tweet directly from its platform, as well as track a brand or keywords on Twitter from within the application. Also, users can monitor and track updates on a Facebook page.

Socialwok is also allowing users to import RSS feeds and share it within a company’s Socialwok account. And Socialwok is integrated with Google Buzz, and allows users to tap into their Buzz streams from within the platform and share content in Buzz from within Socialwok.

With the addition of social networking functionality, Socialwok is becoming more than just a collaboration platform.After the startup’s launch on the Google Apps marketplace last week, Socialwok signed up over 4000 businesses to its service. Prior to the launch on the marketplace, 6,000 domains and tens of thousands of users were using Socialwok.

Socialwok, which employs a freemium model, has steadily been adding features and improvements to its application, including releasing a new version of its HTML 5 mobile version for Android and iPhone browsers. And in the process of developing an innovative application, startup managed to catch Google’s eye. In addition to joining as a pilot partner on the Google App Marketplace, Socialwok was chosen as one of the showcase companies for AppEngine technology at this year’s Google IO Developer Sandbox (Socialwok is powered by Google App Engine).

Obopay, a mobile banking and payment provider, was recently chosen by MIT’s Technology Review as one of the top 50 innovative companies in the world across sectors such as energy, computing, the Web, biomedicine, and materials. Obopay was conferred this honor under ‘Private Web Company’ category for bringing innovation in mobile payment services through its pioneering mobile payment service which is ubiquitous and highly secure.

With technology developed at its Bangalore based R&D centre, Obopay products are platform agnostic and global in nature. Other companies in ‘the Web’ category included names like Google, Twitter, IBM, Adobe amongst others.

The companies on MIT’s Technology Review list have been assessed on basis of their business model, deployment strategies, scalability of technologies as well as success rate. The editors of Technology Review analyzed companies over the last year that has demonstrated their superiority at inventing technology and using it for business growth as well as for transforming the lives of people. The companies identified were the ones with most promising technologies, whether they were giant corporations or fledgling startups with initial venture capital investments.