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SAN FRANCISCO, California - Twitter has announced it will start its own URL shortening service for tweets from its official apps. Twitter CEO Evan Williams made the announcement Wednesday night at Chirp, the Twitter developer's conference. It happened casually, during a Q&A session with attendees.

Following its $8.5 billion acquisition back in May, Microsoft has officially welcomed Skype into its family. The world's most popular VoIP service will become a new business division within Microsoft, and will remain focused on its goal of "connecting all people across all devices and accelerating both companies' efforts to transform real-time communications for consumers and enterprise customers."

Research In Motion is on a quest for goodwill after last week's massive outage that left BlackBerry users without service for three days. The company just took to the wires and announced that over a $100 worth of premium apps will eventually be free for a limited time and enterprise users will also net one month of free technical support. RIM hopes SIM 3, Bejeweled, N.O.V.A. and many more will help calm the nerves those BlackBerry users thinking of jumping ship.

Following a statement from the company earlier today to confirm that it is working to restore BlackBerry services around the world, RIM's co-CEO Mike Lazaridis has release a video in which he apologizes to BlackBerry users for over three days of downtime affecting BlackBerry Messenger, email, and internet access.

There's no escape. The Blackberry service outage is now impacting users on almost every planet, CNN reports. Tatooine and Coruscant appear to not have been affected yet, but users all over Geonosis, Naboo and Yavin were reportedly hit hard. Our thoughts are with their inhabitants.