Twitter keeps on growing like a weed, and there seems to be no stopping the much-hyped, heavily scrutinized Silicon Valley startup in its quest to turn its popular micro-sharing service into a veritable pulse of the planet. Twitter passed 50 million unique visitors worldwide in July, according to comScore, reaching 51.6 million UVs at the end of the month. But its biggest increase in traffic Twitter saw earlier this year, when unique visitors numbers gradually increased to reach 44.5 million in June, up from 19.1 million in the beginning of March.

While the service’s growth understandably lifts the follower numbers of the average Twitter user along the way, a Raplead study shows there’s also an apparent popularity gap that continues to widen.

One of the richest areas of experimentation in search right now is how to rank real-time results. For the most part, that means finding relevance in Twitter and bringing up the most important Tweets for any given keyword (see OneRiot, Collecta,Scoopler). Today, real-time search engine CrowdEye is introducing its own real-time ranking algorithm called CrowdRank. It’s supposed to be like Google’s PageRank, but for the crowd.

Right now,real-time search is Twitter search because that is the richest source of real-time data. And Twitter search is essentially a form of people search. Twitter’s own search engine simply brings back a reverse-chronological list of the most recent Tweets that match the keyword you enter.

CrowdEye does that as well because often in real-time search you just want to see what is happening at this second. But now CrowdEye will let you sort by relevance as well, rearranging results by the most influential people on Twitter.

T-Mobile UK this morning announced the Pulse, the first pay-as-you-go Android 1.5 smartphone and the third coming from the network operator.

Available for £180 starting October exclusively on T-Mobile, it boasts a 3.5″ HVGA touchscreen display, the biggest yet on an Android handset, a 3.2-megapixel camera and a TeleNav-powered GPS (more specs below).

The new device comes courtesy of Huawei, which had been rumored to be working with T-Mobile since displaying a device at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year.

More details about the device:

The phone runs on a Qualcomm’s MSM7200A chipset and weighs 130g. It features a trackball and a 3.5″ HVGA touchscreen display with auto-rotation.

The T-Mobile Pulse also features a 3.2 mega pixel, auto-focus camera (no flash) that allows photos to be uploaded straight to the Internet, a 2GB internal memory and a micro SD card slot for storing media. The handset also offers access to corporate e-mail through the Road sync client, and boasts enhanced social networking and community features.

Laggard UK music retailer HMV is buying a 50 percent stake in the UK-based online music retailer 7Digital for $12.6 Million (£7.7 million). The move looks set to give HMV a ‘great leap forward’ in digital, since 7Digital has been fleet of foot in pushing non-DRM MP3s, open formats, its white label API and signed deals with tech rock stars like Spotify and many major record labels.

The purchase creates a neat exit for 7Digital’s VC backers Balderton Capital and Sutton Place Managers. CEO Ben Drury told me that the VCs got a “positive return on investment” – though terms have not been disclosed. In January last year it took £4.25 million in a round led by Sutton Place Managers that included original investor Balderton Capital. HMV Group will now use the five year-old 7Digital as its sole supplier for “all of its existing digital operations” in the UK and Canada.

A little over a year ago we saw the launch of Anyvite, a Y Combinator funded competitor to Evite that was looking to streamline event planning. Tonight, that startup is launching a spin-off site called Tweetvite — a site dedicated to helping plan and discover Tweetups.

For those that haven’t encountered the term before, a Tweetup is a real-life get together between people who use Twitter. Beyond that, the rules are flexible: Tweetups can be large events or small gatherings, can involve grabbing a few drinks or just socializing for a bit, and can be planned for in advance or spontaneous. Founder Jeff Morin says that while there are plenty of sites that cater to traditional events, like birthday and BBQs, the Tweetup niche is underserved.

I don’t know about you, but I never really consider September to still be the Summer. But it is, until September 22, anyway. Why that matters is that AT&T promised iPhone users in the U.S. MMS capabilities by “late Summer.” So, technically AT&T, you have three weeks.

I shouldn’t have to remind everyone how utterly ridiculous it is that about three months now after much of the rest of the world got it, the U.S. still has no MMS capabilities for the iPhone. Reasons seem to vary for why exactly it is taking AT&T so long, but my favorite is the one where they have to manually remove MMS opt-out codes from each iPhone contract. Genius planning right there, if that’s true. And still, why exactly does that take three months?

When it comes to the battle for top talent in Silicon Valley, perks can be a powerful weapon. For years, Google owned this space — you couldn’t read a report on the company without a mention of the search giant’s multiple cafeterias or onsite haircuts. But in the last few years Facebook has been piling on the perks, even going as far as poaching Google’s in-house chef. And today Facebook is taking another page from Google’s playbook: shuttles from San Francisco to Facebook’s headquarters in Palo Alto, provided by Bauer’s — the same company used by Google. A number of pleased employees have been tweeting and updating their Facebook statuses with their enthusiastic responses to the announcement.

The news comes only a week after Facebook announced plans to drastically increase the size of its workforce by as much as 50% by the end of the year, during a time when most of Silicon Valley is not hiring and is cutting back on perks. Clearly, the social network is doing everything it can to make the decision to join as easy as possible.

Digg announced a seemingly small, but rather interesting change on its blog today: It has added a “rel=nofollow” tag to every link on the site that it doesn’t trust. What this means is that all the spammers who submit their stories to Digg, are now basically out of luck.

Sure, all spammer who submit something to Digg hope that it hits the frontpage and brings a rush of traffic. But more important to them are the links associated with Digg. If a story is popular on Digg, it will also likely garner quite a few links back to it. But even if it doesn’t become popular, the link coming from Digg itself gives some weight to the spammy URL in a search engine crawler’s eyes.

This morning I wrote about NetBase Solutions’ healthBase, a semantic search engine that aggregates medical content from millions of authoritative health sites including WebMD, Wikipedia, and PubMed. But is it a semantic engine or an anti-semitic search engine?

Several of our readers tested out the site and found that healthBase’s semantic search engine has some major glitches (see the comments). One of the most unfortunate examples is when you type in a search for “AIDS,” one of the listed causes of the disease is “Jew.” Really.

The Apple/Google Voice fiasco just got more interesting. Toktumi, a startup that lets small businesses build office-caliber phone systems with their mobile phones and computers, just had its application Line2 approved by Apple — nearly three months after it was originally submitted. The powerful service allows business employees to assign two phone numbers to their iPhone: one that they can give to family and friends, and another that can be given to business contacts, with features that allow for call filtering and a professional-grade voicemail system. But it’s also notable for its many similarities to Google Voice, an application that Apple has kept out of the App Store for months now.

The story so far: late last July, Apple abruptly pulled all third party Google Voice applications from the App Store, explaining that they somehow were duplicating the iPhone’s native functionality. Later that day, we broke the news that Google’s official Google Voice client had been barred from the App Store, sparking a media storm and a FCC inquiry into Apple’s rationale for the ban.

Event ticketing and management site amiando is reporting some impressive growth in revenues. In a company update the private German startup is circulating, it is reporting 200 percent annual revenue growth in the second quarter, and 65 percent growth over the first quarter of 2009. The report doesn’t give absolute numbers, but I’ve learned that it is in the range of a few million Euros a year, split evenly between its two main businesses, amiandoTICKETS (ticket sales) and amiandoEVENTS (event registration and management). The company says it is on track to become profitable by early next year.

More information is coming in about that $14 million third round of financing that personal finance service Mint closed last month. That financing, we’ve heard from two sources close to the company, valued Mint at a whopping $140 million post-money valuation.

That’s not bad for a company that launched just two years ago – Mint won the top prize at TechCrunch50 2007.

In a “normal” round of financing a company would dilute by 25-35%, meaning the expected valuation on a $14 million round would be, roughly, $45 million – $60 million. The $140 million valuation shows two things – Mint is on a roll, and they don’t seem to need much capital.

Mint has grown to 1.4 million registered users, tracking $175 billion in transactions and $47 billion in assets. The site also reports that it has identified $300 million in potential savings offers for its users. It primarily makes its money by generating leads for financial institutions, but it’s also sitting on a goldmine of user data that it hasn’t even begun to tap into yet.

There are plenty of Web-based task management tools that let you track the progress of your work projects and collaborate with co-workers. Producteev founder Ilan Abehassera wants to go one better and help you “complete your task” by making it easy to ask your contacts and followers on Twitter for assistance.

Producteev shows you a dashboard of different tasks you’ve set up, each in its own widget box which you can drag around and rearrange. For its commercial launch today, Producteev is introducing some new features. One is the ability to syndicate any task to Twitter or Facebook.

Say what you will about the quality of the reviews on Yelp or the lengths it will go to get verboten features into its iPhone app, it has made the jump from Web 2.0 darling to a mainstream service. Over the past year, Yelp has nearly doubled its U.S. audience, while incumbent CitySearch has remained flat. In July, Yelp had 8.6 million unique U.S. visitors, up 80 percent from a year ago. Citysearch, on the other hand, literally had zero growth, staying at 15.4 million uniques, although it bottomed at 13 million in April and has come back up since then (comScore).

Yelp also has the No. 1 travel app on the iPhone (it is No. 26 overall). Whereas Citysearch’s similar iPhone app is not even in the top 20 travel apps.

Yelp’s pageviews and average time spent per user on the site are also up 150 percent and 22 percent, respectively. In fact, the 3.3 average minutes per visitor on Yelp is above Citysearch’s 2.3 minute average. But comScore shows a steep drop in both pageviews and average time spent starting in May, with a leveling off in July. Citysearch experienced similar drops. (See charts below).

Foursquare has been all the rage in the early adopter mobile space the past several months. And it has been peeking outside of the early adopter crowd with things such as local bars offering promotions for Foursquare usage. But it has still been held back a bit by the fact that it has only had an iPhone app and a somewhat clunky mobile web interface. And Foursquare understood that, so it called for developers to help build its app for the other mobile platforms. Today, the first of those is ready to go: Foursquare for Android.

Work on the project started back in April and was mainly coded by Joe LaPenna and Chris Brummel in their spare time. It started as a project to first reverse engineer the iPhone API, and then migrate to Android using Foursquare’s beta API, LaPenna tells us. After a few months of work, the duo and Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai (who has been managing it from the service’s side) feels its now feature-complete and ready for distribution.

Former Google exec and the cofounder/CEO of RSS service Feedburner Dick Costolo is Twitter’s new chief operating officer, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Costolo, who sold Feedburner to Google for $100 million in 2007, left Google in July. We’d heard he was looking to start a new company, but obviously Twitter swooped in and grabbed him.

Santosh Jayaram, Twitter’s existing head of operations (and also from Google), will presumably remain with the company and report to Costolo.

Steve Gillmor is going to love this, of course, since he proclaimed that RSS was dead and Twitter was the new messaging protocol bus, or something to that effect. “Rest In Peace, RSS,” he wrote, saying “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter…All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.”

Sometimes you come across something and don’t know exactly what it is. What if you could snap a photo on your iPhone, upload it to a site where people can submit answers and vote on the best ones, and send out a link to everyone you know on Twitter to get them to weigh in? That basically describes idthis, a simple site developed by Billy Chasen, who previously created chartbeat (which I covered here) and firef.ly for betaworks.

With idthis, which is both a Website and an iPhone app (iTunes link), the concept is pretty simple, but I can see it going in different directions. One is a simple utility. You see an old BMW convertible on the street and want to know what year it is. Send a photo to idthis. It could also be a way to play visual games. Take a closeup of an object or make it slightly blurry and see who can guess what it is first. (Obscene photos will be taken down and can be flagged by the community).

Talk about strange – while Google Voice can’t get so much as their foot in the App Store’s door, Vonage has just done a pirouette and waltzed right through. According to a recent release from the Jersey-based VOIP giant, their new Vonage mobile application has been approved for inclusion into Apple’s App Store as soon as it comes out of beta.

Details at this point are still lacking: we have no idea when it will actually release, nor do we know how much it’ll cost for all you Vonage-faithful out there. The press release doesn’t even go into what kind of services the app will provide, but we can certainly hazard a few guesses.

Online wine store and community site Vinfolio has raised $4.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Panorama Capital after receiving an undisclosed amount of angel investment earlier. San Francisco-based Vinfolio offers a set of integrated services and resources to basically help wine enthusiasts and collectors buy, sell, manage and enjoy wine.

Vinfolio CEO Stephen J. Bachmann said the investment will mostly be used to accelerate the growth of its Vinfolio Marketplace, an online platform for buying and selling wine that currently boasts over 250,000 wines up for bidding, and the startup’s expansion in Asia.

Dimdim, the open source web conferencing software company backed by $8.4 million in venture capital, today launched Dimdim Webinar, which allows SMBs and individuals to host an unlimited amount of completely web-based webinars with up to 1,000 people using nothing but a web browser.

Dimdim has arranged to provide free Dimdim Webinar accounts to up to 300 TechCrunch readers by signing up right here. The winners will be notified by e-mail.

In addition to its new product, the startup announced a partnership with Eventbrite, a provider of online event management and ticketing services, to enable webinars organizers to make money with web-based meeting and events.