A couple of days ago, I checked if there were any updates for the applications I have installed on my iPhone, and one that was identified as having published a more recent version in the App Store was TweetDeck, the popular Twitter client for desktop and mobile. Strangely, the update failed and I just gave up trying to install the upgraded version after a while.

Now it seems the TweetDeck iPhone app is MIA from Apple’s App Store completely, barring new users from installing the app on their phones and existing ones to upgrade to a new version.

If you’re a Twitter freak and think that a dedicated Twitter device is just the thing for you, read on.

This week we saw the launch of the TwitterPeek, a cute little device built by Peek that will do just about anything you want it to do, as long as all you want it to do is access Twitter. It won’t surf the web. It won’t make phone calls. It won’t support third party apps. But it most certainly does run Twitter.

You can get it in black. Or, if you want to show a little flair, you can get in in cyan.

For some crazy reason I wanted one. A friend bought me one that I will truly love forever(ish). But the company also sent me one. And while I may or may not need one TwitterPeek, I almost certainly don’t need two TwitterPeeks.

This is where you come in.

We’re giving one of these away to a TechCrunch reader. It’s the cool one, cyan, with lifetime service that costs $200. And it’s all yours. Just retweet this post and make sure to include the short URL link – http://bit.ly/3U2Yhy – as well as the #crunch hashtag. Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. Tomorrow we’ll sort through all of the tweets and pick one randomly for the win. You’ll get the TweetPeek device in the mail, and we’ll throw in a TechCrunch tshirt. Even the postage is on us. But please note that in this case only U.S. readers are eligible, because the device only works in the U.S.

I think it’s safe to assume their Twitter account has been hacked.

Update: Yep. Now suspended.

Brizzly is on a roll right now. Just yesterday, it became the first web-based Twitter client to implement Lists, and last week it rolled out Facebook support. Today brings good news for its parent company: More funding.

At the end of this month, Thing Labs will close a $600,000 round which is basically an extension of its Series A from back in June of last year, co-founder Jason Shellen tells us. This will bring its total funding to $2.2 million. But this round is more notable for who is involved: angel investor Ron Conway, Steve Olechowski (the former COO of Feedburner, now at Google), and Greg Yaitanes, who was an early Twitter investor, but is better known as a director of Fox’s hit show House. He’s also directed episodes of Lost, Heroes, Grey’s Anatomy, and many other popular TV shows.

Earlier this week, Seesmic rolled out support for the new Twitter Lists for its Desktop client. Today, that same functionality comes to its web-based client. And with it comes a bonus: Geolocation support.

Now, to be clear, most users still won’t be able to use this geolocation support just yet, as Twitter has yet to enable it for most users. But if you do happen to have it, Seesmic supports it. As you can see in the screenshot, it looks pretty nice. If you see a little location marker on a tweet, you can hover over it to bring up a Google Map overlay showing where that tweet was sent from.

With Twitter rolling out its own retweet functionality soon, people will be pointing their followers to more users they may not be engaging with yet, which will spark users to follow more people and hence increase the amount of conversations on Twitter. At least, that’s what I think.

But Twitter has never been an ideal two-way conversation tool. It’s hard to keep track of back-and-forth communication between users, particularly when you’re not actually part of the discussion but still interested to know what’s being said tweeted. A new tool called Bettween aims to make it easier to visualize conversations between two specific users as well as share them with others.

When it was first unveiled at our Realtime Crunchup in July, easily one of the best features of the web-based Twitter client Brizzly was Groups. Basically, it allowed you to sort your Twitter followers into subsections, to make specific groups of users easier to follow. Of course, with Twitter’s new Lists functionality, you can basically do the same thing. So Brizzly is screwed right? Nope.

First of all, Brizzly has decided to make Groups play nicely with Lists — very nicely. Starting tonight, Brizzly is importing all of the Lists that its users have made on Twitter and it will begin showing them within Brizzly. But that’s not all: It’s also going the other way. Any Group that you made in Brizzly will be converted to a Twitter List. To be clear: A private Twitter List. So no, no one will be able to see that you put them in the “Loser” Group on Brizzly.

Twitter has just activated the retweet button a a small number of accounts, according to a blog post. The new retweet functionality was originally announced back in August. Below, you’ll find a picture of what it was slated to look like when it was previewed back in September. (We haven’t actually seen this latest implementation yet, but feel free to send us screen shots if you are one of the lucky ones who has the retweet button activated.)

As we’ve written in the past, Twitter has been tweaking this new functionality for a while, making a pretty significant change to the API prior to launch. Previously, Twitter was requiring third party developers to check whether a tweet has already come in or not in any users’ stream to see if they should collapse it under the new retweet structure. Now, Twitter has built its own mechanism to check for those duplicate tweets into the API. This will ensure that only the first tweet is shown and the retweets go under it automatically.

Twitter’s Trending Topics area is one of the easiest things to game on the web. Even when trends start out as real items, spammers often latch onto them with bogus tweets hoping to ride the wave and get some people seeing their spammy nonsense. Today, Twitter is acknowledging this.

In a post on its blog, Twitter notes that the “noisiness of the conversation” has led Trends to be less interesting. So beginning today they’re going to be experimenting with ways to surface more relevant tweets in this area. While they don’t come out and say it, the implication here seems pretty clear: They’ll be in some way curating the topics and the tweets. It’s not clear if this will be algorithmic or manual yet.

Over the past few weeks, it’s definitely been crunchtime as we’ve been putting together the panels and demos for our Realtime CrunchUp on November 20 in San Francisco. Get your tickets here. After much back and forth, and with the help of our Realtime Board, we finally have an agenda we are very excited to present (see below).

Speakers will include Twitter COO Dick Costolo, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley, angel investor Ron Conway, FriendFeed co-founders (and now-Facebook VPs) Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. The CrunchUp will take place at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco and will kick off with a big roundtable discussion and one-on-one interviews, followed by startup demos and panel discussions drilling down into geo streams, media streams, marketing, and venture capital.

Back in August, we covered the launch of TwitCause, a service not unlike Causes on Facebook, only built on top of Twitter. Basically, they find a cause to support (partially based on community feedback) and use Twitter to drive awareness for it. They also ask that you donate some money if you find the cause worthy. But today brings a new little twist: A sponsor willing to pay for any Twitter user who tweet out their support for a cause. Ice cream maker Häagen-Dazs has stepped up to do this to try and save honeybees.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Digg captured our collective imagination. In fact, even last year Google thought it was important enough to seriously consider buying Digg, only to back out at the last minute. Digg was the future of news. It was crowdsourced, democratic editorial. The masses decided what was news, not some 50 year old guy in a skyscraper in New York, who secretly hated the Internet.

a lot of the shine has come off Digg. And while it still drives a tremendous amount of traffic, it’s amazing to see just how completely it has been eclipsed by Twitter, which in turn is still just a drop in the Facebook bucket.

Comscore worldwide data says Digg, Twitter and Facebook have 32 million, 58 million and 411 million unique monthly visitors (September 2009), respectively. Google Trends says much the same thing, but the growth over time is fascinating visually. We started with Digg, then added Twitter, and then added Facebook. In the end, Digg and Twitter are just footnote blips in the chart.

About a third of all Internet users worldwide visited Facebook in September 2009, says Comscore. A year ago it was 17%. And what about Digg? They grew from 15 million worldwide unique visitors a year ago to 32 million today. And they tripled page views to 171 million. So it’s not really about Digg doing anything wrong. They just pale in comparison to the guys currently in the spotlight – Twitter and Facebook.

If you could only use one service, which one would you choose? I’d be unhappy about the forced decision, but I’d go with Twitter, even with all its flaws.

Charts below:

Twitter has a problem: A number of users tweet, then lose interest. It needs a way to reengage them in the site. And tonight it’s starting to test one way: Notifications.

The test is currently only rolled out to a “limited” number of users right now, according to this update. But those who have it should notice an indicator similar to what Twitter does to let you know there are new search results on a query (see a capture above and below). There’s another service that does these types of notifications for new messages also: Facebook. Yes, Twitter for once is taking a playbook from its rival rather than the other way around.

Tonight, Amazon sent an email to members of Amazon Associates letting them know about a new feature: Twitter integration. Basically, when you’re logged into your Associate account, you’ll see a new “Share on Twitter” button on your Site Stripe (a management toolbar along the top of the page). As you’d expect, clicking this button will prepare a tweet complete with a shortened URL to send out of all of your Twitter followers.

Here’s why this is interesting: As Amazon clearly notes at the end of its email (copied below), you will earn referral money for anyone that clicks on these links and buys a product. Obviously, links that bring in referral fees are nothing new, this has been going on with blogs for a long time. But Twitter users do love to click on links, so this feature could actually mean some real money for popular Twitter users with a massive following. And it’s yet another way that companies — and now even Twitter’s users — are making money off of Twitter, which Twitter won’t see a dime of (presumably, anyway).

Last month, Twitter noted that it was seeking volunteers to help translate its service into other languages. Today, the first of those is ready to go, as Twitter has formally unveiled support for the Spanish language.

The Twitter Blog has a post about it right now, but co-founder Biz Stone has cheekily written it entirely in Spanish. We’ll go ahead and translate it for you:

Real time search and discovery engine Topsy is releasing a bunch of new products and tools this afternoon.

Topsy is all about the power of the ReTweet on Twitter. When the service first launched publicly in May we noted that ReTweets are the new currency of the web. And it isn’t just the number of retweets that matters (which is subject to large scale spamming efforts). It’s the authority of the people doing the retweeting, too.

One way Topsy is distinguishing itself from competitors like OneRiot and TweetMeme is by holding on to data forever. Most real time search engines are focused on right now, which is exactly what people want. But they dump data periodically, and anyone looking for older stuff won’t be able to find it. Here’s a sample search for “skype andreessen” on OneRiot (4 resutls), TweetMeme (0 results) and Topsy (37 pages of results, which can be sorted and filtered by time). So when you want to look up old Tweets around a link, Topsy has the data that no one else is currently showing.

I just got my hands on the the Twitter Peek aka the Tweek and I’m trying to figure out who, specifically, this is for. First, consider this my review: this device is not very good if you’re a Twitter “power user” like myself or anyone else with maybe 100+ followers and a few hundred folks you follow. To be clear, this isn’t quite Peek’s fault as they’re clearly not interested in pleasing folks like you and me. They’re looking for folks from a different aviary, presumably new Twitter users who haven’t quite gotten hooked but are interested in the service enough to stick with it and have $199 burning a hole in their pockets absolutely right now and don’t really follow very many people. If you know any of those people, please send them to Amazon to pick this up.

For the rest of us, this thing is pretty rough. I follow 2104 people and so this thing was buzzing and Tweeting all afternoon until I finally turned it off. Weird batches of tweets would come in, all from one person, for example, or weird messages like “Oh Hey, you’re Tweeting so much! We’re going to try to catch up” or something to that effect. It’s also really slow. You have to click twice to read a Tweet – once to bring up the menu and once to read the Tweet – and scrolling is really bad. And it makes a buzzing and a tweeting noise when tweets come in – which is all the time. And it’s $99 with 6 months free or $199 for life. And it only does Twitter. No email. No texting. I’m really selling this thing, aren’t I?

Remember the Twitter Peek thingie Peter Ha spotted last week?

Yeah, it’s official now and is actually a neat little device if you Twitter a whole lot and don’t carry a smartphone.

Wait, what?

Since it was turned on for all users late last week, everyone is talking about Twitter’s new Lists feature. Most people seem to like it, but some have no idea what it’s good for. Perhaps those people will understand a bit more about Lists potential with a new widget that Twitter has launched today.

The List Widget is exactly what you’d expect: A widget that you can place on your blog that displays a list of your choosing. One nice thing is that this can be a list you made or one any user has made (that is public). If you simply type if a user’s name, it will show their lists in a drop down menu. You then give the list a title, a caption, customize its look and feel, and you’re good to go.

By now, Tweetie 2 has probably stormed your iPhone. If not, you should check it out; in our opinion, it’s the best Twitter iPhone app out there (and yes, definitely worth the $3 [iTunes link]). But developer Loren Brichter isn’t resting on his laurels. Instead, he’s hard at work on Tweetie 2.1.

So what’s new? Well, there are a ton of small bug fixes, but also some pretty big additions. There are two that you’ll probably care the most about: New-style rewtweets and geolocation support. We got an early alpha build of 2.1 to try out, and it’s looking good.