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Twitter! Whether you use it or not, or understand it or not, it’s the hottest thing in Silicon Valley right now. It’s brought up in every conversation. And no wonder - the service has exploded to somewhere north of 25 million users and has been growing by 40% a week since that Oprah appearance, says a source close to the company.

Google tried to buy it but was rebuffed by Twitter CEO Evan Williams, says a source with knowledge of the talks.

Today, though, rumors popped up that Apple may be looking to buy Twitter. “Apple is in late stage negotiations to buy Twitter and is hoping to announce it at WWDC in June,” said a normally reliable source this evening, adding that the purchase price would be $700 million in cash. The trouble is we’ve checked with other sources who claim to know nothing about any Apple negotiations. If these discussions are happening, Twitter is keeping them very quiet indeed. We would have passed on reporting this rumor at all, but other press is now picking it up.

Twitter is strongly signaling that it doesn’t want to sell at any price right now. The founders took significant money off the table in the last round valuing Twitter at $250 million, we’ve heard, and are aligned with investors to see Twitter through to the end.

And frankly that’s probably the best thing for the Internet. I wrote in an earlier post that I’d like to see Twitter spread its wings a little longer and see what it can become. It’ll be hard to do that as a subsidiary of Google, Apple, or anyone else for that matter. If Twitter wants to stay independent that’s just fine with me

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The site is bringing together mobile devices and multiple social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, into a very visual platform. As well as integrating YouTube video onto their Google map, they’re pulling in partners including pictures from Mobypicture and live video from Bambuser. It will also pull in geotagged content from YouTube and news alerts from media such as CNN and Reuters.

Launched today at TechCrunch Europe’s Geek ‘n Rolla tech startup event in London, the site is not just a mashup. The business model is that you can buy a location on the map, so for instance, we can own the venue on the map for our Geen’n Rolla conference and brand it how we like.

CEO Frank Schuil reckons “By showing users this is where you are, right here, right now on the planet, we can create true presence that you can’t find on any other social network.” Now of course, the question is, are people going to put their real location on the map? They may not have a choice of course if they absent-mindedly click the ‘allow location’ on their iPhone Twitter application. Users will also be able to show their precise location through Wi-Fi positioning withLoki.

That aside, the advantage is that you can see both Twitter and Facebook friends location on a map and anything they may be uploading at that moment.

IRL Connect is also providing its own geolocation data to provide context to the video through location. Developers can apply for an API key at api.irlconnect.com. The privately funded company is headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with an office in China."

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According to a report published by computer antivirus and spam filter seller McAfee, the annual sending, receiving and hand-deleting of 62 trillion email spams consumes 33 terawatt hours of energy every year. Producing that energy emits about 20 million tons of greenhouse gases.

In the translational shorthand of environmentalism, that's enough juice to power Chicago for two years, and the greenhouse equivalent of driving 1.6 million cars around the Earth.

The findings have met with a mixed reception. The report "strikes me as reminiscent of those insipid lost-productivity studies that blame the global recession on March Madness office pools," wrote Paul McNamara at Network World. "I'm just not ready to translate every human endeavor into an environmental forum."

Though nobody likes having every last decision turned into a morality play, there's nothing good about spam. March Madness pools at least make office life a bit more fun. Spam, on the other hand, is entirely worthless, and it accounts for between 85 and 97 percent of all email activity. And though worrying about spam's environmental impact is a bit like complaining about the Titanic's deck chairs, it's still worth fixing. Eradicating spam might not save the polar ice cap, but the world would be a bit cleaner without it.

Naturally, McAfee didn't commission the report out of charity. They say more than half of spam's carbon footprint is produced during its end-stage, when users scroll through messages and delete the junk. That's exactly where their product offerings fit. The report claims that spam filtering reduces end-stage energy consumption by nearly 75 percent.

But that confluence of interest doesn't necessarily invalidate the findings. My own spam filter — which is not, for the record, a McAfee product — has already plucked 22 messages out of my email stream today, and saved me the trouble of deleting them manually.

"It's not just a nuisance, it's not just clogging your inbox. It has a quantifiable environmental impact," said McAfee researcher Dave Marcus. "This is a different way of looking at something people can take control of.

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