It was back in July of last year that we first wrote about a service called Voyurl with the headline:

@bbc_global BBC Global News BREAKING: Col Muammar Gaddafi's government in Libya has taken a series of measures, including blocking internet … http://bbc.in/gUVJNN about 1 hour ago via twitterfeed Retweet Reply Both the BBC and Yahoo News are reporting that Muammar Gaddafi’s government in Libya has begun to block user access to Facebook in the country’s capital of Tripoli and is sporadically shutting down electricity access and access to Internet connections in the rest of the country as a response to anti-govermental protests.

The media world is in a tizzy over Apple’s new subscription billing rules for iPad and iPhone apps. Basically, Apple will now take a 30 percent cut of all in-app subscription revenues and own all the customer data.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been visiting a city, looking for a place to work, and have just ended up in a Starbucks. I hate working in Starbucks. But I know they have WiFi, so I go there anyway.

Last week, Mike promised that, if Sarah Lacy’s new book, Brilliant Crazy, Cocky , reached the number one slot in Amazon’s Entrepreneurship category, we’d host a big launch party in San Francisco. At TechCrunch, we keep our promises. The party in on! The fun kicks off at 6:00p.m

This morning Twitter shut down UberMedia clients UberTwitter and Twidroyd because of privacy violations for tweets more than 140 characters, monetization violations (concerning affiliate links) as well as trademark infringement.  While UberMedia CEO Bill Gross tells us that UberMedia is doing what ever it takes to get the apps back up, currently the final (and only tweets for some users) tweets you can see on the Twidroyd  Android app are the below from Twitter’s @support account.

We’ve written a number of things about the contrast between native apps and web apps . The common consensus these days is that the two will eventually converge — but that has been happening more slowly than some have been hoping , particularly in the mobile space where native apps dominate. On the more traditional side of things, the transition is happening faster, but something Google has been working on could be the real missing link: Native Client.

I just got off the phone with UberMedia CEO and Idealab founder Bill Gross on the heels of Twitter’s suspension of two of UberMedia’s products, UberTwitter and Twidroyd, for violating Twitter’s API rules . The violations in question concern trademark, privacy, and monetization. Gross tells me, “We just talked to Twitter and discussed the various issues they raise

TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Groupme has launched a cool new feature today, in advance of tomorrow’s Foursquare hackday.

Facebook is rolling out the option for users to set their relationship status to “In a civil union” and “In a domestic partnership”. These types will allow gay couples to more accurately describe their relationship. However, advertisers don’t have the option to target users based on these types, or any other types than “Single”, “In a relationship”, “Engaged”, or “Married”