Socialite Paris Hilton took some of the spotlight from the World Cup after she was arrested on suspicion of possession of marijuana, then had the case dropped at a midnight court hearing.

Phone lines at the command center where teams are directing clean-up of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill are often jammed, but media-savvy fishermen, residents and others can find the latest updates on Twitter and Facebook.

SAN FRANCISCO–Twitter’s roadmap will include locations, user streams, and annotations, Ryan Sarver, head of Twitter’s platform development, said Thursday at the Chirp conference here.

The company did not announce a formal roadmap, choosing instead to disclose a few additions that the company will be building in the next few months. One of the first was the addition of “places,” a more fine-grained version of location that was announced earlier by Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive.

Microblogging sensation Twitter. which has now signed up more than 100 million users, outlined on Wednesday several revenue-generating initiatives, declaring that making money was now a primary goal.

The popular Internet service hopes to snag hundreds of millions more users in coming years by making the service easier, integrating Twitter directly into Web sites and focusing more on customizing the service for mobile devices.

At the company’s first conference for Twitter developers on Wednesday, Chief Executive Officer Evan Williams said generating revenue was among the key priorities going forward — a change of tone for a firm that had previously said it focused mainly on improving the user experience.

One of Shakespeare’s most famous plays gets a 21st century makeover in a new version of “Romeo and Juliet” which will unfold through Twitter messages and on the Youtube video website.

Entitled “Such Tweet Sorrow,” the experiment is a collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and Mudlark, which produces entertainment on mobile telephones.

Organizers have already outlined a contemporary “narrative arc” loosely based on the original tragedy, and the cast will improvise the rest through Tweets which have already begun to appear on the website www.suchtweetsorrow.com.

The production will take place over five weeks and allows for the characters to interact not only among themselves but also with members of the “audience.”

Each character writes their own tweets, guided by an existing storyline and diary which outlines where they are at any moment in the adventure.

Zynga is the darling of social games, but it’s hard to believe that the maker of Facebook games is worth $5 billion, as estimated by SecondShares.com, which is run by a group of former equity analysts who evaluate the value of private companies and what they would be worth if they were actually public.

While Zynga has no near-term plans to go public, the analysts can surmise its value based on a variety of measures, such as the price that employees are getting by selling their stock options on the secondary market. There is a lot of black art to this kind of evaluation, and the high value for Zynga is likely to stir a lot of debate.

It’s hard to watch some of this from the sidelines, sort of like watching the craze over the dotcom madness of the late 1990s. Yet there are differences between a company like Zynga, which is profitable, and Pets.com, which had no hope of being a money maker. There is a gold rush mentality in social gaming. You can imagine that executives at Microsoft, Google, and Facebook would look at this report and conclude, “Oh dear, we have to buy them now or else they’re going to get even more expensive.” Crazy valuations have a way of inspiring even more crazy behavior.

My guess is that the top folks at Zynga don’t like some of this speculation about Zynga’s imaginary public value. They, of course, stand to get rich at some point from Zynga’s high valuation. But they don’t want to be over-hyped, only to fail to meet expectations. Getting a valuation like this is kind of a jinx. Mark Pincus, chief executive, said that after his company was profiled in Fortune magazine. Tonight, Pincus offered no comment when asked about the estimate via email.

A jailed judge “tweets” to her followers from prison. The director of an opposition TV station uses Twitter to denounce a conspiracy to oust him.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s opponents have jumped on the use of Twitter and other social networking sites, opening up a new flank in a decade-long campaign against the self-proclaimed socialist revolutionary who they accuse of silencing critical media and attacking free speech.

A China-based root DNS server associated with networking problems in Chile and the U.S. has been disconnected from the Internet.

The action by the server’s operator, Netnod, appears to have resolved a problem that was causing some Internet sites to be inadvertently censored by a system set up in the People’s Republic of China.

On Wednesday, operators at NIC Chile noticed that several ISPs (Internet service providers) were providing faulty DNS information, apparently derived from China. China uses the DNS system to enforce Internet censorship on its so-called Great Firewall of China, and the ISPs were using this incorrect DNS information.

Chinese Internet users have one less Web search option this week, but otherwise it’s business as usual as the People’s Republic of China uses technology and intimidation to keep citizens away from objectionable content.

Following several months of strategizing and negotiations, Google finally stopped censoring its search results in China and is redirecting visitors to Google.cn to a server based in Hong Kong. There they see unfiltered results and are able to visit sites about Falun Gong, Tiananman Square, and Tibetan independence.

As noble as the move might be on Google’s part, it changes very little for the approximately 4 million Internet users in China who have lived with restrictions on their online and offline activities for decades.

The departure of Google search from the country is “an obvious reminder of how heavy censorship is in China,” Hal Roberts, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, said in an interview this week.

Meanwhile, a mysterious mix-up that sent Domain Name Server (DNS) traffic destined for Google’s YouTube, Facebook and Twitter among other sites to servers behind the so-called Chinese Firewall of censorship on Wednesday has some speculating it was retaliation against Google. How far will the People’s Republic of China go in its geopolitical squabbles over freedom of the Internet?

Whether it’s fomenting revolution or telling people what you had for breakfast microblogging service Twitter seems to have it all.

Now, New York City’s enterprising mobile food vendors are using the instant messaging website to help their hoards of hungry followers stay tuned to their favorite delicacies.

Kim Ima, owner of the Treats Truck, which serves up caramel creme sandwiches, sugar cookies with icing, and other diet busting delights, uses Twitter to stay in touch with her 3,000 fans.

“For someone like Kim with St. Patrick’s Day Parade on Wednesday, she wasn’t sure if she was going to park here. So with Twitter she was able to provide location updates and we knew where to find her,” said customer EJ Cory.