A mere six months after its release, Windows 7 is reportedly now installed on one in 10 PC's around the globe. This makes Windows 7 the fastest-selling Windows yet, which is much needed good news for the Redmond-bsed software giant. The release of Windows 7 last October was followed by a great deal of scepticism surrounding whether or not the new operating system would fare better than their previous attempt.

Microsoft's release of Windows Vista in January of 2007 kicked off one of the weakest adoption rates in the company's history. There was a lot of public criticism over the operating system and it made surprisingly few inroads in the corporate sector during its 2-and-a-half year lifespan.

In its first year of availability, PC World rated Windows Vista the biggest tech disappointment of 2007, and it placed second in InfoWorld's ranking of technology's top 25 all-time flops.

Windows 7, on the other hand, is seeing a surprisingly warm welcome among home users and big business, despite its drastically similar underlying architecture. This is not the first time we've seen a heavily-marketed 'Saviour' come out of Redmond. Their most successful operating system ever, Windows XP, followed on the heals of their worst and shortest-lived OS, Windows Me.

As most of you know, Twitter has been one of the most rapidly growing web technologies of the past few years. It has been gaining so much publicity in such a short period of time that it's nothing short of a buzzword among social networking, the web industry, online marketing, traditional media, cell phone makers and more.

Even among the market analysts, however, things have been a little cloudy as to what exactly their business model is, how this trend is affecting the web as a whole and what Twitter's longer-term affects will be.

Ev Williams (Twitter co-founder) shared some important numbers with the online community at the recent Chirp conference. The brief version is as follows:

This doesn't explain much about their goals, monetization plans or future integration with other web services, but it does help us understand the magnitude of Twitter as a global influence.

Anyone in the industry who though this was a fad that will quickly blow over, is probably thinking twice. Twitter will be around for a while, and those who have already started using it to their benefit are in an advantageous position.