Welcome back everyone, to another edition of “The Roundup”!

This week I’m talking about if Google and Twitter are getting together, Twitter’s graphic issues, the new FriendFeed beta, and changes in price at all the major music download stores. Take a look, after the jump.

This week I have four stories for you. Let’s get started.

1: From : TechCrunch and BoomTown
Sources: Google In Talks To Acquire Twitter and Sorry to Get You All A-Twitter, but Google Is Not in “Late-Stage Talks” to Acquire the Hot Microblogging Service
Thursday, April 2, and Friday, April 3, 2009

Rumors were originally herd that Google might buy Twitter. TechCrunch originally reported that Google was in “late stage negotiations” to acquire Twitter. But, it turns out this isn’t the case, or at least the “Late-Stage” part. There was a post on twitters blog entitled Sometimes We Talk, and Kara Swisher’s BoomTown reported that “Twitter and Google (GOOG) have simply been engaged in “some product-related discussions,”” So, Lets face it, Google isn’t going to buy Twitter right now, though that doesn’t mean it will never happen. And, I don’t think that anyone should ever trust anything that’s “Breaking” from TechCrunch, they have had their fair share of article needing retractions and updates due to inaccuracies. Just look at the Last.fm and RIAA fiasco (See Roundup 3/27/09). And, I can’t see anything going major wrong if Google did buy Twitter, and if they don’t Twitter should still be fine for a while.

2: From : TechFlash via TechMeme
Amazon.com: Don’t blame us for Twitter problems
Tuesday, April 7, 2009

In other Twitter news, Twitter had a few problems this Monday, with users’ profile icons being reset to the twitter defaults (Note: above image is a “replica” of what happened, and was not taken during the events). Since twitter uses Amazon’s S3 storage for hosting the images, many people thought that this issue originated over there. However, an Amazon spokesperson said that the disappearance of images and S3 were “Not related”. Twitter did mention that the issue did exist, and that users’ icons would be back shortly. They did not however, announce what actually went wrong. Fail Wale also made a reappearance during the”troubled times” on Monday. …And we thought that Twitter finally worked out all the bugs.

Don’t forget to follow The iLife on Twitter, for the latest updates about the site at twitter.com/theilife.

3: From : ReadWriteWeb and FriendBlog: The official blog of FriendFeed
The New FriendFeed: Real-Time, Direct Messages, Better Filters and A new design for FriendFeed at http://beta.friendfeed.com/
Monday, April 6, 2009

FriendFeed has released a updated version of there popular personal social media aggregator. It now is real time (no more refreshing!), you can send direct messages to other FriendFeed users, and you have better filter to control what content your viewing (what used to be rooms). And overall, the interface looks a lot nicer. I think that a lot of people who just subscribe to every person they come across are going to extremely overwhelmed, since now the feed will literally fly past your eyes; But if you take advantage of the filters, there shouldn’t be any problems. I think this is a great direction for FriendFeed to take, and make me want to jump in and rediscover the product.

4: From : Gizmodo
Variable Song Pricing Hits Amazon’s and Walmart’s Digital Music Stores
Wednesday, April 8, 2009

After iTunes switched over to the variable pricing structure that they announced at Macworld 2009 on Tuesday (but was supposed to happen on April 1, guess they didn’t want people to think it was a joke), several people thought that other online music stores, such as the Amazon MP3 store, had a bit of advantage with its flat rate pricing structure. That’s not the case anymore, because the next day (Wednesday), both Amazon and Walmart’s MP3 stores switched to a variable pricing structure. Amazon prices now rage from $0.79 ($0.10 higher than iTunes) – $1.29 (Same as iTunes). Walmart prices are $0.64 (just a bit cheaper than iTunes by $0.05) – $1.24 (also by $0.05). Neither Amazon or Walmart issued press releases about the price changes. The only reason we can suspect, is that the recording labels wanted more royalties from their MP3 stores, just like they wanted from iTunes. So, the playing field is back to level, but now you should really shop around at the different MP3 stores, just because a track is $1.29 at iTunes, doesn’t mean that its the same price at Amazon. Amazon has also been know to give a bigger discount when you buy the complete album. The biggest advantage that iTunes had, and still has, is its integration into the actual iTunes music player and the iPod.

That’s it for this week, see you next time, right here at The iLife.

–Keith Hobin