China is well known for its online censorship and for taking down even major sites. But two days before the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Great Firewall of China has taken its efforts to a new level – Twitter, Flickr and a number of Microsoft services have been blocked.

First to go was the micro-blogging site Twitter, which has seen a rise in popularity in China as well as everywhere else. Some users are apparently still able to use the service via third-party clients but the main site is inaccessible. Twitter was followed by the photo sharing service Flickr, which saw outages before in the country, usually around sensitive dates for the Chinese government. Less expected was the blocking of Microsoft’s email service Hotmail as well its new search engine Bing and MSN spaces. All this comes after YouTube has been blocked for several weeks.

Twitter has been proving very popular in China especially since it was able to circumvent the country’s blocking of many words and phrases like the ones related to the Tiananmen Square massacre. Interestingly enough, Chinese blogger and New York Times researcher Michael Anti predicted the blocking of Twitter in the area just a few days ago.

“Twitter is a new thing in China. The censors need time to figure out what it is. So enjoy the last happy days of twittering before the fate of Youtube descends on it one day.” he said. “I want to point out that the Chinese Twitterland is funnier than the English one, for a Chinese tweet can have three times the volume of an English tweet, thanks to the high information intensity of the Chinese language. 140 Chinese characters can make up all the full elements of a news piece with the “5 Ws” (Who, What, Where, When and HoW). But the joy of the Chinese Twitterland is more fragile, and I hope that it will live longer in this country.”

Search suggestions can be a time saver and they’ve certainly improved the searching experience on the main Google site since they’ve been introduced. Google is now working on making suggestions available in a wider set of products. It has recently rolled out better suggestions on its mobile apps and is now making them available in Google Maps for a larger number of countries, after being in testing in Germany and China.

“We experimentally launched suggest for Google Maps in Germany, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan a while ago. Since then, we’ve been working hard to improve the quality and coverage,” Steffen Meschkat, Engineer, and Peter Lidwell, Product Manager at Google, wrote. “So from today we’re making the feature available on 10 more domains and in 8 additional languages, including English and on maps.google.com for the first time.”

When a user starts to type a query, Google will start poling its huge index and look for entries that match the letters typed. It then serves those entries as suggestions and it happens so fast that, in most cases, they are updated instantly after typing a letter. With the wider release, search suggestions on Google Maps are more widely available. But that doesn’t mean the same data is used universally, the suggestions are customized based on the user’s location and previous searches.

“For example, if you search for ‘Mandela’ in San Francisco, you’ll see items such as Mandela High School and businesses in nearby Oakland,” the Google product managers explain. “But more than 8,000 kilometers away in London, you’ll see a completely different set of suggestions, which are more relevant for users searching in that location.”

Users in China, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, United States, and the United Kingdom now have access to the suggestion feature in Google Maps and the developers are saying it will eventually be rolled out to everyone.

Blogs are getting really old, by Internet standards, but they’ve become such an integral part of Internet life that we hardly realize they’re there. In fact, one of the best-known blogging platforms out there, Blogger, is turning 10 years old in a couple of months. And, just to make sure nothing will ruin the party, the data from comScore consolidates its rule as the biggest blog hosting platform, by far. The numbers for May show that 52 million people have visited a blog hosted on Blogger in the US alone.

The second biggest platform, Wordpress.com, had almost half of Blogger’s traffic, with 28 million unique visitors. Six Apart sites collectively gathered 14 million visitors, coming in at number three. But while the ten-year-old platform may still be number one, with a comfortable lead, Wordpress.com is growing at a much higher rate of 40 percent compared to Blogger’s 14 percent.

Worldwide, it’s pretty much the same story, with Blogger in front, having 267 million people reading a blog hosted on it every month, while Wordpress.com has 143 million unique visitors. However, the two platforms are growing at a much faster rate globally, with the former at 38 percent a year and the latter at 59 percent.

Blogger was founded in 1999, when blogging platforms were just beginning to appear, and was later acquired by Google, in 2003. No doubt, the search giant is making a nice profit with the optional AdSense ads displayed by many of Blogger’s users, but just yesterday it started showing ads in the post publishing page.

Blogs haven’t been very hot for a while now, with social networks and, recently, Twitter stealing the limelight, but neither are they very likely to go away anytime soon. And while Twitter already has more than 17 million unique visitors in the US, it really started taking off just a couple of months ago and, in fact, the latest numbers show a big slowdown of its growth rate.

Blogger is one of the most popular blog hosting platform in the world. It provides a simple way of enabling anyone to publish to the web, this is true of any blog platform, obviously, and this is what most people use it for. However, there are those who prefer to have more control over their blogs but still use the Blogger platform for publishing. One way of doing this is by using a remote FTP server to host the files and quite a lot of people use this for their Blogger blogs. Those should be looking for alternatives and fast, as Google is planning to drop support for the feature in the not-so-distant future.

“FTP remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger: only .5% of active blogs are published via FTP — yet the percentage of our engineering resources devoted to supporting FTP vastly exceeds that. On top of this, critical infrastructure that our FTP support relies on at Google will soon become unavailable, which would require that we completely rewrite the code that handles our FTP processing,” Blogger’s Rick Klau writes.

“[W]e have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users… [W]e are announcing today that we will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010,” he revealed.

0.5 percent of users may not seem like a lot but with Blogger’s tens of millions of users around the world, this adds up to quite a few people. They’re probably not going to like it but Google is trying to make this as painless as possible and will offer help and tools to aid them transition to either Blogger or a Custom Domain set up to work with the blogging platform.

A migration tool that would automate much of the process is coming in about a month. Google says this should be a viable solution for the vast majority of cases. It is also setting up a dedicated blog for the switch and says it will have people ready to answer any question users may have.