That didn’t take long. Two days ago, well known VC (and early Twitter investor) Fred Wilson wrote a post telling Twitter startups to stop filling holes in Twitter’s products and to instead look to launch killer apps that start entirely new businesses. That led some third party developers to question if Wilson was hinting that Twitter may start filling in these holes itself, displacing third party apps with official ones (he later said that while he was on the Twitter board, he didn’t know their plans). It looks like the concerned developers may have been right: today, Twitter has announced the launch of the “Official Twitter for BlackBerry App”, which can be downloaded at blackberry.com/twitter.

Now, we’ve known that this application was coming for a long time — we gave out beta keys and reviewed it in Feburary. But looking back, all of the language around this was that it was RIM’s application — RIM was the one pitching us on the news, and there wasn’t any mention that this was endorsed by Twitter. That’s no longer the case. In its blog post, Twitter says that it has been “working closely with RIM to deliver the official Twitter app…”.

This is important, because Twitter has long thrived on its developer community. Third party applications like Tweetie, Seesmic, TweetDeck, Twitterific, and many, many others have brought the service to the desktop and mobile platforms. And myriad Twitter-oriented image and link shortening services have taken off as well. If Twitter is going to start endorsing offical versions of these applications, you can expect some signficant backlash. Other BlackBerry Twitter apps included UberTwitter and Seesmic.

We’ve reached out to Twitter to ask if they have plans to endorse applications on other platforms.

Yesterday, Facebook released a proposed privacy policy that foreshadowed a bold (and creepy) new feature: some third-party partners are going to be allowed to access and use your Facebook data without any prior consent. Make no mistake — there will be backlash. That’s par for the course for Facebook, which has shown time and time again that it isn’t afraid of a little bad press. But this time could be different: Facebook users may not only object to having their social graphs shared without their permission, they could also finally get a wakeup call as to what the site’s infamous ‘Everyone’ setting really means, as well some of the other unsettling privacy changes Facebook made last December. And things could get ugly.

Imagine what will happen the first time Joe Facebooker visits a third-party site he’s never been to and is greeted by the smiling faces of his friends, his most recent shared updates, and content tailored to his gender, location, and age. There’s a decent chance he’s going to assume something has gone terribly, terribly wrong — maybe he’s been hacked or phished. Or maybe he’ll realize that the privacy wizard he went through last December wasn’t as benign as he thought.

For those that haven’t been keeping score, Facebook’s ‘Everyone’ setting lets users share their content with the entire Internet, which includes search engines and (apparently) third-party sites. It was originally released last June, when it was buried deep in Facebook’s labyrinthine settings, but it wasn’t until December that it was used on a wide scale. The reason for the mass migration toward sharing data with Everyone instead of with just your friends on Facebook? As part of an ostensibly easier-to-use privacy overhaul, Facebook decided to make it the default setting. As part of that same overhaul, Facebook also decided to make data like your friends list, gender, and current city publicly available when it previously wasn’t.

Press, bloggers, and numerous privacy organizations attacked the Trojan horse of a launch as soon as it happened, contending that users were not being properly informed about what this new Everyone option entailed. Facebook’s PR team battled back by saying 35% of users had made changes to their privacy settings during the process, which supposedly implied that they knew what they were doing. A few weeks later, the uproar had dissipated.

Which brings us to today. I’m still firmly of the opinion that the vast majority of Facebook users do not fully understand their privacy settings, nor do they grasp what “Everyone” means in this context. Facebook may have gotten users’ consent, but it certainly wasn’t informed consent. Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd, who studies this sort of thing for a living, has come to the same conclusion: during her keynote at SXSW, Boyd revealed that she’s been asking “non-techie” users what they thought their privacy settings were, and then walked them through what they actually were on the site. Not once have the settings matched the user’s expectations.

So why haven’t Facebook users started unleashing a Beaconesque wave of fury over this? There’s a good chance that they simply have no idea that there’s been a significant change. From a functionality perspective, the Everyone setting changed almost nothing — it’s easier to find content in Facebook Search, and now some of the data is being shared with Google and Bing, but that’s about it. Likewise, the expanded definition of “General Information”, which now includes your social graph, hasn’t had much impact yet either.

That’s going to change with this forthcoming version of Facebook Connect — or whatever Facebook plans to call it — which will apparently give “trusted” partners access to your data as soon as you visit them, whether or not you opted-in to share it. Facebook will be sharing what it calls “General Information”, which includes profile photos, your gender, social graph, and — you guessed it — anything you’ve ever shared using that Everyone option. Facebook hasn’t outlined exactly how it will work, but a spokesman told ReadWriteWeb the following:

“The right way to think about this is not like a new experience but as making the [Facebook] Connect experience even better and more seamless… People love personalized and social experiences and that’s why Facebook and Facebook Connect have been so successful. We think there are some instances where people would benefit from this experience as soon as they arrive on a small number of trusted websites that we pre-approve.”

Facebook is hoping, of course, that users will embrace this — they’ll effectively have a personalized Internet experience that automatically draws from their social graph and demographic information, like age, sex, and location. It could make the web at large smarter and more social, which is actually a pretty exciting idea. Thing is, Facebook is shoving that dream down its users’ throats, and it’s the one deciding which sites are trustworthy enough to swap your data with.

If the inevitable backlash does lead to users raging against the Everyone setting, that could have a major impact on Facebook’s future. For over a year now, the site has been gradually evolving to leverage its data beyond Facebook proper so that it could better compete against Twitter and Google. This, in some senses, will be the moment of truth — will users be okay with sharing their data beyond Facebook’s walled garden, or will they feel like they’ve been duped?

In its relentless push to turn YouTube into a profit center, Google is trying anything it can to pump more advertising into the billions of videos people watch on the site. Now it is automating the way that Flash overlay ads can be created and displayed on YouTube videos. Through the self-serve Display Ad Builder in Google AdWords, mom-and-pop businesses can now create Flash overlay ads as easily as they can create display banner ads and place them in YouTube videos.

Overlay ads have been around for a long time on YouTube and other video networks. YouTube constantly refines the types of overlay ads it shows, but many of the small businesses which typically advertise on Google AdWords don’t have the tools to create Flash overlay ads. Now Google is providing them with templates, much like it does already for banner ads.

As of last October, YouTube was showing ads on more than one billion videos a week, which was roughly one in seven videos. YouTube wants to open up all of its video inventory to advertisers large and small. Today’s release is the latest move in that direction.

At what point will there be too many ads and will consumers ever backlash? Already I find those persistent pop-ups and overlays to get in the way of the videos I am trying to watch, and I don’t find them particularly relevant. Flooding YouTube with even more of these ads may be good for its bottom line, but viewers are not going to like them.

Google Buzz launched with more than its fair share of privacy issues, leading to a significant backlash from some users. Fortunately the Buzz team is fixing these issues at a brisk pace. Today, they’ve rolled out a fix to a bug that would let users inadvertently expose their friends’ private email addresses using Buzz’s @reply system. Now, instead of sharing these private email addresses with the public, Buzz will simply show everyone a series of asterisks.

The bug stemmed from the way Buzz handles @replies. To send a message to someone you do it using their Email address, and Buzz makes this easy by showing an autocomplete box as you start typing their name. Unfortunately if you happened to pick an Email address that wasn’t associated with a Google Profile (which is quite easy to do given how many people use multiple accounts), Buzz would expose that Email address to the world.

Earlier this week Google helped allay privacy concerns with some other changes to Buzz, including a more prominent option to hide your follower lists (which could be used to figure out who you frequently exchange emails with).

As we noted this morning, Google isn’t wasting any time in responding to user criticism about Buzz.  Now they’ve rolled out another set of changes to further address Buzz’s privacy issues. The biggest change involves the automatic follow system: it’s now being switched to a suggestion model, where Google will present you with a list of friends it thinks you’d like to follow, but gives you a chance to deselect them before you start using the service.

That’s a pretty big change — when Buzz launched four days ago, one of its selling points was that it took no work on the user’s part to get started, because Buzz would automatically follow the people you interact with most on Gmail. Of course, that isn’t always a good thing — there are plenty of cases when you wouldn’t want people to know who you’d been communicating with. After an initial backlash Google made it easier to hide which users you were following, but now they’re ditching the auto-follow model entirely. Fortunately it only takes a minute to go through the suggestions, so it’s not much of a hurdle.

New users will see a screen like the one above, and Google’s post says that existing Buzz users will be shown a version of this friend selection screen in the next few weeks to confirm that they’re comfortable with everyone they’re following. The service is also going to stop automatically connecting Google Reader and Picasa albums to Buzz accounts, though those options will still be available.

Finally, Google is adding a Buzz section to Gmail’s Settings. Why this wasn’t there from the start is beyond me — before now, if you wanted to adjust your Buzz settings you had to go to your Google account page, which made very little sense because most people use Buzz from Gmail.

Earlier today, Google made yet another change to Buzz’s privacy settings by fixing a bug that could cause users to inadvertently expose their friends’ private settings.

All of these are good changes for Buzz, and I’m optimistic about its future, but I can’t help but wonder how they all made it through months of internal testing.