Better late than never is what they say right? Everyone else and their brother have made their deal with Twitter so Yahoo doing so only makes sense. What is interesting is that while this kind of announcement should be a big deal it comes off as sounding a little “after the fact” which, unfortunately, seems to be how Yahoo is perceived more and more these days.

To be fair, Yahoo has more properties to tie Twitter into so the deal is likely to be more complex than the “real time search” deals that have been struck with Google and Microsoft. Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog sings the deal’s praises

Well folks it looks like the days of advertising free tweeting may finally be coming to an end. The rumors are flying around regarding the ad platform that Twitter has in the works and is testing. Everyone is “atwitter” with this change and for good reason. Of course, until there is more than what has already been released by Twitter itself any ideas / thoughts about what Twitter ads might look like are for the imagination.

MediaPost reports on how this whole thing really started to bubble to the surface.

Twitter plans to launch an advertising platform in about a month, according to Seth Goldstein. The chief executive officer and co-founder of socialmedia.com led a panel Monday focused on the next wave of interactive advertising at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2010 in Carlsbad, Calif., that shed light on Twitter’s strategy.

Yesterday, Google announced five little tweaks to Buzz. While they’re certain to please active users, they do little to address some of the issues Buzz has faced.

To be fair, Google has tried to address the major privacy concerns after Buzz’s initial (rushed) launch. Probably most important is the note that buried in your Gmail settings is the Buzz tab where you can disable the service if you’re not interested.

Probably the two most useful new features are a yellow bar to denote new items from the last time you checked your Buzz, and a way to keep your Gmail chat status from appearing in Buzz (putting it in parentheses. Obviously I love the parens, but in a chat status it’s kinda ugly, actually.).