Facebook Places is no more. According to Business Insider, location details will now be a regular part of a user’s status update.

Also, Facebook has introduced a number of privacy changes. Mashable has an overview and The Wall Street Journal has an interview (above) that discusses what it all really means. (Maybe not much.)

CNW (Canada Newswire) has launched a revamped, multimedia-focused website. You can check it out here.

Twitter En Español has more followers (about 6.4 million) than Twitter (about 5.9 million). [via HispanicBusiness.com]

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Left to right: NYWICI immediate past president Linda Kaplan Thaler; The NYT's Gail Collins; and new board president Catherine Mathis at a meeting last month

Publicis Consultants, part of MSLGroup, has named Michael Echter director of client engagement and growth. Echter was previously the new business lead for MSL New York, and will continue to be based in NYC. He joined the firm in 2000.

Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, as well as Jason Goldman, a Twitter executive, are stepping away from the day-to-day at the microblogging company in order to relaunch The Obvious Corporation, which will focus on issues like those facing nonprofits. Obvious was started to purchase failed start ups and spawned Twitter.

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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced on his blog today that he will be serving as AOL’s Social Impact Advisor.

Also announced today, the “30-Day Service Challenge,” a philanthropic program launched “to kick off the first official week of the new Huffington Post Media Group at AOL,” Arianna Huffington writes in a HuffPo post. The program will encourage people across the now-joint organization to give back to their local communities. There will also be additional coverage of companies and individual people who are doing good works.

Stone says his role at Twitter won’t change. And AllThingsD reports that Stone is getting AOL equity. Both that site and Mashable also suspect that this is a way for AOL to get some good PR after last week’s layoffs. True.

Egypt celebrates after President Mubarak's resignation.

While the world has been talking up the impact that Facebook (and other social networks) have had on the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, Facebook is keeping quiet about their role.

The New York Times quotes this statement from Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s VP of global communications:  ”We’ve witnessed brave people of all ages coming together to effect a profound change in their country. Certainly, technology was a vital tool in their efforts but we believe their bravery and determination mattered most.”

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463 Communications Partner Sean Garrett is leaving the tech PR agency to join Twitter as VP, Communications, he said in a blog post yesterday afternoon.

Garrett said, in part:

Based on all the love that I have for 463, it would have to be a profoundly amazing opportunity for me to make a move. And, this is. I’m all the more confident of this because, via 463, I have been consulting for Twitter the last few months.

I’m excited to build out a creative, smart and aggressive team that is an appropriate fit for the uniqueness of Twitter. I’m also eager to dust off my front-line media relations chops after spending most of the last nine years focused on the shadowy, back-room strategy thing.

We’ve asked Twitter co-founder Biz Stone several times if the company planned on hiring outside PR help with all of the venture capital money they’ve raised. About a year ago, Stone told us Twitter had “no plans just yet” to hire PR. This past June Stone said Twitter had not hired “any PR company.”

That being said, we’re not entirely surprised to see Twitter go the in-house route.

Garrett co-founded 463 Communications in 2004, after stints at Applied Communications and Bite Communications. 463 is a part of holding company Next Fifteen, which includes the aforementioned Bite Communications, as well as Text 100, M. Booth & Associates and OutCast Communications. More to come…

Have you always wanted to sync up your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts? Well, now you can, thanks to a deal announced late yesterday by the two social networks. The deal makes it easy to send LinkedIn status updates to Twitter, and “Tweets” to your LinkedIn profile. You also have the option of only syncing certain content from each profile. The LinkedIn deal comes on the heals of deals with both Bing and Google, both announced several weeks ago.

In a video announcing the deal, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said, “The general idea of putting a little Twitter in everything, is being able to inject into LinkedIn a little bit more of this fresh, kind of here’s what’s going on with these other things, but with a little bit of curated sense in terms of your professional life…You want the widest possible distribution.”

[Twitter co-founder Biz Stone]

A post on Adrants covering the Cannes Lions festival caught our eye this week. Specifically, when blogger Angela Natividad wrote, “This year was the first year Cannes recognized PR’s role in getting a brand message across, so PR people just about creamed themselves getting here. Even Twitter’s PR folk, Hill & Knowlton, couldn’t help but say something smug about it before passing the mic to Biz Stone this afternoon.”

Twitter? PR folk? Hill & Knowlton? This was all news to us so we did some investigating. Reached for comment, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told PRNewser, “Hill and Knowlton invited me to speak at their session-Twitter has not hired them nor have we hired any PR company.”

The session Stone speaks about was a Tweet Up hosted by Twitter and H&K at the festival. If anything H&K is trying to get the most out of the connection, and we can’t blame them. An agency blog lists both company logos with the copy: “Joining forces at Cannes.”