Twitter has announced in a blog post a glorious new ability: “the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world.” At last!

There are two ways of looking at this new “ability,” one optimistic and one pessimistic. One is that Twitter is now more able to effectively tailor itself to the needs of certain countries. The other is that Twitter is now more able to effectively tailor itself to the needs of certain countries.

If Twitter continued to sell its firehose to Google, fewer searches would occur on Twitter’s internal search engine where the microblog platform can serve its own ads. That’s why sources familiar with the negotiations tell me Twitter wouldn’t renew the data access deal at any price, or at least set a ludicrously high price to sink the deal. Cash and increased visibility on Google Search was more valuable to Twitter in 2009 when it was still trying to gain serious traction. But by July 2011 Twitter was more established and ready to try monetizing without Google. A firehose deal would have impeded this, so it’s understandable why Twitter walked away.

The Republican Primaries are underway, with two states already in the rearview mirror. The second primary, New Hampshire, wrapped up last night. Mitt Romney took home the most votes from New Hampshire voters, winning just about every county and beating out Ron Paul, who came in second, followed by Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum, rounding out the pack.

With social media playing an increasingly important role in spreading political messages and news, Crimson Hexagon, a company that specializes in social media analytics, delved into the Twittersphere to find out which of the candidates is being discussed most positively online.

Following media mogul Rupert Murdoch‘s arrival on Twitter this week, wife Wendi Deng (@wendi_deng) showed up shortly afterwards, tweeting alongside her husband, flirting with comedian Ricky Gervais, politely declining to engage with the man who attacked Mr. Murdoch with a pie, pushing @rupertmurdoch to take down a questionable tweet (which he did), and generally being a spicy character worthy of a Twitter follow.

Only one problem: that wasn’t Wendi Deng Murdoch.

Twistory, which lets people save their tweet backlog to their favorite calendaring application, has finally come through with full support for popular Web-based calendaring service Google Calendar.

You can now subscribe to Twistory using your existing Twitter account and automatically view in Google Calendar when you’ve tweeted what. Up until now, compatibility with Google Calendar was a little flaky, but the team behind Twistory tells me it is now finally stable.

In an unexpected move, a member of the Saudi royal family has invested $300 million in social networking company Twitter.

This morning, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud, founder and CEO of Kingdom Holding Company and one of the wealthiest people on the planet, announced the investment, which was reported first by Bloomberg.

In a statement, Twitter’s newest equity holder says that the investment was the result of “several months of negotiations and comprehensive due diligence”.

Twitter is starting to push out a significant redesign of its service that makes the interface simpler for all users across all of its platforms. The goal is to resolve complexity around concepts like the hashtag or the ‘at’ symbol. We’re about to get a closer look here at the press event, but in the meantime Twitter has a new page up about the changes (fly.twitter.com) and a video, below.

The four key elements are a new homepage timeline, an interface for easily finding context for hashtags, a better way to see anything related to you, and a slicker user profile (as well as a fuller-featured one for brands, apparently).

Automated Insights, the venture-backed digital media company formerly known as StatSheet, automatically transforms data into content – think interactive applications and things like data-driven news articles, charts and whatnot.

Lately, Automated Insights’s been making waves with its extensive network of sports-related websites. For an example, check out the StatSheet MLB website.