A savvy move for Amex, too. Though Revolution competes against entrenched credit-card companies and PayPal, among others, its alternative payment system, which reduces costs for accepting credit cards by up to 75 percent, is quite attractive to merchants who’ve shouldered those costs for so long.

Says JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan: “While it is hard to know precisely what direction AmEx plans to take the Revolution assets, we think the acquisition suggests the company is trying to be more aggressive in the online payments arena. We think PayPal’s existing account base and international footprint have given it a network advantage in the C2C space that is hard to dislodge. On the other hand, we believe significant room exists for market share gains in Online Payments by companies that offer innovative solutions, and this acquisition gives Revolution Money a stronger backer.”

According to a new company timeline (see image below; click to enlarge), webOS developers who’ve had their applications accepted for the App Catalog will see them featured there on that day. Apps can be purchased via credit card. App sales will be split 70/30, with 70 percent going to developers and 30 percent going to Palm (PALM).

Twitter went down around 6:30 am PDT and was live once again by 8:30 am PDT, but remains under attack.

“We are currently the target of a denial of service attack,” said Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. “Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we defend and later investigate.”

Interestingly, Twitter wasn’t the only social media service targeted in this attack. Facebook and LiveJournal were hit as well. “Earlier this morning, Facebook encountered network issues related to an apparent distributed denial of service attack, that resulted in degraded service for some users,” the company said in a statement. “No user data was at risk and we have restored full access to the site for most users. We’re continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.”

Said a LiveJournal spokesperson, “While we can’t be 100 percent sure it was the same attack as on Twitter, Facebook, et al., it would be a huge coincidence if they aren’t tied to one another.” As of this writing, the site was back up and running.

Seems the personal data of Googlers hired prior to 2006 were stolen during a May 26 burglary at Colt Express Outsourcing Services, a financially troubled human resources outfit Google (GOOG) once used to administer employee benefits. The data, which astonishingly were not encrypted, thankfully did not include driver’s license, credit card or bank account numbers. It did, however, include employee names, Social Security numbers, birthdates, and addresses–everything an identity thief would need to open a credit card account under another’s name.

It’s unclear how many Googlers are affected by the breach, but it could be quite a few. CBS’s (CBS) CNET Networks was also affected by the burglary, with details from about 6,500 employees stolen.

“We take the security of our employees very seriously and require outside vendors to meet appropriate security standards. We review and update these standards on an ongoing basis,” a Google representative said. “Google is not currently using Colt’s services and had made this decision long before this incident.”

If that’s the case, what was Colt doing with that data in the first place?