HACKER REVEALS TWITTER'S PLAN FOR GLOBAL DOMINATION!

Tweet tweet! Hollywood is obsessed with Twitter.com, and celebs have led the stampede to the fastest-growing Web service in the world.

But just when Ashton, Demi, Diddy and Miley had us tweeting away, Twitter got hacked.

The online invader found huge gaps in the site's security, but he also discovered something more interesting: an internal memo that outlined Twitter's ultimate goal. The service wants to be the first to reach 1 billion users and become "the pulse of the planet."

Can it happen? Does a trend that continues to baffle many have the legs to trot around the globe?

Despite its three years up and running, Twitter is still a ­cultural novelty, still riddled with technical issues and, if you believe Lindsay Lohan, still home to prowlers who impersonate celebrities just to soil their good names.

That said, Lindsay's still using it, and she's not the only one.

In June, the site passed 20 million users in the United States, and almost double that worldwide. The number of people online around the world has already passed 1 billion and, according to forecasters at Forrester Research, could balloon to 2 billion by 2013. Twitter's goal of global domination looms large.

Michael Arrington, founder and co-editor of the Internet business news site TechCrunch.com, calls the Twitter mission a "realistic goal."

It was Arrington who received and published selections from 310 pages of internal documents leaked by the Twitter hacker, known only as "Hacker Croll," as proof the breach had taken place. Among them were financial records, lists of staff dietary restrictions and credit card numbers, office floor plans and notes from the executive meeting that focused on Twitter's dream of global domination.

"As far as we can tell, no site has ever grown as fast relative to its size,"says Arrington. "Earlier this year they were having 30% weekly growth."Twitter's appeal, he says, lies in both its simplicity and potential for personalization. Every user gets a distinct name — usually a play on his or her real one — and can be located at a Twitter page with a custom URL.

For example, you'll find Sean Combs by typing in twitter.com/iamdiddy. On the user's page, you'll find a collection of his "tweets,"140-character updates on his daily activities and thoughts. Click to "follow" the user, and his tweets will pop up in real time on your home screen. You can even direct a message to a specific user by typing the @ symbol and his user name at the start of your tweet.

The service has been a successful campaign tool for President Obama and ­other politicos, who use it to reach millions of followers with each update. ­Twitter has broken news, and carried the first photos of U.S. Airways flight 1549 floating in the Hudson.