But, so far, there have been several hitches in that plan. Not everyone has access to a computer and a broadband connection. Some governments still censor the Internet. And of course, we don’t all speak the same language.

For the World Wide Web to be truly global, shouldn’t Chinese speakers be able to chat online with people who only speak Spanish? And why should an English speaker be barred from reading blogs written in Malagasy or Zulu?

Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. are two Web companies trying particularly hard to make this happen, and they’ve released a number of updates to their translation services in recent weeks.

It’s unclear if the attacks were coordinated against the social media sites.

Twitter says its site’s blackout was caused by a “denial of service attack,” which likely means a hacker used a herd of infected computers to send bad information to the site to overwhelmed it.

A post to Twitter’s blog said its Web site was back online before noon ET, but the site’s users still were reporting problems.

“We are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack,” the message from the company says.

Facebook and other social networking sites appeared to be affected by Twitter’s shut-down, too. Twitter runs applications through those sites and there was speculation that the glitches were related.

A new Web site unveiled Thursday will track policies imposed by popular Internet sites such as Facebook and Google, hoping to help users spot potentially harmful changes.

TOSBack.org, the brainchild of privacy advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, will track terms of service modifications within hours of an update.

The site will compare old and new policies side by side and highlight changes. With about two dozen sites covered already, TOSBack.org plans to add more agreements, from credit card, bank, cable TV and other companies.