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Trade between the United States and its two closest neighbors has accelerated under NAFTA. But there are still some rough patches to work out between the three countries.

Despite Twitter's success in the U.S., the three-year-old company's service hasn't caught on in Europe. According to Twitter's search tool, Twitter Scan, there is one account under Tesco, the U.K.'s largest retailer, but it has only one outside comment so far. The same goes for financial services firm HSBC, which has 18 followers but no status updates. Most European companies haven't even heard of Twitter, and some might think it's a time waster. A spokeswoman for energy firm Total says that Chief Executive Christophe de Margerie has no idea what Twitter is. British Telecom says it doesn't have a Twitter account and doesn't plan to open one. Nestle's communications manager says using Twitter "just never came up within the group strategy." In general, experts say Europeans don't latch on to new social networking technologies as quickly as Americans.