The reason for suspension is probably the quotes in her name. A Google engineer on g+ posted that you should not have any special characters in your name to avoid getting suspended.
Most of Google's competitors (in search) are already trying to discover/emulate Google's algorithms. There is no need for a contest. Any one who is capable of doing that can build a great search engine instead and earn a lot more money.
But a person/team making it easy to write programs that use the Kinect on Linux may not be able to sell the software. So a contest makes sense.
What are you talking about on YouTube? Most of the top Youtube partners (people who get paid by youtube for videos) are individuals and not corporations.
I don't know any YouTube decision that hurt YouTube channels by individuals in any way.
The Twitter API docs (http://dev.twitter.com) has HTTP error codes for each Twitter API. There is Twitter Search API, Twitter REST API and Twitter Streaming API. So though the meaning of the error code might differ slightly generally it is the same. For example, 200 is always successful request and 404 is always resource not found.
Are you seriously checking for failwhale's image name in API response?
Twitter API has rate limits. I think it is 360 req/hour per IP if you are not white-listed. So if you poll using server-side code you are likely to hit the rate-limit. You can cache results to avoid this.
May be "Show details" should be "About Me". And instead of forcing "login\signup", a page allowing direct customization of the widget and embed code would be more impressive.
Why did Google blacklist all of your Tldscan sites? Was it just because your sites' content was updated automatically? Or was it because you did something wrong for SEO?