Welcome to The Next Web’s Weekly Recap.

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This week saw the first unveiling of Google’s Chrome OS, some big Microsoft announcements from their developer conference in Los Angeles as well as a bunch of geolocation news as Twitter and Foursquare publicly released their APIs and Google added features to Google Latitude.

A closer look at Chrome OS
The press coverage Google’s Chrome OS has received since it was announced back in June likely rivals the speculation to actual knowledge ratio that Apple products receive. However, this week’s Google Chrome OS event revealed a bunch of new information on what the OS will look like and how it will work (watch demo here or “Chrome for Dummies” video here). Headlining the announcements was it’s release date (which is still a year away) as well as its 7 second boot time and no local storage (100% cloud). As a result, all Chrome OS apps will be web-based (no native apps).

Big announcements from Microsoft
Steve Ballmer called Windows 7 a “fantastic” success so far. Windows 7 has sold 40 million units since it was launched on October 22nd. This week also saw some big announcements coming out of their Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. Among the big announcements included a variety of new information on Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure as well as the introduction of Pinpoint and Dallas, two new and important components of the Azure Platform. Out of the conference also came the announcement that the beta of Silverlight 4 was available (Adobe also announced the release of AIR 2.0, their competing technology). Microsoft also revealed that they are still serious about building a world-class browser and promise that Internet Explorer 9 will be a “modern browser” and include support for HTML 5 as well as other emerging modern web browser standards.

Geolocation Heats up
This week saw two major releases of geolocation APIs. The biggest news came from Twitter as they officially released their geotagging API. As Twitter noted in their announcement, this will dramatically enhance users’ ability to have local conversations. Since geotagging is an opt in feature, make sure to visit your settings page to enable it. The other major announcement came from the red hot location-based social network Foursquare. They publicly released their API in the hopes that third-party developers will be quick to build applications for their platform and continue the momentum of the service. You can check out some of the apps already using Foursquare’s API. Foursquare was also in the news this week for expanding its service to 50 more cities. Not to be outdone, Google also updated their social location service latitude by adding two new features including the ability to store a history of your location as well as receiving proximity alerts if your friends are nearby.

What’s happening on Twitter?
In addition to the big Twitter geotagging API news, Twitter also made a small but noteworthy change to their site by replacing the question “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?”. Twitter also added the ability for users to add descriptions to their lists and made some UI changes to their site. In addition, Biz Stone revealed that Twitter will be rolling out Premium accounts before the end of the year. While the feature set of premium accounts is unknown, it’s sure to include analytics which many companies as well as regular users have been asking for for a while. In legal news, Twitter was once again sued for patent infringement by Cooper Industries. The company is calling for Twitter to pay a license fee for it’s mass notification technology.

Quick Hits

• We were really excited this week to announce that The Next Web is coming to the Middle East, UK, Australia, Poland, Italy, and Bulgaria. Check out the Twitter and Facebook Fan Pages to follow.
• Salesforce launched a corporate collaboration tool called Salesforce Chatter which goes head to head with companies like Yammer as well as SocialCast (which we use here at The Next Web).
• Two major sites got facelifts this week including the human-powered search engine Mahalo as well as the gadget blog Engadget.
• Camino, the open source Mac browser that I’m a big fan of, released version 2.
• Seesmic released of a native Windows Twitter client to compliment their browser and AIR clients. Hopefully there will be a Mac version soon.
• Brizzly is now open to the public. It’s a great web app that provides an interface for interacting with Twitter and Facebook.
• If you’re a fan of music videos make sure to check out TubeRadio.fm which we reviewed this week.
• TypePad introduced TypePad Micro, a micro-blogging service to compete with the likes of Posterous and Tumblr.
• The popular Android bar code scanning app ShopSavvy made its way to the iPhone this week.
• The dominate URL shortening service bit.ly added a Click Summary dashboard which gives users the ability easily view overview stats on their links.
• US President Barack Obama revealed while speaking in Shanghai that despite his millions of followers on Twitter, he has never used the service.
• Oxford University Press announced on their blog that “unfriend” was the word of the year.
• With the Internet becoming more important and vital in our everyday lives, countries are starting to categorize it as a legal right. The latest country to do this was Spain.
• Techmeme is now 6 people. They also released a version of their site optimized for mobile.
• Apple’s long battle with clone maker Psystar finally ended as a court ruling prohibits them from selling computers running OS X.
• Interested in Twitter’s new digs? Check out some images of their new headquarters or head over to Officeal which aggregates workspace images from various companies.
• If you want to punk your friends on Twitter check out FakeWhale. It’s an extremely juvenile but fun way to craft fake tweets from any user. Check out Alex’s nifty creations here.