Welcome to The Next Web’s Weekly Recap. Make sure to check out The Next Web’s Podcast (iTunes or XML) where we analyze, rant and have fun with the weekly tech news.
This week tech pundits had a field day predicting how Facebook’s mega patent of “the news feed” will effect the web and the social media sites we all use everyday. This week also saw Twitter reach a statistical milestone and close a major deal with Yahoo.
Facebook Patents “the feed”
The biggest news this week came out of left field when Facebook was granted a patent that they filed for back in 2006. The patent (covered in detail here), essentially claims ownership over what we take for granted on almost all social networks today – the news feed. What remains to be seen is just how Facebook plans to leverage this patent and enforce it. Many believe that we are set to see some ugly legal battles in the coming months surrounding this patent. Taking a backseat to this news but likely just as significant was Facebook’s announcement that they were expanding the Facebook Credit system in order to bring microtransaction features into more apps.
Twitter Yahoo Deal & New Stats
This week saw a bunch of miscellaneous Twitter news. The biggest was the announcement of a deal between Twitter and Yahoo that will integrate Twitter into Yahoo’s various properties. The other major news was that Twitter’s long awaited advertising platform will likely launch within the coming month. The advertising news came on the heels of new Twitter statistics that revealed nearly 75,000,000 people visited Twitter worldwide in January and are tweeting at a rate of 600 tweets per second. This week also saw some big names join Twitter including the Dalai Lama and Conan O’Brien.
Quick Hits
- How to get business done at The Next Web Conference
- Manage your Twitter account with ease using Manage Twitter
- Tweetmeme launches a new “Follow me on Twitter” button
- Wagamama becomes first UK restaurant to offer ordering on your iPhone
- Everything you ever wanted to know about the blogosphere in a diagram
- XBox Project Natal coming in October
- Great Twitter usernames may soon be released
- Gmail adds address based predictive search
- Google search goes local with nearby option
- How to use social media as a business collaboration tool
- Who is more popular on Twitter – Bill Gates or the Dalai Lama?
- Twones launched a Music Bar to discover, bookmark and share music
- Android app Recognizr uses face recognition to gather social networking activity
- Music streaming service We7 makes it to the iPhone
- Former Google employee launches instant messenger Imo.im
- Hollywood appeals loss in landmark ISP piracy case
- Flavor.me publicly launches an aggregator built around simplicity
- Read it Later bookmarking services launches a new digest feature
- A complete guide to everything you need to know about Smartphones
- Opera 10.5 for the Mac was released
- Five ways Bing is Better than Google
- Pentagon gives troops permission to Tweet
- Digg becomes profitable
- How to check your popularity online
- Newsweek in 1995: Why the Internet will Fail
- How to make Foursquare REALLY interesting…
- How to get past the Oprah barrier on Twitter
- iTunes reaches 10 billion song downloads
- Will Google Buzz and Facebook threaten Twitter?
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