This article was published on April 4, 2010

The Next Web Network’s Weekly Recap: iPad Released and Twitter’s New Algorithm


The Next Web Network’s Weekly Recap: iPad Released and Twitter’s New Algorithm

Welcome to The Next Web Network’s Weekly Recap. Make sure to listen to this weeks podcast where we discuss, rant and debate the weekly tech news. Also, there are still a handful of tickets available for The Next Web Conference ’10 (April 27 – 29).

This week was dominated by two major news stories. At the beginning of the week it was Twitter who refreshed their homepage and also unveiled their new popular tweets sorting algorithm. The end of the week was marked my the highly anticipated iPad release.

iPad Released

The tech world had been waiting with great anticipation since Steve Jobs announced the iPad on January 27th. Until Saturday when the product was released in the United States, we had been relying on demo videos and reviews of select journalists who got their hands on the iPad early. On Saturday the masses were finally able to get their hands on the coveted device. Piper Jaffray estimated that between 600,000 and 700,000 iPads were sold on Saturday compared to 270,000 iPhones sold on it’s initial launch. These are quite impressive early sales figures.

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Here are some highlights from our iPad Coverage this week:

Twitter’s New Algorithm (and Homepage)

Twitter has quickly become the most significant social network on the web when it comes to sharing information. This week Twitter took a major step in trying to make a little more sense of all that information by launching their new search algorithm. For any search query, Twitter now inserts three tweets above the rest of the results. The exact algorithm that determines the three “popular” tweets selected is unknown but it’s based on things such as number of times retweeted, favorited and the influence of the Twitter user. Twitter also syndicates the top tweets selected by this algorithm using their new @TopTweets account.

This new algorithm is also featured on Twitter’s new homepage under the “Top tweets” section. While not as significant a change as their major refresh back in July, the new homepage does boast a couple of very useful features aimed at attracting new users.

Quick Hits

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