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This article was published on April 18, 2010

The Next Web Network’s Weekly Recap: Twitter Announces Monetization Plan and New Features at Chirp


The Next Web Network’s Weekly Recap: Twitter Announces Monetization Plan and New Features at Chirp

Welcome to The Next Web Network’s Weekly Recap. Make sure to check out this week’s podcast where we discuss the biggest stories of the week. Also, the deadline to grab your tickets to The Next Web Conference 2010 in Amsterdam (April 27 – 29) is fast approaching.

This week was all about Chirp, Twitter’s first official conference. At Chirp Twitter unveiled it’s long awaited monetization strategy as well as a bunch of new product announcements. Google also made a variety of product announcements as well as posting strong Q1 results. This week we also announced the finalists for The Next Web Paypal X Startup Rally 2010.

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Twitter’s Chirp Announcements

This past Thursday and Friday was Twitter’s first official conference dubbed Chirp. The conference was highly anticipated for a couple reasons. First, it was expected that their business model would finally be unveiled. Second, Twitter had a lot of damage control after last weeks drama with developers (outlined here). In order to improve developer relations, Twitter officially responded to developers and also launched dev.twitter.com. As for their product announcements, Twitter had many:

  1. Promoted Tweets – Twitter monetization model built around paying for tweet promotion in search. Details
  2. Places of Interest – instead of listing coordinates of tweets, Twitter will associate them with the name of the specific location. Details
  3. Annotations – third party developers will be able to add any metadata they want to a tweet. Details
  4. @Anywhere – allows third party sites to have deeper integration with Twitter. Details
  5. URL Shortener – Twitter will be launching their own URL shortener. Details
  6. Twitter Media – launched a new portal for journalist and media focused on case studies for using the service
  7. Twitter Archive – The US Library of Congress will be the official archive for tweets. Details

In addition to the above announcements, Twitter also hinted at the fact that they will be integrating media sharing at some point in the future. They also released some impressive stats on Twitter’s usage (infographic). For a detailed summary of all of Twitter’s Chirp announcements in one handy list, visit our cheat sheet here.

Google Product Announcements

While Twitter dominated this week’s tech news cycle, Google did announce new features to a variety of their products. They also reported their financials for Q1 which fell in line with analyst expectations. The biggest news was on Monday when they announced the acquisition of Plurk, a visual search engine. Google’s product announcements included:

  1. Google Docs – many new and improved features for Google Docs announced. Details
  2. Follow/Rebuzz Buttons – Official Google Buzz buttons were released. Details
  3. iPad App – Google’s Mobile App that has been available for the iPhone for a while is now available for the iPad. Details
  4. Twitter Timeline Search – will offer a timeline of tweets by day and topics. Details
  5. Cloud Printing – Chomium OS feature attempting to solve the dreaded printer driver problem. Details
  6. Search Enhancements – Localized Google Suggest, Improved Name Search and Spelling Auto-Correct added to Google Search. Details
  7. Bye “http://” – Chrome’s developer version now eliminates the “http://” in the address bar. Details

Quick Hits

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