The Next Web’s Weekly Recap

Welcome to The Next Web’s Weekly Recap.

This week’s news was headlined by the debate over in-tweet advertising on Twitter. After Twitter COO announced that their ad platform would be unveiled soon, many argued over the viability of the in-tweet advertising model. The other big news of the week was Google continuing their shopping spree by buying display ad company Teracent.

Twitter Ads
A big debate this week started after Twitter COO Dick Costolo revealed information about their upcoming advertising model while giving an interview at TechCrunch’s RealTime CrunchUp in San Francisco. While Costolo didn’t reveal too much information, he did say that “It will be fascinating. Non-traditional. And people will love it… It’s going to be really cool.” These comments started a debate in the blogosphere about in-tweet advertising on Twitter. Like them or hate them, Twitter users with high follower counts are already raking in money using third-party ad platforms built on Twitter. For well articulated arguments on both sides of the issue I recommend reading Robert Scoble’s post (against in-tweet ads) and Mark Suster’s post (for in-tweet ads).

Twitter Pay Accounts
It was announced this week that Twitter would begin to add pay accounts to its service in Japan. This differs from the “Corporate Accounts” that Biz Stone announced would be coming before the end of the year on Twitter.com. Under what Biz Stone described, corporations and individuals would be able to pay Twitter for advanced features (analytics etc..). With Twitter’s Japanese site, accounts will now have the option to charge their followers to receive their tweets. The user charging for their tweets could either setup payment by a monthly subscription or charge on a per tweet basis. Twitter’s partner in Japan, Digital Garage, would take a 30% cut. Serkan Toto, who is based in Japan, offers an explanation of why this subscription model will likely work in Japan. Personally, I believe the subscription model of charging users to receive tweets would work on Twitter.com as well. I would be surprised if both the pay account model as well as premium corporate accounts are not both up and running by mid-2010.

Google Continues Shopping Spree
There was a lot of miscellaneous Google News this week but the biggest piece of news was the announcement that they had acquired the display advertising company Teracent. This comes just a couple weeks after they announced they had acquired the mobile advertiser AdMob. In related advertising news, Google announced a partnership with TiVo to provide Google with viewing analytics of TiVo users.

Quick Hits

• If you like Tweetmeme check out MailCounter, the Tweetmeme for email.
• If you’re looking for a web-based Twitter client make sure to check out Alex’s roundup of the best ones out there.
• LinkedIn released an API which will allow social networking applications and third party web apps to integrate with their service.
• Tim Ferriss, author of the 4 Hour Work Week, had a great short post on “The Benefits of Pissing People Off”
• How powerful are you on Twitter? Klout tells you.
• AOL revealed it’s new logo this week as it prepares to spin off from Time Warner.
• Check out SendSocial to send parcels to your friends on Twitter, without ever knowing their address.
• @BreakingNews, one of my favorite sources for news on Twitter, was acquired by MSNBC.
• Google Maps Navigation is now open for all devices running Android 1.6.
• Twitter has shown to be a great source to get movie reviews. This week we reviewed a cool site that attempts to aggregate movie tweets and other content.
• If Twitter did audio, Grapevine could be it. We took the service for a spin here.
• Video site Joost makes its way to the dead pool.
• If you’re looking for a simple and sleek to-do manager, task.fm might be your answer.
• Visualize where you have been with foursquare using 4mapper.
• Wikipedia on the decline? A big WSJ article on declining contributors ignited the debate.
• iTunes and Live Nation team up to offer live concert recording downloads.
• Google Chrome users: 5 Must Have Google Chrome Extensions.

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