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This article was published on December 18, 2009

The Next Web’s Weekly Recap: GPhone, URL Trimming and…Twitter.


The Next Web’s Weekly Recap: GPhone, URL Trimming and…Twitter.

The Next Web's Weekly RecapWelcome to The Next Web’s Weekly Recap. Also make sure to check out The Next Web’s Podcast (iTunes or XML) where we talk about the weekly tech news.

This week saw the rumor of the Google Phone become a reality as it was announced that phone is real and is called the “Nexus One”. This week also saw a bunch of URL shortening announcements from Google, Facebook and bit.ly as well as some big API announcements from Twitter and a couple huge investment deals.

HTCPassiongooglephoneThe Google Phone
It turns out that the rumored “Google Phone” was in fact real and is called the Nexus One. It was revealed on Google’s blog that the device will only be available for Google employees (at least right now). While details are still uncertain, the phone is known to be manufactured by HTC and will be sold by Google directly as an unlocked phone.

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bit.lyURL Shortener Announcements
This week saw a flurry of URL shortener announcements from Facebook, Google and bit.ly. Facebook has begun to automatically shorten URLs down to FB.me for Facebook’s mobile interface. On the same day as Facebook’s news, Google announced their own shortened URL services, Goo.gl. The service is only available via Google Toolbar and FeedBurner but will likely become a stand alone product down the road. Bit.ly, the dominate leader in the space, striked back with news that they were launching bit.ly Pro, a service that gives users the ability to have customer URLs as well as some advanced features. Bit.ly also announced the launch of bitly.tv which aggregates the top videos online using bit.ly link data.

twitter-logoTwitter’s Contributor API
Twitter announced this week that their API would be supporting multiple contributors to a single account. The capability is a logical one as many companies with many contributors use Twitter today to reach their customers. Managing a single account with many users has been accomplished by using popular applications such as CoTweet. CoTweet, the dominate leader in this space, was quick to respond to announcement and defend their legitimacy in the marketplace and the additional features that they bring to the table.

farmville-logo1Big Investments Announced
This week saw the Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies (DST) make two huge investments. The first came on Wednesday when it was announced that DST had put in $180 million into Zynga, makers of FarmVille. DST then announced the next day that they had invested a further $300 Million into Facebook.

facebookFacebook Privacy Backlash
There was big backlash this week from last weeks privacy decision by Facebook. Facebook, clearly trying to nudge users in the direction of opening up their content to everyone has enraged many of their users as well as privacy advocate. This week saw a bunch of privacy organizations file a complaint against Facebook Inc. to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the United States. It will be interesting to see how this story plays out and how Facebook deals with privacy going forward.

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