The Next Web’s Weekly Recap: Battle Over Mobile, Facebook Turns 6 and Twitter Attack

Welcome to The Next Web’s Weekly Recap!

This week saw a couple of big deals involving Monster and Yahoo as well as UStream. It also saw the battle over mobile heat up. Android’s platform is gaining features and more phones. The big question mark in the space, Microsoft, appears to be poised to release a mobile phone soon. This week also saw Facebook turn 6 and get an improved UI. Meanwhile, Twitter added a key new feature to their web interface.

Battle Over Mobile
New stats reveal that world Smartphone shipments are up 39% year over year. For Apple, who released the latest version of their iPhone OS this week, iPhone sales account for an estimated 54% of their total stock price compared to only 21% for Mac sales. Google’s Android platform is gaining steady adoption and this week pushed out an update on the Nexus One that brought long awaited multi-touch to the device. Samsung also released an Android 2.1 device. Meanwhile, everyone is still waiting to see how Microsoft plans to play in this market. The Zune Phone is rumored to arrive this Month.

Facebook Turns 6, Gets a Facelift
On Thursday Facebook celebrated is 6 year birthday and also announced that it had reached 400 million users. In this interview this week, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg revealed that a whopping 175 million people log onto Facebook every single day. This week also began the rollout of the new UI that is being gradually released to users as well as a handy new image uploader. Meanwhile, a rumored email product called “Project Titan” appears to be in the works.

Twitter Features, Attack and Stats
This week Twitter introduced “hovercards”, a quick way to see a user’s info without having to visit their profile. Many users were also required to change their password due to a phishing attack. Users who used the same login info for a torrent site had found their accounts compromised. Meanwhile, a study by Pew Internet found that while 73% of teenagers were “avid” on social networks only 8% use Twitter. While perhaps this is cause for concern, this visualization of Twitter’s amazing growth is anything but.

Quick Hits

• Monster bought Yahoo’s HotJobs for $225 million in cash.
• A review of SeeSaw, the UK’s Hulu
• Why You Should Be Afraid of Internet censorship in Australia, even If you don’t live there.
• YouTube’s movie rental service is off to a slow start.
• URL shortening service Bit.ly launched a new self-service custom URL option for free.
• FriendFeed like service Nsyght, has added some key new features.
• Online streaming service UStream secured $20 million in investment this week.
• Apple has stopped production on its troubled 27″ iMac until it figures out the problems.
• Engadget, in order to combat trolls, has turned off comments on their site.
• Martin reveals how favorite tweets can reveal self-obsessed celebrities.
• Kevin Rose’s We Follow Twitter directory had a glitch that replaced users’ profile link with a We Follow profile link. The issue has since been resolved.
• Reports this week show the FBI’s desire to know everything that you do online.
• Movie Pirates vs Movie Industry, Matt explores the industries’ claims vs the reality.
• Alex covers some great sites in his Pirate’s Guide to paying for music.