A Week in Digital
Twitter Promoted Tweets Come To Google
In a first ever move, Google is now carrying ads from someone else’s ad network — Twitter’s, as Google integrates Twitter’s new Promoted Tweets into Google Realtime Search.
Not In “Regular” Google
It’s very important to understand that Promoted Tweets will NOT show within regular Google search, which sometimes integrates real time matches along with web search listings and other matches. They’ll only appear when someone drills-down into the real time results after doing a regular search at Google, or if they conduct a search from the still relatively new Google Realtime Search home page.
Google confirmed there’s a revenue split. Twitter confirmed the split is 50/50, as it had previously said partners would get.
Is Twitter About to Let Businesses Claim Locations?
Twitter has allowed users to tweet their location via its Places feature for a while now, but now it looks like the company is taking Places a step further with a feature that lets businesses “claim” a location or place.
The feature, first spotted by the Hacker News community and tech pioneer Dave Winer, provides a permanent URL for specific locations, along with a list of people who have recently tweeted from that location and their tweets. The interesting part though is that at least one of these pages, Twitter HQ, has been “claimed” by @Twitter.
The “claiming” of Place pages could be a sign that Twitter is getting serious about competing in the geolocation space currently dominated by Facebook and Foursquare. It could give businesses a new avenue to promote themselves on Twitter, and it could lead to new revenue possibilities for the microblogging service.
Facebook’s Weak Excuse For Not Building An iPad App
iPad users have been demanding a custom Facebook application for months, however Facebook doesn’t appear to feel any pressure to launch one anytime soon for a number of reasons.
Most of the coverage so far has centered around Mark Zuckerberg’s response that the iPad is “not a mobile device” response to a question at Facebook’s mobile press event on Wednesday.
After the event Facebook’s CTO, Bret Taylor, said that one of the primary reasons that the application hasn’t been launched yet is that there are so many mobile devices and the site is perfectly functional as it exists within Safari on the iPad although many users claim its not touch friendly.
