Twitter gets on the money

Twitter has rolled out the second phase of it's monetisation: Promoted Trending Topics. And Disney / Pixar are the first ones to buy a promoted topic. They've chosen Toy Story 3, which gets featured at the bottom of the trending topics list and also gets them the top tweet on the results page.

Read more here:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/16/twitter-trending-topics-ad/

Google's new Wave

Google's new large venture is Google Wave - a kind of mix between email and chat and the future. It's easier to read the Tech Crunch article than a summary by me, but they're pretty excited about it.


Read more:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-drips-with-ambition-can-it-fulfill-googles-grand-web-vision/

Read about WaveProtocol:
http://www.waveprotocol.org/

Pandora makes money!

Pandora is finally making some money and it's all thanks to its iPhone app. It makes most of its money from affiliate schemes with Amazon and iTunes. This has been increased significantly by the addition of an iPhone app.
I'm glad to see that some of these great online music apps are being monitised finally, as they've provided me with great music over the years and I hope that other apps / sites can follow suit.

Read more:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/07/the-iphone-is-accelerating-music-sales-for-pandora/

NB Unluckily Pandora is only available in the US due to licensing issues.

Google and Twitter sources wrong

So Techcrunch told us that Google was in talks with Twitter to buy it:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/02/sources-google-in-late-stage-talks-to-buy-twitter/

But it turns out their sources were wrong:
http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090403/sorry-to-get-you-all-a-twitter-but-google-is-not-in-late-stage-talks-to-acquire-the-hot-microblogging-service/

It was nothing as exciting as a purchase, more just that they were in talks about how to work together better. Oh well!