Twitter enlisted Citysearch as the first user of its Sign-Up API, which helps new users create Twitter accounts from other people’s web sites. Citysearch gets a sprinkle of social media goodness from the arrangement, fostering real-time interaction between consumers and companies, while Twitter — which has a notoriously inscrutable new user experience — gets someone else to handle customer acquisition of smaller brands as it prepares to offer corporate accounts. Citysearch says it has direct relationships with some 200,000 local merchants, and it wants to build a multi-service social media directory for small businesses.

It might take you a while to ask them all, so to make it easier Google launched a new effort to send window decals to over 100,000 local businesses in the U.S. that have been the most sought out and researched on Google.com and Google Maps. Google is calling these businesses the “Favorite Places on Google” and you’ll now start to find them in over 9,000 towns and cities, in all 50 states.

You can also explore a sample of the Favorite Places, in 20 of the largest U.S. cities, at google.com/favoriteplaces. Each window decal has a unique bar code, known as a QR codethat you can scan with any of hundreds of mobile devices — including iPhone, Android-powered phones, BlackBerry and more — to take you directly to that business’s Place Page on your mobile phone. With your mobile phone and these new decals, you can easily go up to a storefront and immediately find reviews, get a coupon if the business is offering one, or star a business as a place you want to remember for the future. Soon, you’ll be able to leave a review on the mobile page as well, just like on your desktop.

So I am sure many people would be willing to know how to Tweet to multiple accounts, here are my 4 favorite twitter apps:

1. Hootsuite
2. Tweet3
3. Seesmic Desktop
4. Digsby (Windows only)

Source: Search Engine Journal by ANN SMARTY

The news of the day in social media land: Twitter is apparently going to start experimenting with paid premium accounts through its Japanese subsidiary, which has always been a bit separated from the rest of Twitter and in many ways a playground for the company (Groups, Twicco, Twitvideo.jp).

Details are sketchy at this point, but Japanese media are reporting that Twitter is going to introduce a tiered payment model and aims to charge people to view tweets from certain premium Twitter accounts.

Source: Techcrunch.com

Back in March AdMob’s statistics showed quite how dominant the iPhone was, with 50% of the U.S. smartphone OS market–RIM’s BlackBerrys came next at 21% share, and Android lagged in fifth place behind both Palm and Windows Mobile with just 5% share. Now, all of that has changed.

Apple’s actually consolidated its position with another 5% of the market. But RIM’s share has dropped to just 12%–despite the arrival of sophisticated iPhone competitor BlackBerrys like the Storm. And Android has stormed to 20% of mobile browsing requests passing through AdMob’s servers (the metric the company uses to calculate these statistics.) The HTC Dream is the most popular Android handset, it seems, but among the numbers it’s the Motorola Droid that’s the real surprise–it’s so freshly available, but AdMob’s November statistics show it’s responsible or 24% of Android’s mobile browsing figure.

The issue stems from corrupted backups, according to Pre enthusiast blog PreCentral. The Pre backs up its data as a “Palm Profile” online, and it only stores the most recent backup. That means if the most recent backup becomes corrupt, Pre owners could not revert to an earlier, non-corrupt profile.

Some Palm Pre Profiles Get Lost in the Cloud

“We are seeing a small number of customers who have experienced issues transferring their Palm Profile information to another Palm webOS device,” a Palm spokesman said in a statement. “Palm and Sprint are working closely together to support these customers to successfully transfer their information to the new device.”

Though Palm says only a small number of customers were affected, the PreCentral blog said it had received several tips throughout the day suggesting this was a widespread issue. Recently, T-Mobile Sidekick owners faced a similar problem. Microsoft, T-Mobile and Danger hosted the data of all of T-Mobile’s Sidekick users in the cloud, and recently the server crashed, losing everything. These incidents are rare, but they underscore the risk of trusting a third party to secure your data over the web.

Unlike other mobile navigation apps, Waze “crowdsources” its map-making process, reliant on its users to switch the app on when driving around town. Then, using the phone’s built-in GPS capabilities, Waze uses the information sent back to create base maps and determine traffic patterns in order to warn other users of traffic jams ahead.

Although Waze is an application dependent on critical mass to become successful, they’ve already had good results since their original launch in Israel. In less than a year’s time, Waze was able to map 91% of the country thanks to user involvement. The company believes they will have similar results here in the U.S. with highly populated urban areas being mapped first with the rest of the country following over the coming months.
See Their Guided Tour:

Google’s new movie listings page now includes buttons to play trailers right on your phone, ratings and categories, movie posters, upcoming showtimes, and a concise list of the nearest theaters and their distances from you. They keep information on this page succinct so you can quickly browse through shows and showtimes to help you decide which movie to see. If you want more details about a specific movie, just touch the poster or movie title and you’ll see our new movie details page that has a synopsis of the movie, a more detailed list of showtimes, the cast and crew, and pictures. Watch our trailer for a quick demo:

“That is something we are definitely interested in,” Stone told a news conference in Tel Aviv. “We made an acquisition last year that turned out to be an outstandingly good decision.”

He said there was nothing specific on the horizon.

“As our attention is grabbed by some of these developers, we will take a hard look at them,” Stone said.

Twitter bought search engine Summize in 2008.

Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.

Stone said Twitter will “start making money” in 2010 as it unveils a plan early next year on how it will produce revenue through advertising. He declined to give details but said advertising will be “non-traditional.” Twitter will be in English with a next wave into French, German, Italian and Spanish.