But what implications will this have for Twitter as a company and as an online brand? Is this good or bad news for the Web 2.0 superstar?

Twitter’s mobile brand not as big as previously thought

This means two things for Twitter. The first is that they clearly have a long way to go if they are to get the right amount of mobile market penetration that a service like this needs to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google. This last year has seen Twitter embroiled in a number of controversies, including their site being hacked embarrassingly on a number of occasions and sensitive user data potentially stolen from their servers.

The second thing for Twitter to take from this data, on a more positive note, is that the predicted demise of their service due to Facebook’s increase in its mobile service is short sighted. Since they are not dominating the mobile world (as once suspected), they have nothing to fear from an unrelated increase in Facebook’s mobile activities. They should be more worried, perhaps, that Facebook will be able to take the ground and the initiative which they themselves may want to occupy first.

Either way, this year promises to be an interesting one in social networking, with the established brands trying to win the hearts and minds of users moving into the the new decade, and new pretenders on the horizon. The web has never looked so interesting!

Google loses French legal case over book digitization

At the heart of the argument is the question as to whether Google has the right to scan and use the extracts from books in its online searches. Some people believe that by making the texts of some literature available to people over the web, they are depriving publishers of the right to sell those books on to customers, which in turn will make those publishers lose profit.

Google does not agree, and they claim that they do not actually make the whole book available, just extracts which can be found in short snippets. They say that there is no difference between going to a library and reading through the archives there and checking online for a quotation from a printed book – it may even be better for the publisher if they make their books more available on the web.

The court was not convinced, however, and this leads to a bigger question – will Google’s quest to put all of the books in the world online fail due to the court actions of publishers across the globe? It is possible the benefit to Google of this experiment may start to be outweighed by expensive legal action and fines – and they could even consider slowing down or stopping entirely.