Thus, Twitter just put up a vague blog post that promises more features to come for its popular Vine video app. And as AllThingsD just reported, a new video offering from its Instagram photo-sharing unit will be the sole product launch at a Facebook event this Thursday.

Which means, it was time for Twitter, which has the most popular such product in the space, to crow.

“Over the next few weeks, we’ll be introducing some exciting new parts of Vine,” said its blog post today. “As always, we’ll share details on updates as we release them.”

Instagram plans to release its video product at a press event at the social networking giant’s headquarters, according to sources, marking the first time the robust, 100-million user photo-sharing network will offer more than static images.

It will have to catch up to Vine, which is now available on both Apple iPhone and Google Android, and which recently announced 13 million users. The new features are presumably to keep clear of Instagram’s splash in the pool.

Until it’s all sorted out, here’s Vine’s clever “thank you” video to users, which it also released today:

Instagram plans to release a video product this Thursday at a press event at Facebook’s headquarters, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter, marking the first time the robust, 100-million user network will stray from being strictly a photo-sharing app and dive head first into the world of moving pictures.

The new video product is something that the service said it was planning to do for two years now, and there have been numerous rumors about it in recent weeks. As was first reported by TechCrunch, it’s actually going to happen this week. Sources said that Thursday’s event will solely be focused on Instagram’s new video product and there will be no other Facebook product reveals.

While details of the product have been kept under wraps, sources said Facebook is seeking to differentiate itself from Vine, the popular instant video app from Twitter, which is now available on both Apple iPhone and Google Android. It recently announced that Vine has 13 million users.

The worry, said sources, is that this late-to-the-video-app-party offering will be seen as a copy of that, much as Facebook’s Poke service was received as a copycat to the explosively growing SnapChat.

In a sense, video on Instagram is not a complete surprise. After the rise of products like Viddy and Socialcam last summer, many have expected some sort of mobile video offering from either Facebook or Instagram.

As it happened, that so-called “Instagram of video” turned out to be neither Viddy nor Socialcam, but rather Vine, the standalone app offering from Twitter.

Twitter has become one of Facebook’s largest competitors — and coincidentally enough, the company that ultimately lost out on acquiring Instagram to Facebook in a whirlwind, billion-dollar acquisition deal.

So, not so coincidentally, Vine just did a “Thank you to our community” post on its company blog, with the promise of more features to come soon (see Vine video below).

With its success, Twitter has loudly trumpeted the fact that Vine has hovered around the No. 1 most downloaded free app in the App Store for weeks, a position only solidified by the recent release of Vine for Android.

Obviously, Facebook — and therefore Instagram — cares about video. But the question now is, can Instagram pull off a video product without screwing up its user experience and turning off users?

Part of the appeal of Instagram as it stands today lies in its simplicity. Scroll down the ever-flowing cascade of photos in your stream and the movement is seamless, easy to ingest. Its elegance and ease of use is one of the key reasons why Instagram has seen such a rapid growth curve over its short lifespan.

The introduction of video directly into the stream could break up that simple flow, potentially putting off many who have come to love the ease of moving quickly through the feed. Think of the time it takes to look at a photo and that low threshold for attention is exactly what makes them so easy (and addictive) to consume.

It’s simply not the same with video, which takes more time to load and view. So it will be interesting to see how Instagram — still led by co-founder Kevin Systrom — handles the integration.

To that point comes the issue of how long the videos themselves will be. Ex-Reuters employee Matthew Keys reported that videos would range between five and ten seconds — somewhere in between Vine’s six-second sweet spot and Viddy’s longer 30-second times. Again, it’s TBD on whether or not users will have the patience for it.

Facebook has gone after competitors in the past with varying degrees of success. Poke has been a spectacular flop. Same with the Quora-like Facebook Questions, and the very Foursquare-ish Facebook Places.

In other words, just because Facebook is aping your product, doesn’t mean you’re gonna get crushed.

Is it fair to call video on Instagram a Vine clone? Maybe, maybe not. The new product isn’t here yet, so we don’t know exactly how it will work.

But let’s be clear: Facebook wants to own mobile video just as badly as anyone else.

Until we know more, please enjoy Vine’s claymation-style thanks video:

Although not the inventor of the tool, Twitter has dominated conversations centered around the hashtag (#) for quite some time. As we saw last week, however, Facebook wants in on the action, introducing hashtags to its users, so that they can follow individual topics throughout the network.

Why ape some of your stiffest competition, ultimately validating their little language of pound symbols?

Here’s why: It’s all about the second-screen audience.

Data from Nielsen’s latest research shows that nearly half of smartphone owners and tablet owners (46 percent and 43 percent, respectively) said they use their devices as second screens while watching TV every day. And nearly half of that activity on tablets is directly related to the shows they’re watching (one-third for smartphone users).

Think on this: It’s been Twitter’s major pitch to advertisers to tack little hashtag addendums and catchphrases onto the end of their commercials. From there, a viewer can do a quick search for the hashtag to track conversation about the ad and connect with other folks. Same with TV marketers: Identify a hashtag with your show and viewers can talk about the action in real time.

That demographic is ripe with potential for seeding ads. Twitter, for instance, lets advertisers stick promoted tweets for their products in with those specific hashtag searches. So, if you’re a viewer watching an NFL game on the couch and search the hashtag #MondayNightFootball, for instance, that’s prime real estate for companies such as Frito-Lay or Budweiser to slot a promoted tweet right in there.

And that’s a lot of potential ad dollars being lost by Facebook over to Twitter. Facebook even said that on any given night during prime-time television hours, there are between 88 million and 100 million people active on Facebook. Give those folks a way to use hashtags and follow content more easily on the social network, and you’re giving Facebook’s ad guys an easier way to sell against said hashtags.

Granted, Facebook’s hashtags are a) only rolled out to a small percentage of users for the time being and b) not on mobile yet, only the Web. But this is merely a temporary stopgap.

Facebook’s larger problem is whether or not viewers will associate hashtags with Facebook, just as they already do with Twitter. It seems like it’s working on Instagram, so perhaps that will translate to Facebook’s mobile apps.

And perhaps even more problematic: Part of why it’s so tough for Twitter to court and retain mainstream, average non-techie users is because of the opacity that the language of hashtags and @symbols creates. If you’re someone in, say, the Tide detergent demographic, you may not be as able to figure out just what a hashtag actually is. Try selling that to an advertiser.

Personally, I anticipate Facebook’s adoption will only make the language more accessible to the mainstream; stick the hashtag in everyone’s faces, and you’ll be forced to learn what it means. That, paired with the fact that it’s floating over to other platforms like Vine, Path and most recently Google+, and I’d guess it reaches a tipping point.

The heat is on to see where the ad dollars go from here.

Well, Jay-Z is way too smart for that!

The brand-endorser/value-adder/Beyonce’s husband/musician has a big deal with Samsung to give away free copies of his new album to people who download an app to their Galaxy devices.

So it would totally be embarrassing if he tweeted about that from an iPhone, right?

No problem! As Amanda Lucci notes, sometime between April 3 and today, Mr. Z, or whoever social-messages on his behalf, switched his Twitter account over from iPhone to Android. Disaster averted!

Jay-Z has switched from iPhone to Android since his last tweet, HOW CONVENIENT pic.twitter.com/93ddm7Vos0

– Amanda (@alucci) June 17, 2013

Bonus Jay-Z handset info: As our intrepid Mike “Tats-a-plenty” Isaac notes, Mr. Z, or whoever social-messages for him, wasn’t that attached to iOS, anyway. A little more than a year ago, he (or whoever) was still using a BlackBerry to tweet.

Luckily, because Mr. Z (or whoever) is an infrequent Twitter user, we can see exactly when he switched over: September 2012.

OED chief editor John Simpson announced the addition of the word — both as a noun and as a verb — in his June update.

Obviously the word “tweet” was in the dictionary before, dating back to at least 1851 as an imitative word for bird calls. But the definition has now been expanded to include its use to include: “To make a posting on the social networking service Twitter. Also: to use Twitter regularly or habitually.” It also includes its use as a noun for the messages.

One weird thing about this: The OED had already added “retweet” as far back as 2011, alongside such gems as “mankini,” “jeggings” and “sexting.” No explanation from Simpson why “retweet” got in first.

The addition, Simpson said, violates at least one rule for inclusion in the OED, specifically the one that says that a “new word needs to be current for 10 years before consideration for inclusion. But it seems to be catching on,” he wrote.

Whatever the reason, “tweet” was just one of a batch of tech-related words and phrases added to the OED in the last year. Among the others is “big data,” the fashionable phrase and subject of glossy photo books that evokes the act of analyzing large data sets for otherwise undetectable patterns.

Other tech-related words added this year are “crowdsourcing,” “mouseover,” “e-reader” and “re-direct.”

Numbers covering the final six months of 2012, shared in a company blog post, are slightly higher than Facebook’s.

As with Facebook’s disclosure on Friday night, Microsoft’s new figures include the number of requests made by law enforcement and national security agencies under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The disclosures were worked out as the result of a deal between the companies and government agencies because under current U.S. law, such disclosures are illegal.

Microsoft said it received between 6,000 and 7,000 requests for information from local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in the United States. The affected number of accounts was between 31,000 and 32,000.

Before adding six months’ worth of FISA requests to the overall statistical bucket, Microsoft had previously disclosed in its 2012 Law Enforcement Requests Report that it had received 11,073 requests for information affecting 24,565 accounts from government entities in the U.S. during all 12 months of 2012.

These requests covered the following services: Hotmail ad Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Xbox LIVE, Microsoft Account, Messenger and Office 365. Skype was reported separately in part because, before Microsoft bought it in 2011, it was tracking this data differently.

Assuming a consistent run rate, the difference between FISA-inclusive and the non-FISA numbers would suggest a difference of no more than about 3,000 overall requests per year.

But when taking into account the average number of accounts affected per request, the picture changes. In its FISA-inclusive figures for the second half of the year, Microsoft averaged between four and five accounts affected per request. That’s about double the average of 2.2 accounts per request in the earlier data that didn’t include FISA requests. (Facebook, in its FISA-inclusive disclosure, averaged about 2 accounts per request.)

What this suggests is that requests made to Microsoft by government agencies under FISA tend to cover multiple accounts more often than in non-FISA cases. Why the higher average? It’s unclear.

But here’s another bit of data that may tell part of the story. Remember that Microsoft’s non-FISA disclosures counted Skype, Microsoft’s audio and video calling service, separately. The 2012 report shows that U.S. agencies made 1,154 requests affecting 4,814 for an average of 3.62 accounts per request. This is just a guess from the math, but it may explain — at least in part — why the FISA-inclusive average of affected accounts is higher than the non-FISA one: Maybe it contained more Skype requests.

Also, this may be precisely the kind of analysis that makes the government so ticklish about releasing any of these numbers in the first place.

But Google, in a statement released on Friday evening in response, isn’t satisfied with Facebook’s deal with the Feds.

“We have always believed that it’s important to differentiate between different types of government requests,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We already publish criminal requests separately from National Security Letters. Lumping the two categories together would be a step back for users. Our request to the government is clear: to be able to publish aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, separately.”

Facebook’s data disclosure deal with the federal government comes on the heels of a knock-down, drag-out battle behind the scenes with lawmakers in Washington over the past week. Consumers were on high alert after reports from the Guardian and the Washington Post suggested that major tech companies in the Valley were sharing private customer data with the government via a National Security Agency program, codenamed PRISM.

Companies across the Valley lobbied hard, both in public and private, to be able to disclose to consumers the number of requests for information they received from the government, and how many of those requests they’ve complied with. Google was the most outspoken of the bunch, with other companies like Facebook and Yahoo following suit.

What Google seems to be arguing here, however, is that Facebook’s deal isn’t a win for consumers who want more transparency. As Facebook’s deal stands, tech companies are allowed to release information requests in aggregate and within specific ranges — meaning you can’t drill down on which agencies are making the requests. In other words, with the numbers Facebook is providing, you’re seeing requests from state, local and federal agencies, and there’s no way to differentiate the quantity from each.

Microsoft followed Facebook’s lead on Friday evening, releasing its own aggregate numbers for information requests for the six month period ending December 31, 2012. It too, however, agreed with the overall sentiment desiring greater transparency.

“With more time, we hope [the U.S. Government] will take further steps,” Microsoft VP and deputy general counsel John Frank wrote in a company blog post. “Transparency alone may not be enough to restore public confidence, but it’s a great place to start.”

Update 9:20 pm PT: Twitter legal director Ben Lee issued a statement via tweet on Friday evening, largely echoing Google’s sentiment:

“We agree with @Google: It’s important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests — including FISA disclosures — separately.”

One source said Facebook continues to fight for greater transparency. Google will do the same; however, it has not come to an agreement with the federal government in its own separate discussions.

That’s part of why Twitter is stepping up its efforts to become less opaque to the millions of first-timers to the service, releasing a series of instructional consumer videos and projects over the past week in the form of cool data visualizations and cutesy Fathers Day shorts.

Take the tool launched on Thursday morning, for instance. Twitter hooked up with data visualization company Vizify to create a fun product called #FollowMe: Sync your Twitter account with Vizify’s service, and the company produces a short remixed video of the way you tweet, including your most tweeted words, times of day you’re the most active and other data points, all set to a music track.

It’s not exactly useful per se, but it’s a clever way to show off stats to folks who may not really get why Twitter matters, or why they should use it.

Which is a far greater number of people than, say, on Facebook, which hosts more than a billion users. Facebook is straightforward, even if waning in its coolness. Twitter, with its confusing language of hashtags and @symbols, isn’t as easy to just jump into.

It’s likely that recent efforts to step up the mainstream consumer pitch and explain just what Twitter is stems from recent changes in management; namely, Twitter VP of communications Gabriel Stricker adding marketing oversight to his list of duties. He has employed the aid of a number of Twitter designers to helm the effort.

Heck, Stricker even made an appearance in Twitter’s recent spoofy video celebrating Feathers Day Fathers Day, which is really a short crash course in how to actually use Twitter, all in the guise of a joke video. (Stricker is the deadpan dude toward the end.)

How ironic that Twitter — a communications service now so well known it has made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary — has such a problem with being understood.

Perhaps Facebook’s recent adoption (ahem, rip-off) of Twitter’s hashtags will help the confusing language break through to the mainstream.

My guess: More marketing videos, better Twitter blog posts (on its newly redesigned blog) and clearer explanations of the service.

After AllThingsD.com reported earlier today that Facebook had been in advanced discussions with the federal government to allow it to disclose requests under national security laws, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), to the public, sources said that Google has appeared to be following its lead and is similarly engaged in talks to do the same.

This parallel effort would allow the Internet giants, as well as other digital companies, to disclose aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures, as well as their scope.

This controversial issue has occupied Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. over the last week, after a series of news reports about the level of U.S. government scrutiny of telephonic and online communications of all kinds.

While sources noted that the discussions might not result in any action, it appears as if they are in advanced stages and could result in more robust disclosures being allowed if agreements can be made.

Pressure to take action has escalated ever since myriad allegations that top Silicon Valley Internet giants had given authorities unprecedented access to their huge stores of information via a National Security Agency program called PRISM. The companies, also including Microsoft and Yahoo, have denied that kind of “direct” access, but cannot escape the spotlight placed on how much information they are all compelled by the government to hand over legally.

That’s why all of them — facing consumer backlash and a big hit to their reputations — have called on the government to allow them to lift restrictions on reporting national security requests for information.

Google has been most vocal in calling for changes, while also taking to government officials behind the scenes, as Facebook had already been doing. The two companies, though, are not working together, and are having these discussions separately.

How much leverage the pair have together or apart is unclear. Collectively, they could threaten to sue the government to allow the disclosures, or be more publicly pugnacious about cooperation, as Twitter has done.

Instead, they are employing both public statements and private outreach to the Justice Department, the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The goal is to be able to release more accurate information, typically via a “transparency report,” which discloses legal queries received.

But strict non-disclosure rules for the most important ones, from FISA, prevent the companies from telling users what is being given to the government.

Earlier this week, Google’s top lawyer David Drummond published an open letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI director Robert Mueller Tuesday asking to be able to publish information on such requests.

Drummond noted that the government should be able to “publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures — in terms of both the number we receive and their scope.”

He added: “Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing to hide.”

Maybe we will see soon enough, sources tell me, including the possibility that the numbers could be available within a few days.

Do you still want your MTV? And, if so, do you want it on your iPhone or iPad?

Then here you go. This is the second “TV Everywhere” app from corporate owner Viacom, following on the heels of a Nickelodeon app it launched this spring.

Like the Nick app, the free MTV app will let some pay TV subscribers watch some of the channel’s shows for free. And, like the Nick app, there are extra goodies, too.

In MTV’s case, there is a set of “second screen” features, like Twitter filters, that you’re supposed to use while watching MTV broadcasts on your TV. And a bunch of non-TV content, produced by something MTV is calling its “connected content lab.”

On deck: Versions that will work on Android, and later Xbox 360, as well as more apps for other MTV/Viacom channels, like VH1 and CMT.

The most important thing to note is that this is another small step from promise to reality in the evolution of “TV Everywhere.” The promise, recall, is that people who pay for cable TV (or satellite TV, or telco TV) should be able to watch TV shows on any device they want, whenever they want.

We’re still a long way from that because of a mix of contractual, business and tech issues. And even moves like this are only partial steps. MTV/Viacom says that about 50 million pay TV customers will have access to the programming on its apps. But subscribers to at least three different major pay services — Comcast, Dish and Charter — won’t be able to watch the shows (for now).

And even if you have a pay channel that does have a deal with Viacom, you won’t be able to see everything the channel has put out. Remember that it has different “windows” of content with other distributors — like Amazon — which means that different outlets will have different catalogs at different times.

Meanwhile! The extra video goodies that MTV has added in here are kinda fun. MTV is branding a group of them as “MTV Other,” which in my mind reads as “You think ‘Vice’ is cool? Well look at this raunchy stuff we would totally put on TV if the TV guys weren’t such squares.”

Here’s a sample, which you won’t want to look at if you don’t like swearing, or unpleasant use cases for hot dogs. (On the other hand, if you’re a fan of Minnesota’s own Har Mar Superstar, you should definitely watch.)

As a result, I often click on mobile ads, regardless of whether I’m interested in what’s being pitched, just to see what awaits on the other end of the finger-tap.

So, a few days ago, I did just that, after seeing a link in a Promoted Tweet from Best Buy on my Twitter iPhone app advertising a two-day Father’s Day sale. There I was greeted by the image to the right.

And while I could make out prices and images of computers and TVs without zooming in or squinting, that was about it. And once you ask me to zoom in — tap — I’ve clicked on the “X” and I’m gone.

And then, yesterday morning, another Best Buy Promoted Tweet arrived in my stream on my Twitter iPhone app, advertising the Nintendo DSi. Of course, I clicked.

This time the result was much worse: A broken page, telling me “there was an error when processing your request.”

I closed out and clicked again. Same result.

I’m not just picking on Best Buy — these types of experiences are par for the course in mobile advertising that could lead to buying online. And, as we all know by now, mobile phones are still challenging devices to advertise on, especially with all the different devices and screen sizes.

Despite the challenges, advertising on mobile devices is expected to rise 76 percent from $4.36 billion in 2012 to $7.65 billion this year, according to research firm eMarketer.

But if you are going to spend the money to advertise in mobile — especially on a popular platform such as Twitter — it’s probably a good idea to make sure the experience for the consumer will be a decent one.

It’s also not a good look for Twitter, which is effectively sending its users off to unreadable pages. Once that happens a few times to the same Twitter user perhaps they think twice before clicking on a Promoted Tweet again.

Still, Twitter doesn’t seem to feel this is its responsibility. “Brands control the content that they put into a Tweet, regardless of its promoted or organic,” a spokesman wrote in an email. “We don’t screen what the final experience looks like on specific landing page[s], etc.”

A Best Buy spokeswoman acknowledged that the company has work to do in digital.

“As we have shared previously — most recently during our Q1 earnings, we are focused on accelerating our online growth and are taking a number of steps including consistent browsing across devices to improve the online experience for our customers,” she wrote to me in an email.

“We’ve talked publicly about our dot.com platform being woefully underfunded,” she added. “The new Executive Team has recognized this and is making the additional investments to get the site improved for our customers across all platforms.”

As for the broken link, “a brief outage this morning on our Web site” was the cause, she explained.

It’s no secret that more and more people are making purchases from their mobile phones. EMarketer estimates that mobile commerce sales will increase 56.5 percent this year to $38.84 billion, from $24.81 billion in 2012. But those mobile shoppers choose the brands that make it easy.

In the end, I did indeed end up buying my dad a Father’s Day gift from my iPhone — a label maker, just like he asked. But it happened on Amazon.com’s mobile website — and while I was standing in a Staples analog store.

Trevis and Ray write about the experience on Twitter, post pictures on Instagram and put short videos on Vine. It might be an average day for any American teenager in 2013.

Hollywood producer Peter Chernin is betting it is the future of the entertainment industry.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

As we reported in March, Facebook plans to introduce the hashtag symbol to its network, effectively stepping in on territory long occupied by Twitter, the company that made the simple symbol a major part of online social communications.

Over the past seven years, the hashtag has slowly but surely invaded technological parlance. It’s a way of organizing themes, topics or thoughts into categories, a label that anyone can apply to their social sharing. To be sure, a number of social services use the symbol today — from Tumblr and Pinterest to Google’s recent impressive incorporation of hashtags in Google+ — but Twitter is largely credited with the rise of the hashtag.

And in a time where content spreads virally in real time — think about the spread of information in the “Boston bombing” — ideas like the hashtag are a way for a user to navigate the ceaseless flood of status updates and information and drill down on a particular topic.

“Whether it’s talking about a favorite television show, cheering on a hometown sports team or engaging with friends during a breaking news event, people on Facebook connect with their friends about what’s taking place all over the world,” Facebook product manager Greg Lindley said in a blog post on Wednesday.

“To date, there has not been a simple way to see the larger view of what’s happening or what people are talking about. To bring these conversations more to the forefront, we will be rolling out a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people are having about public events, people, and topics. As a first step, we are beginning to roll out hashtags on Facebook.”

So, in a sense, it’s Facebook’s tacit admission that, yes, Twitter has tapped into a smart way of connecting with the masses in a fairly simple fashion.

Consider this, too: Lindley said that Facebook has anywhere between 88 million to 100 million Americans actively using Facebook during prime-time television hours, “roughly a Super Bowl-sized audience every single night.”

This is exactly the audience Twitter’s ad guys are going after with Twitter’s “second screen” pitch. Note that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo’s constant argument is that while you sit down in front of the television to watch the big game, the Oscars or whatever, Twitter is the place to go for real-time conversation. It’s also the perfect moment, Twitter would argue, to serve up a relevant ad related to the hashtag you’re tweeting about.

Twitter, by the way, declined to comment.

Facebook would love to cash in on those potential ad dollars but, unless you’re considering Instagram — which is often used by people during live events — Facebook isn’t popularly known as the go-to place for real-time conversation in the way that Twitter is. Now, obviously, Facebook wants to be that place.

But that’s a tough move for Facebook because of the very nature of its network. This is a company that made its first inroads into social with a more private social network pitch, in contrast to Twitter’s entirely public realm. To be able to navigate subject matter by hashtag inside of Facebook is something of a shift.

Facebook, however, has been all about shifts over the past year. It made serious privacy-settings changes at the end of 2012, taking a more public stance on user profiles and making them all searchable. Publicness is something Facebook wants to slowly, carefully push its users toward (whether they want it or not).

It’s somewhat funny, too, considering how often Costolo admits that Twitter has a language and complication problem; as popular as hashtags have become for the service, they’ve also made Twitter somewhat inscrutable to the non-tech-savvy, the newcomers to the service who Twitter so desperately wants to court. It’ll be interesting to see if Facebook will have these same struggles.

But, on that note, it could end up being a helpful thing for Twitter, in that the increased prevalence of the hashtag on Facebook could make it more common, and thereby easier to understand for people in general.

Facebook’s Lindley said there are more types of discovery and surfacing tools to come in the future. @Facebook, anyone?

Just like Pandora, users can create radio stations based on songs they’re listening to. And, yes, iTunes Radio lets you share those stations you create with friends. You’re also able to flip through curated channels picked by the dudes at Apple, and even select a channel based on what’s trending on Twitter.

Apple has its work cut out to take down Pandora, which currently holds 70 percent of Internet radio marketshare among the Top 20 Internet radio stations in the U.S., according to Pandora. And it’s a cross-platform app, which means reaching all sorts of users, not just the Apple devotees.

That’s not even including Amazon, Google’s new All Access music service and the myriad other competitors in the space.

But Apple still has a broad customer base who have bought millions of its products. And iTunes radio will be built into all Apple software, including iOS, OS X and Apple TV. So there’s your instant install base, right off the bat.

iTunes Radio comes ad-free if you’re an iTunes Match subscriber, Apple’s existing cloud-based music service which lets users incorporate their previously purchased tracks into their cloud-based library. Apple will kick off iRadio starting first in the U.S., with plans to add more countries over time.

Along with the new Radio service, Apple introduced a series of improvements to other iOS apps, like Siri — which will come with a new interface and feature Twitter integration and now routes to Bing for search queries — and debuted iOS in the Car, which, just like it says, brings many iOS applications to the screen of your vehicle (think “music and Siri access from the driver’s seat”).

There’s also FaceTime audio, which lets users make high-quality audio calls over Wi-Fi, and is integrated with China’s Tencent Weibo.

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Asa Mathat | D: All Things Digital

In April, Twitter linked up with ad giant Starcom in a deal worth “hundreds of millions” over a few years. Now it has another one, with Starcom’s rival WPP.

WPP’s press release doesn’t mention a dollar value, but the broad strokes sound similar to the earlier pact: A “global strategic partnership” that will “see the launch of new data products and services, the integration of Twitter data into key WPP media and analytics platforms, training for staff in the application of these new capabilities and a partnership approach to key clients and markets.”

In English: Twitter will try to make it very easy for WPP to spend a bunch of money on the service, and WPP has likely committed to spending a bunch of money on the service.

Note that we’ve seen similar pacts with new media companies and ad giants before, notably Google.

And, again, this is the kind of pact that’s very nice to have as you prepare to go public. Not that Dick Costolo says he spends any time thinking about that. Here’s the Twitter CEO insisting that’s the case at the D: All Things Digital conference last month.