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Peter Kafka of All Things Digital has come out with some more details, which he says come from "people who have been briefed by the company", about Twitter's expected advertising platform. According to Kafka, the platform will be primarily search based, distributed via third-party applications and will appear in the familiar 140 character tweet format.

He makes sure to include a caveat, because there's been a bit of confusion since reports of an "imminent" launch the other day, but the details mesh with what we've heard so far.

If you haven't yet heard of Chatroulette, the webcam shuffle site that connects you with random people from around the world, then it's time to crawl out from under that rock where you've apparently been hiding. This viral sensation, created by a 17-year-old Russian programmer, lets you flip through video chat sessions with anonymous strangers using a simple interface that anyone can master. You may end up having engaging conversations with someone thousands of miles away or you may connect with a curious voyeur like yourself, but you're just as likely to come across the oddballs, the freaks, not to mention the downright disturbing.

Yet despite its weirdness, Chatroulette brings back an element of fun and surprise to vastness of the Internet, where social networks of friend lists and avatars has remained the norm for years on end. And now, thanks to the site's popularity, the Chatroulette clones are beginning to appear.

Google is having a hard time in Europe these days. Whether its employees are being convicted of violating privacy laws in Italy or it's being accused of copyright infringement in Germany, the company is facing opposition wherever it goes.

Now, the company that has set out to digitize everything from ocean bottoms to outer space has received a warning from the European Union that it needs to do more to warn people before sending out cameras to record images for its popular Street View feature.

Earlier this week, Juniper Research published a report which said the market for location-based services (think mobile check-in games like Foursquare, social networks like Loopt, location-enabled apps like Google Maps, etc.) will bring in revenues of more than $12.7 billion by 2014. Spurring this growth are a number of factors, including the increased number of App Stores, handset improvements, access to high-speed mobile Internet and improvements to positioning technology.

While it's clear that location-based services are on the move, pinpointing a dollar amount to their market is a trickier subject. Has Juniper overestimated? U.K.-based consultancy Broadsight thinks so. "These numbers are way overstated," says firm co-founder Alan Patrick, who concludes that's it's far too early to tell the market's true size at this time.

YouTube is continuing with what it's calling "one of the biggest redesigns in YouTube history" and today it wants to point out some of its new, shiny features. The streaming video site first offered its users a sneak peek last month and it says it's been listening to feedback and it now has three new features it wants to show off.

Mark Fletcher, the man who built one of the first easy email group services online and sold it to Yahoo! for $400 million, then built former market-leading RSS reader Bloglines and sold it to Ask.com, plans to launch a new service next week called SnapGroups (currently password protected).

Fletcher planned on unveiling the company tonight at Dave McClure's Palo Alto event Lean Startups but had technical problems hours before going on stage that delayed the launch of the site. None the less, he offered some details about what we can expect next week.

After looking over recent stats from Hitwise Intelligence on the decline of e-cards and the simultaneous rise of social media, we were stopped mid-yawn by this weird little blip on the radar:

On Mothers' Day, e-cards show a less drastic YoY decline, and social media visits actually temporarily plunge, showing a 13 percent decrease in site visits between Mothers' Day 2008 and Mothers' Day 2009. Do we think Mom isn't checking her Facebook? Or is it that we consider a more old-fashioned and difficult method of communication more "personal" somehow?

Swedish marketing technologist Dennis Hettema has created a hot-item tracking website for the most-shared items on Google Buzz, called Buzrr. The site is very simple right now, it doesn't include categories, there's no description of how it works ("we are jumping through a bunch of hoops," Hettema says) and the "new buzz" column is already full of spam. People love this kind of thing, though, so check it out.

Tweetmeme had similar beginnings and is now quite an impressive little company. Google Buzz has a lot of potential, and Buzzr is worth watching too.

TheSixtyOne Seeks to Solve the Problem

In an interesting move against those who would manipulate traffic on the social web, music site TheSixtyOne is looking for a programmer who can crack the codes of voting rings.

On sites such as Digg, Reddit and even TheSixtyOne itself, spammers can rig a supposedly democratic system that allows good content to rise to prominence. They do this by having networks of bots that automatically vote for any content they submit. TheSixtyOne hopes that a cleverly written code submission will solve the problem of gamed virality or popularity mechanisms - and they're looking to hire the hacker who can do it.

Facebook has been granted a patent on the Newsfeed, "displaying a news feed in a social network environment." Nick O'Neill at AllFacebook found the patent first and says it could be "one of the most significant social web patents" in a decade.

If all algorithmic ranking and delivery of social activity updates to social network users falls under this patent Facebook applied for in August 2006 (one month before it launched its controversial Newsfeed) then there's going to be a whole lot of trouble for sites all over the web. We've got calls and emails in with Facebook PR, we're going to start thinking and reading up about what this could mean but for now, please join us over on Google Buzz to discuss this story as it unfolds in real time. Our coverage continues below.