Twitter is stepping into a new area of e-commerce by partnering with American Express to enable its consumers to buy goods by simply typing in a hashtag of an item they want to purchase. To start using the micro blogging service for shopping purposes, users are invited to sync their Amex accounts with their Twitter profile here, at sync.americanexpress.com/twitter.

YouTube is planning to introduce paid subscriptions for some individual channels, and this will start a whole new era in the history of the global video sharing community in particular, and online video in general. With this move, YouTube aims to attract more professional content makers as well as advertisers and refined audience to make the video platform a stronger rival of television. The first paid subscriptions are said to be launched in the second quarter of this year.