Techloy joins leading technology sites such as TechCrunch (tcrn.ch), Mashable (on.mash.to) and Engadget (engt.co) that have acquired their own unique URL shortener.

Techloy.com’s URL shortener leverages on Bit.ly’s API and shortens a long URL to just 14 characters. Teck.ly will be used internally on Techloy.com and would be seen on Twitter and around the web.

Teck.ly is not a service such as Bit.ly or Yrn.me, and as such is not available for public users at this time.

My post and tweets got the attention of Mobitel Nigeria, one of the ISPs that may be experiencing issues with their service in recent times. In a direct message sent to me a few hours ago via Twitter, the @MobitelNigeria representative apologised for the challenges I’ve experienced with their network.

He further said that Mobitel doesn’t believe that these challenges have been there since I acquired their device and that my experience is not the true nature of their network and does not reflect the quality they have worked to build or wish to deliver.

No doubt, Mobitel 4G is a great network. I used the service at a friend’s place when they launched sometime in December last year. But, it is possible that the quality of service has decreased due to more and more people joining their network.

And that’s not just peculiar to Mobitel. It happens to almost every new Internet service out there.

However, it could also be that Mobitel’s coverage area is not as strong as required where I reside in Ajah in the Lekki Penninsula. The Mobitel rep acknowledges that if in the course of a diagnosis they find that my current location of use is not well covered, they will advise and as appropriate.

But a quick look at Mobitel’s Coverage map found here, shows that Ajah seems well covered with infrastructures in Victoria Garden City (VGC), Thomas Estate/Abraham Adesanya Estate and Modupe Young Street, off the Ajah-Badore Road, which is pretty closest to where I reside.

Perhaps these infrastructures are not robust enough or are simply inadequate to cater to the community. Again, I’m not sure if Mobitel has a base station around the Lekki axis, of which if present could boost Internet speed within the area.

But whatever the case, I’d like to believe that Mobitel is not any of such ISPs that advertise what they can’t offer. But with its touted 2.3 GHz frequency, we shouldn’t even bother making complaints or twiplaints, as the case may be.

Today, GTBank officially announced via Twitter, the passing on of their MD/CEO, Mr. Tayo Aderinokun.

In honour of the former GTBank, the bank’s Twitter page spotted a black background and their twitter profile picture was changed to a candle-lit image possibly denoting that Aderinokun’s memory lives on, with the text that reads: Tayo Aderinokun passes…(1955 – 2011).

According to GTBank’s website:

With a deep sense of loss, but with gratitude to the Almighty God, we write to notify you of the passing on to eternal glory of our dearly beloved Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Tayo Aderinokun. Mr. Aderinokun who had been on Medical Leave, passed on this afternoon, Tuesday, June 14, 2011, in the United Kingdom.

Aderinokun co-founded Guaranty Trust Bank Plc in 1990 and served as Deputy Managing Director for 12 years between 1990 and 2002, after which he became the Managing Director, a position he held until his death.

While serving as the Bank’s Managing Director, GTBank witnessed tremendous progress and growth and recognised as one of the most profitable and professionally managed corporate institutions in Nigeria.

Last week, I introduced a new feature: a weekly round-up of the biggest technology stories both locally and globally. Check out last week’s biggest stories here.

So what happened this week? Which tech company made top headlines within the tech world?Yeah, you guessed right:-)

Apple. (Not the fruit, the company) The news of Apple’s iCloud launching at the Apple’s WWDC 2011 keynote and several other interesting announcements and revelations made our week engaging and rewarding.

Without further ado, here comes this week’s hottest tech stories (in no particular order):

1. Apple iCloud, iOS 5 and OS X Lion (Oh, by the way Apple sued by iCloud Communications over iCloud trademark)

2. Twitter Now Automatically Shortens Links

3. Nigerian VC Firm Invests Into Social Mobile Music Service, Spinlet

4.WordPress.com Adds WordPress, Twitter And Facebook Comments (In That Order)

5. Nintendo Announces The Wii U, A Unique Controller/Console Combo

6. Sony Officially Announces Playstation Vita Handheld (With AT&T Partnership)

Of course, there were other tech-related news that disrupted our senses and generally caught our attention. For me, these are the ones that I found most interesting and fascinating to write about.

Just in case I missed something that you think was a huge story, you can whisper them in your comments Just allow me do the hyping

Perhaps the most memorable royal wedding to date is that between Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer who got married on the 29^th of July, 1981 at St Paul’s Catheral before an invited audience of 3,500 and an estimated global TV audience of 750 million.

Fast-forward to 2011, about 30 years later and we are about to witness the first social media royal wedding between Prince William & Catherine Middleton, which could become the most memorable royal wedding of all time. William is second in line to the throne and marrying Middleton will make her the next Queen.

Apart from news coverage that could attract viewership from more than 1 billion people around the world, it is expected that people all over the world will be tweeting, facebooking and blogging on the day of the Royal Wedding.

Already, discussions about the Royal Wedding have taken over social media. According to Greenlight, a London-based independent search marketing specialist and technology firm, new research shows that in the past seven days the royal nuptials are getting one new mention every 10 seconds.

About 12 years ago, the world witnessed a Royal Wedding between Prince Edward Windsor and Sophie Rhys-Jones on the 19th of June 1999, but without the help of social media. Even the last Royal Wedding between Peter Phillips, the Queen’s eldest grandson and Autumn Kelly on 17 May 2008 (in the age of social media) couldn’t produce the world’s first social media royal wedding.

But on the 29^th of April, 2011, the world, yeah I mean even the worldwide web and the social web will witness the first ‘Royal Wedding’ of the digital age between Prince William & Catherine Middleton.

The Official Royal Wedding website for Prince William and Catherine Middleton’s wedding was launched on 2nd March and has received 9.5 million page views as at 19th April. The website features news and information about the royal wedding which holds at Westminster Abbey, London at 10 am (GMT +1).

The site, powered by the Google Apps Engine, provides details about the service, the procession and the reception. It also features exclusive photos and videos, including links to official Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Youtube accounts as well as a virtual tour of Buckingham Palace.

For such a significant and historic event, social media has cemented its place in our lives and it’ll be interesting to see what impact this event would have on social media usage for future weddings.

Will the royal wedding help increase people’s hunger for social media weddings? Will you use social media for your wedding? If you’re already married, do you wish you used social media?

Twitter has launched local trends in 70 new locations around the world, including Nigeria. The feature which launched in a few countries back in January 2010 exposes what people are talking most about on a state or city level.

In November 2010, Twitter announced that they were expanding local trends to 14 new countries and 6 new cities, which included some of the site’s fastest growing markets. Just last week, Twitter added Nigeria to the list of countries with local trends.

At the moment, only Lagos, apparently the largest Twitter community in Nigeria is listed on Twitter’s ‘Local Trends’. Twitter had previously explained that “locations are not manually selected, but rather displayed dynamically based on tweet volume.”

I’m guessing that other cities in Nigeria would get on the ‘Local Trends’ list once there are signs of huge tweet volume coming from that area. It would be interesting to see what the local trends for Lagos would reveal, although as at time of writing this, the trends for Lagos didn’t reveal anything local.

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Today, Nigeria’s first-ever youth -focused, youth-driven presidential debate spotlighting priority issues for young Nigerians will hold at the Shehu Musa Yar’adua Centre, Abuja.

The ‘WhatAboutUs?’ debate would be a direct conversation with the Nigerian youth, inviting presidential candidates to answer questions posed by young Nigerians, at home and abroad, via social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, SMS, email and video diaries.

It’s been said that young Nigerians represent 70% of Nigeria’s population, yet their concerns and issues are not present on the national agenda or current political campaigns.

Even last week’s presidential debate aired live on NN24 did little or nothing to address the most important concern of every young Nigerian – UNEMPLOYMENT.

At the moment, Mr. Nuhu Ribadu (ACN), Chief Dele Momodu (NCP), Professor Pat Utomi (SDMP), and Governor Ibrahim Shekarau (ANPP) have confirmed their participation, while Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (CPC), President Goodluck Jonathan (PDP), and Reverend Chris Okotie (FDP) have declined the invitation to attend the youth-focused debate.

The debate will be simulcast live at 7pm on local television station, Channels TV and also online on Youtube.

In addition, viewers everywhere will be asked to chime in using #whataboutus on Google Moderator, a unique platform which empowers communities to connect and share comments, questions, and analysis.

The debate will also be rebroadcast on the WhatAboutUs website following the event.

The “What About Us?” Campaign is a collaborative effort from Enough is Enough Nigeria, Vote or Quench, Sleeves Up, StandUP Naija and several other youth advocacy groups and activists.

Who in your opinion will win the WhatAboutUs debate?

Yarnable, the Nigerian Twitter-like service has been acquired by MobiQube for an undisclosed fee.

Update: We just received a confirmation email on the acquisition detail from Yarnable’s founder. It was acquired by Le Proghrammeen Solutions Ltd and Mobiqube Nigeria Ltd, both partnering to take Yarnable to the next level.

The deal was finalized yesterday after several weeks of discussions with the founder, Ahmad Mukoshy. Although we’re not sure, it is likely that Yarnable was sold for between $2000 and $3000 (about N300,000 to N450,000).

Yarnable started about a year ago and has just about 300 members actively using the site, according to Mukoshy. When asked why he sold the site, Mukoshy said that he’s been having challenges with his time and focus on other new ventures he’s running.

We also think that it’s been a challenge for Yarnable to differentiate itself from Twitter and similar services. Yarnable may also have been struggling with how to monetize the service, which in fact has been a huge challenge for Twitter.

But now that Yarnable is now owned by MobiQube Nigeria Limited, a company that specializes in developing applications for mobile platforms, as well as Le Proghrammeen Solutions Ltd, I’m guessing that Yarnable will go mobile and eventually monetize.

While it’s not certain whether or not Yarnable will remain a micro-discussion site, it is likely that ‘yarns’ would go on from a mobile app.

If the ‘new’ Yarnable could offer something unique that’ll make all of us probably stop ‘tweeting’ and start ‘yarning’, then we can say that local micro-discussion sites can go mainstream.

Adloopz is a new service launched today that allows you to post adverts and share them with your friends and followers on social media platforms.

The service, currently in beta version, was founded by five Nigerian tech entrepreneurs.

Adloopz helps people to spread the news of their products/services via adverts they create on Adloopz which gets shared across several social networks.

To get a beta invite, tweet at @adloopz and ask for an invite with the hashtag #adloopzbeta attached to your tweet.

How It Works?

Once you create/log into your account, go to the settings page and setup any information you feel will help your customers get in touch with you. Then, link your Adloopz account to your social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc).

To create an advert, simply click on the “Post ad” button, upload pictures and add meaningful descriptions about what you want to advertise. You can also indicate when and where you want Adloopz to serve your adverts.

After your adverts are created and published to the advert feed, the service allows you to loop your adverts across social networks.

Adloopz also let’s you comment on adverts, like them, share them to your social networks and email them to others.

You can also monitor and guage user interaction with your adverts via the Adloopz statistics.

Thoughts

These days, entrepreneurs are launching startups and apps that leverage on the social graph.

Startups like Lotaar and Mysifty are good examples.

The idea behind Adloopz is quite cool, and looks somewhat like RadiumOne, a service that uses your Facebook friends interactions to deliver relevant ads to users for brands and products that their friends like.

It’ll be interesting to see if this service would be adopted as well as what business models are likely to be adopted.

Today, the news broke that Twitter has re-assigned the account @gtbank to GTBank Plc, one of Nigeria’s leading banks.

While it’s still uncertain, the account was likely registered by a squatter, but has posted little or no updates.

According to GTBank, they have been following up with Twitter over time and recently had to pay several visits to the Twitter Headquaters in San Francisco.

Before now, GTBank used the twitter handle @gtbankonline for posting news and updates about their activities and products.

Since 2009, when GTBank embraced social media, they have been at the forefront and can easily be described as one of the best corporate use of social media in Nigeria.

In January this year, GTBank’s MD/CEO, Tayo Aderinokun hosted a 15-minute live Q&A webcast via their social media channels on Facebook and Youtube (watch it here) where he talked about GTBank and answered some questions from their customers and the online community.

In fact, they were recently nominated in 3 different social media award categories at the Sowambe Awards.

Why Not Verified?

GTBank’s acquisition of the twitter account proves that they want to be in the social media space for a long time.

But one wonders why Twitter is yet to verify @gtbank’s twitter account (as at the time of writing this), given that representatives of the bank have visited the Twitter HQ.

According to information on Twitter’s site:

Twitter’s public beta version of account verification is no longer available. After a long period of manual testing, we’ve closed public applications. We have removed our public-facing verification request form. In the meantime, we’re still verifying some trusted sources, such as our advertisers and partners. If you’re one of our partners or advertisers, please follow up with your account manager for details.”

I think Twitter realised too late that they should be charging a fee for verifying trusted accounts.

But the question is: Will Twitter eventually give @gtbank verified status?