VentureBeat

updated
We’re at the point that when either of the two social networking giants, MySpace and Facebook, does something, the other has to respond. Yesterday, MySpace unveiled its “Data Availability” initiative, allowing other sites around the Internet to utilize its users’ data to update profiles, photos, videos and other attributes. Today, according to a TechCrunch scoop, Facebook is following that up with “Facebook Connect”. Which does, wait for it — the exact same thing.

As Mike Arrington points out, Facebook Connect is basically an updated version of Facebook’s API for third party sites. These sites will now be able to use Facebook’s trusted identification methods, profile information (including pictures, videos, events and the like), friend lists and privacy settings. Just as with MySpace’s announcement, the idea is to make Facebook a central hub of users’ web experience.

Lest you think this wasn’t a game of one-upmanship: whereas MySpace announced Twitter as a launch partner for its initiative yesterday, Facebook is launching with Digg as a partner. The social news voting site is quite a bit larger than the micro-messaging Twitter.

Facebook Connect’s formal launch won’t happen for a couple of weeks. We’ll update when we know more.

update: Dave Morin, Facebook’s senior platform manager has posted on the Facebook Developers Blog with more details about Facebook Connect. Some of the details:

Today we are announcing Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook – similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook.

Here are just a few of the coming features of Facebook Connect:

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the latest action:

EBay’s Q1 is good but not great — The company’s net income grew 22 percent to $562 million compared to the same period a year ago, and its revenue climbed 24 percent to $2.19 billion. However, user growth has slowed, and the operating margin fell, largely because eBay’s growth is in its sites with low-profit like Skype and PayPal. EBay is trying to hold it own against Amazon’s auction features; John Donahue took over as the company’s chief executive in March, and has already instituted changes to the site’s fee system. Now the market turns its attention to Google’s earnings, which will be announced this afternoon and could provide more evidence that the Internet economy is slowing.

Diggers don’t dig tech stories — Tech stories’ presence on Digg has fallen from 76 percent to 20 percent, according to ReadWriteWeb. The site (with help from blogger and developer Richard Cunningmham) compared Digg’s front page during the first week of March in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Twenty percent is still a significant chunk of news, but the decline seems to indicate Digg’s shift away from tech and toward becoming a more mainstream news site.

Twitter message helps Berkeley student get out of jail — Egyptian police reportedly arrested journalism graduate student James Karl Buck while he was photographing a protest. Buck then sent out a short Twitter message on his cell phone: “ARRESTED.” His friends called Berkeley and the American Embassy, and the next day Buck was a free man. The San Jose Mercury News has more.

Google Maps predicts traffic — Not only does the site offer live traffic information, it can also predict conditions based on past coverage. Google says it has comprehensive traffic data in 30 major metropolitan areas, with partial coverage in others. I, for one, am grateful: This should be a huge help in deciding when to navigate the fearsome stretch of Highway 101 between San Francisco and VentureBeat’s office in Redwood City.

Chip maker Phiar goes out of business — The Boulder, Colo. company had trouble raising a second round of funding after recapitalizing and raising $9 million last October. GigaOM has the scoop, and says chief executive Bob Goodman hasn’t confirmed yet.

Londoners give passwords away to good-looking women — A study found that 21 percent of 576 London office workers were willing to give their computer passwords away to women offering them a chocolate bar in exchange. This sounds crazy to me (Who would do such a thing? Who would design a study like this, anyway?) but the Wall Street Journal says it’s true.

Ad network AdRoll now open to the public – AdRoll’s goal is to sell ads for community-specific networks of small web publishers. Silicon Valley Watcher says the startup’s “blend of social networking tools and marketing technologies” could be competitive against larger, existing networks like Federated Media.

Apple rumors are a tricky subject to broach simply because a lot of the time they are off base. That said, a new one surfacing may shed light on some of the restrictions Apple is placing on the iPhone SDK (our coverage). Digg founder Kevin Rose on his weekly Diggnation show (embedded below) states that the next-generation 3G iPhone will have a major focus on instant messaging — and more intriguing, video chat.

Citing unnamed sources, Rose claims to have heard that the reason Apple may be restricting developers from creating applications on the iPhone that run continuously in the background (our coverage), is that the company does not want anyone to create a competitor for a new iChat application that would be a focal point of the new iPhone. This would not only bring instant messaging to the iPhone, but just as with iChat on current Apple computers, would allow for video chatting over the device as well. Apple would make such a feature work by embedding a camera on the frontside of the iPhone in addition to the one on the backside.

The restriction on applications running in the background has been a major gripe developers have stated with regards to the SDK. Apple right now is claiming it’s more of a security issue, but some are questioning that reasoning.

It should be noted that Kevin Rose has a mixed track record with regards to Apple rumors. Leading up to Apple’s initial iPhone announcement, Rose claimed to have inside sources which described the device to him as having two batteries (one for the phone, one for music) as well as a slide-down keyboard among other things. Much of this turned out to be wrong — however Rose claims the sources on this latest info are different. Rose has also been right in the past describing the device that eventually became the iPod Nano before its release in 2005.

Rose claims this new iPhone will be out in a few months.

[Jump to about 32 minutes in for the rumor]

[photo: flickr/andynahman]

Today, social news site Digg announced it was joining the DataPortability Project, the latest in a string of big companies to join, including Facebook (our coverage), Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others. The project is a workgroup, where engineers from these companies discuss ways to let a user on any of their respective sites export their own data, and share it with the other sites.

Here’s an example of how this could work. The New York Times could create a full-fledged social network, where New York Times articles you submitted, voted for or commented on at Digg could appear next to your NYT social network profile.

But that’s just one potential scenario. The jury is still out as to whether this workgroup will be able to accomplish its goal, as user data can be valuable intellectual property for a company that it might want to not share.

The most obvious ramification could be that you would be able to transfer all of your contacts from Digg to other social networks. Like AIM, Gmail, Yahoo and other sites offer already, this means you could see, for example, who among your Facebook or Myspace friends is also a Digg user. If you see your friends using Digg, maybe you’d be more likely to.

But, the real impact could come from the following line in Digg’s announcement: “Want to use your Digg activity to get recommendations from another web site? We’re working on that, too.”

This sounds like a form of targeted advertising. Imagine a Digg user, say someone who submitted, voted and commented on stories in Digg about Apple and Linux products, getting served ads about Apple and Linux on other sites.

Some more context: Digg is reportedly growing fast, with 2.7 million users today, up from the one million it claimed to have hit less than a year ago. The San Francisco company is also for sale (our coverage).

By allowing third-party developers to more easily incorporate Digg user data in other sites, valuable new uses of Digg data could emerge — maybe a way to see the most “dugg” photos on photo site Flickr or the most “dugg” videos on YouTube.

Messaging service Twitter is a good example of a site that gives other sites free access to its users’ messages. This has led other services to incorporate Twitter, and this in turn sends more users back to it. Digg’s portability effort, in turn, could make Digg a more integral part of the social networking community, and so more valuable to an acquirer.

If nothing else, this alignment with DataPortablitity should help the perception of Digg among some of its own users. You’ll remember that just six days ago some of the site’s top users were on the verge of revolt amid controversy over algorithm changes and the lack of transparency in some of the site’s actions (our coverage). It took personal intervention from Digg chief executive Jay Adelson and founder Kevin Rose to quell the rebellion, but they were only able to do so with promises that they would work to make the community more in tuned to its users’ desires. DataPortability is nothing if not a big badge of apparent openness.

MG Siegler blogs on technology and new media at ParisLemon.com.

Here’s a pre-weekend roundup of the latest action:

1) Is the recession coming, or already here?
2) Jaman signs distribution deal with TiVo
3) Amazon buys indie film distributor Without a Box
4) Google probably intends to lose in 700mhz auctions
5) The “UltraBattery” has promise for electric cars
6) China on the verge of becoming largest internet market
7) But they’re worried their citizens game too much
8) Digg’s editing Illuminati

Is the recession on its way, or already here? — While we’ve been snuggled away in our safe world of private investing, Wall Street has been busy crumbling under the psychological pressure of a possible recession. The major exchanges all lost significant ground over the past four days, with the Dow dropping 306 points today alone, leaving it down 14.2 percent from its October high. That, in turn, brought comparisons to the catastrophic drop in 2001, just prior to the last recession. Housing starts also fell, and pundits are saying it’s too late for an economic stimulus package from Washington. But hey, Silicon Valley, look on the bright side — at least nobody will say it’s your fault, this time.

Jaman signs distribution deal with TiVo — Jaman’s catalog of independent and international films will be offered for direct download to TiVo users, under the term of a recent agreement between the two companies. Previous deals inked by Jaman include partnerships with TakeTV and DivX. See the full release here.

Amazon buys Without a Box, an independent film distributor — The Internet Movie Database division over at Amazon.com has picked up a Los Angeles-based film distributor called Without a Box for an undisclosed sum. The company helps independent directors distribute their films to hundreds of film festivals around the world. No official line yet on why, but it’s very conceivable that Amazon will soon be offering a plethora of independent films for download, a move that could conceivably compete with startups like, you guess it, Jaman. (via John Cook’s Venture Blog )

Google may be playing to lose in the 700mhz auctions — Google spent a lot of time and effort trying to impose its own guidelines on the 700mhz spectrum auctions starting in less than a week, going so far as to promise a minimum $4.5 billion bid. However, the company probably has no intention of bidding to win and will likely throw the auction to AT&T and Verizon, according to an analyst interviewed by PaidContent, who goes on to say that the winner “will likely implement the letter rather than the spirit of the open access requirements.”

Combined battery / capacitor could set new standards for electric cars — The “UltraBattery,” a project being run by the United Kingdom’s Energy Transformed National Research Flagship, is an energy storage unit combining a battery and a capacitor. It gets about 50 percent more power than conventional batteries, lasts four times as long, and a test car with one installed just crossed the 100,000 mile mark on a test track. More from ScienceDaily.

China is on the verge of becoming world’s largest internet market — According to a recent announcement by the Chinese government, its population of internet users reached 210 million at the end of 2007, a 53 percent gain on 2006’s year-end number of 137 million.  At that rate, it’ll surpass the United States by the end of this month. As it is, only 16 percent of the country’s entire population has internet access of any type.

Next up: The Chinese government hates your gaming startup — Or, at the very least, there’s the potential that they do. The latest target is online gaming, with the government raiding Internet cafes, barring children from entering them and setting time limits on players. This is possible because a good portion of China’s internet users only have access through cafes.

Digg may have secret editors — Social news site Digg, where users supposedly have all the control over which news items make it to the top, actually has editors, says Valleywag. Aside from any sense of betrayal the users might have, though, this probably isn’t a big deal. The point of automation and crowd-sourcing is, at least in part, to keep costs down for startups, something that’s less of a worry for Digg these days. And, judging from the junk content that regularly reaches the top of Digg despite any secret editors, we could almost wish they exercised their powers more.

The VentureBeat team is mostly taking a much-needed holiday break this week. In the meantime, here’s some of the latest news:

1. Apple devices to offer payment service?
2. Digg tells BusinessWeek that “no acquisitions are in the works” but we’re sticking by our story
3. Amazon Music Store to sell Warner Bros. music
4. Apple’s iTunes to rent Fox Studios movies
5. Web analytics service Compete examines Kayak-Sidestep travel site merger

Apple devices to offer payment service? — The company has recently filed a patent for “a wireless system that would allow customers to place an order at a store using a wireless device such as a media player, a wireless personal digital assistant or a cellphone,” Brian Caulfield reports. Phones in other countries, most notably Japan, can already be used to make credit card purchases at stores. Here in the US, we are still looking forward to this feature. (Image via Phone Different.)

Digg tells BusinessWeek that “no acquisitions are in the works” but we’re sticking by our story – Earlier this month, a well-placed source told us that social news site Digg has hired a bank to help it sell itself for $300 million or more. However, companies that are looking to sell usually won’t admit it publicly. Instead, they like to talk about how they’re focused on building a big business. True to form, Digg chief executive Jay Adelson only tells BusinessWeek about a number of new Digg features, and the potential for the company’s international expansion. He also says that Digg’s new advertising deal with Microsoft has been “great” since it started a few months ago.

Amazon Music Store to sell Warner Bros. Music — For some time, we’ve been hearing that Amazon’s music service has been growing quickly, as users are able to purchase songs and albums from it that don’t have restrictive digital rights management (DRM) software in place. DRM software technology is unpopular because it prevent you from buying a song then freely copying it to multiple computers and music-playing devices. Now, Warner Bros. will also sell music without DRM (press release here), following similar moves by EMI and Universal Music Group, who already sell large portions of their music catalogs DRM-free on Amazon. Apple’s iTunes has also begun to sell some DRM-free music — it has a DRM-free partnership with EMI, but not Universal. No word, yet, on whether Warner Bros. will offer DRM-free music through iTunes.

Apple’s iTunes to rent Fox Studios movies – Despite the competition from Amazon, Apple has more plans in the works for iTunes, the Financial Times reports. Apple will let iTunes users “rent” the latest DVD releases from Fox Studios — which means you can pay to download a digital DVD copy of the movie from iTunes for a limited time. Apple already lets you purchase Disney movies (Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is Disney’s largest individual shareholder), as well as a few Paramount titles. Aside from these companies, most studios have, like the record labels, balked at Apple’s efforts to cut deals with them. See the Wall Street Journal for more.

Web analytics service Compete examines Kayak-Sidestep travel site merger — Lots of detail on what Compete says is “among the most significant news items of 2007,” here. Our previous coverage of the deal is here.

It’s been a little more than a month since the last rumors surfaced about social news site Digg trying to sell itself for at least $300 million.

A reliable source just confirmed the company’s plans, noting the company has hired Allen & Company, a tiny but influential private investment firm, to help broker a deal. The asking price is still $300 million, the source said.

This will come as no surprise. Rumors of a sale have been rampant for months, although until now we hear co-founder Jay Adelson has been trying to muster up interest in a sale. This is the first time Digg has hired a bank to shop the deal, we’re told.

Valleywag reported the $300 million rumor last month. Separately, it reported Digg chief executive Jay Adelson’s attendance at Allen & Company’s annual Sun Valley, Idaho get-together of the rich and famous, noting the company might be looking to find a buyer among one of the many media company executives in attendance.

Allen & Company traditionally uses the event to do what it terms “direct research” on potential buyers and sellers, then inserts itself as banker.

For more on the history of Digg rumors (including a suggestiong to “Hire A Banker. Sell This Thing, Already”), see Techcrunch’s post from last month.

We asked Digg founder Kevin Rose about a potential sale, and Allen & Company’s involvement. He told us, unsurprisingly, that “we never comment on things related to acquisitions.”

Digg, the popular news-ranking site that is trying to extend its popular beyond its young geek-oriented audience, has significantly revamped its user profile section. The changes are aimed to give the service much more of a community feel, letting you share Digg stories with friends, and giving more profile to your most recent activity and favorite articles.

More significantly, the changes appear to be a direct response to Facebook, which has exploited its sharing features to tremendous success, and has also talked about using it to become a news site.

Digg’s new features are explained in this video.

Digg joins an increasing number of companies incorporating Facebook’s popular “feed” concept, where users can track the activities of their friends. This tends to create more activity on the site, because friends are likely to click on stories liked by their friends. This is particular important for Digg, which depends on its users to read and endorse stories, and so it’s a prudent, obvious move. On the one hand, it makes it easier for cliques of people to conspire to jointly endorse a story — something that has plagued Digg because marketers have a strong interest in pushing their own stories to the front page. On the other, it may generate more legitimate activity and thus help the community override that nefarious activity.

You can hit “share” and then “shout” to send a message to friends about articles you like. You can select favorites, that put your favorite articles on your profile. Your profile also shows the latest ten things you’ve done, comments you’ve made, shouts, and friends you’ve made. The profile has all sorts of information including age, name, picture, location, favorites sties, an about section, personal photos, and then your friends’ activities — just like Facebook. You can customize it all with filters.

Digg will notify you via email when certain activities happen, such as when someone adds you as a friend or a story you submit becomes popular. You can control what emails you want to receive in the email settings section of your user profile. You can find your friends’ profiles on Digg by searching for them by their email address. If you don’t want to enable others to search for your profile, you can specify that in privacy settings.

Here’s the latest action:

Digg, the news-ranking site, signs big advertising deal with Microsoft — It is similar to the one signed by Facebook with Microsoft, says co-founder Kevin Rose.

Divx to spin off its Stage6 video-sharing site: Stage6, a site featuring user-created videos that uses technology from its publicly traded parent company Divx, has been growing so fast that Divx has experienced a sharp up-tick in operating expenses, lowering its overall operating income. So San Diego’s DivX will spin out Stage6, which will now seek venture funding. Unique visitors to Stage6 numbered 10 million in June, up from four million in April. DivX, meanwhile, focus on its core business of licensing high-resolution video creation technology to device manufacturers — TV makers, mobile phone companies and others. The Divx “codec” or video compression-decompression software library, has been downloaded over 220 million times since the start of 2003, including 70 million times in the last 12 months, the company said in a statement.

Facebook lawsuit continues — Facebook, responding to a suit filed against Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg that alleges he stole code from an earlier company working on a similar idea, issued the following statement after a hearing: “We are pleased with the outcome of the hearing today. We continue to disagree with the allegations that Mark Zuckerberg stole any ideas or code to build Facebook. We intend to honor the judge’s request not to comment further in the media and will continue to vigorously defend this case in court.” This comes after presiding federal judge signaled he thought the suit was merely an effort to extract payment from Facebook, saying that “dorm room chitchat does not make a contract.” He gave the plaintiffs two weeks to file a revised complaint.

AideRSS puts article quality under microscope: AideRSS, of Waterloo, Ontario, is launching an online service where you can sort, track and filter RSS feeds. You can see how many times an online article has been commented on, “dugg” on Digg, tracked in Bloglines and how it has fared in a variety of other social news. VentureBeat’s RSS performance here. We played around with it and found some other features handy, like a way to import feeds from Google Reader and other feed readers so you can analyze all of your favorite blogs and web sites.

Toyota introduces a plug-in hybrid vehicle that you can plug in to an electrical outlet — It will introduce the car in Japan first, and test it in the U.S. The car will use “good enough” nickel-metal hydride (Ni-MH) batteries and have an eight-mile all-electric cruising range. (Details here)

GreenFuel Technologies, the alternative fuel company that had problems with its algae production, has raised a $5.5 million bridge loan — It is led by Access Industries, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Polaris Venture Partners (Bob Metcalfe’s company). Metcalfe last month became interim CEO of Cambridge-based GreenFuel after a series of setbacks sent the firm reeling, forcing layoffs and causing the company to scramble for additional financing. (Source Xconomy)

Google keeps buying stakes in Indian investing firms — Google has joined the investors of Delhi’s Band of Angels (BOA), we’re hearing from Sahad of VC Circle. Google had recently acquired 30 per cent of Ventureast TeNet Fund II for $3.75 million. Google had also previously invested as a limited partner in two early stage funds — Erasmic Venture Fund and Seed Fund. Sahad, who blogs about Indian investors, also notes that Canaan Partners, another valley firm that began investing in India lately, has invested in career-focused professional networking site TechTribe in a sub-$10 million round including Silicon Valley’s The Entrepreneur’s Fund III and Miven Venture Partners.

Tech blogger Om Malik is launching a television show with video site Revision3 — AllthingsD reporter Kara Swisher has the news. His first three interviews, to air weekly for about 10 minutes, are with RealNetworks’ Rob Glaser; Seagate’s Bill Watkins; and entrepreneur James Hong of HotorNot fame.

Here’s the latest action (updated):

Airborne mash-up: lawn chair travels 193 miles –Oregon resident Kent Couch tried to fly to Idaho last weekend — in an apparatus made out of his lawn chair carried by 105 large helium balloons. He carried instruments to measure altitude and speed, and also a parachute. He didn’t make it, though. (Image courtesy of AP)

More adult supervision at Facebook — Chamath Palihapitiya, a former AOL executive turned venture capital investor at the Mayfield Fund, will be joining the company as VP of product marketing and operations. Known for helping to turn around AOL’s instant-messaging division, his job now will include helping the company to figure out how to make more money.

Rumors have emerged that Facebook wants to public, and so filling out senior ranks is important. Facebook now says it has 30 million active users. It is reportedly making $30 million annually from $150 in revenue. We’ve heard a big portion of this comes from Microsoft payments for banner ads on the site. Palihapitiya caused controversy earlier this year, when he commented in a French video about a “white male circle of insiders” running Silicon Valley (our coverage here). Facebook also recently hired a new chief financial officer, Mike Sheridan, formerly CFO of video game publisher IGN Entertainment Inc.

MSN search engine market share actually grows — After steady decline, it has grown of late, driven by online games like Chicktionary, Compete reports; analyst Steve Willis has the full explanation:

A good portion of the additional Live searches are coming from the Live Search Club, where you can apparently play games for points which you can redeem for fine Microsoft products. All of the games involve using Live’s search engine - to get the points, you have to search with Live.

Google brings Map mashups to its platform — Tomorrow, Google brings Map mashups of data from external sites like Zvents and ChicagoCrime.org to its own platform, Mashable reports.

Index Ventures and 3i launch Seedcamp in Europe — Details are here. Entrepreneurs apply with their “big ideas” before August 12 and the top 20 will be chosen to spend a week in London with industry professionals (VCs, lawyers, marketers, HR people, etc), and from there, the top 5 winners will be announced and they’ll receive 50,000 euros in funding and continued mentorship to get their businesses started.

Nielsen/NetRatings, a leading online-measurement service, scraps rankings based on page views — Instead, it will begin tracking how long visitors spend on Web sites. The move comes as page views lose their value in expressing a site’s importance. Many sites, such as Friendster, have boosted page views with simple networking features. Others, such as those using online video and new technologies such as Ajax, reduce page views.

AOL releases new test version of myAOL — It offers new personalized tools such as myPage, a personal dashboard offering access to content and applications from AOL and other sites; Mgnet, which lets users find new sites and information based on personal preferences; and Favorites, a feed reader that combines user feeds and bookmarks in one place.

Users of TiVo can order movies from Amazon.com directly from their TVs — Details here.

Intel Corp. invests $218.5 million in virtualization software maker VMware – The investment will give Intel ownership of about 2.5 percent of VMware’s outstanding shares after VMware completes its initial public offering. Details here.

Will the video start-ups ever stop coming? — United Talent Agency and advertising start-up Spot Runner have jointly created a company called 60Frames Entertainment to finance and distribute original professional videos online. 60Frames, of Los Angeles, has raised $3.5 million in funding from investors including Tudor Investment Corp. and the Pilot Group, and says it wants to provide higher quality videos than YouTube. Its videos will run a few minutes and cost “in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands” of dollars to produce, the NYT reports.

Talking of video sites, Revision3, another one, finally gets CEO — Recently departed PC World editor Jim Louderback will become CEO at video site Revision3, replacing interim chief exec, Jay Adelson NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes reports.

Sequoia Capital, which recently invested in video site, Funny Or Die, now says there’s too much content — Roelof Botha, the Sequoia Capital partner who also invested in YouTube and Joost — video companies that only help to propagate more content — now says there’s so much information out there that it is overwhelming, and so you need humans to help (thus Sequoia has invested in Jason Calacanis’ human-assisted search engine, Mahalo). See video below, conducted by WSJ’s Kara Swisher (RSS readers will have to go to site):

Ning’s ridiculously large venture capital round — Ning, the company that provides tools for people to create their own social networks, co-founded by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, has raised a whopping $44 million, on a reported $170 million pre-money valuation. That values the company at a mighty $214 million. Andreessen says on his blog the round was “orchestrated” by the wealthy family firm Allen & Co, of New York, and was led by Legg Mason of Baltimore, with a number of others participating. Andreessen is smart. Large East Coast firms are flush with cash, and are also somewhat removed from the valley, and so won’t realize just how competitive this market is. If you’re curious to know more about Allen & Co., here’s an impossibly long story in Fortune about the firm.

Digg released an application for the iPhone — The news ranking site’s founder Kevin Rosen announces it here.

A link-exchange network for Facebook apps — Developers of applications on Facebook’s platform can exchange links in order to get more attention and traffic, by using FbExchange. More details at GigaOm.

Hey!Spread, a video uploading service that delivers your videos to multiple sites — Upload your video to YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Yahoo Videos, Dailymotion and Blip.tv all at the same time. (Techcrunch).

TwitterGram lets you deliver voice message on Twitter — It comes from Dave Winer, the Web guru who also created the RSS protocol. You can leave the message with a phone.

(Updated at bottom with more discussion on differences from Digg, others)

Thoof is the latest company seeking to offer news readers articles that are relevant to them.

The Austin, Tex. company launched today, boasting an approach it says is more useful to the wider masses than competitors such as Digg, Reddit, NewsVine, NowPublic, Topix and others that seek to rank articles. Thoof’s trick is to latch on to information it finds about users’ news tastes, store this information in a place where it constantly updates its list about you, and then steadily improve its service.

It is founded by engineer Ian Clarke, who left the video-sharing site Revver last year, where he had been a co-founder and chief scientist. Two other Revver employees have joined him.

After an initial review of the site, we’re convinced this has great potential, and are keen to see it succeed — because most other efforts have failed to do this job well. By its nature, Thoof does better the more people use it. It depends on user-submitted articles, and so the volume of stories in its system is small at launch. We found no articles on “finance,” for example.

Here’s how it works, and why we endorse the concept.

Like Digg, Thoof provides a synopsis of articles on its home page — this includes headline, brief summary, and tags to designate topic matter. It then provides a link to the article, and sends the reader to the original source.

That’s where the similarities with Digg end. It doesn’t let other readers rank the articles for you. Rather, it offers articles to you based on what knows about you, such as IP address (which provides geographical location), the browser you use, your operating system and the site you were on when you clicked through to Thoof — all of which offer subtle clues about you. Then, additionally, as you search articles, it tracks the tags of the articles you read. Finally, it may soon begin asking you a random question from time to time, to gather more information.

Next, it lets you correct the article summaries. See screenshot below, where the arrows show the multiple ways you can correct a piece. You can propose a change, but it must first be approved vote a vote by members of Thoof’s community. Right now, that community consists of just three people, but Thoof hopes more members will participate as traffic grows. This correction process gives Thoof a leg-up on Digg, which has suffered notorious accuracy problems.

This project is way too early to know whether it will succeed or not. A long-shot? Yes. However, Clarke has put deeper thought into this than we’ve seen in some other throw-it-together jobs on personalized news attempts over the past couple of years.

Before Revver, Clarke built Freenet, a very early decentralized P2P technology designed to let people obtain information on the Internet while avoiding censorship — for use by people in China, for example. He attempted to commercialize the technology, forming Uprizer, but left in 2002 and dabbled in a number of projects.

At Revver, Clarke says he learned the limitations of collaborative filtering technologies used by companies like StumbleUpon and Amazon.com. These services offer you content — music, articles or whatever — based selections by others who have shown similar choices you’ve made in the past. However, the technology slows the more users are added to the system. It also doesn’t work well without the user first surfing for hours — so that the system can track selections.

Clarke also sought to avoid problems faced at other companies: Digg is dependent niche crowd of tech-savvy young males selecting stories, and can’t get out of its rut, he says. It offers no personalization for the rest of the world’s audience. Reddit meanwhile, tends to be politically slanted, and lacks corrective features, thus pointing to the need for editors. Finally, Wikipedia does a good job with editors, but breaks down when dealing with controversy. Some entries, on President George Bush for example, get “locked down” to avoid constant edits by fringe interests. A group of editors voting on changes deals with controversy, Clarke concluded.

Clarke wanted to build an algorithm that can store unlimited amount of information about a user’s interests. Thoof seeks to pinpoint personal tastes in more sophisticated ways, using Bayesian statistics. He points to a company called Cycorp, which is developing large knowledge base, feeding information into it like the “sky” is “blue.” He’s licensing information from a company doing something similar, but wouldn’t specify.

Thoof is built on a Java-based open-source framework called Wicket.

It has raised $1 million from Austin Ventures and angel investor Ron Conway.

.

Here’s the (updated) latest action:

Marc Andreessen getting taste of what it’s like to be a blogger – The Netscape co-founder launched a blog last week. The NYT ran a story about one of his earliest posts. Then he did a good piece about how to hire. And now all the attention has him racing out more posts, including a three part series on The truth about venture capitalists, all very good reads (here, here and here). I recommend reading the last of these, to understand why the debate about the bubble will continue. Marc, welcome to the blogger treadmill.

Video-sharing site Revver’s CEO Steven Starr steps down — This is the second shakeup in six months. No more details given about the change, other than the obvious context: Lots of competition. The company has been losing executives. (CNET)

Xing to buy Plaxo? – Unlikely. A rumor at Techcrunch says Xing, the German version of professional networking site LinkedIn is buying Plaxo, the contact updating service. However, we’ve been told that this isn’t happening. There could be big announcement over next week or so from Xing, though.

Eye-Fi raises $5.5M for camera Wifi — We have the story on VentureBeat NewsWire (for our hard-core readers, here’s another reminder to check that left-hand column).

Apple in talks with major Hollywood studios to get more new films for rental service — The WSJ has details: Will be launched in the fall, and cost $2.99 for 30-day rental of movies. Details are still speculative, though, on who will be participating.

Yigg.de, a remarkable rip-off of Digg.com, gets funding — This is German clone, in both name and presentation. The amount raised is undisclosed but comes from angel investor Roland Metzger and Baytech Venture Capital, the German company says on its blog. It reports 1.4 million unique users a monthly.

SplashCast, the multimedia Flash player, raises angel funding from poker celebrity Phil Hellmuth — Its funding is now about $2 million, according to NewTeeVee

Chris Yeh takes CEO job at Ustream — The company is a competitor to Justin.TV, which is the permanent webcam of a guy named Justin. Ustream wants to let anyone do that. We’ve mentioned them before in our story about Justin.TV’s move to try to do the same. (See Yeh’s blog)

Google worst on privacy? – If you read this report by Privacy International, you should also read the response by search expert Danny Sullivan, who tears it to shreds. Obviously, Google has its own issues with the report, quite emotionally so.

What happens when you piss off attorneys? – Well, you get sued. We reported how Avvo, a site that rates lawyers, had launched, and that some lawyers were upset. Now, one of them is close to suing.

Internet radio station companies fight back — The U.S. Copyright Royalty Board ruled to increase royalty rates earlier this year, starting July 15. RealNetworks, Yahoo, Pandora and Live365 say they’ll be paying more than $1 billion per year.

Gamemaker of popular Desktop TD leaves to run company full-time — He’s joined with another guy, Kottke reports. They’re blogging here.

Private equity riches, will you be picking up the tab? — Blackstone Group, the high-profile buyout firm that plans soon to go public, filed more papers with the SEC that show it could be valued as high as $33.62 billion. Also, the filing shows Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman pulled down $398.3 million in 2006 which, according to Dan Primack, would place him only behind Steve Jobs on the Forbes list of highest-paid public company CEOs. So, as Blackstone issues shares to the public at the top of the private equity bubble, will you be the public investor to buy shares?

Yourminis, which are the widgets offered by Goowy Media, are now more easily compatible with desktop — Previously, you had to download Apollo from Adobe and a widget manager from Yourminis to use that company’s widgets on your desktop. Now, they’re compatible with Micrsoft’s Vista sidebar, without that step. Yourminis’s widgets can easily go anywhere, from blogs to social network pages to personalized homepages like iGoogle Pageflakes, Netvibes and now your Vista desktop. The interface for adding widgets, however, is a bit confusing, and could be simplified by reducing the number of necessary clicks. Goowy CEO Alex Bard assures us that improvements, including support for OSX, are in the works. More here.

Updated

Collactive is a new company that lets users mobilize friends and others to get more attention for causes they care about by overwhelming news-ranking sites such as Digg.

Users identify articles or video clips they care about, and then specify what actions they want their friends to take, such as voting for the video or article on Yahoo, Digg, Reddit, YouTube and other news sites. Collactive blasts the request out to the user’s contacts, and makes it easy for them to vote for the story on the news-ranking sites. See screenshot below. There’s a story about it today in the WSJ.

It provides links to the user’s cause “bulletins” so that friends can post it on their Web sites. Collactive, a Delaware-registered company with operations mainly in Israel, is backed by Sequoia Capital’s Israeli office (Update: funding amount is $2 million). The service is free for individuals, but will charge businesses, politicians and some nonprofits for usage. Apparently, it has already been used successfully by the Genocide Intervention Network, a Washington, D.C. nonprofit, to boost visibility about the conflict in Darfur, Sudan.

Notably, it is run by Eran Reshef and Amir Hirsh, the co-founders of Blue Security, a company that developed an innovative anti-spam technique: It would deluge spammers by sending them massive amounts of spam back. While momentarily successful, a Russian based spammer counter-attacked, and brought Blue Security to its knees about a year ago. Ironically, the co-founders have joined the other side, using what they’ve learned to essentially spam news sites under the pretense that is for good causes. Blue Security had been backed by Sequoia’s rival, Benchmark.

Here’s the latest action:

Google’s fireworks — This has been an impressive week for Google, and it shows in the 4 percent-plus jump in Google’s stock price earlier this morning (though it has tapered in the past hour). The main driver was its stellar earnings report. But here are the side-shows:

Video: It announced a video-conferencing product acquisition this morning (see our story).

StumbleUpon lookalike: Google also released a tool that looks a lot of like StumbleUpon, the site that delivers Web sites for you based on what you’ve told it you find interesting. Google’s tool centers on a recommendation button on its Toolbar that looks like a pair of dice:

Google explains: “Click on the dice, and we’ll take you to a site that may be interesting to you based on your past searches. If you want another, just click the dice again and we’ll show you a new one. We’ll give you up to 50 new sites per day that might be of interest. If you prefer to get your information at a glance, we’ve added a recommendations tab that you can add to your personalized homepage….We’ll give you a page of recommendations that are updated daily.”

Froogle tossed — Google has relaunched its shopping engine, changing its name to the bland Google Product Search. (We think Froogle is a cool name, and should be kept for a discount version of Product Search.) Google didn’t do much marketing of Froogle. With the relaunch, they’ve changed that: In your main search results, Google will sometimes feature an item from its Product Search if it matches your search query exactly (contained atop the regular results in a so-called “onebox” area). Notably, however, there’s no change from the prior policy of using only products submitted to Googlebase. So Google is forcing merchants to play in its system — unfortunately, not trawling the Web for items objectively, the way that made Google so popular in the first place. (See our story here on this). Google is also prioritizing merchants using Google Checkout, thereby penalizing those relying on PayPal. This is another Big Company move that undercuts its image of impartiality. Too bad. (See more thorough analysis at CNET and SearchEngineLand), which obviously got previews before it was released.

Google phones will be out by the end of this year — Apparently, they’re launching with Orange and HTC, featuring Google search and email built in. They’ll sport the Texas Instruments 3G platform and EDGE, but not GPS. (Details here)

There is, however, some non-Google news:

Twitter spun out — Evan Williams, who runs Obvious, the parent of Twitter, they messaging company that is all the rage lately, says Twitter is being spun out into its own company, Twitter Inc, with a CEO in Jack Dorsey.

Mitt Romney gets private equity support — The former Bain Capital chief, Mitt Romney has raised about $257,525 from buyout professionals in the first quarter, way more than anyone else, according to PEHub.

Web 2.0 Pyramid Watch — Cambrian House, a Canadian company creating a place for people to sell their business online, is moving to Mountain View, Calif., and its latest scheme is to give a share of stock in the company to anyone who signs up for his service, according to the SF Chron. He plans to ultimately sell the company or have a public stock offering. “We really are built to flip,” he said. “I’m the only guy who says that out loud. I don’t know why everyone lies.”

Digg releases API, an answer to MySpace News — News-ranking site Digg has released its API, which gives developers tools to build other products around Digg’s data, and also to integrate it into existing sites. You can use the API to request very specific information about news stories and videos submitted to Digg, digging activity, comments, and users. This comes just as MySpace has unveiled its own Digg-like news service (see our previous coverage), built after acquiring Newroo.

Flickr has integrated Imagekind — This gives Flickr users a way to create prints of their photos, or sell them to others online. Techcrunch has story.
(Our coverage of Imagekind.)

coRank is another news ranking site, similar to Digg in style, but ranks the news according to how interesting your friends and other pre-selected sources find it.

There is a tour here.

Digg has the sheer numbers, surpassing a million registered accounts earlier this month, but it still hasn’t locked things up. As has been widely publicized, it is vulnerable to being gamed and influenced by cliques — and is mainly popular among the tech crowd. coRank removes the danger of gaming. However it isn’t clear how many people have such information overload that they need this intermediate filter — instead of going to the news sources they trust — or subscribing to them through an RSS reader.

We’ve tinkered with coRank, and it implements a clean design. It gives people the ability to tailor their reading pages. It also gives people more niche categories of news to choose from than Digg does. Founder Rogelio Andreo, who works in Silicon Valley, informed us of the launch last night.

Rex Dixon is a contributing author at VentureBeat