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Here’s the latest action:

The Associated Press to blogs: Don’t quote us — The Associated Press has demanded that The Drudge Retort (not to be confused with much more famous Drudge Report) take down several blog posts containing excerpts of AP stories. The objections sound pretty silly — the longest excerpt was 79 words long, and quoting and linking other articles is a popular blogging practice. AP Strategy Director Jim Kennedy’s response that the excerpts were “more reproduction than reference” isn’t particularly persuasive. Kennedy later told the New York Times that the AP’s response was “heavy-handed,” but, strangely, he said the organization isn’t backing down from its initial takedown request.

Google reveals escape clause from Yahoo partnership — It looks like Google’s deal with Yahoo, through which Google will serve ads to Yahoo’s search results, is even better for Google than was initially apparent. According to a filing with the federal Securities Exchange Commission, if the partnership ever makes less than $83.3 million in four months for Google, the search giant can terminate the agreement. TechCrunch spotted the filing, and pointed out that it’s a pretty low threshold: Yahoo makes $1.3 billion every three months. Still, here’s another reason to believe that it’s a better deal for Eric Schmidt than for Jerry Yang.

Yahoo exec Weiner joins venture firms as EIR — Speaking of Yahoo, the company has lost another executive. Jeff Weiner, who was most recently in charge of core products like Yahoo.com, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger, left to be an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, according to the Los Angeles Times. Weiner follows Andrew Bracchia, another Yahoo executive who left for Accel last year. Google just lost a big name as well: chief litigator Michael Kwan left for the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Google creating new services to fight for net neutrality — The network analysis tools will allow normal users to see if their Internet service providers are abiding by “net neutrality.” In other words, you’ll be able to make sure your ISP is giving you the best connection possible to the entire Internet, not just to websites that pay for better service. A Google policy director mentioned the project during a panel discussion on Friday.

XM/Sirius merger close to a done deal – The merger between the two satellite radio companies has just been recommend for approval by the staff of the Federal Communications Commission, meaning it’s unlikely at this point that the government will stop the deal.

Streamzy lets you search for music videos — Music startup Streamzy, which launched into the crowded online music market just a couple of weeks ago, has added some new features it hopes will set it apart from the competition: It has integrated video searches through YouTube and AOL’s Truveo. One of its competitors, Seeqpod, is already integrated with YouTube, but the ability to stream music performances via Truveo is something none of the other search engines are doing yet. Streamzy also plans to offer music and ringtone purchases shortly and to add playlist-sharing capabilities.

Orgoo to offer webmail service to existing social networks – The startup, previously known for a site that integrates email, instant messaging and SMS text messaging, will try to sell networking sites like Facebook and MySpace a solution that allows users to check their various email accounts through the social network.

[David Adewumi contributed to this article.]

Orgoo, a Los Angeles startup that’s trying to become the hub of all your online and mobile communciation, is gearing up for a public launch scheduled for late June. As it opens up to more users (more on that in a second), Orgoo has redesigned its interface and unveiled some other new features.

We first wrote about Orgoo almost exactly a year ago, and the redesign (see screenshot below) is a big improvement over what we saw then. In addition to just being prettier, the new look packs more information onto the page — and when your selling point is integrating web communication features like email, instant messaging and SMS text messaging into a single page, layout becomes crucial.

There are other additions. Orgoo now allows your computer to both send and receive SMS messages, and it has integrated the video chat feature the company unveiled earlier this year into the main site.

As we’ve noted before, there are other startups trying to accomplish the same goal — for example, I’ve been impressed by Digsby’s IM-style interface, which seems more convenient than a standalone web page like Orgoo’s.

Still missing from Orgoo is compatibility with a user’s social networks. Co-founder Sean Rad tells me the company is working on a feature for sending and managing a user’s messages on Facebook and other social networks.

VentureBeat readers can check out the service themselves. We’ve got 500 invites, which you can use by going here. And once you’re an Orgoo user, you can invite six of your friends. Check it out, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Orgoo has an undisclosed amount of angel funding.

Online communication start-up Orgoo is launching a new video chat service that merges the intimacy and conversational style of normal chats with the larger audience of video “lifecasting”.

Orgoo co-founder Sean Rad argues that there’s room for an application that falls between the video chat model exemplified by Skype and the new trend of video lifecasting, which Yahoo entered last month with Yahoo Live. (You can read our recent roundup of lifecasting start-ups here.) In the former, you can get a real conversation going, but there’s only an audience of one — namely, the other person you’re chatting with. In the latter, you send video messages to a potentially vast audience, but the conversation is all one-way.

This new focus on video chat is a detour from company’s original offering when we profiled it back in May. At the time, Orgoo was touting a service that merges your online communication, including instant messaging, email and chat. (It even included video chat, albeit in the traditional one-on-one conversational model, rather than the company’s new hybrid.) Orgoo isn’t neglecting this tool, Rad says, and will unveil some new features in the next few months.

Los Angeles-based Orgoo is angel funded for an undisclosed amount, Rad says.

With Orgoo Video Chat, up to four people can have a normal conversation, but thousands of other users can also watch. (You can see me chatting — by myself — in the screenshot above.) The chat rooms are built around topics like the American Idol TV show and professional sports, so people will have a chance to find others with similar interests, start conversations and maybe even become the “stars” of a particular community whose discussions are watched by everyone.

Even if you’re stuck in the audience, there’s still plenty to do — users can comment on the video in the related text chat room, start private one-on-one video conversations and eventually jump into the video chat when someone leaves.

Still, if Orgoo Video Chat is going to take off, its users will need to have worthwhile things to say. I like the fact that Orgoo is bringing YouTube’s “anyone can be a star” philosophy to video chat. But there are a lot of sites doing video these days, and it’s a real challenge to stand out from the crowd. Of the companies we’ve profiled, Kyte seems to be the most similar — unlike Orgoo, it emphasizes the one-way communication of lifecasting “channels”, but it has similar video chat capabilities (our coverage).

In Orgoo, as elsewhere, I’ll stay in the room as long as someone’s saying something interesting.

[Update: Orgoo chief executive Michael Kantor outlines some other features in the comments below.]

In ten years, an internet eternity, web-based email has only made token improvements, moving from Hotmail to Gmail. Meanwhile, instant messaging and social networks have rapidly developed.

Four new startups, all of which came out of secrecy this year, point toward a bright new future for email. These oddly-named saviors — Fuser, Orgoo, Xobni and Xoopit — have a simple goal. They want to centralize communication, and they want to give it structure and meaning.

Power users feel the pain of having to repeatedly switch between email and the address book, having to close one email before writing another, or losing track of instant messages as the write a new email. For lighter email users, only once email begins to stack up and conversations become lost or forgotten do their cries for help begin. The least committed email users may have dropped it entirely in favor of messaging on a platform like Facebook, which seems to offer many of the same basic features.

The individual aims of these companies differ. Fuser and Orgoo (previous coverage) both centralize communication, whether from email, instant messaging, a social network or even mobile SMS and video, in one simple interface. Xobni (previous coverage) is an overlay for Outlook that helps organize high-volume communications with a multi-functional sidebar. Xoopit organizes all those thousands of pages of archived email, pulling out meaningful content long since lost by the user.

While each is different, they recognize the same disease, and offer the same cures. To use the wording of Sean Rad, co-founder of Orgoo, the aim is to first aggregate all communication; next, integrate the separate streams into a single work flow; and finally, organize, to increase the efficiency and usefulness of email.

We’ll give a summary of each startup, followed by some thoughts from their top executives as to what’s in the future.

Fuser
Fuser pulls together its user’s communications, both from all of their email accounts as well as the social networks Facebook and MySpace. It then places the message-centers of each service in a single web based interface, providing a central place to catch up on what’s been happening everywhere.

According to the company’s president, Jeff Herman, “The problem is that most people today have multiple email, social networking accounts and so forth. You have to log in to five or six places to find out what’s going on. What we’re really going for is a virtual command center to pull together everything a person has.”

Orgoo
Orgoo, like Fuser, aggregates communication, but with an interface that more closely resembles traditional email. And while both Fuser and Orgoo can access any type of email account, Orgoo adds in instant messaging accounts rather than social networks, and also has a video chat option.

“As things stand, you have different accounts on all these services. If I email you, we continue our conversation by IM or phone. But I don’t have one single view of that conversation. We’ve taken the first step of integrating and allowing you to organize in one central location,” says Rad.

Both Fuser and Orgoo plan to add, as quickly as possible, features that the other has — Fuser will add instant messaging, while Orgoo will add social networking. Where the two companies differ is in their interface (see screenshots) and their target markets; Herman says that Fuser is aiming for the “middle American” market, while Orgoo seems to appeal to a more tech-savvy crowd.

Xobni
Xobni attempts to help information-overloaded business people keep track of their contacts within Microsoft Outlook. A sidebar view shows the relationship of a message’s sender to the user, as well as a correspondence history, their contact information, and files exchanged — all without ever opening a single email, much less tracking through endless folders and conversational threads.

Despite some initial problems with the software’s implementation, with users complaining of excessive memory usage, co-founder Matt Brezina says demand has been strong from heckled Outlook users. “We decided to stick to Outlook because there’s a lot of pain there, and a lot of value that can be created for those users,”Brezina says.

Xoopit
To Xoopit, the email inbox is a library in lack of the Dewey Decimal System. While co-founder Bijan Marashi is guarded in his statements about the company, which will come out of stealth mode later this year, he told us that the purpose of Xoopit is simply to organize email.

For example, Xoopit can search through every email ever sent to a user and pull out and compile a photo gallery from the attachments. Other content in emails can also be separated out. The idea is to make even old emails and content available without requiring hours of digging, much like separating a single towering stack of documents into organized filing cabinets.

The future

The question is, just how painful is existing consumer email? The majority of us are lazy, and we’ll put up with a lot before learning a new system. Sure, our Yahoo Mail may be clunky at times, but it’s “good enough,” right? If they only appeal to a tiny sub-set of users, all four startups are doomed to failure.

However, there are examples of innovation in email paying off. When Zimbra, an enterprise email client, launched in 2005, we admit to doubting that it could challenge Outlook. It took two years, but the Ajax-based software took off, gaining enough momentum among users excited about its extensible features and add-ons to convince Yahoo to acquire it for $350 million, earlier this year. However, Zimbra isn’t (yet) for general consumer use, nor is it a standard web mail client like Yahoo or Google offers.

The lesson is that to have a chance, new email startups must be easy to use, and address multiple needs effectively. To become the command center for any internet user, email should go further, pulling together communication and making them more intuitive, and more useful.

Rad says that Orgoo’s goal is to make a user’s past communications reveal deeper patterns about them. If all your messages are aggregated in one place, the inbox can be the target of an automatic analysis to “allow people to explose the hidden social networks and the hidden information,” Rad says. “We want to create new ways for you to visualize email, easier ways to navigate through and see things in messages and relationships in a larger context. For example, if you look at Gmail, it groups your emails by subject line. That’s good, but there are a lot of other ways to group, whether by sender, topic or something else. You want to create a user interface that allows you to re-thread conversations and put them in context.”

Likewise, Fuser wants to dig into the wealth of information flowing through user’s accounts. While the site already features a “leaderboard” showing who users communicate with most on their social networks, it could gather more information, for instance keeping track of a friend even when she has different accounts as well. More such features are planned, but Herman also points to another important area for his company. “We’re aimed at middle America, where people are not technologists,” he says. “If you don’t make it very easy for people to set up accounts, you’ll lose them. To really win we have to focus on an interface that can be useful to mass America.”

Xobni’s co-founder Brezina says his company doesn’t plan on resting on its Outlook laurels, and may branch out to a high-powered web mail or a client that can, like Zimbra, act as a platform for developers, for example being able to automatically look up real estate prices and connect them information in an agent’s email. And like the other companies, Brezina thinks that email is a rich information resource about a person’s life. While Xobni already pulls out some information like phone numbers from email, there’s much more information waiting for someone to find an innovative way to highlight. “There’s a structure that just hasn’t been broken apart and exposed,” he says.

And when will a Google or Yahoo decide to change their own platforms? Xoopit founder Bijan Marashi compares the challenge of changing email to upgrading an operation system: “That’s a major overhaul of stuff consumers use every day, and the [OS] companies pull it off. If someone can really make this stuff simple, the majors might be able to take a lot of it away.”

Adoption or acquisition by a big company may be the best way for any of the four to succeed, providing them with the money and backing to spread their word.

We’ll follow these startups as they evolve. More this week, on related projects coming out of the Web 2.0 conference.

Yahoo Mail upcoming redesign is offering text messaging from within email to external mobile phones.

It is introducing shortcuts, underlining addresses, places, dates, contact information and other data with blue dotted lines. Click on these link you’ll be taken to maps for the addresses, calendar for dates, and so on — with more to come. Most notable, however, is its text messaging (SMS) service: You can now send them a text message from your email, in addition to instant messaging that is already available. Responses also come into your mailbox. Techcrunch has a review here, noting that Yahoo’s main weakness continues to be the lack of free POP access. We use Google’s Gmail to import messages to Outlook for example, using POP, for free.

In fact, we’ve been following a young Los Angeles California company, Orgoo, which is still testing its product privately, and lets you communicate in an even more comprehensive and open way than Yahoo or other mail services. It is due to launch this fall.

It supports all IM and major email clients (not just Yahoo), and so lets you IM people directly from your Orgoo’s messaging dashboard, regardless of what IM service they use. It includes texting, as well as video chat and video email. It also allows you to POP other email clients into Orgoo, and its testing version lets you POP Orgoo into Outlook. However, it’s unclear what Orgoo’s exact plans are, and what services it will make free versus paid. We’d encourage to offer it all for free, because that would make us switch over, and probably millions of other people too. But then there’s the inconvenient question of how they’d make money. Orgoo is also offering IMAP, so that you can sync any device. Ah, there’s a way to make money: Offer it to corporate clients, along with support, and they’d snap it up in a heartbeat. It works seamlessly with Outlook, and young, top-performing employees crave its integrative features, companies will want to try it out. To do that, though, the bootstrapped Orgoo would have to raise a hefty venture round first.

Earlier today, we wrote about the IM players, and noted that start-ups such as Meebo and eBuddy will have to work hard to to keep from getting swallowed by the big guys.

Coincidentally, Meebo had been working quietly on a project that launches tomorrow: Meebo Rooms. They are web-based IM chat rooms where people can gather and discuss a video or other media file that plays from a central media player. The company showed us the feature earlier today.

It’s significant because it keeps its features its IM offering one step ahead of the Google/Microsoft/Yahoo crowd, and directly answers the product soon to be offered by Orgoo, also mentioned today.

Here’s how it works: You create a room by clicking at the bottom of your profile (see red arrow on right in image below). Then you post a media file like you’d post a normal IM message: You paste in the link, hit return. Meebo recognizes the media file, and automatically queues it to play in the room’s media player. The player can play audio or music files too. Each room has it’s own URL, so you can invite people to join in by sending them a link. See below for example of a room with NBC Late Night clip.

The feature is useful because users can chat with others with similar interests. For example, there are featured rooms, such as the Flixter room (see left arrow above). If successful, this will move the company beyond its original role as “instant messaging aggregator” and into a new role as instant media aggregator.

As with Meebo Me, the company’s embeddable widget that allows people to chat within blogs and other public sites, Meebo Rooms can be embedded into sites across the internet.

Meebo Rooms taps into the people’s interest in compelling content and their desire to instantly talk about it with like-minded individuals. In fact, a single room, say, about “politics” can both be embedded in multiple sites across the web and displayed within a Meebo user’s homepage: one conversation, occurring synchronously across the web.

Meebo is well-positioned to promote the service. The company has been growing quickly, with 6.5 million screennames this month as opposed to 5.5 million in March — which means around five million humans are on the site a month (factoring out the people with multiple screen names), according to chief executive Seth Sternberg.

Moreover, Meebo has cut deals with major content sites such as Sony, NBC, Vibe and Pop Sugar. These sites will feature Meebo Rooms on their sites, thereby driving Meebo users to them and their users to Meebo.

Perhaps even more significantly, Rooms marks the first time the company is actively trying to make money — through video ads displayed in Rooms during lulls in the Room’s media player.

Sternberg claims Rooms, with its media files, is around four times harder to handle than the base Meebo IM service — it takes significant scaling technology.

It’s one way Meebo differentiates itself: The vision is to build interesting applications on the IM base, and Rooms is the company’s first big test of the vision.

Orgoo, a Los Angeles based start-up, is about to release a futuristic Web-based message tool that brings together all your IM, voice, text and email into one place.

It is still in early testing mode, but we got an early look at the product.

The cool thing about Orgoo is that it lets you switch seamlessly between formats — IM, voice, text and email. You can do things like send an IM as an SMS message, for example. No other company has thrown all of this together in one offering.

Orgoo is the latest company to realize that users want many of these things in one platform, and to store and manage it in one place. Orgoo lets you store all your IM, SMS, email and voice messages all on one screen (see screenshot below; note that it provides icons to show that a file is, for example, an IM message). Orgoo offers you a chat room to have conversations with multiple people, and offers a URL to each chat room (similar to Campfire). Within a chat room, you can enable live video streaming too, for video conferencing. For all this, there’s no download. Orgoo’s main challenge is latency. In our test, the service took a while to load emails. Orgoo is working to compress the code — loaded through the browser — by 60 percent, in order to speed things up.

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When you sign up (you can apply for test account), Orgoo prompts you to enter your logins for pop email accounts and IM clients, and lets you import your contacts. The company is still ironing out some bugs, but hopes to launch an open testing version sometime over the next couple of months. It has a WAP version for mobile users. Orgoo will also not have off-line access, though it is working toward this.

Co-founders Sean Rad and Shahzad Tiwana, students at USC, started the company two years ago. Michael Kantor, who was on the founding team of InfoSpace, was brought on as chief executive in January. They’ve raised a small amount of angel funding, and are looking to raise a first round of capital.

See our our related story today about IM, and how Orgoo fits in.

(Disclosure: Orgoo’s Sean Rad once contributed an article to VB. There are no financial/business ties between Rad and VB).

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