VentureBeat

Here’s the latest action:

MySpace apps also making money from virtual currencies — We’ve covered how some Facebook application developers are making seven figures through virtual goods and currencies. Offerpal, a company that offers advertising that lets users earn virtual rewards for participating in surveys and programs, tells Silicon Alley Insider the same is happening on MySpace. Apps on both social networks are making “about $75 per 1,000 daily active users and $150-$200 for the higher engagement applications,” its says.

Red Dawn, Part II: The South Will Rise Again — One of my favorite childhood movies was Red Dawn, a fictional story about Coloradans waging a guerrilla war against an invading Russia-led army. Today, as Russia invades the country of Georgia, Google News delivers this map and Valleywag-truncated AFP headline about the news.

Google mobile Olympics search is here — There have been a lot of tech-related Olympics announcements, from where to view the Olympics on the web to how to translate Beijing directions from English to Chinese. Google’s not going to lose out on this one: It’s announcing its own customized search feature for mobile devices, so you can look for Olympics news and information on the go — in 36 languages in more than 60 countries. More generally, you can get Google Translate on the iPhone here.

Blog platform WordPress’s forthcoming social network due out later this year – It’s called BuddyPress; the latest at webmonkey.

Who will this video annoy more, our readers who really hate Nazi jokes or our readers who really hate Twitter? — Watch it for yourself.

Video search company Blinx wants to buy video ad company MIVA — Allen Stern at Centernetworks obtained the proposal email.

Yahoo now lets web publishers customize Yahoo search results for their own sites — The technical details, for those interested.

Turner looks to sell online game site GameTap — The service has been moderately successful, but expensive. Turner has already taken an $18 million write-down on it, Variety reports.

Ryanair cancels third-party flight reservations, to drive more ticket sales on its own site — The low-cost Irish airline wants “to cause as much chaos for the [websites] as possible,” according to the Independent.

Facebook gained nearly two million new US users from May to June of this year, while MySpace lost about a million, according to the latest data from comScore. MySpace is still nearly twice the size, though, at 72.8 million national users versus Facebook’s 37.4 million. Facebook has, meanwhile, grown 34 percent since June 2007, while MySpace has grown only two percent. A range of smaller, niche social networks — and related social web sites — are also seeing solid growth.

One blog platform, Google’s Blogger, has grown from being slightly larger in the US than Facebook last year, to nearly 45 million users last month; another, Wordpress, has more than doubled its user community to nearly 19 million; another, Six Apart and its various sites, has actually dropped by two percent. Six Apart, however, sold its Live Journal blog service this past year, which likely counterbalanced any growth it has seen on Typepad and other properties.

Meanwhile, Yahoo-owned photo sharing site Flickr has grown 66 percent over the last year to 16 million users — and that’s not the only Yahoo property to stay on the up and up. Yahoo’s new news aggregator, Yahoo Buzz, has passed the nine million user mark since launching less than a year ago. That growth was no doubt driven by users coming from the monster-sized traffic on Yahoo’s homepage that Buzz features are integrated into. It’s clear why Propeller would want to shift gears towards a Yahoo Buzz-style site leveraging its connection with AOL.com.

And, let’s not forget staid old social network Reunion.com, which has doubled from nearly six million users in June, 2007 to nearly twelve million this past June.

There are some smaller sites also seeing notable growth, but comScore won’t let me republish more than just the top ten in table format. So here they are:

Digg has grown from 4.4 million to 6.2 million — meaning Yahoo Buzz has managed to get way bigger, way faster.

Buzznet, a music-sharing site, has grown by around 1.5 million to reach nearly 7 million users. A younger music site, imeem, now has nearly 6.5 million users.

LinkedIn, a business networking site, has grown 141 percent from 1.7 million users to 4.2 million in June. Still not huge, but its users are typically businesspeople with money to spend, so it may be easier to monetize than many of these other sites.

Shopping site Kaboodle has grown 83 percent to slightly more than four million.

And finally, there’s not all bad news for maligned old web conglomerate AOL in the report. Sure, its AOL Hometown site has dropped 34 percent to 5.3 million users, but check this out: Its new AIM instant message profiles have grown from zero to 7.5 million, and its AOL Community site has grown 8,703 percent to 3.6 million users.

Final note: As always, you have to take third-party data analysis with a grain of salt, as each firm’s measurement methodologies may differ from companies’ internal numbers. For example, while comScore reported that Facebook had 123 million worldwide users last May, Facebook itself has more recently claimed only around 80 million.

WordPress for the iPhone is done and has been uploaded to the iTunes App Store for approval, according to the WordPress for iPhone blog. While there is no set time for release, it could be as early as tonight. (Update: It is live now, see the bottom of the post.)

With this announcement, WordPress becomes the second company (TypePad was the first) to offer a dedicated blogging app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. If you watch the video at the bottom you’ll see that WordPress is taking an elegant approach to the app.

I never thought I would be comfortable blogging from my phone, but I think this app may change my mind. Certainly, it would still be a hassle to type a long post, but a short blurb on some breaking news will be easy enough. What this may be real a lifesaver for is existing posts that need updates.

The app could prove even more helpful to spare-time and hobbyist bloggers than to professional bloggers. It lets you easily add pictures from your iPhone/iPod Touch album and take a new picture to upload.

The tool will work with both WordPress.com and WordPress.org blogs (version 2.5.1 and later).

Update: As we predicted, the app has gone live tonight. You can find it here.

Hitwise: Digg has been sending more traffic to mainstream media web sites lately — Take a look at the graph below, and read what the web research company has to say, here. Allen Stern at CenterNetworks recently published his own report anecdotally noticing the changes; he speculates that Digg may be looking to sell to a mainstream news company.

Intel announces a second-quarter record of $9.5 billion in revenue — More here.

San Francisco government computer system compromised – A rogue IT employee, currently cooling his heels in jail, illegally created his own master password that gave him exclusive access to the city’s new multi-million dollar computer system. He still hasn’t turned over the password, and top administrators haven’t figured it out on their own. Files he currently has access to include city payroll files, official emails — and importantly for him, as he’s getting arraigned today — confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmate bookings (”What? Show me the documentation that I was ever in jail.”). The Chronicle has a closer look at this man-made disaster.

As real species go extinct, millions of virtual ones are springing up on Spore — First, the bad news: Researchers announced today that many more species may face extinction than previously thought, based on newly-revised calculations. Now, the good news: Spore, a forthcoming video game that recently launched a way for users to create their own virtual creatures, announced today that so far, users have made millions of new species. Spore, a game that will let you evolve a single creature into a galaxy-spanning race, is due out this fall.

Blog software Wordpress gets useful upgrade — New features include a way to track changes across blog-post revisions and a way to easily post media to Wordpress from other sites. The company has more details on these new features and others. Or watch the video. 1.

Pheedo launches additional web advertising tracking features for its RSS feed service - The press release is here.

Business networking site LinkedIn launches ads to target particular subsets of its users — The automated service lets anybody create and pay for their own text ads that run within the site. Read the company’s blog post on the ads for more detail.

In the world of blogging most people use online editors such as those provided by MovableType, Blogger and WordPress. Some however, prefer desktop editors because they are faster without having to load all of the elements required for a web page — which an online blog editor is after all. WordPress.com has just announced a feature that may render the speed issue moot; support for Gears.

Gears is a browser extension that allows you to create local version of files used on webpages. Developed by Google, it was originally created to allow for some of Google online applications, such as Google Reader, to work when users are not connected to the Internet.

WordPress however is using it to store highly used admin area files to speed up its online blogging experience. The idea is if you don’t have to reach out across the Internet each time to pull some some editor icons or graphics, it will be a much faster experience.

To use this feature, simply click on the “Turbo” button in the upper right corner of your admin area. If you do not yet have the Gears plug-in installed, it will tell you how to do that. Currently, to use Gears you must be using either Firefox 2 or 3 or Internet Explorer 6 or 7. Support for Apple’s Safari browser is coming.

It’s important to note that this is currently only for WordPress.com users, it is not supported for hosted versions of WordPress just yet. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg tells us that the functionality has been in development for weeks for hosted WordPress blogs and will be in the next WordPress.org release, 2.6.

[photo: flickr/sarah jane]

Here’s the latest action:

1) Classmates.com IPO called off
2) Microsoft buys Multimap for $50M
3) StyleHive picks up StyleDiary
4) Toshiba’s new lithium-ion released
5) Venture Hacks on legal fees and VCs
6) Zoho Show adds on functions
7) Six Apart sets Movable Type free
8) Guardian Analytics launches product

United Online cancels Classmates.com IPO — One less for the story books of internet success: United Online has nixed the nearly $180 million Classmates.com public offering, planned to take place on the Nasdaq. PaidContent points to an analyst forecast that sums up the lack of investor excitement over Classmates: “We expect the Classmates.com subscriber base to peak in the first half of 2008, followed by a steady decline to zero by 2012,” opines Cowen & Co.’s Jim Friedland. If he’s a betting man, we’d guess his money is on Facebook.

Microsoft buys Multimap for $50 million — Multimap is a U.K. company that offers interactive online maps, much like Google Maps or Microsoft’s own, less successful Live Search Maps. Multimap also has two mobile apps with rather self-explanatory names: Storefinder4Mobile and Multimap2Mobile. Microsoft likely has plans to use the company to flesh out its mobile advertising efforts. The company’s founder, Sean Phelan, cashed out to the tune of $25 million, according to the Times Online.

StyleHive pulls StyleDiary off the rack — StyleHive, of San Francisco, is one of a handful of social bookmarking sites for fashionistas. It acquired StyleDiary, of Los Angeles, for an undisclosed amount, to provide professionally produced editorial content as a complement for its user’s contributions. Our past coverage on StyleHive’s $2.62 million funding is here.

Toshiba releases fast-charging lithium-ion battery — Toshiba’s Super Charge ion Battery (SCiB) contains an advanced lithium-ion technology that extends the life of the battery up to 10 years and allows charging in as little as five minutes. The battery should be especially useful for motorcycles, automobiles and construction equipment, and may help foster the market for fast-charge electrical stations, as well as the vehicles that visit them.

Sneaky VCs trying to pass off their legal fees — Venture Hacks has a good post on a tricky practice that new entrepreneurs should look out for. “When you pay your investor’s legal bill, you’re paying their lawyers to negotiate against you. You’re paying their lawyers to make your deal worse,” goes one piece of cautionary advice. For other nuggets of wisdom, go read the original post.

Revamped Zoho Show released – Zoho, an online office suite that we’ve covered several times before (here, here and here), has continued to be just as active in releasing new iterations of its products. The latest is Zoho Show 2.0, an upgraded version of their online presentation application, which is similar to PowerPoint. The new features include a new interface, support for shapes, symbols and clip art, and integration with their chat and meeting applications. For a video of it in action, look here.

Six Apart sets Movable Type free — The popular blogging platform will henceforth have an open-source license, much like larger competitor Wordpress. Some have speculated that Movable Type’s smaller market share had much to do with remaining proprietary, while Wordpress remained completely open, although Movable Type always allowed user modifications to its code. Six Apart will continue to offer paid licenses for bloggers who need professional support.

Guardian Analytics launches anti-fraud product — Guardian Analytics (previous coverage) released FraudMAP, one of a number of new applications aimed at preventing identity theft. It’s one of a new generation of startups using web analytics to identify online activity not consistent with a user’s normal behavior patterns, with FraudSciences Corp. (previous coverage) being another. Given the rising incidence of identify theft (read a Dean Takahashi rant on the topic here), we’d expect this field to grow fairly quickly.