Now that the Twitter API finally allows for retrieval of the number of times a Twitter user has been added to a list, celebrities can now brag about something other than their numbers of followers on the popular micro-sharing service.

Fan Page List noted the addition of the new fields in the Twitter API and quite rapidly came up with a handy ranking that gives you an overview of both stats for the most popular Twitter users, as well their number of fans on Facebook.

Unsurprisingly, celebrities (i.e. persons) rule the ranking, with musicians like Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga topping the charts with over 264,000 and 106,000 counts on lists, respectively. Number three is Barack Obama, the only politician in the top 40.

The Twitter account for CNN Breaking News is the first media company in the ranking with an appearance in over 61,050 lists, while Microsoft founder Bill Gates makes it to the top 13 spot with nearly 50,000 list counts (and he’s a retired CEO, booyah!).

The company account with the most list counts is Google, ahead of Twitter, with close to 41,000 list appearances. Ricardo Kakà and Shaquille O’Neal are popular athletes, apparently.

TechCrunch made spot number 35 on the ranking, and we’re not resting until we surpass The Onion (#26), although admittedly they’re way more funnier than we could ever dream to be.

On a sidenote: a good place to start for great Twitter lists is Listorious.

As expected, EA's Read more…

One of Zynga’s newest game titles, Mafia Wars Las Vegas, kicked off with a bang last week as rap star Snoop Dogg blew up a 4-ton armored truck in the middle of the desert in Nevada. The event, which took place last Thursday, broke a Ustream record for the most viewed original event with more than 2 million live views.

Zynga streamed the event, which commemorated the game reaching 10 million visitors in two weeks, live via Ustream, and more than 2 million viewers dialed in simultaneously, making the stunt the most viewed one-time event in 2010. This is actually pretty impressive considering that popular TV shows like The Office and 30 Rock generally get 2 million households viewing the television events. The Zynga event was also only surpassed by Ustream's broadcast of Twilight: Eclipse in June, but this wasn’t an original web event created specially for Ustream.

Unfortunately, Zynga’s other marketing stunt for Mafia Wars, didn’t settle well with San Francisco politicians. After Zynga glued fake $25,000 bills to sidewalks in San Francisco directing people to check out the Mafia Wars website, San Francisco’s Deputy City Attorney Alex Tse called the marketing tactic “documented acts of sidewalk vandalism” and stated that the City “intends to pursue every available cause of action aggressively against Zynga for these illegal marketing tactics.”

It’s a little absurd for the City to use such aggressive language towards the marketing campaign; especially considering that the advertising agency responsible for the stunt seems willing to cooperate with officials.

On another note, it’s interesting to see Snoop Dogg getting involved with another social media event/campaign; the rapper seems to be turning into the new Ashton Kutcher these days. Snoop seems to have an affection for location based social network Fousquare and also recently partnered with PlaySpan to peddle his branded virtual goods.

While Google is testing search results that update as you type on its own, startup CloudMagic is bringing that functionality to Gmail and Google Apps – and other cloud-based services in the near future – by means of a Firefox and Chrome browser extension.

Installing the extension results in an extra search box in your Gmail interface that allows you to rapidly search for anything in your inbox, with results updating as you type and the ability to preview messages from a thread in a tab or open entire conversations with a single click.

If you’re a Gmail power user like I am, you need to hear no more to realize how useful that functionality is. It’s entirely free, so nothing should stop you from installing either (account credentials are stored locally, and not on CloudMagic’s servers).

I installed it, and while the speedy search and email conversation previews are nice and welcome, the one thing that will make me get used to CloudMagic very quickly is the fact that when you have tabs open with search results, they remain up on top on the right-hand side while you peruse other emails or compose new emails to people.

This basically means no longer having to open another tab to search for e.g. a telephone number in Gmail I’d like to pass on to someone else by email. And if you want to go back to the full Gmail interface, all you need to do is hit the shortcut key (Esc).

That feature alone will save me a couple of hours per month, and that’s a whole lot in my book.

The app is currently limited to Gmail and Google Apps, but will soon be introduced for Google Docs, Hotmail, Yahoo & other cloud services.

Magic? Nah. Terribly useful? Yes, Sir.

(Also check out Rapportive, another plugin that makes Gmail better).

Reports are appearing this morning about a major security hole in iTunes accounts linked to PayPal. At least one group of scammers has found a way to charge thousands of dollars to iTunes accounts through PayPal. One targeted customer told us, “My account was charged over $4700. I called security at PayPal and was told a large number of iTunes store accounts were compromised.” His email was filled with nearly 50 receipts from PayPall for $99.99 each. He was able to catch it before his bank disbursed funds to PayPal.

But others were not so lucky. A quick search of Twitter and Facebook shows that the problem is not isolated. Joey Bruce on Twitter laments:

Someone hacked my iTunes/paypal acct and drained everything from my bank account. Life is kicking me in the balls while I’m down.

A search of public status updates on Facebook uncovers more people with the same issue:

Darn…what a day! Someone hacked into my itunes account and bought a crap load of downloads and emptied out my paypal account….grrrrr. . . . Paypal is very cooperative but there is just about no way to get ahold of itunes. I did call paypal and they assured me that they had contacted itunes and it was going to be taken care of in my favor.

so apple/itunes had a security breach & someone bought over $500 worth of music through my paypal account. just what i wanted 2 b dealing w/ while in San Diego! AWESOME!!!

Everybody watch your itunes account closely. I just got hacked for almost $1000.00 worth of software, videos and music. Hopefully paypal will refund it all. . . . This happened within the last few hours. Once transaction after another.

AT least PayPal is aware of the issue, but it seems like the problem is on the iTunes side.

While the value of this information is fairly dubious and fraught with hidden factors, it seems that the Kindle store is outselling the iBooks store (on iPad) by 60 to 1. First, let’s look at the source of this information and then discuss why ebooks are winning and, more specifically, the Kindle store won.

A young man name J.A. Konrath, who seems to write mysteries, noted that he sells many, many ebooks, commenting that the Kindle store is literally making all of his boat payments for him. However, the iBook store is garbage. He writes:

That leaves Apple, and according to my numbers Apple is a very small part of the ebook market. I sell 200 ebooks a day on Kindle. On iPad, I sell 100 a month.

Read more…

Germany-based Brand Science Institute, a renowned think-tank focused on brand and consumer management, has carried out a fairly extensive study on corporate social media projects over the past 7 months. Focal point of the research was a desire to understand why (most) social media projects tend to be utter failures. BSI questioned 560+ marketers representing 52 brands from some of the largest companies across 12 European countries, and poured the end results in a presentation.

Edging down Natchez Trace parkway, in the mountains just southwest of Nashville, a small convoy of journalists deftly put the new 2011 Ford Edge through its paces. When making passes along the route one couldn't help but notice smiles gleaming on the faces of the other journos.

We tested both the 22-inch rolling Edge Sport and the $10K cheaper Edge SEL. This vehicle is the first from Ford to include the new MyFord Touch system – a fully interactive suite of tools for your driving experience – and it was an experience. Remember when you were younger and imagined cars that drove themselves, listened and talked to you and offered beautiful displays to showcase information, that's MyFord Touch – sans auto-drive, for now.

Read more…

A new law in Germany could soon make it illegal for employers to check out prospective job candidates on Facebook and other non-career focused social networks, according to local newspaper reports. Bizarrely, however, it will still be legal to "google" applicants, although they are to disregard information that is either too old or outside of a candidate's control. Social networks specifically designed for professional purposes, think LinkedIn or the larger local player Xing, are OK too. (Interestingly, there's no provision for Google CEO Eric Schmidt's prediction that a free and legal name change once a person reaches adulthood could be the solution.)

HP has proposed to acquire data storage company 3PAR for $24 per share in cash, or roughly $1.6 billion. Thus, it trumps Dell's offer to buy out the company for $18 per share or $1.13 billion. The proposed transaction represents a 33.3 percent premium above the price proposed by Dell, is not subject to any financing contingency and has been approved by HP's board of directors. If and once approved by 3PAR's board, HP expects the transaction to close by the end of the calendar year.

At the moment Facebook Places is only available in the United States. Or to put that another way, it's only available to IP addresses associated with the United States. But clearly Facebook has been working on it for several months, and that also means that they have probably been tentatively testing it in other parts of the world, although there's not a lot of information to go on right now. But, handily, Mark Zuckerberg travels a lot and has probably been testing Places out himself. Evidence to that affect has emerged today via a developer in London. Arun Stephens has uncovered what looks, at least to our eyes, like a Facebook Places footprint which Zuckerberg and his entourage left behind on their recent visit to the FB hack day and Facebook Developer Garage in London. His findings make interesting reading.

WorldTV, which funnels the world of web video as a TV-like experience, has gone High-Definition, adding full support for YouTube HD videos. The feature allows users to set the quality for how they would like YouTube videos to be played and scales the video to the highest quality available. On WorldTV the idea is that you create you own channel of preferred web videos, eventually coming up with something that feels more like linear TV. So far there have been 225,000 channels created on WorldTV from users in 200 countries. Interestingly the site is biggest in Brazil. WorldTV users use the site's chanel editing tools to incorporate clips from YouTube, live video, and 25 other sites, like an iPhoto of videos. Every playlist creates a channel which is then embeddable. The end game will be a WorldTV app which turns your TV into Internet video TV.

There’s a new “next generation” digital publishing solutions provider in town, and its name is liquidpubs. Offering tools and services for publishing for smartphones and tablet computers, specifically, the startup aims to cater to publishers of magazines, newspapers and books wanting to get their content onto devices like the iPad and iPhone.

Of note: one of the company’s creative directors is Rob Janoff, a graphic designer probably most famous for his creation of the Apple logo (the rainbow bitten apple one, not the early Isaac Newton one) and his later design work for the likes of IBM and Intel.

The other creative director is renowned photographer and image artist Alexx Henry, but let’s not digress too much.

Liquidpubs is essentially a set of services and technologies that allows publishers of magazines, newspapers and books to offer owners of the iPad, an iPhone or an Android based tablet or smartphone an experience of their content specifically made for said devices.

Initially, the liquidpubs team will customize and brand its technology for magazine and newspaper publishers in particular. This includes interface design, app customization, and linkages to content management systems, with available plugins for design programs like Adobe InDesign. The branded app is then launched publicly via the iTunes App Store and/or Android Market, and publishers can continue to add interactive content to it at will.

Here’s a feature overview, including pretty pictures.

Post-launch services and support include payment processing, real-time readership stats, app updates, and further programming and design support. Also part of liquidpubs’ post-launch service is motion and still photography for nifty magazine covers and interactive content. Needless to say, with creative directors like the two men cited above on board, that’s a pretty decent value proposition.

Additionally, the ‘liquidpubs eBook publish’ solution services book publishing houses and self-publishers wanting optimized, digital and publication-ready versions of their print books on the eBook marketplace.

Social mobile app directory Appolicious is deepening its integration with Yahoo today with the launch of ‘yap.appolicious.com,’ a website that to help people find an apps that run on Yahoo’s platform, and the re-launch and design of AndroidApps.com, a website that helps people find Android Apps. Earlier this year Appolicious announced a partnership with Yahoo to co-brand its Appolicious app directory. The startup’s founder Alan Warms (who sold his previous startups to Yahoo) says that traffic to Appolicious is exploding thanks to the partnership.

Appolicious, which owns AndroidApps.com through its AppVee acquisition earlier this year, will now offer the Yahoo-branded mobile apps experience across all of its verticals (including the new vertical (Yahoo Apps).

Similar to Appolicious’ main site, links to Yap.Appolicious.com and AndroidApps.com original articles about mobile apps will be featured elevant content on Yahoo's media properties, including News, Sports and Finance. And both sites will now have the branded logo with “in association with Yahoo,” included.

Appolicious also announced a new federated search functionality across the three properties that allows users to access user generated app lists, articles written about apps relevant to the search, and apps from the Appolicious recommendation engine. Additionally, Appolicious is releasing an Android app today, which like its iPhone cousin, allows user to import their app directory to the site, ratings, reviews, profiles, curated app lists, app pages, and more.

Besides the Yahoo integration Appolicious has had a big year when it comes to product enhancements. The startup rolled out curated lists and launched an Appo.me URL Shortener for links to apps, and a Twicker ad model, which allows users to view tweets and offers from sponsors on the site. Late last year, Appolicious raised $1.5 million in funding and debuted an iPhone app.

Fresh off the heels of Intel acquiring security software vendor McAfee for $7.7 billion in cash, another household name in the industry, AVAST Software, has raised $100 million in private equity from investment firm Summit Partners.

With the investment, Summit Partners has acquired a minority stake in the company, which markets its popular antivirus software based on a freemium model.

AVAST Software CEO Vince Steckler says the combination of offering a free product alongside a premium one has disrupted the tradition antivirus software market, where vendors often rely on advertising or installation fees for revenues. Steckler added that they’ll stick to this approach for the foreseeable future.

According to the company, its software suite – avast! antivirus – currently protects one out of every five computers around the world from malware. One of the co-founders of AVAST Software, Pavel Baudis, is cited as saying that the company’s Virus Lab adds around 3,000 new virus samples to its database on a daily basis, compared to a single virus emergence every six months when he wrote a program to remove the Vienna virus back in 1988.

We covered other Summit Partners investments in the past, including its participation in the $23 million round for Cloudmark together with Nokia Growth Partners.

Summit Partners clearly eyes Europe for interesting financing deals, too; AVAST Software is based in Prague, Czech Republic and the growth equity firm recently acquired a majority stake in Belgium-based e-payments provider Ogone.

Source: press release

In this Sunday’s New York Times, reporter Brian Stelter outlines his using Twitter as a tool for weight loss by setting up a @brianstelter25 account for his progress and tweeting out his exercise plan and meals.

"I knew that I could not diet alone; I needed the help of a cheering section."

He ended up losing 75 pounds.

On my birthday this year, I decided that 15 years of smoking were enough and tossed cigarettes. I didn’t tweet about it at first, mostly because I felt really sick from nicotine withdrawals –- but on day three I mustered enough energy to pound out the above missive.

The amount of support I received then and in the days afterward was overwhelming, and much like Stelter I would have felt like I’d let people down if I picked up a cigarette instead of my iPhone.

I stuck to my guns and stuck on my nicotine patches, tweeting instead of smoking when in at-risk situations like parties with friends and passing by airport entrances.

I loved smoking like Stelter loved Dunkin' Donuts, but seeing the support tweets like this one from Lowercase Capital's Chris Sacca and this one from Twitter’s Troy Holden made me think twice before buying a pack of cigarettes, no matter how much the urge to smoke burned.

I could not quit alone, I needed the help of a cheering section.

Why do people overeat, or smoke or drink in the first place? In my experience it's either because they want attention or need to be soothed. If you can replace the “stress relief” or whatever satisfaction unhealthy behaviors give you with the positive feelings engendered by reinforcement from the people you're connected with on Twitter, then Twitter becomes a powerful supplemental tool in the management of addiction.

“Then she mentioned, casually, ‘By the way, I've lost 50 pounds along with you.”

The idea of using Twitter as a support group is as new as Twitter itself, but I’ve heard countless stories like Stelter's, whether it's OneForty's Laura Fitton using it to make sure she does her yoga poses every day or our own Paul Carr and his successful attempt at quitting drinking.

One of the more haunting Twit-quitting stories: ZDNet blogger Marc Orchant’s last tweet before his death was in support of blogger Aaron Brazell’s efforts to kick the habit.

And sure some may argue that the gross self-indulgence of the first vice is replaced by the gross self-indulgence of the second. But I'll take TMI over black lungs any day.

And of course, there’s a Twitter app for that.

Recommendation site Hunch has been going through a reboot lately. Back in June, it stopped showing results to people who are not signed in, and earlier this month it redesigned its home page to offer personalized taste recommendations across a wide variety of categories such as dog breeds, U.S. national parks, camcorders, soft drinks, luggage, and film directors.

Now it is testing out local recommendations on a map with a sidebar showing restaurants, nightlife, hotels, spas, clothing stores, and more. Hunch local tries to figure out which spots your friends on different services might like (you can sign in with your Twitter or Facebook account) and offers them up at the top of its local search results. Each spot has a corresponding pin on the map. You can filter by different types of venues, and there is also a slider which lets you select more personalized “unique” results or more “popular” ones.

The restaurant recommendations it gave me are pretty decent for an early alpha. In New York City, it suggested Katz’s Delicatessen (a classic), Artichoke Pizza (trendy), Momofuku Noodle Bar (if only I could get in), and Hundred Acres (my wife went there last night! no joke). Each spot contains links back to profiles on Foursquare, Yelp, Hunch, or other places, just like a local search engine.

“It starts out looking at what your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare friends like, and then gets smarter over time as people give feedback,” says Hunch founder Chris Dixon. He notes that the feature just launched in alpha and is far from fully baked. His plan is to partner with Foursquare, Yelp and others to get their direct data feed of all of their places, which should improve the data.

Hunch took a hit when it started requiring that all visitors sign in. According to comScore, the site went from about 750,000 unique visitors in May, to 250,000 in June, but it already started rebounding in July to 350,000. These numbers undercount Hunch’s actual visitors by at least half, but the trend is right. By focusing on its core “taste graph” and giving people actionable recommendations every time they log in, Hunch is making the right moves to get back on track. Before, Hunch was interesting, but vague. I wasn’t really sure why I needed to go there. Now there are more and more specific reasons, and Hunch Local is something I will definitely go back to try out when I need to find a new place for lunch.

The problem is obvious: it’s hard to launch a startup. But one potential solution, great mentorship and support, isn’t so easy to come by. With their own startup of sorts, seven ex-Googlers are going to attempt to solve that.

While there isn’t too much information out there just yet about AngelPad, it should be something very interesting to watch in the next couple of weeks. A tweet today (the first from their account), reveals a launch date of Friday, September 10 and the opening of an office in San Francisco.

So what exactly is AngelPad? As they briefly state on their site:

AngelPad is a mentorship program founded by a team of ex-Googlers to help web-technology startups build better products, attract additional funding and ultimately grow more successful businesses.

As they also note on their site, AngelPad is about “founders and angels working together to build great startups.” In other words, it’s an incubator.

While at first, it undoubtedly won’t be as structured as something like Y Combinator or TechStars, given the pedigree of the people involved, AngelPad could be a hit among young startups in the Valley.

Here are the seven ex-Googlers involved complete with the bios they included on their team page:

Thomas Korte
Thomas is an active angel investor and startup advisor. Before investing in web technology startups, Thomas was a longtime Product Evangelist for Google and the company's first international product marketing manager responsible for European advertiser and partner acquisition.

Richard Chen
Rich is an active investor and board member with several technology startups. Previously, Rich led Google's product strategy for international versions of its advertising, content, and distribution products. He also founded an interactive marketing agency based in Tokyo, Japan.

David Scacco
David is the Chief Revenue Office of Mylikes and an active angel investor. Prior to Mylikes, David was a longtime Google business executive and the company's first advertising sales executive. He was responsible for Google's sales strategy dating back to 2000.

Vibuh Mittal
Vibhu is the founder of Root-1 Research and an active angel investor. Prior to Root-1, Vibhu was at Google Research where he worked on a variety of machine learning technologies – several of which made it to publicly facing products. He has also worked at Xerox PARC, Carnegie Mellon University and TIFR, Bombay.

Gokul Rajaram
Gokul is the founder and CEO of Chai Labs and a board member for several internet startups. Prior to founding his own company, Gokul was a Google Product Management executive who helped start Google's Adsense partner business and other key products.

Deep Nishar
Deep is the Vice President of Products & User Experience at LinkedIn. Prior to LinkedIn, he was a Google executive who helped start Google's mobile business and was responsible for the product strategy in the Asia-Pacific region.

Keval Dasai
Keval is the VP of Product at Digg. Prior to Digg, Keval was a Google Product Management executive responsible for Google's AdWords, Syndication & TV Advertising products.

As I said, this a solid list of people that could undoubtedly help any startup. Expect to hear more about this in the coming weeks an months.

Ad network Federated Media is announcing an acquisition today, buying a semantic profiling technology platform from semantic search startup TextDigger today. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

TextDigger, which was incubated at CNET in 2005, spun out a platform for semantic search and related services. TextDigger's technology allows owners of large content
collections to add semantics indexing on top of an existing keyword search engine.

Federated Media will use the new technology to add semantic technology to content tagging, filtering, topic extraction, and SEO. The technology will also be used for ad targeting, and semantic search engine optimization for a site or network of sites. As you may know, Federated went beyond just serving ads a few years ago, to giving advertisers and publishers a marketing toolbox to see how people interact with these ads.

Tim Musgrove, TextDigger's founder, will join Federated as Chief Scientist, while retaining an affiliation with TextDigger as their Senior Research Fellow. TextDigger will continue its search business. TextDigger will bring over 5 customers to Federated

Federated Medias founder John Battelle tells me that the acquisition (which he says is the first in the company’s history), will help website owners make their content more engaging. He says the buy is part of of the company’s aggressive strategt towards boosting its product offerings. Last fall, the Federates launched more ad-units and social media-focused ads. The company also recently brought on a Chief Product Officer as well.

After shopping the company around in 2008 and not finding a buyer willing to pay his price, Federated raised a $50 million investment round instead. The company is now profitable and reaches 70 million uniques worldwide.

When it comes to mobile app stores, there’s iTunes and then there is everyone else. PocketGear which bills itself as the “World’s Largest Mobile App Store,” closed a $15 million series B round. The round was led by Trident Capital, with the Blackberry Partners Fund and Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s personal investment vehicle, TomorrowVentures.

PocketGear isn’t the prettiest app store in the world, but it sells apps for practically every smartphone platform except one (that would be the other App Store). PocketGear sells apps for Blackberry, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm, Symbian, and Java phones. It distributes more than 140,000 paid and free titles, and claims that it has sold more than $2.5 billion worth of apps total (which would make it bigger than iTunes, which just recently crossed the $1 billion mark).

Obviously, there is a large and growing market for mobile apps across multiple smartphones that are not made by Apple, and PocketGear aims to be a one-stop shop for all of those apps. PocketGear is based in Durham, NC and was bought out from mobile phone software platform Motricity by Jud Bowman, who was CTO and co-founder of Motricity and now acts as CEO of PocketGear. Previous investors include Noro-Moseley Partners and Wakefield Group.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare
- W.H. Davies, Leisure

A little over a week ago, I closed down all of my social media accounts, with the exception of Twitter, which I locked. The explanation I gave was that, in an age when everyone and their dog is sharing every aspect of their life, being a digital recluse is the new "Internet famous".

Since then, some people have criticized my logic – pointing out that if I really wanted to be a digital recluse then I'd close Twitter too. By drawing attention to myself for becoming a semi-hermit, am I not just trying to have my social media cake and eat it too?

Perhaps. The truth is that there were numerous reasons for me wanting to dial down my use of social media, but presenting numerous arguments in one column is the kiss of death to a columnist. The neo-narcissistic benefits of locking Twitter were what finally made my decision, and so that was the reason I gave. The others would keep.

This morning, though, Leo Laporte wrote a hugely revealing blog post and, in doing so, artfully proved the misquoted maxim that the medium is the message. In short: Laporte discovered last night that, due to a glitch in Google Buzz, several weeks of his updates had failed to reach either Buzz or Twitter. The kicker? Not one of his tens of thousands of followers had noticed, or cared.

Leo's response was a vow to turn his attentions back to his blog – a place where people visit specifically to read about Leo, and where they email in the hundreds if he skips an update. By contrast, he argues, people on Twitter are so busy broadcasting their own updates that they're unable or unwilling to listen to others'.

But, while I certainly agree with Leo's reasoning for abandoning Buzz and going back to macro-blogging, it was another – almost throw-away – line in his post that chimed most loudly with me.

“I should have been posting [on his blog] all along. Had I been doing so I'd have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs.”

Reading that line, I instantly felt Leo's pain. When I was researching my most recent book – which mainly focusses on the events of the past three years of my life – I spent several days going back through my blog archives, plus Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and the rest – to remind myself of details and events that may have been missing from my more traditional notes. What I found – or rather didn't find – shocked me.

Throughout my earlier archives, I was able to find lengthy, sometimes surprisingly personal, posts – recounting the highs and lows of starting companies, making and losing friends, leaving London, beginning to travel around America and Europe… and countless other published episodes that backed up, and enhanced the contents of my private notebooks. But then, as I clicked forward through the archives to more recent years, something odd happened. At a certain point, the number of posts in each monthly archive dropped off a cliff, particularly where details of my personal life were concerned.

The reason, of course, was that I'd started to use Twitter for that kind of personal stuff. Unperturbed, I moved my research attentions away from my blog archives and over to my Twitter archives – and that's when I started to panic: for all the dozens of updates I wrote each month, there was absolutely no substance to any of them.

"I am learning a lot about pens." reads one update from last year. What does that even mean? "Ok, that’s quite enough of all this. I’m going out", reads another. Enough of all what? And where was I going? Of course, the fact that I'm a particularly boring tweeter doesn't help, but look at anyone's Twitter account and it's the same story – 140 characters simply doesn't give enough depth or breadth to commit events, memories or feelings to the permanent record.

I'm one of the lucky ones: I hand-write a lot – and I mean a lot – of notes. Recalling personal experiences is what pays my rent so I have dozens of Moleskine books full of memories to look back on. I also have a similar number of published columns and a couple of memoirs to refer to if my recollection gets patchy.

Others aren't so fortunate. A decade or so ago, a new generation who would previously have kept diaries instead started to set up blogs. Sure those blogs may have been twee or self-absorbed or clumsily written or emo or just plain boring – isn't that the joy of a diary? – but they at least required the writer to take the time to process the events of their life, and the attendant emotions they generated – before putting finger to keyboard. The result, in many cases, was a detailed archive of events and memories that they can look back on now and say "that was how I was then".

And then along came micro-blogging – and, with a finite amount of time and effort available, the blog generation turned into the Twitter (or Facebook) generation. A million blogs withered and died as their authors stopped taking the time to process their thoughts and switched instead to simply copying and pasting them into the world, 140 meaningless characters at a time. The result: a whole lot of sound and mundanity, signifying nothing.

To argue for a mass switch back from Tweeting to Livejournaling (or Bloggering, or Movable Typing…) in the interests of the permanent record is as ridiculous as campaigning for everyone to abandon instant messaging and return to letter-writing. The fact is people are busy (or lazy, depending on your view of humanity) and for the vast majority, immediacy will always trump posterity.

But for those of us who have had reason to look back at the past few years – like me writing my book, or Leo having "woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I've put in others' hands" – the realisation is slightly terrifying: by constantly micro-broadcasting everything, we've ended up macro-remembering almost nothing.

Chatroulette, the service that lets strangers meet over video, has been taken down. A message reads “The experiment #1 is over for now. Thanks for participating – Redesigned and updated version of the website will be launched tomorrow.”

We’ve also heard, but haven’t confirmed, that Napster founder Shawn Fanning has broken ties with the company and is no longer advising founder Andrey Ternovskiy.

The title of this post kind of says it all. As pointed out by blockzuck.com, you can block anyone on Facebook except CEO Mark Zuckerberg. If you try to do it (we did), you’ll get a message saying “General Block failed error: Block failed.”

This kind of thing is funny, and adds a little personality to the site. But Facebook is getting way too big and culturally important for things like this to continue. In 2005 it was cool for Zuckerberg to have a business card that said “I’m CEO…Bitch.” And we can forgive early Facebook engineers from perusing confidential user data in their leisure time. But it’s time for this company to go through puberty and start acting more like a teenager than a fifth grader. If you want to block Zuckerberg, you should be able to block Zuckerberg.

Flash sales sites like Gilt Groupe have proven to not only be a popular e-commerce experience, but also a profitable business model. In fact, Gilt is on track to hit $450 million in revenue this year, with rumors of an IPO swirling. But while Gilt pioneered clothing and accessory-focused flash sales, One Kings Lane entered the space last year as one of the first sites to go after the home goods market.

Launched in April of 2009, One Kings Lane runs brand- and theme-specific sales, at least two to three per day, five days a week. During the 72-hour window that items are on sale, members have can move to purchase limited quantity of hand-selected home goods products at significantly reduced prices. Luxury items range from Ralph Lauren home accessories, to Missoni towels to Frette sheets.

Founded by Alison Gelb Pincus (the wife of Zynga’s founder Mark Pincus) and Susan Feldman, One Kings Lane raised an undisclosed amount of funding from led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, First Round Capital and angel investor Reid Hoffman last December.

However, as other flash sales site, such as Gilt and Ideeli; have entered the luxury home goods vertical, One Kings Lane is now facing a considerable amount of competition to the space. But Pincus doesn’t seem to be to worried about the added players in the arena and tells me that she welcomes the challenge of competing with Gilt in the home goods space.

Pincus and Feldman just brought on a new CEO Doug Mack, a seasoned e-commerce exec. Mack co-founded Scene7, a rich media platform provider for the e-commerce industry, which was eventually sold to Adobe. The site has also added Tastemaker Tag Sales, which allows renown interior designers to create curated sales of items that reflect their style. Mack tells me that these sales are meant to give users fresh content and design inspiration from professionals. And for designers, Tastemaker Tag sales are an opportunity to draw attention to their brand and style.

And One Kings Lane is seeing significant growth. Q3 sales are up 561 percent year over year and the site is seeing high loyalty from consumers, with more than 50% of customers as repeat purchasers. One Kings Lane is now getting into other verticals and will be launching food category in the near future.

It should be interesting to see how One Kings Lane continues to compete with challengers like Gilt. One way the startup could drive traffic is via partnerships with retail stores. Gilt just launched a sale with Target to feature the store’s designer-created home goods and fashions. While One Kings Lane would want to retain its focus on the luxury home goods market, a deal with stores like Restoration Hardware or Design Within Reach could be a good fit.

Regardless, the flash sales model for e-commerce is here to stay and One Kings Lane is proving that vertical-focused sites can grow in the crowded space.