Oh, glorious day. Britney Spears is no longer the Queen of Twitter. She has been toppled from her thrown. A cultural milestone? Perhaps. But wait. The new Queen of Twitter is Lady Gaga. Is that any better? At least she is more entertaining, or at least more self-aware.

Sometime last night, her highness Lady Gaga passed Britney in Twitter followers. She currently has 5,777,492 to Britney’s 5,721,702. And she gloated appropriately enough via Twitter and the odd YouTube video below.

There are currently only five people with more than five million followers on Twitter (Lady Gaga, Britney, Ashton Kutcher, Ellene Degeneres, and Barack Obama). Justin Bieber will soon join them. The top ten people on Twitter are all celebrities, as is most of the top 50. Twitter is mainstream, and has been for a while. But which of those celebrities is able to rally their followers the best to actually do something—whether that is buying albums and concert tickets or rallying behind a cause?

In a way it is appropriate that LAdy Gaga is now at the top of Twitter. It is the ultimate medium for constant self-promotion.

The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen.

You would think most people know how to get a simple web site up and running these days just on something like Wordpress, but the fact remains that millions of people don't have these skills. As a result Moonfruit, the web site building business which has survived the dotcom bust to return in the age of Web 2.0, is on a charge. It's profitable, growing internationally and as a result has chosen to fundraise to really take the market on. It's just secured $2.25m from U.S. investment bank Stephens. The bank originally helped Moonfruit to buy Gandi.net, the domain registrar but since then Moonfruit has been spun out to go for accelerated international growth. Moonfruit competes with Weebly, Yola and Webnode, and many others that provide services for building simple but elegant web sites, as opposed to blogs. Clearly its drag and drop Flash interface appeals to 'design aspirers' who want to customise their own site styles. Moonfruit is a real blast form the past come good. It was founded in the UK in 1999, went through the whole VC-backed-to-bust cycle but fought back and now over 2.8m websites have been built using its DIY software. But it managed to re-invigorate it's brand last year by being among the first to trend on Twitter for a laptop giveaway contest. Try that now.

Apture, the startup that lets online publishers enhance content with rich media pop-ups from a variety of sources based on the context of linked words and terms, is launching a nifty new plug-in today that brings instantaneous search to content on the web.

Called ‘Apture Highlights,’ the browser extension aims to plug the "search leak" that the company says is taking place with content on the web. Apture highlights a search leak as when a users is reading content, wants more information about a keyword or phrase and then opens another browser tab to search for the information on Google, Bing or Yahoo. The downside for the content publisher is that the user disengages with the actual content by leaving the page.

Apture Highlights allows you to highlight any word or phrase on a page and instantly bring up search results in a window. The startup brings results from 60-plus sources including YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Google and more for extra context around content. The browser add-on is currently available for Chrome, Firefox and Apple's Safari browsers.

Apture has been offering the technology for publishers such as the Financial Times and Reuters for some time now. But this is new add-on represents the startup’s first offerings for consumers. And publishers say that Apture’s plug-in increases engagement, with interaction with their site increasing by two to three times when activated. Apture says that publishers are also increasing their search volume and site page views by driving traffic to related articles for every search.

I’ve installed the add-on and it’s actually very useful for looking up keywords without needing to leave the page or article. And adding context to content through search is something that even large tech companies like Yahoo are trying to get into. Yahoo just released a feature called Infinite Browse, which will suggest searches for specific terms around news content. Similar to Apture, the idea behind the new feature is to allow readers to access related content they would search for without having to go to a separate search portal and type in the query.

Launched in 2008, Apture has raised $4.1 million in funding.

According to a rumor on the Internet, Facebook may be rolling out a new data center filled with servers using ARM CPUs rather than the more traditional chips from Intel and AMD. ARM chips are less complex than x86 systems, and ARM is ubiquitous in mobile computing environments. The simplicity of the architecture makes the systems far more energy efficient, which is a pretty serious concern when you're a company like Facebook building a new data center.

A few weeks ago, location-based game SCVNGR launched a new feature called Rewards that makes it an increasing threat to the likes of shopkick, Foursquare, and every other company looking to combine the power of coupons and deals with location.  The premise is simple: complete SCVNGR challenges to earn points, which you can in turn redeem for rewards at select merchants like Journeys. And today SCVNGR is adding a key new partner to its Rewards program: AT&T.

Over 50 AT&T stores across the midwest will be promoting SCVNGR as part of the launch of the new Samsung Captivate. AT&T will be using SCVNGR to offer three rewards: if you earn two SCVNGR points, you’ll get a free giftcard for a ring tone. Earn five points and you get 20% off accessories. And, in an especially compelling offer, if you earn 15 points at a store you get $50 off the phone — not too shabby.  The deal is currently only running in the midwest, but SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch sounds optimistic about AT&T pursuing a wider deployment depending on how this goes. Oh, and SCVNGR is getting paid for the AT&T deal, though Priebatsch unsurprisingly wouldn’t get into specifics.

Unlike check-ins on Foursquare and Facebook Places, which aren’t especially engaging, SCVNGR revolves around more interactive challenges. For example, one challenge might ask you to take a goofy photo of a friend holding his new Android phone at the AT&T store. Other challenges include the recently-launched social check-in, which entails getting a few friends to tap their phones together to ‘check-in’ at the same place.

Each of these actions earns points, which can be used toward SCVNGR rewards. Once you’ve earned enough points to redeem a reward, SCVNGR displays a screen on your phone instructing the cashier on how to give you your discount (this is more straightforward than having to print out a separate coupon).

Priebatsch says that one interesting observation the company has seen since the launch of Rewards involves the distinction between coupons and rewards. He explains that many retailers aren’t particularly found of coupons, because they can cheapen the value of a given item in the buyer’s mind (he says the term “race to the bottom” frequently comes up in this context). Rewards, on the other hand — where the buyer needs to complete some tasks before they’re given access to the discount — don’t have that effect, because the buyer feels like they had to earn it, even if the net effect is the same at the cash register.

Partnerships like the AT&T deal are important for SCVNGR, because the war over location looks like it will increasingly be fought through deals, rewards, and other partnerships. The basic act of checking into a venue is becoming commoditized, especially with the launch of Facebook Places and services like SimpleGeo — now startups are going to be adding additional layers like rich gameplay to attract more eyeballs and more businesses.

The (in my opinion entirely justified) hype surrounding private sales sites like Gilt Groupe, Vente Privée, Beyond The Rack and One Kings Lane have prompted publicly listed Internet retailer Overstock.com to launch one of its own.

Dubbed Eziba.com, the site will feature exclusive deals on the home decor products from major brands.

As is typical with these types of sites, products will be offered in daily sale events, with sales for selected home decor products starting each day at morning time and lasting between 48 and 72 hours. Orders ship for a $2.95, which is what Overstock.com charges as well.

Eziba.com is free of charge and open to anyone who signs up (or logs in with his Overstock.com credentials), but will not be made accessible through the Overstock.com homepage per se.

Barnes & Noble has reported earnings for its fiscal 2011 first quarter ended July 31, 2010. Total sales for the first quarter were $1.4 billion, a 21% increase compared to the prior year. Sales increased 42% as compared to the prior year to $145 million. Unsurprisingly, Barnes & Noble in-store sales decreased 2% to $1 billion.

For the first quarter, the company reported a consolidated net loss of $63 million, or $1.12 per share. This was the result, the company says, of legal expenses of $9.5 million involved with B&N’s dispute with Yucaipa over shareholder control. The company has been embroiled in litigation with private equity firm Yucaipa after the firm’s CEO Ron Burkle recently challenged the company's stockholders rights plan.

Of course digital is now key to B&N’s future, says the company. B&N’s eBook reader, the NOOK, has helped the company gain greater market share in digital books than it has in physical books. ANd eBook sales are accelerating week-over-week, says B&N. The compnay’s customers who have NOOK devices have increased their spending by approximately 20%. NOOK has also greatly expanded the Barnes & Noble customer base, with 25% of all NOOK customers new to BN.com.

B&N has added new leadership to the digital and e-commerce sectors of the company, naming Jamie Lannone as President of Barnes & Noble Digital Products and John Foley as President of Barnes & Noble eCommerce.

A few months ago, Barnes & Noble debuted the NOOK Wi-Fi at $149, and a new lower price for its NOOK 3G model at $199. And company now has NOOK apps for Android, iPhone and the iPad.

Of course, the digital book space is heating up as competitors vie for the biggest piece of the pie. Amazon slashed the price of its Kindle device. And Apple is now playing in the space with iBooks and the iPad. Plus, Google is expected to launch Google Editions, their e-Book platform soon.

We covered Scitable.com, the social network for science education from Nature Publishing Group, back in May. At that time, I was told that a mobile-friendly version of the site was in the works. Today that mobile site is ready, as seen in the screenshot above. Scitable's Vikram Savkar has been studying broadband adoption, and has drawn some interesting conclusions. Obviously one of those conclusions is that a science education site like Scitable isn't a one-size-fits-all operation. As mentioned in our original review of Scitable, a large portion of the target audience that Scitable is courting may not have easy and regular access to a modern PC with a broadband connection. Instead, many will be using mobile devices.

Apple this morning said iTunes U downloads have topped 300 million, making it one of the world's most popular online educational catalogs. The company also says over 800 universities throughout the world have active iTunes U sites, and nearly half of these institutions distribute their content publicly on the iTunes Store.

Currently, iTunes users have access to more than 350,000 audio and video files from educational institutions around the globe, the company adds.

Created in collaboration with colleges and universities about 3 years ago, iTunes U offers users public access to free content from institutions such as Harvard, MIT, Cambridge, Oxford, University of Melbourne and Université de Montréal.

iTunes U gives users the chance to experience university courses, lab demonstrations, sports highlights, campus tours and special lectures.

Interactive marketing software and services provider ExactTarget this morning launched ExactTarget Australia, following the acquisition of its reseller mPath Global in Sydney and Melbourne. Terms of the acquisition of its 5-year long partner were not disclosed, but all mPath employees are said to have accepted positions with ExactTarget Australia.

The new operation will expand ExactTarget's suite of offerings to the more than 150 clients throughout Asia Pacific previously supported by mPath, including companies like Fairfax Digital, Lend Lease, ING Australia and Tennis Australia. The teams in Sydney and Melbourne will also support marketing campaigns in Asia for ExactTarget clients headquartered in Europe and North America.

mPath Global has served as the exclusive distributor of ExactTarget's technology throughout Asia Pacific since 2005. Clients throughout Australia, New Zealand and Asia previously served by mPath will now be served directly by ExactTarget's teams in Sydney and Melbourne.

The teams will also support marketing campaigns in Asia for ExactTarget clients headquartered in Europe and North America.

Chris Gartlan, founder and CEO of mPath Global, will lead ExactTarget's new Australian operation as managing director. Gartlan previously held marketing roles across Asia Pacific with Hewlett-Packard and General Electric.

The acquisition of mPath Global is the third ExactTarget acquisition in 2010. In March, ExactTarget announced the acquisition of San Francisco-based CoTweet, and in September the company moved to buy U.K.-based Keymail Marketing.

Perhaps unsurprising for a newspaper that probably has more SEO staff than, well, actual journalists, the UK's Daily Mail is hiring a new Search Engine Optimization manager. Interestingly, however, the job advert itself in fact appears in the newspaper's website robots.txt file, which isn't usually designed to be read by humans but is targeted at search engines bots to tell them what content shouldn't be indexed and other related information. The idea being that only particularly geeky SEO types would be snooping around in said file, the type of candidate that the Daily Mail hopes to attract. Here's the 'advert' as spotted by Malcolm Coles, an SEO guy himself:

Up until a few months ago, I was using Facebook the same way I was using Twitter. That is, I was allowing anyone to follow me. But it was different. With Twitter, anyone can follow me without my approval. On Facebook, everyone needs my approval. Though perhaps ill-advised, I was simply blindly approving anyone. Then I stopped.

There was no single reason why I switched my Facebook habits, but I decided that I was going to start using the service the way Facebook made it seem it should be used: befriending only actual friends. I was a bit more lenient — I friended anyone I’ve actually met in person. Everyone else? Gone. I purged several hundred people, cutting my “friends” in half in one day. But now I’m realizing that’s not good enough.

With the launch of Facebook Places, there’s a lot of talk about it being creepy or a potential security nightmare. I think all of that is and will continue to be largely overblown. That said, I’m also sure there will be legitimate causes for concern with the feature — but mainly because people aren’t using Facebook the “right” way. Nor do I think Facebook actually wants them to.

You see, Facebook really did used to be all about friends. As in, your real-life friends that you could connect with online. But in their drive to be the center of the social web and promote sharing (of links, of data, of information, of everything), Facebook is mutating. The problem is that the original social graph isn’t built for this mutation. And we’re going to see that very clearly with things like this new location element.

Facebook wants us to share things more openly, but with Places, they have launched a feature that most people will want to keep close to the vest. They can’t have it both ways, right?

Well, actually they can. But they need to fundamentally change the way their social graph works. It’s a move that would be controversial — but hell, all Facebook moves are controversial. I think ultimately, this would be very beneficial — to both Facebook and the users.

Facebook needs to adopt a friend/follower system.

What I mean by this is that there needs to be a two-tier system for Facebook. On one level, you have the things you share with your friends. On the other, you have what you share with your followers (including your friends). To some degree, you can already do this. But it involves befriending everyone and using Facebook’s convoluted lists to distinguish your real friends. No regular user is going to do this. Ever.

Or, you can use the “everyone” setting (now the default) in your status updates. But I’m still not clear that anyone ever looks at these “everyone” updates besides Facebook, advertisers, and search engines. Facebook needs to allow you to have followers to make this data meaningful.

There should be a simple switch or button on the Status area (and not in some drop-down) that lets you determine if what you’re about to share should be with your followers or with only your friends. And the default should be to share with only your friends (unless you change that in the settings).

Basically, this would morph Facebook into Twitter on one level, and back into the old Facebook on the other. I’ve brought this up before — but again, things like Facebook Places are making this more important.

And it needs to be simple. Currently, the Facebook privacy settings remain a nightmare. Things need to be simplified further — into a followers or friends sharing scheme. All people would be followers unless you marked them as friends. And again, all updates would be done with a big, clearly-labeled switch in the update area — do you want to share this with FRIENDS or FOLLOWERS? It needs to be crystal clear.

Others actually have this sort of system in place. One perfect example that isn’t widely used is Foursquare. The app has a little-known “celebrity mode” feature which allows famous people who sign up for the service to have both friends and followers. Followers are people that you don’t have to explicitly approve, they’re just following you if they choose to. Friends, you still have to explicitly approve. With each check-in, you can chose whether to send the update to just friends or to all those followers. It’s so simple that I almost can’t believe Facebook isn’t doing it.

Since my great Facebook purge, I’ve noticed interaction on the items I post to my profile has gone way down. This is obviously because I have half as many people reading these updates but also likely because many of the ones I purged were followers from Twitter or elsewhere on the web who were more accustomed to the idea of interacting with stuff I share. I miss those people.

But again, I wasn’t actually “friends” with these people, so I’m not sure I want them seeing my location updates or pictures from my vacation. I’d like them as followers, that I can interact with if I chose to.

I know, I know. Fan pages. Facebook fan pages are bullshit. Pure and simple. The fact that Facebook makes you create another profile page that you have to update entirely separately is just lazy. Worse, these pages are crippled. There’s no good way to bring tweets into them (though you can pump them out from the page), nor is there a good way to share your content. They’re just awful. A hassle — nothing more.

So again, why not just befriend everyone and use the lists to managed who can see what? Because that’s also a hassle. And there’s the ridiculous 5,000 friend limit. Can you imagine if Twitter had that?

It’s simply time for Facebook to evolve the social graph. If they want to be the social center of the sharing web, they could do that with such an option. Forget the silly “everyone” button — move to the follower model. Allow people to opt-in to following others but allow that user to determine if they’re actually a friend, and as such, open to more information than a regular follower.

Obviously, this is more complicated than I’m making it seem. But it really doesn’t seem all that complicated. It would just mean a changing of the social graph once again. It would be messy at first. It would mean backlash. But ultimately, I think it would truly make Facebook the center of social sharing.

Until then, all these other networks are going to stick around and continue to grow. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I like the idea of Facebook taking it to the next level. I like the prospect of a network with over 500 million users being open to the concept of following. We would all gain a lot of new followers and also find a lot of new people to follow. More importantly, we would all gain and share a lot more information.

It would be a better-designed Google Buzz with 500 million users built-in. It would be a richer Twitter with five times the users. It would be a preemptive Google Me-killer. It would be great.

At one point the Chatroulette V.2 anticipation was so thick over at TechCrunch HQ that even we were, how you say, premature. But not as premature as the folks over at Chatroulette themselves, who ominously lured us in yesterday in with, "The experiment #1 is over for now. Thanks for participating – Redesigned and updated version of the website will be launched tomorrow” and then well, nothing.

The silliest part is that I’ve got some kind of update alarm on Chatroulette, so imagine my excitement when I heard the alarm go off at about 11p.m. “YOUR WEBSITE HAS UPDATED.”

Guess what the update was? Someone changed the word “tomorrow” to “shortly” on the site’s cryptic “Coming Soon!” message. Now I’m not sure whether this means it will be launching in the next 30 minutes or the next three days (I’ve emailed founder Andrey Ternovskiy for an exact ETA), but rest assured, you’ll hear about it here first.

Tweet: TechCrunch’s own Roi Carthy

Brand Affinity Technologies (BAT), the company that creates a technology that matches celebrities with endorsement deals, has just raised $20 million in Series C funding led by Miramar Venture Partners, with existing investors Newport Coast Investments, RimLight Capital, Fulcrum Venture Capital, CGI Opportunity Fund II, and Ad Pepper Media International also participating. This brings the company’s total funding to $26 million. We’ve heard that the pre-money valuation was in the ballpark of $60 to $80 million.

BAT's technology includes a research engine that matches advertisers with more than 38,000 celebrities for endorsement deal. The company’s proprietary technology will take into account the ambitions of an ad campaign and the particular brand of a celeb and recommend a deal with the appropriate athletes, actors and more.

The company says that the investment will be used to extend BAT's Endorsement technology into music and other celebrity categories, and international expansion. While BAT’s technology is relatively new, the company is seeing success with its model. While endorsement deals tend to take 6 months from inception to contract signing, BAT says their platform now completes deals in a matter of two weeks.

And the company says that revenues are expected to double this year to $30 million. BAT’s main revenue stream comes from a service fee that advertisers pay to use the technology platform. BAT was founded by serial entrepreneurs Ryan and Chad Steelberg, who together founded and operated three successful companies prior to BAT: dMarc (sold to Google in 2006), AdForce (sold to CMGi in 1999), and 2CAN Media (also sold to CMGi in 1999).

Since launching 18 months ago, BAT has matched campaigns for advertisers such as AT&T, Ford, Comcast, Intuit, and Samsung. And more than 3,600 celebrities have signed on to BAT's Endorsement Platform, including Jorge Posada and Lamar Odom.

YCombinator-funded database analytics company Chart.io launches today, giving businesses access to enterprise level analytics tools that they need to rock their databases in realtime.

In the same space as Metricly and Stats Mix, a tool like Chart.io would have been unnecessary 10 or so years ago, but now co-founder Dan Levine says, “It’s easier than ever to have a database” so everyone and their mother seems to also need interpret one.

Levine, who used to work as a Research Analyst for TechCrunch, got the idea for Chart.io while managing our very own Crunchbase. Currently most companies view and analyze data in a pretty clunky way, by exporting their database into a file and then looking at it in Excel, which aside from being an unwieldy pain, is also bereft of the benefits of realtime and automation.

While there are plenty of solutions for database analytics, they’re costly and not as easy as Chart.io, which works by pulling data out of your database with your permission, loading it onto a web dashboard from which you can create charts from multiple data streams. Because it’s web based you can have a group of people view the results through a permalink instead of emailing an Excel file.

While chart software is not the most exciting or original product, the market for inexpensive B2B database analytics is currently in the tens of thousands, including plenty of younger companies like Eventbrite, Airbnb and HireHive who all need data insight.

In terms of future plans, Co-founders Levine and Dave Fowler plan on building better visualizations with more charts connected to more data sources. They also hope to expand into data interpretation and intelligence services.

Currently in private beta, you can apply for an invite to Chart.io here.

When a service such as Facebook limits users’ creative freedom, it is inevitable that other add-on services will overcome this limitation. This is why then, we see more and more Facebook tab apps that give us more control and freedom when it comes to customizing a fan page or a personal profile.

I can’t really understand why Facebook doesn’t create an editor that lets users create a super fan page. I can only guess they don’t want to deal with it and prefer their uniform design, which may be boring but at least it is consistent and familiar. Instead, Facebook lets other people get creative and offer an array of Facebook related apps built on the API. In any case, you must know this by now: A personalized page can drive more attention and probably, more traffic to your brand.

I’ve written about this subject over, and over, and over again here at TechCrunch. In this post, I just want to give you a clear picture about the best services that are out there, by gathering all the information in one place so it’s easier to save and use as needed. (Also check out AppBistro for more Facebook tab apps and reviews).

Please note that starting today, if you own a page on Facebook, you will need to customize the page under your tab to a width of 520 pixels. The reason Facebook is changing the tab size is because they want to leave the left sidebar open when you navigate from one tab to another, which might make sense, but don’t you just feel like they are changing stuff constantly? It is really hard to follow and adjust to the new changes for everyone, which is not cool. Why would you constantly want to alienate your users?

But I digress. Here are the 12 best services for making Facebook page tabs:

Miproapps—The newest service around, Miproapps allows users to design a fan page by simply dragging & dropping elements to the center of the page. I found it to be one of the best services I’ve tried so far because it really is very easy to use, and it only took me a few minutes to create an interactive fan page.

How it works: You just need to log-in with Facebook Connect, then the service will recognize your existing pages. Pick one, and you can start working on the page: You have basic edits like choosing page colors, height, and background image. Then you can move to the advanced editor and drag widgets from the sidebar to your right, into the center of the page. It includes photo/file sharing, status updates, blogs, audio, contact form, and much more. Easily customize their settings, and your page will be ready in no time. You can always go back and change it any way you see fit. The results are quite good and look like a nice company start-page. But note, that there are lots of widgets to choose from, you might end up with a cluttered page.

Cost: 1 free page/ad supported. (more plans & prices)

Tabfusion is an ultimate tab suite for your fan page and profile. Unlike most of the services offered here, Tabfusion has an app for each tab you want to add. I believe that the Twitter tab is the most used one, and Tabfusion was the first to release this kind of tab. This is probably why it has more than 122,000 monthly active users alone. But there are many more tab apps to choose from and the integration is done in a flash.

How it works: You choose an app from here and authorize the application. You will get an-easy-to-use guide for each app after authorization.

Cost: Profile pages are free. (more plans & prices)

15 apps await you at NorthSocial, a service that can help to make your Facebook page look a lot better than it looks now. Their easy-to-use applications enable anyone to quickly create & manage a custom Facebook page. I didn’t like two things though. First is the fact that each service is individual so you can’t create a page that combines elements such as video and pictures. The other thing is that none of the plans offer you the ability to use the apps in all of your pages.

How it works: Each of the apps are installed onto a Facebook page as a new tab. Each “account” will authorize one Facebook page to install all 15 apps at one time. So you can pick which apps you want to install and they will add tabs to your selected page.

Cost: 14-day free trial. (plans & prices)

Static520 will give you the ultimate welcome page, there’s no question about it. In fact, it is almost like having a mini-site inside your Fan page. If you have a site, this might be too much for you. But if you don’t, and you have your own small business, and are looking for ways to market your brand, then Static520 is a very good place to start.

How it works: A user sign up for the service and adds their content to the massive editor. The next step is to add the static FBML app to the page you want to customize. After you set this up, all you need to do is to copy the Static520 code into the Static FBML app. Change the tab name, and you’re good to go.

Cost: Two weeks of free trial, $19/year. (fair price)

We wrote about Pagemodo recently and since then around 6,000 Pages have been installed. The editor is easy to understand and very pleasant to use. The problem however, might be the fact that Pagemodo creates a static page, which means only text and photos that are not really click-able. But I’ve heard that they are about to launch a new template that will allow you to add video as well, one that will play directly from the page. If you are not satisfied with it you could always try Miproapps for more interaction on the page.

How it works: You go to this editor, log-in with your Facebook account, and then just follow the easy-to-use steps. Watch the Demo.

Cost: One page is free. (more plans & prices)

TabSite is one of the few services that also allows you to create a Welcome tab on your personal Facebook account. So you don’t have to own a page to enjoy and utilize this feature or service.

How it works: Again, you log in through Facebook Connect, then you’ll need to sign up for the service, go through some email verification, and then you can create your own tab. The creation of the tab is done by a text editor similar to WORD, which should be really easy for users to understand. However, after trying other services, I found TabSite to be a bit old fashioned, and I really hated the picture uploader, but it might be that new users will appreciate this kind of experience. You can have one tab for each personal and fan page that you manage. You will be able to manage them all in one easy to use Content Manager area.

Cost: Free for personal profile tab. You’ll need to pay for anything else. (more plans & prices)

Involver probably has the biggest gallery of applications around. Similar to NorthSocial, you can add only one application under one tab (unless you get Involver to maintain the page for you). Anyway, you can enjoy some of the best apps for free. Apps like Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, RSS, and more, are available for download.

How it works: The implementation is easy. Click on your desired app, and Involver will find the pages you admin and will let you choose which page you want to customize. But it looks like this is only a small part of what Involver offers. I’ve seen them partner with Facebook on the Stories page, so they must have some other essential services under development that are probably worth watching out for.

Cost: Free, Pro, and Premium apps.

Static FBML is the pioneer app that lets you add advanced functionality to your Page. This application will add a box to your Page in which you can render HTML or FBML (Facebook Markup Language) for enhanced Page customization. The problem is that you’ll need to know some basic HTML code, or at least find other services to help you deal with the coding (like Flickr, for example), as mentioned in our first guide. Bottom line, this should be your choice if you have the skills for that. If not, I suggest that you try the other services. After all, they are all based on the same principles with the same end goal.

Shoptab is for anyone who wants to bring e-commerce to their Facebook page. The service will help you set up a mini-store under a shop tab on Facebook.

How it works: First, you’ll need to upload your products to the ShopTab interface (which is similar to Google Base). Add “Shop” tab to your Facebook fan page, which allows your fans to browse your products directly on Facebook. If a visitor/fan clicks on “Buy” a product at your page, it will take him to the product page at your site.

Cost: 7 days of free trial. (more plans & prices)

Clobby provides you with a way to chat with people from your own page within a simple-to-use chat tab that can be installed on any Facebook page: profile or fan. Your pages can become a platform for fans to chat, and invite more friends to join in. You’re thinking to yourself: oh, I have chat on Facebook, why would I need another one. Well, Clobby is also a collaborative Chat Room, meaning everyone can join and chat together, which is somewhat neat, somewhat annoying—your choice.

How it works: Click on this link, choose your setup page (profile or page), and simply follow the instructions.

Cost: completely free.

iLike music is perhaps the best known music tab on Facebook. The service has two apps: One for regular profiles, where everyone can list favorite music/artists, get personalized concert alerts, create and share playlists, and discover and share new music and free MP3s. The other app is for professional musicians, where they can upload their own music, and share their events, photos, videos, and blog posts.

Cost: both apps are free to use.

Unlike ‘Like’, RootMusic uses a SoundCloud connection to promote music over a musician’s fan page on Facebook. RootMusic also allows the page creator to design it the way it suits him/her. The results can lead to a great looking page that will stand apart from other pages in Facebook, which is why musicians should use it. The creation process is pretty easy, it just may take some time to add all the information about yourself (bio, gigs date, etc). All you need to do is to connect through Facebook, and RootMusic will guide you from there.

A new feature called YouTube Tracks is an uploader on the BandPage Editor where musicians can upload YouTube Tracks to their profile, which fans can then share with their friends across the web. As a musician, you can link your YouTube account to Adsense so you will start earning revenue from performance royalties every time a fan plays your track. (Demo)

Cost: Free or pay $1.99/month for pro features.

As I mentioned, on Facebook is changing the size of their pages to 520 pixels, which means that page owners (you) will need to customize pages yet again.

If you own a page on Facebook, created by yourself and it contains FBML tabs, I suggest you go and adjust it to the new customization rules. If you use one of the tools above, they will fix it themselves.

BTW, if you need some page design inspiration, you can check out this directory.

*Comparison chart created by competitious.com.

It was last November that we first heard about Chomp, a sort-of Yelp for iPhone apps. At the time, it was still very much in stealth mode, but we kept hearing they raised a seed round of funding from investors like Ron Conway insanely fast. Obviously, we were interested.

By January, we had a sneak peak at the actual service. And about a week later, it formally launched as an app recommendation engine for Apple’s App Store. Another larger round of funding quickly followed, and since then Chomp has been off and running with over 400,000 active users at this point. But now it’s time to take things to the next level — with search.

App discovery in the App Store still basically sucks. There’s the main page which Apple’s curates (and does a nice job with). But beyond that it’s pretty much a nightmare. Discovery is continually under attack by developers trying to game the system by putting bogus words in their titles. And with over 250,000 iPhone apps out there now, there simply needs to be a better way to find the best ones.

Of course, that’s what Chomp has been doing. But up until now, they’ve basically only been doing it based on recommendations from your social graph on Chomp. Yes, there has been some basic search functionality, but it has been no better than the one Apple provides (again, pretty lousy). Today brings the launch of a completely revamped search engine for apps. And notably, it’s in both the Chomp app and on chomp.com.

Co-founder Ben Keighran calls this latest version of Chomp “the most personalized way to search and browse for apps.” He notes that the addition of topic-based search is going to change the way people discover apps. “Imagine having to to go Google and search for ‘www.facebook.com’ — rather than just searching for ‘social network’ and having Facebook come up as a result,” is how he puts it.

Competitors like Appsfire are out there also doing search, but they’re also mainly title (and description) based. In Keighran’s mind, this isn’t enough.

He notes that previously beyond simple name searches results would show up based on popularity of the app. While this isn’t the worst way of doing it, Keighran believes the 50 million recommendations that users have already seeded into Chomp will provide a much better way. “We have a lot of data to build a semantic search engine,” Keighran notes. “We have our own Chomp user sentiment.“

He also notes that they have more reviews in many cases than Apple itself does on apps. The reason is that Chomp makes it very easy to do a review — you say whether you hate the app or love it. And if you want, you can leave a 60-word comment.

Keighran also says that Chomp’s system is better than Apple’s own Genius feature for apps because that’s simply based around what you’ve downloaded. This is all about what people you trust enough to add to your social graph have downloaded and love.

All of this points towards Chomp’s larger goals: to be the place people go to find the best apps no matter what platform they’re on. Currently, Chomp only works for native iPhone apps and web apps for the iPhone, but Android and iPad app search/recommendation is in the works.

Keighran sees a future where apps are everywhere, and people need a single place to find the best of them. Yes, kind of like Google for the web. “This is like the web in 1996,” he says. If this future is realized, he envisions Chomp as having 10 million users by the end of next year. A lofty goal, but perhaps not an insane one.

And if they can get to that size, Keighran sees a lot of money to be made. Sponsored search and recommendations will be a huge business — again, at scale. For now, Chomp is making a small amount of money via affiliate fees from Apple every time someone buys an app by way of Chomp.

So what does Apple think about Chomp one-upping them in app discovery? “Apple is insanely excited about this,” Keighran says. Undoubtedly Google is excited for Chomp to come to Android too. Because this is a very real problem across all platforms and one that’s only growing in size.

As kids flock to the internet for social networking, educational tools and more; safety on the web is becoming a concern for parents. However, one wouldn’t necessarily connect AOL with child safety on the web. But the success of companies like ReputationDefender, SocialShield and Safety Web are showing that now, more than ever, parents are looking to spend money on tools to help protect their kids on the web. Tonight, AOL is launching an new pre-teen/teen online safety application called SafeSocial.

AOL is licensing technology from SocialShield, a startup that offers a web application that targets various security risks on social networks. AOL’s application is similar in functionality to SocialShield. Safe Social will allow parents to monitor their kids social network conversations and actual "friends" network by sending parents real-time alerts if inappropriate conversations are happening (such as mentions of sex, drugs, suicide, and other red flag terms).

And Safe Social will run background checks of "friends" to match against a national registry of child predators, criminal activity, etc. Safe Social will also flag anyone who is not age-appropriate, or who doesn't have other friends in the same network. For example, Safe Social will cross any new friend with Match.com, alerting parents when a child befriends a possible adult on a social network.

The application’s Activities Engine stores every comment and photo a child posts. The photo feature will track all images that are posted by a child, or an photos where a child has been tagged.

Of course, the key to all of this is that the parent has to have the children’s credentials to their accounts to track all of their activities. But as cyber bullying and predators pervade the web and social networks, there is increased pressure on parents to protect their children.

AOL is planning to charge for this service-Safe Social will be free for 30 days and then $9.99 per month. That price includes tracking of a number of childrens’ accounts.

Interestingly, this is the first branded paid consumer service AOL has launched in a number of years. The company’s President of AOL Paid Services Ned Brody, tells me that the new product is in line with AOL’s core values. And he says that we will see a number of consumer-focused subscription products to “help people with different parts of their lives.” It should be interesting to see AOL build out this part of its business after a continued focus on content strategy.

The New York Times highlighted in a recent overview of the space that it’s also important to note that these services are only a piece of the puzzle when it comes to protecting your children online. Parenting and communication is also an important part of avoiding unsafe or inappropriate behavior on social networks.

On Friday, I caught wind that the engineering director in charge of Yahoo’s mobile app development, Sandeep Gupta, had resigned. Now I know where he landed: Next Jump.

Gupta formerly worked at Apple on the iPod, and put out a slew of iPhone and Blackberry apps for Yahoo, including the Flickr iPhone app, Yahoo Messenger, and the Yahoo Entertainment iPad app. His hire by Next Jump signals that the New York City e-commerce company is planning a big push into mobile apps. Next Jump currently operates employee discount and corporate perks programs for more than 90,000 companies and organizations. It also runs one of MasterCard’s rewards programs. Ram Shriram is an investor and board member.

Next Jump targets consumers with deals, and convinces merchants to offer discounts and treat them as a marketing expense. It currently operates a couple of daily deal mobile apps, including Overwhelming Offers on the iPhone and iPad, and Shopping Goddess, where shoppers can gain followers by writing product and store reviews and get discounts by becoming the “mayor” of a store. Next Jump is planning a travel destination review app and a holiday shopping guide with hooks into social commerce.

Daily deal and flash sale sites like Groupon and Gilt are all the rage right now, but Next Jump already has deep ties with more than 30,000 merchants and has been building targeting algorithms which increasingly turn discounts into conversions. The company has mostly stayed behind the scenes powering corporate rewards portals, but its mobile apps are aimed straight at consumers.

Back in the old days, Facebook was a site where college students could share photos of their youthful indiscretions without having to worry too much about their boss or parents stumbling across them. That isn’t the case anymore. This isn’t an inherently bad thing — there’s a reason the site has over 500 million people — but there’s also room for startups to fill in the more private niches that Facebook doesn’t. Enter The Fridge, a Y Combinator-funded site launching today that makes it easy to create private groups that let you use a Facebook-like interface to share photos, links, and status updates.

Today the company is also announcing that it’s closed a seed funding round of over $500K, with a stellar list of investors including Mitch Kapor, Naval Ravikant, Keith Rabois, Jim Young, Jeremy Stoppelman, Jameson Hsu, Geoff Ralston, Jason Sander, and Joshua Schachter.

The Fridge aims to be the perfect service to share a bunch of party photos with only your fraternity brothers, or share stories with only the friends you’ve invited to your wedding, or plan a trip with only your hiking buddies (you get the idea). The whole site is focused on privacy, but you won’t find an array of dials that let you fine-tune which of your twelve buddy lists you want to show a certain photo to. Instead, The Fridge is built around private groups — if you’re in a group you can see everything everyone else in the group shares (you don’t have to ‘friend’ each individually). If you aren’t in a certain group, you won’t even know it exists.  It’s all-or-nothing, and that isn’t a bad thing.

Creating a group is painless: Enter your email address, name your new group, and distribute the private link to each person you’d like to invite. Group creators have some administrative control (you can boot people and disable the private invite link if it gets shared too broadly) but beyond that you don’t have to do much to manage your group.

Once you’re actually in a group, the experience is similar in some ways to Facebook’s core functionality. You can post photos and status updates using a publisher at the top of the screen, and your friends’ recent updates will flow down the page in a stream. Clicking on a member’s icon will take you to their profile page, which has a list of their most recent updates (it also tells you who invited that person to the group). You can see a full list of group members at the left hand side of the screen. You can join more than one group, but each is kept totally separate from the others (you navigate between them in the left sidebar).

Cofounder Austin Chang says that The Fridge’s long-term vision is to build a social graph that in’t based on 1-to-1 connections (as Facebook’s is), but rather is focused on interests and the connections between the site’s groups. Building this social graph won’t be any small task (The Fridge will need to do extensive analysis to determine how each group relates to a given interest, for example), but it’s a compelling idea.

The Fridge has some clear benefits — it’s cleaner and more fun than some of the more traditional online groups sites like Yahoo Groups (though its competitors are more mature). And it gives you a chance to interact with your friends in a secure group setting, assuming your friends don’t invite anyone else to join.

That said, the site isn’t exactly welcoming to new users. If you visit the site right now without being invited to any of yours friends’ groups, then your only option will be to create a a group and try to get your friends to join. And the site doesn’t have Facebook Connect (Chang says some users were getting wary about accidentally sharing their Fridge content to Facebook), so there isn’t an integrated way to blast invites to friends (though it isn’t exactly difficult to shoot them an email or Facebook messages).

Along with major sharing hubs like like Yahoo Groups and Ning, other sites that focus on selectively sharing your media include rrripple and Multiply. It’s also worth noting that during a recent presentation Google’s lead user-experience researcher Paul Adams detailed a sharing model that shares similarities with The Fridge, where different content is shared with different spheres of your friends. It’s possible that Google’s upcoming social network, rumored to be called Google Me, will use a similar model.

Last night, we first unveiled AngelPad, the stealthy new startup incubator run by seven ex-Googlers. Today, we’ve managed to get quite a bit more information about it. How? One of those ex-Googlers, Thomas Korte, stopped by our office to talk a bit about the project.

Actually, it was quite convenient for Korte to come by because AngelPad’s office is right around the corner from our own office in the SoMa area of San Francisco. And though it’s not open just yet (September 10), soon, this will be the home to all of the startups accepted to be the first class of AngelPad.

And that’s one key to the project: they already have their first class all signed up and ready to go. Korte says there are 10 startups that were accepted into this inaugural class. In total, there will be about 25 founders working in the AngelPad offices when the 10-week program starts on September 10. Those companies will each be allowed to stay long after the formal program wraps up as well, Korte says.

They’re actually still figuring out all the best practices for AngelPad, Korte admits. But the core idea is what’s important: they want to recreate the type of atmosphere they all experienced relatively early on at Google. “You want smart people around you. That’s the secret sauce down at Google,” Korte says.

He notes that startups with founders working by themselves at home or in their own office space are missing out on the kind of impromptu conversations that can happen when great minds come together — even if they’re not all working on the same thing. Obviously, the seven ex-Googlers will be around to act as advisors, but it’s also about these guys’ networks that they’ve built up over the years. The startups that are a part of AngelPad will have plenty of resources at their fingertips.

Korte wouldn’t say how many applicants they cut to get down to the 10 they accepted in this initial round. But he does say that since they were doing it stealthily, all were hand-chosen by the seven members. With that in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that more than half of the founders in this first class are also ex-Google employees.

Obviously, given that AngelPad is essentially a 10-week incubation program, it’s going to draw some comparison’s to Y Combinator, Paul Graham’s incubator (which is incidentally having its demo day tomorrow). Korte freely admits that this “incubator 2.0″ idea was Graham’s, but he says that they will distinguish themselves by looking for founders with a bit more experience — ones who are more seasoned.

Zal Bilimoria, the founder of Snip.ly (one of the initial AngelPad startups), expands upon this in a Quora post. In terms of differences with Y Combinator, Bilimoria notes:

• YC is based in Mountain View, CA; AP is based in SF, CA.
• AP supplies your team with office space for the 10-week period and expects all startups to try and work there regularly to foster a collaborative work environment.
• The AP thesis is focused on accepting experienced veterans in their respective fields who wish to launch a startup, whereas YC may have a broader philosophy. Not a requirement, but simply a focus.
• AP also seeks to have at least 1 product/business co-founder in addition to 1 technical co-founder. Again, not a req.

For similarities, Bilimoria notes that both are web startup-focused and both are founder-friendly.

Korte also notes that all seven AngelPad principals put their own money into the pool which is then invested out into each of these companies. He says the amount should be larger than what Y Combinator and TechStars companies get in their initial rounds.

He notes that he doesn’t want AngelPad to turn into another so-called “Super Angel” fund (angel investors who raise a lot of outside capital to pump into startups) because he really doesn’t see this as being about the money. Instead, this is all about creating an environment that will help these startups grow.

Korte notes that between things like Dogpatch Labs and Kicklabs, these types of creative working environments are hot right now. Given the heavy Google influence on both sides, AngelPad has an opportunity to be the hottest.

Last month, we gave an update on the state of Tumblr that included some pretty impressive stats: over 6 million users, 1.5 billion pageviews a month, and 4.5 million new posts a day. Throw those all out the window.

The blogging/microblogging/ social/whateveryouwanttocallit network has just crossed 1 billion total posts today. You can tell by looking at the number after the “/post/” area in each Tumblr blog URL. Sometime a couple hours ago, it passed 1 billion — and the broken counter on the Tumblr About page confirms this (it was only set to got up to 999,999,999).

Aside from the massive billion number, Tumblr now stands at 7.2 million users. Those users are now generating over 5.2 million posts a day. Their Quantcast data now has them at 1.7 billion pageviews a month.

Yes, the network is still surging.

[thanks Andrew]

With apologies to AOL and Frank Gruber, few big tech hits have come out of Washington DC. Which is strange, because on paper, DC has those "ingredients" for a high-tech ecosystem that so-called experts love to tout.

It has money, it has universities, it has AOL which could theoretically spin smart coders off, it has a big, honking, recession-proof customer right there in the form of the government. And there are a ton of smart tech people in the city. On the book tour for Sarah’s last book, nearly 400 people came to the DC event where she did a signing—a record on the 15-city tour.

But for all these attributes, DC has struggled to define its tech scene as more than just AOL. That may be changing. There is a cadre of smart, young techies pulled in by the Obama campaign and its social-media-can-win-elections-after-all aftermath. A lot of those people are spinning into companies that hope to use SMS, Twitter and other basic social media tactics to do more than just win elections—to change the world.

What’s interesting about this world is how much of a mirror image it is to Silicon Valley. It's about trying to take tools created here and use them in innovative ways. And it's not about getting rich—many of the most innovative techies in DC are starting non-profits. Increasingly, DC techies aren't trying to be another Silicon Valley—they are creating their own ecosystem that's in tune with why people move to DC and what DC has that no other place has.

Today, more than 90% of large companies use open source technology, and yet the largest software companies in the world are still proprietary vendors. Might we see something similar with social media? Taking out the handful of obvious winners like Facebook and Twitter, will the social impact—the change in how we donate money, talk to friends, live life and participate in government—be ultimately greater than the returns to shareholders?

We asked Scott Goodstein of Revolution Messaging—one of these digital do-gooders– to be our guest this week on Why Is This News? to talk about these trends. Sarah met Goodstein on a recent trip with the State Department to Colombia, where she also met other impressive digital do-gooders like Josh Nesbit from FrontlineSMS Medic and Maria Theresa Kumar of Voto Latino. Goodstein recently finished building a hate-crime alert system for the NAACP.

He called in tell us why DC matters – from a seedy hotel in Vegas. Oh, the glamour of being a Washington insider. . .

You’re Apple. You’re selling millions of iPhones, millions of iPads, and millions of notebooks. The App Store is printing money, but conversion rates aren’t fast enough for your liking. How do you get more people hooked on your mobile and touch platform? Easy: convert all your devices into iOS devices. iOS convertibles, to be precise.

A patent filing by Apple describes a pair of devices with the plain object of providing the user with both OS X and iOS on demand. The iMac Touch (not an official term, but good enough) would lean over and tilt up, providing a tablet-like surface on which to browse or play games. The MacBook Touch would feature a swiveling, flipping screen much like existing laptop-tablet convertibles. I don’t know about you, but I think they sound great. And expensive.

Continue reading…

Social ride-sharing start-up and FBfund recipient Zimride announces today a round of seed funding led by FLOODGATE, K9 Ventures and a group of angels including Keith Rabois and Teddy Downey.

Co-founded by Logan Green and John Zimmer, Zimride is a carpool startup that actually makes money, using the Facebook platform to allow people in the same networks to coordinate carpooling. The service is also available at Zimride.com via Facebook Connect.

Future plans for Zimride include further expansion; Zimride currently is the only carpool community that serves a swath of prominent universities and corporations including Stanford, USC, UCLA, UCSF, Cornell, Harvard, University of Michigan and CIGNA.

Says Green “Nobody is doing what we’re doing, in taking a social ride share product to organizations.” The Zimride freemium business model is quite nifty as well; the first 50 users within a given network can sign up for free, and the organization has the option of signing up for a subscription past that. Thus far people have been very receptive.

Green also tells TechCrunch that Zimride will be putting its latest financing towards improving its mobile application and investing in user experience as well as expanding its user base,
“The holy grail of ride-sharing is figuring out how to engage users in a ride sharing program. We reach critical mass when we get 10-20% of an organization signed up.”

With this current seed round, Ann Miura-Ko, a partner at FLOODGATE, will be joining Zimride's Board of Directors. Manu Kumar, founder of K9 Ventures will come on as a board observer. Zimride is also hiring for engineers and designers at zimride.com/jobs.