Kansas City-based startup Neighbortree checked in to tell us about their efforts to grow a fledgling network of hyper-local neighborhood community websites operated by residents. The company has just raised $120,000 from an undisclosed regional angel investment firm, notably a mere month after launching its service.

Neighbortree provides free, interactive neighborhood websites to any type of residential community, including traditional neighborhoods, subdivisions, condominiums and apartment buildings. Think of it as a sort of Ning for neighborhoods.

Since this requires a hyper-local approach (we’re talking physical, not virtual communities), its business depends on developing partnerships with other companies that can execute its network model at the metro or state level. The startup says most of the angel funding will be allocated towards establishing these types of partnerships.

Evidently, the company aims to generate the bulk of its revenues from local businesses advertising on neighborhood websites, which can be equipped by locals with news updates, photos, a local events calendar, discussion boards and more.

Other possible revenue streams include leveraging the services offered by Neighbortree sister company Kansas City Website Design (which, obviously, designs and develops websites, mostly for small businesses).

Interestingly, the young company says it has already been approached by two unnamed companies interested in licensing its “site of sites” treetrax platform for other markets (one for real estate and one for schools).

You can see a demo site here. Alternatively, check out a live example.

PogoPlug keeps getting better and better. Today they’re announcing that wireless printing, first mentioned earlier this summer, is now available. Users can print from iPads, iPhones, Androids and pretty much any other Internet-connected device. While you’re vacationing in Rio, you can print off instructions for your buddy who’s house sitting for you! Or you can print off a stack of vacation photos while still on vacation! Also announced today is that the PogoPlug Biz and the PogoPlug WiFi Adapter are both shipping.

Udemy, which aims to democratize learning on the Web by basically letting anyone teach and school themselves through online courses, has raised $1 million in seed funding from a host of top notch investors to ramp up hiring efforts.

The Founder Institute-incubated startup received funding from an impressive list of angel investors such as Keith Rabois, Rick Thompson, Russ Fradin, Benjamin Ling, Larry Braitman, Jeremy Stoppelman, Naval Ravikant, Paul Martino, Josh Stylman, Mark Sugarman‘s MHS Capital and Dave McClure‘s 500 Startups fund.

Proud disclosure: the company was co-founded by TechCrunch / MobileCrunch writer Gagan Biyani. They grow up so fast.

Here’s how Udemy – the name stems from the catch phrase “academy for you” – works: after signing up, via the registration form or via Facebook Connect, you can browse the available online courses, including a number of academic courses from leading universities.

If you find something if interest, say Seduction Language 101, you can subscribe to the course and share it with your friends via the usual social networks.

Educators (which can be real teachers, wannabe teachers or, well, anyone else) can create their own course(s) and webinars in minutes. Using Udemy’s content platform, they can upload texts, videos and presentations and create structured courses that can be followed by users asynchronously. The site is inherently social, too, as educators can engage and interact with users and subscribers via online discussion boards and more.

My fear is that this degree of openness will ultimately result in generally low quality of content and be viewed by many a consultant, author, conference speaker, etc. as just another means of online promotion rather than an honest way of passing on knowledge to others via the Web, but only time will tell if that fear of mine is justified.

Interestingly, Udemy also provides instructors with a way to host live video conferences over a proprietary tool, which includes a whiteboard feature, presentation viewer, chatroom and a file-sharing component. The startup says over 20 live webcams can stream on Udemy Live, while more than 1,000 users are able to watch a session simultaneously.

Biyani tells us Udemy, which launched on May 11, has had over 1,000 instructors create over 2,000 courses to date. Since its launch, the site has attracted nearly 10,000 registered users.

Will you be next? Why (not)?

Only a few hours after RIM managed to avoid the Indian ban hammer, it now looks like Google and Skype could be the next target. India’s Home Ministry, the country’s interior ministry (think police force and other domestic policy matters), has told the BBC that "any company with a telecoms network should be accessible" to the country’s security services. India says it needs to be able to be able to tap into such communications in order to thwart potential terrorism threats.

For the longest time the Kindle was only available via Amazon. It’s actually a wonder that it did so well without a brick and mortar presence, but a few months back, Target started displaying and selling the ereader within its stores. Soon, Staples will be the latest to hawk the best-selling ereader device in 1,550 of its stores. Participating Staples locations will begin selling all three Kindle models sometime this autumn.

IFA is upon us; think CES but bigger. The showfloor doesn’t open until September 3rd, but most of the news should drop this week as companies try to steal 15 minutes of fame before the flustercuck begins. And this year it’s all about Android tablets and 3D TVs. I know, exciting stuff.

You could almost feel the excitement at CES 2010 back in January. It felt like the whole CE market was on the verge of something big. Tablets and 3D TVs were the buzzwords but only the big players where showing off prototypes and first-gen models. All the mid-level consumer electronics makers had ereaders instead of tablets. But IFA should be a bit different now that the Chinese OEM factories are already pumping out slates and 3D TVs are commonplace. But you might not wanna get too attached to any of the products announced in the coming days; they might not be for you.

Internet investment group Digital Sky Technologies (DST) today formally announced the acquisition of Russian social network Odnoklassniki.ru, which we reported on last week. DST has bought out out the minority shareholders in Forticom Group Limited - which it now fully owns - and Odnoklassniki, and interestingly transferred its interest in the Polish social network Nasza-Klasa.pl to the previous minority shareholders of Forticom as part of the deal.

Endorse for a Cause is launching today to allow you to raise money for your favorite charities while making purchases online. Some online retailers allow you to do this through their own sites, but Endorse For A Cause is hoping to allow consumers to give back at any online retailer.

Once you register on the startup’s site, you can access your favorite stores on EFAC’s site. EFAC lists the percentage of your purchase that will be donated to the organization (which ranges from 0.7 percent to 8 percent).

And EFAC also has widgets on retail sites like Target, Old Navy and Starbucks that allow you to share retail items to Facebook and Twitter; if any of your friends purchase the item shared, EFAC will donate the affiliate fees to a charity.

While EFAC is partnering with a number or charities, including Kiva, The Humane Society Of The U.S., the American Cancer Society, and the American Red Cross, the startup allows you to nominate charities to the platform. You can also earn points on EFAC for raising money, win badges, and prizes for participation.

Endorse For A Cause seems like a easy way to go about your everyday activities and be able to give back. A number of startups have been trying to innovate around this space including CauseOn and CauseWorld.

As competition in the e-books device market heats up, Borders is cutting the prices of its leading eReading devices, the Kobo and Aluratek to $129 and $99.99 respectively. The Kobo was previously priced at $149.99 and the Aluratek was priced at $119.99.

Borders is also announcing that Velocity Micro’s Android-based Cruz Reader R101 and Cruz Tablet T103 are now available for preorder on Borders.com for $199 and $299 respectively. Borders is currently offering 1.5 million titles through its e-book readers.

The latest price drop isn’t surprising-Borders has been launching a series of products and initiatives to drive sales and traffic towards its e-book offerings. Most recently, the company tried to drive more downloads for its free mobile applications for Android, iPad, iPhone and BlackBerry as well as its desktop applications by offering five free books – valued at more than $40 – and content exclusive to the company. Earlier this summer, Borders launched a branded eBook store and released the BlackBerry, Android, iPad and iPhone eReading applications, all powered by Kobo.

The question is whether Borders can still compete in an increasingly competitive and cutthroat market. Kindles are selling at record rates (and dropping in price); and Barnes & Noble slashed the price of the Nook. And Apple is ramping up its presence in the e-books space with iBooks and the iPad. Plus, Google is expected to launch Google Editions, their e-Book platform soon. Does Borders have any hope?

In a short amount of time since its launch in April, 2009 and its redesign a year later, realtime analytics startup Chartbeat has gained an impressive following of more than 2,500 paying corporate customers. All of this was done so far with 5 employees, led by general manager Tony Haile.

Now, the betaworks-incubated company has gained an impressive roster of investors in a $3 million Series A financing. The round was led by Index Ventures, and includes some serious superangels such as Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, Chris Dixon’s Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Freestyle Capital, betaworks, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, and Jason Calacanis. With the funding, Chartbeat will be spun off as its own separate company, just as betawork’s bit.ly was before it.

Chartbeat gives you a realtime dashboard that shows you the activity on your Website as it happens: what stories, pages, or items are hot; where traffic is coming from, how fast your pages are loading. “Understanding what is going on with your business in realtime and being able to respond to that, we believe is the future of online business,” says Index partner Saul Klein.

Chartbeat is especially popular with publishers and retailers. We use Chartbeat at TechCrunch every day. I always have a tab open to see what stories are gaining the most traction. Other publishers who use it include the New York Times, AOL, Starbucks, and Groupon. Gawker is testing a beta site where feature stories are determined by their Chartbeat stats.

Today Chartbeat helps people monitor their sites, but the next step is to help them take actions based on the realtime data. Giving businesses actionable data and helping them take those action sis where the real value in this business lies—whether that is tying Chartbeat into an ad server throw more ads at hot stories, or linking it to a realtime merchandising and inventory systems for retailers.

A month ago, Chartbeat passed one million concurrent active visitors across all the sites using the service. That number is now regularly past 1.5 million. The dial below shows the cumulative active visitors across all Chartbeat-enabled sites.

Apptio, a Bellevue, Washington-based provider of SaaS-delivered Technology Business Management solutions this morning announced that it has closed a $16.5 million Series C round - the company has now raised up to $37.5 million in venture capital. The financing round, which the company says was oversubscribed, was led by Shasta Ventures, with participation from all current investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Madrona Venture Group.

Showroomprive, which claims to have the No. 2 spot in European private sales sites after Vente Privee, has raised 37 million euros from Accel Partners for a minority stake. The members' only fashion e-commerce site which sells designer brands at discount prices was founded in France but entered the Spanish market this year and is growing quickly. Three years after launch Showroomprive claims to be the second online sales site in France with 3 million members and 75 millions euros of revenue in 2009. It's now aiming for 140 millions euros and 6 millions members. In 2010 it partnered with Orange.fr for "privileged sales," launched in Spain and is soon launching a mobile app. Showroomprive will invest in a new warehouse to increase capacity and also look to acquire. Yes folks, it's time to roll-up all those private sales sites in Europe.

Next November, it will be three years since AOL acquired Israeli startup Yedda in an effort to foray into the online Q&A service business.

Today, Yedda is finally graduating to a full-fledged AOL property with the ‘launch’ of AOL Answers (or Aol Answers, still not sure about that).

Since nothing else changes apart from the name – Yedda users still have access to their accounts and their bookmarks are still available – there’s not much to add at this point.

AOL Answers is a straight-forward Q&A site similar to the plethora of other services out there, including Yahoo Answers, Answers.com and Ask Answers.

As such, it’s not to be compared to ‘next-generation’ Q&A services that tap your social graph rather than the entire Web community as a whole, such as Quora, Aardvark and the recently launched Facebook Questions.

Featured questions on the site range from ‘Is there an age limit on blogging?’ to ‘How to thicken oil based paint’ and ‘Have you seen the movie Casablanca?’.

Hopefully you’re reading this as you’re waking up with access to Gmail Priority Inbox. Jason already posted his review/overview last night, so I figured I’d just talk a bit about how I’ve been using it for the past several days since Google turned it on for me to test out on my account. My opinion of it is in-line with Jason’s — once you fine-tune it, it’s game-changingly awesome. There is simply no way I could ever go back to using Gmail without it enabled. So how have I tuned it?

First of all, before you get started, I highly recommend that you watch the overview video Google made for the feature. It’s two minutes long, and makes the basics easy to understand. For most people, the basics are probably good enough. But for people who get a lot of email, you’re going to want to go a bit deeper.

My favorite aspect of Priority Inbox is the settings that allows you to create four different sections of your inbox. Yes, you could previously do this with the Multiple Inboxes feature, but these new settings make things much easier to understand and implement. The three default sections here are: “Important & unread,” “Starred,” and “Everything else” — but there’s an option to add a fourth, which you should. You should create a new label that you can quickly tag emails with. For example, I chose “A1″ since “A” shows up first in the Labels drop down menu. Set this section (which is actually the second section) to show emails with that label.

Once you do that, your inbox will be transformed into four different boxes stacked on top of one another. At the top will be the “Important and unread” elements — this is your true Priority Inbox and ideally would be empty most of the time (indicating that you’ve read all these messages). Below that would be this new A1 section — these are your most important saved emails to come back to. Below that is your starred section — these are emails you quickly star that you might want to come back to. And below that is everything else — your general incoming email. Or as I like to call it, Hell.

What’s great about this new “Everything else” section is that it filters out the stuff you already have in one of the upper sections, so things aren’t repeated. The regular Gmail inbox does not do that.

With this four-level hierarchy in place, you basically have a mountain of email that trickles down from most important to least important in an easy-to-digest manner. This is arguably more vital to me than the actual Gmail filtering of important messages.

That said, the filtering is still pretty killer when you first open your inbox each day. To me, the most impressive thing about it is how quickly it learns. On day one it was fairly hit or miss. But now, on day five using it, it’s scary accurate. And I suspect it will keep getting better. Part of that is me creating new filters for things to absolutely not tag as “important” — but most of it is simply hitting the “important” or “not important” buttons.

Again, all of this is really no different from basically what you could do before with a combination of multiple inboxes and your own highly-tailored filters. But with Priority Inbox, you don’t have to spend all that time making those filters — something which most users are never going to do. Instead, you just spend time teaching Gmail what’s important and what’s not by clicking the buttons, or simply reading/not reading certain messages.

It’s weird, but I actually look forward to opening Gmail each day now just to see how well Priority Inbox has filtered everything. I also find myself feeling less overwhelmed when I come back to my inbox midday. That said, this still doesn’t solve the fundamental problems of email: namely that there’s too much of it, that it takes too long to respond to, and that it’s considered proper etiquette to respond to each message.

I would estimate that I get about 100 to 200 emails a day — plus another few hundred that are sent to general work accounts that I have access to. If I tried to read and respond to each and every one, it would take hours. It’s simply not possible if I still want to get work done. The main problem is all the clicking required. Click to open, click to respond, click to send. All of this, plus the seconds spent loading after each action, adds up quickly. And this combined with the fact that expectations are usually such that you respond more formally to emails — again, Hell.

That’s one reason I love Twitter. It’s a stream. There’s nothing to open, things just float by. When you want to respond to something, it’s one click — nothing new has to open. And it’s a click to send, but there’s no box that closes after (at least not on twitter.com) and there’s no need to have to reorient yourself. Further, the 140 character limit gives you the best excuse in the world to be brief. People used to bitch and moan about this limitation hampering conversations — I think it’s the single greatest aspect of Twitter — by far. And, of course, there’s no built-in notion that every message necessitates a response. It’s wonderful.

It seems as if everyone is always sure we’re on the verge of some startup solving the fundamental email problems. But I’m simply not sure that’s even possible. Even if something is truly great, it would take a large amount of both luck and time to get everyone in the world on board in the way they are with current email systems. Twitter or Facebook are the closest, but when you think about it, they’re really not all that close.

Instead, it may have to be one of the established players that rewrites the rules. Of those, Google with Gmail is clearly doing the best job. But even Priority Inbox isn’t a rewriting of the rules, it’s simply an organizational tool that makes everything seem better. But believe me, I’ll take it.

It’s like clockwork. 9 PM PT rolls around on Monday evening, and Apple rolls out an update to the iTunes Store. You see, Tuesday is the day that new movies and music are typically released in the U.S., so it makes sense to overhaul the store at this time to show off that new content. Only tonight, that didn’t happen. Why? Because why roll out an update when you’re going to completely overhaul the store the following day?

As you’re probably well aware, Apple is holding an event in San Francisco this Wednesday. They tend to hold events related to iTunes and the iPod every year around this time, though this is a little earlier than normal. The invitation gives every indication that it will be music-related, but it will likely be more than that. Speculation is mounting that we’ll see an update to the Apple TV, called iTV, and some new iPod hardware as well. But iTunes itself is also due for some changes, and that’s very likely why we’re not seeing any updates tonight.

One such change may be the introduction of iTunes television show rentals. Apple has had movie rentals for some time now, but with television shows, you have only had the option to purchase up until now. For many people, this makes no sense — but $0.99 rentals might. Apple has clearly been tinkering with the television show layout pages, and it looks as if they may be making room for a new “rent” button below the “buy” one.

Oddly, the movie and music sections of iTunes haven’t been updated either. CNET reported earlier today that Apple is likely to double the song preview limit from 30 seconds to a minute, but that probably doesn’t require any front-end changes. Might something else be changing?

Meanwhile, if the iTV does come, movies are likely to be a big selling point of the device. Perhaps Apple is getting ready to emphasize that. Or maybe there will be some kind of new streaming video service?

To be clear, there is new content in the iTunes store. For example, here’s the movie Harry Brown which was released today. And here’s the new Heart CD that was released today. But Apple isn’t highlighting any of this new content as it normally does on Tuesdays with a front-end change. Again, likely because some major changes are coming to iTunes tomorrow. It’s quite likely that will include a new version of iTunes itself.

If you live in San Francisco and you haven’t tried UberCab yet, do it. The service, which we first covered in July, eliminates everything bad about a taxi experience. In my order, that’s flagging one down, finding the cash to pay, and being in a sometimes disgusting car. For bonus points, I always enjoy negotiating whether or not I get air conditioning in the summer in NY.

UberCab contracts with black car services – mostly Towncars and Escalades. There’s a lot of unused inventory in those businesses and they are happy to work with someone who eats up that inventory. As a user you download an iPhone app (I have it on my iPad) and add your credit card information (that’s the last time you ever have to deal with that). When you want a car to pick you up you hit a button. The app knows where you are and finds a car and driver nearby. The driver accepts via his/her own iPhone app, and you then get to watch them come to you on a map with a pretty darn good estimate of the number of minutes it will take for them to get there. When they arrive you get in the car and tell the driver where you want to go. When you get there you see the charges and accept them, which are then billed to your credit card, tip included. A receipt is emailed to you. And then each side gets to rate the other – I love the fact that the driver rates the passenger, too. Makes for good tips and a happy overall transaction. Watch a demo video here.

When I tried UberCab a few days ago I had to wait just 5 minutes for the car to arrive (a big Mercedes), and the overall experience was way better than a taxi.

The charges are 1.5x taxi rates, and it’s worth it. You’re in a much more comfortable car and you don’t have to waste time finding a cab in the first place, a real problem in San Francisco. I’ll use this all the time now when in San Francisco.

The company is planning to expand to other markets, so you may not need to wait long to use it (and if they move too slow, others will pop up anyway).

But here’s where things get really interesting – the difference between UberCab and its various competitors is that the driver uses his own iPhone app, not some clunky one-use device installed in his car. That means there’s no technical barrier to anyone becoming an UberCab driver. Which means that anyone with a car, theoretically, could join the network and start picking people up.

That’s exactly like Airbnb for people’s homes, and Square for credit card transactions. And don’t think people won’t want to do this – drivers generally make around $50 per hour.

There’s no reason I couldn’t become a UberCab driver and maybe charge less than others for driving – meaning competition will drive the rate down to some sort of equilibrium pricing. I can also sell myself based on the car I’m driving (hybrid, SUV, whatever), and my overall rating.

What’s standing in the way of all this? Not much. You need a special type of license to drive other people and your insurance rates will probably double or triple. But UberCab could help new drivers get through that paperwork and reduce the friction.

In most cities today you need to purchase or lease a medallion to drive a taxi. That’s just a way of keeping out competition and keeping rates high – it has nothing to do with making sure only qualified people drive those cars. In most cities you can drive people outside of taxis but you can’t let them flag you down, a big competitive disadvantage. With UberCab they’ve solved that problem – click a button and car arrives in a few minutes wherever you are.

Instead of looking for pedestrians to flag you down, wasting gas and not being the safest road aware driver, UberCab drivers will just park near where they know that a lot of clicks happen and watch their phone, bidding and grabbing those nearby clicks as they come through.

I can imagine it now – click a button and see a variety of options. A five star rated driver 15 minutes away in a late model Prius at 2x taxi rates, or a 1975 Camero 1 minute away with a three star rating for .5x taxi rates. Choose your car, driver and price and get exactly what you pay for. And help break the back of the taxi medallion evil empire.

In May 2009, I wrote a post speculating about something called “Magic Inbox.” What was so special about it? It was a reference found in the code of Gmail by the blog Google Operating System, and appeared to point to a new Gmail feature that would sort your email with the help of your social connections. Many of us wondered if such a feature would be launching soon. But that never happened. Well, until tonight, that is. Magic Inbox is the new Gmail Priority Inbox.

Gmail Product Director Keith Coleman made that revelation during our meeting with him last week to discuss the new Priority Inbox. Magic Inbox had been in testing at Google for a long, long time leading up to this launch. “We went through so many versions of this,” Coleman said. In fact, Coleman noted that the idea to prioritze email based on who you contact that most was an original idea for Gmail itself, but no one could nail the combination of user interface and features. Obviously now, they think they have.

Over the years, Google has tried various grouped views, and even ordering email in one inbox by order of importance, Coleman noted. But this priority filter is what they finally decided to focus on several months ago. With the feature turned on, Priority Email looks at a lot of things, such as who you email a lot, who you chat with, and who you actually read email from, among other things. That’s slightly different from the Magic Inbox code dug up last year, which seemed to be focused on the idea of “friends”.

As we’re all well aware, “friends” has been a tricky concept for Google to tackle — though they’re about to try again with whatever their upcoming social product is. For this, it was smart to go with something less predicated on a concrete social construct, and go with something more vague.

How does it work? It’s magic. We finally found out what’s in the box.

“Digg v4 is not a redesign, not a reskin, it is a 100% rewrite. It's completely new design, code, architecture, and infrastructure. It has almost no relationship to the v3 system whatsoever.“

Social news site Digg is currently in the particularly bloody throes of its fifth user revolt and, unlike revolts one through four, we’ve heard that Digg is absolutely positively not capitulating to users on this one.

Has Kevin Rose finally decided to heed our advice? It’s not so cut and dry according to former Digg engineer Ian Eure who wrote “They Can't Go Back” on his personal blog earlier today. One reason they can’t move backward? Talent, Eure emphasizes, in underline.

“Even if they still have the systems and the desire to roll back, they don't have the talent to maintain Digg v3. Nearly everyone who built and worked on the legacy Digg codebase has left the company. When I started at Digg, the engineering team was: Joe Stump, Matt Erkkila, Eli White, Steve Williams, Steve French, Kurt Wilms, Nancy White, Bill Shupp, and Micah Snyder. Operations had Ron Gorodetzky, Scott Baker, and Tim Ellis. Except for Matt, everyone else has moved on. There were others, but those people were the core team that made the legacy code work, and they're gone now.”

This makes sense. At the moment the Digg v4 “Top News” page is basically aggregating feeds from other aggregators like Reddit which is an algorithm flaw that needs to be fixed, now. Before your next episode of Diggnation, even.

The amount of pain that the power users are feeling makes for good drama and great headlines, but is secondary to the major coding issues and design flaws allowing competitors to garner traffic off your site. If your business is about aggregating eyeballs, it’s crucial to keep your eye on the ball.

Update: Kevin Rose responds on the issue of reverting back to Digg v3.

“The core of Digg v4 (Cassandra) will enable us to scale for the next few years, so it’s important that we stick with it. As of right now we are rolling the Digg v3 features into the Digg v4 architecture, there will be no need for us to go back once this is complete, as we’ll have the best of both worlds – Digg v3 functionality w/Digg v4 backend.”

Comic: Ncomment

Navigating maps on computers and mobile devices can still be a clunky experience, especially when you try to search for places on a map. Typically, on Google Maps or Bing Maps, you get a bunch of virtual pushpins for each place which you can click on for more information.

UpNext, a 3D mapping startup based in New York City, brings that information forward in amore fluid way in the latest release of its iPad app. As you push the 3D map around with your fingers, labels for specific searches or your friends’ recent Foursquare checkins pop open as they come into view. UpNext calls this the Fluid Labeling System, and you can see it in action in the video above.

The app, which is also available on the iPhone, now covers eight cities: New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Portland, San Francisco, and Austin. The apps are free, and they’ve been downloaded 170,000 times—not terribly much, but it is a good example of where map apps could be going. It renders each city in full 3D and lets you dive into each building to find the businesses inside.

As far as the Fluid Labeling goes, anything that eliminates an unnecessary tap is good in my book, but this is really just an improvement on the existing map UI that is now commonplace. Is there a better way to display information about places on a map than through pushpins?

Just as I was reading Paul Carr's latest column about quitting social media, my husband looked at his phone and broke into a huge smile. He is a graphic designer and has long been a fan of Chank Fonts. Earlier that day, he'd taken a picture of a retro-looking podiatrist office, posting it on Twitter with the word "Font-o-licious." It didn't go viral. It didn't become a trending topic. It didn't get him 1,000 new followers or even attract much attention at all. But it was noticed by Chank Diesel of Chank Fonts who Tweeted "I'm gonna dedicate my next font to that type-savvy podiatrist" and started following my husband.

Here in front of me was one of those serendipitous moments of social media collapsing  space-and-time. These moments don’t change the world, but they’re exactly what made social media so addictive in the first place. Imagine an industry hero of yours who seemed untouchable creating a product just because of a random picture you posted on an ever-moving stream of colliding information that he happened to see. Here, in the guise of my beaming husband, was the perfect articulation for why I think people—even my close friends— who declare dramatic social media bankruptcy were just doing it wrong.

What made social media a phenomenon were moments like these. Passively connecting in-and-out of a persistent conversation with people you know and see everyday, people you know but have lost touch with, and people you don't know but share interests with. People who in a more efficient world, you might have known. It's about making relationships more efficient. My parents know what I've been up to by reading my Twitter feed, so when I call home I don't have to answer a vague question like "What have you been up to?" I answer a specific question like "What country are you traveling to now?" If a friend is looking for a job at a given company, I can't always remember who I know who works there, but with LinkedIn, I don't have to. And seeing what an old flame looks like on Facebook never gets old.

If these selling points sound horribly cliché it's because they are commonplace reasons most everyday people use these sites, and indeed, the same reasons why the founders of most social media companies started these sites. But the sites worked too well at amassing fans, friends and followers, creating micro-economies where people sought to cash in on their would-be fame and influence. And that is when the problems—and inevitably the fatigue— started. People competed for how many friends and followers they could rack up and how many RTs they could get in a day, seeing it as evidence of how cool or smart or influential they were. That's when social media got mercenary and soulless.

Here’s a clue: If you find yourself saying “(Fill-in-the-blank-social-media-site) used to be soooooo much better before everyone was on it”– you are using the site wrong. You are following too many people, you are using it too much, you are strangling the pretty, little bunny. The beauty of these sites is you control how many friends you see, and how many of them see you. So if you used to love it and now hate it, well, you know what they say about when you point a finger. Three are pointing back at you.

Sometimes metrics can be a bad thing and beware of any so-called “social media consultant” who tells you otherwise. What's the value of a Retweet or a Like? It's roughly the equivalent to sitting next to someone during a keynote who nods his head at a salient point. Someone hitting a button in front of them is hardly a heady endorsement—nowhere near the impact of someone calling you to tell you about a story he read. That actually takes more than one-second of attention and work.

Everyone touts stats showing that recommendations are the most trusted form of advertising. That's because in the old world recommendations were inefficient. I had to be so moved by, say, the service at a restaurant, that I proactively called people to tell them about it, or it stuck in the front of my mind solidly enough that when someone asked "Where should we go to dinner?" it came flying out. The power of personal recommendation doesn't carry over in a world where it's as easy as clicking a button because the caliber of that recommendation is necessarily lowered by taking out barriers.

Of course not everyone becoming fatigued with social media whored themselves out to anyone who would follow or friend them, bartering likes and retweeting anyone who said something nice about them. Indeed, Mr. Carr locked his account and only followed a core group of friends. His biggest complaint was simply that he used it too much—updating any thought in his head so that he didn't take time to mull and form that idea or joke until it was perfect, and that he was distracted. That’s a fair point.

But I wonder whether the flood of apps may be making the problem worse, not better. You can have too much of a good thing. After some early security glitches when Twitter desktop apps published direct messages, I decided to only use Twitter.com and update by text message to interact with the service.

That's downright luddite in my TechCrunch/iPhone world, but by going to Twitter, rather than Twitter always flooding to me, I forced myself to keep my Twitter feed as manageable to keep up with as email. What's more, when I travel to places like China or have a big deadline, I don't log onto Twitter for weeks. When I come back it's still here. Both Twitter and I continue to go about our lives without one another just fine.

I don’t think changing an avatar to green saves Iran. But I wouldn't say Twitter is making us all more detached and stupid either. I just like life with social media better than life without it, for silly little moments like the one my husband had with Chank Fonts. Same thing I’d say about email or a mobile phone or TiVo or a Blackberry.

I realize that doesn't make gripping blog copy like Twitter-democratizing-the-world or Twitter-totally-sucking, but I think for most of the average users out there, that's the Twitter they know and the Twitter that will continue to steadily grow, all this hype and backlash aside.

Email overload has finally met its match. Tomorrow, Gmail is rolling out a new feature called Priority Inbox that is going to be a Godsend for those of you who dread opening your email. In short, Google has built a system that figures out which of your messages are important, and presents them at the top of the screen so you don’t miss them. The rest of your messages are still there, but you don’t have to dig through dozens of newsletters and confirmations to find the diamonds in rough.

The beauty of the system lies in its simplicity — it’s nearly as easy as Gmail’s one click spam filter. There’s almost no setup: once it’s activated on your account, you’ll see a prompt asking you if you want to enable Priority Inbox. You can choose from a few options (the order of your various inboxes and if there are any contacts you’d like to always mark ‘Important’) but don’t have to setup any rules or ‘teach’ Gmail what you want it to mark important. It just works, at least most of the time.

The system uses a plethora of criteria to decide which messages are most important: things like how frequently you open and/or respond to messages from a given sender, how often you read messages that contain a certain keyword, and whether or not the message is addressed solely to you or looks like it was sent to a mailing list. If you come across a message that’s been marked important when it shouldn’t have been, you can hit an arrow to tell Gmail it’s messed up. Likewise, if a message that should have been flagged gets sent to the ‘everything else’ area, you can promote it. Through these actions Gmail gets progressively smarter, so the system should work better over time.

I’ve been using the service since late last week and have found it to work very well. Occasionally messages that shouldn’t have been marked ‘Important’ are flagged, but I’ve yet to encounter an urgent message that slipped into the ‘everything else’ section. My colleague MG Siegler, who has also had the feature active, has had similar success.

It’s great. I love it. But it isn’t perfect.

My biggest gripe so far is the fact that there’s no way to tell why a given message has been deemed important. Oftentimes it’s obvious — emails from my coworkers are generally given the golden arrows, as are messages from PR contacts whom I frequently communicate with. But occasionally there are oddballs that have been marked important for no apparent reason.

Sure, it’s easy to tell Gmail that ‘this message is not important’ and strip its golden badge. But what if the message was marked important for a reason that is usually sound (perhaps it contains a reference to TechCrunch Disrupt, for example)? It would be nice if I could tell Gmail something to the effect of “this sender is never important”, but not to start frowning on whatever keywords the message contained. Still, it’s a great start.

Of course, this introduces a new dynamic to the way a lot of people are going to be reading email. Email intros will become ever more important, because you’ll want to ensure that your message gets marked with coveted ‘important’ tag.  It also has much broader implications. Increasingly, content will be displayed to you based on its importance rather than its time stamp — not just when it comes to browsing email, but for social networks and other content as well.

Priority Inbox will be rolling out to Gmail and Google Apps users alike over the course of the week.

More:

• Remember Magic Inbox? Yep, That's What Is Now Gmail Priority Inbox
• Inbox Hero: Gmail Priority Inbox Has Doused My Raging Email Fire — For Now

Denver, Colorado based MapMyFitness, Inc has just announced raising $5 Million in a Series A round of financing lead by Austin Ventures. The health-related social network and training application company operates a network of sites including MapMyFitness.com, MapMyRide.com, MapMyRun.com, MapMyTri.com, MapMyWalk.com, MapMyHike.com, and MapMyMountain.com.

The MapMyFitness community gives their over two million members the ability to record and store their various running, cycling, walking and hiking routes as well as access to a database of international routes, fitness calculators, and events listings. MapMyFitness also offers mobile apps that use GPS on iPhone and BlackBerry in order to help users geolocationally track their fitness regimes.

The latest investment will enable MapMyFitness to expand its site network into further verticals as well as bolster its already existent offerings. The MapMyRide property already has a Tour de France tie-in and its easy to see where similar distribution deals might be possible for each fitness category.

Additionally, the company will be relocating their headquarters to Austin, in order to be closer to their Austin-based lead investors.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that a couple days ago we flipped the switch to enable the shiny new commenting system here on TechCrunch powered by Disqus. So far, the feedback has been very, very positive — and we’re pleased with how well it’s performing. But Disqus is just one step of what we need to do.

As many of you are well aware, the commenting situation on TechCrunch has been completely out of control for a long, long time. That seems to be one unfortunate side effect of when a site gets large enough (see: YouTube and Digg for other great examples). But we also realize that things don’t have to be that way. Some popular sites have very good comments (see: Hacker News and Quora for good examples of that). We’d like our comment section to be useful too. So we’re going to try to do something about that.

As I said, Disqus is the first step. The service offers a very nice set of tools for on-the-fly moderation. We’ve also worked with them to do things such as make it very obvious when an actual TechCrunch writer is responding to a comment (I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that something like a quarter of commenters claiming to be us — or at least me — were impostors over the past few months) — you’ll see our names in bright green when it’s actually us.

But as we’ve learned over the past several months, comment moderation is a big job. So we’re going to hire someone to help us with it. On the face of it, this may not sound too attractive, but the job we’re creating is about a lot more than just moderation. It’s also about responding and engaging with our readers in an actual conversation rather than shouting matches about nothing.

And it’s not just about our comments — in fact, that may end up being the smaller aspect. It’s also about interacting with our community on all the various networks where we have a large presence — Twitter, Facebook, etc. On Twitter, for example, we have nearly 1.5 million followers now. Sadly, right now, all we do is mainly shout links at them. It would be great to interact more there as well.

We’ve already gotten a number of resumes for this position when we quietly announced it several weeks ago, but we wanted to open it up one more time as we’re finally looking to hire this person soon.

Some quick requirements: you need to be based in San Francisco and willing to work out of our office in the SoMa district. But believe me, you’ll want to. We’re a fun bunch. Prior experience is obviously a plus, but not necessarily needed.

If you’re interested, please email: tcsocialczar [at] gmail.com

Maybe it’s too lofty of a goal to think that our comment section can be something like the one found on Hacker News, but it’s a good goal to have. As all of you know, the fact of the matter right now is that the vast majority of our comments are pretty worthless. It’s so bad that I use an extension to turn them off most of the time. But at the same time, we have an incredible readership at TechCrunch that spans the tech universe — and beyond. Whether you’re Mark Cuban or an unknown-but-devoted reader, if you have something worthwhile to say, you deserve to be heard.

One final thing: Just to be clear, we welcome dissenting opinions. What we don’t welcome is bile or nonsensical comments that add nothing. It’s going to be a work in progress, but we are working on it.

[photo: flickr/EraPhernalia Vintage]

Yes, Google Wave is dead — but it won’t fully flatline until some time in 2011, Google confirmed in a post today. Well actually, their words were that wave.google.com (the front-end product) “will be available at least through the end of the year.” But yes, you can probably expect them to shut it down sometime in 2011.

But before that happens, Google is also promising that “there will be ways to export your waves before the end of the year.” So if you have been one of the seemingly few users who has been using Wave a lot, there will be a way to get the data you created out of it. It’s not yet clear what format this will be in, but we’re going to assume some sort of standard export file type.

Google also says they’re continuing to look “at ways to continue and extend Wave technology in other Google products.” Does that mean the new social product known as Google Me? We shall see. They also reiterate that they will be “open sourcing more of our code and providing support for our loyal users and Apps customers.“

Finally, the team thanked the outpouring of support from projects such as savegooglewave.com. Sadly, it looks like the nice words and nearly 42,000 thumbs up won’t be enough to stop the execution.

[photo: flickr/mendhak]

If you’re running a website — be it a world-famous news portal or a personal blog — there’s a good chance you spend a lot of time poring over your stats. There are of course plenty of services available to help with this, including the hugely popular Google Analytics. But the older systems tend to have lengthy lag times before they’ll generate a report, whereas services like Chartbeat show things as they happen. Given how quickly things spread across the web these days, the future is clearly real-time, and today sees the public launch of another powerful analytics service called Reinvigorate.net.

After logging into the site you’ll see an overview page which displays the number of currently active visitors, active pages, and a graph of your traffic over the last few hours, all of which update in real-time. If you’d like to drill down more, you can jump into a separate Traffic tab, which includes stats like your daily and monthly visitor counts, bounce rates, and a breakdown of how much traffic each page is drawing. At this point the site doesn’t offer much in the way of a real-time visualization of your traffic the way Chartbeat does, but the company says that it’s coming in the future.

Reinvigorate.net also offers heat-maps, which allow you to see where users are clicking across each of your pages. These have been available through other services, like Crazy Egg, but the Reinvigorate team believes it’s the only service to offer both heat maps and live analytics in one package.

The main overview page also offers “Live Visitor Tracking” — a list of the users currently browsing your site, listed by their username. This is where Reinvigorate.net gets a bit creepy. If you’ve integrated Reinvigorate’s analytics tools, you can track the browsing habits of each of your visitors across your site, labeling each user with the name they used to register or to leave comments with. You can use the real-time overview to see who is currently browsing your site, or you can jump to the ‘Detailed Activity tab’ to look back at any user’s browsing history, including they’ve time spent on each page. This information can of course be very helpful for site owners, and it’s been technically possible to do this kind of tracking for quite a while. But most systems don’t make it this easy, and it’s a bit unnerving.

For example, to test out Reinvigorate.net I was given the test account ‘techcrunch’. You can see my browsing history as I bounced around the site in the screenshot below:

The service has an unusual backstory. It was created as a side project back in 2002 by Sean Mcnamara, who was a longtime MediaTemple partner. In 2008, MediaTemple acquired it through its ventures arm mt ventures, and Mcnamara began working on it full-time. The service has only been available with an invite until now, but has still grown to tracking 15,000 sites and 500 million pageviews over the last 30 days.

Reinvigorate.net runs $10 per month for its beginner package and ramps up to a $20/month Pro account, with custom plans available for “ultra-high traffic sites”. If you’d like to try it out there’s a free 14 day trial.  Also see Clicktale, which is significantly more expensive (the “small site” plan starts at $99/month).