Facebook Places appears to be off to a strong start, with integration into services like Gowalla, Yelp, and SCVNGR. But it also has some pretty glaring omissions, namely the fact there’s not really a good way to do much with Places data from the browser. Now PlacePop, a startup that launched at our CrunchUp in July, has fixed that with a new Facebook application that gives you an overview of how you friends are using Facebook Places. You can access the new application right here.

The new application can best be described as a power user’s tool for Facebook Places. After connecting it with your account, you’ll see a dashboard offering an  overview of your recent Places activity: data like your total checkins this week, the venues you check into most frequently, and how often your friends are checking in. There’s also a handy ‘Trending’ category that shows you where your friends have been checking into the most.

The application’s second tab is an ‘Activity’ section, which displays a feed of all of your friends’ recent checkins — in other words, an at-a-glance view of where everyone is right now, similar to what you’ll get from Facebook’s mobile application. The third tab is for Trends, featuring graphs tracking which venues are most popular over time.

The application is easy to use and has a clean design — it’s definitely worth checking out if you’d like to explore Facebook Places. That said, we can also probably expect Facebook to build out much of this functionality itself in the not-so-distant future.

PlacePop’s core product is an iPhone application that lets businesses create virtual rewards cards (see our previous post for more info). CEO Kent Lindstrom (who formerly ran Friendster) says that there are plans to integrate Places data into the PlacePop iPhone app (checking in on Facebook will count as ‘swiping’ your card at a venue).

It seems like just yesterday, we were fighting our way through traffic on the way to Apple’s iPhone 4 antenna press conference. Today, we’re joining Apple for something a bit less out-of-the-blue: their annual September product announcement in San Francisco.

So, what’s coming? New iPod Touches? A brand new, iOS-powered AppleTV (which may or may not be known as the iTV)? Join us after the jump for the liveblog.

Just last week, a couple of much-trusted birdies popped into the MobileCrunch office, claiming to have some details on SkyFire (a Flash-friendly mobile browser already available on a number of smartphone platforms) and its impending iPhone release. “They’ve entered the very final round of testing!” they said. “It’s going to get submitted to Apple early next week!”

We’re one day past what we’d personally consider “early next week”, but sure enough: SkyFire has just announced that they’ve submitted the browser for Apple’s oh-so-important stamp of approval. Start the timers, folks.
Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian will be taking a position at early stage venture firm Y Combinator, the company will announce later today.

Ohanian left Reddit, one of the first Y Combinator startups (acquired by Conde Nast in 2007), in 2009. He’s not returning to do another startup, like cofounder Steve Huffman did earlier this year with Hipmunk. Rather, he’ll be taking a position with Y Combinator itself. And he may continue to work on other projects as well.

His new position, based in New York, will be Y Combinator’s Ambassador to the East where he will be meeting with East coast applicants and generally representing Y Combinator.

Since leaving Conde Nast in 2009, Alexis has focused on his social enterprise, Breadpig, which has generated over $150,000 for charities.

Ohanian is one of the more passionate and audacious young entrepreneurs in tech today. He’ll get along very well with potential applicants, we suspect, and generally represent Y Combinator well over on the other side of America.

Y Combinator should confirm shortly, we’ll update when they do.

As Facebook and Google’s Orkut duke it out for traffic in India, another social network has quietly gained traction in the space. SMS GupShup, a Twitter-like service in India that is primarily accessed via SMS, has hit 35 million users (up from 26 million late last year) with 1 million users joining monthly.

This number seems to outpace July traffic on Facebook (21 million unique visitors) and Orkut (20 million unique visitors). Of course, SMS GupShup’s model is slightly different from the two web-based social networks because it is SMS based. Launched in April 2007, SMS GupShup (spawned from Webaroo) has seen rapid growth in users primarily due to the immense popularity of mobile devices in India.

According to the startup, there are 550 million mobile phone users in the country and only 50 million web users. With a 10 to 1 mobile-to-PC ratio and SMS serving as the most popular communications platform, the market is ripe for SMS GupShup to take off. SMS GupShup currently processes more than 500 million messages a month and accounts for over 5 percent of all texts sent within India.

The social network has also seen traction with its groups feature. Advertisers, celebrities and publishers are able to create SMS-based communities around brands on the network, and currently over the network hosts over 3.5 million groups, compared to 2 million groups eight months ago. Brand using the platform include Microsoft, eBay, pepsi, Nokia, Ford, and Dell.

SMS GupShup is now expanding into the Philippines, often called the texting capital of the world, with carrier based products. Social SMS is expected to grow in stature as a mobile networking tool, and will make it easier for people in these countries to be social and keep in touch without ever having to access the internet. The opportunities for brands, businesses and carriers will multiply both in the form of content and advertising.

The company is also attempting to use its massive userbase for pilling purposes in India, where Indians are polled monthly on topics ranging from India’s view on gay marriage, India’s rating of Barack Obama vs. Manmohan Singh and more. SMS GupShup says that it is working with media companies to market this data. And the company launched an App Store and opened up its API earlier this year.

SMS GupShup plans to expand to the Phillipines next, after raising $12 million in funding earlier this year.

Last year, Aurora Feint launched a comprehensive social gaming platform dubbed OpenFeint. The platform has seen considerable success in attracting independent iPhone game developers to its rapidly growing community and Android developers as well. Today, the network is launching PlayTime, a set of technologies that will allow developers to make real-time multiplayer games with voice chat across iOS and Android.

PlayTime for Casual Games gives developers the tools to create a simple multiplayer game based on highscore competition. The PlayTime for Casual Games SDK will include drop in widgets for displaying progress, an embedded VoIP client for group voice chat, a lobby, a matchmaking system for starting sessions, and a synchronized event system for passing data between games.

With PlayTime for Core Games, developers can built build a more complex real time multiplayer games with group voice chat for team coordination, as well as a skill based lobby and matchmaking system. PlayTime will launch later this year as part of OpenFeint 3.0.

Of course, PlayTime faces competition from Apple’s Game Center solution for developers, which also provides a real-time gaming platform. But OpenFeint claims that PlayTime will keep games in play even if one gamer drops connection (GameTime apparently disconnects the entire game if one player loses connection). And OpenFeint promises a simple install of the PlayTime SDK.

The OpenFeint platform is already quite popular amongst developers and already powers social gaming services for 37 million users and 2800 connected games. This new offering should help boost the platform’s presence even further.

Online learning site Grockit is scaling up its leadership team after raising $7 million last May. Today it is announcing that it is hiring Roy Gilbert as CEO. Gilbert is Google’s director of user operations and policy, in charge of many non-advertising operations. He helped set up Google’s India operations and grew it from 20 people to 1,000, and was the first business manager for Gmail.

Founder Farb Nivi recruited Gilbert, who will also be taking a board seat. Nivi will be president, chief product officer, and chairman. “I kind of look at him as our Eric Schmidt,” says Nivi, who came back getting hit by a minivan last year to keep his startup going and growing.

Gilbert served in the military driving nuclear submarines, and yes, he was a boy scout. But he also comes from a family of teachers, and he and his wife started a school in Hyderabad while he was in India for underprivileged children called the Rainbow Primary School. So he has education chops as well. “I pretty much can’t believe we landed him,” says Nivi.

Nivi also recently hired a chief marketing officer, Chris Strausser, who created the Jamba Juice brand, and previously worked at PepsiCo and Kaplan. Knewton, another online education startup, also recently made a top executive hire. The whole education space is definitely heating up.

When you think about broadcasting live video over the Internet, being tethered to your computer isn’t so much fun. Broadcasting live from your mobile phone, now that starts to get interesting. Today, Justin.tv is joining the mobile party with an Android app for broadcasting live video (which will be available later today). A similar iPhone app is also in the works (it’s current iPhone app is view-only).

The Android app allows you to record video from your phone and broadcast it directly on Justin.tv. The company is serious about mobile. CEO Michael Seibel believes mobile apps can help solve some of the fundamental barriers holding back live video today.

Competitors Qik and Ustream already have mobile broadcasting apps for Android and the iPhone. Qik’s Android app is even built into the HTC EVO.

While Justin.tv may be a little late to the party, it comes bearing some new gifts. The Android app takes advantage of hardware video encoding, which drains the battery less. It also adjusts the bitrate at which the video is uploaded, depending on the strength of your wireless connection.

The app is designed to be a complete experience. You can download it, register for a Justin.tv account and start broadcasting without ever going to the website. It has three buttons: record, share, and chat. Once you hit record, you start broadcasting live. It lets you record in landscape mode as well as portrait.

You can share a link to your video with your friends on Facebook or Twitter, and when the the broadcast is over that link redirects to a saved archive version. Every video you shoot from your mobile phone is automatically saved. You can also chat with live viewers right from the mobile app as you are shooting your video. All of these features are unique to Justin.tv.

Below is a video demoing the new app with a very deep voice-over by founder Justin Kan (I think he’s been watching too many movie trailers):

The World Economic Forum has announced its list of 31 Technology Pioneers for 2011. The Technology Pioneers are its list of up-and-coming startups. Last year’s list included Twitter, Playfish, and Boston Power. The year before, Mint, Etsy, and Brightcove were named.

Joining the pantheon this year are foursquare, Knewton, Layar, Scribd, and Spotify. However, greentech is equally strong on the list, particularly with smartgrid companies such as OPower and Tendril. Below is the full list of infotech companies that made it, with links to their Crunchbase profiles for more information:

Aster Data (big data)
Atlassian (product management)
Foursquare (Geo-location)
GetJar
Knewton (adaptive learning)
Layar (augmented reality)
NetQin Mobile (mobile security)
OpenDNS (domain names)
ReputationDefender (online reputation monitoring)
Scribd (online documents)
SecondMarket (private securities market)
Spotify (streaming music service)
Vortex Engineering (low-power ATMs)

It's Alcatel-Lucent's second acquisition in 3 months and without a doubt, the company is trying to flex a little muscle in the mobile applications space. The company bought ProgrammableWeb, a well-known respository for web API's back in June and has just announced the acquisition of OpenPlug for cross-platform mobile app development. With the acquisition of France-based OpenPlug, Alcatel-Lucent will provide tools enabling developers to develop and easily deploy mobile apps across multiple platforms. OpenPlug's solutions allow developers to write apps once and then convert them into native software, compatible with various mobile operating systems - including iOs, Android, Symbian, Windows Phone and Linux.

In an interesting twist of events, eBay announced last week that third-party checkout solutions will no longer be supported on eBay after June 30, 2011. eBay says that other checkout solutions (besides PayPal) are only used less than 10 percent of the time on eBay.com. UPDATE: It’s come to out notice that eBay never offered Google Checkout as a payments service on its platform. The post has been amended to reflect this news.

As a peace offering to those who do use other checkout systems, eBay checkout is being upgraded with a number of features including advanced tax reporting, more credit card integration, and advanced shipping solutions.

Clearly eBay is looking to only expand the use of PayPal, which is currently one of the most popular payments platform across the web.

RadioTime, a Dallas, Texas-based provider of applications for finding and listening to online radio stations, has acquired the TuneIn Radio iPhone app, one of the best-selling and highest rated Internet radio applications for iOS devices.

Terms of the acquisitions have not been disclosed, but I’m told the deal was part cash, part equity. The developer of the TuneIn Radio app, Ben Alexander, was hired by RadioTime to oversee the development of the company’s iPhone and future iPad applications.

Here’s the link: the TuneIn app features the RadioTime directory of AM/FM and online-only radio stations airing in 140 countries and broadcasting in 55 different languages.

TuneIn is said to have been the first Internet radio application to turn the iPhone or iTouch into a DVR for radio, enabling users to pause, rewind and record live radio programs, and search for music and programs by the names of artists or on-air personalities, specific songs, station call letters and genre.

According to the press release announcing the transaction, more than 700,000 iPhone and iTouch owners have purchased the $1.99 TuneIn app in less than a year.

In Alexander’s words:

"I have realized the dream many independent apps developers share of having my app become a best-seller on iTunes, which is very difficult considering there are more than 225,000 apps and counting available for the iPhone, iPad and iTouch (sic).”

If I’m reading these numbers correctly, that means the app has grossed close to $1 million in less than 12 months (taking into account the 30% commission fee on sales that goes to Apple), which leads me to believe this particular one-man venture had a pretty good exit.

When it comes to seed investing, New York City is becoming a hotbed. And now TechStars, the incubator that began in Boulder. Colorado and has spawned nearly 40 startups, is coming to New York. This will be the fourth (and supposedly last) city TechStars expands to, according to CEO David Cohen (the other two are Boston and Seattle).

TechStars is accepting applications for the New York City Class of 2011, which will start in January. TechStars provides a little bit of cash ($6,000 per founder for a three-month program) and a lot of mentorship. The list of New York City mentors includes Foursquare founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, Tumblr founder David Karp, VC Fred Wilson, Hunch founder and seed investor Chris Dixon, angel investor Roger Ehrenberg, StockTwits CEO Howard Lindzon, Boxee CEO Avner Ronen, BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg, and Hot Potato founder Justin Shaffer. Jeff Clavier and Dave McClure snuck in there as well, even though they live in California.

TechStars takes a 6 percent equity stake in each startup in common stock (no board seats), and has a decent track record. Cohen and David Tisch will be running the program. They are looking for about ten startups for the initial New York City class.

Card.ly, a Web service that allows anyone to create sweet-looking online business cards (see my personal site robinwauters.com for an example) has been acquired by Workface, the company behind digital business card creation tool BusinessCard2. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

In fact, I didn’t even manage to hear about the acquisition, let alone get the purchase price, from Card.ly parent company Harkness Labs founder Daniel Blake, who to date I had considered to be a friend of mine.

All kidding aside, Workface acquired Card.ly primarily for its user base, as it aims to introduce its virtual business card creation technology to more potential users. Blake says Card.ly has attracted tens of thousands of active users, but declined to share more detailed numbers.

Blake sold off Card.ly to Workface because he’s focused on his most recent venture, video chat and collaboration app Tinychat, which has seriously taken off this year.

Until further notice, Card.ly will remain unaffected, although Workface does say it plans to integrate the service into BusinessCard2, which has been around since 2007, in the months to come. As long as they don’t kill my website, fair enough.

When Salesforce.com bought crowdsourced business contact database Jigsaw for $142 million earlier this year, the CRM giant said that it would combine its suite of applications with Jigsaw's model for the automation of acquiring and keeping up-to-date business contact data. Today, Salesforce is unveiling Jigsaw's deep integration into the company's platform, Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM. Jigsaw will now deliver real-time updates to contact and company information within Salesforce CRM through communication platform Salesforce Chatter. Jigsaw, which uses a Wikipedia-style crowd-sourcing model to bring in data around business contacts, has been incorporated into CRM applications to provide on-demand data, and analytics on the health of data and on usage.

Electronic payment solutions provider VeriFone Systems this morning announced it has acquired the assets of WAY Systems, a provider of mobile POS solutions and gateway services for mobile merchants. The purchase price consisted of an upfront payment of $6 million and an earn-out payable in one year of up to an additional $3 million dollars should certain performance targets be met. VeriFone says the acquisition will not have a material impact on its financial results.

If you didn’t think the check-in was a commodity before Facebook launched their Places feature, you likely do now. But Gowalla has known that for awhile, and that’s why they’ve been moving to extend the service and build on top of the check-in. Comments and photos came several months ago. Today brings another nice addition: Highlights.

The best way to think about the feature may be to think back to the “25 Things About Me” meme that spread throughout Facebook last year. The meme asked you to answer a set of 25 questions and send the answers to your friends. Gowalla Highlights is similar in that they want you to tag about 20 real world places based on a set of criteria. For example, you’re asked to name you favorite “Date Night” spot, the place you think has the “Best Tacos,” your “Alma Mater,” and your favorite “Watering Hole,” among other things. Each of these answers reveals a bit about who you actually are, and where you spend your time.

Where this gets really interesting is when you bring the social graph into it. So, for example, if I check-in near a spot where a friend of mine asked his wife to marry him, I’ll get a message alerting me of that. Or if I’m looking for the best taco place in Austin, Texas, I can visit the Highlight page and see what the masses are voting for. There are a lot of potentially interesting uses for this when it starts to get populated with a lot of data.

And co-founder Josh Williams knows that. He thinks of Highlights as sort of a replacement for the atlas. “In 2010, what was the best scenic view point in Seattle?,” Williams wonders. With Gowalla Highlights, he’d be able to tell that.

Williams notes that the idea behind Highlights came about in a sort of odd way. While the feature is launching today in beta on the website version of Gowalla, they actually thought of it while building the iPad version. Williams says that the way you can manipulate a map on the iPad made this social geo atlas idea make a lot of sense. With that in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that Gowalla is working quickly to bring this feature to both the mobile apps (in about a month) and the iPad (shortly after that).

They chose to put this on the website first because it’s easier to test and built it out there. Williams notes that close to 50 percent of Gowalla’s active users now visit the website on a weekly basis to see their Passports (Gowalla profiles), look at pictures, or comment. As they add more features, such as custom Passports, this has been growing quickly.

But obviously, mobile is still the key to the app. And Highlights is going to make the experience better. It’s the latest step in what Williams calls “the intersection of people and places” — in other words, it’s the latest step beyond being just a check-in service. You’ll note that you don’t have to check-in at all to use this feature.

But the truth is that Gowalla always has been more than that. At first, it was all about virtual items based around check-ins. That aspect never really took off, and it has since been depreciated (but is still around if user want to use it). Now it’s all about this real world interaction with places. Williams notes that Gowalla’s Trips feature has been working well, and hints at another new feature due shortly as well.

As with the rest of Gowalla now, Highlights will be a part of the API. Williams says he’s excited to see what kind of visualization tools people come up with using this data. I’m excited to see what my friends consider to be their “Take My Breath Away” spot.

The textbook rental market is heating up as school season gets in full swing. Chegg recently made its first acquisition of CourseRank, and Barnes and Noble is also playing in the space. College textbook rental startup BookRenter is also taking part in this growing market, reporting 725 percent growth in revenue from textbook rentals since last September. The company says that revenue is expected to be in the range of $20 to $50 million in 2010. Of course, this is still behind competitor Chegg, which is expected to see revenues in the range of $130 million this year.

Like its competitors, Bookrenter wants to be the Netflix of textbook rentals. By renting textbooks, Students are able to save money by loaning textbooks for a fixed duration, usually a semester, and end up spending only the fraction of the cost of outright purchases. The system is simple: a student searches for a book on the website using a title or ISBN, and places an order by selecting a rental period and delivery option. The book(s) are delivered complete with return UPS labels for easy shipping.

BookRenter also partnering with a number of colleges to set up a virtual rental store on their sites. Partners have access to the same selection of textbooks available on BookRenter's site (which are electronically sourced from the largest textbook suppliers.) Since March, BookRenter has partnered with 260 campus bookstores, serving over 3.2 million students.

Of course, BookRenter, which just raised $10 million in new funding, is playing in a competitive space. But from the way Chegg and Bookrenter are growing in terms of sales, there cloud be plenty of revenue to go around.

Target just announced that it would be the first brick and mortar retail store to sell Facebook Credits gift cards. The cards will be available at Target stores across the country beginning Sept. 5.

Facebook Credits gift cards will be sold in increments of $15, $25 and $50. The $15 Facebook Credits gift card has been created exclusively for Target. This a big move for the social network’s virtual currency; which is expected to make up one-third of Facebook’s revenue in the next year.

Facebook has scored a number of deals with gaming companies to allow its members to use Facebook Credits to buy virtual goods through Facebook credits, including partnerships with Zynga, Crowdstar, LOLapps, and RockYou.

The social network also recently struck a deal with Malaysian payments company MOL Global (the company that bought Friendster) to sell gift cards for credits at retail stores in Malaysia and Singapore.

Zynga also made a similar move earlier this year.

Greenpeace, the organization with noble goals but a prickly way of going about things, has asked Facebook to stop using coal at its new data center in Oregon. Given Greenpeace’s history (seen here annoying Deutsche Bank), I should expect some attention-seeking prank if Facebook doesn’t comply. Watch out, Zuckerberg.

Kenexa Corporation, which provides business solutions for human resources, has agreed to acquire compensation and talent management solutions provider Salary.com. The NASDAQ-listed company has made an all-cash tender offer and merger for $4.07 per share, or approximately $80 million.

The agreement has been unanimously approved by the board of directors of both companies.

Kenexa expects to complete the cash tender offer and close the transaction during the fourth quarter of 2010. Aside from customary closing conditions, the completion of the transaction is also subject to a majority of the outstanding Salary.com shares being tendered.

Salary.com provides on-demand compensation software that helps businesses and individuals manage pay and performance. The company offers market pricing and compensation analysis software that helps companies benchmark, compensate and reward its employees.

Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan in a statement said Salary.com's value proposition spans both software and proprietary content, and that their compensation management solutions complement its own suite of talent acquisition and retention services.

Over the weekend, over 200 teams of developers met up to participate in Node.js Knockout, a 48 hour coding competition with one basic rule: you *had* to use node.js to build your app. The deadline was midnight on Sunday, which means that the finished applications are currently being subjected to the scrutiny of the expert panel of judges and – perhaps even more terrifying – the general public. The winning team walks away with a whole bundle of prizes, including an iPad for each member.

So what is node.js? Without getting super technical, it’s a framework for JavaScript that allows developers to easily write programs that run on the server, rather than in the browser like JavaScript normally does. Node’s design takes advantage of this fact by using a novel approach to I/O that allows a lot of users to access the program at the same time. If that whets your appetite, Simon Willison gets into some more technical details. Side note: if you like to build things (especially under arbitrary deadlines), using node.js or anything else, you should come show us what you’ve got at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon on September 25-26 here in San Francisco.

Voting for the best application is open now through Thursday night at midnight, so head over and cast your vote. Here are our favorites:

Swarmation – This multi-player game reduces each participant to a single pixel. Players must work together (or not) to move their pixels to form patterns that are chosen by a Tetris-like unseen overlord. Gameplay is super smooth and it gets very interesting to watch the strategies employed by each player. Huge time sink potential.

Drawbridge – This one has some serious potential to turn into a revenue-generating business.
Multiple people can share a sketchpad to draw out quick notes, ideas, whatever. It can be tough to control using a trackpad, but a mouse is better. The real win would be if the team can get it to work on the iPad – unfortunately it doesn’t right now, but that’s definitely an app I would pay for.

Jackalope – You’ll want to open two windows for this one: the admin pane and the demo site. As you mouse and click around on the demo, you can watch all of your actions reflected in real time on the admin page. Now imagine getting this data from all the visitors to your site, in real time. Another one that has a clear potential for revenue.

Salamander – Multi-player snake. Eat the apples to grow – trap your opponents in the corners of the board. Similar to Swarmation in that it’s a simple concept, easy and fast to control, interesting to watch player behavior, and (of course) a massive time sink.

Tweet Quest – This one is actually really fun. You’re a knight in shining armor with nothing but your wits and your sword (at first) to help you make your way through a rat-infested dungeon. Hook it up to your twitter account and it imports the avatars of the people you follow – and photoshops them onto the bodies of the rats that you must destroy. That doesn’t sound like much but it really is what makes the game what it is – seeing the alerts that I had defeated both Heather Harde and Paul Graham pretty much made my night.

Audience measurement company comScore has acquired Nedstat, an Amsterdam-based provider of web analytics and video measurement solutions for approx. $36.7 million. ComScore says the purchase will help the company accelerate its global expansion strategy, particularly in European markets.

Back in July 2009, Twitter made a big stink about developers using the term “Tweet” in their Twitter apps. The Twitter API team had contacted a third-party developer—TweetKnot—informing the company that it had “grown uncomfortable” about the use of the word “tweet” in the app’s name. That was before the company effectively secured the trademark with the USPTO, notably.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone promptly clarified the situation in a blog post, stating that it has “no intention of ‘going after’ the wonderful applications and services that use the word [tweet] in their name when associated with Twitter.”

That may well be, but it isn’t stopping Twitter from continuing to try and get the mark registered in the United States.

On Thursday, August 26, 2010, Twitter apparently filed a U.S. federal trademark registration for TWEET, in connection with computer software, online advertising and marketing services, business data analysis and more.

From what I can tell, someone actually owns the trademark for ‘tweet’ in the US, namely Paul Rosario. The description provided to the USPTO is automatic fluid-composition control machines and instruments, electromechanical controls for use in bird remediation / pest control etc., so not exactly related to Twitter users’ understanding of the term.

Strangely, the company also filed a new trademark application for “Twitter” on the same date (August 26). The reason I think that’s weird is because Twitter had already filed for the trademark back in April 2007, and from what I can gather it was effectively registered under their name in May 2009. Perhaps they’d like to include other classes this time.

For what it’s worth, I also checked trademark registrations in Europe and noticed Twitter already owns both “twitter” and “tweet” there.

I’ve asked Twitter for clarification and whether or not the company plans to use the trademark against owners and developers of Twitter applications and services with (one of) both terms in their product or company names. It’s the middle of the night in California, but I’ll update the post as soon as I get a response.

It seems as if the ads for Sony’s upcoming movie The Social Network — you know, the Facebook movie — are everywhere on the Internet. They’re here on TechCrunch, they’re on VentureBeat, they’re on Techmeme — they’re just about everywhere but Facebook itself. In fact, they’re even on rival MySpace. In fact, the movie is sponsoring a whole section of the other social network. Yes, the Facebook movie is sponsoring MySpace.

Again, this isn’t too shocking considering that the ads are everywhere on the web. But it has to be a little bit of a slap in the face for MySpace, which was once the king of the hill in the space but has long since been passed — and lapped — by Facebook. Now, not only is MySpace’s rival important enough to warrant a movie, but that movie is paying to help keep MySpace afloat.

It’s a bit like if Yankee Stadium was going to be renamed to Fever Pitch Park, after that (bad) movie about the Red Sox.

Further, when you click through to the movie area of MySpace, there’s another The Social Network ad. And that ad has one social sharing option: Facebook.

I know MySpace is supposedly cool with Facebook now in a defeatist kind of way. They just launched a Facebook sync tool to hook into the Facebook stream. But still.

Perhaps sadder than all of this is that no one has even bothered to make a Facebook movie trailer spoof for MySpace yet — probably the most obvious one. Twitter has one. YouTube has one. MySpace? They just have a movie section sponsored by the Facebook movie.