I sent my first e-mail message in 1995, to a member of my development team. That was the only person I knew who had an e-mail address in those days.  I also did my first web search around that time. I think I used Lycos for this. I entered some keywords into a text box, separated by Boolean operators, and received a list of web pages that I could click on that referenced these words.

Sixteen years has passed. I receive about 400 e-mails a day now from people all over the world. E-mail has become part of my life and has changed the way I communicate and the way I work. I don't know anyone anywhere who doesn't have an e-mail address. When I went to Sikkim, India, last year, a Buddhist monk in a remote Himalayan monastery even gave me his e-mail address. The web has also evolved in a similar fashion—it seems to be everywhere and connects everyone, for everything. Internet technologies are now toppling dictatorships in the Middle East.

But what has really changed in search? We still go to the same text boxes, enter expressions that we hope the computer will understand, get back lists of web pages that reference those words, and click on links to find the information we are looking for. The only real difference is that now the top links take you to spam sites—which want you to click on other links that make them money and that make Google money. Creating low-quality, low-cost information pages has become such big business that the leading content farm, Demand Media, just went public and is valued at $1.9 billion. According to Blekko's spam clock, over 1 million spam pages are created every hour. So the web is becoming one giant heap of trash.

I had hoped to put Google and Bing on the spot at the recent BigThink conference by challenging them to fix the spam problem; perhaps to follow Blekko's bold lead in blacklisting the leading polluters. But they instead got into a pissing match about who was copying whom.  Google simply changed the subject. And when I asked the panelists about their long-term vision on search, I was really disappointed at the shallowness of the response. They weren't talking about changing the world—just about fine-tuning what they’ve been doing forever. You can watch the video below to see what I mean.

In the hope that I don't have to wait another 16 years to see advancements in search, I'll share my views on where it needs to go. Perhaps you can also share your views and we can inspire a new generation of startups to do to the current search leaders what Google did to Lycos and AltaVista: antiquate them.

In a nutshell, what I want is for my computer—or a new Google—to serve me. I don't want to be serving it words that make sense to it, and then have to wade through pages of spam it delivers to me, to find the information I am seeking. I want it to learn what I like and what my friends like and tell me what I want to know or do what I need it to.

If I am visiting New York City tomorrow and want to eat dinner at a moderately priced North Indian restaurant near where I am staying, I want my computer to suggest the two or three places that I will like and that have space available. I book my flights and hotel reservations on line, have my calendar on Google, tweet my likes and dislikes, and talk to my friends on different social media sites, after all. So why can't my new Google simply take my information and my friends’ information and give me what I want?

Is this so hard? I don't think so. This week, we witnessed a computer, Watson, beating the top Jeopardy contestants. It was able to parse human speech patterns, make sense of complex questions, do very sophisticated searches, and come back very quickly with the right answer. It didn't respond with a series of links—it computed the probability that its answer was correct and responded accordingly.

Watson's technology is a great start, but I want much more. I also want it to analyze my social graph and get recommendations from friends who matter. For example, when it comes to Indian food, I don't care what my academic peers say or what my South Indian friends say; I want input from fellow Punjabis—they know their tikka masalas and saag paneers better than anyone else does. If I am looking for health-related advice, I want to know what doctors say. If I am shopping for a gift for my wife, I want input from women who share her tastes. This isn't rocket science.

And then I want more. I want my new Google to automatically make a dinner reservation for me, buy me a ticket to a movie that I may want to watch, or place an order on the cheapest and most reliable shopping site. Yes, I know there are already many applications/sites that do this. Why aren't my preferred sites integrated into the search function—so I never have to see the 90s-era text links?

What I really don't ever want to see is the spam that Google delivers. The present page-ranking system is easy to bait—just add the right key words to some garbage content or pay Google for an ad, and your listing appears at the top of everyone's search results.

Google took some good steps forward this week with its announcement that it will let users tag sites as spam via a Chrome extension and rank the websites of people they know higher than others. But this is still more of the same—the spammers still get top billing. Just do a search on a term like "digital camera under $200" to see what I mean. The results are practically useless. (Bing just added a nice option to let you search by price, but that is buried in its spammy results when you do a regular search).

We need some out-of-the-box thinking here. I doubt we will see this from Google, because it makes billions by serving up ads.  So here is an excellent opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Editor's note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at The Halle Institute for Global Learning at Emory University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com.

Last time we checked in with SecondMarket in late January, Facebook shares had declined from the auction’s high point at $28.26 a share  (a $70 billion + valuation) to $26.25 a share which means a $65.5 billion valuation going by its 2.5 billion shares outstanding. While at the time we had speculated about a peak and signs of a decline, shares are up 2.85%  this week in SecondMarket’s 10th Facebook auction, at $27.00 a share and a $67.5 billion valuation.

What’s changed (again)? Continued market exuberance as Facebook platform developer Zynga’s valuation slowly rises and reports of a Kleiner Perkins investment at $52 billion.

Guess we’ll have to get the interns to update our infographic.

Full SecondMarket mail below.

Subject: Privileged and Confidential – Participate in SecondMarket's 10th Facebook Auction

To Facebook market participants:

Last week's SecondMarket auction cleared at a per share price of $27.00. Attached is the detailed auction results report.

Like last week, the minimum sale and minimum purchase will be 10,000 shares. If you are bidding for fewer than 100,000 shares, you are required to open a brokerage account with SecondMarket. Please email XXXX@SecondMarket.com to receive a Brokerage Account Opening Form and return the completed form by Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 5:00 PM EST.

Please email your completed Seller or Buyer Information Forms to fb@SecondMarket.com by Wednesday, February 23 at noon EST. To verify receipt of your order, you must receive a confirmation email from fb@SecondMarket.com. If you do not receive a confirmation email, your sell order has not been received by SecondMarket and may be excluded from the auction.

Next Week's Auction Timeline:

•         Friday, February 18 – SecondMarket will begin accepting Seller Information Forms, Buyer Information Forms and Brokerage Account Opening Forms

•         Tuesday, February 22 at 5:00 PM EST – Brokerage Account Opening Form due, if bidding for fewer than 100,000 shares

•         Wednesday, February 23 at 12:00 PM EST – Seller and Buyer Information Forms due

•         Wednesday, February 23 at 5:00 PM EST – Participants informed of auction results

•         Wednesday, February 23 at 8:00 PM EST – Transaction documentation distributed to buyers and sellers

•         Thursday, February 24 at 5:00 PM EST – Wire of 100% of gross purchase price to escrow account due, if allocated fewer than 100,000 shares

•         Friday, February 25 at 4:00 PM EST – Completed transaction documentation due from buyers and sellers

•         Friday, February 25 at 7:00 PM EST – Notice sent to Facebook, Inc.

By reading this email, the recipient acknowledges and agrees that all of the information contained herein is confidential and that the recipient will keep this information confidential. The recipient further agrees that it will not copy, reproduce, or distribute this email in whole or in part.

Please contact us at fb@SecondMarket.com or XXXXXXXX if you have any questions.

Please note that the information in this email does not constitute an offer to sell to, nor a solicitation of an offer to buy from, nor shall any securities be offered or sold to, any person in any jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.

Regards,

Terrence

Between the likes of picplz and Instagram, image-sharing sites are making plenty of headlines these days. And there’s one obvious offshoot that seems ripe for similar services: video. Granted, Path offers support for video, but it’s semi-private and there could still be an opportunity for a more public service to tap into this trend.That’s where Justin.tv’s upcoming app Socialcam comes in.

The app, which remains in a very limited beta, is looking to to offer a straightforward way for people to capture and share their videos with friends — and yes, it’s doing that in a way that is very similar to Instagram and picplz, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I sat down with Justin.tv founder Justin Kan and VP of marketing Matthew DiPietro to get a tour of the app, and have also gotten the chance to play around with the Android version myself.

Kan says that it’s frustratingly difficult to share video taken on your phone with friends: email attachments are a pain because of size issues, and MMS leads to heavily degraded video quality. YouTube makes it easy to upload directly from your phone, but the focus there doesn’t seem to be on sharing your clips with a network of friends. And posting a video to Facebook is way harder than it should be, which is why the company started working on Socialcam last fall. A significant number of Justin.tv videos are watched as archived footage (as opposed to live streams), but this is the first time the company will be launching a product that’s dedicated exclusively to recorded footage.

The app, which will be available for both Android and iPhone, is pretty simple: after firing it up you’re asked to log-in via Facebook Connect, which is currently the only login option. The app presents you with a list of your Facebook friends who are already on Socialcam and asks if you’d like to ‘Follow’ them (Socialcam uses a one-way follower model like Twitter). After that, you’ll spend most of your time looking at the stream of Socialcam videos posted by your friends. Each video is represented by four frame grabs — tapping on one will cause the video player to pop open the clip will start playing immediately. You can leave comments and ‘Like’ each video, and you can also tag your friends in clips. If you tag a friend who isn’t on Socialcam, it will still show up on their Facebook wall (and the video is playable directly from there — you don’t have to click a link).

There are a few other nice touches. I’ve been using the Android app, and aside from some quirks you’d expect from a beta, it’s clear that a lot of attention is being given to the UI, with smooth transitions and so on. One of my favorite features: Socialcam uses face identification when it generates the preview thumbnails for each video, so you wind up seeing photos of your friends instead of a shot of someone’s shoe or the wall. The application also uses “streaming upload” — as soon as you start shooting a video, it will start uploading to Justin.tv’s servers, which reduces how long you’ll have to wait before you can publish it.

Kan and DiPietro acknowledge that they aren’t the only ones looking to launch an ‘Instagram/picplz/etc’ for video — given the popularity of these services, it’s an obvious idea. There will be plenty of competition, but Socialcam has a chance at being first to market, with launch planned for just before SXSW. Of course, there’s still the question of whether users will be as quick to latch onto a video-oriented sharing service — people tend to get more upset when you post a video of them without their permission, and it’s obviously quicker to take a snapshot.

Oh, and the first 20 people to sign up at this link will be added to the beta. Be quick!

Want to come celebrate Sarah Lacy’s new book with us in San Francisco? Here’s your chance. We are giving away a total of 10 free tickets to her launch party, all of which include a free signed copy of her critically acclaimed new book, Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How The Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos. We will give 5 free tickets away for this giveaway, then another 5 away next week.

As Paul Carr noted, Sarah’s new book has been called “a fascinating new gem of a book” by USA Today, and “an outstanding piece of journalism” by Fortune.

The party will start at 6:00pm PST on Wednesday, March 9th at the amazing SWIG in San Fransisco. If you are one of our winners, your ticket will include an open bar, free food, and a signed copy of her book.

If you’d like to come to this awesome party, all you have to do is the following.

1) Make sure you fan our TechCrunch Facebook page:

2) Then do one of these two things:

- Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TechCrunch hashtag)
- Or leave a comment below telling us why you want to come.

The contest will end tomorrow, February 19th at 5pm PST. Please only tweet the message once or you will be disqualified. We will go through the comments and tweets, make sure you added us on Facebook, and contact you this weekend with details if you are chosen. Anyone can enter, but please note this is a giveaway for tickets only, and does not include airfare.

You can also still find tickets on sale here. Hurry though because they will sell out fast.

Good luck everyone and we hope to see you at the party!

It was back in July of last year that we first wrote about a service called Voyurl with the headline: It's Hard To Tell If Voyurl Or Their Ads Are Creepier. You see, at the time, the still-in-stealth startup was targeting angel investors via Google ads get their attention to hopefully talk about their product. That’s actually pretty smart. So we had to give the edge to the product itself being creepier. You see, its aim was to be a service that made your entire browsing history public.

At the time, we said the best way to think of this was as a sort of “Blippy but with more potential porn”. Of course, Blippy has since been tweaking its service to be less about public sharing of your purchases and more about the social dynamics of purchases and recommendations. But fear not, Voyurl is gladly picking up the creepy mantle!

After all that time in stealth, the service finally launched in private beta recently. I’ve had a chance to test it out for a bit and it really is pretty amazing. By using a Chrome extension, they not only keep track of everything you browse on the web and publish it in a realtime updating list, but they can also publish your back-history of surfing as well.

So who the hell would want to possibly use this? Well, first of all, it is kind of fun. If you only browse sites you don’t mind sharing, or just don’t care in general, this is a fun way to share those sites with others. And it’s a fun way to easily keep track of these sites. And to get/give recommendations. More importantly, with the extension, you can easily pause the tracking — or you can set it to be anonymous with the click of a button. And you can stream just individual URLs (either with your name attached or anonymously).

And if you do choose to share, you’ll be adding your data to a growing database of interesting data from Voyurl users. You can easily see the system-wide Top URLs, for example. Here you’ll find that, unsurprisingly, Facebook dominates followed by Twitter, Tumblr, Google, Engadget, and even TechCrunch (though the amount of time spent on Facebook compared to other sites really is pretty amazing).

You can also break those charts down by categories or domains. And you can see the top users of the service based on both total site visits and total time spent browsing overall. In other words, this gives you great insight into the true Internet addicts.

So far, those in the beta seem to be the nerdy, early-adopter type who actually browse Reddit more than porn. But when this baby opens up to the regular public, I cannot wait to see what we find.

Obviously, this is very use-at-your-own risk. And things are still a bit buggy. But if you want to try out Voyurl, use this link made for TechCrunch readers. It should get about 500 of you into the beta. Really, just be careful what you browse with it on. I’ll be watching. No really, I will be watching.

@bbc_global
BBC Global News

BREAKING: Col Muammar Gaddafi's government in Libya has taken a series of measures, including blocking internet … http://bbc.in/gUVJNN

about 17 hours ago via twitterfeedRetweetReply

Both the BBC and the AFP are reporting that Muammar Gaddafi’s government in Libya has begun to block user access to Facebook in the country’s capital of Tripoli and is sporadically shutting down electricity access and access to Internet connections in the rest of the country as a response to anti-govermental protests.

Effective Measure CEO Scott Julian has confirmed to TechCrunch that Internet access in Libya is indeed restricted, but not totally cut off. Effective Measure measures analytics tags on pages like arabia.msn.com within the MENA region.

Says Julian:

“At around 10pm local time, Internet traffic dramatically dropped across the board. Whilst not completely cut off it’s clear it’s a pretty concentrated effort, which in my opinion is unlikely to be the result of a random failure.”

“The profile of the change in traffic is very similar to what we saw in Egypt, and leads one to conclude that this isn’t the result of a group of random, unconnected events. It seems some ISP’s are still up and running, which follows the same pattern as the first shutdown in Egypt.”

Twitter user Ramy Raoof says that sources in Libya have cited the Facebook blocks, but that Twitter.com is still not blocked and Internet access is not yet down. I have contacted both companies for information and will update this post as soon as they respond.

You can follow the events in Libya on Twitter at #Libya and #Benghazi.

@RamyRaoof
Ramy Raoof

according to friends in #Libya- facebook.com blocked, twitter.com not blocked. Internet is not down (i am chatting with them now) #Feb17

about 18 hours ago via webRetweetReply

Al Jazeera is also reporting access to its Aljazeera.net site being cut off as well as access to select Facebook opposition groups. This is reminiscent of the steps former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak took to cut off Internet access in Egypt before popular uprisings lead to his resignation.

View the BBC’s video here.

As with Egypt, Telecomix is offering a free dialup number to Libyans who are having trouble connecting.

@marwame
Marwa Elnaggar

RT @ChangeInLibya: RT @sunnkaa: PLS RT!…+494923197844321
User: Telecomix
Password: Telecomix
12 lines for Libyans only #Libya #Benghazi

about 19 hours ago via SnaptuRetweetReply

The media world is in a tizzy over Apple’s new subscription billing rules for iPad and iPhone apps. Basically, Apple will now take a 30 percent cut of all in-app subscription revenues and own all the customer data. As written, the rules apply to everything from iPad magazines and newspapers to subscription music services and even subscription movie services like Netflix.

We’ve debated these rules up and down. In this special episode of Fly or Die, Rhapsody president Jon Irwin joins us to explain how online subscription media businesses work from his perspective. Irwin is one of the few executives brave enough to speak out against the new rules. Rhapsody’s position, in a nutshell, is this:

Our philosophy is simple too – an Apple-imposed arrangement that requires us to pay 30 percent of our revenue to Apple, in addition to content fees that we pay to the music labels, publishers and artists, is economically untenable. The bottom line is we would not be able to offer our service through the iTunes store if subjected to Apple’s 30 percent monthly fee vs. a typical 2.5 percent credit card fee.

Rhapsody’s iTunes app is used by a substantial portion of its 750,000 subscribers, but they also listen across other devices. Rhapsody’d service is not limited to the iOS platform. Similarly, many media companies want the ability to bundle print subscriptions with iPad subscriptions to publications. Apple’s new rules complicate such bundling.

So will the rules fly or die? I am reminded of a similar move Apple did previously when it changed its rules for how it would handle other mobile ad networks. They issued new rules, which effectively turned out to be a trial balloon. When the market reacted and antitrust investigations were threatened, Apple backed down. The same could happen here, or Apple could choose to selectively enforce the rules against digital publishers but not against music or movie services.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been visiting a city, looking for a place to work, and have just ended up in a Starbucks. I hate working in Starbucks. But I know they have WiFi, so I go there anyway. Time and time again. But what if a service existed that showed you other options for getting work done when you’re on the go? That’s exactly what LiquidSpace is going to be.

The service, which hasn’t launched yet, can most easily be thought of an Airbnb for workplaces. Their aim is to find the best spots around a city to work from and show them to you via a location-based mobile application. But these aren’t Starbucks locations, instead they’ll be offices, business centers, lounges, and all sorts of other places that people have set up with things like WiFi, but are under-utilized at various times. LiquidSpace will help these places maximize their potential.

This idea is potentially huge for workers on the go. Certainly an aspect of it will be co-working spaces, but there will also be places more tailored for private work and/or meetings as well. It’s something that I’d probably use every day while on the road.

And LiquidSpace is going to see if there are others like me when they do their first major test of the service at the upcoming SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. The team is setting up a bunch of pop-up workspaces around the city that users will be able to reserve. These will be places like Art House, Copa, a few hotels, and even some local startup spaces. They’ll also have a “badass” bus that will roam around the city allowing people to come inside and work. Their partner, Turnstone, is helping them out with all of this.

Polaris Ventures’ Dogpatch Labs will offer similar working space during SXSW, and the LiquidSpace guys thinks that’s great and hope they can work together to fill out that space. But the key is the wide variety of spaces they’ll be opening. At the same time, the plan is still to keep the app in limited beta testing throughout the conference so they don’t get bombarded and have nothing to offer most people. We’ll work on getting some invites before the event begins to dish out here.

All of this is possible thanks to a nice seed round LiquidSpace has landed from Reid Hoffman (Greylock Discovery) and Mike Maples (Floodgate). The $1.3 million round will put Maples on the Board alongside LiquidSpace co-founders Mark Gilbreath and Doug Marinaro.

Last week, Mike promised that, if Sarah Lacy’s new book, Brilliant Crazy, Cocky, reached the number one slot in Amazon’s Entrepreneurship category, we’d host a big launch party in San Francisco.

At TechCrunch, we keep our promises. The party in on!

Update: Tickets to the event are now completely sold out. If you’d still like to attend, you can try to win a ticket here.

The fun kicks off at 6:00p.m. on Wed, Mar 9th at SWIG in San Francisco. Tickets are just $20 which includes an open bar (oh yes), food and a signed copy of the book (which normally retails at $24.95). All of which makes this probably the best value event TechCrunch has ever hosted.

And there’s more: a portion of the event proceeds will go to Partners in Health, a group that brings high-quality health care usually reserved for the rich to the poorest people in the world. Known for their long time work in Haiti, Sarah spent time with Partners in Health in Rwanda, seeing the difference they were making in lives close up. You can ask her about it at the party.

You can also ask her about the Brilliant, Crazy and Cocky entrepreneurs she met around the world during the reporting of the book. A book which, by the way, USA Today called “a fascinating new gem of a book” that “[gets] inside the heads of idea people,” Fortune said, “Go buy it. Seriously. This is an outstanding piece of journalism,” and New York Magazine just featured in its ‘approval matrix’ between “highbrow” and “brilliant.” So there you go.

The venue has limited capacity, so tickets will sell out fast. You already know how much fun TechCrunch events are and – given the international flavor of the book (and the open bar) – this one should be particularly entertaining. For one thing, we’re trying to arrange a fleet of internationally themed food-trucks to give a taste of some of places Sarah travelled.

And did I mention the open bar?

Tickets are available here. (All sold out!) See you at the party!

This morning Twitter shut down UberMedia clients UberTwitter and Twidroyd because of privacy violations for tweets more than 140 characters, monetization violations (concerning affiliate links) as well as trademark infringement.  While UberMedia CEO Bill Gross tells us that UberMedia is doing what ever it takes to get the apps back up, currently the final (and only tweets for some users) tweets you can see on the Twidroyd  Android app are the below from Twitter’s @support account.

@Support
 

UberTwitter, twidroyd, and UberCurrent have been suspended due to policy violations. Read more here: http://t.co/HHGa9k1

about 22 hours ago via webRetweetReply

@Support
 

Want to keep using Twitter on your phone? Download an official Twitter client here: http://t.co/rxwSYuW

about 22 hours ago via webRetweetReply

The first tweet announces the news and the second is a direct link to Twitter’s official app. Twidroyd users did not have to be following the @support account in order to receive the tweets, they were forced by Twitter. According to a thread on Hacker News, this is what happens when a banned app keeps making Twitter API calls.

Gobbling up Twitter clients in the past couple of months, UberMedia will control 20% of tweets if its acquisition of Tweetdeck is finalized. Did Twitter, who was late to the game when developing its own in-house apps (mostly through an acquisition of  3rd party client Tweetie), just take down the app market leader in order to promote its own?

While this could just be Twitter’s innocent way of breaking the news to app owners (it also sent an email in conjunction with the announcement), it seems like, at least to some, an interesting way to get the message across.

Thanks: Fried_Yoda

We’ve written a number of things about the contrast between native apps and web apps. The common consensus these days is that the two will eventually converge — but that has been happening more slowly than some have been hoping, particularly in the mobile space where native apps dominate. On the more traditional side of things, the transition is happening faster, but something Google has been working on could be the real missing link: Native Client. And according to Google, it’s getting close to being ready for primetime.

As a quick primer, Native Client allows developers to build web apps that execute native code inside the browser. This means that on top of traditional web-based languages like JavaScript, the browser will be able to execute things written in languages like C and C++. More importantly, it will make porting desktop apps to the web much easier.

And while the technology is fully open source, it’s clearly being driven by Google. They’ve not only worked the most on Native Client, but they’ve developed other tech such as the Pepper Plugin API (PPAPI) which is an evolution of the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI), which pretty much all browsers use to handle browser plugins — well, all browsers beside Microsoft Internet Explorer which uses ActiveX. Pepper was made to address the portability and performance issues with NPAPI.

Anyway, in a post today on the Chromium blog, Google has announced that Native Client is “getting ready for takeoff“. Google has been working to get full Pepper support, and now they believe they’ve made Native Client “as portable and secure as JavaScript”. And thy’ve just unveiled a completely revamped SDK for the project.

Technically, this new SDK is called “Arctic Sea” and it requires Chrome 10 or above (which we just covered yesterday). Also worth noting, with the Pepper support (which is close to being “stable”), Native Client no longer supports NPAPI. You can read more about the new SDK here.

[photo: flickr/U.S. Geological Survey]

I just got off the phone with UberMedia CEO and Idealab founder Bill Gross on the heels of Twitter’s suspension of two of UberMedia’s products, UberTwitter and Twidroyd, for violating Twitter’s API rules. The violations in question concern trademark, privacy, and monetization.

Gross tells me, “We just talked to Twitter and discussed the various issues they raise. It took us by surprise because they didn't raise them before. We started making the changes”

UberTwitter will change its name to UberSocial. The privacy issues are related to handling Tweets longer than 140 characters. And the monetization issue, Gross believes, has to do with Twitter’s belief that UberMedia is using affiliate links, which he says it is not. But he is eager to comply with Twitter’s requests and be back in its good graces. “Whatever it is we will change it,” he says.

Gross says that he spoke to Twitter to better understand what the issues were and he is “comforted by the fact” that an executive there told him that if he gets UberMedia’s products back into compliance, Twitter will reinstate them. So what message is Twitter trying to send by going after such a big member of the Twitter eco-system in such a public way? “I think that what Twitter is saying is we really, really want you to comply with the terms of service.” Uh-huh.

TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Groupme has launched a cool new feature today, in advance of tomorrow’s Foursquare hackday. People who link their Foursquare accounts to Groupme here can now pull up an interface of all Foursquare friends in the vicinity of their last checkin. You can then select which friends you want to be a part of a texting group, and the app will notify those selected with a text and the group’s number.

This is first group texting app I’ve seen to incorporate geo-location — The feature is perfect for the use cases of Coachella-like music festivals, sprawling tech conferences like SXSW or any other place where tons of smartphone wielding individuals tend to congregate in large groups.

From the Groupme blog:

“Imagine it with us: you're at a concert and notice on Foursquare that a bunch of your friends are there too. But you don't know where they are or how to get everyone together. You open up groupme.com/foursquare on your phone, check off all their names, and you're instantly dropped into a GroupMe. With one text, everyone can plan where to go next.”

Groupme is also open sourcing much of the code behind the new feature, humorously naming it after pop singer John Mayer.

Right now the feature isn’t integrated into either service’s mobile app and can only be accessed by those sober enough to remember to visit groupme.com/foursquare on web or on mobile. Hopefully Groupme will use some of its $10.6 million in funding to develop in-app integration some time soon, before SXSWi preferably.

Well this is interesting. According to this post, Twitter has suspended UberTwitter and Twidroyd for violating its policies.

The action is even more fascinating considering that UberMedia, which operates UberTwitter and Twidroyd, is building an army of third-party Twitter clients, including Tweetdeck, that compete directly with Twitter’s web and mobile clients.

Here’s the response we received from Carolyn Penner, Twitter’s spokeswoman:

We ask all developers in Twitter ecosystem to abide by a simple set of rules that are in the interests of our users, as well as the health and vitality of the platform as a whole.

We often take actions to enforce these rules; in fact, on an average day we turn off more than one hundred services that violate our API rules of the road. This keeps the ecosystem fair for everyone.

Today we suspended several applications, including UberTwitter, twidroyd and UberCurrent, which have violated Twitter policies and trademarks in a variety of ways. These violations include, but aren't limited to, a privacy issue with private Direct Messages longer than 140 characters, trademark infringement, and changing the content of users' Tweets in order to make money.

We've had conversations with UberMedia, the developer of these applications, about policy violations since April 2010, when they first launched under the name TweetUp – a term commonly used by Twitter users and a trademark violation. We continue to be in contact with UberMedia and hope that they will bring the suspended applications into compliance with our policies soon.

Wow. This is war, and allegations of privacy violations and trademark infringement are serious. By way of history, UberMedia has been scooping up third-party Twitter applications left and right, buying UberTwitter, EchoFon, and Twidroyd. In April 2010, they launched as TweetUp, then they became PostUp, and then, following the UberTwitter deal, they became UberMedia. And the company just raised a boatload of money as well.

In terms of the privacy and monetization violations, details are unclear. The trademark infringement most probably refers to the terms UberTwitter or Tweetdeck, since Twitter frowns on the use of either Tweet or Twitter in a third-party developers name. From Twitter’s side, it appears that the company has been expressing its views on these issues for nearly a year. But we’d love to heard what UberMedia’s side of the story is.

We’re working to get UberMedia’s response to this sudden turn of events. Something tells me this is going to get ugly.

Here’s a copy of the email sent to users:

Dear xxxx,

Regardless of how you access Twitter, we are dedicated to making Twitter better, faster and more reliable for you. As part of this effort, we ask applications that work with Twitter to abide by a simple set of rules that we believe are in the interests of our users, and the health and vitality of the Twitter platform as a whole. We often take actions to enforce these rules.

We are sending this email today because we suspended twidroyd for violating our policies.

Every day, we suspend more than one hundred applications that are in violation of our policies. Generally, these apps are used by a small number of users. We are taking the unusual step of sending out this letter because today's suspension may affect a larger number of users.

We are committed to helping you continue to use Twitter during the disruption of this application. You can download Twitter for Android and other official Twitter apps here. You can also try our mobile web site or apps from other third-party developers.

We appreciate your continued support of Twitter and regret any inconvenience to you.

It’s as if Radiohead got the lion’s share of Internet awareness, leaving the rest of the music industry completely clueless. Pretty much all anyone can talk about right now is Radiohead’s The King of Limbs, for a number of reasons (not least of which is because it’s amazing) but primarily because Radiohead mirrored the patterns of digital album leaks, generating major buzz.

On the Internet everyone expects everything a day early.

The band surprised everyone this morning by tweeting out “It’s Friday… It’s almost the weekend…You can download ‘The King of Limbs’ now if you so wish,” which led to coverage from Pitchfork to tech blogs , over 2000 retweets and #thekingoflimbs hashtag surpassing Queen Gaga to an impressive position at the top of Twitter trending topics. Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke is also trending.

The Rolling Stone explains the um, premature release “They chose to push up the release because everything was ready on their website and so, hey, why not?.”

Having primed the digital sales pot with”the pay what you will” model of 2007 release In Rainbows, which “sold” 3 million copies, this time fans have to pony up a fixed amount of cash, $9.00 for MP3s and $14.00 for higher quality WAV files. Further driving in the nail in the coffin of physical music sales, Radiohead is releasing what it is calling a “Newspaper Album” three months from now which will include 625 pages of artwork, a MP3 ($48) or WAV ($53) version of the album and two, 10-inch vinyls — More a collector’s item than anything else.

The album is backed by TBD Records in North America, Hostess Entertainment in Asia and XL records in the United Kingdom.

In testament to the times we live in, already there are three torrents of the album up on file-sharing service The Pirate Bay. But, in a glimmer of hope for the burgeoning online music industry, one reads “This is for your consideration only. If you like it, buy it. http://www.thekingoflimbs.com/”

Watch the video for ‘Lotus Flower’ below.

We have given away an Apple iPad, Google Chrome Cr-48 Notebooks, a Dell Vostro V130 laptop, a Google Nexus S, and many other prizes over the last few months. We didn’t want to disappoint this time around either, so we are offering a Boxee Box for today’s giveaway.

The Boxee Box is a device that finds all of your favorite shows and movies available on the Internet and puts them onto your TV. Not only that, but just this past Valentine’s Day, it was announced that you can browse the Netflix streaming catalog right from the box.

Just for fun, here is a demo of the Boxee Box.

Want one? Just follow these steps to enter.

“Like” us on our TechCrunch Facebook Page:

Then do one of the following:

- Retweet this post (making sure to include the #TechCrunch hashtag)
- Or leave us a comment below explaining why you want to win

The contest starts right now and ends tomorrow, February 19th at 7:30pm PST.

Like previous giveaways, please only tweet the message once. We will choose at random and contact the winner this weekend with more details. Anyone in the world is eligible, as long as you can receive delivered packages. Good luck and happy Friday!