Ajax Girl

Facebook is starting to pursue social networks that have copied their design or features by suing German site StudiVZ. The Financial Times has reported that Facebook filed a suit in the California Supreme Court against the German company for what it claims is an infringement of Facebook’s “look, feel, features and services”.

StudiVZ claims to have 10 million active members, and is the largest social network in the German-speaking world, covering Germany, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland. The network is actually comprised of three different sites, each one a separate social network aimed at different segments of the market. StudiVZ.net is the classic site for college-aged students, SchuelerVZ.net is for high school students and MeinVZ.net is for older adults (these three networks were very hard to decipher in German when I attempted to sign up).

Facebook does seem to have a claim here, as the German site looks like nothing more than Facebook in red and translated in German. Everything from the first public page to the sign-up page and the profile pages look eerily similar to the US-based social network. StudiVZ was acquired earlier this year by the German media group Georg von Holtzbrinck, with an acquisition price in the €100M range. They always say you should sue where the money is, and Facebook has certainly found a pile of it by targeting Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck.

Disclaimer: This is not the real Mark Zuckerberg profile in StudiVZ (at least we don’t think so).

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A few weeks back we launched Elevator Pitches, our community video project that allows entrepreneurs to pitch their startups through 60 second YouTube videos. Since then we’ve received a number of pitches covering everything from a fandom portal to a site focusing on group based text messaging.

Above, we’ve embedded the most popular of the videos submitted this week. If you don’t like it, don’t blame us (it was voted on by the community). This week’s runner up is Bars For Us, a tool to help you find local bars. Their video, as well as others, can be found on Elevator Pitches.

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Mint, the popular personal finance site that won TechCrunch 40, has further expanded its services by introducing support for mortgage and loan tracking. Users will now be able to keep tabs on their loans from over 1,000 supported institutions. In addition to the mortgage and loan tracking, Mint also monitors users’ savings accounts, credit cards, and investments.

Mint doesn’t deal with any actual fund transfers. Instead, it monitors users’ spending habits, producing coherent graphs that are designed to help people save their money (or at least know where it’s all going). Users can also elect to receive SMS and email alerts when bills are due or their balance drops below a certain level.

Mint has seen extremely quick growth since its launch at TechCrunch40, and is now
monitoring a total of $11 billion in assets, with 350,000 registered users, it says. CEO Aaron Patzer says that Mint will eventually be able to move money around, but that functionality won’t be coming until 2009. Until then, Patzer says that the addition of mortgage and loan tracking will let Mint users effectively monitor their entire financial portfolio. It’s too bad we’ll still have to rely on our banks’ websites to actually pay the bills.

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The current iPhone App Store revenue share model - a 70/30 split for the sale of apps, generally in the $0.99-$9.99 range - doesn’t exactly reward developers for producing addictive games. Greystripe, an advertising network for mobile games, has stepped in to compensate developers for every time their games are played, not just for when those games are initially sold.

Greystripe has actually been distributing free games and applications for about 1,400 handset models since 2006, mainly through its consumer site GameJump. The site offers mobile gamers a catalog of 800 games from 120 game publishers that can be downloaded directly to phones through mobile browsers. GameJump has experienced 75 million downloads so far, a big jump since last summer when they reached 14 million.

Now the company is turning its attention to the iPhone by providing developers with pre-, interstitial and post-roll ads from advertisers like Best Buy, eBay, Yahoo!, New Line Cinema, the US Army, Wal-Mart and Subway. Greystripe claims it will deliver a 10.1% click-through rate (CTR) when other mobile advertisers are averaging a 1-2% CTR.

To begin competing in a competitive mobile ad market, Greystripe is offering iPhone developers 100% of their in-game ad revenue until they reach $10,000. If you’re an iPhone developer, you can register for the network here.

Other iPhone ad networks include: AppLoop, a recently launched location-based iPhone ad network; AdMob, a browser-based ad network with iPhone-specific advertisements that has served almost 250 million ads; and new-comer Medialets.

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Twiddla, a free service that lets users draw and annotate webpages with their peers, has launched a new version of its site that introduces a number of new features. Compared to enterprise-grade collaboration software, Twiddla falls a little short - there’s no screen sharing or video chat, and the software seems a little buggy. But for ease of use and compatibility it can’t be beat: the browser based AJAX software is platform-agnostic, requires no plugins, and is free for everyone.

Twiddla launched earlier this year with the intention of helping website designers better communicate with their employers. Instead of giving vague descriptions (”make that button bigger”), Twiddla allows coworkers to relate their thoughts by marking up webpages with text, drawings, and images. Users can navigate between sites together using a “cobrowsing” function that is sort of like a limited shared desktop. The site also supports platform-agnostic voicechat through integration with PhoneFromHere, a free web based service.

Today the site is introducing support for a number of new document formats besides static websites that can be marked up with the same tools. Users can now markup emails, widgets, and documents (viewed through Scribd’s iPaper). The site has also implemented a number of usability enhancements, including a more robust chat function and standard hotkey functionality.

Twiddla probably isn’t going to be a big hit with its current feature set - there are countless collaboration tools, including Microsoft Groove and WebEx, that offer more feature-rich collaboration than Twiddla ever will. And sites like Awesome Highlighter and Fleck already offer website markup annotation. That said, the site could become a handy tool for users looking to set up impromptu meetings without having to deal with the hassle of plugin downloads.

If you’d like to test Twiddla out, try clicking the button below to doodle on TechCrunch.

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A large portion of YouTube videos are watched on other sites in embeddable players (like the one below of Erepublik CEO Alexis Bonte giving us an Elevator Pitch). But if someone watches a YouTube video on a site other than YouTube, does it count towards the total views of that video? Apparently not, or at least not always.

One TechCrunch reader had a video of his picked up by a popular site, where it generated 15,000 views, but the YouTube view counter for that video only went up by about 1,000 views. Perplexed, he sent YouTube an email, and received the following response (bold added for emphasis):

“Hi there,

Thanks for your email. I would like you to know, if a user views the video
on the external website itself, it is not added to the view count of the
video on YouTube. However, if a user is directed to the YouTube site on
clicking the embedded video on the external website, it would register as
an additional count to the video views.

Additionally, changes to video and account information on our site such as
video view count can take a few hours to update and synchronize. We’re
constantly working to make that happen a lot faster and appreciate your
patience.

Regards,

Shweta
The YouTube Team”

This is just from a support rep who may be mistaken about YouTube’s policy on counting views (we have an email in to YouTube asking for clarification), but her response does suggest that at least some views from other sites do not count. One reason for this might be that some external sites put YouTube videos on autoplay whenever the page they are on loads. That can game the whole YouTube popularity system, so YouTube does not count autoplays, as NewTeevee recently found out. And indeed, our reader’s video was on a site that autoplayed his video. (For more on how the various video sites count views, see this TubeMogul report).

Mystery solved, right? Well, not exactly. We use YouTube for all the videos on Elevator Pitches, and we don’t set those to autoplay. Viewers have to click on them to watch.

Yesterday, we hit play repeatedly on a bunch of videos on Elevator Pitches, and then went over to their YouTube to see if any of the views registered. Nada. Then we started watching the videos on YouTube itself. Still nada. Maybe it’s the time delay, though. We really can’t tell. Because the views do change a few hours later, there is just no way of knowing if it was from us or someone else.

So as a final test, I’ve embedded an Elevator Pitch below from the CEO of Erepublik, a massive online social strategy game. At the time of this post the video has been viewed only 490 times. We’ll see if we can move that number up at all from here.

Update: We’ve received word from a YouTube spokesperson who told us:

Viewcounts are important to the community and are a reflection of the interests and intents of video viewers. Autoplaybacks are not counted toward the visible “views” numbers displayed on the YouTube site because autoplaybacks are not viewer initiated. The majority of videos are not affected by this.

Update 2: The view count for the video below is up to 1,786 views by Saturday morning. Most of those are presumably from this post, and took a while to register. So maybe Google does know how to count but it can only count very slowly.

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Evite is getting long in the tooth. Every day it seems there is some new startup ready to take it down: Pingg, Socializr, Center’d, MyPunchbowl, Presdo. Well, today the IAC-owned invitation juggernaut is fighting back. Or at least, it’s stirring. Evite is launching a new design in beta today. (On a Friday afternoon—interesting choice of timing).

The new site, which is simplified, and has more of a tabbed and modular approach, was built by a relatively new team. General Manager Rosanna McCollough does not try to sugarcoat The problems with the current version of Evite:

We saw some issues. Evite wasn’t giving the user enough control or customization options. There was too much clutter. Everything was jammed onto one page. It was a bad UI.

Amen. She hasn’t fixed everything yet, but she is on the right track. The Evite beta includes more design options, making it easier to customize invitations with rich-media embeds and photos. It integrates with Flickr, YouTube, Imeem, and other places where people keep their photos, videos, and music content. In partnership with JS-KIT, it is adding polling and message board widgets to each page, and (finally) it is including more information in the e-mails people send out so you don’t have to click through just to get an address. Users can also now send private messages to hosts, and there’s an option to designate if you’ll be bringing children to the party.

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This isn’t enough data to declare Microsoft’s much derided Live Cashback search product a winner, but the first full month after it launched (June) shows a 15% gain in search volume v. the previous month, according to Comscore. This erases the previous month’s losses, bringing Microsoft up to 9.2% overall search share.

Live Search CashBack gives advertisers the option of offering users a direct rebate for purchases made after searching on Microsoft. The product shifts search advertising from cost-per-click (CPC) to cost-per-action (CPA) and give a lot of the revenue back to users.

Live Search Cashback isn’t designed to grab a ton of market share away from Google and Yahoo, but Microsoft is hopeful that more users will come to them when doing searches around buying goods online. And those queries tend to bring in the lion’s share of advertising dollars. This won’t affect Microsoft’s bottom line much, of course, since they are passing most of the money from purchases right back to consumers.

This is far from a definitive statement of Live Search Cashback’s success as an ongoing product, but the jump is an early sign that consumers may be intrigued. Let the debates continue.

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Twitter is living up to its promise to open up its data stream as much as possible to developers. While I was negotiating with Twitter cofounder Evan Williams to sit down and do a video interview at Foo Camp last weekend, Gnip founder Eric Marcoullier was hitting him up to give Gnip, and therefore everyone, Twitter’s XMPP “firehose.” Williams was obviously in a good mood, because I got my interview and, as I just found out today, Eric got his data feed.

What does this mean for the average Twitter user? It means that more third party services will start to work better. Today, other than a handful of services like Summize (which was just acquired by Twitter) and Friendfeed, third party apps must talk to Twitter via their normal APIs. Those APIs require applications to send Twitter a request and then get a response. The two way communication creates a big load on Twitter in the aggregate.

With XMPP Twitter just sends out all of their data in a constant stream, whether you ask for it or not. The third party, in this case Gnip, takes the data and parses it for further use.

Gnip acts as an intermediary between applications that create social content and those that consume it. They take the Twitter feed, which is a list of usernames, Twitter status URLs and time stamps, and make it available to any third party that requests it. Both Plaxo and MyBlogLog are already using the new feed, and more partners will add it immediately. And every third party that takes data from Gnip doesn’t have to take it from Twitter, easing the overall load on Twitter’s servers.

For now Gnip is only sending updates for requested users, not the richer data that some applications like Twhirl need to build a Twitter-like desktop environment. Twitter may give Gnip permission to send additional data, like @replies and direct messages, over time (if that last sentence doesn’t mean anything to you, it means you aren’t a crazy-heavy Twitter user, just disregard it).

What this means is that Twitter is taking yet another step towards openness and leaning on outside parties to help them with scaling issues.

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Next Wednesday is Facebook’s F8 developer conference, and speculation is swirling about what Facebok might announce at the event. Last year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the Facebook Platform for Web app developers, which is now its own mini-industry. So what will Facebook announce this year? We’ve suggested that Facebook might take the opportunity to expand its open source offering, new profile product, or launch Facebook Connect. My vote is for a payments system (confirmed in March) so that developers can actually make money.

But those are all known projects, more or less. What could Facebook do to really make a splash, and get some of the attention back that has been flowing to the iPhone and elsewhere?

In a Twitter on Wednesday, Michael said:

I think it’s time to start speculating about what Facebook will be announcing at the F8 conference next week.

Of course, the conversation quickly moved to FriendFeed, where some of the following responses (both silly and serious) were generated. Please add your own speculation in comments (best one gets a TechCrunch T-Shirt). I’ll excerpt a few from that FriendFeed thread to kick things off:

They will be acquiring the Democratic Party. - Todd Brunner via twhirl

better access to messaging infrastructure. - Robert Scoble

They will disable all applications because the find them “too confusing” for the users ;o) - Daniel

The CIA Monitoring API - Todd Brunner via twhirl

What ever it is, you’ll have to install the Announcement Application and invite 20 friends first to find out. - John Worthington

Facebook gets angry at all the iPhone, twitter, and FF attention, attention shifting and drastic plans afoot - Dan Rockwell via twhirl

Mobile platform - simonpure

FB offers whitelabel service - Rebecca Caroe via Alert Thingy

Facebook needs to buy Friendfeed.. or Friendfeed needs to buy Facebook.Whoever got the money, go for it! - Muthu Ramadoss

Further international expansion. - Andrew Feinberg

Personally hoping for jabber interoperability with facebook chat. - Matt Harwood

More design flexibility? Profile pages and page sites and groups can need more color and more individuality options. - Lars Wehmeyer

They’re going to announce that they’re going to copy the functionality of the 5 top applications (after shutting them down for a week of course) - Thomas B via NoiseRiver

An Amnesty Day for disabled accounts due to their overzealousness to disable accts would be highly appreciated & not excessive:) - Roney Smith

Hopefully something to improve their ads, especially those they target at international users (as a Russian I am forced to watch child porn ads, really). But I don’t really hope for it. - Svetlana Gladkova

Is there actually a reason to care? - Brian Sullivan

They’re going to buy yahoo. - Chris Hollander

They’re going to integrate Google Gears into Facebook - Daniel Spisak via twhirl

Facebook is soooooooooooo boring. - Thomas Hawk

bill gates is their newest programmer - acedanger via twhirl

Two possible features: Multi-friend chat and in-house video and voice messages. - John Worthington

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