The Latest from TechCrunch

Yesterday, Twitter engineer Raffi Krikorian presented a number of new stats about the microblogging service as part of a recruiting talk at UC Berkeley. One interesting stat involves the number of API calls that the site is seeing: Krikorian says that Twitter is seeing 6 billion API calls per day, or 70,000 per second. That’s more than double the amount (3 billion API calls) that Twitter was seeing in April, according to the Programmable Web.

Some of the stats, including the fact that Twitter is seeing 90 million Tweets per day, we heard at Twitter’s news event this past week. Krikorian delved into the amount of data storage each Tweet includes in terms of text (200 bytes for 140 characters). Twitter is seeing 800 Tweets per second, or 12GBs of Twitter text. And Twitter generates 8 terabytes of data per day (or 80 MB per second), whereas the New York Stock Exchange creates 1 terabyte of data per day.

In his slides, Krikorian says Twitter’s 150 million users generate 1000 Tweets per second, and that Twitter eventually wants to be able to support half the world’s population and all of their devices (5 billion people and 6 billion devices, according to Krikorian). Challenges for the network, says Krikorian, include indexing, search, analytics, storage, scalability and efficiency.

Twitter had a considerable amount of downtime over the summer due to record usage because of the World Cup, and was forced to cut API limits on Tweet read requests. Krikorian presented a nifty slide in his presentation that shows the usage of Twitter by World Cup games (embedded below).

As we wrote earlier this week, while the number of API calls from clients are increasing, traffic to Twitter is increasing as well. Co-founder Ev Williams told press that traffic to Twitter.com has grown about 100% this year; and with a shiny new interface, I’d expect traffic to continue to surge.

The stats regarding the growth in API calls are somewhat ironic considering Twitter’s recent upgrades to its platform and what this could mean for developers. Unfortunately, as more and more users flock to a newer, more feature-filled (i.e. inline photos and videos; mobile apps) Twitter for interactions, developers that provide these features (and whose clients are contributing to these massive number of API calls per day) are probably going to lose traffic.

Love it or hate it (you can consider me to be part of the latter group), “follow Friday” is here to stay. In case you’re not familiar with the term, you’ve probably never ever looked at Twitter on a Friday or because you’ve only been using the service for a couple of seconds.

Basically, on Fridays, a lot of users recommend their followers some other people to follow on Twitter, usually appending the hashtag #ff or #followfriday to their tweets.

Think of it as Twitter’s recently launched ‘who to follow’ recommendation engine, only driven by regular users rather than algorithmically.

Enter FollowFriday.com, which launched recently and is basically a site ranking “tweeps” (people formerly known as Twitter users) based on how many #followfriday recommendations they’ve received on the micro-sharing service.

Rankings can be looked at by country and language – supported languages are English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Italian. Unsurprisingly, there’s also a celebrity ranking.

The FollowFriday.com ranking mechanism monitors tweets from the entire world that include one of these hashtags: #ff, #followfriday, #cuate, #sigueelviernes and #vivaviernes. The system counts all tweets sent between Thursday 12:00 GMT and Saturday 12:00 GMT, in order to monitor all featured countries.

Users who sign up for FollowFriday.com get a personal profile (MyFF) where they can consult their own FollowFriday history. It also boasts a recommendation management tool where they can check who recommends them, whom they’ve recommended and automatically thank all of them or create custom Twitter lists in only a couple of clicks.

Note that it takes a while to compute, up to 24 hours, after you register (which you can do with your Twitter account).

The people who cooked up FollowFriday.com (equipo24) tell me there are a set of ranking rules in place that penalize users who abuse the #followfriday hashtag. The company also says it’s working together with Twitter and sending them weekly spam reports.

FollowFriday.com, a mere month after launching quietly, says it is already tracking more than 5 million users who actively participate in “FollowFridays” in its database, which has prompted them to create a – pretty decent – Twitter user search engine to help people find users worth following.

You can search by keywords in the user name, bio or location fields and apply several filters such as the number of followers, tweets per day ratio, if they have a customized avatar, etc. You can also order the results by different criteria, including their “FollowFriday Score”.

FollowFriday.com is part of the e24Apps Network, a network of Twitter apps mainly focused on helping users find and follow “quality users”.

Oh, and don’t forget to #ff @TechCrunch while you’re at it.

Afar Media, a recently launched alternative magazine for “experiential” travelers, is launching a new site in private beta today that aims to match adventurous travelers with like-minded travelers to exchange information about trips, experiences and more. Afar Connect is sort of like eHarmony meets TripAdvisor, but without the romantic interest. We have 100 invites for TechCrunch readers to use the site; you can use the code “TCAFAR” here to sign up for the Afar.

Afar Connect uses a proprietary ‘Travel Personality’ technology to create a customized profile for each user. Types of profiles range from the Florida-bound "Vacationer" to a "Discoverer" volunteering in Haiti. Users can then ask questions on the site about their upcoming travel plans and the site will connect the user directly with others who share their same travel profile and have specific knowledge of a particular destination.

In addition, users can also comment on posts, 'follow' other members whose advice they value, share photos, and more. Users can either create an Afar-specific profile or log in using Facebook Connect.

Afar also encourages local businesses and travel brands to participate in the community. Businesses can set up profiles similar to travelers, and respond to questions, offer advice, and share information about their company. From airlines to snorkel shops, travel brands that participate in the spirit of the community can use the platform to drive customers to their front door.

The site seems to be ideal for more adventurous travelers, where first-hand trip information for unique and out-of-the ordinary journeys is harder to come by. So if you wanted to trek the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, Peru; you’d be able to connect with another traveler who had made the same journey.

Afar Connect is complimentary to the brand’s bi-monthly magazine which portray’s narratives and photography of experiential travel and trips. In theory, the site seems to provide a somewhat unique service in a very crowded online travel space. One challenge for the site may be driving traffic to Afar so that there are a large number of experiences for users to tap into for advice. One way Afar could gain more users interacting with its site could be through partnerships with companies that attract travelers like Travel And Leisure, Fodors, or even National Geographic.

This amazing little projector, OEMed by XDM, a part of Explay in Japan, is truly something to behold. Smaller than a matchbox – it’s about an inch on each side – it pumps out an unspeckled 14 lumens image in full color at about 800 pixels on the top side. It small enough to fit in the upper corner of almost any phone and the aperture is so tiny it’s almost unnoticeable. And guess what? XDM is making it smaller.

Read more…

Students! As anyone on a Windows machine who has visited good ol’ CrunchGear in the past few weeks knows: the Internet can be a dangerous place. There’s malware everywhere, dumb, time-wasting YouTube videos are embedded all over the place, and Flash advertisements constantly contrive to steal away your processor cycles. Really, if at all possible, you should just avoid the Internet entirely: it’s rarely worth the effort. But, I know this isn’t an option for many of you. That’s where this post comes into play. Hopefully by the time you’re done reading it, you’ll be a little bit safer as you troll the Internet late at night instead of doing your work.

The San Francisco Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon is the weekend of September 25th and 26th. It’s shaping up to be even bigger than our NYC event, which drew more than 300 hackers. One of the projects from last May, GroupMe, even ended up getting funded. You could be next.

Sign Up Today!

If you haven’t already made plans to attend a fun weekend of caffeine and code, we’re going to tempt you with 7 reasons to show up.

1. Scratch an itch. It’s amazing how many awesome new technologies there are to explore. Most of us don’t have the excuse or opportunity to fit them into our fulltime work. What better way to try something out then to dive in and build it! Sir Edmund Hillary said he climbed Mount Everest because it was there. What’s stopping you?

2. Network. This event is chock full of talented folks who are experienced, supportive and creative. We can’t think of a better place to meet new techies who share your obsessions. They can help you build something, introduce you to high caliber talent or set the stage for an exciting new career opportunity. While we do not require your hack to work 100%, you must at least try to make it work. We do not allow powerpoint presentations or existing projects (i.e., startups.)

3. Demo or die. It’s exciting and nerve racking to share an idea with others. It’s also informative. Time to get off the couch and find out the truth about that garage project fantasy. Get on stage and demo your hack to a roomfull of folks interested in hearing from you and providing feedback! Who knows, maybe someone will reach out and help you take it to the next level—it’s happened before!

4. Workshops. On Saturday, we’ll be hosting API Workshops and presentations from some of the industry’s biggest players – BitTorrent, CityGrid, eBay, Facebook, Google, Groupon, Microsoft, Paypal, SimpleGeo, Twitter, and Yahoo! It’s a great opportunity to connect with these companies, learn about their APIs and maybe even impress your future boss.

5. Meet the judges. We’ve carefully selected judges who we know provide great feedback. We’ve rounded out the group to provide multiple tech perspectives to your project: code jockeys, entrepreneurs, designers and VCs. The experience and mindshare they bring can help you hone your idea. We’re excited to announce the following judges: Brett Bullington. Cyan Bannister, Bradley Horowitz, Dean Hovey, Michael Marquez, Christopher Poole, Joshua Schachter and Mike Schroepfer

6. Win a prize. There will be a host of prizes. Many of our sponsors will be giving away their own awards. In addition, if you demo on stage on Sunday, we’ll be giving your team 2 tickets to the Disrupt Conference! Finally, there will be an award for the judges’ favorite hack which includes a chance to demo on stage on Wed in front of 2000 people.

7. Support the dreamers. We’re super excited about giving hackers a platform to do their thing and shine. If you aren’t hacking but wanna show your love, please come Sunday, September 26th at 11am when we kickoff the demos. Everyone is welcome!

Apply now!

An interesting piece in the Mobile Business Briefing points to the possibility that European carriers like Orange, T-Mobile, and Vodafone could be working together to build their own OS, possibly following the China Mobile model of creating their own flavor of Android far-removed from the official Google code.

Take a look at this amazing quote:

French newspaper Le Figaro has reported that Stephane Richard, chief executive officer of France Telecom-Orange, has invited the heads of Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica and Vodafone to discuss the possible creation of a common platform for mobile devices. The talks, which are scheduled to take place October 8th in Paris, are motivated by a view that Apple's iOS and Google's Android operating systems have become a "Trojan horse" for these companies to establish their own relationships with mobile customers, reducing the significance of the operators in the value chain.

Read more…

Textingly, one of the inaugural startups that launched at the first TechCrunch Disrupt last May, raised some seed money and landed its first big customer, the New Jersey Nets. The company is raised $400,000 of a still-open $750,000 seed round.

Textingly is a text-message marketing campaign management tool for businesses. The New Jersey Nets will be using it to give away free tickets to fans who text in “NETSBUMP” to 88062 and say why they are excited to be a Nets fan. You accumulate points by being one of the ten most recent texts. The basketball team is also going to use Texting.ly to manage a Nets trivia game.

Textingly gives both businesses and consumers finer controls over these kinds of SMS marketing campaigns. It is all opt-in and consumers scan start, pause, or stop the messages at any time.

Personally, I think this kind of fan-based marketing would be more effective on Twitter, where fans can broadcast their loyalty to all of their friends, but not all Nets fans use Twitter. They all most certainly have cell phones.

Plus, these SMS campaigns will start to become more interesting once location becomes a factor. Textingly is working on a very interesting new feature which allows marketers to send text messages to people only within a certain geo-fence. That could be really great for local businesses to entice their most loyal customers to come more often: “Hey, you are in the neighborhood! Come in for a free coffee.”

Well what do you know? Netbook growth is so low right now that a recent report by NPD, Morgan Stanley Research lists last months growth as a negative number. That’s right, people are apparently selling the notebooks back or something. (not really, but no one is buying netbooks right now)

Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty’s report is intended to show the state of the netbook market and since the iPad was announced, netbooks declined steadily. She states that the iPad is partly responsible to the loss sales. August saw a 4% decline over last year’s numbers and apparently September will produce similar numbers. If the back to school spending spree can’t save netbooks, nothing can. Not even Santa.

As anticipated, Sony's motion control system, PlayStation Move, will be available exclusively for the PS3 at retail stores across North America on Sunday, September 19, later than expected but still way before Microsoft' Kinect hits the market (coincidentally, I just played with Kinect for the first time this morning, courtesy of Microsoft, and absolutely loved it). Anyway, PlayStation Move relies on the PlayStation Eye cam, along with internal motion sensors in the PlayStation Move motion controller and the PS3 system itself, to detect the movement, angle, and position in 3D space of the user, thereby allowing users to play "as if they are within the game".

Many, many positive things have already been said on the Internet about Shuffler, a brand new way to discover music on the Web, and we haven’t even gotten around to covering it. Shame on us.

Our sincere apologies, but on the upside we now have an excellent excuse to notify you of the awesome service’s existence, as it has gotten some new features today.

First things first: what is Shuffler?

Cooked up by Amsterdam-based Tone.fm (also see the now deadpooled Twones), it’s a service that essentially aggregates (mostly indie) music from around the Web based on genres.

When you visit the homepage, you can pick your favorite genre (from electronic to hip hop and classic rock to ‘Folktronica’) and immediately start listening to a relevant track you probably haven’t ever heard. The service uses Last.fm's API to assign genres to songs.

The sounds come from a great deal of music blogs from across the Web – or basically any site with an RSS feed (WordPress, Typepad, Posterous, Blogger and so on). Tracks can be paused, emailed, tweeted or Facebook-liked from a toolbar that sits on top of your screen after you’ve picked your genre (there are a whole lot to choose from, by the way).

From the same toolbar, you can jump to another track from another music blog instantly, or go back to one you’ve listened to before. If you listen to a song until the end, it jumps to another one within the same genre automatically. A menu also lets you cycle through different genres to fit your mood for the day – or the minute, if you will.

Needless to say, Shuffler is excellent for music discovery, although depending on how picky you are it might take a while before you come across tracks you actually love. I wish there was a way to bookmark your favorite tracks and access them from a single interface, but other than that it’s a great little product for music lovers like myself.

Shuffler maintains a self-reportedly “more or less curated list of blogs”. Upon launching about a month ago, there were some 1,600 blogs in the list, but soliciting users and publishers to flag more blogs for inclusion will grow the list to roughly 2,600 music blogs shortly.

That’s a lot of music in aggregate.

And starting today, Soundcloud and YouTube have also been added to the list, which Shuffler claims triples the number of music tracks they can serve users.

So what else is new? As from today, you can turn a specific blog into a music station – for example, try turning Pitchfork into your channel for the day. Also, some blogs have already started embedding Shuffler channel buttons on their sites, e.g. TSURURADIO (see right sidebar).

Shuffler has been bootstrapped by Tone.fm up until now, but the startup does plan to raise some funding for further growth. Right now, they’re working on shipping an iPad app before year’s end (“think of it as a Flipboard for music”), iPhone and Android apps and a premium version with more features.

The applications and the premium version is where the money will – hopefully for them – be coming from, but Tone.fm says it will also experiment with advertising.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some shuffling to do.

Facebook’s geo-locational service Facebook Places is now working in the United Kingdom. Want up to the minute proof? Check Twitter and TechCrunch Europe.

The Next Web reports that a conference for the formal announcement of Facebook Places United Kingdom happened at 8am BST, where Facebook Places product manager Michael Sharon walked British press through the service. If you are in the UK and you’d like to find out more about Facebook Places or how to claim your Places venue, you can read more here.

This is Facebook Places’ first full on launch in a European country after having launched in Japan last week. Users have previously reporting the ability to check in from places like Canada and even Paris due to a wifi glitch.

Notably, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg left a trail of Facebook Places check-ins on a recent trip to London. Hmm …

Jambok is a software as a service platform that enables companies and communities to share knowledge in the the cloud. Ideal for the “informal learning” (everything that’s not official training) part of corporate communications, the Jambok platform allows you to post video, audio, photos, as well as screen capture your desktop in order to share knowledge within your organization.

Like an elaborate multimedia wiki, Jambok allows for multiple ways to upload and socially engage with enterprise content, supports a wide variety of media options including Powerpoint and screen capture and is available on the mobile, enabling users to rate, tag, and comment on the go while still maintaining enterprise level security.

Attempting to capitalize on the theory that most on-the-job learning is informal, Jambok was the first to market in the burgeoning informal learning niche, which includes Knowledge 2.0 players like Street Smarts and Cornerstone LMS.

Founded this May by former Sun Chief Learning Officer Karie Willyerd and former Sun Chief Technology officer Charles Beckham, Jambok is the first SaaS built specifically for informal learning.

Possible use cases for Jambok include launching new company wide features, organizing internal communications like collaborating on presentations, as well as the ongoing “unofficial” training of employees. Currently founder-funded, the nascent company boasts customers including Thomson-Reuters, British Telecom and Mitsubishi.

According to a new SEC filing, Rhode Island startup GreenBytes Inc. added $3.5 million to the series A round they raised last year, led by Battery Ventures and initially consisted of $7.5 million.

GreenBytes provides “energy-efficient, inline deduplication storage appliances.” In plainer English, the company makes hardware and software that IT operations teams use to store and protect huge amounts of data, and to control how much energy they must use to do so. GreenBytes claims its technology can cut storage power consumption by 50%.

The company was founded in 2007 by Robert Petrocelli, who previously started and grew a medical information services firm, HeartLab, that was acquired by Agfa in 2005 for $132.5 million.

Investor Sunil Dhaliwal, a general partner at Battery Ventures in Boston who holds a board position at GreenBytes, said of this additional series A investment: “The company has seen strong growth in customers and revenue in the past few quarters. We elected to do a small internal round to maintain momentum rather than spending time with external investors at a critical time.”

The company recently escaped a legal threat from Sun, now part of Oracle, and NetApp as did several other companies whose products and services used Zettabyte File System technology, according to reports by Chris Mellor at The Register.

GreenBytes plans to raise a B-round in the next year.

Los Angeles based tech chronicler Lalawag has ended its two year stretch with a blog post of its “Greatest Hits” today, a heavily trafficked blog post, judging from the fact that I can’t get any part of their site to load. Run by Laurie and Sean Percival, who is now VP of Marketing at MySpace, the site covered the lives of tech notables in L.A. and beyond, including us, early and often.

Lalawag dealt with the often dry subject of technology news with wit and humor (and infographics!) and will be missed by many fans of the not boring, outside the “213″ and “818″area codes even.

“So, we've decided to shut down lalawag for the time being. Both Laurie and I really enjoyed running this site and want to thank everyone for their support. We both look back on this little passion project of ours with great memories and accomplishment, but my wife (who took over the publication for most of its run) is now trading blogging for diapers. Personally, I'm not sure which is worse.”

Percival tells TechCrunch, “I need to trim back a few things in my life, and we just haven’t had time to keep her going. L.A. Tech is still a vibrant and great space.“ (I know this from experience). Percival is not precluding the site making a comeback however and is in fact looking for a new owner. Interested parties can contact him here.

Our favorite Lalawag post, below:

Earlier this month, we gave you a first look at Geeks On A Plane’s recent tour through Asia. Led by super angel investor Dave McClure, roughly 55 entrepreneurs and investors traveled to Asia’s top markets, including Shanghai, Seoul, Beijing and Singapore, to get a better understanding of the booming region, connect with their local counterparts and sample the rich culture and history on display.

Along the way, the group documented their travels in short videos with the help of Ben Henretig, founder of Micro-Documentaries, who shot and produced each piece. Geeks On A Plane has graciously agreed to give TechCrunch readers first access to these mini-documentaries, a small window into Asia. In this week’s installment, we go to Beijing and Seoul.

In China’s capital, we look at the city’s rapid urbanization through the eyes of web strategist and photographer Kris Krug (his photo essay for the trip is also available here, on Flickr.) Meanwhile, 593 miles away, in Seoul, we follow Francine Hardaway, co-founder of Stealthmode and a self-described venture mom as she looks at the disconnection between North and South Korea and how technology is changing social dynamics. (Video below).

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Michael Markson, VP of Marketing for internet search engine Blekko, Inc. Previously, Markson was founder and VP of Business Development of news site Topix.

In the 1956 classic horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the citizens of the fictional town of Santa Mira, California are replaced by perfect physical duplicates, simulations grown from plantlike pods. The goal of these pod people is to work together in order to replace the entire human race.  You may remember the scene when the star stares at the camera and yells: "They’re here already! You’re next!”

Fast forward 54 years to the current state of the Web and guess what? They're here and you're next. I'm talking about Web spam and, unfortunately, no one is safe. We found this week that even a venerable institution like Harvard University, which I'd bet invests a great deal in securing its website and protecting its reputation online, can be a victim of the Website Snatchers.

Here's an example (click through to Harvard's site):

First, you see the site's header, which trumpets the Belfer Center for Science at Harvard University. But the headline on the page, "buy cialis online cheap" quickly alerts you that this ain't your typical page of medical info. After a quick scan of the copy on this page the purpose of the hijack is clear: 150 of the 850 words on the page are devoted to mentions of "generic Cialis" and "Viagra".

Why snatch this site? Well, as most of you probably know, a site's ranking in a Web search is determined not only by its relevance to the search query but also by the number and quality of other sites linking to it. Harvard is a very tasty catch for a Cialis spammer, and no doubt this hijacking improved the ranking of the site the spammers were promoting.

Just to ensure maximum value, the hacker has even inserted a table that points to even more links in an attempt to boost the ranking in results for the term "Cialis". Links point to terms like "cost of viagra 50mg," "viagra best prices," and finally "cialis Thailand."

Of course, this is only one form of Web snatching.  Here's another, even more insidious form: imagine you are having medical problems and you go online to do some research. You start by visiting a major search engine and doing a query or two about your condition.  Quickly, you find a result with a title that perfectly matches your query. You click on it and read the content, presuming that since the search engine served it as a top result it must be trustworthy.

Unfortunately, a closer look reveals that the source of this article isn't the Mayo Clinic or WebMD.  In fact, it's not even written by a doctor. It's an article produced by ehow.com or ezinearticles.com (or some other content farm), written by a wholly unqualified author who was paid by the word. Just like that, your attention was snatched from an authoritative site (mayoclinic.com) and sent to the website of the imposter. Ugh.

How does this happen? We're 15 years into the Web now. Aren't the algorithms smarter than this?  Short answer: no.  Behind the scenes of every search there's actually a war going on. On one side are algorithms designed to cull information from relevant websites and deliver it to you on a query-by-query basis. On the other, imposter sites created solely for profit and designed entirely to get in the way of what you are searching for. Unfortunately, in many cases the bad guys are winning.

As this problem grows, it becomes a real threat to the Web.  And trust me, it's not about to get better. I mentioned eHow.com previously. eHow is owned by a company called Demand Media whose sole business is to create these type of imposter pages. Demand Media just filed for their IPO. With that type of reward out there, do you think more or less of these imposters will be created every day?

So, how do we solve this?  First step: stop relying wholly on algorithms. The sober truth is that smarter algorithms can't save us. There will always be huge economic incentives for hackers to build smarter spam machines. Fooling machines has always been relatively easy. Fooling humans, not so much.

At blekko, we're taking this threat seriously. Unlike the other search engines, we want actual people involved in our ranking. We've introduced a feature called 'slashtags' that allows you to cut out spam sites and search only the sites you want. A small group of users is currently testing this functionality in a private beta. (If you'd like to be included in the beta, send us an email at techcrunch@blekko.com or follow us on Twitter – @ blekko.)

One of the benefits of slashtags is that if you find a site like eHow in your results, you can instantly tag it as spam. Once tagged, it will never show up in your blekko search results again. As we like to say, that site is now dead to you.

Soon we're going to be adding new social tools so that our users can play an even more active role in separating the wheat from the chaff. We could never build a machine that can perfectly analyze the quality of a site.  But we know that people can do the job easily and instantly. Our job is to provide a platform where people can share that information in a way where everyone benefits.

In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the star was told that there was no actual problem; rather the aberrant behavior he observed was an epidemic of mass hysteria.  However, he didn't listen. With respect to the Web today, neither should you.  As Harvard can attest, the Web Snatchers are here already, and you could be next.

Yahoo unveiled a bevy of new product features today at a press event, and Yahoo product chief Blake Irving told the crowd "You're going to see things over the next few years that will feel a little bit different.” He declined, however, to tell the audience what the specific internal goals were, or how Yahoo would define success or failure. “Irving said there are internal goals that the company will use to measure its success, but he declined to share them with reporters,” says VentureBeat.

Those goals, we’ve heard from a source close to Yahoo: an increase in the number of unique visitors to Yahoo properties from today’s 622 million to a cool 1 billion. And an increase in overall Yahoo revenue from last year’s $6.5 billion to a whopping $10 billion.

Doable? Not a chance. Well, maybe on the user number. They grew 9% over the last year in unique users according to Comscore. If they keep that up they’ll be at around 800 million, and I guess they could buy their way to a billion buy buying WordPress, Glam and/or Myspace, each with about 165 million unique monthly visitors. But short of some sort of massively popular new product, 1 billion unique visitors isn’t going to happen.

The revenue target is even less likely. 2008 revenue was $7.2 billion, dipping down to $6.5 billion last year. 2010 looks flat v. 2009 so far.

So this is a bit of a stretch goal. Which is still a goal and is a great target. But what Yahoo really needs is some serious product vision beyond what they showed today. Irving certainly has his work cut out for him.

Update: Here’s Yahoo’s old 3 year plan from 2007.

Deep in the heart of New York City, where the weather has made a surprise turn for the worse and Tornado warnings (seriously) are on everyone’s lips, Samsung is about to announce their iTunes-esque media rental service, Media Hub, and… something else.

What that “something else” is is supposed to be a mystery, with Samsung only saying that they’ll be talking about “their latest Android-powered device”.

Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>

Mobile social payments startup Venmo has some interesting backers and a new iPhone app. The Philadelphia-based company closed $1.2 million in seed funding last May led by RRE Ventures. Other investors include betaworks, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, as well as angel investors Dustin Moskovitz, (Facebook co-founder), Dave Morin (founder of Path, senior platform manager at Facebook) and Sam Lessin (Drop.io CEO).

Co-founder Andrew Kortina used to work at betaworks, where he was one of the original engineers on URL shortener bit.ly. Earlier today, I met up with Kortina and Venmo’s other co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail at a coffee shop in New York City, where they showed me their newest iPhone app (see video above, taken on my iPhone).

Venmo lets you send payments to your friends through text messages and mobile apps. You connect your Venmo account to a credit card or your bank accounts and then you can make or accept payments. But Venmo puts a social twist on these payments because it allows you to broadcast the fact that you just paid a friend $5 for a beer over Twitter or Facebook.

Venmo has been in private beta for a while, and really the only way to try the service was to get invited (try the code techcrunch). But if you download the new iPhone app, you can sign up without an invite. It lets you pay, charge, connect with friends in your phone’s contact book, and see your payment stream. The payment stream is an activity feed of all your payments and your friends’ payments, along with the messages attached to each one. Venmo lets you make messages and payments private, share messages with all of your other Venmo friends, and publish the payment messages to Facebook or Twitter. Venmo also has a similar Android app.

Once you set up an account, you can essentially follow your friends and watch their public payment activity streams. It is a social way to split up a restaurant tab or to send a friend some money with a suggestion of what to spend it on as a friendly gesture. In the video below, for instance, Iqram charges Andrew for being late to our meeting.

There is also a deeper relationship you can form by categorizing someone as a “trusted” contact. Once someone is trusted, payments can start to flow back and forth automatically without prior authorization, as is normally the case. It is like electronic billing for friends. But even with trusted friends you get an immediate notification and can charge the amount back if you don’t like it. I can see this getting messy, especially after a night of drinking or a breakup—choose who you trust on Venmo carefully.

But isn’t there something wrong with trying to commercialize friendships? Kortina doesn’t see it that way: “We are not trying to commercialize a friendship, we are trying to make the commerce more friendly.” Payments between friends happen all the time. Venmo is a way to make those payments easier and to share messages spurred by those transactions. In that sense, it is more like Blippy or Swipely

Right now, Venmo is starting small and is focussed on just peer-to-peer payments. But if it grows, businesses could start accepting Venmo payments simply by opening an account. Venmo doesn’t get in the middle of the transactions, and so it does not take a cut of each payment like PayPal does. If it can start collecting enough public data about what people are buying, that data could be very valuable to brands and businesses.

The upcoming Facebook movie, The Social Network, continues to perplex me. I’m still not sure how they got all that talent on board to make it (director David Fincher, writer Aaron Sorkin), nor can I believe that it sounds like it’s actually going to be good. One such early rave review was from musician Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails fame). Reznor is actually doing the score and soundtrack for the film alongside Atticus Ross. And tomorrow, they’re launching a website to give a free five-track sampler of the upcoming record.

Reznor’s record company, The Null Corporation, will be releasing the full album on September 28 (just before the film itself opens on October 1) alongside Sony’s Madison Gate Records. Pre-orders begin tomorrow on the site which will be found here (again, not live until tomorrow).

I’ve heard these first five tracks and happily report that they’re quite good and dark (as you might expect from Reznor). Or, as Reznor himself might say, “really fucking good — and dark.”

Reznor, who has dabbled with unconventional ways of releasing records in the past, notes that they’ll be releasing the soundtrack in a number of formats, including audio Blu-ray. But they’ve also partnered with Amazon to digitally release the album for only $2.99 — for all 19 tracks.

“This has been an interesting new discipline for me to work in and I’m pleased with the process and the result.  The film opens October 1st and really turned out great,” Reznor writes in an email he distributed today.

Tomorrow we’re taping our second episode of “Ask a VC” where you email in questions and I ask them. Satish Dharmaraj of Redpoint Ventures is the guest. He’s a relatively new VC, having joined Redpoint after making them a lot of money when he sold Zimbra to Yahoo for $350 million– directly without a banker. Yeah, he’s kind of a bad ass.

Dharmaraj doesn’t mince words so expect honest answers. And there are a ton of things Dharmaraj is perfect to talk about including the sell-or-not-to-sell dilemma, his thoughts on the Yahoo drama, whether his copious operating experience is or isn’t that much of an advantage to entrepreneurs he invests in, the future of open source or business software, his angel investing in India, his absurdly tricked out Prius thanks to George Barris of Batmobile fame, and of course any practical questions on pitching Redpoint. (The car is above, see a video I did about it when I was at TechTicker here.)

We’ve already gotten a good number of questions, but to add yours email askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com.

A photography deal offered on Groupon in Atlanta yesterday turned messy when it was revealed that the photographer had promoted her work with stolen images and was far from equipped to carry out the terms of the Groupon.

Groupon user SP, who called attention to the fishiness of the Dana Dawes Photography deal in the first place, brought up the following interesting point in the discussion thread.

“Groupon – one major clue that the business is fraudulent is if they offer a deal like this, that cannot be physically fulfilled by a true professional photographer. I've seen these deals pop up countless times on groupon, and no one is verifying that these are legitimate businesses that can fulfill their promises. It is physically impossible for a pro photog full time to do 1,000 sessions in a year (and on location at that).”

The volume of users (around 2,000) generated for a small photography service by a Groupon deal seems pretty impossible to handle for mom and pop shops. I ended up not buying a heavily discounted one-hour cleaning Groupon for a similar reason, when the deal closed it basically meant 2,000 hours of work for just a couple of guys, which seemed to me like it would take years.

From Jodie O, on the discussion board.

“To allow photographers to come on here and sell out thousands of "deals" that let me tell you, speaking as a professional – full time business for 7 years now – I know for a fact that this is an impossible schedule to keep. Simple math will tell you that after Groupon takes it's cut, she will be left with $35. After she pays her gas money, pays for her equipment, even internet service and office supplies…. next, the session, the travel time, the editing, the burning on CD… now we are seriously talking, working for not even minimum wage, but we are looking at $1 or $2 an hour if she's lucky, because by my calculations, and how I personally work as a professional, I would be in the red, as in, NEGATIVE a few dollars an hour. A fellow professional just said to me recently, she would be better off paying each person $75 to stay home and not do the session.”

The fact that no single photographer could fulfill thousands of shoots in a reasonable time frame, calls into question whether Groupon should enforce limits when deals like this are unreasonable, which is currently the onus of the merchant. From Groupon representative Julie Mossler:

“We’ve always offered merchants the ability to cap their deals to ensure they only sell an amount of Groupons that permits them to give customers the best service possible. Some choose to use a cap, and some don’t. The businesses that find success on Groupon are those who are honest with themselves, know their books and aim for a manageable number of customers.”

The case of Dana Dawes Photography makes it clear what happens when small business owners find it hard to not only be honest with themselves, but also with their customers — the end result being thousands of refunds from Groupon and the eventual pulling of the deal, which oddly reappeared on Dawes’ personal site.

But what about when business owners overestimate their capabilities, and end up like Jessie Burke from Posie’s Diner, who recently wrote a blog post on Facebook about the drawbacks of the Groupon model.

“After three months of Groupons coming through the door, I started to see the results really hurting us financially. There came a time when we literally couldn't not make payroll because at that point in time we had lost nearly $8,000 with our Groupon campaign. We literally had to take $8,000 out of our personal savings to cover payroll and rent that month. It was sickening, especially after our sales had been rising.”

“[I was] asked if there was a cap on how many were sold to help protect the business from too much loss, and the simple answer is, no. When you sign up for Groupon, you are agreeing to sell as many as get sold… and why would Groupon want it any other way? They get half of the earnings.”

Should Groupon enact stricter policies to protect small businesses, especially in light of this?

According to Mossler, merchants do have the options to cap their deals the day of in the case of overwhelming demand. Says Mossler, “Our sales reps work with each merchant to craft the deal that’s best for their particular business, and we push back if we think they’ll be overwhelmed; but ultimately it’s the responsibility of the merchant to know what they can handle. In the case of Dana Dawes, her deal was capped at 1500.”

To its credit, Groupon is currently re-evaluating the photography deal structure after reading the comments on the discussion board, which it pulled from the site. For a particularly interesting read and a glimpse of the story as it unfolded, go here.

Thanks: Petapixel

Facebook may have known all the details about Google’s new social product for months, but we’re just now getting our sources to talk.

On Tuesday Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave additional details on the plan. We posted the entire press conference video then, but we’ve pulled out the part relevant to social and embed it above.

The key text:

Arrington: How important is social to google’s future, and how might google go about competing with a large established competitor?

Schmidt: Our view of social is a little different than what everyone has been writing. we want our core products to get better from social information. The best thing that could happen is if Facebook opened up its network and if we could just use that information…Failing that, there are other ways in which we can get that information.

We are trying to add a social component [to google's core products] to make them even better. With your permission…and knowing more about who your friends are, we can provide more tailored recommendations, search quality will be better.

A reasonable expectation [of launch] will be the Fall.

We’ve also heard more from sources who’ve worked with Google on the product. “Google Me is not a product, it’s a social layer across all products” (not so helpful). But there’s more – “Google Me will produce an activity stream generated by all Google products. Google Buzz has been rewritten to be the host of it all. And the reason Google Buzz isn’t currently working in Google Apps is because they’ll use the latest Buzz to support the activity stream in Apps…All Google products have been refactored to be part of the activity stream, including Google Docs, etc. They’ll build their social graph around the stream.”

Well, at least all that hard work on Buzz won’t be completely wasted. What I don’t know is how third party services and sites will factor in to all of this. But we’ll continue to dig.

The big SMS startups like 4INFO, ChaCha and others are seething at T-Mobile’s plans to charge $.0025 per SMS sent over it’s network. Currently these services generally pay a third party a set fee per month to send SMS messages, and their business model is dependent on fixed pricing.

At least one service, ChaCha, says they’ll stop sending messages through the T-Mobile platform when the charges begin. It’s 12% of their total traffic, says CEO Scott Jones, or 125,000,000 messages per year on T-Mobile. In terms of where ChaCha stands competitively, they are sixth on the list of U.S. SMS senders, after Twitter, Facebook, ESPN, 4INFO and Fox.

“The problem isn’t T-Mobile, it’s what happens if the other carriers choose to do this as well,” said Jones. “This is effectively an $8 CPM cost just for transport.”

Verizon explored a 3 cent fee per SMS two years ago, but it was never implemented.

ChaCha’s statement:

If T-Mobile moves forward with its "twitter tax" that is rumored to begin on Oct 1st, ChaCha absolutely will drop T-Mobile from our service. T-Mobile is a carrier that doesn't understand the realities of content businesses including Facebook, Twitter, ESPN, and ChaCha. ChaCha has more than 15 million monthly unique users for whom we answer over 2 million questions every day. The vast majority of these answers are delivered by SMS text. T-Mobile is already getting paid by subscribers for these texts and they are paid something already by aggregators/publishers. Now, they plan to impose an egregious and unacceptable tax.

Given that the costs to deliver text are miniscule, T-Mobile already makes profits from what they charge their customers, aggregators, and publishers. There, T-mobile is "triple dipping." We don't see any reason for this, other than greed.

This will be unfortunate for T-Mobile users who will either need to switch to another carrier to enjoy texting services, or access similar services via the mobile web and/or mobile apps (for which T-Mobile gets nothing incrementally). Starting today we will make it clear to our T-Mobile users that ChaCha would still be available on other carriers and/or via the mobile web or mobile apps.

If T-Mobile moves forward they will give their subscribers reasons to consider other carriers and/or prevent defectors from AT&T/Sprint/Verizon from considering T-Mobile. Also, their proposed pricing move will completely stifle innovation in the space, further harming T-Mobile customers.

ChaCha knows that our real-time "answers" and dbase of billions of answers is valuable and can be leveraged within any of these platforms. We prefer that T-Mobile not take this step, but if they do, we will no longer provide our free SMS service to T-Mobile and shift the traffic to other carriers and platforms. It's unfortunate for T-Mobile subscribers since they will miss out on ChaCha and many free services because of this short-sighted move by T-Mobile.

4INFO also sent us a long statement on this topic:

I wanted to let you know that T-Mobile has informed the industry that they plan to charge a $0.0025 toll to all businesses for every standard rate text message sent through their network (beginning October 1, 2010). You may recall that Verizon Wireless considered a similar charge in 2008, but relented under consumer and industry pressure, helping to enable the vibrant mobile service programs that exist today. Carriers have been increasing the cost of text messaging to consumers over the past several years, drawing antitrust investigations and class-action lawsuits. Now they are turning to businesses to do the same thing.

We recognize the economic realities of the times, but it is very disappointing that T-Mobile is taking this action against their own consumers and the mobile industry. This action will stifle (or reverse) growth of mobile messaging service businesses, harming not only consumers but also T-Mobile itself. Message volume will go down as businesses pass the costs of such programs to consumers, and consumers (as a result) move to carriers that can provide full access to mobile content.

This action will likely result in T-Mobile customers being unable to access SMS services offered by businesses, such as real-time sport scores, social networking updates, interactive voting, and special offers. This will affect 4INFO publishers such as Yahoo, AOL, the NBA, Zynga, Playdom, The Weather Channel, USA TODAY, NFL, NBC, CBS, IAC, Comcast …and other media companies, banks, and mobile marketing firms that use text messaging as a communication tool. They may be forced to turn off services to T-Mobile consumers.

Although the fee may seem small, companies like 4INFO, Facebook, and Twitter send billions of messages to tens of millions of consumers in the US; and the implications of this move from T-Mobile are far-reaching and damaging in the long term. 4INFO has seen great success as we've expanded into mobile display/apps, but we are adamant about this issue as SMS is a critical part of our one-stop mobile tech platform. Let me know if you'd like to discuss this further. I'd be happy to go on record about it.