In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze a new breed of content site that is rapidly gaining momentum, look into recent statistics showing that Gen Y is using Twitter more, compare five recommendation services for iPhone apps, review the new-look MSN, and more. We also check in on our two main channels: ReadWriteEnterprise(devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart(dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs). SponsorSubscribe to Weekly WrapupYou can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapup by RSSor by email(form below).RWW Weekly Wrap-up Email Subscription form:Web TrendsThe Age of Mega Content Sites - Answers.com and Demand MediaTwo companies that produce massive quantities of new content every day, Answers.comand Demand Media, are rapidly moving up the list of top U.S. web properties, as measured by comScore. Answers.com has risen from #26 to #13 in just two months, and Demand Media has risen from #24 to #15 in the same time period. Is the fact that these sites produce so much content, and are quickly gaining in popularity as a result, cause for concern about the future of the Web?As Facebook Ages, Gen Y Turns to TwitterFacebook is getting old. No, people aren't getting tired of it, it's actually getting old, as in its population is aging. In May of 2008, the median age for Facebook was 26. Today, it's 33. So where are today's college students hanging out now? Well, to some extent, they're still on Facebook. Surprisingly though, they're also headed to another network you may have heard of: Twitter.Amazon Turns Twitter into a Marketplace - Are You Concerned?This week, Amazon sent out emailsto their Amazon Associatesmembers touting the latest addition to the company's affiliate program: a new feature called "Share with Twitter." According to the email, participants can generate "tweetable" links to any Amazon product after first logging into their Associates account. After updating Twitter, any person who clicks through on the link and makes a purchase will earn the participant referral fees payable through the Associates program.Thanks to Mozilla, Web Gets Less Ugly, Good Type Gets Machine ReadableRecently, a consortium of type designers and web designers have gathered around a new font format specification called Web Open Font Format (WOFF). The format would allow more typefaces to appear across the web and to be readable by both humans and search engines. With support from Mozilla announcedwith the release of Firefox 3.6, the question of web fonts might be satisfactorily resolved in the near future.SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORYReadWriteEnterpriseOur channel ReadWriteEnterprise, devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. Enterprise 2.0: Declaring War Does Not WorkAt the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week,Andrew McAfeemade a few points about the approach to enterprise technology and how it might be changed. McAffee, of the Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Management, is considered the father of Enterprise 2.0. His views reflect how Enterprise 2.0 is evolving but still with a fair degree of resistance for its adoption.ReadWriteStartOur channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad: Newbies Take the StageAt the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, we witnessed some of the enterprise community's brightest new stars. Enterprise 2.0 Launchpadoffered early-stage companies a chance to shine. In a gong-show like presentation series, the four finalists took to the stage to battle it out for the title of best newcomer. SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNELWeb ProductsDiscovering Great iPhone Apps: 5 Recommendation Services ComparedThe iPhone App Store is a blessing and a curse. It's one of the best things about the mobile platform, but it's so popular that finding great new apps to download can be a real challenge. Where there's a monetizable pain-point, services will flower! Enter a variety of new iPhone app recommendation services that aim to point you toward your next download and pocket the affiliate fees for paid apps.Below we've posted a chart comparing the features of 5 new services for iPhone app discovery.The New MSN: Will More White Space and Local News Make You Visit It?Microsoft announced this week a radical redesign of its MSNhomepage. Today's MSN homepage for the US market is a busy mix of ads, hundreds of links and some customizable local news and weather widgets. The redesign, MSN's first major redesign since 2004, puts a new emphasis on search, local news, video and integration with social networks. The new page features more white space, a tabbed design and a new MSN logo.The Very Strange Story of the StartupThat Says It Made $10m Before LaunchingBen Behrouzi came from the shadowy Lead Generation business, but some people in that fieldsaid he played too dirty. Now he's got a real-time search engine that just came out of beta today, called Leapfish, and he says the company will already report $10 million in revenue this year despite having barely launched to the public. This is a strange story, so consider suspending your disbelief so you can see what Leapfish has to offer.PayPal's X: A Platform to Pick Your PocketAfter waiting for two months for PayPal to release its much-anticipated platform, the day finally arrived for PayPal X. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's announcement in late Julyand this week, at San Francisco's Concourse Exhibition Center, developers and press people waited with baited breath to see what was earlier described as a "platform as ubiquitous as the electrical outlet."Ribbit Launches Google Voice ChallengerRibbit announced this week the launch of Ribbit Mobile. Ribbit Mobile is a cloud-based VoIP telephony service that brings together web-based calling, smart call routing and voicemail transcriptions. It is hard to look at Ribbit Mobile without comparing it to Google Voice. Just like Google Voice, Ribbit gives users a new phone number or they can use call forwarding. Ribbit Mobile also has quite a few features that Google doesn't offer, including the ability to make calls from within the browser.SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORYThat's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.Discuss

  Dennis Howlett got the attention of the Enterprise 2.0 community today, with his continued skepticism about "social" technologies and their place in the business world. Here's a quote from his post entitled Enterprise 2.0 - the non-debate:"Why am I not surprised? I've argued for years that the notion of anything that has 'social' attached to its moniker is about as welcome as breaking wind in a spacesuit."SponsorWhile Howlett makes a few good points in his post, we think that he's making a straw man argument - that the Enterprise 2.0 community is somehow involved in a big lie.The reality is that Enterprise 2.0 applications augment our work and these technologies are having an effect on productivity and in some respects, business processes.We spoke today with Mike Gotta, an industry analyst with the Burton Group. He puts it well. For data entry and claims processing, people use othertools. The Enterprise 2.0 offerings augment their work. "Dennis has a point," Gotta said. "These systems are not workflow driven - we already have tools to do that. These tools augment work. They enhance it, they enrich it."But even tools like ERP offerings are integrating lightweight layers to make them more usable, so that people can get their work done. We also recently wrote about Netvibes working with Sage Softwareto provide personal dashboards so business users can better use ERP applications. A few other signs:The Services sector is growing. We spoke to a large technology company this week that is questioning how they can grow under the weight of the email that stalls people in their work. They are working with a large services group which is helping them look at a number of ways for real-time data and notifications to take some of the load off of their engineering team. They've looked around and believe Enterprise 2.0 tools can perform a role that will help them grow and become a more profitable business. More use cases are popping up. No matter how you feel about the Enterprise 2.0 conference, a lot of companies were there to say how they are using lightweight technologies to solve productivity and business problems.Companies on the sell side are growing. Are they all charlatans? If so, are their clients really that stupid? We don't think so. To call people fakes is to say that these poor business people are just victims. That makes no sense. Moreover, we wonder how much more waste enterprises can take with heavyweight IT projects - those cost far more than a SaaS offering that you can test, try and pay on a per use basis.We do see the gap between productivity and the business side of the organization with Enterprise 2.0 technologies. But the innovation is there. And lines of business are taking advantage of tools because they help get the work done.We do agree that 'social' is a term too often overused. But to dismiss the Enterprise 2.0 community is going a bit too far - and does not reflect the reality of this new world.Discuss

  Finding specific online videos from TV networks and independent producers can often be a daunting challenge. Some TV shows are on Hulu, some can only be found as paid downloads on iTunes or Amazon and some are only available for streaming on the network's and producer's own sites. Clickerwants to change this by making it easier to find shows from TV networks, music videos, and web videos from across the Internet. Clicker is currently in private beta and only available in the US. The company gave us 1000 invites for our readers. Read on to find out how you can get yours.SponsorClicker aggregates over 300,000 episodes from over 1,200 networks, as well as 50,000 music videos and thousands of movies.Features and User InterfaceThere are, of course, already numerous video search engines like blinxor Truveo. Few of these make it as easy as Clicker to find the videos you are looking for, however. With auto-completed searches, a smart categorization system and well designed search results page, finding the right video on Clicker is a snap. Whenever possible, Clicker uses video embeds to play videos right on its own page, though if a show can't be embedded, Clicker will point to other sources. It's important to point out that while most of these videos are available for free, Clicker also indexes shows that are only available for paid downloads and streams on services like iTunes or Amazon. Clicker also indexes shows from Netflix - though you need to be a Netflix subscriber to stream these.A very useful feature on Clicker is that users can subscribe to shows and build up a personal library of shows and playlists. Every episode page gives users the option to add this episode to the playlist or to subscribe to the complete series. Clicker also keeps a record of all the shows a user has watched already. All of these features are nice and useful, but the area where Clicker really shines is in how it presents the search results and how easy it is to browse the site and discover shows. Taming the Wild West of Online VideoWith its focus on indexing high-quality videos and making it easy to find them, Clicker manages to stand out from its competition. Earlier this week, Clicker addedBlake Krikorian, the founder of Sling Media to its board of directors, whose experience in this market will definitely be a boon for the company.As Clicker's CEO Jim Lanzone told us earlier today, online video is still going through its Wild West phase. Thanks to services like Clicker, it's now getting a lot easier to find and play online videos without having to search through dozens of sites.InvitesClicker gave us 1000 invites. Simply click here, sign up, and you are ready to go.Discuss

  When you've got a global audience, maybe it's good to make sweeping, ambitious statements. Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald, co-founder of Augmented Reality browser company Layar, was interviewed by CNN todayand took the opportunity to claim that AR on phones is going to be so big in the future that only voice will be more popular.Maybe. Many people in the Augmented Reality world are rolling their eyes at Layar's incredible media exposure. They worry that relatively simple implementations of this technology paradigm will create such a bubble of hype that software developed over decades will suffer as well, if public opinion crashes in a let-down from high expectations.SponsorFact of the matter is, sometimes Layar and other AR services work well and sometimes they don't. None of the mobile applications currently available actually process the live video they are looking at and respond, some just postulate at what should be where you're looking and others look for a very specific marker. In other words, it's not at all like the Terminator view shown by CNN to illustrate the concept. Live video AR (called "true AR" by some in the industry) is just beginning to make an appearance on mobile devices. Layar could not identify pant sizes walking down the street if it wanted to.Either way, here we are: AR is becoming the hot new thing and not just among geeks. It's hitting the mainstream. From CNN profiles like this to the next issue of Esquire Magazine. Even the New York Times is beginning to explore the possibilities- though the Times is both mainstream and full of super-geeks.What do you think? Is Augmented Reality the next step for the internet? Displaying data about the world, on top of our view of the world, certainly seems compelling. Could mobile AR overtake traditional mobile browsing, photography, etc. and be second only to voice as the way people use their phones?It seems possible. Here comes the future, when we get to find out.Discuss

  In 1906 John Philip Sousa criticized the gramophone saying, "These talking machines will ruin the artistic development of music in this country." Nevertheless, because Sousa did not forsee user-generated culture proliferating alongside "mechanical music" he could not have been further from the truth. Not only have machine technologies aided in musical development, but there are a variety of mediums to choose from. While audio engineers may scoff at the idea of making music on the iPhone, there's no denying that a number of options exist for the pocket DJ. Below are a few tools to get you started:Sponsor1. Melodica: Melodica is like Yamaha's Tenori-Oninstrument for the iPhone only it doesn't cost $1000 to play with it. This tool interface consists of rows of buttons. Users touch specific buttons on the app surface to create ambient loops. From here the loops can be layered and combined to make fuller sounding music. 2. Sonifi: Sonifi allows users to remix, record and control visualizations via the iPhone. Created by electronic DJ BT, the service allows for real-time collaborations and users can control beats, bass, melody and harmony via the iPhone's accelerometer. 3. ZOOZBeat: Similar to Sonifi, Zoozbeat allows you to remix and make music via gestural motions from the iPhone. Users shake and tap to change song tempo and tone. You can also record your voice directly to the App. 4. Looptastic: With this service users can import loops, share them between sets and combine them with others. You can also download pre-existing loops to experiment. Users rave about this app, but for many the $9.99 price tag will be a deterrent. 5. Thounds:Thounds is a music platform that allows you to create music and share it with friends and family. The service lets you to create one portion of a musical track and share that link with other musicians for additions. Users can contribute a basic baseline, vocals or guitar riffs. An iPhone app is expected shortly. If you've got more tools to add to this list or examples of music you've made using any of the above products, link to them in the comments below. Discuss

  Seesmicjust announced the launch of Twitter lists in its browser-based Seesmic Web Twitterclient. Earlier this week, Seesmic releasedthe first desktop Twitter client with support for lists. Despite Seesmic's best efforts, Brizzlymanaged to become the first company to release a web client with support for lists earlier today. Seesmic Web offers another first for web-based Twitter clients, however: support for Twitter's geolocation API.SponsorLists With Auto-UpdatesIn Seesmic's web interface, users can now simply hover their cursor over profile pictures and a menu will appear. This menu, among other things, allows Seesmic's users to add others to lists. One nice aspect of the web interface is that it auto-updates lists when new tweets come in. The desktop app - at least in the current version - doesn't do this and forces users to manually refresh lists to see updates.GeolocationIn addition to supporting lists, the new version of the web client also supports Twitter's geolocation API. Seesmic users can't share their locations, but whenever a Twitter user broadcasts location data, a little pin will appear underneath the profile picture, and hovering over this pin will bring up a map. Only a few usersactually have the ability to broadcast their locations at this point. Twitter is only giving platform developers access to this feature for now, but it should soon become a standard feature in mobile clients like Tweetie 2 and Twitterrific.Discuss

  We had almost forgotten about Orb, the media-sharing software that lets you stream video from your home computer to your iPhone or any other internet-connected device. In fact, the last time we had even looked at the application was November of 2008 when the company announced an update to their iPhone applicationwhich allowed you to stream live TV over the 3G network. At that time though, the desktop software portion of the Orb product was PC-only. As in Windows PC-only. Today, that has changed. Orb for Macintosh has finally been released so Mac OS X users can now stream their media over the net, too. SponsorOrbis a desktop software program that facilitates streaming of personal media over the internet. Once installed and configured, you can access your home computer's content library from any internet-connected device. The software easily achieves what many other technology companies are still figuring out how to do - make your media available anywhere and everywhere on any device you use with minimal effort on your part.One of Orb's best features is the OrbLive iPhone application which connects with your home computer over the internet to provide access to your media library of audio, video, and photos. Through the mobile application, you can access any of your media files and play stream them over either a Wi-Fi or 3G connection. In the Windows version of the software, PC's with TV tuner cards can also connect you to live, streaming TV in addition to the other shared media saved on the PC's hard drive.To some extent, Orb competes with Apple's own offerings since it provides access to music and video from either a desktop computer or an iPhone. That's why it was somewhat surprising that Apple ever approved the company's iPhone application to begin with. Even moresurprising is that they allowed it to function over 3G when similar products - like Slingbox's SlingPlayer for iPhone, another live TV streaming app - are restricted to Wi-Fi only. No Live TV for Mac Users YetUnfortunately, the Mac version is debuting without the live TV streaming functionality. According to Joe Costello, CEO of Orb Networks, support for live TV support will be added in subsequent versions. In the meantime, however, Mac users can install the Orb software to stream music, photos, videos, home movies and webcam feeds stored in iTunes to their iPhones or to any other internet-connected device including netbooks, notebooks, media players, game consoles and more. All that's needed is the new Mac OS X desktop software (works on OS X Intel 10.5 or later).Those interested in trying out the new Mac version can grab the installer from here: orb.com/en/download_orb. For now, the Mac software is available in English only. Discuss

  Some LinkedInusers will have noticed a change to the navigation and user interface of the LinkedIn.com website, announces a company blog post. The business-focused social network is in the process of rolling out an updated design that aims to improve and simplify site navigation while also offering a cleaner, less-cluttered look. Does the fresh coat of paint hit the mark? SponsorWhat's New: Navigation Improvements, Lots of WhitespaceOne of the main new features of the revamped LinkedIn is the global navigation bar at the top of the page which links to all the site's features including profile, contacts, groups, jobs, your inbox, and more. Click on any of these items and a drop-down menu will appear providing you with further options. This gives the most important navigational aspect to the site a more modern look than it had before when each section was displayed in clickable tabs of different shades of blue. The company also touts how the new look and feel also makes room for more page content with less scrolling needed in order to see everything on the page. This is also true to some extent. However, on your homepage where network updates and group updates are featured, the amount of scrolling depends on the size of your network and how active the network members are. For example, under the "group updates" section, updates for the past seven days were posted followed by a section that included updates from the prior week. That actually led to quite a bit of scrolling to see them all. It's not necessarily a bad feature, though. After all, LinkedIn isn't the sort of site we're logging into on a daily basis so it's nice to be able to catch up when we're there... even if that means the homepage screen extends downward forever.Also new on the homepage are moveable, collapsible sidebar modules which can display things like who's been viewing your profile, events, job listings, applications you've added, and more. Cleaner Look Highlights AdsOne downside of the site's "cleaner" look is how much more noticeable the ads are now. Of course, to LinkedIn this may be an upside. Although the ad placements are no different than before, the new look makes them really stand out. Since everything is now black or blue text on a white background, the full-colored ad at the top of the screen is the first thing to draw your eye upon login. There's also a text link ad directly below the global navigation that demands your attention. It's in the exact place where a company message would normally appear and the font used is a darker, bolder blue than anything else on the site. Both of these elements are somewhat distracting, but we suppose there's nothing that you can really do about ads. Still, we wish that the network had taken a page from Facebook's book when it came to ad placement - when you log into Facebook, the first thing you notice is the content and the updates, not the ads. LinkedIn says the updated design was based on years of data from usability research but what you're seeing now isn't necessarily the final product. They're still iterating and, based on user feedback about the new look, they may make some additional changes in this and other areas. Still Needs Improvement: the LinkedIn InboxOne thing that still hasn't improved, sadly, is the LinkedIn inbox. Although the homepage view of the inbox provides a handy "take action" button which lets you quickly accept, reject, or archive requests, the full inbox view still forces you to click each message to accept or reject requests - there are no bulk actions you can take from the inbox screen besides archiving or marking messages as read or unread. Even worse, after accepting or rejecting a request, the message remains in your inbox until you manually archive it, necessitating quite a bit of additional work if you've let those invites pile up. What Do You Think?Are you impressed with the new look for LinkedIn? Or did you prefer the old tabbed interface better? LinkedIn obviously hopes that by simplifying the navigation and site elements which help to better engage users that they will spend more time exploring and interacting with the various site elements. Do you think that will be the case? Or do the underlying features of LinkedIn need improvement as well?Discuss

  Editor's note:we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interestingto our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.Remember what it was like to capture video off a computer screen before desktop recording software came along?You'd mount a big, expensive camera on a tripod, point it at the screen and, unless you had tweaked a bunch of settings or loaded special software, you'd get black bars creeping up and down the screen because of a refresh rate mismatch. And once you solved that problem, you still needed to be well versed in editing tools, video-tape transfer and replication.Sponsor1990s: Cost of Production and Distribution = Very HighThe advent of all-in-one desktop recording software was a minor revolution, because it gave ordinary computer users the means to capture anything they could see on their computer, edit it into a finished production and get it onto a CD-ROM or their Web server.Now, anyone could be a software trainer—or at least share tips and show off cool stuff that they'd done on their computer.Just as blogging platforms lit the fuse that rocked the world of online publishing, tools such as Camtasia Studiobrought screencasting production to the mainstream. And video-sharing sites (think YouTube and Screencast.com) came along to eliminate distribution costs and hassle. The read/write Web took a step forward.2000s: Cost of Production and Distribution = LowThen along came "instant" screencasting tools such as Jing, ScreenToaster and Screenr (see ReadWriteWeb's reviews), which have lowered the barrier even further. The cost of these tools is nothing. And because content uploading and hosting is built right in, the time between idea and posted content has shrunk from hours to seconds. Think it, record it, post a link.If the all-in-one screen recorders are like blogs, these new apps are like Twitter. And they've birthed a new mode of communication: the casual, disposable micro-screencast.2010s: Cost of Production and Distribution = 0Meticulously orchestrated and slickly edited screencast productions will always have their place. But now it's also practical to fire off a quick, informal micro-screencast in the time it takes to jot an email or dial a phone number.And just as with Twitter, a stripped-down feature set and length limitations can be a benevolent deficit. The author has no time to ramble and no temptation to fiddle around, "improving" something that's good enough. (Anyone who has wasted 15 minutes tweaking the formatting of an unimportant document just because you could, raise your hand!)On the other hand, simple doesn't mean poorly executed. You don't want the equivalent of typos and grammatical errors in your screencast. So, keep these basic tips in mind and you'll make something worthy of the viewer's time and attention.Three Tips for Micro-Screencasting ExcellencePrepareThis is as easy as pausing to collect your thoughts and maybe jotting down on a sticky note three things that you want to communicate. This will help you focus and be succinct.PracticeNo one wants to watch you hunt around, looking for the right window or browser tab. A quick dry run goes a long way towards smooth delivery on the first take.PauseMemorize the hotkey that pauses your recorder (or write it at the top of your sticky note). Use it to stop and regroup if your brain freezes or you start to bumble. It's faster than starting over.How about you? Are screencasts part of your day-to-day communication? Got a story or tip to share?Daniel Foster (@fosteronomo) is a marketing writer at TechSmith and edits the company's monthly e-newsletter.Discuss

  Microsoft will offer an application marketplace within Sharepoint 2010 that will integrate with third-party applications from its partner network. No date has been set for the marketplace lauch but it will evolve from "The Gallery" a feature that provides Sharepoint 2010 users access to templates.SponsorIn an interview we did at Enterprise 2.0, Christian Finn said Microsoft will offer the marketplace for vendors who want to sell their products through the Sharepoint platform."We will have a route to market for vendors who want to have applications and add-ons available," Finn said. Conceptually, Finn said, you think about a marketplace idea. Customers will navigate from the Sharepoint interface to see what web parts are available for a trial period.Finn said that from their perspective, collaboration is mostly on-premise. Customers are starting to move to the cloud. "We are seeing early customers starting to move. When we see that bell curve adoption we will definitely be there."But collaboration services are increasingly cloud-based. MindTouch, SocialCast, Socialtextand a host of other companies are offering best-of-breed-services.The availability of a marketplace brings up a lot of questions about the role that partners will play with Sharepoint. But it also raises interesting competitive questions about the role of Sharepoint as a cloud-based service. It almost looks like it will be more of a Software-as-a-Servce (SaaS) than the on-premise platform it is today.The Sharepoint application marketplace will evolve out of The Gallery, a resource within Sharepoint 2010 that serves as a central place for templates. Microsoft will initially offer their own web parts through Gallery. Eventually the service will take a different name and migrate to offering partner services. We asked Finn what the model will look like. Will it be pay per use? How will the application marketplace be administered? Finn said most of the details are being worked out in Redmond. The service will have IT safeguards. Finn said that IT managers will have a level of control over what applications users may integrate.What Finn describes sounds similar to application platforms now commercially available. Salesfoce.comis the obvious example. TheirForce.complatform is a full development environment. AppExchangeis the platform for building third party applications on Salesforce.com CRM. Dazzlefrom Citrix also comes to mind. It is an iTunes like service that is all about making IT more consumer friendly. Employees may choose the applications that they want to purchase. The service is set up as a store front that can automatically stream the application on a virtual desktop to a Windows PC, a Mac or an iPhone.Details are few about the application marketplace that will be offered through Sharepoint. But it does point to the increasing significance of third-party applications for the Sharepoint platform and how the service may evolve as cloud computing becomes more prevalent.Discuss

  The wildly popular nonprofit fundraising application Causesreportedly emailed users of its MySpace app on Tuesday to tell them that all Causes will be removed from MySpace on Friday morning, in three days. Causes was co-founded by Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, the Comcast-acquired Plaxo and Founding President of Facebook. MySpace users of Causes were encouraged to post links on their MySpace profiles asking cause supporters to join the cause on Facebook instead. In abandoning MySpace, is Causes abandoning nonprofit groups organizing online with poorer users and people of color? Or are neither MySpace or Causes any big loss for social change organizations?SponsorThe Politics of PoliticsAmy Sample Ward writes today on the Stanford Social Innovation Reviewblog that she's concerned. "Causes leaving MySpace," she writes, "means that no users there will be able to continue promoting the causes, organizations or sectors that they care about via a process that's already been established, adopted, and networked."[The] Causes' About statementsays, 'The goal of all this is what we call equal opportunity activism.We're trying to level the playing field by empowering individuals to change the world.' The removal of Causes from MySpace where there are active communities of supporters means 'equal opportunity activism' is defined by only certain communities - we know that social networking platforms have very different demographic user groups."So Sample Ward argues that Causes is being hypocritical by allowing equal access to tools for social change to be defined only by the more economically powerful demographic groups on Facebook. Causes told users it was pulling out of MySpace because of a lack of activity, but the MySpace App Gallery says there are almost 190,000 active Causes users right now, making it the third most popular appin the politics and causes category.Housing rights nonprofit exec Justin Massa concurs with Sample Ward and takes the critique a step further: "Causes' justification sounds an awful lot like what financial institutions and the real estate industry used to say about poor and minority neighborhoods. I'm planning a longer post on this subject early next week, but in the meantime wanted to label this for what it is: social network redlining. " [Our link added for clarity.]On MySpaceNot everyone thinks that MySpace provides a meaningful opportunity to effect social change, though. In an interview four years ago on the topic of nonprofit promotion on MySpace, Pete Cashmore of social network tracking blog Mashablearticulated what's now a widely-held belief. He said he believed MySpace was really just filled with young, drunken, hyper-sexualized, attention seekers. "You've been there...it seems crazy for organizations to invest time and resources there," he said, "but it's popular!" Not everyone sees it that way. The Humane Society, for example, posts daily to MySpace about animal welfare issues for its 65k+ friends. Causes co-founder Sean Parker poses sitting with crossed legs in his photo on the company profile page; his mission statement begins with the words "According to the historical Buddha..." It's hard to imagine a beneficent religious figure that would ditch MySpace for Facebook, isn't it? Perhaps "the historical Buddha" would choose to pull up stakes from the 11th most popular website in the worldif the people were too shallow and go to the hip social network where the money-raising action is.The Loss of CausesPerhaps even more cynical are some of the attitudes around Causes itself. This Spring the Washington Postreported that despite big expectations from many nonprofit organizations, posting a Causes app to a Facebook profile and waiting for the money to roll in is a sure path to disappointment."Only a tiny fraction of the 179,000 nonprofits that have turned to Causes as an inexpensive and green way to seek donations have brought in even $1,000, according to data available on the Causes developers' site. The application allows Facebook users to list themselves as supporters of a cause on their profile pages. But fewer than 1 percent of those who have joined a cause have actually donated money through that application."Widely respected nonprofit technology consultant Beth Kanter says that Causes is like a one-night stand. "Where's the opportunity to cultivate and get to know those joiners and move them up the ladder to donation?" she asks, "Where's the relationship building?"So by pulling out of MySpace, is Causes abandoning some of the people who need it most? Or is MySpace a bad place to do political organizing anyway? Or, is Causes just not a great way to organize and fundraise? There's a lot of negative feelings around this news, but maybe that's what happens when the struggling nonprofit technology sector puts too much stock in the dalliances of a big-named Silicon Valley baron like Sean Parker.Kanterbrings a twinkle of optimism to the conversation: "This sounds like a great opportunity for other fundraising applications," she says.Discuss

  Finally, the powers that be are planning to put a stop to #liesboystell, #goodhead, and... well, all the other asinine, vulgar, and generally pointless trending topics one finds in the right column of the Twitter web interface.Over the summer, we noticedthat Twitter was submerging some adult-themed trending topics, and we noted the absolute need for more top-down policing of the trends list, which should be available for surfacing interesting and timely items to engage users. Today, Twitter has finally acknowledged the brokenness of the feature and has stated its intentions to fix the issue.SponsorTwitter rep @jennadawn (no real name given, and no link from her Twitter profile, either) wroteon the official Twitter blog, "We've noticed an increasing amount of clutter in the public timeline, especially with trending topics. Trends began as a useful way to find out what's going on but has grown less interesting due to the noisiness of the conversation."So, today we're starting to experiment with improvements to trends that will help you find more relevant tweets. Specifically, we're working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful. The improvement won't be very noticeable at first, but this is a small step toward unearthing more value in search and getting you more relevant results."We are interested to know exactly how this new algorithm will work. Clearly, the wisdom of the masses has proved to be anything but. We hope that, beyond editing the tweets that qualify as representatives of a given trending topic, Twitter will acknowledge that they already dopolice trending topics, and we hope they will do so with greater diligence, intuition, and intelligence.Vulgarity and inanity aside, we worry about dupes. For example, right now, FortHood, Fort Hood, and FtHood are all trending topics. Likewise, every time a good football game rears its majestic head, we see the name and city of each team start to trend, along with NFL and the like.There are many ways in which trending topics are busted, useless, and irritating - hence, many opportunities for making them customizable, interesting, and useful. We're sensing an opportunity for third-party apps to step in here. Traditionally, Twitter is late to the gamein making official features from ideas third-party developers have been working on for ages. Unless Twitter takes some impressive and noticeable action, an app might fix trending topics before Twitter does.Discuss

  Metaio Augmented Reality Solutions is about to announce the release of the company's JunaioiPhone application and ReadWriteWeb has an exclusive pre-release review. While other products like Wikitude, Robotvisionand Layarallow users to view notes and text above a location-based layer, no other service offers us a chance to add 3D objects and animation. While the demo may seem frivolous for now, the possibilities for branded scavenger hunts, real-world

  Ben Behrouzi came from the shadowy Lead Generation business, but some people in that fieldsaid he played too dirty. Now he's got a real-time search engine that just came out of beta today, called Leapfish, and he says the company will already report $10 million in revenue this year despite having barely launched to the public. This is a strange story, but no one said the path to the future wouldn't itself be strange. So consider suspending your disbelief so you can see what Leapfish has to offer.SponsorLeapfish was at first a site for calculating the estimated value of domain names, then it became a patched-together meta-search engine that prioritized timeliness. Now it's a gorgeous, smartly planned real-time search service with an introductory video that can only be described as epic. (See below.) The company has convinced businesses to pay hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for year-long exclusive keyword advertising and the first right to renew each year. It's like an investment in the future viability of Leapfish, the company says. Leapfish at present only looks good, though, it doesn't really work that well. Leapfish searches for user queries across 25 different services, from Google and Yahoo to Yelp, Digg and some Real Estate sites. The service determines which sources are providing the most relevant results and constructs a search results page accordingly. If users love Leapfish enough to marry it they can turn on as many as 35 different widgets to interact with things like their Facebook and Twitter accounts on the Leapfish home page.The design of the site and results pages are quite nice and the fundamental idea is a good one. But how could Leapfish already be set to bank $10 million in revenue this year? The Pleasanton, California company says it has 100 employees; 50 are listed on LinkedInand almost every one of them are in sales.The sales pitch is this: Leapfish is small today, but the keyword prices that companies (like this lady) are paying will be a bargain if Leapfish can really grow. It's an investment, and as such it's a very affordable one. Some companies have already resold the keywords they bought from Leapfish for a profit, the company says.One part of what's being invested in is, no doubt, a vision of the future. Check out this absolutely cathartic videothe company made about the real-time web. It just might make you want to leap to your feet, pump your fist and shout "Go get 'em, Lead Generation Guy, go capture the future of the internet!"Unfortunately, in our tests Leapfish doesn't work very well. Search results are often off-topic, there are software bugs in some of the most basic parts of the site on the day of its grand unveiling and the compelling vision isn't that exciting in reality. Check out our 5 minute tour of the siteto see what $10 million in ads have been bought against over the last year.If Leapfish can in fact pull it off, it wouldn't be the first time a company has sputtered oddly into a final, grand-slam iteration. It wouldn't be the first time a controversial entrepreneur with a business model that some people are skeptical of ended up capturing the world's imagination, either. Leapfish is right, the web has changed dramatically, and someone's going to figure out how to searching it effectively. The Leapfish story sure is a strange one, though.Discuss