If a post on Facebook’s developer blog is accurate, you have less than a week to make your call for no change. That’s right, no change. a group of members have coalesced behind a petition, massing together “Against the ‘New Facebook’” to send Zuckerberg and the rest of them out in Palo Alto a message: “We’re not saying get rid of the new layout, just that they should keep the old one and let us choose which layout we want like skins. Color options would be good too.”

As Compete’s trendspotters made known this past week, many Facebook users have switched over to the “new” Facebook, also called “beta,” only to revert back to the old way. Yet, the company is choosing to switch the network over by default in a matter of days, not months, as I myself envisioned it would. If you’re not fond of the idea of a site-wide shift, join the gentle opposition. Their goal at present is to reach 1 million registrants. As of 7:50 PM ET Saturday, they collectively number 424k-strong. The count has been 11 days in the making. Thousands enter the fold by the hour. All to invoke no change, but rather, a choice. Where do you fall? (Note: We made mention of a parallel movement yesterday, less than half the size, with nearly the same title. It happens.)

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While others at Google are busy launching and talking about Google’s browser Chrome, the Picasa team was busy releasing the new features. The newly launched feature set now pit Picasa directly with Flickr since it now has an explore page, where you can explore the latest, hottest and most interesting page in the Picasaverse.

In addition to this the Picasa team has also added a recent photos tab that allows you to see the latest photos currently being uploaded to Picasa. Picasa is terming it as seeing the world through someone else’s camera. The photostream on Picasa is near real time and since Picasa is localized in 38 languages the stream allows you to taste different global and cultural flavors. By the way the Android team has also released a new open source Photostream application for Android.

In addition to this Picasa has also added a game called “Where In The World”. The game allows you to test your pictorial memory and shows you a photo and asks you to point on an adjacent map to tell where in the world that photo might have been taken. I really dont get the point of this game, but it was interesting nevertheless. No need to mention that I was always off the mark by a couple of thousand miles.

TechCrunch has come up with interesting traffic stats of the popular photo sharing services. According to TC:

Globally, Picasa passed Photobucket in July with 48 million visitors compared to Photobucket’s 43 million, according to comScore. It still trails Facebook Photos (97 million unique visitors) and Flickr (63 million). In the U.S., it is much further behind, with only 8.3 million monthly visitors, compared to 18.3 million for Flickr, 23.5 million for Photobucket, and 25.4 million for Facebook Photos.

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Tatango, a Seattle based SMS service, has officially launched for the public now. The company aims to revolutionize group text messaging, thereby allowing any group the ability to send and receive group text messages from the web or their own mobile phones for free. In a nutshell they want to create yahoo groups for SMS messaging.

This would enable group to shift from slow, inefficient email lists to fast and quickly delivered mobile group messaging. Tatango enables groups to collect, manage and message to groups via SMS.

Speaking on the occasion Derek Johnson, CEO and founder of Tatango said:

SMS has become the most popular form of communication, yet there has been no website that has made this technology easily accessible to groups. We’ve developed Tatango exclusively, to fill this demand. Our mission at Tatango has always been to improve group communication through the use of mobile phones, with Tatango, we have achieved this.

Tatango has also included Gartner forecast in their press release according to which more than 2.3 trillion SMS messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008, up 19.6´% from the 1.9 trillion in 2007.

Tatango has already been in private testing since October 2007 and has built a user base of over 500,000 users that have sent 25 million SMS messages to their groups nationwide.

At the moment the service is only available in the U.S. I would love to use it in Europe. It would be nice if they could dream about the rest of the world soon.

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FreshBooks is an easy-to-use online invoicing service that saves you time, gets you paid faster and makes you look Fortune 500 professional. From estimates and expenses to time tracking and invoicing, FreshBooks makes everything quick and simple — letting you focus on your work, not your paperwork. Customize the service with your own logo and colors, send invoices by email or ground mail, accept payments with PayPal, Authorize.net and more. To learn more about FreshBooks visit their site.

Mosso has built the next generation of the Hosting Cloud. The applications you load on the Hosting Cloud immediately and automatically inherit clustered processing, load-balancing, and redundant storage. The moment you upload an application, it’s set to scale across an entire fleet of computers. There are no devices to think about or servers to configure. You don’t install an operating system, you simply select one. You don’t administer the underlying systems, you develop your own unique applications. To learn more about Mosso visit their site.

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ThemeForest, an Australian company, deals in trading and purchasing files. Their services include buying and selling of: site templates and themes to skin popular CMS products like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. Users can sign-up for free and use their account to begin trading or purchasing files. Files start from $5, based on the complexity, quality and use of the file.

ThemeForest, a part of the Envato network, strives to produce websites and communities that empower its users. They proceed with this task by providing sites users to buy and sell digital goods and resources. Whilst also improving their skillsets, and socializing communities. ThemeForest caters to a wide range of audience and are home to creatives from around the globe.

Starting off with ThemeForest services isn’t that hard either:

• Go to the homepage, create a free account (which takes just a few minutes).
• Find the items you want by browsing or searching the ThemeForest library.
• Deposit some cash to your account.
• Purchase ThemeForest services you selected and you’re in.

The website usability is pretty smooth, meaning that it is easily accessible to everyone, with a nice color combination and neatly placed tabs. To keep things rolling, on and off ThemeForest puts up contests with cool prizes, which’s a nice attraction for the users.

Checkout one of the samples of ThemeForest templates by clicking here. While I’m posting one of the screens from the services sample templates:

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Quintura, an search startup has raised funds in its new round of funding. The amount will be utilized to build the engine. The search engine is used by various media sites including Maxim, ReadWriteWeb, etc. The exact amount raised in the round is still unknown, though the founders are only saying it ‘several million dollars’.

As the site is founded by Russians, it is popular in Russia the most. The startup has hired a chief marketing officer in the U.S. lately, so things might start getting changed now.

One of the most interesting things about the startup is its capability to illustrate stuff in the form of clouds. If you search anything, the results will not only include the searched stuff, but it will also include the list of topics related to it.

According to the startup they currently have 8 million visitors per month. Furthermore they say that there are a lot of publishers in the U.S. which are testing the search method on their site. The current round of funding was lead by Mangrove Capital Partners.

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Joost, a startup that allows users to watch free video content on the web, has now enabled its video streams on the browser-based player and is going to stop making desktop clients. Based on the Internet Protocol television (IPTV) the service was incubated last year with great expectations and aims. Though all the hype it created was badly slapped by public’s criticism that includes service execution ( as it was a typical desktop client), bandwidth limitations and limited content.

Joost new announcement of shifting towards the web browser is supposed to be the much awaited feature. According to GigaOm, the web version will allow users to to view content right on their web browsers with a small plug-in that would be gabbing files using the P2P technologies by embedding itself into the browser. The service is also making a video based social network that improves your interactivity level by allowing you to share your content with your friends.

Though the shift strategy does make sense, but its true that Joost have taken quiet a lot time to focus the in-browser. Apart from this, Joost still has more challenges to face. Hulu, one of the main competitor and a good player of IPTV field, can give Joost a bitter pill to swallow because of its rich content. Hulu has got a wholesome collection of some hit shows like The Daily Shows along with list of feature films whereas Joost is only limited to some shows from MTV and Comedy Central.

As Hulu is backed by some popular channels like NBC and Fox it is quiet difficult for Joost to build an enriched media content platform.

According to VentureBeat, the launching of plug-in, itself could provide hindrance in its publicity as the plug-in restricts users to use either of the two dominant web browsers i-e Microsoft IE and Mozilla’s Firefox while Hulu only requires Adobe Flash to run. Thus, sizable portion of users who are using other browsers will certainly not compromise on their compatibility because of Joost and prefer Hulu over it, as Adobe Flash is now become standard of most of the machines.

With this plug-in issue Joost can even loss sizable Apple users who uses Safari as their default web browser. Apple is quickly captivating the market shares and is experiencing an abrupt growth in its iPhone and iPod users.

Founded by the Skype founders, Joost still has some options to attract users by improving its content or by introducing a feature that could be generic for all browsers users. The service has already raised $45 Million funding from some Strategic Investors, had a content partnership with WarnerBros along with its partnership with 31 major advertisers and CBS (The most widely distributed professional content provider on the Web) and have had integrated the Google Talk to allow its users to share their views about a particular TV program with friends in real time. These all collaboration and funding reveals that Joost can still touch the heights of success by formulating some intellectual strategies and by quickly adopting them as IPTV is one of the growing field and offers some good scope for the newly incubated companies like Joost.

Apparently the new browser-based Joost with the social networking features is in its testing phase. You you can watch its video to see it in action.

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Microsoft has started their $300 million ad campaign that, as previously mentioned, features the talent of Jerry Seinfeld. I saw the ad last night, and there has been a lot of talk about the quality of it this morning. Personally I was expecting it to, at the very least, inadvertently show off some things Vista is capable of doing. If you haven’t seen the ad yet take a look and let us know what you think:

TechCrunch managed to get their hands on an internal email that implies this is just the first phase of the campaign, and that some of the future ads will better highlight Vista’s features:

The first phase of this campaign is designed to engage consumers and spark a new conversation about Windows – a conversation that will evolve as the campaign progresses, but will always be marked by humor and humanity. The first in this series of television ads airs initially in the U.S., and it aims to re-ignite consumer excitement about the broader value of Windows.
[...]
Think of these ads as an icebreaker to reintroduce Microsoft to viewers in a consumer context. Later this month, as the campaign moves into its next phase, we’ll go much deeper in telling the Windows story and celebrating what it can do for consumers at work, at play and on-the-go.

I’ll reserve my final judgement about the video until I see what else they come out with, but I don’t think it will become the viral campaign they are hoping for if it continues down this path. Hopefully I’m not the only one who didn’t understand the point that the ad was trying to get across.

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Valleywag breaks the news of Michael Widenius aka Monty quitting Sun, the man behind the authoring of the original MySQL database and also one of its founders has finally though of changing lanes and keeping his eyes at Sun’s future developments from outside its boundaries. Things would turn out to be pretty 50-50 for those at Sun, for he had been a vital part and the chief architect behind MySQL’s technical efficiency plus he had been an avid supporter of preventing the Company’s stand at monetizing the database.

What appears to be good for Sun is the fact that they might very well use his insight on products and company’s decision from third party perspective as he would be at liberty to comment and criticize any and every step the company takes without the constraints of following employee agreement etc. So no matter how much they miss his presence, they might still make good use of his feedback and why not? At least he wont appear contradictory to the company’s decisions as he had making stand for public positions.

he has done so much sitting inside the company’s shell from giving opinions to making an all out stand on behalf of public positions and then the launch of Drizzle; a smaller, slimmer and (hopefully) faster version of MySQL. With so much to speak of his abilities and importance one wonders  where exactly does he make his next stop? Any ideas?

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