The Social

As part of its annual "Wikimania" conference in Alexandria, Egypt, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation--parent company of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and a number of others--announced two new members to its board of trustees. The announcement went out on Friday and is effective immediately.

Taking over from current chair Florence Devouard will be Michael Snow, who has been on the board since February and has been an active member of the Wikipedia community since 2003. A lawyer based in Seattle, Wash., Snow created the "Wikipedia Signpost" community news resource in 2006.

Another Wikimedia Foundation board member has been announced, too: Ting Chen, who has worked on both the German and Chinese editions of Wikipedia. He currently lives in Mainz, Germany and works at IBM.

The Wikimedia Foundation restructured its board in April, formally naming creator Jimmy Wales as "community founder" and expanding the total membership of the board from eight to ten. The nonprofit also received significant donations this spring, including $500,000 from venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and $3 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. But things haven't all been sunny: the Wikimedia Foundation has come under fire regarding use of funds on Wales' behalf.

PodTech, a video podcast network that had taken over $7 million in venture funding, has been sold--and the price may have been a downright embarrassing $500,000.

The news was reported this week by Eric Eldon at VentureBeat, but Valleywag's Jackson West was floating the rumor with less detail last week. And Fake Steve Jobs jumped the gun a little bit by declaring the company dead last October.

The buyer is the Los Angeles-based ViewPartner, a "communications technology company" that seems to only produce Google results about the fact that it bought PodTech. And while no financial specifics were named in the release, VentureBeat reported that the price was around $500,000. Ouch.

PodTech's woes had been very public as high-profile employees started leaving: marketer Jeremiah Owyang, who became an analyst at Forrester; blogger Robert Scoble, essentially the face of the company; and even CEO John Furrier. It was reportedly out of money, despite having raised a $5.5 million venture round and then another $2 million from U.S. Ventures and Venrock.

The rough economy is making it a shaky ride for many start-ups, but PodTech may have suffered from additional problems: the niche of "podcasting" didn't play out the way many expected it to, instead blending into Web video and audio content alongside far more traditional programming. While a few podcasters have become stars, the "top podcast" charts at the iTunes store look a whole lot more like big media: NPR, Comedy Central, and um, ... Read more

A look at the new Last.fm homepage.

(Credit: Last.fm)

Social music site Last.fm has unveiled a new look: a slick new design, an iPhone app, a partnership with Logitech to stream music to compatible home stereo systems, and a host of new features.

With the new features, members can receive music recommendations instantly by naming a few bands and artists they like. Previously, they had to hook up their music libraries so that the site's engine, or "scrobbler," could read and analyze what songs they'd listened to recently. The site's music charts now also update in near-real time.

Unfortunately, when I tried to load the new Last.fm, the site had crashed. TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld said he experienced problems, too. (Update at 12:33 p.m. PDT: the site loads but unreliably.)

That said, we certainly have seen recently that server outages aren't limited to Twitter. Ironically, I managed to get Last.fm's iPhone app working just fine.

(Disclosure: Last.fm is owned by CNET News parent company CBS Interactive.)

The game development platform du jour might be the iPhone 2.0 software, but News Corp.'s MySpace hopes to make a splash with a new contest in its Asian market: TheGame08, which pits developers against one another in an attempt to create a hit social game that runs on MySpace's platform. It all leads up to the legendary Tokyo Game Show this October.

Starting Thursday, developers who are at least 18 years old and legal residents of either China, Japan, Korea, or India can enter the contest in groups of no more than three; regional semi-finalists from each country, who win trips to the Tokyo Game Show, will be chosen by a panel of judges that includes MySpace President Tom Anderson, IGN executive Peer Schneider, and Sherpalo Ventures' Sandeep Murthy. The final winner will be announced on October 9 at the gaming expo.

"MySpace is defining the future of online casual gaming by providing a global platform to showcase the best and the brightest that this incredible developer community has to offer," Steve Pearman, senior vice president of product and strategy at MySpace, said in a statement. "I am looking forward to the unique and engaging applications that this contest will inspire."

The winning application, which will be translated into English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, will earn special promotion from MySpace (and there are some cash prizes involved, too). And for MySpace, it's a way to get some publicity for quality applications. Because its platform is OpenSocial-compatible, ... Read more

A look at Flixster, with a Meebo IM window in the bottom right corner.

(Credit: Meebo/Flixster)

Web-based instant-messaging company Meebo has taken a new step forward: bringing its IM technology to partner sites. This fall, Meebo will start powering IM "buddy lists" on a handful of social-media sites so that you can chat with your friends who use those services. They're calling it Community IM.

Right now, the partners announced are the MC Hammer-backed DanceJam, movie fan site Flixster, teen social sites MyYearbook and Piczo, MTV Networks' AddictingGames, SparkArt, women's blog network Sugar, and Tagged.

Altogether, that's more than 54 million users worldwide for Meebo, according to ComScore. But that list will get longer before the service launches, co-founder and CEO Seth Sternberg told me earlier this week. Developers are welcome to check it out now.

The technology itself will undoubtedly remind you of Facebook Chat, the instant-messaging feature that the social network launched earlier this year. It's controlled through a menu bar at the bottom of the site, and will let members know which of their friends are also logged on. The catch is that the window can also pop out, and you can migrate your buddy lists from the likes of Flixster and AddictingGames into the broader Meebo client. Ad revenue will be shared.

Meebo developed the service in response to customer requests, Sternberg told me. And he said it's much-needed, considering traditional IM services often don't reflect all the people ... Read more

MTV might've strayed away from music these days--My Super Sweet Sixteen, anyone?--but the entertainment mainstay's latest project aims to both bring it back to its roots and propel it into the social Web. Ambitious, yes.

'The Hills': Now telling you what you want to listen to.

(Credit: MTV)

It's called "Soundtrack," and it's an "interactive music guide for TV." If you're watching a heated moment of cattiness between Lauren and Audrina on The Hills and are dying to know what song's playing in the background, you can log on and find out exactly what it was. Then you can purchase the MP3, thanks to MTV's partnership with music service Rhapsody, as well as look up more soundtrack information from past programming. You can, of course, network with other members--this is powered by Flux, the social-networking technology that MTV Networks parent company Viacom built when it acquired a start-up called Tagworld.

Radio stations have been doing the "look up a song" gimmick for years, which makes it not particularly jaw-dropping for MTV to institute the same thing. But it does tap into a host of extremely popular and influential cable shows (for better or for worse) and cross-promotion on TV will likely boost traffic. Plus, it should be said that television soundtracks have become a crucial spot for music discovery--remember when The O.C. propelled California indie-pop bands to the heights of coolness a few years ago?

But MTV also ... Read more

Twitter has indeed acquired Summize, a nifty search engine built specifically to index Twitter posts, TechCrunch reported Tuesday along with a video of Twitter founder Evan Williams talking about it.

The news follows sporadic rumors that were accompanied by both shaky confirmations and shaky denials. An under-the-radar blogger, Josh Chandler, reported the news first; GigaOM's Om Malik was the first big name to "confirm" it.

Some logistics, as reported by TechCrunch: five of Summize's six employees will become Twitter employees, minus founder Jay Verdy, who will depart the company for "a new project." Naturally, no one's naming numbers--though the Silicon Alley Insider puts it at around $15 million. The transaction was, reportedly, mostly in stock.

So what does this mean? Basically, that Twitter won't have to build its own search engine. Simple enough.

This post was updated at 10:27 a.m. PT.

(Credit: Adrian Pike/TechCrunch)

A lucky Google user, Adrian Pike, has noticed something cool on search results: buttons to vote on links, much like Digg or StumbleUpon. He sent some screenshots over to TechCrunch.

The feature is being "bucket tested," meaning it's likely been rolled out to a handful of random Google users. As TechCrunch points out, it's not the first time that Google has experimented with voting on links.

Google has put out some official words on the test: "This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you'll continue to see those changes." Users can additionally suggest changes to search results, something that Google says may be shared with other users. The explanation added that users will probably only see this feature for a few weeks before it returns to the drawing board.

There's a Google FAQ for it too, explaining that the feature is called "Edit Search Results." And blogger Justin Hileman has posted a detailed account of his experiences with it.

Learning personal search preferences could not only help make results more relevant, but could also add to Google's vast library of personal data and preferences, potentially for ad-serving purposes. It could also be applied to other areas of search, like images, news, and video, which many critics argue are tougher to index by algorithm alone.

But this is interesting for another reason: the persistent rumors that ... Read more

Facebook hasn't made its redesigned profiles official yet, but a number of blogs have posted a link where you can check out the redesign and play with your new profile a bit.

It's a bit convoluted at first, especially since there are some features you have to manually turn on now, like displaying lists of "networks" on a profile, not to mention the fact that your personal information (interests, contact info, etc.) is now on a separate tab from your "social" information (wall posts, etc.) Plus, your profile picture is now on the right side of the page--shocking! And I'm really not sure how it makes the Facebook experience easier.

But it hides those "Which Dictator Are You?" eyesore apps, so I suppose it's doing its job. Developers, meanwhile, are undoubtedly going to be concerned about what this will do for the viral spread of their creations.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

UPDATE: Looks like Facebook locked this up a bit later on Monday. Readers say you must now have a specific developer application installed to access the new profile design.

We've heard about songs getting released on iLike, Imeem, MySpace, and a whole lot else. But Rock Band?

(Credit: MTV/Harmonix)

That's on the way, according to Microsoft's press conference at the E3 Expo. The New York Times reported that that it could be on the way as rumors swirled that Rock Band 2, the second iteration of the music video game from MTV, would include a track called "Shacklers' Revenge" from legendary hard-rock group Guns N' Roses.

Now it's been confirmed. The long-delayed new Guns N' Roses album, Chinese Democracy, is on the way too, and the band has chosen the game, which hits stores this fall, as the venue to release its new single.

The Times points out that games like Rock Band, and Activision Blizzard's rival Guitar Hero, have been a bright spot in an otherwise dismal atmosphere for the music business. They're more profitable for record labels than digital downloads from places like iTunes, because a Rock Band track typically costs more. Sometimes they sell more copies, too. Motley Crue's "Saints of Los Angeles" sold more than three times as many tracks on Microsoft's Xbox Live Marketplace as a Rock Band song than it did in Apple's iTunes Store.

They're also a way for "old" bands to reach younger audiences, the Times noted. An executive for Anthem Records, which releases music for '70s prog-rock group Rush, said young people have started showing up for the band'... Read more