In a story I just wrote for the New York Times, I spoke to Smalley, Mashable founder Pete Cashmore, and other high-volume networkers to get their social network efficiency tips. Here’s a bullet-list version of their advice (follow the link above for the more detailed write-up):

• Set an avatar. Don’t change it. Others will use it to find your posts. A photo of you is best, like the one Bonnie uses for @comcastbonnie.
• Install Tweetdeck or Seesmic Desktop rather than using your browser for Twitter and Facebook.
• If you can’t resist networking during work hours, install LeechBlock on Firefox and schedule it to disable Twitter, YouTube, and other time-eating sites during your workday.
• Take notes! Keep a notepad app of some sort open on your computer desktop. Write down anything interesting before you forget it.
• If you’re worried what others will see, use Twitter’s Protect my updates option to allow only users whom you personally authorize to read what you tweet. This is considered heresy by many Internet evangelists, but not everyone wants to be the Queen of Overshare.

The system is relatively simple. Users can choose to login to their Tweba account using their existing Twitter login or their Facebook Connect login. Or they can create a unique username and password. Once signed in, they list goods they want to sell directly on Tweba, as if they were tweeting normally. Every listing (up to 240 characters for initial posts, and more afterward) includes a link to a picture or more information. Even easier than that, members on Twitter can also add a listing to the Tweba page by including #ihave or #iwanttosell in a regular tweet on their own pages. Hashtags are also used to sort the Tweba tweet stream into goods sold and goods wanted as well as into categories ranging from #Antiques and #Cars and Accessories to #Stamps and #Personals (again cutting into Craigslist’s turf).

Here’s an example:

Users who buy goods on Tweba can pay via Google Checkout, Paypal or through an Out of Tweebay Transaction. Just like eBay or Craigslist, the seller then ships the item or items. And just like on eBay, sellers and buyers can provide feedback on one another to ensure good sales in the future. There is even an auction model that can be tapped into — with users listing items for a set number of days and fielding bids until the listing (which is assigned a particular ID number) expires.

Tweba’s traffic has climbed steadily since March — the site recorded nearly 10,000 unique visitors in May 2009. This might now sound like a lot, but for a new concept that is just six months old, the growth seems promising. It hasn’t disclosed any funding history to date.

That’s a big problem for any vendor using Authorize.net, since this basically means they can’t accept payments through their website until the service is up again. I’m told this affects both one-time and recurring payments. With its website down, Authorize has set up a new Twitter account to provide updates and address the many customer complaints and questions. Many of the tweets can be boiled down to, “The team is working hard to get things running again, but I don’t have a timetable”; the company is also trying to reassure customers, “yes we have fully redundant data center” (sic), and also just said, “Transactions are up except for Global processing and Concord. No ETA on those, but we are working on in.”

The service has been down since around midnight Pacific time. I’m also trying to find out how many businesses are affected; TechCrunch says it’s “tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors,” but when Authorize.net was acquired by CyberSource back in 2007, it reportedly had 175,000 customers, and processed 1.1 billion transactions worth $65 billion in 2006.

Meanwhile, TechFlash notes the travel section of Microsoft’s Bing “decision engine” is also down due to the fire. The Bing Travel website says the site should be back up at 5pm Pacific time today.

“There’s factories that just churn stuff out. It’s pretty simple,” Arrington told the Business Times. The article spends most of its time profiling Arrington and his various business ventures including TechCrunch itself. Did you know he has 21 employees and claims $6 million in 2008 revenue from events and advertising? He also claims 15 million pageviews and 5.5 million unique visitors per month for his network of blogs. That puts it ahead of most newspapers.

Can Arrington raise the funding to ship the Crunchpad to consumers? Because so much Valley investing is based on personal connections, I’ll bet a buck he makes it happen. Angel investor Ron Conway, whose Wikipedia entry says he “is thought to have made more investments than anyone else in Web 2.0, supporting more than 100 companies,” told the Business Times he wants to invest in the Crunchpad.

(Insider gossip bonus: Arrington, who made his name with a blog that refuses to adhere to some of the ground rules in use at older print-based publications, normally has little use for traditional journalism. So it’s amusing to some of us that he used an old-school local newspaper, the San Francisco Business Times, to announce his company. Why not Twitter, Mike?)

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But Doom Resurrection is changing that. It’s the first authentic hardcore game on the iPhone. Much like Social Gaming Network’s aerial combat game, F.A.S.T., Doom Resurrection lives up to my expectations for a next-generation iPhone game. Game developers may have to match this kind of game play in order to make popular games on the iPhone.

Doom Resurrection is selling for $9.99, far more than the average $2 price for a paid iPhone game. If game developers can consistently produce high-quality, higher-priced games for the iPhone, then the profits generated by the iPhone might truly threaten the profits of Nintendo DS games, which cost $20 to $40. It will be interesting to see how long Doom Resurrection can sell at the high price and still rank high in the AppStore.

The experience of the game is so visceral that you almost forget you’re playing it on a phone. It’s intense, addictive, and full of blood-soaked gore.  Your palms sweat as you try to fire your weapons at demons and dodge the flaming balls they throw at you. I finished it in a few nights, but it commanded my attention for hours, not just five minutes at a time like most mobile games. And thanks in part to the pretty 3-D art, it’s easy to get lost in the game and forget your surroundings.

The plot is basically like the rest of the Doom video game series – you’re a space marine fighting demons who mysteriously appear in a Mars research facility when scientists open a portal to hell. John Carmack, technical director at id Software, worked with a half dozen people at Escalation Studios to create the game over six months. They used artwork from the original PC game, Doom 3, which debuted in 2004. But the art is “down rezzed,” or shown at a much lower resolution and thus isn’t nearly as sharp.

I felt nostalgic playing the game, but it’s not the same as Doom 3 (pictured above), which in its day was one of the creepiest and most exhilarating games on the PC. The creatures were loud and scary. You never knew when one was going to leap out of the darkness at you.  Doom Resurrection is just as violent and bloody. But it isn’t as pretty as Doom 3 itself, which had more lighting effects such as shadows moving as a light bulb on a wire sways back and forth. So the element of fear carries over from Doom 3 somewhat, but not fully.

On the other hand, I don’t consider the quality of the graphics to be a disappointment. Consider, for instance, the cartoon-like art from id’s Doom RPG (right), which debuted on older cell phones in 2006. Can you imaging being scared in a game with demons that looked like a bunch of Lego characters? And the gunfire in these games sounded like variations on the bleeps or bloops of classic video games. The quality of the iPhone graphics and sound shows you how far we’ve come in just a few years.

The major difference from a traditional shooting game is that Doom Resurrection runs on rails. That is, you don’t get to roam free through a 3-D level. Your camera viewing angle is tightly controlled, sort of like how you ride on the rails through the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland. Your character moves automatically through the 3-D space until you encounter an enemy. Then you’re free to aim at whatever creatures are before you. To fire a gun, you tap the lower right corner of the screen. Although the game is difficult, the controls take into account that playing a game on an iPhone should be an easier experience. The game takes advantage of the iPhone’s user interface.  For example, you use the accelerometer to aim, meaning you move the cross-hairs onto targets by tilting your iPhone in various directions.

You might think you’d lose a lot by not being able to roam freely, but putting the game on rails is a reasonable design choice given the limitations of the iPhone. It’s just too hard to control movements at the same time you’re controlling your aim with just your fingers tapping on a screen.

You scroll through weapons with a single tap on the screen. Your choices range from a machine gun for light targets to a BFG (initials for big f…ing gun) that wipes out everything but runs out of ammo fast. There are four levels of difficulty. So newbie players can tackle the game at the easier recruit level, while hardcore players can fight at the Marine, Veteran or Nightmare levels. Putting in so many levels of difficulty is a good move because it makes the game more accessible.

The game play is fast. You have to tap the screen to collect hidden objects, health reloads, and ammo. If you’re going too fast, you might miss them. Then you have to make sure that you dispatch your enemies as fast as possible, using the right weapon. The challenge comes when two or three of the enemies come at you at once, which means you may have to switch weapons fast. You constantly have to reload by tapping the upper right corner of the screen. You can dodge flames or hide in cover by hitting the lower left corner, and if a zombie grabs you, you can shake the iPhone to get free.

It’s best to play it with headphones to get the full audio effect. Also, the sounds of gunfire and screaming demons will annoy, and perhaps freak out, anybody sitting near you. There are eight levels to the game. Six are set in the Union Aerospace Corp. mining facility on Mars. I would rather have spent all eight of the levels on Mars. Two of the levels take place in Hell, which isn’t all that pretty. In fact, the scenery of Hell (below) — which you get to by falling through some orifice-like portal — looked fairly laughable to me.

Certainly, not everything is next-generation. The story unfolds through text-based still frames, sort of like a comic book. While the music sets the mood, it would be far better if there were more video scenes or spoken words. That’s clearly a limitation of the mobile platform. But over time, with new models such as the iPhone 3G S and whatever comes in the future, iPhone games will truly cross a bridge and deliver these elements as well. Meanwhile, Doom Resurrection runs fine on the iPhone 3G. There are only occasional slowdowns in the action because there is too much happening on the screen at once.

If you’re not occupied on the Fourth of July, it’s worth becoming a space marine and doing your patriotic duty by mowing down a lot of demons. It’s a great way to entertain yourself during the slow summer weeks when few console games come out.

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Most analysts thought the 3GS launch would fall short of sales on launch day last year for the 3G, but they were wrong. With AT&T’s contract with Apple set to expire next year, the company may double its efforts to extend the exclusive deal before Verizon horns in on the action.

Here’s the memo:

1. Fact of the Week: On June 25, the day Michael Jackson died, text messages sent on our network spiked at 65,000 messages per second — the largest volume ever recorded — surpassing events like American Idol voting and New Year’s Eve, when millions of our customers wish their friends and family a happy new year via text.”

2. iLaunch day 2009 was one for the record books, as AT&T customers scrambled to get their hands on the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.

Here’s a look at some of the milestones we achieved:

* Best-ever sales day in our retail stores
* Second-largest traffic day in our retail stores
* Most transactions processed via our IT systems in a single day
* Most upgrade eligibility checks in a single day
* Largest order day in att.com history
* Largest features sales day in att.com history

On this year’s launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008’s iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008 — all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008’s launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.

[VentureBeat's Camille Ricketts contributed to this story.]

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If the web has let a thousand flowers bloom, pornography has been its most prolific deflowerer. One study found a third of Internet users visit an adult site at least once a month (a number that sounds low to me), and one in four workers view porn during work hours, the most frequent time of day for visits. The $100 billion pornography market is a fountainhead of innovation and the most lucrative type of content: an estimated $3,000 is spent every second on the web’s 420 million adult pages (12% of the web). This is a tail longer than Ron Jeremy.

With so much web porn available, how do people decide where to get it? The most common search queries used to be porn-related, but navigational queries are now more popular, suggesting searchers are going directly to their favorite sources (social networks may also be co-opting adult traffic, suggesting people are focusing on the real McCoy). Aggregators like Xvideos, RedTube, and YouPorn have made finding porn easier, but these sites do a poor job of personalization.

In a category where people have such deep and varied tastes, there is an opportunity to create a StumbleUpon for porn. Let’s call this hypothetical product Frisky.

Frisky could be a toolbar like personalized recommendation service StumbleUpon but would likely get traction faster as a website like Digg. Users would sign up, enter demographics, and select their preferences for many criteria: orientation, age, race, fetish, number of participants, media type (photos/videos/audio/slash fiction), and more. Users might select specific stars they like and categories they don’t like, since repulsive content can kill interest faster than a mullet.

Users could then click, rate, and comment on recommendations, making Frisky continually smarter about the tastes of each user and the community. Crawling content would not be hard — the web won’t run out of porn any time soon — and most adult sites would welcome the incoming traffic; they would probably submit a lot of content themselves. Frisky would not host content but merely link to it, avoiding hosting costs and conflicts of interest with content sites.

While a lot of adult content has metadata like orientation and category, Frisky could solicit even more tags from users. This would allow further personalization, flag spam, and create valuable metadata to share with partners, who could then enhance their own tags.

Frisky’s main revenue model would be lucrative affiliate fees from paid subscription and DVD sites, which typically pay $30-50 per subscription or 40-50% revenue shares. Frisky could also sell reports on consumption patterns, with likely valuable insights since research in this area is challenging.

Marketing may be a challenge since porn is a private, anti-viral application. One strategy would be Digg-like widgets for content sites seeking more incoming traffic. Search engine marketing and partner advertising are also likely feasible given Frisky’s high monetization potential. Porn stars and companies could also create site profiles to market their popular content and interact with fans.

Frisky’s deep personalization would be a significant competitive advantage over adult search engines like Booble and aggregators like RedTube, most of which have only general popularity ratings. Frisky would also benefit from a slight network effect, since its engine would become continually smarter with every new user.

Other competitors include StumbleUpon itself, which has a porn category but doesn’t have deep categorization or targeted features. This is the same reason Pandora is a better source for popular music. Many of StumbleUpon’s top listings also just go to porn aggregators instead of specific content. StumblePorn was a Firefox install that didn’t get traction and desperately sought a small sale. AdultStumble also came and went, so to speak.

The porn market is not appealing to a lot of entrepreneurs, and it’s not one I’d personally try, but an intrepid team could build this quickly. Long tail markets are ripe for discovery engines and few tastes are more insatiable. Executed well, Frisky could bring a new level of spiciness to serendipity.

What do you think?

[Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannysullivan/292257748/]

Want to see previous columns?
What’s Next: a Mint for location?
What’s Next: a Pandora for fashion?
What’s Next: Free computers for small businesses?
10 lessons from a failed startup

Mark Goldenson wonders if anyone has ever used Chrome’s incognito mode for non-porn purposes (birthday gifts? riiight). He’s starting an innovative venture in health care. To submit an idea for the What’s Next series, email Mark at mjgold3@gmail.com. Selected ideas will receive attribution.

Affiliates are website operators who get a commission for routing buyers from their own site to, say, Amazon. Last Sunday, Amazon notified its affiliates in Rhode Island that the company had cut its ties with them in order to avoid paying current and back taxes.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the move isn’t just bean-counting. It’s a game of chicken against state governments that want sales tax revenue to balance their budgets but don’t want to be seen as killing jobs during a recession.

In May 2008, Overstock.com ended its affiliate programs in New York after then-governor Eliot Spitzer included e-commerce sales tax in the state’s budget.

So far, the merchants and most of their affiliates are winning. According to the Journal, Maryland, Minnesota and Tennessee have already abandoned plans to apply taxes to online sales.

[Photo from Mudflats]

While the U.S. unemployment dashed stock market hopes of a recovery

Chips are a leading indicator for sales of things such as computers, consumer electronics and cell phones. Some observers are predicting a second-half turnaround. Worldwide sales of chips rose 5.4 percent in May to $16.5 billion from $15.6 billion in April. Compared to a year ago, May sales were down 23.2 percent from $21.5 billion, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.

While the year ago comparison is still weak, the month-to-month figures have now grown for the third consecutive month, said George Scalise, president of the SIA.

“The sequential monthly increases lead us to be cautiously optimistic about a return to normal seasonal patterns for the industry going forward,” Scalise said. “As consumer confidence returns and the economy resumes growth, we expect the industry to reflect those patterns.”

The chip report is a sharp contrast to yesterday’s unemployment figures, which rocked the stock market. The unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent in June from 9.4 percent in May, and the economy lost 467,000 jobs in June, more than the 322,000 in May. It showed that the longest recession since the 1930s has yet to release its hold, the New York Times reported.

The stock market has been steadily rising since the Obama administration pushed through the $787 billion stimulus plan, but joblessness has remained stubbornly high. Yesterday, the S&P 500 stock market index fell 2 percent after the unemployment news surfaced. About 6.5 million jobs have been lost since the beginning of the recession in the fall of 2007. That’s equal to the net job gains over the previous nine years.

If the labor market continues to weaken, it could threaten the tech economy, which hasn’t been hit as hard compared to the 2001 post-9/11 crash. More than half of all chip sales now go into products for consumers. For all of 2009, the SIA is predicting sales will drop 21 percent.

The Chicago-based company has created a portal where gamers can log in and challenge others to play networked console games on the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Xbox, Xbox 360, and the Nintendo Wii. The winner gets cash and BringIt takes a cut. The company is coming out of its beta testing soon.

“We’re taking online gambling and giving it a little edge,” says Woody Levin, the 30-year-old chief executive who founded BringIt in May, 2008.

It sounds like gambling, but the games fall under the definition of games of skill, which are legal in most states, in contrast to games of chance, which are considered gambling. (See Eric Eldon’s piece on the distinction in social games). Instead of poker or BlackJack, the games of choice are titles such as Ultimate Fighting Championship 2009, Killzone 2, Halo 3, Madden NFL, Fifa Soccer, and Call of Duty World at War.

Where it’s allowed, BringIt extracts data from games or networks such as Xbox Live to get verified game results. Players also verify the scores themselves. If there’s a dispute, BringIt will resolve the disagreement, based on evidence such as shots of a game screen that show the results. BringIt displays results for others to see and brag about when they win.

If it sounds familiar, there is competition. Gamers Saloon has been doing something similar for a couple of years, but it hasn’t raised capital. Other companies such as Raptr have formed gamer social networks, but they haven’t made the leap into betting on games. BringIt, by contrast, isn’t really a social network. Its focus is on making betting transactions happen.

It isn’t easy to do. The original Xfire company tried to get gamers to bet against each other in matches, but it decided to end that business in favor of creating a chat tool for gamers. Now it is part of MTV Networks.

Levin said he got the idea by reaching back to his college days, when he played hockey at the University of Wisconsin. During winter break, the team stayed and played. In their downtime, they challenged each other at video games such as GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64. The winner would get a beer.

BringIt launched in November, 2008, and its user base has grown steadily. The company doesn’t release its user numbers, but Levin says it’s well over 50,000 and is growing 1 percent to 2 percent a day. Gamers have played more than 25,000 one-on-one matches. Fees run anywhere from $1 to $250 to join tournaments.

Over time, the company will add more options, such as clan-based team fights where 16 players can take on 16 rivals for money.

Players deposit money in a BringIt account, using credit cards, debit cards or paypal transfers. BringIt verifies that players are over 18 through a variety of identification means. The key to its expansion is adding lots of games that gamers want to play. Right now, there are a few dozen titles. Over time, the company could add PC games, mobile games, and even casual Flash-based web games.

BringIt raised an angel round of $1.34 million and it is looking for a first institutional round of funding now. The company has seven employees. Levin was previously founder of Riverbank Capital Management, an equity options trading firm, and InStadium, a company that put ads in restrooms in Major League Baseball and National Football League stadiums.

Amazon

Analyst firm  Cowen & Co. estimates that the online retailer has sold 800,000 Kindles to date, and that by 2013 it will have penetrated 10 percent of its customer base, or 2 percent of the U.S. population. Primary competitor Sony, has been hush hush about how many of its digital readers it has sold — last reporting 300,000 in December 2008.

But for a company that has reaped big rewards from its international business (Amazon made $2.31 billion in revenue outside the U.S. in the first quarter, accounting for nearly half its overall sales), it seems pretty slow to the punch on pushing the Kindle out to foreign markets.

This week saw the latest story around Kindle’s delays in Europe: Germany, the biggest book market in the region, will not be seeing the Kindle anytime soon because of a breakdown in negotiations between Amazon and the country’s two leading wireless carriers, T-Mobile and Vodafone, according to reports on the German WirtschaftsWoche.

Apparently, the carriers have been wrangling with Amazon over charges for the Whispernet service — the wireless connection that delivers books and other content directly to users’ Kindles.

Amazon has a chance to be groundbreaking in Europe. Whispernet is based on a wholesale deal with Sprint. The connectivity works in the background to update the device when not connected to the Internet at a user’s home or office, and it means that users get that Whispernet service without getting billed separately for it. Wholesaling the wireless data and bundling it with a device is a great idea, and one that — if it catches on — could provide entree for other players in the space: if the price of mobile data is one of the things that puts people off using wireless content and services, then why not get rid of this part of the equation altogether and bundle the price into the device?

“The user is effectively oblivious that this works through the mobile phone network,” says Mike Grant, a partner at Analysys Mason. “We will see a lot more of that coming along, this kind of service-based concept.”

But even if users are being alleviated of some wireless headaches, Amazon isn’t: As it is now, the Kindle device has been built to run over Sprint’s CDMA-based network, but the networks in Europe use a different standard, WCDMA, which is used by AT&T and T-Mobile. “It’s not impossible to swap out hardware and replace the radios and all the support on the global network, but it’s a lot of work,” says Ian Fogg, an analyst at Forrester. “If handset companies like Nokia find it hard to create compelling products on CDMA, it clearly will be a challenge for companies like Amazon to do this [in the other direction].”

There is the option of using the device over WiFi — an idea mentioned by Amazon.co.uk’s managing director Brian McBride (who was the managing director of T-Mobile in the U.K. previously) in an interview with The Bookseller last October. But this too presents a “minefield” of operators for negotiations, he says. Plus Wi-Fi generally wouldn’t present the seamless kind of coverage that cellular networks could.

Europe’s many national boundaries, and the data roaming charges that go along with them, are another issue. This month, these charges came down to 1 euro per megabyte, but this is still significantly more than what operators charge domestically. And this is surely also playing a role in the holdup with mobile operators.

“Amazon wouldn’t find it easy to launch [the Kindle] in the U.K. and not have it work in a neighboring country,” says Fogg. “They could do it, of course, but it would damage the proposition.”

But with more e-reader devices coming onto the market, and a growing catalog of content to read on them, the question is, will delaying the Kindle any longer prove even more damaging?

[Are you an entrepreneur or executive active in mobile? Join us at MobileBeat 2009, our mobile conference for industry leaders. Sign up soon.]

Here Wheego! — Electric vehicle startup Wheego announced it will launch its two-seat, low-speed car on August 1 in hopes that its release will help raise an additional round of capital. The car is called the Whip, and its development has been supported by money from founder Mike McQuary, his private equity firm Ellis, McQuary & Stanley, Brash Music and MindSpring. The Whip differs from cars in the works at Tesla and Fisker in that it runs on lead-acid batteries instead of lithium-ion batteries — supposedly avoiding overheating issues associated with the latter. The car charges in six to eight hours and can travel 40 miles on each charge. It will retail for $18,995. With government funding and more capital, Atlanta-based Wheego says it plans to build two assembly plants in the U.S.

Justice Dept. looks into Google Books case — Today the U.S. Department of Justice said it is investigating Google’s settlement with book publishers who objected to the digital publishing of some titles. Anti-trust stirrings spurred the investigation. Totaling $125 million, the settlement gave the search giant rights to publish copyrighted books online unless authors chose to opt out. Critics of this result say that Google is so far ahead of any competitor in the space that it essentially has a monopoly. To counter, Google says that any potential rival could negotiate its own terms with the Books Rights Registry, but the government remains skeptical.

Twitter not safe for work? — As Twitter picks up momentum and more users, pornography and explicit content have become more frequent additions to the micro-blogging site. And with so many companies now using the service as an integral part of their marketing strategies, several have finally called for the site to begin filtering its content more aggressively. Several companies, including virtual world provider WeeWorld and business-owner social network MerchantCircle, have even discussed pulling their Twitter pages if the situation isn’t cleaned up soon. MediaPost is tracking the issue.

Oracle cuts staff in Europe — The major software provider reported today that it plans to cut 1,000 employees from its European staff — about 1 percent of its global work force — due to poor economic conditions. This is somewhat surprising, as it’s one of the last in its market to turn to layoffs to stay in the black. Microsoft, Intel, IBM and Hewlett-Packard have all let employees go since the economic downturn set in. Still, in the past year, Oracle has hired more than a thousand employees at its Redwood City, Calif., headquarters alone. So far, it looks like its U.S. workers will be spared.

I’ve just finished a trip around various U.S. tech hubs in order to scout companies for DEMO, the conference I’m co-producing in September, to showcase the best technology products around.

I visited Washington DC, New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, and Austin — and in all, I found examples of bubbling entrepreneurial activity, and a pride in what are clearly growing regions of technology strength. We’ve found a few DEMO-worthy companies in each place. In each of these cities, all with their own strengths and charm, there are support systems to help startups thrive. In LA, for example, Francisco Dao is as fired up as ever about making the city’s start-up conference Twiistup, a bigger success than ever. In Austin, there’s the Capital Factory, a group which emerged a few months ago to help incubate start-ups.

However, none of these cities are even close to getting what Silicon Valley has. So don’t worry, Silicon Valley, you still rule. The sheer density and diversity of engineering talent is going to keep the valley in front of trends — both nationally and internationally — for a while to come. I’ll be writing more clearly about this on Monday.

That said, DEMO co-producer Chris Shipley and I threw a cocktail meetup in Austin last night, and had a blast. Thanks for coming, everybody. Some pics below, courtesy of Eugene Hsu.

The Socialthing toolbar has let people sign in with AIM, ICQ or Bebo identities and chat with friends on that service without leaving the site hosting the toolbar. You could also see a stream of comments and activity from whatever site you were on, as well activities of your friends on other sites from around the web. It let you read and share information with other sites, similar to Meebo’s toolbar and more generally like Facebook’s, Digg’s and others. See my more in-depth look — I actually came away somewhat impressed.

But while the old toolbar offered a right-hand window that let you see your buddies’ activity on other sites, that feature now seems to be broken. It doesn’t actually show anything except very old and random updates from AIM — notice the identical chat in the old and new screenshots. On the left-hand side, a way to chat with other users on the same site is now gone. And, if you click on the AIM Connect button on the left-hand side, you get taken to an information page about the service, with almost identical content to the original Socialthing toolbar information page. I’ve never heard of AIM Connect before, and neither has my Google search, so I guess that’s the forthcoming name.

So, what we seem to have here is a product in a rough transition. The Boot gets more than 1 million users a month, according to Compete — although traffic has halved since the toolbar went live in March. Maybe its users don’t like having a half-broken feature being live-tested on their site? AOL, of course, is in the middle of going through a much more fundamental transition. Perhaps, as with chat service Userplane, the brokenness is a temporary aspect of new chief executive Tim Armstrong coming through, meeting the employees, booting executives, and figuring out the company’s long-term product strategy.

In the  meantime, here’s what AOL tells me:

We are making some updates to the experience which are still underway. Stay tuned for some additional changes. As always we are committed to providing great products to consumers.

Trulia

That continues a pattern we’ve seen already, with Trulia claiming record traffic and revenue back in January — due in part to interest from investors looking for real estate deals. Now the company says that momentum has continued over the first six months of the year, with visits growing 40 percent compared to the same period in 2008. Trulia says it has seen 30 million unique visitors in the last six months, with property views up 83 percent and page views up 90 percent.

Zillow, the heavily-funded startup seen as Trulia’s closest competitor, has apparently been doing well too, with traffic up 67 percent during the last six months.

Third-party data services show traffic growth for both sites, too. Compete says Zillow is way ahead of Trulia, but both sites bounced back after a tumble following last fall’s financial meltdown. ComScore shows a much tighter race, with Trulia catching up to Zillow, with 2.85 million visitors in May compared to Zillow’s 2.74, after many months of the latter company holding the lead. (Trulia says both Compete and comScore are understating its traffic.) Presumably, this is a sign that the desire to find good information about real estate continues even when the market is terrible.

Trulia has raised more than $32 million in funding.