Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks there is a social paradox in the location space. A new service, Rally, believes the power of location lies in less rather than more. That is to say, fewer social connections rather than more of them.

It’s an idea that you don’t hear a lot of social networks talking about these days as each tries to build a social graph that’s as sprawling as possible. But the team behind Rally is taking this different approach largely due to their past experience. Much of the team is the same one that built 12seconds, one of the video platforms that rose as Twitter began to become popular. And eventually, 12seconds started relying heavily on Twitter’s large social graph for its own service. But co-founder Sol Lipman isn’t convinced that’s the right way for services going forward.

We’re big fans of Outright, a free and drop-dead simple online bookkeeping service. Today, the startup has revealed that it is tracking over $1 billion self employed and micro-business transactions, which Outright says is a sign that the freelance, contract labor, and self-employment marketplace is strong.

Outright.com’s platform manages all business finances, tracks income and expenses, and automates tax preparation. The site is now launching a new automated W-9 management service today. A W-9 tax form is required for anyone outside of employees to whom you pay money (i.e. contractors, freelancers), to ensure you properly file a 1099.

Skribit, the startup that is trying to help cure writer’s block, has opened its doors to the public after being in beta since its inception at Startup Weekend Atlanta in November of 2007. Yes, that’s a really long time to be in beta, but Skribit is now ready to show all of its glory to the public.

The main idea of Skribit is quite simple — to cure writer’s block as well as help bloggers and other website owners receive suggestions and topics to write about. It’s a problem that every blogger has. Coming up with original story ideas is hard. So it’s great to see a service try to address the problem and hopefully “cure it” through crowdsourcing. Skribit is offering TechCrunch readers 100 free pro accounts, if you use the code “techcrunch” when signing up.

Venture-backed online advertising company Yodle has filed suit against three former employees, one of which is an ex-manager of the company, alleging that the men ‘hacked’ into its computer systems and stole trade secrets and proprietary data, some of which was sensitive information about current and potential future customers.

Caveat: apparently the three ex-employees now all work for a company that rivals Yodle in the local online advertising space. New York City-based Yodle helps local businesses advertise online by publishing ads on search engines and driving leads to its custom-built client sites.

As Google keeps collecting 360-degree Street View, panoramic photos of the world’s roadways, bike paths, and park trails, most of us are becoming accustomed to calling them up on Google Maps. Microosft and even MapQuest now have street-level photos. Now that we’ve mastered placing stitched-together panoramic photos on a map, the next step is obviously to go to video.

Europe seems to be ahead of the U.S. in this regard. I’ve already written about yellowBird in the Netherlands. Now, GlobalVision drove a Citroen equipped with 360-degree video cameras around Switzerland and put up a demo site called VideoStreetView to show off the experience. (They’ll have to be careful, though, the Swiss are particularly sensitive when it comes to public images on maps).

Short Version: There are two kinds of people in the world: those who will wear Vibram Five Finger shoes and those who won’t. After a bout with plantar fasciitis and shinsplints, I joined the former camp and feel much better for it. These new shoes, called the VFF KSO (Keep Stuff Out) Trek, add a bit of coverage to what are essentially foot gloves for running, hiking, and looking like a total freak.

Mobile ad network Greystripe recently partnered with ad placement service Tribal Fusion to allow online ads to run on iPhones, diminishing the need for mobile specific ad formats. The partnership allows online ads to run on iPhones, eliminating additional mobile campaign creative production and dealing with an additional mobile advertising vendor. And of course, online ad budgets tend to be higher than mobile ad budgets, so Greystripe says this saves companies money.

Greystripe, which extended the ads to over five hundred online to mobile campaigns, says that advertisers are seeing 10-20 percent higher performance with the mobile-online ad compared to the same online campaigns with average click through rates above one percent.

Skimlinks, the platform for content owners to control how their affiliate ads work, has secured a Series A round of funding, which we’ve now confirmed as $1.5 million.

The round, effectively a follow-on internal round, was led by Sussex Place Ventures and includes the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and The Accelerator Group, along with a number of the original angel investors involved in Skimlinks’ seed round earlier in the year.

The funding will be used by the company to expand its US operations, along with investing in sales and marketing initiatives, and product development.

Microblogging startup Plurk took note of Microsoft’s apology, in which the software company took responsibility over the blatant rip-off of the startup’s design and code for a competing service in China.

Microsoft was quick to blame a third-party vendor for cutting a few corners here and there when developing the beta service (MSN Juku), and promptly yanked it off the Web.

But as far as Plurk’s concerned, that’s not where the story ends.

Not spotting the retweet button/link in your Twitter stream anymore? It’s not just you.

The retweet feature, which was rolled out to the masses at the beginning of November, has gone missing before: it disappeared right after launch due to technical issues, and it was again temporarily removed two weeks ago.

Now it’s gone again.

Digital Sky Technologies, the Russian investment group founded by Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger, has increased its stake in social networking leader Facebook to more than 5% of the American company, Russia’s leading business newspaper Kommersant reports.

Furthermore, DST is looking to increase its stake in Facebook even more, according to Yakov Sadchikov from Quintura, who picked up on the news this morning.

Achieving Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance for online transactions is an expensive and timely endeavor; routinely costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and spanning several quarters in tim. According to Gartner, PCI compliance will cost up to an average of $2.7 million among Level 1 merchants and $267,000 among Level 2 merchants. Further, Visa and Mastercard will be imposing new PCI requirements upon online merchants, which will include more frequent on and off site security reviews, beginning in 2010; thus forcing more companies to upgrade their systems to meet compliance standards.

Demand billing and recurring subscription management company, Aria, offers a solution built to manage PCI compliance for companies.

Since the official launch of our integration between CrunchBase and Facebook Connect in November, we’ve seen 19% (5,087 out of 26,850) of our edits come from newly registered, non-anonymous users. Even after the predictable spike around the announcement, we’ve seen a sustained and growing percentage of our edits coming from these users (see figure below).

As they say, no good deed goes unpunished, so we thought it would be fun to give some credit to those users most actively involved in keeping CrunchBase up-to-date and accurate (apart from our internal team of course – it just wouldn’t be a contest). The top ten startup gurus are now highlighted in the right-hand column on the CrunchBase home page, and you can also view the full list to find out where you stack up. We’re planning to completely open up registration (without requiring Facebook Connect) in the near future as well to further broaden the field.

We’re also excited to announce a few new ways for you to keep up to date with the latest CrunchBase data.

Either the WSJ hasn’t taken their anti-crazy pills or there is something severely wrong with the military industrial complex. I’m betting on both.

The story says, essentially, that insurgents in Iraq are “taking control” of our pilotless drones with a $25 piece of software called SkyGrabber. By “take control” the WSJ means “download video feeds from” and by “software” I mean essentially a satellite network snooper.

Now I’m not a rocket scientist, but it looks like what is happening here is that Iraqis are pointing their satellite dishes into the air and watching for downloads. This would be approximately equivalent to packet or token sniffing that, if I’m not mistaken, is popular with teen l33t haX0rz.

Most of the tech world now considers it a given that Google will be selling its own unlocked phone, called the Nexus One, to customers directly early in 2010. A few stragglers are still debating the finer points of the difference between Google working with handset manufacturers and carriers on a good Android experience v. them dictating the hardware specs and selling it directly to users. While they work that out for themselves we’re off to the next story – the Google Chrome OS Netbook (although we think Google has a few surprises left around the Nexus One, too).

Google has said from the beginning that they plan on working with select manufacturers to ensure a good Chrome OS experience for users when devices first hit the market next year. From an early FAQ: “The Google Chrome OS team is currently working with a number of technology companies to design and build devices that deliver an extraordinary end user experience. Among others, these companies include Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.”

Most people assume that “working with” around Chrome OS means the same thing as “working with” around Android – lots of meetings to make sure the devices and software work together as well as possible. But sometimes those pesky hardware guys just don’t do things quite right. And when you’re competing against Apple, everything most definitely needs to be quite right.

That may explain why Google has, according to multiple sources, been talking to at least one hardware manufacturer about building a netbook for Google directly. As in Google gave the company a RFP with quite detailed technical specifications and has begun discussions on building it.

Back in March 2009 a trio of MySpace execs -COO Amit Kapur, SVP Steve Pearman and SVP Jim Benedetto – left to begin working on a new startup.

In May we learned that the company, then called Blue Rover Labs, had raised $10 million in funding. We also heard a few details about what the startup might be about:

I go into more detail on the products below. And here’s a video I took of the team in their Santa Monica offices yesterday:

Two weeks ago we wrote about the story of developer Romy Maxwell, who had built a Craigslist mashup using Yahoo Pipes. A few weeks after sending his app to Craigslist founder Craig Newmark (who forwarded it to other members of the Craigslist team), the world’s largest classifieds site blocked Maxwell’s app. And then it blocked every other application built on Yahoo, much to the chagrin of many developers. Tonight, Craigslist has ended its ban of Yahoo Pipes, according to a tweet from Craigslist (and former Yahoo) employee Jeremy Zawodny.

While Craigslist was initially quiet about the ban (it didn’t warn developers at all), CEO Jim Buckmaster did write a blog post the next day explaining the site’s rationale:

Most of us take them for granted, but web designers have to deal with a myriad of frustrating problems on a daily basis. From browsers that ignore standards to different screen resolutions, there’s a lot for them to grapple with. Today, Google has launched a new addition to its collection of Labs tools called Browser Size that’s meant to help alleivate one of these headaches.

One issue web designers face is ensuring that they keep their important content “above the fold” — you don’t want users to have to scroll down to see the hottest story or a call to action. Browser Size helps with this, by visualizing just what percentage of the Internet-browsing population can see a certain part of your page. This is related not only to screen resolution, but also how large people keep their browser windows.

The last of the “FIGS” has been completed. Twitter has rolled out a German version of the site today. The microblogging platform previously launched Italian, French, and Spanish versions of the site.

As we’ve said in the past, Twitter is crowd-sourcing much of the work for these translations and the speed at which they’ve added the translations is impressive. Twitter was previously available in English and Japanese. As usual, Twitter has written the latest blog post on the matter in the native tongue, so we’ll (roughly) translate it below.

Startup RepairPal, an auto repair and maintenance information site, has raised $4 million in Series A funding led by Tugboat Ventures, with Rick Keister, David Strohm, Mark Goines, and Michael Torres participating. The startup previously raised $3 million in seed and angel funding.

The site, which we reviewed last year, is similar to a Google Health for cars. You get price estimates for different parts and repair jobs for your car. You enter your car year, model, and mileage, and it spits out price ranges for your zip code. There is also a directory of hundreds of thousands of local mechanics, with each shop placed onto a Google Map. Members can rate each mechanic and once a repair is completed, you can keep an online service record at RepairPal. It’s like a one-stop shop to maintain and record the health of your car.