Since the Google crack down on text link ad sales this month many in the blog related advertising industry have been scrambling to introduce new offerings. Text-Link-Ads.com (a TechCrunch sponsor) launched ShoppingAds.com this week, a nice looking CPC advertising system geared for blogs.

New comer ScratchBack, led by well regarded online marketer Jim Kukral, offers an online “tipping” system. It allows a publisher to accept tips and “give back” links or images in return. Each listing has a unique message; when a visitor mouseovers a listing, a custom message shows up in the form of a bubbletip. Publishers name their price on tips, and earn money from every interaction through the ScratchBack system. The service is free to signup, and publishers get the code for a “TopSpot” widget in minutes. ScatchBack will be taking a small cut from each transaction, although the percentage hasn’t been finalized.

Kukral calls it a “cross between textlinkads and blogads, but more fun and more options for publishers, and more fun for readers (who become your best advertisers).”

Notably, the system has been approved by Google (they checked) as every link is “nofollow” and the widgets are built in javascript; this is a product that provides an alternative advertising model that won’t see publishers punished in future Google crackdowns.

This isn’t a product for the top end of town, but it does provide a creative alternative to the many bloggers out there looking for new ways of making money.

LA based white label social networking networking startup Pringo has announced the launch of a new social networking site that is focused on saving the planet and tires.

The site, “Eco Treadsetters” comes from the Yokohama Tire Corporation and is focused on reinforcing Yokohama’s online branding, increasing its user base and enhancing the company’s position as “a socially-aware tire manufacturer that is focused on protecting the Earth.”

Users can create profiles, communicate with each other, form sub-communities, have a profile page etc…the pretty much standard social network feature set. Users are also able to “submit their environmental projects, created to help preserve their respective communities, to potentially win prizes, including an eco-trip to Costa Rica and gift certificates from Patagonia and iTunes.”

Pringo has been off our radar for a while as more well known white label services such as Ning get most of the attention. The company has built up a respectable corporate business providing social networking solutions to sites such as 11on11.com, CBS Radio and ePharma.

It’s no slight to Pringo when I say that I just don’t see the appeal of a social network from a tire manufacturer; after all there is nothing wrong with how the site functions and no doubt they were paid well to host it. The long tail may be long, but I think in this case Yokohama wont gain decent road traction.

See our chart of white label social networking providers here.

Google is taking a multi-pronged approach when it comes to winning over the hearts and minds of Facebook developers. We already know that it will attempt a direct appeal to get developers to come over to Google’s side and create social applications via its OpenSocial APIs. But Google is also trying to convince Facebook developers to use Google’s new pay-per-action ads (still in beta) to get more people to install their apps on Facebook. Google’s AdSense team is specifically targeting Facebook developers with an invitation to its pay-per-action beta program (reprinted beow).

A pay-per-action (PPA) ad only costs the advertiser something if a specific action is taken by a consumer—in this case, installing a Facebook app or going to a developer’s application page on Facebook, where the developer can make money showing his or her own ads. For the most part, it seems these PPA ads will appear on Google itself or on sites elsewhere on the Web that are part of the AdSense network. Thus they will (ironically) drive more traffic to Facebook.

But there’s another, albeit speculative, scenario. According to VentureBeat, Google may try to sneak AdSense ads into Facebook itself. This is a stretch, but bear with us. Google would have to do so through a back door, by appealing to developers themselves, who control the ads on their own pages within Facebook. If Google can show generic AdSense ads on Facebook, it could show these PPA ads as well. In the letter to Facebook developers, Google curiosly says the PPA ads will appear on “individual publishers in the Google content network, including other Facebook applications.” It seems that Facebook would crack down on any such sneak attack, given its ad partnership with Microsoft. But it would be interesting to see which ads do better on Facebook: Google’s PPA ads or Facebook’s upcoming SocialAds. Let the most relevant ads win.

Here is the full text of the letter from Google to Facebook developers:

Dear Facebook Application Developer,

Would you like to drive more users to your app? We’ve expanded our pay-per-action (PPA) beta test and would like to invite you to participate by creating ads for your Facebook application.

To start setting up your first pay-per-action campaign, click on the link within the pay-per-action alert in your AdWords account and follow the simple steps at http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=68150 to get your PPA ads up & running across the Google content network and on other Facebook applications.

Key Benefits of PPA

* Save money by paying only for actions that you define, such as users adding your app. Rather than paying for clicks or impressions, you only pay when a visitor performs a specified action, such as installing your Facebook application or visiting your main application page.
* Save time by setting up AdWords conversion tracking: you can set your desired cost per action and pay for completed actions to hit your cost-per-action targets.
* Increase conversion rates by using publishers’ knowledge about visitors to their websites to your advantage. Individual publishers in the Google content network, including other Facebook applications, choose to display PPA ads that they feel will appeal to their visitors. This works to your advantage, as publishers are motivated to choose ads they believe will have a high conversion rate.

With PPA, you decide how much you want to pay for each type of action, whether it’s $1 for a user installing your application or $.15 for visiting your application page. You can also control your spending by setting a daily budget. In addition, you can view clicks, impressions, conversion rate, cost per conversion, total conversions, and total cost for each pay-per-action campaign by running a Placement Performance Report or a pay-per-action report in the Report Center of your AdWords account.

For more information about pay-per-action ads and a list of our most frequently asked questions, please visit the pay-per-action section in the Google AdWords help center: http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=11635

We are excited to offer you a new way to attract new users to your Facebook application and meet your advertising goals.a If you have any questions, please email adsense-developer-research@google.com.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Last night we outlined the details emerging about Google’s social networking initiative, OpenSocial. Below are some screenshots of OpenSocial in action that we didn’t have time to include in that post.

Most of these shots show the integration of iLike and Flixster applications with social networks on Ning. A few show the integration of applications with orkut and hi5. We’ve also included an overview document below.

Update: See Marc Andreessen’s screencast here.

Thank you to the current TechCrunch Sponsors, who keep the lights on for us:

• Wild Apricot

• Opera

• Text Link Ads

• PeerMe

• iJ.am

• Ads-Click

• Edgeio

• Le Web3

And thanks to Media Temple who handles our hosting.

Wow, maybe Henry Blodget wasn’t so wrong after all. Google broke through $700 a share in trading today, closing at a record high of $707, just over 3 weeks since breaking through the $600 mark.

Google did have the benefit of a surging NASDAQ; the exchange favored by tech stocks closing up 42.41 pts or 1.51% after the Fed cut US interest rates by 25 basis points to 4.5%. A range of analysts including Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and others have raised their target price for GOOG stock to $800 and above.

It’s not all clear sailing ahead for Google, though. The US Federal Reserve wouldn’t be cutting interest rates if it thought the US economy was healthy and the Federal Open Market Committee said that although financial market turmoil linked to a US housing downturn had eased in part, “the pace of economic expansion will likely slow in the near term, partly reflecting the intensification of the housing correction,” which if applied to Google would see its revenue growth slow.

International markets also present a problem for Google, with a decline that wasn’t widely reported when Google announced its 3rd Quarter earnings result October 18. According to Google’s statement, if it hadn’t been for currency movements international revenue would have dropped $121 million in the 3rd quarter (presuming that USD has remained at the same level). It might have been a blip but it’s certainly something to watch given most of Google’s growth opportunities should be coming from outside its home country, given the relative maturity of the US internet market.

WooMe – a website for “speed introductions” that presented at TechCrunch40 but is still in private beta – is giving out one thousand invitations to our readers (redeem yours here).

You would be excused for mistaking WooMe for a speed dating website like SpeedDate.com (covered here). WooMe users are put into one minute-long webcam sessions with one another to decide quickly whether or not they are compatible. After five subsequent sessions, you indicate which of the people “woo’d” you or not. If they were woo’d by you too, then you can choose to contact them for $1. This obviously lends itself to speed dating, and indeed 75% of the 30,000 total sessions conducted in private beta have been for dating purposes.

However, the company is insisting that the service has many non-romantic uses. You can leverage WooMe to find a travel partner or someone to babysit your kids (hopefully you’ll make that decision after more than a 1-minute long face-to-face). You can also just use it to find people with similar interests to you. Last night, WooMe hosted an event for UC Berkeley that got students together to meet over topics such as “I still love Cal football”.

CEO Stephen Stokols says that almost 7,500 people have mutually woo’d each other on the service so far. On Friday, WooMe will add the ability to tag the people you meet over webcam. These tags will stay in people’s profiles so new introductions come loaded with some basic information about a person.

As far as I know, YouTube never changed their logos for holidays like famously Google does. But today they did, quietly adding a pumpkin to the logo in lieu of the television screen we normally see. Too bad it wasn’t something a little scarier. An evil looking clown, for example, would have been perfect.

Advertising has gotten a lot more complicated since the early days of the internet. There are hundreds of ad networks out there. With targeting being the name of the game, efficiently allocating your ad space to visitors is nearly impossible. In response, automated ad optimization engines have started up to help manage these advertising complexities. Using one seems like a no-brainer for publishers concerned about making the most of their advertising. Advertising rates change too quickly over time and the complexity of serving the right ads to your different demographics is simply too hard to handle by hand, particularly on websites with large footprints.

There are several engines out there already, including YieldBuild and The Rubicon Project. Now TechCrunch 40 finalist Pubmatic is hosting a contest to draw more publishers to their platform. Every month, the two publishers who see the greatest gains using Pubmatic will receive thousands in free advertising on top “web 2.0 web sites” (i.e. blogs). The amount is still unknown because they are still finalizing the sites they are advertising on. You can sign up for the program here.

PubMatic’s ad optimization engine is similar to YieldBuild and the Rubicon project. Unlike these earlier two, Pubmatic is actually live with 1,300 sites and open to anyone else. The engine serves as a meta ad server that serves the highest revenue ad network for each visitor given the time, geographic, demographic, and layout aspects of your site. It currently supports ad networks like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network and Value Click. They also provide them with a central dashboard to track all their ad networks and ad configurations. Below you’ll find more information from their TechCrunch 40 video.

Pubmatic has already picked the November winners WinCustomize and BikerOrNot, which they claim have seen over 100% increases in their ad revenue since using PubMatic. YeildBuild and The Rubicon Project have boasted similar increases for their publishers. To a degree, it all just depends on how poorly monetized your site was to start. However, Pubmatic is looking for sensible successes from fairly well trafficked sites and will double check your previous monetization metrics to ensure the increase in revenue is real.

If you’re like Marie Eve Bergeron-Tourangeau from Canada, you’ve decided to become a Facebook profile page for Halloween. Which is better, I guess, than trying to dress up like a Google OpenSocial, since the only image really associated with that so far is this horny elmer’s glue thing.

One of the most disruptive startups in the financial industry is Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending marketplace. Since its launch in February, 2006, Prosper has attracted more than 450,000 members who have loaned $96.4 million to each other. There is so much liquidity on Prosper now that the startup wants to create a secondary market for loans on the site.

Right now, if you loan money to someone on Prosper, you have to wait for the term of the loan to expire to get all of your money and interest back (unless the debt is paid back early). A secondary market would allow individual lenders on Prosper to sell loans to each other right away, and perhaps even package them together. Such a secondary market could make Prosper a more appealing place for larger financial institutions to invest in.

Hints of what Prosper is up to can be found in an S-1 registration the company filed yesterday with the SEC (see press release). The part of the S-1 (which is not yet effective) that caught my eye was this:

The Lender Participant Rights are associated with the $500,000,000 in aggregate principal amount of Notes to which this prospectus relates. This amount represents the aggregate principal amount of Notes that Prosper expects will be originated on the Platform during the one-year period beginning on the date of this prospectus together with the principal amount of Notes that have been originated on the Platform prior to the date of this prospectus.

In plain English, that means that Prosper expects that the cumulative amount of loans on the site a year from now will be worth up to $500 million. That would still be peanuts for most banks, but would represent a fivefold increase from the amount of loans originated on the site so far.

Prosper has raised $40 million from Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, the Omidyar Network, and Fidelity Ventures.

We are pleased to release our second batch of 250 tickets for the November 16 Boston MeetUp co-hosted with IDG Ventures Boston.

There also are a few spots left for start-ups to demo their products on site and what our CEO Heather Harde likes to call “creative sponsorship opportunities”. So far, we have sponsors picking up the tab for the music, specialty cocktails, themed entertainment rooms and a few other surprises. (Next thing you know, Heather is going to sell signage space on Mike’s forehead). If you are interested in supporting the event, though, please contact Jeanne Logozzo.

For more details, a list of participating sponsors, and to register to attend, please see our dedicated Boston MeetUp 11 page.

UPDATE: Tickets are sold old again. We will release the last round of tickets the week prior to the event.

Is Facebook finally going to take on MySpace as a place for bands and music fans to hang out? We’ve heard various Facebook Music rumors before. The latest one comes from CO-ED Magazine.com (so you know it’s got to be true!).

According to CO-ED’s executive editor Stephen Gebhardt, who says he heard it from a group of marketing managers at a major music label, Facebook has been holding secret meetings with all the music labels and will announce Facebook Music next week at New York’s ad:tech conference (where it is also expected to announce its social ad network).

Here are the details Gebhardt was able to gather: Facebook Music will essentially be a way for musicians (or their labels) to create their own fan pages just like on MySpace, each with a separate sub-domain within Facebook. Facebook members will be able to join any artist’s network as a “fan.” This will be similar to joining a group, but centered around music. Members will be able to listen to streamed songs, watch videos, add music to their own pages, find out about upcoming tours, and meet other fans. Facebook is also supposedly working on sales widgets for these pages (to be introduced at a later date) so that artists can sell downloads directly through Facebook. (Watch out iTunes).

MySpace, Apple, Google . . . who will Facebook pick a fight with next?

After sprucing up Ask.com earlier last summer, parent company IAC began spending $100 million this year on marketing to raise awareness of the Ask brand. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been seeing a lot of Ask.com ads on TV lately. (And I pretty much only watch TiVo, yet they are so ubiquitous that they still catch my eye as I fast-forward through the commercials). So how is that ad campaign doing?

Taking a look at IAC’s earnings today, it is not clear whether or not the expensive ad campaign will even pay for itself. Out of IAC’s $1.5 billion in total quarterly revenue, its media and advertising businesses (of which Ask.com is a part, along with CitySearch and Evite) accounted for only $190 million. While those revenues were up 40 percent from last year, the search portion of that saw a greater contribution from the Ask network (search results it powers on other sites) than from Ask.com itself. In other words, IAC’s media and advertising businesses saw a $54 million bump in revenues last quarter. Not all of that was due to Ask, and of the part that was, more than half came from traffic outside of Ask.com. The point of the ads, of course, is to drive traffic to Ask’s main site.

At least Ask is not losing market share. According to comScore, the search market share of Ask’s network as a whole nudged up 0.2 percent in September versus August to 4.7 percent (compared to 57 percent market share for Google, 23.7 percent for Yahoo, and 10.3 percent for Microsoft). Both Google and Yahoo still gained more share in September than Ask.com, although it did take some share away from Microsoft. And if you look on Compete.com, traffic to Ask.com itself does look to be picking up.

UpdateIt’s been pointed out to me by someone who know that the $100 million is the total amount the search engine is spending on marketing worldwide, including much more than the TV spots (such as online ads, agency fees, and internal marketing salaries). The TV spots are still a significant chunk of it, but not the majority. Also, the most recent TV ad campaign just started in September. This Hitwise graph suggests that it contributed to a nice 23.7 percent jump in Ask’s share of executed searches from August, 2007

So it could just be too early to tell whether the TV ads are driving enough traffic to Ask.com to be worthwhile. But if they don’t show up more significantly in the numbers next quarter, those ads will be seen as a boondoggle. They are entertaining, though.

Enjoy the latest one, which pokes fun at Google (and which makes you think that maybe Ask won’t be renewing its search advertising relationship with Google when the deal expires at the end of the year):

If things go well, we might finally see that Gphone by the middle of next year. Google is in heated talks with wireless carriers in the U.S., including Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile, (and Vodafone internationally) to carry the Gphone, reports the WSJ. Google already competes (and cooperates) with some of these carriers. It recently fought with Verizon, for instance, over the rules of the upcoming 700 Mhz wireless spectrum auctions, while it is partnering with Sprint on its upcoming Wimax network. The only carrier not mentioned is AT&T, which carries the iPhone.

When the Gphone does come out, chances are that there won’t be just one Gphone, but many. In the next two weeks, Google is also expected, says the WSJ, “to announce new software and services that handset makers could use to build customized Google-powered phones.” Just as in social networking, Google wants to make mobile phones an open platform that developers can build lots of applications on top of. We may very well see a mobile 2.0 platform war brewing between the Gphone, the iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Nokia’s Ovi.

Mobile media company 4INFO has taken funding from the NBC-GE joint venture Peacock Equity and a signed a provider deal with NBC.

4INFO is the sixth Peacock Equity investment since the $250 million fund was established in April.

Under the deal, 4INFO will become NBC Universal’s preferred mobile SMS advertising partner, providing technology and services that will enable NBC Universal “to offer dynamic, targeted advertising in its text messaging content.” NBC Universal will also be able to supplement its own alerts content offerings with 4INFO consumer services such as health tips, fantasy sports player statistics and custom, user-defined alerts.

San Mateo based 4INFO was founded in 2004 and includes amongst its investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Gannett Company, Sand Hill Capital and U.S. Venture Partners. The Peacock Equity investment is 4INFO’s 5th round, with the company having taken $8 million Series C in March 2005 and $10 million Series D in June this year. The amount of Peacock Equity’s investment was not disclosed.

Hot on the heels of the launches of Disqus and Intense Debate, commenting reputation system SezWho has raised a $1 million series A round from KPG Ventures and upgraded their offering. The investment makes SezWho the best funded of the small group of startups currently trying to improve community for commentors. Considering how enhanced commenting somehow became a more competitive space overnight, the money also came at a good time to help speed development.

SezWho has a more basic offering compared with Disqus or Intense Debate, but with a much lower point of entry. It doesn’t entirely replace your comments or wrap them in a fully featured social network. Instead it focuses on simply helping separate the good commentors from the noise by adding ratings and reputations to your blog comments. The Wordpress and MovableType plug-ins let readers order comments by rating and explore the history of their commenting across SezWho enabled sites. The plugin doesn’t require users to sign up for a new account, but rather links commentors based on email address. If someone tries to hijack your reputation, though, you can claim your email address and remove the unrelated comments. VentureBeat and reportedly over 300 other sites use the system, totaling over 100,000 users. Today’s press release also says that the service will work across forums, social networks, and wikis, although that’s not currently the case.

Comment ratings are determined by other users simply answering the question, “Was this comment useful to you? Yes or No”. But not all votes are equal. Commentors with higher overall “star” ratings from consistently highly rated comments have greater weight attached to their votes. SezWho also has a “Red Carpet” widget that highlights a site’s top rated commentors to encourage more participation. Readers can sort the comments based on these ratings and view other blog comments from users by checking out their profile, all via an AJAX popup. The idea is that users will be drawn to comments left on other sites and drive traffic across all SezWho enabled blogs. SezWho has some analytics tools that expose exactly how much traffic other sites are drawing to your blog.

Details emerged today on Google’s broad social networking ambitions, first reported here in late September, with a follow up earlier this week. The new project, called OpenSocial (URL will go live on Thursday), goes well beyond what we’ve previously reported. It is a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called “hosts”) that choose to participate.

What they haven’t done is launch yet another social network platform. As more and more of these platforms launch, developers have difficult choices to make. There are costs associated with writing and maintaining applications for these social networks. Most developers will choose one or two platforms and ignore the rest, based on a simple cost/benefit analysis.

Google wants to create an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks. And if they pull it off, they’ll be in the center, controlling the network.

What They’re Launching

OpenSocial is a set of three common APIs, defined by Google with input from partners, that allow developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

• Profile Information (user data)
• Friends Information (social graph)
• Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

Hosts agree to accept the API calls and return appropriate data. Google won’t try to provide universal API coverage for special use cases, instead focusing on the most common uses. Specialized functions/data can be accessed from the hosts directly via their own APIs.

Unlike Facebook, OpenSocial does not have its own markup language (Facebook requires use of FBML for security reasons, but it also makes code unusable outside of Facebook). Instead, developers use normal javascript and html (and can embed Flash elements). The benefit of the Google approach is that developers can use much of their existing front end code and simply tailor it slightly for OpenSocial, so creating applications is even easier than on Facebook.

Applications can have full functionality on profile and/or canvas pages, subject to the specific rules of each host. Facebook, by contrast, limits most functionality to the canvas page, allowing a widget on the profile page with limited features.

OpenSocial is silent when it comes to specific rules and policies of the hosts, like whether or not advertising is accepted or whether any developer can get in without applying first (the Facebook approach). Hosts set and enforce their own policies. The APIs are created with maximum flexibility.

Launch Partners

Partners are in two categories: hosts and developers. Hosts are the participating social networks, and include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.

Developers include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.

What This Means

The timing of OpenSocial couldn’t be better. Developers have been complaining non stop about the costs of learning yet another markup launguage for every new social network platform, and taking developer time in creating and maintaining the code. Someone had to build a system to streamline this (as we said in the last few sentences in this post). And Facebook-fear has clearly driven good partners to side with Google. Developers will immediately start building on these APIs to get distribution across the impressive list of hosts above.

And they’ll do it soon, too. It’s clear that the developers who arrived early to the Facebook Platform party won easy customers. Those that came later had to fight much harder. Developers found their new gold strike, and they will soon all be there, mining away.

UK authorities may soon be entering Second Life as part of a crack down on virtual pedophilia following the above report being shown on Sky News.

The report investigates an area in Second Life called “Wonderland” where users dressed as children offer virtual prostitution in a space designed to mimic a kids playground.

Someone recently said to me at a conference that Second Life’s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: pure uncensored freedom; they are completely right. No self respecting person could argue that the staging of virtual pedophilia is anything but sick and should have no place within Second Life, and yet libertarian governance has been the key driver of the Second Life success story . The whole thing is yet another tarnish on a space where some really great things are happening, a space that is slowly finding a much wider acceptance in the broader community. The quicker Linden Lab cracks down on these sickos, the better for the many Second Life fans out there who preach the Second Life gospel where ever they go.

What do you get when you cross iTunes with a web browser? You get Songbird, an application built on top of Mozilla Firefox’s core technology that serves as a platform for media websites that want to integrate tightly with a desktop media player.

We last wrote about Songbird over a year and a half ago when version 0.1 was released. Tonight, Songbird releases version 0.3, which the company considers its equivalent to Firefox 1.0.

Perhaps the best way to explain Songbird is to compare it what Apple has done with iTunes. While iTunes is a traditional desktop application that must be downloaded and installed, the iTunes Store within iTunes is actually a website that meshes so seamlessly (and exclusively) with iTunes that you don’t really realize that you are browsing a website when looking for music to buy. Click to purchase some music and the iTunes Store website communicates with the iTunes desktop client to trigger certain functionality, like a user prompt and then a file download. Apple is able to contain the entire shopping experience within its media player, making the consumption of new music very convenient.

Now suppose you’re a media company that wants to set up shop within users’ media players the way Apple has set up shop within iTunes. You could try to hack together a plugin for iTunes, but you won’t get the same results and you’ll be subject to the whims of proprietary software. With Songbird, you have access not only to a fully-equipped desktop media player but also a set of open APIs with which you can easily mesh your existing website with Songbird (see developer center). For the most part, developers just need to program their websites to take advantage of a Songbird DOM object in JavaScript. You can also build themes and plugins for Songbird as you might for Firefox, since the application’s architecture is fundamentally the same.

Songbird turned to Mozilla technology for its product because it wanted operating system agnosticism. Also, other possible web-to-desktop platforms, like AIR, were not created with an open source philosophy nor designed well enough for large-scale projects. Songbird envisions its platform being used not only for track download services, but for services based around any type of media such as video.

The Hype Machine, Insound, and SkreemR have programmed their websites for Songbird and are packaged with the latest release. A screenshot of the player I saw on their website also suggests that an iLike integration is in the works.

Songbird closed $8 million in funding from Sequoia Capital and Atlas Venture in December 2006. The software has been downloaded around one million times so far. And the company’s developers previously worked on Winamp and the Yahoo Music Engine.