Chances are you use at least two major social networks – 49 million people, for example, visited both MySpace and Facebook in October 2008 (Comscore, worldwide). Nearly 7 million people in the UK use both Bebo and Facebook. A lot of people maintain very different friend lists on LinkedIn than MySpace or Facebook. Etc. And when you add in niche social sites like YouTube, Flickr, etc., there’s even more overlap among users.

There has never been an effective way of aggregating and merging all the data and activity on these sites into a single user interface. A new venture backed Brazilian-based started called Power.com launches today, though, that aims to do just that. They’re calling what they do “social inter-networking” because it allows users to view and interact with all of their social networks at once. Data is aggregated, and the sites themselves, if accessed via the Power.com site, are marked up with added features in a way that Greasemonkey users are familiar with.

The service is unknown in the U.S. today, although it’s been live since August and boasts 5 million users already. Until today it supported just a few social networks, notably Orkut. Now, though, the service supports users from Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5 and a number of niche networks like YouTube.

We were doubtful last night when the story first broke. There were just too many oddities to The Times’ tale about a complicated Yahoo/Microsoft search arrangement that would guarantee billions to Yahoo in exchange for a ten year search deal. We’ve checked with our sources – all of them – and we can’t verify a single fact in the story.

The first part of the story: “Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo’s online search business for $20 billion.”

Wrong. Our sources at Microsoft say they are not in current negotiations with Yahoo, over anything. Our sources at Yahoo agree, also saying they are not in negotiations with Microsoft over anything. Yahoo sources add that the company is fully engaged in finding a new CEO right now, and nothing else.

Today’s the day that Facebook makes their big press push for their Facebook Connect service, which was first announced last May. The NY Times has a story giving a broad overview of Connect as well as competing services from MySpace (Data Availability) and Google (Friend Connect).

All three services are platforms for third party sites (Digg, Twitter, Citisearch, CBS, whatever) to let users sign in via their favorite social network instead of the normal approach. Some profile information flows with the sign in, which the sites can keep for a period of time. And activity that occurs on the site – Twitters written, Digg stories voted on, restaurant reviews on Citysearch, etc.) can optionally flow back to the user’s activity stream.

I’m with you on this one Jason. Randall Stross’ article (it’s really an editorial, but not marked as such) rips into Tesla as “not much more than a functioning concept car” and suggests it would be foolish of the government to grant it a loan under a 2007 Federal loan program designed specifically to encourage development of vehicles that conserve fuel.

Love it or hate it, Amazon.com’s Kindle e-book reader is selling well — in fact, even at $359 there currently aren’t any in stock. So Amazon certainly doesn’t need any advice from me about how to sell more Kindles, but I have some ideas about how the company could make the device more attractive to casual readers like me.

The basic idea would be to make the Kindle reach critical mass as a consumer product, similar to how many “average” people own an iPod. Whether iPod owners use it or appreciate it isn’t as important as the fact that they bought an iPod because it’s become the de facto standard for portable music playback.

Granted, e-book readers are a harder sell than portable music players as almost everyone consumes music in someway or another but not everyone regularly reads books for pleasure. Still, the idea isn’t to make the Kindle as popular as the iPod, it’s to make the Kindle the iPod of e-book readers.

The company behind MyQuire, a simple but pretty powerful online application that lets individuals and team members work on projects in a social network-like environment, has been recently acquired.

That’s about all we know. We got in touch with CEO Michael Dawson but he declined to comment or share any details because the buyer apparently requested full confidentiality on the deal.

A tipster shared the following e-mail he received:

We have some big news! After nearly two years of building MyQuire, we have been acquired. We have had a great time working with you, and couldn’t have gotten here without your help.

As part of this deal, we will no longer be able to operate MyQuire.com. Services on the platform will end January 1, 2009. We apologize for any disruption to your work.

The collaboration tool was first launched about 14 months ago at the DEMOFall conference but we hadn’t really heard anything from or about the company since.

Startups can be the most conservative organizations in the world. We spend so much energy nurturing our delicate egos against naysayers and self-doubt that we can hardly admit mistakes. This is especially true of first-time CEOs. Thousands of new web companies were born in the last few years, and many of us just got the job.

We set off with the same directions: tackle a big problem, listen to customers, work hard, pinch pennies, hire slow, fire fast. Still good advice. But I think we’ll have different advice for one another once we’ve come through this downturn, about how we had to change to survive. Since real estate crashed before the overall market, Redfin (my online real estate company) has had a year’s head-start sorting out which changes seem to be working for us.

Not that we don’t still have a long ways to go. We’re still on track for our first profits in 2009, but we’re going to have to fight to make it.

The time we have left to succeed or fail is really just the measure of how long it took to adapt to our downturn. If I had been more experienced, we’d have adapted faster. Here’s the survival guide I’d give my former self, the one just starting to face the storm:

Surveillance cameras can sometimes give you a creepy feeling (especially the ones you can’t directly see) but the nation of cute- and friendliness, Japan, now offers two solutions for that problem.

One example of a “friendly” CCTV camera is the Daruma surveillance doll. Daruma is a wish doll in Nippon so that many Japanese people see the little guy in a positive light by nature (even though it says “security camera” on the doll in the video after the jump).

Last year Amazon had trouble filling orders of the then-new Kindle, so eBay took over and prices rocketed to $1,500. This year, same problem. Amazon says orders for Kindles will take 11-13 weeks to fulfill (which is, we believe, when they will launch the Kindle 2). So you aren’t getting one by Christmas directly from Amazon.

But eBay and Amazon stores have them for sale. New ones are going for as much as $975 (some are less) for buy it now. The market price for used ones seems to be in the $700 range, but some one is just $429.

The UK’s Times Online is reporting that “Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo’s online search business for $20 billion.” The report is filled with lots of juicy, specific details that lend it credence, but don’t make a lot of sense when you drill down into them.

The new deal, according to the Times Online, is a complex transaction that involves Microsoft supporting a new management team made up of former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller and former Fox Interactive Media president Ross Levinsohn, who are investing partners at Velocity Interactive Group. Levinsohn, however, tells VentureBeat there is “no truth” to the story. (Although there were rumors a while back that Microsoft wanted Levinsohn and Miller to run Yahoo, which is where this might be coming from).

And unlike Microsoft’s earlier offer to buy Yahoo’s search business outright, this one is for a long-term operating agreement. In fact, the $20 billion deal that sells the story in the headline is a red herring that refers to a call option that is part of the supposed deal.

Everybody these days has some advice for the beleaguered U.S. auto industry. Bail them out. Break up the unions. Do something about the dealerships. Do something about spiraling health care and pension costs. Design cars people will love. Etc.

There’s always the “be more like Apple” advice that’s been going around for a couple of years. Make the iPod of cars. One that people love so much that they’ll pay a premium for it. Robert Scoble handed out pounds of this kind of advice a couple of weeks ago.

But there’s a reason why the car companies can’t build the iPod of cars. It’s because they’re so weighed down with all the logistical nightmares of actually building the stuff that goes into those cars.

The competition for the next wave of enterprise computing has heated up since Microsoft announced its Windows Azure strategy a month ago. While the jury is out in some quarters about Microsoft’s ability to actually deliver the reliability, security, and even the interoperability that is promised, the timetable has accelerated the plans of competitors and forced some to define themselves in terms of the cloud at a dangerous moment.

Sun Microsystems has been under particular pressure to realign; analysts and even Sun employees such as Tim Bray have been outspoken in their pleas for Sun’s executive team to jettison unprofitable ventures in favor of some kind of cloud strategy. CEO Jonathan Schwartz has hinted in recent months of some wood behind what Sun calls its Grid effort, and will this week roll out Sun’s JavaFX 1.0 front end technology to compete with Flash/Air and Silverlight.

JavaFX could be one of the casualties if Sun decides to pare technologies along with the 18% of its employees it’s trimming. Other cuts might include the NetBeans development environment, which has kept pace with or even bettered Eclipse in quality but not in uptake, and OpenOffice, the free Office replacement. Unfortunately for Sun, Google Docs has stolen some of the strategic thunder with an on-demand product from a company that can afford it.

Bureaucracy kills innovation. We all know that. But why? Partly, it’s because bureaucracy grows out of prudence, a desire not to repeat the mistakes of the past. With the current economic crisis, for example, you can be sure that a lot more checks will be put into place—both in Washington and in corporate boardrooms—to prevent the excesses that got us into this situation from happening again. Governments and corporations alike react to crises by implementing more rules and regulations.

Putting checks in place, after all, is the prudent thing to do. But bureaucracies, and the checks they impose on companies, have their unintended consequences. Paul Graham takes a stab at exploring these costs in a new essay. He writes:

Every check has a cost.

148Apps, which tracks and reviews iPhone Apps, says 10,000 applications have now been released on the iPhone App store (the site is named after the fact that you can add up to 148 applications to an iPhone or iPod touch).

A tribute page shows a mini icon for every application. And it also gives some interesting data. About 24% of apps are free; 35% cost $.99. The average cost is $3.12, including free apps. About 34% are games or entertainment, and there are 49 weather related apps for the iPhone despite the fact that a weather app is built in.

In case you’ve noticed more notifications from Facebook in the past 24 hours, it’s probably not because you’ve suddenly become more popular. It looks like Facebook’s email notification problem is getting worse.

Facebook lets members turn email notifications on or off for more than 30 different actions on the site. These include anything from when someone sends you a message inside Facebook, invites you to an event, or adds you as friend to when someone tags you in a photo or sends you a poke. Facebook sent out the email below to anyone who is affected:

The theme this holiday shopping season is frugality. J.P. Morgan analyst Imran Khan expects online sales to be flat this year. In a survey of U.S. consumers conducted by J.P. Morgan, nearly 30 percent of online shoppers say they plan on spending less this year during the holidays than last year.

Nevertheless, online retailers should do better than offline ones. In total, including offline shoppers, 44 percent say they plan on spending less this year (up from 33 percent who responded the same overall last year). But even among those who plan on reducing their total spending, 19 percent still think their online purchases will be higher.

And while only 12 percent of total shoppers plan on spending more money this year, that number is 32 percent for onine shoppers—slightly more than the number who are cutting back on their online holiday expenditures.

The debate about Netbooks, which are very small and very cheap laptop devices, is beginning to heat up. The category is only about a year old but sales are expected to top 5 million this year.

Lots of people think Netbooks are the next big volume market because they allow people who previously couldn’t afford computers to own one. People got so bullish on the devices that sales projections reached 50 million units by 2012.

I’ve had a chance to test many of the units, though, and I can say that the promise is much bigger than the payoff. Perhaps that’s why Intel is rethinking whether the devices are as great as everyone’s expectations.

A digital design shop in Australia, Boffswana, shows off a neat parlor trick in the video above. It places a 3D Flash character made with Papervision into a regular Webcam video using nothing more than a paper printout. (Update: Oh, and you can print it out yourself and add the character to your own video).

Eat your heart out, George Lucas.

(Hat tip to Cory O’Brien).

Joost launched their iPhone application on the App Store this evening, giving users access to 46,000 Joost videos, including major television shows and films. The iPhone has a built in YouTube application already, giving them a serious head start when it comes to video on the iPhone. But archrival Hulu doesn’t yet – giving Joost a little room to maneuver for now.

I’m sure it’s a temporary issue, but the application just doesn’t work yet. I tried to play multiple videos, including the full length version of Men In Black, but an error message reads “The connection to the server was lost. This may be because of poor network quality. Please try again later.” Meanwhile, YouTube videos are playing promptly.

Still, when the app settles down and works properly, it will be a nice addition to the iPhone. Lots of great shows to watch while wiling away the hours on a plane. At least until the battery runs out.

With the economy as turbulent as it is, most people are trying to save a few bucks whatever way they can. CabEasy, a 1-man startup that launched earlier this month, is looking to help people save some cash on their Taxi rides. The site allows people to post a public listing of their upcoming taxi travel plans, and pair up with someone else who is traveling a similar route to split the ride.

The concept is very similar to Hitchsters, a startup that helps pair up travelers so that they can share a limo on the way to the airport for a fraction of the cost they would normally pay. Hitchsters has plans to expand beyond airport travelers (including events like ball games), but at this point these options aren’t available. And, unlike CabEasy, Hitchsters only offers support for a few cities.