It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as go Google yourself, but now you can go Bing yourself. (Then again, Google took a few years to become a verb.). Bing, Microsoft’s latest effort to compete in search, is now live on a “preview” site. The key thing to pay attention to is the guided search assistance on the left and the different experiences for the travel, images, video, maps, news, and shopping tabs.

A few things to try:

Many believe the greatest potential of Twitter lies in its ability to perform real-time searches of various keywords. So when that functionality is delayed by some 3 hours, as it is right now, and has been throughout much of the night, with no explanation, you can imagine that users are going to get a little annoyed.

Go ahead, search for anything right now — a good example is for the word “the,” as it’s used in a ton of tweets. The most recent results you’ll find are from 3 hours ago. Not only does this badly impact my vanity searches, but there are companies who now rely on Twitter Search to run services such as brand management. Imagine the horror Comcast must be feeling right now not being able to see my tweets constantly bitching about their crap service in real-time.

At this past week’s Google I/O event in San Francisco, Google brought a contraption it calls the “Holodeck,” for event-goers to experience. Basically, it’s a near-360 degree way to view Google Street View in fast motion, high definition video. Danny Sullivan posted a bunch of pictures of the thing earlier in the week.

Unfortunately, Google only allows it to show the area at and around the actual Google campus in Mountain View, as I’m sure it doesn’t want any legal complaint from those caught sunbathing in their backyards. Also, while it does zoom past the area where the Google Goats were kept, it unfortunately failed to catch any of them on tape. Luckily, I did that for you a few weeks ago.

Music service Last.fm, which was bragging about server uptime a week and a half ago, shuts its doors for the afternoon, claiming “datacenter temperature issues beyond our control” required them to go offline. The outage began around 12:30 pm PST, so we’re at two hours and counting. Updates are on their Twitter account.

One thing I love about Facebook spokesperson Randi Zuckerberg – she says exactly what she thinks, and she isn’t afraid to use the power of Facebook to back up her opinions.

Mean bar bouncers can lose their Facebook pages (this was later retracted but remains funny). Meanwhile, Holocaust deniers are given a pass.

Now she’s taking on the Republican party, and the Republican party is fighting back.

At a Startup2Startup event last week Zuckerberg talked about her experiences at the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions last year.

“At the Democratic national convention we were like rock stars,” Zuckerberg said. “At the Republican national convention I sat in my hotel room by myself for three days, no one would meet with us, I was like begging people to meet with us.” Randi also recounts a conversation on a plane where a Berkeley professor calls Zuckerberg “you’re like the most powerful person in the world.”

The video is below:

When Fotonauts debuted at last year’s TechCrunch50, I called it a “gorgeous photopedia” because it promised to turn your photo albums into collaborative Web pages about different topics and subjects. Fotonauts is a desktop photo client which helps you tag, organize, and share your photos in a live feed, and is still in private beta. But you can see a glimpse of what the Web-facing version will look like at Fotopedia, which just soft-launched. A message at the top of the page states: “Fotopedia, a sneak peek. This site is an in-progress read-only preview of what we are going to launch in a few days.”

One of the features of Fotonauts which has yet to be turned on is the ability to turn any photo album into a Web page, complete with tags, associated Wikipedia entry, and Google map information where available. Fotopedia showcases some of the same public albums you can see in the Fotonauts client, plus it adds a few twists. Each photo can be voted up or down or flagged as inappropriate. There is an Encyclopedia tab, which shows albums by topic/tag. For instance, you can see albums about Volcanos, butterflies, or Venice.

Facebook will soon be allowing all users to claim a vanity URL pointing to their regular profile page, we’ve heard from a reliable source. The announcement should come sometime later this week. Afterwards, at a certain date and time, the landrush will begin. Users will be able to grab a vanity URL of their choice.

The Landrush rules will prohibit trademark infringement and a lots of words will be blacklisted, such as generic terms. But for the most part, we hear, users will be able to grab a name that they like.

Facebook has been toying with vanity URLs for some time. URLs for user profiles are currently user id numbers – such as facebook.com/profile.php?id=500065899 (that’s me). In March some Facebook pages started rolling out with vanity URLs, although you must have a business relationship with Facebook (or know someone there) to get one. Facebook.com/techcrunch, for example, links to our TechCrunch page.

Yes, Twitter is down. Yes, again. Yes, they’re looking into it. Yes, this is another Twitter post. But, I come bearing gifts. Spymaster, the somewhat controversial and addictive Twitter-based game obviously doesn’t work nearly as well when Twitter is down. In fact, it doesn’t work at all. The creators have made a fun little Fail Whale graphic of their own, indicating the the game will be down until Twitter comes back up.

“The Directorate can’t assassinate the failwhale,” the message on the site reads. Funny, but this is a serious problem for a growing number of services that are built using Twitter as their backbone. Even FriendFeed looks like a ghost-town right now with no Twitter messages coming in.

We’re less than a week away from the launch of the supposed next “iPhone killer,” the Palm Pre. The iPhone has miraculously survived a few of these attempts on its life before — it somehow weathered the BlackBerry Storm, and before that, the G1 was going to be the device the did it in. The G1 was compelling because it was the first phone to run Google’s Android operating system. But as a piece of hardware (made by HTC), it sucked. You know it, I know, even Google employees will admit it. And that’s why I was at first less than thrilled when I heard Google would be giving away Android phones to everyone at the Google I/O event a few days ago. But it turns out, they weren’t giving away G1s, but rather that device’s successor, which they call the “Google Ion,” though some know it better as the HTC Magic, or even as the “G2.” And it was a brilliant move by Google, because this device is leaps and bounds better than the G1.

Mostly setting aside the software itself — the Ion runs the new “Cupcake” variety of Android, aka Android 1.5 — the hardware that HTC has built this time around is much, much better. First of all, the thing just looks a lot nicer. It’s fairly sleek, almost iPhone-like, compared to the G1, which looked like a dull black plastic brick with a protruding chin at the bottom. The Ion is smaller, it’s thinner, the camera is nicer, the buttons are nicer, hell, even that stupid trackball that HTC insists on including is nicer. Most importantly though, it’s much more usable as a device. And we can thank one thing for that, as well as for much of its much improved design: The removal of the physical keyboard.

Bad news for Portland-based Open-ID startup Vidoop (as well as Vidoop partners like AOL, MySpace and Flock): it’s apparently out of business. Earlier this month the company announced layoffs, but based on an email string that was forwarded to us, the company is now “officially out of business” and winding down.

From CEO Joel Norvell to Vidoop insiders, where he says that the company has no funds to pay wages or other liabilities, and that employees are being offered computers in lieu of wages:

Life is not easy for search engine startups. FIrst, it’s hard to create something that doesn’t fall flat against Google. Too much hype (Google Killer!), whether the company drives it or not, inevitably leads to disappointment.

Cuil is walking dead, for example, and Wikia Search is just dead. Other ambitious projects like SearchMe are dealing with tepid user enthusiasm, and Wolfram Alpha’s over-hype has cost it credibility.

Any search engine startup with a shred of common sense wouldn’t want to create a lot of hype about itself before launching. There are too many dead bodies lying around to prove how badly that strategy works.

But on the other hand: ambitious startups need to hire talented engineers, and they need lots of money. Crawling and indexing the web is expensive and requires thousands of servers. Those servers aren’t free. So there needs to be at least a little awareness of the startup out there for hiring and fundraising purposes.

And you thought the South Carolina v. Craigslist story was dead.

If anything sucks more than being the target of an ambitious but delusional gubernatorial candidate who has suddenly developed a bit of a fetish for prostitution, it’s being ignored by that candidate. As far as Village Voice sees the world, Craigslist just got a bunch of free press. And they want their share.

When Craigslist management was facing a criminal investigation for listings on the site they did the smart thing. They talked about the law, and they pointed out that the real smut was on other sites that were being ignored by the South Carolina Attorney General. If you really want hard core porn and prostitution, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster pointed out, check out Village Voice’s BackPage.com.

That’s all body fluids under the bridge now, of course, since a federal judge smacked down McMaster and forbid him from stalking Craigslist management.

Warning: It appears that a worm has hit Twitter-the tweet will say “Best Video” with a link to “http://juste.ru.” If you see this in a tweet, do not click on the link. It’s unclear exactly how the worm is spreading. But from the look of Tweets about the virus, if you click on the link, you account could be compromised and spammed.

According to reports on Twitter, users who clicked the juste.ru video link had their account compromised and passwords stolen. Further details about the virus are limited but Twitter’s official spam account was updated this morning stating that Twitter is aware of the issue and making steps to resolve the virus. The Tweet also warned users to not click the Best Video link.

Venture capitalists can be valuable sources of information about the tech community. Not only do they have quality insider information but they also have a knack for figuring out how to evaluate startups. So it makes sense that their blogs can be compelling reads.

Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, has compiled a list of the 100 top VC blogs, according to the number of Google Reader subscribers for each one. Cheng admits that the rankings don’t necessarily equate to the best quality of content and that there is fine content coming from VC blogs with less subscribers. But the list is a good starting point. Cheng says he will be highlighting the best VC blog posts from this list on his blog every two weeks and will update the directory to add new VC blogs quarterly.

(List after the jump).

When you’re on the road, passing time reading up on things online from your mobile phone, it can be quite a pain in the ass to bookmark articles for later or share them with others. Smub aims to change all that by debuting a web-based tool that you can access from anywhere and lets you easily bookmark and share stuff from your mobile browser without necessarily having to register for the service.

Smub is incredibly simple to use. All you need to do when you’re browsing an article on your computer or mobile device is add “smub.it/” in front of the URL and it will take you to a page where you can bookmark the link to your Smub profile if you have one, or alternatively your favorite social bookmarking service or one of the more popular social networking services without the need for a separate account. Currently, Smub boasts e-mail support as well as direct push to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Mixx, Reddit and HelloTXT.

Over the last 15 years or so, most of us have adapted to the new forms of communication that pervade the web, ditching letters (and in many cases, phone calls) in favor of rapid fire IMs and Email. But there’s still at least one formality embedded in most of us that’s been hard to overcome: the personal signature. The simple act of signing a document, silly as it may seem in an era of fingerprints, photographs, and passwords, is something that has been engrained in us. And while signing a digital document with an “Okay” button or check box may be legally binding, they’re so basic that it makes the gesture feel insincere.

Cue the digital signature – handwritten signatures input using either your mouse or a tablet, which are then embedded alongside the document in question. These have around for quite a while, with companies in this space including DocuSign and EchoSign. Now RightSignature, a new startup that launched to the public last month, is looking to make things even easier.

Earlier today, we wrote about Facebook updating its terms to get ready for the roll-out of its payment system. Well guess what, it’s already here.

The application GroupCard is currently testing the new payment system live for all accounts that have it installed. I included some screenshots below. It’s very straightforward: There’s a big “Pay With Facebook” button, similar to the “Facebook Connect” buttons you see throughout the web. Next to that, there are the other options to pay with Visa, Mastercard, etc.

Google’s head of public policy, Andrew McLaughlin, will join the Obama administration as deputy chief technology officer, according to a report by the New York Times. McLaughlin will assist former Virginia Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra, who President Obama appointed as CTO in April.

McLaughlin has been leading Google’s public policy efforts for quite some time now. According to this blog post, he was the first member of Google’s policy team in 2005.

Spymaster, the Twitter-based game that we covered last night, is spreading like crazy today. It’s been a trending topic on Twitter throughout the day, even ahead of the hype around Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Because of this popularity though, some Twitter users are getting inundated with tweets from the service in their streams. It’s not really spam, because it’s their friends doing it, but to some, it’s very annoying. Former Digg lead architect, Joe Stump, is particularly pissed off.

“I’ve started both unfollowing and reporting users of this game to @spam. This isn’t because I hate my friends, it’s because I have no other recourse to stop this application’s abusive behavior,” he writes in a blog post today. While Stump isn’t entirely accurate that the only way to gain points is by tweeting out your actions in the game, the spirit of what he’s saying is correct because you are encouraged to tweet out your actions in the game to earn more points. He notes that this is similar to what happened with Facebook Platform early on, as games like Zombies took over people’s streams. This is something that VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon notes as well, joking that maybe they should rename the game “SpamMaster.”

A couple years ago, Netflix began supplementing its DVD mail rental business with movie streams over the Web. for a few thousand select titles. Today, millions of Netflix customers stream their movies instead of waiting for them to come in the mail (or, more often, do both). ComScore Video Metrix estimates Netflix’s online viewership a bit lower at 645,000 unique viewers in March. They watched 6.9 million video streams and the average time spent watching per viewer is an amazing 128 minutes for the month, which is right up there with YouTube in terms of time spent (having full-length feature films helps keep people around longer).

I ran into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings at the AllThingsD conference this week, and asked him in the video (after the jump) how his streaming service is going and how its economics compare to that of mailing out DVDs.