When it comes to free media streaming, the United States is flush with premium content from great sites like Hulu and MySpace Music. But aside from a handful of exceptions, the rest of the world is out of luck. Today, the balance changes a bit: MySpace has just launched its hugely popular MySpace Music service in Australia and New Zealand, bringing those regions unlimited streaming of songs and albums from all four major music labels, as well as many indies.

AU/NZ users will have access to the same features as the US site, including shareable playlists, artist activity feeds, and other social functionality. But there is at least one notable difference: while MySpace Music launched in the United States with Amazon as its partner for purchasing digital downloads, the AU/NZ version has teamed with Apple’s iTunes. MySpace wouldn’t comment on whether this is foreshadowing a larger partnership, but we may well see the Apple deal extend stateside. MySpace likely had an exclusive partnership with Amazon for the US launch, but it’s been a year (which may well have been the length of the deal), so it may soon be free to explore other options.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about Swedish startup Twingly and its stealth memetracker Twingly Channels. Tonight, Twingly is launching in closed beta. In the past, Twingly has brought us a microblogging search tool, a search engine for blogs, and a global ranking system for blogs. Twingly Channels essentially lets users to create their own personalized real-time memetracker. To sign up for an invite, click here with the code “TechCrunch.”

As we wrote previously, Twingly is a mix between Digg and FriendFeed. Twingly Channels lets users to create their own personalized social memetracker by collecting feeds and search terms covering any topic or event into a channel they share with others. And the site has real-time functionality. Users can post links posted by users, content from RSS feeds, and real-time search results for terms from blogs and microblogs (i.e. Twitter). The resulting stream is filtered into a Friendfeed-like channel where people can comment on, like, or dislike incoming items.

So, Justin Timberlake was supposed to be at a party tomorrow night in San Francisco. The “special, private celebration” was in honor of the company Particle (which counts Timberlake as its lead investor), which recently launched its Robo.to service. Myself and fellow writers Jason Kincaid and Paul Carr were so excited that we’ve been gossiping about it all day in back-channel conversations. I believe Paul even bought a JT book for him to sign, earlier today. But sadly, Justin, is bailing on us.

It appears that like most celebrities, Timberlake came down with a case of the “scheduling conflict,” and had to fly back to L.A. (or stay there, not sure if he left or not) to go be a movie star. But we’ll forgive him this time because of the reason for his conflict: He needed to be on the set of The Social Network, yes, the Facebook movie.

Forbes today released their annual 400 richest Americans list — no surprise, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is on it at number 158. His net worth is $2 billion, one-fifth of Facebook’s $10 billion valuation.

At 25, Zuckerberg is by far the youngest member of the Forbes 400 list. The next youngest person on the list is hedge fund operator John Arnold, who is 35. Last year, Zuckerberg debuted on the list at #321. His net worth at the time was $1.5 billion.

Zuckerberg started Facebook in his Harvard dorm room in 2004, and now Facebook is the third largest site on the internet. In May, Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies invested $200 million into Facebook, setting its $10 billion valuation.

In case you haven’t had enough location-based news tonight, here’s another very interesting bit. It looks like Apple has very quietly bought an online mapping company, Seth Weintraub of Computerworld reports tonight.

Apple’s purchase of Placebase actually took place this past July, and a founder of a partner company that was using Placebase maps tweeted about it. But it slid under most people’s radars as that was the only news out there about it. But Weintraub dug up Placebase CEO Jaron Waldman’s LinkedIn profile tonight, and sure enough, he is now part of the “Geo Team” at Apple.

I noticed something interesting tonight. In the new build of Tweetie 2 (not out yet), a bunch of little red location markers started appearing next to tweets in my stream. Knowing that this new version was built using Twitter’s new Geolocation APIs, I inquired if this mean they had been turned on. Sure enough, they have, developer Loren Brichter just confirmed after talking to Twitter.

But there’s a slight problem. Apparently, the reason these geotags are showing up for all tweets (even those not actually geotagged) is that the documentation was a little unclear on how to handle non-geotagged tweets, Brichter says. The result is that every single tweet is tagged with a location somewhere just off the coast of Africa, south of Ghana. Either this is Atlantis, the Island from Lost, or we have a problem.

Ah, the Windows install process. Long associated with repeated clicking of the “Next” button, it’s also home to one of the more shady practices to exist in modern software: the bundled application. Hapless users looking to get through the process as quickly as possible inevitably wind up installing some junk software that they don’t really want or need, only to scratch their heads when their browser is suddenly slowed down by a clunky new toolbar. Users may not like them, but many developers don’t want to scrap these bundled software packages entirely because they’re a steady source of income. OpenCandy, a startup that launched last year, may offer the solution by pairing up users with software they might actually want. And today it’s announcing that it’s been integrated with the latest version of PrimoPDF by Nitro PDF, the most popular freeware PDF creator.

What if the desktop on your computer was just like your actual desktop? That’s the core idea behind BumpTop, a really nice looking graphical overlay for Windows-based operating systems. But as cool as BumpTop looked, you still had to use your mouse and keyboard to manipulate it. As I made clear yesterday, I want those to die. So good news for me today: BumpTop is adding multi-touch support. And the result is awesome.

When we think of multi-touch right now, most of us think of the iPhone. But really, with such a small screen, there are only so many gestures you can do. Multi-touch BumpTop greatly expands that roster, and includes several gestures that it claims to have patents for. Basically, they have gestures that use all of you fingers, and both hands, and even the side of hands. You can “lasso” things, “shove” them, “scrunch” them, and “crop” them.

One of last year’s TechCrunch50 startups, Bojam, is launching in public beta today and we have 500 invites. Bojam is a Web-based sound studio that lets musicians practice playing music, find other musicians around the world to jam with, and lay down tracks together on the same song. Click here to try out the service.

Bojam is a fully functional music mixer. You can adjust the volume on each track or add effects like distortion and reverb. Similarly, you can solo or mute instruments, loop, cut, copy, paste and trim audio clips. Bojam also includes a plugin that allows you to record and upload directly into the mix, or you can upload tracks recorded in Garage Band or other software.

Top technology advertisers are finally catching on to the fact that we are kind of obsessive here at TechCrunch in our technology coverage and so are our readers. In fact, they’re want to understand why TechCrunch is such a big deal to so many different types of people (we do too.) To help them get a better understanding of us, we’ve constructed a quick 20-question survey that will help them get a better sense of how today’s leading start-ups and enterprises use social media, business and personal technology, and how TechCrunch influences your thinking about key strategic trends.

Please take 5 minutes to complete our survey. We’ll publish the results here on TechCrunch.

Did you know that Failblog serves up 22 million video views per month, and Engadget gets at least 2.3 million monthly views for its gadget videos, while Joystiq gets another 2 million? All three blogs use Viddler, which is now selling ads directly for its top content providers though its just-launched Viddler AdWorks. Advertisers can see a directory of the top three dozen video producers on Viddler and buy ads on their videos (overlay, pre-roll, and post-roll).

Viddler is selling ads against 30 million views a month collectively from those top producers, out of a total of 36 million views for all the videos uploaded to Viddler. Failblog, which puts up videos of pratfalls and people acting stupidly, on its own accounts for 73 percent of Viddler’s video ad inventory, and is a big reason Viddler’s total views have gone from 10 million in January, 2009 to 36 million in August, 2009. After that, the most popular Viddler producers are Engadget and Joystiq, which are both owned by AOL, followed by niche video like WineLibraryTV (142,424 monthly views) and Gary Vaynerchuk’s personal marketing videos, which get only 27,070 views per month).

Twitter has just announced a new feature that is sure to excite anyone who has been waiting for the site to offer an alternative to its Suggested User List. Appropriately called ‘Lists’, the new feature will allow anyone to make a list of other Twitter users and label it appropriately (for example, I could make a list called ‘TC Staff’), then share that list with other members. Twitter writes that the feature is still in limited testing, but that it will eventually be rolled out to all users.

By default any lists you create will be public, though you’ll also be able to hide them. If you choose to leave them publicly viewable, other Twitter users will be able to hit a button to “Follow this list” so they can add everyone at once. This is a big deal — until now the only convenient way to start mass following people on Twitter has been to use its own curated SUL.

If you’re reading this, you clearly use the Internet. And if you use the Internet, you clearly know Google AdSense. It’s pretty much everywhere (even on this site in places). But as much as Google would like you to believe they are serving up ads that users want to click on because they are relevant, these are still ads, and most people do not want to click on them. OneRiot’s new product, RiotWise, has an interesting spin on relevant ads.

You see, RiotWise’s ads are only ads in the sense that someone is paying to place them in a certain highlighted position on the page. But in fact, all of these “ads” are content. And I don’t mean content like the homepage of a website, I mean stories/posts/articles about a particular topic. Just as with Google, these are served up via keywords being searched for. But unlike Google, advertisers aren’t bidding on keywords. Instead, content producers strike a deal with OneRiot to place their content in an emphasized (but clearly labeled) place in their realtime feed.

Have you gotten your Google Wave invite yet? Just kidding — they’re not out yet. The team (which is based in Australia) decided to push them out later today so they could be up to deal with issues surrounding the massive influx of new users. And judging from the response on the web, “massive” is also the perfect word to describe the anticipation for the service.

Ever since it was unveiled at Google I/O this past May, it seems that everyone wants to know everything about Wave. And yesterday, when it was revealed that a big roll-out to more than just developers was around the corner, interest spiked again. Since then, the term has not left Twitter’s Trending Topics area. But there is always a downside to so much hype, and I’m pretty certain we’re going to see it in the coming days and weeks with Google Wave too: Backlash.

With the growing market of internet users in the country, India has become a battlefield for social networks. Google-owned Orkut has long been the most popular social network in India, with Facebook fighting to catch up. But Facebook has been upping the ante over the past few months, and according to August’s ComScore numbers, the plan may be working. In August, Orkut’s unique visitors in India dipped by 800,000 within a month, from 16 million visitors in July to 15.2 million visitors in August. On the other hand, Facebook grew its unique visitors in India by 700,000, from 7.5 million visitors in July to 8.2 million visitors in August.

This the largest drop in unique visitors Orkut has seen in India over the past year, while Facebook has been steadily growing each month. In fact, Facebook’s audience in India is up 228 percent from a year ago, compared to a 35 percent annual gain for Orkut.

Facebook Connect launched to the public less than a year ago, and already it’s seen an incredible amount of traction. Unfortunately, for those people with little to no coding experience, implementing Facebook Connect has seemed like more trouble that it was worth. Today, Facebook has an answer: Facebook Connect Wizard and Playground.

Facebook writes that “you can now incorporate Facebook Connect into your site in 3 easy steps.” The process is simple. First, you enter the name of your site and its URL. Then Facebook asks you to download and then upload a special file to your site’s main directory. And.. that’s about it. Once you’ve done that, Facebook will present you with its Playground — a list of code snippets you can embed on your site to round out the functionality, including Login buttons, profile photos, publishing items to News Feeds, and rendering photos of a user’s friends.

School’s back in session, and Weebly, a startup that makes it super easy to build websites using a drag-and-drop interface, is looking to capitalize on it. Today Weebly is launching a new product geared directly at educators and their students, allowing schoolchildren who may not familiar with the basics of HTML or CSS to craft their own multimedia online blogs and reports with a minimal amount of effort.

The new product is similar to the normal Weebly editor, but with a few key differences. For one, Weebly has stripped out all of its monetization and retail features that wouldn’t be applicable to students. And more importantly, the site is letting teachers manage the accounts of all of their students. Because schools obviously wouldn’t want some of this content to be avilable to the public, teachers can elect to keep their entire class’s accounts set to Private, which means only the student and their teacher can see it.

The original Chumby was soft, cuddly, and cute. The new Chumby One is uptight, all-business, and commercial. I hate it.

The draw to the original Chumby was that there was nothing like it on the market two years ago. You could load it up with all sorts of pre-made widgets like YouTube, weather, news, or one you made thanks to the open source hardware and software. Sure, the upcoming Chumby One still has the original capabilities if not more thanks to the upgraded 454MHz CPU, but it doesn’t have the same crazy beanbag form factor. It’s missing the “cute.”

Social gaming startup Zynga is seeing some impressive traction. It now boats 129 million monthly active users across its portfolio of more than 30 games, according to both Inside Facebook’s AppData(see chart) and Developer Analytics. That’s up from about 50 million three months ago, and 30 million in April.

Zynga’s most popular games are FarmVille (the most popular game on Facebook with 50 million cumulative players), Mafia Wars (the second most popular game on Facebook with 25 million), Zynga Poker, and YoVille. The majority of Zynga’s users play its games on Facebook, but it also has games Bebo, Hi5, MySapce, and Friendster.

Collaboration applications are becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise space. Startup Huddle.net has been steadily accumulating innovative features to its business-friendly collaboration platform and quickly adding big name companies, including Samsung and Panasonic, as clients. Huddle is a network of secure online workspaces where you can share files, collaborate on ideas, manage projects and organize virtual meetings. Today, Huddle is adding several more useful features to its platform—web conferencing, integration with Microsoft Office, and a much-awaited iPhone app.

Huddle’s web conferencing feature, which is similar to web-ex, lets users set up meetings, schedule recurring events, and share their desktop and content with other members of their workspace. Huddle has also sent up a partnership with InterCall, one of the world’s largest conference call providers, to handle phone conferencing. Huddle’s web conferencing tool is integrated with Outlook or Google calendar and users receive free conferencing minutes as a part of their monthly package and can also access low-cost international service plans.