One of the most tiresome group of people you encounter when you write a weekly column is the “suggesters”.

Throughout the week, my inbox receives a steady flow of emails; from friends, from colleagues, but mostly from total strangers – all containing useful links to stories they “assume I’ve seen”. And always with the same suggestion: “you should write about this in your column!”.

Worse than the suggesters are the “trusters”. They’re even more irritating because of their belief that they wield some kind of editorial influence. “Trust you’ll be writing about this in your column this week. Can’t wait to hear your take on it!” they say, blithely assuming that their lack of patience will ultimately be rewarded. Some of them even add a ‘LOL’ to further underline what total and utter wankers they are.

In truth, it rarely pays to indulge the recommenders or the trusters. If a subject has blipped across their radar then chances are, by the time my weekly deadline has come around, it will have been done to death by other bloggers and columnists. By Saturday even the person who ‘couldn’t wait’ to hear my take on a subject will be utterly bored with it.

The perfect example of this is Rupert Murdoch’s “threat” to remove News Corp content from Google, and his “negotiations” with Microsoft to make articles from The Wall Street Journal and the rest “only available on Bing”. It’s no exaggeration to say that the entire fucking universe has emailed me to say how much they’re looking forward to hearing my opinion on the prospect.

Over the last six months just about all of my tech friends have started using Foursquare, a geolocation-based game that was built by the creators of Google-acquired Dodgeball. Some of them will literally pull out their phones as soon as they enter any restaurant, event or even TechCrunch HQ and check in just so they can be named ‘mayor’ of that establishment (whoever checks into any particular location the most times becomes mayor of that location). It’s fascinating and a bit bizarre to watch, and it clearly shows that Foursquare has tapped into something powerful.

But all this time I’ve had a nagging feeling that Foursquare, at least in its current form, is not going to be the next Twitter, as some people have concluded. Because as good as Foursquare is at figuring out where and what your friends are up to, they can’t hope to compete with Facebook. That is, if Facebook does Geo right.

While the world’s largest social network has been almost totally silent with regard to its plans for geolocation, we’ve been hearing an increasing number of rumors about Facebook finally coming close to launching these features. Such rumors have come and gone for a long time, but all signs point to the most recent batch being true.

You can now run Chromium OS, the open source developmental version of Google Chrome OS, on your Dell Mini 10v. Don’t have one? Neither do I, so don’t feel too bad.

Hey, guys. I, John Biggs, will be in Hong Kong and Guangdong next week (November 30-December 5) to visit some folks and would love to meet up with Web 2.0 and gadget purveyors in mother China. If you would like to chat, drop me a line at john @ crunchgear.com and let me know what’s up. I’m thinking about doing an informal meet-up on Thursday so advice on places to meet in Hong Kong are welcome.

In this age of instant Internet celebrity, anyone can become famous for 15 seconds (to rework Andy Warhol’s oft-quoted maxim). But what does famous mean exactly when anyone can have a Facebook fan page—those public pages on Facebook set up by brands, media outlets, celebs, and wanna-be celebs. As it turns out, being popular is not as easy as it looks. A full 77 percent of Facebook fan pages have less than 1,000 fans, according to an upcoming report by Sysomos, a social media monitoring and analytics firm.

Once a fan page is set up (here’s ours), anyone on Facebook can become your “fan,” which is like following someone on Twitter in that it doesn’t require a reciprocal friendship. Sysomos analyzed 600,000 fan pages on Facebook and came up with the distribution curve in the chart above. The vast bulk of fan pages have between 10 and 1,000 fans. Only 4 percent have more than 10,000 fans, and less than 1/20th of a percent have more than a million fans. It breaks down as follows:

While Black Friday has long been a popular phenomenon for brick and mortar stores, the deal frenzy has been extending to e-retailers and online stores. Now, sales on the web are equally as lucrative as those in the stores. eBay is launching a campaign to capitalize on the holiday shopping season, called “12 Days Of Deals,” and has also rolled out a new Deal-focused iPhone app and partnered with Microsoft to offer deals directly from Internet Explorer 8.

Today, the e-commerce giant is launching a interactive map that shows all of the transactions that took place on eBay on Black Friday. The map provides a visualization of all U.S.-based buyer and seller transactions that occurred on eBay on Black Friday.

One of the best things about being an academic is being able to mold young minds and guide them to success. When one of my students, Andrew Leblanc told me he was entering the Duke Startup Challenge Elevator Pitch Competition, I told him to come and see me and do a practice run. After all, I had judged several of these contests at Duke and other universities. I thought I knew what worked.

After the eleventh iteration, Andrew got it right. He wasn’t trying to pack his presentation with unnecessary details. He had slowed down his pitch, added a personal touch and was now exuding confidence. Andrew even researched the background of the judges and tailored his message to their interests. So after two hours of intense preparation, I had little doubt that Andrew would win.

Andrew lost. I was surprised. But what I told him afterward is that it really doesn’t matter. Contrary to what the organizers of these competitions will tell you, university business plan contests don’t produce winning companies. Yes, a number of companies have emerged from business plan bake-offs that have been moderate or small successes. But not a single home-run has emerged from this now-omnipresent practice.

We reported yesterday about Twitter Japan’s plans to start charging followers to view tweets from certain users starting January and explained why this paid subscription model could work in Japan.

Well, please forget it, this won’t happen. Just a few minutes ago, Digital Garage (the company responsible for Twitter operations in Japan), issued a press release (English PDF, Japanese PDF) stating there won’t be any fee-based services of any kind on the site and that Twitter in Japan will remain completely free for the foreseeable future. There’s also a blog post by the Twitter Japan team (who just copied and pasted the press release text, providing no further explanation). Digital Garage says the media reports on their plans to monetize Twitter are based on a “misunderstood presentation by a DG subsidiary, DG Mobile”.

Video Professor continues to be angry that I called them a scam in my original Scamville post. They’ve gotten nowhere reaching out to me directly (more on that below), so now they’ve tried complaining to the Washington Post, which has syndicated our content since 2008. The Washington Post stood firm beside us today and kept our original post as written. Good for them.

Essentially Video Professor is arguing that they didn’t have the chance to respond to our post before we published, and that in general we aren’t behaving very journalistically.

One of my favorite habits of journalists is that they refuse to state an opinion. Instead, they find a source to say whatever it is they want said and then quote them. And when I say “favorite,” what I really mean is that I hate it.

The story the journalist writes has the look of objectivity but really it’s just the same as if the journalist wrote what she or he meant, directly, in the first place. A gold star journalist will then find a “balancing” quote from someone else, often the person or entity being attacked. “When did you stop beating your wife,” etc.

I prefer to just skip all that nonsense and get right to the meat of a matter. And most of my favorite bloggers do the same. None of us have the audacity to think that we are your only news source. You can find other opinions elsewhere, and judge them on their merits, too.

Video Professor was a side note in our original Scamville post, just one of a bunch of scams that were making their way into social games on Facebook and MySpace. But now we’re focused on them like a laser.

The year is 1963. It’s November. At 1:40 PM ET, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite comes on the air. “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.” Rapidly, everyone in America descends upon the closest television set to tune in.

Thankfully, we have not yet had a tragedy of that magnitude in the age of the realtime web. But we will. It’s just a matter of time.

If it were to happen today, most people would still turn to their TV sets to get the most up-to-date information on such an event. We saw that on September 11, 2001. But a large number of people would also now turn to the web. And there they would likely find the information they were looking for faster than those watching on television. We’ve seen it time and time again recently.

While consumers around the U.S. are sniffing out Black Friday deals today, sample sale sites have emerged to provide members with serious discounts year round. Online sample sales sites such as Gilt Groupe, HauteLook, Ideeli, RueLaLa and others, have been picking up serious traction in the past year.

We’ve seen a plethora of sites pop up for women’s and men’s clothing and accessories, travel deals and even children’s clothes. Totsy, an invitation only sales site that features children’s brands, baby gear and products, recently launched to appeal to parents looking for a bargain.

If you’re anything like me – and let’s for all of our sakes pray that you’re not – then your first thought as you stagger back to your desk today, bloated and giddy after Thanksgiving, will likely be “what can I do to kill time until the end of the week?”

Actual work is out of the question, obviously. If you’re a PC person then there’s always Minesweeper, while Mac users can make a start on editing their Thanksgiving videos in iMovie. Linux fan? I suppose once you’ve finished your daily six hours of masturbation, you can just fill up the rest of the time pompously explaining to the rest of us precisely why what we’re doing is wrong. You know, the usual.

But, regardless of our OS allegiance, there’s one activity we can all enjoy together – and that’s taking a look back at the last seven days of TechCrunch. So let’s get started, shall we?

(And Linux users, please wash your hands before clicking. We all know where they’ve been…)

We all know that Psystar is busy bleeding out in federal court, but that doesn’t mean the fun stops. We’ll be dissecting their glorious failure for quite some time. The most recent development: it seems their plan for taking a bite out of Apple’s sales was comically ambitious. How many clones do you think they sold in 2009? Somewhat under a thousand would be putting it kindly. And how many were they hoping to sell? Around a hundred times that.

This according to some recently released slides depicting Psystar’s pitch to venture capitalists — some of whom must have clearly wanted to be taken in, or else they would have called it the cock-and-bull story it certainly was. Now, to be fair, the 12m units figure cited in the headline was part of the “aggressive growth model.” 1.45m was the conservative estimate, which is technically not millions. For reference, Apple sold just over 10m Macs during 2009.

Undoubtedly by now you’ve heard about Tiger Woods’ car crash. Early reports had him in serious condition (which remember, is better than critical condition) after he apparently hit a fire hydrant and a tree while leaving his home in his SUV. The latest reports say he has been released from the hospital and is “fine.” But I’m not going to speak to any of that because that’s not what we do (you can find out more here).

Instead, as I’m watching this unfold infront of my eyes on the Internet, I’m reminded that this type of story is exactly why the web is destroying newspapers, and should eventually even take down television and the main source of news for most people. I first heard the news via a BNOnews bulletin sent via push notification to my iPhone. I immediately pulled up Twitter and already some 10-15 people had retweeted it and the news was appearing in my stream.

Over the last few days, Facebook has apparently been rolling out some UI changes to a small number of users, moving many of the navigation elements that currently rest at the bottom of the screen back to the left sidebar. The changes are subtle enough that they probably won’t spark yet another user rebellion against Facebook — aside from the people who will hate it automatically — but they’re very significant.

The changes in the screenshot above are nearly identical to the shots that were presented at Facebook’s developer garage a month ago. But there are some key differences. First, search now has much more prominent placement, appearing just above (and almost as an extension of) your News Feed.

In time for Black Friday, Microsoft and eBay are partnering to offer eBay Daily Deals to Internet Explorer 8 users directly from the browser. Via a Internet Explorer Web Slice, Microsoft will offer users the best “Daily Deals” from eBay from within the browser.

The deals will be found within Favorites Bar on IE8, and will be updated daily within the browser. In conjunction with the new feature, eBay will also launch a “12 Days of Deals” promotion that will feature a deal of the day within the browser starting tomorrow. The search feature will also let you search eBay from IE8 and will show suggest popular products on eBay to users. And you can find and preview eBay items from any site you are on without leaving the page. eBay previously launched a browser highlighter for IE last year.

Perfect for Black Friday: JustBought.it lets you share what you’re thinking of buying – or what you’ve already picked up – with your Twitter and Facebook friends in just a couple of steps.

When you sign up for the service, you can have it connect directly to your Twitter and/or Facebook account, giving you the opportunity to share your shopping experience with your social graph by letting your friends and followers know what you’ve purchased where (including pictures and product links). You can hook up with other people who have similar interests, and easily determine if you have friends who are already using the service on Gmail or Hotmail.

We reported today that Digital Garage, Twitter’s partner in Japan, is ready to roll out a new, Japan-only way to monetize the service. The way it’ll work is pretty simple: Japanese Twitter users will soon be able to charge their followers to view tweets – on a monthly basis or per single tweet. Otherwise they will only see excerpts or no text in the postings at all. Digital Garage gets a 30% cut.

Not charging companies for holding accounts but having users pay to view tweets? What may sound like a bold move at first actually makes sense, as the web in Japan (where I am based) features a number of peculiarities that play into the hands of Digital Garage’s Japanese operations.

So it’s been nearly 10 days since Foursquare launched its social mobile game ‘ground assault’ into 50 more cities, including a bunch of European ones. But what I’d like to know is who’s actually using it here in Europe?

Because, you see, Europeans are already quite well served by location based mobile applications like Qype, the various localised versions of Yelp, and other startups like Rummble. And there are increasingly new kids on the block like Flook.

What is clear however, is that only Foursquare and Gowalla (at least to my knowledge) have come up with this gaming approach to ‘checking in’ which has attracted so much interest from high profile blogs like TechCrunch and bloggers like Robert Scoble.

The question is, which will scale and ultimate prove the winner? Because – at least in this instance – we have two distinct approaches to the issue of social, mobile and location.

The news of the day in social media land: Twitter is apparently going to start experimenting with paid premium accounts through its Japanese subsidiary, which has always been a bit separated from the rest of Twitter and in many ways a playground for the company (Groups, Twicco, Twitvideo.jp).

Japanese media are reporting that Twitter is going to introduce a tiered payment model and aims to charge people to view tweets from certain premium Twitter accounts.

Update: TC contributor Serkan Toto (who’s based in Japan) followed up with six reasons why this subscription model might just work out well for Twitter … in Japan.