Tickets for the one and only Crunchies, which honors the best products, startups and founders from around the tech world, are now on sale at Amiando.

The event is being held on Friday, January 9 at the beautiful Herbst Theater in San Francisco. And we’re also holding an extravagant (read: free drinks and cool music from MySpace) after party across the street at City Hall’s Rotunda from 9 - midnight. MySpace is bringing a celebrity DJ, and we will also feature a gaming room with a variety of online and offline games (if you are interested in demo’ing, contact jlogo at earthlink.net or heather at techcrunch.com).

Among other surprises at the event, you’ll see the famous Richter Scales make a return performance. We’ve commissioned them to write a special song just for the Crunchies.

Following in the tradition of Google’s Zeitgeist and Yahoo’s list of top searches, MySpace has put together its “Top 8’s of 2008″, detailing some of the most popular artists, songs, searches, performers, and blogs on the social network in the last year.

The biggest winner overall seems to be Twilight - the vampire flick that took the world by storm earlier this winter ranked highest in terms of overall searches on MySpace as well as for the movie trailer category. Other popular search terms are unsurprisingly entertainment oriented (and stand in contrast to popular searches on Google and Yahoo, many of which were focused on the election and the Olympics).

Google Friend Connect launched with Twitter this morning, a big win for Google in the fight for control over user logins on third party sites. Recent speculation was that Twitter would be partnering with Facebook to integrate Connect first.

Twitter quickly corrected stories, telling reporters that they’ll soon integrate with Facebook Connect, too. Twitter CEO Evan Williams even Tweeted about it, saying “For the record: Twitter did not “choose Google, not Facebook.” We’re working with both. We have more to do on the FB side before launch.”

But, er, hey Twitter, what about MySpace? You know, the company that you agreed to launch with back in May? Here, this screen shot may jog your memory.

For some startups, there is life after the deadpool. Take Wallop, a social-network-turned-social-app company that dove under in September, only to now arise again as Coveroo. Wallop still had some money from the $13 million it raised in 2005 and 2006, but its business wasn’t working. It’s original idea was to sell virtual “self expression” items through its own social network. It ended up creating animated greeting card and party invite apps for Facebook. Rest in peace.

CEO Karl Jacob isn’t giving up, though. He is just moving in a different direction, away from virtual goods and towards customizing real consumer devices. Using mostly its stock, Wallop acquired Etchstar, a custom engraver that specializes in laptops, iPods, and cell phones. And now it is relaunching as Coveroo, which is making it even easier to personalize your digital devices. All you do is order a back cover to your existing cell phone, pick a design, and they send it to you.

Xoopit, the email-enhancement service that helps you locate files, images and videos in your inbox, is getting a potentially big shot in the arm with the launch of Yahoo Mail’s application platform today.

Previously, Xoopit was only available to Gmail users who were proactive enough to install a Firefox plugin. But with the opening up of Yahoo Mail, Xoopit will now have more immediate access that webmail service’s 275 million monthly global users. And the company won’t have to hijack Yahoo Mail to do it, as it has essentially done with Gmail - Xoopit will be presented nicely in a Yahoo application gallery for easy installation.

“I have never seen anything like this” said a corporate law partner at a large silicon valley law firm. He was referring to the undoing of a $17 million venture round at BitTorrent and subsequent recapitalization that we reported yesterday.

In one board action, $10 million was removed from the company’s bank account and the valuation slashed from $177 million to just $35 million.

I’m not suggesting we turn off old Rudolph here, but which holiday TV show or movie would you turn off at your next holiday get-together? The Charlie Brown special? That very special Christmas episode of Scrubs? Fox News? Answer and win a TV-B-Gone just in time for CES.

Yahoo has invited the press to an event in San Francisco today where it will announce the next steps in its open strategy (details found here).

As GigaOm speculated over the weekend, we should be hearing details about the deployment of applications on Yahoo Mail. We’ll post the details here as they become available, starting within the next few minutes.

For people who live inside their instant messenger clients and SMS text messages on their mobile phones, Kwyno wants to help bridge those worlds with the Web. Kwyno is a simple service developed by Raphael Caixeta out of Boca Raton, Florida that launches in private beta today. We have 200 invites here.

Kwyno is very raw at the edges, and needs a lot more feedback before it becomes anywhere near useful, but it points in an interesting direction. You enter commands like “check techcrunch” or “check twitter,” and it returns the latest feed headlines or Twitter stream (after you’ve given the service your Twitter credentials).

This Friday, we the editors of CrunchGear will be hosting our Gala Online Awards Ceremony complete with dancing bears, punch, and whirling mirror balls. Until then, we invite you, the reading public, to select your favorite - and least favorite - gear of 2008 in our 2008 People’s Choice Awards. Click through to make your end-of-year picks.

Google’s got a new partner at Friend Connect, their service to let users log in to third party websites with their user credentials from social networks.

Last week at Le Web conference MySpace was doing all the heavy lifting to promote Google Friend Connect. But it turns out Twitter is the first third party service after Plaxo to actually integrate with Google’s new service.

What The New Announcement Means

For users, it just means you can use your Twitter credentials to sign into third party sites like Billboard For The People, and pull in your Twitter friends and some profile information.

But for Twitter, it’s a real change in policy and an illustration of just how much they’ve grown in the last year. Back in May Twitter was seen as a relying party in the Google/MySpace/Facebook war, and they hastily chose MySpace as their partner of choice (Data Availability is now called MySpaceID). In their launch announcement for Data Availability MySpace showed a Twitter log in screen where users were using their MySpace account to access Twitter.

Google’s universal sign-in system, Friend Connect, which just opened to all Websites two weeks ago, now accepts Twitter IDs as a sign-in option. That means when you visit a participating Website that accepts Friend Connect as a log-in option, you can sign in using your Twitter account. If any of the people you follow on Twitter are also members of the third-party site, they will automatically be added as your friends.

Twit Or Fit launches today - effectively an idea borne of combining Twitter with a site like Hot Or Not, where you rate the appearance of people displayed. HotOrNot was recently sold for a rumored $20 million, but since TwitOrFit relies on Twitter and therefore has little inherent intellectual property, I somehow doubt it will attract a similar valuation. However, it is already doing a lot of traffic and the US - Twitter’s biggest market outside Japan - is only just waking up right now. (The site is coming out of the UK, where Twit is slang for fool and Fit means good-looking).

In most offices, coming to a consensus on a decision can be a time wasting and often futile process - thoughts are often shared in convoluted Email threads, some voices go unheard, and responses are often wishy-washy to the point of being totally useless.

Portland-based startup Zapproved has created a decision system that removes this ambiguity by forcing users to make up their minds. The site allows members to send out proposals via Email, each of which includes a description of the project and large, bold buttons asking if the recipient ‘Approves’ or ‘Denies’ the idea. It’s a simple concept, but it’s one that could easily help companies cut back on meetings and frivolous email exchanges by streamlining the decision-making process.

OpenX (which used to be called Openads), provider of an open-source ad serving solution for web publishers - we use it at TechCrunch -, is growing like weed under the leadership of former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller, who is the company’s chairman, and ex-Yahoo executive Tim Cadogan who is CEO. According to the company, they’re serving well over 300 billion ad impressions through its software as of this month, while its Hosted product line has achieved a more than 1 billion monthly ad impression run rate.

In August 2008, OpenX announced the launch of version 2.6, an update to its downloadable ad server and introduced a couple of features which spurred usage of the system, including a new API, dashboard and a speedier ad tagging system.

Stickam, a live video streaming service that competes with the likes of Justin.tv and Ustream.tv, is releasing a new API that effectively allows anyone to build their own streaming video startup with a minimal amount of effort. The service is normally pay-as-you-go, but the first 100 users to sign up will be able to try it out for free.

StickamAPI allows developers to leverage Stickam’s infrastructure - which handles handles everything from actually hosting videos to bandwidth and streaming - to integrate video streaming into their own sites. While most video services have allowed users to create their own ‘channels’ (typically videos associated with a group or theme) and embed their videos wherever they’d like, the Stickam API allows for much deeper integration of live video streaming.

Peter Burrows at BizWeek has some hot news about Palm’s new OS, Nova. The company hopes to fit their new system in the gap between the BlackBerry and the iPhone (good luck - Microsoft has been trying to do that all year) and they are looking to grab 2% of the middle-range market shere, the range that Google/Android is also gunning for.

“If they can’t show me a large, active audience, I’m not going to be interested,” says Jeff Holden, CEO of Web 2.0 company Pelago, maker of a social networking tool for the iPhone. “At this point in the game, you’re toast unless you have something completely unbelievable.”

Looks like Google is rolling out more tests with integrating results from its Shopping / Product Search engine (former Froogle) in traditional web search queries, right before the start of the holiday period. This isn’t necessarily new (see this WebMasterWorld forum entry from November 2007), but it does appear to be more widespread now. Our tipster says he’s had 5 of his friends test queries like ‘bed sheets’, and they all saw the changes, although sometimes after about a dozen times of hitting ‘Refresh’.

I’m not able to reproduce this, but it might have something to do with the fact that I’m not based in the US. If the images I embedded below are in fact real, this shows Google is getting very serious about creating a nice direct gateway for Google Checkout partners.

Last year YouTube scored big at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. They had the best space at the conference, with world leaders and celebrities wandering through on the way to the press area (I, on the other hand, flailed).

Attendees and everyone else were asked to create a video and answer the question “What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?” Here’s Bono giving his answer. Henry Kissinger and Shimon Peres were among the others to do so.

Mahalo is now answering your questions. The human-curated search engine/ condensed wiki guide is adding a Q&A service called Mahalo Answers to its mix. It is a combination of Yahoo Answers and the long-defunct Google Answers, with some cute avatars and virtual currency thrown in. (Disclosure: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is our partner in the TechCrunch50 conference).

Like Yahoo Answers, anyone can ask or answer any question. But Mahalo Answers throws in a twist. If someone really wants to encourage the best answers, they can offer a tip in “Mahalo Dollars,” which can be funded through PayPal and are convertible into real dollars once a member has earned at least 40 of them. For those of you who remember Google Answers, it paired questioners with vetted researchers who found answers for a fee. This is slightly different in that questions are not assigned to a specific researcher. As many people can answer it as they want and all compete for the tip. Furthermore, the tip can be rescinded by the questioner if he or she is not satisfied with any of the answers.