A new service from 83 Degrees called Super Chirp launches this evening that lets Twitter users get paid for their content stream.

This is a theme we’ve touched on in the past. There is a huge market for celebrity fan pages that Super Chirp will play right into. In fact, 83 Degrees CEO Narendra Rocherolle wrote a guest post here last year called A Missed Opportunity – Britney On Twitter where he talks about the idea. Twitter is mobile and it’s real time, two huge advantages over normal fan sites. And it’s constantly refreshed with new content. Britney Spears has 1.7 million Twitter followers. How many of them would be willing to pay $1, or $10, per month to see a premium stream of her content?

Here’s how Super Chirp works. Unlike Twitpub, where publishers have to create a new Twitter account, Super Chirp works through direct messages (Twitter’s private message system). That means publishers can leverage their existing Twitter accounts to promote the paid streams. Users subscribe to the content on the Super Chirp site, pay via Paypal, and then get the messages via DM. They can also visit Super Chirp to see all those paid messages, and sort them by publisher.

The New York Times Sunday edition team picks fights like no one else. The problem is they tend to pick the wrong fights. And mask opinion pieces as straight up factual articles.

In December they wrote about Facebook revenue woes just, as it turned out, at the time that Facebook saw a huge spike in advertising dollars that will propel them to as much as $600 million in revenue this year. Then there was the Tesla article that prompted quite a response from CEO Elon Musk. That article was retitled and rewritten to correct errors and change the overall tone.

I can’t help wondering if our occasional criticism of the NYTimes prompted their most recent attack, this time aimed squarely at us. Not only does writer Damon Darlin get a lot wrong, he just absolutely failed to write the real and far more interesting story that was staring him in the face.

When Damon reached out to me by email to talk about the story, I wrote back something along the lines of “The Sunday New York Times scares the shit out of me” because of their reputation for twisting conversations to fit whatever story they’ve decided to write. But Damon persisted, saying “I want to call you about a column I am doing on different ways news organizations approach reporting rumors.” Seemed fair enough, I have lots of thoughts on that subject.

We talked for 20-30 minutes by phone. About 30 seconds of dialog, remixed to change the meaning and context entirely, made it into the article as quotations. None of the rest of our talk seemed to influence his thesis, that blogs can’t be trusted, at all.

A couple of days ago we reported statistics from StatCounter suggesting the Bing, Microsoft’s new “decision” engine, had bypassed Yahoo as the number 2 search engine in the U.S. and the world. Well guess what? That same data suggests Bing reign as #2 was extremely short-lived: As in one day. Yes, the same data now suggests that just as quickly as Bing shot up, it’s now heading the opposite way. And in fact, it’s still falling.

On June 4, Bing had over 15% of the U.S. search share market, according to the data. On the same day, Yahoo had just over 10%. The following day, Yahoo had almost 11% while Bing had fallen below 10%. And yesterday, Bing had fallen to 6.68% while Yahoo rose again to 11.33%. Meanwhile, the same data suggests that while Google took a big dip during Bing’s reign, it too has now started moving back upwards as Bing declines. Not that Google was in any real danger — on June 4 (the day of Bing’s #2 position), Google had fallen to 72% of searches in the U.S. Now it’s just about back up to 80%.

We’re on the verge of Apple’s WWDC keynote tomorrow morning in San Francisco. We’ll be there covering it live starting at 10 AM PST. After the usual months of speculation, there are two things Apple’s VP of marketing Phil Schiller is expected to focus on during the keynote: Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” and the iPhone platform. Obviously, the iPhone 3.0 software will be a big part of that, but most of those details were already given during Apple’s iPhone 3.0 SDK event a few months back. That’s why a new piece of iPhone hardware seems likely to take center stage tomorrow as well.

Details of such a device (or devices) have been trickling out over the past few months. It now seems fairly likely that the device will look similar to the current iPhone 3G, perhaps with a different, more matte-finish back and a loss of the silver ring that goes around the screen now. It will likely feature a better camera — probably 3.2 megapixels (as opposed to the current version’s 2 megapixels) and could have autofocus. The device should also be able to record video. It’s also possible that it could have a front-facing camera, though that may be saved for a future version rather than this one. Speed will likely be a focus as the device should have a faster processor, more RAM and be able to handle faster 3G connection speeds. And that leads to two final rumors: The device’s name and battery life.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber made his predictions for the WWDC keynote this morning, talking about what he’s heard and what he’s unsure about. He has a great track record when it comes to such things, so when he says he’s heard a new possible name for the device, it’s at the very least probably a code name, which he notes. And I hope it is a code name, because it’s kind of lame: iPhone 3GS.

I had an informative chat with Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur at the TechFellow Awards Friday night, where he revealed to me the future plans for Seesmic Desktop, a desktop Twitter and Facebook client that’s built on Adobe Air. Seesmic will launch a new version of the desktop client next week that will let users compress their stream of Facebook updates and Twitter messages into one column. Currently, the client divides streams from different accounts and social networks into several columns.

The new version also features a new button that will let you post a Tweet to multiple Twitter accounts at the same time. And Seesmic will also let you see tracking stats from links sent out with url shortening service bit.ly. Seesmic’s current version lets you use a variety of other url shorteners, including tr.im and Snurl, but doesn’t let you see stats within the client itself.

It’s been over three months since I wrote anything here on TechCrunch, but over the next 10 days or so you’ll be hearing more from me as I travel with a group of 32 techies through East Asia as part of GeeksOnAPlane, a field trip of sorts organized by Dave McClure intended to open our Western eyes to how the technology industry works in Japan and China.

The web as experienced by the biggest continent on the planet unfortunately gets short shrift on the blogs that regularly hit Techmeme. I personally can profess to have only cursory knowledge of the trends and companies that come out of Asia, and that knowledge consists mainly of echoes that get passed along by word of mouth. Sarah Lacy has done all of us a favor by recently reporting from China, but we can always use more to enlighten us about what’s going on across the Pacific.

Even on the Web, world dominance must be achieved one country at a time. While Facebook has long been the largest social network in the world, and should soon pass MySpace in the U.S., it is not the largest social network in every country. The map above created by Vincenzo Cosenza resembles more a game of Risk, with Facebook sweeping across the globe from the West.

Using Alexa and Google Trend data, Cosenza color-coded the map based on which social network is the most popular in each country. All of the light green countries belong to Facebook. But there are still pockets of resistance in Russia (where V Kontakte rules), China (QQ), Brazil and India (Orkut), Central America, Peru, Mongolia, and Thailand (hi5), South Korea (Cyworld), Japan (Mixi), the Middle East (Maktoob), and the Philippines (Friendster).

One of the most useful, if often-overlooked, features of Google Book Search is the ability to enter your own books and create a personal library which you can then search if Google has scanned those books. (And chances are it probably has). If you are trying to find a passage or a factoid you once read but can’t remember the book no matter how hard you wrack your brain, the ability to search your personal library can come in handy. Except who wants to enter each book one at a time?

Now you can scan your books into your library on Google Book Search using a normal barcode scanner. I am not one hundred percent convinced that this is actually faster than simply typing in the title of the book and adding it to your library. It is faster than typing in the ISBN numbers, however, which is how Google Book Search handles mass imports.

Founder and former CEO of Netvibes Tariq Krim is moving forward with his ambitious Jolicloud project, looking to build a better operating system for web workers with netbooks (or smartbooks or cloud computers, whichever term you prefer). A couple of days ago, we got a couple of exclusive screenshots from the team, and just a day after the startup started sending out a handful of invite codes for early adopters who wanted to get a peak at the alpha developer release. I also got hold of one and have been using Jolicloud on my Acer Aspire ONE for about four days now. These are my initial findings.

We’re just two days away from Apple’s WWDC keynote where it’s expected to show off the next generation iPhone hardware. Not surprisingly, pictures are starting to surface on the web of the purported device — a French site, Nowhere Else, has a bunch of them, that have since been posted elsewhere. Who knows if the pictures are real or fake — it seems like just as often these days people yell “Photoshop,” when the product is actually real as the vice-versa situation. But real or fake, I have to say that I hope they’re real for one reason.

While at first glance, that device looks nearly identical to the current iPhone (it seems like that will definitely be the case), there is one big difference: A front-facing camera. This is interesting to me for two reasons, because it could jump-start two trends: Mobile video chatting and the self-picture.

No, we didn’t get a Palm Pre to check out before its launch today — something which is a bit fishy and contributed to a big heap of drama earlier today. But it does seem like a ton of people both on the web and in real-life are very excited about the device. And they should be, having just read others’ reviews and talking to friends who have used it, it seems like it will easily be at least the number two coolest phone out there.

So for those of us who didn’t get one today, here’s the video that plays upon starting up your new Pre. It’s pretty damn awesome — much better than the iPhone’s startup screen — which I’ve been seeing a lot of lately. This one actually reminds me a bit of the cool Apple TV startup video.

Judging from the reaction on the web, people aren’t having too hard of a time getting the new Palm Pre at Sprint stores across the country. But last night, one woman was apparently so concerned that she wouldn’t be able to get one that she sped her car to a Sprint store — wait, let me rephrase that — she sped her car into a Sprint store.

Check out the video embedded below from NBC Chicago. It’s pretty incredible. Joking aside, I highly doubt the elderly woman behind the wheel actually wanted a Pre and more importantly, she was fine aside from a few bruises. But as you can see, the store didn’t fare so well. And it was probably the worst time something like that could have happened given the Pre launch today.

So.

The Gillmor Gang was today. We started things off with a nice talk about Rajeev Motwani and his contributions to the community. That was nice.

Then Leo Laporte started talking about the Palm Pre, which launches today. That part of the show, which turned as ugly as a show can turn, is in the video clip embedded below. The unedited audio file of the show is here, you can listen to the pre show banter and the first bit about Motwani before the train wreck.

I ask Leo whether he bought the Pre or got it free and in advance of the launch, which I think is relevant because Palm is being very picky about who they give them out to. We were promised one but it wasn’t delivered. We suspect our critical coverage may be the reason, one other blogger I spoke to is in the same situation. Many of the pre-launch reviews are overtly positive, and we’re comparing those reviews where the journalist got a free Pre in advance of launch to the less cheerful ones written by people who had to pay for the device. Getting a high profile device in advance is a huge advantage, and is a conflict of interest that should be disclosed in our opinion. But the catch is this – as long as Palm sends out a letter with the device asking for it back in a week, it isn’t considered a financial conflict of interest. The fact that few people ever return them is rarely brought up.

Anyway, Leo lost it and shut down the show. I’ve had a lot of interactions with him and they’ve always been positive. Or at least I thought so. I wasn’t watching the video live during the show and I really thought Leo was joking until the very end (as did Steve Gillmor and Loren Feldman, who were chuckling in the video). My “what are you going to do about it” comment doesn’t sound so great in hindsight. But I really did just think he was joking around.

In early June 2007, Palm was teetering on the edge of obscurity. Their flagship Treo product line had gone stale, numbers were down across the board, and rumors of a sale were abound. On June 4th, 2007 it was announced that Elevation Partners had purchased a 25% equity stake of Palm for $325 million. Flash forward to today; just two years later (almost to the day), Palm has launched the Pre, a phone which managed to nab the attention of just about every blog and blog reader out there.

So what changed? What had that new-found $325 million bought them? Talent. Lots and lots of talent – from their competitors, no less. With a good amount of lucky timing and some decent salary proposals, Palm managed to snatch up at least 8 people who were just oh-so-damn good at what they do, ending up with the Palm Pre and webOS as a result.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin have always given Professor Rajeev Motwani significant credit for helping them create what would eventually become Google. Today, as I say my personal goodbye to the man who helped so many people in our community, I’m also spending some time going back and reading some of the early papers that Rajeev co-authored describing how PageRank could become the basis for a new kind of search engine.

In a 1998 paper called “What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket” Brin, Motwani, Page and Terry Winograd say “…we have developed a global ranking of Web pages called PageRank based on the link structure of the Web that has properties that are useful for search and navigation..we have used PageRank to develop a novel search engine called Google, which also makes heavy use of anchor text.”

An even earlier paper in 1998 that the four co-authored called “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web” went into much more detail on PageRank. “In this paper, we take advantage of the link structure of the Web to produce a global “importance” ranking of every web page. This ranking, called PageRank, helps search engines and users quickly make sense of the vast heterogeneity of the World Wide Web.”

The papers are embedded below.

Twitter has faced harsh criticism from celebrities, including Kanye West, about impersonators creating unauthorized accounts on their behalf. Tony La Russa, the manager of the St. Louis Cardinals Major League Baseball franchise is suing Twitter claiming that someone is pretending to be him on the site.

Today, Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone responded to the lawsuit, adamantly stating that Twitter will not settle with La Russa, calling the lawsuit an “unnecessary waste of judicial resources bordering on frivolous.” Twitter, as it has done with other similar situations, suspended the account in question.

But in response to the problem of impersonators of brands and famous people, Twitter is giving us a sneak peak of an experimental feature they call “verified accounts.” Twitter says it will start rolling out the beta of this feature this summer for a small set of public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other celebs who run the risk of impersonation.

Here’s a question that’s been running through my head ever since Michael posted about FriendFeed being in danger of becoming the coolest app no one uses: exactly how many startups out there are trying to be the one social networking service aggregator to rule them all, and how many is enough?

It seems like every day startups come up with new applications, be it for desktop, Web and/or mobile phone, that essentially want to be the gateway to our online lives. In reality though, there are not that many people who want – let alone need – continuous access to multiple social networking services, and even if they do, how many people (outside of the tech industry) do you know who are genuinely waiting for a extra third-party that helps them manage all their online personas?

Let’s face it, most people are sheep. It is much easier to follow than to lead, and on Twitter it is no different. A full 80 percent of Twitter accounts have fewer than 10 followers, according to an analysis of seven million Twitter accounts provided to TechCrunch by Web security firm Purewire (which operates TweetGrade). What’s more, 30 percent have zero followers.

Does this mean nobody is using Twitter? Or that they are using it more as a one-way information consumption service?

The fact that an estimated 32 million people around the world visited Twitter.com alone in April certainly indicates that there is something going on there. It just may be that Twitter really isn’t as much about two-way micro-conversations as it is about one-way micro-broadcasting. Indeed, a recent Harvard Business School study suggested that the top 10 percent of Twitter users produce more than 90 percent of all Tweets.

Here is how Purewire breaks down activity on Twitter by number of followers, followings, and Tweets:

The news of Professor Rajeev Motwani’s untimely death on Friday afternoon spread quickly throughout the couple of hundred attendees of tonight’s TechFellow event in San Francisco. The mood of the event turned from cheerful cocktail sipping banter to stunned silence.

Most everyone who was there is his friend. And most everyone there had a story to tell about how Motwani had helped them at one time or another, asking nothing in return. I have a couple of those stories myself.

Ron Conway, a long time friend of Motwani, was visibly shaken. We asked Ron to make a few remarks to honor Motwani before the event started. His talk was not scripted or prepared. He was in a state of shock before, during and after his talk. And it clearly came directly from the heart. He talked about a man who loved entrepreneurs and who would meet with anyone to at least give them advice. Motwani influenced hundreds of entrepreneurs and students, Conway said, and never refused a meeting. We’ve included the video of Conway’s tribute to Motwani above.

Google founder Sergey Brin, who describes Motwani as his “friend and teacher,” also wrote a tribute on his blog:

It’s a Saturday morning. You’re making Silver Dollar Hots for the family. The doorbell rings. It’s the mailman. He’s brought a CubeGuard.

That’s right: on the traditional day before or the actual day of rest, the mailman is here to bring you something to remind you of work. But what a gadget it is! It’s basically one of those crowd control tapes with a spring loaded reel to wind it back up after use. However, this tape has a calming scene – a mountain range or a happy face – with a message (”Do not disturb” or, in my case, “John is blogging. Do not disturb.”

That’s right: it’s crowd control tape for your cubicle. Read on for more info and a giveaway.