One of my longstanding gripes with Facebook Platform has been its lack of a unified payment platform that would offer developers a way to tie a Facebook-branded payment system into their apps. Back in March 2008, the company announced that one was coming in the “next 180 days”. That milestone came and went, and since then the company has been quiet about its current progress (we’re typically told things like “It’s not coming out any time soon”).

But now it sounds like payments are finally starting to make some headway, reports Eric Eldon of VentureBeat, who writes that Facebook is set to begin testing a payment system with developers “in a few weeks”. We’ve independently confirmed that Facebook is indeed planning to test a payment platform, and that it will be a limited to a very small number of developers.

The need for a payment platform may not be immediately obvious – after all, there are already quite a few ways for developers to accept payments through third party services like PayPal, and some companies are making quite a bit of money in the process.

One of the biggest knocks against traditional media isn’t necessarily that it’s not online — most of it is now — but rather that it’s slow when it comes to delivering news. By the time an old media site gets a story approved, written and edited, a dozen blogs probably have already covered the same news. That’s not always the case of course, and for those stories, Times Wire, a new service by The New York Times, will be very useful.

Times Wire allows you to see New York Times articles, blog posts and stories by some wire services as they are placed on the web. It automatically updates every minute, placing the latest articles at the top of a stream of content in reverse chronological order. As an overview of the entire NYT site, it’s actually quite interesting. Looking at it right now, I’ve seen five new stories pop up in the past five minutes. But for the individual sections, such as technology, it’s pretty limited.

Babble, a magazine and parenting community site aimed at urban hipsters, has secured $1 million in Series A funding from Greycroft Partners. This round adds to the $2 million Babble raised earlier from Village Ventures in December of 2008. (This is an extension of that round at the same valuation) Spun off from sex and dating community Nerve Media, Babble takes a more modern view on parenting, aimed at a younger generation of parents who live in cities, equally share parenting duties (or at least make an effort) and use the internet to access information. It is the same demographic that the magazine Cookie is going after, except it tries to appeal to the Dads as well. href=”http://www.urbanbaby.com/”>Urbanbaby.com is also a site that appeals to urban dwellers and parents.

Nerve Media is also gaining a new CEO. Founder Rufus Griscom is passing the baton to Sean Mills, former president of The Onion. In his seven years as president, Mills helped grow the Onion from 30 to 175 employees and developed and launched The Onion News Network. Prior to The Onion, Mills founded and was managing director of ad agency Adgile Interactive in San Francisco and sold the company’s proprietary technology to Doubleclick in 2001.

The clock’s ticking for Playboy, folks.

During an earnings call earlier today, Playboy Enterprises‘ interim CEO Jerome Kern (who replaced Hugh Hefner’s daughter Christie after she stepped down last December) didn’t really have any uplifting news to share. The publishing company reported a $13.7 million net loss during the first quarter of 2009, more than 3 times the loss it took during the same period in 2008 ($4.2 million). Athough, we should note Kern indicated that the loss includes $8.7 million of “impairment and restructuring charges”.

In October 2008, Playboy laid off over a quarter of its workforce, axed its DVD business and its New York office and consequently merged its print and online operations to reduce costs significantly.

Google can’t help itself. It just loves to brag about how green it is, even though its data centers use up a tremendous amount of energy. Still, on a per-search basis, it is less polluting than many alternatives – a fact it likes to remind us of, especially since it was accused of being an energy hog last January. In a greener-than-thou blog post touting how energy efficient its data centers are compared to the industry norm, Google points out that it takes 850 searches to emit the same amount of CO2 as it does to produce and distribute one newspaper. I wonder which activity produces the most information.

And here I thought Google was trying to make nice with the newspaper industry. I can’t wait for a Google executive to bring up this factoid at the next Congressional hearing questioning whether Google is responsible for the demise of the newspaper industry. See, newspapers are dirty, practically evil. How do we know? Some Google engineers figured out the Co2 emissions comparisons on their computers.

Google has given us 10 free tickets for TechCrunchIT readers to attend for the upcoming Google I/O developer event on May 27-28 in San Francisco.

Google I/O will be held at the Moscone Center and will cover the following topics: the Android, App Engine, Chrome, GWT, and AJAX APIs, with a special focus on the enterprise. Last year’s event saw one of the first demonstrations of Google’s Android mobile phone OS, as well as the public launch of App Engine. Google also handed out T-shirts cleverly meant to spell out “Google IO” in binary, except they actually said Google KO.

Tickets are usually $400 each; but we are giving ten free tickets away to readers who give us the best answer to this question:

Does Google have a real-time strategy and if so, how is it going to compete against Twitter and Facebook in the real-time wars given the recent death of RSS?

I love my iPhone, but I’ve always harbored some contempt for its built-in Email application. Not because of the occasional message download issues and display quirks, but because the iPhone’s Email application has absolutely no search function at all. Given how much essential data is now stored in most peoples’ inboxes, from phone numbers to flight confirmations, this has been an endless source of frustration.

Today, these problems are solved: a new Y Combinator startup called ReMail has just released its application on the App Store, and it’s bringing full text Email search to the iPhone. The application is currently free during its Beta period, and you can grab it here.

Now, I know the first response people will have is that the upcoming iPhone 3.0 update is going to include Email search as part of the new Spotlight feature. This is mostly true – 3.0 will allow you to search through Email headers, which include the message’s subject line and its ‘To’ and ‘From’ fields.

In honor of the latest Star Trek release, MSN Video has rolled out a Klingon version of its Star Trek video page. Klingon, of course, is the tongue spoken by the race of the same name in the fictional Star Trek universe. For those of you who aren’t Trekkies, Klingons are the warrior race and usually are portrayed as the enemy in the Star Trek series and movies.

One notably hilarious (or sad, depending on your point of view) video shows a “Captain_Krankor,” or taHjaj wo,’ seen posing in random photos, including one where he is holding a dolphin. The Klingon imperial anthem serves as the soundtrack to a slideshow of Captain Krankor spottings here on Earth, many of them on a corporate campus that could easily be Microsoft’s.

Twitter is abuzz with angry complaints about FTD not delivering flowers to recipients on Mother’s Day. Apparently a number of Moms didn’t receive their FTD flowers even though the senders made the orders early in the week. Here are a few sample tweets about the FTD mishap:

“FTD.com still hasn’t delivered the flowers I ordered Wednesday to my mom in the hospital, and they still haven’t replied either. Grrrrr.”

“Firing off an angry letter to FTD. They are liars, use 1-800-Flowers or call an actual, real florist on the telephone.”

“Calling FTD…mothers day flowers that were not delivered….”

“FTD had two days to get RA’s mom her mothers day flowers and they FAILED. I am SO waiting this 15 minute hold time to rip someone a new one.”

“FTD resolution was terrible; solution to missed Mother’s day flowers;send flowers tomorrow & discount the service charge!”

Amazon releasing a Kindle iPhone app shortly after the introduction of the Kindle 2 was a brilliant move. It seemed to show that the emphasis was on the platform, not just one device. And that it was interested in making its customers happy. Unfortunately, to use the Kindle iPhone app, you still basically had to set your iPhone down and buy books on either your Kindle or the Amazon website. Sure, you could browse to it from the Safari browser on the iPhone, but the experience was laborious to say the least. Today, Amazon changed that a bit, and it may be an indication of where it’s going.

Now, when you click on the “Get Books” icon in the iPhone app, you’re taken to a page that has a very iPhone-friendly Kindle book browser. From here you can search the over 280,000 Kindle books or browse by things like category, New York Times Best Sellers or books recommended for you. Unfortunately, clicking on any of these items kicks you out of the iPhone app and into Safari, where you actually do your surfing/purchasing (again, in this new iPhone-friendly look). That simply appears to be a limitation of the Kindle iPhone app itself (which wasn’t updated, just the look of the Kindle iPhone website was), and it seems likely that Amazon will correct that soon so you can browse and buy right from within the app.

We recently covered socialmedian, which late last year was acquired by European business social network XING, when they introduced a nifty application on the Facebook platform that allowed its users to share personalized news from across the web with their social graph.

As of today, XING users can install the first two applications on its OpenSocial-driven platform: one (Xing News) takes the entire concept of socialmedian – personalized news filtering and sharing – and transforms it into a straightforward XING feature, the other one (Ask Xing) is a tool users can install to easily ask questions to the XING community and get responses without ever needing to leave the service.

Apple has a lot of silly reasons for rejecting iPhone apps, but Twitter seems to bring out some of the best of them. A few months ago, Apple rejected the popular iPhone app Tweetie because it featured curse words in the trending topics area — something which obviously the app has no control over. Today, it appears another app has been rejected because of Twitter — only this time it looks like it was rejected because the reviewer who looked over it did so on Friday when Twitter had its scheduled maintenance.

Developer Kuan Yong, received the following letter from Apple letting him know about the rejection of his app, Tweetspotter:

Social interaction is one of the driving forces behind the web right now, with Twitter and Facebook both growing at phenomenal rates. But outside of social networks, advertisers have largely failed to get in on the action – on most web pages, banner ads usually consist of a flashy logo and maybe some clever text, without any content that is actually personalized to you.

SocialMedia, an advertising company that has largely concentrated on social network advertising until now, is looking to change this. The company is releasing a suite of new interactive advertising products, collectively being called “People Powered Ads” that look to help brands create more engaging ads by tapping into the social power of the web. Alongside the launch the company has announced that publishing giant IDG is its first partner, and that IDG will be rolling out advertising campaigns and selling customized versions of ‘People Powered Ads’ under its own Amplify banner.

There are two interesting things about the new New York Times Reader application. First, the company has abandoned SilverLight for Adobe Air, thereby ensuring cross-platform compatibility without that nasty Microsoft aftertaste. Second, the application is great.

Full disclosure: I’m a regular contributor to the NYT but I’m not employed by them full-time and act as a freelancer. But I still read the paper every day.

Now, for the good stuff. I used the earlier app briefly and put it away. I find that this new version is much cleaner than the earlier iteration. The front page is extremely readable and sections are clearly laid out. The application stores up to seven days of content and includes the crosswords as well as much of the standard print layout. You can’t do a full, site-wide search through the app simply because that data isn’t there. However, you can read the paper on a laptop. on a laptop.

The Obama Administration’s new chief antitrust enforcer at the Department of Justice, Christine Varney, is making it very clear that she is going to be much more aggressive in bringing antitrust actions against large, American corporations. The Bush Administration took a hands-off approach to antitrust enforcement, and that is about to change. Varney needs a high-profile case to make her name, and all indications are that she is eying Google. After all she needs to make an example out of a big powerful corporate “predator” and in this limping econmy there simply aren’t that many powerful companies to chose from.

Google, quite literally, is the new Microsoft when it comes to antitrust scrutiny (although, Microsoft itself is also still under the magnifying glass, as is Intel, at least in Europe). Even under the Bush Justice Department, last year Google had to drop its advertising deal with Yahoo because of antitrust issues. Today, Google is dealing with an antitrust investigation over to its book-scanning settlement, the newspaper and magazine industries are rattling their sabers, and every other industry facing disruption by the internet is lining up to blame Google for their woes. Varney will be encouraging competitors of all potential antitrust targets to file more complaints, so you can be sure that anti-Google lobby will grow.

The CDC’s report on wireless substitution – aka canceling your land line for a cellphone – is out and we discover that one in five U.S. households have cut the cable, an increase of 2.7 percent over six months ago. Another tidbit: one in every seven American homes (14.5%) took all their calls on cellphones despite having a landline.

The report polled 12,597 families for 23,726 adults total – there were 8,635 kids under the age of 18 – which makes it a fairly strong sample size. A few other tidbits:

TechCrunch Europe is putting together a round-table event in Stockholm on May 27. TechCrunchTalk Nordic, at the Elite Palace Hotel, St Eriksgatan 115, Stockholm (3pm to 8pm), will be an afternoon of panel discussions, presentations and pitches followed by a networking reception. We’ll be bringing together the startup, Angel and VC communities together to debate the next phase of the startup world in Scandinavia, Finland and the Baltic countries – which should make for a lively discussion. Please get your ticket here. Our speakers so far include Pär-Jörgen Pärsson from the VC firm Northzone Ventures, and Angel Gambino, formerly of Bebo. TechCrunchTalk Nordic is sponsored by Bloglovin and Sunstone Capital.

Twitscoop, a real-time visualization tool that lets you see hot trends and buzz on Twitter, is getting a makeover and adding several useful features that may help you “mine the thought stream.” These features will roll out this morning. Twitscoop’s algorithm identifies tags and keywords in the Twitter stream and then ranks them by how frequently they appear versus normal usage. Twitscoop detects growing trends in real-time, identifies breaking news and then monitors specific keywords along with graphs that display the activity for any given word on twitter. The results are also displayed in a “Tag Cloud,” where the hotter tags are presented in a bigger front.

Besides showing the trending topics on Twitter, Twitscoop, which provides a service similar to Tweetag, Tweetmeme, and Twitturly, also lets you search Twitter messages for trending topics. Twitscoop is becoming a full-fledged Twitter service, adding oAuth to let you sign in with your Twitter account and tweet from the site without leaving the page. Additionally, you will be able shorten urls and tweet searches from the site.

This last Friday, a few of the developers behind Microsoft Surface took some time out of their schedules to meet with us and talk about what’s coming in their Surface Service Pack 1, due to be rolled out today. Now, it’s called a service pack for a reason — as opposed to a fun pack — this update is a response to the requests and concerns of the community using and developing for the Surface, so it’s not about flashy new gizmos and eye candy, but usability.

There are still a few new visible features, and it’s always fun to play with a Surface, so there’s a nice video for you to watch if you’re interested in how the Surface is changing and how Microsoft is responding to developer feedback. It’s easier to show them than explain them at length, so check them out in the exclusive video inside.

A couple lines of code. That’s all it takes for photographers and publishers with large inventories of images to start selling their work on their own websites, thanks to an ambitious fledgling company. You’d think that something so simple could be pulled off by many a startup, but in reality I’m having trouble finding other companies that do it the way the recently launched Fotomoto does it (i.e. the right way). Sure, there are multiple ways for photographers to sell photos on other websites, but that usually requires both them and buyers to have a separate account with the provider of the marketplace service.

Fotomoto does things differently: photographers only need to insert a few lines of codes in their website, after which the images on his or her website will automatically be indexed and automatically provided with a ‘purchase photo’ link. Sellers can tweak the settings so the ‘buy’ links appear completely integrated and branded to match their sites’ look and feel, and the back-end of the tool enables them to set the availability next to the sizes and pricing of the photos.