The ads are destroying YouTube. At least this one is. It is a video ad for sustainable energy company from Spain called Acciona. Yeah, I had never heard of them either.

The video starts with this Euro-dude in a suit starting to blow up and crack apart like he’s made from plaster. Halfway through, the actual video player crack in half, and all of the surrounding parts of the site shake and fall away, while an annoying voiceover is saying something about rebirth. I don’t know, maybe it makes more sense in Spanish.

The visual effect is interesting, but feels like a gimmick since it’s already been done before to much better effect by Nintendo. A year ago, they used the same collapsing webpage motif in a video ad for Wario Land: Shake It. At least that made sense.

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Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer was recently profiled in a Vogue Magazine article that offered a in-depth glimpse into the exec’s lifestyle, loves, career and fashion preferences. Now, Mayer has been named as one of Glamour Magazine’s 2009 Women of the Year. Joining Mayer on the list are a variety of female powerhouses and icons including Maya Angelou, First Lady Michelle Obama, Susan Rice, Euna Lee and Laura Ling.

Mayer has been frequently profiled in business and technology publications over the years, but it’s also nice to see her achievements highlighted in magazines like Vogue and Glamour. The brainy Stanford-grad has been able to set an example for young women everywhere. As one of Google’s early hires, she’s now helping to lead product design for one of the world’s most innovative companies. And she’s only 34. What’s not to love about a successful and geeky coder who also loves to wear Oscar de la Renta, Chanel and Armani?

Photo credit/Glamour Magazine/Brigitte Lacombe

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This week we saw the launch of the TwitterPeek, a cute little device built by Peek that will do just about anything you want it to do, as long as all you want it to do is access Twitter. It won’t surf the web. It won’t make phone calls. It won’t support third party apps. But it most certainly does run Twitter.

You can get it in black. Or, if you want to show a little flair, you can get in in cyan.

For some crazy reason I wanted one. A friend bought me one that I will truly love forever(ish). But the company also sent me one. And while I may or may not need one TwitterPeek, I almost certainly don’t need two TwitterPeeks.

This is where you come in.

We’re giving one of these away to a TechCrunch reader. It’s the cool one, cyan, with lifetime service that costs $200. And it’s all yours. Just retweet this post and make sure to include the short URL link – http://bit.ly/3U2Yhy – as well as the #crunch hashtag. Please only tweet the message once, anyone tweeting repeatedly will be disqualified. Tomorrow we’ll sort through all of the tweets and pick one randomly for the win. You’ll get the TweetPeek device in the mail, and we’ll throw in a TechCrunch tshirt. Even the postage is on us. But please note that in this case only U.S. readers are eligible, because the device only works in the U.S.

By the way, if this goes well and everyone doesn’t spazz out, we’ll do a giveaway every week. Next week we’ll give away a Droid if we can talk Motorola, Verizon or Google into paying for it. If you are a company that has a cool device befitting the refined tastes of a TechCrunch reader (as defined by us) and want to supply the goods, let us know in the comments or via tips@techcrunch.

Oh. And on an unrelated note, it’s unlikely we’ll be returning this test unit, Peek. Something, err, happened to it. I mean we lost it. Actually, it never arrived.

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As a small team, Gowalla, like its rival Foursquare, doesn’t have a lot of resources to devote to building apps on all the mobile platforms, so this is a good solution for the time being. Eventually, the plan is to have native apps for all the big platforms, Williams says.

But the most-loved child will remain the iPhone app for the foreseeable future. In fact, version 1.3 of that app has just been submitted to the App Store for approval, we’re told. Williams says that it should alleviate a lot of the check-in and place adding issues that users were experiencing in previously versions, which we touched on here.

Yesterday, Gowalla also added Twitter feeds to venue pages on their web site. This allows you to see what the official Twitter accounts for those places are saying at any given time. They also began appending place’s Twitter names to your tweets when you check into a place on Gowalla. See an example here.

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textPlus, a text messaging app that’s powered by GOGII, has just hit the App Store. textPlus lets any iPhone or iPod Touch send free text messages to any cell number by using in-app advertising to cover its costs. There is no limit on how many text messages you can send per month, it’s just a matter of getting WiFi, 3G or an Edge connection. GOGII was one of the first companies that was funded by iFund, the partnership between venture capital firm KPCB and Apple, which was announced at the Apple SDK roadmap event.

With version 2.0 of textPlus, GOGII is announcing the availability of textPlus usernames, which can effectively serve as a stand-in for a phone number, which is great for iPod Touch users. Your friends can send standard text messages to you from any phone, simply by sending a text to the shortcode 60611 that leads off with your username followed the rest of their message (so a text to me would look like “DanielBru Hi are you coming to the movie tonight?”). textPlus also supports group messaging, though someone with the app installed needs to initiate the conversation (the other participants in the chat don’t necessarily need it installed and can use regular SMS).

One of the biggest upsides to textPlus is that you can send text messages internationally at no cost at all — the one requirement, is that you have a textPlus username. And of course, with iPhone OS 3.0, and push notifications, you’ll get a notification each time someone sends you a new text message. GOGII’s goal with textPlus is to make the texting functionality much better then what Apple has already developed.

After playing with textPlus over the last few days, I can see where the success of version one came from — textPlus is very to use, and the ads don’t really get in the way. The only thing I fear is that GOGII doesn’t have any immediate plans to support picture and video messaging, which iPhone users on AT&T recently got.

textPlus currently supports the following carriers; AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Alltel, US Cellular, Virgin Mobile, Nextel, Boost, Cellular One, Dobson, nTelos, Cellular South, CellCom, evol, ECIT, RINA, Bluegrass, Cox, Inland Cellular, West Central Wireless, Centennial, EKN, RCC, and Immix/Pc Management.

You can get textPlus on the App Store today at no cost. [iTunes Link]

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5:30 AM. I woke up this morning to the soothing chimes of my over-priced alarm clock, took a look at the ungodly hour, and immediately sank back into my pillow. It wasn’t until my second alarm (strategically positioned far out of arm’s reach) kicked in that I remembered the task at hand: Droid day.

Ah yes, the phone that seemingly came out of nowhere — at least to those who haven’t had their ear to the ground on Android phone news, which until now has largely been a steady stream of mediocracy, fueled by underpowered CPUs and generic UIs. But Droid has something special. Mostly, it’s the phone’s heavy duty processor, but there’s also its brilliant screen, much-improved operating system, and the fact that it runs on a network that doesn’t leave people screaming profanities (at least until they get their monthly bill).

So I embarked this morning to the Palo Alto Verizon store, hoping to use a Qik live stream to capture the festive line of Droid fans sure to be present. After all, Verizon customers have plenty to celebrate — though they’re on the nation’s best network, they’ve long been burdened with an underwhelming selection of phones. This is the first time they’ve had a chance to pick up a device that’s a viable alternative to the iPhone. And with Verizon’s marketing onslaught over the last few weeks, not to mention the generally very positive reviews, I expected the turnout to be good. Not Apple good mind you — no marketing push can match Steve Jobs’ mystical mind control over a rabid fanbase of millions. But this was the heart of Silicon Valley, where gadget geeks flourish.

Alas, it seems that my expectations were unwarranted. I walked up to the Verizon store no later than 6:20 AM, forty minutes before the 7:00 AM opening time (three hours earlier than usual in light of the big day). But no sooner had I arrived than I began to question my still-groggy mental state. The Verizon sign was directly above my head. There were five or six employees buzzing around the well-lit store, two of whom were decked out in bizarre Droid-branded outfits, complete with black leather vests. But the street could not have been more empty.

The door cracked open. One of the employees, perhaps concerned by my confused expression or excited that someone had actually shown up, had come to talk to me. Yes, I was in the right place. Yes, they were due to open in a little more than half an hour. And yes, they too had expected more than one person to be standing in front of the store at this point. The door closed again.

A few minutes later I was joined by two new Droid fans. Unfortunately, my excitement over my new friends was rather shortlived — the newcomers turned down my offer of free TechCrunch T-shirts, and informed me that they weren’t actually waiting in line, but had come to witness it for themselves too. As it turned out, they were members of the Android team, who were also apparently let down by the sad turn out. But, as they quickly pointed out, the line was not actually as empty as it seemed! For I had neglected to take into account the three cars parked at the side of the road, each of which was occupied by one future Droid customer. And we were also joined by one other person, who was officially the first person in line, a mere 30 minutes before the store opened. You can relive this moment in the poorly shot video below.

Over the course of the next half hour we were joined by perhaps four more people. I was cheered up by the fact that many of them accepted my offers of free TechCrunch T-shirts (the Android team members eventually caved and asked for some too). But the atmosphere was oddly solemn as we tried to brainstorm where everyone else could possibly be. We eventually arrived at the conclusion that people may have decided to head to the nearby Best Buy, which actually offers a better deal because they take care of the Droid’s $100 mail-in rebate for you (Verizon makes you go through rebate hell). It was time to look elsewhere for a line. You can see our heartfelt goodbyes in the video below.

Thus, I set out on part two of my journey, which was even more boring than part one. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say, there wasn’t a single person in front of the Best Buy. Not even an Android team member. My quest was a failure. There are lines being reported in places — dozens of them —  across the country, and I was unable to find one.

All of this would bother me more, were it not for the fact that I now have a Droid sitting on my desk. Over the course of the last few hours, I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that this thing rocks, plain and simple. I’ll always have a soft spot for the iPhone, but for this generation of smart phones, at least, I’ve made my choice.

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Update: Yep. Now suspended.

Update 2: MSNBC is now saying that the account was never in their control in the first place. It was previously sending out MSNBC headlines, but then today went off the deep end, obviously. So I guess this is a lesson in controlling your online brand.

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Now, readers will not only have to pay for the dedicated BILD iPhone app, but they also need to pony-up recurring fees for new articles. The same is planned for Axel Springer’s quality paper Die Welt. Users of Nokia, Blackberry, HTC or other smartphone brands will not be blocked – but only for as long as it takes for Springer to develop an app for each device.

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So what do we know? Well, the company is definitely in the mobile space. In fact, it’s a “BIG mobile play,” founder Ben Keighran tells us. Keighran, who in 2006 started Bluepulse, a mobile messaging app, has most recently served as the lead advisor to Aardvark for their mobile strategy. There’s apparently no website for the company yet, but they do have a Twitter account, which features one tweet: “Working on something sekret… ”

We managed to squeeze a logo out of Keighran, but that’s about it. He also told us that we should hear more about Chomp early next year, but for now, they will remain shrouded in secret. Still, someone must have liked something they heard about Chomp if they were able to in just 10 days get a seed round of around $500,000 – $550,000, which is what we’re hearing.

We’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

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More good news for Indian entrepreneurs! Infosys co-founder and chairman N. R. Narayana Murthy’s new VC firm, now called Catamaran Venture Fund, just added a whole lot more money to its coffers. A few weeks ago, we reported that Murthy was turning to “the dark side” after selling a large amount of company shares in order to set up a venture capital firm. To set up the fund, Murthy reportedly sold 800,000 shares, or 0.13 percent of the company, its total value converting to $38.7 million, more or less.

It appears that Murthy’s wife, Sudha Murthy, who reportedly put up the seed funding for Infosys Technologies at its founding 30 years ago, has sold 2 million shares worth of her Infosys stock, worth roughly $91 million dollars. And Sudha sold 22 percent of her personal holding to fund her husband’s new VC fund.

The Catamaran Venture Fund will have a total of around $130 million dollars to invest with and will focus on early stage and angel investing. As we wrote in our past report, Murthy aims to invest mainly in ‘brilliant’ Indian entrepreneurs who found startups that operate in the areas of healthcare, education and nutrition, which may include technology-related companies.

Murthy started Infosys with six others back in 1981 by borrowing INR 10,000 (roughly $215 today) from wife Sudha. Infosys went public 12 years after its original founding and its share increased three thousandfold over the next 15 years or so. While Catamaran’s fund is still small compared to the war chests of other VC firms like Battery Ventures and Sequoia Capital, it still has the potential to make some very meaningful investments.

Photo credit/Flickr

(Thanks for the tip, Jason)

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Do you see something strange in this screenshot of Google’s homepage today? No, not Bert and Ernie (it’s Sesame Street’s 40th birthday). It’s that ad for the Verizon Droid right there under the search box (today is also Droid Day). Although, the juxtaposition does make it seem like Bert and Ernie are trying to get you to buy a Droid.

Google’s homepage is normally an ad-free zone. No more than 28 words are allowed on it, and Google is always trying to find ways to make it even sparer.

But the company does make exceptions now and then to promote a partner’s product, such as it did with Firefox back in the day, and with the launches of Chrome and the very first Android phone from T-Mobile a year ago. And at least this Droid ad does not break the 28-word rule. The page weighs in at 27 words.

The ad goes to this Google landing page, which then links to Verizon’s Droid page. I guess they want to lose some folks along the way. Still, I’d love to see the clickthrough rates on that promotion.

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Let me remind everyone that Apple rejected a Someecards application last month partially due to the fact that one of the cards included was mocking Hitler (and more specifically, the film Inglourious Basterds). They flat out rejected it, didn’t require a certain rating for the satire, just rejected it. So when you see Mein Kampf in the store, complete with a swastika as its icon, you’ll forgive me if I’m a bit dumbfounded.

Not only that, the app is rated 9+. So apparently, 9 year-olds are good to go to read about the “Jewish plot” and other anti-Semitic bile. Also perfectly fine for the App Store are apps that focus on upskirt pictures, and Asian Boobs. But satire? Nope, that’s too hardcore.

This version of Mein Kampf is in Spanish, so maybe that’s what allowed it to slip by the App Store guardians. But that’s no excuse. If the Nazi logo didn’t raise a red flag, I’m not sure what will. The point is that Apple is so ridiculously hypocritical (or, at the very least, incompetent) with its selection process and it just keeps getting worse.

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Android Developer Challenge 2 officially began way back in May, though the actual voting didn’t begin until some time in September. The votes were split amongst Android users and Googlers (with the latter getting a 55% say), with all voting taking place in a special, custom-made application. To be eligible, applications had to be completely fresh to the Android Market (read: no updates allowed) as of August 1st, couldn’t have been a part of the first Challenge, and had to play friendly with Android v1.5.

Read the rest of this entry at MobileCrunch >>

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Zillow, a popular real-estate listings site, recently tweaked the pricing model in its marketplace for mortgages, angering many of the lenders who pay Zillow for customer leads. A few weeks ago, the site announced that it will be introducing a new pricing model for these leads to lenders.

Zillow’s mortgage marketplace, which launched in 2008, lets borrowers submit loan requests for mortgages and then review quotes provided by lenders. Basically, lenders will be able to submit any number of loan quotes for free, but will be required to pay Zillow a “market-priced fee” when any borrowers contact them regarding their quotes. When a contact is made, the lender will be charged a market-priced fee.

Zillow insists that “the market” will determine the price for each contact and it will not be setting the price itself, but rather it seems to be based on how much each lender is willing to pay for a lead. The company did warn lenders that Zillow contacts are more valuable than Google clicks for mortgage keywords, which typically range from $7-$25. Each Zillow lead is can be anywhere from $1 to $100, with lenders able to set a maximum price to pay per contact. Lenders will also be required to pre-fund their Zillow accounts with a minimum of $250 so Zillow can automatically deduct the price of the lead from the lender’s account.

On the site’s forums, it’s apparent that lenders are not happy with the new system. First, lenders are angered because they are now not allowed to list contact phone numbers or link to any of their contact systems, because Zillow needs a way to monitor whether the lender does in fact get a lead. Zillow will post a 1-800 phone number for each lender, which is actually forwarded to the lender’s actual phone number. Zillow records any calls made from a borrower to a lender to make sure leads are accurate (which works in the lender’s favor but is a little sketchy, as some lenders point out). The first phase of the new system rolled out a few days ago and already lenders are complaining of disconnected calls.

And of course lenders are frustrated by the fact that Zillow is even implementing a fee in the first place, when the site has long been known as a free and open marketplace for both lenders and buyers. Apparently realtors on the site, who often get leads from advice forums, aren’t being charged for their customer contacts (yet).

The change in policy is interesting considering the fact that a few months ago, Zillow’s CEO and co-founder Richard Barton told CNET that Zillow is growing, despite the credit crunch and implosion of the real-estate industry, because the site “doesn’t try to over-monetize.” But in its message to lenders, Zillow said the free marketplace that was launched in April 2008 was an “experiment” to determine if the site could connect borrowers with lenders. The project worked and Zillow is currently seeing borrowers filing an average of 50,000 loan requests per month, with thousands of lenders helping to fund and close these loans.

Nothing stays free forever.

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At the end of this month, Thing Labs will close a $600,000 round which is basically an extension of its Series A from back in June of last year, co-founder Jason Shellen tells us. This will bring its total funding to $2.2 million. But this round is more notable for who is involved: angel investor Ron Conway, Steve Olechowski (the former COO of Feedburner, now at Google), and Greg Yaitanes, who was an early Twitter investor, but is better known as a director of Fox’s hit show House. He’s also directed episodes of Lost, Heroes, Grey’s Anatomy, and many other popular TV shows.

Polaris Venture Partners, which did Thing Lab’s initial round is also re-upping to put in some more money we’re told. Thing Labs initially sprung out of Dog Patch Labs, a San Francisco-based incubator that is run by Polaris.

Shellen first unveiled Brizzly at our first Realtime Crunchup back in July, and he will be appearing at our second event later this month.

[image: Fox]

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Earlier this week, Seesmic rolled out support for the new Twitter Lists for its Desktop client. Today, that same functionality comes to its web-based client. And with it comes a bonus: Geolocation support.

Now, to be clear, most users still won’t be able to use this geolocation support just yet, as Twitter has yet to enable it for most users. But if you do happen to have it, Seesmic supports it. As you can see in the screenshot, it looks pretty nice. If you see a little location marker on a tweet, you can hover over it to bring up a Google Map overlay showing where that tweet was sent from.

Last week, we previewed Tweetie 2.1, which will include geolocation support as well. Seesmic’s method looks like it may be a bit easier since it only requires a hover state to get to a detailed map of where the tweet was sent from, whereas Tweetie 2.1 requires two clicks (to the tweet and then on the tiny map to get a more detailed version).

Meanwhile, List support looks solid in Seesmic Web as well. As you can see in the other screenshot below, when you hover over a Twitter username, you have an option to add them to one of your Lists. Another web-based Twitter client, Brizzly, rolled out it support for Lists last night. The plan is to have all Brizzly “Groups” (a feature that worked like Lists) synced with Twitter Lists by tomorrow. Presumably, Seesmic will have its lists synced with Twitter Lists tomorrow as well.

It’s not yet clear when Twitter will do a wide roll-out of its geolocation support, but with several third-party services looking ready to go, it seems likely that it will be realatively soon. Following Lists full launch last week, Twitter has also begun testing its new Retweet funtionality to a small set of users.

Along with Lists and geolocation, Seesmic Web has a new Trending Topics area it is rolling out today as well.

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It is time for the second annual TechCrunch Europe ChristmasCrunch! Yes folks it’s our annual TechCrunch Europe meetup and Festive Holiday party, in one handy package. This year we’re taking a different tack – basing it around one of the the hottest themes right now, namely the rise of realtime streams. We’ve seen the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, Friendfieed and Google Wave but it’s clear that this is only just the beginning of the world going realtime. TechCrunch is running the Realtime Crunchup of course, but this event in London will also feature some of the hottest realtime startups in the world today.

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Earlier this morning, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis settled their lawsuits with eBay and a syndicate of investors in return for a 14 percent stake in the company they founded. The lawsuits were complicating the spin-off of Skype from eBay because the Skype founders still controlled the service’s underlying peer-to-peer technology.

In an interview with me this morning, Marc Andreessen, one of the investors through his new fund Andreessen Horowitz, told me, “The deal was never held up. The money was in escrow and was going to close” even if the lawsuits weren’t settled. The transaction is on track to close later this quarter. The other investors are Silver Lake Partners and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Index Ventures and Mike Volpi are out of the deal. Josh Silverman will continue to be CEO.

Andreessen is glad that the lawsuits are settled and that the “Joltid IP is now owned by Skype,” but was prepared to litigate if it didn’t work out. He explains: “This was a completely known situation going into it. It was one of the reasons the deal was available, because of the situation. We assumed it would be a good idea to bring the founders on board and resolve all the issues, we are very pro-founder. There was some drama along the way, but we came out with everybody in the same boat rowing in the same direction.”

In addition to legal avenues, Skype also had the option to try to switch to a different technology, such as SIP-based Internet telephony. “Had this not happened,” says Andreessen, “there were various technological paths that could have been followed. Now that it is settled, it is not necessary to make any changes. The technology is scaling very well.”

Skype is on a $740 million revenue run-rate and boasts 521 million users worldwide. “Skype is gigantic and yet still a relatively small percentage of international call volume,” notes Andreesen. “This is, and ought to be, one of the most important companies on the Internet.”

Now that the deal drama is over, we’ll get to find out.

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Index Ventures, a historical investor in Skype, is not going to be part of that buying party after all, and its partner Mike Volpi is definitely out of the picture (no surprises there). Marc Andreessen, partner of Andreessen Horowitz, tells us: “Everything is settled—all lawsuits, all IP. The Joltid IP is now owned by Skype. The company is free and clear to execute to its full potential.”

The original Skype founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, are now back in the game. The Scandinavian businessmen are getting 14 percent of Skype back for rights to the Global Index P2P technology their company Joltid controls (which is key to the Skype software) – and not 10% like previously reported by other media. In addition, Friis and Zennström gain representation on the board of the new entity. The two men are also putting in a ’significant amount of capital’ of their own in exchange for the stake in the new company, presumably through their Atomico Ventures fund.

Marc Andreessen, General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz, tells us: “Everything is settled—all lawsuits, all IP. The Joltid IP is now owned by Skype. The company is free and clear to execute to its full potential.”

Update: Andreessen shares more of his thoughts on the deal, saying Skype is one of the most important companies on the Internet.

GigaOM first reported that a settlement might have been in the works earlier this month, a report that was later echoed by the NY Times.

Thus ends the legal kerfuffle surrounding eBay’s sale of Skype to the investor consortium (news we broke last August), which it acquired back in September 2005 for $2.6 billion (written down to $1.2 billion in 2007). Friis and Zennström had accused eBay of breaking a licensing deal and sued the investor group last September, claiming damages were growing by $75 million a day.

The newly structured buyout group is now on track to buy approximately 56% of Skype, with eBay continuing to own 30% and the original founders 14%, in a deal valuing Skype at $2.75 billion. EBay is expected to receive approximately $1.9 billion in cash upon the completion of the sale and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million. The deal is still expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Withdrawing party Index Ventures released the following statement:

“We are pleased that Skype will now be able to put litigation behind it, and we wish Josh Silverman, his team and the Skype investors well in continuing to grow a great business. Although Skype has the potential to be a great investment, the deal terms changed for Index such that it no longer matches our investment criteria and thus we have decided not to participate in the transaction.”

Meanwhile, the two ruthless European entrepreneurs who founded Skype walk away with a renewed stake, seats on the company’s board and the smile of victory on their faces.

(Top image via E24)

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Launch day of a new cool gadget is the closest thing to being a kid again on Christmas day (or whatever your winter solstice holiday of choice). You’ve anticipated the day. You’ve called in sick to work. And you are standing out in the freezing cold at 7 in the morning, hoping your place in line assures you a device before the carefully-planned sell out occurs. You’ve worked yourself into…a Fever Pitch.

I’ve always been let down with the real world gadget after that high of anticipation. But that’s ok. It’s part of the cycle of tech.

Today is Droid day. In just a few hours Verizon stores will open and the first customers will get their hands on their very own Droid.

And I promise you, if you are one of the people waiting in line, you will have a much lower than average amount of letdown. That’s because, in my humble opinion, the Droid is the coolest mobile phone to exist to date. It is as close as we’ve come to the Platonic ideal of a smartphone. Its very existence ensures that the next iPhone will be even better than it otherwise would have been. Competition is good.

Yes, this is an unabashed love letter to the Droid. If you want the dispassionate reviews, we’ve got em. And then some. That isn’t what this post is about.

This post is about love of technology.

I’ve had one of the devices, a free loaner that I wasn’t ashamed to beg for, for a week now. I’ve assigned it to my Google Voice account and have used it and only it since it arrived.

I have placed it in the car doc and have used Google Navigator to get around, shunning my expensive but suddenly dated in-car navigation system. I talk to my Droid. And it talks back to me, guiding me to my destination.

I have installed a dozen apps on my Droid, and all run smoothly in the background. Skype, Yammer, Twitdroid and Google Voice all let me know when something is happening that I need to be aware of. There is no lag when I open these apps. Even when most of them are running at once.

And when I respond, I can choose between the quick virtual keyboard or the slider real keyboard. And I notice how slim the device is, about the same as the iPhone, even though it has a physical keyboard.

I make calls from my home via the robust Verizon network, something I had to forgo in my AT&T/iPhone days. My voicemails are transcribed automatically by Google Voice and delivered via email, along with my text messages. Not one call has been dropped in a week’s use.

I view web pages in the gorgeous 3.7″ WVGA (480 x 854 pixels); 16:9 widescreen. And the scrolling speed on web pages is faster than even my desktop computer.

Droid is the Alpha phone. And I will love it and only it. Until something better comes along.

Happy Droid Day. Let me know what you think of yours.

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But Twitter has never been an ideal two-way conversation tool. It’s hard to keep track of back-and-forth communication between users, particularly when you’re not actually part of the discussion but still interested to know what’s being said tweeted. A new tool called Bettween aims to make it easier to visualize conversations between two specific users as well as share them with others.

Like most Twitter-related web apps, the tool is simple and crisp. You enter the usernames of two Twitter users and you get an overview of what they’ve conversed about on a single page, with an indication of when the tweets were published and who replied to whom. And because it comes with a dedicated URL à la bettween.com/arrington/craignewmark, you can easily share conversations between two users with others as well.

I’m left wondering if it would be possible (and/or desirable) to tweak the tool so it could track conversations between more than two users.

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But what he didn’t say in that blog post is that Zynga has been scamming users from the beginning quite intentionally as part of their revenue model. Rather, he pointed much of the blame at middlemen offer companies: “We need to be more aggressive and have revised our service level agreements with these providers requiring them to filter and police offers prior to posting on their networks.”

Last spring, though, he gave a much clearer explanation to an audience at a Startup@Berkeley mixer, admitting that scamming users was part of Zynga’s business model from the start. And it was all caught on video. I think everyone sort of knew that this was exactly Zynga’s gameplan. But to hear it said so directly is just shocking.

The full 30ish minute video is here. We’ve taken the relevant section of the video, roughly starting at around the 10:40 mark, and embed it below. From the video:

I knew that i wanted to control my destiny, so I knew I needed revenues, right, fucking, now. Like I needed revenues now. So I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I dont know, I downloaded it once and couldn’t get rid of it. *laughs* We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business…So control your destiny. So that was a big lesson, controlling your business. So by the time we raised money we were profitable.

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Garrick, who has been the CEO of Offerpal for less than 48 hours, is already taking a polar opposite approach to his predecessor. He left a lengthy comment, reprinted below, on a post earlier today about Facebook’s policy and enforcement changes around application offers.

The full comment is below. But he doesn’t beat around the bush.

Garrick admits that Offerpal made mistakes – “I have quickly concluded that regrettably, Offerpal has been guilty of distributing offers of questionable integrity from some of our many advertisers.” And he says that recent communications with partners stating that Offerpal was in compliance with Facebook rules were innacurate – “…we’ve also made some erroneous communications to partners and developers about the state of our compliance. In particular, we recently sent a letter to our Facebook developers which assured them that we were completely in compliance with Facebook standards, when in fact we were not.”

Garrick also makes a series of promises in the comment, including “any offers we distribute meet stringent standards of integrity and quality, as specified by our partners, credible industry experts, and good old common sense” and “we will do everything we can within reason to lead the industry and set the example in these efforts.”

Garrick is very much taking the Mark Pincus approach to dealing with this situation. He’s admitting mistakes and he’s promising his company will do better. Compare his words to Shukla’s a week ago. It’s night and day.

Offerpal Today:

I am the new CEO of Offerpal (as of yesterday) and although I’ve only got 48 hours under my belt, and have entered this industry in the midst of a recent firestorm of controversy, I thought it was time to share some of my thoughts and plans.

Direct marketing, in particular lead-gen, has always been full of questionable, misleading, and outright fraudulent marketers and offers. We all get these daily via snail mail, email, phone, and late-night TV. Unfortunately, this is the nature of the Direct Marketing beast.

Although a distribution channel which carries or distributes such offers does not actually create the offers, I do believe that a channel that wishes to be perceived as credible and of high integrity does indeed have a responsibility to make sure that the offers it distributes are not deceptive or “scammy”.

Over the last year, the use of offer-based payment systems such as Offerpal has skyrocketed, and it’s pretty clear today that the industry has not kept up with its explosive growth in terms of properly policing the offers that are being distributed.

I am not going to comment on events leading up to this situation, nor on other players in the industry, but I have quickly concluded that regrettably, Offerpal has been guilty of distributing offers of questionable integrity from some of our many advertisers.

The policies we’ve had up until now have not been thorough enough to prevent such offers from airing, nor has our organization had the proper focus and accountability to ensure quality assurance over the offers we distribute.

As a result, we’ve had a number of offers which were recently taken down by either ourselves or our partners. Although we believe that the majority of our offers were valid and not misleading in any way, we have acted conservatively by taking down the majority of our offers and we are now in the process of letting them back into the system after inspection.

However, we’ve also made some erroneous communications to partners and developers about the state of our compliance. In particular, we recently sent a letter to our Facebook developers which assured them that we were completely in compliance with Facebook standards, when in fact we were not. This was not a deliberate tactic of any kind, it was a mistake that reflected our ineffective checks and controls. But nevertheless, it was an inaccurate claim and for that we take full responsibility, and I apologize to Facebook and to their user community.

The good news in all this is that it has brought to light some very important issues for our collective industry which need to be addressed immediately. For our part, we will be doing the following:

1. It will be a fundamental part of the Offerpal culture that any offers we distribute meet stringent standards of integrity and quality, as specified by our partners, credible industry experts, and good old common sense.

2. We will individually inspect and approve every single individual offer before it is allowed to go into distribution on our system.

3. We will customize our offer profiles to meet the needs and standards of each partner and will not attempt to have a “one size fits all” approach.

4. We will do everything we can within reason to lead the industry and set the example in these efforts.

Over the coming weeks you will hear much more from us on this issue, but more importantly you will see action and results. I will remain personally involved in this initiative and consider it one of my highest priorities in assuming my new role here.

Offerpal a week ago:

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When it was first unveiled at our Realtime Crunchup in July, easily one of the best features of the web-based Twitter client Brizzly was Groups. Basically, it allowed you to sort your Twitter followers into subsections, to make specific groups of users easier to follow. Of course, with Twitter’s new Lists functionality, you can basically do the same thing. So Brizzly is screwed right? Nope.

First of all, Brizzly has decided to make Groups play nicely with Lists — very nicely. Starting tonight, Brizzly is importing all of the Lists that its users have made on Twitter and it will begin showing them within Brizzly. But that’s not all: It’s also going the other way. Any Group that you made in Brizzly will be converted to a Twitter List. To be clear: A private Twitter List. So no, no one will be able to see that you put them in the “Loser” Group on Brizzly.

And of course, Brizzly does much more beyond Groups. Notably, it recently added Facebook support. That alone is worth the price of admission right there. But Brizzly also offers Direct Messaging capabilities that are superior to twitter.com. And it allows you to upload photos to its servers. And it displays pictures and video inline, in your tweet stream. So Brizzly should be just fine even with Twitter’s Lists now rolled out to everyone.

Brizzly expects the Groups to Lists transition to be complete by tomorrow night, co-founder Jason Shellen tells us. Here are the other main features he laid out in an email:

• We display, sync, create and navigate Twitter lists
• We provide an infinite scroll view of lists so you can scroll as far
  back as you like into a list
• Users who had created Brizzly Groups will see their groups migrated
  to Twitter Lists marked as “private”, but of course users can change
  that to “public” at any time
• We expect the migration to be done for all users by some time tomorrow night.
• Lists can be viewed by “tweets” or by “members”
• Lists are easy to create within Brizzly and make use of our
  auto-fill for users you are already following for easy creation

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