Facebook and Social Startups Meme.

Tweako, a social news site for programmers, launched this week. It is yet another digg clone but instead of targeting social news it is targeting user submitted tutorials, guides, resources and services. Don’t get pissed off by it being a clone, I actually liked the concept. Digg is a great idea and will surely have applications in many areas and this is just one of the many.

The users can also post tutorials, tag content, comment and vote in addition to submitting links. Tweako also allows you to send private messages and initiate chats with other users, something that digg does not allow, may be out of the fear of gaming. The site currently has 14 different categories ranging from gadgets to windows.

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Techcrunch has just announced (what others were gossiping about) that they have acquired Fucked Company in a stock for assets transaction. I would call it a merger since they are reporting that the traffic at both the sites is almost the same size. The press release will be coming out shortly.

Fucked Company focuses on bad news (going bust and failures etc) about startups where as TechCrunch focuses on the positive ones (mergers, acquisitions, fundings, milestones etc). This is a terrific move and will ensure that they cover news at all times, both good and bad. Because in order to cover news you got to have it in the first place, and Techcrunch might run out of news to cover if the bust sets in.

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JobCoin is taking Job Boards to a new dimensions with the launch of their customizable job board widgets. JobCoin is partnering with indeed, one of the top job search engines around, to provide a job board widget to be embedded in websites and blogs. JobCoin will monitor the content of the site to deliver target jobs according to the content and viewer ship of the site/blog (think of it as Adsense for Jobs).

JobCoin has also enlisted for FeedFlare, a tool offered by Feedburner to embed job listings within feeds. Whenever a visitor of a site apply for a job the site will get a cut of the payment taken from the publisher of the job. This will be a great alternative for sites willing to try out new options for monetization of their content.

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This is yet another interesting and innovative use of a Social Network. Paid Content is reporting that Six Apart and SonyBMG have partnered to launch a new service for A&R. So you don’t need to send your record labels to SonyBMG, the world’s second largest record company.

Sony from Monday will be directing budding acts to ColumbiaDemos.co.uk or RCADemos.co.uk which will be serving as landing pages for Six Apart’s Vox multimedia blogging service. So if you are an artist just get a multimedia blog on Vox and make your records available on it, instead of sending dozens of demo tapes here and there.

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BetsGoWild, a social network for betting, just launched into public beta today. Betting addicts could bet on the site using the virtual currency “WildBucks”, which means that everything is completely legit.

BetsGoWild based in NYC is the first legal, cash-free, online betting community where people could bet against each other and with friends on anything. The service uses an advanced point system to encourage competition through dares and bets. Users can simply pick “Yes way” or “No Way” to bet on anything and will be rewarded for points if they rate, tag, or leave comments besides winning in bets. The activity points that you ll accumulate will determine your status (from Jack to Ace), and you could win from WildBucks to free Dinners etc.

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After a month of hard work traffic has finally started to pour in. This is good news not only for us, but also for the startups. The sole purpose of this effort was and still is to help out startups in as many ways as I possibly can. The reviews that we do are certainly not the only way in which we are helping out the startups, in case you haven’t notice I embark on providing free consultancy and advice to who so ever wants to seek it.

And now I will be offering free ads on Startup Meme starting from 1st April 2007. This isn’t something that I thought over night, but was in my plans right from the very beginning, was just waiting for a while to disclose it. I have allocated 10 125×125 pixel sized Ad units in the sidebar. Every month these Ad places would be allocated to 10 aspiring new startups.

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I now have been covering startups since a month. Its a hard and daunting task with so many startups poping up every day from all corners of the world. I thought it would be worth while to cover other such blogs, see how they are doing and if they have a special angle to it. So lets jump to it.

Techcrunch is definitely not the oldest blog to cover startups but it sure owns the no 1 spot with a Google page rank of 8 and Technorati rank of 9. Techcrunch generates around 1,10,000+ visits and 1,35,000+ pageviews a day, and has around 3,42,000 subscribers. Techcrunch is edited by Michael Arrington and now spans a network of blogs ranging from domain focused ones to location centric ones. Techcrunch covers startups in general and other technology news and has become famous for its spicy and crunch reviews. Techcrunch recently scored a big win for the blogsphere by attracting an executive from Fox Interactive Media, a large media company.

GigaOM is the largest blog to focus on broadband and VoIP, but now also cover online games and Web2.0, with a Google pagerank of 8 and Technorati rank of 56. GigaOM does not openly provide feed and traffic stats but safe estimates would put the monthly pageviews in excess of 1million and feed subscribers in excess of 1,00,000. GigaOM is edited by Om Malik, who prior to becoming a full time blogger was a senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine covering telecom and broadband stories.

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Hot on the heals of Universal Widget API release, Netvibes launched the Coriander edition of their popular startup web page. Even before we could have digested all this, they have come up with top 5 things we didn’t knew.

Now you could just drag and drop any module from the sidebar and have it on your page. Can it get any easier than this ?

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WSJ is reporting on a tip from Bloomberg that Microsoft is buying DoubleClick an ad-serving network. The price tag is rumored to be around $2 billion, which is a hefty amount even for some insiders. This clearly shows how desperate Microsoft has become to compete with Google at all costs, if they cant build it, they’ll buy it.

DoubleClick helps better targeting of ads via its technology called Dart. It also monitors the performance of ads and help create successful campaigns for marketing companies. DoubleClick went public in 1998 at $4.25 per share and reached $134 on the first day of trading. The almost went bust in 2000 when share price dropped to $4.53.

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Google Notebook has just been released in 17 additional languages besides English. Wondering what the service really is ? Google Notebook lets you collect and clip useful information (text, images and links) from web pages while you are browsing. You can then organize these notes into different sections by just drag and drop. It also allows you to share your notes by making them public. So it is your personal collection of useful notes from the web.

Google Notebook is one of those services from Google that have gained little or no traction, I haven’t heard many bloggers talking about it or users using it. I would suggest that instead of wasting time on certain eye candy features, the notebook team should go for integration of notebook with other Google services like Orkut, Gmail, Finance and so on.

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