Today, user-friendly web site builder Weebly is launching what it says has been its No. 1 most-requested feature: The ability for users and third-party designers to create themes for Weebly web sites and have them listed in the general catalog for any one of the service’s 3.5 million users to choose.

Not only can anyone submit a theme to the Weebly listing now (as long as it is approved), users can rate and comment on themes, provide feedback to their creators, and vote up the most popular selections. In this way, Weebly’s theme catalog will be similar to Firefox’s listing of applications and personas, making it easier for others to sort and decide between them.

All designs, sent as .PSD files, will be approved individually by the Weebly team. But this opens up the site to much more public participation. The company hopes that it will create a sense of community among its users, instead of having them all working on their own individual projects.

In order to make a splash with the launch of this new feature, Weebly is hosting a theme design contest. The grand prize winner will receive $10,000; second prize will get $2,000; and third prize will get $1,000. The deadline for entries is April 30, 2010.

Submissions will be judged by a panel of six celebrity designers, including Michal Cronan (the man who named Tivo and the Amazon Kindle), Scott Thomas (official designer for the Obama campaign in 2008), Jason Putorti (former lead designer at Mint.com), and Andrew Wilkinson (founder of MetaLab).

This is the second big development for Weebly in the last two weeks. Late last month, the site launched versions of its services in French, Italian, Spanish and Chinese to give the company a wider global presence.

Weebly has raised about $670,000 from Ron Conway’s Baseline Ventures and Y Combinator.

Here is a short video demonstrating how the new theme tools work:

Companies: Weebly

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Many companies already have Facebook Fan Pages where they can interact with their customers, but Get Satisfaction has partnered with a company called Involver to turn these pages into what it calls Social Engagement Hubs. These improved pages will feature a “support” tab including many of the same features as a Get Satisfaction page, with options to “Ask a Question,” “Share an Idea,” “Report a Problem,” or “Give Praise.”

Co-founder and President Lane Becker told me that one of the big drawbacks of a standard Facebook Fan Page is that it has “no memory,” because the content is lost as soon as it scrolls off the wall. That eliminates one of the big selling points of doing customer service online — companies should be able to address a question once and have their answer reach many people, permanently. Instead, they end up having the same one-on-one conversation over and over again.

So in addition to giving more structure to the page, the Social Engagement Hub stores all the conversations and makes them searchable. When someone types in a problem, the service’s first response is to search for similar problems in the database, so the customer gets a solution more quickly and the company doesn’t have to waste time re-posting the same answer. And these conversations can be shared and searched back on a company’s Get Satisfaction page, making them accessible via Google searches as well (which is where many customer service queries begin).

Becker added that this should help make Get Satisfaction a viable option for small businesses, because customizing and managing a Get Satisfaction page still requires a little technical know-how, while a Facebook Fan Page should just work intuitively. The Social Engagement Hub is primarily designed for big brands, but Get Satisfaction plans to roll out a simpler version for small businesses in the next few months.

During my conversation with Becker, it also became clear that Get Satisfaction has become very focused on selling itself to companies — which makes sense from a business perspective, but seems like a change from its early credo of letting customers take control of customer service conversations. But that philosophy is still part of the company, Becker said. After all, the new features are a way to bring better customer support to a site where customers are having relevant discussions already.

Get Satisfaction has raised a total of $4.8 million.

(Disclosure: The company’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Thor Muller, used to be an advisor to VentureBeat, but he’s no longer active with us.)

Companies: Facebook, Get Satisfaction, Involver

People: Lane Becker

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The deluge of information rushing by on Twitter may get a little less intimidating.

Brizzly, the social media client from the team behind Google Reader, just launched a wiki-style guide to Twitter trending topics that stays long after hot stories fade from view. Each trending topic will get its own guide page that is a permanent source for up-to-date information where anybody can see the latest about a topic. Brizzly users can edit these pages to add context or the freshest news.

It’s a pretty interesting concept with lots of implications for journalism, if Brizzly can push enough users to participate and curate the pages. If the company is successful in engaging its community, it may have a much more diverse group of editors than Wikipedia in the long run — especially since the encyclopedia has become more exclusive. Brizzly was among the first companies that allowed regular users to add explanations for why certain keywords had sudden bursts of mentions on the microblogging network.

The company has made a bet on a wiki-style approach to curating information on Twitter by acquiring WikiRank, a visualization web app based on Wikipedia data, from Small Batch. Brizzly CEO Jason Shellen says the company will be integrating Wikirank technology into the Brizzly Guide over the coming months.

Last but not least, the company launched an iPhone app today that offers all the standard features: support for multiple Twitter accounts, lists, geolocation, the ability to upload photos, retweets and custom tabs. The special extras unique to the app are the Brizzly Guide and the ability to temporarily mute people you follow.

Tags: iphone app, Social Media, wiki

Companies: brizzly

People: chris weatherell, Jason Shellen

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Google notes that adoption of the YouTube mobile site saw rapid growth in 2009 with an increase of 160 percent resulting in the streaming of tens of millions of videos every day. The move is yet another example of Google’s push into mobile advertising. Most notable its recent acquisition of mobile advertising network Admob for $750 million.

The company claims that its launch provides one of the biggest audiences for a mobile campaign anywhere on the web and that it will provide easy segmentation of that audience. It would appear Google has run several “test” campaigns – mentioning Land Rover and L’Oreal – and have figured out that banner ads running on a full-day basis works best. Mazda appears to have launched a campaign today as well.

Tags: mobile advertising

Companies: Google, Kia, Sony, YouTube

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The number blasted expectations out of the water, said Tom Clayton, chief executive of Bubble Motion, the Sequoia Capital-backed startup that created the Bubbly service.

“We were expecting 10,000 to 20,000 users in the first couple months,” Clayton said. “We haven’t even really told anyone about it, it’s just sort of grown virally.”

Bubbly is cell phone service that aims to bring social media to the masses. It builds on the foundation set by Bubble Talk, which has 100 million users who use the service to send voice messages to on other individuals. With Bubbly, messages go to a bigger audience — followers.

Users can easily follow friends, family, celebrities, religious leaders, and BBC News by typing in the person’s number or access code, then *. They’re notified when there’s an update –- a friend inviting a group of classmates to a bar, a short news update from BBC News, or a message for fans from a Bollywood star.

Followers get notified when someone sends out a new voice message – normally just 30 seconds long -– and Bubble Motion earns money by taking a cut of the airtime used to listen to the message. It’s free to send a message, though in the case of celebrities, it could be thousands of fans who dial in.

“From a fan’s perspective, there’s a little more intimacy from hearing the voice,” Clayton said. “They know it’s not fake or a PR agent or some guy in a call center typing out a message.”

Most of the 500,000 new users are teens and tweens, Clayton said. The average Bubbly message gets listened to by about half of the senders’ followers. The company has launched the service in three of India’s 23 cell phone service areas, and plans to expand to the rest of India, Japan, Europe the Middle East and later, Brazil.

Bubble Motion also hopes to offer video Bubbly messages, where followers could easily dial into watch homemade videos, or even give users the option of including text – making it a true mobile Twitter.

There’s just one glitch to that idea, though -– Bubble Motion wouldn’t make money off texting, because users in Asia don’t pay to receive text messages.

Tags: Bubbly

Companies: Bubble Motion, Sequoia Capital

People: Tom Clayton

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As reported by the Wall Street Journal (via Silicon Alley Insider), the service is driven by new set-top boxes that replace the standard Dish Network box. Intriguingly, the new boxes are running “elements” of Google’s Android mobile operating system — which hints at an even more interesting future for Android outside of mobile devices, netbooks, and tablets. The interfaces on cable and satellite set-top boxes haven’t evolved much over the past decade, and certainly haven’t made much progress on the search front. Google is taking advantage of their lack of innovation by bringing television search to modern times.

As is typical for Google, the company is also eying advertising integration into the television search service as well — which may also make it more tempting for cable and satellite providers to jump in bed with the search company.

Currently, the service is being tested by Google employees and their families.

Even if all of the cable and satellite providers decide to jump on Google’s TV search service, it will likely be some time before we see it in our living rooms. Rolling out the service would require replacing current set-top boxes, which is something that traditionally happens at a snail’s pace.

Tags: cable, satellite, search

Companies: Google

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Boston-based Localytics gets its data directly from apps that incorporate the company’s analytics tracking tools. The data is, of course, biased by being measured only through a fraction of the 100,000-plus apps in Apple’s store, but Localytics’ analysts believe it’s enough of a cross-section to apply broadly to the rest of the app market.

Weekday usage peaks at 9 PM local time, they found, with Tuesday being the busiest weeknight. There’s an obvious implication: People are using iPhone apps while watching TV. That bodes well for the iPad’s adoption as a couch-surfing device, Localytics exec Brian Suthoff told me in a phone interview. “It seems people are reaching for their iPhone rather than their laptop” on the couch, he said.

On weekends, iPhone owners only increase their app playtime by 7 percent over weekday use, and as shown in the chart, Saturday app usage is spread out surprisingly evenly across the day.

Localytics, founded in 2009, is privately funded.

Companies: Apple

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