Flickr and Snapfish have struck a deal to make HP’s photo sharing sites (and Flickr competitor) the go-to printing partner for the 40 million Flickr users in the US and international markets.

As Flickr’s “preferred printing partner,” Snapfish will let Flickr users to transfer, organize, and print photos, scrapbooks, and more. Yahoo says that this is the first time Flickr’s international users will have an option to print photos directly from their photostream thanks to Snapfish’s presence in 22 countries. And Flick users can also ship photos to anywhere in the world.

Flickr’s online photo organization features, such as Organizr, Sets, and Photo Page, are integrated with Snapfish as well. Members in the U.S. have the option to pick up their prints locally at any of Snapfish’s retail partners’ stores, including Walmart, Walgreens, Staples, Duane Reade, and others retail stores.

It’s unclear what the revenue share is between the two photo sharing sites. HP acquired Snapfish in 2005 days after Yahoo acquired Flickr.

Flickr also recently added people photo tagging and launched an iPhone app. But the popular photo sharing site has come under fire in the past few months for freedom of speech issues and Yahoo’s branding of Flickr. But Flickr has remained a dominant player in the photo sharing space, with more than 4 billion photos uploaded, growing at a rate of 100 million per month.

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It also pulls your name, and other details from your Facebook profile such as your career. For example, at one point, it flashes the following message to me, “you are squandering your potential as a writer.” Interesting.

I took a video grab below of it in action, but unfortunately, it doesn’t capture the sound. You need to watch this for yourself to get the full effect. Do it now. You are not your f*cking khakis.

Update: And in one of those awesome little moments of coincidence, commenter Ron reminds us that it is none other than David Fincher who is currently filming The Social Network, the new movie about Facebook, which presumably, the company isn’t too happy about.

[images: Fox]

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MySpace seems to be on a bit of a hiring spree. Over the past few months the social network hired Mark Rosenbaum as Chief Financial Officer, Alex Maghen as CTO (he was formerly CTO of MySpace Music), former AOL and Tsavo exec Mike Macadaan as VP Product, and former Facebook Director Katie Geminder as SVP of User Experience and Design. Now MySpace has recruited a product manager from LinkedIn, Christina Wodtke, to be the general manager of social.

Wodtke was previously a Principal Product Manager at LinkedIn and ran the activity stream (which recently got a little Twitter-happy), communication products, and the events application. She also built the search and marketplace design team at Yahoo, and helped to redesign search, shopping and local products. Wodtke will fall under the purview of chief product officer Jason Hirschhorn.

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Foursquare is teaming up with an org in New York City (where they are based), Techies Give Back, to translate checkins into donations. Ideally, this money would come from brands/organizers that would sponsor the Foursquare Leaderboard for a week, co-founder Dennis Crowley tells us. Money earned would be given to CampInteractive, a nonprofit that works with inner-city youth on both outdoors and tech projects, which Techies Give Back is working with to hold an event on December 13.

Here’s how this would work: When you checkin on Foursquare, you generate points that go towards your score on the leaderboard. These points differ based on a few factors. Generally, you get more points if you’re checking into a place you haven’t been to before, or in a long time. You also get more points for adding a venue that isn’t yet in Foursquare’s system. Based on these points, a sponsor would donate a set amount of money per point.

Foursquare is looking for a brand that will donate at least $0.03 to Techies Give Back for each point earned. In NYC, that means the charity would have raised over $4,500 last week. (For those keeping score at home, that means there were about 150,000 points earned from checkins in New York last week.)

The sponsorship would allow for a complete re-skinning of the Foursquare leaderboard, Crowley notes. The week they are targeting is December 7 through the 12. Ideally, they’d have a brand step up with a winning proposal by December 1. Those interested should email info [at] techiesgiveback.org.

While this will just be an experiment in NYC at first, Crowley hints that this is something the company is thinking about doing with its leaderboard going forward. And this extends upon the idea of using the game element of Foursquare for good. Last month, the service teamed up with BART, the public transportation system in the San Francisco Bay Area, to encourage people to check in more at BART stations to earn rewards such as free rides and a special badge.

Of course, none of this has to do with the business model Foursquare is also working on, which involves partnering with local venues to create incentives such as free meals/beer for users who checkin.

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Did LinkedIn more than double its U.S. visitors in October? A casual glance at the latest comScore data makes it look that way, with LinkedIn shooting up to 20 million unique visitors in October, 2009, from 9 million in September, 2009. The new estimate puts LinkedIn ahead of Twitter, which saw a decline of U.S visitors last month to 19.2 million.

Of course, LinkedIn didn’t really all of a sudden have a growth spurt in October. Rather, comScore was previously under-counting its reach. Now it does a better job of measuring Web usage at work, which apparently is where about half of LinkedIn’s users check in. It makes sense, since LinkedIn is a professional network and you are more likely to be looking for contacts at other companies during work hours.

While the fish-shaped chart above suggests that LinkedIn is now about as popular in the U.S as Twitter (or at least Twitter.com), the two are complementary. On Tuesday, LinkedIn gave users the ability to link to their Twitter accounts so that their Twitter stream shows up as status updates in LinkedIn as well. Since Tuesday, LinkedIn has witnessed a 25 percent increase in status updates. Long live the stream.

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To be clear, despite some of the wording ins its blog post, SPDY (pronounced “speedy”) isn’t about fully replacing HTTP, the standard web protocol since 1996, but it is about augmenting it, to make delivery faster. How much faster? After doing some initial internal tests with Chrome, Google claims that the top 25 websites in the world can load up to 55% faster with SPDY.

Of course, as Google notes, those tests were done in Google’s labs, likely under optimal conditions. SPDY in an average home during daily use may produce different results. But again, this protocol is still very young, so it’s entirely possible that things could get even faster. To that end, Google is asking for the development community’s help. They’ve posted some early documentation and code samples, hoping for feedback.

In the docs, Google lays out the difference between HTTP and SPDY:

SPDY is intended to be as compatible as possible with current web-based applications. This means that, from the perspective of the server business logic or application API, nothing has changed. To achieve this, all of the application request and response header semantics are preserved.  SPDY introduces a “session” which resides between the HTTP application layer and the TCP transport to regulate the flow of data. This “session” is akin to an HTTP request-response pair.

I reached out to Google just to confirm that they weren’t going to try and do something completely crazy like change the “http://” we all know and love with “spdy://”, don’t worry, they’re not. As stated above, SPDY will create a session of sorts that resides between HTTP and the data transportation.

What will be interesting about this protocol is if it’s optimized for Chrome over the other web browsers. It would seem Google wouldn’t do that, since its ultimate goal is to have people using the web through any means as quickly as they can (so as best to serve their ads more often). But when you’re developing both a protocol and a browser, it seems likely that Google will have an advantage to offer the best experience.

A few startups are also working on ways to deliver web content faster. One, FasterWeb, which we covered in July, is hoping to improve web surfing speeds tenfold next year. Their approach is different, optimizing content on the provider or ISP end.

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Ever since last summer, Twitter’s growth in the U.S. has been stalling. But in October, the number of people who visited Twitter.com from the U.S. actually declined for the first time by 8 percent month-over-month. Estimates released today by comScore put Twitter’s domestic unique visitors at 19.2 million, down from 20.9 million in September.

On an annual basis, Twitter is still going gangbusters with 1,271 percent growth from 1.4 million visitors in October, 2008. And on a global basis, it still seems to be chugging away with 58.4 million visitors in September. But a hypergrowth company like Twitter cannot afford to slow down in its home market.

CEO Evan Williams recently acknowledged the slowdown in the U.S., and hopes that a slew of new features will help revive growth to the site. Many of these features are already rolling out, including the new Retweet button, Lists, and Geolocation features.

Twitter is obviously committed to making its service better on its own Website (these numbers do not measure usage on mobile or desktop clients, which is easily half of all Twitter usage). But while it fiddles, rival Facebook keeps moving further and further ahead.

Will the new features be enough to bring back growth in the U.S.? If they don’t, Twitter’s troubles will really begin.

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Last January Warner Music Group forced YouTube to remove all of its music from the site, citing disputes over royalty payments. This led to an outcry from users, who created protest videos once YouTube started muting or pulling down any user-generated content that contained WMG songs as background music. Today, those songs are starting to make their way back to the world’s largest video portal: music videos for Madonna, Green Day, and Bee Gees, among others, are now live on YouTube for the first time in nearly a year.

That’s great news. But the new videos will look a bit odd to anyone who has used YouTube before — they’re all decked out with extensive branding, including colorful backgrounds and large links to the artist’s products. Warner alone has the ability to do this, because of a deal it negotiated that gives it far more control over its pages than other content partners have. Warner is allowed to control its own branding, and can sell its own ads against both its own music videos and the user generated content that features its songs, with the majority of the revenue from these ads going to WMG (YouTube will take a cut as well).

At this point the branding isn’t awful, but it’s a concession YouTube surely wasn’t eager to make. After all, now that Warner has the ability to brand their clips however they want, other content owners will want to do it themselves. If YouTube agrees to that, we’ll lose the relatively uniform layout on the site in favor of something that’s more reminiscent of (the old) MySpace. And there’s always the risk that Warner won’t be happy with its initial results and may try some more aggressive branding, which could get even more annoying.

At this point it looks like only a fraction on Warner’s content has been reintroduced to the site, though we can likely expect more of it to come online in the next few weeks.

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This tool, developed by Egghead Ventures, with the help of developer Sean Percival, who has been advising MySpace recently, uses MySpace ID to sync any RSS feed with your MySpace status. This is similar to the tool that MySpace’s recently announced that syncs your Twitter with your status. But instead of showing a tweet with a Twitter logo, it shows a blog post title with a link, and a RSS logo. This should make it clear to people looking at your profile that you’re highlighting a post of yours rather than just linking to some piece of content you think is cool. The blog URLs are shortened with MySpace’s lnk.ms shortener.

There are also options for this tool such as setting the time interval that dictates how often it will pull in new content. And you can set an into text to put in such as “New blog post:”

More here on Percival’s blog.

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Today Intel agreed to pay rival chipmaker AMD $1.25 billion to settle a raft of ongoing litigation going back decades. AMD accused Intel of anti-competitive practices, which sparked an antitrust investigation. By settling now with AMD, Intel avoids paying out billions more down the line and being branded a monopolist by the government for abusing its 80 percent PC-chip market share.

The size of the settlement is as close to an admission of guilt we’ll ever hear from Intel. It still maintains its innocence, as any prudent corporation would, but you don’t pay out $1.25 billion just to avoid the hassle of a trial. And while $1.25 billion is an enormous sum which will help shore up AMD’s balance sheet, it amounts to only 10 percent of Intel’s $12.9 billion in cash and short term investments.

Just to put the size of the settlement in context, last year Intel’s revenues were $38 billion. Last quarter alone, it was making roughly $104 million a day. At that rate, Intel brings in $1.25 billion every 12 days. It can absorb the settlement pretty easily.

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This morning, Google is making a slight update to Wave to help users unclog their inbox from public waves. Previously, you could see public waves in your inbox, which was fairly annoying. Now for a wave to appear in your inbox, you need to “follow” the wave.

When someone adds you directly to a wave, or if you contribute to a wave, you will automatically be following that wave. But when you see a public wave that you would like to get updates on and monitor the conversation, you can chose to follow it by hitting the follow button in the wave panel toolbar. You can also archive waves, which will removes waves from your inbox. When there is an update to an archived wave, it will appear in your inbox again. And you can switch between following and unfollowing a wave as much and as often as you like.

Google says the “unfollow” feature replaces the mute command. You can still find waves that you are not following by searching for them or if you have organized them into saved searches or folders. The feature certainly gives your more control over your inbox, which is always a good thing. Google needs to continue adding more intuitive features to help users better understand the innovative, but confusing communications product.

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As AOL prepares to spin off from Time Warner in an IPO, it wants to gussy itself up so that it looks as appealing as possible tp ublic investors. Today, AOL disclosed that it plans yet another restructuring which could cost as much as $200 million. The biggest cost savings from any restructuring is usually through layoffs, and the latest round has already started at AOL, with 100 let go this week and as many as 1,000 of its 6,000 jobs at risk of being eliminated.

Despite new leadership under CEO Tim Armstrong, AOL has yet to turn around financially.  Last quarter, revenues sank 23 percent to $777 million.  The biggest drop came from subscription revenues to its legacy Internet access business, down 29 percent, but advertising revenues also took a hit, down 18 percent.  AOL depends on display advertising, which has not yet rebounded like search advertising appears to be doing.

By cleaning up house and removing as many costs as possible before the IPO, Armstrong is trying to make AOL as lean as possible. But eliminating salaries and benefits can only go so far. He has to show that his new content strategy can create actual growth as well.

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Now, obviously, this link will be clearly labeled as “sponsored,” but that shouldn’t make it that much less of an enticing opportunity for some individuals who want to drive traffic to their site. Reddit says it sees anywhere from a 2% to a 10% click-through-rate on the ads that run in this area. At the very least, this should mean thousands of hits coming to your site that wouldn’t otherwise get.

So what’s the catch? The only catch is money. As long as you’re willing to pay the minimum of $20 a day, Reddit will enter you into a pool with everyone else willing to pay to determine how much face time you’ll get on the homepage. For example, if the total bids for the day equal $200, and you bid the minimum $20, you’ll get 10% of the day in this ad slot. It seems very likely that the daily bids are going to be quite a bit more than that, so $20 probably isn’t going to buy you much, but still, it will get you something.

With this beta, there won’t be the ability to target specific Reddits (the Politics Reddit, for example), but the plan is to eventually offer that option to better match individual advertisers with the audience they are trying to reach.

Adding your own self-serve ad is as easy as can be. Once you’re accepted into the beta, you simply fill out a title for you link, enter the URL, put in the duration that you wish to run your campaign, optionally disable comments, put in your bid amount, and then upload an image (if you choose). You then pay by entering your credit card information into a form.

What’s great is that just like regular Reddit items, users will be able to vote up or down on your ad, which means that if your content actually is good, you can even appear on the homepage for longer than you’ve paid for.

The company notes that users have tried to game the system for years attempting to get traffic, so this is a logical extension to allow them to pay to get it. It officially unveiled sponsored links for advertisers (big name ones) in January. Reddit’s main competitor, Digg, also has a advertising voting system, but so far, it’s only open to Digg’s advertising partners, not anyone willing to pay. Assuming they put guidelines in place (which Reddit has), it’s not hard to see this type of model eventually making its way to Digg as well.

Reddit’s founders, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, recently left the company three years to the day after Condé Nast purchased them. But they’re still clearly involved, as we spoke with Ohanian about this new launch, and he seems pretty excited about it.

As a part of the launch, Reddit has given us some invites to give to TechCrunch readers to check out the self-serve advertising system. The first 50 people to email MArrington [at] reddit.com will receive the invites.

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Wordpress is one of the web’s most popular blogging platforms, with over 8.5 million downloads and 7,200 plugins. But with all those plugins, finding the high quality ones can be a challenge. That’s where WP Plugins comes in. Launching today, WP Plugins hopes to be the App Store for WordPress plugins.

WordPress plugin developers can upload their premium plugins to WP Plugins and sell them to users. Developers have the choice to sell their plugins at whatever price they choose, and can two choose from two pricing models: they can offer their plugin as-is (buyers will have a 7 day window to download it) or they can offer it as a subscription, which includes upgrades and personal support from the plugin’s developer for as long as you continue the subscription. Of course, the subscription will cost more in most cases. WP Plugins then takes 10% of each plugin sale.

To participate, plugin developers have sign up for a developer account, and upload their plugin. Incsub’s team of WordPress experts will then look over plugin, and once it’s approved, it’ll get put on the store and up for sale. Incsub will monitor plugins and make sure there is no malicious content as well. WP Plugins has more information here.

Incsub has quite the experience with WordPress; they’ve run sites including Edublogs, WordPress Multi-User Dev and blog network hosts Blogs.mu.

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SpotiChart, for example, is an amazing pet project by London-based developer Benoit Xhenseval that aggregates Spotify tweets from public Twitter accounts and parses the data in order to build dynamic global music charts based on streams of tracks, albums, playlists, artists and more.

SpotiChart regularly tracks the public Twitter timeline for tweets that contain the word spotify (which can be in a URL, even when it is shortened by one of the many tools for that) and upon reception contacts the Spotify service to get the details of items. SpotiChart then weeds out duplicate tweets, compiles the rest and turns the data into custom charts.

Every now and then (see schedule), SpotiChart will create updated charts and alert followers of the @SpotiChart account, which means in between 7 and 12 tweets per day will be sent to these users. Custom charts for tracks, albums and artists also have their own RSS feed, which updates once every day.

Great stuff, Xhenseval. But expect some backlash over that one unsolicited tweet your service sends out to random Spotify users to raise awareness for SpotiChart.

(Via Kieran McGrady)

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Mobile content delivery startup Myxer has officially delivered over 10 million free ringtones to iPhone users.Myxer allows users to download ringtone in two ways. First, Myxer’s free ringtone podcasts allows any iTunes user to pull ringtones directly from the channel. And the startup has a standalone site that gives users the ability to download from a catalog of more than two million ringtones and sync them to the device from their PC.

The easier of the two options is surprisingly subscribing to the podcast. Being subscribed means that iTunes will check for new files as they become available, allowing users to get Myxer ringtones directly from iTunes and on their mobile phone every time they sync. Two new ringtones are added each week.

In addition to ringtones, Myxer offers over 2 million free ad-supported ringtones, wallpapers and videos and currently counts more than 27 million users. Users can also make their own ringtones, videos and wallpaper from music and files a customer already owns. Competitors include mSpot, Playphone and SendMe.

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I spoke with Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone (formerly CEO of Ask.com), who says that the site’s beta was actually shorter than expected, in part because intital feedback has been quite positive.

Since appearing at TechCrunch50, Clicker has added 33% more content to its database, growing from an index of 300,000 up to 400,000 full length episodes. These 400,000 episodes come from over 7,000 different shows across 1,200 content sources around the web. Lanzone says some of the biggest changes since we last saw Clicker have been to its Playlist function, which new includes more DVR-esque features like new episode alerts and season passes.

Lanzone also says that the site has continued to build out its search engine, which now allows you to constrain your search to episode descriptions of a specific show — for example, you could do a search for “Michael Arrington” within the Charlie Rose show to see all of the times Michael has been interviewed on that show. Clicker has also launched a ‘related search’ feature that suggests shows you may like based on what you’re currently viewing (this feature was only a placeholder during the TC50 demo because it relies in part on user data to help determine what’s related). And there’s integration with Facebook Connect, which you can use to sign in and to share content to your News Feed.

Another big change is the addition of premium content to Clicker’s search engine: the site now includes shows from both Amazon Video on Demand and Netflix’s ‘Watch Instantly’ content (you’ll obviously have to pay for these to watch them). Clicker doesn’t actually host any of this content — instead, it provides deep links that point you directly to whichever episode you want to watch. All of this is provided free, but the site plans to roll out premium features (following the ‘imdb model) in the future. Stay tuned.

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This was a safety round, as Redfin announced profitability over the summer and have now exceeded a $20 million in revenue run rate (it was just $15 million last summer). They’ve roughly quadrupled in size since 2008, even in a down real estate market.

I used Redfin as a buyer over the summer when I was looking for a house. Here’s how it works, and why it’s so attractive compared to normal real estate broker deals: As a buyer you spend a lot of time on the Redfin site, looking at available houses and a rich set of data on previous sales, comps in the neighborhood, other homes listed in the same price range, etc. (or you can use their iPhone app, which the company says is the highest rated real estate app).

If you want to view a home you schedule online. They set it up for you and meet you at the house.

In all, it isn’t much different than the standard buying a house procedure. Except at the end they refund 50% of their commission to you. On a $500,000 house, you get a check for $7,500 at closing.

Sellers who use Redfin pay a flat a $5,000 – $7,000 fee, depending on services ordered. And if you’re also using Redfin to buy a home while you are selling, that fee drops by $1,000.

As you can imagine, real estate professionals aren’t thrilled. Nor do they love CEO Glenn Kelman, who said In an interview with 60 Minutes: “Real Estate is by far the most screwed up industry in America.”

But customers clearly love the service, and they have closed more than $2 billion in home sales since launching in February 2006. The total U.S. home real estate market is around $1 trillion, so they have some room to grow.

Redfin is currently available in Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Washington DC, Baltimore, New York’s Long Island and Westchester County as well as most of California, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California and Sacramento.

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The creator, Josh Weinberg, was quiet for a long time after that video. But in the last few months have been productive for him. And he now has three new videos and posted them on The Website Is Down. All, including the original, are embedded below:

Episode 1 – Sales Guy vs. Web Dude

The original website is down video web dude tries desperately to get his important work done while assaulted on all sides by rampant incompetence. Will he survive???

Episode 2 – Excel Hell

Video #2 from the website is down! Chip takes us on a wild ride into the life of a master salesman. How many sales can he make in a single video? One? Maybe?

Episode 3 – Remain Calm

Chip Demonstrates his special procedure for a hot-swap hardrive replacement using only his steel-toed boot and his razor thin patience. Watch and Learn!

Episode 4 – Sales Demolition

Biz Tip of the week: Get your clients in the room and shove your product down their throats in a sales demo!

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