FriendFeed, the social activity aggregator, has released a set of customizable widgets that will allow bloggers to make sure their readers can follow all of their activities across the web. While the site has provided some widgets in the past, this set includes some new widgets to facilitate story sharing and allows for more tweaking than was offered before.

Among the widgets offered are a new profile badge, a list of the most recent items in your feed, and a “Share on FriendFeed” chiclet that allows users to add an item to FriendFeed without leaving your site. You can grab the widgets here.

Mark Cuban will be joining the TechCrunch50 program on Tuesday, September 9 for a one-on-one interview with Jason Calacanis from the main stage. You probably know Mark as both the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a serial entrepreneur who co-founded Broadcast.com with Todd Wagner. They then sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo in July of 1999 for $5.04 billion. Before Broadcast.com, Mark co-founded MicroSolutions, a leading National Systems Integrator, in 1983, and later sold it to CompuServe.

The mass exodus of both execs and rank and file employees at Yahoo continues. In fact the real defections may just be getting started at a high percentage of employees vest on lucrative restricted stock units this month. Two new SVPs, Todd Teresi and Steve Boom, have now also resigned from Yahoo.

When it comes to the availability of good mapping data, not all parts of the world are created equal. That’s why Google is taking a wiki approach to filling out the white spaces on its maps, particularly in developing nations. Back in June, it launched Map Maker for a small group of island nations where there isn’t great existing cartography data. But now it’s added India to the countries that can modified on Google Maps. As Google gains more experience with this experiment, more countries may be added in the future. Although it is starting in regions that have poor map data, hopefully it will figure out a way to add this capability for every region of the world. (Even in the U.S., Google Maps is not perfect).

As many of our readers have noticed (and noted) already, we rolled out a new design for TechCrunch yesterday evening. And while we’re still making lots of small changes, we wanted to take a second to write a proper post explaining our intentions and soliciting your feedback.

The Active Network, a network of sites focused on getting people involved in sports and other activities, has raised an additional $80 million in a Series F round led by ESPN and joined by Canaan Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Performance Equity Partners.

Today CrunchGear reviews the $549 Palm Treo Pro, a Windows Mobile Smartphone with the good looks of the Blackberry Bold and the goodness of unlocked G.S.M. with 3G and G.P.S. support.

Today Acquia has announced the beta launch of a commercially supported distribution of Drupal. The release is essentially a hardened distribution of Drupal, complemented with technical support and network service offerings. Code named Carbon for now, the package includes a select set of community contributed modules alongside the Drupal core.

Cisco is getting into the Web e-mail game with a $215 million purchase of five-year-old PostPath. PostWho? The company sells a Linux-based e-mail service to enterprises somewhat like Zimbra (which Yahoo bought for $350 million last year). PostPath is a fully functional in-browser Ajax client, and on the back-end it is trying to take on Microsoft Exchange. Cisco will likely add PostPath’s functionality to its WebEx collaboration service (it bought WebEx for $3.2 billion last year).

A big problem in Europe - and something I found out during my TechCrunch Euro Tour this Summer - is that startups have very few opportunities to meet and network. If a startup eco-system in Europe is ever really going to take off, startups need to get together more often. Berlin is centrally located for the rest of Europe (East and West) and has a thriving startups scene right now. Get where this is heading yet?

Guess what the URL Diary.com has been doing since 1996? Not much. But now the owner, a guy in London, is looking to re-imagine the concept of the diary for the Twitter generation. Diary.com has a clean interface, a little like like Twitter, but instead of 140 charcters you plug in 1000.

For Web companies looking to expand abroad, Russia needs to be at the top of their list of markets to enter. Russia has the fastest growing Internet population in Europe, followed by France and Spain. In a comparison of 16 European Internet populations by country, comScore reports that Russia’s Internet audience for the month of June grew 27 percent year over year, compared to 21 percent growth in France and 15 percent growth in Spain. (Is Russia part of Europe? It is for the purposes of this analysis). If you look at the total size of the Internet populations in each country, however, Russia ranks fifth with 17.5 million monthly Internet visitors. But by Internet penetration, Russia ranks last, with only 14 percent of the total population online. So there is still lots of room for growth there.

Google Earth is getting a nice plug from Olympic Gold Medal cyclist Kristin Armstrong. When she did her time trials in December, 2007 in China, she took along her husband’s GPS unit to capture the elevation along the route. Then she used that data to find the best training route back home. In a guest post on the Google Lat-Long blog, she writes:

After returning home to Boise, Idaho, I exported the GPS data to several different formats, one of which I was able to launch with Google Earth. I was then able to trace the entire course from the comfort of my home half a world away and find a similar route to train on back in Boise. This capability along with having the elevation profile proved invaluable in my preparation for my Gold Medal race.

Google proves that once again, information is a competitive advantage.

Earlier this month LonelyGirl15, one of the most successful examples of viral web marketing to date, aired its last episode. The series originally began as a joint project created by Miles Beckett, Greg Goodfried, and Ramesh Flinders, who produced a series of YouTube videos portraying the life of a fictional 16 year old girl named LonelyGirl15. The videos presented LonelyGirl15’s life as if it was real, leading to a media scandal when the fictional nature of the show was revealed. Following the revelation (and the show’s continued popularity), the founders launched Kate Modern, a British web show hosted on Bebo that was set in the same fictional world.