These social networks sure do like Google execs. Facebook hired Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s VP Global Online Sales And Operations, in March 2008. Bebo hired away Joanna Shields as President - previously she was Google’s Managing Director for Google Europe, Russia, Middle East & Africa.

Now Friendster. They’ve hired Richard Kimber, who was Google’s Managing Director of Sales and Operations for South East Asia and had over 1,000 people in his organization, to take over as the new CEO.

Previous CEO Kent Lindstrom will become SVP Corporate Development, says the WSJ. And the company has also raised a new $20 million round of financing led by IDG Ventures. The company has now raised $45 million.

The Friendster story is long and mostly sad. The company was founded in 2002 and owned the social networking world five years ago. They turned down a $30 million offer from Google in 2003 because they thought their destiny was something greater (that stock would be worth many times that amount based on Google’s stock price today). Instead of selling to Google, founder Jonathan Abrams raised venture capital. Friendster eventually raised money from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital and Battery Ventures. Some of the most successful and well known venture capitalists in silicon valley joined Friendster’s board of directors. After a failure to sell the company in late 2005, they recapitalized the company and Kent Lindstrom, one of the founders of Friendster, took over as President.

By our calculations Friendster is the worlds 16th most valuable social network today, although it is the 9th most trafficked website.

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Sonos just announced smaller receivers and players. The ZP120 - with amp - is 43 percent smaller and the ZP50 - without amp - is a standard receiver. Both use MIMO for increased range and link quality. If you’re familiar with the current Sonos line-up you’ll be doubly impressed by the size of these little buggers.

The entire kit, along with the LCD-based remote, connects to PCs and Macs and can stream audio to multiple rooms or zones. The real draw of the Sonos system is the zone system which allows you to play different music in different rooms. For example, my living room could be the drum and bass room while the basement could be the chill out room. The bathroom could be full of whale-song.

Pricing is still unannounced for the U.S.

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Youth-oriented sports social network WePlay raised $8.6 million in a series B financing led by Deep Fork Capital. Existing investors also participated in the round, including FirstMark Capital and athletes Derek Jeter, LeBron James and Peyton Manning. That brings the total capital raised to $13 million.

WePlay launched in March, and is designed as a social utility where parents, coaches, and kids can manage their Little League and school sports teams. The company was founded by former Geo Cities CFO/COO Steve Hansen. Chairman Rick Heitzmann, a managing director at FirstMark, says the goal is to become:

. . . the operating system of youth sports.

We are hyperlocal content. It is not about the New York Yankees. It is about the Gramercy Bombers T-ball team. You have a deeper connection to that team if you are a parent, coach or grandparent.

But connecting with the pros is definitely an an extra draw. The site features personal pages from about a dozen professional athletes, who offer kids playing tips as well as see footage from their high-school days and earlier. WePlay’s traffic is off to a decent start, but it is still modest, with about 200,000 U.S. unique visitors in June, according to comScore. Competitors include TeamSnap and RosterBot.

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Adam Hyder, Yahoo’s Senior Director of Engineering for its Advertising Management Platform (AMP), has joined the flood of recent departures from the search giant in hopes of greener pastures. Hyder has joined Jobvite, an online recruiting service, as the company’s CTO.

Last month, Jobvite hired Yahoo HotJobs boss Dan Finnigan as its CEO. It’s likely that Finnigan had something to do with Hyder’s choice of relocation - the two worked together at HotJobs before Hyder moved to AMP.

The loss to Yahoo’s AMP platform is significant - the service was only announced in April, and has yet to launch (it is supposed to launch some time this summer). AMP is supposed to “help marketers buy across search, display, local, mobile, and video inventory - all from a single, integrated interface.” During the Yahoo conference call last June, the company said that AMP would be available within a week. Six weeks later, the platform’s homepage still displays a teaser trailer. We haven’t heard what the status of the AMP platform is at this point, but it’s never a good sign when your Director of Engineering jumps ship weeks (or less) before release.

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Adaptive Path, a product development and consulting service in San Francisco, is releasing a new web interface concept called Aurora this evening. The project, which was developed in collaboration with Mozilla, is being released to the community via the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license and is available on the Mozilla and Adaptive Path websites.

Jesse James Garrett, the cofounder of Adaptive Path and the person who coined the term “Ajax,” is the lead designer for Aurora.

A video of the concept is above. People, places and things on the web are represented by objects in a three dimensional space. When users stop using objects, the objects drift off into the distance. Data objects can easily be dropped in and out of applications and communication tools are built into the UI.

Closely related objects are clustered together. As users rotate through the wheel (aka the dock) at the bottom of the page, the spacial view gives greater visual emphasis to clusters that are most closely related the object at the center of the wheel.

Aurora isn’t being productized - Adaptive Path is simply releasing the design and interface ideas into the wild as a “springboard” for an open discussion about how to evolve the user experience of the Web browser.

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Here are some of the jobs listed on CrunchBoard over the last week:

• Senior Java Web Engineer
  TinyPictures.us - San Francisco, CA
• Backend Web Developer
  SlideShare - San Francisco, CA
• Developer
  SNAP Interactive - New York, NY
• Product Marketing Manager
  Mimeo - New York, NY
• Front End Ninja
  Uptake - San Francisco, CA
• Directing Engineer
  ZOOSE - San Francisco, CA
• Systems Engineering Developer
  Digg - San Francisco, CA
• National Sales Executive
  Liquidity Services - Washington, DC
• Interaction Designer
  Lunch.com - Manhattan Beach, CA
• Manager, Engagement Management
  Organic.com - New York, NY

Additionally, we’re looking for a Ruby Developer to join us here at TechCrunch HQ (Atherton, CA).

International readers can check our British and French job boards as well.

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One of the most irritating obstacles encountered by growing startups is the hunt for affordable office space. Startups with a dozen employees generally aren’t interested in leasing vast tracts of space, which makes them unattractive clients for business realtors, so they’re typically left to fend for themselves.

Rofo, a new startup founded by two former commercial real estate brokers, is trying to offer small companies a solution. The site recently launched in public beta, and specializes in offering real estate listings for offices up to 5,000 sq feet. For the time being listings are restricted to the Bay Area, but the company hopes to expand to other regions in the near future.

Rofo (which stands for “Right of First Offer“) sports a basic but intuitive interface that allows users to specify the size of their desired office using sliders. Users can tag suitable candidates with the “shortlist” option, and each listing is plotted and pictured using integration with Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth.

To generate its listings, the site crawls a number of partner commercial real estate sites for open office inventory, and also monitors XML feed from brokerage firms and larger landlords. Users can also create a traditional direct listing, similar to those seen on Craigslist (but hopefully with less spam).

CEO Alan Bernier acknowledges that there are some strong competitors in this space, including Loopnet, but points out that many of these require a fee to post or view listings. Conversely, Rofo is free for both brokers and browsers. As with other realty sites, Rofo’s success will lie in its ability to collect useful and current listings. Bernier says that the site currently has about 80% of the Bay Area market covered, but that number will be hard to maintain as the site expands to new areas.

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Google does a decent job translating Web pages from other languages, but machine-based translation is still not good enough for when you need a truly accurate translation. A new service called the Google Translation Center looks like Google is making its machine-translation technologies available to human translators. If you have a document that needs translating, you can upload it and request a translator to work on it, according to the marketing information on the site. (I was unable to actually sign in with my Google account, so this may not have fully launched). The service can accommodate both professional and volunteer translators, and will let them use Google’s automatic translation tools and dictionaries to do their work. This could make translations a lot easier to do because the machine translation tools could take a first pass at the documents, meaning the translator would just have to correct any mistakes instead of starting with a blank screen.

The Translation Center is set up as a marketplace for matching translators with people who need texts translated. It supports both paid translations and volunteer ones. In a sense, the system is like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, in that it finds humans to do work that computers are not yet proficient at.

The system also keeps track of previous translations, and matches new ones against its “global Translation Memory.” That makes this project sound like a way for Google to collect a good set of translations to help improve its core translating algorithm, more than as a standalone business. Google Blogoscoped has more details.

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Update: The first batch of tickets has sold out. We will add more in the coming weeks.

TechCrunch is heading South for a Meet-Up in Austin, Texas with the team from Austin Ventures. We are landing in town on Thursday, September 25 just in time for the Austin City Limits music festival.

We’ll be holding a 500 person event on Thursday, similar in format to our other events around the world (see recent wrap up posts on Silicon Valley and Los Angeles events). As always, ticket proceeds will be donated to charity.

We have a handful of three day ACL passes to give away to sponsors and attendees, and will be announcing details of music festival give aways in the coming weeks. Register now to join us in Austin.

The TechCrunch Austin Ventures Meet-Up will be held at Pangaea, one of the hottest new venues in Austin. At Pangaea we will feature local start-ups and other sponsors, starting at 5:30 p.m. (central time) and running to 10:00 p.m.

We will also be holding a mini conference before the meetup - a roundtable discussion with Erick Schonfeld (details will be announced soon), just as we did at August Capital.

All of the proceeds from the TechCrunch Austin Ventures Meet-Up will benefit the Lance Armstrong Foundation, an organization uniting people to fight cancer – believing that unity is strength, knowledge is power and attitude is everything.

In addition to releasing tickets for the Austin Meet-Up, sponsorship opportunities and demo tables are now available for companies to show off their products. If you are interested in supporting the event, please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde. If you are a member of the press wanting to cover the event, please contact Sarah Ross.

Attendee identification will be checked at the door. Tickets are not transferable and not refundable. If you use your name to purchase multiple tickets, your guests must arrive with you to check in at the door.

We look forward to seeing you in Austin!!

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It is hardly surprising that FeedBurner’s subscriber numbers can be faked. What is surprising is how easy it is to do so. As the video above shows, all you need is a Netvibes account. The folks at the Next Web in Amsterdam took a blog with 43 subscribers and turned that into 2,500 overnight simply by creating an OPML file with the same feed copied 2,500 times and pasting it into their Netvibes page. The result was 2,500 widgets of the blog feed, which FeedBurner counts as separate subscribers.

Why does this matter? Blogs like to tout how many RSS subscribers they have because, even if it is a smaller number than direct visitors to their site, it represents their most loyal readers. That’s why we display how many RSS readers we have in the Feedburner chicklet at the top of TechCrunch (currently 850,000). For these numbers to have any meaning, though, they cannot be as easy to game as the video shows. (And, no, we don’t game our numbers).

You’d think that Google would be smart enough not to double-count these things, or at least ask Netvibes and other widget start pages to de-duplicate the numbers for them by user. What appears to be happening here is that FeedBurner counts each widget for a particular feed on Netvibes as a separate subscriber, regardless of whether that widget is on ten thousand different user pages or repeated ten thousand times on the same page. The same thing happened a couple years ago with Pageflakes.

Update: Netvibes VP of Product Development Franck Mahon responds in comments that it is working to fix the problem of duplicates, but that there are other ways to “hack the numbers.” And he notes that it might be more useful to count active subscribers than just people who may have added a feed two years ago and never read it.

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