Editor’s note: Guest author Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks.  He is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semilshah.

Many years ago, after graduating college, I came home before moving to NYC, wondering how I would scrounge together the money for the first month’s rent and security deposit so my friends and I could all live together in the Big Apple. I had one month to get the cash, and instead of going out for traditional, hourly-wage work, I decided to go through all of my old stuff and throw it on eBay. In those days, I got online through dial-up, would have to mail a hard copy of the pictures to interested buyers, and would ship items to auction winners only when their check arrived by mail and cleared into my bank account. In one month, I got rid of winter jackets, sports equipment, and baseball cards to the tune of $7,000, tax free, enough to buffer the move to NYC.

A few years later, when I moved to San Francisco, it was Craigslist to the rescue, helping with initial sublets, furniture, stereo equipment, and the odd jobs I did to soften the transition. Without knowing it, I was stumbling through life fueled mainly by a peer-to-peer (P2P) network and economy that helped me connect supply and demand, as well as time and money. Instead of using consignment shops or hosting a garage sale, or instead of buying new items in a traditional store, I buffered my moves to NYC and SF primarily fueled by P2P networks.

That was P2P 1.0, anchored by eBay and Craigslist, networks that have connected billions. And, while these companies continue their march, we are already into the next peer-to-peer evolution: P2P 2.0.  Unknowingly at the time, I was exposed to the thought a few years ago in graduate school, when my classmate, James Reinhart, came up with the idea for a “Netflix for used clothes,” which has morphed into venture-backed thredUP, a P2P network connecting parents to trade gently-worn baby and kid clothes, goods that are very expensive to buy new. Another success is Lending Club, a peer lending site connecting lenders with borrowers primarily for refinancing credit card debt or small business loans.

Today, P2P 2.0 is in full-swing, and that’s putting things lightly. Y Combinator breakout Airbnb began as an ad-hoc solution for the founders to earn a little extra scratch during a convention when tight hotel supply provided an opportunity to rent out air mattresses in their apartment, with the added touch of breakfast. The result today is a rapidly growing company and brand that aims to connect those who seek space with those who need it—you can rent boats, treehouses, and even castles. Airbnb has been so successful that it’s spawned a handful of international copycats and motivated the likes of GetAround, a P2P car-sharing network.

The newest entrant into the P2P space is the concept I’m most excited about: Zaarly. The founder, being taller than average, realized prior to boarding a flight in economy class that he would be willing to pay someone on the same flight to swap for an exit row seat. That moment gave birth to Zaarly, a new service that will leverage a mobile device’s location to connect those who demand something to those who can provide it. Imagine busy New Yorkers with disposable cash demanding something immediately, delivered right now: “Zaarly it.” The Zaarly concept connects time and money in the P2P vector, just like eBay connects sellers and buyers.

All of this activity in P2P 2.0 is now possible because of advancements in location sensors in mobile devices and social network platforms. The time is ripe for even much more advancement in P2P ideas, leveraging today’s technologies in new ways. Even as consumer-focused entrepreneurs work to build the next solutions, they are raising money on P2P services like Angel List, which connects fundraising entrepreneurs with seed stage capital and has shaken up the early stage investing game. Task Rabbit connects individuals and businesses with “task runners” that provide an outsourced task service, and Listia is an eBay for trading free stuff, where site users earn and spend credits. (Many others are also emerging, please add them here.)

During all these P2P transactions, companies like Square, Roam, and Bump leverage mobile phones to help drive payments. For instance, buyers and sellers can trade data by bumping their phones together, where Bump technology measures the movement from the accelerometer and pairs two users together. Square connect buyers and sellers using a credit card and mobile device. A merchant can charge a customer for goods or services by using the Square reader attached through a device’s audio jack to read a buyer’s credit card (like a cassette tape) and transmit the signal to help complete the transaction. (Surprisingly, not many others have yet fully leveraged the phone’s audio jack or accelerometer, making Square, Roam, and Bump standout.)

The driving force behind all of this P2P activity is the fact that today’s technologies make many more types of transaction possible between average consumers by finding an equilibrium between time and money, supply and demand. Transactions once locked up and never realized now create entirely new economies, free of established brands and fat middle-men.

In a world where everyone is rushing to drive all commerce online, some P2P solutions sprinkle a dose of humanity into the transaction. Will P2P services keep bringing more of this human element, personalization, and discovery into the foreground? Will services like Housefed, which provides a personal meal service, create a welcome alternative to nuking frozen food for dinner? It will be fascinating to see what new types of businesses are built on top of these P2P engines, and what traditional businesses they will disrupt.

The U.S. economy, struggling its way slowly out of a major recession, will only benefit from a continuous flow of new ideas to help connect people and keep things going. And, the potential for these services overseas is just staggering, especially within cultures that already have strong informal economies baked into their DNA. So big, in fact, that the simple desire to swap airline seats or find a reasonably-priced place to crash during a convention could create, accelerate, and fortify new informal micro-economies in the far corners of earth.

Photo credit: Flickr/ NASA Robonaut

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has just launched craigconnects, which he says is a long-term initiative to “connect and protect organizations that are doing good stuff”.

Newmark on the site’s homepage says craigconnects is “the biggest thing” of his life, and that he’s committing 20 years to the project, which will initially focus on non-profits and public service organizations that “get stuff done on a sustainable basis”.

To be clear, craigconnects isn’t a fundraising or grant-making organization, but an entirely different beast with a big bold vision (getting everyone in the world together for the common good via the Internet). The overall purpose of the project is explained here.

It’s all a bit hazy if you ask me (the welcome message video, embedded below, didn’t quite help either) but who would like to bet against Newmark to turn something rather basic into something enormous using the power of the Internet?

You are the sword and shield of the party! In this case, the party is a California-based private investigator looking to bank a few dollars by fighting piracy. An ad recently popped up on Craigslist San Antonio looking for “piracy surveillance investigators.” Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to sneak about town, seeking bars and other establishments that are illegally showing sporting events, like UFC or WWE or boxing. You stand to make up to $500 per night.

Following the trail of breadcrumbs leads us to Wayne & Associates, a California-based private investigator. It’s owned by a man in Los Angeles.

The deal is that you go around and gather evidence of establishments illegally showing pay-per-view events.

Nearest I can tell, you go out on the town the night of a pay-per-view event, like the upcoming WrestleMania, and try to get video of the illegal broadcast.

You’d think that no bar owner on Earth would be dumb enough to connect a laptop pointed to a justin.tv stream to his HDTVs, but that’s exactly what happened in Boston about a year ago. Pretty sure that guy should have been nominated for a Darwin Award.

The payscale seems to vary. Previous informants were paid $75 if they reported on an establishment with no video, but that jumps to $100 if video is taken. You’re provided with a list of establishments that are fully licensed to show the event in question.

Mighty, mighty strange, this.

Co-founded by Brooke and Lynn Dixon (Left to right, in image below), Hour.ly has been in pre-revenue, beta mode since September 2010. The bootstrapped company’s newest site features should have it generating and sharing revenue in the second quarter of 2011.

Through its partnership with Trufina, Hour.ly will allow temporary job seekers to pay for and run their own identity and criminal background checks, so that employers won’t have to, and so that hiring decisions won’t be delayed. Hour.ly will also enable employers to conduct an in-browser video chat interview with job seekers — through its partnership with Tinychat — rather than requiring them to download and use a service like Skype or Jabber.

Lynn Dixon, EVP of sales and business development at Hour.ly, explained that her company’s early market research found a large number of temporary job seekers online — for example substitue teachers, barristas and cooks who might not require use of this technology at work — do not have existing accounts with (or even familiarity with) standalone video chat services.

Hour.ly started with a focus on temp hiring needs within the hospitality industry, inspired by Ms. Dixon who holds a culinary degree, and worked for a celebrity chef of the NYC fine dining scene, Daniel Boulud, after spending years in media and technology business development.

Among Hour.ly’s 10,000 active users today, she said, 8 percent are employers. Users can create a profile to apply for and get automatically matched with jobs on other sites with listings like Craigslist, or Indeed. Ms. Dixon reported that the greatest demand for qualified workers via Hour.ly, however, is split between tech and web design, hospitality and retail.

Brooke Dixon, the company’s chief technology and executive officer (and Lynn Dixon’s husband) noted that recent economic trends have driven people to seek temporary employment, yet existing job sites [ranging from Monster and CareerBuilder, to Mediabistro and Simply Hired] have not adapted to the quick sales cycle and price sensitivity of this market.

Hour.ly lets job seekers and employers build “dynamic work profiles” and job listings for free. Through Hour.ly, workers and potential employers get matched automatically, based on their location, availability within a range of time, keywords, multiple job functions that a worker would be willing and able to do, rate of pay, and experience.

Apparently used by some (it looks like primarily vehicle enthusiasts mostly) more than Craigslist.com itself, aggregator and search engine Craiglook was shut down by Craigslist this week for violation of its Terms of Use and trademark violations regarding the Craiglook domain name, in a move reminiscent of when the company blocked Oodle back in 2005.

A visit to Craiglook reveals the following pop up disclaimer:

Dear Craiglook users,

Craiglook.com has been shut down by demand of Craigslist.org

The site has now moved to CLAz.org

I have also complied with Craigslist.org request and removed all RSS feeds and links to craigslist.org from the new website.

I am extremely grateful to you all who keep the site running with your great ideas and feedback. I will try my best in reaching to Craigslist to see if there is a way for Craiglook to work out a resolution for legal claims that they have pointed out.

It’s hard to think of the decidedly Web 1.0 Craigslist as Goliath in any David and Goliath story, especially since it has its fair share of companies wishing it hadn’t encroached on their territory (media companies mostly) and especially because it doesn’t provide the Craiglook search functionality itself.

I have contacted both Craiglist and Craiglook for more information and will update this post when they respond.

Everyone is talking about Craigslist finally folding and taking down its adult services section. Earlier this month they took it down on the U.S. Craigslist sites without public comment, replacing it with a “censored” logo. A couple of days ago even that censored logo was removed. The debate is centered around prostitution. And in particular around sex slavery, sex crimes and underage prostitution. Nasty stuff, which is probably why Craigslist eventually surrendered. It’s hard to debate that kind of emotion with logic, even when the law is on your side.

And on Craigslist’s side the law is. The EFF rightly sees this as nothing but a freedom of speech issue, saying “Through this now years-long struggle, Craigslist’s legal position has been and remains absolutely, unequivocally correct…The federal statutory immunity upon which Craigslist relies is not some clever loophole. Rather…a conscious policy decision by Congress to protect individuals and companies who would otherwise be vulnerable targets to litigants who want to silence speech to which they object, illegal or not.”

But Craigslist folded anyway. And in the words of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, “You fuckin’ people. You have no idea how to defend a nation. All you did was weaken a country today, Kaffee. That’s all you did. You put people’s lives in danger. Sweet dreams, son. “

Blame then? Absolutely not. How long could we really expect them to stand up to the righteous indignation of the masses as well as the political ambitions of no less than 17 state attorneys general. It doesn’t matter that Craigslist had already won one case in Federal court and humiliated the South Carolina AG. This cause plays well to many of their constituents, and it’s an election year after all.

Craigslist’s defense was straightforward and logical – they complied with the law and they went beyond the law in moderating and tracking harmful listings. When it came to prostitution on Craigslist, it was far more likely that it was the victimless mutually consenting adults type prostitution. Now that it’s down and driven underground again, the really awful stuff will blossom. And as Danah Boyd says, having everything so visible on Craigslist made it easier for police to conduct sting operations. So much for that.

Craigslist was always unapologetic in their approach to the situation, making it too easy to take shots at them. It was shooting fish in a barrel for the smooth talking politicians, with big media lapping it up. Sex crimes are boring. But sex crimes that had anything to do with Craigslist were front page stories for weeks on end.

They could have continued to fight, risking even personal criminal charges, but they didn’t. And none of us really stood by them, either. When they folded it we all took a hit. And the world became a less safe place to live.

I’ll always admire Craigslist for taking such an unpopular but important stand in defense of free speech. And when more dominoes fall in the future, censoring all of us, we can look back at this and realize that Jack Nicholson was right. All we did was weaken a country today, and ensure that more women will be victimized by sex crimes.

I’ve reached out to Craigslist for comment and await their reply. But the choice of words is significant – the section wasn’t simply removed, the censored word was used.

The site has been embattled as old press and state attorneys general use any excuse to blame sex crimes on the site. From South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster’s failed crusade against them to a variety of press stories about sex and other crimes. If it’s just a sex crime it isn’t a story. But if a listing on Craigslist was involved, it’s a big story.

Craigslist has fought back using little more than their blog and logic. And they’re right. Having prostitution up front and regulated, as Craigslist does, means less crime is associated with it. It’s not like prostitution, sometimes called the world’s oldest profession, was invented on the site.

The fact that eBay and others do exactly the same thing, but without human review and moderation, doesn’t seem to matter. Craigslist Sex is what scares the general population, and it’s what the press and the politicians will continue to use to get their hits and votes.

So the Craigslist Adult Section was removed. Is the world now a safer place?

Update: This only appears to affect U.S. sites, so if you’re looking for a happy ending in Saskatoon or the West Bank, have at it.

Craigslist, embattled over the most recent allegations of sex trafficking and underage prostitution, pointed their finger at eBay yesterday. Craigslist has put significant efforts into moderating inappropriate listings on their site, says CEO Jim Buckmaster. But eBay continues to accept the worst kind of ads, depicting “young Asian females engaged in unprotected sex” on its Spanish subsidiary Loquo. He points to a number of listings that showed graphic pictures of sexual acts, and also pointed out that eBay aggressively markets upsell opportunities to listers, effectively taking part in the transaction.

How did eBay respond? By blocking access to Loquo from IP addresses originating in the U.S. But the site, and the listings, are easily accessible – just copy the URLs into an IP anonymizer, for example. The extremely NSFW listings are still up and active.

A post on Aimgroup says eBay is also planning on eventually taking down these types of listings as part of its “process of ensuring all of its sites are in alignment with its family-friendly values.”

For its part, Craigslist has taken a disproportionate share of the heat over prostitution and sexual trafficking claims. A half page ad was recently run by two “survivors of Craigslist sex trafficking” in the Washington Post, for example. And last year South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster targeted Craigslist as part of his run for governor.

And recently a new Facebook group emerged called “Stop Craigslist Human Trafficking – Choose Ebay Classifieds.” Buckmaster seems particularly incensed by the fact that eBay is being seen as family friendly, when they’re running ads far worse than anything you see on Craigslist and have historically been quite fine with selling pornography and other adult materials.

They say nothing is certain except death and taxes. And, maybe, you could be certain that no matter how many design fads come and go on the Internet, Craigslist would pretty much look the same as Craigslist has always looked. Designer types get downright pissy that the site’s design has stayed static. And makeover recommendations abound – Wired even dedicated several print pages to the idea last year.

“Craigslist is frustrating and claustrophobic,” said Matt Willey of Studio8 Design in that Wired article, who recommended pull down menus and lots of images. But Craigslist had trudged along, racking up 50 million unique visitors a month and 13.4 billion page views (Comscore, July 2010). Not bad for a site that has looked almost exactly the same for over a decade.

But parts of Craigslist are now sporting a somewhat updated design. It hasn’t rolled out on all of the geographic sub-sites, particularly bigger cities. But many of the smaller city sites are now showing something that’s a little different.

There are a number of small changes, like removal of the boxes around the left navigation bar items, and slightly bigger main section headers (community, personals, etc…). But the most useful change is the right sidebar, which now defaults to show other cities close to your current site. In the old design, you had to click on your state or country and then select the other area. This saves a lot of hunting and clicking.

That right side bar also uses a little JavaScript to let you toggle to see other cities, countries or worldwide instead of just the sites closest to you.

Never say never, I guess. And with the Singularity coming, perhaps the only thing we’ll soon be able to say is certain are all those taxes.

Along with his title of co-founder, Whiting will be BlockChalk’s chief engineer. The location space continues to be red hot right now, and BlockChalk has a compelling, yet simple product. It’s a mobile app that lets you adds notes to the real world by pinning them to any location. Hood notes that in the past few weeks alone, they’ve doubled traffic and users, and are now available in 111 countries, 8217 cities, and nearly 13,000 neighborhoods all over the world.

Whiting’s engineering expertise will certainly come in handy, as will the local experience he’s picked up with Craigslist for the past year. You can find the BlockChalk iPhone app here in the App Store. Or simply use the mobile web to use it on Android phones (or the iPhone since it’s HTML5-ready).

We forgot to mention this, but if you want to buy Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show set make your way to Craigslist. Conan is asking for your best offer, or Coldplay tickets if you’re willing to trade. Boo, NBC!

This Craigslist job listing has some interesting rules, to say the least. While the eye-grabbing headline is asking for a “Twitter Genius” in Greenwich Village, the actual role is an “expert” social media marketer for some sort of e-commerce startup. “I need someone who tweets in their sleep and updates their fb status before calling their mom on Mother’s Day,” the description reads. And it gets better.

Background, education, references? Nah, these people don’t care about that stuff. All that really matters for getting this job is to follow the six little rules perfectly. Those are:

1) Email me two tweets. The first should be about your experience. The second should by why you’re perfect for this job. If you exceed twitter’s allotted character count, you’re done.

2) Email me your Twitter name in link form (e.g. http://www.twitter.com/YOURNAME)

3) Tell me how many followers you have and how many people you follow.

4) Tell me who’s the best person you follow and why (in tweet form).

5) Tell me what’s the best way to get more followers (in tweet form).

6) Specific salary requirement.

So basically, if this application is more than 600 characters or so, you’re done. And you better be damn well ready to talk briefly about how you can best self-promote, or you’re done. Also, it’s probably better if you don’t want too much money. But don’t say why, keep it short.

Think you can handle all that? Then you may have found your dream job with the easiest application ever.

[thanks Shmuel]

[photo: flickr/uaybet]

While Craigslist was initially quiet about the ban (it didn’t warn developers at all), CEO Jim Buckmaster did write a blog post the next day explaining the site’s rationale:

Yesterday afternoon craigslist engineering noticed a disproportionate amount of server/bandwidth resources being consumed by requests referred via Yahoo Pipes, with the lion’s share of that activity appearing also to be in violation of CL terms of use. Pipes access has been suspended pending further review.

We’ve reached out to Maxwell to see if his app, Flippity, has been restored as well, or if it is considered to be in violation of Craigslist’s terms.

Update: Maxwell says that his team decided to drop ties with Craigslist ever since the incident. He notes that while they could have continued using Craigslist data using something other than Yahoo Pipes, they have instead chosen to rewrite the site to use eBay’s API, which has been a positive experience thus far. Flippity is still a work in progress.

Image by foxrosser

Maxwell is one of the developers behind a new mashup called Flippity, which lets you plot Craigslist listings on a map. In a blog post, Maxwell writes that he had been having an Email exchange with Newmark over the last few weeks, during which Maxwell asked if the techniques employed by his project would be acceptable under Craigslist’s restrictive Terms of Use.

Newmark replied that “as a rule of thumb, [it's] okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes.” Since the project used RSS feeds and was non-commercial, that seemed to indicate that the project would be OK. Maxwell followed up by asking if he was allowed to ask for donations on the site, which Newmark said he would look into. A couple weeks later, Maxwell sent Newmark a link to a working alpha version of Flippity. Newmark went silent, Craigslist pulled the plug on Flippity and every other Yahoo Pipes project soon thereafter. From Maxwell’s blog:

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw what Craigslist had done. They literally added a check for “pipes.yahoo.com” in the referrer header of any HTTP request, which was then redirected to the home page. In essence, they blocked them. Really, Craig ? This is your response ?

To be clear, Maxwell says that his post isn’t meant to be an attack on Newmark himself. Newmark actually CC’d a customer service representative on a couple of messages during the exchange, so it’s possible that they were the ones who ultimately decided to shut down Flippity and all of Yahoo Pipes.

Maxwell writes in his blog that he and another developer have been building the mashup for 2 months. The goal was to build something that would plot Craigslist listings on a map, offering an easy way to see what goods are being sold in your proximity. There’s already a great mashup called PadMapper that does this for housing, but Flippity was supposed to work for any Craigslist listing. For details on how the mashup worked, check out this post.

Of course, this isn’t really anything new for Craigslist. The site has previously shut down mashups using its data many times before. But they have permitted some sites, like Housingmaps, to tap into Craigslist data for years. And it seems strange that they would ban all Yahoo Pipes apps in response to this.

Maxwell says that this doesn’t mark the end of Flippity: the site will adapt to use another source of data, like eBay or Oodle.

We’ve reached out to Craigslist for comment and will update if we hear back.

The Wikimedia Foundation advisory board was created in January 2007. The main job of advisory board members is to attend a once a year meeting at the annual Wikimania conference. They also contribute in their specific areas of expertise. I guess that means customer service for Newmark (his Craigslist title is Customer Service Rep), as well as patting Wikipedia on the back for also creating a massively massive website based at least party on sparsity of design (something he has direct experience doing himself).

Newmark has called Wikipedia “first draft of history.” Current advisory board members include:

Angela Beesley Starling (Chair, Wikimedia Advisory Board; co-founder, Wikia)
Ward Cunningham (Developer of the first wiki)
Melissa Hagemann (Open access and open education advocate, Open Society Institute/Soros foundations)
Mitch Kapor (Founder/Co-founder Lotus Development, EFF, Mozilla Foundation)
Neeru Khosla (Co-founder, CK-12)
Teemu Leinonen (Professor, Media Lab, Aalto University)
Rebecca MacKinnon (Journalist; founder, Global Voices Online)
Wayne Mackintosh (Education specialist, Commonwealth of Learning)
Benjamin Mako Hill (Author, free software advocate)
Roger McNamee (Venture capital, musician)
Trevor Neilson (Partner, Global Philanthropy Group)
Craig Newmark (Founder, Craigslist.org)
Florence Nibart-Devouard (Former Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees; Consultant in Collaborative Media)
Achal Prabhala (Researcher and writer)
Clay Shirky (Associate Teacher, Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU)
Ethan Zuckerman (Research Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School)

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dart (pictured) said he was disappointed with the verdict and is now considering an appeal.

The legal battle Dart just lost was centered around Craigslist’s erotic services category (now dubbed Adult Services), which the Cook County sheriff alleged facilitated prostitution and constitutes a public nuisance.

Federal District Court Judge John F. Grady threw out the lawsuit, which was filed in July 2009 and got Dart a lot of attention, in its entirety.

The judge said that it was far from clear that Craigslist had actually encouraged its service to be used for advertising prostitutes, which was the core of Dart’s allegations. Grady added that Craiglist may even be able to claim protection under U.S. freedom of speech laws and the Communications Decency Act, which immunizes Internet intermediaries from civil liability for material posted by others.

Dart has now reportedly “vowed not to give up” and seems determined to waste more valuable time and resources on this ridiculous case.

We couldn’t have put it better than the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Matt Zimmerman, who wrote:

Meritless cases brought by law enforcement officers, amounting to little more than publicity stunts with little to no chance of success, do little to address the officers’ underlying concerns.

You might remember how South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster threatened similar legal action against Craigslist but ultimately got served nothing but humiliation when another federal judge blocked him from prosecuting Craigslist management, at least until he’s made a final decision on the case.

(Image via Huffington Post)

http://viewer.docstoc.com/
dart.dismissed –

Cruising Craigslist usually brings up some interesting things. And this is definitely one of the most terrible and yet oddly funny posts I’ve seen in a while.

When doing the Empire Strikes Back costume of Chewbacca, most people would just get a few C3PO parts and throw them over their back. One resident of Austin, Texas however, wants to take it the next step. This guy is looking for:

A double amputee (someone missing both legs – preferably at the hip) to accompany me as C3PO for the evening. We should meet ahead of time so that we can work out the backpack/harness system. There are a few parties that I want to hit and I think we will be the hit of any event we attend.

Hey, dude’s upfront about it. If you’ve always wanted to be everybody’s favorite protocol droid, but you’re missing a few appendages, this might be for you.

Even with a reasonable amount of overlap accounted for, these are significant numbers, albeit in countries where potential advertising income is generally much lower than it is in the U.S. and Europe.

OLX (a competitor to Craigslist in the United States) and hi5 (a competitor to the likes of Facebook and MySpace on a global level) claim the fresh partnership serves to consolidate both companies’ hold on the Latin American market, while making way for accelerated growth in the rest of the world.

As part of the agreement, hi5 will implement OLX features that include the ability to display ads on a user’s profile page and to see friends’ ads, as well as a feature to tell friends about their own ads via newsfeeds. OLX will also allow users to include videos and pictures in classified listings, comment, post/view listings in over 39 languages and 90 countries, and access the site from mobile devices. The latter two features are clearly meant to appeal to a large international user base.

Oodle, another major player in the online classifieds space, has been scoring similar deals recently with social networking services and portals like Facebook, MySpace and AOL.

Anyone see Funny People this weekend? One of the best movies I’ve seen this year, despite the 10 minute MySpace commercial in the middle of it.

The two main characters, Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen, visit MySpace for a $300,000 paid comedy gig. Among a variety of “f**ck Facebook, In the Face” jokes (said two or three times. really) was some really good material, including Rogen asking “I wonder if Tom and Craig from Craigslist would ever get in a fight….Who’s tougher? Tom has more friends…Craig has weirder friends though. Craig has friends that are willing to do a lot more for cash, I’ll say that.”

Sandler also says “They say the more friends you have on MySpace the less friends you have in real life.”

MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson was also on set and part of the movie, and has now officially been mixed up with another Tom Anderson on IMDB. Overall it was an amazing commercial for MySpace. The company says they did not pay for the placement.

It really was an excellent movie, and it was no. 1 in the U.S. over the weekend with $23.4 million gross. At 140 minutes long, though, you need to be prepared for a long one.

I have an older laptop, about 8 years old, it’s a blue toshiba. It has a few missing keys and a few scratches, and only about 40 gigs of free space. I got a newer laptop though and I don’t need this one. I call it a porn laptop because I’m pretty sure it has a few viruses and stuff, but I still use it for porn. It runs internet pretty fast and I already have about 200 favorites of porn sites saved in my favorites for firefox. It works for porn perfectly, but not big or fast enough for music/video editing or any of that. I wouldn’t type any credit card info with it though, like I said it has some viruses and spyware so it’s not worth the risk. Great for porn though.
So if you just want an extra laptop to sneak in your office that is dedicated just for porn, I got your back.
Give me an email, price is negotiable

So not only do you get a notebook computer, but you get a deep insight of this man’s sexual adventures. What a deal.