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For the last six months, you may have noticed that some of your favorite apps on Facebook Platform carried a special badge deeming them to be “Facebook Verified”. These apps “passed Facebook’s review for trustworthy user experiences”, and were given both greater exposure in the App Directory and less restrictive limits on the number of messages they could send to users. And tomorrow, just over six months after the program launched, Facebook is killing off Verified Apps for good.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise: Facebook announced plans to end the program in late October, and has been Emailing developers about it for weeks. But now that Verified Apps are going away, it’s a good time to look back at the long, convoluted road Facebook took to a program that was ultimately very shortlived.

The Verified Apps program has been anything but a smooth ride for developers. It was first announced at the Facebook developer conference in July 2008, with the intention of helping users identify the most trustworthy apps on the platform. In return for meeting Facebook’s guidelines, apps would be rewarded with bonuses like advertising credits and relaxed rules on how many notifications and messages they could send to users.

More concrete details about the program were revealed the following November, when Facebook opened up the program to applications. Developers were charged a $375 fee to apply, which we likened to a protection racket. But after developers paid their money, Facebook went silent about the program for half a year. That understandably led to growing developer unrest. Finally, nearly a year after it was first announced, Verified Apps made its debut in May 2009.

But Verified Apps was only supposed to be a stepping stone to the site’s true cream of the crop. The most elite class of applications was to be called “Great Apps”, and launched with iLike and Causes as inaugural members. But that was another false start. Two months after the launch of Verified Apps, Facebook revealed that it was canceling its plans for its Great Apps program and demoting current members to regular Verified Apps. Or, as Facebook put it, they were getting rolled into the same thing, so Verified Apps were getting the benefits that would have been reserved for Great Apps.

Despite these logistical hurdles, developers certainly benefited from the program. For example, CampusBuddy, a verified app we covered in September, has grown from 60,000 to over 150,000 monthly active users. CEO Michael Moradian says that the company will especially miss the “extra boosts” that applications received as part of the program because they helped virality. But while CampusBuddy would have liked to see the program continue, Moradian acknowledges that times may be changing. You can see his blog about the news here.

So why is Facebook getting rid of Verified Apps? Facebook gives the following explanation:

We are standardizing the idea of verification to apply to all of the applications on Facebook Platform. We are evolving the program to improve the overall user experience and ensure that applications on Facebook Platform meet verification standards. We intend to make sure that the experience that our users have on Platform is of the same quality as they experience elsewhere on Facebook, which is something that we are constantly asked for by developers.

In other words, Facebook wants every app to be trustworthy. To do that, they’re planning “to expand [the] team responsible for policy enforcement on Platform so that they can support the upholding of the principles we’ve introduced as part of our roadmap.” It’s not really clear why they wouldn’t have done this from the start.

The timing is certainly interesting. Some of the companies we called out in our ScamVille posts for using scammy offers, like Zynga, have some of their apps Verified. Granted, Facebook announced the decision to end Verified Apps a few days before we first broke the Scamville story, but they’ve been aware of the infringing games, offers, and ads for a long time. In effect, they’ve been stamping their seal of approval on games using tactics that are the target of a class-action lawsuit.

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With the rise of Twitter, we’ve also seen the rise of link shorteners (standard URLS take up too many characters). The king of the link shorteners right now is bit.ly, which is the default shortener on Twitter and accounts for more than 75 percent of all short URLs on the service. Every month, bit.ly shortens about 1 billion links. For spammers, that’s one huge honey jar.

The flip side of a short link like this one—http://bit.ly/6PwhcP—is that you can’t tell by looking at it what website it redirects to. It could be a TechCrunch post, or it could be a spam site. There’s no way to immediately tell the difference when you see the link in a Tweet. (Don’t worry, it’s a TechCrunch post). You can find out more about any bit.ly link by cutting and pasting it into your address bar and adding a “+” at the end like this—http://bit.ly/6PwhcP+—that will take you to a bit.ly page with all the stats for that page.

The spam problem is getting worse, which is why bit.ly is taking more serious measures to sniff out spam behind its short links. Today it announced it is working with three new services to fight spam and malware: VeriSign’s iDefense, Websense Threatseeker Cloud, and Sophos. These efforts will be in addition to its current attempts to warn users when it suspects malicious sites behind its links.

It’s going to be a constant battle. The best protection from spam is to only click on links from people you trust, but even they can be fooled. And then friendships are lost, society crumbles, and the spammers win. Unless bit.ly can weed out most of those bad links before you even click on them.

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So this is funny. Yes, Twitter is having downtime issues right now. Yes, again. But that’s nothing new, obviously. What is new is that Twitter being down has also apparently borked the site many people use to check if Twitter is down, downforeveryoneorjustme.

While the site, made by Ryan King, is working for every other site on the web, the image below shows what is returned when you put in twitter.com now. Did I mention King is now a Twitter employee? Beyond meta.

And yes, I tried putting in downforeveryoneorjustme.com into downforeveryoneorjustme — and I somehow ended up inside John Malkovich’s head.

Update: Both are back up now, however the Twitter Lists feature appears to be disabled.

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Apparently, like everyone else, the Seattle Times is very interested in trying to figure out what to actually use Google Wave for. But while most are trying to use it for either fun, realtime chats, movie reenactments, or inner-business workings, the Seattle Times have tasked Wave with a larger goal: Catching a killer.

This public Google Wave has been set up to involve the community by offering realtime information that anyone may know about the location of a man suspected of killing four Seattle police officers. A search of a Seattle-area home this morning turned up nothing, but various reports of sightings are coming in, and the Times is opening a Wave to help with the flow of information.

About 45 minutes ago, the Wave was opened with just a few people in it. Already, there are over 100 people in here now communicating quickly with updates. Included are Wave elements with links to police scanner audio, live video footage of the search, a suspect description, and information about local schools on lockdown. It’s actually quite amazing to watch this unfold and get updated before your very eyes.

That said, it will also be a bit overwhelming for many people to follow. In just the first Wave message in the thread, there are four people currently updating things, for example. As one users participating wrote, “distracting/annoying, mostly,” with regard to the live-typing element of Wave. Another simply wrote, “google wave is a mess… back to twitter.”

But others participating are amazed at the rapid flow of information coming in. And plenty are able to follow along. As someone else writes, “That last radio about the fresh blood was pretty chilling… hopefully they are close.”

The fact that this is a public Wave that anyone can join is also both a blessing and a curse. Right now, the comments are pretty much all on-point, but that’s only because many people on the web still don’t know about, or have access to Wave yet. If they did, undoubtedly forums like this would turn into a mess of spam. That’s something Google has to think very seriously about for Wave going forward.

Still, a use case like this is very interesting. A manhunt is all about gathering information. Could there be misinformation? Of course, but there could be on tip lines as well. If a police department had someone watching this Wave (I’m not sure if that’s the case right now), they could do their best to attempt to filter the good information from the bad. Something like this could also be potentially useful for a missing child.

Of course, for all of these types of cases, a solid mobile interface may be better than someone sitting at their computer using Wave. Presumably, the best tips will come from someone who is out and about and sees the suspect.

[thanks Brian]

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San Francisco based Eventbrite went prime time earlier this month when they raised $6.5 million from Sequoia Capital, and added partner Roelof Botha to their board of directors. We had a chance to sit down with Botha as well as founders Kevin Hartz and Julia Hartz and talk to them about their business and the fundraising.

We were supposed to talk for just ten minutes, but the interview went on for a solid 25 minutes before we were done. Julia and Kevin talked about Eventbrite’s growth to ten million registered users based only on word of mouth advertising. The company lets people sell (or give away) tickets to events – something only the big venues could do previously through companies like TicketMaster.

The service is free for people who give away tickets, and they charge a small percentage on non-free sales. The free tickets spread the word to new users, who often come back to sell tickets to their own events. This year, Eventbrite will rack up $100 million in gross ticket sales, says the company. The average ticket price, not factoring in the free tickets, is $60.

Why did Sequoia invest? Botha talks at length about the business model and explosive growth, and the fact that Eventbrite invented the market. The potential market for small-scale event tickets, says the company, may be as high as $36 billion in the U.S.

If you’re trying to raise money, listen closely to what Botha says. This is the guy who first invested in YouTube, and he’s one of the young guns at Sequoia. You’ll also want to read Good Question! The Eight Best Questions We Got While Raising Venture Capital, where Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman – he gives more details on the types of companies that Botha looks for when investing.

Botha also shows off his MBT shoes at the end of the video, which apparently make him a happier and healthier venture capitalist. I know what I want for Christmas.

And for everyone that couldn’t care less about this stuff, just skip to the outtakes at the end. Just skip to 24:40.

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As online retailers are witnessed strong Black Friday results, Google is reporting that there was a surge in online shopping searches with “Black Friday” on Thanksgiving day and the Friday after the holiday. Searches with the term “Black Friday” were up by more than 20%, year over year, according to Google. Searches for “black friday sales” and “black friday ads” were both up by more than 50%, year over year.

This data indicates that consumers match deals around this time of the year with Black Friday and that these deals are increasingly displayed online versus on TV or in newspapers. The most fast growing store-specific search terms were “Walmart Black Friday”, “Kohls Black Friday Ad”, “Sears Black Friday Sales” and “Target Black Friday Deals Online.”

Searches for “printable coupons” on Thanksgiving and Black Friday were up about 50% over last year and searches for “sales” were up by more than 25%. Google also released a few interesting data points about consumer interest in specific verticals. Searches in the apparel and toys categories rose about 50% and searches in the consumer electronics category more than tripled over last year, with “Black Friday Computer Deals” and “Best Buy Black Friday Deals” also topping the fastest growing search terms during the holiday period.

It should be interesting to see how Cyber Monday fares in Google Search.

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What is it with architects that they feel the need to glom onto the latest buzzwords to justify their projects? A group from M.I.T.’s Senseable City Lab is looking for funding for an ambitious observation deck designed for the 2012 London Olympics. They are calling it the Cloud. It is a “lightweight transparent tower, composed of a ‘cloud’ of inflatable, light-emitting spheres . . . fed by real time information from all over the world.”

The structure is an architectural interpretation of the realtime cloud. Videos of the Olympic events, Twitter and Facebook streams, and other realtime data such as energy usage, Internet traffic, and mobile phone activity will be projected onto LED displays in the Cloud so that people in the Cloud can observe the events from high above London.

M.I.T. credits Google and the engineering firm Arup as part of the design team. Fiction author Umberto Eco is an adviser. In other words, it’s never going to be built. Not by 2012. They don’t even have building permits yet.

The drawings are nice though. Except I’m not sure what that person is doing inside one of those spheres in the bottom image. Is that some sort of realtime cage?  He looks like he needs saving.

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Rumors were swirling that IBM would be acquiring database security company Guardium after the Israeli financial newspaper, TheMarker, reported the acquisition yesterday (translated version here). Big Blue has officially confirmed to TechCrunch that it has acquired Guardium but did not disclose financial terms. TheMarker reported that IBM is shelling out $225 million for Massachusetts-based Guardium.

A subsidiary of Log-On Software, Guardium provides technologies that ensure security of enterprise databases. The startup protects databases for Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and other companies. The company’s technology is installed in more than 450 data centers worldwide. IBM says it will integrate Guardium within IBM’s Information Management Software portfolio. Guardium, which was founded in 2002, has raised a total of $21 million in funding from Cisco, Cedar Fund, Ascent Venture Partners, Stage One Ventures, Veritas Venture Partners and others.

Here’s a excerpt from the statement IBM issued:

The acquisition of Guardium will enable IBM clients to maintain trusted information infrastructures by continuously monitoring access and activity to protect high-value databases against threats from legitimate users and potential hackers. It will also help clients streamline compliance processes for ever-changing industry and government mandates with centralized and automated controls for all major platforms.

IBM said the acquisition represents a shift in its strategy to focus on investing in systems software for the enterprise, as opposed to hardware. This year alone, IBM has acquired six companies, including RedPill Solutions, SPSS, Ounce Labs, Exeros and Outblaze.

IBM’s strong Q3 earnings reflected this shift in strategy, with the software and business analytics business growing steadily. In fact, IBM said that software profit is expected to grow more than 20% this quarter, with $8 billion in software group profits predicted in this year alone.

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Digg has poached Keval Desai away from Google as their new Vice President of Product, we’ve confirmed from the company. Desai’s last day at Google is today.

Desai is a long time Google employee, first joining the company in 2003. He’s currently their Director of Product Management and has led development of product/businesses in Google’s advertising business (including AdWords, Syndication & TV Ads).

He’ll be Digg’s first head of product, a responsibility that has been shared at various times by founder Kevin Rose, CEO Jay Adelson and Chief Strategy Officer Mike Maser. And he’s got a big job ahead of him: Digg is hard at work on releasing an entirely new version of the site.

Digg continues to build out a top exec team. In the last year they’ve brought in Thomas Shin and then Chas Edwards on the sales side. And new head designer Jeffrey Kalmikoff is hard at work building out Digg’s next user experience.

And the company has been fairly quiet, moving steadily towards profitability, says CEO Jay Adelson. They certainly needed that quiet time after all the acquisition hype around the company up until last year. The company will likely have revenues of around $15 million this year, we’ve heard.

As an aside, I’ve known Desai for a decade. We first worked together at Achex, a startup I cofounded in 1999 and that we sold in 2001. He is an intense, intelligent and highly capable executive. He’ll be a great fit at Digg.

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There is a lot of buzz around SimpleGeo right now. The service, which participated in our RealTime CrunchUp earlier this month, also took home two prizes at the Under The Radar conference just prior to that. And that was a big deal for the company considering it won the audience award even though it’s not exactly the most consumer-oriented project. But people seem to understand that the location space is getting really hot right now, and SimpleGeo, which provides its geolocation infrastructure to other companies, offers one of the best models to capitalize on that. So it should be no surprise that they’ve attracted some big time investors.

SimpleGeo has just closed a $1.5 million seed round of funding, we’ve confirmed. This round, led by First Round Capital, also includes from Redpoint Ventures, Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, Joshua Schachter, David Cohen, Debbie Landa, Tim Ferriss, Shawn Fanning, Gary Vaynerchuk, David Lee, and Freestyle Capital. Yes, it’s basically a who’s who in angel investing that is on board now with SimpleGeo.

The two founders, Matt Galligan and Joe Stump, who are both based in Boulder, CO, used their time in San Francisco this month to close this new round. And the company is moving fast. Just a few weeks ago, the company raised a debt round to cover expenses as the company switched gears away from a previous focus on augmented reality gaming (which Galligan wrote about for us here). This new funding is being tacked on to that for its proper seed round.

SimpleGeo is not the only company working to provide an easy way for others to tap into the location craze. Another company on our geostream panel at the CrunchUp, GeoAPI, is doing something in a similar vein, but with a different approach.

SimpleGeo remains in beta for the time being.

Participants in its previous debt round include Joanna Shields (formerly Bebo), David Liu (formerly AOL), Ziv Navoth (formerly Bebo), Darius Contractor (Bebo), Ravi Narasimhan (Strategic Data Corp/NewsCorp), and Jason Knapp (Strategic Data Corp/NewsCorp). Needless to say, a lot of powerful people clearly want this company to succeed.

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