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AddictingGames, a popular Flash game portal, has announced plans to hold a large-scale awards show pertaining to casual games. The show will take place in 2009, with a series of voting rounds conducted on the site that will allow AddictingGames’ users to decide the final outcome (though judges will have some say).

The show will be open to any casual game on the web, but the results will likely be heavily skewed towards games on AddictingGames, since that’s where voting will actually take place. Few details have been released, but the Nickelodeon-owned site promises content spread on websites and television programs across “the entire Nickelodeon/MTVN Kids and Family Group”.

While the execution is flawed (the voting will be totally biased), developers could use an incentive to create casual games that are more involved than the mind numbing junk games that litter countless sites and development platforms across the web. Alongside a compensation program that AddictingGames will be rolling out for its most popular developers, this could at least help gamers pick out the best of the crop.

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Tripwolf, the social travel guide that we introduced last month, has launched in public beta. The site allows users to network with friends to create an ideal travel trip, and also has a number of features designed to help research destinations and points of interest. To coincide with the launch, Tripwolf also announced that MairDumont, a travel guide publisher, has invested about $1.2 million into the company, in addition to the backing it has received from Austrian/American incubator i5invest.

One of the most appealing features of the site is the ability to generate a printable pdf travel guide by dragging and dropping the POIs you’ll be visiting. Unfortunately, while the dragging and dropping functionality works well, the guides themselves are very sparse, offering little more than an address, the hours of operation, and a one paragraph description. It would be nice to see a bit more content in these, even if it was only a summarized version of a Wikipedia article.

Tripwolf draws its data from a number of external sources, including Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube. And while it features a fairly comprehensive listing of interesting locales, it may have a hard time differentiating itself from countless other travel sites - there doesn’t seem to be anything too unique going on here.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

There has been much talk of Twitter users moving over to FriendFeed since Twitter replies were down for the majority of last week. Twitter announced that they were back on Saturday in their blog, but seeing as the outage may have inspired some users to flock to FriendFeed, I decided to take a look at the 3rd-party applications and scripts that enhance the FriendFeed functionality.

For those of you moving on to FriendFeed’s greener pastures, here are 13 essential tools for an organized, “noise”-free experience.

Gridjit is a new web application, that is currently in private alpha, that organizes your FriendFeed and Twitter timelines into columns. It spreads out your timeline by user and shows that user’s most recent posts in boxes that are distributed across three columns. You can also post to Twitter and FriendFeed from the site. It’s a very new service, so there may be bugs, but if you’d like to try it out, Gridjit has supplied us with 250 invites. Enter the code dde60be to try it out.

Alert Thingy enables you to see your FriendFeed timeline from your desktop and receive updates through notifications (covered here). You can post updates and comment from the application, as well as post to Twitter or Flickr. Alert Thingy runs on Adobe AIR.

Twhirl, a popular desktop application among Twitterers, allows for FriendFeed posting and has a timeline tracker. It also supports posting to Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku, and allows for filtering news by “rooms”. Since Twhirl is a widely-used Twitter client, this should allow for an easier FriendFeed transition. Twhirl runs on Adobe AIR so it is available for Windows and OSX.

bTT by Sobees is a desktop FriendFeed application that is part of Sobees’ desktop suite bSuite. It is currently available for download independently of bSuite. bTT allows FriendFeed updates, comments, comment replies, and likes. It is currently available for Windows.

MySocial 24×7 is a Firefox plugin that allows you to access your FriendFeed timeline from your sidebar (covered here). You can filter your timeline by friend, or by feed source (Youtube, Amazon, RSS). MySocial 24×7 has also released an Adobe AIR desktop application (covered here). The desktop application provides the same functionality of the Firefox sidebar in an attractive desktop application.

NoiseRiver is a new web application launched yesterday, from FeedEgo, that uses FriendFeed’s API to filter out some of the noise. You can login through the site, and import your keywords from del.icio.us, or input them manually, and NoiseRiver will color code your feed according to your interests or neighborhood. When you input your keywords, you can rate your them with a slider from “love” to “hate” and from then on your timeline will be color-coded, green or red, to show what you’ll probably like or not. NoiseRiver provides a full FriendFeed user experience, allowing for sharing and comments.

FriendFeedMachine is a web application that allows you to organize your friends list into close friends, and people you just want to follow. It does a lot to clean up the problem of “noise” in FriendFeed, by making sure that what your friends say doesn’t get lost in the mix with heavy posters.

Feedalizr, enables you to post text, links, images and video to FriendFeed from your desktop. You can drag and drop images into your post, or you can take a picture with your webcam. You can also post video through Feedalizr through your webcam. It hosts the video on the Feedalizr site, and includes a link in your post. You can filter your timeline, and just yesterday they added a new feature that allows you to take advantage of tabs. You can open new tabs with specific user’s timelines, separate from your main friend timeline. Feedalizr runs on Adobe AIR.

Filter by Service is a Greasemonkey script that allows you to filter your timeline by service. It displays a box with all of the service icons, and you can filter the public timelime, your friends timeline, or any user’s timeline by service. For example, if you are browsing TechCrunch’s timeline and click on the Twitter service icon, you will see TechCrunch’s tweets. A similar script, Filter Icons, places the service icons in a neat row on the top of the timeline, but it does not display all of the service icons, just the ones that are used on the page.

Remove Visited Links, a Greasemonkey script, removes links that you’ve already visited. A very useful script that really cleans up your timeline by removing content that you’ve already viewed.

Read Later, is a Greasemonkey script that adds a “Later” link under every post, and adds a “Read Later” tab to the top. This enables you to bookmark things, within FriendFeed, that you find interesting and want to save for later.

FriendFeed Comments is a WordPress plugin that can take comments and likes made on FriendFeed, and place them into the related post on WordPress. On your blog, you will see the comment along with the commenter’s FriendFeed image and link. The plugin also allows (as an option) a separate FriendFeed comment entry, so your readers can enter FriendFeed comments from your blog page.

FF To Go is a mobile site that you can access from any mobile phone’s web browser. It has a simple interface that shows the 10 most recent posts from you, your friends, or the public timeline. It adds no special features, but remains consistent with the FriendFeed user interface.

About noon Friday here in California, I happened to click on a Summize tab substituting for Twitter’s Track functionality and monitoring the use of my Twitter screen name. Someone named Scrabo had tweeted “Rumor here at NBC is that Tim Russert passed away”. A minute later another: “@stevegillmor Brokaw getting ready to go on air.”

Turning on NBC, then MSNBC, then CNN, I found nothing: reports on flooding in the Midwest, breaking news about a bomb attack in an Afghan prison, a strange obliviousness on the NBC outlets. Something about the first tweet resonated - “here at NBC” - and I went back to the computer and Summize, finding another tweet directed at me that said Wikipedia was already updated with the news. Jumping to the New York Times, a single line at the top of the home page. Finally, at 12:33 Tom Brokaw broke into programming with the news.

Today Summize has “Tim Russert” at the top of the Trending Topics list, with “Russert” third. The tweets continue to roll in 20 hours after the fact, even now at 9am Pacific at some 200 per hour. Twitter’s international audience lets the story follow the sun, but Russert’s fame is largely U.S. centric. Clearly we have lost what many consider the soul or conscience of our political process at the head of the stretch leading to November.

That same presidential race is the likely culprit in Twitter’s recent collapse and partitioning into minimal services. As the company scrambled to get some coherent strategy in place to keep users from tipping into a stampede away from the service, Twitter’s API was gated, the Web UI was dynamically stripped of pagination, @replies, and sometimes even the array of follow icons as event swarms stressed the servers. Most significantly, IM services over XMPP were the first to disappear and not yet fully restored, and with that the service known as Track that I was emulating with the third party Summize client when Russert collapsed.

We may look back at Monday’s Steve Jobs keynote at the WWDC as the point where Twitter stabilized enough to survive. Because of the intense developer interest in creating applications for the iPhone 3G product, the conference was sold out and, like Twitter services, the media gated to only a certain number from each outlet, whether blogger or mainstream. Missing the cut, I went to Plan B as I’ve often done when trips took me away to New York or CES during Apple rollouts.

As the event began, I followed Qik reports from Mike Arrington, page refreshes of photos and text from EnGadget, Techcrunch, Gizmodo, and Cnet, and a live video aggregation of various Ustreams and commentary from Leo Laporte’s TwiT Live. As Jobs took the stage, a video stream captured a murky view of the stage from too many rows back, but the audio proved unmanageable. Laporte’s chat stream produced a URL to a more stable audio feed that held up throughout the rest of the keynote. Arrington produced two short Qik videos of key sections that surfaced as Qik servers restabilized.

The net effect was exhilarating; a bootstrapped symphony of virtualized Steve Reality Distortion Field funneled through the MacBook AIR that I route every bit of my real time digital life through. Throughout, Twitter remained up except for a ten minute period when Jobs announced the 3G device’s price, and as the event retreated into the past Twitter services unseen for weeks began to reemerge.

Much has been made of the fanaticism spurred by social media events and seminal products such as the iPhone - the swarming of the early adopters, the trivialization of Twitter as a toy, you know the drill and the comments on this post will likely personalize the pushback. But an event such as Russert’s death and the emotional shock wave it produced put the lie to the notion that this stuff is echo chamber or A-List or whatever. 30 minutes before the world knew about this tragedy, someone I don’t know reached out and established a connection based on mutual affinity.

The magic of Twitter, and Ustream, and Qik, and all the social tools just now emerging, is this incredible, subtle, hacked, user-controlled information network, that in a million ways and micro-communities, performs as efficiently and professionally as the greatest media empires on Earth. In fact, the two have merged as we gain access to the tools of the trade while the trade gains access to our hearts and minds. Track will return, and with it a flowering of this new media revolution where the new boss is the same as the old boss: Us. And you’ll see Tim there in the front row, if you look closely.

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People-powered search engine Mahalo will soon have some competition from a stealth startup called YouBundle. If you go to YouBundle’s site now, there is nothing other than a landing page. But we got our hands on a couple screen shots from the private beta (click above for a larger image and see topic page below) and the guidelines sent to beta testers (reproduced after the break).

Like Mahalo, YouBundle is more of a Web guide than an actual search engine. Bundles of Web links, YouTube videos, Flickr images, Amazon product descriptions, and uploaded photos and documents are created around different topics. These can be anything from “VC Funding Resources” to “Tibetan Buddhism” to “Apple Rumors Sites.” Bundlers add titles, tags, and descriptions to each bundle. The company explains to beta testers in its guidelines:

A bundle is a collection of your expertise on any given subject. A bundle should NOT BE a completely exhaustive list of links to cover every possible point of the subject. It should rather be a finely tuned and specialized list of links to relevant information on the subject. The idea is NOT to replicate the 1st page of Google or a link farm. We want every single link in the bundle to be tested, relevant and offering quality information. Just because a link comes from an authority site such as Wikipedia, does not mean that you have to include the link – we want flavor and variety – not sterility.

You should consider a bundle your work of art. . . . Remember the purpose is not to get AS many links as possible. The purpose is to create a well balanced bundle with many different types of links of only the highest quality.

Unlike Mahalo, YouBundle does not rely on a paid staff of editors to create its topic guides. It is all done by the community. While Mahalo does incorporate some social feedback as well, it is more controlled. Each submission is reviewed before being included on a Mahalo page. This policy is one way to control spam from clogging up the system.

On YouBundle, the community does all the work. So in this sense it is more akin to Topicle or Wikia Search. The latter is a slightly different beast, since it truly is an algorithmic search engine whose results are re-ordered and modified by the community. But like Wikia Search, YouBundle relies on its community to flag spam and inappropriate content. Any bundles tagged “SPAM,” “PORN,” or “TOS,” are reviewed and moderated. (The TOS tag refers to bundles that violate the site’s Terms of Service).

The YouBundle community is also be able to vote the best topic pages up by “bumping” them, or vote them down by “dumping” them. Dumps are “anonymous in order to prevent retribution dumps,” says the guideines. Members can also “bag and tag” other people’s bundles. Bagging a bundle is like bookmarking it as one of your favorites, and once you do that you can up to three tags to improve the categorization of the site.

I was not able to test the site out myself, so I can’t say if it is producing better results than Mahalo, Topicle or Wikia Search. But the steep rise in Mahalo’s traffic, much of it driven by the SEO juice its pages have, is no doubt a motivating factor here. According to comScore, Mahalo attracted 2.6 million unique visitors worldwide in April, up from zero when it launched last summer. Total pageviews were 5.6 million.

Disclosure: Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis is a partner of ours who helps us put on the TechCrunch50 conference. Neither TechCrunch, its employees, nor Michael Arrington owns any stake in Mahalo.

Here is the full text of the guidelines sent to YouBundle beta testers:

Bundling Guidelines

A bundle is a collection of your expertise on any given subject. A bundle should NOT BE a completely exhaustive list of links to cover every possible point of the subject. It should rather be a finely tuned and specialized list of links to relevant information on the subject. The idea is NOT to replicate the 1st page of Google or a link farm. We want every single link in the bundle to be tested, relevant and offering quality information. Just because a link comes from an authority site such as Wikipedia, does not mean that you have to include the link – we want flavor and variety – not sterility.

You should consider a bundle your work of art. In order to assist you in creating this work of art, we are able to Parse and display thumbnails and unique information for the following types of links

* Web Page links- We will call and display a thumbnail of the site screen shot
* YouTube Videos – Just enter the address URL and we will call and display a Thumbnail of the video and relevant video information
* Photos – If you enter a link of a photo extension (.jpg, png, gif etc…) We will call and display the thumbnail of this.
* Flickr Photos – All you have to do is enter the Flickr page of the photo and we will automatically grab and display the thumbnail.
* Documents- PDF’s, .DOCs ad Excel will be displayed in their own section.
* Links to Other Bundles. These will also be in their own section with a preview of the other bundle. Good when you need to refer to another bundle with more specific or generalized information on the subject in questions
* Amazon Links- Consider to include a link or two to a relevant Amazon product. We will automatically grab the photo thumbnail for display

Remember the purpose is not to get AS many links as possible. The purpose is to create a well balanced bundle with many different types of links of only the highest quality.

Describing your bundle.

* Your Bundle Title is going to be the First and only thing that many people will see. Therefore make it unique, focused and interesting as possible.
* Your Description can be any length and should give a concise summary of your bundle subject and maybe even a little history and unique content.
* Your Bundle Tags are how you would subcategorize your bundle and can be used in a number of ways. For example, lets say that you made a bundle on 67 Ford Mustang’s. The category of choice for that bundle could either be under Transportation. However the category choice is a very general thing. To further sub-catagorize your bundle you will want to add tags. Tags can be both specific to the bundle and used in other fashions. First lets talk about the obvious method. You could for example tag this bundle
o Ford
o Mustang
o 1967
o Fastbacks
o Hot Cars
* Having these tags will make it show up in searches used for these and also cross reference with other bundles sharing the same tag. You can add up to 10 tags when you create a bundle
* The other way to use tags is not to directly describe the contents of your bundle, but maybe to identify it as part of some bundle association or group. For example maybe I am part of an internet forum on mustangs called ‘Mustang Talk.’ I can also tag my bundle ‘Mustang Talk’ (or whatever tag we agree on) and then on the forum I just have to refer the other users to come to youbundle and search for that unique tag – which will return everything returned as such. The functionality is open to be used as your creativity dictates

Browsing and Tagging other peoples bundles

A Unique and fun feature of YouBundle that can keep you occupied forever is our Bag and Tag feature. This allows you to do 2 different things

* BAG – Essentially like saving the bundle to your favorites. Meaning that it will be there in your ‘Favorite Bag’ to go back to and reference any time you like. This is a great way to bookmark your favorite bundle for easy access
* TAG – Just like when you make a bundle – you are allowed to add tags, when you browse other peoples bundles you can add up to 3 tags to those bundles as well. When you tag another persons bundle – a number of things will happen
o That tag gets added to the bundle Tag Cloud – so it will cause the tag to grow in weight.
o That tag gets added to your personal tag cloud on your homepage and associated with that bundle. This being another way for you to categorize and easily access the bundle
* By tagging you can help to categorize other peoples bundles into the correct place and at the same time increase your collection. Another very useful feature of being able to Tag other peoples bundles is to really put them in their place.
* Meaning that you can start clubs and tag the bundles according to the club. Something like ‘Best Bundle’ or the likes. You can also help the community with quality control. Instead of reporting spam via a link, we are asking community members to tag bundles containing spam links as ‘SPAM’ and our Moderators will routinely check this tag and delete the offending bundles and accounts. Even if another user has already given the tag to the offending bundle, please tag it yourself as well as the more people that tag it – the faster it will be brought to our attention. A full list of moderation tags you can use are as follows (Please use all CAPS)
o SPAM - We will review and take action on bundles marked as SPAM
o PORN - We will immediately delete bundles with links to PORN
o TOS - Bundles that link to pages that violate our TOS, such as pages that.
o BOTD - Bundle of the Day. If you want to recommend a Bundle for Bundle of the Day. Please tag it BOTD and we will review and consider.

Bundle Rating

You can also show your approval or distaste for a bundle by bumping or dumping it. When you Bump a bundle, your username will show up on the bundle to show that you approve. However when you Dump a bundle, it will be anonymous in order to prevent retribution dumps.

FeedBack

As we are currently in Beta Testing – this is a work in Progress and we are constantly changing things and listening to your feedback. If you find a bug, have suggestion, or just want to chat a bit about the industry, please use email us at

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I can’t resist a good heat map, especially on real estate sites. HotPads, which brought us the foreclose heat map, now offers a handy rent ratio heat map. The rent ratio is a home’s sale price divided by the annual rent of a comparable home in the same neighborhood. Looking at the rent ratio gives you a quick sense of whether it makes more sense to rent or buy in a particular neighborhood. If the ratio is high (red on the map), it is usually a good indication that you are better off renting. If it is low (blue on the map), you are better off buying.

In the map above for New York City (click on the image to make it larger), it shows that people are better off renting in Tribeca and Soho and buying in the Lower East Side and parts of Brooklyn such as Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg. For Silicon Valley, you are better off renting just about everywhere except part of Sunnyvale.

The Rent Ratio heat map is part of a soup-to-nuts redesign for HotPads that includes improved search.

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Even on the Web, radio is local. People still tune into their favorite college or hometown radio station from hundreds of miles away. Today’s relaunch of AOL Radio (in beta) embraces that aspect of radio in many ways. First and foremost is its partnership with CBS Radio, which is replacing XM Satellite as the provider of music for 150 radio stations on AOL Radio (AOL itself continues to program another 200). Along with providing much of the music people can listen to for free, CBS is also taking over selling the ads. CBS sales teams are already selling local radio ads, and now those teams will be selling ads on AOL Radio as well. CBS Radio’s ability to sell local ads was major reason why it won the partnership deal, especially with online music royalties increasing sharply. Lisa Namerow, the general manager of AOL Radio, tells me:

The royalties have gone up significantly. We had to reevaluate our business. We needed to partner in order to monetize radio better. We have grown advertising year-t0-year 100 percent, but with the increasing cost of royalties, we need to do a better job by leveraging local markets and advertisers. CBS has a string foothold in that local sales market, with over 140 sales teams.

That statement is an eye-opener for any music service hoping to make money from advertising. If AOL Radio, with three million unique listeners per month (according to Namerow), is having a hard time, how are smaller ad-supported music startups supposed to survive? And affiliate links are not going to cut it. Every song on AOL Radio has a link to iTunes or Amazon, yet Namerow cautions that “those commerce links are a very minor revenue source.”

So how does the new AOL Radio stack up versus other free music services on the Web? It is not bad for basic radio-listening, but is lacking any social features beyond the ability to share a station via email or AIM. It is definitely a vast improvement over the old AOL Radio, which didn’t really work that well in most browsers other than Internet Explorer. The new AOL Radio pops up in a separate Flash player that works on IE, Firefox, and Safari. There is plenty of music and sub-genres to choose from. Some stations: Rock Anthems, ’80s Alternative, Salsa, Rockabilly, All Stevie Wonder, Sports, and Opera. You can also search stations by city (that local thing again). The player highlights 10 preset stations, but you can manage an unlimited amount of presets and change them around.

AOl has also done a better job of deep linking into AOL Music. If you mouse over any album cover, links to album, artist, and song information appear. The service also keeps a history of every song you listen to so you can learn more at your leisure. There is also a pause and skipping ability. You can skip six songs per hour. And right now there are about four video ads per hour. I don’t mind the ads as long as there aren’t too many. But one suggestion: don’t subject people to an ad at the very beginning before they can even listen to one song.

Two more suggestions: 1) Make personal music recommendations based on my listening habits; 2) Integrate with CBS-owned Last.fm for more music choices and social recommendations.

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Gabe Rivera finally added search to Techmeme last month. But already he is making it much better. Rivera just added a nice prospective search feature to the site.

Anytime you search Techmeme, you can subscribe to future search results for the same term through an RSS feed. Just click on the RSS icon in your browser after you do a search, and you will get a feed for stories that appear on Techmeme with that term. So you can keep track of breaking Techmeme news about that particular subject in your feed reader.

By default, the feed only includes stories with your search term in the headline or first few sentences, but you can opt for any mention of the term throughout the story as well. This is a good way to keep track of breaking news on companies or products. For instance, you could subscribe to a feed for the term “iPhone” or “Google” or “Twitter.” In fact, we already incorporate a Techmeme feed for this very purpose in our Crunchbase profiles. (The image above is the latest feed in the sidebar of Techmeme’s page).

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Continuing its push to become a major provider of Webtop software, Adobe is releasing two new products on Monday: Acrobat.com and Acrobat 9. Adobe’s Webtop arsenal already includes the recently launched online version of PhotoShop and its online media player, Adobe TV. Acrobat.com is another big step towards bringing more desktop-like experiences to the Web. “It is our intent to blur a lot of the lines of the past,” says product manager Erik Larson.

Acrobat.com—Online Word Processing, Meetings, and File Sharing

Acrobat.com is a combination of three recently launched online services: Adobe Brio (online meetings), Adobe Buzzword (online word processor), and Adobe Share (online file sharing). Thus with the public beta launch of Acrobat.com, Adobe is taking on Google Docs, Microsoft Office Live Workspace, WebEx, and GoTo Meeting—all at the same time.

Buzzword is now integrated into Acrobat.com as the default word processor. (I reviewed Buzzword and Share when they first launched last March). Multiple people can edit a document and leave comments. Tabs along the bottom representing different people show you who has accessed the document most recently and their status (author, reviewer, etc.). It paginates documents, supports all kinds of fonts, and lets you create the closest equivalent to a PDF that is possible online.

All the documents on Acrobat.com are organized in what up until now has been Adobe Share. The document and file-sharing service now offers five gigabytes of free storage, and lets you embed documents in a widget on other sites across the Web. (I’ve put an Adobe PDF widget at the bottom of this post). This last feature should worry startups like Scribd and DocStoc, which are based entirely on the ability to upload and share documents in a similar fashion.

Finally, my favorite part, Acrobat.com includes Brio, which is a light version of Adobe Acrobat Connect. It lets up to three people have online meetings for free, with screen sharing, desktop video, voice conferencing, chat, white-boarding. You can add in a regular toll line for a fee. Anyone with a Mac is going to love this. Whenever I get a virtual demo, I prefer to do it through Adobe Connect because WebEx and GoTo Meeting sometimes don’t work with my Mac. And Adobe’s Flash viewer simply looks better.

Acrobat 9—Now With Flash

At the same time Adobe is launching Acrobat.com, it is releasing Acrobat 9—a major upgrade to one of its anchor desktop apps. The big news here is that for the first time, Adobe’s PDF-creating desktop software will support Flash. So people can now create documents with embedded Flash movies from YouTube, or developers can design entire new skins for electronic documents using Adobe’s Flex framework—the same programming tool they use to create Web applications.

PDF documents made with Acrobat 9 also support collaboration among multiple authors and reviewers over the Internet, making them connected documents. Best of all, they no longer take forever to load. The next step is for Adobe to make it easy to turn any PDF into a Web page, and vice versa.

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Want to see what the earth would look like in your iPhone? Watch the video below, which was shot by Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog. It shows a demo of the “coolest thing” he saw at the recent Where 2.0 conference from a Boulder-Colorado startup called Earthscape..

The demo is of a mobile application (Earthscape Mobile) in development that puts virtual earth software on the iPhone. When the iPhone is tilted, the earth begins to rotate and you can navigate to another part of the globe. Taylor notes that the app was running locally on the phone, and that ideally you’d would want real geo-spatial information downloaded over WiFi or 3G, which would take a ton of bandwidth and effect performance. But perhaps his fellow Googlers will be inspired enough to create a mobile version of Google Earth for the iPhone or Android with just such features. (We can dream).

Note that what you see in the video is not Google Earth, although it looks very similar. Earthscape has created its own virtual earth program that it describes as a social geobrowser. As with Google Earth, it allows you to tag places with text, photos, restaurant reviews, and Wikipedia articles. It also lets you see different image overlays of the same spot during different seasons and different times in history. The software is available only in private beta for Windows (sign up here). Mac and Linux are coming soon.

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