ReadWriteWeb

Recently, Firefox released an update to their Personas experiment, an add-on designed to simplify the process of skinning and theming your Firefox web browser. It's been downloaded 2.5 million times, to date, and currently exceeds 1 million active daily users. The latest version of this add-on finally introduced some fresh themes to the mix, welcoming over 3000 new designers and 5000 new designs. If you haven't heard of Personas before or have ignored them in the past, we think it's time you checked them out.

Current real-time search engines generally focus on just searching a single service - and typically, that service is Twitter. Scoopler, however, a Y Combinater-funded startup which launched today after a short private beta, goes far beyond that. Scoopler is a real-time meta-search tool for Twitter, Flickr, Digg, and Delicious, with support for more services to follow in the future. As one would expect, search results from Twitter dominate the real-time stream, though, depending on the topic, the most interesting links often come from delicious or digg.

Forrester Research CEO, George Colony, writes a blog where he helps other CEOs understand how business and technology intersect. His most recent post compared social media to sex, a comparison that may have you giggling at first, but is actually a pretty apt way of describing what it's like to delve into the social realm.

When we first looked at MillionDollarFollow, a new Twitter advertising network with some interesting twists, we couldn't help but compare it to the Million Dollar Homepage. MillionDollarFollow (MDF) is quite different, however. Instead of advertising a product or tweeting affiliate links, MDF tries to get its users more followers. Rather than thinking about MDF as an advertising network, it's actually probably best to think about it as a Twitter lottery with some added benefits, even if you don't win. An ad on MDF costs $1, and users who buy an ad are regularly entered into a lottery drawing where they can win new followers. The final winner will receive 1 million followers.

The following post was originally titled The Robot Made Me Do It: Comparing Three New Cyborg Q&A Services and ran a week and a half ago. It's a slow morning around here and we thought readers who missed this the first time might appreciate a chance to see it now.

One part people, one part machine. Is that a formula for more effective decision making? A number of high-profile entrepreneurs believe it is, and they are starting companies based on the idea.

Hey web DJ. Reach into your magic bag of search tools and pull out a big result - dripping with related ephemera born just moments ago. Those could hold the grain of information you're really looking for, or they could sparkle with data that changes your course of action in unexpected ways.

Alert! Another factor has emerged, elsewhere on another site. You said you wanted to be told, right away, about any online artifacts that crossed a threshold of popularity within a certain group of people in your field. That has just occurred, so it's time to watch the replay of how it got so hot, evaluate its usefulness and decide whether to bring this emergent phenomenon into the work you were doing before you were interrupted, drop the former for the latter or return to your original focus. How would you like this to be your job description? It could well be - if the red hot Real Time Web keeps showing up on sites all around the internet.

Forget all the On the Road, this-land-is-your-land hype. Here's what the RoadTwip boils down to: The gas money was less than the cost of a plane ticket to get to the BIGOmaha conference. Pure and simple stinginess.

I had been pitched on this interdisciplinary tech/creative conference in the middle of nowhere and decided to go out of perverse curiosity - because really, who in their right mind would have a conference in Nebraska? I had to find out. My good friend and FreedomSpeaks.com co-founder Kurt Daradics' curiosity got the best of him, as well; and when I told him I planned to drive, he booked a plane not to Omaha, but to D.C., so we could make the journey together. That was the start of the "road trip gone Twitter."

In Nashville, Tennessee, Marcus Whitney, founder of venture technology firm Remarkable Wit, takes a moment to talk to us about the struggles and triumphs he's experienced in the wonderful world of tech startups.

Marcus explains a little bit about the differences between venture technology and venture capital models and how his firm adopts good ideas and "A team" executives-in-training to create living, breathing tech startups without blowing through ungodly amounts of cash. He also talks about the need for a solid revenue model for even the best of tech ideas.

Illegal movie and TV show downloaders, rejoice. Soon, you will no longer have to wait and hour or two to start watching your favorite obscure dramedy series. Streaming torrent site Bitlet.org is preparing for instant gratification beyond your wildest dreams: Streaming video from torrent files.

About a year and a half ago, we reviewed the site, which then allowed users to download torrents without a BitTorrent client and allowed users to instantly stream audio and other non-video content from those torrents. In the closing remarks from that post, we noted, "Presumably, the same idea can be applied to video -- imagine: streaming video distribution over BitTorrent. Very cool." And behold, Bitlet has made this suggestion very real and quite simple, as well.

One year ago this week, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was traveling throughout India meeting with local technologists and vacationing. Reporters wanted to know, what was he doing there? Speculation that a Facebook India would soon launch was inevitable.

Apparently, earlier today Facebook users in India were greeted with a new message upon logging in: Facebook is now available in Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam. As of 2001, (the latest numbers available) those languages had a combined 770 million speakers. Facebook has just over 200 million users, so this could be a huge opportunity for growth if the company can pull off more than just interface translation.