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Remember what it was like to capture video off a computer screen before desktop recording software came along?

You'd mount a big, expensive camera on a tripod, point it at the screen and, unless you had tweaked a bunch of settings or loaded special software, you'd get black bars creeping up and down the screen because of a refresh rate mismatch. And once you solved that problem, you still needed to be well versed in editing tools, video-tape transfer and replication.

The wildly popular nonprofit fundraising application Causes reportedly emailed users of its MySpace app on Tuesday to tell them that all Causes will be removed from MySpace on Friday morning, in three days. Causes was co-founded by Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, the Comcast-acquired Plaxo and Founding President of Facebook.

MySpace users of Causes were encouraged to post links on their MySpace profiles asking cause supporters to join the cause on Facebook instead. In abandoning MySpace, is Causes abandoning nonprofit groups organizing online with poorer users and people of color? Or are neither MySpace or Causes any big loss for social change organizations?

Finally, the powers that be are planning to put a stop to #liesboystell, #goodhead, and... well, all the other asinine, vulgar, and generally pointless trending topics one finds in the right column of the Twitter web interface.

Over the summer, we noticed that Twitter was submerging some adult-themed trending topics, and we noted the absolute need for more top-down policing of the trends list, which should be available for surfacing interesting and timely items to engage users. Today, Twitter has finally acknowledged the brokenness of the feature and has stated its intentions to fix the issue.

Ben Behrouzi came from the shadowy Lead Generation business, but some people in that field said he played too dirty. Now he's got a real-time search engine that just came out of beta today, called Leapfish, and he says the company will already report $10 million in revenue this year despite having barely launched to the public.

This is a strange story, but no one said the path to the future wouldn't itself be strange. So consider suspending your disbelief so you can see what Leapfish has to offer.

Magnatune, a small and eclectic online record label, just released its first iPhone app. As far as we know, this is the first time that a record label has released an iPhone app that allows its users to play every song of every artist on its label for free and as often as they want. The only restriction on the app is that every song is followed by a short announcement with the name of the artist and title of the song.

Yahoo just announced that it has upgraded its video search product with new features that make it easier to discover music videos. Yahoo Video Search now recognizes and shows the most popular albums and songs whenever a user searches for an artist or band. A sidebar on Yahoo Video Search now displays an artist's most popular albums and songs. The album view then allows users to drill down even deeper and see videos for all the songs on this album.

Google is open sourcing a collection of Javascript tools today that will enable developers to build faster, more powerful and more efficient web applications using some of the same code that runs Gmail, Google Maps and Docs.

Why is Google doing this? Because the more powerful web applications become, the more important Google's search, browser and nascent OS become. More relevant to developers than some grand anti-Microsoft conspiracy, though, is that some serious UI sweetness may be forthcoming.

Earlier this morning, Google launched the Google Dashboard. This new feature gives users a quick overview of the Google products they use and a slice of the data that is connected to these accounts. Google sells this as a way to enhance "transparency, choice and control," though it is important to note that none of this information is new. The dashboard simply brings all of this data together in one place and gives users an easy way to access the privacy controls in the Google services they use.

Facebook is getting old. No, people aren't getting tired of it, it's actually getting old, as in its population is aging. In May of 2008, the median age for Facebook was 26. Today, it's 33, a good seven years older. That's an interesting turn of events for a site once built for the exclusive use of college students. So where are today's college students hanging out now? Well, to some extent, they're still on Facebook, despite having to share the space with moms, dads, grandparents, and bosses. Surprisingly though, they're also headed to another network you may have heard of: Twitter.

In our society, there's an image of a computer nerd as this sad, pale, and lonely guy sitting in the dark gazing at a glowing screen. As it turns out, that's just an image and it's far from the truth. The reality is that most technology users are perfectly well-adjusted and social creatures. In fact, those who surf the web and use their mobile phones may actually be more social and better connected to the world at large than those who don't.