Chances are that Amex is mostly interested in the P2P payment system that Revolution Money has developed. It will be interesting to see what the company will do with the Revolution Money card, which, even though widely accepted, hasn't exactly become a household name yet. Amex also plans to expand Revolution Money's reach beyond the US.

Lots of Participating Merchants - But How Many Customers?

The Revolution Money card is currently accepted at about 650,000 stores in the US, including Barnes & Noble and Whole Foods. Merchants have been drawn to Revolution Money because the company charges lower fees than credit card companies. The company didn't announce how many actual users it currently has, though just like GigaOm's Om Malik, we still haven't met anybody who owns a Revolution Money card.

Solving CAPTCHAs to Transcribe Books

We took detailed looks at reCAPTCHA and how it works last September and in early 2007. In short, reCAPTCHA has found a nifty way to crowdsource book transcriptions. When users solve a CAPTCHA through reCAPTCHA, the software will give users two words: one with a known answer (the control word) and one where the OCR software wasn't quite sure what the word was. Once a certain number of users have solved the suspicious word with the same result, it becomes a control word itself and the OCR software can learn this word.

Now, Google will be able to use this same technology to improve its own OCR efforts. Google currently makes over 1 million out-of-copyright books available for download through Google Books and one of the main arguments against these books has been the fact that these texts are not edited and include a lot of OCR errors. With reCAPTCHA, Google could potentially bring the error rate down dramatically and make Google Books even more useful.

Local EveryBlock sites are currently available for Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. While a number of other companies, including Outside.in, for example, also aggregate local news from blogs and mainstream news sources, EveryBlock stands out because of how well it displays local information from public records. For example, the site aggregates data about everything from building permits and police calls to liquor license status changes and excavation permits - data that is generally hidden away on government websites that are often hard to navigate.

EveryBlock's source code is freely available under the GPL license. The site was built on top of the Django framework.

Facebook had continually copied parts of FriendFeed's feature set, including the 'like' feature and Facebook's new focus on the real-time stream. Still, this acquisition took us by surprise. After all, while FriendFeed has been lingering in terms of users adoption, Facebook has been growing rapidly and doesn't really need FriendFeed's user base to continue this growth.

On the technical side, however, FriendFeed has a lot of expertise, especially when it comes to aggregation and real-time updates. Given that Facebook is also moving in this direction, this move does indeed make a lot of sense, as Facebook gains access to FriendFeed's talent pool.

FriendFeed's employees and founders will join Facebook.

What Will Happen to FriendFeed?

The question now, of course, is what will actually happen to FriendFeed. Will it continue as a separate service or will it be rolled into the Facebook ecosystem? For now, the two will operate as separate entities, but in the long run, chances are that Facebook will try to roll more of FriendFeed's services into its own offerings.

FriendFeed's API will also continue to operate normally.

FriendFeed's Users: Mostly Unhappy

The first reactions from FriendFeed's users have been relatively negative, as users are worried about what will happen to the service once it becomes more tightly integrated with Facebook. In an interview with Rober Scoble, FriendFeed's Paul Buchheit stressed that the company will not just abandon its users, though he didn't go into the company's exact plans.

Here is a copy of Facebook's press release:

Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- August 10, 2009 -- Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed's four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams.

"Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends," said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. "We can't wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world."

"As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they've built and their desire to have us contribute to it," said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founders. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google's "Don't be evil" motto, added, "It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook's engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group."

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they've brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. "As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

On the blog, the group hopes to alleviate concerns by saying:
"If the new owners screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want it to. And - you can now not only share files, but shares, with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That's awesome and will take the heat off us."

Judging by blog comments, it's obvious that users are extremely concerned. Global Gaming Factory will be taking over operation of the site in August 2009. As part of this acquisition, GGF can now incorporate the KTH Royal Institute of Technology and SICS, Swedish Institute of Computer Science's new data distribution technology - Peerialism. Presumably the service will increase torrent speeds.

Additionally, says GGF CEO, Hans Pandeya, "We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site."

It will be interesting to see if fans will stick with the service and how the company's revenue program will differ from predecessors like Grooveshark's compensation service for file uploaders.

Thanks to Steven for the tip!

UPDATE: According to TorrentFreak, The Pirate Bay will be using a 3rd party tracker and host for torrents. We'll just have to wait and see if this has to do with GGF's move with Peerialism.

Clearly, this is a big win for Socialmedian, which only recently came out of private beta.

But what does this mean for XING? According to XING CEO Lars Hinrichs, Socialmedian promises to make XING's network of business people more successful - by saving them time:

"In business success depends on access to the right information at the right time. Both the speed of information and the sheer volume of data have increased rapidly due to the rise of the internet. Traditional media companies, social media such as blogs, tweets, videos and other user-generated websites now provide daily news, leading to a veritable flood of information. The consequence: Time-strapped professionals are forced to parse through numerous news sources for relevant information and sort, organize, and share stories on their own.

Thanks to socialmedian you can save the little time you have."

As part of the deal, Socialmedian CEO Jason Goldberg will be relocating to the Hamburg, Germany headquarters of XING and serving as VP of the XING Applications Platform. The entire Socialmedian team will become employees of XING, as well.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Update, Ed: PaidContent is reporting that "the purchase price was about $4 million in cash and stock (Xing is publicly traded in Germany), and a performance-based earn-out valued at between 0.5-2.5 million Euros payable over three years."

Also see ReadWriteWeb's in-depth comparison of Xing to LinkedIn back in March. At that time we suggested that "the real race for business networking has two horses. LinkedIn is clearly one. The other is not Facebook, but Xing."

Keep your eye on Xing, they've just snapped up an innovative little social news network - and they mean business.

Imeem is one of Sequoia's portfolio companies, so it doesn't come as a surprise that it is looking to keep its budget under control, but we do think that Imeem is going to have a hard time finding a buyer in these tough economic times.

Update: We just got a response from Imeem. The company is indeed laying off 25% of its staff (20 positions) in order to cut cost, but wouldn't comment on the rumors around a potential sale of the company.

Imeem's last funding round was a Series C round led by Sequoia in April, though the company did not reveal the actual amount of this investment. Warner Brothers also invested about $15 million in Imeem. Imeem has licensing deals with all of the major record labels, as well as with a large number of independents labels.

$200 Million

While Imeem's valuation is a bit hard to estimate, PaidContent reports that Imeem and its investors would be looking for somewhere "north of $200 million." Given the current economic climate and the strong competition in the streaming music business, $200 million might be a rather high number, however, and this will surely scare off quite a few potential buyers.

YourMinis was a start-page service like no other, but its feature richness and happy users fall victim to the cold business logic that so many cool startups face after being acquired. YourMinis is now primarily used to power advertising widgets for AOL, a practice that will continue but pales in comparison to the beautiful topical pages its users built with the full service over the last several years.

As several upset users pointed out in the blog post announcing the service's closure, though, none of these services are quite like YourMinis. The Flash interface, while disliked by some critics as all things Flash are, allowed fans greater flexibility in visual design.

Few if any of the many start-page startups have succeeded in their vision of becoming mini-publishing houses for users building content aggregation pages that are then shared with the world. See our interview last year with Dan Cohen, who has lead the team at Pageflakes, iGoogle and MyYahoo, for a great look into the start-page world.

All too often, this is how it goes in startup land. You fall in love with an innovative little service, you give it your attention, then it gets scooped up by a big player and everyone is happy until the acquiring company turns it into an ad network for crappy pop music and 3rd rate movies and then shuts down the original service you loved.

If you're addicted to the fringe startup start-page experience, check out recent sites bookmarked "startpage" in Del.icio.us. In between the big guys, you'll find some innovative little players there. The nice thing about RSS services like this is that it's not hard to move at least your reading list from one service to another. The user experience though, as YourMinis users no doubt are aware, is much harder to reproduce.

Update: AOL emailed the following response.

Goowy is not shutting down
yourminis, but has made a decision to close the startpage and remove
some of the functionality of the gallery. Goowy's core focus is creating
widgets and working with developers to create widgets that can live and
work on sites across the Web, including startpages such as iGoogle,
myAOL and Netvibes. By shutting down the yourminis startpage and some
of the functionality of the gallery, Goowy can continue to focus on its
core business -- developing new widgets.

I thought there might be some confusion about yourminis/Goowy shutting
down completely based on the headline of your post, and want to make
sure it's clear that it is just the startpage and gallery functionality.