What a cynical bore. Here's the new formula, meant only to tease users with innovation and ultimately enrich a select few Valley darlings:

Check out the Etherpad company blog post about the deal. They didn't even pretend to be sorry about closing the service. They didn't thank any community of users for help along the way. They just said the deal is done, here's what's happening to the money you paid, now get out.

Maybe Google Wave will change the world, maybe it won't. It's hard for a person who loves startups and innovation not to feel a little toyed with by this kind of drama though.

The acquisition he's referring to is Twitter's purchase of Summize, a real-time search engine that has now become search.twitter.com. Since that original purchase in summer of 2008, Twitter has made no other moves or indications that they were interested in buying other companies, seemingly more focused on quashing bugs, acquiring funding and partnering with major search engines like Bing and Google. Meanwhile, the ecosystem of Twitter applications exploded, and now includes hundreds if not thousands of apps powered by or integrated with Twitter's service. But which of these apps deserve to become an official company offering?

What Companies are on Twitter's Radar?

Which applications do you suppose have crossed Twitter's radar? Some insight may be found on Twitter's "goodies" page where the company lists a handful of apps, widgets, and website buttons which Twitter users can browse through and download. Here, desktop Twitter clients like Twhirl and TweetDeck are promoted alongside mobile applications like Twitterific and PocketTweets.

However, the complete app list seems a little out-of-date when compared with what today's Twitterers are actually using, especially on the mobile front. According to a study from August of this year, iPhone apps like Tweetie and TwitterFon are just as popular as Twitterific - if not more so - as is the Blackberry app TwitterBerry. And the one-time popular Twitter app Twhirl, an Adobe AIR desktop client, has long since been overshadowed by the more robust TweetDeck and similar web counterparts.

Among those web counterparts are the new tools from Seesmic and Brizzly, both of which have been garnering attention as of late, especially when they each introduced support for Twitter's new "lists" feature earlier this month.

But client applications are only a small slice of the entire Twitter app universe. There are also games, blog and email plugins, utilities, analytics and search tools, shopping services, URL shortners and so much more. Plus, there are sites that attempt to aggregate the chaos into some sort of meaningful structure, like the oneforty.com website, for example, often called Twitter's unofficial "app store" by its fans.

While we could only guess at which applications Twitter would want to adopt as their "official" clients or services, a good guess may involve some of the media sharing tools that have been popularized by a number of Twitter users wanting to share photos and videos in addition to plain text. TwitPic comes to mind as one of the top photo-sharing clients and TwitVid or Tweetube may be considered for video shares. These sorts of acquisitions seem to fit better with Twitter's goal of expanding upon the core functionality of Twitter. Where before, the company was content with its simple 140-character updates, recent changes, including the integration of the URL-shortening service bit.ly, Twitter lists, geolocation features and a new implementation of the "re-tweet" structure seem to hint at Twitter's desire to add more layers of complexity to the once-basic service.

More Acquisitions Could be Too Much of a Good Thing

However, Twitter needs to be careful not to add too much. Up until now, the service has grown organically, with a lot of its features and conventions implemented by its own user and developer community outside of the official channels. Bog it down too much with extra add-ons and new behaviors, and Twitter may scare off potential new users who already often struggle with figuring out what to do with the service in its simple form. Plus, longtime Twitterers may also be put-off to see their favorite clients or services ignored in favor of whatever companies Twitter chooses to bless through an acquisition deal. And once acquired, competing companies could wither and fade away, unable to compete, eventually leading their developers to cut their losses and move on.

What Should Twitter Acquire?

Earlier this year, we listed ten companies that Twitter should acquire next. Not surprisingly, some of the companies or their features have already been implemented, including bit.ly's URL shortening service and the geo-location feature we mentioned. Meanwhile, another app on the list, FriendFeed, has already been acquired by Facebook, leaving our original list much shorter and now in need of an update.

Given Twitter's intentions to start a shopping spree sometime in the near future, we wonder what apps will make their list. We also wonder if more Twitter acquisitions will end up being a good thing for the company and the community as a whole, or if it will end up stifling competition in what is now a thriving ecosystem of innovation and development. We hope Twitter proceeds cautiously and wisely in this area - any major unwelcome changes have the ability to alienate the very community that made Twitter what it is today.

This June, Brightcove's CEO Jeremy Allaire told Sillicon Alley Insider that the company was now profitable and that he expected the company to see a 50% revenue growth in 2009.

Is Google Buying Brightcove's Tech or Its Customers?

While Google could obviously offer the same kind of services Brightcove currently offers on its own YouTube platform, Brightcove has already locked in most of the customers that Google would also be competing for. Also, while YouTube was designed as a consumer platform (even as Google is slowly moving to featuring more commercial content on the site), Brightcove has set up a platform that gives enterprise customers the flexibility and metrics they need. In the end, though, if this rumor is true, Google is most likely more interested in Brightcove's customer base than in its technology.

We asked both Google and Brightcove for a comment about this rumor and will update the post when/if we hear from them.

Update: as Dan Rayburn points out in the comments below and on his blog, Brightcove's setup requires its customers to use third-party content-delivery networks like Limelight to stream their videos. If Google really acquires Brightcove, this could turn out to be a problem, as it would keep Google from being able to use YouTube's (cheap) infrastructure.

Image by Peachtree Media Advisors

Mike Macadaan started Twiistup two years ago when he was a UX/design creative executive at AOL. When he moved from NorCal to SoCal, he started the event to make friends and networking connections, not planning on growing the event beyond the initial two instances. Instead of just concocting another mixer, he added a few twists, and Twiistup gained popularity and a hundred or so attendees with each occurrence.

Photo by Mike Macadaan.

"Conferences are boring as sh*t, but Twiistup was just this party. He sold 600 tickets and had 600 people on the waiting list. At at that point, Twiistup became L.A.'s flagship event. Twiistup 5 this February was held in a hangar in the Santa Monica airport, all decked out in this cyberpunk, Blade Runner kind of thing. Mike had 1,000 people with a 400-person waiting list. He really never planned for it to be this big. It's too big and valuable to just stop, but it also became too big for Mike to take it to the next level."

Enter Dao, a "funemployed" SoCal entrepreneur, author, and blogger.

"It's a natural fit when you learn that, in a former life, he was both a standup comic and life coach," wrote Sean Percival of Dao in today's installment of LaLaWag.

"Tired of having to make a scene at other people's events, Francisco started to arrange his own unique series of fun-inspired get-togethers. Rumor has it he may even make a career out of it, bringing you a new type of tech event, with a twist."

Hint, hint.

So when silent investors bought the brand, Dao was brought on board. He is raising the stakes by making Twiistup 6 a two-day event. He's thinking of it as "a mini-TED" with an evening party and a all-day stage event the following day. Already, Dao has secured several tech and mainstream persons of note as speakers.

Photo by Mike Macadaan.

Twiistup is already known for its New Tech-esque "Showoff" competition and signature evening event; the addition of a full conference agenda and the seeding of similar event models in other cities are two immediate enhancements announced with the influx of new capital.

"The groundswell of community support for Twiistup in other states, let alone Los Angeles, has been incredible to watch and it's the driving reason Twiistup's reputation has spread so far and wide," said Macadaan. "People from New York, Colorado, Miami, Seattle, Atlanta, Chicago, and even Switzerland have reached out wanting to create a similar experience to help bring their communities together. I'm thrilled that Twiistup will get the dedicated time and focus it needs to become bigger and even better."

There have also been suggestions that Twiistup should be a regional event with national reach, such as South by Southwest. "It should be on the level of Blogwold, TechCrunch 50, a young and hip tech show," said Dao. "The one thing I'm sure about is that Twiistup is going to be a lot bigger."

The next Twiistup will take place July 30-31 at the Universal Hilton in Universal City, Los Angeles.

Integration with WordPress

PollDaddy and WordPress were already working on integrating PollDaddy into the WordPress.com platform, and, as PollDaddy's founders put it, "in the end, it just seemed like the perfect fit for us to join them." As has been the standard for Automattic's acquisitions, PollDaddy will continue to operate as a standalone platform and the company will continue to support and develop it on other blog and social networking platforms.

WordPress.com has already integrated PollDaddy's functionality for its users, who can now easily add surveys to any blog post, which will surely give PollDaddy's user numbers a significant boost. Automattic is also making a PollDaddy plugin available for self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Here is a short overview of how the WordPress.com integration works:

Dba.dk is Denmark's largest online classifieds and auctions site and has been able to challenge eBay in its own market.

Fewer Auction - More Direct Transactions

EBay's move to acquire classifieds sites and payment services is part of the company's strategy of putting less emphasis on auctions and more on direct transactions. EBay is currently in a bit of a slump and its workforce reduction is clearly meant to keep cost under control while the company restructures its business.

The shares were bought by internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, which now controls 50.6% of Mail.ru. You can see a clumsily Google-translated version of the site's "blogs" section here.

Context

Traffic analysts Quantcast estimate the site sees almost one million visitors each month from the US. For context, Facebook says it sees 100 million unique visitors per month from around the world.

Another 32% of Mail.ru is owned by South African conglomerate Naspers, the same company that we reported acquired African social media aggregator Afrigator earlier this month. Naspers says that Mail.ru generated $56 million in revenue last year, meaning presumably that it's either growing revenues quickly and/or is now drastically over-valued. 40X annual revenue is the kind of valuation that people make fun of Silicon Valley for.

The moral of the story here is that there is huge internet activity all around the world and not just in Silicon Valley. Many of our international readers are fully aware of that but even we need occasional comments or multi-billion dollar valuations in order to remember.

StumbleUpon was a bargain at $75 million and probably a worthwhile experiment for eBay, but now that eBay's future does not look as rosy as it once did, we think it only makes sense for eBay to sell it off again. According to TechCrunch, eBay has hired Deutsche Bank to find a buyer, though the asking price is not clear.

We contacted eBay about these rumors and will update this post once we get a response.

Skype?

It would be easy to draw parallels to eBay's acquisition of Skype, which eBay bought for the staggering amount of $2.6 billion. Skype, too, was never fully integrated into eBay's business model. However, as Peter Kafka notes, this extremely high purchase price also makes a sale very difficult now, unless eBay is willing to take a loss. Only a handful of companies are able to pay $3 billion or more, which leaves Google as one of the few potential candidates.

The Afrigator interface, algorithm and user experience were key in driving the kind of growth that made it an interesting acquisition target. We haven't been able to get any details on the record about the price paid but suffice it to say that Afrigator's founders and angel investors have all been well rewarded.

If you're unfamiliar with the blogging scene in Africa, Afrigator is a good place to discover top blogs there like The Mail & Guardian's Thought Leader, the occasionally prurient tech blog iMod, the very politicized Black Looks and the internationally minded Afromusing.

We'd like to offer our congratulations to the Afrigator team and to the African blogosphere, whose work has been recognized by a large traditional company as important enough to warrant a significant acquisition in that space. Such recognition isn't the most important thing in the world, the social media world has plenty of its own inherent worth, but such validation is nice too, even for people beyond the founding team. We assume that Afrigator will expand its operations significantly with this infusion of support.

Earlier this year, AOL acquired Bebo for a hefty $850 million. While the news was huge, we didn't think the acquisition would be particularly beneficial to AOL or Bebo. I don't see this being any different with SocialThing! in the picture now. The acquisition is still coming to a close and no financial details have yet to be released. SocialThing! has published a blog post with more details about the acquisition.

Web 2.0 Going Mainstream?

This acquisition may have other results outside of bringing AOL more consumers. For instance, lifestreaming is definitely picking up in the mainstream arena. We've written plenty of articles about lifestreaming in recent weeks because we're noticing that the trend is spreading. Is it going mainstream? There has definitely been a ton of recent activity to hint at it. First, Facebook integrates the aggregation of popular services such as Twitter and Flickr. Now AOL is snapping up SocialThing!. It should only be a matter of time before bids for FriendFeed start to float around. Outside of lifestreaming, but still in the web 2.0 arena, CBS acquired Last.FM last year for $280 million. So, let me rephrase my question: are different components of web 2.0 going mainstream or is the entire concept finally catching on?

AbeBooks has generally stuck to its roots, by creating a thriving marketplace for rare and used book sellers worldwide. It is not clear if there will be any direct benefits of this acquisition by Amazon for the merchants on AbeBooks, though chances are that Amazon is going to start integrating the AbeBooks inventory into its own store. This will give the AbeBooks sellers access a far larger market to sell to than just the AbeBooks community, though many of them were already listing their inventory on Amazon (and other services like Alibris and Biblio.com anyway).

Currently, there are over 110 million books from over 13,000 sellers available on the site. Besides AbeBooks, the company also runs the book search aggregation site BookFinder and provides a sales and inventory management through Fillz.com.

AbeBooks also has a very active user community. Judging from the email AbeBooks send out to its sellers, it would seem that nothing much is going to change on the site for now and that the management team at AbeBooks is also going to remain in place.

As Larry Dignan points out, this deal has a precedent in Icahn's proxy fight with Motorola in 2007. In the end, there, too, Icahn got seats for his picks on an expanded Motorola board, though this did nothing to improve the performance of Motorola's stock.

While this current deal gives the Yahoo board a chance to focus once again and getting Yahoo back on track, it remains to be seen what Icahn is going to do once he takes his seat on the board. Given his intense focus on selling at least part of Yahoo to Microsoft, it wouldn't be surprising to see him take up this topic once more.

It also remains to be seen what Microsoft will to do next. Now that a deal with Yahoo is out of the cards in the near future, we might see Microsoft pursue more search oriented acquisitions. As Microsoft can't just buy additional market share, it will either have to dramatically improve its search or seriously expand its marketing efforts to gain back the market share it has lost to Google.

In its letter, on the other hand, Microsoft stresses that it submitted a new proposal specifically at the request of Yahoo's chairman Roy Bostock that included the advertising deal outlined in Yahoo's rejection letter. However, Microsoft says it did not request any changes to the Yahoo board.

In his own open letter (PDF) today, Carl Icahn, too, is trying to set the record straight. According to his statement, Yahoo purposely mischaracterized Microsoft's offer by putting too much stress on a 24 hour deadline Microsoft had supposedly set, as well as by pushing the idea that Microsoft might still be interested in buying all of Yahoo, while it is only interested in Yahoo's search business at this point.

Of course, Icahn also stresses that Microsoft is now willing to commit a lot more money than before Icahn got involved in the deal.

As we are getting closer to August 1, when Yahoo's shareholders will get to decide on the fate of Yahoo, this constant mudslinging will surely continue and will, if anything, only get worse. We are already at a point where constant misinformation is being disseminated by all parties involved (to the detriment of the shareholders who will have the ultimate say in this deal). It is not even clear if the latest Microsoft proposal was a 'joint proposal' as Icahn calls it, or if the replacement of the Yahoo board was really part of the proposed deal.

Just a few weeks ago, it seemed the Microsoft-Yahoo saga had come to a quiet end. Now, however, we can look forward to at least another three weeks of battling open letters and announcements.

Icahn is clearly pushing to get Microsoft back to the negotiation table and given Microsoft's response to his letter, this is apparently still a possibility.

Microsoft thinks that a deal with Yahoo is impossible with the current board still in place, because Yahoo's management would be prone to mismanaging the company during the potentially long regulatory delay of the acquisition. Icahn notes that the old board has to go, simply because "one thing is clear -- Jerry Yang and the current board of Yahoo! will not be able to 'botch up' a negotiation with Microsoft again, simply because they will not have the opportunity."

Judging from the letter, Icahn is still completely transfixed on Microsoft as the only possible partner for Yahoo. His first objectives, if elected to the board himself, would be to immediately start negotiating with Microsoft and to replace Jerry Yang "with a new CEO with operating experience".

At the same time, though, rumors about Yahoo being in merger talks with Time Warner also resurfaced again today.