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There are more startup tech companies launching this week than almost anyone can keep track of, but any time a new service launches - one thing is key to its survival. The initial User Experience has to be compelling or any new application is going to be passed up in favor of whatever shiny object is next in line.

What's a company to do? Luckily, there are people who specialize in the field of User Experience (UX) and many of them share their best practices freely. We see applications all the time that are based on a great idea but are poorly designed in a way that leaves us frustrated and unlikely to return as users. Below are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience.

According to a report in the International Herald Tribune, Facebook tried to acquire the popular German social network StudiVZ. When those negotiations ended without a deal, Facebook decided to sue StudiVZ instead for copying Facebook's look and feel. According to the article, StudiVZ's owners, the German media company Holtzbrinck Gruppe, wanted to sell, but for far more than the $134 million it originally paid for StudiVZ in 2007.

Everything's changing on the internet these days, so it's as good a time as any to make some drastic changes to the way we interact with it too. Mozilla Labs has put out a call for anyone in the world to share their vision of how they would like to see the browser, or the web in general, look and act in the future.

Called The Concept Series, the project will track down and share future web concepts submitted through a very simple process. What would you like the web to look like in the future? We offer one of our favorite visions below.

Do you need to pick out a new color scheme, but don't know where to begin? If you're designing a web site or blog theme, finding just the right color palette is nearly as important as writing good code, but it can be a challenge for those of us who don't have any innate design skills. When looking for inspiration today, it's easy to become overwhelmed with the number of choices available for generating color schemes, but here are five apps we find truly inspiring.

Balsamiq, an application mockup creation tool built on Adobe AIR, has generated more than $10,000 in revenue less than 6 weeks after the $79 tool launched. The one-man company was profitable within 3 weeks after launch and the application itself is quite remarkable.

It's a great story of a creative entrepreneur using new technology to address a key market need and finding a healthy number of customers willing to pay for software. Balsamiq lets users drag and drop a library of common design elements around a work space, then export their final product in PNG or into a Confluence wiki. It seems like something that could cut design work headaches down substantially. Demo video below.

Yesterday, we told you that Facebook would be launching its new design today and briefly highlighted the coming changes. Today we've received the official word from the Facebook team that the new profile is indeed live. According to the company, access to the new design will be limited at first as it gradually becomes available to all of their more than 80 million users over the coming days. What's most interesting about the new Facebook design, though, is not just the change in the aesthesis. Instead, the new look reflects the changing needs of their core user base.

Here is a new cartoon from Rob Cottingham of Social Signal. Rob runs a regular cartoon blog called Noise to Signal, in which he puts in graphical form some of the big questions of the social web.

There have been various sightings of a new design for Twitter this afternoon, though by now, Twitter has reverted back to its old design. Possibly, Twitter is testing this new design as it prepares to integrate Summize's search into its current look. The new design moves the navigation bar away from the top and to the right side of the screen, making the overall look of the site more coherent and modern.

Facebook's new profile design, which we first wrote about in February is now live for developers. Any developer can visit http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php to access the developer sandbox and play around with the new design, which aims to unclutter the site by breaking the profile into five distinct areas. Will the new profile provide a better user experience? Or will it be met with resistance?

Scrnshots, currently in private beta, is meant to serve as a community for designers to share their screenshots of interesting or beautiful designs. However, the service, which allows you to upload shots which others can use via an embed code, has the potential to be more than just a niche community for artistic types.