ReadWriteWeb

Lunch.com, a year-old personal recommendation network that functions somewhat like Yelp, is implementing Facebook's newly launched Open Graph API (application programming interface) in an interesting way: It's doing Facebook "like" imports. In the next 24 hours, this feature will appear on the Lunch website for all users to try.

Making breakfast, lunch or dinner plans for any group that involves more than two people can quickly become a chore. Lunchwalla, which launched earlier today, wants to make this task a bit easier by providing you with a web service that allows you to avoid long email chains and back-and-forth phone calls. You simply pick a time, choose a few restaurant options and a list of friends you want to invite. Lunchwalla will email your contacts and they can then RSVP and vote for the restaurant they prefer.

In the summer of 2008, J.R. Johnson sold Virtual Tourist to Expedia for $85 million dollars. While Johnson seems like the type of laid back Los Angeles entrepreneur that would take some vacation time, his quest for relevancy had him launching a new community the following March. Lunch.com is Johnson's attempt to cut through the noise that has proliferated since he first started in the user-generated-review space in 1999.

Says Johnson, "When I started, people asked me why anyone would want to read an amateur review. Now the environment has changed and there's even pay-per-post happening across the net. Virtual Tourist is travel-specific and you increase relevancy by picking a niche topic on which to base your community. With Lunch I'm trying to solve something new." Johnson spoke to ReadWriteWeb about some of the ways he's managed to ensure that his community is more than just search engine bait.

After selling VirtualTourist to Expedia, J.R. Johnson launched Lunch to encourage intelligent content and critical dialogue. Today, in expanding his mission for meaningful engagement, Johnson is launching Twitter Lists. This new service asks users to rationalize their Twitter recommendations. While services like Twubble, Mr. Tweet, Chirpio and even Twitter itself offer suggested accounts, Lunch is the only site that also requires a good explanation.

What do you get when you combine a platform for creating user-generated video content with the micro-blogging sensation that is Twitter? According to 12seconds.tv, you get a viable business model for your company, a platform that allows brands to leverage Twitter for communication, and a way for everyday Twitter users to have fun and earn prizes. Does that sound like a win-win-win all around? It very well may be...or it may just be the first example of how Twitter is transforming from a fun, communication tool used among friends to a commercialized platform for mainstream marketing.

Conficker, the Internet worm that caused a mild panic reminiscent of Y2K late last month, but which failed to do anything spectacular that would have warranted the breathless coverage on 60 Minutes ("The Internet is Infected"), has finally woken up. This morning the worm  started to update itself via a peer-to-peer network between infected machines after downloading its payload from a server in South Korea.