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A visit to the typical homepage for a venture capital firm most likely provides a well designed landing page that spells out the firm's mission with links to its portfolio companies and VC bios. Secondary to this general information is a page dedicated to press releases from the firm, or in many cases, a company blog with relevant posts. First Round Capital, however, recently redesigned its homepage to place a much heavier emphasis on real-time information from news sources and its VCs, and portfolio companies.

Blogged started out as a straightforward blog directory in early 2008. Today, Blogged announced a major redesign of its product that puts the service's focus on facilitating conversations around blog posts. Blogged now presents users with a Facebook-like feed of blog posts, with the ability to comment on posts and share them on Facebook and Twitter. In addition, Blogged also rolled out support for Facebook Connect and a widget that allows bloggers to bring comments made on their posts on Blogged back to their own blogs.

After watching from the sidelines for almost a year while rival Facebook had praise heaped upon it by the press for the success of their application platform, it is no wonder that MySpace would be pushing its recently released developer platform hard. It has been just about 3 weeks since the first few apps were unleashed on the MySpace public, and over the past two days MySpace had made a pair of announcements that demonstrate just how much the company is committed to seeing their platform succeed.

Backlash is probably too harsh a word, but as the buzz around lifestreaming continues to build, some people are starting to question where it fits into their daily lives. Last week, we wondered whether sites like FriendFeed solved the problem of information overload, or merely brought attention to it. Keeping track of all that activity is starting to feel like watching code in The Matrix, and this week, others are starting to feel the same way.

This week Facebook opened up its News Feed to third party services, allowing users to add content from outside sites to their Facebook feed. Third parties could already allow their users to do this by creating Facebook Apps. However now users will be able directly import these content streams by inputing their login credentials to Facebook. It's a good first step, but not enough.