For those of you who don’t think voicemail is counterproductive, there is a new app on Facebook called Voicetag that lets you send voicemail messages to individuals or groups. This is not the first such app on Facebook (see Voicemail or TringMe), but it works with regular phones and incorporates SMS messages.

The app is very simple. You select a Facebook contact you want to leave a voice message for (or you can set up group aliases), and add an optional text message. Then, instead of using a computer microphone, you enter the number where you are at and Voicetag calls you. After leaving your message, the recipient gets a notification via Facebook and can play the Voicetag from his or her browser. You can also leave messages to groups from your cell phone by texting Voicetag. It will then call back your cell phone and you can leave a message.  The service is free for now.

Voicetag was built by a startup called Ringful to showcase its voice app APIs. (It hopes to compete with BT’s Ribbit and Gizmo).  Voicetag’s future feature list includes:

• The ability to not only record but also deliver voice messages to phones, in addition to the online voice Inbox we have today.
• The ability for the message recipient to interact with the message via touch tone when they hear the message on the phone (imagine that you can send out a voice poll on “where do we want to eat tonight? punch 1 for XYZ; punch 2 for ABC”, and get the votes back in text message!)
• The ability to start ad hoc group / conference calls among facebook friends.
• The ability to call your Facebook friend on the phone no matter where she is in the world, and no matter how many times she has changed her phone number since you last talked.

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It’s always fun to hear what Google employees call various projects when they think no one is listening. In 2007 they called the upstart Hulu joint venture Clown Co. as a private joke about the messy start to that unlikely company (I was right there mocking Hulu with them, but later gave them their due when they failed to fail).

Now we’ve confirmed that inside the Googleplex their new social product, Friend Connect, is often referred to as “Friendsense.” Why? Because like Adsense, Google plans to use Friend Connect as a shoehorn to insert advertising onto third party websites.

Friend Connect was first confirmed in May 2008. Earlier this month it opened to all comers.

The product (see the video below) lets websites add social features to their website. Add a few lines of code and you can let users sign in through a variety of social networks. Websites can also add various widgets and applications through Google’s Open Social project.

Soon websites that use Friend Connect will have a new option - add Adsense-like advertising within the Friend Connect and Open Social widgets that they’ve added to their websites. Publishers will get a percentage of the revenue generated from the advertising.

And that’s the big monetization scheme behind Open Social and Friend Connect for Google. And that’s why they call it Friendsense internally. And occasionally let it slip to outsiders.

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Forget using Facebook to hook up with random girls or guys. Venture fund Charles River Ventures is using it to find a hot startup or two. Eagle-eyed reader Rishi Mandal saw the ad to the left today, which says “Running a hot startup? Learn more about Charles River Ventures and how we can help you. We are actively investing in great entrepreneurs and big ideas.”

Usually VCs get way more business plans in their inbox than they can even read. But CRV, which is a traditional venture fund (meaning they tend to make larger investments than most very young startups need), also has a “Quick Start” program where they invest smaller amounts in very early startups. Some of those investments have done well, which explains why they’re trolling Facebook for more. I expect their competition will be there shortly as well.

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Great news for people who a) own an iPhone or iPod Touch and b) never know what kind of topping to get when eating Sushi: Tokyo-based Shogakukan, known outside Japan for its extensive offerings of manga (Ichi The Killer, Ranma 1/2, Crying Freeman etc). is releasing a virtual sushi guide for these devices.

You know those engineer elves at Google like to do things their own way. That build-it-better ethic also applies to Christmas toys. If you click on the Christmas Doodle on Google’s main search page, you will see the five images below, which shows what I can only assume is one of Google’s older engineers in his workshop with his son. He is putting together a contraption with wooden gears and tubes that create toys (and explosions too!). Those must be Internet tubes.

(Yahoo and Live Search are also celebrating today).

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News Flash: More people get their news from the Net than from newspapers. While this will hardly count as news to most of our readers, the Pew Research Center seems surprised by the shift. In a survey of 1,489 adults in the U.S. conducted in early December, 40 percent said they get most of their national and international news from the Internet, compared to 35 percent from newspapers. The percentage of newspaper readers has been pretty steady since 2005. What’s changed is the number of people admitting they get their news from the Internet as well, up from 24 percent the last time the Pew Center asked this question in September, 2007.

TV still beats both as a news source, with 70 percent, but give it a couple more years and the Internet should overtake that as well. Among younger adults, those under 30, the Internet already ties TV as a news source at 59 percent for both. (Last year, TV beat the Internet among this age group, 68 percent to 34 percent, to give you a sense of how fast things can switch).

Have people’s reading habits really changed so much in just a year, or are Pew surveys a lagging indicator of reality?

And if the numbers are accurate, is this just another nail in the coffin of newspapers? Not exactly. What isn’t clear from the survey is how much of that Internet news comes from Websites run by newspapers.

The New York Times alone, for instance, operates the 16th most popular set of properties on the Web, although that does not seem to be helping much in the online advertising department. Even if newspapers grab a large share of the Internet news pie, that pie is just not as filling as a pie filled with more lucrative print ads. But as long as newspapers keep producing journalism worth reading (and adjust their business models accordingly), people will keep going to them for a portion of their news. It is just that they will read their news in their browsers instead of on paper.

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I can only imagine the angst that Jessica Vascellero at the Wall Street Journal inserted into countless minds this evening with her article about the difficulties people are having defining what is and isn’t a “friend” for online social networking purposes.

Most Americans who aren’t teenagers or a little older are just getting used to the idea of social networks in general. But the complicated and evolving rules about what constitutes friendship online is adding even more stress.

One young woman had to face someone she defriended on Facebook in a chance encounter on an elevator, and re-added the person to rid herself of the guilt. A middle aged jeweler frets over the implied meaning a competitor unfriending him. Meanwhile, the web-savvy David Dalka, saying he doesn’t need to know “you’ve changed to a new brand of peanut butter,” has unceremoniously dropped people from his friend list at LinkedIn.

So What Is An Online Friend, Anyway?

The social networks themselves, and those of us who spend a lot of time there, are still trying to work out the details on what it means to be a friend with someone online. With friendship comes benefits - you get a stream of information about the person, but it also has costs (you have to wade through a stream of information about the person, and they get access to your intimate details).

Facebook in particular has struggled with this. For a time they really just wanted users to be online friends with people they already know in the offline world. That messaging has subtly changed more recently, though, to a less rigorous position.

It’s clear that the more friends you have on any given service, the more noise you have to wade through to find the golden signal. In the real world when you don’t want to be friends with someone, you just find ways not to spend time with them. But online, you click that friend button because it seems so easy, and it’s considered insulting if you don’t. And then you pay.

Social networks are taking two approaches to dealing with this. MySpace and Facebook (and those like them) have added different buckets to throw friends into. You can share more or less information with different groups of friends. So if you aren’t really friends with someone but don’t want to insult their friend request, you can throw them into the unwashed masses bucket (or whatever you want to call it).

The other approach is the one taken by sites like Twitter and Friendfeed. Anyone can follow anyone and watch what they’re up to, but you are under no pressure to reciprocate. The problem with this approach is that there is still a lot of social pressure to follow people back. I suggested a “fake follow” back in August so that you can just pretend to follow those people. Friendfeed now has a feature which allows just that.

But bucketing friends just seems like a bolted on way to fix the problem. And managing the changing relationships you have with of hundreds or thousands of people across multiple sites is a real time sink. In the future, the services should be able to do a much better job of just figuring out, through your gestures, who you are really close to and who you aren’t. It may also define a relationship with someone I don’t know at all based on whether or not we have friends in common. So even if there is no interaction at all, Facebook and MySpace (or whoever) can theoretically have an idea of how much personal information to share between us.

Ultimately, though, our culture is adapting just as quickly as the networks are. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has said users are becoming more and more comfortable sharing online. Sometimes (ok, often) Facebook is pushing the envelope when it comes to deciding on my behalf what is shareable and what isn’t. They’re placing aggressive bets on where this is all evolving. And sometimes they lose the bets (but not always).

But where they are correct is that there is no bright line of right and wrong when it comes to defining online friendship. The algorithms and the humans will meet somewhere in the middle.

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Editor’s note: The poem and illustrations below were submitted by an engineer in Silicon Valley who works for a big company and wishes to remain anonymous. The views expressed are not (necessarily) those of TechCrunch. The awesome illustrations are by Doug Shannon

Every geek
Down in Geek-ville
Liked searching a lot …
But Bill Gates,
Who lived just north of Geek-ville,
Did NOT!

Bill Gates hated searching and search advertising!
Now, please don’t ask why. It’s not that surprising.
It could be his brain had slowed up with age.
It could be, perhaps, that he loathed Brin and Page.
But I think that the most likely reason of all,
Was his wallet was feeling 2 sizes too small.

But,
Whatever the reason,
His wallet or brain,
By Jan of ’08 he was feeling the pain.
Looking down on the web with a Gatesian stare,
At the billions of people just becoming aware,
That web search NOT windows was the new way to think.
That it’s really more fun to surf popular links!

For,
Tomorrow, he knew …
That some Google shareholder
Would make many more billions
Than him or Steve Ballmer.
They’d start BIGGER foundations
To improve world health
And they might even give away
MORE of their wealth!

And THEN
They’d do something
He liked least of all.
Every googling fool, the tall and the small,
Would sit at their laptops like Sergey and Larry
They’d open their browsers and type in a query!
They’d search! And they’d search!
AND they’d SEARCH! SEARCH! SEARCH! SEARCH!

“They’ll be clicking those ads”, he snarled with a sneer.
“I smell a monopoly! It’s practically here.”
The he growled, with his fingers nervously drumming,
“I must somehow stop that monopoly from coming!”

Then he got an idea!
An awful idea!
Bill Gates
Got a wonderful, awful idea!

“I know just what to do!” Gates said with a laugh.
Then he called his pal Ballmer, to plan an attack.
And he chuckled, and clucked, “What a great business trick”.
I’ll buy up Yahoo and I’ll buy them up quick.
All I need is a deal
To get their web stuff
31 dollars per share seems enough!

So Ballmer sent Yahoo his generous offer,
But was told by Yang to return to the coffer.
Did that stop Bill Gates …?
No! He simply said,
“If I can’t buy Yahoo, I’ll sink them instead!”
So while Yahoo’s board was asleep at the wheel,
He asked Steve Ballmer to walk from the deal.
“Now, that is a lesson in playing hardball!”
Said Gates, as he watched Yahoo’s stock in free fall.

Well, it looked like Yahoo was certainly done.
It seemed like Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer had won.
But, let’s not forget, that in Silicon Valley,
You’re one hack away from printing more money.
So Yang and his gang started coding from scratch.
They made up a product that no one could match!
“Part open, part social,” Yang said with a grin.
“We’ll rewire Yahoo from outside to in.
And open up search, the home page, and then
We’ll double our profit by 2010.”

And Gates, in ‘08, who’d lost half of his dough.
Stood puzzling and puzzling: “How can it be so?
Is there any way Yahoo can help MS Windows to sell.
Or keep Office sales from going to hell.”
And he puzzled for hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then Bill Gates thought of something he hadn’t before.
“Maybe Yahoo,” he thought, “is more than just search.”
“Maybe Yahoo … perhaps … HAS significant worth!”

And what happened then …?
Well … in Geek-ville they say
That Bill Gate’s small wallet
Magically grew 3 sizes that day!
And the minute his wallet didn’t feel quite so bare,
He made a cash offer of 30 per share.
Then he opened HIS browser and did something new.

And he
… HE HIMSELF …!
Tried a search on Yahoo!

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Next month is the annual Lotusphere conference. IBM is giving two free tickets to TC readers–leave a comment saying why you’d like to go to Lotusphere, and we’ll pick the winners by Monday morning. (Note: Passes cover conference registration only, not travel/hotel.)

Few pieces of software are as polarizing as Lotus Notes. When my last job forced me to use Notes, I found the interface clunky, the graphics Win 95′esqe, and the workflow architecture non-intuitive. Granted, I was using Version 6.5 (Notes is now on Release 8), but even so I found it frustratingly unproductive. And I’m clearly not alone.

Which leaves me wondering–has IBM’s Lotus Notes lost touch with the user-centric web 2.0 world?

To answer these questions, I interviewed Kevin Cavanaugh, IBM’s VP in charge of the Notes/Domino group. Also joining us was Ed Brill, IBM’s Director of Messaging and Collaboration.

Before this week I’d never really heard much about DailyLit, a site that Emails you books in short, easily-consumable chunks. But after a few days of receiving The Count of Monte Cristo in my Email inbox every morning, I think I may be hooked - these serialized novels couldn’t be more perfect for a 10 minute coffee break or waiting at the bus stop.

To use the site, you choose a novel from DailyLit’s catalog of over 1300 novels, many of which are free. Each book is broken up into dozens (or hundreds, depending on the length) of installments, each of which is supposed to take around 5 minutes to read. You can tell the site exactly what time you’d like to receive each update, which can be sent either via Email or in an RSS feed, and how many chunks you’d like to receive at a time. And if you just can’t wait to see what happens next, you can also immediately download the next section of a book using a link at the bottom of every Email.

DailyLit has also recently launched public reading groups, which broadcast links to the current segment over Twitter. Because the books are being sent over Email, they can be read from nearly any mobile device with a dataplan. My only gripe with the service is that there seem to be few current bestsellers, which means you’ll need to look elsewhere for more recent novels.

Of course, with the growing popularity of Ebook readers like the Kindle and books on the iPhone App Store, DailyLit may seem pointless - why chop a book up when you can download the entire thing at once? But there’s something about receiving stories in these bite sized chunks that make them much more appealing - reading a 400 page novel on my iPhone’s 3.5 inch screen has always seemed like a daunting (and painful) endeavor, but when it’s only for a few minutes at a time, it couldn’t be any more convenient.

Thanks to Christian Bogeberg for the tip.

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