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Spotify Music Pro@ile is the new feature set from popular music service Spotify. Integrating with Facebook, Spotify believes it has created a true social music network. Spotify’s goal is to be ‘your only music source’ in what Daniel Ek, Spotify’s founder and chief executive, says is the ‘the biggest change to Spotify since our launch’.

The star feature is the new Facebook integration option, which allows a user to view the tracks that their friends are listening to, as well as a feature allowing them to recommend songs. When signed in, the Spotify/Facebook feature will appear in a people sidebar, listing all Facebook friends who are also subscribed to the Spotify feature.

Spotify now also integrates with the music library on a user’s PC, allowing users to merge their own tracks into Spotify playlists. Using the Gracenote service, Spotify imports and titles the music on the local PC. Premium users can synchronise their playlist with Spotify’s mobile client which works even if the artist is not in the Spotify database, as Spotify will wirelessly upload the content.

Spotify is a closed peer to peer music service streaming application from a Swedish company. The service features instant playing of any track or album, with no buffering. The new features are part of the Spotify 0.4.3 software which is being rolled out now, although Spotify says it might take a while to reach all users, there is currently no way to force the upgrade.

This week Google announced on its blogging platform that it has acquired LabPixies, a company that develops lightweight utilities and games for several platforms, including the iPhone, Android and iGoogle, Google’s customisable home page.

Google and Labpixies have been working in collaboration for some time (Labpixies being one of the first developers to create widgets for iGoogle). According to Google’s blog post, Labpixies is joining the Google team because the acquisition will allow both companies to work closer together and allow them to be more innovative. The small team from LabPixies is due to join the Tel Aviv office of Google.

A statement on the site blog of LabPixies says that “The acquisition is an opportunity to learn from each other to bring more apps to users, help developers and improve the overall developer ecosystem.” The company claims that is has 40 million users across its widgets, which includes a Calorie Calculator, Expenses Manager, Phonebook and Calender and several games, including versions of Minesweeper, Hangman and Blackjack.

It’s not clear whether Labpixies will continue to develop applications for platforms other than iGoogle, though they may stick to the OpenSocial platform which is used by most of the main social networks, except for Facebook. OpenSocial is a common API used for social applications across a number of websites.

Labpixies is the eighth company Google has acquired this year and the fourth this month. This number equals the total number of acquisitions made in 2008 and 2009 put together. So far Google has acquired at least 70 companies to aid it in fulfilling its strategies at a total price of $10bn.

Some people think of Spokeo as just another social networking app.  Others see it as a glorified phone book or search engine.  Both are right, but not quite entirely so.  Spokeo is a social hub that offers information syndication and aggregation from everything you use: search engines, blogs, Twitter, you name it.

Mainly, though, Spokeo is a people search engine.  At least, that’s what it is now.  I spoke with Harrison, one of Spokeo’s founders and a frequent poster to the Spokio Blog.  The company started in 2006 as a search aggregation tool for social networks and has blossomed into a true people finding tool.  He says they’re up to 12 employees and counting now, as the company and app grow quickly.  That’s 4 coders, 1 graphic designer, 1 project designer, 1 business person, and 5 customer service reps.

“The 4.0 version that you see today (the one that gets a lot of press right now) is our first attempt at expanding beyond organizing social information, and it launched only a month ago,” Harrison says.

So far, the app and business of Spokeo runs on its own funding, bootstrapping by the four founders: Harrison, Ray, Eric and Mike.  All Stanford graduates.

The site and app themselves have done well, riding high on recent media attention, but going strong since beginning in 2006.  The popularity of the app, especially in this new iteration, is thanks in large part to its usefulness.  It fills a large hole in the current Web2.0 landscape: users can find one another on individual sites, if they know what to look for, but not across sites very easily.

Spokeo is a great showcase of boostrap entrepreneurs who have found a niche, are filling it, and are growing their business quickly thanks to their ingenuity.

Foursquare, the location based social network that lets users connect with friends by regularly updating their location, is taking steps to ramp up the numbers of local advertisers featured on its network. So far there are only about 2,000 live offers from local advertisers (stores, restaurants and local bars) worldwide.

Now most unclaimed business venues are adding a link asking “Are you the manager of this business?” Managers click on the link and submit proof that they are indeed managing the business. A sales rep from Foursquare then makes a follow up call to explain and set up the tools for managing the business’s offers.

Foursquare launched a page on their website explaining how the tools work and how it can benefit a local business. Included in the Foursquare toolset is a dashboard that lets a manager track the number of check-ins, the times of day users check in and the most recent and the most frequent visitors. The dashboard also manages special offers such as discounts for users that frequently check in at the business location.

If a local business puts up frequent offers it should generate enough buzz so that more users will check in at that location. More check-ins should boost revenue and could give local businesses a valuable data mine that they can analyse using the Foursquare dashboard.
VC’s are valuing Foursquare at $80m+, which puts some degree of pressure on the company to prove that there’s a revenue stream on the horizon. However Yahoo and others are already showing interest in buying the company at a price far higher than $80m.

It has long been speculated that video gaming is a missing piece in the portfolio of the world’s second largest media conglomerate. Now it emerged that the company’s first step into gaming is the acquisition of Irata Labs, the social software studio, best known for the Twitter-based game #Spymaster.

Irata Labs has three employees and develops games and other apps for social networks. It’s most popular project is #Spymaster, an espionage game where players use Twitter to perform spy activities, e.g. ordering assassinations, buying items on the black market or securing a safe house. Word is that #Spymaster is the first game to use a micro blogging platform. The developers are adding technology that will let #Spymaster incorporate the user’s location into gameplay.
#Spymaster is actually a side project of ilist.com; a venture for which Irata Labs has secured $1.5m in funding. iList lets users search Twitter feeds as they would classified ads to find items on sale sorted by ZIP code or category. A person close to the acquisition says that iList and #Spymaster shows that the company can develop ground breaking products which is what buyers such as News Corp. are looking for.

Irata Labs adds a new item to News Corp’s vast internet business but it is hardly the billion dollar buyout that everyone is expecting. The company will not be incorporated into either of News Corp’s major online platforms, IGN (the games review website) and MySpace. Instead developers at Irata Labs will work with those divisions as and when necessary.

Most developers and their startups are looking to build that ìkiller app.î The one thing that, once people start using it, they’ll wonder how they ever did without. Lately, the platform of choice to build these killer apps around is Twitter. Last week, Twitter’s top investor, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, wrote a piece for Business Insider that rocked the world of Twitter developers.

An uproar of “Twitter is abandoning” and “Twitter is screwing” and “Twitter is [insert evil deed here]” hit the blogosphere and developer forums. Because Twitter is the top interface (API) for building third-party apps around, there was bound to be some backlash to Wilson’s statements.

Just what did he say, anyway?

“Much of the early work on the Twitter Platform has been filling holes in the Twitter product. It is the kind of work General Computer was doing in Cambridge in the early 80s. Some of the most popular third party services on Twitter are like that. Mobile clients come to mind. Photo sharing services come to mind. URL shorteners come to mind. Search comes to mind. Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.”

With this and his article, Wilson intimated that Twitter has been allowing too many non-affiliated application builders to horn in on its basic services. Of course, Twitter’s basic service is micro-blogging at 140 characters or less, but there are so many things that surround that (most of which Wilson names) that it’s hard not to wonder why Twitter doesn’t have built-ins in some of these areas.

Another thing that Wilson alluded to, that goes largely ignored in the commentary around the Web on the subject, is the continually-changing atmosphere that is Web and mobile app development. He mentions that in the early 1980s, companies like General Computer (making external hard drives for the Apple, which had no HD), Lotus (software for the PC), and others all were hot commodities with “killer apps.” They were filling a hole that existed in the current technology and were, thus, doing very well.

Once the original owners of the technology began to fill that hole themselves, however, those killer apps became obsolete. Eventually, Apple started putting hard drives directly into their computers and Microsoft came out with a full Office suite that included a spread sheet to replace Lotus.

When I contacted Fred Wilson to further substantiate this idea, he respectfully declined and said that he’d said all he intended to say on the subject in that original article. He said a lot, I think, but the message is largely being unheard.

What Wilson is saying is that most “killer apps” are not very long lived. They have their heyday and then changes in technology, marketplace movements, or other things eventually make them obsolete. Technology moves fast and even the original platform itself (in this case Twitter) will either move with it or die. Twenty years ago, there was no Facebook, there were no “blogs,” and there was no Twitter. Eventually, there will again be no Facebook and no Twitter and probably no blogs as we know them today.

As if to substantiate the evolutionary nature of apps, Twitter, earlier this week, acquired Tweetie (now to be renamed “Twitter for iPhone”), the popular Twitter application for the Apple smart phone platform. The fact that this popular iPhone app will now be under the Twitter pavilion and offered for free will likely cause some turmoil in the Twitter application development arena.

I mentioned Tweetphoto (a Twitter-based photo-sharing app) recently getting another cash infusion from venture capitalists to Florian Seroussi, an entrepreneur “geek,” and he replied “I share Fred Wilson’s opinion on hole fillers. Moreover I think 3rd party applications that do not offer added value to Twitter are betting on a buy out. Lame attitude.”

All of this goes to show that application developers cannot sit back and be happy once their killer app starts taking off. Apps have a limited lifespan and anyone in this business who doesn’t realize that will go from one disappointment to another.