Last night Techcrunch held their annual Crunchies awards. The recap is here (they should have video live soon). Below are the websites that I use that were awarded last night. Congrats to all of them:

Best Overall: Facebook

– I said not too long ago that social networking would be huge in 2008. I believe that not only will Facebook lead the way, they’ll top Myspace in 2008 (just my opinion).

Best Video Startup: Hulu

– I agree completely with this one. They had a slow and rough start, but the service is very cool.

Best International Startup: Netvibes

– This has got to be one of the best sites for organizing external content feeds.

Best Mobile Startup: Twitter

– This service I rarely use (mainly because of time constraints), but the concept behind it is great.

Best Consumer Startup: Meebo

– I love this service, mainly because it allows for the use of multiple chat platforms using an online webtop.

Best Enterprise Startup: Zoho

– Zoho made the list of websites that I use quite frequently. Their Zoho Creator service is extremely useful for creating custom applications and can now even be used as the backbone database for existing emterprise applications.

Most Likely to Succeed: Automattic (Wordpress)

– In case you’re wondering… this is a Wordpress blog and a lot of professional bloggers use Wordpress as the backbone of their blogging system.

Again, congratulations to everyone that received an award last night.

Google released a new user interface for the iPhone/iPod Touch the other day (they prelaunched this very thing in early December, but this was a full release).  The design is reminiscent of the Facebook iPod/iPhone UI released last year. I’ve included a screenshot below.

Get in touch with your inner geek… I will.

I discovered these this afternoon and had a blast going through them. All of these images are courtesy of thinkgeek.com. If you click on the images, you can get more information. Here are some of my favorites:

Ha!

Creative… it’s a caffeine molecule

For the spouses…

I believe you have my stapler

A little over-used, but still one of my favorites.

My absolute favorite. It’s a real wifi detector!

I know… I’m a…

Hey everyone,
I’m testing out mobile blogging using my new iPod touch. I hope to use this to post a little more often and from different locations.

Mobile development took a big leap forward today.

At CES today, Yahoo announced the early preview of it’s Mobile Developers Platform. The goal is to enable developers to quickly create and deploy mobile applications across a wide variety of mobile devices. The platform, called Yahoo Mobile Widgets, is expected to usher in a new era of expanded mobile use and include launch partners such as Myspace, MTV and ebay. I’ve posted a copy of the press release below.

I mentioned a few days ago that mobile would be big in 2008. It looks like from this announcement, that it indeed will be.

Need I say more?

An interesting tidbit I found when I was reading articles today. Aparently Google search results showed preference for more recent content Tuesday. The 1st was the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP and on the search results page, Google displayed results that were very recent, including some news items from featured on Digg.

The question we all want answered is: How will this affect search results in the future? For instance, in today’s search marketing world, sites rely on a number of factors to help them rank higher for keywords. One of these factors is the number of inbound links that a particular page on a website receives. If Google begins to shift their focus to more recent content, the factor of inbound links becomes a less important factor, if not irrelevant. (Although at least one person has suggested that Google could be calculating inbound links in real time rather than over time).

For right now, though, any immediate or recent results that appear in Google seem to be temporary in nature. That means, for now, inbound links and internal optimization is still the way to go.