Webware

Facebook has instructed Meebo to temporarily take down its newly implemented Facebook Chat integration. According to Meebo, Facebook would like them to, "...connect to their network in a different way." Facebook has committed developers from Chat and Facebook Connect to help Meebo get Facebook Chat up and working on the service again.

To be clear, Facebook is in no way discouraging Meebo from integrating Facebook Chat into its service; it's just asking Meebo to hook-in through a new and most likely more secure method. Facebook has a history of cracking down on unauthorized uses of their data or services. Most notably, we saw Facebook ask Plaxo to stop scraping their data. It's definitely a step in the right direction that Facebook is helping Meebo find a secure solution to Chat integration.

The official response from Meebo is below.

As a bunch of you already know (because you've been using it), we recently added Facebook Chat into Meebo.

We have been speaking to the Facebook team, and it turns out, they'd like us to connect to their network in a different way. In the interim, they asked us take Facebook off Meebo, and we said "okay."

However, we were glad to hear that the Facebook team was genuinely excited to see their network on Meebo, especially since they already have plans to open Facebook Chat. They also committed resources from their Chat and Facebook Connect teams to do extra work with us to get Facebook Chat back on Meebo "really, really soon."

Work began this week, so stay tuned. We expect some all nighters on both sides!

The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is one of those exclusive, highbrow affairs with a guest list tighter than your belt after a pie-eating contest. But social network MySpace is leveling out the playing field by partnering with the Wall Street Journal for a competition called "MySpace Journal," in which an aspiring "citizen journalist" will be awarded the chance to attend the summit later this month.

MySpace is now accepting video submissions in which entrants explain their reasons for wanting to attend and be a member of the Davos press corps. One winner, chosen by a panel of industry figureheads that includes pundit and Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe, will receive an all-expenses paid trip, a coveted press pass, and a blog on MySpace that will also be syndicated to The Wall Street Journal's Web site.

They probably don't attract the same demographic, but MySpace and the Journal have something big in common: Both are owned by the Rupert Murdoch-helmed media conglomerate News Corp.

MySpace might be better known for music promotion than international affairs, but the social network showed off its civic colors quite a bit during last fall's presidential campaign. A similar "citizen journalism" competition was conducted in partnership with NBC, and a series of candidate dialogues were broadcast in conjunction with MTV.

Are My Sites Up is a free service that monitors Web sites to see if everything is up and running. You simply plug in the URLs of whatever sites you want to keep an eye on (they don't even have to be yours), and it will send you an alert if it notices one is down.

It does this by visiting each page on your list--up to 50 per user--every 15 minutes. If it can't load the page, you get an e-mail. You can also plug in your mobile phone number to get an SMS alert.

I very much like the idea, since you just set it and forget it. It's a nice complement to downforeveryoneorjustme.com which does the same check, but for the people unsuccessfully attempting to visit your site who believe their local undersea cable may have been cut again.

(via Delicious)

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I spend a considerable amount of time perusing financial sites for data that impacts a respective company's financial statements. Because of that, I've developed a liking for certain sites, and a severe distaste for others that have no business providing information to anyone.

But it's the great that I'm highlighting today. And in the following list of services, you'll find some obvious choices and hopefully some new services you may have never seen.

Emerginvest

One of the main issues facing sites like Bloomberg or MarketWatch is that most of their focus is placed squarely on U.S.-based companies. It makes sense--most of the visitors to those sites are looking for information on companies that operate in the United States. But that doesn't mean we don't need international data, and that's exactly what Emerginvest provides.

The self-proclaimed "Yahoo Finance for the rest of the world," Emerginvest provides outstanding financial data about companies that are operating outside the U.S. Once you register for the site, it displays a "heat map" detailing the performance of markets around the world. That's just a starting point for what is a deluge of financial information about companies operating in over 120 countries. That data includes news, market overviews, sector data, individual company performance, analysis, and much more.

Even better, Emerginvest provides a link to brokerages that allow you to purchase the security in international markets. Unfortunately, though, I've found that few brokerages will allow their clients to acquire obscure international securities.

Emerginvest's claim that it wants to be the "Yahoo Finance for the rest of the world" is a bit troubling, though. What would stop Yahoo, Google, or any other major firm from creating a similar service that would put this company out of business?

Investopedia

If you want to research stocks and mutual funds, while learning about them, Investopedia is the best place to do it. With thousands of articles on investing, the stock market, and other financial topics, Investopedia offers an exceptional amount of value to the novice and professional investor alike.

The real beauty however is in the breadth of information it provides. Want to learn how to buy a security for the first time? It will walk you through the process. Want to learn about pink sheets? Investopedia has your answer. Oh, and if you want to find out if Google is a good buy right now, Investopedia will fill you in with analyst opinions, historical prices, and much more. Suffice it to say that if you're looking for anything related to business, Investopedia will have it.

It's that good.

StockCharts

Sometimes, when I use Yahoo Finance, I take historical stock price charts for granted. After all, they're really only useful to show price differences of a particular stock over time, right? But when I find my way back to StockCharts, I can't believe that I even considered using Yahoo Finance charts to make a decision about a company.

StockCharts doesn't just provide historical share price data in its charts, it provides a full solution for analyzing the value of a stock. Along with price changes, it can display key indicators of financial health like Moving Average Convergence/Divergence, Relative Strength Index, Moving Averages, and Volume. It even lets you embed those graphs into your own site, social network profile, or presentation if you want to share the information you've gathered with others. That said, be aware that a couple trips to Investopedia may be in order--StockCharts is specifically designed for those who are knowledgeable about investing and have a keen understanding of company valuation.

ValueEngine

If you want to know what a stock is really worth and you don't want to do the heavy lifting with a service like StockCharts, ValueEngine is the perfect alternative. There's only one catch: you'll need to pay $199.95 per year or $19.95 per month to do it.

ValueEngine provides accurate valuations for any stock you throw at it. According to the company, it analyzes each stock based on a number of key factors and ratios to determine what a share should be priced at and whether it's a good buy or not. Upon entering a particular security, ValueEngine provides extensive data that not only gives you a valuation, but financial evidence to support its claim. It even runs market trend analysis and price reversal calculations to estimate stock performance over the next few years. I'm not convinced that kind of long-term planning is reliable, but it's tough to argue with the company's success: it claims its recommendation engine enjoyed a 25 percent rate of return during 2008.

Yahoo Finance

Any mention of financial data research cannot be complete without talking about the de facto leader in the space, Yahoo Finance.

Although some prefer Google Finance to Yahoo's because of its slightly less-cluttered design, I don't think it compares to Yahoo's page. Combining news, analyst opinions, key ratios, and charts with an outstanding design that makes it simple to navigate from one security to another, Yahoo Finance is set apart as the most useful financial research tool on the Web. And although it's lacking in international data and Google is making inroads, Yahoo's finance page provides the best information as quickly as possible.

Apple's Macworld announcement about professional and celebrity music instruction as part of GarageBand '09 may have been impressive, but what might be a little more eye catching (and ultimately useful) is iPerform3D. This browser-based music learning system shows users how to play guitar in 3D, and works on both Macs and PCs.

iPerform3D eschews A-list music celebrities like Sting and Sarah McLachlan in place of guitar-playing veterans who have undergone motion capture recording of their entire bodies (fingers especially) to teach you various lessons. To learn, you get control of a 3D video player that lets you change vantage points, as well as slow down or speed up the lesson.

The service's claim to fame is that this 3D viewer gets rid of some of the limitations that come from simply watching someone play in a video or over a Web cam. You can zoom around behind the neck of the guitar and see through where your fingers are supposed to go. It's pretty neat, and a lot easier than trying to reverse the image in your head to do what you're seeing. Each video comes with three view presets, although you can simply click and drag around with your mouse to adjust each angle further.

iPerform3D's player lets you zoom around to whatever angle you want, and includes three button presets to let you skip to ones that cover finger placement. Click to enlarge.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The service offers both a beginner course ($40) and three different monthly membership subscriptions ranging from $30 for one month all the way up to $140 for an entire year. These give you access to set of intermediate lessons and "jam tracks" which serve as background loops for you to practice what you've learned.

One thing worth noting is that the service won't work without the installation of the Unity-3D rendering engine (which isn't just a simple browser add-on). The upside of this is that once it's installed on your machine you can run the lessons from almost any of your browsers, although IE, Firefox, and Safari are the only ones "supported."

Here's the video pitch:

Related: JamLegend turns your keyboard into a guitar

Box.net has made two new interesting hires. The Web storage provider on Thursday announced the addition of Jen Grant as the new VP of marketing, and David Lee who will be taking up the reins as Box's director of Product Management.

Grant was formerly the head of Google's marketing team for Google Apps, while Lee was heading up work building advertising into several of Yahoo's video projects.

From a brief interview on the company's blog Lee says one of the things he hopes to improve is Box's business and collaboration features. Lee formerly worked on WebEx's MeetMeNow Web conferencing service as a UI designer, which could be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it. Last month company began a beta program with a handful of new features aimed at SMBs, filling in the gap between its consumer and enterprise offerings.

Nine Inch Nails band leader Trent Reznor announced in a blog post on the band's official page Wednesday that a "subversive" group contacted him recently with 400GB of HD footage from three of the band's recent concerts. In a move that would send shock waves through the music industry, Reznor provided a link to the file and challenged fans to create compelling videos out of all the footage. Those interested can find more information about the video on the Nine Inch Nails Web site.

Slacker.com, a service that provides personalized online radio stations, announced Thursday that it has partnered with Research In Motion to bring its offering to BlackBerry devices. Dubbed Slacker Mobile, the service will provide personalized music discovery and listening with the help of 100 pre-programmed stations, as well as 10,000 individual artist stations. The app is free and available now.

Thursday at the Consumer Electronics Show, Sonoro Audio, a German designer and engineer of high-priced audio products, announced that it has partnered with music-streaming service Pandora to make Web radio available in its entire line of Elements W radios. Much like other devices that interface with Pandora, users will be able to access all their stations anywhere a broadband connection can be established. The company's Elements W line of radios will be made available sometime in the next few months.

Mobile TV provider FLO TV released a report Thursday detailing the growth of television viewership on mobile phones. According to its research, the average consumer is now spending 20 minutes per day watching television on a mobile phone. It also found that viewership increased 103 percent over the daily average during the one-day playoff between Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate at the 2008 U.S. Open and the company witnessed a 22 percent jump on Election Day.

eFresh.com, the self-titled "eBay for produce", announced Thursday that it has secured $5.4 million of venture funding in a round that was led by Rabobank. eFresh executives say they will use the cash to expand the company's presence internationally and increase the usability of the site.