Perhaps it’s a sign of an economy on the brink: I’m getting pitches for sites about crime. This week I heard from reps of both CrimeReports.com and CriminalSearches.com. Together, their services will help you find crime and criminals, let you look for police records on anyone, and illustrate how pervasive crime is in every community in the U.S.

All these crime reporting services take their data from public sources. It’s tax dollars, after all, that fund police departments and the courts. The trick is in the packaging. CrimeReports does a nice job of placing criminal activity icons on a Google Map. The main business of the company that makes it, Public Engines, is the repackaging of information for municipalities themselves, which can then use it internally to look for patterns, or put the maps on their own Web sites. The CrimeReports.com site lets users get the data directly, and it’s nicely laid out and easy to use. I found the data on the site up-to-date as well.

There is the neighborhood (CrimeReports.com).

Another good source for crime maps, in a limited selection of cities: Everyblock (review).

CriminalSearches, a product from PeopleFinders, lets you find criminals to go with your crimes. Enter in a name, and it will tell you if the person has a criminal record. That’s potentially useful if you’re hiring people for a business or for domestic services like child care. The details you get back from a search hit are sparse, though. Like PeopleFinders, CriminalSearches makes its money by selling you the full report. Or, if there’s someone you want to keep an eye out for, you can sign up for a free alert service that will tell you all the criminal activity of a person in the public databases. Be aware that the site does return traffic violations from some states (I found a family member’s record for driving without a seatbelt), so a positive hit in the database certainly does not indicate criminality.

We recommend careful consideration before hiring this person for a retail job (CriminalSearches.com).

The site will also show you a map of registered sex offenders in your neighborhood. If you want the full details on one, again, you’ll have to pay the service for the full report. But the free results will probably give more information than you wanted.

The real question these sites raise for me is this: What do you do with this data? Now that I can see that my neighborhood is a magnet for car break-ins and that burglaries are not uncommon, will I change my behavior? Not much. Living in the city means being careful no matter how safe a street appears on the surface. Likewise, I see that there are registered sex offenders within a few blocks. Should I avoid walking down that block with my son? I don’t think so. If I were moving, or hiring a babysitter I would, of course, find these services more useful–although even in combination they don’t tell what’s going to happen with people or places in the future.

But it is sure entertaining to see if your boss, friends, and co-workers have records.

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Mark Zuckerberg today officially rolled out Facebook Connect, a way for apps not on the Facebook Platform to leverage the Facebook social network. It’s an extremely powerful idea, and the demos we saw at the F8 conference were much more impressive than the MySpace Data Availability project that rolled out yesterday.

Mark Zuckerberg officially rolls out Facebook Connect.

(Credit: Brian Solis)

Facebook Connect allows other Web sites and apps to have their users log in, or authenticate, to the Facebook system, and once logged in, their social network comes with them. The reason it’s a bigger deal than Data Availability is that it’s two-way. Not only does your Facebook data come to you on the external site, but things you do on the site can be reflected back to your Facebook profile and news feed. Two examples:

Digg: Users on Digg will be able to connect their accounts to the Facebook profiles, and then when they digg a new item, that information will get fed to their Facebook feed, and presumably will be seen by all their Facebook friends. This is one of the best examples of an app exercising the “virtuous circle” of content and community that Zuckerberg discussed in his keynote today.

Movable Type: Facebook Connect will allow commenters on MovableType blogs to log in via Facebook authentication. Comments they leave will get posted to their news feed, which is somewhat cool. What I really like is that when a user posts a comment on a blog, they’ll see which of the other people commenting on the item are in their social network.

Other Facebook Connect partners include Amiando, CBS.com, CitySearch, CNET (which I had no idea about until today), CollegeHumor, Disney-ABC Television Group, Evite, Flock, Hulu, Kongregate, Loopt, Plaxo, Radar, Red Bull, Seesmic, Socialthing!, StumbleUpon, The Insider, Twitter, Uber, Vimeo and Xobni.

I was disappointed that Facebook did not announce OpenID support, like MySpace did yesterday (although it only went half-way). Using Facebook as an authentication provider on any and all Web sites is an important development, but it’s a shame that the system is proprietary.

More: Liveblog of Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 Keynote.

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Fluther, my favorite Q&A site has launched a new feature Wednesday called “Your Fluther.” It lets you follow other people’s activity on the site in one centralized, easy to parse feed. It’s a companion to the built-in recommendation engine “just for you” that will feed you with questions based on topics listed in your profile and tracked site usage. More importantly, it’s an easy way to create a private group of users who you’d rather keep an eye on than the growing public feed.

One thing I’d like to see added to that feed is users’ responses to other people’s questions as many of the site’s best users seem to do more answering than asking. It would also be another good way to discover new worthwhile questions besides the centralized feed.

Fluther co-founder and CEO Ben Finkel tells me the site has been doubling in users every three months, which has been helped with a successful iPhone Web app and an overall increase in traffic from search engines. While Fluther has less users than more established services like wiki.answers.com and Yahoo Answers, I think it’s got a far more advanced offering with things like live tracking of written answers and a count of how many people are watching. There’s honestly nothing as cool as asking a question and seeing who is in the middle of responding before their post goes live.

If you see a user your like you can their question asking abilities with this new feed. Missing however is a way to track their responses.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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If you’re not the type of person to carry around a notepad or voice recorder with you, there are a handful of Web services raring to help you out if you’ve got a mobile phone. ReQall, a service that launched back at Demo 07 has a great new iPhone application that does just that. I got in touch with Sunil Vemuri, ReQall’s chief product officer who showed it off during one of today’s CEO pitch sessions at the AlwaysOn Summit.

The application’s killer feature is that it saves your notes both locally and to the cloud. It also sends these notes to ReQall’s servers without using your voice minutes–that is as long as you can note down everything you want to say within the 30 second allotment. Previously you had to type them in to nix having to make a phone call. Vemuri says the service will transcribe them in just a few minutes, but since launching with the app store a few weeks ago, that time has gone up drastically–leading to some negative reviews. Vemuri told me they’re working to get the time back to just a minute or two.

Another nice feature is the “Memory Jogger,” which will pop up one of your upcoming reminders when you shake your phone in order to get you to start thinking about it ahead of time. It’s fun, silly, and makes use of the device’s accelerometer. I honestly doubt many people are going to use it, except by accident, but it sort of doubles like a flash card tester.

The new application is definitely a step up from the Web version that launched back in early March. It’ll let you swipe back and forth between things noted in time, things, and people categories. One thing that’s missing, though, is integration with the phone’s built-in calendaring tool. This is due to a limitation in Apple’s iPhone SDK, something Vemuri hopes will be changed in later revisions. For now he says a good workaround is to subscribe to the calendar feed provided by ReQall in your Exchange-compatible e-mail client.

Reqall's iPhone app gets around the issue of using your mobile phone minutes to make notes by sending your reminder as an audio file instead.

(Credit: reQall.com / QTech Inc.)

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PALO ALTO, Calif.–There are nearly 30 start-ups promoting their wares today as part of AlwaysOn’s Stanford Summit–and that’s just before lunch. Many have been profiled by Webware in the past, but I wanted to take some time to dig into two of my personal favorites from this morning’s CEO presentations.

MyTrybe. This is a behind-the-scenes service for site owners who want to add recommendation features to their content. It uses a sliding scale happy face that you can drag on tagged pieces of content like stories, videos, and pictures to establish a ranking. MyTrybe will take that information and give you recommendations for other content you’d like, along with friend suggestions for others who liked similar things.

The service is about to launch a location-based service that will recommend things for you to do in a city (be it your home or while you’re out traveling) based on previous preferences and tastes. This information can be compiled into one central location, and viewed by anyone who has used a MyTrybe-integrated site.

MyTrybe keeps track of user ratings from various integrated sites and displays the information on a Google Map.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)

Seen above is an example of this in action for finding art gallery recommendations. Unlike Yelp, MyTrybe’s rating and recommendation system can be used to filter in what you might like based on previous ratings and the ratings from your friends.

Funny or Die is one of the few video content providers that’s got both a plan for comedians to make money from content they create, along with some really amazingly well-done videos done by mainstream actors.

Much of the site’s professionally-produced content has been wildly popular when it hits social news and bookmarking sites. In fact, 140 of their videos have gotten on the front page of Digg since launching in April of last year.

What’s smart is that the same model that works for comics on Funny or Die can be scaled to other genres like snowboarding (ShredOrDie), Food (EatDrinkOrDie), and gaming (PwnOrDie). CEO Dick Glover told the audience here that they’ve gotten celebrities to do all their videos for free simply for the sake of getting their names out there. Celebrity videos are separated from the other content, but don’t make up for the mass of traffic and page views which come from user-submitted content.

ZipClip is a very simple service that relies on a browser plug-in to port content from your Web browser to your phone. Once installed you can send things over by highlighting them and using your right click. I remember Mozilla was on to something similar with project Joey, and it’s pretty cool if you want to save some time sending things like addresses, pictures, or articles to a mobile device without going through e-mail.

ZipClip’s “Ace” (it says that on his business card) Jeff Rails walked me through a demo of using the tool, which will run on most mainstream phones short of Apple’s iPhone or Windows Mobile smart phones (although Rails says a native iPhone application is on the way). One of it’s cool capabilities is that any video you select will be converted and optimized to stream on your device, just in case the original site was not compatible. You can also search and sort through all of your archived content right on your phone.

Stay tuned for more coverage. Some of the companies coming up deal in mobile broadcasting, so we’ll see what they’ve got up their sleeves.

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My favorite app concept from the Facebook F8 Developers’ Conference was Connected Weddings. Based on the fact that planning a wedding is a social affair (duh), it lets you connect with two different groups: the people coming to your event, and other people who are getting married. With the former, you can share stories and photos. With the latter, you can talk about your plans and get advice. But that’s not the cool thing.

What I really like is that Connected Weddings will create seating charts for your wedding reception, based on the Facebook connections between your invitees. You can overrule the placements, but this concept is just cool. As anyone who’s planned their own wedding knows, figuring out who to seat where is a difficult topology problem, and it’s great to see the “social graph” applied to this real-world exam test.

The app’s not out yet, unfortunately.

Somewhat related: Those trying to get to the wedding can use the Carpool app.

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Google programmers are adding support for the Perl programming language to its App Engine service for hosting Web applications, but so far it’s not really an official project.

The work is the project of Google employee Brad Fitzpatrick, who disclosed the project on his blog Tuesday. But he’s not a member of the App Engine team, and Google isn’t promising Perl support, he said. By going public with the project, he hopes to intercept other Perl fans’ work in the area.

“I (along with other Perl hackers here at Google) are now allowed to work on this 20 percent project of ours out in the open where other Perl hackers can help us out, should you be so inclined,” Fitzpatrick said. (Google permits engineers to spend 20 percent of their work time on pet projects.)

“Here at Google…it’s not one of our big languages so I don’t get to write as much Perl as I used to. I’d still like to run my personal Web apps on App Engine, though, and I’d like to write them in Perl,” he said.

Google plans to add new languages to App Engine, but hasn’t yet said which. Perl ranks fourth on the list of desired App Engine languages, after Java, PHP, and Ruby.

Check Fitzpatrick’s post for details on the roadmap and what he thinks is necessary to make Perl a full-fledged part of App Engine.

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