AOL on Monday launched When.com, a rebranded version of Zvents’ online events guide.

The two sites are largely indistinguishable except for one element: “Where when.com differentiates is the addition of Kids and Family activities, which we feel is important to our audience,” said AOL spokeswoman Jaymelina Esmele. Zvents handles the categorization, but AOL draws more attention to the family-friendly events.

Another difference: the AOL version lets people search by popularity and date.

AOL expects more changes. “While it is fully functional, the site today is still a phase one beta site; we’ll be continuing to introduce new features as well as update the site based on user feedback,” she said.

AOL launched its When.com site Monday, a rebranded version of the Zvents online events site. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: CNET News)

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Google on Thursday will begin expanding the instant-messaging feature built into Gmail so people can use it to send text messages to their contacts’ phones.

To use the feature, people can click on a chat window’s settings to send a text message with SMS or type a contact’s phone number in the chat contact search box, Gmail Product Manager Keith Coleman said in an interview. The feature is experimental, available only to those who opt to use it through the Gmail Labs settings, and Google will begin offering it Thursday.

Gmail Labs has let Google offer a wide variety of experimental features to those who want them–27 so far since the feature launched in June. None has graduated to full-fledged features or options, but Google clearly is eyeing candidates.

Among the most popular Gmail Labs features, according to Coleman: a reminder that makes sure you really have attached an attachment you promised; “Superstars” that let people flag messages not just with yellow stars but with a variety of other colors; pictures in chat to show the face of your instant-messaging contact; and QuickLinks that let people bookmark Gmail interactions such as a search for all unread messages from your mother.

Keith Coleman, Gmail product manager

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

However, Google still has interface refinement and testing work to do before any feature becomes part of the standard Gmail application, Coleman said. Gmail Labs is intended to be a proving ground where new features can be tried sooner rather than later, even if they’re still immature.

However, Gmail Labs is limited to Gmail. The Gmail text-messaging feature doesn’t work with Google’s other instant-messaging options, including the chat gadget that can run on iGoogle or the Google Talk software that can be downloaded and installed on a computer.

Behind the scenes, Gmail Chat sends text messages to people’s phones from a specific Google phone number–one of about 1,000 the company reserved for the purpose–and each pair of people communicating gets to keep that number for future use. That’s handy, Coleman said, because the person who receives the text message can store the Google phone number in his or her address book as a conduit to reach the sender’s computer-based Google chat.

The phone numbers are recycled, Coleman said; the system works because each person probably won’t need more than 1,000 text-message chat contacts.

Those rumors about eBay making layoffs proved true. It’s kissing 1,600 people good-bye, 10% of its workforce. The move, which will save $150 million a year, isn’t supposed to stem from the punk economy, which is admittedly hurting business, CEO John Donahoe said. It’s more institutional and competitive. Traffic on the site is down 11% over the last two years, though revenues this year are expected to be up 17% to $9 billion.

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(Credit: Twitter)

Now live, from the team behind Twitter: a site for tracking “tweets” pertaining to the fast-approaching U.S. presidential elections. Enter an election-related post on the page and it will appear in the continually-updating feed, which also aggregates other Twitter posts that contain election-related terms like the candidates’ names.

In July, Twitter announced that it had acquired Summize, a popular search tool based on the Twitter application program interface (API). Now called Twitter Search, the Summize technology appears to be behind the filters on the election site.

If the 2004 elections hailed the debut of bloggers and the 2006 mid-term elections were when YouTube popped onto the scene (just ask former Virginia senator George Allen), it’s looking like 2008 will be the election cycle where Twitter sped to the forefront of the political Web. The campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain have created Twitter accounts for up-to-the-minute news and updates–the most recent updates are featured at the top of the Twitter election site–and the micro-blogging site has proven to be a must-use tool for opinionated news junkies and aspiring pundits.

But Twitter is still small enough so that it’s possible to generate a simple “election feed” without encountering too much noise or irrelevant banter.

Twitter has also partnered with experimental news network Current TV on its election coverage, and selected live “tweets” will be displayed on-screen during its coverage of the presidential debates. Those are slated to start on Friday night, but Republican candidate John McCain’s participation is still up in the air due to his announcement that he would suspend his campaign to focus on the ongoing Wall Street calamity.

Will he debate or not? Check that nifty new election page on Twitter. They’re talking about it.

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The good news for Facebook, according to new statistics from Hitwise, is that its traffic is up 50 percent in the U.S. since last August. The not-so-good news for Zuckerberg & pals? The same numbers say that News Corp.’s MySpace still owns a whopping 67.5 percent of the social-networking market in the U.S.

Hitwise gathered its data from an analysis of traffic to 56 different social-networking sites, and concluded that Facebook has gone from a market share of under 14 percent to slightly over 20 percent in the past year. MySpace, meanwhile, has seen a 10 percent decline in visits, which has pulled its share of the sector down from over 75 percent last year. These numbers, however, were tabulated well before this week’s launch of MySpace’s music service, which may well boost its traffic.

Behind Facebook and MySpace, Hitwise found that the third, fourth, and fifth most popular social networks in the U.S. are MyYearbook, Tagged, and the AOL-owned Bebo. None of them, however, has yet to bring in more than 2 percent of the U.S. market share.

Facebook vs. MySpace traffic comparisons are popular among data firms these days, withComScore announcing in June that Facebook had passed MySpace in traffic for the first time. But much of Facebook’s growth is overseas, and everyone seems to be in agreement that MySpace is still the top social network in the U.S.

But Hitwise had some more news that might not be so good for either MySpace or Facebook: Visits to social networks overall were down 17 percent from August 2007 to August 2008.

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Lemondrop, one of AOL’s new sites. Do you miss making out, too?

(Credit: AOL)

After letting them gestate in beta for a while, AOL has formally launched two new “lifestyle” sites: entertainment blog PopEater and quirky women’s lifestyle title Lemondrop. They’re the latest in a series of original blogs that AOL has rolled out, from men’s site Asylum to Web meme blog Urlesque, adding to the titles it absorbed when it acquired the Weblogs Inc. network.

Lemondrop is cute, fluffier than Jezebel but a little bit edgier than anything you’d see in the squeaky-clean Sugar Inc. blog network. When I loaded it up, the top story was a rant called “I Miss Making Out,” and further down was a gallery of sexy fictional murderers in conjunction with the recent news that the slasher flick American Psycho will be adapted into a stage musical.

As for PopEater, AOL already owns a phenomenally successful entertainment site, TMZ.com, so a new one may look a bit redundant. PopEater, however, looks like it’s more Entertainment Weekly than Us Weekly, focused more on how the fall TV season’s faring than which celebrity is staggering drunk out of which West Hollywood nigthclub.

But more importantly, both Lemondrop and PopEater are geared toward tasty advertising demographics: young-ish, media-savvy women with enough time on their hands to read entertainment blogs. Like all other AOL properties, their ads are served by the company’s Platform-A technology.

AOL is pitching its sites as prime space for advertisers: traffic numbers for these “programming sites” hit an all-time high in August, according to ComScore.

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The TimesPeople toolbar shows the latest activity in your social circle.

(Credit: NYTimes.com)

The New York Times has started rolling out TimesPeople, a sharing-and-recommending tool that the publication first announced earlier this year. It’s essentially an extension of the free user accounts that are already required to read the Times‘ Web site: You can now build up a friends list, recommend stories to people you know, and see what they’ve been recommending or commenting on.

In other words, it’s a social news feed for Times readers. You can also sync it up with your Facebook account to push your feed–stories you’ve commented on or recommended–to your profile on the social network.

We first reported on the debut of TimesPeople in June, when it was still being tested as a Firefox plugin. Now it’s been fully worked into the NYTimes.com site with no download required.

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