Google AdWords is rolling a new tool that would let AdWords members identify which keywords their potential customers are searching for and to help them identify which keywords they should advetise on and which keywords are relevant to their landing pages. This new AdWords tool is called the Search-based keyword tool.

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When I first saw this I thought "Where have you been all my life?" Then I realized the answer: In 1.x iPhone and iTouch firmware. iMobileCinema is a homebrew app for 1.1.1-1.1.5 firmware and must be installed on jailbroken phones. This tool is all but useless to early adopters who are already into the 2.x version of the firmware but a version that should work with 2.1 is coming soon, according to the website. The question, then, is whether this app breaks the terms of use.

Local review site Yelp is not going to sit around and let competitor CitySearch have even a day to celebrate their new beta launch.

CEO Jeremy Stopellman, noticing our Comscore comparison of the services - “According to comScore, Citysearch brought in 14.6 million unique visitors in the U.S in October, compared to 143 million uniques across its ad network. (Yelp, by the way, did 6 million uniques)” - emailed us with some of their internal traffic numbers and stats.

Yelp’s Google Analytics stats for the past thirty days show 15.8 million unique visitors, way above the six million Comscore records. And Yelp also shows other interesting stats in the chart below: 4 million reviews, with 34% restaurants, 23% shopping, 8% beauty and fitness, etc. Users are 51% male and 49% female, and 65% have a college degree.

Not bad for a company that was born just four years ago.

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If you don’t know what being RickRolled is, go look it up because you don’t want to be the last person to figure it out. YouTube even RickRolled its own users as an April Fools joke.

Anyway, tonight I get a call on my mobile phone. And it’s that damn song. Apparently it’s some new startup called Twilio, and according to a Facebook message it was initiated by Dave McClure, who is probably advising them.

Congratulations Dave, you’ve found a unique way of bugging me. Hope there’s more to the business than that. Did you get my text message thanking you?

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Jeff Bonforte never met an API he didn’t like. The CEO of Xobni, a startup that makes an outlook plug-in that makes your e-mail smarter, has been busy getting his team of engineers to integrate every possible API they can think of into the service. Xobni already added LinkedIn last June. Today it is adding integrations with Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, and Hoovers. Data from all of these services appears in the Xobni sidebar in Outlook. Let’s take them one by one.

Xobni has been working on its Yahoo Mail integration since last April. Now in the sidebar, users can search their Yahoo Mail messages and see contacts and attachments. To send or receive email through your Yahoo account, however, you still have to click through to Yahoo Mail in your browser, which is sub-optimal.

Every time someone sends you an email who is also a Facebook member, you can see in the sidebar their current Facebook status message, general profile information, their Facebook picture, and recent updates made to their profile.

The Skype feature lets you send instant messages, SMS messages, and make Skype or regular calls to contacts who are also Skype users. Again, as with Yahoo Mail, actually making a call or sending an IM automatically launches the Skype application.

Finally, the Hoover API brings up Hoover company information for each contact. That provides some helpful context when responding to business emails, although I find the LinkedIn data more useful.

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Citysearch is finally coming around to replacing its creaking site design with something a little more contemporary. Today, it is launching in a major rethink of its entire site in beta that drills deeper into neighborhoods, uses Facebook Connect as an optional identity system, and lets users vote reviews up and down. The beta will quickly become the default Citysearch experience. During a demo at IAC headquarters yesterday, Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti told me:

We’ve been working on it for 10 months and built everything from ground up. In Q1 we will be turning off every system that operates Citysearch today, and running everything in the new environment.

Citysearch’s engineers stripped out the decade-old proprietary code that runs Citysearch and replaced it with open-source code. By replacing what’s under the hood, they were freed up to make some major improvements that are immediately apparent. The main changes are:

1. Hyper-local content. Citysearch is currently organized by city, so no matter what neighborhood you are looking at you get the same city guide. With the beta, Citysearch has mapped each city by neighborhood and placed each restaurant, bar, hotel, theater, or other local business in a specific neighborhood. So now when you are looking for things to do in a given neighborhood, Citysearch can dynamically create a neighborhood guide complete with restaurants, shops, and other businesses. With this one change, Citysearch is going from 140 cities to 75,000 neighborhoods by the end of the year.

2. Hyper-social content (Facebook Connect). This is one of the biggest changes. Citysearch has only 4 million registered users, but it will now adopt Facebook Connect as an optional identity system. That means anytime someone wants to submit a review or rating who isn’t already a registered Citysearch user will be able to simply type in their Facebook username and password. Any review or rating can then appear on your in Facebook feed, just like with the old Beacon program, except with Facebook Connect it’s all opt-in. (Citysearch was an original Beacon partner, but it shut that down long ago). “Friends love to talk to other friends about local businesses,” notes Herratti.

Even better, anytime you see reviews for a particular restaurant or business,reviews from your Facebook friends will show up first. We were wondering when Facebook Connect partners would start announcing their implementations.

3. Rebalancing the power between reviewers, merchants, and editors. Instead of highlighting Citysearch’s editorial voice, the design has been tweaked so that underneath each entry thereare now three columns representing the voice of the business owner, the Citysearch editor, and the user reviewers. Citysearch reviews have become so crucial for many restaurants and bars that they’ve also become suspect in that many businesses try to game the system. Herrati says:

We are looking to restore the balance of content in the local space. By that I mean we feel UGC has been so powerful in this arena, but it also comes with a bag of issues.

So not only do business owners now have their own more prominent column to promote their business, but the reviews are now voted up or down so that the community can self-moderate the most obviously abusive comments.

4. A better mobile experience Finally, since everything has been remapped by neighborhood, Citysearch is well positioned for mobile apps. But Citysearch is also working hard to optimize the experience for mobile browsers. It is using the geo-location API in Google Gears to surface nearby results for anyone using a phone running Windows Mobile 5 or higher. For everyone else, it remembers the last destination you specified by typing into your phone. t is also working on specific apps for phones with GPS chips. An iPhone app will come later this quarter, and Android and Blackberry apps are also in the works.

Overall, Citysearch is taking some big steps in the right direction. Facebook Connect is going to be huge for the site. With the turn of a switch, it now has social features it would have been nearly impossible to build on its own. Who wantsto become someone else’s friend on Citysearch? But if you can find your existing friends there, that is one more reason to use it.

In practice, it still has a ways to go in terms of bringing up the best results at the neighborhood level. At least that was the case for my neighborhood in Brooklyn. The top result for dining brought up a restaurant that went out of business a long time ago. Too bad you can’t vote search results up and down.

In terms of Citysearch’s business, though, the hyperlocal results will really help with its local search business. The one part of the new Cityseearch that is not open-source is Citysearch Pay, its pay-for-performance ad engine that turns up sponsored results on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level. In teh future, it will introduce “event variable price per lead.” Basically, that means businesses will be able to bid on how much they are willing to pay for different types of leads. Viewing a geo-proximate ad on a mobile phone could be one type of lead, texting an address to a friend could be another, as could playing a video profile of a business or making a reservation.

And these types of ads would not be limited to its own site. Citysearch also operates an ad network for partner sites looking to bring more local content. Herrati explains:

Between a quarter and at third of revenues comes from the ad network. If you look at impressions and uniques, it crushes our network.

The ad network’s reach crushes it by ten to one. According to comScore, Citysearch brought in 14.6 million unique visitors in the U.S in October, compared to 143 million uniques across its ad network. (Yelp, by the way, did 6 million uniques). By doing abetter job mapping all of its data on local businesses, Citysearch should be able to boost the relevance of its search results and therefore how much it gets paid for them. Maybe Barry Diller should start breaking out results for Citysearch now that IAC is a smaller entity.

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Earlier this year we watched as Redlasso, a very popular video service that allowed bloggers to clip portions of television content, got beaten into submission (at least temporarily) by a flurry of lawsuits. The company’s platform gave bloggers access to content spanning popular channels including CNN and ESPN almost immediately after it aired, and was a favorite across blogs like The Huffington Post and others. Unfortunately, Redlasso didn’t secure any rights to the content it was distributing, and it wasn’t long before the networks started to crack down. Now 1Cast, a new startup launching today in private beta, is looking to fill the void left by Redlasso by offering similar clips of recent television footage with one key distinction: it has all been fully licensed. TechCrunch readers can grab one of 1000 invites here.

At launch the site is offering content from Reuters, CNBC, CBC, AP and the AFP, and plans to have more content partners by the end of the year. Footage is sorted into categories including Sports and Headlines, as well as by individual network. Unlike Redlasso, which used its own recording system, 1Cast receives its content directly from its partners. At this point it sounds like some of the networks are slower than others in getting their content distributed (quick turn around was one of the things that made Redlasso so appealing), but they are expected to speed up over time.

Instead of appealing exclusively to bloggers, 1Cast is trying to serve a more general market by allowing users to create frequently updated video ‘channels’ on topics they’re interested in, which can be embedded on blogs and are also viewable on the iPhone/iPod Touch (it’s sort of like your own personal news network).

In practice the service seems to work adequately well, though I have some problems with it. For one, searching for a specific clip is difficult - videos are all broken into ‘channels’ and grouped with other videos on the same topic, but it’s hard to tell what each clip is actually about without watching it. And it seems that every time you want to watch a clip you need to sit through the ads attached, which gets really annoying when you weren’t interested in it in the first place.

1Cast may catch on with the general public, who may be more interested in the ‘personal news channel’ aspect of the site rather than being able to embed a breaking news clip on their blog. But until the site has a larger collection of content and a better way to search through it, it probably won’t appeal to the same blogger audience that Redlasso did.

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