Everyone knows there are lots of amateur and hobbyist photographers out there, and collectively they produce a massive amount of material stored on online photo sharing sites and desktops around the globe which might just contain that one image an advertiser was looking to use to communicate a message.

Adography is a relatively new service that offers a way to monetize your own amateur photos if you think there are some who might make for great advertisement material.

Adography is essentially a marketplace where people can put their amateur photos up for sale, while businesses can put out requests for photos by creating so-called ‘want-ads’.

YouTube has just launched an expansion to its Annotations feature that gives users the ability to invite their friends to help spruce up their videos using text boxes, labels, and interactive buttons. In the past I’ve been somewhat critical of these annotations, primarily because they can be really annoying in the wrong hands. But tonight YouTube has also introduced a oft-requested feature that will turn off all annotations entirely, allowing users to peruse videos in their unadulterated form if they wish to. You can find the option under your account’s ‘Playback Settings’ menu.

YouTube originally launched annotations last June, and introduced a new interface in January that made the process more intuitive. Tonight’s new sharing feature presents video uploaders with a link that they can share with friends to invite them to help annotate their video. Anyone who accesses the video through the special link will be able to use the same annotation interface, though the original video owner will retain final control over what appears (they can also reset the link should it become too widespread).

Intuit, the company behind the well-known Quicken suite of money management software that includes Quicken Online, can’t believe how well its competitor Mint is doing. In fact, they were so bewildered by Mint’s claims of gaining 3,000 new users a day and jumping from 600,000 to 850,000 users in a matter of months that they decided to send a threatening letter demanding an explanation for this apparently inconceivable feat. We’ve obtained copies of both Intuit’s letter and Mint’s reply, which we’ve embedded below.

From Intuit’s letter:

“While we do not wish to suggest that Mint.com is engaging in false advertising, the substantial difference in claimed user numbers over a short period time [from 600,000 to 800,000] is of some concern. As a result, we’re requesting that you provide us with the Substantiation and evidence that you rely upon to support the above reference claims… before February 6, 2009.”

Note that the letter says that Intuit doesn’t “wish to suggest that Mint is engaging in false advertising”, despite the fact that that was the entire purpose of the letter. Nice.

Facebook has just launched its first widget for Facebook Connect, its recently-introduced platform that allows users to authenticate themselves using their Facebook logins. Dubbed ‘Comments Box’, the new widget allows site owners to integrate a comments section into their webpage. But unlike normal commenting systems, comments left in Comments Box will be relayed back to the users’ Facebook profiles, where the conversation can continue (users can also choose to receive notifications through Facebook whenever someone responds to their comments on other websites).

Until now only developers have been able to take advantage of Facebook Connect. This new widget represents the first time anyone, using a small snippet of code, can include some of the functionality afforded by the new platform. They’ll still need to create an account (as demonstrated in the video below), but compared to the effort required to fully implement Facebook Connect, this should be much easier.

Also important to note is the fact that Comment Box retains the Facebook ’style’, which for the first time will begin creeping beyond the borders of the social network. It’s also the first substantial widget created by Facebook, and the first in what will likely be a suite of similar widgets that could begin to encroach on the likes of JS-Kit, IntenseDebate (recently acquired by Automattic) and Disqus (some of which have already enabled Facebook Connect into their commenting widgets).

Some readers took issue with our list of Top 21 Twitter Applications (According To Compete), wherein we tried to gauge which Twitter Web apps were gaining the most benefit in the form of trickle -down traffic from Twitter. Most Twitter apps don’t even register on the majority of site measurement services. We chose Compete because at least they had stats on a good many of them. We figured even if the absolute numbers are wrong, at least we’d get an interesting ranking.

What Compete does not measure very well is Twitter traffic from desktop and mobile clients. One service that tries to measure that is Twitstat. So take your pick, clients versus Web apps. Which is the stronger list (meaning which list has the most companies likely to amount to something)?

Below are the top 21 Twitter clients from its bigger list of 99, ranked by percentage of users who opt for that method of Tweeting. The Web ranks No. 1 with 32 percent (presumably that is Twitter.com itself), followed by Tweetdeck and Twhirl (there, are you happy Loic?), with 16 percent and 7 percent, respectively. Twitstat also counts services such as Ping.fm (no. 12) and FreindFeed (no. 14) as Twitter clients, although they do a lot more than just support Twitter. But then again, the majority of activity on those services is Twitter, so you could argue it either way.

(Full list after the jump).

We’ve accumulated a list of the twenty most popular Twitter applications, based on monthly unique visitor data from Compete.

Twitpic, an app that lets users share photos on Twitter, took the top spot with 1,236,828 unique visitors in January. Tweetdeck, which came in second with 285,864 monthly visits, is a Twitter app that streamlines notifications and tweets. Third place went to Digsby (with 233,472 monthly visitors), an application that centralizes e-mail, IM and social networking accounts into one desktop program. With 149,812 visits, the fourth most popular app, Twitterfeed, offers to automatically tweet posts published on a user’s blog using RSS. A Twitter user ranking site, Twitterholic, is the fifth most popular application, with 147,164 people visiting monthly.

(Full list after the jump).

Fred Wilson finds himself on two sides of the fundamental issue of our time: the user’s right to access data the way he or she wants to. On one side, that of the user, Wilson is an investor and board member of Boxee, a startup that translates web pages into a form more easily consumable on a TV screen. One site in particular, Hulu, just shut Boxee down at the insistence of the content providers for material on the NBC and Fox-owned site.

Boxee’s popular because it leverages Hulu’s free access to mainstream content in an on-demand solution. It’s the long-awaited rollup of TV or the computer, where on demand entertainment can be watched on the big screen under computer control. The studios don’t want us getting used to that methodology, especially not when it breaks out of the tightly controlled box where you can watch for free (ad-supported) or pay (DVD and Pay per view on demand) but not free on demand on the big screen.

Yesterday we reported on the shutdown of Coghead, a web-based enterprise software editor that featured an unusually intuitive interface. Today, we were contacted by the company’s CEO Paul McNamara, who informed us that software giant SAP, which previously had invested in the company, has acquired Coghead’s intellectual property assets. While Coghead will cease operations, much of the company’s team will join SAP (though McNamara will not be joining the company).

While SAP had previously invested in the company, its ultimate acquisition of Coghead is sure to raise a few eyebrows. SAP has long been associated with local enterprise software suites that require time-consuming upgrades and IT teams, and has had trouble coping with the pressure to lower its prices to reflect those offered by SaaS services like Salesforce.com (though SAP offers products that these SaaS solutions don’t).

Our roundtable on cloud computing is coming up next week. (Get tickets here via Eventbrite: $75 each based on availability). In addition to the previously announced speakers, I am happy to announce a few more very special participants: Amazon’s chief technology officer Werner Vogels, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini, Facebook VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer, and Jon Engates, CTO of Rackspace. Below is the complete list of Roundtable Participants

Roundtable Discussion
Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon
Mike Schroepfer, VP of Engineering, Facebook
Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning
John Engates, CTO, Rackspace
Marc Benioff, CEO, Salesforce.com
Vic Gundotra, VP Engineering, Google
Amitabh Srivastava, Corporate VP, Windows Azure
Lew Tucker, CTO, Cloud Computing, Sun Microsystems
Scott Dietzen, SVP Communications Products, Yahoo
Paul Buchheit, Co-founder, FriendFeed; creator of Gmail

Roundtable Moderators:
Erick Schonfeld, co-editor TechCrunch
Steve Gillmor, editor TechCrunchIT

The roundtable will be preceded by five cloud computing enterprise product demos which will be evaluated by a panel of judges TechCrunch50-style.

There will also be a networking party afterward where more companies will be giving product demos. We couldn’t do this without our sponsors Microsoft and Ribbit. To find out about how to become a sponsor or get a demo table please email Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde. (More after the jump).

It’s not every day we get a chance to sit down with one of the world’s richest and most industrious men. Actually, Sir Richard is only the 236th richest person in the world according to Forbes. I thought he’d be higher. *shrug* Anyway, we had the esteemed pleasure of taking Sir Richard’s IM interview virginity last week as he was jetting back to his private island, Necker.

CBS’ The Early Show’s Dave Price was also onboard to broadcast weather updates from a Virgin American flight and kept pulling Sir Richard into one segment after another. It got to be really annoying after a while.

Kerpoof, a web-based creative design suite for children that launched at 2007’s TechCrunch 40, has been acquired by Disney. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Kerpoof’s online portal at Kerpoof.com will continue to operate as its technology is deployed on Disney’s homepage.

Kerpoof is a good fit for Disney: the company’s technology is primarily image-based with little instruction needed so it’s ideal for kids, and it has become increasingly popular in classrooms worldwide. Creating a picture generally consists of dragging and dropping images from the site’s large collection of clip art, but users can also draw their own doodles and insert speech bubbles. The editor also includes a number of ’smart’ features - for example, as users move their images through the pseudo-3D landscapes, the editor will automatically resize them to fit perspective. Kerpoof has a half-dozen different editing modes, including movies, E-cards, pictures, and story books, each of which takes advantage of the same accessible interface.

Meetic, the popular European online dating company, announced today that it has agreed to buy the European operations of the IAC-owned Match.com. The news was announced on the blog of Loïc Le Meur, who is a board member of Meetic but will need to resign to leave room for an IAC representative.

IAC will sell 100% of the stock of Match Europe - the entity that houses Match.com’s European operations - for an approximate 27% stake in Meetic, plus a 5 million euro note (which converts to just over $6.33 million). Additional terms of the transaction are not being disclosed.

Document sharing site DocStoc has launched DocShots, a free service that allows publishers to convert any document on a website into a hoverable link that provides an instant online document preview. DocShots’ technology cuts long downloading times while also giving readers an easy way to preview documents in a pop-up window.

DocShots allows website and blog owners to easily add a custom DocShots code (by literally just copying and pasting) into the html code of the site, rendering any posted documents (Word, Powerpoint, PDF, and Excel) as DocShots links. The publisher can even specify the exact size of the pop-up window. When users scroll over the links, they can instantly preview files in the pop-up viewer. DocShots is similar in theory to Snap’s Snap Shots application (whose technology we feature on TechCrunch), where a user can hover over a link to a site and see a small visual preview of what is on the site.

There may be more than 20,000 iPhone apps out there that have been downloaded more than 500 million times, but what is the average shelf life of each app? Greg Yardley, CEO of Pinch Media, offers some stats based on the 30 million+ downloads his iPhone app analytics startup has kept tabs on. One of the most telling slides in a recent presentation he gave shows the drop-off rate in iPhone app usage (see above; entire slide presentation embedded below). For free applications, only about 20 percent of users return to use the app the first day after they download it, and then it quickly drops off from there. By 30 days out, less than 5 percent are using the app. The chart for paid apps shows a slightly steeper fall-off rate. So there is a very brief window of time to capture people’s attention and potential revenues.

The key insight of the presentation is derived from this data. Because it answers the eternal question that all iPhone developers have: Should my app be free or should I charge for it? For all but the most successful apps, the free route does not make much sense because ther eis not enough time to recoup the costs of developing the app from advertising.

Todd over at SlideSix recently cooked up a couple nice additions for this slide-sharing service, to make it a more useful offering in this age of mashups and interconnected media. First and foremost, he’s added a robust API to allow third-party integration, so enterprising developers can build upon the SlideSix foundation. And it’s now possible to search for and embed YouTube and Vimeo videos as slides into an existing SlideSix presentation.

One of the best decisions we ever made at TechCrunch was when we launched CrunchBase, our open startup directory, at the end of 2007. We aspired to make it the best current source of information about technology startups, people and investors. Data is added by TechCrunch editors, our amazing team of interns, and the community at large (it is a moderated wiki, so anyone can contribute data). Over the last year, the database has grown to include more than 15,000 companies, 26,000 people and 1,700 investors. In short, it’s finally gotten big enough to become interesting. So as 2008 drew to a close, we started running statistics on the structured data to see what we could learn.

Today, we unveil our first premium research product, the TechCrunch 2008 Year In Review, which presents our key findings. The report takes a step back from the news that breaks day-to-day and provides a unique perspective on the major trends of 2008. We cover new products, financings and exits across a variety of technology sectors: search, social networking, cloud computing, mobile communications, advertising and ecommerce, consumer media and entertainment, consumer electronics and clean technology.

Below is a portion of the executive summary and key statistical highlights for all to read.

TechCrunch is hosting a Roundtable and Meetup at Mobile World Congress today. The live video stream is being piped in right now, so come on in and join us. “TechCrunchTalk: Mobile 2.0 - Where next?” features an afternoon of panel discussions with mobile startups and the investment community. Plus we’ll be having some startup pitches. The whole thing will run for three hours from 3.30pm to 6pm (Barcelona time).

Featuring:
Davor Hebel, Fidelity Ventures
Ben Holmes, Index Ventures
Bob Last, SVP Taptu
Ken Johnstone, Co-Founder INQ Mobile
Jean Schmitt, Sofinnova Ventures
Peter Vesterbacka, Founder, Some Bazaar
Marc Rougier, Co-founder, Goojet
Andrew Scott, Founder, Rummble
Jennifer Grenz, VP of Marketing, Shozu
Mike Butcher, TechCrunch UK (moderating)

NY-based Portero has raised $6.6 million in VC funding in a round led by LFE Capital and joined by return backers like The Grosvenor Funds. The company, founded in 2004, operates an online marketplace and auction service for branded and authenticated luxury goods from more than 180 brands.

Portero.com offers pre-owned vintage and new goods, with a focus on watches, handbags, accessories and jewelry, all certified authentic and often in original packaging. To verify authenticity of goods, Portero draws on the experience of in-house specialists, by working with outside experts, and in some cases even by partnering with selected luxury brands directly.

I managed to grab a short video interview with Travis Katz, international head of MySpace at Mobile World Congress today. In it he talks about MySpace’s announcement of its integration with the new Palm Pre and the new Nokia flagship phones. MySpace will now have integrated apps for all the major phones, including the existing Blackberry and iPhone apps, and it’s the only social network on the Android platform right now.

So VeriSign released its Q4 2008 Domain Name Industry Brief (PDF) yesterday, a document that zooms in on “the state of the domain name industry through a variety of statistical and analytical research”. Let’s take a look at their findings and stats.

As you could have deducted from the headline, last year ended with a total base of 177 million domain name registrations across all of the Top Level Domains (TLDs), up from 153 million at the end of 2007 representing a 16% growth rate. Over the entire year, there was an average of 11.9 million new domain names registered per quarter compared to an average of 12.2 million new domain names registered each quarter in 2007.

Last quarter, like Q3 2008, the five largest TLDs in terms of overall size were .com, .cn (China), .de (Germany), .net, and .org. The overall base of .com and .net domain names grew to 90.4 million domain names at the end of 2008.