It’s been a long time coming, but it’s almost here: Tapulous is putting the finishing touches on Tap Tap Revenge 3, the next installment of its wildly sucessful iPhone music game. The game, which is best described as a “Guitar Hero for the iPhone”, will feature in-game song purchases, which were finally enabled with the release of the iPhone 3.0 software update in June. If there’s a game ripe to make a killing with these in-game downloads, it’s TTR. Tapulous expects to have the game submitted by the end of August, with general release soon thereafter depending on the App Store’s approval process.

So why does this matter? Tap Tap Revenge and its various spinoffs has been some of the iPhone’s most popular games since the App Store launched last year (in fact, a very similar game was very popular on jailbroken phones before the official store even launched).

Popular music recommendation service iLike launched a music download service this afternoon, offering users MP3 downloads for $0.89 to $1.29 per song. Previously the service only offered users the ability to sample 30 second clips of songs, or restricted full streaming via a partnership with Rhapsody (now phased out).

iLike says the first song purchased today was Get Away, Jordan by Ernie Haase & Signature Sound. Music is available from all four major labels and “hundreds of indie labels, enabled via MediaNet.”

Rumors of the music store were first reported by CNET’s Greg Sandoval last month. Until now iLike has offered downloads from Amazon and iTunes. Those options remain.

The service is rolling out now on iLike (I was able to purchase a song), and should be available to all U.S. users by end of day, says iLike. iLike applications on iGoogle, Facebook, Bebo and other platforms will also be available “soon” says the company for U.S. users.

In an email exchange, iLike CEO Ali Partovisaid:

If you’ve ever spent much time working from the command line, there’s a good chance you’re going to love TweetShell, a new Twitter client that replicates the terminal environment in the browser. No, it isn’t very user-friendly — if you’ve never heard of commands like ls or man you’re going to be totally lost here, but if you can hold your own in a Bash shell you’re going to be right at home. (Note: while the site is called TweetShell, the URL is Tweetsh.com.

To get started, it’s probably a good idea to run the man command to get a list of the site’s main features. TweetShell just launched a few hours ago so it’s buggy and is missing some common Twitter functionality, but it has most of the basics: you can login using either OAuth or the ‘old’ less secure way, you can tweet from your account using the wall command, and you can browse through tweets from other users using the directory commands like cd and ls.

When Robert Scoble, lover of all things web, says something is lame, you know it must be really lame. And that’s what he’s saying about a new Yahoo site, Know Your Mojo! — and he’s right.

The site claims to tell you what kind of “social mojo” you possess by analyzing your tweets. It’s a very simple site, below the big “What’s Your Social Mojo?” question it asks you to put in your Twitter username. You then hit the submission button and it takes you through an animation of a series of pipes. You’re spit on on the other end with what kind of Twitter user you are. The only problem? It’s different just about every time you put in your user name.

There’s some excitement around the web today among a certain group of high profile techies. What are they so excited about? Something called WebFinger, and the fact that Google is apparently getting serious about supporting it. So what is it?

It’s an extension of something called the “finger protocol” that was used in the earlier days of the web to identify people by their email addresses. As the web expanded, the finger protocol faded out, but the idea of needing a unified way to identify yourself has not. That’s why you keep hearing about OpenID and the like all the time.

But those standards, while open, have failed to latch on in a meaningful way with the public at large. One of the holdups is that you have to set up a website or service you use to be your OpenID. It’s relatively easy to do, and you may already have one ready to go, but just not realize it. But it’s still kind of tricky to explain to a regular web user — wait, you login with your website?

Analytics firm comScore has just released its latest statistics for video streaming sites in the United States for the month of June, and at first glance the results are quite surprising: the top video sites have seen a major shakeup, with many of the top sites abruptly falling in the rankings.

The cause, of course, is the Michael Jackson effect — media organizations around the world dedicated huge amounts of coverage to the pop star’s tragic death on June 25, and many people turned to the web to learn more. Other breaking news that month, including the Iranian election controversy, also likely contributed to the growth seen by news properties.

Hulu, which has ranked as the third most popular video site in the United States for the past few months, has dropped down to seventh. Likewise, Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace, has dropped from second to fifth.

If you need proof that the stream makes complex services more accessible, take a look at Glide Engage. Launched last week, Glide Engage is a stream front-end for the Glide, a Web OS which offers a suite of integrated Web Apps including docs, spreadsheets, photo and music uploading and sharing, calendar, email, Website creation and collaboration tools. Glide can be overwhelming. There is a lot there. But it has attracted its own loyal following of about one million registered users.

With Glide Engage, the various features of the Glide OS become available on an as-needed basis and gives a better entry point for the service. At first glance, Glide Engage is a micro-messaging service on steroids. You can follow (”engage” with) other people in Glide, add comments to your stream, share links and files, create discussion groups and bring different media and people into online meeting spaces. In the left-hand column you can also set up news alerts and see the latest articles being shared on Glide about those topics.

What makes Glide particularly interesting is that it is also a Twitter client. You can import your Twitter stream and read it within Engage like you can with other Web-based Twitter apps. You can Tweet out messages, but also add links to photos, documents, playable music files and videos which bring people back into Glide. Imagine if Seesmic or Tweetdeck hosted their own photos, videos, and other shared files, and had a Web productivity and communication suite as well.

Movie piracy is a problem, but it’s not as huge of a problem as music piracy was this past decade. While certainly the size of the movie files and the need for fast broadband connections to get them in a reasonable amount of time plays into it somewhat, also helping is the fact that there are some fairly decent ways to get movies quickly, for a pretty fair price these days. And now Hollywood is apparently trying to change that.

The studios are starting to rally around a horrible new idea: Keeping new releases out of Redbox and more importantly, Netflix for 30 days. Let me repeat that: They think Netflix shouldn’t be able to ship many new movies to you until 30 days after they’re released on DVD.

If you’re on the hunt for a new job, check out our CrunchBoard. We’ve added nearly 50 new jobs from leading internet businesses in the last two weeks. Here’s a quick sample:

• Product Designer
  TokBox, Inc. - San Francisco, CA

• VP, Products
  TokBox, Inc. - San Francisco, CA

• Product Manager
  Ustream - Mountain View, CA

• Research Scientist
  Orange Labs San Francisco (France Telecom R&D) - San Francisco, CA

• Sales Account Manager
  Glu Mobile Inc. - San Mateo, CA

For job hunters in Europe, check out our Europe CrunchBoard.

It’s a great story for us whenever an entrepreneur makes a crazy amount of money and we get to tell the world about it. For the entrepreneur? Not so much. Hitherto unknown relatives, entrepreneurs seeking angel investments, money managers and supposed baby-mamas all come out of the woodwork with dollar signs in their eyes.

Since I outed their take-home pay from the Amazon merger a few weeks ago, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and COO/CFO Alfred Lin have figured out a way to cope with this: Giving everyone my email address and telling them I’m in charge of their investments.

The doodle for today’s Google logo might give a new meaning to the term “Google bomb.” While it is not actually a drawing of a bomb—it is an electromagnet in celebration of the birth of its inventor Hans Christian Ørsted—a lot of people might mistake it for a bomb. It has a wire and a clock timer (Update that’s actually a compass) and that magnet kind of looks like a stick of dynamite.

For most of the world, it is just another quirky Google doodle. But for people in Palestine, it might just seem in poor taste. Especially since this is one of the first things they are seeing on the new Google Palestine domain. Yes, there is now a separate domain for Google Palestine, it just launched yesterday. Welcome, Palestine!

If you’re like me you’ve always wondered about making an iPhone game. What mad skillz do you need? What course in computer science will teach you how to vector a jet across the screen? Well, Nicholas Francis set out to solve that problem and came up with Unity, one of the most popular games development platforms for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

CrunchGear: Tell me about your company?

Nicholas Francis: Unity Technologies is the company behind the Unity gaming middleware. We have 44 employees with our development HQ in Copenhagen, Denmark. Then we have a bunch of hardcore demoscene guys in Lithuania that have forgotten more about low-level optimizations than most developers will ever know, some developers in Brighton, UK and a few hotshots that work from their respective countries. Our corporate HQ is getting moved to San Francisco - there’s so much more business going on over there, that we figured it made the most sense to have business be over there but keep development in Europe.

We launched Unity 1.0 in 2005 and slowly grew it. We never had any VC backing or anything, so we’ve grown the company organically (by about 200% per year. these days we have over 9000 customers - pretty much spread through word-of-mouth. Basically, we’re a tool by developers, for developers. Quite simple really, but our tech packs a real punch.

Marc Andreessen is backing a new browser company called RockMelt. Not much is known about RockMelt other than it is being designed by an all-star team (including software engineer Robert John Churchill from the Netscape days) and that it is tied into Facebook through Facebook Connect. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has a screenshot of the sign-in page and speculates that RockMelt is in fact a Facebook browser. Miguel Helft at the NYT leans in that direction as well. It kind of makes sense since Andreesen is on the board of Facebook, but I suspect it is only half the story.

A Facebook browser, however, is a good metaphor for thinking about how browsers, in general, need to change. What would a Facebook browser look like? Well, to start with, you would be able to see updates from your friends on Facebook, share your own updates and media right from the browser, and perhaps IM with your friends through Facebook chat. While those set of features would be convenient, they are nothing revolutionary. Flock, which calls itself the social browser, already incorporates Facebook Connect (and Twitter and other social networks to boot), but it hasn’t taken off. And Facebook itself offers a toolbar for Firefox that lets you see notifications, search Facebook, and share links. There are plenty of other Firefox add-ons which incorporate Facebook features as well.

But the Facebook connection may just be the starting point for a much more ambitious piece of software.

Perhaps you’ve been following the Tr.im fiasco. If not, basically the URL shortening service shut down and said all its links would cease to work by the end of the year, dealing a severe blow to users of any URL shortening service. Tr.im has since recanted its decision (if only to make it easier to sell), but the problem is still a very real one: What happens if your favorite URL-shortener just shuts down? 301works hopes to solve that.

Perhaps you heard about 301works in one of our recent pieces about how Bit.ly was attempting to salvage the Tr.im wreckage. The idea was the 301works would be a centralized hub for all shortened URLs, not run by any one URL-shortener. Tr.im balked at the idea of joining, but plenty of others are, including Bit.ly, Awe.sm, Adjix, betaworks, Cligs, and URLizer. All of them are teaming up with Gnip to launch this project.

Facial recognition service Riya will shut down on August 21, 2009, says founder Munjal Shah in an email to users this morning. We are adding it to the TechCrunch DeadPool.

This was one of the original services that defined the early Web 2.0 movement. We first covered it, then known as Ojos, four years ago. The service changed its name to Riya before launching at a party, yes, in my back yard. Here’s our fist full overview of the Riya product, which helped users by auto-recognizing friends in photos and tagging them.

The company came close to selling to Google, but the deal never closed. And eventually the company refocused its efforts on visual search ecommerce (and is still going strong at like.com).

The email is below.

If the RIAA can’t stop music sharing, the U.S. government is going to have an even harder time trying to stop the sharing of federal court documents hidden behind a paywall. Those documents aren’t protected by copyright law.

The PACER service provides on-line access to U.S. Appellate, District, and Bankruptcy court records and documents. The fee to access PACER is $0.08 per page: “The per page charge applies to the number of pages that results from any search, including a search that yields no matches (one page for no matches.) The charge applies whether or not pages are printed, viewed, or downloaded.” For people who do a lot of legal research, those fees add up quickly.

Enter RECAP, a Firefox add-on created by a group of people at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology. Install the add-on and any documents you access on PACER are automatically uploaded to an Internet Archive repository. These documents are then shared with other users when they do similar searches. See a video overview of how it all works here. The repository already has over one million documents available for free download.

FatSecret, a social network focused on nutrition and weight loss that we covered back in 2007, is launching a new API tonight that allows third party sites and services to tap into its database of nutritional data, excercise information, and other health stats. You can access the new FatSecret Platform here.

CEO Rodney Moses says that FatSecret is allowing developers to access the API for free, in the hopes of turning FatSecret into the reliable and accurate resource for nutritional information. He points out the fact that while there are plenty of diet sites on the web that contain nutrition info for various foods, much of the data is disjointed — there’s no established comprehensive source that people turn to first. FatSecret hopes to become the authoritative hub for this kind of information. The site has gathered its data from a number of publicly available resources like the USDA, and also has many user-submitted entries from users on its social network. Moses says that all of the data has been curated to ensure accuracy.

Canadian photo sharing startup BubbleShare will be shuttered on November 15, 2009. Users were notified via email and a notice on the site’s home page.

The site, founded by Albert Lai, first launched in late 2005 and we immediately liked it: “Toronto-based online photo sharing BubbleShare is just wonderful, and ridiculously easy to use. Their interface team deserves a gold star or something…” Adding interface features like zoom just made it even more fun to use.

In early 2007 the company was sold to Kaboose Inc. (TSX: KAB), a small public “family focused online media company” in Canada, for US$2.25 million plus up to another US$750,000 based on an earn-out provision.

Some Kaboose assets, in turn, were acquired by Disney in April 2009 for $18.4 million.

One of the big problems with starting a new service that relies on user submitted data is getting people to actually use it — nobody is going to routinely boot up your app if they don’t have an incentive to do so. One way to tackle this problem is by working the service into a game, which is a technique that seems to be working quite well for Foursquare, a service that makes it easy to find your friends. GraffitiGeo is a new Y Combinator funded startup launching tonight that’s looking to combine similar gameplay elements to take on a different space: restaurant reviews.

At its core GraffitiGeo allows users to leave brief reviews of restaurants, or for those too lazy to do that, to simply leave a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ — it’s like a highly condensed version of Yelp, or a “Digg for the world”.