The little gadgets range from music to games and pregnancy calculators. The New York Times offers readers the possibility to add a crossword puzzle to their Google Homepage.

It provides users with the ultimate online personalization experience: They can add widgets to their personalized homepages such as Google, pageflakes, netvibes etc. with exactly the content that they want.

LabPixies also creates gadgets that are essentially ads based on content – something that companies are desperately in need for to get the attention of their customers.

LabPixies is creative, fun and easy to use – it is certainly worth to keep an eye on them and see what’s next in widget world.

The intention of the site is quite similar to many other news aggregators. But the realization is much better. Techmeme’s revenue stream is as simple as it is good. They sell sponsored posts. These posts are integrated in an informationstream and are marked with a grey background. So they are not annoying flashing ads popping up and moving around but rather paid PR with interesting content. This revolutionary sponsoring model is the only revenue stream, but a very efficient one. And it works due to its average 230.000 unique users every day. Founder Gabe Rivera describes the way the sponsored feeds are working:

“The way it works is simple. A sponsor’s blog feed is polled every few minutes, the latest post of which appears in its assigned slot (first, second, or third).”

For me, Techmeme is a good approach to integrate paid content in a popular news blog. Through the sponsoring model the advertisments get more attention and the way the companies transport their marketing and PR stuff has to be more sophisticated since the sensitive blogosphere does not excuse marketing mistakes. And honestly I also read the sponsored story because I naively still don’t believe that every company is sneaky.

Here are some facts and figures: Current users worldwide: 24 million, 150.000 new sign-ups each day! Market share of visits to Facebook.com increased by 134% from Sept 07 compared to Sept 06.

And I also found a quote by RBC Capital analyst Jordan Rohan that describes pretty well why facebook is so successful: “Google is all about finding information; Facebook is about communicating that information and sharing it efficiently.” This even more so, since Marc Zuckerberg announced I n May that it will open its APIs for developers. On programmableweb.com you can find mashups that have been created since.

Facebook could easily have 100.000 new applications (says analyst Rohan) by the end of next year which will prevent people from going to other sites and through the hassle of creating a new profile. Looks like a bright future for facebook!

Tim O’Reilly,  the inventor of the term web 2.0 calls it “a milestone in the history of the internet” – read his blog entry about pipes if you want to get into it in more detail.

The latest pipe coup: they created an iPhone interface for pipes. Being mobile you can still access your mashups – provided you own an iPhone. See some cool pictures about the app here.

The neat thing about pipes.yahoo: it is social, too. Users can publish the pipes they created, there are rankings and featured pipes and so on. So even if you do not want to create pipes yourself you might find something there that is useful for you.

Pipes.yahoo.com went live during the first quarter of 2007. It is our 5 of clubs – my guess is that it will be a 10 in the next edition of our poker game.

In just few easy steps you can create an account and your own mobile network regarding your interests or the interests of a group, a club, your company etc. For each sign-up you as the network leader get payed by Sonopia and in addition to that you also ear a small percentage (3-8%) of the monthly fee your subscribers pay.

You can provide your mobile network with content e.g. a co-branded website for subscriber administration and their profiles. Various kinds of social networking features are available and make it to a community like network.

Sonopia uses the Verizon-Network and just passes the conditions on to its users for a fee. You as the head of the wireless connection of your friends can not only earn their money but also pollute them with your senseless pictures and videos. In my opinion a Twitter function in the network would be useful to keep your subscribers updated.

But honestly the approach is new and innovative and has a chance to gain popularity. But as Michael Arrington at Techcrunch and Nada Collar already wrote: customer information is fairly poor and you don’t really get informed in “a few minutes” about what you just did. Sometimes it’s not all about simplicity, at least it should follow the trend of sophisticated simplicity.