How hip are you? Are you on the cutting edge of what's being talked about by those in the know? You know, the "twitterati"? (Sorry, I just gagged a little there.) If you enjoy stock market-based games, and tracking the trending topics on Twitter, you might want to have a look at Pretweeting.

Pretweeting is a virtual stock market where the commodities that you buy and sell are trending words on Twitter. As words become more popular, they gain value, and as they become less popular, they fall. Now, I should make this clear: this is a virtual game, no real money trades hands.

When you sign in to Pretweeting using your Twitter account, you are given $5,000 virtual dollars. You can then choose to research the current price for trending words, and buy shares in them.

Unfortunately, like other "viral" games, by allowing Pretweeting access to your Twitter account, you are allowing Pretweeting to post tweets on your behalf, a practice that I'm personally not a fan of. For example, when you buy shares in a trending word, Pretweeting automatically posts a tweet to your account like the following when I purchased 500 shares of the word "minute" using my test Twitter account:

@pretweeting buy 500 minutes -> see price at http://pretweeting.com/w/minutes

Yuck, right?

It's too bad that an otherwise fun game is handcuffing itself by being a less than stellar netizen. (Wow, first twitterati, then netizen. I feel dirty.) I would wholeheartedly recommend this game to friends if it weren't for the spammy messages every time you do something in the game. There's a prominent "Like this game? Tell your friends!" link that auto populates a tweet for you to tell your friends about the game. That one's fine; it's up to the user whether they want to do it. But auto-spamming messages based on activities is just plain user abuse, and won't do Pretweeting any favors in the long haul.

iLike, the popular social music service that took Facebook by storm, has always featured free 30-second preview clips of songs, but now they're getting into the business of selling full-length mp3 files. Prices are comparable to what we're used to from iTunes: songs range from 89 cents to $1.29. Songs that are available for purchase will have a "buy" button next to them in your profile.

The buying process is pretty easy: click, enter card info and go. Interestingly, there are "other options" links to iTunes or Amazon in the corner of the purchase screen, although they're small. I'm not sure that iLike can compete for sale with huge players like those, but it's starting with a built-in userbase of several million on Facebook alone. Purchases are only available on the main iLike site so far, but they're coming to the service's various apps soon.

[via TechCrunch]

Google is all about buying companies. Not just any company, companies that help with their mission to organize all of the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Well, they have done it again with a site we profiled late last year, Panoramio.

Panoramio was built as a Google Maps mashup that lets users map photos based on geographic locations. The company is based in Spain and connects digital photographers with the ability to geo locate, store and organize photos in Google Earth. An API is also available with Panoramio that lets developers embed functionality into websites.

Google has already been using Panoramio's images in Google Earth as a default layer since early this year.

Could Google possibly buy another company? You bet, there is always room inside the what seems to be the hollow halls of the Googleplex.

Rumors are getting passed around about a purchase of SimplyHired, the job search engine. SimplyHired, who just raised $13M from NewsCorp has over 2 million monthly uniques, which is a perfect traffic amount to make a sizable income from Google's AdWords. Can anyone count the number of companies Google has bought this year on one hand?

SimplyHired has been focused on building the largest online database of jobs on the planet, making it a simple and easy to use location for jobhunters.

[via TechCrunch]

It's heartening to know that money isn't everything when deals are on the table. Some interesting new discoveries have come out of the Google DoubleClick deal, and it seems as though Microsoft may have put more money on the table than Google did.

John Battelle discovered that Microsoft did offer to match the $3.1 billion that Google paid for the company, and was willing to pay more to ensure that Google did not get a stronghold on the online ad market. For some reason that private equity firm that owns a majority stake in DoubleClick decided to go with Google. Could it be because of it was a better cultural fit, reputation, or was it for the employees as Robert Scoble points out?

Just goes to show us that money isn't everything, and there are different priorities that have to be met when building or buying top notch properties.

Are you a digital photographer? Like to bring your camera wherever you go and snap like crazy? Why not enter the world of buying and selling your stock photos?

Lucky Oliver is a community of photographers, designers and artists who all buy and sell stock photos. The images and illustrations in Lucky Oliver are high enough quality for both web and print work, and are pretty affordable and starting at only $1.00. For people interested in submitting images to the image portfolio, there is a photographer's guide on what type of images the team is looking to sell. Photographers have to prove themselves to get started in the system by submitting their three best photos. When they are in the system though, royalties can be range from $0.30 to over $12.50 per use.

No more stealing images from Google for projects, this is an affordable way to get the job done without breaking the bank on high priced stock photos.

There have been lots of rumors and buzz circulating the past few weeks on whether or not Google was pursuing Adscape, a startup -- only officially launched in February 2006 with $3.2 million in funding -- that specializes in in-game advertising. After a brief quiet period, details are starting to emerge about an agreement to acquire Adscape Media for $23 million. Could this be the next big thing for Google?

In-game advertising insiders say that it will most likely will not do much for the search giant but, I highly doubt that. With this being a potential new advertising category, and with Microsoft already in the mix, there is serious potential for Google to open new doors and show smaller businesses the opportunities they could bring. With all current generation gaming machines having some form of internet connectivity, locally focused in-game advertising could find a whole a new level.

Google specializes in online, and if the ads are kept online in Adscapes dynamic advertisements for video games, all should do just fine. Don't expect and major deals to be worked out yet, as I'm sure Google has a lot of development to do on the project.

Flipped is a very unique idea. The site brings users new ways to shop online for all sorts of items. Users post what they want, and sellers bid your price down creating a buyoff, getting you a great deal for the item you want. Buyoffs do have a time limit, at which time the buyer can reject or accept any offer from any seller.

Not only is Flippid a buying site, but sellers can also stop by, register, and post items for free. So how does the site generate income? From sellers, of course. They take a percentage of the sale, when the item is sold. It's a great way to get people to try out the site, and actually see it work for them without dropping listing fees. Fees range from 10 cents for items under $5 to $2 for items selling for over $100.

The service was launched in mid-November, and looks to be slowly drawing a decent crowd and racking up items. Flippid does have a special promotion on now, where they pay all fees until 2007, so it could be worth giving it a shot.

[Via Emily Chang]

MySpace is making the unsurprising move of launching its own online music store, which will enable artists to sell their music directly from their MySpace pages. The service will be powered by Snocap, the content licensing venture from Napster creator Shawn Fanning, and will allow recording artists to set their own prices, according to BusinessWeek. You can see the service in action at the MySpace page of Dani Dudeck from MySpace PR where it takes the form of a Flash module that allows visitors to preview tracks from The Format's latest album and, if they have a Snocap account, purchase them for $0.79 each via PayPal. I bought a track ("Snails") and found the process simple and painless. As soon as I finished the purchase I was able to stream the whole song in the Flash player and also download it. The download, much to my surprise, came in the form of a DRM-free 192kbps MP3 file.

Though I don't see MySpace unseating the iTunes Music Store from its throne with this new offering, I do think that it will prove beneficial to unsigned artists whose audience is mainly in the MySpace demographic and who might have a hard time moving physical CDs--once you've signed up, the Flash player/store widget makes impulse purchase terribly convenient.