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LIVESTRONG.com is the social networking piece of the Lance Armstrong Foundation (making remarkable strides in social media for social good) that aims to help people better their lives with tools and resources for diet, nutrition, and fitness.

There’s also a very popular Calorie Tracker iPhone [iTunes link] and BlackBerry applications that are giving would-be lifestyle improvers the ability to find and track information on the food they consume while on the go.

Now at the one year mark, LIVESTRONG is releasing some impressive numbers based on app and site activity. In short, users have burned a collective 1.9 billion calories from over 5.86 million logged activities. They’re accomplishing these feats by mapping runs, tracking exercises, calculating caloric intake on a regular basis, and using the site’s community features to find support and encouragement.

Some other notable benchmarks from the community experience include users spending a total of 340 million minutes exercising, with 2.3 million miles walked, 1.16 million miles ran, and 2.3 million miles biked. All this activity has helped members shed 22,000 inches from their waistlines, 14,000 inches from their hips, and burn a remarkable amount of calories in the process.

Given that the site is only a year old, we expect to see these numbers continue to grow with time, and ultimately hope to see a more inspired and active population of healthy people.

See also: HOW TO: Use Social Media for Better Health

Tags: fitness, health, lance armstrong foundation, livestrong

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It’s been a tough week for celebrities and their fans, as we’ve lost Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and Billy Mays. Last night, I noted on Twitter that “why is everyone dying” was actually a hot Google search term, as apparently the masses think perhaps it’s more than just a coincidence that so many famous people are passing away.

Unfortunately, that’s leading to a lot of false rumors going around, the latest of which involves actress Natalie Portman. The story claims that Portman fell from a cliff while filming a movie, plummeting to her death. Sound familiar? Yep, it’s the same story that supposedly claimed the lives of actors Jeff Goldblum and Harrison Ford on the same day that Michael Jackson died last week.

As it turns out, there’s actually one site responsible for all of these stories – fakeawish.com. The site lets you input the name of a celebrity, and then generates a fictitious story about their untimely demise. The news story actually somewhat resembles a Yahoo News page, which is perhaps why these stories get wings and spread.

Of course, another option for spreading fake obits is hacking Twitter accounts – like we saw yesterday with Britney Spears. Although still fairly difficult to believe – at least after a few seconds of Googling – the sheer number of people who search for, tweet, and otherwise spread these stories make it clear that there are eyeballs to be gained by publishing fairly far fetched stories for the gullible.

Reviews: Google, Twitter

Tags: natalie portman

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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Whyzz

Quick Pitch: Whyzz helps parents answering their child’s many “Why” questions in a kid’s language whenever and wherever they are asked.

Genius Idea: Whether you have children of your own, or simply look after or spend time with them, you’re very likely to find yourself in a situation where you’re stumped by the questions that they throw at you at any given time, and on any given subject matter. You probably know the answer, but do you know a child-appropriate answer for those extra tough questions? Whyzz does, and they can help quell those inquisitive minds with suitable answers for children whether you’re at home or on the go.

You can use Whyzz by either typing in the exact question you’re hoping to find a good answer to, search by keywords, or browse by categories. Whatever your method, you’re bound to find an explanation related to your child’s “Why” questions.

They’ve got the standards like death, sex, and pregnancy covered, but Whyzz also has answers for those strange questions that only occur to children. Answers are penned by staff writers, psychologists, experts, and site members (which do require review), so you’ll notice that they’re fairly replete with information, tips, and talking points.

As a site member, you can bookmark the articles/answers you like, add comments to entries, and view all the content you’ve contributed to the site. The mobile-friendly version of the site is also easy to use from any smart phone.

So the next time you find yourself stuttering over how to explain to a child why they shouldn’t pee in the pool, or what a booger is, you can turn to Whyzz to answer those questions and possibly educate yourself in the process.

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest– use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Reviews: PHP

Tags: Children, Kids, whyzz

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Spending too much time reading friends’ Tweets? Only got 5 mins and you’d need an hour to get through em all?

No worries: you can now speed-read your way through your Tweet reading with Twitter For Busy People, a new interface for Twitter created by the team at Bluejava. The idea is that you can skim all the people you’re following and see the latest tweet from each.

From the blurb:

We found ourselves wanting to see what our friends were up to “at a glance”.

By using the Twitter web site, our “active” friends often push the status messages of less active friends far down the page, or off the page completely.

So, we created this site, to see each of our friends at once (up to 500). Then we can quickly “mouse around” and see what each of our friends are up to. If we want to check recent history of a specific friend, it’s just one click.

Is this the end of Twitter timewasting?

Reviews: Twitter

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We wrote about Trendrr approximately 9 months ago; it’s a nifty free service that lets you follow a number of interesting graphs related to a company, brand, person – any entity, really, that makes an impact on the net. Want to know how many Twitter followers, Delicious links and Flickr images someone has? It’s all there on Trendrr.

Now, adding to the free service, they’ve introduced a pro version, aimed at companies and marketing professionals who are a bit more serious about tracking this sort of data.

The packages range from $49 per month, which gives you 30 trends you can track, unlimited alerts but somewhat limited reporting, to $999 per month, which will give you access to a 1,000 trends, unlimited alerts and full reports. Furthermore, paid accounts have access to Trendrr’s custom API which allows you to customize your data and graphs.

The jump from free to paid can be tricky, as corporate customers expect a far higher level of service than what’s usually offered on free services. Trendrr’s reports, an example of which you can see here, are quite comprehensive, but some of the graphs are lacking historical data, the frequency of data updating can vary greatly, and the explanations for certain data sources can be vague. Is it enough to justify the quite hefty price for the Elite $999/mo account? Well, that’s the advantage of the freemium business model: you can start out with the free version, and if you like it, upgrade to the more powerful paid versions of the service.

[Trendrr CEO Mark Ghuneim is an occasional guest contributor to Mashable.]

Reviews: Delicious, Flickr, Mashable, Twitter

Tags: freemium, graphs, Trendrr, trends

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In the space between a long-form blog and a short-form Twitter account, there are mini-blog services like Posterous and Tumblr that seek to make blogging much more immediate, support all types of rich media, allow for longer entries if needed, and support short spurts that auto-post to Twitter as well.

Once the niche powerhouse dominating this middle space, Tumblr has since seen Posterous, the somewhat unremarkable email-to-blog platform, rise from obscurity, iterate at lightning pace, and start to build up well-deserved web buzz and high profile users.

This tumbling and posturing web-aholic has been using both sites for quite some time, so the head-to-head you’re about to read is filled with intimate knowledge of both applications.

Posting Options

Both Posterous and Tumblr have bookmarklets that make grabbing content as you browse and posting it to your respective site easy as can be. When it comes to posting original entries from the web, Tumblr’s text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, and video options are just plain killer.

Posterous, though not really made with the web-created post in mind, does have a web posting WYSIWYG editor that does just fine. It’s a little bit more difficult to post and preview, but that’s not where Posterous tries to excel.

Posterous’ knockout posting punch is email — the technology that most of us take for granted on a daily basis. What Posterous can do with your emails is simply incredible, and we recommend creating all of your posts by emailing post@posterous.com.

The email post creation process is dead simple. Email whatever you want — photos, videos (even iPhone 3G S vids), audio — to post@posterous.com and it will do the rest. Your subject line becomes the title, the email body your post description, and you can even add tags to your post by adding them with the appropriate syntax to the subject line: ((tag: social media, photo)).

We’d also be remiss if we didn’t discuss mobile options for posting to Tumblr and Posterous. While we’ve made it clear that email is the way to go with Posterous, we haven’t yet stressed the fact that this means your blogging activities are incredibly mobile on any smartphone. Take a video on your iPhone 3G S, email it to Posterous, and instantly have it pushed out to the other social sites you have integrated (like Twitter). Tumblr, however, does have a pretty fantastic iPhone app, and even allows for audio posts if you call 1-866-584-6757 and record your message. Their email and SMS posting options work just fine, but they’re just not as exciting as the competition’s.

Simply because email access is more ubiquitous than a full blown web experience (especially while on the run), and we love posting multiple photos (and especially video) that others can download, Posterous takes an edge up on the competition.

Customization

You can do a lot to customize, tweak, and own your Tumblr theme. There are a bevy of free themes that you can choose from, HTML and CSS whiz kids can create their own, and there are also some pretty nifty Tumblr themes available for purchase from third-party developers.

On the flip side, you can do absolutely nothing with your Posterous theme. For some, this is a deal breaker, while others can accept Posterous’ clean site design for what it is.

The clear and obvious winner here is Tumblr.

Community

One of Tumblr’s hidden gems is an active community of Tumblr enthusiasts who will not only tumble across the web and post a variety of content, but also subscribe to each other, reblog and like posts, and basically spread the Tumblr love far and wide (in much the same way that RTs distribute content on Twitter). The community element is a warm and fuzzy thing that is also tangible in the site’s new Tumblarity scoring system, though we do think that this creates a bit of a popularity contest.

Community on Tumblr is also facilitated by the dashboard design which pulls in content from the people you follow, similar to Twitter. You can reblog and favorite items from your dashboard, which will influence those users’ Tumblarity score.

On Posterous, community is still a work in process. So even though you can subscribe to other users, and they to you, there’s less sharing and community support. You can also favorite items, but there’s no quick way to reshare content from your My Subscriptions page. Clearly, Posterous is still playing catch up on this front.

Integrations

Posterous has been on a tear when it comes to social integrations. You can basically import content from any blogging platform ever created (you can export too), and push your Posterous content out to any social site where you have a following. This creates a harmonious situation where your content lives where you want it to live, and a single Posterous video post could auto-post to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo, and blog sites, while photo posts could automatically add images to your Flickr, Facebook, and Picasa accounts.

Here’s the real kicker. Say you have autoposting enabled for all of your favorite social sites, but you’re only in the mood to tweet a video, just update Flickr, or only post to Posterous. You can do that simply by switching up the email address you send your content to. In a twitter mood, email your post to twitter@posterous.com. Only want to update Flickr, send your email to flickr@posterous.com. Want to do just those two, that’s okay too; email flickr+twitter@posterous.com. You have complete control of your content and where it goes.

Tumblr, however, is a little in the dark ages and only goes so far as to enable posting all Tumblr posts to Twitter. It’s an all or nothing situation, to Twitter only, that we really hope they improve in the future. We do, however, appreciate that Tumblr supports auto-import of RSS feeds, while Posterous does not. So, should you want to import your blog’s RSS feed, or your Digg activity, Tumblr is perfect for those behaviors.

At the end of the day, however, we have to award the integrations category to our social site happy friend, Posterous, simply because you truly can post anything, anywhere.

Extras and Goodies

With Posterous you can manage a group blog with multiple collaborators and turn an email list into a group blog from the comfort of your inbox. The best part is that your collaborators don’t even have to create a Posterous account.

You also might have noticed that Posterous has snuck its way into 11 of your favorite Twitter clients, making it a viable competitor to TwitPic, and giving it a leg up over Tumblr when it comes to posting photos to Twitter.

And most importantly, Posterous is perfect for the analytics types who want simple integration with Google Analytics. No need to add special code to your site, simply input the Google Analytics Domain ID in your settings. Oh so simple, and oh so Posterous.

In opposition, we have Tumblr and their robust API that many a third-party developer has leveraged to build Tumblr-friendly apps. Must-try extras include Tumbltape to turn any tumblelog into an instant playlist, the Tumblr tag cloud (though Posterous does come with a tag list), and Dial2Do for transcribed audio posts. Tumblr Image Viewer, the Tumblelog Facebook app, and OpenTumblr are also worth a look.

The Celebrity Factor

Maybe celebrities shouldn’t matter when it comes to web services, but the reality is that when a celebrity uses your product, others notice. Take, for example, the combo Shaq/Ashton/Oprah effect on Twitter, and Twitter’s subsequent coming of age party. Celebrity matters.

When it comes to flashy Hollywood and music industry types, Tumblr is certainly the shinier star. They’ve got Katy Perry, Pete Wentz, Josh Groban, and John Legend to name just a few.

But geekdom has a higher standard for celebrity credibility, and most of us are likely more impressed by the fact that Steve Rubel, Guy Kawasaki, Jason Calacanis, all keep a regularly updated Posterous.

We can’t declare a winner on this front, since celebrity is very subjective, but we do know that right now Tumblr’s star power is influencing monthly traffic numbers that far surpass those of Posterous.

And the Winner is…

Certainly personal preference will win out, and we’ve given you enough tools to make an educated decision, but we think by rolling out features faster than humanly possible, Posterous is poised to be the future of this middle blogging space.

Of course, Tumblr’s community elements, star-studded user list, and goodies certainly make it a great option, but we’re so much in love with the anytime, everywhere model that Posterous supports for blogging, lifestreaming, photo sharing, and video and audio posting. There’s just too much good stuff there to ignore.

Reviews: Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Google Analytics, Posterous, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, YouTube

Tags: audio, email, Mobile 2.0, posterous, tumblr, video

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Last month, Google News began including videos from a variety of news organizations, such that some stories on the aggregator now include related videos from YouTube that are embedded side-by-side with links to news articles.

Now, any news organization that is included in Google News can get their videos included by way of YouTube’s Partner Program. Considering there are now more than 25,000 sources contributing to Google News, this opens the door for both Google News and YouTube to become massive sources for video news.

Olivia Ma of the YouTube News team explains some of the benefits to publishers on the Google News blog, the most significant of which is probably the simple fact that “YouTube and Google News have millions of visitors every day searching for the latest news and information,” meaning that getting your videos included will “raise awareness around your brand and reach new audiences.”

You can imagine producing video around top stories quickly becoming a tactic for news organizations large and small to gain more exposure through Google News. There is clearly traffic to be gained from doing so, and as Ma notes, YouTube partners are also “eligible to participate in an advertising revenue share program.” Not to mention, aside from Google News, YouTube is building out its own news destination within its site.

Overall, it looks like an attractive proposition to content producers, and a potential boon to Google News and YouTube’s ambitions as aggregators of video news.

Reviews: YouTube

Tags: google news, video, youtube

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It has been just shy of two weeks since the first release candidate of Firefox 3.5 became available for download, and reports say that the latest version of Firefox should go official tomorrow. Yet already, the Mozilla team is wasting no time in preparing for Firefox 3.6 — the next, next big version of the world’s second most popular web browser.

Scheduled for early-to-mid 2010, Firefox 3.6 promises a number of major feature improvements over the current generation, so much so that it could actually see a bigger number jump (in the same manner that Firefox 3.5 was originally called “3.1,” until its newness made it more than just an incremental release). To avoid confusion, then, developers at Mozilla often refer to Firefox 3.6 as “Firefox.next” or refer to it by its codename, “Namoroka,” named for a national park in Madagascar. So what’s on tap for users in Namoroka? Here’s a sneak peek, though keep in mind that this early in the development cycle, things are bound to change.

Top Priority Changes

The following are top priority changes and additions for the Firefox.next team. These are generally not cosmetic enhancements, but things that will have a real, noticeable effect on how you use the browser and how it performs.

Better Peformance – For Firefox.next improving browser performance is one of the biggest goals. That means “dramatic, human-perceivable speed increases,” such as getting startup time, and the time it takes to do common tasks like open a new tab, open a bookmarked page, or complete an address in the Awesomebar to under 50ms. One of the main areas of focus for Firefox 3.5 was improved JavaScript performance via the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which means faster, more responsive web apps. For the next version, performance improvements will be felt in how the browser itself functions.

More Personalization and Customization Options – One thing that has always made Firefox stand out, is how easily you can change the look, feel, and functionality through themes and add-ons. In Firefox.next, one of the top priorities is a long talked about “light weight” framework for themes and add-ons that would allow you to load them up without restarting the browser. That would make testing out new personalization and customizations a much easier and faster process.

New Navigation Options – Mozilla wants users of Firefox.next to be able to organize their tabs based on the task they are attempting to accomplish. That means adding the ability to search for existing tabs, and the ability to navigate by tag, date, or source metadata, which could borrow from the unconventional navigation elements in Mozilla’s Ubiquity project. Lower priority enhancements to Firefox navigation in this area include giving users the ability to create, save, restore groups of tabs, and adding some light file management features — such as copy, move, and delete — to the download manager.

Better Web App Support – Web apps are a huge part of Mozilla’s vision for the future of computing, which is why Firefox.next will add better support for them. For the next version of Firefox, this means an improved interface for uploading files to websites, but more importantly it means the ability to save web pages as applications. That likely points to an integration of the Prism project, which is a Firefox extension that lets users pop web applications out of the browser and run them directly on the desktop. Helping web applications run and feel more like their desktop counterparts could be an important part of bringing web apps to a mainstream audience.

What Else is Being Considered?

In addition to the main focus areas mentioned above, Mozilla is also considering a number of other features and changes for Namoroka. Many of these might never find their way into the next version of Firefox, but a few of them very likely will.

Taskfox – Taskfox is a recently announced project at Mozilla to bring some of the experimental Ubiquity user interface and navigation paradigms to Firefox. Some of those navigation features are higher priority and will more likely find their way into Firefox.next, but if there’s time, we could actually see a lot more of Ubiquity in the next big version of Firefox.

Better Session Management – I already mentioned that the ability to create, save, and restore a group of tabs is a low priority addition for Firefox.next, but this would be such a hugely useful feature that it deserves a second mention. Firefox can currently save and restore session data when you shut down the entire program or suffer through a browser crash, but there’s not really a good way to just save a set of tabs and put them aside for later, which is something I often want to do when researching multiple posts. The best option right now is just to bookmark tabs or save them elsewhere (like in a text file or on Delicious) — those aren’t very good options.

Personally Customized Browser – Mozilla is tentatively planning for a Firefox that can adjust itself based on how you surf the web. That means things like personalized form and search fill-in features, and a new “about:me” page that gives you statistics about your browsing history and behavior.

Identity Management – There’s not much information about what this means, but Mozilla is again talking identity management as they did before Firefox 3.0. Back then it meant things like OpenID and CardSpace — we’ll have to see what it means this time around.

New Tab Page – One of the coolest features of Google’s Chrome browser is their new tab page, which shows users their most frequently visited web sites when they open up a new tab. Firefox might be planning to follow suit in version 3.6 with something perhaps similar to the proposed new tab page prototype they showed off in March.

What other features would you like to see in the next version of Firefox? Let us know in the comments.

Reviews: Chrome, Delicious, Firefox, Google, Ubiquity

Tags: browser, Firefox, mozilla, Ubiquity, web browser

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Steve Jobs is officially back to work today, according to Apple spokespeople. “Officially” is the key word here, as the “unofficial” return of Jobs from a liver transplant came last week, when the Apple founder was quoted in a press release about the iPhone 3GS’ massive first weekend of sales.

The good news is that Jobs’ return appears to be going according to plan. When it was first revealed in January that Jobs was ill and taking a leave of absence, he said at the time in a note to Apple employees that he’d be gone “until the end of June.” True to his word, with two days left in the month, Jobs is back to work as Apple’s CEO.

Despite that, Apple is still being coy as to Jobs’ condition and how “back” he really is. According to Bloomberg, Apple has“declined to say whether Jobs is actually at the office today. He also declined to comment on Jobs’s liver transplant or whether the company will provide more information on the CEO’s health.”

In other words, while Steve Jobs is alive, well, and apparently back on the job, his long-term prognosis and that of the Apple CEO position remain just about as much of an enigma as ever before. Nonetheless, the news does point to Jobs’ recovery being right on schedule, and for that, we’re all happy.

See Also: What Will the Return of Steve Jobs Mean for Apple?

Tags: apple, steve jobs

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Some folks will love this, while others will probably think it’s a sign of the impending Twitter apocalypse. Facebook-style pokes have arrived on Twitter, by way of a new service called Poke.ly. Similar to the sheep throwing, virtual drink buying chaos that are Facebook pokes and superpokes, Poke.ly lets you direct any of hundreds of actions at other Twitter users.

To “poke” another user, all you need to do is login to Poke.ly (using Twitter OAuth) and select what type of poke you’d like to initiate – from the mundane like “play tennis with” to the more risqué like “do body shots with” (there are far worse) – and who you’d like to send it to.

Poke.ly lets you either scroll thru and select from your friends and followers or manually enter the names of Twitter users. When done, you just “send poke” and Poke.ly broadcasts it as a tweet.

Trite and pointless? Completely. Likely to be highly popular and potentially irritating? You betcha. Poke.ly actually continues a bit of a trend we’ve been seeing lately with Facebook activities being ported to Twitter by developers. For example, the hugely popular Spymaster game on Twitter closely resembles the Facebook hit Mob Wars. In any event, least common denominator entertainment has clearly arrived on Twitter.

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter

Tags: poke, superpoke, twitter, twitter games

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