Apparently a lucky few Gmail users had a "Themes" tab pop up under settings. No longer do you have to suffer through the boring-if-functional standard Gmail interface for the 16 hours a day that you keep the page loaded. Try "Ninja" instead.

Tweetag is a brand new way to search Twitter, or 'browse the Twittosphere' as they put it. The app, like most Twitter-related applications, is fairly simple: you enter a tag, and Tweetag will show any public Twitter messages that contain that particular keyword, but more interestingly also a list of other tags that are related to it. This allows you to filter down Twitter's constant stream of 140-or-less-character messages intuitively. Take for instance a query for 'obama': you'll see all tweets contain the President-elect's first name, and you can simply filter it down by adding other keywords to the URL or clicking an associated tag, e.g. 'obama/youtube'.

Russia's media conglomerate, Gazprom Media, is now the proud owner of video-sharing site RuTube. This deal has been in the works since at least June, 2007 and is believed to be in the $15 million range. RuTube is the YouTube of Russia. Or, rather, it wants to be. According to comScore, YouTube is actually the YouTube of Russia. In September, RuTube attracted 2 million unique visitors in Russia, versus 2.9 million Russian uniques for YouTube. RuTibe is seeing some nice growth, though. It has doubled its audience since June. (All caveats about comScore estimates apply here. Their numbers for Russia should be looked at as indicative of the trend rather than as absolutes). TechCrunch reader Andrei Taraschuk, the founder of UMapper, translated the following Russian press story about the deal into English for us:

New York-based advertising firm MediaWhiz, never one to worry about gray areas when it comes to advertising, has launched a new product today called InLinks. It's fairly straightforward - advertisers who want their sites associated with specific keywords simply buy ads. Links to those sites are then added to publishers sites whenever those words pop up in content. These aren't ghost links like Kontera and others include in content - they're full blown links without any notation (like a nofollow) that they are advertisements meant primarily for SEO juice. Content sites are paid a flat rate per month per ad sold. I'm trying to get more details now from the company, but there is more on this here and here.

We've written a lot about the death of the recorded music business, but in a keynote address to a music industry conference a couple weeks ago Topspin CEO Ian Rogers sketches out a different future. Rogers, the former head of Yahoo Music, correctly points out, as others have before him, that it is not the music industry that is dying. It is the CD business. And as far as the CD business going the way of the dodo, with sales of physical CDs declining and the growth of digital sales not making up the difference, his response is:

I don’t care.

TeachStreet, a Yelp-like service for real world classes (cooking, dog obedience, music lessons, ballroom dance, foreign language, golf, yoga, etc.), just opened its doors in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The site first launched in Seattle, where the company is headquartered, and then expanded to Portland. Their Bay Area expansion adds 65,000 local classes, teachers and schools, and more than doubles their existing 50,000 resources in Seattle and Portland combined. There are, for example, 442 painting classes, 625 Yoga classes and 567 piano classes in the area. More importantly, TeachStreet tells me there are twelve dog training classes near my home in Atherton. The company raised $2.25 million in a 2007 financing.

Video infrastructure site Delve Networks launched TroopTube in partnership with the Department of Defense a few days ago as a more secure alternative to YouTube, which the DoD banned in 2007. TroopTube is basically Youtube, but without the embedding feature, and the DoD has moderation and censorship controls. Now Delve Networks CEO says Google is up to no good, trying to convince the DoD that TroopTube won't scale, and that YouTube's exclusive arrangement with Barack Obama means the troops won't be able to watch the president's weekly talks. "Google is trying to attack TroopTube," he says. The email is below, and we're following up with Google for a comment.

With Yahoo now looking for a new leader, Silicon Valley's favorite parlor game is picking a new CEO for the embattled company. Plenty of names are being bandied about, from former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller (whose non-compete with Time Warner expires next March) to OpenTable CEO and former eBay superstar exec Jeff Jordan. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is also being thrown out as a possibility, but she is not interested. Other strong candidates include Google senior VP Tim Armstrong (who heads up North American ad sales), former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig (as we've noted before), and Marc Andreessen. Mark Cuban would have been interesting too, but he has other things to worry about right now. Vote below for who you think is the best candidate, or nominate your own in comments with your reasons why he or she should be considered.

JuicyCampus, a public, anonymous message board that basically encourages college students to gossip about each other (often using full names and with malicious intentions), got its first ban from a public university. Apparently, Tennessee State University's VP for Student Affairs, Michael Freeman has blocked access to the website, which spurred CEO & President of JuicyCampus Matt Ivester to write an open letter in response. Get ready for some drama, with Ivester claiming TSU is "joining the ranks of the Chinese government in internet censorship, and spitting in the faces of everyone who believes in free discourse online".

A team of ex-Googlers, with backing from Y Combinator, the Friendfeed founders and others, have created what might be both the ugliest and most useful group productivity app we've seen. Etherpad, a new product from Appjet, launches this morning, and you must try it out. It's comparable to Google Docs or a wiki, but it's far more useful. You start off by creating a new workspace. You type basic text on numbered lines at will. Then invite someone else in and have them type as well. Each user's edits are highlighted a different color. Changes are made in absolute real time, something even Google hasn't been able to do (Google docs update every fifteen seconds). Users can also chat in the sidebar, save versions and make a few tweaks to the settings like removing line numbers. One great feature optionally highlights Javascript syntax (making this a great way to write code collaboratively) And that's it for now. There is very little bling to the site at this point.

Guy Kawasaki posted a poll on via his SocialToo service that asks "How much would you pay to use Twitter?" More than half (around 53%) of respondents, presumably all Twitter users who follow Guy, said they'd pay at least $5/month. The last thing I want is for Twitter to start charging, so I want each of you to take that poll and say "$0, I'd rather see it go away."

Mobile advertising network Apptera has closed a $10.5 million funding round led by Alloy Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Walden International. The company is also announcing that David Karnstedt, Yahoo's former SVP of North American Sales who has extensive experience in advertising, has joined its board. Apptera offers a suite of audio and visual advertising solutions for companies looking to place ads on mobile devices. The company is behind many of the voice ads when you hear on free 411 services, as well as the ads found on AOL's Moviefone. The company estimates that its ads reach over 100 million users a year, with huge growth rates as more companies expand to take advantage of mobile platforms.

By using ultra-fine polymer fibers, military researchers have been able to regrow damaged or missing organs and limbs. They will announce their findings officially next month at the 26th Army Science Conference in Florida. One example given by John Parmentola, a director of research and lab management, involved a man who lost the entire tip of his finger while starting up a model airplane.

"That has been completely regrown . . . the nail, the bone, the tissue," he said.

When I first saw this I thought "Where have you been all my life?" Then I realized the answer: In 1.x iPhone and iTouch firmware. iMobileCinema is a homebrew app for 1.1.1-1.1.5 firmware and must be installed on jailbroken phones. This tool is all but useless to early adopters who are already into the 2.x version of the firmware but a version that should work with 2.1 is coming soon, according to the website. The question, then, is whether this app breaks the terms of use? And it does.

Local review site Yelp is not going to sit around and let competitor CitySearch have even a day to celebrate their new beta launch. CEO Jeremy Stopellman, noticing our Comscore comparison of the services - "According to comScore, Citysearch brought in 14.6 million unique visitors in the U.S in October, compared to 143 million uniques across its ad network. (Yelp, by the way, did 6 million uniques)" - emailed us with some of their internal traffic numbers and stats. Yelp's Google Analytics stats for the past thirty days show 15.8 million unique visitors, way above the six million Comscore records. And Yelp also shows other interesting stats in the chart below: 4 million reviews, with 34% restaurants, 23% shopping, 8% beauty and fitness, etc. Users are 51% male and 49% female, and 65% have a college degree. Not bad for a company that was born just four years ago.

It's wonderful to see people doing what they love. Jay Maynard, for instance, loves dressing up in spandex and turning on his Tron lights for all and sundry. Sure, he's no Eva Longaria but isn't it great to know that Microsoft has this guy on their side? He could literally blow up Master Apple in a few minutes with a well-placed discus throw. Tron Guy is actually a computer programmer from Minnesota who dress up like a character from Tron on a lark. While it's abundantly clear that Tron Guy isn't anyone's idea of a super hunk, I think he's a great choice for convincing a younger, more plugged in audience of MS' cool factor. Pop over to CG for the full video.

If you don't know what being RickRolled is, go look it up because you don't want to be the last person to figure it out. YouTube even RickRolled its own users as an April Fools joke. Anyway, tonight I get a call on my mobile phone. And it's that damn song. Apparently it's some new startup called Twilio, and according to a Facebook message it was initiated by Dave McClure, who is probably advising them. Congratulations Dave, you've found a unique way of bugging me. Hope there's more to the business than that.

Jeff Bonforte never met an API he didn't like. The CEO of Xobni, a startup that makes an outlook plug-in that makes your e-mail smarter, has been busy getting his team of engineers to integrate every possible API they can think of into the service. Xobni already added LinkedIn last June. Today it is adding integrations with Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, and Hoovers. Data from all of these services appears in the Xobni sidebar in Outlook. Let's take them one by one.

Citysearch is finally coming around to replacing its creaking site design with something a little more contemporary. Today, it is launching in a major rethink of its entire site in beta that drills deeper into neighborhoods, uses Facebook Connect as an optional identity system, and lets users vote reviews up and down. The beta will quickly become the default Citysearch experience. During a demo at IAC headquarters yesterday, Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti told me:

We've been working on it for 10 months and built everything from ground up. In Q1 we will be turning off every system that operates Citysearch today, and running everything in the new environment.

Citysearch's engineers stripped out the decade-old proprietary code that runs Citysearch and replaced it with open-source code. By replacing what's under the hood, they were freed up to make some major improvements that are immediately apparent. The main changes are:

Earlier this year we watched as Redlasso, a very popular video service that allowed bloggers to clip portions of television content, got beaten into submission (at least temporarily) by a flurry of lawsuits. The company's platform gave bloggers access to content spanning popular channels including CNN and ESPN almost immediately after it aired, and was a favorite across blogs like The Huffington Post and others. Unfortunately, Redlasso didn't secure any rights to the content it was distributing, and it wasn't long before the networks started to crack down. 1Cast, a new startup launching today in private beta, is looking to fill the void left by Red Lasso by offering similar clips of recent television footage with one key distinction: it has all been fully licensed. TechCrunch readers can grab one of 1000 invites here.

Each month, AdMob, a mobile advertising network, rounds up the data from over 6,000 mobile web sites and applications, analyzes it all, and releases their findings in their Mobile Metrics Report. In the September report, AdMob determined that the iPhone had become the #4 handset worldwide by count of ads requested. In the October release, the iPhone has skyrocketed all the way to #1. Note that these rankings are not directly representative of sales numbers; while AdMob's ad network is wide enough that these numbers can provide an accurate picture of usage trends, they don't necessarily prove that one handset is outselling another.

Sequoia-backed visual search engine SearchMe finally got approval on their iPhone application - it appears to have been sitting at Apple waiting for approval for over two months. Well, it was worth the wait. Like Google's voice recognition app, it's a much better search experience than the default Google search built into the iPhone browser. The app gives you a visual preview of all search results, which is a noticeably better way of searching on a small screen with a small virtual keyboard. It isn't in the app store yet directory yet, but you can download it here.

For years, people have been turning to the web to ask perfect strangers for advice. But while largely anoymized services like Yahoo Answers have proven to be hugely popular, there's something to be said for getting advice from people you actually know. Last month we wrote about Aardvark, a social search engine in private beta built by The Mechanical Zoo that distributes your searches across your social graph for quick, highly accurate results that are likely more credible than what you'd get from Yahoo Answers or a normal search engine. Today sees the public launch of another social advice site called Mobspin that is also leveraging the social graph, though in a slightly different manner. Mobspin CEO Roy Goldman says that while Aardvark is a good service for questions that need near-immediate answers, many questions aren't that urgent, which is why Mobspin is taking a more passive approach.

The big three automakers are clamoring for a piece of the hypothetical $25 billion auto-bailout fund. And newcomer Tesla wants a piece of that too, apparently. The startup auto-maker has requested $400 million in low or no-interest loans to fund two upcoming projects (likely their new $70k electric sedan and a low priced third car). Tesla has raised nearly $200 million in capital since 2004, including a recent $40 million convertible debt financing. Prior to the debt round, Tesla unsuccessfully tried to raise $100 million in new capital.

Ocarina, the second iPhone application from Silicon Valley based Smule, has surged to the top spot on the iPhone App store just a little over a week after launching (you can download it here for $.99). Why? Just like Smule's first application, a social virtual lighter (yeah, I know), People are fascinated by interacting with others. With the lighter it was competing geographically for the brightest light. With Ocarina, it's listening to the music of others. Ocarina, named after an ancient flute-like wind instrument, lets people play haunting, flute-like songs by blowing into the iPhone microphone and hitting the virtual buttons. Yay. But the cool thing is you can hit a button and listen to what other Ocarina users are playing around the world. It's social music, and strangely compelling. The company says Oscarina users have have listened to more than three million melodies. You can listen to some of them here.