Roundup: Twickr, Yappd, EggNetwork, My iTunes, iMovie, Classmates & more

Here’s the latest action, about 80 percent of it in Silicon Valley:

Introducing Twickr — This is Flickr photos on Twitter, the messaging service that lets you send one-liners to your friends. Web guru Dave Winer came up with it , and Twitter investor Fred Wilson writes more about how it works.

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Introducing Yappd — Which is similar. It is a Twitter copycat, also with picture messaging.

VideoEgg unveils EggNetwork — ads for Facebook applications — VideoEgg, which lets publishers serve ads in videos on their Websites, has announced a new ad platform that lets partners place video ads in any Flash video player, widget or Web page. It offers a product designed specifically for Facebook applications. You can see a demo here. It shows an example of a normal text ad, with a video playing inside of it.

Facebook opens its feeds to RSS — The status updates and other posts of your friends are now retrievable by RSS. In other words, you don’t have to go to Facebook to see them. This may not seem like a big deal, but Facebook had been slow to open up this feature. David Winer pointed it out.

Apple launches My iTunes Widgets, a social version of iTunes — Details here. Niall Kennedy had an early look.

Apple’s new software: iMovie – iMovie lets you load video from a camera in a console, and then, as writer Dean Takahashi describes: …Here’s the magic. If you position your mouse arrow at the edge of the video’s cover photo, a vertical red line appears. Move the mouse and slide the red line from left to right. As you do so, the contents of the video are revealed to you on a larger video window. Move the red line to the left or right and you’re “skimming” through video at a high speed. Within a second or two, you can find the exact spot in the video clip that you want to use. Then you can snip it out and use it in your home movie. You can’t do this with a Windows Vista machine. When Jobs showed this at his press conference Tuesday, everyone let out their “oohs and ahhs.” “Isn’t this incredible,” Jobs said…

Classmates.com, the gaudy old school social network, files for IPO — Classmates.com, that site owned by Internet service provider United Online, is being spun off and wants to raise $125 million in an IPO. However, this one smells of desperation. Several social networks have emerged to overtake it in popularity, Facebook foremost among them. So perhaps Classmates sees this as a now or never, especially since markets are looking favorably on social networks right now. Look at its filing, and you’ll see it has been losing money for the last couple of years, including $250,000 on $42 million in revenue for the quarter ending March 30.

Something Simpler buys assets of PubSub — PubSub was the briefly popular service (among geeks, at least) that let you specify keywords of subjects you were interested in following, which directed it to send you news about those keywords via RSS. It was a perfect way to track blog content on subjects you cared about without having to visit the blogs. The service went defunct. Now telecom executive Ian Bell, president and founder of a quiet company Something Simpler, of Vancouver, has bought the technology, but isn’t saying much about his plans other than he’ll launch in about six months. (GigaOm has more).

VMware, the Palo Alto, Calif. virtualization company, surges to $51, or $22 above the initial IPO price of $29 — This makes it the hottest tech IPO since Google’s in 2004. The company raised $900 million in the offering. Early Mercury News story here.

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Founders: Time is on your side! — Great post by venture capitalist Fred Wilson, counseling entrepreneurs that time is on your side. Hang in there, if you can.

Cerberus, the self-effacing private equity firm — Portfolio has the story about the firm of Stephen Feinberg, which has the following philosophy: Reveal as little as necessary; be anonymous; be invisible. “We try to hide religiously,” he says. “If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper and a picture of his apartment, we will do more than fire that person. We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it.” There are a few nervous laughs…

The “Quant” funds doing terribly, amid liquidity crisis — The Dow keeps getting pummeled. It loses another 200 points Tuesday. It’s notable that the Quant funds are all doing poorly. Makes us wonder how FatKat is doing. Remember FatKat, the Quant fund backed with $2 million from Silicon Valley hotshot investor Vinod Khosla, and Nasdaq chairman Michael Brown, and built on the work of technology futurist, Ray Kurzweil? We wrote about it in March, before its launch. We’ve inquired, and will update if we get a response. Meanwhile, Goldman and others inject $3 billion into a faltering quant hedge fund backed by Goldman.

Tesla Motors replaces CEO — The Silicon Valley electric-car startup has seen number of exec changes over the months. It changed it PR/marketing team several months ago, and now it has replaced Martin Eberhard, its chief executive officer, with Michael Marks. Marks, an early investor in Tesla, is the former CEO of Flextronics. No reason was given.

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General Motors’ electric car — GM is building a car that will travel 40 miles a day on a single electric charge, and has signed a contract with battery maker A123Systems to develop lithium ion batteries for the Volt plug-in hybrid vehicle.