Oh, hello there new StumbleUpon design. This past April, StumbleUpon had spun-off from their parent company eBay and has been improving upon the service ever since. The company improved their web toolbar and created a new analytics service called Su.pr.

Now the social media toolbar company has launched a new user interface that is “somewhere between a Twitter and Google” according to StumbleUpon co-founder Garrett Camp. StumbleUpon has about 8 million users that have stumbled about 35 million websites. All of these stumbled websites have now been indexed and StumbleUpon is tracking how many hits have been sent to them. The homepage for StumbleUpon users shows the recent activity for themselves and their friends.

StumbleUpon search results can be sorted by friends and by your own stumbles. The Discover tab allows users to sort recent stumbles by top rated, stumbles from friends, most shared, or by the topic. The toolbar itself will be updated later this week which will have the new features integrated. The toolbar will also have a new feature which will allow users to share links on Twitter and Facebook.

Below is a screenshot of the new user homepage:

Jetstar Airlines was forced to apologize to a mother that said that a male attendant harassed her daughter. The unidentified mother is being referred to as Elizabeth in the media. The flight attendant supposedly added Elizabeth’s daughter on Facebook as a friend. The friend request was made a few hours after the Jetstar Airlines flight landed in Melbourne.

“Elizabeth said her daughters did not give the attendant their names but the younger one received a friendship request, followed by messages asking why she hadn’t added him as a Facebook friend,” wrote Australia’s News.com editor Angela Saurine. “While it was originally believed the flight attendant accessed her daughter’s details through the flight manifest, Mr Westaway [a Jetstar spokesperson] said he understood the girl’s name had been obtained through a flight boarding pass.”

Jetstar initiated an internal investigation to find out the full story. In the meantime, the flight attendant was banned from making additional Facebook friend requests. Jetstar said that the flight attendant has been with the company for 2 years and has been a good employee. A majority of Jetstar’s airplane attendant staff are under 40 years old and are encouraged to engage with customers.

This is a pretty disturbing incident. If a flight attendant kept sending me friend requests and messages, I’d block him or her as quickly as possible.

For most of the day today, #mileycomeback was the trending topic on Twitter. This is because Miley Cyrus has quit Twitter. “FYI Liam doesn’t have a Twitter and he wants ME to delete mine with good reason,” was Cyrus’ last tweet. Miley was referring to Australian actor Liam Hemsworth.

Hemsworth and Cyrus are starring in a movie together called The Last Song and they are rumored to be dating. Miley and her mom’s Twitter account are both now offline. However Miley’s brother Trace and sister Brandi are still sending tweets.

Miley had about 2 million followers by the time she quit. All things considered, I think this is a bad marketing move for the singer. She is cutting off a way for her to communicate with her fans directly. I’m sure if she tweeted her Twitter followers to download her music on iTunes, a large number of them would do it. I wouldn’t be surprised if she comes back sometime in the near future.

Ari Gold has Lloyd, but not all of us can have an assistant that is as handy as the Entourage character. The problem with business today is that sometimes administrative tasks may take as much time as important jobs.

Solvate is a startup company that has just raised $2.3 million to help you find an assistant. Julie Ruvolo, the co-founder and COO of the company considers today to be the company’s real laucnh date even though the company was first noticed back in March. The investors in this round include RRE Ventures and DFJ Gotham Ventures Solvate recently redesigned their website too.

The website works like this: first you tell Solvate what you would like to have accomplished. The company finds who is the most qualified and charges you for every 5 minute increments of work with a rate of about $25 per hour. The company contracted can be contacted by the client through e-mail or phone. Some of the tasks that can be done include PowerPoint presentations, expense report management, sale management, and trip planning.

“There’s this hegemonic Valley mentality that the way to scale is automation,” stated Ruvolo in an interview with VentureBeat. However Solvate does not believe in automation as much as they believe in human interaction and involvement. And I couldn’t agree with them more. I’ve used eLance before and it seems like that there isn’t much human interaction at all.

Rapper Fabolous who is known for the songs “My Time,” “Throw It In The Bag,” “Make Me Better,” “So Into You,” etc. Fabolous grew up in the Brooklyn area of New York which is within 15 miles where 50 Cent was raised in South Jamaica.

On October 6th, Fabolous wrote the above Twitter message and 50 Cent’s blog wrote that he wrote the message because he wasn’t invited to the ThisIs50 Fest. The ThisIs50 Fest had artists performing such as Kid Cudi, Wale, Wyclef, G-Unit, Slaughterhouse, Maino, Jadakiss, Papoose, Crooked I, Uncle Murda, Jim Jones, and Juelz Santana.

Fabolous wrote “Its interesting to c 50 Cent unit wit NY artists when he’s 1 of the reasons NY hip hop became so isolated & crumbled..DO u agree NY??” Thats a pretty bold statement considering that 50 Cent is one of the most prominent rappers from New York.

50 Cent personally responded to the statement on his blog:

Reading what Fab said about me on Twitter was disappointing.
I have extended myself to Fab personally to allow him to expand himself as an international Touring Artist.
I Thought we were Friends but that’s cool.

Law #2: Never put too much trust in Friends, Learn how to use Enemies
Be wary of friends—they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.
—50th Law of Power.
Am I 50 Cent or Am I Machiavelli? Dammmm!!!

After 50 Cent responded and Twitter users were angry with what Fabolous said, the rapper from Brooklyn immediately regretted what he wrote as displayed in the below tweets. 50 Cent has about 1.7 million followers on Twitter and Fabolous has about 300,000.

Rumor has it that T-Mobile and AT&T will both be selling the BlackBerry Bold 2 on October 21. The BlackBerry Bold 2 is also known as the Onyx and the model number 9700. This BlackBerry uses a touch-pad interface. Other specs include high-gloss black finish, leather grain detail on the back, 3G web browsing, WiFi calling capable, visual voicemail, corporate/personal e-mail options. The phone comes preloaded with BlackBerry App World, TeleNav GPS, and the Amazon MP3 store.

I’m not going to lie, I like the submissions that make it to the homepage of Digg.com. I visit their homepage at least once per day. The news is often times entertaining and relevant in every day news. Many people have built a brand around the stories that they’ve submitted on Digg.

For example, the icon of power Digg user Mr. Baby Man (Andrew Sorcini) built a brand around his Digg icon that features a stick figuring digging with a construction sign. Muhammad Saleem, another power Digg user built a brand around his black spade icon. Many people even decorate their icons depending on what holiday is coming up. If Christmas time is near, people will stick a Santa hat on their icon.

Now when a story is submitted, the user’s icon will not show up anymore. There is still a hyperlink that links to the user’s profile that submitted the story, but I don’t think that is fair for people that have built a brand for their icon. In a way, it makes the Digg community seem less relevant.

Why did Digg do it? Apparently they did it to save costs. Digg engineer John Quinn stated “Today, we’re also making some changes to reduce page payloads and minimize HTTP requests with subtle UI changes. By removing the 16px user icon from stories on the home page and other story lists, we’re reducing HTTP requests to Digg for a warm cache load by around 75%.”

What are your thoughts on the changes? Perhaps you prefer to see the icons? Or do you just not care at all?

Want to know how big the mobile short messaging market is? Well I’ll tell you. About 4.1 billion text and SMS messages are sent per day. This is based on a CTIA semi-annual wireless industry survey report that states that 740 billion text messages were sent in the first half of 2009 in the U.S. This is double the amount of text and SMS messages that were sent in the same period last year.

“Once again, the new survey results indicate that mobile broadband is an integral part of everyday life for many Americans,” stated CTIA – The Wireless Association CEO and President Steve Largent in a press release. “The wireless ecosystem—infrastructure suppliers, service providers, device manufacturers, operating system providers, and applications developers—are simultaneously working together and competing against one another to generate valuable and unparalleled products and services for consumers. The survey proves that more people are quickly embracing these advancements and integrating them into their daily lives.”

Other statistics include:
- 1.1 trillion minutes used in the first half of 2009
- 6.4 billion minutes of use per day
- Wireless service revenues were about $76 billion in first 6 months of 2009