Zivity, the adult social network and media site that describes itself as a “community-powered showcase of female beauty”, has laid off 1/3 of its staff, cutting back from 22 employees to 14. (Again, 1/3 seems to be the magic number - Jive and Seesmic have both laid off about a third of their staff in the last week).

Zivity is in a unique position as one of the only venture capital backed sites with “adult” content (i.e. nudity), and has raised a total of $8 million. Earlier this year the site scored Napster co-founder Jordan Ritter as its CTO.Source:TechCrunch

Microsoft isn’t exactly known for championing open source projects. So it’s rather surprising (in a good way) to see the company release something called the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, which makes it possible to batch install a set of open source projects on Windows Vista or Server 2008.

We initially reviewed spam prevention service Mollom back in April and I noted that it gave me back an hour a day because I didn’t need to spend as much time picking out the good comments in the thousands of spams we get a day. I worked with the Mollom team of Dries and Benjamin over the summer to get the plugin working correctly on CN. There were tweaks on both sides that needed to be implemented because of our cloud computing setup.

Since the kinks were resolved, Mollom has worked really well. It seems at this point that only Svetlana has issues posting comments from Russia - no matter what I’ve tried, I can’t get them to come through! Mollom has been working as well on CN with our Drupal setup as Akismet works on our Wordpress-based blogs.

Mollom has made three big announcements over the past week: leaving the beta period, hit 10 million blocked spams and their pricing model.

The pricing model is listed on the Mollom site and there are free and paid options. The differences are simple. The free account is limited to 100 blocked spams a day and there’s no uptime guarantee. The paid plan is $30/month and blocks up to 10,000 spams a day and has a more robust environment and support policy.

I don’t see many Wordpress users switching from Akismet to Mollom. I do imagine that with the right marketing plan, Mollom could do very well for a variety of CMS and blog platforms that don’t already incorporate a spam protection tool. Once the base is strong, then go after the platforms that have built-in spam protection tools.

We are going to remain on as a tester for Mollom going forward to provide feedback and a testing platform as they improve the service. My hope is that they will create hooks into other Drupal features like trackbacks - I sure would love to turn those back on sometime!

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Jaxtr is unveiling premium memberships this evening, making it easier for users of the web-based VoIP service to make long distance and international calls. The service – which includes widgets that users can put on their social networking profiles to enable friends to call them – previously employed a credits system, requiring users to reload their account each time it emptied.

While the credit system isn’t disappearing, the new premium memberships will offer most users a better value according to CEO Konstantin Guericke. In an interview last week, Guericke noted that “in exchange for users committing to us, they will get rates that are 20-30% lower than buying calling credits a la carte.”

For example, the lowest level Jaxtr plan, priced at $2.95/mo, gets you 350 minutes of calls per month, while when buying a la carte, 400 credits will cost you $5.00. Jaxtr is also introducing two other membership levels – $7.95 for up to 1,000 mins/mo and $19.95 for up to 2,500 mins/mo.

In turn, Jaxtr gets more predictable subscriber revenue, which it projects will make the company profitable in the second half of 2009. Jaxtr currently claims more than 10 million members, and also generates revenue through advertising via its Café Jaxtr social networking product.

Overall, Jaxtr is emerging as one of the better positioned companies in the social networking space amidst the current economic slowdown. The hybrid business model of subscriptions and ads is akin to that of LinkedIn – where Guericke was a co-founder – and provides Jaxtr with flexibility should advertising revenue slow down significantly. Meanwhile, the service saves customers money through its low cost international calling – something more and more businesses will be looking to do as budgets get trimmed.

On the other hand, web-based VoIP hasn’t been a slam dunk for everybody. Earlier this year, we witnessed the implosion of one of Jaxtr’s biggest competitors – Jangl – the team of which has since been absorbed into Jajah. Nonetheless, Jaxtr appears to be executing well, and adding premium memberships is a logical step in the often elusive march towards profitability in the social networking space.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Jaxtr Reaches 500k, Expands to 18 More CountriesJaxtr Grows 10x; 5 Million Users in 5 MonthsJaxtr Makes International Calls Cheap and Easy; Raises $10M to Go GlobalJaxtr Raises $10M in Series A Round: Reaches 1 Million UsersWhere Does Ribbit Fit in the Web-Based VoIP Universe?Jajah Introduces Buttons: Widgets for Toll-Free CallingRibbit to Launch Flex Developer Tools for Voice & Contact Management

Source:Mashable!

Acquia has announced the availability of Acquia Drupal, a free and commercially supported distribution of the popular Drupal open source social publishing system. They also unveiled the Acquia Network, which offers subscription-based access to technical support and remote network services that simplify the development and operation of Drupal Web sites. Entry level subscriptions to the Acquia Network will be free of charge through the end of the year.

For those that aren’t overly familiar with Drupal, it’s an open source web development and content management platform that publishes, manages and organizes a wide variety of content on websites. Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal.

With the release of Acquia Drupal with its streamlined packaging of Drupal and a support system via the Acquia Network, there will definitely be a tremendous increase in Drupal developers and websites powered by this Drupal.

All subscribers to the Acquia Network will gain access to the Acquia Network’s subscriber forums, remote network services such as software update notifications, uptime monitoring, Mollom spam blocking, and Acquia Drupal documentation.

What all this means is that many more companies, especially enterprise class entities, will be much more willing to dip their toes in the Drupal pool now that there’s a commercial grade package available that includes tech support. If all this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking about Linux and how similar its path has been to the corporate world. At one point, only extreme geeks used Linux, until some big names like IBM and Novell started proving technical support plans with their Linux offerings. That allowed larger companies to try Linux much the same way they will try Drupal thanks to the Acquia partnership and support offering.

It seems like the natural evolutionary progression for all open source projects to go from a handful of geek’s using it in their basement to the corporate enterprise once a commercial package with tech support is distributed. It will be interesting to see what kind of websites and social networks are born from this marriage between Acquia and Drupal.

—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Drupal Developers Acquia Raise $7 MillionDrupal 5.0 Launches TodayDrupal Version Six ReleasedNew Project Aims to Bring Drupal to FacebookKickApps SSO Now Available for DrupalChris Pirillo’s Gnomepal - Drupal For The Masses7 Ways To Create Your Own Digg Clone

The Drupal NYC group is having their monthly meetup tonight in NYC. The group is going to discuss setting up Drupal and working with themes. Below is the live feed - should start at about 6:20pm Eastern.

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Video hosting service Viddler is currently down and has been for the last 45 minutes or so (as of 8pm eastern). Viddler CEO Rob Sandie has been using Twitter to communicate with Viddler customers. It looks like most of the issue is around their content delivery network (CDN) Limelight. The latest update is:

Limelight says they had DOS attack, but they lost all power as well… not entirely sure.. but should be up soon

Follow SandieMan on Twitter for the latest service updates. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that Viddler has been down. 

We recently wrote a column explaining how important it is to have a status page/blog where users can visit to know what’s going on with outages and maintenance. Viddler just learned an important lesson - don’t host the status page/blog on the same servers as the main service!

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Video messageboard and now blog commenting service Seesmic has now taken up residence inside the Drupal content management system (CMS). Unfortunately it’s not a blog plugin like those fine folks using Wordpress have, it’s just an API module hook. So basically what this means is that you can tie Seesmic into other modules on Drupal but you can’t use this as a stand-alone module to add the Seesmic functionality. They note that the full video comment functionality is coming soon to Drupal. I will report back once I have a chance to test the full functionality.

I believe Viddler’s video comment system has a Drupal option but their servers are down so I can’t verify.

Check out our prior Seesmic coverage including our reasoning as to why Seesmic won’t work. Though I will admit that Loic has some amazing connections that could put the product over the top. I do notice that the Seesmic video comments plugin provides Seesmic with some really juicy SEO with the way the links are setup. This could help Seesmic gain ground in the all important video discovery arena.

Ten days ago we posted a review of the new Mollom spam protection system. What I learned over the next few days is that every comment/tech directory listing that a CN reader attempted to post was hit with a message suggesting that the comments or tech directory listing might be spam.

I posted a message on the Mollom support forum along with the Drupal support forum.  Thursday I decided to attempt to email the Mollom founders, explain the situation and tell them that if we can’t get this fixed, I will need to remove Mollom as my readers are mad!

After a brief email exchange with founders Benjamin Schrauwen and Dries Buytaert, they were able to get the problem fixed. Apparently there was a bug that caused some sites (i.e. ours) to force all comments to show as "unsure". The "unsure" flag forces the CAPTCHA validation.

In summary, the issue has been resolved and you should now be able to comment quickly and easily. Big thanks to Dries and Benjamin for immediately resolving the issue and thank you for your patience!

On a related topic, you can now subscribe when you post a comment. Check the subscribe box and you will receive an email when someone replies. It’s a great way to keep the conversation going!

Here on CenterNetworks, we use the Drupal content management system and have tried a variety of spam blocking applications. Earlier this month on HTMLCenter, I explained how I believe spammers are able to attack posts we create within 1 second of posting. I’ve tried the basic spam plugin which was barely effective, Akismet which I believe is the most popular spam protection service and now we are using Mollom.

On our Wordpress blogs, Akismet is awesome and blocks nearly all the comment spam that comes in. For some reason with Drupal, it seemed to let through a good bit of spam both in comments and in the Web Directory.

Last weekend I installed the new Mollom spam prevention service. Mollom was founded by Dries Buytaert who also founded the Drupal project. Perhaps that’s why the first Mollom plugin is for Drupal. Installation went very smoothly and I was up and running in minutes. The plugin provides a chart showing the number of spam messages destroyed by Mollom.

Mollom works differently than Akismet and also different than CAPTCHA verification. CAPTCHA verification forces each user to enter a code to let the system know they are human. I found adding this forced verification reduced the number of comments on CN - you want to make it as easy as possible for people to interact.

At a basic level, Akismet looks at each comment, compares it to their list of spam and if it’s deemed to be spam, it goes into a folder which you then have to check (or set to delete). I found that while Akismet caught the majority of the spam, going through the pages of spam looking for the few legitimate comments was taking nearly an hour a day.

Mollom works differently. When you post a comment on CN, Mollom scans the comment and if Mollom thinks it might be spam, it sends you to the CAPTCHA page. So while a few real comments might get sent to the CAPTCHA page, the majority go through without ever knowing Mollom is active. Here’s where Mollom gets bonus points. By sending the potential spams to the CAPTCHA page, I never see them and they aren’t in a spam folder - they just don’t make it. Hello one hour at the gym! So far, one spam comment made it to the live page - but it appears that comment was from a human.

Mollom works on the same pricing model as Akismet - free for most, pay for the largest sites and those that need customizations.

I’d like to see Dries add the ability to customize the message that a reader sees when Mollom thinks the comment might be spam. Right now the message suggests that the message might be spam and frankly if it isn’t sure, just ask the reader to enter the code, no reason is frankly needed. No reason to potentially piss off a reader.

There’s only one part of CenterNetworks that Mollom does not currently protect — trackbacks. If Mollom could remove the 8,000-10,000 trackback spams we get a day, I could easily turn them back on the site. Currently I have to manually look through each batch of 500 at a time to find the one valid one in between the 499 spams. It is just out of control.

Both Akismet and Mollom are some of the best spam protection services out there and while some bash when they miss, just think about if they weren’t around. I will report back after a longer period of time with more stats.

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Quick note: We are now in the process of upgrading Drupal. Things might appear broken during the transition. Please remain calm with your hands and feet inside the site at all times. We expect the upgrade to be complete within 4-5 hours max. While we don't expect any downtime, you might have to refresh multiple times to view your desired page. Thank you for your patience.

Tonight I had the pleasure of sitting with about thirty Drupal folks of all experience levels down by the World Trade Center. This space will always hold a special place in my heart as it was the first place I worked after college and lost a lot of friends on 9/11. It's always a bit emotional to go back there. So many tourists taking pictures and videos of the area.

Ok, on to the meetup. The meetup was hosted by Mansueto Digital. They produce magazines such as Fast Company, Inc., and IncTechnology. Awesome space, but where were the drinks! At least water in a cooler? Deduct 4 points for no water offering during the summer.

First up was a man who spoke about using Drupal for DNA research. Way over my head but it looked very interesting. Basically he has a 30 gig database of DNA "stuff" which he is using drupal to pull out his specific needed content and creating new content pages from the mashed-up content. It's not live so I can't link to it, but it was groovy.

Next up was Paul Maiorana from Mansueto Digital who took us thru the new FastCompany web site. I have a video but Paul asked me not to post it as it contains their development url which is not secured. From what I can tell, it's a start page plus a social network all built on Drupal with some external help from the Lullabot team.  They are looking to hire two Drupal developers, if interested drop me a line and I will put you in contact with Paul.

Last up was a developer who seemed to be willing to make demands on the clients or pass on the work. He showed us his latest work at Thehotreportonline.com which uses a flash replacement option to create the text based on font switching - was pretty neat.

I am still so impressed by the amount of community we have around the software and programs we use online. Here are 30 people all willing to help others for free with their questions and concerns. We should never forget how great we have it. Get out to a meetup sometime and share your knowledge and learn something new.

Here are my pictures from the event - check out the last one - it's one of my best photos - awesome reflection off the buildings back inside to the wall.