New York-based Betsgowild, which launched in public beta today, is a legal betting community that uses a virtual currency called “WildBucks”.

Users can bet “Yes Way” or “No Way” on all kinds of topics, building up their rank when they guess correctly. The co-founder, for instance, created a bet on whether Mashable will enter the Alexa Top 2000 at the end of April. Users are also rewarded with activity points for rating, tagging, adding a bet and leaving comments. Activity points determine your status (from Jack to Ace), and bets can be made for either WildBucks or stuff like “drinks”, “dinner” etc. Bets can also be supported by additional media like images and videos.

Widgets! Users have profiles with clean URLs, and this profile info can be embedded on MySpace, hi5, Piczo, Xanga and the rest using javascript or html widgets. There are also widgets for each bet, of course. Bookmarking icons for Digg, Bluedot, StumbleUpon, RSS feeds, yadda yadda….

The problem with entrepreneurs these days is that they’re too well informed: they know exactly what their competitors are doing, and exactly how to appeal to bloggers. They’ve implemented all the features on the list, and a little bit of edgy content (note the 18+ button) won’t hurt as they try to get mainstream appeal. Now everything is set up, the question is whether they can get the network effects going - ie. getting enough people into the system until it hits the so-called tipping point. There are some pretty obvious things to do there too, but we’re gonna have to start getting a stake in these sites before we hand over the written guide to building your startup. Did someone say Mashable Ventures?

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The kids on MySpace will kill for this. Flektor, which a tipster told us will launch on Monday, is a tool for creating mashed up videos, photobooks, animations and basically anything media-related in Flash, then post that creation to MySpace, hi5, Piczo, Stickam et al. The site was created by Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin, co-founders of game developer Naughty Dog (Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter).

They’re coming out of the gate running, with an extremely advanced Flash tool that lets users import content from sites like Photobucket and Flickr, and build a slideshow, video, or whatever you like, using the timeline to insert transitions. These can all be shared, rated and commented on in the “Watch” section.

I’m not crazy about the overuse of Flash, but I think in this instance it’s ok: Flash is fine for generator-type applications, and the rest of the site isn’t using it to such a degree. It’s clear that these guys want to hit the MySpace market hard, and I’ve no doubt that RockYou and Slide.com will be calling them up pretty soon, if they haven’t already. Bound to be popular, provided they avoid the dreaded MySpace Block ™.

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