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The Kevin Rose/ Leah Culver Twitter meets file sharing network Pownce has finally launched a public API, 3 months after first announcing that an API was coming.

Pownce launched in late June to a surge of interest based around the involvment of the ever-popular Kevin Rose (Digg, Revision3), however the popularity has not lasted. Both Compete and Alexa show big drops in traffic from Pownce as users have abandoned the platform, Alexa showing a remarkable 80% drop in traffic. The Pownce AIR client was buggy at launch and the lack of an open API has meant that whilst Twitter continues to grow with the assistance of an ever increasing range of third party apps, Pownce has actually gone backwards.

Culver and Rose will be hoping that the interest in Pownce hasn’t declined to a state where 3rd party developers will not be interested in building for Pownce: it’s really the only thing the platform might have left to arrest its continued slide of user interest.

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Fantasy sports betting startup PicksPal has taken $3 million Series C in a round that included previous investors Bay Partners and Canaan Partners.

PicksPal is a free sports site where people bet on upcoming games, but without the use of real money. Sports covered include boxing, NFL football, pro football, bass fishing, ultimate fighting, basketball and baseball with the site making money via advertising. PicksPal launched a related site “PicksPop” in January that offers fantasy betting on celebrity news and also offers a paid “Genius Picks” service that provides betting tips based on the top 30 users of PicksPal.

PicksPal is based in Silicon Valley and had previously raised $6 million.

(via PEHub)

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New site “Dig a Silicon Valley Girl” takes Digg cloning into the realm of hot or not with a geeky premise: it only covers Silicon Valley girls.

User can submit “Valley Girls” for public scrutiny, although the definition of Valley girl is fairly broad; Desperate Housewives Star Terri Hatcher made the cut based on her being born in the Valley.

Valley Girls currently on the front page include Google’s Marissa Meyer, Pownce Co-founder Leah Culver and former TechCrunch writer Natali Del Conte.

I suppose the notion of rating Valley girls in a Digg-style beauty contest could be deemed as being sexist, but I’m not going there: if the five women who read TechCrunch find this offensive their contact page is here

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MySpace has announced a music merchandise deal with Zazzle that will allow the “more than 6 million musicians and bands on MySpace” to sell unlimited music merchandise to the MySpace community.

Under the deal, musicians and bands on MySpace will have the immediate ability to create products and sell merchandise by putting the Zazzle Merch Booth widget on their MySpace profile. Zazzle’s “Model Realview” technology allows artists to display their very own branded merchandise three dimensionally, on real models in their profile. The Zazzle Merch Booth widget will also enable placement of the artist’s merchandise in a Zazzle gallery, their own websites, fan sites and blogs.

MySpace said the deal was part of their “commitment to offer tools and services to the music industry that benefit artists and consumers alike.”

The Kleiner Perkins backed Zazzle appointed Jim Heckman, formerly of Fox Interactive (the News Corp arm that owns MySpace) as Chief Strategy Officer Saturday and was rumored to have closed a second round of $30 million in July.

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Sequoia backed Meebo launches Meebo Platform this evening, allowing third party developers to create applications for the Meebo web chat service. They’re celebrating the launch with a big party in San Francisco with hundreds of the company’s closest friends.

Like Facebook Platform and the recently announced MySpace Platform it consists of a set of APIs to give developers access certain user features and information. Developers will be able to include Flash applets and Javascript snippets within the applications.

Unlike MySpace and Facebook, however, the platform is not open to all who choose to come. The company is announcing four partners this evening and opening up a sandbox area for developers to build potential applications. Those that Meebo thinks will make the user experience richer, will be permitted to launch.

Meebo Platform will allow developers to monetize their applications, but it’s not open. Meebo will sell ads into the applications directly and split revenue 50/50 with the application developers.

Four partners are being announced this evening along with the launch. All are communication based: Tokbox (video chat), Talkshoe (conference calls on the fly), Ustream (lifecasting) and Pudding Media (PC to PC VOIP calls).

Games and other types of applications will come next. Basically, any type of application that can benefit from having either instant access to friends who are online right then and/or the need to communicate with them via instant messaging, would do well on the platform. With the communications partners, they simply use the friends list and presence indicator to help start a voice or video communication on the third party platform. For gaming and other applications, it may simply embed a game within a chat environment, allowing players to communicate real time with each other.

Meebo will also be hosting an open-door developer day on November 22 in their Silicon Valley offices. Developers can show up, show off their applications, talk to Meebo about potential applications, etc.

We mentioned current Meebo user stats in a post about them last week.

The image below shows the Tokbox application in action.

Meebo

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