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For any small business, there’s no question that efficient internal communication is key. That’s doubly true in today’s world, where many companies have team members scattered around the world. There are communication platforms out there that look to tackle this, but many of them are either time consuming to setup or aren’t really designed for your ‘everyman’ small business or organization. Enter HipChat, a startup that wants to be the communication platform that any business or organization can get up and running in a matter of minutes. The service launches today in private beta, and the first 100 people to enter “TECHCRUNCH” as their invite code will be able to start their own company networks (you only need one code to invite your entire company).

HipChat offers an Adobe AIR client (compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux) that lets you chat with your entire team at once, or hold more private discussions with select team members. It offers support for quick attachment sharing, notifications when you receive a message, and a searchable web archive for past messages. And perhaps most important: it’s very easy to get up and running, even for the most casual users. You don’t need your own company Email address, and the signup process takes all of three minutes.

The app itself is slick. It runs in AIR (which I’m not typically a fan of) but it looks very clean and doesn’t come with that distinctly unnative you often wind up with on AIR. Chats are broken into different rooms — along with your companywide chat, you can invite other team members to join you in smaller groups, and you can mark them private if you’d like to restrict access.

Now, businesses often have the same question about services like this: why not just use a group chat room on AIM or Skype? The answer is equally obvious. If that’s so practical, why aren’t you already doing it?

It’s hard to overstate how much these services can help. At TechCrunch we rely heavily on TC50 winner Yammer for much of our internal communication. It’s amazing how reliant we’ve become on the service in such a short time — if Yammer goes down, we wind up turning to mass Email messages, which are hardly ideal.

HipChat will be facing off with Yammer and, to some degree, Salesforce Chatter, but it’s tackling a different market. Yammer appeals to a huge variety of companies, but it requires that they have their own internal Email address (e.g. john@company.com). For small companies with limited tech resources, that’s a fairly high barrier to entry, which gives HipChat an opportunity. There’s also the potential to appeal to organizations like fraternities and clubs. HipChat also competes with Campfire by 37signals but Campfire is web-based rather than a desktop app.

HipChat does have a ways to go from a functionality perspective before it can really match Yammer’s offerings. For one, there’s currently no way to receive a SMS notification when someone mentions you in a message. There are also no mobile applications currently available. HipChat also lacks some of the security options offered by Yammer, like restricting access to specified IP ranges, but for most small businesses that probably isn’t much of an issue. The HipChat team says that they’ll consider any good ideas its users request, so don’t be surprised if we see some of these features roll out soon.

Users will be able to try the service free for thirty days, and then can step up to a paid plan, which range from $9 a month for 12 members and a restricted chat history to $100 a month for 100 members and unlimited chat history. More pricing details are here.

HipChat was founded by Garret Heaton, Pete Curley, Chris Rivers, who previously founded calendar startup HipCal, which was acquired by Plaxo in 2006. At Plaxo they helped build out Plaxo Pulse. They stayed at the company through its acquisition by Comcast in 2008, and left earlier this year to start HipChat.

You can get a feel for HipChat in the demo video below. Clearly the HipChat team had a good time making it — make sure to pay attention to the The Office inspired chats (this is especially funny because Salesforce used the exact same idea for their demo).

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Facebook has just announced the launch of a new Create Application API, which makes it easier than ever for users to build secondary apps based off of another app. It sounds like a good idea at first, but it comes with one nasty consequence: those viral and sometimes incredibly annoying quiz applications are going to become more popular than ever. Fortunately Facebook has had the foresight to release the new API with a complimentary new feature — you’ll now be able to block the parent application of any of these quizzes, which means you can hide many of them from your News Feed with one click of the ‘Hide’ button.

For those who haven’t tried out one of these quiz apps, here’s a refresher. There are a number of very popular quiz generators on Facebook that let people create their own, secondary applications that they can share with their friends. But actually going through the process has been a bit tricky — users had to deal with Facebook’s developer app and API keys, which is hardly familiar territory for the vast majority of Facebook users (though many made it through the process anyway). The new API eliminates much of this hassle, allowing quiz makers to automate the application creation process. And that means we’re going to be seeing lots more quizzes.

Of course, many of us aren’t exactly keen on seeing countless quizzes filling up our News Feed. This wouldn’t be a problem if they acted the same way as most applications do — after all, you can hide any application from your News Feed. But because each quiz is treated as a unique app, you have to manually hide each new quiz that one of your friends makes. At least, until now.

Now you’ll be able to block all quizzes from the parent Quiz Generator applications, which means you’ll be able to hide many of them at once without having to deal with them again. It will be interesting to se what the net effect on the quiz makers will be: they’ll be easier to use than ever, but it’s also much easier to ignore them.

Aside from its importance to Quiz Makers, the new API has plenty of other uses. Developers on Facebook will now more easily be able to offer self-serve custom app generators (for example, you could build an application that sports teams could use to build their own branded applications). The API can also be used by services like Disqus to further streamline integrating Facebook Connect on sites outside of Facebook.

Photo by alexanderdrachmann.

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As content sites on the web mature, they continue to blur the line between straight news sites, social hubs, and references for structured data. No longer are these sites just home to editorial content — many of them have created databases of the products they cover (take for example TC sister site CrunchBase offers a comprehensive directory of companies and people in the startup community). Unfortunately, content management systems and databases that run these increasingly diversified sites don’t always play nicely together. CrowdFusion, a TechCrunch50 finalist launching today, is an impressive new CMS system that’s looking to eliminate these hassles. To put things simply, the platform helps streamline content writing, database management, and social features by combining features of blogs, wikis, and more into one unified platform.

To help give an idea of exactly what Crowd Fusion can do, the startup walked us through the process of creating a blog post. First, the CMS can present a writer with stories they might want to cover: the platform has an integrated feed reader, which can intelligently determine when there’s a breaking story that your site has yet to write about. The CMS can then facilitate actually writing the post by importing excerpts into your new posts (with links to the original articles). It can also suggest related blog posts for you to include at the bottom of your post (you can simply drag and drop to rearrange or remove the stories).

Say a gadget blog wanted to write about a new phone that had just come out (today’s demo featured our super-secret iPhone Killer, the CrunchPhone). Because the CMS can integrate the site’s gadget database directly into the CMS, adding a new product is simple — you can add it to your database using a small widget on the same page that you’re writing your blog post in, without having to leave the page. And because the blog system is integrated with the product database, you can generate intuitive tables comparing multiple existing phones against the new one.

CrowdFusion has a plugin architecture so it’s extensible. The company is open-sourcing the CrowdFusion platform, and will be releasing it in public beta today.

Q&A with panelists Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Sean Parker, Mike Schroepfer, and Robert Scoble:
DC: There are only so many blogs and companies that will need something like this. The millions of blogs out there won’t need this. We’re talking about the TechCrunch, Glams of the world. I think the challenge will be how big can you make the market?
RS: He didn’t say it, but (founder) Brian Alvey built the backend for Weblogs, Engadget, big publishing sites.
A: There are top publishers who know what I’ve built (big names like Engadget). But lots of people aren’t going to just immediately move over, so we open source it. Clicker is exactly the sort of thing you build on this.
RH: Getting people to adopt will have a slow curve. In tech I don’t think you’re ever the last everything. I think what you’re doing is exactly right, with plug-in arch and open source.
A:I’d love to be doing this for 10, 20 years.
A:We’re big fans of MySQL model where you have an industrial strength free product anyone can use. We figure we can build a valuable business with scaling, hosting, etc.

Videos:

Other Coverage
TC50: Crowd Fusion wants to be the ultimate tool for web publishing VentureBeat.

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Just hours after we broke the news that Facebook had acquired FriendFeed comes Facebook’s announcement that it’s deploying its improved search product to everyone. This improved search functionality, which has been in testing since June, gives users the ability to search through shared media and status updates from their friends and the Pages they follow. And, perhaps more importantly, it lets users search through updates shared to ‘everyone’. The gloves are off — Facebook is going after Twitter where it hurts.

The new search will be a breath of fresh air to anyone who has previously tried to search Facebook for, well, anything. Under the old system, users had to browse through clunky categories to find their results, and there wasn’t a way to search though status updates or shared items at all. Now you’ll be able to simply click through different tabs on the left side of the page to jump between different categories, much as your would jump between Friends List on the Facebook News Feed. Another change is the way Facebook lets users ‘Search The Web’ — now these results are shown as a filter, rather than on their own page. And Facebook has also changed the search engine from Live.com to Bing, Microsoft’s rebranded and improved search engine.

These changes are especially important because search has long been one area where Facebook fell well behind Twitter. Twitter Search has become an amazing tool for finding the most up-to-date information on a variety of topics, including everything from breaking news to movie reviews. Facebook has slowly been making headway in this area by allowing users to share status updates with ‘everyone‘ (before that only your friends could see status updates). But until now there hasn’t been an easy way to actually search through those public updates, which made the feature useless to most people.

Now you’ll be able to jump over to Facebook search, click ”Posts By Everyone” and use it in much the same way you would use Twitter Search. You’ll see a list of matching updates from other users on Facebook, and a message at the top of the screen will update in real-time, alerting you as new updates containing your query come in.

For the time being it looks like Facebook isn’t promoting the feature too heavily — the ‘Posts By Everyone’ is the last item in the list of search filters, and I suspect that Facebook has relatively few users who are sharing their updates with the public in the first place. That will likely change soon though, as Facebook is planning to roll out a new suite of privacy options that will suggest that users begin sharing some of their data publicly.

Facebook’s 250+ million active users still dwarfs Twitter’s userbase, so even if only a small fraction of them begin using these new features, it won’t be hard for Facebook to become a serious contender in the real-time search race.

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When Facebook’s Vanity URL landrush kicked off nearly two weeks ago, over 500,000 people registered their new names in a matter of 15 minutes. Over the following weekend, nearly 6 million users staked their claims. The most desirable names, like ‘Jason’ or ‘Mike’, were snapped up in a matter of seconds (if they weren’t already registered by a Facebook employee before the landrush even began). Needless to say, a lot of people were left in the dust, forced to settle for something other than the vanity URL they’d been dreaming of for weeks.

Well, if you’re a member of the unlucky masses, here’s your chance to get the name you’ve always wanted. Sort of.

Developer Alex Gonzalez of Branch Interactive has put together an application that will allow you to to generate a Facebook application in your name, giving you the URL apps.facebook.com/NAME. So instead of Facebook.com/jasonkincaid, I would be apps.Facebook.com/jasonkincaid. Sure, it has the four extra letters designating it as a Facebook application, but it’s hardly an eyesore.

Gonzalez’s application, which is called Personal URL, builds a basic secondary profile that can link to your online presences, including your main Facebook profile. At this point the options are very sparse, but if the application becomes popular Gonzalez plans to introduce more features.

Installing the application forces you to jump through a few hoops (the process is similar to the custom Quiz apps that keep popping up all over Facebook). First, you’ll have to install the Facebook Developer App and create a new application. Then you’ll have to copy and paste your API Key and Secret Key into the Personal URL app. This is all spelled out pretty clearly in the directions, but it’s not exactly user friendly.

So should you do it? The URL may be easy on the eyes, but it could also easily confuse anyone who tried to recall it from memory since normal vanity names don’t have the preceding ‘apps’ in front of their Facebook URL. There’s also a good chance Facebook is going to kill off the application entirely, and it may not be SEO friendly. Still, at least it’s a decent consolation prize for those that missed out on the great vanity landrush of ‘09.

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