Online storage provider Box.net has raised $6M in a Series B round of financing led by U.S. Venture Partners and involving Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

According to the release, Box.net currently has over 1.4 million registered users and will use the funding “to continue company expansion, including the development and marketing of new services and products.”

OpenBox, a way for third-party web service developers to build functionality into Box.net. The company its $1.5M in Series A funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson mid-2006 when it had only 500,000 members.

Facebook is now taking user privacy and improving the user experience very seriously. As part of its ongoing improvement program the rules for allowing publication of a story have been updated. Henceforth they will only allow actions that have been actively taken by the user to be published to the news feed.

At present applications can publish alerts to the news feed whenever a user profile gets updated, whether this is done by the user themselves or due to a third-party action via an application on the user’s profile. For example, if a user receives a virtual gift from a friend, the application can publish this to the news feed, even though the user has not done anything themselves.

In a month’s time, passive events, or third party reporting of an act will not be allowed to be published to the news feed. This is because Facebook wants to reserve its most valuable feature, which gets the most user eyeballs, to maintain the highest standards and only publish stories that are relevant to user activity, rather than publishing poorly masked promotional activity from third-party providers.

Technical details about the change in policy can be found on the Facebook Developers blog.

Facebook expects all developers to discontinue usage of the old, passive format of reporting, at the earliest. They may contact their users or use other means to enforce the necessary changes if they think it appropriate to do so.

Ultimately, this is good news for users. It will not only improve their experience on Facebook, but also shows that Facebook has been listening to user feedback provided via the ‘thumbs up’ and ‘x’ rating icons alongside every news feed item.

Kiwee, the online social expressions outlet, announced extraordinary growth in its first six months out of beta, attracting one million members since July 2007. In December, Kiwee hit another milestone; delivering 500 million IM graphics downloads. This exceptional growth has been bolstered by the Kiwee IM Toolbar, recently out of beta, which provides thousands of unique 2D and 3D expressions for the AOL, MSN and Yahoo! instant messaging platforms.

Kiwee currently adds an estimated 14,000 new members every day, and has tripled its number of unique visitors and page views from December to January. Also, Kiwee features a vast amount of original content for social expressions on the web — more than 6,000 items, many of which can be completely customized by adding text, color and even photographs.

Kiwee’s social expression content is all free and includes postCards, graphics, emoticons, winks, display pictures, widgets and backgrounds for all major online communications platforms including Facebook, MySpace, Piczo, Multiply, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, and AOL Instant Messenger.

“The teen and twenty-something demographic communicates with friends and family immediately on whatever platform reaches them fastest, and we provide expressive content that isn’t available anywhere else on the Internet today,” said Rajiv Jain, SVP and General Manager, Kiwee. “We know how people connect with one another based on our 101-year American Greetings heritage and our deep psychographic knowledge of this market, and these exciting growth numbers illustrate how our content resonates with young people all over the world.”

As an innovative leader in social expressions, Kiwee speaks to the MySpace generation by creating new content to match their changing moods, and developing new applications for all the major social networking platforms. In the past two months, Kiwee launched a Facebook application, added postCards, and released a line of customizable widgets.

In addition to the social expressions at Kiwee.com and on the IM toolbar, Kiwee manages a relationship with Microsoft for delivery of content to their Windows Live Messenger product in 15 countries and 11 languages.

For more information on Kiwee, Kiwee branded content or the growth of the service (including graphs of recent growth) please visit http://www.kiwee.com/press.

About Kiwee

Kiwee, the youth-focused online social expressions division of AG Interactive — a subsidiary of American Greetings Corp — is one of the fastest growing social expressions companies on the web today. It is committed to providing an easy, fun, and personal way for teens and twenty- somethings to express themselves on today’s most popular online communications platforms. Kiwee closely monitors Generation Y to constantly deliver content that is relevant to their moods, lifestyles, current interests, and online personalities.

Kiwee works across all major social networking and instant messaging services including Facebook, MySpace, Piczo, Multiply, Yahoo! 360, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger. Headquartered in Cleveland, Kiwee has a dedicated creative studio in Los Angeles, and operates in 15 countries around the world. For more information please visit: www.kiwee.com.

About American Greetings Corporation

American Greetings Corporation is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of social expression products. Along with greeting cards, its product lines include gift wrap, party goods, stationery, calendars, ornaments and electronic greetings. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, American Greetings generates annual revenue of approximately $1.7 billion. For more information on the Company, visit http://corporate.americangreetings.com.

SharedBook Inc., a “reverse publishing” site that allows users to create books from website content, announced today its agreement with Random House to give readers the ability to create personalized versions of books using its web site. Golden Books’s classic The Poky Little Puppy will be the first book available for personalization.

For $25, consumers can add a custom dedication to the book and upload a personal photo to the front of the book. The book is then printed on-demand as a laminated hardcover and shipped. Amazon sells an un-customized version of The Poky Little Puppy for $4.99.

This is the first time SharedBook, which launched in 2002, has partnered with a traditional book publisher. Its other partners include AllRecipes.com, DNC Parks & Resorts (Yosemite National Park), FuneralNet, Little League International and Regent Seven Seas Cruises, all of which offer their customers ways to make books using their content. SharedBook CEO Caroline Vanderlip said Random House plans to add additional titles and customization elements later this year. It launched the partnership with Poky because the book is celebrating its 65th anniversary.

When SharedBook makes a sale, it remits Random House’s share back to them immediately (Vanderlip would not divulge what the split is), and customers sign a user agreement saying that the books they make are not for resale.

Vanderlip said she is talking with other publishers—“both small and quite large”—about similar partnerships. “This market is starting to really experiment and look at their content in a different way,” she said. “We’ve only found recently that they’re very receptive to what possibilities exist in customization and personalization. Book publishers are looking for ways to protect and to monetize their copyrighted content. In the experimentation they’re doing, they’re starting to look at ways to do just that.”