I’m not an advocate of asking random people on the Internet to help you with your personal problems. But if you think there’s value in crowd-sourcing solutions, there are plenty of question-and-answer services on the Web to help you. One such service, Fun Advice, brings social networking aspects to the mix, and allows you to connect with members whose advice you trust.

Most question-and-answer services, such as ShouldI, allow you to pose your questions to a community, sit back, and wait for answers to roll in from people who have been in your situation and want to offer their help or just have an opinion to share. At ShouldI, you’re allowed to rate the trustworthiness of a member and the helpfulness of the answers they provide. Fun Advice doesn’t really allow you to rate members and responses, but you can add members that you trust or know as friends and keep track of the questions they’ve asked and the answers they’ve provided to others.

If you want to ask the Fun Advice community a question, sign up for a free account and ask away. Select the appropriate category for your question, type in your question, and submit it. Your question will be available for members to answer instantly. Answers show up underneath the question (along with some ads), and featured questions make it to the front page.

The answers tend to be conversational, and the answers are entirely based on people’s opinions–as opposed to fact or research. This makes the service great if you’re just curious what people think about a specific issue, but not if you want technical or specific advice on a certain topic, troubleshooting a problem, or research leads.

Fun Advice has a strong social-network backbone underneath the question-and-answer service. When you sign up for an account, you can customize your profile with location information and a blurb about you and your life. You can upload photos for your Fun Advice account, and comments from other members appear on your profile. Your Fun Advice friends, questions they’ve answered, and other friend activity also appears on your profile, as well as the questions you’ve asked and answered.

Fun Advice is simple, but it has a relatively robust social-networking engine built underneath it. The community at Fun Advice may be growing, but because the site’s strength is social networking, the question-and-answer functions take a backseat to traditional social networking features: Members spend more time commenting on each other’s profiles, making friends, and sharing photos than they do asking and answering questions.

Ian Rogers, vice president of video and music applications at Yahoo, is leaving the company to launch a start-up, Rogers said on his blog.

During his time at Yahoo, the company released the Yahoo Media Player, purchased FoxyTunes, and launched a new version of Yahoo Video.

His new company, Topspin Media, is a venture-funded start-up that aims to “help independent artists make a living.” The company, which Rogers founded with Peter Gotcher and Shamal Ranasinghe, is developing Web applications that enable distribution and marketing of digital content.

A few months back, in a blog post recounting a presentation he gave for music industry players, Rogers summed up some of his thoughts on how those folks should finally come to grips with the Web. Matt Rosoff of CNET’s Blog Network gave a thumbs-up to many of Rogers’ points–for instance, spend on improving quality, not on marketing–but took issue with his call for a new set of standards for labeling media files and playlists, and for sharing data among social-networking and user-generated-content services.

Members of international social network hi5 will now be able to access and play massive multiplayer online-style casual online games with friends, family and colleagues on other popular social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, through the first social gaming community, Mytopia.

Launched on March 24, 2008, by company owners and siblings Guy and Galia Ben-Artzi, Mytopia is, according to its creators, the first casual MMO and aims to bring together the social features typically found in hardcore MMO games to timeless, casual favourites like chess, backgammon, bingo, dominoes, sudoku and Texas Hold’em, to name a few.

“Bringing Mytopia to hi5 users is part of our mission to help the world play together – from any social network, any widget, any online entry point,” said Guy Ben-Artzi, founder and chief executive officer of Mytopia. “Today, online social networks are isolated from one another. Members of different communities really can’t socialise with each other freely.

“Mytopia and others in the games industry are changing that. We’re building bridges, uniting these islands of isolation to form a larger, converged community that welcomes internet users from every corner of the modern web.”

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Mama Group, the owner of the Mean Fiddler and live music venues including The Forum, Hammersmith Apollo and The Jazz Cafe, has appointed mobile marketing specialist New Visions Mobile to develop its social networking strategy.

The agency, which was behind the development and launch last year of KylieKonnect, a Kylie Minogue-endorsed social networking site, has been tasked with building Wap sites for Mama Group-owned venues as well as collecting, managing and using mobile data to create marketing campaigns to boost ticket sales.New Visions said that it would be creating a number of social networking applications for Mama brands, including the website for music magazine The Fly, music festival Lovebox (in which Mama owns a 25% stake) and venue websites. Activity will enable clubbers and music fans to join online and WAP communities by region, musical genre and venue.

It turns out that building a startup company in 54 hours is a little tougher than people imagined.

Skillbit, the Seattle Internet startup created in January by a group of more than 100 volunteer developers, lawyers and business people as part of the Startup Weekend, has closed down due to legal complications over the ownership structure.

nPost’s Nathan Kaiser, who had taken a lead role at Skillbit, writes in a note to Startup Weekend participants that issuing shares could expose them to penalties from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Here’s a portion of the note:

I hope that you found, as I did, that the Startup Weekend we attended together was a “one of a kind” community building experience. I had the opportunity to meet dozens of new people, and made new friendships that will surely grow over the months and years to come. I hope you had the same experience.

When it comes to building a viable business we can all share in legally, however, we found a problem that appears insurmountable. After consulting with attorneys specializing in securities law, it has come to our attention that Startup Weekend runs afoul of Federal and State securities laws. The problem stems from the original offer on the Startup Weekend site. We have not been able to find a way around these laws or any exceptions to the laws or the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules.

Thus, it is impossible for us to actually issue shares from the company that was formed to anyone–or even promise to do so in the future–without exposing all individuals involved to substantial risk of penalty from the SEC. Please believe that we tried to think of every possible way around this problem, but have been unable to do so.

Consequently, I am resigning from the formal position I hold as managing member of the limited liability company that we formed called Bittly. The corporation, skillbit inc., will be dissolved as well.

In an e-mail, Kaiser said that they have contacted other Startup Weekend groups to express concerns over the legality of the entities created. The key issue, he said, is that the SEC does not allow public promotion of an equity without first filing with the regulatory body.

“If we were to ever issue shares, we would be in violation of these SEC rules,” he said. story source