Topsy provides a real-time search engine for social networking sites with particular focus on Twitter. It works through content and relevancy keywords, then it rates the discussion based on the influence and reach of the participating users. This, the company proclaims, is the forefront of Search 2.0.

StumbleUpon’s most pressing challenge will be to perfect a clever advertising system that will not bog-down the sense of random adventurousness its users come to expect. Whether or not clients buy it and web surfers feel unimpeded is yet to be seen.

A week ago, the VC community was abuzz over chatter that LivingSocial, the daily-deals purveyor, was on the brink of yet another mega-funding round. This week, Flipboard is the next up, in the process of raising capital that would value the i-reader at a $200 million valuation. In the meantime, we have six new freshly funded social startups from the commerce, gaming and analytics sector.

Last year Ford put its Fiesta brand in the hands of America’s drivers to help tell the real story behind the car. This year the company has placed its social media faith in an orange sock puppet called Doug.

Founded in 2010, RadiumOne is plotting an ambitious path: to use consumers’ social data to make online advertising smarter, more targeted.

Backtype operates one of the web’s favored “free” social measurement and analytics dashboards. Backtype boasts it has the best tool to deliver Twitter analytics – a notoriously fickle proposition – as it was able to build a profile of every active Twitter profile in under 24 hours with a “high tech stream processing system.”

That’s one of the big findings that come out of a new survey of the British public released this week by the UK’s Carbon Trust, a non-profit with the mission to accelerate our move to a low carbon economy over the coming decades. It’s become evident that we’ll never reach this goal unless the public gets involved to prod along the laggards and to Tweet kudos to those leading the way.

Fast Company may have said it best, when it described Dailybooth as a micro-blog, like Twitter, “based on photos.” So far the user base appears to be dominated by tech-savvy teenagers with photo-capable smartphones. Could the iPad 2 crowd provide yet further growth?

Rovio has recently been crowned the leading mobile game apps developer, popular (or soon to be) on all mobile platforms [More...] – iPhone, Android, Microsoft and Nokia. Its most famous production, Angry Birds, was downloaded 50 million times across a handful of mobile platforms, making it one of the most popular mobile games of 2010.

Microsoft last week officially launched a new version of Internet Explorer that it’s billing as the ideal way to browse the social web. Not surprisingly then, with the launch of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), Microsoft has pushed the social media presence of its once-tired browser. Is anybody listening to all the talk?