This morning Pinterest co-founders Ben Silberman, Paul Sciarra and Yashwanth Nelapati woke up to a barrage of tweets, “So @myspace has completely ripped off @pinterest. It really pisses me off when an old, tired hack tries to undermine hardworking inovators. [sic]” Myspace revealed its new redesign last night and Pinterest users quickly picked up on the similarities between the two site aesthetics, leading to an intense Twitter debate.

The offsite grid layout used by both Myspace and Pinterest is nothing new; Lazyfeed, http://enjoysthin.gs and countless other sites have a similar design. But the fact that former Myspace Director of Technology Dave Peck emailed Pinterest back in March asking for an advance invite is interesting, especially when you read the email.

Founder Silberman told TechCrunch, “The Myspace product team joined our site really early and so I’m sure they took inspiration from it. Our impression was that they took some information and we were touched that our users were vocal about it.”

However, Silberman who retweeted the accusations from the official Pinterest account this morning, emphasized, “I wouldn’t go as far as saying they ripped it off. They’re probably in tune with organizing friends around interests after they missed the boat on friends,” referring to how you can now use Myspace to follow Topics pages.

Pinterest is still invite only and is currently seeking funding. Despite being in stealth mode, the social cataloguing startup has 17,000 users and is about to experience it’s one millionth “pin.” Silberman plans on launching in a couple of months, encouraged by all the user support today, “It’s cool when you’re a small company and your users stick up for you.”

Myspace had 90 million users this September according to comScore, marking a 18% drop from last year. This recent design and concept overhaul was an attempt to win back some of the traffic lost to competitors like Facebook.

Myspace screencap via The Guardian

• MySpace Fan Video Not Indicative Of Wider Facebook Connect Rollout
• ‘Fast Company’ Influence Project Proves Online Influencers Have No…

Since I’ve blocked out communications from Fast Company ever since their linkbait Influence Project started a couple of months ago, I didn’t see this below email sent to all “participants” of the project signaling its close (thanks Danny Sullivan!).

The Influence Project’s basic goal was to get people click on Fast Company links — the more links you personally got people to click on, the bigger your “influence.”

Blogger Jeremy Schoemaker heroically got enough people to do it, beating out Internet biggies like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, video blogger iJustine and even our own Michael Arrington in online influence according to the Fast Company rules.

iJustine did get her place in the Fast Company sun however, in a sprawling six page photo piece called “The New Faces of Social Media,” which actually included none of the top Influence Project influencers. (A much shorter article about those guys here).

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan points out the discrepancy between the two sets.

Online influencers according to The Influence Project

1. Jeremy Schoemaker
2. Shefqet Avdullau
3. Tod Sacerdoti
4. Cory Boatright
5. Greg Clement
6. Frank Kovacs
7. Sebastian Saldarriaga
8. James Dunn
9. Richard Lee
10. Pace Lattin

Online influencers according to the Mark Borden “The New Faces of Social Media” piece

1. Justine Ezarik
2. Jill Fletcher
3. Gary Vaynerchuk
4. Christopher Poole
5. Greg Allan
6. Jonah Peretti

Truth be told, it’s taken tl:dr.it about 20 minutes to summarize “The New Faces Of Social Media” so I haven’t actually read it, but the very fact that it’s paginated probably means that there’s nothing in it you as TechCrunch readers don’t already know.

Key takeaway: Instead of an article of any substance or a spot on the cover, non- web celebrity participants in the project got the following letter …

Bob Safian here, the editor of Fast Company.

I want to personally thank you for participating in our online experiment, The Influence Project, last summer. More than 30,000 people signed up, and more than 1.5 million individuals came to the site to show their support.

We promised to highlight all participants who submitted photos in the November issue of the magazine; that issue is now rolling out on newsstands across the country. (The cover image is of Lance Armstrong.) You can also view the final results of The Influence Project–and zoom in on specific photographs–at www.fastcompany.com/influence.

I hope you found The Influence Project a worthwhile experience.

Thanks again,

Bob Safian
Editor
Fast Company

Well, no Bob, as a participant, I most certainly did not find The Influence Project a worthwhile experience, not in the slightest. First of all you all but ignored the guy who actually won and picked your own winners, presumably because an opening picture of iJustine will drive more traffic to your website than a profile of the virtually unknown outside of the tech industry Jeremy Schoemaker.

And then, to add insult to injury, and despite your previous promises of this thing actually having some real world impact (a.k.a influence), you end up putting cyclist Lance Armstrong on the cover of what was vaguely designated as your Fast Company “Influence Project” issue because what? Oh, that’s right, while they may generate traffic, online influencers (even your self-designated “New Faces Of Social Media”) don’t necessarily sell hard copy magazines.

• You Know Where Else It’s Hard To Delete Your Account? Mahalo
• Yet Another Social Network Launches, But At Least With An Epic Press…

Causes, the startup that helps users leverage Facebook and other social sites to raise money for charity, has closed a $9 million Series C funding round led by NEA with participation from Founders Fund, Marc Benioff, Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, and Karl Jacob. Scott Sandell of NEA will join as an observer on the Causes board. Causes CEO Joe Green says that the company will be using the money to build out its team, including some senior hires (the company is currently seventeen people). Causes will also be moving from Berkeley, CA to San Francisco.

As we’ve recently reported, Causes is transitioning from living primarily as a Facebook canvas application to running off of its standalone website Causes.com, with social connectivity through Facebook Connect. This change, along with some other optimizations, led to a two-fold increase in the amount of money the site raises in donations from its ‘Birthday Wish’ feature on a daily basis — $20,000 a day, up from $10,000 two months ago. It raises money though other channels, too, taking in a total of around $40,000 in donations a day.

The company has also recently landed a deal that will put Causes gift cards in every Safeway and Vons location in California. After buying one of these gift cards, users can sign onto Causes.com and donate it toward the charity/cause of their choice.  Causes earns revenue (it’s a for-profit company) by asking users for tips between 10-20%. Green wouldn’t disclose revenue figures, but says that Causes has 119 million installs on Facebook and has 25 million monthly active users.

Causes has now raised over $16 million, including a previously unannounced $5 million Series B round led by Case Foundation and philanthropist Ray Chambers’s MCJ Foundation, with participation from Founders Fund. That round closed in March 2008.

• You Know Where Else It’s Hard To Delete Your Account? Mahalo
• WhitePages Now Lets You Control Your Own Listings

Today at Y Combinator’s Startup School, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down for a lengthy interview with Jessica Livingston. The topics discussed ranged from Facebook’s beginnings (including a brief discussion of The Social Network) to the social network’s strategy in China, which has proved to be problematic for other Western tech companies like Google.

Zuckerberg says that for years Facebook didn’t have a strategic plan for international growth — each month, the site would take off in a seemingly random country with no apparent pattern (obviously this approach paid off). But there are still a handful of countries that Facebook isn’t winning in, or isn’t on a path to win: China, Japan, South Korea, and Russia.

“China is extremely complex,” Zuckerberg says, and the site is taking its time to make sure it approaches the world’s most populous country with the  right strategy. The hope is that if Facebook can show that, as a Western company, it can succeed in a place where no other Western company has before (like Russia), that will help it get the momentum to figure out the right partnerships it needs to succeed in China.

With respect to openness in China (or lack thereof), Zuckerberg says that different countries around the world have different values, which Facebook has historically respected. For example, in Germany it’s illegal to post content about Nazism, so Facebook blocks it in Germany (but not in other countries). It has a similar policy with regard to drawings of Muhammad in Pakistan, where it’s illegal to post that content.

Zuckerberg says that he’s spent a lot of time personally examining Chinese culture (including daily Chinese language lessons) to help with this. Above all, it’s clear that Facebook would like to establish a strong presence in China down the road, explaining, “How can you connect the whole world if you leave out 1.6 billion people?”

Oh, and about Zuckerberg’s wardrobe? He says that while The Social Network got a whole lot wrong, he actually owns every shirt and fleece that appears in the movie.

Image by Robert Scoble

• You Know Where Else It’s Hard To Delete Your Account? Mahalo
• WhitePages Now Lets You Control Your Own Listings