Zivity, a new adult social network start-up, has raised a $1 million round of seed capital from Silicon Valley investors — as it prepares for launch.

It’s not a porn site, such as the newer sites Eroshare (pictures) or Pornotube (vidoes). Rather, it likens itself to a mixture of MySpace and Playboy magazine with popularity/voting features thrown in. It says it focuses on pinup-like photography, or so-called “fine art erotica.” It invites regular woman — such as the local Starbucks barista — to submit photo shots.

It is apparently based on ruby+rails, python, and/or perl, according to its job list.

Shopify Launches Shopify Marketplace

Shopify, one of a number of services for creating niche online stores, has launched the Shopify Marketplace, a venue to search all items on Shopify stores, browse by tag, vendor and product type and use the slick interface to view the featured stores of the day. The site was announced to users today.

Shopify claims to have more than 20,000 stores running on the platform, with pricing between free and $299/month. Rivals include Zlio and Amazon aStores.

Mashable Launches the Web 2.0 Marketplace: Free for 48 Hours

This week we’re soft-launching something that I think fills a big need: a single place to buy, sell and trade modern websites, services and more. What’s more, everyone who lists within the next 48 hours gets a week’s free listing. It’s called, at least for now, the Web 2.0 Marketplace.

Increasingly, companies are listing themselves on eBay and other marketplaces, but telling us they got more leads from Mashable. Pligg, for example, told us about the sale before anyone else. Or folks are trying to sell their Facebook applications, provide development services for Facebook applications and MySpace widgets, looking for suitable job candidates, looking to advertise their events and so on. Clearly, there needs to be a single point for all this activity. So here are some of the things you can list on the Web 2.0 Marketplace:

We wrote about Pibb first back in May and I called it a “comprehensive communications tool“. It’s “like” a combo of a very fancy IRC client plus a top notch message board. Pibb is brought to you by the folks at Janrain who also are contributors to the OpenID protocol.

Today they announced that you can embed Pibb into your web site or blog. Adding Pibb is easy with just a simple script code addition and if you use Wordpress, they offer a plugin as well. Users will need an OpenID account to post comments into embeddable Pibb which might limit comments until OpenID becomes more well accepted. Check out the details on the Pibb blog.

I don’t know about you, but I am planning a trip to Israel now! I totally want to tag my food, create wish lists, food stumbles, eggs with RSS, and timer point 2:54 just about bust my gut. And of course, everything is free because it’s the Internet! You must take a cookie so that the store owner will remember you for tomorrow! Shalom to all my friends in Tel Aviv!

Texty is a dead simple but useful new internet service that you can use to quickly create and edit content on a web page with zero HTML or programming skills.

Go to the site, start typing text in a WYSIWYG editor, format it and add images. Click a button and get an embed code. Your text will appear in whatever website you add the code to. And if you want to make changes, go back to Texty and edit it. The changes will flow to whatever sites you’ve embedded it on. You can also add comment functionality to a piece of text, and create a RSS feed.

No matter what blog I have read in the past month discussing some aspect of Facebook, inevitably someone posts a comment that they are exhausted with all of the Facebook discussions. I agree and have decided to declare that this week (August 12-18) “Facebook Free Week“.

This means that for this entire week, you will not find any stories about Facebook on CN. Zip, nada, none (no, this doesn’t count!). Would you like to join CN this week? It’s easy. Save the image on the right (or copy the code below), place it on your blog, link to this post�and leave a comment (or mail me) with your blog info. If there is enough interest, I will create an ongoing list of sites that have joined in on Facebook Free Week.

Disqus is going to launch two features to help blog readers track the most interesting comments on a blog or other web site.

Forum and blogging software has been around for many years, but there’s still no easy way to find the best comments within a web site or from across web sites.

Disqus has a two-part answer to this problem. It provides an advanced commenting system that can be added to a blog article page. Features include nested comments — tiered according to the order in which they were left — and a way for readers to vote for or against comments, and spam protection.

On the face of it, straight away, you can see both Kaboodle and Clipmarks are not media outlets. They are not press, or blogs, or magazines. Hearst, and Forbes, deal in these areas - and it seems very interesting to me that they would take an interest in something out of their usual line of business. Maybe they are worried that new media is going to trump them. Maybe.

If I may, I’d like to explain why I believe these types of deals and acquisitions are 100% necessary for the web to progress on its current path. In tech today, we only really have a handful of big tech companies that can instantly come to mind as targets to buy. These are namely Google, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, IBM (maybe).