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AOL said at the TechCrunch50 conference this morning that it plans to release a host of AIM Lifestream products, including Mac and Windows desktop apps and mobile clients, on Sept. 22. AIM Lifestream marries the classic instant messenger system with support for social networks, such as Twitter, Flickr, Digg and Facebook, so users can check their friends’ updates on those sites directly on AIM. This is yet another example of a company revamping its product by tapping into the power of social networks. The paid AIM Lifestream iPhone app is already available for download, and the beta versions of the upcoming products can be found here.

Meanwhile, Facebook, in addition to announcing that it’s cash-flow positive, released a section for experimental features and applications on its site today that’s similar to Google Labs, called Facebook Prototypes. Instead of waiting for a feature or app to be fully baked before releasing it to the social network’s 300 million users, Facebook engineers can post their ideas for future features to Prototypes. Since the ideas in Prototypes aren’t officially incorporated into the Facebook platform, some may have bugs and not work properly.

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New companies seeking riches, or at least a bit of fame, continued to parade across the stage at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco Tuesday, ranging from the creepy scary to the coolly crowd-sourced.

Fifty companies were launched Monday and Tuesday in short six-minute demos, with the most popular taking home a $50,000 prize and the others walking away with buzz, new users and potential investors.

Read more on wired.com

Per Michael Arrington’s request I ran backstage and shoved a camera in CitySourced’s founders’ faces just after they completed what was one of the more compelling presentations of the day.

Question one: Palm is really paying companies to write apps for the Pre? Yes. How much? All I got despite truly obnoxious questioning was “under $500,000.” (If you’re a developer and you have a better answer, leave it in the comments or send to tips@techcrunch.com.)

Read more on techcrunch.com

It’s not that the smattering of fresh new companies presenting at the annual TechCrunch50 start-up launch conference was boring, per se. Most of them, in fact, had an extremely practical slant to them, like the array of job- and car-hunting sites that take something Craigslist does and make it way less sketchy. And therein lies the problem: Sometimes, those sorts of productivity and next-gen enterprise start-ups simply aren’t that cool and shiny when you stick them into a PowerPoint demo.

But it was on the morning of the second day of the conference that the judges, audience, and organizers seemed thoroughly impressed by an app that they could actually use. Meet Citysourced, a new iPhone app that lets the residents of an individual city log complaints and inquiries–graffiti, potholes, neighbors who go streaking–and send them straight to City Hall.

Read more on news.cnet.com

Ever seen a nasty pot hole or a wall full of graffiti and wished you could report the problem on the go instead of writing a letter or email to your city bureaucracy? TechCrunch 50 startup CitySourced is launching an a slew of smartphone applications that let you file an issue to your city from your phone, aiming to crowdsource this information for cities.

It’s pretty simple. The app on your Blackberry, Android or iPhone lets you take a picture of the infraction. The app detects your location via GPS and once the image is loaded and approved, you are brought to the reporting screen. You can then identify what the problem is, add comments, and Tweet the problem out from your Twitter account.

Read more on techcrunch.com

CitySourced is a mobile app that lets residents report problems to their local government and hold them accountable for it.

The company launched today at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.

Read more on venturebeat.com

Fifty startups launched on-stage at the TechCrunch50 conference over the last few days. Despite a few duds, most presenters had cool ideas, solid products, or both. VentureBeat writer Kim-Mai Cutler and I watched all of the presentations, and now we’ve put together a list of our five favorite companies.

These aren’t necessarily the companies that we’d invest in if we were venture capitalists, or the companies that had the best presentations. Instead, we judged them based on a combination of ambitious ideas, wanna-have-it products, and realistic business plans. These are the companies you’ll be hearing more about in the future.

Read more on venturebeat.com