During its earnings call today, Apple COO Tim Cook (who is leading Apple day to day with Steve Jobs out on medical leave) fielded a question about netbooks. The market for the small notebooks is red hot, yet Apple hasn’t entered the field yet. Cook attempted to explain why, and Apple’s thoughts on the trend for the future.

Notably, he reiterated Apple’s stance that netbooks, as they exist today, are basically crap. He called their keyboards “cramped,” and their hardware “junky.” “This is not something we would put the Mac brand on,” Cook said. He believes that if people want a small, very portable computer, they should perhaps look at the iPhone or iPod touch. That comment will likely make a lot of people annoyed, but if you think about it, with the increasing numbers of things that those devices can do (and will be able to do with the upcoming 3.0 software), it’s not an entirely ridiculous thing to say.

The real-time web is all the rage, with FriendFeed widely deploying live feeds earlier this month and Facebook working hard on bringing real-time streams to its homepage. Now YouTube is looking to get in on the action, and is currently testing a new feature dubbed ‘YouTube RealTime’, which allow users to see which of their friends are currently online, the videos they’re watching, and comments they’ve left. Updates will be shown in a persistent toolbar, which means that users will be able to see them no matter where they are on the site. The new feature is currently being tested on a limited basis, but we’ve gotten our hands on 25 invites, which we’ll give to the first 25 users to leave a comment below.

This is going to be big. While real time feeds are bound to increase engagement on most sites, I think they’ll work especially well on YouTube. Many people go to YouTube without any particular video in mind - they simply go to watch something. Now as they browse through the site looking for the latest videos to go viral, they’ll also get constant status updates as their friends stumble across cool videos too.

Apple has just released its second quarter financial results, and surprise, surprise: they’re very good. The company had revenues for the quarter of $8.16 billion and net profit of $1.21 billion — both easily beat Wall Street expectations. Both also beat the numbers the company posted a year ago, and actually represent the company’s best March quarter (which is Apple’s second quarter) results ever.

Breaking the numbers down a bit: Apple sold 2.22 million Macs for the quarter. 11.01 million iPods. And 3.79 million iPhones — which was more than double the number it sold a year ago. While both Mac numbers and iPod numbers beat Wall Street analysts’ estimates, the iPhone numbers surged past what many were looking for.

Okay, this is just beyond ridiculous and a bit horrifying. In Apple’s App Store right now is Baby Shaker, a new app which, displays a picture of a baby and plays crying sounds. To make it stop, you have to shake your iPhone really hard, after which the crying will stop and two X’s will be placed over the baby’s eyes — implying, of course, that the baby is dead. I’m not kidding.

Apple has approved a lot of questionable apps since the App Store launched last summer. A few I recall include the $1,000 app that did nothing (which Apple later pulled), the app that keeps track of multiple girlfriends’ menstrual cycles, a fart one that took things a step farther to actually show the anus, and now this, which is without question the least tasteful yet. If Apple had a completely open App Store, in which anyone could submit anything and have it approved, that would be one thing. But it obviously does not. Instead, apps featuring tiny elements like icons that somewhat resemble an iPhone get rejected. Yet somehow, this gets through.

The body isn’t cold yet (or even officially pronounced dead), but there is already broad speculation on who may be the next CEO of MySpace. Last night we were handed a list of names by a source close to MySpace parent company News Corp., cloak and dagger style, with a “guarantee” that one of them will be the next CEO. We don’t put much faith in the guarantee, but speculation is always interesting. Here’s the list of possible candidates, along with our thoughts on each. We’ve also added a couple of names that we think would be compelling candidates.

Here’s the list:

Earth Day is in full swing. Have you offset your carbon emissions yet? Well, there are plenty of apps and Websites out there ready to help you do just that and more. Green is the new black. Speaking of which, if you want to be green, you’d better avoid black cars and Websites with all-black backgrounds (like goth sites and sometimes even Google).

But don’t avoid us. We just decided to turn the background of TechCrunch black today in memory of Google’s noble effort last year, when its site went black in honor of “Earth Hour”. And don’t even think about printing out an e-mail (not that you would—unless it had really important information on it that you needed hard copy of like a contract or a map, in which case, be my guest).

Seriously, green apps are great and we fully support them here at TechCrunch. The first step to dealing with a problem is often to measure it. And theer are plenty of Websites that let you measure your carbon footprint such as Co2Stats, (for Websites) and Zerofootprint (for people). But all too often these turn out to be nothing more than green vanity apps, designed to make you feel good about being green, but not really impacting the environment one way or the other.

During its earnings reports today, AT&T posted numbers that easily beat Wall Street’s expectations. Yes, profits were down, but we’re in a down economy, and there’s simply no denying that things would have been much, much worse without the iPhone.

First of all, AT&T announced that it had a net gain of 1.2 million subscribers for the quarter. That’s solid, but guess why? It also announced that it had gained 1.6 million new iPhone activations. Some of those were existing customers, but 40 percent of them were new to AT&T. Without the iPhone it seems fairly likely that AT&T may have lost customers for the quarter. It certainly wouldn’t have gained over 600,000 new iPhone ones, and given the numbers, you can imagine that a good number of existing customers would have left had they not upgraded to the iPhone.

Photosynth, Microsoft’s impressive photo viewing project that stiches together images to create pseudo-3D worlds, got a major upgrade last week. The app has ditched Direct 3D (which only works on Windows) in favor of Silverlight, Microsoft’s cross-platform viewer, which means that Photosynth is now Mac friendly. So if you’re on a Mac and have only been able to look longingly at our coverage of the app over the last two years, here’s your chance.

Mac and Linux users have been able to take advantage of an experimental Silverlight Photosynth viewer since December, but the viewer has been missing a few key features until now, and Mac users haven’t been able to really participate in the Photosynth community. Now all Photosynth embeds will be in Silverlight by default. Also included with the update is a new ‘highlights’ feature, which makes it easier to find important landmarks and impressive photos in the Synths you’re exploring (previously you had to wander around aimlessly to find the best shots).

In this day and age, with technology, no one works alone — that’s how Soonr sees it. And it’s a key part of the company’s offering: collaboration. Another is portability, and with the launch of the 3.0 version of its software, Soonr is expanding in both of those areas.

And this update comes complete with an attempt to leverage two of the hottest things out there: the iPhone and netbooks. Soonr launched its iPhone app back in January, and despite supporting some 800 phones, the company still touts that one as a key part of its business. And netbooks are a slightly newer phenomenon that the company is now mentioning as fitting in to what it’s trying to do. Sure, Soonr works on netbooks, just like it works on other computers. But buzz-worthy products aside, the key idea is that you can access your documents from a huge variety of devices, no matter where you are.

Regular search engines such as Google and Yahoo use statistics to make sense of the Web. They count links, keywords, and other items on a page to determine its rank in search results. Semantic search engines try to actually understand the meaning of the words found on the Web and other documents to bring back the most relevant results to a query. Microsoft bought Powerset for $100 million to gain semantic search expertise, but so far all it can search is Wikipedia.. Hakia, Textwise, and other startups are also working on semantic search. Now comes NetBase, which brings a slightly different approach that its says can scale to the entire Web.

NetBase has been around for a while. Originally called Accelovation, it has raised $9 million in two rounds of venture funding over the past four years, has 30 employees, and counts among its current customers P&G, Caterpillar, 3M, BP, Kraft, BASF, and Goodyear. It is now changing its name and offering its core semantic indexing technology as a platform for other companies to build their own products. Already, scientific publisher Elsevier uses NetBase to power its Illumin8 research tool for searching scientific articles, patents, and Websites.

NetBase takes a sophisticated linguistic approach, actually diagramming sentences to determine the relationship between words and phrases. It does particularly well with causal relationships, allowing it to tease out cause and effect from raw text.

LogLogic, a security and log management firm that helps companies sort though log data in their IT systems, has acquired security management company, Exaprotect, for an undisclosed amount. Exaprotect’s software monitors and manages companies’ IT security threats and breaches.

LogLogic, a Sequoia and SAP Ventures-backed private company, offers companies a suite of software products that helps IT departments make sense of logs of IT audits, compliance, and threats, other operational data. Customers can also build their own applications and workflow from LogLogic’s log management software. LogLogic has nearly 800 customers. LogLogic is hoping that this acquisition will help the company edge out competitors RSA, IBM and ArcSight for market share in the security management space.

Twitter, you need to do a better job at communicating with the developer ecosystem that has been formed around your API for the past couple of years.

At least, that’s the message the developers themselves seem to be sending out to the startup at an increasing rate. Jesse Stay from SocialToo wrote something about this earlier today on his blog, criticizing the startup over a change it made to its following limit policy without notifying anyone else prior to the tweak actually being implemented.

Now we’re getting more and more incoming from developers who have noticed that OAuth, an open authorization protocol that Twitter’s been testing in public beta for about a month now, has been “temporarily disabled”.

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What’s that you say? How can I win? Why were we put on this Earth?

The real estate slump is still dragging the economy down, but real estate sites that can help people save money or cut down the time it takes to find a decent home are still hanging on. Today, regional online brokerage Redfin is expanding into parts of New York for the first time, including Westchester, Long Island, and Queens (Manhattan and Brooklyn still remain beyond its reach). And in California, it now covers Sacramento and the Central Valley. These will be added to its existing markets of Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Washington DC, Baltimore, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

More significantly, Redfin is adding up to 200 additional data fields thanks to last year’s settlement between the Department of Justice and the National Association of Realtors, which requires multiple listing services to make data available online and share it more broadly. Anything a real estate broker can tell a client can now be put online. Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman is now finding that traditional real estate brokers are more willing to hand over the keys to the kingdom. Depending on the area, Redfin will now list property details such as price history, the sellers’ mortgage history, cumulative days on the market, lot square footage, and will display addresses on a map. Other sites such as Trulia are also taking advantage of these relaxed rules.

There’s another online marketplace for buying and selling stock photographs in town, and its name is ClusterShot. Don’t look for it to bring any major innovations in the space, of which Getty Images-owned iStockphoto is arguably the dominant force, but feel free to check it out if you agree that there it needs a bit more competition (also check out our earlier review of Adography, another contender).

Like Adography, the quality bar is intentionally set quite low. Basically, anyone is free to upload images, even amateurs willing to contribute crappy photos of their pets. It’s free of charge, and you can choose for yourself which photos you want to put up for sale at which price point (either fixed or based on offers). The startup takes care of the rest of the process and keeps a 12% administrative fee off any transaction as a commission. Outgoing payments are handled through PayPal so users are required to have an account for registration.

An update to my post earlier today that News Corp., under new CEO of Digital Media Jonathan Miller, is looking to replace MySpace CEO and cofounder Chris DeWolfe. We’ve confirmed that things are actually moving much faster than we first understood, and that a decision has already been made to terminate Chris DeWolfe’s employment with MySpace. We’ve also been told that the core MySpace executive team will follow.

MySpace has a dozen or so “execs,” but our guess is that it’s the very senior team that will be terminated: cofounders Chris DeWolfe (CEO), Tom Anderson (President) and Aber Whitcomb (CTO). Removing any more of the team would be much more than a morale blow to the company - it would also bring operations to a screaming halt.

Our understanding is that a new CEO has already been recruited and is in the final stages of contract negotiations. An announcement could come as soon as this week or next. We’ll be posting a shortlist of who we believe are the likely candidates for the CEO position shortly.

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Yahoo and now Google. What does these have in common? If you’re reading this blog, you probably have a profile on all of them. And those are just the obvious ones, you probably have a bunch of other profiles on a series of other networks too. The situation has become untenable.

Imagine if you wanted to update one piece of information on all of them — like I recently had to do with a job change. That’s a lot of work for such a minor tweak. But if you don’t do it across the board, there will be incorrect information about you out there on the web. Information that is always just a search away.

Online health records is a rapidly growing segment of the health 2.0 world—Google Health, Microsoft’s HealthVault, WebMD, Aetna’s SmartSource (via a partnership with Healthline), and Revolution Health (now part of Waterfront Media), are just a few of the many online platforms that let consumers organize their health records online in a secure portal.

In a space where you are competing with prestigious medical institutions and platforms backed by the largest tech companies in the world, there’s not much room for the small, bootstrapped startup. Unfortunately, miVitals, an Australia-based startup that provides an online storage platform for consumer health records, will be shutting its doors in mid-May due to lack of funding. miVitals, which was primarily financed by angel investors, is a free service that let you store medical records, manage accounts for your family, schedule appointments, and share this information with your health care professionals.

We all know that Apple is closing in on a billion app downloads in the App Store. Currently, the counter on the main Apple.com claims it’s about 10 million away from the major number. But, Apple apparently already knows when the billion mark is going to be passed, because the billion celebration page is ready to go and can easily be accessed, right now.

And we know the exact time Apple is predicting when it will cross the mark — at least, right now (more below): 1:24:06 AM PST on April 23. Simply go to your system settings and set the date and time to anytime after that mark, and reload the main Apple page. You’ll be greeted by big picture on the landing page reading, “Thanks a billion. Over a billion downloads in just nine months. Only on the App Store.”

MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe has been with the company since its August 2003 launch, seeing it through a 2005 $580 million sale to News Corp. and growing revenue to something approaching a billion dollars a year. 130 million people around the world visit MySpace every month, making it one of the largest sites on the Internet.

And now it may be time for him to step down.

He and co-founder Tom Anderson are reportedly making an aggregate of $30 million/year under a contract signed in 2007. That contract terminates this October and must be renegotiated soon. But MySpace is under a new boss, Jonathan Miller, who joined News Corp. last month as CEO of Digital Media. MySpace is one of his assets, and he may be inclined to make a change in management.

DeWolfe is also dealing with the recent departure of three of his top executives, and more may be on the way.

A top headhunting firm is starting to scour for possible replacements. We’ve spoken directly with one person who was contacted by the firm and asked to give recommendations for possible candidates. One source close to News Corp. says that no firm has been officially retained to do a search, but won’t comment further or make any explanation as to why calls are being made.