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As America celebrates its 233rd year of independence from England today, many red-blooded Americans will celebrate the old-fashioned way, by going outdoors, having a picnic or barbecue, decorating everything in red, white and blue and watching or holding their own fireworks displays. But in this rough economy lots of people are choosing to stay close to home. Who really wants to spend lots of money traveling, fighting huge crowds at the day's events and possibly blow off your fingers or light yourself on fire? Luckily we've got you covered.

This is a good day to stay home, watch a baseball game, throw some hotdogs on the grill, eat an apple pie and watch fireworks on your computer. earthTV, an international live TV channel, has cameras located in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., New York City, Niagara Falls and Honolulu and will be broadcasting live streams of fireworks displays beginning at dusk in those cities. If you just can't wait until then, go check out its timelapse showing Independence Day displays from years past.

You can't swing a stick on the Web these days without hitting a photo or media sharing service. Some of the most popular ones like Flickr and Photobucket have become an indispensable part of our online lives. Among the most recent services to enter the game is Expono, a photo sharing, organizing and protecting service with added features like GPS tagging and the ability to connect with social media services Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed. Expono has everything you would expect to find on a media sharing site like online backup, easy sharing, albums and tagging, but adds a whole bunch more features that you might not expect all in one place. It is certainly worth taking a look at.

In September of 2008, Expono went live with its site and made the bold choice to go with 100% cloud computing. Other sites like SmugMug have done this with great success and it feels like a growing trend. The lower cost and ease of scaling made cloud computing a sensible choice for Expono and the company set about building its incredible array of features. Those features, combined with the company's talented and ambitious team based in Oslo, Norway, make Expono a potential contender in an increasingly crowded media sharing marketplace.

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we analyze the latest changes to Facebook's privacy controls, investigate trolling on FriendFeed, explore the impact of push notifications on the iPhone, review Firefox 3.5, check out Google's update to Blog Search, and more. We also update you with the latest from our new channel ReadWriteStart, dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

Three months ago we reported that Ads Had Come to Twitter and it was a pretty big deal - until Twitter promptly said the word "sponsored" was only appearing on the site in error. Now the "sponsored definitions" of certain Twitter "concepts" have appeared on the site again - and they sure look legit this time.

These first ads probably aren't going to bring in enough cash to fuel a micro-app acquisition spree by Twitter, but this is the first clear public indication of one way the company is bringing in revenue. It's funny - the ads have been live for about a week now and no one but a few small, alert blogs has written about them. (Seth Simonds in particular caught a really interesting international angle on the story.) It was big news three months ago and we believe it's still important.

In a new report issued on the first of the month, Forrester Research has asserted the importance of enterprise platforms for governance, risk management, and compliance (GRC). Pointing to big name corporate failures in the last decade, they argue that the value proposition for GRC software is clear, and they identified leaders in this growing market.

The open question from the research is whether enterprises will really see the need as being so desperate. Fear may be a great motivator, but GRC platforms have yet to prove that they're a piece of IT that businesses require to succeed.

Peachtree Media Advisors has just released their latest report on digital media mergers and acquisitions. We posted their 2008 report back in January, and this is a mid-year 2009 update to that. According to Peachtree, there were 342 digital media transactions in the first half of 2009, which was 12.3% below the number of transactions in the same period for 2008. More notably, the total value of transactions was much less than a year ago. In the first six months of 2009, there were $4.2 billion in digital media transactions - a whopping 61% decrease from the same period in 2008. And that $4.2B figure includes $2.5B from the Live Nation - Ticketmaster merger this year.

You know that scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice is tumbling down the rabbit hole past all those miscellaneous chairs and birds? That same feeling of confused dread is often how users feel when they're attempting to navigate a site that has never been tested. We know that developers pour their souls into their projects. But that's also why it's sometimes difficult (and even personal) to point out the flaws. A developer has to ask, "Do I want it built my way without compromise or do I want users?" If you want to run a business, rather than spending months speculating on what you think users might want, it's sometimes best to simply ask them.

Launchly is a web application review site where developers can upload screen shots and links and ask for user advice and feedback. Released this past week, Launchly appears to be a beefier version of Feedback Army with the additional abilities to track changes and request multiple rounds of recommendations.

If you were a little blue bird, with a good pile of money and a whole lot of hype, what would you buy to spice up your nest? There are so many little services being built on top of Twitter that we wouldn't be surprised to see some more of them acquired by the company soon. That would mean more features for everyday users and more usefulness for features loved by loyal early adopters.

Twitter has acquired two other companies so far, that we know of. Search engine and sentiment analysis service Summize became Twitter's own search engine and Values of N sold its assets so engineer Rael Dornfest could be brought into the company. Here are ten other startups we think that Twitter should consider acquiring next. Which kind of company would you most like to see become part of Twitter itself? We've got a poll below.

We're sure by now you've heard about the upcoming extensions that will soon arrive in Google's Chrome browser. Already we've seen a handful of these become available, including AdSweep, a PageRank checker, Cleeki, and, as of yesterday, a new bookmarking extension from Delicious. However, if you've been running the standard Chrome install (or even the public beta), new features like this are just out of reach.

Has Twitter spam gotten a little out of hand? According to today's top story on Techmeme, it has. Apparently, marketers are calling for Twitter to filter out spam and other adult content from the microblogging service. You know, so their all-important tweets about the products and services they're pushing don't have to share the same web space as that other nasty stuff. But fighting actual spammers is still relatively easy for an end-user: it's called the "unfollow" button.

Ironically, if anyone's to blame for spamming our Twitter timelines, it's the marketers themselves. They've managed to trick our friends into spamming us with their messages instead.