Author: Eliza Kern

Klout has long tried to help users understand their influence on social media networks, but on Wednesday the company has announced an addition with a new direction: Klout for business.

The company is launching a set of tools aimed at brands that want to measure social influence, and in many ways, this makes a lot of sense. While an average user might be curious about his or her reach on Twitter or Facebook, understanding this data is much more valuable to a business than a consumer, and likely something Klout will better be able to monetize.

The company explained in a blog post that it’s already begun measuring the social influence of brands through its Klout Perks program, but now it will target those businesses directly:

“Today, we are taking the data-driven intelligence we’ve developed over the years to begin a more measured march towardKlout for Business. Initially, Klout for Business will give businesses a complimentary set of analytics with pointed insights into how and where influencers are engaging with their brands in social media.

Businesses will be able to look at an easy-to-read dashboard that tells you, at-a-glance, whether you are engaging your influencers on the networks where they are most actively exerting their influence and on which Klout Score ranges you could stand to amp up your efforts. Most importantly, Klout can tell you which topics your audience influences others on, helping you maximize your content efforts to drive consideration for your brand.”

The company last tweaked the formula for its Klout scores in August 2012, and will now launch a specific page for businesses on Klout. Customers will gain access to a dashboard where they can monitor social interactions and communicate with customers.

Klout has been in business for almost five years, and it’s unclear that the company has converted average consumers — or even tech-savvy social-media addicts — into caring about their Klout scores or achieved real traction as a measuring stick for social influence. The company wrote in the blog post that it has acquired a vast amount of social data that it’s now ready to use for other purposes, but it’s possible the company has simply reached the limit of its own influence with consumers.

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Yahoo announced on Wednesday that the company has acquired Jybe, a social recommendation startup that aimed to give users a sense of the books, movies, and restaurants their friends like, in an attempt to be a more personalized, accurate version of Yelp. By acquiring Jybe, Yahoo gains a set of engineers who understood how to build social software, providing some insight into where Yahoo is headed in terms of recommendations and social cues.

Jybe was founded in 2011 by former Yahoo employees, so both the startup and Yahoo noted that the acquisition, which will shut down Jybe and have the founders working on projects at Yahoo, is something of a homecoming. Yahoo wrote in a blog post on the acquisition:

“As part of this acquisition, we’re welcoming an extremely talented group of engineers and data scientists who will join Yahoo!’s platform organization, focused on targeting and personalization. This will be a “coming home” for the team — all five are former Yahoos. Arnab Bhattacharjee was the VP of Yahoo! Search Technology (YST), one of the most well respected engineering and platforms groups in the company. He returns together with former key members of the YST and Hadoop teams — Tim Converse, Christian Kunz, Sameer Paranjpye, and Karthik Krishnamurthy.

While the Jybe app has closed, we’re confident that their data- and science-driven experience will supercharge our efforts to build great products and experiences for the millions of people who come to Yahoo! every day.”

The Jybe employees wrote in a blog post about the decision to re-join with Yahoo:

“The Jybe team first set off two years ago to bring mobile users smart, personalized recomendations on food and entertainment. This has been a fun and furious journey for our tiny startup, as we applied our various technology backgrounds to recommendation and mobile app design. It’s now time to move ahead to join a larger company, and Yahoo! is the perfect match.

For the five of us who will be joining Yahoo! this is a coming home – we are all former Yahoos. Three of us left Yahoo! to pursue our passion at Jybe, and two of us took a longer path via other startups and search-engine companies. We can’t wait to apply what we’ve learned about recommendation, personalization and the mobile experience to the hundreds of millions of people who come to Yahoo! every day. We look forward to (re)joining the world-class talent already working at Yahoo! and are excited to hit the ground running.”

Jybe had just launched its iPhone recommendation app in March 2012, allowing consumers to see reviews and recommendations, but then also move toward making a purchase on the app. For example, customers could see restaurant recommendations and then book an OpenTable reservation, or see book recommendations and get the barcode and the ability to download it from Amazon.

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It would be easy to think that moving companies toward a future in data would be a technological challenge, but Paul Maritz, EMC’s chief strategist and a key member of its Pivotal Initiative spin-off, took a different approach: it’s about human leadership.

Speaking with Om Malik on Wednesday in New York for GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference, Maritz talked about the two potential courses a company might take in heading toward a data-driven future:

“I think there’s two ways. One way is, unfortunately, Darwinian evolutions,” he said. “But others will change and change always comes through leadership, where someone in the organization has to really step up and drive change.”

Maritz said when he was at VMWare, he was fascinated that in looking at different companies in the same businesses, he could see that some would be fifty percent virtualized, and others only ten percent virtualized, simply because of the mindset at the organization that had inspired the change.

“Change really requires leadership. It requires people to understand the organization and get behind it,” he said.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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In a refreshing deviation from the 80 companies that generally present at a Y Combinator demo day, only seven companies (plus two off the record startups) pitched to investors and the media at the Founder’s Den in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Founders Den is “one part co-working space, with 55 to 60 people working here, and one part clubhouse for experienced entrepreneurs,” said Michael Levit, one of the managing partners, and the group hosts demo days about every six months. When I wrote about the group’s last demo day in September 2012, I explained the structure behind the space:

“The group, which is a co-working space in San Francisco that allows startups to join and collaborate on an invite-only basis, typically picks startups that have already been through other incubator programs like Y Combinator (which was heavily represented among Tuesday’s startups.) Startups selected to join pay competitive prices for the space and gain access to a well-connected community in the city.”

For its relatively short history and small number of companies per demo day (they’ve hosted about 85 in total), Founders Den has hosted a number of interesting companies. They include Datasift, the Twitter data company that we’ve written about extensively, as well as e-commerce company Wanelo and social video startup Socialcam.

My colleague Janko Roettgers has written about Movl, the company that provides tools for multiscreen activity on smart TVs. Jeff Roberts wrote for PaidContent about vidIQ, the company that gives enterprise companies a dashboard of tools for YouTube. And two of the company presentations were off the record. But among the other five, here were the three I’d particularly keep an eye on:

Namo Media

Namo Media comes from Gabor Cselle, the entrepreneur who presented the slightly tongue-in-cheek app Draw Chat at the last Founders Den event, but is now focused on his “million dollar” opportunity (after auctioning off Draw Chat). Namo Media helps apps do in-stream native advertising, inserting sponsored posts into streams just as Twitter does with promoted tweets or Facebook does with sponsored posts.

The team mostly comes from backgrounds at Google, working on products like Gmail (Cselle founded reMail, a mail search app that was acquired by Google in 2010). Namo Media just raised a $1.9 million funding round led by Google Ventures with participation from Betaworks, Andreessen Horowitz, Trinity Ventures, and angels.

Survata

Survata finds users to complete market research surveys, integrating with other websites to easily acquire responses. The company explained the idea behind its product on its website: “Our customers write surveys, and we find respondents to complete those surveys. But, unlike most market research firms, we don’t use traditional research panels. Rather, we collect survey responses via our partner publishers around the web.” The company’s founders noted that they’re doing surveys for groups like Disney, Microsoft, Harvard, and McKinsey.

Rollbar

Rollbar works to help developers find and track errors, installing on sites as “a small library to detect errors and collect context about each,” surfacing the most important issues to the developer’s attention, and then working to understand the problem to find a solution. The company has graduated pricing depending on the scale of operation required.

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When you log on to Twitter during March Madness starting this week, you probably won’t be thinking much beyond the state of your bracket. But if you happen to notice video replays showing up in your feed, they’ll be coming from the technology platform built by SnappyTV, the little startup at the heart of Twitter’s video advertising strategy during one of the biggest sporting events of the year.

We’ve heard a good deal over the past year or so about Twitter building up advertising opportunities as well as multimedia content, and now it’s all coming together during March Madness. SnappyTV will bridge the tech gap between Twitter and Turner Broadcasting to create new opportunities for advertising revenue around the second screen television experience, providing short highlight videos throughout the entire basketball tournament.

Twitter is clearly interested in making money from social TV, as it demonstrated with the Bluefin Labs acquisition, so this partnership is a window into what that concept could look like.

We covered the news about the partnership on Monday that was first reported by USA Today, but today I spoke further with SnappyTV CEO Mike Folgner about the technology involved in his platform and how it presents opportunities for both the basketball fans and Twitter. Folgner built one of the first in-browser video editors with Jumpcut in 2006 before the company was acquired by Yahoo, where Folgner went to become general manager for video.

The partnership this year will allow editors at Turner TO use SnappyTV’s video-editing platform to put together short, 15-second highlight videos throughout the tournament. Editors with Turner will use both human judgement and an algorithm from SnappyTV that tracks the most-discussed moments on social media to pick the best moments from the games, and less than a minute later, can send out an video with the highlight for people to view and (hopefully) retweet.

“Let’s say something happens, like there’s a great play, and 20 seconds later, there’s a tweet from the March Madness account with the play. And people can watch it almost instantly and retweet it,” Folgner said. “You just get this really cool second screen experience around Twitter and the game.”

This isn’t the first year that SnappyTV and Turner have partnered to provide March Madness clips — they actually provided the same function for last year’s tournament. But this is the first year that the videos will be able to take advantage of Twitter cards, which allow you to expand tweets without leaving the main Twitter stream to view content. (Last year the videos were just tweeted out as URLs.) And this is the first year that Twitter has found advertisers specifically for those video — AT&T and Coke Zero will be sponsoring them.

“The real difference with this year is now these advertisers who are buying these key TV shows, now they have the opportunity to buy the social conversation around the shows as well. And there really hasn’t been that connection before,” Folgner said. “People watch TV and talk about it on Twitter. So by sending the video out, you connect the brand advertisement on television with the branded content on Twitter.”

Users watching from the March Madness app (available mainly to existing cable customers) will be able to see the social conversation around the games, as well as the highlight videos they’ll be able to replay and tweet out. While the number of videos per game will vary, SnappyTV estimated that it would be about 10 clips per game on the high end. Which, at more than 60 games, is a fair number of video tweets. So you might want to follow the @marchmadness account at your own Twitter discretion.

It will be interesting to watch how the partnership plays out for this year’s tournament — and if it goes well, just how quickly SnappyTV gets acquired before the next one rolls around.

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While it won’t be all that easy to watch full NCAA March Madness games online unless you’re a cable subscriber, you will be able to tune into quick highlight clips from the big games at a slightly unlikely source — Twitter.

As USA Today reported Monday evening, Twitter will be teaming up with Turner Broadcasting and a startup called SnappyTV to provide short, 15-second highlights from all 67 games, tweeted out shortly after the moments happen. The Twitter account @marchmadness will have the clips, which will serve like instant replays on the social media site.

While Twitter started out as a text service — SMS, in fact — it has moved into the realm of visual content and media recently as part of an attempt to create a full-featured news stream with associated in-stream advertising.

The company launched a photo editing and filters app, the video app Vine, and there has been talk of a music app as well. Video replays around sports, which is an area with lots of advertising dollars, would make sense as Twitter builds up its monetization efforts and looks to add multimedia content into the service.

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It might be snowing on the East Coast, but it’s almost spring here in San Francisco, which makes it a great time to think about cleaning your house. Or so I hear.

Several startups have been cropping up in the Bay Area recently that are specifically targeting the young, affluent professionals who are ambivalent about home cleaning and chores. While there are already countless numbers of cleaning services on Yelp or Angie’s List, these startups are attempting to displace traditional services with a more tech-savvy approach, generally touting credit card payments, mobile apps and online booking as selling points.

As Om wrote this weekend in response to the Uber strike in San Francisco, we will continue to face questions as we get used to booking and rating services online that are performed by other people, and likely these cleaning services will be no different in the challenges they face. But for a lot of consumers getting used to booking and paying for services online, these kinds of apps and services could become the norm.

House cleaning

Hipstermaid

Only in the Bay Area can you hire an American Apparel-clad, self-proclaimed hipster to come clean your house. (With organic cleaning products, naturally.) Hipstermaid was launched by ex-Googler Cathy Tang who wanted to book and pay for home-cleaning services online, as she was accustomed to doing with most other daily tasks.

The premise of the company is fairly absurd (since it’s unclear why a hipster would clean a bathroom better than anyone else), and the company’s prices are definitely more expensive than some of the other options. Tang, who is CEO of the company, said the average San Francisco house cleaning job with costs $129-$159 (typically two cleaners covering a one or two bedroom apartment.) But the company does offer eco-friendly cleaning supplies, flexible booking and online payments, and Tang says having hipster in the title is mainly part of the marketing strategy.

Homejoy

Homejoy was frequently known as Pathjoy, but has recently re-branded to emphasize its focus on home cleaning and care. Just like some of the other services, Homejoy lets you book a cleaner on the site for a flat price per hour, and you’re guaranteed a home cleaning in the time you specify, as well as online booking and profile of your cleaner. You can leave reviews of your cleaner afterwards and give Homejoy gift cards.

The service is available in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose and Seattle. The company charges a standard $20 per hour rate with a minimum booking of 2.5 hours, although cleaners can be booked for longer periods of time as well.

Handybook

Based in New York, Boston, and San Francisco, Handybook lets you book cleaners online, as well as find a handyman to put together your IKEA furniture, hang pictures, paint or help you move. The company also helps you locate plumbers in your area. Any of the services booked through the site and you can pay with a credit card, and the company has an app on iOS right now.

CEO and co-founder Oisin Hanrahan told me that they wanted to take the friction out of booking home services, but quickly discovered that it’s as much about standardizing the experience (making sure the cleaner shows up on time, uses eco-friendly materials, brings his or her own vacuum, etc.) as it is about allowing credit cards:

“The whole process puts so much friction and tension on the customer, we think it just doesn’t make any sense. We want it to be as easy to book a home service as it is to book an Uber or buy a book on Amazon,” he said.

Handybook estimates that home cleanings cost between $25 to $35 per hour.

Do-it-yourself cleaning

BrightNest

As someone with the time and energy to clean my own small apartment, I’m less interested in finding a service to do it for me, and more interested in reading about the best ways to do it myself. BrightNest is a website (and iPhone app that just launched Monday) that allows users to check out different tips for home cleaning and maintenance, depending on the type of home you have and the size of your family.

I’m a single person without pets, kids, or a lawn; my needs are fairly limited. But after signing in and telling the app about my basic living setup, I received tips for making a butterfly feeder, removing stains from carpets, cleaning out my fridge, purchasing a smoke detector, conserving tap water and organizing my closet.

Aside from the butterfly feeder, which sounds like a kick, it’s a pretty useful list of things I might use with detailed information under every suggestion. Plus, the app is fairly attractive to use, and you can save particular items to do on an ongoing basis.

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As Twitter looks for more and more ways to turn its massive user base into revenue and profit, the company is expanding the options available to a select few who are trying out its self-service ad system.

Twitter announced Monday that it has further refined its targeting options for self-service advertisers on Twitter, allowing companies to advertise specifically to people based on the accounts that they follow. While Twitter’s self-service advertising product is still in beta since its launch about a year ago, Twitter is clearly focused on improving and refining the product before it opens it up to everyone.

Advertising is key to Twitter’s monetization strategy, and as the company refines its leadership and prepares for a potential IPO, nailing the type of service that Google used to make its advertising platform will be key. We’ll be discussing the future of digital advertising on several panels in April at our PaidContent Live conference in New York.

So, for instance, if I follow @UNC_Basketball on Twitter, I might start seeing more promoted tweets geared specifically toward UNC fans, since Twitter will allow advertisers to serve ads up to specific audiences based on the accounts they follow. Advertisers have always had their promoted tweets matched with appropriate interest groups, but the improved targeting will give advertisers more controls to pick the audience. Twitter explained how it works in a blog post:

“Our self-service advertisers can now target interests in two specific ways. First, they can target users with the same interests as followers of @usernames. For example, if a golf pro shop were promoting itself, it might target users who are similar to those who follow @GolfDigestMag, @GolfChannel or even a former professional golfer like Annika Sorenstam (@ANNIKA59).”

The company will also allow advertisers to target particular platforms like Android phones, giving them greater flexibility in where promoted tweets appear and to which user, and target ads around a user’s gender. Advertisers will also be able to pick from generic interest categories as well:

“They can also choose from a wide-ranging list of over 350 interest categories—from auto racing to birdwatching (or in this case, golf). By targeting people’s interests, advertisers can tailor their messages to reach those most likely to engage with them.”

Users who want to pay for ads on Twitter will now also have access to a more advanced set of tools if they want a larger-scale advertising campaign on the platform, likely for bigger businesses using the service.

This post was updated at 1:18 PST to clarify how companies can target promoted tweets to particular groups.

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You might notice a different design if you log into Pinterest soon, as the social photo and content-sharing site begins rolling out a new look that makes pins larger and the activity feed smaller, cleaning up the design much as Facebook did earlier this month.

Pinterest announced the redesign back in January, but only tested it out with a small number of users. The company is now rolling it out more broadly. In the new design the photos pinned to the site appear larger, and the activity feed is smaller, which makes sense given its focus on displaying attractive images. It seems like the biggest complaint from users so far is the removal of the thread of re-pins under each photo (similar to reblogs on Tumblr) that showed who shared each photo and in what order. However, you can still see who has re-pinned or liked individual photos when clicking on them.

At GigaOM’s Roadmap conference in November, CEO Ben Silbermann said they’re constantly pushing the Pinterest team to come up with new ways to engage people’s attention on the site:

“Every one of your experiences has to feel good,” he said at the time. “Every month, it has to be more than a passing novelty. If they don’t feel like it gives anything to them, they’ll crowd it out.”

The company recently released a web analytics tool for brands who have a Pinterest account, which arrived after a new $200 million funding round.

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Twitter’s now-iconic hashtag could be taking flight and it may start appearing on Facebook, the Wall Street Journal first reported Thursday afternoon. The move to start taking advantage of the hashtag, a symbol that users are starting to recognize across the web, could help Facebook build on the idea of organizing content by topic and give advertisers new opportunities.

By organizing content through hashtags, Facebook could allow advertisers to specifically target discussions on the site, as Mike Isaac explains further for AllThingsD, which would make sense from a platform perspective. But it would be a strong acknowledgement on Facebook’s part that Twitter has developed a dominant social strategy, which would be especially interesting.

Facebook announced news feed and Timeline redesigns within the last week that have focused strongly on content like news articles or music or book suggestions. The addition of the hashtag could fit in with this strategy and help people congregate around particular discussions and group more content into these areas. Although how exactly the company would roll out an official hashtag feature or integrate it into the platform is anyone’s guess right now.

A Facebook spokesperson said the company does not comment on rumors. Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The hashtag originated on Twitter after users wanted to organize their topics more clearly on the site, which we wrote about in 2010:

“On August 23, 2007, the Twitter hashtag was born. Invented by Chris Messina (then with the consulting firm Citizen Agency, now an open web advocate for Google), the first tweet with a hashtag read as follows: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”

Today, hashtags make tweets more meaningful and findable, traits that many users appreciate. No conference or speech is complete without a hashtag these days, binding together the ad-hoc community of observers and their pithy comments and memorable quotes.”

The primary reason it would make sense for Facebook to adopt hashtags lies with advertising. Advertisers want to pay for their products or offerings to show up around searches and information that show intent on the part of the user. So if you search for #SuperBowl on Facebook, advertisers would know that you were at least interested in football or watching the Super Bowl or purchasing snacks to eat during the Super Bowl, and therefore might be especially interested in those products. While Twitter’s discovery options have struggled slightly, the use of hashtags to categorize content for advertisers has been more of a success and makes sense that Facebook would want to adopt.

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It’s rare that you find people who actually enjoy checking or using their email, but the recent launch of sleek new apps like Mailbox might reinvigorate the fairly staid technology. Could email be getting cool again?

The entrepreneurs behind the email app Inky think that email could indeed be cool, but CEO David Baggett said it will take a more tech-centric approach than what most popular apps are doing to really tackle the core of email, addressing some of the trickier things like attachments that keep it from being truly easy to use.

A good number of apps like Mailbox, Mailstrom, and Gander, just to name a few, are tackling email management by improving the ways that we sort or deal with a huge email influx or the inability to take action on the emails that arrive. While email overload is a huge part of what makes it overwhelming for most people, most of those apps sit like filters or layers on top of whatever email service you use — like Gmail — and don’t actually dig deep into the platform itself. Inky, a desktop client for email, is taking a more technical approach and hoping that bet pays off, Baggett said.

“Because it’s hard, you see two distinct approaches. One is to build a layer on top of existing mail platforms and make a new UI. What’s nice about that is you don’t have to solve any of the actual mail problems: all of that’s done for you by Google or Microsoft,” Baggett said. “You can paint your house another color but it’s not going to change the energy efficiency of the whole house.”

Inky is a desktop app that lets you pull all of your mail clients onto one simple screen that has much more white space and fewer controls than you might be used to. The app shows which accounts have unread emails (you can pull in any IMAP or POP account), sorts mail by the importance of the sender based on frequency of communication and social signals, and divides up your mail by type (social media, daily deals, etc.). You can reply and sort emails from all linked accounts within the Inky app. But Baggett has big plans for where Inky is headed, and is still expecting improvements to the service.

If you’re an avid user of Gmail’s filters and folders, you might not see as much value to Inky’s controls right now. But Baggett points out that setting up Gmail filters is not something that everyone wants to do, and providing a simple approach is a good way to reach a wide variety of users.

Baggett is no stranger to tackling tricky problems. He previously founded ITA Software, technology that provided flight search software, that was eventually acquired by Google for $700 million.

“I thought to myself, ‘What’s the biggest thing I could potentially do?’” He discounted browsers, search, and operating systems, but thought email could have potential. “I thought mail is really interesting because most people are really unhappy with their mail.”

So Baggett launched Inky, and was pleased to discover that while it’s stiill growing, he already has a strong following. The app doesn’t have a mobile version yet (which was a big downside that would keep me from using it right now) but Baggett argued that desktop computers are still where most people do the heavy lifting when it comes to email — few are spending a lot of time composing on their phones, which seems true.

“We started with desktop because it’s where people have the highest expectations in terms of features and feature set. If you can convert someone from Gmail or Apple mail to your mail client than you have an MVP mail client,” he said.

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For those of us who rely on Google Reader for organization of our RSS feeds and staying up to date on the day’s news, the announcement yesterday that Google will shutter the project as part of a “spring cleaning” was fairly devastating. But almost instantly, a few clever companies like Feedly began highlighting their support and solutions for RSS orphans. And on Thursday, Digg jumped into the fray with the promise of such a new answer to Google Reader.

Reuters had reported Wednesday night that the Betaworks-owned company had something in the works, and on Thursday the company released a blog post explaining that it has been working on something around Reader, but will speed up production in light of Google Reader’s imminent demise on July 1:

“We’ve heard people say that RSS is a thing of the past, and perhaps in its current incarnation it is, but as daily (hourly) users of Google Reader, we’re convinced that it’s a product worth saving. So we’re going to give it our best shot. We’ve been planning to build a reader in the second half of 2013, one that, like Digg, makes the Internet a more approachable and digestible place. After Google’s announcement, we’re moving the project to the top of our priority list. We’re going to build a reader, starting today.

Since 2010, when we started working on News.me at betaworks, we’ve been obsessed with building tools that surface the most interesting things on the Internet, in real-time. That’s what has guided our approach to rebuilding Digg, and it’s with that experience behind us (including a whole load of mistakes), that we will build the new reader.

We hope to identify and rebuild the best of Google Reader’s features (including its API), but also advance them to fit the Internet of 2013, where networks and communities like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit and Hacker News offer powerful but often overwhelming signals as to what’s interesting. Don’t get us wrong: we don’t expect this to be a trivial undertaking. But we’re confident we can cook up a worthy successor.”

Om published an interview Wednesday night with Google Reader creator Chris Wetherell, who’s working on his startup Avocado now, and Wetherell explained that Google Reader always lived on borrowed time. But as Buzzfeed’s John Herrman pointed out, the RSS reader was still driving significant traffic for many publishers, and as Laura Owen wrote for PaidContent, Google Reader’s demise could have a significant impact on digital publishers and news outlets.

Whether Digg’s new product solves the problems that Google Reader’s exit creates is unclear, but creating a news reader built on RSS from scratch could allow for some innovation around a product that hasn’t changed much since the mid-2000′s. If you’re interested in following Digg’s progress, the company has a sign-up list … along with a highly depressing countdown until Google Reader is really dead.

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Twitter has appointed Adam Messinger, formerly the company’s VP of application development, as the new Twitter CTO, according to his Twitter profile and as reported by AllThingsD.

The company has been shaking up its leadership recently and making new appointments, having made Ali Rowghani the new chief operating officer and named Mike Gupta to chief financial officer position back in December.

Twitter has not yet responded with a comment on Messinger’s new role.

Messinger was previously Twitter’s VP for application development, and before that he was vice president for development at Oracle. Twitter has had a decent run lately on the infrastructure side with its uptime, but is rolling out a number of new product features as it gears up for stronger monetization efforts and a potential upcoming IPO

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Less than a week after rolling out a brand new news feed design that emphasizes recommended content and a cleaner layout, Facebook announced similar tweaks to its Timeline product on Wednesday, involving a simplified layout and sections for users to note their favorites books and movies.

The updated Timeline, originally launched in September 2011, will allow users to designate their favorite books, movies, and music, which makes sense as the updated news feed has specific tabs where users can view recommendations and news related to categories like music (Om wrote last week that he thought adding an emphasis on music was a smart element to the re-design). Clearly, Facebook needs more users thinking of the site as a place to talk about music, and emphasizing this on Timeline could help.

If users see a book or movie that a friend has marked as a favorite, Facebook will make it easier for the user to mark it as their favorite as well.

When asked about the influence of the news feed changes on the Timeline updates, a Facebook spokesperson replied that “The new News Feed and timeline work together to now show a more visual experience. Both make you and your friends’ activity and app stories more prominent,” and it’s hard not to draw a link between the timing and similarities between the two changes.

Users will also have a dedicated space on the Timeline to show their activity in other apps, and Facebook used Instagram as an example in announcing the Timeline tweaks. While CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that Instagram wouldn’t receive preferential treatment on the Facebook platform, it’s clear that the new Timeline is a way for users to incorporate their photos on the site, a feature that didn’t get much mention last week. And it could encourage other third-party developers to integrate more heavily with Facebook’s platform.

The Timeline is also getting an updated design that’s more in line with the new news feed, with a cleaner look and simpler layout. The company said it would be rolling out the changes over the next few weeks.

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Want to know what U.S. smartphone adoption might look like next year? You’d do well to start by taking a look at today’s teenagers, who are owning smartphones and accessing the internet through mobile in increasing numbers.

A new study set to release Tuesday night from the Pew Research Center finds that one in four American teenagers accesses the internet primarily through mobile; about three quarters of those teens own cell phones, and half of that group uses smartphones. The report, titled “Teens and Technology 2013,” surveyed 802 teenagers (ages 12-17), as well as their parents, to better understand how U.S. teenagers are using technology.

The major mobile carriers in the United States found that adult smartphone adoption in the United States hit 50 percent in August 2012, and teenagers aren’t far behind, nearing almost 40 percent at this point.

Here were some statistics we found most interesting from the report, which can be found on the Pew Research Center website:

• Almost all teenagers — 95 percent — use the internet, and 93 percent can access a computer at home
• 74 percent of teenagers get on the internet somewhat occasionally via phones and tablets, and one in four of them access the internet primarily through mobile
• 78 percent of teenagers own a cell phone and 47 percent of those teenagers have smartphones specifically
• 37 percent of all teenagers in the United States own smartphones, an increase from the 23 percent in 2011
• Tablet computer ownership marks 23 percent of teenagers, which is about the same percentage among U.S. adults
• While girls and boys are equally likely to own smartphones, girls aged 14-17 are much more likely than boys of the same age to get on the intenret primarily through mobile (34 percent of girls versus 24 percent of boys)
• Interesting, teenagers from lower income families are more likely to access the internet primarily through cell (30 percent of teens from households earning less than $30,000 per year, compared to 14 percent from households earning $50,000-$74,999 and 24 percent from households at more than $75,000.)

And probably to no one’s suprise, teenagers are the age group most likely to be accessing the internet, still out pacing older users, particularly those over 65, by a wide margin:

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Businesses and bloggers posting photos to Pinterest will now have a better way to monitor whether people are actually clicking on those images.

The popular online pinboard launched a web analytics service Tuesday morning. Pinterest wrote in a blog post  that accounts will now be able to monitor clicks and pins around photos:

“If you have a verified website, you’ll get information about how many people have pinned from your site, how many people have seen these pins, and how many people visited your site from Pinterest. We’ll also show you a selection of your most repinned, most clicked, and most recent pins so you have a better idea of what’s popular. For example, if you have a travel blog, you’ll be able to see whether people are pinning your ski vacation posts or beach vacation posts more.”

Pinterest recently raised a massive $200 million funding round led by Valiant Capital Management that put the company’s valuation at $2.5 billion. It had previously raised $100 million in May 2012. Pinterest began rolling out options for businesses in November 2012, so adding an analytics platform for users to measure who’s clicking on photos and engaging with accounts is a logical next step.

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When it comes to SXSW, it appears that the accepted mentality is go big or go home. And that doesn’t just apply to raging parties, open bars, or the number of times you say the word “innovate.”

As The Onion so perfectly noted, SXSW is a haven for marketers and advertisers looking to make more people aware of their companies and products. But a tent and a sign doesn’t exactly cut it here (sorry, Samsung Galaxy tent.) This is a time for the big guns. And people went all out.

Below are photos of some of the most absurd or bizarre marketing stunts we saw this weekend. Know of one we shouldn’t miss? You can leave a comment or tweet at us if we should check something else out:

 

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Bit.ly, the data company best known for helping its customers understand who is clicking on their links, announced Monday that CEO Peter Stern will be stepping down. The company did not give much explanation for Stern’s departure in a short blog post Monday:

“Bitly is announcing today that Peter Stern has resigned to pursue other interests. “Peter has been a key leader and contributor to the Company,” said Bitly Board member Sam Mandel. “In particular he has been instrumental in transforming Bitly into a successful business while growing its unparalleled data set. We are very happy that he will remain a shareholder and supporter.””

Stern was previously the founder and CEO of Zenbe, a mobile and web-based collaboration service that was acquired for talent by Facebook in 2010.

Bit.ly released a new API in January to allow companies to track the flow of news and information on Twitter and across the web, and has been focused on providing more real-time analysis. We’ll be talking about some of the challenges associated with real-time data at our Structure Data conference next week in New York City.

“Bit.ly is in a great position to see this kind of social data. We see a slice of what people are sharing and reading across the social web. So this is a way to start to put that power in the hands of people who can build interesting things with it,”  Hilary Mason, Bit.ly’s chief scientist, said in an interview in January.

Bit.ly is a company that grew out of Betaworks, and it shortened 8.4 billion links in 2012. Bit.ly raised $15 million led by Khosla Ventures this summer and has rasied more than $28 million in total.

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Looking for digital inspiration, or staring at an empty computer screen? Even at the tech nerd mecca that is SXSW in Austin, designer Von Glitschka has some radical advice for you: Close your laptop, shut off your iPad, and pick up a pencil. Open a paper notebook. And give doodling a shot.

“The computer is great, but it’s become a crutch for creative people,” he said. “My computer makes me more efficient … but that said, it’s just a tool. What designers need to do more today than ever before is bring a balance between analog and their digital skills. Because the methods that worked in the past can only benefit and enhance your work going forward.”

As a doodler and casual artist myself, I’m a huge fan of iPad apps like Paper that let you turn your tablet into a digital drawing and painting device. Even if you don’t consider yourself an artist, per say, you’re probably familiar with apps like Draw Something.

But Glitschka went back as far as cave drawings and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics to remind us that sometimes, digital isn’t always better, and drawing with paint and pencils can kickstart the creative process when computers fall short. In fact, some of our most popular logos and ads these days come from drawing methods popularized much earlier, such as Picasso’s use of line drawings that we now see in ads all over the place:

“There’s a common misconception that doodling shows that you’re not paying attention,” he said, but “doodling improves your brain recall by 30 percent.”

It’s too easy for design students to get caught up in computer programs when drawing is still an essential skill, he said, but drawing can open doors for journalists like Mathew Cook who brought the Iraq War to life through pen and paper, or art students who forget that as designer Saul Bass said, “design is thinking made visual.”

Bass designed iconic American images like the AT&T bell logo, the United Airlines tulip logo, or the racing credits in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. But even if most of us know Bass’s work from the television or computer screens, he reminded designers not to forget the art of drawing on paper:

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As Nate Silver discussed earlier today at SXSW in Austin on Sunday, the polarization of cable news and politics means that if you’re a serious Rachel Maddow fan, there’s only a tiny chance that you also vote Republican, and the same is true of Sean Hannity listeners and chances they’ll go for Democrats.

But as we change where we get our news and turn to places like Twitter for information and verification of facts, it’s important to ask how that polarization will translate to social media – if it will at all. Several journalists discussing the future of news dissemination (something we’ll also be discussing at paidContent Live in April) tied these issues to those of crowdsourced news, particularly in the Middle East, when the tensions between accuracy and access are most apparent.

NBC correspondant Ayman Mohyeldin made an interesting argument about verification, arguing that people should be free to select the accounts they want to follow and personally decide whether to trust that information or not, just as they tune into particular cable shows in the United States and apply their own sense of skepticism to Maddow and Hannity.

“You ultimately choose which channels to watch,” he said. “There’s no reason that should be different in who you follow.”

The argument puts a good deal of trust in the user’s judgement and takes some pressure off journalists or random people on Twitter to present accurate information, but it’s an idea that fellow panelist Andy Carvin has popularized to much controversy recently. The idea came under fire during the spread of misinformation on Twitter during Hurricane Sandy, and certainly has its detractors:

The end user is responsible for deciding who they trust, @AymanM says. True, but most don’t have the expertise to decide. #nextnews #sxsw—
Eric Carvin (@EricCarvin) March 10, 2013

But it’s a good reminder that even if we think of cable news as being particularly polarizing right now, news consumption and opinions on Twitter might not be all that different.

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