Author: Liz Gannes

Yelp, like Facebook and Zynga before it, has taken a large late-stage funding round that includes measures to cash out employee shares, effectively negating internal pressure for a public offering to make early employees rich. As had been reported but not confirmed, Elevation Partners announced today it was buying $25 million worth of Yelp’s Series E preferred shares plus up to $75 million more from vested employees and other eligible shareholders.

San Francisco-based Yelp had been in widely publicized negotiations to be acquired by Google in December, but they fell through. Clearly the local reviews company is now setting itself up to take the independent route. Yelp said in a release it had 26 million uniques in December, with its number of reviews doubling last year to top 9 million.

Yelp, which has put much effort into cultivating reviewers and negotiating its tricky relationships with local businesses, was to some extent left out of the recent hype cycle associated with creative uses of mobile location, social connections and reviews by companies like Foursquare and Gowalla. However Yelp recently introduced a mobile check-in function and now surfaces user visits in reviews.

The Elevation funding, which comes along with managing partner Marc Bodnick taking a seat on Yelp’s board, is to be used for growth in Canada and Western Europe as well as for mobile application development.

Yelp’s revenue was reportedly $30 million for 2009, which might not have been enough to excite the public markets. Elevation joins the Russian investor DST, which provided similar rounds for Facebook and Zynga, helping these startups find a middle ground between being acquired and going public. While many had hoped an IPO from a solid consumer Internet startup would liven up the stock market in 2010, Facebook has already declared itself out of the running.

Though its web site has been blocked by Chinese censors since last June, Twitter is working on utilizing the distributed nature of its service to become available to Chinese users, said CEO Evan Williams at the World Economic Forum in Davos, according to a report by the Financial Times.

Williams was quite vague, and it’s not clear what it is that Twitter could do itself (you’re welcome to post your theories in the comments!), but he spoke of “technological ways” and “interesting hacks” that could utilize the thousands of access points to Twitter’s network.

In the U.S., at least, the greater Twitter ecosystem is estimated to have twice as much traffic as Twitter.com does.

Williams also gave kudos to Google for standing up to Chinese censorship, but said his company was too small to do the same. He said China and other totalitarian government’s “very being is against what we are about.”

Williams was speaking on a panel with folks from Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, who reportedly declined to take as strong a stand against censorship as he did.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz trumpeted the comeback of display advertising on the company’s fourth-quarter call with analysts today by saying: “Frankly, our competition is television.” Yahoo’s display revenue grew 26 percent on a sequential basis, to $503 million, down just 1 percent from the same three-month period a year ago. Bartz said larger advertisers are now getting back in the mix, ready to spend significant money — often out of what used to be their TV budgets.

That “makes video really important,” said Bartz, adding that along with social features, Yahoo expects to integrate video across all of its properties this year. “Social and video should not exist in a silo,” she said. Bartz pointed to the success of Yahoo’s TV recap show “Primetime in No Time” (see NewTeeVee coverage) which saw a high of 12 million daily streams on one occasion in November — larger than the “24″ season premiere on television, she pointed out. Bartz also highlighted a deal for more original content production with IAC’s new programming venture, Electus, led by Ben Silverman.

While few online video content companies have had the opportunity for exits post-YouTube, that might change in 2010. Bartz, who has said in the past she wants to acquire video companies, despite Yahoo’s rocky history with both video technology and original video creation, called 2010 a year of “acquisitions and investments to make Yahoo even stronger.” It would not be, she said, “about divestitures.”

A key area of acquisitions will be for companies that have audience, content and community, especially in a niche, said Bartz (other shopping categories are technology and new geographies). She didn’t name any names, but from my reporting on the video market I can think of plenty that fit that bill — say, Next New Networks, Worldwide Biggies or Howcast. Though web video companies generally get more creative than just display advertising, they help connect the dots for Yahoo to compete with television.

Bartz promised would-be acquisition targets that, unlike in the past (like with white-label video site Maven Networks, which cut off customers only a little over a year past being bought for $160 million), Yahoo is now committed to “post-deal accountability.” Meanwhile, Yahoo’s not the only acquirer in the hunt. AOL just paid $36.5 million for StudioNow and its community of video freelancers.

Related GigaOM Pro Content:

• The Emergence and Evolution of Over-the-Top Video

Now here’s an idea that could be really cool: applying the Threadless, buy-on-demand, customer-voted online store model to something much more high-end and design-oriented: home furniture. That’s what Fashion4Home, a Berlin-based startup launching in the U.S. today, is doing. They company has already had preliminary success in the German market, shipping its first products in time for Christmas and now bringing to the U.S. about 80 designer-originated and crowd-influenced models, ranging from lamps to couches at prices ranging from $29 to $999.

It’s early days and there’s a lot of executing to be done, but the less-than-one-year-old Fashion4Home has put together a team of top e-commerce and retail folks from Europe and raised Series A funding from Holtzbrinck Ventures and Rocket Internet (aka the famous German Samwer brothers). It’s also gathered a crew of furniture designers who are receptive to the idea of feedback and enthusiastic about improved turnaround time to see their products and get paid for them.

While the process of furniture design — sketching, pitching, prototyping, manufacturing, shipping, selling — can last a year or more, Fashion4Home cuts it down dramatically. After a feedback period, the company farms out the manufacturing to one or more of the firms it’s working with, and has a product for customers in about eight weeks, said co-founder and managing director Just Beyer in an interview on Monday. Shipping is free, and orders are placed once a week. Once demand ceases, a product is retired (that’s the plan, at least; it’s so early it hasn’t happened yet).

Users who contribute feedback have no obligation to buy, but they do get a 10 percent discount on the final product if they vote on it. Because all furniture that’s produced has already been paid for, and avoids ever sitting in a showroom waiting for a buyer, Fashion4Home can charge significantly less for it.

But then, online furniture buying is a tiny market; even Beyer, who’s trying to advocate it, says only 5 percent of U.S. furniture sales today are online, and 2 percent in Germany. Still, it’s the kind of sector you can see taking off, especially when free shipping and a good return policy are involved.

The only thing I don’t like so far about Fashion4Home is the chintzy name, but Beyer explained that he hopes his sped-up furniture development process can better bring a sense of trends and fashion to the furniture world. Personally, I’d be set for quite a few years with a nice-looking couch that I helped design and bought for a good price.

HipChat, a new self-funded startup from the folks who sold web calendar HipCal to Plaxo right out of college in 2006, is launching today an Adobe AIR corporate group chat client.

With a look very similar to 37signals‘ web chat product Campfire, but with some added features such as one-to-one messaging, notification noises and file-sharing support, HipChat is targeting startups as customers — its largest plan maxes out at 100 people.

There are already lots of products filling this need for casual and convenient corporate communications — for instance, Socialcast (which, like us, is funded by True Ventures, where Om Malik is a venture partner) and Yammer, or an IRC client. However, in just a 30-day private beta period, HipChat reports it had 500 companies sign up and more than 100,000 messages sent. And some of these users are already paying. So that’s a pretty good sign it’s not superfluous!

However, I think the issue with these tools is that it often isn’t enough to do one thing well in the corporate environment. When your paying customers are asking for more and more features it’ll be hard to avoid being a general collaboration tool.

With Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly criticizing China’s Internet censorship, the Chinese government has gone on the offensive, denying Google’s insinuation from earlier this month that it’s been involved in hacking email accounts and labeling calls for an open Internet as self-interested fallacies.

Now maybe I’ve been brainwashed by U.S. propaganda and Google is simply the U.S. government’s “chess piece,” as China claims, but I found some of the Chinese commentary about Internet freedom seriously offensive. One such example came from an article in Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily (via the Wall Street Journal):

“It was America that initiated Internet warfare, using YouTube videos and Twitter micro-blog misinformation to split, incite, and sow discord between the conservative and reform factions…to bring about large-scale bloodshed in Iran.”

This comment comes from Yan Xuetong, head of the Institute of International Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, who was quoted in the Communist Party-backed Global Times (via the New York Times):

“As the global landscape is undergoing profound irreversible shifts, the calculated free-Internet scheme is just one step of a U.S. tactic to preserve its hegemonic domination.”

And this, again from the People’s Daily (via the AP):

“In reality, this ‘Internet freedom’ that it is marketing everywhere is nothing but a diplomatic strategy, and only an illusion of freedom.”

Image by Flickr user googlisti.

The U.S. Military launched in October a social networking site called recruiting videos (see below). Though many of our readers are probably not eligible to join, the concept was intriguing, so we followed up to learn more.

The idea behind milBook (which along with wiki and blog tools is grouped into something called “milSuite”) is for the Department of Defense to get a dose of Web 2.0 flavor, said officials for the Army’s MilTech Solutions group. “milSuite’s aim is to provide those serving our Military the same experience they take for granted in the public domain, behind the security of a firewall,” explained Justin Filler, deputy MilTech Solutions, in an email interview.

Filler clearly wants milBook to be as open as possible, allowing military employees to share “official and sometimes sensitive information” in a way they hadn’t been able to do so before due to geography and rank. He said milBook members come from every level of military service, from privates to three-star generals.

“We understand there is information that needs to be more secure, so we advise and offer the ability to label appropriately,” he said. “At this point we are seeing a nice variety of both open and closed groups so that is a nice surprise in a traditionally closed environment.”

Bundle.com launched this week a free data visualization site for personal spending. The company, founded last June with Series A funding from strategic investors Citigroup, Microsoft and Morningstar, helps users understand how they match up to others in their demographics and locations with regards to monthly household expenditures. So for instance, you could see how your budget ranks vs. other people in your neighborhood of your age and income level. Or if you were thinking about moving to a new neighborhood, you could get a sense of whether you’d be able to afford living there.

New York City-based Bundle’s data currently comes from Citi and the U.S. government, and covers categories like shopping, food and health. Within each category, you can see how much people who live near you spend, what merchants they commonly patronize, and how that compares to the rest of the U.S. (No surprise, the largest U.S. grocery shopping destination within the system is Wal-Mart, followed by Wal-Mart Supercenters. In my San Francisco zip code, it’s Safeway followed by Trader Joe’s.)

A core challenge for the site is balancing anonymity vs. detail, said CEO Jaidev Shergill, who incubated Bundle while still in his former role at Citi’s Growth Ventures Unit. That goes for users; while Citi’s spending data clearly needs to be anonymized, if it’s made too vague it’s not useful; and for advertisers, who are very interested in detailed targeting.

Though early reports had said Bundle wanted to compete directly with Mint (which was sold to Intuit in September for $170 million), at the moment Bundle doesn’t have personal finance management tools. However Shergill said that early users (the site opened Wednesday) are asking to get more hands-on with their own accounts, so it’s likely that Bundle will try to integrate with Mint or build its own version.

Bundle has put effort into content creation, with an editorial team writing articles and quizzes and picking out interesting data points (like “Young, wealthy, and still shopping at Target” or “What’s your spending type?“) and a community message board. But for now, its main asset is the pretty bubble graphs and charts. Coming soon, said Shergill, will be local data sets for rents and mortgages as well as saving.

Google HQ

Google did well in the fourth quarter, giving the company runway to talk about its next wave of initiatives. Specifically, executives that said alongside the larger category of display advertising, mobile will be the No. 1 growth area in the next year, with significant revenue to accompany the widespread uptake of mobile devices that can handle data.

With phone features like GPS and cameras, and the incorporation of personalization, social and local features, Google SVP of product management, Jonathan Rosenberg, said on today’s earning call for press and analysts, “There is potential to make this mobile web better than the PC web.” Rosenberg said advertisers are also wising up to mobile, finding that including their phone number or address will increase click-through rates. Further, targeting tools and analytics are improving monetization rates. However the company declined to break out mobile revenue.

On the device side, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he felt the Android strategy has shown to be “a pretty clear success at this point.” He also sought to clarify Google’s approach on its own device, the Nexus One: “What the Nexus One is really about is a new way of buying a phone. We think that’s a natural evolution of a particular model. It does not exclude other models.”

The other interesting takeaway was a Schmidt comment with regard to Google’s stance on China. “We would like to stay in China, and we remain quite committed to being there,” he said, emphasizing that as company talks with the Chinese government about recent security breaches it continues to censor search results and operate its China business unchanged.

Related research: Google’s Mobile Strategy (GigaOM Pro subscription required)

Many people only use Twitter to watch and hear from other people, often celebrities. To that end, Seesmic is reversing the trend of adding more and more features to Twitter clients, releasing today a tweet visualization tool called Seesmic Look, which it’s describing as “a visually rich and engaging way for users to keep track of the people, topics, news and brands from one of the most popular social networks in Twitter.” This is a tweet consumption tool, not tweet production — you don’t have to log in to Twitter to use it.

Look is currently only available for Windows (old school!) and features the very first “powered by Twitter” logo for a third-party app through a formal contract with Twitter. Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur would not, however, disclose the terms of the agreement.

What’s very smart about how Seesmic is doing this is that brands will be able to pay for “channels” on Seesmic Look, which display their tweets and/or related topics and news, then distribute the branded software to their fans. Le Meur said this would cost a “fixed monthly fee,” waived right now for launch demos by folks such as Ellen DeGeneres, Reggie Bush, Kim Kardashian and even Time.com. You’ll notice this is the first time Le Meur is actually talking about Seesmic making money; in the past he had waved it off as a future priority.

“We know Seesmic Desktop does not fit the needs of mainstream users simply because it’s by nature complex,” Le Meur said in an email. “People who heard about Twitter for the first time watching CNN or Oprah don’t need multiple Twitter accounts support and will never know what an hashtag is, like they never have heard about trackbacks or RSS feeds and never will.” He said he hoped power users would also enjoy sitting back and watching Twitter as well.

Seesmic has raised $12 million from investors including Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners.

Managing your social media presence at times seems like a full-time job, but for some people it actually is one. And professional social media-ites need professional-grade tools to do what they do. A new service called Spredfast, launching tomorrow from Austin, Texas-based Social Agency and already used by IBM, HP, AOL, the Sierra Club, Cisco, Intel, Monster.com and the Salvation Army, is a completely web-based social dashboard with more features than you can shake a stick at.

Spredfast, which Social Agency only first demoed for IBM last September, already faces competition from companies such as Objective Marketer, CoTweet, HootSuite, Ping.fm (now owned by Seesmic) and Involver. (Time to call it a sector!)

However, the Spredfast product, which costs $50-$100 per month per campaign, offers these key features:

• It is multi-user, with multiple access levels, calendaring and scheduling tools.

• It’s integrated with a whole bunch of services: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr, with support for WordPress, Blogger, Moveable Type, Lotus Live Connections, Drupal and most XML-RPC-enabled blogging platforms. Users can respond to conversations from within the site.

• It offers its own metrics system that helps you compare week to week how your brand or campaign is doing. So, for instance, getting a new fan on Facebook or getting a “like” on a post would earn you a point. Then you can see in a pretty chart how your engagement is trending vs. previous weeks.

Plus, said co-founders Kenneth Cho and Scott McCaskill, upcoming features include: importing conversion stats from Bit.ly links, exporting reports to PDF and email, and an iPhone app.

Cho and McCaskill, who started their business making Facebook apps three years ago and have bootstrapped since then, say their goal is to make Spredfast as full-featured as possible. Which is kind of crazy, when you consider it’s purely a web app for now — that’s an awful lot of enterprise-level integrations and controls and reports to cram into a few web pages. But considering the two have already gotten such high-level customers in the last four months, there’s definitely a market for this.

After cleansing myself of multiple generations of email list subscriptions over the years, I’m surprised at how happy I now am to receive automated alerts every morning from services like Groupon, RueLaLa and Travelzoo. Maybe offer-based newsletters are just more relevant than they used to be; maybe they’ve figured out the right time to get me. In any event, not only am I not upset to see the emails in my inbox, but I actually open many of them.

If you believed prognosticators, you might have thought email was well on its way to death by irrelevance with an assist by spam. But now, as of today, email will also be the primary way Facebook applications correspond with users. That’s because, in an effort to give application makers more responsibility and control of their communications, Facebook will now allow apps to require an email address (or an anonymized Facebook proxy). In the short term, it could mean a lot more clutter in your inbox, as apps notify you of receipts for things you’ve purchased, remind you to come back and visit them, and tell you about new feature launches. But eventually, that should normalize as you uninstall the ones that abuse their email privileges.

What application makers used to do was tell you of such happenings via Facebook notifications, which are being phased out. Facebook is actually weakening its own platform status by pulling itself out as a middleman and encouraging apps to correspond directly with their users. In the past, social web platforms were much more controlling of their users. Not to knock on Ning (though it can probably take it), but I remember a few years ago trying to contact the members of a group I ran there. The only way to do so was via a mass email to every member, written in a tiny form field on Ning’s site that continually timed out and deleted my message when I tried to send it. Ning has certainly fixed the bug by now, but in a broader sense the tide has clearly shifted.

So much so that some application developers are concerned that emailing users will be less effective than contacting them through channels on Facebook.

Further reading:

• The Social Web Prays at Email’s Altar
• Email: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated (GigaOM Pro subscription required)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

Some of my favorite Facebook users are my aunts on my dad’s side. In the last two years, since they joined the site, I’ve gotten a window into their lives that I never had having grown up on the West Coast, far away from the family core. I’ve learned about what movies they’re seeing, their politics and religious celebrations, their weather, their pride in their kids (and my cousins), and the casual games they play. And without fail, they comment on each other’s posts.

While sometimes status updates and comments provide a window into the day-to-day, other times they showcase amazing communication that I might otherwise never see, such as memories of a loved relative on the anniversary of her death. I feel privileged to observe and sometimes participate in these conversations, and thankful that social web services have helped expose them to me.

On that note, Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff noted today that the firm had recently observed a “new behavior” in its two and a half years of tracking and classifying social technology usage, and made a new category to describe such users: “conversationalists.” Bernoff defines conversationalists as “people who update their social network status to converse” on at least a weekly basis. According to Forrester surveys, the category is 56 percent female, more so than any other group, with 70 percent aged 30 and older. All of which fits quite nicely with my anecdotal evidence.

At 33 percent of online consumers, conversationalists are a larger group than Forrester’s “creators” (now 24 percent of that population), but much smaller than “spectators” (now 70 percent). See the full chart below; it allows for people to be part of more than one category. The conversationalist kind of activity happens prototypically on Twitter, notes Bernoff, but actually more commonly on Facebook, since that site is so much larger.

Back in 2006, the VC Brad Feld and our former columnist Robert Young were part of a blogosphere discussion about the “80-19-1 Rule” and “the Fat Belly.” The idea was that between core elite contributors (thought to be a very small sliver — perhaps 1 percent — of a user-generated site like Digg’s content) and the mass of casual spectators (say, 80 percent, in line with the Pareto principle), there’s a middle ground of important engaged contributors.

It seems to me that these theories are coming to life. Social services are now figuring out how to facilitate open participation by a group that produces content for each other. These updates and conversations reach a wider group than they might have in the past, but still quite a small audience for the web. And sometimes that’s a beautiful thing.

When Yahoo announced in early December that it would integrate with Facebook Connect, many considered it an admission of the long-reigning portal’s defeat in the battle to be the hub for people’s online identities. Om read the deal as a signal of Yahoo’s “technological irrelevan[ce],” and by extension, the “ultimate validation” of Facebook.

Cody Simms and Chris Yeh of Yahoo

Yahoo certainly made itself a target by pre-announcing a non-monetary integration set to “begin in the first half of 2010″ but offering little to no information as to what, exactly, that meant. However when it comes to the social web, the company does have a master plan, said Yahoo’s Cody Simms and Chris Yeh in a visit to GigaOM this week. (This follows previous posts I’ve written about Facebook and Google’s master plans for the social web in 2010.)

What Yahoo wants to do is aggregate its users’ activities from around the web. The Facebook Connect integration is the first in a string of coming deals with other social sites, said Simms, who is director of product management for the Yahoo application platform. It is also supposed to be a deeper form of content and user sharing than that available to those sites that simply integrate Facebook Connect on their own (but again, there’s nary a mockup to give some actual shape to the deal).

2009 was a behind-the-scenes building year for Yahoo’s social aggregation strategy, said Simms and Yeh, who’s head of the Yahoo developer network. The company has finally created a common platform layer for its many, many products — with more than 80 of them integrated since last April. It’s also allowed outside applications to come onto its platform, for instance Mint on My Yahoo, through OpenSocial.

And now, at the center of Yahoo’s new open social strategy, is a product called Yahoo Updates, which consists of activity streams shown in Yahoo Mail, on its front page, in Yahoo Messenger clients and on its toolbars. They are already functional; users receive a feed of updates from their contacts’ participation on Yahoo media properties when they comment or rate a story, for example. So when a normal user goes about their business chatting with their friends or reading their email, they’ll also see a stream of their friends’ social activities and updates taking place on Yahoo or elsewhere.

Yahoo users’ primary mode is consumption, said Simms, so that sort of activity will remain the core of Updates. But what the Facebook integration will do is enable that feed to be interactive — so a user could see a post from Facebook and comment back on it, for example. And a user’s Yahoo activity could show up in their Facebook stream. The concept and execution is quite similar to AOL’s Socialthing/Lifestream efforts.

What about integrating with Yahoo’s own services? This will happen in a number of ways:

• In the next couple of months Yahoo plans to start allowing comments on its incredibly popular News, Finance and Sports sites. While that will undoubtedly set off unfathomable floods of comments on the story pages, you’ll get the ones from your contacts brought right to you.

• Right now the people you see in your Updates are those with whom you have explicit Yahoo Connections. Next the company will add in your Mail and Messenger contacts. (Google is also planning to make use of existing social ties in its communications products.)

• Yahoo will also try to make helpful content connections itself. So if an update says “Just saw ‘Avatar,’” Yahoo might drop in the appropriate movie trailer.

The beauty of the Yahoo Updates product is that it isn’t really a product. And there won’t be any “big bang release,” said Simms. Unlike similar efforts like FriendFeed or Cliqset, which are great at aggregating social activity, Updates doesn’t require users to do anything but go to their friendly and familiar Yahoo sites — something millions of people do every day. And Yahoo should be able to attract developers to build interesting things because it can offer them an tremendous amount of traffic.

But Yahoo will need to be really smart about integrating services in order to ensure that the combined user experience is better than going to all of them individually. And that’s going to be hard, because often someone else owns the social graph, users syndicate their updates all over the place, commenting and rating systems differ — in other words, the whole thing could end up an uninformative, repetitive muddle.

Photo courtesy of Yahoo Anecdotal via Flickr.

Not content to control only their own domains, social web sites are trying to conquer those of everyone else — by becoming the dominant log-in system for the web. Facebook, of course, is off to a quick and convincing start. Inside Facebook reports that MySpace is now using Facebook Connect for its Fan Video feature, which is a kind of JibJab/ElfYourself-like thing where you insert a picture of yourself into a music video. To be fair, this is not so unusual; for instance, Google’s YouTube — a much bigger video site — integrated Facebook Connect last June. However, reports suggest that MySpace will give up the ghost on its own portable profile efforts (it had previously pushed a “Data Availability” product) and use Facebook Connect site-wide instead.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch says that Twitter will soon launch a full competitor to Facebook Connect, which would bundle the company’s existing off-site log-in system with a platform for pulling data back to Twitter that’s more smoothly packaged than its current API support. That move seems overdue.

Google also has its own hat in the ring with Google Friend Connect, and is closely aligned with taking an open standards approach when possible, which may help it win collaborators.

Though Facebook is currently furthest along, many sites will be happy to integrate all of these options and let the market decide. Users, in the meantime, are left with the question: Between what Google knows about you, what Facebook knows about you, or what Twitter knows about you, which is the face you want to present to the rest of the web?

Cake Financial, a social web service for sharing stock portfolios, has been acquired by E-Trade. The service is to be shut down, information destroyed and account payments reimbursed, according to a thinly positive landing page letter from Cake CEO Steven Carpenter now blocking access to the site. “We are honored to be a part of the E-trade family and believe that E-trade can make the vision we had for all investors a reality,” it reads. No word yet from E-Trade about the deal, the terms of which were not disclosed.

Cake, which launched in 2007, had seen minimal traffic over the past year, according to public records; Compete reports less than 25,000 unique visitors per month. TechCrunch reports the Motley Fool may have also been interested in buying the company. Cake had raised a $1.26 million Series B round from KPG Ventures and Alsop-Louie Partners last year.

Cake competed with Covestor and StockTwits (which, like us, is funded by True Ventures). Another social financial service, Mint, was acquired by Intuit for $170 million in September.

It’s downright impossible to be a private person these days. Sure, you could stay off Twitter and Facebook and lock the doors. But whether it’s a colleague uploading a drunken picture of you online, a personal letter to a friend stored on their webmail provider’s servers or a random hater posting about you on a message board, much of the information about you on the Internet is completely out of your hands. What do celebrities do about this problem? Hire an entourage of people to manage their reputation.

But few us have the luxury of an entourage, so instead we might be looking for help from companies like ReputationDefender or Visible Technologies, which collectively raised more than $30 million for reputation management this week. As ReputationDefender CEO Michael Fertik put it to me, “Everybody is now the star of their own movie on the Internet whether they like it or not, and the majority of content about you is not going to be put there by you anymore.”

I spoke to Fertik in light of his company raising $8.65 million in Series B funding in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and Bessemer Venture Partners. Redwood City, Calif.-based ReputationDefender provides consumers and small businesses with tools to manage, analyze and remediate their reputations online.

Though I personally don’t feel paranoid enough to invest in this sort of a product in my own name, I can understand why other people, especially entrepreneurs and companies big and small, might need a reputation manager. What’s said about you online can very quickly come to define you. And in that vein, Visible Technologies, a online reputation management and social media engagement platform for larger brands, today announced $22 million in Series C funding led by Investor Growth Capital and including existing investors Centurion Holdings, Ignition Partners, In-Q-Tel and WPP (yes, that’s the In-Q-Tel that’s the investment arm of the CIA — social media marketing and national security go hand in hand these days!).

So why is reputation such a loaded term, garnering millions of dollars from VCs?

Reputation management for individuals could really be called privacy monitoring, said Fertik. And reputation management for brands could really be seen as interacting with customers online. Now that everyone has a public image, regular people and big companies have a lot more in common with celebrities than they did before.

So what’s next? Certainly there’s a lot more to be done to get control over that information. For instance, ReputationDefender has little access to info that’s below a registration or privacy protection layer on a social network (Fertik said that ReputationDefender has a deal to get better access to social networks than search engines do, but it still has quite a ways to go on the “deep web.”) The ReputationDefender offering is kind of a cross between the hypothetical social media dashboard I’ve been hoping for and an inversion of “people search” products like Spock (used mainly to research other people, not yourself)…with an ample overlay of worry. Fertik contended that improving his product is more of a problem of business development and social norms than integrating technology, however.

There’s a parallel to the FTC requiring bloggers and tweeters to act like publishers and disclose sponsorship (though it’s come out that apparently celebrities are exempt because it’s expected that they get free rides?!). Everyone on the web is a public person now, as far as what you say yourself and what other people say about you.

By the way, if we’re all celebrities now, let’s hope we get some of the perks. That means cutting to the front of lines, being paid to go to parties and driving a Ferrari, right?