Sam Lessin Pitches The Facebook Timeline

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Is Facebook Trying to Kill Privacy? [OPINION]

This post reflects the opinions of the author and not necessarily those of Mashable as a publication.

Facebook has finally done it. It’s just a few updates away now from euthanizing the concept of privacy, already ailing on its network.

Timelines and Open Graph, introduced at this week’s f8 conference, sit on either edge of the sword that’s just been run through privacy’s heart. It is finished. It is done. This turn of events probably makes CEO Mark Zuckerberg happy. Let’s look back:

“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘Why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’

“And then in the last five or six years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”

That was Zuckerberg’s January 2010 argument that sharing is the new social norm. But that’s only half of the sharing equation. Zuckerberg didn’t talk about the other half: privacy.

The first big change Zuckerberg revealed on stage was Timeline, the completely overhauled version of profile pages. No longer is your Facebook profile about what you did recently–now it’s about everything you’ve done on Facebook and beyond.

SEE ALSO: Facebook’s New Profiles: First Impressions

The Timeline interface lays out everything you’ve shared on Facebook. One of the new features, Map, lays out your checkins on a world map. My map is sparse because I primarily use Foursquare to share my location. But now that I see how sparse that map looks, I feel compelled to start sharing my location via Facebook.

In addition to laying out everything you already shared for the world to see, the Timeline encourages you to share more than ever about your life so far. Millions of people are likely to post their baby pictures so that the beginning of their Timelines — birth — isn’t just an empty box.

Timeline is just the appetizer. The second announcement, the launch of the new Facebook Open Graph, is what will forever transform the world’s largest social network.

There are a couple of key changes that deserve mentioning. The first is the addition of customizable actions and gestures. No longer do apps prompt you just to “like” something on Facebook. Instead, you’ll share that you “hiked a trail” or “rode your bike” or “kissed a girl” (and liked it). Any action can be shared via Facebook, and the only limit is the imagination of developers.

The second addition is the new permissions screen for giving apps access to your Facebook account. It’s more robust and explains exactly what an app will be sharing with it. The result is that the prompt will only appear once. Once you accept, the app can share exactly what you’re doing to your Facebook wall as you’re doing it.

There is no longer a “Would you like to post this to Facebook?” prompt. It just posts. When you run with Nike+, it gets posted. When you use your favorite cooking site to make a new dish, it gets posted. When you go to bed with a device tracking your sleep patterns, it gets posted.

Everything can, and eventually will, get posted. Facebook has done something nobody has ever been able to do at scale: It has enabled passive sharing.

In 2009, Mashable‘s CEO and founder Pete Cashmore argued on CNN that privacy was dead, and social media was holding the smoking gun:

“We’re living at a time when attention is the new currency: With hundreds of TV channels, billions of Web sites, podcasts, radio shows, music downloads and social networking, our attention is more fragmented than ever before.

“Those who insert themselves into as many channels as possible look set to capture the most value. They’ll be the richest, the most successful, the most connected, capable and influential among us. We’re all publishers now, and the more we publish, the more valuable connections we’ll make.”

While I agree with his assertion that in an age where attention is king, privacy is simply an illusion, I disagree about the murderer. Sure, Twitter, Flickr, Google and others played a part in privacy’s death, but Facebook made the killing blow.

But thanks to what Facebook launched at f8, we’re at the point of no return. Facebook’s passive sharing will change how we live our lives. More and more, the things we do in real life will end up as Facebook posts. And while we may be consoled by the fact that most of this stuff is being posted just to our friends, it only takes one friend to share that information with his or her friends to start a viral chain.

Sharing with just your friends doesn’t protect your privacy. I know the people at Facebook will disagree and argue that users can control what is shared with whom. But this is simply an illusion that makes us feel better about all the sharing we have done and are about to do.

We may not notice the impact on our lives immediately. But it won’t be long until your life is on display for all of your friends to see, and then we’ll all know what Facebook has wrought.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, RapidEye

The Social Analyst is a column by Mashable Editor-at-Large Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

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HOW TO: Use the New Facebook to See Who Has Unfriended You

In addition to showing users a timeline of their activity on the site throughout the years, it turns out that Facebook’s new profile provides a rundown of which friends they’ve lost.

Here’s how you can see which friends you’ve lost:

1. Enable the new Facebook timeline.2. Pick a year in the timeline and locate the “Friends” box.3. Click on “Made X New Friends.”4. Scroll through the list. Where you see an “Add Friend” box, you know that you are no longer friends with that person. If you haven’t unfriended them, they’ve unfriended you.

There’s still no real-time Facebook alert for an unfriend. But if you’re really interested in learning more and more quickly about your declining online popularity, a browser plugin like Better Facebook is a good alternative.

[via BuzzFeed]

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Facebook Platform Starts Living Up To Its Potential

This guest post was written by Joe Green, the Founder and President of Causes. Causes is the largest online platform for activism and one of the original Facebook Applications. Green’s approach to building online tools is rooted in his offline experience as a grassroots political organizer for federal, state, and local campaigns. He recently wrote a guest post on Facebook Smart Lists, and, as a launch parter at today’s f8 conference, has significant insight into how Facebook’s announcements will impact its developer platform. Disclosure: Green was an early advisor to Facebook and has a small amount of stock.

I was one of the first people to join Facebook in February of 2004, and launched one of the inaugural applications on the platform in May 2007. The new Facebook profile and Open Graph announced today, along with the launch of smart friend lists last week, is going to usher in a new era of the Facebook platform. And I believe entire industries will potentially be revolutionized by social, from travel to reviews to health to e-commerce, and of course charity.

Wait. Wasn’t this supposed to happen 4 years ago, when Facebook launched platform at the first F8? Yes it was, but it didn’t. Today Facebook Platform is known primarily for gaming. This is not to say that Facebook Platform has not accomplished a lot so far; we, for one, owe the existence of Causes to it. But it is still far from achieving its potential.

The original dream of Facebook Platform was to enable developers to build experiences that were social at their core, like Facebook Photos, without having to build their own standalone social network. Remember all of the “me to” social networks built just to have a social feature Facebook and Myspace didn’t have? I built one for political discussion called Essembly. It enabled unique and potentially transformative social interactions, but only 20,000 people ever used it.

It was in this context that Facebook launched platform, with the noble goal of making core parts of your life that are social offline equally social online, as Facebook had already done when it upended the already-mature world of photos. This aspiration was evident in many of the Platform launch apps: iLike in music, Flixster in movies, Where I’ve Been in travel, Causes in charity. (In fact, Where I’ve Been seems to be a new FB in-house app, maps). We launched Causes on Platform precisely because we believe that altruism is fundamentally social and should be core to online identity, as it is for most people offline.

When it first launched Platform, Facebook opened up every integration point they could think of, including friends lists, profile, news feed, email, and they even created new channels like requests and notifications. The main value Facebook intended to offer was providing everything a developer would need to make his or her product social. And to sweeten the deal (and I think as something of an afterthought), Facebook offered these developers some distribution. This last point, as it turned out, was key.

There were two main reasons that the first 4 years of platform played out as they did: 1) Communication Channels were overwhelmed by the distribution Facebook offered developers and 2) Facebook Profile did not offer an enduring presence for applications.

Communication Channels:

When Platform launched early in the morning on May 25th, 2007, from a ballroom at the W hotel with engineers sitting on the floor, apps grew faster than anything else in the history of the Internet. Causes was at a 1 million installs inside of a week. And the race was on. This massive growth was enabled by the opening of so many friend-to-friend promotional channels, but fueled by apps aggressively pushing users to invite their friends any way they could.

Apps grew very fast, but mostly because they would create lightweight but broad engagement, rather than deep engagement with friends.  Facebook spent the next couple years focusing on clamping down on spam on Platform, and slowly eliminated or restricted communication channels they had previously opened to developers . This was unfortunately necessary, but it also stifled the development of revolutionary applications in core utility areas because the same channels that are most ripe for abuse are also the ones providing the deepest connection between users.

Facebook’s attempts to deal with these issues also often ended up increasing spam, because as conversion rates of communications went down, developers increased volume. If you want 1 click and the conversion rate is 10% you need to send 10 messages, if you have a 1% conversion rate you need to send 100 to get that same 1 click. What succeeded on platform were, for the most part, applications that could get users to frequently and somewhat indiscriminately communicate with lots of friends.

The changes made over the past few weeks, along with those announced today, will fundamentally alter the paradigm for Facebook communication channels. Specifically, there are two main types of communication on Facebook: direct friend-to-friend, and feed posts. For the direct friend-to-friend communications, friend lists allow for appropriate targeting, therefore making more high bandwidth channels acceptable. Instead of having to send requests to donate to my birthday wish to 50 indiscriminately chosen friends, I can send an FB message or email to 8 of my close friends.

For feed posts, the new Open Graph with specific edge types allows Facebook to know a lot more about data coming into the feed and to filter accordingly. I also can do more to filter my feed manually, and I have been seeing much more interesting content in my feed as the people in my close friends list get more prominence. It turns out, perhaps against Facebook’s better judgment, that people are willing to do a bit of work to improve their experience.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that for the first time since live stream came and went, Facebook has increased the total amount of feed stories consumed with the rollout of a mixed real-time and top stories stream, which is a win for everyone publishing into the stream.

Profile

From the day Facebook launched in 2004 the profile was the most critical, and really, the only page on the site.  Only with the addition of News Feed in 2006 did attention shift away from profile.  People used to navigate the site by surfing friends’ profiles, and used their own profile as their navigational starting point.  The profile used to consist mostly of a list of interests, actively curated by the profile owner.  With the addition of news feed the entirely of your Facebook experience has moved toward representing primarily your recent and frequent activities, which is great for capturing someone in a given moment, but not the whole of the person.

For example, your favorite movie is likely not the one you most recently watched, and there is no way to represent that on the current profile except buried on the info tab. Likewise, you might only donate once a year to your favorite charity, but that one act may mean more to you than 50 moves you’ve made in a game. In other words, the current profile benefits applications that have frequent usage, such as games, but offers no way to show how deeply someone cares about something.

This was not always the case. Of all the integration points opened at the original F8, profile boxes were the ones both developers and users were most excited about. There was an entire category of apps that users did not interact with frequently but loved to have on their profile. One great application, called “Where I’ve Been”, let you put a map of the world on your profile and highlight every country you had visited. But like the communication channels, profile boxes quickly overwhelmed the profile and Facebook justifiably pared them back and then eliminated them altogether. The day the last profile boxes disappeared we received the most user complaints in our history, making it very clear to us that people want their giving to be represented as a core part of their identity.

This new version of profile, if it works correctly, should achieve a balance between displaying things you have done recently and representing a comprehensive view of who you are. Key to this will be understanding which actions you really care about, even if they happen infrequently, and which frequent actions you care less about. Facebook seems to be intending to do this algorithmically, but I bet they will end up incorporating a big dose of direct user curation, as they are now doing with friend lists. Being able to ‘star’ a story is a good start, but it will need to be able to happen more in the flow of posting.

Whatever you think of Facebook, you cannot fault it for lack of ambition. In the course of a month they have fundamentally altered pretty much every major part of their site—profile, feed, friends—sometimes more than once. User reaction will likely follow the usual pattern of initial outrage followed by gradual acceptance and embrace. The more open question is how the rest of the Internet ecosystem will react. Facebook is making its usual appeal to developers: “give us your data, and we will give you distribution and engagement.” This tradeoff has not always worked out as intended, but I think it will this time.

I am confident we will see major sectors, from music to reviews to commerce, revolutionized by authentic friend-to-friend interactions. We are fortunate at Causes to have a big start in one of the largest markets around, the $300 billion giving market. It is anyone’s guess if the other major categories will go social with their current leading companies, or if entirely new ones will emerge, like Zynga in gaming. Either way, it will be a fun ride.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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Joe Green is a Co-Founder of Causes, a popular Facebook and MySpace application.

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Social TV Just Got Real With Hulu On Facebook

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

Hulu does TV shows better than just about everyone. In fact, other than YouTube, Hulu attracts the highest level of engagement of any web video platform (with the average web viewer watching an average of 3.2 hours a month). That being said, Hulu has never done social particularly well. Sure, users interact on Hulu discussion boards, tweet clips to friends, and share shows on Facebook, but the platform has long been in need of a better way to find and share TV shows and movies.

So, today at F8, Hulu announced the launch of a brand new Facebook app, which endeavors to make the Hulu experience social. How exactly? For Hulu users this means getting to watch the video platform’s content directly within Facebook. Now you no longer have to leave Facebook to watch Hulu. And judging by all the news out of F8 today, soon you’ll never have to leave Facebook, period.

The videos you watch on Hulu are automatically shared with friends (approval is needed, thankfully). What’s more, according to Hulu’s blog entry today, the Facehulu app will give you a comprehensive glimpse into what your friends are watching, in realtime, and allow viewers to spark conversations with each other about what shows they’re watching and how bad the new season of House is.

The coolest part? As you’re watching Hulu content, be it a full show, clip, or film, you can leave comments on particular moments within the video. Oh yes. SoundCloud-style. And, naturally, once you leave a comment on a particular moment, you can then blast it out to friends to let them know how clever you are — on both Hulu and Facebook.

And for those zealous Hulu Plussers out there, you will be happy to know that the new Facebook app will give you access to your entire H+ library on Facebook, and discuss, comment and share in the same way the unwashed regular Hulu subscribers do. And, for all Hulu users, an important thing to remember: You can change your share settings at any time by clicking on the “share to feed” icon and selecting “Hulu and Facebook” or “No One. Do not share what I watch.” (Or you can go to Facebook or Hulu’s privacy settings.)

We welcome you, Hulubook. Facebulu.

“>Check it out for yourself here.

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Spotify CEO Daniel Ek On How The New Facebook Music Integration Will Work

Alexia Tsotsis currently works for TechCrunch as a writer. She is also a blogger who attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA. She majored in Writing and Art, moving to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Entertainment/Media industry. After four years of living in New York City and attending courses at New York... ? Learn More

Before I lost my voice earlier today (yes, that’s me up there asking all those questions, NOT Marge Simpson), I sat down with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek at F8. Ek and I spoke about today’s “launch” of Facebook Music, which wasn’t a music console built on top of Facebook like some had conceived, but rather a partnership built around a dozen music apps — like Rdio, Mog and Iheartradio — through Facebook’s now extended Open Graph.

In addition to sharing their own and seeing their friends’ music listening activity in the new Facebook News Ticker, users will eventually see and share all music-related activity in a Music Dashboard in the left hand corner of their Facebook profiles, if they or their friends are using a partner app like Spotify. Users can access the “Listen with a friend” feature we reported on yesterday through either feed by hitting the Play button on their friend’s update.

Responding graciously to my pressing about the rumor I heard that Spotify was to power Facebook’s universal music player, an idea which eventually got scrapped, Ek went on to reveal that, because of the new Facebook integration, Spotify will be removing its invite-only barrier — In addition to giving non-paying users six months of unlimited music listening.

Okay great, but what if you don’t want your embarrassing musical taste to be broadcast to all your friends via Facebook? Hit up Applications > Spotify (or Rdio or whatever) > App Privacy >  Only Me.

Because only you need to know that you’ve been listened to that one Kid Cudi song basically on repeat since March.

Spotify has created a lightweight software application that allows instant listening to specific tracks or albums with virtually no buffering delay. It was launched in the fall of 2008 and had approximately 10 million users by September 2010. Spotify offers streaming music from major and independent record labels including Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group, and Universal. Users download Spotify and then log onto their service enabling the on-demand streaming of music. Music can be browsed by artist, album, record...

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Wheelz: Automotive Veterans Launch P2P Campus Car Sharing Platform Backed By Former Facebook VP

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

Kicking it into fifth gear and zooming out of stealth and into the public sphere today is Wheelz, a new person-to-person car sharing platform for campuses — designed to connect students who have cars with student who need ‘em. Granted, when I first heard the basics on Wheelz, I immediately thought, “gadzooks, another car sharing platform!?” What about RelayRides, GetAround, Zimride, and Zipcar? These are all by and large great young businesses, adding value to the space; sure they’re not all targeting campuses, but I wasn’t so sure we needed another one.

Whether you feel the same way or not, Wheelz begs to differ. Launching initially at Stanford University, the startup is bringing campuses a technology and service platform that allows students and other campus dwellers to connect safely and easily — through Facebook integration, a good-looking iPhone app, and its proprietary in-car hardware system, called DriveBox.

Facebook integration and mobile apps are fairly standard for savvy online businesses today, but the latter feature isn’t. Once a user signs up for Wheelz, the startup will install the DriveBox in their car for free (installation takes about an hour), which will allow other Wheelz members to unlock the car using the startup’s iPhone app or Wheelz card. This is a great feature for those who don’t have time to meet the person to give them keys, or don’t want to (can’t) make a new key, etc.

After sign up, the company then provides a secure “Key Box” in which owners can leave the key so that renters can start the car. They Key Box also contains a gas card, so that when your car falls below a quarter of a tank, the person driving the car is responsible for filling the car up, using the gas card. The owner of the car is responsible for the price of gas, which will be deducted from the owner’s total earnings each month.

Earnings? What earnings? Well, there are very few free rides in life, my friend. The person driving your car is obliged to pay for use of your wheels, and so each car has hourly and daily prices that are established by the car’s owner. Prices will vary depending on the type of car, age of the car, use, and so on, though Wheelz contends that it is offering the cheapest solution on the market. (Also, users looking to rent for longer can also set up weekly share prices).

As to insurance, as soon as a user borrows a Wheelz car, they are covered by the startup’s million-dollar insurance policy for the entire time they’re using their car. And, according to Wheelz’s website, a user’s “personal auto insurance is in no way affected” by the startup’s coverage.

Some other nifty features? Wheelz is offering a pretty wide variety of cars, including sedans, hybrids, luxury cars, convertibles, vans, SUVs, and even a few trucks — plus, while you’re enjoying your Wheelz reservation, you’ll be able to take advantage of free, 24/7 customer support and roadside assistance.

Another piece that helps inspire confidence in the nascent startup is that it raised $2 million in seed funding, pre-launch, led by Chamath Palihaptiya, a former Facebook VP and early employee (who recently left to found the Social+Capital Partnership venture fund). Joining Palihapitiya are VC firms Felicis Ventures and Red Swan Ventures as well as an impressive list of angel investors, including Jim Freer, the former vice-chair of Ernst & Young, and Sebastien De Halleax, the founder of Playfish.

The Wheelz team also brings significant automotive experience to bear on their new venture, including founder and CEO Jeff Miller, who has spent the better part of the last three years focused on building sustainable transportation solutions, working for electric vehicle network provider Better Place. Furthermore, Akhtar Jameel, Wheelz Co-founder and CTO (and the architect behind Wheelz’ technology platform) was formerly the CEO of Mercedes-Benz R&D and has held senior product and technology positions at Daimler, Better Place and Xerox PARC.

And, um, also of note? Jameel was awarded a Smithsonian Computer World Innovations gold medal for developing the world’s first Internet connected car back in 1997.

Of course, this name-dropping doesn’t mean that Wheelz categorically predestined for success, they still need to offer a more trustworthy service than their competitors and avoid those Airbnb-type PR kerfuffles. The startup is aiming to get at the trust factor via the platform’s integration with Facebook Connect, so that students know who they’re renting their car to, seeing as they can access the social data of prospective car-sharers to make sure they’re actual people, not criminals recently out of Shawshank.

And though there’s certainly some interesting technology at play, Wheelz still has to kill the customer experience — or they will be headed to the startup deadpool in the sky just like everyone else.

“Social is changing every industry in a profound way, and we believe this is the team that’s going to revolutionize the concept of car ownership, turning cars from financial burdens into opportunities”, Palihapitiya said. “I invested in Wheelz on the strength of the executive team and its thoughtful approach to building this business and bringing it to market.”

For more on Wheelz, check out the video below:

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Facebook Announces f8 Speakers, Including Spotify And Turntable.fm CEOs

Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). ? Learn More

Facebook’s f8 developer conference is two days away and the company has been trickling out additional information related to the event, including the roster of speakers that will be appearing on its ‘Transforming Industries’ track. It includes plenty of familiar names — namely, some top executives and investors in the valley — which isn’t all that surprising.

But reading between the lines a bit, it may well give some insight as to who Facebook’s launch partners will be for the features that will debut at f8.

Among the speakers: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek will be speaking on a panel called ‘The Future of Digital Music’, which makes the much-anticipated launch of a Facebook Music platform seem all the more likely. Appearing on the same panel will be Clear Channel Chairman Bob Pittman (who, by the way, also founded MTV) and Troy Carter, CEO of Atom Factory.

Also notable is Turntable.fm CEO Billy Chasen, who is appearing on a Mobile+Social panel — perhaps we’ll see the hot social music service take part in the launch as well.

And, of course, there are plenty of well-known executives and VCs who have long been part of the Facebook ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, Zynga is the best represented, with execs speaking on two of the panels. Here’s the full list:

The Future of Digital Music:
The music landscape is evolving with new channels and innovative social experiences. Leaders in the industry will describe where things are headed.
Bob Pittman – Chairman, Clear Channel Media and Entertainment
Daniel Ek – CEO, Spotify
Troy Carter – Founder, Chairman and CEO, Atom Factory

Mobile + Social:
As mobile apps become ever more social, new opportunities are emerging. Listen to mobile developers discuss social and the future of mobile.
Paul Bettner – Vice President and General Manger, Zynga
Kristian Segerstrale – General Manager and Co-founder, Playfish
Alexa Andrzejewski – Co-Founder and CEO, Foodspotting
Billy Chasen – Co-Founder and CEO, Turntable.fm

The Rise of Social Gaming:
Social gaming is disrupting the traditional video game business. Top game executives will provide their views on the next big trends.
Barry Cottle – Executive Vice President, EA interactive, Electronic Arts
Kevin Chou – CEO, Kabam
John Pleasants – Co-President, Disney Interactive Media Group
Owen Van Natta – Chief Business Officer, Zynga

Investing in Social:
Hear leading venture capitalists discuss their views on the future of the social web.
David Sze – Partner, Greylock Partners
Matt Cohler – General Partner, Benchmark Capital
Kevin Efrusy – Partner, Accel Partners
Bing Gordon – Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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Yardsellr, The eBay For Facebook, Grows To 5 Million Strong, Rebrands; Launches Marketplace For Fashion

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

In November of last year, TechCrunch broke the news that Yardsellr, the eBay for Facebook (without the auctions), had raised $5 million in series A funding from Accel Partners. At the time, the investment seemed testament to the growing interest in the value of bringing eCommerce to Facebook in order to expose it to, you guessed it, your social graph.

Since then, Yardsellr has mostly remained under the radar, building out its platform and quietly growing its user base. Today, the startup is making a couple of big announcements, starting with a high-level rebrand. The motivation? Yardsellr Founder and CEO Danny Leffel tells me that his company wants to do for the eMarketplace what social gaming companies have done with studios. So, that means in practice that Leffel and company have started YellowDog Media, which will become the overarching entity, or studio, behind a diverse catalog of transaction-based titles. Yardsellr was the first title, and today the company is announcing their second: Sty.ly.

Sty.ly, simply put, is a new social marketplace for women’s fashion. As Yardsellr was formed to be a person-to-person marketplace built on Facebook in which users can connect with other people selling everything from vintage guitars to Hello Kitty collectibles, Sty.ly is the same — for fashionistas. (You can see here why Yardsellr has drawn comparisons with eBay — not to mention that Leffel worked at eBay for five years and knows the business well.)

With Yardsellr, users can follow products in their news feed, talk to friends, share, and when they’re interested in making a purchase, move over to Yardsellr.com to use the site’s secure transaction mechanism to complete the sale.

Since launching, Yardsellr built out over 4,000 of what it calls “blocks” — or niche communities based on particular interests — in which users can follow, browse, and connect with like-minded people based on their love of vintage guitars, or whatever the case may be. All they have to do to join one of these blocks is “like” it on Facebook. Compare this to traditional eCommerce, which focuses their verticals based on product categories. The former is inherently more communal, social, and geared towards real engagement with actual people.

Sty.ly was born out of both those “blocks”, and obviously the growing demand for eCommerce platforms that target women’s fashion in particular. Thus, with Yardsellr as the template, Sty.ly will become a social platform (based on Facebook) for those who want to buy and sell new, lightly-used and vintage items, from designer labels to boutique finds. Voice is what matters in social commerce, Leffel said, and he’s betting that the Yardsellr model — the one that’s a bit eBay and a bit Etsy — will work well for Sty.ly’s target audience, and other niche audiences going forward.

And so far, it seems to be working. In a soft launch of Sty.ly, Leffel and team found that more merchandise was sold in two weeks on Sty.ly than Yardsellr sold this year. As for Yardsellr, since November, the platform has grown steadily at a rate of 35 percent per month in terms of gross merchandise sales (in both the quantity and value of products changing hands).

According to Leffel, on any given day, there are more than 120,000 items for sale through Yardsellr, with 6,000 new items listed for sale each day. What’s more, Yardsellr has grown into a community of over 5 million people, 175K of which are monthly active users. If both titles can sustain that kind of continued growth, the company might not even need to consider a series B.

Going on from here, naturally, the company plans to add further “studios” for particular interest groups, so that eventually Yardsellr will become the general store-type marketplace for those random odds and ends that will be complemented by Sty.ly as well as that future drove of secondary targeted communities (or titles).

But why social? Leffel told me that what used to be so special about eBay was that it’s eFlea marketplace lent itself well to the formation of communities that aggregated tightly around particular interests. Those small communities incubated fierce friendships and bonds among those buyers and sellers that loved, say, first edition novels.

Leffel told me that the eBay team used to joke that there were marriages that happened because of those communities. Of course, eBay has gone on to focus more on commoditized goods, to compete with the likes of Amazon and Walmart, but the goal for YellowDog’s properties is to capture the feel of the old eBay — and find that mix between the loneliness of traditional eCommerce transactions and the scalably social aspects of Facebook.

When the social graph meets the interest graph, Leffel said, commerce is a natural byproduct. It certainly seems that the industry is reevaluating its stance on social commerce, and its long term viability, and if this model proves workable in the long run, Yardsellr, Sty.ly, and YellowDog seem poised to be close to the front of the pack.

Yardsellr is an online marketplace which uses social networks to connect buyers and sellers. Yardsellr believes that people are natural born buyers and sellers. In the tradition of neighborhood garage- and yard-sales, we make it easy for you to list and sell, or find and buy whatever you want. Best of all, the buying and selling is done by regular people like you. That means you get great prices from folks you can trust within your network or...

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Expect This Year’s f8 To Be Huge — The Biggest Since Facebook Platform Launched

Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). ? Learn More

Last week at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference, I had the opportunity to interview Facebook’s VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer. It was a great talk: I asked him about his favorite features on Google+ (he said something about loving competition), and there was even a brief mutual death glare.

A few minutes after the interview, I chatted backstage with Schroepfer and Facebook VP of Global Communications Elliot Schrage and asked about their impending f8 developer conference, which takes place on September 22.

Schrage’s eyes grew wide — he paused, then said that this was going to be big, and that it would go down as either the most important, or the second most important f8 yet. When I asked which of the previous three conferences might best it, he said that only the first one, back in 2007, stood a chance. Which is when they originally launched Facebook Platform, allowing third party developers to tap into the social graph for the first time.

He also made it clear that he believes this f8 will be bigger than last year’s conference, which was no slouch: it saw the launch of the Open Graph API, Instant Personalization, and the now-ubiquitous Like Button, among other things.

In other words, we should expect this year’s f8 to bring a lot more than the video and music services that have already been thoroughly covered. Frankly I don’t think either of those would fundamentally alter the Facebook experience — they’ll make some people happy, and they may help services like Rdio, Spotify, and MOG get more users, but there’s still going to be a lot of friction getting people to change the way they consume media.

Instead, I’m guessing we’ll see some much bigger changes — things that alter the way Facebook’s graph works, and that will enable a new class of applications to flourish (like, for example, those aforementioned media sharing apps). I’m still digging to find out the specifics, but I wouldn’t be surprised if these changes revolve around broader sharing. After all, so much content on Facebook is already shared with a ‘Public’ setting — Facebook just needs to start surfacing that content to more people.

Facebook’s recently-launched Subscriptions feature is a great example of this. At risk of tooting my own horn more than usual, I’ve watched my Subscriber count grow from zero to 2,500 in less than a week (that’s way faster than I’ve ever accrued followers on Twitter). I can’t take much credit for the growth though — the only thing I posted was a photo of puppies. Instead, this uptick is fueled by the way Facebook works suggestions into News Feed and various widgets. If Facebook can create similar viral growth around content shared from other apps, that would be a big deal, indeed.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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Facebook News Feed Gets Smarter— And The Ticker Makes Its Big Debut

Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). ? Learn More

One of Facebook’s most important products is getting much smarter — and a little easier to use.

Less than 48 hours before its f8 developer conference, Facebook is rolling out an updated version of News Feed that does away with the two-tabbed interface that it’s had for two years now. Before today you’d have to swap between ‘Top Stories’ (a feed of stories that Facebook thought were important) and ‘Most Recent’ (a feed of your friends’ most recent actions on the site). Plenty of users clicked both of these tabs — over 50% as of last year — but Facebook has long been convinced that it wasn’t the optimal solution.

Which brings us to today’s launch. Facebook will now merge both types of content into the same feed, intelligently determining how much screen real estate to allocate to ‘Top Stories’ based on how recently you’ve logged into the site. If you’re checking Facebook ten times a day at work, then most of the items in your feed will be recent; if you’re logging in for the first time in the few days, Facebook will try to give you an overview of the most important things your friends have shared. These important stories will be denoted with a small blue triangle in the corner, and you can manually tell Facebook if it missed an important story, or if you don’t care for one of the items it deemed important (in this sense, it’s a bit like Gmail’s Priority Inbox).

This is a big change, and it’s been a long road to get here — as the site’s home page, News Feed has seen plenty of iterations over the years, particularly around the way real-time content is displayed.

In the early days of News Feed, users would see a listing of posts that Facebook felt they’d be most interested in. It worked pretty well, but it had one downside: posts were often hours old, which made the content feel stale compared to services like Twitter. Facebook unveiled its solution to this in March 2009, which it first introduced a real-time News Feed. No longer would all posts be delayed by at least 10 minutes — the new Feed would show them as they happened.

Which, of course, brought with it other issues, like the fact that it was harder to tell which posts were actually important. Facebook used a ‘Highlights’ section in the sidebar to showcase the most important stories, but those were easy to look over. So it wasn’t a big surprise when Facebook later merged highlights back into News Feed, allowing users to swap between a ‘Live Feed’ and ‘News Feed’ view (which were later renamed to Top News and Most Recent).

How’s that for a history lesson?

The second major change today is the official unveiling of the Facebook Ticker, a stream of content in the right sidebar that some users have been seeing for the last few weeks (Facebook’s VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer says that the company has put a lot of work into making sure it gets Ticker right, hence the extensive testing).

The purpose of Ticker is pretty straightforward: it shows you a stream of your friends’ most recent activity on Facebook, as it happens. This means that every time one of your friend ‘Likes’ a piece of content, posts a photo, or comments on a status update, you’ll immediately get a notification in your Ticker. And if you mouse-over one of the updates, Facebook will show a pop-over with relevant information (for example, if a friend checked into a venue, you’ll see a Bing map).

At first glance Ticker may not sound like a big deal (after all, you’re going to see the most important updates in your News Feed), but it may well become one of the site’s most important features. The immediacy of these updates means it’s easy to tell if a piece of content is quickly going viral among your friends, or if they’re participating in a particularly active discussion. And, perhaps more important, it gives you a near-constant stream of stuff to look at, which means it’s probably a great way to kill time (this is one reason, I suspect, why Twitter has become popular). Ticker will also be accesible throughout the site: it shows up next to everyone’s News Feed, and if you widen your browser window, the Ticker will show up in a persistent right sidebar, above the chat box.

Finally, Facebook is boosting the size of photo thumbnails in your feed, which makes them nicer to look at (and more inviting to click on).

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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Facebook Revamps Friend Lists [PICS]

Facebook is launching a massive upgrade of its Friend Lists feature in an effort to make it more useful for users.

The feature, which debuted in 2007, is currently used by less than 5% of users, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The revamp is designed to make Friend Lists easier to manage and and more popular.

The changes include Smart Lists, sharing content to lists, consuming content from lists and two new lists: “Close Friends” and “Acquaintances.” Facebook has been testing these features for the past few days and intends to roll it out to all users in the coming weeks.

The problem with current solutions for organizing friends (i.e. Google+ Circles) is that users simply don’t enjoy taking the time to organize their friends into groups, Facebook Product Manager Blake Ross told Mashable. So Facebook decided to find a way to automatically curate Friend Lists on behalf of the user.

The result is Smart Lists and suggestions. Smart Lists automatically creates lists for city, work, family and school. You can, for example, create a list of friends that live within 50 miles of your location. You can then use that list to find out what’s happening nearby or share local parties with local friends without bugging friends in another city.

Suggestions continues the process by suggesting friends that you may want to add to one of your lists. Facebook uses its algorithms to determine which friends may belong in a group.

Facebook is also introducing two other Friend Lists: Close Friends and Acquaintances. These lists are not Smart Lists — they do not automatically update themselves. However, they do have a few unique features. If you add a friend to Close Friends, for example, that friend’s posts will appear more prominently in your News Feed. On the other hand, adding a friend to the Acquaintances list will assure you don’t see that person’s posts unless it’s major news (i.e. an engagement).

With more Friend Lists and friends in those lists, Facebook is hoping you will use them more. To that end, Facebook is introducing easier access to Friend Lists all throughout Facebook. They are now integrated into News Feed, making it possible to check what your close friends or your work buddies are posting. They are now more prominent in the Facebook Publisher, making it easier to share a status update with just a small group of friends. And finally, you can add friends to Friend Lists right from a friend’s profile page.

While these changes feel like an answer to the rise of Google+, the search giant’s social network, Ross says that’s not the case. “We’ve been iterating on this in the last four years,” he said. He thinks that nobody has done friend grouping right. He believes that Smart Lists and automatic friend grouping is a step toward taking away the pain of organizing friends.

We’ve included some screenshots of the new Friend List features. Will you use Friend Lists now? Let us know in the comments.

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Fanzila Upgrades Facebook Pages, With Apps For Blogs, Forums, Contests And More

Fanzila is a new startup that lets brands upgrade Facebook pages with blogs, forums, competitions and more. The company announced this week that it raised $1 million in Series A funding in round led by Blumberg Capital, who joins previous investors, Dr. Yossi Vardi, Shiomo Nechama and the Haaretz Newspaper Group. The announcement was timed perfectly to coincidence with Fanzila’s spot in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Alley, which is where we ran into them.

Currently, Fanzila has 20 brands using the service for their Facebook Pages, including MTV Networks, Viacom, JWT, Y&R and other agencies.

All the features that can be added onto the Facebook Pages are dubbed “apps,” and brands can choose which ones they want to use on their site’s page. The end result are pages that are more fully featured mini-sites which engage a brands’ fans and customers where they typically hang out: Facebook.

In addition to the aforementioned apps for blogging, forums, contests, etc., Fanzila pages can also include a video portal, wiki site, photo galleries, Twitter feeds and more. On the back-end, advanced analytics provide Fanzila’s users with business intelligence on their fans’ engagement and interactions. The system identifies and tracks relevant fans activities on Fanzila apps and the Facebook page (e.g., likes, comments, churn, fans leaders, etc.)

Previously, Fanzila would set up the Facebook Pages for the companies paying for its service, but it’s just now launching a self-serve platform that brings the same tools and customizations to brands and businesses of any size. There’s a free version of the service that includes Fanzila branding, two premium versions (one with and one without the analytics) and an Enterprise version.

Not surprisingly, the Fanzila “homepage” itself, is available a Facebook Page, demonstrating the service in action. On Monday, the company is launching a new standalone website, it says.

Launch Date: September 15, 2011

Fanzila applications enable brands and companies to maximize the value of their Facebook fan communities by offering them customizable blogs, forums, videos, competitions, wiki’s, and more. Each application can be presented across multiple platforms and is updated simultaneously on Facebook pages, websites and the mobile. Fanzila applications are managed by a powerful analytics and marketing platform. This platform tracks fan page growth, identifies fan activities and interests, and uses this data to generate opportunities for your business.

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Two Key Features Of Facebook Music: Scrobbling And Track Unification

MG Siegler has been writing for TechCrunch since 2009. He covers the web, mobile, social, big companies, small companies, essentially everything. And Apple. A lot. Prior to TechCrunch, he covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where... ? Learn More

Yesterday, we outlined a bit of what we’ve heard about Facebook’s upcoming f8 conference. One big launch will be their official foray into music. Today, we’ve heard more about that launch.

One thing we’ve heard from a very good source is that a key aspect of the service will be “scrobbling”. The term, made popular by Last.fm, means that when you listen to a song, it gets sent to your profile without you have to do anything. I assume there will be a way to turn this off, or a way for you to selectively share songs, but this is a key to the service.

Not that a post-music-to-profile feature should be surprising. Facebook’s core feature is the feed, and music will now make it even more robust. In fact, depending on how popular Facebook Music is, it could end up being one of the biggest sources of feed content.

And I think it will be pretty popular based on the second bit of information we’ve heard. Facebook Music will also apparently offer content resolution between all the different music partners involved. This means that if you’re listening to Rdio and a track goes up on your profile, a MOG user can click on the track and still hear the exact same song in full. Essentially, you’ll only need to sign up for one of the major music services Facebook is launching with to be able to access most content (there undoubtedly will be some songs available on one service but not another, so it probably won’t be fully seamless, but I assume you’ll be able to hear previews regardless).

This content resolution will likely be the most important aspect of Facebook Music. It turns Facebook into the great social music unifier. You can share songs without having to worry if your friends will be able to hear it or not based on what streaming service they use.

It’s not clear what partners Facebook has gotten to agree to this unification beyond Rdio, MOG, and Spotify. It’s certainly possible that while other services will be a part of Facebook Music, those three will be the key ones.

In terms of functionality, we’ve also heard that there will be a standard player that plays music without interruption from page to page as you browse Facebook. Om Malik previously reported on the persistent controls as well as a larger Music Dashboard area. Malik stated that the player would be at the bottom of Facebook, but we’ve heard that Facebook has been testing variations on this player, so it’s not yet clear where it will reside (top, bottom, etc).

Update: Inside Facebook’s Josh Constine has an interesting thought: what if the desktop software team at Facebook was working on a scrobbler that could also work with iTunes to import listens? Those tracks could then by matched and played via Spotify, MOG, Rdio, etc, on Facebook Music itself. Constine notes that he doesn’t have any inside information on this, but he did outline that possibility following our post from May on Facebook’s Seattle-based desktop software team.

Even if that isn’t a part of the initial roll-out, this makes a lot of sense down the road for Facebook Music. Or what about a Last.fm partnership for the service? And what would Apple think of all this?

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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Is Facebook Copying Google+ And Twitter? VP Of Engineering, Mike Schroepfer, Responds

Mike Schroepfer, Vice President of Engineering at Facebook, spoke with Jason Kincaid at this morning’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference. The topic of the conversation focused on many of Facebook’s newest features, including the recently launched Friend Lists and “Subscribe” option, which lets users follow others’ public updates in a model very similar to Twitter and Google+.

This led, of course, to a discussion of how much “inspiration” Facebook drew from other sites. Is Google+ now influencing Facebook’s feature set?

The “Subscriptions” feature, in case you missed the news, addresses one of the biggest pain points for Facebook users who have a lot of friends, Jason blogged earlier today. It means that power users who want to follow the updates of public figures now have a way to do so, without having to submit a friend request to the person in question. It also provides a way for users to breach the previously constricting 5,000 friend limit on Facebook.

But what about Facebook Pages?, Jason wanted to know. How does this feature compare?

“Pages are an awesome product for multiple people who are administering a Page for a brand,” explained Schroepfer, but subscribe is for sharing with friends and others more broadly. (Hmm…sounds like Twitter, doesn’t it?)

In addition, Facebook also rolled out a new feature that lets you customize the kind of updates you see from friends. For example, if you only want to see status updates, and not updates from games, you can now do that.

The recently added automated friend lists were discussed, too. Instead of dragging-and-dropping friends into Circles as on Google+, there is no manual effort involved with these lists. And the lists are there if people want to use them, otherwise, they just fall off the left-side navigation where they now reside. It’s not overly complex.

But one-way follows, ways to get Games out of your stream, friend lists? Who else in the social networking space is doing this? Twitter and Google+.

So why launch these features now, asked Jason? (The implication that Facebook is now being directly influenced by competitors’ products).

“We’ve been working on lots of iterations of friend lists and the subscription metaphor for a while,” hedged Schroepfer. “No one wants to spend their afternoon dragging and dropping,” he said. But Facebook couldn’t get the Friend Lists really working until now, he added.

In response to a more direct question about what Schroepfer’s favorite feature of Google+ was, Schroepfer had nothing to say. However, he later explained, “the challenge with this is that anytime we launch something, you can say it’s a response to X or Y.” But competition is great, he believes, and people can choose.

Not all of Facebook’s attempts to emulate other social networks or new trends pay off, though. Examples of recent failures are Deals (a Groupon-like service), Questions (a Q&A product similar to Quora or Yahoo Questions and others) and Places (a check-in function that emulates Foursquare). All have either been largely downgraded in importance or killed off entirely.

“In order to innovate, you have to experiment,” said Schroepfer. But to get things right, you have to fail, he said. Facebook has a sign hanging in its offices, for example, that says this job is 1% complete.

Most importantly, Facebook wants to be able to ship code fast…it wants to deliver changes to its 750 million users faster than a startup with a million users can. Of course, moving quickly can mean more bugs. But dealing with that issue has been a big focus this year, says Schroepfer. Every single metric he’s seen says it’s getting better.

But the best question from the interview was probably Jason’s bold attempt to get some info on new Facebook products, namely Facebook Music and the forthcoming iPad app.

Will we see Facebook Music integrated into the iPad app?, asked Jason.

A “death glare” was the jovial, but decidedly non-comittal response.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

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Gift Engine Predicts What Your Facebook Friends Want

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Name: GiveEmThis

Quick Pitch: GiveEmThis is a personalized gift engine that analyzes your friends’ social media updates to recommend relevant gift ideas.

Genius Idea: A bevy of gift suggestions for every Facebook or Twitter friend.

Facebook’s 750 million-member social network makes connecting with family members, friends and occasional acquaintances easy. More friends means more birthdays and anniversaries to remember. For the thoughtful among us, that equates to more gifts to buy.

Herein lies the promise of GiveEmThis, a simple to use gift-giving assistant from Imply Labs. It promises to help you discover gift ideas your Facebook friends might actually want.

Sign in with Facebook. Select a Facebook friend. Enter the friend’s gender and age (the info will auto-populate if it’s in your friend’s Facebook profile), and enter the person’s Twitter user name (if he has one). A few seconds later, GiveEmThis will spit out a selection of gift ideas — all sourced from Amazon for the time being — tailored to your friend’s interests.

The GiveEmThis prediction engine, powered by Imply Labs’ predictive technology, considers a Facebook user’s demographic data, as well as her on-site behaviors and patterns. Events, status updates, shared links and “Likes” all factor into Imply Labs’ arcane algorithmic calculations. Twitter data is computed, albeit to a lesser extent, and natural language processing is used to understand the context of status updates.

The sum total of everything Imply Labs can glean about a person via social data makes its way into individual user profiles. These profiles rub up against Amazon’s catalogue to generate product matches.

How well does it work? Imply Labs founder Zack Oates says 87% of users found the right gift for themselves, based on survey data the startup collected from alpha testers.

Even so, we think GiveEmThis has plenty of room for improvement. It works really well — except for when it doesn’t. I highly doubt my friend and colleague Ben Parr, a diehard Chicago Bears fan, would ever appreciate Green Bay Packers gear.

“The more users that we get, the more that we can improve the algorithm,” Oates counters “It’s a constantly learning system.”

In due time, GiveEmThis product listings will expand to include Zappos’ product catalog, and Imply Labs will eventually allow companies to add their own products to the system. GiveEmThis will also get Google+ and LinkedIn integration, Oates says.

GiveEmThis is the consumer-facing version of the startup’s prediction engine. Imply Labs will also provide businesses with a white label version of its predictive technologies.

Founded in 2009, Imply Labs is a privately funded Utah-based startup.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Chris P.

Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

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PlaySay Uses Facebook To Help You Learn A Language

Alexia Tsotsis currently works for TechCrunch as a writer. She is also a blogger who attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA. She majored in Writing and Art, moving to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Entertainment/Media industry. After four years of living in New York City and attending courses at New York... ? Learn More

Launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, PlaySay is a Facebook app that takes advantage of the social graph and the fact that most of us spend an inordinate amount of time on Facebook in order to help people learn a language.

PlaySay uses images to represent the fundamental components of language learning, allowing basic language learners to build or deconstruct Facebook status updates word by word and image by image. The theory is that users will be more enthusiastic about learning languages with their friends in an environment they are already comfortable with.

“Your Facebook friends are your new classmates. Checkins, status updates and pictures are your course materials.” co-founder Ryan Meinzer tells me about the app. Indeed, seeing an update in Spanish on your friend’s profile page does pique your curiosity as to what that status update says. One click on the status and you are transported to PlaySay, which offers you the option to decode that status through images, even if you don’t speak a word of Spanish.

PlaySay plans on monetizing by offering the users ability to cash in Facebook Credits to in order unlock premium PlaySay features like private messaging and levels and offering a subscription option for those that want to delve deeper into the content. Product placement within the language learning flow is also an avenue the company is exploring.

While currently only available in Spanish, Meinzer plans on making it available in every language through content partnerships like the one it recently closed with publisher McGraw Hill.

Meinzer tells me that he came up with the idea for PlaySay when he was living in Japan and was inspired to learn Japanese after the first time he was exposed to it. “We hope to convert people to learning foreign languages,” he says “If you’re using Google Translate, you’re not learning anything.”

PlaySay has over $570K in funding.

Q&A

WC: How do you attract users?

A: Partnership deals, facebook is the best place to launch this platform.

MS: It’s too complicated. When you take it to the normal’s I’m not convinced.

A: There’s a huge play in UI, by making it super simple we’re able to get it to the people. With A/B testing we’ll get to a perfect UI.

YV: How long have you worked on this product?

A: Three years.

YV: Suster they spent years on this and you don’t encourage them.

RC: Marks right it needs to be simplified dramtically. Why did you take this problem on?

A: My friends couldn’t sustain learning a language because they didn’t have a need. The idea here is to break down language in a visual sense.

RG: I think this could be well used as an augmentation to an existing language course. It doesn’t have enough structure to take me through learning a language.

A: We’re a supplement not a course.

Through a language learning layer on Facebook, PlaySay is disrupting the $83 billion dollar market for language learning. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 in San Francisco, PlaySay unveiled the world’s first method of learning foreign languages by communicating in those languages through pictures.

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Shaker Aims To Turn Facebook Into A Night On The Town — Complete With (Virtual) Drinks

MG Siegler has been writing for TechCrunch since 2009. He covers the web, mobile, social, big companies, small companies, essentially everything. And Apple. A lot. Prior to TechCrunch, he covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where... ? Learn More

Facebook is the social network. But it’s still not really all that social. Yes, you chat here and “like” things there. But it’s not the same as going out to a bar with a group of friends. Shaker, a new startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt, aims to turn Facebook into that bar.

The easiest way to think about it is as a mixture of Second Life, The Sims, and Turntable.fm all mixed together using your Facebook data and connections. Your Facebook profile becomes a walking avatar. Your pictures are placed on an actual (well, virtual) wall. You can choose what music is playing in the room for everyone to hear. And you interact with other Facebook users as avatars. You can even buy people drinks.

Shaker is a fun, interesting way to socialize on Facebook without feeling confined to the more static and flat elements of the service. Shaker’s idea is that if you can make Facebook itself more like a bar, real social interaction will happen more naturally. It’s one thing to chat with your friends on Facebook, but it’s extremely hard to try to meet new people. That’s what Shaker is hoping to enable.

They do this by using color codes to show you not only your connections on Facebook, but also friends of friends. These are people you may not know, but you have at least one thing in common with — a mutual friend. Shaker also looks at profile information to show what else you may have in common with seemingly random people in the room. For example, you may have the same birthday as someone. Or you may both like the same band. Etc.

Another elements include proximity based chat, a Tweet wall, and a “smart phone” social discovery tool to look up information about people in the room.

The team has been alpha testing a version of the Shaker app in their homebase of Tel Aviv, Israel. The response has been extremely viral so far, the team says. So much so, that they had to shut it down to stop word from getting out too much before Disrupt. As a part of the Disrupt launch, they’ve created a special TC Disrupt-themed room for attendees to hang out in .

Shaker has raised about $3 million in funding so far.

Expert Judges Q&A Session:

Josh Felser, Freestyle Capital; April Underwood, Twitter; Jim Lanzone, CBS Interactive; Michael Marquez, CODE Advisors

AU: There are some interesting concepts here, to make social more fun and richer. But users only have so much time. What are you competing with for time?

A: The time we’re competing with is the time you spend anyway on Facebook. That time is huge — almost 2 hours a day for young people. We’ll make it more fun and casual.

JF: Love the demo. But synchronous model is hard. Asynchronous as well?

A: We did bet on synchronous. It’s a big bet, but it’s one we’re making.

JF: What’s ratio of registered users to simulataneous?

A: We had to block the invitations, it was going viral. We were at 80,000 MAUs after blocking invitations. People complaining that the bars are too crowded.

JL: It reminds me of casual Second Life. But it doesn’t have the gaining users problem. And it gives them something to do.

MM: I like what you’re doing to figure out what you have in common with other users. But what are you doing more than making it about inviting other people?

A: The location system isn’t yet built-in. But we’re using algorithms to bring together people who will be relevant to you.

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Ooyala Now Allows Publishers To Sell And Rent Premium Video On Facebook

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Video publishing platform Ooyala is adding a social component to its videos today with the launch of Ooyala Social, a new HD-quality Social TV experience that brings video sharing and and viewing to Facebook.

Ooyala specializes in hosting videos for large corporate and media clients, such as the Telegraph Media Group, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Dell, General Mills, ESPN and TechCrunch. Now these content owners can use Ooyala Social to make premium on-demand and live video available on Facebook via rentals, subscriptions, purchases, and and more.

There are a number of features of the platform, including the ability to allow for group-activated “screenings,” allowing a certain number of people on Facebook to unlock a viewing experience. And users can share what they’re watching “Like” a video or “loan” a show for later viewing. Viewers can also chat together through a movie or show.

Part of the Ooyala Social allows for mulit-screen and device access and users can buy or rent videos with Facebook Credits, PayPal, a credit card or their mobile phone number. Content may be rented, subscribed to, or purchased outright.

There’s no doubt that Facebook has become a major destination for discovering online video. Ooyala’s move to Facebook makes sense as more premium content publishers look to bring video to the social platform, Warner Brothers is dabbling its toes into the Facebook stream with movie rentals, and Netflix is also preparing for a deeper integration with Facebook (though there are some challenges to this).

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Facebook Imitation Not Sincerest Form Of Flattery, Says Twitter Mobile Designer

Alexia Tsotsis currently works for TechCrunch as a writer. She is also a blogger who attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA. She majored in Writing and Art, moving to New York City shortly after graduation to work in the Entertainment/Media industry. After four years of living in New York City and attending courses at New York... ? Learn More

Because this reminds me of that time when Facebook unveiled that the Facebook Places logo was, no joke, a “4? in a square, I’m just going to copy the intro sentence to that post:

On the right is the status and photo update interface for Facebook’s iOS app, updated to a 3.5 version yesterday. On the left is the iOS interface for the current leader in the status update space Twitter. Notice anything interesting?

Sure you say, a standard mobile status update box isn’t exactly a UI opus. But it’s the little things, like how the people tagging icons are in exactly the same place on both apps, that matter. Also, this is what the Facebook iPhone status update interface looked like before the 3.5 version.

Heh.

Apparently I’m not the only one who sees the resemblance between the two, as Twitter mobile designer Bryan Haggerty has tweeted out comparative screencaps of both, with the comments, “Seriously Facebook?” and “Okay Facebook, enough with the flattery.”

Interestingly enough, Haggerty used to work on the mobile team at LinkedIn, which, coincidently, was at some point itself on the receiving end of claims that it had copied Facebook’s iPhone app interface.

What goes around comes around.

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It...

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Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to...

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