According to BuzzFeed, people e-mailing stories on its network of sites has dropped a whopping 61 percent — 13 million in January to 5 million in August. The survey counted the number of referrals sites like TMZ and the Daily Mail received from Gmail, Hotmail and other email services.

The likely explanation here, as you may have guessed, is not that people are reading or sharing less. Instead, it appears the email button is fading compared to other ways of sharing stories like Facebook or Pinterest. (And, of course, more people may be cutting and pasting the article URL instead of clicking the email button).

One result of the decreased use is that some publishers are tucking the familiar email icon into smaller corners. Another implication is that the “most e-mailed stories” box, long a fixture of the New York Times and other major news sites, may soon go the way of MySpace. The Atlantic’s new Quartz offering, for instance, does not have a “most emailed” display but simply a button that says popular.

(Image by amasterphotographer via Shutterstock)

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But the service has only continued to grow in popularity, adding two million more members in the last year to get to 5 million members. And now, it’s looking to build upon that momentum with a new $15 million Series B investment, led by General Catalyst Partners with help from Menlo Ventures and existing investors Benchmark Capital and Omidyar Network. The San Francisco-based company will use the new money to shore up its infrastructure, improve its products and hire more employees.

CouchSurfing often gets mentioned along with Airbnb, which also helps people find a place to sleep from fellow users. But CEO Tony Espinoza said the goal of CouchSurfing has been about more than just finding a place for someone to sleep. The service is looking to build a global human travel network and foster connections between users, so hosts aren’t just making their beds available, but welcoming potential friends into their lives. Users have already had more than 10 million face-to-face encounters and many are participating in 40,000 interest groups on CouchSurfing.

The basic service is free, but users can pay a one-time fee of $25 to verify their identity and location, something many serious users pay for. Espinoza said CouchSurfing has been generating significant revenue and was not in danger of exhausting its previous funding. But he said the chance to get backing from General Catalyst, which has invested in Kayak and Airbnb, and Menlo Ventures, whose managing director Shervin Pishervar has been an vocal advocate of collaborative consumption, was too good to pass up.

The new money, however, may raise more questions from die-hard fans worrying about the startup becoming more corporate. With $22.6 million under its belt, it’s a far cry from the plucky communal startup that was founded in 2004 and survived on donations and code contributions from users. Now, it has 30 employees, and it’s churning out improved products including the recent addition of new mobile applications.

Espinoza said even with its growing following, CouchSurfing is still just scratching the surface of what it can become. He said while there’s a need for more transactional services like Kayak and Airbnb, CouchSurfing is serving a big opportunity by bringing people together through travel.

“When people want to have a great time, the best way to do that is through people,” Espinoza said. “With Kayak or Airbnb,  when you meet people through those services it’s not a natural act to add them as a friend on Facebook. When you use CouchSurfing, you use it to find people,” Espinoza said.

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Bitly is building out its service with an eye toward doing more than just shortening links. With a major redesign of its website rolled out Tuesday and its first iPhone app, the service is making it easier to save, share and organize content.

Shortened links are now called bitmarks and they can be shared using improved privacy controls that allow for both private and public sharing via Facebook, Twitter and email. Users can now log-in through Facebook and Twitter, which speeds up sharing on those networks, and they can see what their friends are sharing across different social networks. They also get a faster search experience for finding older bitmarks. The bitmarks can be tagged with notes and hashtags for better retrieval later.

The curation tool Bitly bundles, introduced in 2010, has been improved, allowing users in a group to see which curator added certain bitmarks. It also offers the ability to leave comments on individual bitmarks in the bundles.

Bitly is rolling out a new Chrome bookmarklet extension for people to easily save and share links. And for the first time, Bitly is launching an iPhone app that will allow users to share more easily from a smartphone. The iPhone app lets people get quick access to their saved links and creates a mobile Web-optimized view of content, kind of like Instapaper.

The redesign has confused some regular users who aren’t clear on how to use the new site. Anthony De Rosa, a Reuters columnist complained about not being to easily shorten a link on Bitly though his Twitter followers helped him through the redesign.

The service has already helped people save 25 billion links since its launch in 2008 and is used daily to share almost 100 million links. The additions are part of a larger effort to make Bitly a hub for saving and sharing content on the Web, said Matthew Rothenberg, Bitly’s head of product. He said some of the new features were available previously, but the redesign helped surface them to make it easier for Bitly users to take full advantage of them. He said the goal is to fix the fragmented way most people share and save links and content online.

“Right now, it’s not an optimized experience. If I bookmark something, I might not be on the same computer or phone later to share it. Or I’m cutting and pasting into Twitter and Facebook,” Rothenberg said. “We’re trying to be a hub in the sense that we want to make that base use case of I find something on the web and want to save or share it, we want to be the best tool to be able to do that.”

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On its blog, Twitter said it will put Posterous’s engineers and product managers to work on several initiatives that will make Twitter even better. Twitter stressed the talent it has acquired and said it will give Posterous users plenty of warning if it makes any service changes. Twitter will release instructions soon that allow users to back up or export their Posterous content.

Posterous founder Sachin Argawal explained the sale in a blog post as a chance to bring the Posterous team’s expertise to Twitter, which has more than 100 million active users. “The last four years have been an amazing journey. Your encouragement, praise and criticism have made us better.  Thanks for that. We look forward to building great things for you over at Twitter,” Argawal wrote.

Now, it’s not an admission that Posterous will be shuttered. But it sounds like the Posterous team will be occupied more with making Twitter better than keep Posterous up and running.

The acquisition means an even larger workforce for Twitter, which has been on a hiring spree. Headcount has doubled from 450 in mid 2011 to nearly 900, according to a recent report in Gawker. It’s unclear how the Posterous team will make Twitter more profitable.

Posterous, which had raised $10 million from Y Combinator, Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures and Jafco Ventures, had 15 million users as of September 2011 but had been long since passed by rival Tumblr, which is now serving 120 million users. Jumping into the arms of Twitter may be a good consolation prize for a Posterous, similar to how Gowalla’s team got bought out by Facebook. Without a clear path to beating Tumblr, it might have made more sense to just join a rising power in Twitter.

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But besides keeping talent in town and upping foot traffic to surrounding businesses, what other benefits might coworking spaces provide communities? In an interesting recent post for DeskMag, Angel Kwiatkowski of Cohere Coworking Community in Fort Collins, Colorado, offers a suggestion. Agreeing with the obvious benefits, she adds one more: “Coworking creates a network for collaborative consumption.” Kwiatkowski explains:

The quest for bigger, better, faster has crippled our economy. People are tired of keeping up with the Joneses and just want to keep their families fed. Collaborative consumption means reusing, growing, renting, bartering and making instead of buying. But the sharing economy demands a network of friendly, trustworthy people to make it work. Like the people who work right next to you in a coworking space.

Yes, coworking allows you to share your professional expertise and network with other successful freelancers. But you could do that at a once-a-month meetup. What makes coworking unique is the sharing that takes place on a personal level –- be it a potluck meal or vegetable seeds or a ride to a conference in Denver.

When a community is connected and open to sharing, people save money, learn new skills and reduce their impact on the environment. New ideas emerge, problems are solved in creative ways, and the community at large reaps all the rewards of a happy independent workforce.

Coworking helps people consume only what they need and share out resources that are superfluous, according to this argument. It’s a point of view explored in greater depth by Lisa Gansky, author of The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing, in her TED talk. Using services like Zipcar and Netflix as her jumping off point, Gansky argues that in many areas we are slowly moving away from ownership toward sharing resources. Coworking facilitates this process by switching folks from “owning” exclusive access to an often-empty office or cubicle to using space only when they need it and sharing it when they don’t. And the same can be said of resources from staplers to skills — rather than employ, say, a graphic designer and have full-time, exclusive access to her skills, a small company at a coworking space might be able to access a designer of the same caliber on a project basis, saving themselves some cash and helping the designer use her talent in a variety of stimulating ways.

Do you buy this argument for the economic benefits of coworking?

Image courtesy of Flickr user hyku.

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When Snow Leopard came out two years after Leopard, it provided a lot of UI refinements and some important under-the-hood upgrades for developers, like full 64-bit support, Blocks in Objective-C, Grand Central Dispatch, QuickTime X, OpenCL, native Exchange support and more. Mountain Lion is a similar upgrade — it looks to improve on Lion with a lot of UI refinements and some significant changes for developers. But instead of under-the-hood improvements, the most significant changes appear to be out in the cloud this time around.

Here’s the list of changes that Apple is rolling out, and how they will affect developers:

iCloud

iCloud can store both documents and key-value pairs. The important thing to keep in mind here is that the developer is responsible for collisions and conflict resolution between different devices updating the cloud. Documents have a dialog to let users select which version of a file they want to use. If you need to merge document changes, you’re on your own. Developers will need to think really carefully about how to manage conflicts when saving to iCloud if you are syncing data between multiple devices/computers. It’s not clear yet if apps signed by the Mac developer program certs can access data stored by apps signed by the iOS developer program certs. We will have to wait and see what Apple intends here.

While Snow Leopard added Exchange, and Lion added iOS-like features, I think Mountain Lion will be remembered as the “iCloudification” of the Mac.

Game Center

Something like 25 percent of titles in the Mac App Store are games, and the percentage is also quite high on iOS. I think there is a major opportunity here for developers to port games from iOS and keep high scores, achievements and friend lists in sync. iCloud support also means keeping saved games and game states in sync across devices. I’m not sure Game Center will ever be as popular with gamers as Steam and Xbox Live, but it could be great for casual gaming. I’d love to see someone come up with Xcode achievements so I could compare KLOCs with my friends.

Developer IDs, App Signing, Gatekeeper & Sandboxing

A lot has been written about sandboxing, which is coming to the Mac App Store and Lion, in advance of Mountain Lion’s release. I don’t think I’ll try to add anything to the discussion except to point out that Gatekeeper should help to educate users on what the differences are. It appears that you’ll be able to sign your apps — and gain the increased trust of users — without having to submit to the App Store and agree to sandboxing. Of course, to use the iCloud features and other goodies like notifications, you’ll probably want to go with the App Store anyway. Overall, I think this will end up being a good thing, despite the growing pains endured during the rollout.

Ken Case of The Omni Group is optimistic about the announcements:

This seems like a very big deal to me. Partly because Gatekeeper takes a more proactive stance against malware, preventing malware developers from producing new software which infects systems rather than always retroactively tracking down the bad software and preventing it from spreading further.

But even more important to me is that while designing this feature in a post-Mac App Store world, Apple went out of their way to build a mechanism which still supports developers who distribute software through channels other than the Mac App Store. It would have been much easier for them to simply say “to get malware protection, you must use the Mac App Store; otherwise any software you use is at your own risk” — but instead they’ve introduced a new mechanism for identifying trusted developers who distribute software outside the Mac App Store’s curated experience.

Color me relieved!

Sharing

Integrating single sign-on for Twitter in iOS led to a marked increase in people signing up for Twitter accounts. Just as Twitter integration didn’t kill the sales of dedicated Twitter clients on iOS, I would expect that the market on OS X won’t be affected much. Of course, Twitter isn’t the only way to share things. Flickr, Vimeo, etc. are there as well. What I’m really curious to see is if developers will be allowed to extend the sharing sheet by registering their own apps on the system. That could be awesome.

Apple is trying to make it easy to add sharing to an app, but the real issue here is figuring out if your app needs Twitter integration or not. I’m not sure I need to tweet my word count from within BBEdit, for example, but I do like the idea of tweeting what I’m reading right from within Safari, or what I’m looking at from within iTunes or the Mac App Store. I’m hopeful about this feature, as long as developers are judicious in putting it to good use.

Notifications

I think this is one area that developers should really work to adopt. I’m curious to find out more if Apple will allow online services to send notifications to apps as you can on iOS (where Facebook sends a notification to the Facebook app, and Strategery tells you when you’ve been defeated, etc.). Because of the infrastructure needed to handle those types of notices (especially at Internet scale), I would look into Push IO and similar services to leverage so you don’t have to build it all on your own.

What Else?

I’m sure there will be much more to come as Apple makes their plans more public closer to the summer launch, but I think there is a lot of good stuff here that developers can use to improve and build on their Mac apps. I think that iCloud integration will have the biggest long-term impact on OS X, but the refinements in app signing, sharing and notifications will be important features for developers as well.

What do you think will be the biggest change to the ways you make Mac software today?

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Facebook’s implementation of what it calls “frictionless sharing” continues to cause controversy: critics complain that the new feature — which automatically shares songs from Spotify or news stories from social-reading apps — is ruining the site, cluttering up their stream and is generally just creepy. As newly-minted venture capitalist MG Siegler has noted, this kind of backlash is par for the course whenever Facebook makes sharing-related changes, so it’s likely this particular storm will also blow over. But what the fuss does highlight is how Facebook still needs better filters to help users cope with the onslaught of social-sharing information.

Molly Wood at CNET seems to have started the latest furore, saying the new changes at Facebook are “ruining sharing,” because they clutter up a user’s feed and try to badger them into signing up for apps like Spotify or the Washington Post app. Wood calls Spotify song sharing “the new Farmville,” and that isn’t meant as a compliment — and she also notes, as many other critics have, that Facebook is driving this behavior because it wants to collect more information about its users and make that available to advertisers. But one of her main complaints seems to be that instead of reducing the friction around sharing, Facebook is actually increasing it:

In search of “frictionless” sharing, Facebook is putting up a barrier to entry on items your friends want you to see–that is, they’re creating friction. Even if it’s just a onetime inconvenience, any barrier to sharing breaks sharing. The barriers will keep popping up as more content publishers create social apps that have to be authorized before you can view their content.

Noisy? Yes, but also a serendipity engine

I can see Wood’s point. My Facebook page has also gotten noisier, and the incessant links to Washington Post articles — which Liz Gannes at All Things Digital has also complained about — and Spotify music-sharing links can be irritating. But at the same time, those links can also be an interesting way to discover content, and a fairly powerful illustration of the “long tail,” as the Financial Times noted in a post about the kinds of stories that newspapers like the Post are finding get a lot of traffic through their apps. In other words, that sharing can produce a kind of serendipity that is very valuable.

Uber-blogger Robert Scoble writes about how Facebook’s sharing is getting closer to the “freaky” line, where it starts to bother people by being intrusive, but I think MG Siegler is right when he says that Facebook has always been pushing this envelope — right from the beginning of its existence, when it encouraged university students to post their photos and relationship status. When the news feed was first introduced, there was a hue and cry about how intrusive it was, and yet it has become the foundation of everything Facebook is, and millions of users are addicted to it.

Does that mean Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is altering our vision of privacy for his own nefarious purposes? I don’t think so. I think he and others like former Facebook president and Spotify investor Sean Parker have simply been more aware than others of the way that privacy is evolving. It used to be a binary thing — you shared certain things with family, friends and neighbors but kept most of that from the outside world. Now, you can choose to share certain things, like the songs you are listening to or the news articles you are reading, and not share others. Is sharing a song an invasion of privacy? It’s hard to see how. Privacy is now a spectrum, not an on-off switch.

We need better filters, not more privacy

Sociologist and Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd has written a lot about how younger users respond to privacy issues around Facebook, and it’s a lot more nuanced than just saying “kids share everything now.” In some cases, younger users are even more concerned with privacy than older users, and they come up with some interesting ways of dealing with that (like deleting their Facebook accounts every evening, and then reinstating them in the morning, since Facebook doesn’t actually delete anything in case you change your mind). But for many things — particularly social experiences like music — they are happy to share, and so frictionless sharing probably makes perfect sense.

For me, what Facebook’s rollout of frictionless sharing highlights more than anything is that we need better filters to cope with the rising tide of information on social networks, and that includes Twitter and Google+. Google’s introduction of “circles” and Facebook’s addition of “smart lists” are a step in the right direction, but they are still too cumbersome, and require a lot of ongoing management (which many people likely just won’t do). Idealab founder Bill Gross introduced a “partial follow” model with his new social network Chime.in, where you can follow only certain topics that a person posts about, but that also requires a lot of up-front management.

So I have no problem with Facebook’s approach to sharing, and I think it is probably the future (as I mentioned in an earlier post). But if we are sending more and more content out through our activity streams, we need to find better ways to filter it — and maybe that’s smarter recommendations from apps like Flipboard or services like Summify — or we are all going to be swamped by the mother of all signal-to-noise problems. As Clay Shirky pointed out some time ago, the problem isn’t information overload, it’s filter failure.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Luc Legay

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One of the best things about media going digital is that it can be easily shared and distributed to others with just a click — except of course that it often doesn’t work like that, thanks to copyright or licensing restrictions and competing platforms. E-books are a great example: Theoretically, it should be easy to share not just books, but passages we like, and there are a number of startups and services like OpenMargin and Readmill and Findings that are trying to make this happen. But competing rights, standards and platforms mean these kinds of features are available on only a tiny fraction of books, and that keeps most readers inside their little reading silos.

OpenMargin, which has been in beta trials for most of this year, just opened to the public on Monday and offers a service that is designed to allow readers to share their “margin notes” or thoughts on the books they are reading with friends and other interested readers. The Netherlands-based company offers an iPad and iPhone app that functions as an e-book reader, and includes the note-sharing ability — something lovers of book “marginalia” are certain to love. But the service only works with books that aren’t locked down through digital-rights management (DRM), which means the vast majority of commercial books are excluded from the service (Amazon offers its own highlight-sharing features on the Kindle).

It’s a similar story with Readmill, which is also trying to create a kind of social network around books and reading. The German company’s service comes with an iPad and iPhone reader that allows users to share not just their favorite quotes from books, but also their reviews and recommendations — a kind of “Last.fm for books.” But they only support non-DRM books as well, which reduces the utility of the service dramatically. Both Readmill and OpenMargin say they have open APIs (application programming interfaces) that would allow developers and e-reader makers to build support for them into their products. But will they? That seems unlikely at best.

Sharing books is virtually impossible in many cases

Sharing books is in a similar Balkanized state: while Amazon allows lending via its Kindle platform, most publishers restrict or even block that feature with their books, presumably because they want everyone to buy their own copy. Even libraries are subject to restrictions on how often they can lend their e-books before they are forced to buy another digital copy. And while there are services like Lendle that are designed to enable sharing of e-books, they are subject to the whims of Amazon and its API — as Lendle found out when Amazon suddenly shut down their access earlier this year.

Obviously, book publishers are a big part of the problem, since they restrict which books can be lent and for how long, and place all kinds of other restrictions on where e-books can be sold and what features they allow. But Amazon and Apple and Barnes & Noble and Kobo are part of the problem as well. Each wants to lock customers to their platform, because their revenue depends on it.  Amazon’s whole strategy with the Kindle Fire is to supply a device that welds a customer to its content-distribution and shopping services.

And while Google Books is trying to open up the e-book market and be as platform-neutral as possible, it has to play ball with publishers because it doesn’t have the market heft to compel them to do anything differently, and it’s already in hot water with authors and publishers because of the Google Books scanning and copyright mess.

In a recent rant at the PBS MediaShift blog, Dorian Benkoil wrote about what he called the current state of e-book “hell,” in which even readers who are willing to pay for books via the Kindle and other platforms are restricted in what they can do with them. For example, why don’t publishers and distributors allow us to download digital versions of the print books we buy? And why do platforms like the Kindle and Apple’s iBooks — or even Google’s supposedly open Books service — make some features unavailable, such as highlighting or copying and pasting, or text-to-audio?

Book publishers need to open up their books

Publishers are up in arms about the inroads that Amazon is making into their business by signing authors to its own publishing imprint, but much of the interest in doing deals with the web giant seems to be based on how much easier Amazon makes it to publish and distribute books. In a similar vein, it’s worth wondering how much of the e-book piracy that publishers are so concerned about — John Wiley and Sons just filed a suit against file-sharers who were using BitTorrent to download copies of their books — occurs because users are frustrated at being unable to get books in the format they want or on the platform they want. As Benkoil put it in his post:

Frustrated consumers will find a way to get books they want, often in ways that don’t benefit the publisher or the author. I, for example, bought the print version of one book, and wanted to buy it for the Kindle. When it wasn’t available, I found a copy online for free that may have been illicit.

Will we ever be able to download a digital version of the print book we just bought, and then share that book with friends — or even sell it to someone else at a discounted price, as we can with real books — or share our margin notes and highlights with others, regardless of what e-book reader they use? Based on the current state of the market, that seems like an almost unobtainable dream, unless some government agency forces publishers and retailers/e-book reader companies to adopt true open standards (which seems unlikely).

The unfortunate part of all this, of course, is that publishers would likely be able to sell far more books if they made it easier for readers to download, read and share them — or passages from them — with anyone regardless of what device they owned. Until that happens, e-books will continue to be a Balkanized mess of competing standards and sharing silos, and the book-reading public will be the worse for it.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Marcus Hansson, Mike Licht and Jeremy Mates

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Step 1: New or existing ID

First, go to the Settings > iCloud screen on your iOS device. By default, Apple will begin with the email address for the Apple ID you use to make purchases via the iTunes Store on your device entered into the sign-up field. If you want to use that ID to create your new iCloud ID, then go ahead and sign in. If not, click the “Get a Free Apple ID” link at the bottom of the Settings page.

If you choose to use an existing Apple ID, you’ll simply have to sign in with your credentials, then agree to iCloud’s terms and conditions. Apple will send out an account verification email to the address that is your Apple ID, which you can then follow a link from to complete the process.

If you choose to create a new Apple ID, you’ll be guided through the entire sign-up process on your iPhone or iPad.

Step 2: Grant permissions and set syncing preferences

Once verified, iCloud will automatically turn syncing on for most services, and ask your permission to either merge or replace data on your device, as well as use your location for Find My iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

Whether to merge or replace your data is up to you. Merging is probably the safe bet in most cases, since even if you don’t yet have anything on the cloud, it won’t affect what you have on your device. Even in cases where you have a lot of duplicate information on your device and already on iCloud from a previous setup on your Mac or elsewhere, I’ve found that Apple’s service is smart about what to keep, and where to put what information, so there’s little clean-up required after the fact.

Step 3: Choose what syncs

You can selectively set which data does and doesn’t sync via iCloud once you have it set up on your device. Your options include Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, Bookmarks, Notes, Photo Stream, Documents & Data and Photo Stream.

For Documents & Data, you can choose to allow iCloud to sync that information either only over Wi-Fi, or over both Wi-Fi and 3G. As developers incorporate Documents in the Cloud into their apps, this will become more important for customers looking to ease their 3G mobile bandwidth usage.

Note that you can also opt to back up your device to iCloud. This will work the same as a backup in iTunes, allowing you to remotely restore your iPhone’s settings, some content and information. Note that this backs up the camera roll, account information, documents and settings. You’ll have to replace any movies or music from iTunes on your device manually, as well as reinstall any apps in the event of needing to restore from an iCloud backup.

Step 4: Download the apps

Apple’s iCloud works together with some official apps from Apple, too. To complete your iCloud experience, go ahead and download Find My iPhone and Find My Friends from the App Store. These will help you locate your own device should you lose it, locate friends and family on a map if they choose to share their location with you, and vice versa.

You can also grab Apple’s iWork apps from the App Store if you want to see Document syncing via iCloud in action, but note that these cost money.

The rest

iCloud comes free with 5 GB of storage, but if you shoot a lot of video or backup many devices to the service, you might just want to upgrade your storage options. $20 a year gets you 15 GB total, $40 per year allows for 25 GB, and $100 a year will provide 55 GB of iCloud storage. You can upgrade to each option (or downgrade for your next payment cycle) via the iCloud settings on your device.

It isn’t too difficult to set up, but I’d be curious to see what percentage of iOS buyers end up going through with it. Are you planning to use iCloud? If you are, do you foresee any reason to need to upgrade your storage level?

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