The company was known for its social browser that had tabs for chat and features that would let you know when your favorite sites updated with fresh content. But the company moved away from the idea of building a browser and launched more of a news reader on iPad in October, which Om covered. He wrote about the different ways Rockmelt was challenging apps like Flipboard. Rockmelt then went on to launch an iPhone app and web versions.

The company said the revamped version now has 1.1 million users who have used Rockmelt at any one point, with “hundreds of thousands” active users, although they emphasized that they’re still in the “early days” of the new Rockmelt.

We covered the company’s original launch back in Nov. 2010, and then when it raised $30 million in funding led by Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz in June 2011.

The Android app builds on the new concept of Rockmelt, which shows you interesting stories from around the internet that you can respond to with Rockmelt-specific emotions or share to other social networks.

“We think there should be a social network just for sharing the best things you find on the web,” said Tim Howes, CTO and co-founder of the company.

Which is a legitimate goal, except this space is fairly dominated by Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest. But still, the app surfaces some cool content, and determining the next frontier for social news is still something that people are figuring out.

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I’d be hard pressed to think of a seriously useful benefit to the hashtag. Hashtags are a cultural phenomenon that have bypassed their Twitter origins. They’re useful for conveying irony on the internet. They’re useful for conveying extreme irony in real life conversations. The hashtag was even deemed “Word of the Year” — it’s gone global. But on Wednesday, Facebook welcomed Twitter’s iconic feature with open arms, apparently not ironically:

“Hashtags are a first step in surfacing relevant and important public conversations. Over time our goal is to build out additional functionality for marketers including trending hashtags and new insights so that you can better understand how hashtags fit into your overall Facebook advertising strategies and drive your business objectives.”

Maybe back in the day, when Twitter’s search was even less effective than it is now, hashtags helped you discover topics you were interested in. They can occasionally be helpful if you’re looking to find tweets for a particular conference or event — I still check for a conference hashtag if I want tweets from that event. But often the terms are too broad to be useful (just try searching for #socialmedia and see what comes up), or a search for a simple non-hashtagged word would be just as effective — some of the funniest tweets from the event I’m attending today are not accompanied by the official hashtag.

New York Times social media staff editor Daniel Victor wrote a post for Nieman Lab recently where he argued that hashtags are functionally pretty worthless. He even argued that they’re aesthetically damaging, and that over-hashtagging makes your tweets hard to read:

“The noble hashtag is cursed by a problem Yogi Berra could appreciate: Too many people use it, so no one goes there. Presumably, most Twitter users use hashtags intending to add their tweet to a river of similar information and to expose their own thoughts to a wider, interested audience. Twitter itself markets the hashtag to those ends. But does that actually happen? It’s unlikely, especially for the most popular hashtags. There are many useful exceptions, but hashtags for big news stories are particularly vulnerable to mathematical futility.”

As Buzzfeed wrote last week, marketers have been credited or blamed with the rise of the promotional hashtag, and Twitter does sell ads around promoted hashtags, which brands are using. If big brands switched even some of their ad budgets from Twitter promoted hashtags to Facebook ads around hashtags, that could be a big deal for Facebook. But it’s possible that a lot of average people have hit hashtag fatigue.

So what does it mean that we have hashtags on Facebook now? It’s a nice validating moment for Twitter, that its iconic symbol has been adopted by the social network with a billion users. And it could help Facebook push to become more of a real-time news network, since hashtags are often associated with live events or activities. I doubt I’ll be doing many hashtag-based searches any time soon, but they sure are fun to write with:

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Facebook looked at its 27 different ad products and decided to cut down on the number of options to improve a smaller number, and it said that making ads simpler will be a priority for the company moving forward. Facebook explained the idea in a blog post on Thursday:

“When we work with a marketer, we always start with their business goals, and we are going to do the same thing with our ad products. Our vision is that over time, an advertiser can come to Facebook and tell us what they are trying to achieve, and our ads tools will automatically suggest the right combination of products to help them achieve it.

In the next six months, we plan to streamline the number of ad units from 27 to fewer than half of that while mapping all of our ads to the business objectives marketers care about — be it in-store sales, online conversions, app installs, etc.”

The changes will come in several different forms. One will be cutting down on confusing, duplicated offerings, such as the ability to both ask a Question and to post a question on a page and getting replies in the comments. Another is removing the Offer product, since companies have found that posting an ad to a page works just as well (this change will occur in July). Other changes include automatically adding social context to ads rather than requiring marketers to purchase this seperately, and making ads look more consistant across the platform.

The full explanation of changes can be found in Facebook’s blog post, and will be rolling out over the next few weeks and months.

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Pinterest is launching three distinct types of pins, with one type each for food, retail products, and movies. The new format will only work with items pinned from the launch partner sites, but the number of partners is wide-reaching, and will grow. If you click on a food pin, it will now include the ingredient list and relevant information below the photo, auto-generated from the original site. Product photos will show where you can find the item for sale, and the movie pins will show information about the movie such as its rating, cast and release date.

The list of brands participating in the launch demonstrates the strong interest from U.S. retailers in getting on board with Pinterest. Some of the launch partners include: eBay, Etsy, Home Depot, Neiman Marcus, Overstock, REI, Sephora, Sony, Target, Urban Outfitters, Wal-Mart, Bon Appetit, Epicurious, Martha Stewart Living, Whole Foods, Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes, and many others. Companies who want to be included in the program can apply on Pinterest’s developer page.

A Pinterest representative sought to emphasize that the new pins are not a form of advertising, but are instead supposed to make pins more “actionable,” a term the company has been using for a while now, including in our interview with CEO Ben Silbermann just last week.

“We want to make pinning actionable,” he told us at the time. “Our focus has been to become a very valuable service.”

One major complaint with Pinterest, which has given an advantage to sites like Wanelo or Nasty Gal, is that users frequently share or re-pin the same photo thousands of times, but when you actually click the photo to see where it came from the link is broken.

If more and more companies and popular blogs integrate their photos of inventory with Pinterest under the new pin structure, it could make items more trackable on the site — which would be handy for consumers and crucial if Pinterest wants to eventually profit from the traffic it generates.

And it’s not an insignificant amount of web traffic. While Pinterest doesn’t officially release any stats, a recent ComScore report put the number of users at more than 48 million unique visitors globally, and a February Pew report on social media put the percentage of online adults using Pinterest at 15 percent, which is slightly less than the 16 percent on Twitter, and more than the 13 percent on Instagram — and far more than the 6 percent on Yahoo’s apparent new friend Tumblr.

A company spokesperson said Pinterest is currently not profiting from the new integration with brands. But the strong interest on the part of the companies and the launch of a tech platform to support them paves the way for making money in the future. After all, Pinterest just raised $200 million in new funding — it has to be looking to make money at some point.

It’s an inevitable move for Pinterest to accelerate its growth, as we noted in a story on the small team’s unique symbiosis between design and engineering. But the site needs to make sure it crafts a business model that fits with its content, much as Twitter has built up promoted tweets.

Pinterest is still in the early days of that growth, but all sorts of e-commerce companies, from the startup Wanelo to behemoth Amazon, will be watching closely as this unfolds.

Updated at 9:14 PM to note that the new recipe pins will show the full ingredient list, not the full recipe.

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Parakweet is a company that’s working to use natural language processing to cull through your tweets and make smart, targeted suggestions based on the data. On Friday, the company plans to announce the launch of two products. One is Bookvi.be, a consumer-oriented book recommendation engine, and TrendFinder For Movies, which is a social media dashboard primarily for entertainment companies to monitor conversations around movies. The latter is a paid product that provides the company with revenue, and the former is free for consumers.

“It’s a very hard problem we’ve tackled, which is accurately identifying sentiments,” CEO Ramesh Haridas said. “With 400 million tweets a day, there are 700,000 a day discussing movies, and if you tried text-matching techniques you’d come back with 40 million results. Many movies and books have very common titles, so you’d just drown in data.”

Both products use natural language processing to figure out how common a title is on Twitter, but also how a consumer is tweeting about a particular product, and they make recommendations based on those tweets. For instance, if I tweeted that a particular book is terrible and no one should ever read it, it would look ridiculous for a book recommendation engine to suggest that book to people. So Bookvi.be is structured to recognize the words I’m using in my tweet and know not to recommend that book. Users can choose to have a weekly email send to them with book suggestions, and they can type in their Twitter username to get book suggestions based on the people they follow.

“The bar on accuracy is very high,” Haridas said. “Especially if it’s sent via email, the precision needs to be intact.”

I’ve looked at a good number of social recommendation tools, and this one definitely stood out. For one, it was incredibly accurate — all the books it suggested were books I would actually read. But most importantly, it didn’t require me to create a new social network, or depend on friends for reviews, so you could get a lot of value from it right away. This is the obvious benefit of using someone else’s social graph, but Twitter seems perfectly suited to making content recommendations for things like books. Because unlike my Facebook friends, the people I follow on Twitter tend to accurately reflect my intellectual interests.

Of course, there are the obvious potential pitfalls of building a product around someone else’s platform, although Haridas said they support Facebook and are adding other platforms. But there’s a good deal of money to be made in accurately processing and understanding the words people are tweeting, as evidenced by Twitter’s acquisition of Lucky Sort this week, a similar company that also tries to figure out what people are talking about on social media.  As I’ve written before, as Twitter ramps up its advertising products it’s more important than ever for the company to be able to provide brands with more accurate ad targeting which hinges on the words people are tweeting and searching.

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We wrote about Twitter’s collaboration with a startup called Snappy TV and Turner Broadcasting that allowed the NCAA to tweet out highlight clips from March Madness throughout the annual college basketball tournament, with the clips sponsored by AT&T and Coke Zero, and a Twitter spokesperson confirmed Monday that the ESPN clips will appear in a similar manner inside Twitter Cards. The report indicated that Twitter will be selling advertising specifically around the sports clips that are tweeted out.

The company announced major updates to its Cards technology in early April that allowed for more types of content to appear in the tweets and more app promotion for third-party apps cross-posting to Twitter. The key to Cards is that a user never has to leave Twitter to view the content the Cards contain — everything is viewable directly in stream, which encourages users to stay on Twitter’s website.

My colleague Mathew Ingram and I have written about Twitter’s transformation over the past year or so to become more of a media company, and Twitter’s partnerships with television, music and video outlets are numerous. There were rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, a partnership with Nielson to measure user activity around television, the launch of the Twitter #music app and following music entertainment show.

For Twitter, all of this content could make tweets more engaging for users who become captive audience members participating in live events. But perhaps more importantly for the company, if it’s gearing up for the IPO everyone expects, video provides an excellent platform for advertising and big brand partnerships that could make Twitter a lot of money.

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Allowing Android users of certain phones, including the Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One and Torque devices, to more easily find Path could help the app win more users and improve distribution, which has been a continuing hurdle for CEO Dave Morin’s self-described closed personal network.

The company explained the partnership with Sprint in a statement:

“Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re starting something new with Sprint to make finding Path easy. Sprint has brought together a group of some of the highest quality apps around for its Discover-it Widget on the new Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One and Torque devices, and we’re delighted to be included. Now, millions of Sprint customers can download Path with just a quick tap, allowing them to easily connect and share with the ones they love.”

Path was dinged by users recently for reportedly spamming a user’s contacts telling people to sign up for Path. While Morin denied that Path had ever spammed its users, Facebook reportedly cut off access to the Facebook API that allowed users to invite their Facebook friends to join Path.

The Sprint partnership could give Path a needed boost in adding new members, as the pressure increases on the mobile social network. Sprint most recently counted 55.2 million customers, and while not all of them are using Android, it certainly provides Path with a large new group of possible users.

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But in reality? With this pivot, Fab isn’t completely changing its product as much as it is changing what the Fab brand means. Instead of selling merchandise from other retailers on its site through flash sales (sales of limited quantities of items for limited time periods), Fab is expanding to include products designed by Fab, products designed by others, and ventures like custom furniture and a brick and mortar store in Europe. The company wants to be one of the “next great iconic shopping brands,” it wrote Tuesday, and that shopping experience will maintain the design focus that the company was founded on.

Goldberg explained the idea behind the re-launch, which he announced in a blog post Tuesday:

“People called it a “pivot.” We called it a complete restart. We threw out the old and started anew. And it took off fast. Really fast. We re-launched Fab on June 9, 2011 and before we knew it we were tracking to $100M in sales and working with tens of thousands of designers and connecting with millions of consumers. We were on to something big. We knew it. So, in January 2012 we did what came naturally to us: We planned to Pivot. Again.”

Focusing on the general concept of a design-based e-commerce brand will allow Fab to both produce its own products and work with others, expanding the items it sells on its site and expanding the concept of what it means to be a physical retailer, the company wrote:

“We believe that part of disrupting design is disrupting it across multiple channels. We’re working on Fab store concepts that reimagine and reinvent how people buy design products by merging offline & online experiences in entirely new ways. We’ve always said that Fab wants to be where its customers are — be it smartphone, tablets, web browsers, or even physical retail stores. And, with less than 5% of home products purchased online today, we think that physical retail has an important role to play in the customer’s decision process. But, we plan to reinvent retail and help guide home product purchased online to 10%, then 20%, then 30% online as part of our disrupting the industry.”

As part of the expansion, Fab is also acquiring MassivKonzept, a custom furniture company, which will give Fab a head-start on this business and the addition of a physical store, with plans to add more of these stores in the future.

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But then you start noticing some differences. There’s no option to find your friends, and certainly no mechanism for following them. You can interact with anyone who “drops” into your location, but you’re most likely dealing with a complete stranger. If you ask a question or make a positive or critical comment, you’re just as likely to get a response from the venue’s owner as you are from one of its patrons. And once you’ve left a location, you’ll still be able to see all of the activity going on there, but you’ll find your ability to interact with the locale much more limited.

Evzdrop CEO David Rush said he and fellow co-founder Eric Brown were inspired to start Evzdrop in 2012 because of the difficulty of sorting useful information about a bar, restaurant or event from social networks.

“There’s a fire hose of information coming out of Facebook and Twitter,” Rush said. “Check-ins are more about showing where you are to friends, which is what Foursquare has become today. … We wanted to create an app that allows you to share a common interest in place — one that lets you get the perspective of people who, along with you, are actually at an event.”

To that end, Evzdrop has created a kind of geofenced social network, allowing only people who are actually at a location to engage with one another and the business itself. Everyone else is just a voyeur. They can follow all of the drop posts going at location, but they can’t participate themselves except to comment on other people’s drops.

From my experiences fiddling with the app, many of the drops aren’t terribly useful — “Dude, this band rocks!” — but as more people use the app, more useful information rises to the top through a “props” system that allows other people at vote up the most entertaining or informative posts.

The idea, Rush said, is to create not just a repository of immediate information — older drops disappear from the site — but a real-time dialogue between all of the people sharing the same space. That differentiates it from Yelp and other reviews sites, Rush said.

If Evzdrop can reach critical mass it should be able to tell if the Hamachi at the local sushi bar is particularly fresh or foul on any particular hour. Sports bar owners will be able to alert you to which games they’re showing in playoffs, or respond to requests from customers on the premise to switch to a different game. Concert attendees can demand a band play a particular song.

Do we really need another check-in app?

Of course, to get this kind of depth out of the service, Evzdrop really needs to scale. Right now it’s still a tiny operation. It has six employees and $500,000 in angel funding, and its Android and iPhone app only has a miniscule 11,000 downloads. Growing that base is going to be difficult to say the least. Not only are there numerous competing apps promoting their own take on the check-in, every major social network, review app and location-based service — from Facebook to Yelp to Google Latitude — have added check-in capabilities. The last thing most consumers want to do is download and register an account with another check-in app.

Building a business around social-location is also proving to be a difficult even if you 3.5 billion check-ins like Foursquare. New York’s check-in pioneer just raised another $41 million in financing, but it’s under intense pressure to prove it has viable business model.

Rush said that Evzdrop hopes to gain traction by targeting business owners and event planners, getting them to promote the app to their customers. Rush thinks the app would be particularly appealing for helping track customer sentiment and complaints at big events like concerts or benefits, where organizers can communicate with a lot of people en masse.

To that end Evzdrop is making venue owners a key part of the network, rather than just peripheral participants. They don’t get control their local social networks like, say, moderators on a discussion board. But they can communicate privately with their patrons, Evzdrop provides them with real-time data about the sentiment of their clientele. Rush said Evzdrop considers itself just as much a customer relations management (CRM) platform as it does a social networking app.

That business focus is also key to its business model. While any business owner can register their place with Evzdrop, gaining access to its customer communications tools, Evzdrop hopes to build a premium platform that would allow businesses to market promotions to their most frequent customers as well as give them more control over the interaction within the walls of their social networks.

Rush said one tool Evzdrop plans to implement is a means to flag negative sentiment, allowing a proprietor to intercept a critical drop before it goes live giving them a chance to address the complaint immediately. Rush said Evzdrop would never allow businesses to censor posts — every drop would still go live – just create a kind of early warning system for negative feedback.

It seems Evzdrop is trying to walk a fine line. It’s admirable that Evzdrop is trying to develop its business model at the get go, as opposed to Twitter and Foursquare, which built their social networks and then tried to figure out how to make money. But if patrons start perceiving Evzdrop as just a promotional pulpit for businesses, they won’t use it as a social network. And if Evzdrop can’t build up a social network, it doesn’t have a business.

Concert image courtesy of Flickr user humbert15.

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The LinkedIn Contacts app, which will launch just on iOS for U.S. users on an invite-only basis at first, allows you to pull together your Google, Outlook, Yahoo, and phone contacts into one contact database hosted on the app. (It also supports integration with some apps like Tripit or Cardmunch.) Contacts then lets you sort and filter people based on how often you contact them and lets you add details about your relationship to serve as personal reminders.

For instance, I can mark when and where I first met one of my LinkedIn conections, see when I last emailed that person in Gmail, call them on the phone (if they list their number), and see when I last met with them according to my Outlook calendar (if I used one of those).

These seem like useful features that could help you sort and categorize professional contacts, and it’s cool to see how LinkedIn has used algorithims and data to put together individual relationship histories for each contact without much work required from the user. However, it’s unclear why LinkedIn felt that these features should exist in a standalone app.

Will people really download a second LinkedIn app if they already have one that works just fine? These features seem like they’d be more useful if they were integrated into the existing app rather than launched in a second one. The company did indicate that it will evaluate how the product does on mobile in deciding whether to add features into the existing app, and users who gain access to the new Contacts app will have this data integrated into their contacts section of LinkedIn.com, which is smart.

Sachin Rekhi, the former CEO of the address book company Connected, which LinkedIn acquired in 2011, is now heading up the Contacts app, and he explained that LinkedIn wanted to keep the contact info in a separate app to better target the specific audience that would find it useful. Namely, professionals who want networking info on mobile. But it’s unclear which of LinkedIn’s existing members wouldn’t fit that description.

“We’re taking a multi-app strategy across different use cases and target audiences,” Rekhi said.

The other major downside to the app is that it doesn’t integrate with Facebook or Twitter, so it’s fairly limited in the types of information it can actually import. The company would not indicate whether this was because Facebook and Twitter refused to provide access to those social graphs, or whether LinkedIn wasn’t interested in adding them. Rekhi said it’s because the Contacts app just focuses on professional contacts rather than more social features, so starting with apps like Gmail and Outlook made sense.

However, the increasing reality is that a lot of people do make professional contacts over Facebook and Twitter, and as Facebook improves its messaging and contacts products, it seems like a major downside that the LinkedIn app wouldn’t include those. Presumably, LinkedIn wants you connect with people over its own social network, wishing them happy birthday, calling them, and catching up with them on the Contacts app rather than through Facebook. But by not including Facebook’s social graph, it makes the app a lot less complete for younger users like myself.

So what’s the benefit for LinkedIn in producing this app? Of course, more eyeballs focused on LinkedIn and more screentime with the company’s products are always good for the company, and messaging and calling apps have become popular recently as companies try to hook users into communicating through their services. Importing all of your contacts and email information gives LinkedIn much more data to use as it turns your information into value for professional recruiters, who drive most of the company’s revenue.

Plus, as LinkedIn focuses its site on producing more news and media content, as evidenced by the Pulse acquisition, it’s possible it wants to make the main LinkedIn app more of a news reader and the Contacts app where you communicate with other individuals. But the company has a long way to go before it builds the equivalent of Facebook and Facebook Messenger.

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