Launched Thursday by Google’s former Chief Health Strategist Roni Zeiger, Smart Patients is an online community for cancer patients and caregivers that incorporates social networking and search technology.

“Given how many tools are accessible to everyone and how even scientific information is being democratized, there is now an impressive number of smart patients out there [and] we haven’t really thought about how to collaborate with them.,” Zeiger told me at this week’s TEDMED conference. “What can we learn from them to help take care of them and others better?”

While there are other online communities for patients, like PatientsLikeMe, as well as cancer-specific sites, Zeiger said Smart Patients differs in a couple of key ways.  For example, he said, given the important role clinical trials can play in a cancer patient’s treatment, the site includes a patient-friendly clinical trial search engine and it enables them to start conversations about those trials.

Additionally, while most other health-focused social networks and web communities – as well as most things in health care – tend to be siloed by disease, Smart Patients enables patients to follow conversations across their specific cancer and other kinds of cancers. That’s important, Zeiger said, because topics like bone metastasis or certain kinds of drugs may matter to patients with different kinds of cancers.

The free site will not include any advertising or marketing, but the company plans to conduct surveys and share anonymous patient insights with other health care companies, including biopharma companies, Zeiger said. For example, a current project with Oncosec Medical is working with a subset of the community to get patient feedback on how to design upcoming clinical trials of the biotech company’s skin cancer treatments.

Earlier this year, PatientsLikeMe announced that it had received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to create an open research platform that enables patients to take part in the clinical research process. But, for the most part, patients don’t play a part in clinical trials until they’re already designed.

For the past three months, Smart Patients has been in private beta with a few hundred patients but, to help build the network, it’s launching Thursday with partners including The Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation and the non-profit Cancer Commons. While Zeiger said he doesn’t think Smart Patients’ model will fit with every disease, he added that if their approach is successful, they’ll likely expand beyond cancer. He also said that while the company has been self-funded to date, it’s planning to raise a seed round in the near future.

“Our core philosophy is to learn from patients,” Zeiger said. “And I think that’s going to help us build something really useful.”

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Questions and answers have been edited slightly for clarity.

Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler

What does the acquisition mean for Goodreads’ reputation as a neutral hub for readers, authors and publishers?

Otis Chandler [OC]: “One of the extremely important things to us is for readers to share what they’re reading, no matter how they’re reading. We have no plans to change that. We want Goodreads to be a place for readers of all types to share their favorite books. You can expect to see customizations and better integrations for people who do use Kindle. For everyone else, Goodreads will remain largely as it is.”

Will Goodreads remain a standalone site, and is its entire team staying on? Is the site getting a redesign?

Grandinetti says Goodreads will be an independent subsidiary of Amazon, like Zappos or IMDB. The site will remain based in San Francisco. Chandler remains CEO, reporting to Grandinetti. Chandler said that Goodreads’ entire team is staying on (and that the company is hiring). To the question of a redesign, he said there is “nothing specific to mention in relation to the acquisition.”

Will Amazon have access to all of the Goodreads users’ data?

OC: “Goodreads is or will be a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon, so on one level, yes. Are things going to happen in the background without customers understanding it? I think the answer to that is no….We’ll make it very easy for someone to say, ‘Yeah, I’d love it if you could import all of my Amazon or Kindle purchases into my Goodreads shelf.’ We’ll make it very easy for people to do, but they’ll be aware of what’s happening.”

Users already have the ability to export their data from Goodreads, and they’ll continue to be able to do so.

Will Amazon use Goodreads reviews on its own retail site, or will Amazon reader reviews migrate over to Goodreads? In general, how much content will cross between the sites?

OC: “We’re going to think about this in terms of what’s best for our members. Maybe if we find books that don’t have any Goodreads reviews we might consider that, but I don’t think there’s any specific plans to do that at this time.”

Russ Grandinetti [RG]: “Our mentality here is to first do no harm, and make sure that if we’re going to do integrations, users genuinely find it to be a big benefit.”

Right now, Goodreads includes links to many retailers (like Barnes & Noble and Indiebound) on its book pages. Will that practice continue?

OC: ”It’s incredibly important to us that Goodreads remain a platform for all kinds of readers to use, whether they’re reading paper or on their Nook or Kindle or whatever. We always want Goodreads to be a place for people to share and talk about books…As for specific design of [the links], we’ll see, but we really think about it from the user perspective. If users really want those links [to other retailers], then those links will probably still be there.”

Will Goodreads now include a retail component — for instance, selling print or Kindle books from its site?

RG: “The design they have works incredibly well for users. You see that in the number of users who join that service.”

OC: “I think, short-term, the thing we’re most excited about is actually bringing the book into Goodreads and enabling people to just start reading right there from the Kindle Cloud Reader. We’ve never had a good book preview feature.”

Will Goodreads expand internationally?

RG: ”As you’ve seen in the last couple of years, one thing we’ve been working hard on at Kindle is [globalizing] the business…Goodreads has many users around the world. In terms of new languages and other countries, I think that’s an area of opportunity for both of us to work on.”

OC: ”Amazon has done a fabulous job of curating databases of international metadata.”

Speaking of metadata, Goodreads stopped sourcing its metadata from Amazon in early 2012, switching to Ingram’s metadata instead. What happens now?

OC: ”We’re going to determine what makes the most sense, but we’ll have access to Amazon’s metadata and certainly will probably be using it.”

Are the Kindle and Goodreads apps combining?

RG: ”Our goal would be…[for] the Kindle experience as it exists both on devices and apps, [to put] putting the connection [users] have on Goodreads as close to their fingertips as possible. When and how we do that, I’ll ask you to stay tuned.”

Will Goodreads retain its public API? Does Kobo get to keep its Goodreads review feed?

OC: “Yes [on the API],” and “we’re not going to shut [the Kobo feed] off.”

Why did Amazon buy Shelfari? Was that a failed acquisition?

RG: ”We’ve used [Shelfari] to generate quite a bit of incremental data about books. It’s powered features we’ve launched over time, such as book extras and X-Ray. But, of course, Goodreads has been much more of a social connection site and a larger social network. So when it comes to the graph we’ll use to connect people on Kindle, Goodreads will power that.”

Will Goodreads keep sharing data about its readers at conferences and so on?

OC: “Yeah, as far as I know, I think we’re still excited to share readers’ behavior…and create lots more 50 Shades of Grey infographics.”

Disclosure: Goodreads is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock / Thomas Bethge

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On Wednesday, the Boston-based company said it had raised $5.25 million from investors who apparently agree. Evertrue’s Series A round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and included existing investors like TechStars CEO David Cohen, Bonobos CEO Andy Dunn and Trunk Club CEO Brian Spaly. Since launching in 2010, the startup has raised $6.8 million.

Built on top of LinkedIn’s API, the company provides a Software-as-a-Service product that helps colleges and prep schools create mobile networking apps (on iOS and Android ) for their alumni. It combines career data and other information from LinkedIn with traditional databases managed by schools to help alums find others with similar personal and professional interests and schools find new benefactors.

At the top of the “donor pyramid,” Evertrue founder and president Brent Grinna said, there are a few, very wealthy individuals, and schools use CRM-style alumni tracking programs as well as traditional wining and dining to keep tabs on them. But, he added, further down the pyramid, there’s a wide band of untapped alumni who may have less money individually but comprise a big opportunity collectively.

“At the very, very top end, schools and nonprofits are doing great jobs,” said Grinna. “But in the middle of the pyramid, unless there are really significant donors, no one is doing [a similar] level of research.”

While at business school, he said, he helped plan his own alma mater’s five-year reunion and realized that even top schools like Brown used low-tech alumni-tracking methods (spreadsheets) and were sitting on reams of outdated information. That was when (partly inspired by a classmate who went on to work at LinkedIn) Grinna decided to launch Evertrue to blend LinkedIn data with whatever academic and other information colleges traditionally collect.

In addition to helping schools manage their alumni networks, the app is intended to help the alumni themselves take advantage of their networks. From the app, users can search for alums across multiple variables, including location, employer and college major. It also serves as app for organizing class reunions and other alumni events.

As college tuition rises and students find it more challenging to find jobs, more companies are trying to bring LinkedIn-like social networks to college students. CollegeFeed, launched in beta this week, gives college students a social platform for connecting with employers, and AfterCollege, a more than decade-old company, last summer added a new social layer to give students a LinkedIn of their own.

So far, more than 100 colleges and prep schools have signed on as EverTrue customers. But with the new funding, Grinna said the company plans to focus on product development and built out its team to scale its user base.

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Facebook is going to be launching some new features for its feed on Thursday, which may include new ways of filtering specific kinds of content and possibly new advertising features. Meanwhile, Twitter continues to show you everything, without filtering or ranking it in any way. Which method is better? That depends on how and why you are using it.

Much of Bilton’s criticism revolves around what some call the “subscribe” function, which allows users to get updates from others without having to ask their permission. When it launched in the fall of 2011, it was widely seen as an attempt to copy Twitter’s “asymmetric following” model, since Twitter lets users get updates from whoever they wish — whereas Facebook’s model has always been symmetric, in the sense that users must agree to be friends before they can see each other’s updates. Late last year, Facebook changed the name of this feature to “follow,” which made the similarity to Twitter even more obvious.

Do you want to see everything in your feed?

As an attempt to copy Twitter, the follow feature seems to be largely a failure — at least if the experiences of Bilton and others who have complained about Facebook’s newsfeed, such as billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, are anything to go by. They say they don’t get much engagement, which makes them question whether their content is even reaching their subscribers, and whether Facebook is tweaking their feed so that certain kinds of updates don’t show up as frequently.

The last time this topic came up, when Cuban and actor George Takei were criticizing the network because of the lack of engagement from subscribers, a number of Facebook users attacked the company for filtering their feeds and not showing them all of the updates from pages or individuals they were following. Some users said the equivalent of: “If I subscribe to someone, I want to see all their updates, not just the ones that you choose to show me.”

swipe at facebook: 'there's no algorithm standing between you and your audience' - @adambain gets feisty.

—
Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) March 07, 2013

In a nutshell, this is the fundamental difference between Twitter and Facebook: the former doesn’t apply any filters to the stream of updates users get, apart from those required by law — if you follow a couple of thousand users, as I do, then you get all of the updates from all of those users, and they flow past you in a giant river of undifferentiated tweets, in reverse chronological order.

Facebook, however, applies all kinds of algorithmic tweaks to a newsfeed based on what some call EdgeRank (although this isn’t a term Facebook uses internally, according to Anthony De Rosa of Reuters), and therefore some updates are more prominent than others, and in some cases updates may never appear at all. Users have control over some of the knobs and dials that will hide or reveal certain kinds of posts, but there is also a lot of filtering that goes on behind the scenes, which makes Facebook a bit of a Google-style black box.

It’s hard to know what you’re missing

Depending on how you see them, these two different approaches can be a good thing or a bad thing: Twitter’s method is theoretically more transparent and comprehensive, since it is completely unfiltered — but it can also be overwhelming, and the network has worked hard to try and help users cope with this vast stream of content, via things like the Discover tab. Facebook’s method seems a lot more invasive and secretive, but at the same time it can make it easier to cope with the never-ending ocean of content — an average of 2,000 posts a day for each user.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has a useful analogy for the difference between the two: Twitter is a little like real-time TV news, while Facebook functions more like a DVR that lets you watch things after they have happened (although to some extent the network chooses what to show you, which your DVR doesn’t). They are two very different experiences of a social stream.

While Facebook users might complain that they want to see everything their social graph posts, the reality is that they likely wouldn’t see everything anyway — unless they sat on their computer all day long reading everything that was posted. Most die-hard Twitter users likely don’t see everything their followers post either, unless they watch the network 24 hours a day, and many use lists (as I do) to try and cope with the volume of content that is posted, or services like Paper.li that allow them to “time shift” that content and catch up with it later.

In the end, the question hangs not just on how you want to handle that stream of updates from your social graph, but who you trust to do that management for you: in the case of Twitter, you are pretty much on your own, and that can be chaotic — but there is a certain purity to it. With Facebook, you have some tools at your disposal to manage that content, but the network itself also does a lot behind the scenes without telling you much about how it works. Facebook says it’s for your own good, but how do you really know what you are missing?

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In the new version, Path messages take advantage of the fact that as our phones have become capable of much more than transmitting voice and text, traditional SMS has become fairly outmoded. People are looking for ways to communicate with richer features than just the letters of the alphabet. So the company focused on creating a private social network is introducing a much more full-featured messaging option along with the third version, and pretty much everything you’d want is there.

For a company that’s known for its design, some of the features will look different from what users are used to. But in meetings in San Francisco last week ahead of Wednesday’s launch, Path designers said they view the addition of large emojis they’re calling “stickers” as a new kind of digital art — a kind that hopefully, users will pay for.

There’s text, of course, but it’s the other features that kick it over the top: the large emojis called stickers, the ability to quickly insert a pin on a map to show where you are or want to go, voice recording features, the ability to import or snap photos, music, movies, and a few others. They’re the type of features you might ordinarily screenshot or explain with words, but they’re now available at the tap of a button.

“I think it’s a typical Path swiss army knife,” said Nate Johnson, Path’s VP of marketing. “You can do a lot of different things with it. And it helps that we have the list of your closest friends sitting right there.”

Path to success?

The question for Path is whether a robust messaging feature will add to the network’s appeal and either draw in new users or bring back those who have lapsed.

The company recently hit 6 million registered users, and Johnson said that for most people, once they get past the initial hurdle of understanding how to use the app, adoption is quick. Path raised a $30 million Series B led by Redpoint Ventures in April of 2012 and $8.5 million back in April of 2011.

Path’s decision to focus on stickers is interesting. Not only does it infuse the app with a new set of aesthetics and graphic artists who might not necessarily work for the company, it gives a hint at where the company’s monetization strategy is headed.

Users will receive two “packs” of stickers for free. Each pack includes somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 18 images, depending on the pack, and the free sets take the classic Path smiley face (named Jack, apparently) and gives him a whole set of new updates. There’s party Jack, with a beer mug; developer Jack, with a 5 o’clock shadow and Red Bull; sleepy Jack with a robe and coffee mug, and more than 30 other images.

Path is betting that emoji-like images are the kinds of things that consumers will want to pay for under a freemium model. The stickers are basically emojis on steroids, maybe. At first glance they don’t really fit with Path’s carefully orchestrated red and yellow aesthetic. The stickers come in a variety of styles, and most are goofy in nature and garish in color.

“The philosophy here is to build things that people want to pay for,” Johnson said. “It’s not to put in advertising. The spirit of this is that we think there’s a better way to make money. And that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Design uber alles

Path is known for its design — the company has worked hard to create a strong feeling in the app through attention to detail and careful consideration of all elements. From the shading on the buttons to the way certain features fade out when you look at a photo, it’s the way that small things come together that makes Path an attractive app. But with the addition of large emojis, or stickers, the company is detouring a little from its established look, and banking on consumer delight to promote a new kind of design.

“I feel like in this day and age, anyone can be self-taught and design something that looks good. But there’s so much thinking behind our product,” said Jenny Ji, design director at Path.

Key designers at Path said that they’re persuaded the new stickers will not only provide some revenue for the company, but will provide greater joy to the consumers and change how we consider digital art.

The company worked with external artists to create each of the sticker sets or “packs,” and when users tap on a sticker pack to purchase, they’ll see the designers name and bio, making it seem like you’re purchasing a gallery of hand-crafted pieces of art, rather than smiling dog images.

“Each of these packs, there’s a theme around it,” said Dustin Mierau, co-founder and head of design. “So we’re really asking is, ‘What do you want the pack to allow you to communicate? Like this one is about friendship and love, so my wife and I send these back and forth quite a bit.”

“We don’t want people to have to type,” Mierau said. ”Typing is probably the worst part of messaging today. Usually it’s typing to coordinate or do things, so we want to bring in the tools that make it easier. With one tap, I’m saying something more meaningful. It’s a whole phrase. That’s how we see stickers, it’s entire phrases wrapped up in one tap. It’s like the map of saying where I am. It’s this whole giant interaction wrapped up in one Path moment.”

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In the last year, Edmodo’s platform has grown to support more than 400 apps from third-party developers, it said. The company, which gives teachers and students a secure online hub for communicating and collaborating, also said its user base has more than tripled to 18 million.

Edmodo did not share details on the deal but said Root-1 co-founder and early Google employee Vibhu Mittal will head up research and development, co-founders Manish Kothari and Ketan Kothari (former co-founders of AlphaSmart) would assume key positions in platform strategy and growth and co-founder Adam Stepinski (who, incidentally, was Mittal’s intern at Google) will join the company’s platform engineering team in a key role.

With the acquisition, Edmodo not only adds the expertise of Root-1′s team but its five apps, including OpenMinds, which lets teachers and developers customize education apps. That app is particularly interesting as it enables teachers to not just curate apps but play a bigger role in creating digital educational experiences for their students.

“The key focus is how do we continue to drive a deeper integration of high-quality learning experiences. Teachers are the ones at the center of what their students need to learn and giving them more control and choice is what we strive to do,” said Crystal Hutter, Edmodo’s COO. “[The acquisition] is an extension of our commitment to our platform, our developers and our teachers.”

The purchase emphasizes Edmodo’s goal of being a distribution channel for classroom content — not only an online communications site for teachers and students — and it highlights Edmodo’s hopes for becoming a growing influence in the maturing ed tech industry. As content goes digital and teachers are more able to pick and choose content from a variety of sources instead of just using a textbook, Edmodo aims to be an underlying platform. Although further monetization plans are no doubt on the horizon, Edmodo supports both free and paid apps and takes a cut of the revenue from publishers.

The acquisition comes on the heels of a new big hire — last month it brought on board former Mozilla VP Damon Sicore to lead its engineering team and boost the company’s profile in the larger engineering community. To date, the company has raised $47.5 million from investors including New Enterprise Associates, Union Square Ventures and Learn Capital.

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