The changes in the interface are intended to drive home what the founders of the San Francisco startup want this app to be: a tool for food discovery. Though some people may associate the app with people who like to take pictures of their food, Foodspotting co-founder Alexa Andrzejewski says these tweaks to the UI better illustrate the app’s intended purpose.

“We never meant for it to be just photo-sharing, it’s not Instagram for dishes or food,” she said in an interview earlier this week. “It’s trying to be a better food finding app and discovery app.”

Update: The content is there: There have been 1 million dishes uploaded to the app. Now it’s about people using those pictures to decide what they want to eat.

Here’s a round-up of the main changes:

• Tell Foodspotting what you like and what you hate. There’s a little “x” that pops up on each picture of a dish. Don’t eat red meat? If you reject beef dishes in the app, over time Foodspotting won’t show you dishes that feature it. Like mac and cheese? The app will show you much more of that. In other words, the more information you give it about you, the better the app will work for you. “More data helps us understand what you like,” said Andrzejewski.
• More emphasis on who’s recommending. You can see that someone loved it and that the person is an expert in a certain category (sandwiches, sushi, dessert). Reputation, in other words, is coming more to the fore.
• More social features. It’s more obvious right away when you view a dish in a restaurant you’re in or near if your friends have recommended or eaten something there already.
• Navigation for commenting is more intuitive. It has surfaced the buttons to tell someone “great shot” or “great find.” The option to say “want it,” “tried it” or “loved it” is hidden beneath a star button.
• New logo, less emphasis on the camera, more on the lens. Andrzejewski redesigned the logo herself, replacing the “I [camera] Food” in favor of either a lens or a cookie with a bite out of it, depending on how you see it. That multilayered interpretation is intended: Andrzejewski says it’s really in the eye of the beholder. But her intention is to make the logo more representative of what Foodspotting is really about. The logo is “the camera lens or any kind of lens that you can look through to see stuff around you [that] you wouldn’t otherwise have seen,” she said. “Like food x-ray vision.”

Note: This story previously said there have been 2 million dishes uploaded to the app.

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Google launched a news-reading app called Currents on Thursday, something it has been working on for some time — ever since it was a much-rumored skunkworks project called Propeller — and much of the coverage of the new app has called it a challenger to existing tablet and iPhone news-readers like Flipboard and Zite. But while Google Currents is superficially similar to these other services, there are some important differences that make me wonder whether Google really understands how media has changed and is changing. For a company that’s usually so forward-thinking, Currents as it stands now is more than a little disappointing.

Like Flipboard and Zite, the new Google offering (available here — U.S. only at this point) allows you to pull in content from a number of sources and then read through it in a kind of digital-magazine format on a tablet or an iPhone or other mobile device (my colleague Darrell has a hands-on look at the app). As mobile media consumption becomes an ever-increasing part of our lives, this kind of app is becoming the way that many people take in a lot of their news — at least those who wish to browse rather than simply following their favorite news sources on Twitter or Facebook. And Flipboard has shown, particularly with its excellent new iPhone app, that this can be done in a way that’s just as visually appealing as a traditional magazine, if not more so.

Currents is missing some crucial elements

Google’s app, while well-designed in many ways, lacks much of the polish and user-interface elements that make Flipboard so compelling (to me at least). And at least in my limited usage of it so far, it doesn’t even manage to rise to the level that Zite provides — and Zite, a Canadian startup that was acquired by CNN earlier this year for an estimated $20 million, is much more utilitarian in its approach than Flipboard (Zite also just released an iPhone app). It’s entirely possible Google’s app will improve over time, and it does offer some interesting features — such as the ability to sync the content you’ve read between devices — but I still think it’s missing some crucial aspects.

For example, Google Currents is social in at least one way, in that it lets you share articles you read to Twitter and Facebook, provided you click through the default menu (which promotes sharing on Google’s own Google+ network first). But it isn’t social in another important sense: Unlike both Flipboard and Zite, it doesn’t pull in your Twitter lists or streams from those you follow, or content from your Facebook social graph. In other words, you can push content out to these networks, but you can’t pull content in from them and view it inside your news reader. To me, that means Currents is only one-half of a proper social-news app — and not even the most interesting half.

Why isn’t Google helping us filter content?

The second element Google Currents seems to be missing is recommendations or some form of smart filtering of content, apart from the limited amount that appears in the “trending” section. This is something Zite has pursued aggressively, both via its algorithms and through explicit recommendations from users — thumbs up, thumbs down, etc. — and is likely one of the reasons why CNN was interested in acquiring it. Flipboard hasn’t done much in terms of recommendations so far, but has begun to do so through its iPhone app “Cover Stories” feature, which apparently learns based on a user’s activity.

As we’ve noted many times, the massive rivers of information that pour into our lives from all kinds of sources makes the need for a smart filter more compelling every day. That seems like a problem virtually tailor-made for a company like Google, which has boatloads of programmers who specialize in filtering and understanding massive amounts of real-time data, yet the company has done virtually nothing in that space — despite having a long-established platform called Google News to draw from and build on. The only thing Google has done that seems remotely interesting is adding +1 recommendations to Google News, but even that seems designed mostly to promote the Google+ network.

An app like Currents should — particularly if it wants to actually be competitive with Flipboard or Zite — be pulling in news content from every source available, especially real-time sharing networks like Twitter and Facebook. Then it should apply smart filters and recommendations to those streams, to help news consumers sort and understand that information better. Instead, Currents feels about as innovative as your garden-variety app from a traditional magazine — in other words, not very innovative at all. More than anything, it feels like a giant missed opportunity.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Izzard

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The app, created by former New York Times digital design director Khoi Vinh and Scott Ostler of dump.fm, invites people to make simple photo collages that can be shared easily among friends and remixed into new creations that form a sort of visual conversation. Lascaux also announced it has raised $600,000 in seed funding from Polaris Venture Partners, Betaworks and Allen & Company, bringing its total to $700,000 raised so far.

Making art fun

The free app tries to build a social environment that encourages creativity, sharing and building off the work of others. It’s meant to lower the bar for dabbling in art by tapping friends to help unleash a lot of pent-up creative energy. (Check out the video demonstration below.)

“We’re trying to get people out of the thinking that art is something they can’t do because it’s intimidating or difficult,” Vinh told me. “We want to make it fun and casual like a conversation.”

Users create their own collage, or mixel, by pulling from their own pictures on their iPad or from Facebook. Or they can search through Bing image search for photos. They can then crop, rotate, expand and duplicate images, all with simple touch gestures.

Other iPad apps like Photo Wall also let people make collages. But Mixel is trying to distinguish itself by being social. So users can find their friends on Facebook, see what’s popular and trending among Mixel users, and follow other Mixel users, commenting and liking their stuff. And they can share their creations on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.

Remix and share

Mixel users can reuse other people’s collages, pulling out single elements or grabbing all the pieces and working them into something new. One of Mixel’s coolest features is that it saves all the elements separately on its servers, so users can pull out one piece that they like and use it to start their own mixel.

Because Mixel saves each element, it also knows where each piece is reused, so it can show users how one element may have been implemented by other people. And it encourages almost a conversation that builds upon images. This kind of reminds me of Chris Poole’s Canvas image board service, which opened to the public recently and encourages people to interact through images. Vinh, who left the New York Times last year, said Canvas is different in that’s it’s used online and it’s good for creating memes while Mixel encourages art with a broad audience. It also has no drawing, paint or text tools to keep it distinct from meme culture.

Vinh said Mixel is looking to build a big audience first before exploring monetization opportunities. Down the line, he said, he might consider in-app purchase, freemium subscriptions or working with brands on brand-safe collages.

Building conversations around images

I like what Mixel is trying to do. I think the iPad has a great opportunity to spur creativity, but while I have used some apps like Brushes and Sketchbook, I haven’t stuck with it, because I don’t have much desire to keep going. But having a way to easily share stuff within a community of people having fun with art makes it more inviting. And being able to deconstruct and riff off other people’s work helps make the process less intimidating. I can see myself playing with this, and I imagine my nieces and nephews would find this extremely enjoyable too.

It’s interesting to see the way that photos and images are becoming a language unto themselves. Instagram has helped to make photos easily sharable, and now apps like Piictu are trying to get people to communicate through photos. This visual culture is starting to flourish, and I think we’re still early in this trend.

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Facebook made some pretty huge privacy changes last month, which included introducing tag approval and better controls over how information is shared with specific groups. This month, the social network is revealing even more tools to help users automatically categorize their friends, control who views the content they post, and allow users to decide whose status updates and photos they see the most and least.

The biggest change that being introduced Tuesday is to friend lists, with a new feature called Smart Lists. Friend lists, or the ability to group people by how you know them (college, work, family), and only share certain information with certain groups, were introduced three years ago. But Facebook knows that having to go back and categorize how you know people and manually adding them to a list is, well, tedious.

“It’s pretty silly that I have to sit down for an afternoon and categorize these people by hand,” said Facebook product manager Blake Ross. So they’re going to do it for you.

Many people on Facebook already share information that makes it easy to group people by, such as where they went to school, where they work and where they live. So Smart Lists will automatically group your Facebook friends in these different categories: family, city, high school, college and work. All the people in your feed who listed that they went to your same high school or college will automatically be added to those feeds, and all the people who list where they work will be added to your work friends group.

The point of enhancing this feature is to take the task of categorizing your Facebook friends off your plate when the information is already there, says Facebook. Once that’s done, you can then decide whether to share a certain status message or photo with a particular group via the dropdown menu in the status bar introduced last month.

The new Smart Lists are also customizable after Facebook has set them for you. Most importantly, you can turn Smart Lists off altogether if you want to. But if Facebook has added, say, your brother’s ex-wife to your family Smart List, you can always remove her from that list permanently. And if it adds friends to your college Smart List that are, for instance, 30 years older than you, but also happen to have gone to your same college, you can fix that too. Just specify what age group of your school’s graduates from your friend lists you want on there.

The end goal is to help people to be selective about who they share with. “I don’t have to share every bit of information will all of my friends,” said Ross.

Facebook is also acknowledging that you don’t necessarily want to read every single bit of information that all of your Facebook friends share either. So it is introducing the ability to group people as “Close Friends” and “Acquaintances.”

You can add the 10 or 15 people from whom you want to see all of their status updates, pictures, events, etc. to Close Friends. People you know, but you don’t want to see the minutiae of their life, are good to add to Acquaintances. Of these people, you’ll only see major life events show up in your news feed, like when they get married, move cities and list a new job.

These groups won’t be automatically generated like Smart Lists; these you will have to do yourself. Once you’ve put them together though, they will show up in your left rail and you can click them to get a news feed of just close friends or just acquaintances. This will be familiar to those who’ve been using Google+.

You can then share specific information with these lists as well. Facebook says it will not tell people they’ve been added to a list, but it will show them the other people a status or picture has been shared with, which Facebook says is to provide “more context.” This is in line with comments Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made earlier this summer, when he criticized the Google+ “circles” concept because people never know what circle, or group, they’ve been added to. “The definition of groups is … everyone inside the group knows who else is in the group,” he said at the time.

Ross said these changes will begin to roll out Wednesday, and most users should see the changes to their account in the next two weeks.

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Google has bought restaurant ratings publisher Zagat, in a deal whose value hasn’t been disclosed. Marrissa Mayer, the VP of Local, Maps and Location Services at Google, announced the deal in a celebratory blog post that crowed, “With Zagat, we gain a world-class team that has more experience in consumer based-surveys, recommendations and reviews than anyone else in the industry.” What Google seems to be buying with Zagat is a way to bring trusted human recommendations and user-generated content to its local offerings in a format that honors its engineering culture.

From the blog post:

Their surveys may be one of the earliest forms of UGC (user-generated content)—gathering restaurant recommendations from friends, computing and distributing ratings before the Internet as we know it today even existed. Their iconic pocket-sized guides with paragraphs summarizing and “snippeting” sentiment were “mobile” before “mobile” involved electronics. Today, Zagat provides people with a democratized, authentic and comprehensive view of where to eat, drink, stay, shop and play worldwide based on millions of reviews and ratings.

Mobile and user-generated content buzz aside, Zagat is arguably a good fit for Google, which already offers reviews on its Maps/Places sites. However, those reviews were recently stripped down as Google eliminated content coming from other sites because of issues surrounding the rights to that content. With Zagat, Google can theoretically compete against sites such as Yelp (which it has reportedly tried to acquire in the past) by using Zagat’s survey responses and perhaps by continuing Zagat’s practice of bringing in recommendations from social services such as Foursquare.

Zagat is a well-known and trusted consumer brand, although it has lost a bit of relevance as a result of free sites such as Yelp and Foursquare, at least for consumers who care most about the mobile and web world. Perhaps Google can get a little more recommendation cachet while also helping bring Zagat onto the web more widely. Zagat also has ties into the physical network of restaurants and local entertainment spots across many of its categories, which will help Google connect with local businesses for its advertising efforts and even daily deal efforts like Google Offers.

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The recently rolled out Google+ is Google’s latest effort to get a handle on something that so far has eluded the company: namely, gaining access to the data users generate when they post status updates, share photos and comment on friends’ activities. More and more, these social “signals” are becoming a crucial part of how people behave online, and if Google wants to remain on top, it needs to re-evaluate its business strategy and find a way to integrate these features into its search business.

As I describe in a new research report for GigaOM Pro (subscription required), that means other companies that depend on Google for their livelihood — as almost everyone does to some extent — must also change the way that they think about search, in order to take advantage of its increasingly social nature.

Google’s failed attempts at social features are fairly well documented: Orkut was the first — and, until Google+ came along, arguably the most successful — attempt to bolt a social element onto the company’s business. Then came Google Wave, Google Buzz and a number of social tweaks and add-ons for services such as Google News, none of which achieved much success for a variety of reasons (Wave was too complicated and Buzz turned people off because of the way it handled privacy.)

As we’ve explained at GigaOM a number of times, the driving force behind these efforts is not a desire on Google’s part to mimic Facebook or provide a nice place for people to chat about photos of their pets. The main impetus is to extract information from the social activity that occurs on such networks, and to use that information to make better decisions about search results and other targeted services.

Doug Edwards, who was employee number 59 at Google, and involved in the development of Gmail and other major initiatives, described the company’s motivation for its social efforts in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal:

[I]t’s not because they enjoy warm and fuzzy social interaction and they think oh, this would be a really wonderful way to bring our friends together and build a social circle. They look at it and say, “the information created in social networks is extremely important and valuable. If we don’t have access to that information, Google will be less valuable as an information source.”

The key point is that social “signals” — Likes, retweets, etc. — are becoming a much more powerful force in determining user behavior online. In a world where many people devote large amounts of their attention to Facebook, Twitter and other services, the movements —- including shopping-related activity —- of Internet users are being influenced more and more by the recommendations and social signals of their friends.

Google has to figure out how to capitalize on those kinds of signals, in order to maintain its dominant position between Internet users and the information they want. And as the search giant and the rest of the web move toward social signals rather than raw page links, this shift to social search is going to have some profound effects on the search-engine optimization (SEO) industry and the way that companies use these tools to connect to their customers.

The bottom line is that companies of all kinds will have to be more aware of —- and actively involved in -— social networks, so that they can become part of the social signals that Google is indexing. For more on the impact that social behavior is having on search, and some advice on how to take advantage of it, please read the full report.

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Update: My worries have been somewhat assuaged because a Google spokesman said that Gmail Labs, Calendar Labs and other Labs will not be shut down, merely the Labs program that brought us such applications as Google Goggles and Google Reader. There are still cool affected apps, but it’s not the end of my personal world.

Sure there are silly Labs features such as the one designed to stop you from drunk dialing, Image Swirl, which I’ve never figured out. But there are some real productivity enhancing items out there such as the ones I mentioned above or Correlate, which helps connect search trends to real-world data and events. Google didn’t give a lot of detail in its blog post, and I’ve reached out to the company for comment and will update the post when I learn more. From the blog post:

Last week we explained that we’re prioritizing our product efforts. As part of that process, we’ve decided to wind down Google Labs. While we’ve learned a huge amount by launching very early prototypes in Labs, we believe that greater focus is crucial if we’re to make the most of the extraordinary opportunities ahead.

In many cases, this will mean ending Labs experiments—in others we’ll incorporate Labs products and technologies into different product areas. And many of the Labs products that are Android apps today will continue to be available on Android Market. We’ll update you on our progress via the Google Labs website.

The move follows Google closing other experimental efforts such as its PowerMeter product earlier this month, and signals that the company is really trying to focus.

I’m frustrated that Google isn’t giving us a lot of information about what features we’ll lose and when. If I knew what was going away, and when, I could start researching for alternatives. Or maybe a kindly startup could volunteer to take the feature out of Google’s hands and support it. What do y’all think? What Labs features will you miss?

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Postagram, the Sincerely product that allows users to send physical photo postcards directly from pictures on their phones, is now available for phones that use the Android OS. Postagram for Android supports photos from the device as well as from Facebook. Sincerely also rolled out a 2.0 version of Postagram for iPhone on Thursday that supports photos from the iPhone device, Instagram and Facebook.

The Postagram app allows users to turn photos taken with their mobile phones into pop-out postcards with short, 140-character messages. For 99 cents including postage, Postagram will print and mail the postcards anywhere in the world.

At Postagram’s debut in April, the product could only be used on top of the Instagram application, which is exclusive to the iPhone. While Instagram is used by a valuable group of early adopters, Postagram is a product with a huge potential for mass appeal. With Postagram for Android and the added Facebook and device integrations to the iPhone app, the product is now accessible to a much wider audience.

Sincerely’s expansion onto other platforms is right in line with the larger company vision CEO Matt Brezina described to me in April. Brezina was emphatic that though Postagram 1.0 was built on top of the Instagram API, it was only the first of many multi-platform products Sincerely planned to roll out in the months ahead.

For 99 cents including postage, Postagrams are an amazingly easy way to send a small thoughtful “thinking of you” gift to, say, my mom. Now that Postagram is available beyond the realm of Instagram, my mom is much more likely to return the favor.

Watch my interview with Sincerely’s CEO Matt Brezina here:

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Plenty of people are adopting blog-publishing platforms like Tumblr, which has been growing rapidly over the past year or so, but few have made the leap in the way that Steve Rubel — EVP of digital strategy for the PR firm Edelman — did recently. He started a new Tumblr blog, then deleted the hundreds of posts he had created over the years on two other blogs. I wondered why he would take such a radical approach, so I called him and asked. Rubel said he was driven to do it by the fact that Google is paying more attention to social signals for search, and being on a social platform like Tumblr is more important than having old blog posts, whatever their Page Rank might be. But is he right?

In a blog post about the move, Rubel said he believes media is becoming an interlocking system of four elements he describes as a clover-leaf — with traditional sources, newer web-native digital entrants, corporate or branded content, and social media. People are increasingly looking across all four of these different sources or networks to find out what to believe, he said. With a news event like the death of Osama bin Laden, for example, reporting occurred on social networks like Twitter, but at the same time, “people were still going to media sources such as the New York Times  or the Huffington Post to validate what they were hearing.”

More and more of those media entities are using Tumblr as a way to redistribute some of their content, which is part of the reason Rubel said he wanted to move his online identity there. But the main reason for the switch was the need to have a more social platform, because of a sense that Google is increasingly focusing more on social cues and information as part of search rather than just traditional links. “I think with Google relying more and more on social signals, you’d better make your website social in a big way or you will be in trouble,” Rubel says. “Blogs that aren’t social are effectively islands.”

The extent to which Google is using social cues for search is unknown, but the launch of real-time results from Twitter and “social search” — which shows results that users in your social graph have posted or retweeted — as well as the new +1 ranking system are signs the web giant is definitely trying to add more social data. As we’ve written before, social is one of the areas where Facebook has the upper hand, given its knowledge of a user’s social graph and how it reflects their search interests, and this is potentially a serious threat to Google’s dominance.

“I think +1 is their play to get more authoritative signals, and to weed out lower-quality content and find better quality content,” Rubel said. “I think that and [your social activity] is what will control your presence in Google in the future.” Rubel says he chose Tumblr because “I wanted one domain, to centralize everything in the middle of that clover leaf,” and Tumblr was the closest to offering what he wanted. “I wanted to have all the content and the social signals — the plus ones and the likes and the retweets — in one place.” Tumblr is also inherently a much more social platform, he said.

There’s no question that Tumblr has more social elements, and seems to be closer to a social network than competing platforms such as WordPress. The reblogging function is much more like Twitter’s reweet feature than a traditional blog publishing tool, and the way that posts can “go viral” and be retransmitted across the entire network of blogs is fairly powerful — which likely helps explain Tumblr’s dramatic growth.

But why the “scorched earth” approach of deleting all his old content? Why not keep those posts available for the “long tail” of Google search — not to mention retaining all the old links to his posts that other bloggers have made, as some observers have pointed out? Rubel says he considered that, but decided not to because he didn’t want to have multiple sources of content, for fear of confusing Google. Tumblr also doesn’t have any easy way to import old blog posts from other publishing systems, so Rubel says he would have had to pay someone to manually recreate or duplicate them.

So would he recommend that clients of Edelman do the same? Rubel said that for most companies, that wouldn’t be the right approach, but for “thought leaders,” it makes sense to be where the action is, and for him, this was more important than having older content. It’s a dramatic gesture (and likely also a marketing exercise on Rubel’s part, since he is selling his services as a consultant on exactly these kinds of issues) but in the end Google will be the one to decide whether he was right or not.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user James Vaughan

Disclosure: WordPress is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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PostRank’s technology scans the web in real-time for “social engagement events” like comments and tweets so brands and publishers can gauge how influential their content is online. The four-year-old company is based in Waterloo, Ontario, but will soon move its team to Google’s Mountain View, Calif. headquarters, CTO Ilya Grigorik said in a blog post announcing the deal.

The PostRank buy is just the latest example of Google putting its money where its mouth is in tackling the social space. According to an internal memo leaked in April, Google has already placed strong internal incentives for its existing employees to do everything in their power to bolster the company’s social efforts. This week’s PostRank acquisition indicates the company is also looking beyond its own walls to get its social efforts off the ground.

Though Google is famous for investing in the happiness of its existing staff, the acquisition proves the company is continuing to scout for fresh talent and technologies externally. It’s a smart move for a somewhat aging player in an increasingly cutthroat industry. In the gold rush environment of today’s Silicon Valley, brain drain is an ever-present threat. With the lure of quickly growing pre-IPO startups such as Facebook and Zynga, even Google’s best-laid employee retention and bonus plans can easily go awry. By employing both build and buy tactics, Google is showing it’s truly bringing out the big guns with its social web strategy.

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Eric Schmidt, the former CEO and current chairman of Google, took the stage at the All Things Digital conference in Rancho Palos Verdes on Tuesday night, where he was subjected to semi-rigorous questioning and occasional witty banter from the show’s hosts, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. In between the things he wouldn’t talk about (the Commerce Secretary job) and the things he laughed off (his bad jokes about privacy), Schmidt said some interesting things about a number of Google topics, which we have tried to collect and decipher for you below (Note: the words attributed to Schmidt are paraphrases of what he said, not verbatim quotes).

• What Schmidt said: I screwed up on digital identity.
  
  What he really means: Google still doesn’t understand how social works.
  

  It’s nice of Eric to take the blame for missing the boat on the power of social networks and online identity — which Facebook now effectively owns — and that is his duty as the chief executive, since the buck stopped with him. But the truth, as we have argued before, is that Google as a whole has not really figured out the impact of social networks, and that is a far bigger problem than just a single guy at the top. Its +1 offering is a nice try, but the jury is still out on whether it will be a Buzz-like flop or not.

• What Schmidt said: We don’t need to partner with Facebook or buy Twitter, we can get social data in other ways.
  
  What he really means: We will continue scraping whether Facebook likes it or not.
  

  The Facebook-Google blockade over social information is one of the biggest ongoing battles in the social web, and there is no question that it is hurting Google in a serious way, but Schmidt claims to be unconcerned. Gooogle has tried to partner with Facebook to get social data, but Facebook has done deals with Microsoft instead (which also owns a stake in Facebook) and thumbed its nose at the search giant. Google has tried to force Facebook to let users export their contact info, and Facebook basically told the company to take a hike. But Facebook is clearly rattled, since it hired a PR firm to plant nasty stories about Google’s alleged scraping of social data. This one is not over by a long shot.

• What Schmidt said: We have face-recognition technology but haven’t released it.
  
  What he really means: We care about privacy, honest — did you guys hear that over at the Justice Department?
  

  I have no doubt that Google has facial-recognition technology. We are already seeing billboards that can do the “Minority Report” trick of recognizing you and then customizing their content somehow. It’s going to happen. And for a company that is working on cars that drive themselves, backing off on a futuristic — and slightly scary — technology just doesn’t seem like the kind of thing Google would do. But given the privacy concerns in Washington, there is no way the company is going to let this one out of the bag until the heat dies down.

• What Schmidt said: We are moving away from links to just giving you information.
  
  What he really means: We are going to keep buying things like ITA and getting into the service business.
  

  The Google chairman said the company is moving further away from just providing search results with links based on PageRank and doing more of what its purchase of ITA — the travel-information service whose controversial acquisition tied Google up in FTC red tape for months — allows it to do, which is to show actual data on a search page rather than linking somewhere else. Instead of having to go to half a dozen sites to check and book flights, the ITA purchase allows Google to show info and let customers book right on a search page. That is hugely powerful, which is why plenty of people didn’t want Google to buy the company. Expect to see more of those kinds of acquisitions in Google’s future, in a variety of different markets and verticals.

• What Schmidt said: The gang of four is Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook.
  
  What he really means: Microsoft is really good at things that we are not good at.
  

  It’s fair to say, as the former Google CEO did with his “gang of four” comment, that Google and Amazon and Apple and Facebook are where the action is right now, in terms of online businesses and consumer-facing web services, social networks, etc. But Microsoft is still a gigantic company with some pretty huge — and very profitable — businesses, including the Office empire. Google has not made as many inroads into the corporate market as it would like to, despite trying hard with Google Apps and other offerings. But it undoubtedly wants to do better — it just doesn’t want Microsoft to think so.

All in all, Schmidt’s talk at D9 was surprisingly candid for a man who still keeps his cards pretty close to his chest. But he still wouldn’t talk about whether he was going to become Commerce Secretary, and why that didn’t happen — maybe he didn’t want to give up the right to keep making those terrible jokes about privacy.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user World Economic Forum

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Left eBay to co-found consumer-focused ecommerce startup: http://www.shopilly.com. Online shopping is about to get a makeover!—
Randy Shoup (@randyshoup) May 17, 2011

Shoup has been the primary architect behind eBay’s search infrastructure since taking over as chief engineer in 2004. Not going entirely solo on the new venture, Shopilly co-founder and CEO is Anirban Datta, a former senior product manager at eBay. Datta was most recently listed as the VP of marketing for Lealta Media, a customer loyalty and rewards marketing company.

What is Shopilly about? We’re not sure exactly, but given Shoup’s experience with scaling systems and Datta’s loyalty program experience, it could be a service designed to bring intelligence derived from data around a user’s shopping pattern to influence their online retail experience. Shoup’s new startup promises to “cut through the clutter” while navigating the world of big data.

From the Shopilly Linkedin page:

“We’re building Shopilly to save you time and trouble. You’ll be able to cut through the clutter to find what you are looking for and discover shopping opportunities you never knew existed. You’ll feel much more organized and in control.”

Big data, shopping and advertising could combine to create an awesome opportunity for retailers to offer customized recommendations or deals. Or it might just be another comparison shopping site. We’ll have to wait and see.

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Updated: In a bombshell dropped early Thursday, the company behind the PR campaign against Google and its alleged privacy violations turns out to be Facebook, The social network admitted to The Daily Beast that it hired a PR firm to try to plant negative stories about Google and some of its social features. More than anything else, this move shows that the war between Facebook and Google has advanced to a new level — engaging in Washington D.C.-style “dirty tricks” campaigns is a tangible sign that Facebook is scared of what Google could do if it really pours its resources into building something social.

As the Daily Beast describes, word leaked recently that someone was trying to plant negative features about Google, even offering to write an opinion piece and then submit it to major media outlets such as the Washington Post under the name of whichever blogger the giant PR firm — Burson-Marsteller — happened to be contacting. One of those contacted was privacy advocate Chris Soghoian, and he decided to publicize the campaign by posting all the emails. Dan Lyons of The Daily Beast then confronted a Facebook spokesman about it, who admitted the social network had hired the firm.

Large corporations hiring PR companies to plant negative articles in the press about their competitors isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, but this is the first sign that Facebook has taken to using these kind of sleazy tactics against Google. And the sense of desperation that it implies about the social network isn’t helped by the fact that Burson-Marsteller couldn’t seem to get anyone interested in writing about the topic it was pushing so hard — despite the fact that privacy is a hot-button issue. Soghoian has said in an interview that he didn’t think the issue was a very big deal at all.

One of the factors that probably convinced Soghoian and others the issue was overblown is that “Social Circles” — the feature the Facebook smear campaign was trying so hard to raise privacy fears about — has been around for over a year. Even the links Burson-Marsteller included in its pitch were to articles that were almost a year old, including one about how the feature was “creepy.”

If anything, the design of Social Circles should be more evidence that Google doesn’t really understand how social works (a topic we have written about many times here at GigaOM). When you go to the page that shows your circle, you see a giant list of everyone you are connected to through any of Google’s properties, and then sub-menus of lists that detail what they have shared through their various connections. It’s about as social as the restaurant listings in the phone book — and is a typical example of the automated and impersonal approach that Google has taken to its whole social effort.

It seems obvious that part of the reason Facebook was upset about this feature had nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with competition, and the social network’s interest in retaining the walled garden around its content, something it has fought with Google about before. As part of its pitch, the company alleged Google was “scraping” data from it and other services to populate the social circles feature, which Facebook said was a breach of its terms of use and could expose data and connections in ways that users had not intended. It even mentioned the furor over Google Buzz and how it revealed people’s connections in ways some didn’t like.

As many have noted, this is a pretty obvious case of the pot calling the kettle black. While Facebook’s PR pitch tries to paint Google as the company that has been besieged by privacy critics and regulators, the reality is, Facebook has been far more exposed to government criticism and sanctions — and potential regulation — as a result of its approach to privacy and its handling of personal data. The social network may have been trying to shift the attention of the press and regulators away from itself and onto Google, but all this campaign has really done is make Facebook look incompetent and desperate, and scared.

Update: In an official statement, a Facebook spokesman said the following:

No ‘smear’ campaign was authorized or intended. Instead, we wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles — just as Facebook did not approve of use or collection for this purpose. We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Umberto Salvagnin

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Publishers will love +1, but what about people? When Google makes available the “+1″ buttons for publishers, there will be significant incentive for publishers to add the buttons since it will add critical SEO value to the URL. Google may use this data to rank results, but even if it doesn’t, users will be influenced by the number of +1′s displayed in search results when they decide what to click. I believe that unlike the failed “buzz” button, which never got traction with publishers, the +1 button could be very attractive.

Thus, the hurdle for +1 lies not with publishers but with consumers. To be successful, Google needs people to click +1, but that’s a harder task than it may expect. Consider the Facebook “Like” button. People click “Like” not because they want to contribute to an object or company’s ranking, but because they want to show off their association. “Liking” something broadcasts an association with content or products to your feed and therefore your friends. So with no opportunity to show off, Google may get no clicks. But there is a way for Google to help achieve a critical mass of +1 data that doesn’t require a user actually clicking +1.

Here’s how: Social Sign On – an identity play. When a user authenticates with a site by using their Google credentials, giving permission to that site to access their profile information and social graph, that act is a “+1 equivalent action”, and should be treated as such by Google. And Google can build this into the social sign-on process explicitly; I’ve illustrated one option in the graphic to the right.

Identity as the Foothold for Google’s Social Play

Increasingly, sites are enabling users to sign-in with their existing identity on social networks or other providers. Look at the Huffington Post and other publishers like Fox News, CBS and ABC. It’s clear that users prefer to sign-in using an established online identity rather than create a new one on each site they visit. Passwords are dead.
Currently, no identity provider is as popular as Facebook among B2C websites. More than 1M sites enable Facebook for sign-in. The reason Facebook is so popular among websites (as compared with OpenID or other solutions), is that there is real value for the website associated with that Facebook sign-in.

Whenever users sign-in to a site with their Facebook identity, Facebook provides the site with rich user profile data. This type of connection also enables frictionless sharing, which results in more traffic to the site. Yes, Google provides APIs for sign-in, but currently they do not provide enough value — data or otherwise — for websites. As a result, there is insufficient adoption across websites of Google Social Sign-on. With the wide Facebook Connect adoption by websites, people began to use their Facebook identity across the Internet far more often than their Google identity.

So Google needs a killer value proposition for sites to drive adoption of sign-in with Google. To provide one, it needs to continue to leverage its most sacred asset – search. When a user signs-in to a website with Google, over some number of days, Google should give higher weight to results coming from that site for that specific user. It makes sense that if I read articles at cbsnews.com, that site’s results will appear in my news searches above other news sources. Because Search is such a critical source of traffic channel for most websites, sites would implement Google sign-in tomorrow if it meant that their page rank would increase for users who use Google to sign-in into their site.

This could also be the first olive branch from Google Search to websites. For too long SEO has been a black hole for sites that never know when changes in algorithms could adversely affect them. It would be good for Google’s relationship with sites to collaborate with them, giving them a white-hat way to improve search result relevance.

What’s in it for Google? Being one of the leading identity providers gives Google permission-based access to user data that will enrich any service it offers – from search to commerce to social. Google is the leading search engine, but how loyal are its users? Identity can equate to commitment. Having a strong play in identity is Google’s key to building a long-term relationship with its users while increasing the value of Google services to websites Pleasing both parties will put Google well on its way to creating a defensible position in social.

Rooly Eliezerov is co-founder and product strategist at Gigya, a SaaS company providing technologies that make websites social.

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The name doesn’t tell you a lot about what it does, and if you see the hash tags on Twitter you might think it is just about “hooking up,” but Hashable has a serious business purpose, says founder and CEO Mike Yavonditte. It is about helping users — particularly business users — keep track of their connections, both professional and personal, and about creating a real-time social graph around those connections. In a lot of ways, the app and the service are what LinkedIn might look like if it was being created now. It is a professional social network that’s all about mobile, social, real-time and geo-specific — in other words, many of the things that LinkedIn and other professional networks aren’t doing, or have only recently started to do.

Yavonditte is the former CEO of Quigo, a web-based advertising company that was acquired by AOL in 2007 for $340 million. After the sale, the Hashable founder says he sat around for a while wondering what to do, and eventually started a company called Tracked, which he described in a recent interview at the company’s New York offices as “a more focused version of Yahoo Finance.” But when Twitter and Facebook both started pulling in substantial amounts of investment, Yavonditte says it finally dawned on him that the social web was here to stay, and he realized there was nothing really social about Tracked. “I knew I was going to be on the wrong side of those trends,” he says.

Out of that focus on social came the idea for Hashable: a lightweight app and service that would allow business people like himself to easily keep track of their professional connections — whether those connections involved introducing two contacts to each other, bumping into a fellow angel investor on the street, or having lunch with a former partner. The idea of the hash tag “was kind of a hack,” he says, based on the trend of using keywords on Twitter (something Chris Messina, currently at Google, came up with originally). Using a tag like #intro or #justmet effectively connects a user’s activity to Hashable and creates a relationship, and also tracks and geo-tags and indexes that relationship.

So typing #justmet and then a user’s Twitter name, for example, automatically sends the other user your Hashable business card (if you have signed up for Hashable and connected it to Twitter) and gives them the option of sending theirs to you. You can choose to post this to Twitter publicly or not, and you can simultaneously check in at the location you met that person on Foursquare as well. Hashable also adds that person to your address book, which it creates using your Twitter connections and any web-mail or phone contacts.

The real power of the service, says Yavonditte, comes when you have built up a range of different connections, and you can see at a glance who you are connected to, as well as when, how and even where you have interacted with them — and the service ranks the strength of those connections based on how much you have interacted with that person. “It creates a memory bank for your social connections,” says the Hashable CEO. “This is social CRM [customer relationship management] with a fun interface.”

While LinkedIn also keeps track of and shows you all your professional connections, it isn’t really very social, and it isn’t very real-time either. You can see who you are connected to, but it doesn’t show you how you met that person or when, or what you were doing at the time, or where you were. The service has been trying hard to add more social elements to the site, including the launch of Twitter-style functions and Facebook-style features, but it remains a very static service. Hashable, in contrast, is all about the social aspects of your connections — and Yavonditte notes the service is also accumulating tons of data about those social graphs that could be very valuable.

Hashable, which launched as a private beta in June 2010, opened to the public a month ago and has been seeing steady growth, says Yavonditte, although he won’t divulge specific numbers. The company is backed by Union Square Ventures, which led a Series A round of $3.8 million, and a consortium of other investors.

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There have been signs over the past few months that Google is feeling the pressure to step up its social efforts — the +1 features it announced a week ago being just one of them. But the clearest indication yet is a memo from newly-minted CEO Larry Page that told employees their bonuses are effectively on the line if the company’s social efforts don’t work. The Google co-founder may see it as a carrot, but many of his employees are likely to see it as a stick — and you can’t threaten people into being social.

In a nutshell, Page’s memo (the existence of which we have confirmed independently), tells staff that 25 percent of their annual bonuses are at risk if Google’s social efforts aren’t successful. It’s positioned as an incentive, but given the company’s track record with social features, odds are that staffers will lose rather than win. Page’s move feels similar to what Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff discussed last year at GigaOm’s Net:Work conference, which was a plan to compensate his staff based in part on the value of their contributions through the company’s internal Twitter-style Chatter network. As I mentioned at the time, that kind of approach has a number of drawbacks — including incentivizing the wrong kind of behavior.

If nothing else, Page’s move makes Google seem increasingly desperate when it comes to the social sphere. The company has tried to get things moving by launching features such as Buzz and the ill-fated Google Wave but has had little or no traction with regular users. And the +1 network seems to be designed primarily to influence Google search, rather than to actually encourage users to socialize with each other. In that sense, it’s another sign of former CEO Eric Schmidt’s strategy of adding social as a “layer” to existing products.

As we’ve written before, the contrast between Google’s approach and Facebook’s approach couldn’t be more stark: Facebook was designed to be social from the ground up. Social features are the core functionality of the system, not something that gets bolted on after the fact. Google has spent the vast majority of its life not really caring about social features, and it shows. As Om has argued, social just doesn’t seem to be in Google’s DNA, and so far, there are no signs that it has been able to splice that kind of knowledge in from elsewhere.

The risk for Google is that as social networking becomes a larger force, advertisers are becoming much more interested in relationships with Facebook and Twitter than they are in pursuing search deals or advertising keywords.

Social search is the other part of the equation Google needs to be concerned about. The web giant has added real-time results to search — which consist primarily of Twitter results, since Facebook doesn’t allow Google to crawl its data — but that also feels grafted on, rather than something that fits naturally into what the company is doing. Facebook has yet to make any major strides in search, apart from partnering with Microsoft and Blekko, and it’s not clear what form Facebook search would take if and when it appears, but it is still a risk. It’s arguably a lot easier for a social giant to add search functions than it is for a search giant to get social.

Will Larry Page’s attempt to rally the troops and incentivize them to get social actually have some tangible impact on Google’s ability to succeed in this area? That remains to be seen, but I’m skeptical. I think Google staffers are more likely to resent these moves rather than feel inspired, and resentment isn’t a great foundation for a new social effort.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Nick M

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