Nextdoor, the private social network aimed at connecting people in neighborhoods, has a different take. The company unveiled its first mobile app on Thursday, essentially a way for residents of communities to stay in close, constant communication on issues specific to their homes, directly from their smartphones.

If you haven’t heard of it, yes, it’s another social network. And yes, it’s about strengthening ties to those you consider close, something like the original vision of the social app Path.

Unlike existing networks, however, Nextdoor isn’t about sharing things like what new band you listened to, or what type of omelet you had for breakfast. It prioritizes utility over recreation. So, in a typical Nextdoor stream, you’ll likely see posts about local garage sales, want ads for babysitters or rooms for rent. And each node of shared information is relegated strictly to the confines of your specifically drawn neighborhood or surrounding neighborhoods, so, in theory, you’re only in contact with people that would actually find this information useful. (Read Katie Boehret’s recent review of Nextdoor here.)

The new app is largely a port of all the website’s features over to a plain, unobtrusive mobile interface (every mobile social stream looks the same these days). You can post updates, welcome new neighbors and the like.

The biggest pitch, which accounts for roughly one-fifth of the user activity on Nextdoor’s network, is for local safety. Users have convened on Nextdoor to report local burglaries, muggings or suspicious activity in their area. Until now, users could only access the site via desktop or the mobile Web. But with the new app, Nextdoor’s pitch is that it will be far easier to keep tabs on your local goings-on, especially in terms of safety issues.

Especially compelling: You’re able to send and receive urgent alerts to your phone. So, if something bad is going down in your neighborhood, a Nextdoor user can send out an alarm that pings everyone in their district, whether they’re at home or not.

And, perhaps most importantly, you’re able to use the app to post photos on the fly.

By now, we’re well aware that photos do quite well when circulating through social networks — see Instagram, Twitter’s filters, Pinterest, et al. Nextdoor’s appeal here, though, again trumps utility over recreation. Snap a camera-phone shot of a stray cat who may belong to someone, a set of keys lost on the ground or a shady-looking dude peering in someone’s window, and your network of neighbors will be able to see it quickly.

“Think about having hundreds of cameras available at any given moment,” Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia told AllThingsD. “Everyone has a smartphone.”

That’s a cool enough thought for any local safety enthusiast — if not a little “Big Brother”-ish — and seems much more feasible than relying on patrols or radios. I wondered, though, if something like Nextdoor’s service would encourage locals to pull a Charles Bronson vigilante move on troublemakers, eschewing calling in the actual police.

Anything is possible. But Tolia said Nextdoor members weren’t doing that sort of thing thus far.

Ideally for the company, the app becomes something more than just another icon in your mobile tray — less an app than a tool, and a connection to what’s happening back at your home when you’re out in the world.

Of course, the perennial question remains: Can a smart take on an age-old social function convince people to sign up for yet another social network?

The app is in Apple’s App Store now. I guess we’ll soon find out.

Base image: Shutterstock / rvlsoft

“Every day, a growing number of people log in to Twitter. Usually these login attempts come from the genuine account owners, but we occasionally hear from people whose accounts have been compromised by email phishing schemes or a breach of password data elsewhere on the web,” product security team member Jim O’Leary wrote in a blog post.

“Today we’re introducing a new security feature to better protect your Twitter account: login verification,” he said.

The new feature comes in the wake of a string of widely publicized hacks of visible Twitter accounts, including those owned by news outlets like the Financial Times, the Guardian and others. Most recently, when the Associated Press account was hacked, a single alarmist tweet was enough to send U.S. stock markets into a tailspin, plunging the Dow by upward of 150 points in a matter of minutes.

For months, many have called for Twitter to introduce such new security features to remedy the ongoing hacks.

The process is much like other two-factor authentication services across the Web. When a user tries to log in to his or her profile, they’re asked to provide a cellphone number. Twitter sends an SMS message to that phone, and you’ll be asked to enter the code into your browser to continue the login. The new feature is optional, and must be turned on inside the settings menu.

Basically, it’s a way of locally identifying that you are, indeed, who you say you are. If someone is trying to hack into your Twitter account from another location, odds are they don’t have your cellphone as well to snag the verifiable code. It’s a service that other major Internet companies — like Facebook and Google — have provided for quite a while.

While added security measures help, they also potentially complicate the gears for folks who share Twitter accounts — namely, those run by brands and agencies, whose social media presences are managed by multiple people in different places.

This is likely why Twitter said in a recent email to publishers that only one computer should be designated for tweeting; it’s less secure to spread the account access across multiple systems.

Still, brands and publishers can choose not to turn on the feature — they’ll just have to practice other safe account measures like good password hygiene and limiting the number of people able to use the account.

Frankly, even if Twitter’s new feature is optional and far from a cure-all, it’s about time it showed up.

Base image: Shutterstock / rvlsoft

In a bipartisan vote reached on Thursday evening, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved a bill that aims to radically overhaul much of current U.S. immigration policy, which could ultimately increase the number of highly skilled tech industry workers allowed visas to work inside of the U.S.

The bill, which passed through the committee by a vote of 13 to five, is now headed to the floor for debate, where it is expected to be deliberated upon through the summer.

It is, in particular, the first small victory for FWD.us, the political action group formed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and supported by a cadre of such tech industry luminaries as LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and famed venture capitalist John Doerr.

To be sure, Zuckerberg’s group is far from the only lobbyist group aiming for immigration policy reform in Washington, nor should it be solely credited for swaying the final decision. But in Silicon Valley at the moment, it is perhaps the most visible.

“With its 13-5 vote to support comprehensive immigration reform, the Senate Judiciary Committee has taken another crucial step forward to growing a knowledge economy,” Joe Green, FWD.us founder and president, said in a statement to AllThingsD. “This comprehensive bipartisan legislation contains the key principles we support, and its passage is another important step in the right direction.”

“It’s clear that the momentum continues to build in favor of commonsense immigration legislation — and FWD.us will continue to advocate for comprehensive, bipartisan reform that will attract innovators, build prosperous neighborhoods with strong families and good jobs, and ensure the U.S. continues to lead the world in the growth of the knowledge economy,” Green said.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

In a grand mission statement published on the editorial page of the Washington Post when FWD.us launched, Zuckerberg reasoned that the need for his group was to create change in areas like education, long-term economic issues and, most of all, immigration issues.

“We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants,” Zuckerberg wrote in the Post article. “And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.”

Since launching the group in April, FWD.us has spent its money lobbying aggressively for immigration reform in particular, backing lawmakers who have expressed support for changes in the current legislation.

Though not all of FWD.us’s supporters were comfortable with the group’s lobbying tactics. After it came out earlier this month that FWD.us had bankrolled ads for immigration-reform-friendly legislators who also supported controversial environmental policies like Arctic oil drilling and the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, FWD.us lost two high-profile supporters; Tesla CEO and green energy proponent Elon Musk withdrew support, along with Yammer founder David Sacks.

The immigration policy changes FWD.us is pushing for in particular would ultimately benefit many high-tech companies who want better access to recruiting foreign engineering talent, much of which is currently restricted by the number of H1-B visas granted to foreign workers on an annual basis.

“This is about jobs. Period,” Michael Beckerman, president and CEO of the Internet Association, told AllThingsD in a statement. “A highly skilled workforce helps Internet companies grow here at home and hire more Americans. For each worker an Internet company hires under an H1-B visa program, they are able to bring on as many as 12 American workers. … This is a win for the knowledge economy and we look forward to this process moving forward.”

The legislation was held up in the Senate Judiciary Committee until Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) agreed with dissenting members of the committee to hold off on adding an amendment to the bill which would have allowed certain provisions for gay couples.

Sen. Leahy told the New York Times that he withheld his amendment “with a heavy heart.”

The efforts of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Uah) in particular were instrumental in including a last-minute amendment that would benefit the tech industry. His amendment, which the Times said was agreed upon late in the deliberations, would increase the minimum number of high-tech H1-B visas allowed annually.

The office of Sen. Hatch did not immediately respond to a telephone request for comment.

“Thanks to the leadership of Chairman Leahy and a bipartisan group of eight Senators, the legislation that passed the Judiciary Committee with a strong bipartisan vote is largely consistent with the principles of commonsense reform I have proposed and meets the challenge of fixing our broken immigration system,” President Barack Obama said in a statement issued on Tuesday evening.

Flickr/Ei Katsumata

Most of those claims have been anecdotal. The most prevalent voice came from Josh Miller — co-founder of competing social startup Branch — whose argument hinged mostly around the behavioral habits of his teenage sister. Despite a lack of hard evidence, this somehow reinforced just how passe Facebook supposedly is.

Alas, as of Tuesday, we now have a study to bolster the claims. Teens are expressing “waning enthusiasm” for Facebook, according to a recent study from the Pew Research Center. Teens, according to the study, are tired of all the “drama,” the stress of managing their online reputation on the network, and are “annoyed when their Facebook friends share inane details.”

Contrast that waning enthusiasm with an increase in teen Twitter signups over the past two years. Nearly a quarter of online teens use the microblogging service, according to the study. Fascinating, considering the “inane details” Facebook complaint; it wasn’t so long ago that many dismissed Twitter as “the service for letting people know what you had for breakfast.”

As the report states, teens took some time to warm up to Twitter, a service that was first colonized by adults. Today, however, “teens are now migrating to Twitter in growing numbers, often as a supplement to their Facebook use.”

It’s worth noting that while Twitter may be increasing in popularity with the kids, it’s not necessarily at the expense of Facebook in terms of user activity (at least, not yet).

Indeed, the teens queried in the study aren’t leaving Facebook. Rather, they feel burdened by it, a necessity of existing online in the 21st century. “While Facebook is still deeply integrated in teens’ everyday lives,” the report stated, “it is sometimes seen as a utility and an obligation rather than an exciting new platform that teens can claim as their own.”

Perhaps that’s why Facebook Home — the fully Facebook-ed version of an Android phone — doesn’t seem to be taking off. Or maybe that’s why Poke — Facebook’s Snapchat clone aimed squarely at the teen audience– was dead in the water just weeks after launch. Perhaps, at least with teens, Facebook isn’t desirable as every part of our connected experience, but rather as relegated to one part of it: Our identity.

Which, admittedly, isn’t the end of the world for the social giant. Facebook wants to be an online directory of people, making it possible to look up profiles as you would thumb through a phone book of yesteryear. And with Facebook Connect, you can take that online identity across the Web to sign in to any number of commenting systems, applications and partner sites.

Still, losing mindshare and desirability from the young audience today isn’t good for the long term. Today’s kids will be tomorrow’s adults, folks with jobs and a willingness to buy the things they see in the Facebook ads served to them.

Teen or not, Facebook wants you to be delighted to visit its site, not obligated. Perhaps the company can spur that feeling in teens again someday — drama not included.

Image courtesy of Flickr/Ei Katsumata

The payments company is in the midst of slowly, quietly rolling out a new product — dubbed Square Cash, natch — a way to send money to folks you know (and perhaps those you don’t) over email.

The concept is fairly straightforward, according to the site’s FAQ: Draft an email to the person you want to send cash to and CC a Square-designated email as well. Stick the dollar amount of how much money you want to send in the subject line and click the send button. Your friend will receive the “cash” after they link their debit card accounts to Square, and you, the sender, are charged a flat 50 cent fee.

While the site’s landing page is slick and the concept is cool enough, Square isn’t exactly re-inventing the wheel here. You can still send folks money using a PayPal account (and not incur a fee for it if you send it as a “gift”!), and Google’s commerce wing just added a money attachment feature to Gmail as well. And there’s no shortage of startups — Venmo, Stripe and more — doing similar things in micro-payments.

But I don’t think it’s necessarily a zero-sum game. The idea for Square here, methinks, is growth: Ultimately, this could be a faster way of getting more people to link up their checking accounts to Square’s service — especially those who either aren’t a small business using the product, or haven’t discovered the magic that is using Square’s special dongle, attachable to phones, tablets and the like. And I’d say there’s no better incentive to link your debit card account up to a service than an email notification in your inbox saying you’ve got twenty bucks waiting to be redeemed.

And of course, it plays well into Square’s social schtick. It’s a social payments startup, Square would say, not just some boring e-commerce company.

Want to sign up? Not so fast: You can’t use it quite yet, as right now only a select few are in on the invite-only testing period. For now, I’ve confirmed that employees at Pinterest, Box.com and Twitter are currently the only ones in this round of invites.

“We’re excited to share Square Cash with our friends. We’ll continue to invite others to try it out in the coming weeks,” a Square spokesperson told AllThingsD.

For now, you’ll have to stick to the kind of cash that folds.

There’s just one problem with the last feature: Upgrading to Google’s new version of Hangouts denigrates another of Google’s nifty services, Google Voice. After the upgrade, you’ll no longer be able to make outbound Google Voice calls from the Web or via the Chrome extension (obviously a pretty important feature in a phone service).

The good news: That handicap seems to be only temporary.

“Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice, and making/receiving phone calls is just the beginning,” Nikhyl Singhal of Google wrote in a blog post on Monday morning. “Future versions of Hangouts will integrate Google Voice more seamlessly.”

So for Google Voice loyalists, at some point in the future, one service won’t come at the cost of the other. That’s a very good thing; Google’s new Hangouts product, frankly, is pretty great. It unifies chat across Gmail, Google+ and your phone, and includes video-calling options. To add Google Voice functionality in the future would make it a pretty killer app.

The bad news: We don’t know just how temporary this handicap is. So if you’re a regular Google Voice user, you’ll have to choose between either upgrading to the new version of Hangouts or hanging on to your Google Voice functionality and waiting for Google to make both products work in the future.

No timeline from Google on the upgraded integration between the products. For the sake of Voice loyalists, let’s hope it’s sooner rather than later.

mama_mia/Shutterstock

Today marks a year since Facebook’s rough-and-tumble IPO.

Since that disappointing day, Facebook has gone to great lengths to assure Wall Street that yes, it will one day be the social ad spinning, money-making machine that Wall Street hopes it will be.

The biggest potential, Facebook maintains, lies in what executives consider “long-term investments,” products with grand ambitions to change the way we interact with Facebook — if not the world — on a regular basis.

Therein lies the problem. Meaningful change won’t happen soon.

Consider Facebook Home, the mobile project years in the making that aims to shift the way we interact with our mobile devices, anchoring users within the Facebook experience. The potential for success with Home, if widely adopted, could be big. More time spent inside of Facebook’s products means more ads served by default — especially when Facebook finally brings ads to Cover Feed, one of the key features of Home.

And yet by many measures, Home has stumbled hard directly out of the gate. More than half of its user reviews on Google Play are scathing. And as of last week, just over one million people had installed the product, a trifling amount compared to the 1.1 billion users on Facebook’s network.

What Facebook really wants from Home is to catch on overseas. Create a mobile-focused product to capture developing world markets — where the phone is a person’s primary computing device — and you’ve got potential to spur growth. Home, however, runs only on certain higher-end Android devices, hardware that won’t be ubiquitous or cheap in developing countries for at least a few years.

Home isn’t the only long-term bet. Look at Graph Search, Facebook’s search product rolled out earlier this year. Almost immediately came calls saying “watch out Google!” from the public. Perhaps Google’s stranglehold on the search market could be upset by a social form of discovery.

But Graph Search is possibly in an even more nascent phase than Facebook Home; Graph Search has only been rolled out to a select amount of users, and Facebook has oodles of work to do if it wants to curb the way people make Web search queries and focus them on people, places and things inside of the Facebook network.

Granted, Facebook has made serious moves in the past year to spur profitability further, releasing a slew of new ad products, revamping its gaming platform partner ecosystem and pushing, however slowly, into online retail with Facebook Gifts. It has consistently hit its numbers in the company’s quarterly earnings calls. And as the Wall Street Journal’s Evelyn Rusli wrote, the company made significant internal shifts over the past year that have made more teams responsible for Facebook’s revenue.

And still, the needle hardly moves on Facebook’s stock ticker; it closed at around $26 per share on Friday, well below the $38 it opened at one year ago. For all of Facebook’s long-term posturing, the Street remains cautious.

“We don’t build services to make money,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his company’s S-1 prospectus before Facebook’s Nasdaq debut. “We make money to build better services.”

Hopefully, for the sake of the shareholders, Facebook can do both.

For now, it seems a fairly basic integration of Twitter accounts and actual tweets into Yahoo’s flowing news-content stream; think of it as seeing some select Twitter items placed in between the curated Yahoo News stories.

“Tweets have become an important information source for many of our users,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said in a company blog post. “From music to sports, news to entertainment, we’re committed to delivering our users the very best of the web, and our continued partnership with Twitter is an exciting leap forward in our endeavors.”

That makes sense, considering how Twitter has been treated in recent times by the news media itself. Think of recent major media events like the Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent manhunt: News actually broke on Twitter before news organizations were able to get to the scene and cover what was going on, and many outlets — including CNN and other live broadcast networks — were directing users to tweets to tell them what was going on.

Of course, this gets into an entire debate on the accuracy and role of social media in ongoing news coverage, but we’ll sidestep that one for now.

It’s also a win for Twitter, which basically gets a bunch of free distribution of its tweets on Yahoo’s main news page. Yahoo News still has a massive audience. If folks who aren’t already using Twitter return to Yahoo’s news stream daily and continue to see tweets and Twitter accounts, that’s easy potential for converting new users over to the social platform.

As far as Yahoo’s benefit, you might want to note how many times Marissa Mayer said that tweets will be “personalized” in that particular blog post. “Personalization” has been Yahoo’s huge pitch to court users into making Yahoo their destination site for the Web, including signing them up for Yahoo profiles. The more Yahoo can tout a personalized experience tailored to what the user wants, the better that pitch becomes over time.

It’s not clear right now if having a signed-in Yahoo profile connected to your Twitter account will affect what tweets will appear in that news feed, but I’d imagine if Mayer wants to claim true personalization, that would be a good way to do it.

It’s also not clear if Yahoo News editors are curating the tweets themselves, or if they’ll have their news algorithms do the work (we’ve asked Yahoo for clarification). Update 1:21 p.m. PST: Here we go — a Yahoo spokesperson provides me with clarification on this: “The initial list of content sources was editorially curated for relevance and quality, but the Tweets shown on the homepage have been algorithmically selected. The pool of eligible Tweets is further filtered to minimize spam and undesirable content.”

A question: Does this partnership mean we could see tweets appear inside of Yahoo’s search results someday?

No telling exactly, but Yahoo certainly leaves the door open: “We do not currently display Tweets in our search results, but we deeply value our partnership with Twitter and are always looking into ways we can integrate Twitter into our products,” a Yahoo spokesperson told AllThingsD.

Expect to see the tweets roll out in the Yahoo News feed on the desktop and mobile Web in the coming days.

Thanks to app tweaks and software updates, it’s easier than ever for you to hand your photographic history over to the company of your choice.

Consider this: Take a photo using your iPhone, and Apple can instantly upload your snapshot to your iCloud account, where it’s accessible via any of your connected Apple devices. Google can do that, too, with Android phones and your Google+ account. There’s Microsoft and SkyDrive integration, Facebook and album image uploading. Not to mention others like Amazon Cloud Drive and Dropbox.

Google doesn’t want to be left behind, as evidenced by the company’s latest robust photo offering. The Google+ team dropped a massive update to its photo-editing capabilities at its I/O developer conference on Wednesday, bringing a series of professional-grade photo-editing tools to anyone who uses Google+.

The advantage here, Google would say, is that while everyone may offer free online photo storage in some capacity, Google is the one with the consumer editing suite. But you don’t have to be an expert-level Photoshop user to work with Google’s new tools. Auto-enhance, auto-highlight and even “auto-awesome” leverage the power of Google’s algorithms to choose the best pictures out of the many you’ve uploaded, and automatically make them look better than they did before.

The point is simple: The more you’ve invested yourself in a service — be it by filling out and continuously updating your profile, or through uploading photo after photo to its cloud-based storage — the less likely you are to fall away from using it. If all of your memories are stuck inside of, say, Facebook, you’ve got an online repository, an album to point others to in the future or to re-download as you see necessary. And, perhaps because of the emotional nature of the material, you’re less likely to even want to move it in the first place.

It’s also the type of media where platforms see some of their highest engagement from users. Facebook, I’ve been told, sees far and away more activity and engagement from users focused on photos in the stream than they do from text-based status updates. Google+, too, sees high engagement from in-stream pictures.

Users aside, big data companies like Google and Facebook gain reams of information from the photos you’ve sent in. Each file is another piece of location metadata to be registered, another image to identify and tag using facial-recognition tech, another way of recognizing the people and places you interact with most in your daily life.

So now, when all companies are offering similar uploading options and essentially unlimited free online storage, it’s up to competitors to differentiate to try and stand out.

That’s easier said than done. Facebook obviously has its billion-strong network (not to mention the rapidly growing Instagram), where many of your friends already likely have a presence. Apple touts accessibility and safety via only a certain set of devices. And Google+, while its usage and engagement stats are constantly a point of contention, will at least offer a simple, powerful photo tool set that gives any amateur photographer the ability to make their vacation pictures look a whole lot better.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter what winds up luring you to one service over another. What matters is how they keep you coming back to upload more of your photos, more of your memories. Perhaps Google’s new editing-feature suite will give it the edge it needs to stay in the game.

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After writing a post on Tuesday about being diagnosed with a rare voice condition which has barred him from making many public appearances over the past two years, Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page made a surprise appearance at Google’s I/O developer conference on Wednesday.

The CEO, who has not appeared at the I/O conference in years, took about 10 minutes to deliver a sort of evangelist-like mission statement, thoughts on how he sees Google’s role in the world at large, and how the different parts of his organization — Android, Google X, Maps, Search — help people.

“Technology should do the hard work,” Page said, “so that people can get on with doing the things that make them happiest in life.”

Page’s appearance is noteworthy in that, unlike other technology CEOs — Zuckerberg, Cook, Bezos — Page has not often stepped into the limelight for new product introductions or company updates, aside from his appearances on the company’s earnings calls.

But unlike his quarterly appearances filled with balance-sheet numbers and chats with Wall Street analysts, Page’s talk today aimed to appeal to a more emotional part of his audience, even evoking a memory of a time he went to a technology conference with his father, when Page was a child.

At other moments, Page seemed to wax philosophical. “If I think back to a long time ago, all of humanity was basically farming or hunting all the time,” he said. “If you lived in that time, you probably hoped that you could feed your family. For us, we don’t worry about that … and the reason for that is technology.”

Indeed, a lot of the speech had a very “Kumbaya” feeling to it, with Page calling for an end to the animosity that inhabits much of the tech industry.

“Every story I read about Google is ‘us vs some other company’ or some stupid thing, and I just don’t find that very interesting,” Page said. “We should be building great things that don’t exist. Being negative isn’t how we make progress.”

Yet in the very same address, Page took some potshots at competitors like Microsoft and Oracle, both of which are involved in litigation over certain Google products.

When asked during a Q&A session about the fate of Android in light of Oracle’s court victories, Page seemed eager to snipe: “Money is more important to them than cooperation,” Page said.

Speaking of a lack of cooperation, just today The Verge surfaced a cease-and-desist letter from Google to Microsoft, demanding that Microsoft remove the YouTube app from its Windows Phone devices, citing a lack of in-app advertising. Funny timing.

Page is hardly the only Google executive — much less Google employee — to shoot down competitors. Google Maps VP Brian McClendon was eager to make a subtle dig at Apple’s less-than-lauded mapping product. And Google+ SVP and long-time I/O emcee Vic Gundotra has thrown quite a few competitive elbows at other tech companies in his time.

Regardless, the Street seemed to eat it up. Shares of Google reached an all-time high on Wednesday afternoon, hitting $916.38 per share, before edging back slightly to close at $915.89.

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Pretty straightforward stuff: You’re able to chat with friends through five different types of Google properties — Gmail, Google+, iOS and Android devices, and the Chrome browser.

Much like Facebook, WhatsApp, Path and the many, many other messaging services available today, you’re able to send cutesy emoji smiley-face icons and photos, save your entire chat history between devices based on one (or more) people, and make video calls.

It’s a logical progression for Google — whose Gmail and Chrome properties have massive reach around the world — and, frankly, it should have happened some time ago. Since Facebook revamped Messages three years ago, the social giant has threaded email, chat and texting into one unified history, and has recently added emojis, as well.

It would have been interesting to see how WhatsApp could have been integrated if Google had bought the massive messaging service, which Google tried to do months ago. Alas, Google thinks it has reach enough across its browser and email marketshare, competing messaging app or not.

Expect the new Hangouts system to roll out soon.

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And guess what? Like many other startup visual layouts today, it’s beginning to look a lot like Pinterest.

Three-column design spreads the content — photos, video, etc. — across the whole screen instead of relegating it to the single column Google+ uses today. Something cool: Photos and video are dynamic, sometimes spreading out over the entire column view.

Like Instagram and Twitter, of course, Google+ wants to co-opt hashtags into its service more deeply — but with a slightly different take on them. Google can scan one of your entries — text or photo — and impressively add a few hashtags it thinks relevant to your post (delete-able, obviously). Click the hashtag, and you can go down the rabbit hole of conversation based on that given hashtag.

So it’s pretty! Now to see how many people actually want to use it.

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Google unveiled its long-rumored music subscription service at its I/O developer conference on Wednesday, aiming to take on Spotify, the one dominant player in the category.

It’s called Google Play Music All Access, and it has pretty much everything Spotify does. Explore different categories of music, flip through featured content from Google’s editors, browse some of the top albums and songs, and create playlists inside the app. It’s available across the Web — which is nicer than Spotify’s desktop client — as well as on Android phones and tablets.

The biggest likely draw is the radio station option. Listen to one track, and turn it into a radio station that is tailored to your listening habits. If you don’t like what’s in the queue that Google has given you, you can swipe away the music you don’t like. Better radio, as Google positions it.

How interesting! Especially considering that Apple is working on an online music radio competitor with extended features, and Pandora, of course, is going to have to fight on all sides to keep its business strong.

Here’s the biggest drawback: Unlike Spotify, All Access comes with only one pricing plan — $10 monthly. (It’s free for the next 30 days, and you can get it for $8 if you sign up before July).

That means no ad-supported free version, which arguably has been the reason why Spotify has gained more than six million paid subscribers globally to date, and more than 20 million active users of the service overall.

I’m curious to see the level of traction All Access gets compared to Spotify, mostly because Spotify has another key advantage: Facebook. The social giant is a nice boost of traffic for Spotify, surfacing users’ listening activity to the billion-plus users on the social network. Google’s All Access, on the other hand, has Google+. That hardly stacks up to Facebook’s reach.

Time to watch, wait, and see if Googlers are willing to pony up the dough.

RELATED POSTS:

• Shoot the Moon: How Google Turned a Hodgepodge of Upgrades Into a Show of Strength
• Google I/O: Music, Maps, Messaging and More
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• Next Google Maps Update to Include Better Venue Search, Waze-Like Rerouting
• Google Gives Search a Deeper Voice and Adds Reminders and More to Google Now
• With Revamped Hangouts, Google Aims to Unify Messaging
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• At I/O, Google Tilts Toward Android Services Over Android OS
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• Ahead of I/O, Google Wallet Drops Plans to Introduce a Physical Card
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That, in part, is the philosophy behind Square Stand, the payments startup’s new point-of-sale product unveiled on Tuesday morning. Sleek and stark white like Square’s other hardware, it’s like something out of the Braun catalog.

But it’s not all about the looks. The hallmark of high design, for some, is matching form with function, and much of Square’s pitch involves the speed and utility of the new product’s design.

“Good design uses form to illuminate function,” Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO, told me at an event on Tuesday morning. “But elevating the look of a product is what makes it timeless.”

For better or worse — Dorsey would argue better — the $300 product is incredibly simple. Merchants can strap an iPad 2 or iPad 3 to the white plastic stand, and use the company’s Register software to control the back-end analytics and calculating of orders and items. A built-in swiping card reader is located at the lower front end, facing the merchant, but can swivel around to let the customer swipe their own card, as well. The package, which comes with stand and installation materials, doesn’t come with an iPad or with peripherals like a ticket printer.

This raises a question. Right now, any merchant with an iPad can download Square’s Register software for free, perhaps fashioning their own, home-brewed stand to hold the tablet and take orders. They don’t need to spend three hundred bucks for what essentially amounts to a well-designed prop-up stand.

But that, Dorsey said, is where the point of the product comes in. Two areas are being served by POS systems right now — the very small merchants, who use the company’s existing card reader software out there (or ones from competitors like PayPal or Intuit), and the big, cumbersome (and rather ugly) POS systems used by restaurants and others, which cost somewhere in the area of ten grand or more. For Square’s setup, you could slap a $500 iPad on a $300 stand and perhaps buy one or two of the ticket-printing peripherals to go with it, and be set up for under $1,000.

That middle group, I imagine, is the group of people who would be best served by Square’s new hardware release. And despite Square’s hard push into creating functional software over the past few years, Dorsey maintains that his startup is all about the hardware.

“Hardware has always been a big part of who we are, it’s who we want to be,” Dorsey said. “We always want to use hardware to make experiences better.”

Preorders for the stand start Tuesday, and will begin selling at select retailers in July.

Nearly one year ago, at its I/O developer conference, Google unveiled its Android-powered Nexus Q media player product to much fanfare. Little more than a month after the big reveal, Google suspended the launch of the Q indefinitely.

So, will Google’s I/O conference — set to kick off this Wednesday — bring news of the Nexus Q’s fate?

No, it won’t. Google won’t have any news on the Nexus Q this week, according to sources familiar with the matter. Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Q’s notable absence over the past year is almost as big a deal as its initial unveiling. For Google, the Nexus Q was less a new product than it was a definitive statement; essentially, the search giant was saying that with the fully in-house-designed Q, Google, too, could create beautiful products, just like its greatest competitor, Apple, whose iPhones, iPads and computing devices are fetishized by technologists and design fanatics the world over.

What’s more, the Q was to be manufactured inside the U.S., a stark departure from so many consumer electronics companies whose devices are put together overseas in places such as South America and Asia. And the timing of the initial announcement couldn’t have been better for Google: As Apple was facing harsh criticism for working conditions and wages in overseas operations with partner manufacturing group Foxconn, Google reaped the public relations benefits of claiming to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. of A.

The Q was indeed attractive and well built, a matte-black sphere slightly smaller than a bowling ball, encircled in a thin strip of LEDs which alternated in color when interacting with other Android devices. It was sleek, stylish, an item that any design devotee would feel comfortable situating in the middle of their living room.

Aside from looking pretty, the Q didn’t do quite enough to warrant the hefty $300 price tag. The Nexus Q was for all intents and purposes a direct gateway to Google Play, the company’s Web-based media store which sells MP3s and videos to consumers. Link the Q up to your Wi-Fi network and it would be able to tap into a user’s online repository of Google-stored content. Users could control the Q with their Android smartphones and tablets and, ideally, hold listening “parties,” swapping songs in and out of the “queue” of tracks to be played.

However novel, the Nexus Q paled in comparison to devices from competitors like Microsoft, whose massively popular Xbox is capable of delivering all sorts of downloadable content like games, video and music. Apple, too, offers the Apple TV at a modestly priced $100, and is capable of delivering video and music from its iTunes online media store, as well.

As a result of a wave of immediate criticism, Google suspended the Q’s fate indefinitely, citing “initial feedback from users that they want Nexus Q to do even more than it does today,” according to the company’s statement last July. Google said at the time that it was “postponing” the consumer launch rather than halting product development completely, in order to “work on making it even better.”

Indeed, Google will have to return with a strong product to compete in the battle for consumers’ living rooms, an assault waged across all fronts from the world’s biggest American technology companies. Two years ago, Google unveiled Android @Home, the company’s plan to extend Android-based devices into products like in-home lighting fixtures, signaling the company’s grand ambitions to bring Android out of its traditional mobile device roots.

While we’ve seen little progress in the way of news from Google’s @Home efforts since, Microsoft and Apple continue to push for greater market share with their device and content offerings. Even Amazon is reported to be working on its own set-top box, in order to stream its content directly into the homes of consumers.

So, at this week’s I/O, at least, we won’t be hearing about Google’s Nexus Q plans. But there’s always next year.

RELATED POSTS:

• Shoot the Moon: How Google Turned a Hodgepodge of Upgrades Into a Show of Strength
• Google I/O: Music, Maps, Messaging and More
• Larry Page Takes the Pulpit to Praise Technology, Snipe at Competitors
• Next Google Maps Update to Include Better Venue Search, Waze-Like Rerouting
• Google Gives Search a Deeper Voice and Adds Reminders and More to Google Now
• With Revamped Hangouts, Google Aims to Unify Messaging
• Google+ Gets a Bit More Pinteresting
• Google Chrome: 750 Million Active Users, Synchronized Web and Mobile Browsing
• Coming Soon From Google: A $649 Samsung Galaxy S4 Running Stock Android
• With Sights Set on Spotify (And Pandora), Google Launches a Music Subscription Service
• Google on Android: 900 Million Activations, New Tools for Developers Coming
• Google Doubles Down on Music Subscriptions, Which Means Google Isn’t Serious About Music Subscriptions
• Where Are They Now? Google I/O 2012 Edition.
• At I/O, Google Tilts Toward Android Services Over Android OS
• Google Downplays Expectations Ahead of I/O Developer Conference
• Will Google Deliver on Its Nexus Q Promise? Not at This Year’s I/O.
• Ahead of I/O, Google Wallet Drops Plans to Introduce a Physical Card
• Google Goes With Unified I/O Keynote (But Will It Unify Its Products?)