Learnist builds on Grockit’s social teaching concept while adding another element that company founder Farb Nivi claims is crucial: The visual element.

Think of Learnist as something of a mashup between Pinterest and Wikipedia. Users find content from across the Web — videos, news stories, music, Soundcloud links and what have you — and post it to a personal board that other users can follow. It’s ideal, Nivi says, for teachers who want to curate multimedia lessons for students to follow, though without the feel of a stodgy, traditional lesson plan.

Grockit has already garnered a following, attracting more than a million users through its test prep service product alone. But the user pool for online test prep is only so large. With Grockit’s wiki-like Learnist product, the company hopes to spread its reach far beyond the cramming crowd. Facebook integration, which the product indeed has, will only help to further the cause.

Naturally, iPad and iPhone apps are in the works, to be expected in the coming weeks.

The revamped social networking app presents a sleeker user interface that’s easy on the eyes, with a bolder font and smooth animations.

Photos and video are also displayed in full screen in your stream, for a more visually appealing experience. If you happen to come across a photo in your stream that strikes your fancy, you even have the ability to download the image right from Google+ and use it as your wallpaper.

Google also made some changes to make the app easier to use. You can now “+1” a post right from the main page, and edit posts inline. And a new navigation ribbon that slides in and out gives you quicker access to the app’s other functions.

All of these enhancements were rolled out to the iOS (Apple’s mobile operating system) app earlier this month, but one feature unique to the Android version is the ability to create a “Hangout” video chatroom.

Hangout is a function in Google+ that allows you to make a video call to a group of people. Previously, you could only join a Hangout call in progress using the app, but now you can create them using the new navigation ribbon. There’s even an option to ring a contact’s phone when a Hangout request is sent.

Vic Gundotra, senior vice president of social at Google, said all of today’s improvements were made in the company’s quest to create “a simpler, more beautiful Google.” I’d say the company was pretty successful in achieving that goal.

You can try it out for yourself by downloading the new Google+ app for Android from the Google Play Store.

Meet Slade Villena.

In February, the ex-Zynga engineer publicly slammed the door in the San Francisco online social gaming company’s face in this discussion thread on Reddit, although at first he kept his real identity a secret.

With a new seven-person team and a successfully-funded Kickstarter game under his belt, Villena’s a prime example of the sort of independent game developer I wrote about last week. He’s passionate, ambitious and full of big ideas.

But even though he’s adamant about focusing now on a small niche audience, he’s also made a name for himself online directly bashing his old employer.

Welcome to the dark side — or, at least, the gray area– of indie dev culture.

Villena’s Reddit thread three months ago got hundreds of questions and thousands of upvotes, and made Zynga look pretty bad.

But today tomorrow, Zynga — which declined to comment for this article — gets a chance to strike back. In the same section on Reddit, known as IAmA, two Zynga engineers, Seth Allison and Andrew Pellerano, are scheduled to open a Q&A thread at 1 pm PT tomorrow.

So, who do you trust?

When he waxes philosophical about the video game industry, Villena makes some good points. Most interestingly, that competition may be a myth in the indie space, since developers don’t necessarily have to go after a mass audience of, for example, war game-loving teenage boys. But I was surprised by just how much he was willing to put Zynga down, especially since he worked there for only eight months and quit almost a year ago.

And while some of Villena’s points are valid or plausible, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said others are “borderline psychotic.”

On the one hand are arguments you’ve probably heard before: That in the pursuit of bigger and bigger audiences, Zynga grinds its employees too hard and pushes them too far.

“I was averaging 70 hours a week because I had to,” Villena said. “They were demanding large spikes and large revenue gains in a very short amount of time.”

He said the heavy workload leads to lots of bugs, and that bugs drive away players. Pachter readily acknowledged that yes, that could happen, but questioned whether Villena was a fair judge.

“He’s probably not spending as much time playing everybody else’s games like I am,” said Pachter. “So, I can tell you that their games are less buggy than most.”

On top of that, Villena alleged a culture of unprofessionalism at Zynga, where long hours were rewarded with trips to Las Vegas and free alcohol for engineers while they worked.

Pachter said he had never observed anything of the sort any of the times he’s visited Zynga, nor had he heard anything about this supposed drinking culture from the 50-odd people he knows who work there.

Putting aside any culture clash on the social front, Villena also alleged that Zynga invades players’ privacy. I asked him to elaborate in our interview, and he compared the games’ use of player data to military-intelligence profiles he observed while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps.

When he was a member of the FrontierVille team, he said, the company posted on the wall the pictures, real names, ages, habits and Facebook posts of some of the game’s biggest spenders.

Creepy? Maybe, if true. But the devil’s advocate argument, of course, is that many social gamers technically agree to give over some or all of that data to game developers in order to use their apps in the first place.

“I was told, ‘We’re getting to know our players,’ but why are you posting their names?” Villena countered. “Why not just post their game’s avatar without having to deal with their photo or their name or anything like that?”

Fair enough. But it’s really when the discussion gets into Zynga’s finances that he starts to sound, to steal Pachter’s words, “a bit unhinged.”

As we were wrapping up our interview, Villena volunteered: “I don’t expect Zynga to survive the summer at the rate that they’re going. Look at their stock, dude. They’re scraping at $7. The way I’m looking at it, by the end of the summer, they’re going to be de-listed from Nasdaq.”

Pachter’s reaction over the phone was, “HA! Ha ha ha! No.“

He later apologized for laughing, while simultaneously calling the idea of Zynga going under this year “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Even though Zynga’s stock is at record low levels, under $7 per share, it would need to trade at under $1 per share for 90 days to get de-listed. As for going bankrupt, Zynga is profitable, and doesn’t have any debt.

“And by the way, why the hell does he care?” Pachter asked. “This guy sounds pretty bitter.”

But back to things that matter: Like I said in my last article, gamers don’t have to choose between the games that come out of big companies like Zynga and indie shops like Villena’s Mercenary Game Studios.

Keep an eye on the Zynga engineers’ Reddit thread. In theory, Redditors are supposed to be able to ask them anything, so we’ll see if and how they respond to Villena’s claims.

An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that the Reddit Q&A would be happening today.

What we didn’t know, however, is that Facebook was essentially building its own version of a standalone mobile photo-sharing application, ostensibly to compete with Instagram before it took over the mobile photo-sharing world completely.

How do I know that? Because Facebook will launch the product this afternoon in Apple’s App Store.

It’s called Facebook Camera, and it’s essentially Instagram redux. One, it’s a standalone Facebook application, separate from the Facebook app proper, much like the company’s Facebook Messages app. Facebook Photos product manager Dirk Stoop told me in an interview this morning that it’s an instant portal to one of Facebook’s largest use cases: Photo sharing.

Secondly — and I cannot stress this point enough — Facebook seems to have learned a heck of a lot from Instagram. Photos in Facebook Camera are full-bleed, spanning the entire width of the iPhone’s screen (which was probably tested when Facebook tweaked the photo experience for mobile last week). You’re able to comment and “Like” photos directly from the stream. And, of course, there are filters (albeit ones with names nowhere near as fun as Toaster or Valencia).

More than this, it’s very lightweight. The app moves much faster than browsing photos within Facebook. And by introducing a separate camera app, it’s another way of bypassing the cumbersome, clicky process of adding pictures via the main Facebook app.

It would be nice if the main Facebook app could just work this well, but Stoop said that this app was the brainchild of the dedicated Photos team he spearheads. That means moving faster, and breaking — then repairing — things quicker.

“Having separate teams focus on their area of expertise allows us to innovate faster,” Stoop told me. “Which, eventually, helps to integrate features into the mainline product.” There’s hope, then, that Facebook’s main app will actually get better.

There is, of course, a way around all of this photo-sharing friction: If Facebook were to integrate with iOS just as Twitter has, iPhone users could instantly upload photos to Facebook, straight from the iOS camera app. Stoop didn’t comment when I mentioned as much in our conversation.

So yes, the app is slick. And yes, it’s a fast portal into mobile photo-sharing, the likes of which Facebook needs. But it’s skirting the billion-dollar elephant in the room: Why build another camera app when you just dropped a ton of cash on one last month?

Two things: One, the Instagram deal hasn’t actually closed yet. It’s still purportedly being probed by the FTC, and that could take time to finish. And two, Stoop’s team was most likely working on this product long before buying Instagram was ever a real possibility. Stoop confirmed to me that Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom and his team had nothing to do with building Facebook Camera.

But now that Facebook Camera is finally coming to the App Store a month after the Instagram purchase, the whole deal is starting to make a lot more sense. With Instagram’s rapid rise to prominence in quickly garnering a strong user base, Facebook had to have seen the writing on the wall. Tens of millions of users signed up in the span of two years. And the app surpassed 50 million downloads after finally being released on Android earlier this year.

In essence, Instagram was taking over mobile photos, and Facebook couldn’t wait around and watch the company snap up every user while still working on perfecting the Facebook Camera app.

It’ll be interesting to see just how Facebook integrates Instagram’s user base into Facebook over time. It’s odd, too, that Facebook would launch a standalone Camera app, especially when it’s likely that the acquisition will go through. Still, perhaps a mashup of the two apps is on the road map eventually, despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s protestations that Instagram will maintain its autonomy.

Or perhaps Facebook itself doesn’t even know quite yet.

Lift co-founder Tony Stubblebine

Word of the company first came out last August, but since then the idea has changed quite a bit, co-founder Tony Stubblebine told me this week. The problem with earlier versions was a misguided foray into gamification, he said.

Lift’s purpose is still the same: It’s a mobile app to motivate people to reach their goals. And it’s still not out yet, so take all these early learnings with a grain of salt.

Where earlier versions had points, badges and levels, the prelaunch Lift has stripped all that away. Now it will be one part social — Lift community members make each other accountable and give each other positive reinforcement — and one part quantified self — users can see charts and graphs of their personal progress around health, education, happiness and productivity goals.

Everything in Lift is public to the community, so the goals tend not to be terribly personal — some popular ones are “eat breakfast,” “talk to a stranger,” “exercise,” “drink more water,” “do pushups” and “read.”

In recent testing, dropping gamification increased retention to 50 percent from 5 percent, Stubblebine said.

That’s only among a small elite group of early users, but it’s enough of a positive signal that Lift should be ready to launch in August, he said.

Originally, San Francisco-based Lift naturally gravitated toward gamification in the hopes that it could create a sort of “Zynga for good,” according to Stubblebine. But designing around gamification presented a few problems: It tempted complication in the product design, and it set up a rigid structure for people to succeed on preset terms, rather than allowing them to find their own motivation.

“If you build a game, you’re providing a fantasy,” Stubblebine said. “We basically replaced a fantasy with reality.”

The new Lift is an iPhone app that allows users to name their goals and join ones other people have started. Each time users meet a goal, they “check in” to it. Then, other people can give them “props.”

At least anecdotally, giving people information seems to be a far bigger driver of changed behavior than giving them points and badges.

Check out the above chart of Evan Williams’ quest on Lift to trim his incoming emails down to “inbox zero.” Seeing a chart of his inbox zero days starting the week of April 8 quickly motivated him to get to that point on a daily basis.

So it’s a good time to get some perspective on what he learned during the experience, and how he deals with the Web at his newish job at Turner’s TBS.

In some ways, O’Brien told fellow Time Warner employee Piers Morgan at the cable industry’s annual convention yesterday, things haven’t changed that much: In an ideal world, he’d like people to watch his show live, when it airs.

But he also knows it doesn’t work that way, at all. And he’s okay with that, and he’s learned to embrace YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.:

When I got started in the business in ’93, the obsesssion was: Never give anything away. Don’t tell anybody … you want it to be a surprise when they watch the show. You want to tease them, but get them to watch the show.

And what we have found is true is that this is a different generation. It works differently now. You can show them exactly what Will Ferrell did [on O'Brien's show], and get it out there, so there’s no “surprise” …

The days of, “I only want people to experience me at 11, on TBS” — those days are over. The audience is too fragmented, they’re too distracted, and a whole generation is growing up that doesn’t watch television that way.

You can watch the entire 22-minute interview, which moves along quite quickly, below. Thanks to the NCTA for the video.

Keep in touch via Facebook, this is critical to your future success. And we’re public now, so can you click on an ad or two when you’re there?

– Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, speaking at Harvard Business School’s “Class Day” event Wednesday

The Los Angeles firm, armed with information from a May 11 “roadshow” meeting with underwriters and Facebook, along with similar estimates of its own, slashed the number of shares it intended to buy. The night before trading began, a Capital Research manager told a banker at Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter, that the deal’s pricing was “ridiculous,” according to a person familiar with the situation. Some Capital Research fund managers didn’t buy into the IPO at all, say people familiar with the matter.

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It was a bad time for Facebook’s IPO to go south.

Retail investors are not happy. Class-action lawsuits have been filed against Nasdaq, Facebook and the three Wall Street investment banks that took it public. The Securities and Exchange Commission, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the Massachusetts Secretary of State are all “looking into” just exactly how the deal went down.

So, will that be enough to sate a scorned investment public at large, especially amid a current political climate of public skepticism — if not outright contempt — for Wall Street as a whole?

Not at all, especially because it is an election year.

Therefore, cue the tsk-tsking politicians lining up Wall Street’s powerbrokers, as well as a Facebook exec, for a session of pompous I-told-you-sos.

It’s clear the big guns on Capitol Hill are gearing up to intervene. The Senate Banking Committee is in the process of meeting with Facebook, regulators and other stakeholders in the IPO, according to a statement issued by its chairman, Sen. Tim Johnson, on Wednesday.

“Once these briefings have concluded and the staff reports back to me,” Johnson said, “I will determine if a Senate Banking committee hearing is necessary.”

Maybe not necessary, but those hearings do seem inevitably inevitable.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, chairman of the Senate Banking subcommittee, chimed in as well. “There’s a lot that we don’t know about this IPO, but a lot that we do,” Brown said in a statement released on Wednesday. “Effective capital markets require transparency and accountability, not one set of rules for insiders and another for the rest of us.”

And while the House Financial Services committee didn’t as yet return my Wednesday afternoon calls, HFS spokeswoman Marisol Garibay told Reuters that it is also being briefed on the issues, and is in the midst of “gathering information and facts.”

After the most hotly anticipated IPO of the year was mired by technological and potential ethical issues, leaving thousands of retail investors holding the proverbial bag, it’s natural that Congress would consider intervening. Allegations against Facebook and its underwriters surfaced earlier this week, claiming a Facebook executive explicitly told at least one member of its syndicate that the firms should lower their financial forecasts for Facebook at the eleventh hour, mere days before the highly anticipated IPO.

This apparently resulted in institutional investors dialing back the price at which these firms would buy Facebook stock, and that could have dampened demand for shares on the first day of trading, affecting retail investors’ chances at any potential first day gains.

Some have taken steps to ease the investor backlash. Morgan Stanley may adjust prices of orders made by its retail investor clients, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Nasdaq, too, may earmark around $13 million in order to resolve bad trades.

But there is nothing like a good old-fashioned grilling of money makers and Internet zillionaires for the cameras of C-SPAN to make the summertime barbeque complete.

Eat it up, folks.

It was, in a word, creepy.

WhosHere, another social discovery application used primarily for dating, is trying its hardest to fight that stereotype.

“We’ve put a tremendous amount of effort into not being creepy,” CEO and co-founder Bryant Harris told me. Users can fill out profiles however they wish, using a pseudonym or an avatar that isn’t a shot of their face. If two people are interested in one another, they can communicate via text or VoIP call within the app itself, without requiring phone numbers.

But there comes a point in e-dating where two people must take things to the next level. And texts and even phone calls can only tell a person so much.

In-app video chat, a feature that WhosHere is launching on Wednesday, is the next natural step for the app. It’s a way of moving forward in connecting with others without the peskiness of having to take the full leap of meeting in person. It’s also a way to verify someone is who they say they are before meeting in the flesh. After all, you never know who’s actually on the other end of a profile.

“Just like in the real world, you go through a progression of how you interact,” says COO Stephen Smith.

I’m not entirely convinced that the world is ready to move to dating via smartphone. But the app has garnered more than five million iOS installations since 2008, so at least some folks are smitten with the premise.

Not more than a handful of business days after Facebook’s much ballyhooed IPO, and the noise is only getting worse.

One bright spot is that the downward plunge of the social networking giant’s shares has stopped and stabilized at $32.01. That’s up 3.2 percent today in a down market.

But that bright spot has not stopped the ever-louder Facebook fulminations that have begun to resound somewhat more seriously.

Such as a Reuters’ report yesterday that right in the middle of the social networking giant’s roadshow that Morgan Stanley and other Facebook underwriters reduced revenue forecasts, a last-minute change in outlook which could have contributed to Facebook’s first day stumbles on the Nasdaq. The change came shortly after Facebook amended its S-1 filing for the seventh time, a minor and opaque update further stating that the company was weak on mobile, but with little detail.

And that’s not all.

In an excellent analytical piece published earlier yesterday, Henry Blodget of Business Insider claims that a Facebook executive verbally told Morgan Stanley that the firm should lower its forecasts, a message he alleges was relayed to institutional investors, but not to retail investors. That could have dampened the price at which large and powerful firms were willing to pay for shares, severely limiting any potential opening day gains.

With Morgan Stanley switching down its forecast just days before the IPO, retail investors had no way of knowing that the big institutions weren’t going to be making the large day-one pops that they may have gotten before Facebook allegedly warned of its weakened financial outlook.

A Facebook spokeswoman told AllThingsD the company had no comment on the matter.

Perhaps silence will silence the critics eventually, but whatever the outcome, it’s a noisome mess right now, far from living up to what was the most anticipated tech IPO in recent history.

And it looks like it’s far from over.

As a result of the allegations, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the Massachusetts Secretary of State are all looking into the issues surrounding the IPO.

There’s also chatter that the Senate Banking Committee is looking into the matter. Although it’s in a preliminary stage, I confirmed as much: The SBC is holding staff briefings with Facebook, regulators and other stakeholders, a Democratic Senate Banking Committee aide told AllThingsD.

Morgan Stanley issued a statement on Tuesday in response to the agencies’ inquiries, claiming that it “followed the same procedures for the Facebook offering that it follows for all IPOs.” The procedures, Morgan Stanley claimed, are within the realm of compliance with regulatory rules. And after Facebook revised its S-1 on May 9, Morgan Stanley said, “a significant number of research analysts in the syndicate who were participating in investor education” — including Morgan Stanley — “reduced their earnings views to reflect their estimate of the impact of the new information. These revised views were taken into account in the pricing of the IPO.”

Finally, in the first of what will no doubt be many to come, at least two separate class-action lawsuits have been filed against Facebook on behalf of investors who lost money because of Facebook’s failed IPO. One of the suits, of course, names co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a defendant.

Inevitable lawsuits aside, the larger question is who inside Facebook might take the fall. Eyes are beginning to land on David Ebersman, Facebook’s CFO, the former Genentech CFO who came to the company with high praise from those who knew him, both inside and outside of the company.

As Kara Swisher had previously reported in January, Ebersman played a key role in the lead-up to Facebook’s IPO, taking a firm pole position in dealing with underwriters at Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs at every step of the process.

Part of choosing Ebersman, sources told Swisher earlier this year, was to ensure that the IPO would be pulled off in as low-key a way as was possible; it was one of Zuckerberg’s main tenets, especially in light of the disastrous Groupon IPO.

While many are calling him the likely fall guy, sources close to the situation said his job is not now at risk and pushing him out over this would be a highly unlikely move for Facebook.

But now the IPO has come and gone, and he and the company’s IPO remain anything but low key. S&P Capital IQ initiated Facebook coverage with a “sell” opinion on Wednesday morning, setting a 12-month target price at $31. That’s far from the investor fervor leading up to Facebook’s Nasdaq debut.

In other words: Fasten your seatbelts, as it could be a bumpy week.

That’s why Sonar, one of the few apps in the category that has been around for a few years, is trying something new. Up until now, Sonar has acted much like its name would suggest: Walk into a room, and using publicly available data pulled in from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the app tells you who’s nearby, and what you may have in common with one another.

Sonar’s new tack, then, is honing in on relevance. The company launched an update to its app on Wednesday, focused on putting users in touch with others nearby that they want to see. Setting the new Sonar Status feature, for instance, is like sending a tweet out to your nearby connections, but no further. So if you’re, say, sending status updates about how awful the beer lines are at a music festival, that status will actually show up for others in your proximity — you know, the people who would actually care about that status update — but no further.

To boot, the company is also flipping on the ambient location switch, adding features that aren’t terribly different from recent competitors like Highlight, Banjo and Glancee. Essentially, the app will run in the background, sharing your location and status with those nearby without having to open the application.

Sonar insists, however, that its app will only send you push notifications if you’re near someone you actually know — in other words, a Facebook friend, or someone you follow on Twitter — instead of people you should know, a la Highlight or Banjo. And if you want to chat with someone nearby without broadcasting it to the world via Twitter, Sonar now lets users send private messages.

It’s an attempt to tackle a glaring issue in the social discovery space: How do we connect with relevant people, especially when relevance changes on a contextual basis? While I may not want to talk with someone I don’t know at a coffee shop, it may prove helpful to connect with other, less familiar people in your extended network when you’re both at a tech conference.

The great unknown at this point is Facebook, the behemoth that has its sights set on improving its mobile experience. Facebook just recently acquired Glancee, one of the competing apps in the social discovery space. It’s anyone’s guess as to how — or when — Facebook will use the technology.

That decision by the 41-year-old Facebook executive may have doomed any real chance the social-networking company had that its shares would jump when trading began — a hallmark of successful IPOs. On Tuesday, the second full day of trading, Facebook shares fell $3.03, or 8.9 percent, to $31, after falling 11 percent on Monday. Investors are blaming the downdraft on the last-moment expansion of the offering.

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There are identity thieves, stalkers and people generally trying to take advantage of you.

At least that was one of the things that I took away from a privacy conference last week in Seattle, where the word “creepy” slipped into the conversation as a description of everything from location-based services to more cutting edge Internet businesses.

But advocates argued that the cure for creepy was to make services relevant and useful — not spammy and invasive. In other words, consumers are willing to share their information — age, gender, location — if there’s a benefit to them.

I moderated a panel titled “Building Trust in the Sharing Economy,” which addressed identity issues as people become more comfortable using the Internet to find babysitters, rent out their apartments or lend their car to strangers.

In those cases, honest people typically don’t mind sharing information about themselves in order to be considered a trustworthy consumer or provider. It’s a red flag if they don’t.

Sonny Singh, the VP of sales and business development at Jumio, said it’s not creepy when you show your driver’s license to Hertz when you’re renting a car or to a hotel when you’re checking in. That’s why it shouldn’t be viewed as strange when you use sharing services like Airbnb or RelayRides.

But he said, instead, “they are assuming from your Facebook profile that you are who you say you are.”

Jumio is developing technology that allows users to verify their identity by entering their credit card and driver’s license information using a webcam or camera phone.

Participants in the panel (from left to right in the picture) are: Tricia Duryee, AllThingsD; Drummond Reed, founder, Connect.me; Sam Rosen, co-founder, Scaffold; Xin Chung, CEO and founder, Trustcloud; and Singh.

Here’s a video of the whole discussion, but you can skip to around the 26-minute mark to hear the whole discussion on “creepy.”

Created by: MBAOnline.com

First, a successive series of ups: The app scored tens of millions of users via Facebook over a period of no longer than a month and soared to the top of the iTunes App Store.

Then, a few downers. Members of the press (including yours truly) started sniffing around after Socialcam (and rival app Viddy) rose so high up in the ranks in such a short time. Socialcam’s viral growth was due — in part, at least — to successfully gaming the system by incorporating YouTube videos designed to spread like wildfire.

I posed the question then: Now that Socialcam has millions of Web video users and at least a few million app installs, how will the company keep those users around?

The team’s answer is starting to trickle out. As TechCrunch reported earlier, Socialcam released a new design to it Web interface Tuesday morning, an update focused squarely on the social experience. It features everything you’d expect in a modern social Web interface: Friends-to-follow suggestions, user popularity leaderboards and recent friend activity.

But make no mistake: This is more than just a tacking on of better social features.

Think of it this way: With Socialcam’s initial Open Graph integration, Web traffic flooded into the Web app. Yes, that drove installs on the mobile phone, but what Socialcam realized is that it needed to keep its Web experience in top shape to keep its users coming back. That’s entirely unlike Instagram, the photo-sharing app to which Socialcam is compared almost ad nauseum.

“Ultimately, Instagram had an app-focused strategy,” Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel told me in a telephone interview. “Instagram was trying to get people who were using other photo apps to use their app.”

Why? It’s because photos are different; we “consume” them easily with our phones, requiring no more than a flick of the thumb to scroll through scores of snapshots. And if you nail the mobile app like Instagram did, you don’t need to worry about the Web interface (which Instagram, for the most part, clearly ignores).

Video, on the other hand, is a different animal entirely. We’re used to watching video via the Web interface, not our mobile devices. Over the seven-year rise of YouTube, Google has trained us in our streaming video viewing habits.

So as Seibel sees it, the challenge for Socialcam isn’t to compete against other mobile social video apps. It’s to compete against the Web.

“This is really a social video and mobile video vs. YouTube narrative,” Seibel said. “Theoretically, YouTube owns this space. But as our phones have grown into powerful devices for capturing video, YouTube has done virtually nothing to keep up.”

“We’re the first ones to attack YouTube’s flanks,” Seibel said.

Ground zero was getting the user base. Whether or not you agree with Socialcam’s user acquisition strategy is another matter entirely. The first step after that, according to Seibel, is nailing your Web experience — hence Tuesday’s timely update.

And it’s only after mastering the Web that apps like Socialcam can convert its users to a mobile-centric video world. If we enjoy watching mobile videos through our Web browser, Seibel hopes that will inspire us to start shooting our own. After enough of us do that, perhaps they’ll slowly transition to the mobile app.

It’s rather ironic that Socialcam seeded old YouTube videos in its plan to lure us away from YouTube and into fresh, user-generated content. But I guess they had to start somewhere.

The Los Angeles-based company has not raised institutional funding yet, but is backed by its founders along with Brody Jenner, stepbrother to Kim Kardashian and son of Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner (see right).

Jenner has already been busy hyping RocketFrog on his official Facebook fan page, which has more than 58,000 likes, by asking fans to join him in poker tournaments for the chance to win $5 Amazon gift cards.

Additionally, the company said that Myspace founder Tom Anderson will join RocketFrog’s advisory board.

Besides its star-studded alliances, the company’s free-to-play Facebook game stands apart from other casino-based games because it allows players to win a variety of prizes, ranging from movie tickets to music, food and more.

Games include blackjack, slots, roulette, deuces wild and video poker, and prizes during the game’s first month include brands such as Creative Recreation, Steve Angello of Swedish House Mafia, Young and Reckless, World of Dance, Abbey Dawn by Avril Lavigne and Paul Oakenfold.

Many companies are scrambling to gain large casino audiences on Facebook now that it appears that online gambling will become legal in the U.S.

Late last year, the Department of Justice issued a new interpretation of the Wire Act of 1961. Under the new ruling, it interprets the act as only outlawing betting on sporting events — not all events and contests. With that clarification in place, it will now be up to each state to pass legislation outlining operating procedures.

A few companies, such as IGT, Zynga and Caesars Interactive, have already started to get ready and a few states have already passed laws.

RocketFrog’s founder Brett Calapp was previously the CEO and co-founder of Centaurus Games, a subscription-based gaming network that sold to PartyGaming in 2010. He was also the president of the Ultimate Blackjack Tour, an international gambling tour, online game network and hit television show on CBS.

With an interface like Uber, Lyft users will be able to find nearby drivers and hop in for a ride, paying a suggested donation that’s approximately 30 percent less than a cab fare.

Drivers will be vetted by Lyft, and both riders and drivers authenticate via Facebook. Lyft is only in San Francisco and on iPhone for now, where there’s also a competing service called SideCar in beta testing.

Asked about the licensing and insurance issues that come with effectively turning regular cars into taxis, Zimride COO John Zimmer said, “I’m sure people will get upset about more competition. But our understanding is that when it’s ride-sharing, you can use your personal insurance policy. As for regulation, a lot of state laws are supportive of carpooling and ride-sharing and want to make that work.”

Two quick snapshots, via Cristina Cordova, using stats from AppData. Here’s the usage data for the Washington Post’s Social Reader. Note the second steep drop, in the middle of this month:

And the Guardian’s, which has the same pattern and the same mid-May drop:

Note that Cordova runs biz dev for Pulse, the iOS/Android news reader app, so she’s presumably not unhappy about this trend.

But I don’t have a dog in the fight, and I’m delighted with it myself. I’ve always thought the “social reader” apps were bad ideas, executed poorly: I don’t need to automatically know what my friends are reading — I only want to know about the articles they want me to read, and they’re pretty good about telling me that. And I don’t want to have to use an app to read them — the Web works just fine.

The new digerati consensus is that the drops don’t indicate a sudden revulsion by Facebook users, but that they’re the result of Facebook engineers twisting the dials, and ensuring that Facebook users don’t see the apps in their feeds anymore.

There’s an important lesson there for any Facebook partner or would-be partner (hello, Socialcam!). But as a Facebook user, I don’t really care — I’m just glad I don’t have to see these things anymore.