San Francisco-based Spreecast is StubHub founder Jeff Fluhr’s next act, and it offers live group-video sessions that are instantly archived. It’s focused on people who want to be broadcasters — like bloggers or offline personalities — and who can attract an audience.

Spreecasts, which are by default public, have up to four people on camera at a time, while others participate in text chat through their choice of Facebook, Twitter or Spreecast account. The person who starts the conversation gets access to a producer control panel that brings in new questions and speakers.

All sorts of companies have tried this sort of thing with varying degrees of success, like Tinychat, Paltalk, Livestream (now more focused on events), Socialeyes (haven’t heard from them in a while) and Operator11 (now defunct).

Spreecast has gone after people with high Klout scores to seed its user base — but then, Google+ recently got the Dalai Lama to do a Hangout with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. (His Holiness’s Klout score is 82!)

What I’d love to see is something that starts out with a multiplatform approach to social video, but Spreecast is built for just the Web, and all its video runs in Flash. Now that Adobe is halting development on Flash for mobile devices, that gap is only going to get harder to bridge.

(Tango does a pretty good job of spanning platforms, but it is not on Macs yet, and it’s for one-to-one video calls.)

Another new company in the space is LiveLead. Where Spreecast is about public Webcam conversations, LiveLead is about private sharing of video and photo content.

LiveLead, which currently requires a Facebook account to join, sets up private rooms where friends view content and text chat about it. Anyone in the room can take the lead and push something new for everybody to watch.

Again, this isn’t that novel an idea. Others, like ClipSync, Google Hangouts, and even the new Flickr Photo Sessions, provide communal content-viewing experiences. LiveLead’s angle is that it focuses on people who are already friends.

New York City-based LiveLead has a team of three — a former Wall Street finance guy, a graduate student in computer security, and a former privacy-focused social network researcher — and is angel funded.

I am here at Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale, Calif., to check out “Product Runway,” which is the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s attempt to show that it can still innovate.

First and foremost is the launch of Livestand, a personalized news reader that is similar to Flipboard and a variety of other rivals, including — soon — Google.

It’s Yahoo’s attempt to present a business-as-usual feel — amidst a long and agonizing and very public strategic overview that might also include the sale of the company (or not!), in the wake of the recent firing of its last CEO, Carol Bartz.

It has caused a lot of trauma inside Yahoo, which can’t help with innovation.

But we press on!

In other words, despite the three-ring circus going on outside, Yahoo wants you to know it is still hard at work.

We begin:

10:35 am: As the strains of U2 die out, Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving takes the stage, which is actually set up in the company’s cafeteria. I can smell lunch being made nearby and I am hungry.

Apt — Yahoo certainly needs to show off a lot of cool stuff or its fate will be cooked.

No pressure, Blake!

“Personally, I am more bullish on Yahoo today,” he said. “What is Yahoo? Simple. It’s the premier digital media company. Period. Stop.”

Oh, if it were only that easy.

10:46 am: Irving pulls out his favorite slide, which looks like a chemistry test. It lists the various elements of the product strategy, with things like personalization, mobile, premium.

Now to Livestand, which is available on the Apple iTunes app store right now.

Don’t all rush at once!

Irving notes that Livestand is more than just an app — it is a platform.

In other words, Yahoo wants to help publishers publish online. Kind of a Facebook of content.

If Yahoo can pull it off, that is. (And, of course, unless Facebook decides to do the same.)

10:50 am: Livestand is an HTML5 “personalized living magazine.”

“This is the way Web pages are going to look,” declares Irving. Which is to say, heavy on photos, swoopy navigation, a television screen-like interface.

Irving uses the example of Surfer magazine, which is a good idea since waves always look pretty. Especially in a video-in-frame with Kelly Slater in Hawaii.

But, in essence, for anyone who has used Flipboard for years now, none of this is entirely different.

10:54 am: The look of what would be the Yahoo News page is actually much more interesting, since it is clearly a whole lot better than the Web page.

Irving also shows off a “living ad” — in this case, an unusually snuggly couple on a couch. It is cool, but creepy.

When launched, the ad has tap points. Irving — naughtily declaring about what is an ad, “I’ll tap that” — taps the lady’s butt, which would also have been my move. We learn about the jeans, of course.

10:58 am: Irving then shows off the ability to add feeds.

Next, something called “Cocktails.” First up, a developer tool called Yahoo Mojito and Yahoo Manhattan, which is a hosting service. The company will open-source both the technologies in 2012.

Irving brings up Mike Kerns, VP of Personalization & Social, who came to Yahoo when it bought the innovative sports fan site called Citizen Sports.

“We like to ship sh#t,” he notes. I like Mike Kerns immediately.

Kerns intros C.O.R.E. No, it is not a secret government organization that takes out fussy bloggers, who might be more critical than Yahoo execs would like.

In fact, it stands for “content optimization relevance engine.” Of course it does.

Simply put, C.O.R.E. is trying to link the right content or whatever to the right consumers and who likes what. Ladies like this, dudes like this. Apparently, “men of multiple ages” enjoy stories about golden chicken.

11:11 am: Kerns is moving on to social, especially its integration with Facebook. While much touted, sources tell me it has gone slower than expected in terms of use, but that it is improving.

Kerns talks about the idea of matching content to conversations to interests and, well, you know — the now exhausting world of modern media consumption.

The world in which you can no longer simply read an article and enjoy it — you must comment, share, discuss, parse, tweet.

Does anyone remember when you read something cool and just kept it to yourself?

Forget it, pal! It is a full-information society now and you better get on board and start poking your friends about every little thing.

(Personally, I plan on becoming a hermit in 3 … 2 … 1.)

11:18 am: Now Tim Parsey, who is Yahoo’s design head. He is hands down the most delightful exec the company has had in a while, mostly because he loves to smirk adorkably.

He shows off Yahoo’s first original design, which was a dull list. And then another really bad logo. But Parsey loves it! It’s kitschy!

Smirk attack!

Parsey moves into what has to happen now, which is to deliver a much more emotional experience and a much better designed one. He uses words like “humanism.”

Say what? He is right — Yahoo has for too long completely ignored design as an important part of the experience.

That’s why Flipboard was so quickly touted — it was pretty and fun. And it is why everyone is simply forced to love Apple products.

11:22 am: Parsey even has a code for it, called REM — for rational, emotional and meaningful.

He shows off a weather app. People take photos and they can be used in the app. Then Yahoo Mail for the iPad, whic is also handsome with photos and video. Livestand, also pretty.

“Great way to differentiate,” says Parsey. He calls it “one Yahoo!” Indeed.

11:35 am: I’ll admit it. After Parsey-fest, I zoned out for a sec when IntoNow dude, Adam Cahan, comes up.

Donut emergency!

Back to IntoNow, it’s the television indexing service that Yahoo bought in April.

Essentially, more ways to watch the media — in this case, video — and do 53 other things at the very same time. Memo to humanity: We will all be paying continuous partial attention for the rest of eternity.

Like I said: Hermitage!

11:41 am: Product dude Irving is back, making a point that, despite all the public mishegas, Yahoo has been busy at innovating.

A redo of email, better search, social “Facebar” with Facebook, Flickr for Google Android.

Irving is correct — Yahoo’s engineers have been hard at work and deserve kudos for doing so, even with attrition issues, stock declines and questions about the company’s very future being debated daily.

The problem is that too many of these improvements are mostly incremental and essentially table stakes for tech companies, most of whom have introed many more significant innovations in the same time frame as Yahoo has.

Google did Android, Google+ (as well as some notable failures). Microsoft did Kinect, Windows Phone, Windows 8. Amazon did Kindle Fire. Facebook did a range of major updates, as it has grown like a weed.

And there’s Apple. You might have heard of the iPhone and the iPad.

You get my point. Yahoo’s Product Runway today is well done, but what it really needs to be is just the beginning of a take-off.

11:48 am: Now Q&A time.

The first question is what took so long to get Livestand out, the second is why should people use Livestand since Flipboard and others have already been around for a dog’s age.

I ask about design — mostly because I want Parsey to use the word “delicious” a lot — and also about all the turmoil around the company and its impact on product creation. (I decide not to mention that Yahoo blew its acquisition of the bookmarking site, Delicious, and then sold it.)

Parsey delivers on the delicious scale, noting that Yahoo must have one design experience and yet has a lot of different interfaces. In other words, it cannot be Apple, but it can feel a lot more cohesive.

Irving talks a little bit around the obvious elephant in the room — the future of Yahoo — noting that the product staff was trying to focus and forget the storm going on outside.

“We have dreams about what this company can be,” says Irving.

You and me both, brother.

12:04 pm: More questions that are too detailed for my tastes, since they have delivered lunch and I can see it and I am ravenous.

As Parsey might say: It looks deliiiiiccccious.

Now, let’s hope Yahoo can do even more tasty stuff.

Alas, Getty won’t say how many copies of this one it has sold. And it won’t provide any other details about the collection’s performance, like the number of photos it has licensed in the last two years, or the amount of money it has generated, or the way that money is split between photographers, Yahoo and Getty. So we’ll just end here.

Yahoo’s interim CEO Tim Morse penned another weekly email to staff at the Silicon Valley Internet giant today; the only one from the company’s leadership, which sent out two internal memos last week.

It’s below, and again addresses the swirl of news around Yahoo’s plans as part of its ongoing strategery over the company’s future.

“I know there was some more swirl out there this week,” wrote Morse. “You know we don’t comment on rumors or speculation and for now, everything has been just that — rumors.”

Well, not so much, which I will be weighing in on soon via an old-fangled thing called reporting, Tim!

Until then, here is the latest missive:

Short note from me today. Before we head into the weekend, I wanted to give a shout out to the Flickr team for their great work on their new mobile features. What they rolled out this week got rave reviews and tons of great buzz. We also had a nice Demos and Drinks event here in Sunnyvale that I was able to check out, so thanks to all the Yahoos involved in that.

Last but certainly not least, I want to say thank you to the teams that are working hard on Advertising Week. It kicks off on Monday, and we’ve got some big stuff in store, so stay tuned on that front.

I know there was some more swirl out there this week. You know we don’t comment on rumors or speculation and for now, everything has been just that — rumors.

Rest assured, when we have something to share, we will. In the meantime, please know how much the entire executive team appreciates your great work — and please keep it up!

Have a good weekend.

Tim

Flickr, which has 68 million registered users, is “for people who care about photos,” said product head Markus Spiering.

So the Android app puts special emphasis on retaining high-resolution images, even if photo filters are added, and offers options to modify the flash, ratio selection, and shutter focus from within the viewfinder. Users can also scroll through their libraries of photos — though like on the Web, non-paying users can only see their 200 most recent photos.

Flickr previously released an iPhone app in 2009, which will be updated soon, said Spiering.

The other new Flickr feature, called “Photo Sessions,” helps users set up URLs they can share with rooms of 10 people where everyone can flip through, zoom in on and draw on photos in real time. So, for instance, a family could set up a time to virtually flip through an album of photos together and text-chat about them. Photo Session URLs last 24 hours and are only available in Safari (including on iOS devices), Firefox and Chrome. It’s kind of like Google Hangouts, without the video.

Yahoo’s Steve Douty, who is VP of applications and mobile product management, pitched the new Flickr features as part of a larger Yahoo strategy toward building an “interest graph” for its users and giving them “deeply personal digital experiences.” Yahoo had been a part of the Facebook platform announcements last week, and is now offering a personalized view of Yahoo News that shows users what their friends are reading.

And — diverging from the current social gaming trend — it’s not available on Facebook.

The game, called Glitch, is comprised of thousands of hand-drawn illustrations — it’s a multiplayer online fantasy world that takes place inside the minds of 11 giants.

It is less like FarmVille and more akin to Activision Blizzard’s very successful World of Warcraft — except that there is no war. Instead, players must rely on their imaginations to build a nonviolent community of made-up characters.

In the company’s fact sheet, one question asks, “What can I kill in the game?”

The answer: “Your time!”

While that’s a genuine answer, it will be interesting to see if there’s a wide enough audience willing to invest a lot of time in a game without blood and violence.

The game, which targets adults 14 and older and has been available in beta for the past few months, is being called “a collaborative simulation,” where the direction the world takes requires cooperation among the players.

Glitch’s universe is a fantasy land, with plants that look like a hookah pipe with eggs at the end of each tendril. Strange palm-tree-like animations have googly eyes and tongues hanging out, and users can dress their avatars up as space crusaders or in dinosaur or unicorn outfits.

Tiny Speck’s CEO Stewart Butterfield said he doesn’t expect to attract as many players as a top game on Facebook, but added that he expects engagement among the players to be much higher. “We don’t need tens of hundreds of millions of people to play. We need a couple hundred thousand players to break even,” he said.

The game will be monetized through microtransactions — such as buying new outfits for your avatar — or through subscriptions. Butterfield said the company purposely avoided charging for simple things — like more energy in order to play for longer — even though that’s a popular way to get people to pay in free-to-play games.

“It creates a weird experience. It’s like stop signs with dollar signs,” he said.

While Tiny Speck is not on Facebook, the company does expect that the social gaming craze will be beneficial, as players introduced to gaming will seek out deeper experiences elsewhere once they get tired of playing different variations of the same farming-like mechanics.

“I think social gaming companies are burning their customers out. That’s the best possible position for us,” Butterfield said. “We are trying to bring beauty and brains to the online gaming world. There’s humor and absurdity. We have a low-level fundamental belief that there’s an importance of fun in everyday life.”

Even though it is not focused in the hot social gaming space, Tiny Speck has been the recipient of venture capital from some of the big-name Valley VCs, including Andreessen Horowitz and Accel.

But there are two problems with the image:
* Though the caption on the photo’s TwitPic page says it shows you what “the ground zero site looked like this evening,” that’s not true. De Guzman took the photo of the memorial a year ago.

* De Guzman doesn’t want people looking at the TwitPic image at all. Even though his name appears via watermark credit on the top right of the photo, he didn’t give “@DesignedMind,” the Twitter user who took a screengrab of the image, permission to place it there. If you’re going to look at the photo, de Guzman asks, please take a look at his SmugMug or Flickr pages.

Hold on. This is the Internet. Where ideas and images and information want to be free, right? If you don’t want someone to see something you’ve made, you don’t put it online, right?

Nope, says de Guzman, via an IM chat: “There are clear ways to share content on the sites I put my photos on: Flickr and SmugMug. I’d be ok if they had used what was offered to them.”

But since they didn’t? Last night, on Twitter, de Guzman was referring to people who reposted his work as “thieves.”

I’m quite sympathetic to de Guzman’s argument, because the digital content I make for a living is supposed to be consumed in specific places, too. But it frequently isn’t — it gets quoted without attribution, or lifted wholesale without links, etc. — and usually I just accept that as a downside that comes with the many upsides the Web provides for information makers.

And in many ways, images seem even more susceptible to misappropriation than any other media, simply because most people don’t ever bother to consider that someone, somewhere, created the image they’re now passing along.*

Add in the concept of “fair use,” which is both crucial and muddy for old and new media alike (de Guzman gave me the okay to use his image in this post last night), and you can see how tough it is for image makers to control their own work.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try hard to do the right thing. Particularly when it’s easy to do so. The New York Post, whose Twitter account linked to the TwitPic image last night and made the thing go viral, has now put up a new tweet linking to de Guzman’s Flickr account. Both the Post and this Web site are owned by News Corp.

* I’ve been just as bad about this as anyone, though I’m trying to improve. For instance: Turns out the monkey avatar I’ve been using on my Twitter profile for several years comes from graphic designer Andy Rainford. Andy reached out to me — very politely — this summer, and since then I’ve been crediting him on Twitter, and now again here.

Prior investors General Catalyst and Lowercase Capital also joined the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $10.4 million. Avalon’s Brady Bohrmann will join Backupify’s board.

I talked with CEO Rob May, who told me about his plan to accelerate marketing and adoption of Backupify by users of Google Apps, the search giant’s Web-based business suite of applications that is proving popular with businesses. So far, Backupify is being used to back up the files on 5,000 Google Apps domains. He says he would also like to offer Backupify for several other services that users have been requesting. In addition, May wants to boost Backupify’s visibility among the many third-party partners — like, say, Cloud Sherpas — who work with businesses deploying Google Apps.

The outfit is growing fast. It has 175,000 users and stores 200 terabytes of data for its users, not just from Google apps, but also from Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Blogger, and the Zoho Web-based office suite. One public customer is New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which uses Backupify to back up the Google Apps data generated by some 1,000 users. The data is all backed up to Amazon Web Services, but users can also download local copies of their data.

Why would you need to back up data that’s on a supposedly reliable cloud service? Because you might goof up — and delete something you didn’t mean to — just as easily in the cloud as on your PC. May says that roughly one-third of all data loss occurs because of user error. “We hear a lot of different things. When you delete something, Google assumes you meant to delete it. Sometimes things get deleted maliciously by a hacker, or someone who gets ahold of a password that wasn’t taken care of,” he says. “IT administrators want their own backup copy they can restore from. They trust Google not to lose it, but they don’t always trust their own users.”

Backupify’s $4.5 million A round was also led by Avalon and joined by General Catalyst and Lowercase Capital. Prior to that, First Round Capital led a $900,000 seed round, which was joined by Betaworks and several individual investors, including Chris Sacca and Jason Calacanis.

She’s raising what looks like a $2 million round, according to an SEC filing, from a list of investors that she said includes True Ventures, Founder Collective (where she is an investor), SV Angel, Keith Rabois, James Joaquin and Shoshana Berger.

The filing says more precisely that $1.54 million of a $2 million round had been collected as of June 15.

Further Google-stalking shows that the company, which appears to be code-named 2bkco, also involves Marc Hedlund of Daylife and Wesabe as well as Eric Allen of Sauce Labs.

Fake had left Hunch, which makes recommendation technology, after it pivoted from being a consumer destination site to a tool used by other sites. She said on her blog today:
“Entrepreneurs gonna entrepreneur. I have a new startup! We are building something consumer-facing, something social — all the things I love best — for optimal founder-market fit!. It’s crazy times in the Valley and while I prefer doing startups when the going’s tough, money is scarce, and engineers are unemployed — the best time to start a company is always two years ago, and the next best time is now. So now it is.”

The contact information page in the iOS 5 address book has a field not just for Twitter, but also offers space to add friends’ handles on Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and Myspace.

Alongside a person’s email address and phone number, an iOS user can also add links to their accounts around the Web. Then Apple auto-populates the URL for each of the services. Clicking on the account name opens up Safari to that person’s profile page.

AllThingsD confirmed the feature’s existence after a developer mentioned it to us. It’s not hidden in the source code or anything, but plain for users of the developer beta to see.

The developer, who asked not to be named, pointed out that the social integrations are a bit buggy. For instance, adding a Myspace handle brings up an unlimited number of fields, and the social fields only come up when you create a new contact. But again, this is a developer release.

The inclusion of the feature shows Apple’s acknowledgement of the importance of Web presences and contact information. But it could be much more useful if users don’t have to enter each of their friends’ handles manually, as appears to be the case at least in this release.

Imagine entering in your credentials and seeing your social network friends and contacts automatically synced and merged with your phone contacts. This will be the case for Twitter when iOS 5 comes out — Apple will even update users contacts’ photos with their Twitter profile pics (a screenshot from the WWDC keynote is below). Apple may well add authentication for other services as well.

Sucking all these contacts up and matching them together to create a sort of Frankenstein social network would not be trivial; Apple would presumably need to match users’ phone numbers, handles, and/or email addresses across various services to disambiguate them.

Android has offered an automated contact feature which takes the phone numbers listed on Facebook friends’ profile pages and adds them to its on-phone address book. However, Google pulled the feature back from Nexus phones in a recent release as part of its ongoing data portability war with Facebook.

In addition, Google is also working to compile centralized profiles of users’ social Web contacts through its Google Profiles feature — that’s in fact the issue Facebook tried to expose with a secret smear campaign. Facebook’s PR firm proxy alleged Google was sketchily scraping the Web in order to “compile the data into one massive dossier aligned directly with user’s personally identifiable information.”

Facebook, Google and Apple all want to own and protect their relationships with their users, which is why exchanging contact lists arouses such drama. Before striking a deal with Twitter, Apple was going to use Facebook as a social distribution and identity service for its Ping music social network, but that deal fell apart, with Apple CEO Steve Jobs explaining that Facebook demanded “onerous terms.”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Apps like Dropbox could be less relevant for Mac users, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote documents will automatically be synced across devices.

Flickr, SmugMug and mobile photo apps like Instagram could be impacted by Photostream, which automatically sends all photos taken on an Apple device to all your other Apple devices, including the Apple TV, and backs them up there for 30 days.

Many of the Camera+ photo-improving features such as its grid and zoom are now part of the iOS camera itself.

Instapaper and other article-saving apps such as Readability appear to have a direct competitor in Reading List, which formats and syncs pages in Safari. (Instapaper one-man developer Marco Arment’s reaction on Twitter? “Shit.”)

And to-do lists like Remember the Milk now have to compete with a built-in option called Reminders, which even uses the new iOS geo-fencing feature, so you can set it up to get a notification if you attempt to leave a particular location without completing a certain task.

Group messaging apps like GroupMe and textPlus have a challenger in iMessage. But not really, because it’s only for iOS devices.

However, folks who use BlackBerries just for BBM may find themselves with more reason to go iPhone.

Apple also probably didn’t make people happy at Google by mimicking the Android notification pull-down menu at the top of the screen–and the consolidated notifications experience looks like it replaces that of the independent app shop Boxcar. And Steve Jobs–who has tussled with Facebook over past integrations–certainly fired a missile toward Palo Alto by deeply integrating users’ Twitter accounts into its built-in software.

All in a day’s work!

Complete coverage:

• Apple’s WWDC 2011 Keynote: Spotlight on Software
• Apple CEO Steve Jobs Takes the Stage
• Mac OS X Lion Coming in July via Mac App Store
• IOS 5 to Offer Improved Browsing, Notifications, Twitter Integration, 197 Other Features
• The Unlikely Breakout Stars of WWDC: Two Podcasters From the U.K.
• Google, Amazon Dodge a Bullet: Apple’s iCloud Music Is a Meh. (Luckily, There’s Much, Much More)
• Today in Hyperbole (or Possibly Reality): What Did Apple Just Kill?
• Apple’s Lion and Microsoft’s Windows 8 Both Show Mobile’s Influence
• Three Things to Take Away From Apple’s WWDC Announcements (Video)
• Apple’s Invisible iCloud: The Promise of Simple, Seamless Sync
• 25 Million iPads, 1 Billion Tweets: WWDC 2011 by the Numbers
• Apple Delivers Another Slap to RIM’s Face With iMessage
• Apple Enables Post-PC Era With iOS 5, but Are Users Ready?

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is set to speak at D9 on Wednesday.

I am indeed aware that D9 is the conference put on by this very site, but was not able to get sources to confirm the image-hosting announcement on the record. Twitter spokespeople did not reply for a request for comment on the matter.

Currently, Twitter users who wish to post photos in their tweets must host them elsewhere, with popular options including Twitpic, Yfrog, Instagram and Flickr. Users then include links to the photos within their tweets.

Many Twitter clients, including those developed by the company, use the links to go fetch the images and display them inline. But the process could certainly be smoother.

Companies like Twitpic and ImageShack, which operates Yfrog, bring in millions of dollars of revenue by selling advertising on the image pages that are distributed widely by those tweeted links. ImageShack has raised more than $10 million in funding from backers including Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, and Felicis Ventures.

Twitter has previously moved onto turf on which third-party developers had already built Twitter-related businesses. The company has cited a desire to ensure a consistent and accessible user experience on various platforms.

Twitter explicitly told developers to stop making their own clients earlier this year. After that it bought the leading third-party client, TweetDeck.

The news was first reported today by TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis.