Where I — and some others — have found Klout deficient is in its consumer application. Aside from some real-world perks, a scoring system of my online reach doesn’t necessarily do me any good on a consistent basis.

“We weren’t letting people actually be influential,” Joe Fernandez, CEO of Klout, said in an interview.

Klout wants to change that perception, and it’s part of why the company is previewing its latest product, “Experts,” on Wednesday.

Experts is pretty simple. The premise: If you’ve garnered sufficient credibility on a certain topic based on your Klout score — say, gardening or hair styling or whatever — you should be qualified to answer questions on the area. Moreover, you’re likely more credible than some result in a Q&A thread on a site like Yahoo Answers or perhaps a Quora.

So to spur the knowledge base, Klout will drop in questions to some of its users during its preview period. Maybe they’ll answer, maybe they won’t. But, if so, those answers will show up in search results through Microsoft’s Bing — Klout’s official search partner — and potentially Google’s search engine (which Klout doesn’t have a partnership with — just as if it were another page on the Web.

“Think of a company like eBay. It works well because of its reputation layer,” Fernandez said. “We just built that layer first, and now for the first time we’re enabling a direct sense of consumer utility.”

If people actually use the product, it’s clever in a few ways. Yes, it could potentially give people more reason to consider Klout scores important and regard influence more highly. But pumping topic results pages into Bing and (maybe) Google search results is an easy way to stimulate outside activity and engagement, and perhaps increase signups to new users seeing the pages for the first time. I say “maybe” for Google because, honestly, it isn’t clear whether or not Google will surface those results. For now, Klout has only officially — though not exclusively — partnered with Microsoft on this.

If they do indeed show up, there’s still Google’s social recommendation layer to compete with here. Google sticks “+1” recommendations from people using its social network into its search results when applicable (and when users opt in to seeing it), which arguably may have more power than a Klout page. And of course there are existing knowledge bases online — the Wikipedias and Quoras of the Web.

The preview rolls out on Wednesday to a limited group of users, and there’s a waiting list to sign up for on the site, if you’re so inclined.

The company on Wednesday launched Klout for Business, the company’s first foray into offering a complimentary tool set to brands in order for them to better understand the most influential people talking about specific brands across social networks.

Specifically, Klout will give businesses an analytics dashboard, detailing just how well a company is interacting with the most “influential people” — in other words, the folks who have the greatest reach on social networks — and which specific subject areas these people are most influential on, with respect to winning the chatter of others.

Sounds gorpy, yes. But I’d argue that it’s important. Right now, the Twitters and Facebooks of the world continue to argue how crucial it is for brands to spend their ad dollars on social, not just on traditional media outlets. But advertisers aren’t fully convinced, and the ad budgets haven’t shifted as much as the social giants would like.

So the value proposition of something like a Klout for Business, then, is to help a brand better understand how to expand their reach by targeting the most important, “influential” people on said networks. Theory is, if you do a better job recognizing and reaching the people who actually matter, that’ll go a heck of a lot further than blasting out an ad to the social masses (even if those ads are getting targeted better by the day, as Facebook and Twitter would say).

And, as I’ve argued in the past, this is an area that Klout — and competitor Kred, for that matter — should be focusing on. It’s much easier to convince a brand to care about who is most influential in the Twittersphere than, say, a regular dude like me.

Klout has long made its consumer pitch, hoping to convince people to care about their social influence scores with things like Klout Perks, or offers you win by reaching a certain influence threshold. But truly, I don’t see the masses really caring about that number, no matter how many freebies you offer them.

Thus, Klout for Business seems like a smart — and obvious — play. I’m just surprised it took so long.

Greycroft Partners has closed a $175 million fund, its third since it began investing in consumer Internet and media companies in mid-2000.

In a press release, the New York- and Los Angeles-based venture firm said the fund was oversubscribed. But general partner Alan Patricof noted that Greycroft capped the amount and kept it small compared to other VCs, in order to maintain its focus on investing in early-stage capital-efficient start-ups.

“It’s always been our philosophy not to overfund the companies we invest in,” Patricof said in an interview. “It’s sometimes been hard in an environment where there is a lot of money available to entrepreneurs, but we are looking for start-ups that understand that it’s important to maintain the right balance of funding.”

The concept of a small fund is important to Greycroft, which has only three general partners and three venture partners, said general partner Dana Settle. The firm typically invests from $500,000 to $5 million, with more of a focus on online media, mobile and video, and also has a small seed fund.

“I think we are very hands-on helping our companies, but you don’t have to always do that in the traditional way most VCs do,” Settle said. “We want to maintain focus on giving our companies the right kind of advice, and let the entrepreneur take the lead.”

In fact, Patricof and Settle stressed, Greycroft does not often take board seats on the start-ups it invests in, and typically invests with other VCs in syndicates, which sometimes means the firm has less equity.

So far, Greycroft maintains that its system has worked. Its first fund of $75 million was raised in 2006 and has invested in 34 companies, with 11 sold and 130 percent of committed capital returned to partners; its second fund of $131 million, in 2010, put investments in 32 companies, several with valuations over $100 million.

Patricof noted that “the sale of our companies is usually our goal,” rather than an IPO event.

Exits include Vizu, acquired by Nielsen Holdings, Huffington Post (AOL), Babble (Walt Disney) and Buddy Media (Salesforce.com). More recent investments include Klout, Pulse and Maker Studios.

Most previous Greycroft investors have re-upped in the latest fund, the firm said, including J.P. Morgan, BlackRock Private Equity Partners, Fairview Capital and Invesco Private Capital. It also added new investors including Hall Capital, Hamilton Lane, Greenspring Associates and Cambridge Associates.

The service helps marketing, media and PR companies figure out who can best spread their message.

Little Bird was founded by Marshall Kirkpatrick, a former writer for ReadWriteWeb who started dabbling in these sorts of social media analyses before he left tech blogging and was drawn over to the dark side to start his own company.

The company is backed with $1 million in funding led by Mark Cuban’s Radical Investments and including Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage Group, Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah and early Twitter engineer Blaine Cook.

Where Klout ranks the social media world in a sort of universal popularity contest, Little Bird is much more focused on the long tail of people who are trusted within a community around a certain topic.

Little Bird analyzes social graphs — basically, who follows who on Twitter — to spit out long lists of influencers, even from within small communities. Then it compiles those people’s blog content to offer archival search within the experts in a field. “It’s almost like a robot librarian,” Kirkpatrick said.

Kirkpatrick said the closest competitor is probably Traackr, but characterized that company’s process as more manual.

(By the way, the name for the Portland, Ore.-based start-up — which was formerly called Plexus Engine while in stealth mode — comes from the saying “a little bird told me,” not from the comedy show Portlandia’s excellent “Put a Bird on It” sketch. Though that would be fitting, too.)

After Twitter and blog content, Little Bird is adding LinkedIn, Google+ and academic research citations.

The service will have a free preview version and a corporate version starting at $250 per month. For now, it is in private beta.

At their core, the Kred and Klout products gauge a person’s sway in the social realm, measuring how much that one voice matters across the cacophony of tweets and shares in the social media sphere. So, if businesses can use these services to, say, unearth the most important tweeters out there, targeting a social media marketing campaign could be a whole lot easier (in theory, at least).

But that isn’t the problem for Klout and Kred. The problem is convincing you, me and every other regular Joe out there that our social influence — the measure of how much what we say genuinely affects others — is something worth caring about. Both have tried offering incentive-based rewards programs, but outside of bragging rights, it has been difficult to prove either product’s actual social utility.

There’s no quick fix to this. Both, however, are trying, by taking a different, more visual tack: Giving themselves makeovers.

Natch, Klout launched an overhauled version of its consumer-facing site last week, boosting the number of influence signals — up to 300, including culling Wikipedia entries as a new stream of data — and introducing a new, less data-centric and more visually appealing site design. It’s what CEO Joe Fernandez calls the most significant update to Klout in the start-up’s history — and yes, it does indeed look much better.

In that vein, Kred — Klout’s largest comparable competitor — launched an update on Tuesday that echoes the push toward mass appeal with its new Kred Story product. Like Klout’s redesign, Kred Story is all about visual appeal. The content of what Kred users are sharing on Facebook and Twitter is pushed to the forefront, laid out in an attractive grid of photos and text. Think RebelMouse meets Pinterest, but with more text.

Previously, Kred and Klout pitched themselves heavily in the realm of quantitation — that is, appealing to the data geeks that they believed resided in all of us. But both companies are made up of data guys, engineers who geek out on statistics, measurement and sifting through the myriad signals that sites like Twitter, Facebook and others provide. My guess is that those same engineers realized that not everyone is as hardcore about data as they are.

Hence the repositioning of the sites. Yes, it’s still about the data — users can click on content in Kred’s Story view to drill down on who has retweeted your thoughts, how often and which categories you’re seeing the most influence in. But, more importantly, it’s our data presented as a narrative, a collection of our thoughts and expressions put out into the social Web. In essence, we are more than just the sum of our tweets and shares, more than an arbitrary score assigned by a social influence start-up.

Will a spruced-up look be enough to convince consumers, or will the scoring system impart feelings of judgement?

That’s an open question. I’ll have to tweet it out to my followers and see what they think.

Klout is a controversial company, in part because it values people’s online activity with a score — but also because: 1) to many, that score did not seem terrifically accurate; and 2) the way the score was determined was not transparent.

The San Francisco-based company obviously isn’t backing away from the whole premise of scoring, but it is improving its efforts to be accurate as well as transparent, by telling the stories behind the scores.

Where Klout looked at fewer than 100 signals before, now it tracks about 400, including the number of Twitter lists a person is on, the number of people who’ve subscribed to them on Facebook, and how important they are on Wikipedia, as determined by a PageRank algorithm.

The company is also, for the first time, factoring in the “+K” its users can give each other as a sort of nomination for influence on a simple topic. But Klout was careful to tell me that this signal is capped to avoid abuse.

One of the criticisms of Klout had been that it seemed to have a skewed view of the world, where, for instance, Justin Bieber was the ultimate — he had a Klout score of 100 — and Barack Obama was hovering down at 94 (he used to be even lower, below tech pundit Robert Scoble). Klout noted that with the addition of Wikipedia edits and other factors, the two have flip-flopped: Bieber is now a 92, and Obama is a 99. Scoble is an 86.

Previous Klout changes had sparked anger at the company by driving many people’s scores down. A spokeswoman for Klout said she expected the opposite this time, as many people’s influence ranking will go up as additional signals are included. If true, I imagine that spoonful of sugar will make these changes go down more easily.

Also, in the coming weeks, Klout said, its scores will get somewhat more transparent. While the company won’t give away the particulars of its algorithm, it will show users a much more visual timeline of moments at which they were most influential.

The new timeline comes with awkward-funny labels such as, “You engaged Joe Fernandez and 18 others in this moment,” as you can see at left.

27-year-old Danielle Morrill is co-founder and CEO of the new start-up Referly.

Referly aims to introduce incentives into discussions by regular people about regular things, by embedding affiliate links in their conversations. At launch today, it is a link shortener that appends an affiliate tracking code.

Many other companies, including MyLikes and Klout, try to reward people for their social media participation, but Morrill said she thinks they end up rewarding self-promoters and scammers rather than average people.

Referly has already raised seed funding and been accepted into the next Y Combinator round, and since then Morrill convinced her husband, Kevin Morrill, to join as co-founder and CTO from an engineering role at HelloFax, she said. Designer Al Abut, formerly of AOL, is also a co-founder.

Twilio recently hired former Jive exec Lynda Smith as chief marketing officer.

It has been relatively quiet there in the Utah desert ever since, which is odd, because it had been such a chatty company, throwing parties to kill old outdated identities, holding complicated math contests to guess its new name, things like that.

Now it’s about to get noisy again. Effective today, you’re going to start hearing a lot more from Domo and from its employees, and not because its new product is ready. Not quite. (James tells me the company will be talking about it this summer.)

No, starting today, all employees — everyone in the company — will be required as a condition of employment to get seriously engaged on social media in all its various forms in order to make Domo part of the wider conversations taking place on Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare and Pinterest and the rest. It’s called the #Domosocial experiment, and will last eight weeks. James puts it thusly in a post on the company blog:

“The program is designed to get everyone here engaged with and learning from consumer and social technologies. The goal is to help us develop a better product, understand the viral nature of web offerings more effectively, assist in getting the Domo brand out there, enable better customer conversations and see what impact it all has on our business.”

Part of the intent, James told me, is a matter of geography and culture. Being based in Utah, Domo employees are probably better than their equal numbers at other Utah start-ups when it comes to being facile with the ebb and flow of the daily global conversation that takes place on all the social spaces. But they’re probably not as familiar with it all as their rivals in Silicon Valley.

James has seen this sort of thing before. He started Omniture in Utah in 1996 and by 2009 sold it to Adobe for $1.8 billion. “With Domo, I wanted to ensure that we are every bit as adept at understanding and leveraging social as any other bleeding-edge startup,” he wrote.

But on top of that, he’s turning the effort into a live case study to see just how much of a difference it makes in Domo’s business prospects, if any. The company will track important metrics and share them with the world. “We’ll track how things change week after week. The good, the bad and the ugly, it’s all going to be public,” he told me.

Though not about everything. There’s a list of “don’ts.” Don’t tweet about deals in the pipeline, don’t debate with or quarrel with the boss on Facebook. Don’t post about meetings or leak financial information.

What do employees stand to benefit? The best among them will be getting cash rewards for their performance, extra days off, that sort of thing.

What does he expect? He’s been exploring social media pretty seriously for the last six months, and occasionally now gets stopped in the local mall by people who recognize him. “You start having influence in ways you didn’t before,” James told me. He learned with a 10-page article he shared on Twitter, where he has about 12,000 followers, that he experienced a 15 percent click-through rate. “The influence will increase dramatically,” he told me. Also, Domo’s development team will have their eyes opened to the finer points of what works and what doesn’t with social features that are under development at Domo. “We don’t want to re-invent what Facebook and Twitter did, but if you’re not intimately familiar with how those things work, then how can you learn from their mistakes?”

And it’s not just because Klout is excellent at identifying effective self-promoters.

Tawkify, which was started by advice columnist E. Jean Carroll of “Elle,” matches would-be couples by hand.

Her matchmaking team has found that Klout scores are a “magic number” because people can’t make them up, Carroll wrote in a testimonial for the Klout blog.

“We’ve found that Klout scores are an authentic measurement of sophistication, wit, cultural savvy, and appeal — a much truer and more trustworthy measurement than the typical on-line dating site bull-hockey-factors of height, weight, and income,” Carroll wrote.

But that’s based on a sample of just 30 couples, she said.

But here’s one juxtaposition that’s perhaps too close for comfort: Direct competitors Klout and Kred share the same building.

The Klout and PeopleBrowsr offices are in the same double-wide former shoe warehouse on Bryant St. in SOMA.

The two companies, which both score social media influence, moved in to the old Arthur Beren shoe warehouse in January 2011. The space is centrally located, with open floorplans in the industrial chic style — pretty much ideal for a tech start-up.

At the time, they weren’t direct competitors. Klout was having early success with its scores and “perks” for influential users, while PeopleBrowsr was providing data to marketers based on Twitter’s Firehose feed. In fact, PeopleBrowsr was a Klout API user.

But then last fall, PeopleBrowsr launched Kred, a social influence score that obviously has a lot in common with Klout, down to the weird “k” spelling. Kred is much like Klout, except that it’s more transparent, for instance, showing which community a user is influential in, and which specific social media actions earned Kred points.

So, now there are two competing companies sharing walls. While PeopleBrowsr/Kred is at 474 Bryant, Klout is at 77 Stillman — which is only the back entrance in the alley. They are basically the only two companies in the building, since former neighbors Qwiki and Plum District moved out. Only VC firm Kleiner Perkins now has part of the lower space.

Kleiner Perkins, by the way, is Klout’s main investor, while PeopleBrowsr CEO Jodee Rich has backed his company with $5 million of his own money. Klout can be controversial and divisive — since many people are jarred by the idea of an inscrutable algorithm deciding who matters — but it’s more of a start-up in the mold of the Silicon Valley establishment, with a founder/CEO who dreamed up a crazy idea nobody had tried before, and raised tens of millions in venture funding.

I stopped in on both Klout and Kred in the past week and asked them about each other. It wasn’t too strenuous of an excursion, as the AllThingD office also happens to be on this very same block.

The folks at Klout seem to be most upset about Kred devaluing their sacrosanct concept of influence. For instance, Kred did a Valentine’s Day promotion that gave people double the “+Kred” for the “+K” anyone got as a Tweeted Klout endorsement. (In both systems, the endorsements are not part of the main “influence” score, but count for a more fuzzy measure of who and what people influence.) For Kred, said Klout, to depend on Klout seemed like gaming the system.

A pro-Klout blog described Kred’s Valentine’s promotion as a “Coming to America” moment, where the “McDowell’s” fast food restaurant serves “Big Micks” without sesame seeds and says they’re totally different from McDonald’s Big Macs.

You have to admit that’s pretty funny.

Of course, Klout preferred not to go on the record about Kred. Here’s their statement: “Klout does not have a formal relationship with Kred. We consider them to be one of the many influence measurement start-ups that launched after Klout was founded in 2008.”

Meanwhile, Jodee Rich was a little bit more willing to delve into the “drama,” as he called it. He gleefully showed off a tweet reply from Klout CEO Joe Fernandez at SXSW that showed Fernandez’s pent-up aggression against Kred and its sponsorship of Austin’s pedicabs during the ongoing festival. (Pictured above is an excerpt from Rich’s SXSW blog post that probably tells the story better than I could.)

Rich argued that Kred is very different from Klout, because its algorithm is more transparent. Kred is also evolving to include things like measures of offline influence, so that Robert Scoble doesn’t have a higher score than Barack Obama, as he once did on Klout.

I asked Altimeter analyst Brian Solis, who today released a report on “The Rise of Digital Influence,” to help parse the difference between the two companies.

“There is no doubt, from an analyst perspective, that Klout is the 800-pound gorilla,” Solis said. “But Kred is realizing they have all of this data and they’re trying to do something with it. It’s a free market.”

So sure, the two companies can probably coexist in the influence measurement space — but the question is, can they continue to coexist in the same physical space?

So far, there are peaceful solutions to be had in SOMA: After some tussling, the landlord designated the deck for PeopleBrowsr and the parking lot for Klout.

So the first person to leave a comment on a Gawker network post will now be in charge of policing the thread of commenters who reply, maintaining a high level of discussion and recruiting other voices to participate and bring more page views. And there will be multiple comment moderators and threads per post. Free labor!

In a conversation with longtime blogger Anil Dash, Denton said he’s tried throughout his entrepreneurial career at Moreover and Gawker to cultivate good conversations online, at scale. Lots of things haven’t worked.

For instance, the gamification of comments — basically, giving people badges for repeat participation — were a wrong turn, because they encourage insular communities and aren’t a motivator for the most interesting people.

And while Facebook’s embedded comment system might help control for blog-comment trolls on sites like TechCrunch, Denton said, it makes conversations more boring by discouraging new and anonymous commenters. Those people often share the juiciest information.

“The most interesting comments, they don’t come from people with Klout scores. They don’t come from people with a history on our sites,” Denton said.

The ultimate goal of the new system, Denton said, would be to attract people like American Apparel’s Dov Charney or NBC’s Brian Williams — who are at the center of news on Gawker sites — to chime in themselves.

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So, if you have a Klout score of 40, you can get 40 percent off your Gilt purchase; a Klout score of 60 gets 60 percent off, and a Klout score above 80 gets 100 percent off. There’s a bit more fine print than that — for instance, each discount is only valid for a limited number of customers on just one particular day — but you get the idea.

Klout declined to specify how many discounts will be given out. As with other Klout “Perks,” users aren’t required to tweet about their perks, but must disclose the discount when they do.

The deal indicates new directions for Klout, which to date had not been particularly focused on mobile or local.

Blockboard made a neighborhood discussion board iPhone app that had only been available in its hometown of San Francisco. Its team of four had previously been at companies like Delicious and Craigslist. When I covered the company, I noted that it has more of a Twitter approach to a local social network, where competitor Nextdoor requires real identities, a la Facebook.

Klout said that Blockboard’s app would continue to be available, and that its team would work to improve Klout’s local and mobile efforts.

Klout received a rich valuation in its most recent funding round, which closed last November but was only announced in January. Blockboard, meanwhile, had raised $1 million in 2010 from Joshua Schachter, Mitch Kapor, Founder Collective and others.

Twitter lead the charge of critics, saying this was an egregious move for the search company whose mission is to “organize the world’s information.” Meanwhile, Google said that the restrictions Twitter puts around its data make it impossible to search properly.

But this problem of indexing, archiving, sorting and searching the mountains of data across online social networks is bigger than that one spat.

When it comes to social search products, the default seems to be crippled and half-baked. Especially for companies that make their own social networks.

Search may not be one of the core activities on social networks today, but that’s probably in part because the existing tools — both for searching within a particular social network and across multiple social networks — are so lame.

There are some relatively good reasons why social search is hard, but none of them seem insurmountable:

• Competing social networks won’t give each other access to their social graphs and data feeds.
• Privacy settings: Search obviously needs to be respectful to only expose content that people have permission to see. That’s a hard calculation to make on the fly. Plus, since social networking content is so personal, it’s important to respect the settings of content that’s been deleted or made private.
• Ingesting and analyzing tons of data in real time is also hard.
• Ranking content that social network users post can be different than ranking Web pages. A lot of the time, those posts may only be interesting to a small set of people, but every once in a while they are hugely important.

The business deals and access to data are the biggies. Before this latest Goog-Twit war, Google and Facebook tussled over importing friend lists. Facebook is particularly unfriendly to most search engines; it clamps down tightly on access even to its users’ public content.

As for the technical challenges: It’s 2012, people, figure it out! The point is delivering relevant content to users, which should be a core expertise for all of you.

“Google plus Your World” is not the first lame social search product. (And to be fair, the product itself doesn’t seem that lame; it’s more the lack of other networks’ data.)

For instance, Facebook’s feature for searching user posts is so buried within its interface that it almost might as well not exist. (Type a search term into the top bar on Facebook, then move your cursor down to the bottom of all the results, and click to see more. Then, on that next page, scroll past everything again to see “Posts by Friends.”)

And Twitter doesn’t even give users access to their own archive of tweets!

Google+ is actually the only social network with reasonable internal search — it gives options to search posts from everyone, only people in a user’s Circles, or only personal content.

Bing has perhaps the broadest approach of any major player, because it has deals with both Facebook and Twitter — and because Microsoft doesn’t really do social.

Bing does feature Facebook content and usernames in search, but mostly pages that a user’s friends have publicly liked. That’s only scratching the surface of what people do on Facebook.

And while Bing may have re-upped the deal that Google lacks for Twitter’s real-time “Firehose” of tweets, it’s not doing much with all that data. Tweets seem to be relegated to a separate page outside Bing’s main search results.

There are plenty of start-ups getting this kind of stuff done. Topsy tackles both Twitter and Google+ search. Greplin indexes users’ personal content across all of their Web services. Klout analyzes social graphs on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others, to determine which users are interesting and relevant. Katango (which Google bought) and Jildy identify clusters within friend networks to understand different contexts.

It seems about time for the big guys to get their acts together.

(Image courtesy of Flickr user recursion_see_recursion)

Klout CEO Joe Fernandez said Kleiner Perkins lead the round, with Chi-Hua Chien joining the Klout board. KP partner Bing Gordon is also staying on the board. Fernandez wouldn’t comment on the price or valuation but called it a “strong round.”

Sources said the funding closed back in November and valued the company at about $200 million.

Other backers who participated included Institutional Venture Partners, Venrock, Greycroft Partners and ff Venture Capital.

Klout’s main product is a scoring system that measures people’s influence and reach on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ — something that social media marketing types pay a lot of attention to. The concept of Klout scores has been somewhat controversial, but that seems natural for a system that quantifies a person’s worth.

Klout’s mission, said Fernandez, is “to empower every person by unlocking their influence.” He said Klout now handles 10 billion API calls per month, up from 100 million per month in January 2010.

Klout last raised $8.5 million a year ago. Its current business model is Klout Perks, where marketers can target influential people with free stuff. Fernandez said Perks are going well, with 300,000 people having received them last year, but “there’s a lot more we can evolve to.”

So into that context arrives Bottlenose, a new Twitter client. It’s a social media dashboard with a bunch of tools to help people search, visualize and build alerts around their Twitter, Facebook and Yammer streams. The service is meant for power users — social media managers, bloggers and people who are brands.

For the moment, Bottlenose is Web-only; it doesn’t even support mobile browsers. And though it does support some other services, most of its features are built around Twitter.

The company wants to add premium tools that do things like build an archive of a person’s social media history, and support multiple accounts from each service. It’s raised $300,000 from investors including Andy Jenks at Stage One Capital and Gil Elbaz of data start-up Factual.

Bottlenose adds some new features and of course leaves out some others from existing Twitter management tools. For instance, I tried repeatedly to click on tweeted replies to get more conversational context, as you would in Twitter’s Web interface. Bottlenose doesn’t support that.

So what’s interesting about Bottlenose, and what can you do with it? Here are the key points:

• Bottlenose’s natural language processing techniques promise to make its search smarter. The NLP also helps generate trippy clickable trending topic maps called “Sonar” so people can see what’s happening in their streams and nearby without diving directly into their message streams. This is kind of like a personalized news aggregator.
• Users are the data center. “Crowd computing” is what Bottlenose calls its homemade recipe of JavaScript, HTML5 and Node.js. “We have almost no servers, like two as opposed to thousands,” said Bottlenose CEO Nova Spivack. He promised this won’t be a resource hog, and will actually make Bottlenose very fast, but users will want to see for themselves.
• Users can build rules to have Bottlenose do things like automatically repost, forward, notify or reply to tweets. For instance, you could write a canned reply to send out to people who follow you on Twitter but don’t have high Klout scores, Spivack said. Or you could save incoming photos to your Dropbox account.
• Bottlenose doesn’t have access to the Twitter Firehose of Tweets, but rather traces its users’ networks to find users. That avoids spam and irrelevant accounts, Spivack said.
• Bottlenose users can attach semantic metadata to categorize the messages they send so they’re not just flat text and links. While other services may not support this information, it will be appended using a shortened URL.