A study of 58,000 U.S. Facebook users, reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, arises from an emerging discipline in which experts sift through extremely large digital data sets, such as collections of web searches or Twitter messages, for subtle patterns and relationships. It highlights the power and risks of digital demographics, which are the key to targeted online advertising, experts said.

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Welcome to Facebook! Have a poke.

Or a thumbs-up. A flower. Or most recently, perhaps a weird, three-circled symbol signifying search.

No, I’m not on the drugs. I’m talking about Facebook’s rotating signage graphics, a big ol’ billboard on the front lawn of the company’s Menlo Park campus, and the very first thing a person sees upon visiting the company’s headquarters.

Since Facebook moved from Palo Alto to its Menlo Park, Calif., digs inside the old Sun Microsystems campus, the company has had its iconic “Like” thumbs-up symbol as the front-lawn greeting sign.

But every so often, little tweaks and cutesy additions would find their way onto the sign. On Mother’s Day last year, for instance, someone decided to stick a few flowers into the “Like” symbol’s closed fist. And after Facebook debuted its latest app, “Poke,” in December, the sign changed again to — you guessed it — a big poking index finger.

I hear it’s the handiwork of Ben Barry, the designer who spearheaded Facebook’s Analog Research Lab. That’s the old-school screen-printing arm inside the company responsible for the thousands of slogan-laden posters that deck the halls of Facebook’s many global offices.

Barry’s latest sign design: A swath of blue dropcloth decked out in three spyglasses, draped over the poking finger symbol currently occupying the sign space (seen above). The new symbol coincides with Facebook’s introduction of Graph Search, the social giant’s first true foray into providing its users with a functioning search product.

It’s cute and playful, a nice touch to round out a big day of Facebook news on Tuesday. Though, considering the temporary nature of the new sign’s material, I doubt it’ll be up for long.

I’m just waiting to see what Barry puts up come Valentine’s Day.

Where you probably won’t look for this product is in your social stream.

Social product discovery and social commerce have very little in common with the considered purchase process described above. Social commerce is better at delivering discovery-driven impulse purchases. Products or services you weren’t necessarily looking for come to your attention in your social stream, you check them out and if you’re interested, you click “Buy.”

This impulse purchase behavior is a huge part of retail spending offline — retail marketing association POPAI reports that impulse purchases accounted for 55 percent of retail sales in 2011.

So the question is: how can we optimize for social discovery-driven impulse purchases?

Most social discovery is driven through a combination of an initial post in the social stream and a follow-on conversation around that post from users of that social network who react to the post. To create more discovery, you have to move both levers: Encourage as much posting as possible and create mechanisms that cause additional interaction downstream. While there are a number of user engagement mechanisms that generate social posts, some work better than others at generating discovery-driven impulse purchases.

At Payvment, we’ve mapped the different types of social engagement mechanisms onto a social engagement curve to show the level of user effort, or “friction,” as well as the viral reach of each mechanism.

At the top of the curve are automatic, frictionless mechanisms such as “Listen”: these require little or no action by the user and thus generate a high volume of posts and social stream interactions. As you move down the curve, a bit more is asked of the user — for example, clicking on “Like” publicly shares a personal preference about a post, a brand or a product with the user’s friends and network.

By introducing more user friction into the mix, the volume of posts decreases. For someone to click “Want” or “Own” on a product, for example, they have to be willing to share both a preference and intent with the rest of the world — introducing quite a bit of user friction. Finally, at the very bottom of the curve are mechanisms that require you to not only share a preference and intent, but also invest your personal friend “equity” into the sharing action, such as “Invite friends,” which only a small percentage of people will be willing to do.

Let’s look at how these different engagement mechanisms work in a social commerce context.

Frictionless Mechanisms
At the very top of the curve are frictionless sharing mechanisms, such as apps automatically posting to your feed when you listen to a song. While these are the most lightweight mechanisms, frictionless sharing doesn’t work for every type of action. People may be fine sharing what music they’re listening to, but are typically less interested in having everyone know what they’re reading: The majority of Facebook users opt out of frictionless sharing news reader apps when presented with the Facebook permissions dialogue box. Even popular sites such as Huffington Post only have a 28 percent acceptance rate.

When it comes to commerce, frictionless sharing also doesn’t really work — most people don’t want their friends to see every product they’re browsing. Imagine shopping for gifts and having it shared to all your friends automatically.

Lightweight Mechanisms
Further down the curve but still near the high end are lightweight engagement mechanisms, with the most pervasive lightweight mechanism being the “Like” button. While a “Like” may perform well when it comes to initial engagement, it is less effective in provoking response in the stream, because “Like” has become a generic and somewhat meaningless action. In the commerce context, it’s also not a clear signal of user intent around a product or service.

New mechanisms are being introduced that allow people to offer a quick opinion about a product in a way that is more purposeful than a “Like” but lighter-weight than a “Want.” For example, on Lish.com, shoppers can react to products with a smiley-face, a meh-face or a frowny-face. These are more lightweight (and fun) stand-ins for the star ratings systems we’re all familiar with on other product sites — and are very effective at driving engagement in the social stream.

Intent-Based Mechanisms
Near the bottom of the curve are intent-based engagement mechanisms, such as “Want,” “Buy,” and “Own.” While some social commerce technology companies like Payvment and recently eBay have added “Want” buttons to product listings, with several months of data in hand, we’ve actually found that the “Want” button is less compelling for users in a social commerce setting, for several reasons:

• “Wanting” something is typically tied to a considered purchase process, not the serendipitous discovery process that brought the person to the product in the first place.
• As with the frictionless sharing buttons, people are not enthusiastic about broadcasting their product purchase intentions/preferences to their social network.
• People are also concerned that clicking a “want” comes off as an indirect ask to be gifted the product — and don’t want to be perceived by their friends as greedy.

So, which engagement mechanisms work best for social commerce? Payvment data shows that lightweight, emotive ratings systems such as the Lish emoticons work better to drive engagement than “Likes” or “Wants.” Tracking engagement across our base of nearly 200,000 sellers, we found that smiley-faces, meh-faces and frowny-faces generated 5x more shopper clicks per session than our previous “Want” and “Like” buttons.

We also found that a “Want” post performs poorly at driving the kind of downstream interaction in the news feed that causes virality and boosts social discovery. Our data showed an average of 3x more follow-on “Likes” and Comments for the Lish emoticon posts compared to a “Want” or “Own” post. This level of downstream engagement is critical to driving broader discovery in the social stream.

If we’re going to be successful using social discovery to drive meaningful commerce revenues, we have to drive broad social discovery by giving people easy ways to work up the engagement curve and engage in conversation — smiley-faces lead to comments, which lead to dialogue, which leads to purchase. Conversations and purchases create a relationship between the seller and the shopper, which leads to more sales. Clearly, starting the initial interaction with “Want” is not the way to ease people into this progression up the curve.

Refining these lightweight interaction mechanisms is critical to achieve the full potential of social discovery for online shopping. We’ve been at this for three years and continue to see substantial gains by investing to create a powerful intersection of people, products and conversation.

Jim Stoneham is CEO of Payvment. He joined Payvment from Yahoo, where he led the Communities business (Flickr, Answers, Groups, Delicious) as well as key parts of Yahoo’s overall social offering, including the integration of Facebook and Twitter into Yahoo products. Before Yahoo, Jim was a founder of Tangibility, a consulting firm focused on start-ups and new business ventures in the consumer products, Web services and social media spaces. He also spent several years starting and leading businesses at both Apple and Kodak.

Now, on Monday, according to a report from The Next Web, Twitter is tweaking its “Favorite” formula, carrying out a test with some users who are seeing “Star” or “Like” options on tweets instead of the original “Favorite” button.

Testing out different features across broad swaths of users isn’t uncommon. (Facebook does it all the time.)

But here’s something you probably didn’t know: The “Favorite” button could have been the “Thanks” button.

According to sources familiar with Twitter’s early thinking, the company was originally toying around with what to call the “Favorite” button. Along with “Favorite,” there were other popular options, such as those we’re seeing being tested now — “Like” and “Star.”

But naming the button “Thanks” was one of the most popular terms early on. A “Favorite,” if you will, among the team responsible for the feature.

Ultimately, Twitter settled on “Favorite” as the term of choice. But testing alternate versions of the button, as we’re seeing now, is a way of finding which gains the most traction among Twitter users. The company had intended to do this sort of testing for years, I’ve been told, but it was something of a low-priority item on the totem pole. Guess they finally got around to it.

As anyone I follow will tell you, I’m a huge fan of “Favoriting” and “Liking” tweets and statuses. It’s a form of affirmation, and can be used to acknowledge comments without requiring an actual verbal response. I “Favorite” tweets in earnest just as often as I do in jest. The buttons are versatile, useful, amusing.

Will Twitter decide to switch from “Favorites” to “Thanks,” or something else? I don’t know. My hope is that the testing helps others to use this fantastic, fantastic button.

Twitter politely declined to comment. (After which I promptly “Thanked” them.)

Don’t book your flights to the Bay Area just yet — Facebook won’t be putting on F8 this year, the company confirmed in a recent roundtable with reporters.

The reasoning: F8 is most often the premier event for introducing large changes to the way Facebook functions. This year, the company probably just doesn’t have any massive new products or features that would warrant calling in developers from across the world.

In 2008, for example, Facebook introduced the Connect platform for third-party sites, while last year’s event brought with it a major development in integrating with outsiders — Open Graph.

It’s also not a conference that occurs like clockwork annually (like Apple’s or Google’s have in recent years). Facebook has put on four F8 events in five years, sometimes spaced as much as 16 months apart.

Still, in the company’s every public pitch over the past six months, the message to developers is clear: We want you to integrate your mobile apps with Facebook. It was Mark Zuckerberg’s main talking point on the company’s first earnings call, and Zuckerberg again made it clear how important mobile and third-party developers are to Facebook in his most recent appearance at TechCrunch’s Disrupt technology conference earlier this month.

The biggest bummer about no F8? No chance of another awesome Zuck impression from Andy Samberg.

But if I “Like” something that I have to buy every so often — say, some new sneakers or a pair of jeans — and that “Like” turns into some useful information, such as price updates, that might get me (the most promotion-resistant shopper I know) a little more interested. And that’s exactly what a new feature in Glimpse, a Facebook app by TheFind, aims to do.

Apparently, consumers on Facebook have “Liked” 5.6 million products, and more than 70 percent of e-commerce sites have Facebook’s “Like” button on them. The feature is called Universal Price Alert, and it gives retailers a new channel to reach out to consumes who are already interested by sending them carefully targeted emails with discounts and deals. Mix in the possibility of the rumored “Want” button, and you see the potential.

What gives?

With all due respect to Lewis, who is one of the greatest innovators in media, I left realizing that there are different ideas of what “social” can mean on the Web, and that not everyone knows where the gold lies. Putting the whole picture together, there are four different models for social that, despite sharing the same name, are completely different concepts.

• Social = Viral Hit
  For those on the marketing and advertising side especially, the word “social” often means that you or your client are jealous of someone else’s success. Viral hits are largely based on breakthrough creative, though great distribution is an often-forgotten second factor. Who wouldn’t want to be responsible for the next Old Spice guy? Of course, these kinds of hits are easy to ask for and hard to achieve. And if you do achieve it, you’ll need another viral hit to bring your audience back again.
  Verdict: Good luck!
• Social = 1,000,000 Fans
  
  Here, the theory goes that social means getting lots of fans, and then something magical is supposed to happen. Like the boys’ adventure with the “South Park” underpants gnomes, it usually ends up with a lot of time and money spent, a big collection achieved, and a big question mark over “what now?” It doesn’t matter how low your cost per fan was, if the value per fan is near-zero. It’s not the size of the fan base that matters — it’s what you do with it.
  Verdict: Bad strategy.
• Social = Comments
  Another concept of “social” is that it’s a medium for conversation. With programs like @ComcastCares, brands have used this approach to shape their brand images and reputations — and it has worked. On the publishing side, the Huffington Post and other publishers have succeeded in using social engagement to drive deep participation and connection among an inner circle of its audience. Hosting a conversation certainly builds a relationship. A “Like,” comment, or share from a user can all get you more exposure on the margin, but, as Lewis noted on our panel, the friends who come that way don’t stay very long and don’t come back much. They came for their friends, not for your Web site. That’s why, even though engagement strategies are great for your core audience, they won’t single-handedly drive the large, loyal audience we all crave.
  Verdict: Smart, but it’s not enough.
• Social = Lasting Relationship
  A lasting relationship with an audience is the holy grail of every brand online. In fact, it has made Amazon the most valuable e-commerce company on earth, and it’s made Disney and the NFL valuable over decades. But what some haven’t realized yet is that the most valuable mode of social is in keeping these relationships connected.

  Do you have any idea how valuable a “Like” is? Any seventh-grader goes all atwitter when his crush says, “I like you.” It’s permission to see someone more, get to know them better, and talk to them all the time — not just once, but every day. If you are doing it right, a “Like” or a “Follow” begins a two-way relationship: One where your audience is asking for programming from you every day, week and month; and giving you their interest data about what works and what doesn’t. With that relationship, you can choose what content you create, and when and how you share it. That relationship isn’t once-and-done — it’s ongoing.

  And data from our experience shows that it translates into a million visits a week from our fan base — almost one visit for every fan, not to mention dozens more impressions right in their home page, the Facebook news feed. Done right, social can already drive more traffic than search, making a new top venue to recruit, and more importantly, retain an audience.

  More and more, I talk to marketers and publishers who have hundreds of thousands or millions of fans and followers, and yet have no idea what to do with them. They haven’t realized that they have subscribers at the ready, waiting for great content and experiences — the currency of their relationship.

  Nor do they understand the tremendous value of those subscribers: If you give your friends what they are after, they’ll keep coming back for more, and they’ll bring their friends. This is exactly how companies like Groupon and Zynga have reinvented their categories and created businesses worth billions of dollars in the process.
  Verdict: There is nothing more powerful than a lasting relationship.

Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of next-generation Web publisher Wetpaint, and author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile (NILE).

Sloan’s free “Fish” app invites readers to tap through his thoughts about how we tend to race through online content, rather than savoring our favorite stuff with repeat reading or viewing. We might click to say we “like” things all the time, but Sloan thinks that’s become a hollow gesture.

Sloan, who used to work at Twitter, helpfully (and a little presumptuously!) set up links at places within the app where he thinks his readers may want to tweet out his bon mots from their own accounts.

It’s a good read. But if the “tap essay” genre multiplies, Louis C.K.-style, I’m not sure how many such apps I would download and save on my phone. That’s sort of Sloan’s medium and message, all in one.

In one month, Pew study participants “Liked” other people’s Facebook content an average of 14 times, and had their own Facebook content “Liked” 20 times. They sent nine personal messages, and received 12. Twelve percent of them tagged friends in photos, and 35 percent were themselves tagged in at least one photo. Forty percent made a friend request, and 63 percent received one. Every category showed that same pattern.

This probably isn’t surprising if you’ve heard of the “80:20 rule,” or something similar, where the minority of any group generates the majority of activity. Thus, the majority of the group is on the receiving end.

Pew finds that 20 to 30 percent of people on Facebook are “power users” — meaning they perform these various social networking activities at a higher rate, often on a daily basis.

(Interestingly, these power users tend to specialize in one particular Facebook activity. Some people are power- “Likers” and others are power photo-taggers.)

Pew’s findings are based on getting direct access to 269 Facebook users’ accounts, with their permission.

Admittedly, that’s not an enormous sample, but here are some other findings about the frequency with which Facebook users perform various actions:

• On average, users make seven new Facebook friends per month; they initiated three requests and accepted four.
• 80 percent of friend requests that are initiated are accepted.
• Women average 11 updates to their Facebook status per month, while men average six.
• On average, Facebook users contribute about four comments/”Likes” for every status update that they make.
• Less than five percent of users hid content from another user on their Facebook feed.

Pew also didn’t find much evidence of Facebook fatigue among those who chose to be in its study. People who had been on Facebook for longer, and people who had more Facebook friends, tended to “Like,” post, tag and comment more.

But here’s a cautionary note, for those who wish to restrict their personal content within a relatively close network of people. Many Facebook users choose to share content using the “friends of friends” option. The median Facebook user, according to the Pew sample, has 31,170 friends of friends. That’s a ton!

What’s more, the average Facebook user — which includes some people who have enormous networks of people that are not densely connected to each other — reaches 156,569 people with the “friends of friends” setting.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

A few months back, after our staff more than doubled in size, AllThingsD launched our redesigned Web site. Today, we’re taking another step forward by launching an updated social media strategy.

You can explore the new features we’ve added by clicking the button below:

See the new features

But, before you go, I’d like to call out a few specifics that we’re particularly excited about.

The core of our expanded social media presence is the 15 new topic and category-based Twitter accounts. These new accounts — specifically about Apple, venture capital, personnel changes or mobile, to name a few — allow readers to more closely follow topics and companies they care most about.

We’ve chosen to keep the main @AllThingsD account live and real-time, meaning it will still deliver all of our stories within seconds of publishing.

But readers aren’t always awake when the news they care about breaks, so the new topic- and category-specific accounts are optimized through our partnership with SocialFlow, a real-time service for social media delivery.

SocialFlow listens for when the followers of a Twitter account are active, and chooses to tweet the posts that are best. Some articles may be held back for a short time, especially those published in off-hours, although we’ve chosen settings that will keep anything from getting stale and also maximize the relevance of our tweets.

The system is designed so that readers following our main @AllThingsD account can also follow others without being overburdened by additional tweets.

Following multiple accounts just means you’re more likely to see news that is important to you.

Aside from Twitter, which we know to be popular with our readers, we have also expanded our use of Facebook.

At the main AllThingsD page, we curate and offer commentary on some of our more topical and consumer-focused stories. Clicking “Like” on any of our pages will put our updates into your news feed along with your other friends.

Finally, I’m inviting you to interact with me on the various social streams. While tweeting at me via my personal Twitter account will get my attention most quickly, I’m also available to you via Google+, Facebook and also by sending an email.

Most of all, I encourage you to click the button below. It will take you to our new subscribe page, where you can follow any of the new accounts and customize how you get your news from AllThingsD.

Again, here’s the button to get you started:

See the new features

Please, please watch this video if you want to spit up your soda laughing hysterically.

It mashes up the babbling twin babies YouTube phenom with Google’s +1 shoplift of Facebook’s “Like” button.

Enjoy:

“I hope at some time in the future they will be [willing] to choose Android again,” Schmidt said in a roundtable discussion with a small group of reporters following his keynote speech at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Schmidt said that he and Android chief Andy Rubin had talked quite a bit with Nokia and that the company understood its operating system well, but declined to say how advanced the talks with his company had gotten. “We did talk to them,” he said. “I would rather not go into the details.”

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop told Mobilized on Tuesday that Microsoft will pay billions of dollars for the right to have the company cast the “swing vote” in favor of Windows Phone 7.

Asked whether he agreed that the Nokia-Microsoft partnership makes the smartphone business a three-horse race, Schmidt said, “They’ll have to deliver.”

Separately, Schmidt said regarding near-field communications that Google intends to build a business, but won’t be getting into the credit card or terminal business, but is interested in delivering offers to NFC-equipped devices.

He also reiterated that the company isn’t looking to get into the media business.

“It’s important not to get into businesses you don’t understand,” Schmidt said.

Rubin did say that, having gotten into the business of selling apps, Google is also exploring what other kinds of digital goods it might sell, but had no comment on whether it would sell music or publications.

Asked by Mobilized whether the company needs to do more on the social front, Schmidt said that the company isn’t as interested in building products to compete with Facebook as it is to have the social signals it needs in its core products. However, he said that the Facebook “Like” button or something akin to it is important because what you and your friends like is a key to delivering personalized search results.

On the EU front, Schmidt said that company has had some conversations with regulators and looks forward to more in order to address any concerns.

Yesterday Facebook unveiled a plan to let brands turn Facebook users’ online activities into ads. If anyone is complaining, it’s news to me.

Easy enough to see why: There are some very big differences between Facebook’s ill-fated Beacon and Sponsored Stories, the site’s new ad unit.

For starters, Facebook unveiled yesterday’s news in the trade press, not in a high-profile, Apple-aping event. More important is that while the new ads can tell your friends what you’re doing outside of Facebook, they’re mainly focused, for now, on what you do on the site.

Most important: The ads are replicas of the updates your friends are already seeing in their Facebook newsfeeds. So while Starbucks doesn’t pay a cent when this shows up on on the center of your friends’ pages:

It can now pay up and place this on the right side of your pals’ pages, too.

Users can’t opt out of the ads, which seems like a red flag given Facebook’s history. But if a brand wants to shell out money to tell your friends something you’ve already told your friends, who cares? No one, apparently.

Still, recall what Zuckerberg was saying less than four years ago, when he was going to “build a new kind of ad system” based on “social actions” and “information that is shared between friends.” At the time, that sounded wildly ambitious, and maybe a bit creepy.

And look what Sponsored Stories does now. Marketers can purchase ads that tell your Facebook friends when you’ve “liked” something of theirs. Or posted on one of their Facebook pages. Or checked-in to one of their outposts or played with one of their apps.

And they can do it when you’re not on Facebook, too, via “likes” you make on sites that have tied up with the social network.

This is what Zuckerberg was talking about in 2007, right? He just needed time to get there. So did his users.

Remember that when Facebook rolled out Beacon, the site was a big deal, but not the biggest: A mere 50 million users, not 600 million. Many of those people were still trying to get a handle on how the site worked, and what they ought to do with it.

And recall that the newsfeed itself–more or less the core of today’s service–was still a relatively new idea too, introduced just a year earlier. (Another controversy, and another Zuckerberg apology.)

Now, I think, just about everyone who uses Facebook knows, more or less, what they’ve signed on for: A place that wants you to share as much of yourself, with as many people, as you can.

Letting advertisers help you share that much more? No big deal. This is isn’t 2007, you know.

In the No. 1 spot was the California District Court ruling on gay-marriage voter initiative Proposition 8. Uploaded by GoodAsYou.org shortly after the ruling came out in August, the document was Scribd’s most viral ever. The start-up provided a timeline showing how it was spread (image embedded; click to enlarge).

We should note that Scribd did not provide a list of docs ranked by number of views. CEO Trip Adler said such a list would be dominated by random items that have good search engine optimization, like a scan of an Indian phone book that has long been one of Scribd’s most-viewed documents of all time. Scribd, which now has 60 million monthly uniques, attributes much of its growth to its improvement of social sharing features.

The No. 2 most-shared doc on Scribd in 2010 was the surprising claim of proof of the computer science problem P ? NP from earlier this year. Uploaded by Vinay Deolalikar of HP Research Labs in August, the paper seemed to show that a class of computationally intensive problems could not be solved using simple algorithms.

In the third spot was the Republican political platform “GOP Pledge to America,” uploaded in September by CBS News. The draft lays out policy principles on the economy, healthcare and national security.

I find it interesting that Scribd’s most social documents are more often notable for newsworthiness than timelessness. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments earlier this month appealing the Prop 8 decision that was posted on Scribd. And as for P ? NP, while many computer scientists believe the claim in the paper on Scribd is correct, the proof itself is not seen as conclusive.

The rest of Scribd’s 2010 social docs list is a similar mix of newsworthy documents and research, as well as a little levity, including a list of 25 macaroni-and-cheese recipes.

1. California Prop 8 Ruling (Good As You)
2. PNP 12 pt (Angelica Lim)
3. GOP Pledge to America (CBS News)
4. Scribd in HTML5 (Scribd)
5. A Statement to the Viewers of Countdown (Brian Stelter)
6. Marijuana Is Safer (Chelsea Green)
7. Cognitive Biases–A Visual Study Guide (Efern211)
8. Using Facebook to Move Your Business Forward (Facebook)
9. 25 Mac & Cheese Recipes (Gooseberry Patch)
10. Influence and Passivity in Social Media (Hewlett-Packard)

25 Mac & Cheese Recipes by Gooseberry Patch

The social version of Pulse will be available only for iPad for now, and is to be released this afternoon at 3 pm PT.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Alphonso Labs, which makes Pulse, recently stopped charging for its apps and raised $800,000 in venture funding. CEO Akshay Kothari came up to San Francisco today and showed me the new iPad app.

The new Pulse for iPad gives users three feeds of Facebook information: Friends’ status updates, friends’ shared links and a historial look at the user’s own Facebook wall. In keeping with Pulse’s design, items are image driven and easily swipe-able, and expand into a second panel when users tap on them (see screenshots). Users can add comments or “Like” statuses and shared links as they would on Facebook, but this is more of an alternate way to consume content than a full-featured Facebook client.

As with other content feeds, Pulse caches the 25 most recent Facebook updates in each category, so a user who goes somewhere without Internet access could continue to read the content there.

As Alphonso grows from being some young folks with an interesting design approach into a real company, it is exploring closer relationships with publishers like the Huffington Post. “We don’t want to be a company that makes a news reader,” said Kothari. “We want to help people discover awesome content.”

Kothari added that with the influx of new users since Pulse went free two weeks ago, Alphonso is looking to improve content discovery by mining user data to show a “most-emailed” story list across all feeds.

He said his aim is to get away from the hierarchical structure of Web sites–where one must return to the homepage before moving on–and help people scan quickly through potential reading material. Ultimately, Kothari said, recommendations will be done through a balanced combination of machine and social factors.

Further reading: Earlier this year, Pulse was mentioned as an example app by Steve Jobs, then yanked from the App Store due to complaints about content usage by the New York Times. The app was quickly reinstated and Alphonso has an open dialogue with the Times about how best to send it new readers and subscribers, according to Kothari.

While there are many services around, I’ll just touch on a handful of them, including some that take advantage of social networking and group buying.

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is jumping into the wish-list action this holiday season with the Bing Shopping List. Starting Wednesday, this feature lets people add items to a saved wish list by simply check-marking an on-screen box in shopping search results. Shopping search results are displayed by clicking the Shopping tab in Bing search results or by selecting Shopping on Bing.com and going from there. Once an item’s box has been checked, a small, in-browser visual of all items added to the wish list is displayed in the lower left corner of the browser window. Lists are saved between sessions, so you can close your browser and open it another time and work with the same saved list.

In addition to collecting a list of wished-for items, the Bing Shopping List lets people share those lists with their Facebook friends, giving them a chance to see and buy items from someone else’s wish list. Or people can use Bing Shopping Lists to select just a couple items, share them with the Facebook community, and ask for friends’ opinions about which product is better. Users may get feedback from friends they wouldn’t otherwise know were experts in certain areas.

A Microsoft spokesman said the impetus for this came from trends the company saw taking place on the Web—specifically, people using Facebook to solicit opinions about what to buy and to tell others what they want.

A downside to the Bing Shopping Lists is that they don’t yet offer a way to share items with only certain people, which might mean sharing a private gift with all your Facebook friends. And you can’t yet create multiple lists. A way to share items with only certain people and options for create multiple lists are on the product road map for next year, according to a company spokesman.

Speaking of social networks, Sears is taking a unique approach to the group-buying concept with Wish Together, a program launched in mid-November. With Wish Together, Sears puts at least one new item on its Facebook page (facebook.com/sears) each day. If enough people click on the item’s “Like” button before a certain time, a steep discount on the item becomes unlocked, like a diamond necklace that originally cost $285 will cost $100 at its Wish Price if it gets the required 200 “likes.” People can see the number of necessary “Likes” and time remaining (down to the second) displayed on the item’s Wish Together Facebook page.Once a Wish Together deal is unlocked, it’s available to everyone—not just those who originally “liked” it. But those who “liked” the item get an email notification from Facebook as soon as the deal is unlocked so they can buy it while supplies last.

Bing is jumping into the wish-list action this holiday season with the Bing Shopping List

The tried and true Amazon Wish List, which has been around for 11 years, can be used to add wish-list items from any website, not just Amazon.com. This works using the site’s Universal Wish List. It can be set up by dragging an “Add to Wishlist” bookmark (http://3.ly/G82n) into your browser’s bookmark bar. Then you just click the bookmark whenever you’re on the specific Web page of an item you’d like to add to your Wish List. A small pop-up menu lets users designate a specific Amazon Wish List or add their own notes about an item. Universal Wish List browser extensions, or shortcuts built right into a Web browser, are available for Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Some online retailers like ModCloth.com, save you a step by offering “Add To Amazon Wish List” buttons right on their websites. Amazon Wish Lists can be shared to friends through Facebook or Twitter using a link on the list’s webpage.

There are many Facebook apps for creating wish lists and sharing them with Facebook friends. I tried a couple apps, including a basic one called Fulfill My Wishlist (http://3.ly/3u3d). It let me search a shopping portal (that uses Google Shopping in the background) for items to add to my wish list, or let me copy and paste a link for any item to appear in my list. A notes section for each item allows room for describing details like preferred size or style. This list can be emailed to friends or viewed through the Facebook app by friends who use it.

If you’re planning to go in on buying a pricey gift with several other people, a group-gift option like eBay’s might be the right tool for you. EBay introduced its Group Gifts feature (groupgifts.ebay.com) in November. It lets several people pool their money to buy one item without one person chasing down those who owe money.

One person chooses an eBay item and selects the Buy It Now option (auction prices aren’t applicable when you need to tell the group how much they’ll definitely owe). The initiator tells the group how much he or she will pay and then shares the item with others via email, Facebook or Twitter, in hopes of getting contributions. A PayPal account is required for at least one person in the group to ultimately pay for the item, but gift contributors can chip in using credit or debit cards, and they can add their own notes to a gift.

Thanks to technology, there are many ways to direct your friends and family toward exactly what you want for the holidays, taking much of the guesswork out of giving and receiving this year.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101130/bing-shopping-list-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101122/paypal-introducing-social-way-to-shop/ http://allthingsd.com/20101122/paypal-introducing-social-way-to-shop/#comments Mon, 22 Nov 2010 22:41:51 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=666 PayPal has decided it’s about time to break into social e-commerce, following the lead of just about everybody. I received a user email today introducing PayPal Shoptimist that linked to a Facebook page of the same name. The page says it will include both group buying deals and sweepstakes offers, though it’s not fully live yet, so the only things users can do so far are “like” the page and complain about how it’s not live yet.

PayPal spokesperson Charlotte Hill said via email:

Shoptimist is PayPal’s first foray into serving our customers in a social media environment. The site combines the fun of shopping with your friends, with the big savings and convenience of shopping online. Shoptimists Unite, a component of the Shoptimist page, will allow customers to invite their friends to purchase group deals which reduce in price with more buyers, or enter sweepstakes to win popular items. The site also has a blog where customers can get the scoop on the latest news and trends in online shopping.

The Shoptimist rollout appears to be somewhat haphazard; I found a blog post announcing Shoptimist from last month. PayPal told users today it is working through technical issues and will be making deals live soon. Hill added, “The site is currently in beta and we’re working on rolling out these new features to our customers in the coming months.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101122/paypal-introducing-social-way-to-shop/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101118/myspace-a-place-for-facebook-friends/ http://allthingsd.com/20101118/myspace-a-place-for-facebook-friends/#comments Thu, 18 Nov 2010 20:05:11 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=555 Myspace and Facebook are announcing a partnership today via GoToMeeting webinar. As I wrote last night, it’s become quite obvious that the partnership will include integration of Facebook Connect into Myspace.

Presenting at the webinar will be Myspace CEO Mike Jones–-who has been pitching Myspace as “a social entertainment destination” rather than a social network–-and Dan Rose, VP of Partnerships and Platform Marketing for Facebook.

Here are my live notes:

Mike Jones says the launch today is called “Mashup with Facebook.” Users can share a stream of entertainment content with one-click setup.

One million users engaged so far with Myspace Facebook through initial partnership of “Sync with Facebook,” which was launched in August to push user streams on Myspace to Facebook. Adding Facebook Like button soon.

Image to the right is Myspace’s special branding of its integration with Facebook Connect: “Mashup.”

Dan Rose: Every day 10,000 Web sites integrate with Facebook Connect, but this one is special. Adding users into the experience works when it’s naturally social in the offline world, and entertainment is social.

Rose says Facebook users will be able to take their Likes to Facebook as well.

Jones says this feature will be rolling out to the full Myspace audience today.

Rose says, “There’s nothing different about this implementation than any other Facebook Connect implementation or any other implementation of the Facebook Like button across the Web.”

Jones says, “We think this is a complementary offering to Facebook and other social platforms.”

Rose says it’s good that Myspace is focused on entertainment and Facebook is focused on being a social platform, and those things are different.

In the last couple of days (since the Facebook Connect option was rolled out on the Myspace signup page), metrics for people connecting with Facebook look good, says Jones, but he doesn’t specify. (He keeps saying things are good questions, and then not really answering them.)

There is no financial component to the relationship.

And that’s it! Pretty mellow.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101118/myspace-a-place-for-facebook-friends/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101114/meebo-foursquarifies-the-web-with-check-ins/ http://allthingsd.com/20101114/meebo-foursquarifies-the-web-with-check-ins/#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 05:21:38 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=340 Meebo on Tuesday plans to announce an update to its popular Meebo Bar (which is used on this Web site, and many others, to make it easier for users to share content). The goal is to help users discover new Web sites (kind of like StumbleUpon) and become loyal to them by using a check-in system (kind of like a virtual Foursquare).

Starting tomorrow, users who want to participate can download a new browser extension called the Meebo MiniBar. Starting in December, Web sites can add check-ins through embeddable buttons and the Meebo Bar itself (which counts 8,000 publisher users, with a combined 180 million uniques). Brands such as Macy’s, Sprint and L’Oréal Professionnel have already committed to participate.

To check in on Meebo, a user will need to have a Meebo account. The idea is for people to be motivated to share in order to become VIPs on the sites they visit often (another extension of the Foursquare metaphor). Users can also subscribe to feeds of people who like similar Web sites so they can find new places to visit.

This is not a new idea–if you take the pitch and replace the term “checking in” with “social bookmarking” you’ll find a pile of (mostly discarded) companies. More specifically, back when OneRiot was called Me.dium it launched just such an extension in 2006, and the current start-up Badgeville makes a white-label loyalty platform for publishers. And Facebook, of course, has its “like” system of allowing users to subscribe to Web sites and brands.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101114/meebo-foursquarifies-the-web-with-check-ins/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101114/path-the-social-app-thats-not-viral-by-design/ http://allthingsd.com/20101114/path-the-social-app-thats-not-viral-by-design/#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 05:00:26 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=324 Silicon Valley is in the midst of a mini photo-sharing app boomlet. We have Instagram (which started adding 100,000 users per week as soon as it launched last month), Picplz (which beat out Instagram to get a Series A round with their shared investor, Andreessen Horowitz) and as of tonight Path, from former Facebook exec Dave Morin.

Dave Morin

All three companies make mobile apps (primarily on the iPhone) that allow users to take and immediately share images with friends. It seems kind of simple and mundane, but all these smart people seem to think photo-sharing is the future.

Morin and Path are the most convincing about there being a larger idea behind what they’re doing. San Francisco-based Path is stubbornly focused on close personal connections–a.k.a. real friends.

Unlike every other social site, where there’s an implicit pressure to collect as many friends and followers as you can (and at the same time increase the site’s user numbers), Path is only for the people you really know and trust.

In order to force and foster that kind of sharing, Morin’s team has left out many of the social Web features we’re used to. Users can do only two things on Path: Share photos and view them.

There are no reciprocal friend relationships, no likes or comments, no fun photo-editing filters, no publishing photos to services like Facebook and Flickr, no editing something after you post and no global user search (you have to know the email or phone number for anyone you want to add).

And there are additional restrictions. Users can only ever share with a maximum of 50 people (though they can follow more than 50 people, if invited). Every single post has its own privacy settings–you can share with either only the people tagged in it, or only your share list. If you get sick of someone who’s sharing with you, you can “pause” that person until further notice. Users who don’t have iPhones can view photos on the Web.

The most interesting feature for me is that users see which of their contacts have viewed any one photo. So on Path, you can’t lurk in peace. People know when you’ve seen their posts. This might be a little creepy, but it also could cut down on those annoying awkward conversations that sometimes happen when you’ve seen someone post about something online and then they start telling you about it in person.

Photos are tagged with the location where they’re taken automatically, and users can add people and tags. If someone else takes a picture at that same location, tags that have been previously used near that place recently will be at the top of the list.

The idea is those tags will be used to help users relive their memories stored on the service. So, for instance, someone Morin shares with could retrace his “path” of wine tasting in Napa by zooming in on a map of the pictures he posted from California wine country.

But the thing is, if you want to go try Path (which you’ll be able to do in the U.S. and Canada as of 9 pm PT tonight by going to Apple’s App Store, and in the rest of the world within a few hours), it’s going to seem rather empty at first. You’ll have to seek out friends to share with from scratch–but even worse, nobody will be sharing with you until they decide to add you.

Unlike just about every other social service, Path is not really viral. At all. So even though it’s interesting, its numbers are highly unlikely to correspond favorably to those of competitors like Instagram. And after all, how many mobile photo-sharing apps are you really going to use?

“We really prioritize slow organic growth over hyper-viral growth and going after influencers to build this really steep graph,” said Morin, who formerly helped lead Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect before leaving the company in January. “We are building Path to be a 30-year brand.”

He added, “Many of the photo-sharing apps are photo-blogging apps and popularity contests. On Path, you should always feel comfortable being yourself.”

This antiviral stuff almost seems like overkill, but Morin grounds Path’s feature decisions in the theories of the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar (known for the oft-cited “Dunbar’s Number” of 150 acquaintances, he also proposes that 40-60 people is the outer bound of our personal networks) and Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman (who talked about the difference between experience and memory in a well-received TED Talk on happiness).

If this hyper-personal stuff works, I think Path could potentially create a third major category of social network, distinct from the kind of relationships found on the two current giants, Facebook and Twitter. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves–and c’mon Dave, you should really let people comment on and like their friends’ photos.

Path was co-founded by Morin, Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau, both formerly of Napster. The staff also includes Mallory Paine, who helped engineer the iPhone photo and camera apps for Apple, and Matt Van Horn, who formerly did business development at Digg. Fanning is chairman and landlord of the company but is working on his own other projects day-to-day.

Path has already raised a jumbo seed round with Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Founders Fund and Betaworks. The company also provided us with an extensive list of individual angel investors: Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, Keith Rabois, Dustin Moskovitz, Marc Benioff, Gary Vaynerchuk, Steve Anderson, Tim Draper, Joi Ito, Fadi Ghandour, Matt Cohler, Sam Lessin, Bill Randuchel, Karl Jacob, Paul Buchheit, Ruchi Sanghvi, John Couch, Michael Parekh, Claudio Chiuchiarelli, Maurice Werdegar, Don Dodge, and Chris Kelly.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101114/path-the-social-app-thats-not-viral-by-design/feed/ 18 http://allthingsd.com/20101014/skype-and-facebook-announce-partnership/ http://allthingsd.com/20101014/skype-and-facebook-announce-partnership/#comments Thu, 14 Oct 2010 18:41:37 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=31083 As BoomTown’s Kara Swisher reported here on September 29, Skype and Facebook have announced a significant integration–as of today, users of Skype 5.0 for Windows can sign in using Facebook Connect, which will allow them to SMS, voice chat, make status updates, like and comment on Facebook posts from within the Skype desktop client.

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