That’s because Levchin’s newest start-up involves an iPhone app aimed toward helping women get pregnant.

Called Glow, the company has built a fertility tracker that uses cutting-edge data analytics and published information on ovulation cycle forecasts to help advise a woman on the best times for her to conceive.

Users must enter in personal details about their menstrual cycles, their body temperatures and other habits to inform the Glow app. According to Levchin, the app adjusts to the individual as she logs more and more data.

Then, it gives the user — and her partner, if he or she opts to use a version of the app — insight into her fertility window.

The next step is on the part of the users, and it’s advisable that the iPhone might be put aside for that part.

Levchin appeared onstage today at the D: AllThings Digital conference to demo the free app for Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

Onstage, Levchin logged into Glow as his wife, told the app that he and his wife were trying for their third child, entered in menstrual cycle information and was presented with a swipe-through calendar that is color-coded based on peak fertility times.

Another data point that goes into the app is the texture of the cervical mucus, which Levchin explained is an important indicator in fertility tracking.

Glow also offers clever prompts and notifications. For example, Levchin said, the app might remind a woman on an especially fertile day that it’s a good time to wear nice underwear. Her partner might receive a notification on the same day to bring flowers home.

“Many of the reasons why people find it difficult, when they’re keeping on the clock, is because it becomes unpleasurable when it’s a routine,” he said in the pre-interview.

To say Levchin’s Glow is well timed is both an understatement and a bad pun. The topic of women’s roles in the workforce and at home have been pushed to the forefront of conversation in recent months, thanks to published works like Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s cover story for the Atlantic. Three weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal featured an editorial by a woman who chose to freeze her eggs at age 36, spending $50,000 over the course of the two-year process.

Due to a variety of socioeconomic factors, more women are having children later in life. A 2010 Census Bureau study called “Fertility of American Women: 2010” compared childbearing patterns with those in women from 10 years earlier. The study found that a “delayer boom” was under way, in which highly educated women — those with a college degree or above — were more inclined to delay childbearing into their 30s than those with less education.

When I asked Levchin whether the app was inspired by personal experience, he said, “My wife and I were lucky. We had our children without any issues.” (Levchin and his wife, Nellie, have two kids.)

“But we have people close to us that have gone through multiple IVF trials,” he added, “and we’ve heard them say, ‘We’re not going to put my wife’s body through this anymore.’”

To be sure, there are many other apps available that track women’s periods and ovulation cycles.

But Levchin’s goal, ultimately, isn’t just to help women get pregnant. He believes arming the average citizen with data about his or her health will ultimately cut down on health care costs in the long run. He said he plans to eventually apply this financial model to other areas of health.

Last month, at D: Dive Into Mobile, an entrepreneur named Geoff Clapp stood onstage and demoed another app aimed at offering accessible health care. Called Better, this iPhone-only app connects users directly to the Mayo Clinic’s vast database of health information and, for a monthly fee, will also put you in touch with a Mayo Clinic nurse or doctor for consultation.

At the top of the tiered pricing plan is what Clapp referred to as the “Black Card” service, referencing the American Express card for the uber-wealthy, which includes access to emergency health care.

“We’re taking the best of Silicon Valley and best of clinical health and making it happen,” Clapp said in an interview at the time.

Unlike Glow, the Better app is HIPAA-compliant and pre-tax dollars can be put toward a monthly Better subscription.

There will be some, of course, who are dubious about an iPhone app’s ability to make a difference in the current healthcare system in the U.S. This sentiment is probably best encapsulated in a recent New Yorker story by George Packer, which quotes the Belarusian, dark-side-of-the-Internet scholar Evgeny Morozov as saying, “They think that anything that helps you bypass institutions is, by default, empowering or liberating. You might not be able to pay for health care … but if you have an app on your phone that alerts you to the fact that you need to exercise more, or you aren’t eating healthily enough, they think they are solving the problem.”

Levchin is underscoring his commitment to Glow, and to the new age of digital health, by contributing a million dollars of his own money to a mutual insurance fund that goes to pay for fertility treatments for those who fail to get pregnant after 10 months of using the app.

Users also have the option to contribute $50 a month to the fund, a hundred percent of which will then be put toward their treatments. If they do get pregnant, they forfeit the funds.

In the case of the former, Glow will recommend fertility treatment facilities based on users’ locations.

“The rates of success from facilities is required to be published by law, but most people don’t know how or where to access that,” Levchin said. “We have data on the best places.”

Full D11 Conference Coverage

One of the great pleasures of producing D is that every year the discussion is different, because the technology, Internet and media businesses are so dynamic. But, as we convene this, the 11th edition of our conference, the digital world is indisputably at an inflection point: The PC has peaked, and it’s all about post-PC mobile devices, software and services. That means smartphones and tablets, for now, with wearable devices coming on strong.

Our D speakers and attendees have been talking about this trend for years, long before Apple’s Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in January of 2007. But this year, we gather just about six weeks after the report of the worst quarterly decline in PC sales ever recorded, while sales of smartphones and tablets continue to surge. Android devices, which didn’t exist until late 2008, cover the earth, and Apple alone has sold more than 140 million tablets since April of 2010. And Samsung seems to be everywhere.

It’s no surprise, then, that everyone’s new slogan is “mobile first!”

This change has staggering implications for companies ranging from unknown software startups to the “Gang of Four” platform giants identified by Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt at D9 — Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google — and the giant he didn’t list, Microsoft.

What happens to huge companies like Dell and Hewlett-Packard that lack much of a post-PC or mobile presence? Can the company that kicked off the new era, Apple, maintain its reputation for innovation in the post-Jobs era under the onslaught of the Android juggernaut?

Can Google maintain control of its Android platform in the face of Samsung’s power and Amazon’s refusal to use Google’s apps? Can Facebook’s aggressive new mobile strategy succeed? Will Amazon do as well at phones and other devices as it appears to have done at tablets? And can Microsoft become the third big platform player with Windows 8 and Windows Phone? If not, does BlackBerry have a shot?

And more: Will wearable devices that go beyond fitness bands, such as Google Glass, be the next historic game-changers? Or will they remain niche products?

Most of all, how does the mobile surge and the wearable promise change user behavior, entertainment and productivity? What will be the impact on society?

Finally, given all these sweeping changes, can anybody other than a few big companies make real money in mobile?

We’ll discuss these questions and more with a stellar lineup of speakers, one that we’re especially proud to have sit in our signature red chairs this year.

Leading off will be Apple CEO Tim Cook, leader of arguably still the most influential tech giant, but one that faces the challenges of high expectations and its fiercest competition in years. Has Apple lost its cool, or is it just secretly readying its next big surprise to take the world by storm?

Apple’s nemesis, Google, will be represented by Sundar Pichai, who recently took over the Android platform in addition to his longtime leadership of Chrome and Google’s apps. Will he combine the two platforms? How can he balance Android’s open-source roots with the need for Google to make money off the platform?

We’ll also welcome back Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who is not only helping to steer a hugely important company trying to conquer mobile, but also inspiring millions of women with her “Lean In” book and larger project.

Twitter’s smart and funny CEO, Dick Costolo, will also return to the D stage to talk about the future of his iconic service, especially on mobile. And Ben Silbermann, the co-founder of Pinterest, another social networking success story, will make his D debut.

Elon Musk, who is merely a pioneer of both the electric car and private space-flight industries, will take our stage for the first time. We wonder: What has he done for us lately?

And to answer the question of what’s up at Google’s hardware arm, Motorola, we’ll have its CEO, Dennis Woodside, and his advanced research chief, Regina Dugan, who wowed the crowd at D9 when she appeared as the head of DARPA, the Pentagon’s futuristic research arm.

Since speech is a core, vital technology in the mobile era, we’ll welcome Paul Ricci, CEO of speech giant Nuance. Will he recognize our accents?

The CEO of General Electric, Jeff Immelt, will talk about how the digital revolution affects traditional corporate giants. And Tom Staggs, who heads Disney’s theme parks, will show off the latest technology being used by visitors to navigate the iconic destinations.

Recently departed Windows chief Steven Sinfosky, who also ran Microsoft’s Office division, will share his thoughtful views on the new post-PC landscape.

For another look at the overall landscape, we’ll have Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker walk us through her famous annual Internet report. And PayPal co-founder Max Levchin will show off his latest project, which links technology and anatomy.

This year, we’ll also have some pairings of speakers we think will yield interesting insights. Aaron Levie, the CEO of Box, the well-known enterprise cloud-storage firm, will appear jointly with John Chambers, CEO of enterprise tech giant Cisco.

The CEO of Sony, Kazuo Hirai, will be joined by Jed York, the boss of the San Francisco 49ers, to talk about the intersection of tech and sports. From the entertainment world, we’ll have a trio of managers of famous stars, who have been investing in tech in a big way: Troy Carter, chairman and CEO of the Atom Factory; Guy Oseary, partner of A-Grade Investments; and Scooter Braun, founder of SB Projects. Respectively, the three manage Lady Gaga, Madonna and Justin Bieber.

The witty and sharp Barry Diller, who knows the traditional entertainment and Internet businesses inside and out, will be back, no doubt to defend his right, via his latest venture Aereo, to stream broadcast television. And new CNN boss Jeff Zucker will join him to discuss the future of all TV.

We’ll have Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney/ABC Television Group, paired with I. Marlene King, creator and executive producer of ABC’s tech-savvy hit show “Pretty Little Liars.”

Finally, we have a fascinating lineup of demos, including not one, but two companies that focus on another emerging post-PC segment: The Internet of Things.

So buckle up and get ready to enjoy, learn and network. It’s time for D once again.

His newly formed Expa will be akin to startup generators from serial entrepreneurs like Evan Williams’s Obvious and Max Levchin’s HVF, Camp said.

“I’ve been sort of doing this informally but I figured I should formalize it,” said Camp, who recently helped launch BlackJet, an Uber-like company for snagging rides on private jets. “I want to use these observations about everything I’ve learned.”

Camp said he expects to make mobile apps around “media, location, data analytics, smartphones and sensors” and other themes, while admitting that those ideas are indeed vague and trendy.

More specifics will come in a matter of months, when his first app launches, Camp said.

“At Stumble, I tried to be CEO for a long time, but the early product stuff is what I’m really best at,” Camp added. He said he hopes to start these companies and then hand them off to a co-founder, while maintaining the role of executive chairman.

Fliesler is leaving the entrepreneurial world for the cushy VC life at the relatively young age of 28. That’s because, as he put it, “I do growth.” He wants to work closely with young startups, rather than fill a role at an already large company.

At Square, “I was spending a lot of time being a manager and not as much time at the white board,” Fliesler said. And rather than repeat (hopefully) that pattern with other fast-growing companies, he chose what he called “a terminal path” of being a VC for the rest of his life.

Fliesler has had a rapid-fire career. From an early gig in real estate investments, he joined Max Levchin’s Slide in 2007, where he led partnerships, platform relationships, payments and various products. When Slide was acquired by Google, he was director of product.

Then he followed former Slide executive Keith Rabois to Square, where Rabois was COO until he left after allegations of personal misconduct (that’s the other Square guy who became a VC — Rabois is now joining Khosla Ventures). Fliesler attested that the departures were unrelated, and that Square has a strong remaining executive team. Former Square director of products Megan Quinn is also now a VC at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

At Matrix, Fliesler said, he doesn’t intend to specialize in any particular category — Slide was a social product, Square was business-to-business — but rather intends to find young companies he likes and thinks he can help.

Flickr user Gaku

Here are our Top 10 stories from the week of Feb. 25:

1.) “Physically Together”: Here’s the Internal Yahoo No-Work-From-Home Memo for Remote Workers and Maybe More [Previously: Yahoo CEO Mayer Now Requiring Remote Employees to Not Be (Remote)]

2.) Groupon CEO: “I Was Fired Today.”

3.) Exclusive: PayPal Co-Founder Levchin Launches New Payments Startup, Affirm

4.) Survey Says: Despite Yahoo Ban, Most Tech Companies Support Work-From-Home for Employees

5.) Why Silicon Valley Is the Next Detroit

6.) A Wristwatch Tells When Phone Calls, Emails Arrive

7.) Why Carriers Just Love Firefox OS

8.) Cook: Forget About Our Share Price, Apple Has Some Great Stuff Coming

9.) Yahoo Work-From-Home Controversy Already a Silicon Valley Billboard Meme

10.) Old Media Doesn’t Get New Media, Chapter 203: The Sheryl Sandberg Attack

For more of the week in review, you should follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

High-profile Silicon Valley entrepreneur Max Levchin is launching a new mobile payments startup today called Affirm.

It’s the first project emerging from Levchin’s San Francisco tech incubator Hard, Valuable, Fun (HVF), which he started after selling his last company — Slide — to Google and then eventually leaving the search giant. Previous to that, Levchin and investor Peter Thiel had sold PayPal to eBay.

While it might seem at first as if Affirm is in direct competition with other mobile payments-focused companies such as Square and Stripe, it seems to be aimed at another layer of the value chain in an effort to improve conversion for mobile payments.

In fact, Stripe — in which Levchin is an investor, too — will be processing credit card payments on the back end.

But it will be an uphill battle for Levchin in the current payments arena, with a range of challenges from a multitude of rivals to regulatory scrutiny to the risks associated with credit in general.

Its most similar competitor, for example, is Klarna, a hugely funded company based in Sweden that offers payment solutions for a wide range of online storefronts across Europe that did $200 million in revenue last year. Klarna, which means “clear” in Swedish, is likely to be eying the U.S. market and has well-regard VC Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital on its board.

As part of its effort, Affirm will use Facebook for authentication of consumers, and also use a number of other social and data signals to assess risk. It will then guarantee payment to merchants — who will pay Affirm a fee — after this check.

“We are trying to get as close as possible to one-click, which has always been the case on the desktop,” said Levchin in an interview today. “In mobile, it has become an imperative to be able to buy it now or you lose a customer quickly.”

Levchin described Affirm as a digital charge card rather than a credit card, trying to be valuable to merchants by lowering the abandonment rate of mobile transactions. Affirm’s beta launch retail partner is 1-800-Flowers.

“You will essentially be putting a purchase on a digital tab, and we are going to make it work for us by looking at all available data to determine if you are someone who will pay it back,” said Levchin.

Like an American Express or other charge card, consumers will have about 30 days to settle bills, although Affirm will not be making any money from them.

As to why he decided to enter the increasingly competitive online payment space — which is also rife with regulatory and fraud issues — Levchin said that his efforts at PayPal did not go far enough.

“Payments online are still too hard — we started the revolution with PayPal and democratized payments for small businesses, but we stopped short of changing the system,” he said. “The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.”

In addition, he added, the “overwhelming transformation of everything toward mobile changes all the fundamentals.”

Relying on Facebook could be an issue, of course, opening up a thicket of privacy issues and also worrisome reliance on the social networking giant. But Levchin said that Affirm’s system depends on the company for confirming identity more than anything else and there will eventually be a number of ways to do that.

Other data Affirm will be using, he said, range from incomes per zip code and even a user’s mobile device ID.

Affirm has been funded by Levchin and a group of friends in the “low-digit millions,” he said, with only a few dozen employees compared to bigger mobile payments efforts from others.

He said he knows the risk of entering the space, especially given that there are only so many solutions and a limited retailer attention.

Still, Levchin noted: “I just think there is so much more to do. Technology has come a long way since PayPal.”

Keith Rabois, the former Square COO who left the company in the midst of unproven allegations of personal misconduct, is weighing an offer to join Silicon Valley venture firm Khosla Ventures, according to sources close to the situation, and is currently leaning toward accepting the job there.

But, that could change. In an interesting twist, the longtime entrepreneur and investor has also been in discussions with Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky to become COO or president there.

Both the VC and the startup have been doing reference checks on Rabois, news of which has gotten out in the ever-chatty Silicon Valley scene. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today that Rabois had been in talks with the San Francisco-based online housing rentals company.

But sources with knowledge of the situation said that Rabois — who has played the No. 2 to a string of high-profile entrepreneurs, including Peter Thiel at PayPal, Max Levchin at Slide and, most recently, Jack Dorsey at Square — seems “99 percent” ready to move into a more formal investing role.

Of course, there is still that one percent chance he might not, underscored by the eternal lure of the hot startup for serial entrepreneurs like Rabois. That said, he has also been an active angel investors for many years, with a wide-ranging portfolio, and is on many boards, including Yelp’s.

The choice of two very attractive alternatives is in stark contrast to the more tense situation for Rabois just a month ago, after accusations of sexual harassment arose related to a relationship he had with a Square employee.

Rabois has denied the allegations aimed at him and at the San Francisco payments company, which have not yet turned into a lawsuit, and has thus far been backed by Square. Rabois called the accusations by the employee “fiction” and a “shakedown.”

That said, due to the controversy around the serious workplace issue, he stepped down from his job as COO.

“At the end of the day, this is personally embarrassing to me, because when anyone’s life is exposed to a public forum, it creates quite a damaging situation,” said Rabois at the time in an interview with me. “As we looked at it, it was going to become a distraction that was going to hurt the company.”

Earlier today Yahoo reported fourth-quarter earnings that beat analyst estimates, on still-flattish revenue.

Still, up is up, even if it is not really that much up, so Wall Steet bid up shares of the Silicon Valley Internet giant in after-hours trading.

Now it’s onto the conference call with investors for CEO Marissa Mayer:

2:02 pm: Before the call, you can hear Mayer complaining about the goofy music played during the pre-conference call waiting time.

“We have to get better music,” she says to some minion. “This is not good music.”

Music to my ears! I say we get Beyoncé, lipsyncing or not.

The call starts quickly after that, with the ever-eager Mayer leaping right in with the fourth-quarter news, which is not all that bad.

It’s the first full year of growth in a while — though not the first quarter-to-quarter increase — even if it is only a very modest two percent increase.

That compares to industry-wide gains in revenue of many, many, many times that, but for Yahoo this is cause for a parade. A small parade, with good music, but a parade nonetheless.

“It’s hard to believe this is only my first full quarter here at Yahoo,” says Mayer in an upbeat tone.

She notes that her focus on product excellence and user experience was continuing, with some “early positive trends” in both products and people.

Mayer then list a series of moves, from the free food and better smartphones for employees to the addition of well-regarded entrepreneur Max Levchin to the board to the refreshes of Yahoo Mail and Flickr to the acquisition of some sassy new mobile startups.

Mayer also notes that the company under her purview had removed “385 of highest priority obstacles,” although she did not name any specifics.

I imagine what No. 332 is: Switching out the iceberg lettuce at the URL cafeteria on Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif. HQ campus with some tasty organic mesclun as they have at Google, from whence Mayer came.

Better roughage means better returns!

2:14 pm: Mayer turns the call over to CFO Ken Goldman, also a newbie. As usual, he runs through the numbers that are already in all the releases already. But I am enjoying his New England accent, hoping he will say the slight increase in revenue was “wicked” good.

Goldman, in fact, calls the revenue increase “modest,” which is true, although it sounds like “mah-dist.”

What’s not mah-dist is how much stock Yahoo has bought back, using its windfall from the recent sale of assets in China. It’s $1.45 billion, with more that that left to use for more share buybacks. That should keep Yahoo’s stock up nicely.

Goldman also talks about increases in the company’s search business, although notes that the Microsoft relationship is still not the most fantastic.

He speaks more effusively of Yahoo’s Asian partners, including Yahoo! Japan and China’s Alibaba Group. It’s deserved, since they have been the company’s treasure trove against its meh core performance in recent years.

Not so tasty is the problem Yahoo has with a big-money contract dispute in Mexico, which Goldman reiterates is “without merit.”

2:28 pm: Goldman moves onto Yahoo’s cash position, which is strong and which he says is going to be used to make the company better.

Mayer is back on board, talking about key focuses over multiple years.

She says Yahoo needs a “chain reaction of growth,” which needs to be fueled by a dozen new products that become a daily habits for consumers to increase usage and other metrics.

A nuclear bomb explosion is not exactly the best metaphor for a company’s turnaround, but in Yahoo’s case it is probably a pretty good one, given how stubborn its decline has been.

Mayer then switches the metaphor to one she recently used about “returning to the roots” of Yahoo.

Actually, mixing the metaphors, Yahoo has to blast some significant roots that have gotten in the way of its innovation over the years.

“The best is yet to come,” promises Mayer, in what she says will be a multi-year effort.

Now onto questions from the analysts!

2:40 pm: The first question is about commercialization of its products. Mayer answers she is both pro-advertising and anti-ad — meaning they are good when they add to user experience and bad when they do not.

There will be slight margin declines due to this, which is the real point of the query, which Goldman says will not be too impacted.

The next question is on the weaker performance in display ads and whether mobile ads can ramp up quick enough or not.

Yahoo is not breaking out mobile revenue numbers as yet — it’s not impressive as yet, so that’s what’s going on there — although Mayer points to the number of mobile users increasing to 200 million now.

As to the declines in display, Mayer gives a non-answer, but it is likely due to big changes that new Yahoo COO Henrique De Castro has put into place in the way it sells ads and which AllThingsD.com previously reported on. Mayer earlier in the call had confirmed those changes.

The fact of the matter — which is just what the analyst was asking about — is that Mayer simply has to improve display revenue, which is Yahoo’s core business.

Mayer then addresses the issue of not providing usage metrics anymore. Yahoo has withheld a lot of them since she has taken over, and she says it is because they are not indicative of metrics that, well, she thinks you need to know.

Instead, Mayer points to other metrics that she feels are better, such as number of ads sold and price per click on search.

Speaking of search, the next question is about that. What can Mayer say — and she does — but that Yahoo must also improve in that area. Indeed, it is lucrative low-hanging fruit for the company.

Here comes an interesting observation she makes based on a question of mobile versus desktop, which Mayer says should not be separated as two areas as consumers don’t think that way.

Yahoo is tuning up a dozen products, she says, having started with Yahoo Mail and its Flickr photo-sharing app.

2:54 pm: Mayer is not saying which of this dirty dozen is next to get a makeover.

“We’re investing in small, nimble, excellent teams,” says Mayer, who then tries to reference a famous Margaret Mead quote, but ends up mangling it a bit.

It is, for the record: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

This is true, which might make some Yahoo staffers nervous, since Mayer’s recent stack ranking of them means she can start on employee layoffs anytime she likes to separate the wheat from the chaff.

3:01 pm: Whoo-whee, this is going long and I am getting weary. Mayer has to be some kind of digital Energizer Bunny — she just flew in from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and moved right into the prep for the Q4 earnings.

Tomorrow, she is presumably off to Las Vegas, where Yahoo’s global sales conference will start and she will doubtlessly be making an appearance.

I am exhausted simply by walking up and down the stairs at my house.

The next question is about third-party publishers and ad tech on mobile.

“Mobile monetization is new for everyone,” she says correctly, making the point that no one knows what is going to shake out.

She uses — as she has used — the example of when people thought search was not a moneymaker until Google proved otherwise.

The problem is, of course, that Google is Yahoo’s biggest rival in this new mobile ad arena, along with Facebook and many others. And Google, as its recent results showed, does know how to make money compared to Yahoo.

The next question is about mobile monetization eating into desktop revenue.

Mayer notes that Yahoo has hired 120 people with computer science degrees in the quarter to work on that area.

In other words, get ready for a symphony of geeks to return Yahoo to relevance.

Would they can pull it off, as that would be a tune worth listening to.

Speaking of something worth listening to, here is a video of Diana Ross’ song, “Chain Reaction,” to enjoy:

So far in the six-month reign of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, there has been a pile of attention paid to the flashy cultural changes (free food!), much-needed rehauls of key mainstays (Flickr, Yahoo! Mail, homepage), a focus on attracting entrepreneurial talent (Hey, we got Max Levchin to join the board!) and, of course, the frequent mention of mobilemobilemobile by the former Google product exec.

But on the topic of where the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s search and display advertising business is headed — which is, of course, its key revenue and profit generator — it’s pretty much been crickets.

No longer, it seems, according to multiple sources inside and outside Yahoo. Mayer is planning a series of appearances at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show — which is taking place in Las Vegas in less than two weeks.

That includes sitting for a high-profile fireside chat with Starcom MediaVest Group Global CEO Laura Desmond in front of several hundred ad clients on Wednesday, January 9; organizing a plethora of one-on-one meetings; and throwing a Yahoo dinner party, as well as angling for invites to key parties thrown by others, such as MediaLink’s power player dinner on Tuesday, January 8.

As I previously reported, the company is planning on having this much more prominent presence there in order to reset its sometime rocky relationship with advertisers.

And, not surprisingly, its big weapon at the giant annual confab will apparently be Mayer, who has not yet interfaced significantly with the company’s big ad clients since taking the top job in July. At CES, sources said, Yahoo is hoping the “Marissa Halo” — i.e. the excitement around the decidedly telegenic exec — will help boost its business.

It’s important, since big agencies and advertisers have privately been grumbling about the lack of outreach by Yahoo and also how much more active execs at rivals such as Facebook, Google and AOL have been.

More than one source close to Yahoo said the dissatisfaction was being heard loud and clear at the company. “[Everyone will] take it as an opportunity to vent (again), while Yahoo promises a new beginning,” said one exec.

New beginnings will again be the case, though, with new COO Henrique De Castro also in place. He’s been making a series of moves to rejigger the ad business at Yahoo since he got there earlier in the fall, also from Google, including shifting its sales process to a category model.

In addition, Yahoo execs have continued their noodling on whether or not to make significant ad tech purchases — with no major deals in place yet — along with improving the creaky performance of the company’s own owned-and-operated offerings.

It’s all in the hope that advertisers and agencies will reconnect with Yahoo after the nearly consistent CEO changes over the last year. For those keeping score, after Carol Bartz was fired in the fall of 2011, CEO Scott Thompson made his debut at CES in early 2012, touting Yahoo’s data prowess before being ousted only months later. He was followed by renewed efforts toward marketers by interim CEO Ross Levinsohn.

And now there’s Mayer.

Interestingly, while many major ad players are looking for more specifics about how Yahoo will improve its mobile, search and data products to give better insights to advertisers, they also are simply wanting to hear Mayer’s plans for Yahoo.

“What I don’t see yet is what the vision for Yahoo is, articulating the bigger ideas than just presenting an assemblage of products,” said Rob Norman, chief digital officer of GroupM Global. “And what everyone would still like to see is what is the escape route from being a portal or even reemerging from what that means, so I am really interested in what she has to say.”

Added another top ad exec: “She really has not said anything yet about how she plans to capitalize on Yahoo’s strengths over the next year in the ad space. People are genuinely excited about Mayer, but the stakes are still high for her since everyone feels as if they have already given Yahoo a lot of extra chances.”

High stakes, indeed. But, then again, it is Vegas.

When I asked him to talk to me about why he decided to finally became a director at Yahoo after what was a very long mulling that started even before former Google exec Marissa Mayer became CEO, Max Levchin alerted me earlier today to a very solid post he did on the subject on his blog, which is called “too long to tweet.”

I now remember why I really like that Max Levchin: He blogs! (Also because he is an unapologetic coffee snob.)

In his essay, he breaks down the reasons into three parts: Personal, business and sentimental.

Noting his longtime admiration of Mayer, he noted “her decision to take the top role at Yahoo! was a very ballsy move, and when she asked for my help, I was excited about working with her.” Levchin, a well-known tech entrepreneur, also wrote that he hoped for a strong Yahoo, since it was a “massive net-positive for the Silicon Valley ecosystem, the market in general, and the US economy.”

Most of all, he said, Yahoo “showed me that computer geeks can start companies that create that future. I’d love to do my part in helping the company that inspired me.”

Levchin also emailed me to add: “If she gets the place into shape, it will be the absolute greatest turnaround in Valley’s recent history, possibly ever.”

Indeed.

Sources close to the situation told me that Mayer convinced Levchin to join the board by convincing him that he’d be able to help her inject entrepreneurial vigor into the company.

That would be good, and Levchin’s post is actually one of the best recitations of the kind of spirit Yahoo needs to revive itself that I have read in a long while.

It also tracks exactly on many conversations I have had with Levchin in the past about Yahoo’s troubles. He has long been intrigued by the opportunity despite management woes, innovation doldrums and the relentless talent exodus.

But judge for yourself — here’s the whole thing:

As announced by Yahoo! this morning, I have been asked and agreed to join its Board of Directors. It is an honor to be asked, in and of itself. There are three key reasons I accepted:

Personal: I’ve long respected Marissa’s talent and tenacity. Her decision to take the top role at Yahoo! was a very ballsy move, and when she asked for my help, I was excited about working with her.

Business: a stronger, fast-growing Yahoo!, with its tremendous resources is a massive net-positive for the Silicon Valley ecosystem, the market in general, and the US economy.

Sentimental: Yahoo! was one of the first true giants created by this amazing new thing, the Web. Before Google or Facebook, before almost everything there was Jerry’s Guide, right up there with What’s New page in Mosaic. Through amazing luck, I was a Computer Science freshman at UIUC in ’93, which gave me a glimpse into the fantastic future we are now living. Yahoo! showed me that computer geeks can start companies that create that future. I’d love to do my part in helping the company that inspired me.

Here’s the official news from my earlier report about new Yahoo board member Max Levchin and the departure of two directors, Weather Channel’s CEO and Chairman David Kenny and Brad Smith, CEO of Intuit.

Levchin is the fourth director to be appointed as part of an mutually agreed-upon agreement between Yahoo and Third Point’s Dan Loeb, as part of a settlement of its proxy fight earlier this year.

He’s a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur, with stints at PayPal and Slide, a Facebook social apps maker that was sold to Google and later closed down.

Some sources close to the situation maintain that other current board members are also mulling eventual departure and that there will be more director additions, but that is not expected to happen for the next months.

Here’s the official press release:

YHOO_News_2012_12_13_General

On Friday, I began a series about the various and sundry things new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was up to at the Silicon Valley Internet giant.

First up was a look at how she is zeroing in on improving its troubled search efforts and advertising platforms, two business arenas that will get more focus this week when Mayer unveils her plans to the employees of Yahoo at an all-hands meeting.

According to an internal memo Mayer sent out Friday, the confab is scheduled for Tuesday. It comes after two days of meetings with Yahoo’s board of directors last week, in which Mayer outlined the plans for she has come up with to turnaround the company.

[Special note to readers: I would, as usual, embed the entire memo below, but Yahoo's top execs -- most especially, newly installed general counsel Ron "Leaks Are 'Uncool'" Bell -- have worked themselves into quite a lather over the issue of late. Apparently, according to numerous sources, the company is using all kinds of leak-catching tech tools -- free smartphones aren't as free as you might think, if you catch my drift, Yahoos, and I would also advise turning up the music loud when whispering in the Sunnyvale HQ offices -- so I will only quote internal emails only in part going forward to thwart such silliness.]

Pressing on!

In the memo, titled “Board slides, strategy and goals,” Mayer talked about the meetings. There will be two this Tuesday, one in the morning and one later in the day, in order to accommodate Yahoo staffers internationally.

“In an act of radical transparency that will be a tradition moving forward,” Mayer promised that she will go over the slides — which are usually not shared widely — of her “strategy and vision” that she presented at the board meeting on Friday.

“We want to offer you transparency into what happens at the board level as well as guidance as to where the company is going,” Mayer noted.

Kudos to that! (And send all that transparency my way, please!)

Mayer also said in the memo that she will have another all-hands meeting on October 1, where she will begin “rolling out a new system and process for goals for the company,” including annual goals that will be tracked and graded — first on a company level, then to departments, teams and, finally, individuals.

That’s a good idea, of course, because tracking such things has not been a focus of Yahoo for a while now. Not surprisingly, it is very much a practice at Google, from whence Mayer came and where she has been liberally borrowing a wide variety of management concepts.

But she has a few of her own tricks up her sleeve too, according to many sources, in terms of the strategy.

As I previously wrote, Mayer is planning on doubling down on search, as well as advertising platforms. Expect more money spent in both places, as well as a redo of Yahoo’s long-rocky search partnership with Microsoft.

Also up for a refresh is both email and also the critically important Yahoo home page. Both are being redesigned substantially to focus on consumer experience. People who have seen the mock-ups describe them both as more social and as more of a dashboard approach for users than the traditional catch-all portal.

It’s all based around learning technology that Yahoo has been working on called CORE, or Content Optimization and Relevance Engine. There will be lots of linking out and an attempt to make Yahoo more of a platform for others to develop on top of.

It’s a little Facebook-like, said several sources, but more focused on content and other products that differentiate Yahoo. Mayer has decided to back 10 key arenas, such as its powerful Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports sites, as well as its Flickr photo offering.

Still, no redesign is set in stone yet, so we’ll see what Mayer has decided on.

It’s also not clear what the e-commerce focus will be, but it is also an area that Mayer has a lot of experience in. Also a big question: What the heck is Yahoo’s non-existent mobile strategy going to be?

In addition, Mayer has already ordered the removal of some ads from both Yahoo’s email service and also its home page, cutting them back to improve the consumer experience. That’s a dicey move since Yahoo makes a big chunk of change from those ads, especially on the home page.

No matter. “Everything she is doing is about the consumer experience,” said a source. “Nothing else matters to her, even if it might matter to the bottom line.”

So far, Wall Street has been wary of Mayer until they see a strategy — the stock has been sitting in the $15 range since she arrived. That said, the high-profile exec does have more leeway from investors, and — perhaps most importantly — from the board.

In fact, at her now weekly Friday meeting for employees, a big group of the directors appeared onstage in a show of support.

A purple show, apparently — all were wearing lavender Yahoo t-shirts with “BoD” stamped on them.

Awwwwww! It’s like a mostly all-boy band! One, by the way, that might get more members soon. Sources told me that director Dan Loeb has been on the hunt to add at least one more person to the group, focusing on landing a Silicon Valley star.

When he was waging his proxy battle on Yahoo he tried to recruit both SurveyMonkey and former Yahoo David Goldberg and also well-known entrepreneur Max Levchin of PayPal and Slide.

While Goldberg joining the Yahoo board is not happening — he just joined the board of the Washington Post — getting Levchin to sign on seems more likely, especially with the focus on attracting innovative talent to the company.

Levchin is definitely that, as are many others Loeb has apparently been trying to buttonhole of late.

More on talent in our next episode.

A screenshot from Mixpanel's retention analysis

Mixpanel CEO Suhail Doshi said he aims for his products to be richer than Google Analytics and easier to grok than Omniture, while measuring modern things like engagement instead of old-school page views. Mixpanel has both Web and mobile products, and is used by companies like Path, Viddy, Socialcam, Jawbone and Airbnb.

Mixpanel’s three key product areas are: 1) segmentation — it’s extremely queriable, due to the way it built its data storage; 2) funnel analysis — it tries to explain where users came from; and 3) cohort analysis and retention — it explains what happens to users after they join. It charges based on amount of data. For example, 500,000 data points are $150.

Mixpanel is now on track to measure seven billion actions every month, up from four billion in February, Doshi said. That’s primarily based on growth in usage of existing customers’ products, but also because of new customers joining.

Along with Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Yammer CEO David Sacks joined the Series A round.

Doshi said he wanted to let it be known that he’ll use the funding to pay his first 100 employees “way above market” and to “spoil our current employees to retain them.”

Prior to this round, Max Levchin, Michael Birch and Sequoia Capital had provided Mixpanel with $1.75 million in seed funding.

Doshi had been an intern at the social app maker Slide while in college, working on the metrics team at the highly analytically oriented start-up. Former Slide CEO Max Levchin told me he was so impressed by Doshi that he called his mom to try to get him to drop out of school. It didn’t work, but when Mixpanel started, he was there to fund it, and Levchin remains actively involved with the company.

Processing mountains of data and making it understandable is hard stuff. “The goal is always to make things eyeballable,” as Levchin put it. “There’s enormous complexity behind a very simple interface.”

Mixpanel, argued Levchin, is “a very large opportunity, because ultimately it’s not a traffic-analysis opportunity — it’s a data-mining opportunity. They’re building a product that allows humans to leverage algorithms and visualization to grasp the behavioral complexity of their customers.”

When I offered the critique that perhaps Slide — one of the original giants of the Facebook platform that missed the social gaming opportunity while it was continually analyzing and optimizing — was too metrics-driven, Levchin said he thought that was fair.

But Mixpanel doesn’t have that problem, he said — because it’s not producing anything creative, it’s just providing the numbers for other companies to make their own decisions.

When I asked him a similar question, Doshi agreed. “Analytics won’t tell you what product to build,” he said. “It will give you hypotheses, but you still have to have ideas.”

Saddened by Apple’s plan for a huge dividend. Apparently, they have nothing truly capital-intensive in the product pipeline.

– Max Levchin, founder and CEO of Slide, bemoans Apple’s plan to spend just under half of its behemoth cash pile on dividends and stock buybacks

Published reports on Pando Daily had previously suggested that the company was close to landing a round in the $50 million neighborhood, with the implied valuation between $500 million and $1 billion, a range so large you could drive a tank through it. Yammer won’t say one way or another, but it’s pretty safe to say the higher number is the more accurate one.

Prior investors Charles River Ventures, Emergence Capital, Founders Fund, the Social+Capital Partnership and US Venture Partners are all participating again, as are angel investors Bill Lee, Max Levchin and football great Ronnie Lott.

Clearly, the intent here is to raise Yammer’s visibility game a bit, in the face of more visible players in the social enterprise software space — like Jive, which IPO’d late last year, and Chatter, which Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff can’t seem to stop telling people will save the world. Social enterprise software is becoming an increasingly popular and thus competitive business. Jive’s IPO gives it some visibility that doesn’t hurt when it goes to win business from new customers. Chatter tends to be less of a rival, though its strength is in places where Salesforce.com is already well-entrenched, which is the sales department.

One thing that’s going to happen is that Yammer will kick off a large advertising campaign, using print and online ads that aim to tell the world about how enterprise social networks are making companies more efficient in their collaboration.

The other thing is that the drumbeat about a Yammer IPO will start to get louder as the year goes on, though if you ask CEO David Sacks about it, as I have on more than a few occasions, he says very little, and you might be tempted to consider this massive round a case of Jive envy.

Lots of people got very rich on that IPO, and there’s absolutely no reason the same thing couldn’t happen with Yammer: Having launched some years back as a “Twitter for business,” it has evolved into more of a Facebook-like service for getting things done across a company.

Yammer has more than four million corporate users, including employees at more than 85 percent of the Fortune 500. Most of those are simply people inside a company, who signed up for Yammer and may or may not be using it on regular basis. The company has said in the past that it has a 20 percent conversion rate, which works out to about 800,000 paid seats. Part of the advertising campaign may involve trying to kick the conversion rate up a few notches.

Also? Yammer signaled in its press release that it plans on making some strategic acquisitions. This could go two ways. First, Yammer could try and roll up some smaller, lesser-known players in the business and take their customers. Or it could be eyeing some interesting “acqhire” cases, where there are some smart people running early-stage companies that could add some capabilities to Yammer’s. We saw Jive do precisely this, when it acquired OffiSync in May.

The funding comes less than a week after Yammer said it had integrated SAP into its activity streams, making it the first among the social enterprise companies to do so. Sacks has described Yammer as something of a “Switzerland of collaboration,” and has added the ability of something like 15 different enterprise software applications to talk to Yammer, some of them more important than others. That may be so, but given how hot the social enterprise business is getting by the day, it’s starting to look a lot more like the hypercompetitive Coke and Pepsi.

For someone who is still mulling things over about what to do about his more than five percent investment in Yahoo, hedge fund investor and activist shareholder Daniel Loeb has been very busy lately getting his arsenal ready.

While deciding whether to mount a proxy fight — a potentially nasty public fight with the Silicon Valley Internet giant that sources said could start much earlier than the expected February 24 filing date to make a board challenge — he’s also had at least one phone meeting with new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson in the last week to talk about the company’s future.

Sources said the talk was cordial, although the pair were not yet discussing any kind of rapprochement, which presumably could lead to board seats for Loeb.

But how far Loeb will go and how far Yahoo will give are the big open questions that are about to be answered.

The earliest nominations for directors by outsiders like Loeb can be submitted is February 24. He then has a month after that to propose a competing slate.

Starting last fall when he started accumulating Yahoo shares, Loeb had aggressively called for the ouster of Yahoo’s Chairman Roy Bostock and director and co-founder Jerry Yang. Yang stepped away from Yahoo earlier this month and Bostock just announced his upcoming departure this week.

Despite the renewed communication with Yahoo, Loeb is still acting like he might opt to fight — or at least freak out Yahoo enough to cooperate.

Among his recent activities, according to many sources:

* Attempting to assemble an alternate slate of directors — including trying to persuade high-profile entrepreneurs such as David Goldberg and Max Levchin to join his board. Loeb has been to Silicon Valley several times to stir that pot.

* Meeting with a spate of powerful tech execs, here and elsewhere, in order to gain support for his battle and search for his own preferred leaders for Yahoo. A favorite is Hulu CEO Jason Kilar.

* Working on hiring a top outside crisis communications firm to handle the expected onslaught of media mudslinging that is sure to take place.

* Buttonholing large Yahoo investors to join him and getting, sources said, more support than expected from bigger ones. That’s no surprise: Capital Research Global Investors and Capital World Investors, Yahoo’s biggest institutional shareholders, voted against the company’s board in its last proxy battle and has been much disgruntled with the latest Yahoo stumbles.

* Recently reaching out to top Yahoo execs, including both Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving and Americas head Ross Levinsohn. Irving was so spooked by Loeb’s hello-there, several sources said, that he sent an email to Yahoo’s top staff about the contact attempt, noting he did not return the call (teacher’s pet alert!).

These are, of course, classic activist tactics by Loeb, aimed at getting the changes he wants made at Yahoo by applying real and perceived pressure.

Loeb had previously criticized the company’s talks with private equity investors, saying the prices being discussed were too low, which helped scuttle those talks.

Yahoo has also tried to gird itself and to assuage other shareholders and the media, as it can hardly stand what a proxy fight will do to its already battered image.

Some recent moves to look like it is on the move include: Loudly negotiating with its Asian partners for a big payday; making significant board changes; and hiring Thompson. Next up, as I previously reported, a large-scale restructuring and the inevitable cost-saving layoffs.

Who wins — and who blinks — in this Loeb versus Yahoo face-off, though, is still to be determined.

First off: I can reassure all my readers that I will not be coming out with an opus on Yahoo’s turmoil in 2012. Nor rounding out a trilogy of books on AOL in 2013, for that matter, full of lessons learned and bridges burned.

But that’s not true for other players in Silicon Valley, including three sure-to-be prominent books coming out in the next three months.

First off, on Jan. 25, will be the work of Fortune magazine writer Adam Lashinsky, who turned his cover story on the inside workings of Apple into a book called … “Inside Apple.”

The subtitle, “How America’s Most Admired — and Secretive — Company Really Works,” promises the “secret systems, tactics and leadership strategies that allowed Steve Jobs and his company to churn out hit after hit and inspire a cult-like following for its products.”

Apparently, we’re all about to find out about concepts like the “DRI” — or assigning a Directly Responsible Individual to every task (which I call DYS, or Do Your Story, here at AllThingsD); and the Top 100, “an annual ritual in which 100 up-and-coming executives are tapped a la Skull & Bones for a secret retreat with company founder Steve Jobs.”

Sadly, not anymore on that retreat, but I am still looking forward to reading more about the management techniques of the late tech visionary.

On Valentines Day, well-known VC, entrepreneur and Start-Up Whisperer Reid Hoffman’s book with co-author Ben Casnocha also comes out, touting lessons from Silicon Valley.

Titled “The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career,” it is described as a “blueprint for thriving in your job and career in today’s challenging world of work by applying the lessons of Silicon Valley’s most innovative entrepreneurs.”

Let’s hope it’s not the dudes from Color handing out the advice!

According to the authors, “the key is to manage your career as if it were a start-up business: a living, breathing, growing start-up of you.”

If I were a start-up, I would sell virtual doughnuts. Hey Reid, gimme a badillion dollars!

Finally, on March 12, the grumpy investor Peter Thiel teams with entrepreneur Max Levchin and chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov for “The Blueprint: Reviving Innovation, Rediscovering Risk, and Rescuing the Free Market.”

It’s funny that they, and also Hoffman, are using the hopelessly analog term “blueprint,” but I like the retro feel.

No surprise, Thiel’s posse is unhappy with the pace of innovation, presumably underwhelmed by “Plants vs. Zombies” compared to the internal combustion engine.

“Challenging the notion that we are living in an age of technological progress, three of the world’s most original thinkers demonstrate that we have become a risk-averse society, hobbled by tort laws and government regulations, short-term financial thinking, and mind-numbing complacency,” the book’s description reads. “Eager to end ‘paper entrepreneurialism’ and avoid another financial meltdown, they propose that we expand research and development in breakthrough ‘disruptive technologies,’ create millions of jobs through science-based engineering and genuine innovation, shore up our crumbling infrastructure, stop squandering money on misspent ‘horizontal education,’ and restore financial discipline.”

Phew! And here I was very pleased that I can Instagram filtered pictures of my dinner last night around the world.

In any case, before the zombies arrive to steal them, get your brains ready to think big thoughts.

Being an entrepreneur is not about being in love with an idea, it’s about being in love with running a company.

Max Levchin, co-founder and former CTO of PayPal, on lessons learned as a young entrepreneur

Google confirmed the departure today.

“Max has decided to leave Slide and Google to pursue other opportunities, and we wish him the best,” said a Google spokesperson. “Most of the team from Slide will remain at Google to work on other opportunities.”

After being acquired, Slide had operated as an independent unit out of Google’s San Francisco office, maintaining existing apps like SuperPoke Pets and experimenting with new ones such as messaging app Disco and photo-sharing app Photovine, which was released only last week.

The apps, none of which were extremely popular, will be sunsetted over the next few months.

The news was announced to employees at an all-staff meeting in San Francisco this afternoon, sources said. A source said that some of the Slide team is expected to land at YouTube, which is also operated independently within Google. Slide has about 100 employees, with not too much attrition in the last year, said that source.

Although Slide as an independent start-up had not matched its lofty expectations and valuations — at as much as $500 million in a 2008 funding round — its acquisition brought Google some key assets: Social Web expertise at a time when it was dearly needed, and Levchin, who famously founded PayPal.

But that was last August. Since then, Google has entrusted its social efforts to two of its existing executives, Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, who led the team that created Google+. Levchin was left on the fringes with Slide as an autonomous subsidiary, reporting to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

In addition, at the time Slide was bought, Google CEO Larry Page had not yet reassumed leadership of the company he co-founded. In April, Page consolidated and streamlined Google’s product structure into seven distinct units. And even though the social team may have been the natural fit for Slide, the two were not integrated.

In addition to Levchin, Slide head of product Jared Fliesler also plans to leave Google, and has accepted a position with former Slide colleague Keith Rabois at payments start-up Square, sources said. (Rabois had joined Google only very briefly after Slide was bought, before jumping ship to work with Twitter co-founder and creator Jack Dorsey at Square.)

Levchin has also been an active angel investor, is chairman of the board of Yelp, and — congrats to him and his wife — is expecting his second child next month.

Newly restored CEO Larry Page wasted no time in reorganizing Google during his first week on the job, promoting seven executives–most of whom are more techie than manager types–to oversee Google’s most important divisions.

It’s definitely been a significant swing of the pendulum, one that immediately transforms the company from a cross-functional organization to an ambidextrous one and a big move that puts the Google co-founder Page at the center of the action.

But what of Google’s other co-founder, Sergey Brin? Where has he been he in all this?

No longer president of technology, the party line has Brin working strategic projects.

And that’s true, according to many sources, who say he’s been doing things such as working with entrepreneurs–such as Slide’s Max Levchin–and also on the more fast-forward computing projects at the company.

But sources also say he’s been very active behind the scenes in Google’s management streamlining.

“He’s not involved in the day-to-day so much,” said one. “But his presence is definitely felt in these executive shifts.”

“Nothing’s changed,” said another. “It’s still ‘Bosom Buddies’ up there.”

That would be the kitschy television sitcom in which two guys–a very young Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari–dressed up like ladies to live in a women-only apartment complex.

There were, of course, hijinks galore, as there have been at Google, where Page has settled into the star-making Hanks role and Brin the other guy.

And it probably always will be that way, regardless of who’s doing what.

“What do I think’s going to happen to Sergey going forward” said a former employee. “Nothing he doesn’t want to happen. Larry was always more interested in running things than Sergey and I’m pretty sure Sergey’s fine with him having all the headaches that entails.”

To give you a glimpse into that relationship, what would be better than the opening from “Bosom Buddies,” with the incredibly perfect song–”My Life” by Billy Joel:

What Google is doing today is making some careful tweaks to weave social signals into search: Most notably, bringing social search results up from the bottom of the page and parsing links shared by friends.

Google has tried to bring in new blood to help it “get social,” most prominently hiring the PayPal and Slide founder Max Levchin by acquiring Slide. Today’s social search launch was put together by another serial entrepreneur who came into the company through an acquisition: Mike Cassidy. His last company, an online travel guide called Ruba, was sold to Google last May.

Cassidy was a significant get for Google, though he’s stayed under the radar till now. Prior to Ruba, Cassidy had founded and sold three previous companies: Xfire, Direct Hit and Stylus Innovation.

While his title at Google–product management director for search–doesn’t have the word “social” in it, Cassidy noted in a phone interview on Wednesday that Ruba was a social company; it was specifically focused on recommendations by friends. In fact, he said, an early name for Ruba, which was backed by Benchmark Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, was “Friendstips.”

Back to Thursday’s launch: Google already has a “social search” product that turns up for a minority of queries in the No. 9 and 10 spots at the bottom of its results page for logged-in users who have connected their Google accounts to social services like Twitter.

Now those results will show up scattered throughout regular results. But that’s only for users who are logged in, and only when a social result is deemed relevant.

The other big change is Google will also now give higher ranking to URLs that are shared as links by friends on public sites like Twitter and Quora. Google will try to determine on a per-user and per-tweet basis if a link is relevant to a certain searcher based on which users shared it.

So, for instance, if an article was shared by a person you are friends with on multiple services, Google will think it’s probably more important to you. Or if a video has been shared by a lot of people, including your friends, there’s a good chance it will turn up high in your results on that topic.

Lastly, Google is tidying up some stuff so users can link social services to their Google accounts without displaying them for all to see on their public Google profiles.

Google’s search folks are not necessarily in alignment about the importance of social. Cassidy said Wednesday, “Recommendations from friends are some of the most powerful recommendations in the world. We’re trying to turbopower that. Google’s mission is organizing the world’s information, and this is an extension of that.”

But one of Google’s search scientists was recently quoted pooh-poohing the potential for social to change search. “Social is just one signal. It’s a tiny signal,” Amit Singhal told Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison from Search Engine Land about what social signals Bing and Google used as of December. Since then, Bing has upped its special integration with Facebook to include pages “liked” by searchers’ friends.