Weather is now one of social media’s most popular topics and a big storm certainly ups the ante for user interest.

So, if you are tracking Hurricane Sandy as it moves up the East Coast today and reaches U.S. landfall, here are some good Twitter accounts to monitor:

@weatherchannel: The Weather Channel’s updates about, you guessed it, weather.

@twc_hurricane: The Weather Channel’s all-hurricane tweets.

@wunderground: Another 24/7 weather site. Besides Sandy, did you also know there was a tsunami warning in Hawaii yesterday? (Eeek.)

@NHC_Atlantic: The National Weather Service’s National Hurricane Center’s updates, focusing on the East Coast.

@breakingstorm: Real-time severe weather updates.

@NASA: Lovely satellite photos and animations of not-so-lovely storm (like the one above).

@fema: News from the Federal Emergency Management Agency

But if you ask Wall Street, Groupon’s mobile efforts are worth practically nothing.

Groupon’s stock hit a new low this week after plummeting about 27 percent following its earnings release. Today, it’s essentially flat at $5.50 a share. At those levels, the four-year-old Chicago company is worth a piddling $3.6 billion, which is about two times the amount of cash it has on hand, or nearly half what Google offered to buy it for late last year.

With larger questions about Groupon’s growth prospects being asked, it’s hard to pay attention to any possible bright spots on the horizon.

Countless companies, from eBay and Amazon to much smaller firms, are trying hard to crack both social and mobile commerce. So, if Groupon does indeed have one of the biggest leads in mobile, what does it mean?

The falling stock price takes into consideration all of Groupon’s baggage, a load that would rack up substantial extra charges at an airline counter. The most recent concern is that the majority of the company’s growth is no longer coming from its super-lucrative coupons business, but rather from its lower-margin products business.

According to Mason, its mobile presence “makes us extraordinarily well positioned as we make this transition towards becoming the local commerce operating system.” He added that as effective as its email lists are for selling vouchers for spa services, restaurants or other activities, “the demand fulfillment opportunity is even larger than the demand generation opportunity.”

That message may as well be in code, but essentially what it means is that Groupon is well equipped to present a deal or offer when someone wants it, in contrast to its current business model, which is about selling offers in advance to generate demand for a business. To him, the opportunity is in creating “the first true global, local mobile e-commerce marketplace.”

Implementing this vision may be harder than Mason would like to admit.

For the past decade, mobile executives and others have promised that, someday, consumers will be alerted to nearby deals or specials on their phone as they walk by a coffee shop or a restaurant. For example, a free latte with a purchase of a scone, or free fries with a burger and milkshake. Perhaps, in a “mobile e-commerce marketplace,” a retailer wouldn’t necessarily push offers, but consumers could check their phone to find and maybe even purchase meals or items before walking in the door — a model that could look like Yelp plus the check-out experience all in one app.

Companies like Groupon and LivingSocial were considered clear front-runners for bringing these local commerce tools to scale, because both have a large user base and a dense enough footprint of local businesses for it to work. But LivingSocial recently backed out of providing instant offers, and I’d seriously question how many of Groupon’s customers are using the app to purchase offers in real time vs. purchasing everyday vouchers that are redeemed at some point in the future (the company does not break out those figures).

If Groupon is headed down this road of creating a “local mobile marketplace,” then it will intersect with other large organizations doing the same. EBay-owned PayPal is working with major retailers like Home Depot to roll out mobile services, including payments and other futuristic offerings. Likewise, Square made a huge move into the space last week when it announced that it will be processing all of Starbucks’ credit and debit transactions and that the java giant would invest $25 million in the start-up. Eventually, those two companies could also create a mobile network together for ordering lattes — not just paying for them.

In particular, Square’s deal with Starbucks must sting the most. Last week, Starbucks’ Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz went on a media tour with Square Founder Jack Dorsey to talk about the partnership. Remember, it was only four months ago that Schultz was on Groupon’s team before he abruptly stepped down from the board in April.

Google’s powerful algorithm helped us make sense of the Web early on; PageRank served us up the most relevant results based on links, making sure we were getting the best possible hits.

But as social networks like Twitter and Facebook have grown into Web powerhouses, producing billions of pieces of user-generated content every single day, real-time relevance has grown more difficult to achieve. Searching for the most appropriate tweet or the most up-to-the-minute Facebook share isn’t as easy as firing off a Google search — in order to work best, unfortunately, PageRank requires the passage of time and a history of back links.

Bottlenose, a start-up launching in public beta on Tuesday, aims to tackle this massive challenge with its own version of real-time social search. It is essentially described as a Google for the social Web, using public API inputs from the largest social networks out there: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, as well as photo-sharing sites like Instagram. Enter a search query, and Bottlenose scans each of the networks for the most relevant, current information, depending on trends across networks and the influence of the people sharing the content.

“Our mission,” co-founder and CEO Nova Spivack tells me, “is to organize the world’s attention,” in a cute nod to Google’s mission statement. Spivack, a veteran from the early days of the Web, leads a small team of seven engineers, backed by about $700,000 in venture funding.

And despite its lofty organizational intentions, the start-up doesn’t have an exorbitant amount of overhead. Bottlenose’s “Stream OS” engine is lightweight, written in JavaScript and HTML5, and leverages a crowd-computing architecture. Bottlenose HQ houses only 12 servers — most of the work happens on your computer, inside your browser.

After searching, users have an array of display panels in which they can view search results, including Sonar — a constellation-like view of the search term and related ones — a newspaper view, and the Pinterest-like Pictures pane, which delivers results from photo-based social networks. And if you’ve created an account, you can save your searches on the dashboard, coming back to them to see what the latest is on a given subject.

Biggest use case? It’s likely most relevant to marketers and social strategists who want to keep an eye on the pulse of whatever their clients follow. Without the search algorithm, the dashboard is especially close to a HootSuite-like analytics product. The free version is advertising-based — like Google! — while the upgraded paid versions give better access to the Twitter firehose, along with additional feature upgrades.

Bottlenose has its work cut out for it, especially with giants like Google and Microsoft integrating social into their existing search engines (with Search Plus Your World and Bing’s Facebook and Foursquare integration, respectively). But, as Spivack argues, Google’s struggles with other social networks means you only get Google+ results returned in SPYW, and Bing’s social integration isn’t comprehensive. Bottlenose spans multiple social networks while also including RSS feeds and photo-sharing networks, often overlooked by Google and Bing.

The free public beta is now open to all, at Bottlenose.com.

Which is why none of them will talk about it to the press. They’re terrified that if they do, Facebook will kick them out of the club — which is what many people in ad tech believe has already happened to two of them.

The story I’m hearing, from people who aren’t supposed to tell me about it: After news of the Facebook Exchange leaked to the press last week, Facebook came clean and announced its list of preliminary partners (TellApart, Triggit, Turn, DataXu, MediaMath, AppNexus, The Trade Desk and AdRoll). And then it told all of them not to talk to the press, or they’d be cut off.

Who got the boot? Well, nailing that one down is a bit tricky, since no one’s supposed to talk about it. And if those two companies want back into the club, they’re certainly not going to say anything.

But if you had to bet, the most likely wager would be on DataXu and MediaMath. That’s because the CEOs of both companies published bylined pieces about Facebook Exchange in Forbes and AdAge, respectively, within a couple of days of the initial announcement.

Hard to see how there’s anything in either piece that Facebook would find objectionable, since they’re both (unsurprisingly) overwhelmingly positive about the program.

But if Facebook’s point is that the only company talking about Facebook’s ad program should be Facebook, then you could guess that Facebook wouldn’t be happy about either piece.

And if you’re looking for Facebook to clear this up, then I would like to offer you some shares in the upcoming Brooklyn Bridge IPO.

DataXu and MediaMath “are still on our list of partners,” says Facebook rep Brandon McCormick, via email. “We aren’t commenting on timing for any specific partners.”

What does this all mean? Lots and lots more sharing, and probably a good amount of oversharing, that’s what.

It’s infinitely easier to consume something than to make an active decision to share it with other people. Facebook’s new real-time “ticker” stream of everything users read, watch and listen to (and also tag, friend and like) could turn every act of online consumption into something that’s now shared with friends.

Now Facebook users won’t necessarily have to endorse or recommend something by liking it, or exert themselves to come up with a witty comment. They can just keep reading, watching and listening as they always have.

Or they can head over to Facebook, see what their friends are doing at that moment, and join right in.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been positing since at least 2008 that every year Internet users share twice as much information as the year before.

He’s about to give this so-called “Zuckerberg’s Law” a big push.

It’s not hard to imagine Facebook sharing more than doubling after the f8 launches. Millions of tiny little actions are going to move from implicit to explicit. You can start to see why Facebook enabled its “ticker” news feed earlier this week (that’s the dizzying real-time stream that many users have been complaining about). There’s going to be a ton of information flying by.

Of course, many people no longer trust Facebook and its endless revisions and privacy incursions. It seems inevitable that people will feel exposed and exploited when everything they read, watch or listen to is shared.

So we’ll all be watching to see how Facebook and its partners control the privacy settings on this one. At the very least, there needs to be a very prominent and easy-to-use incognito mode.

But at the same time, what Facebook is doing isn’t new — it’s just turbocharging passive sharing with its social network. For instance, Last.fm, which “scrobbles” and shares users’ music listening item by item, was founded in 2002.

Later, in 2009, the Huffington Post built one of the most involved Facebook Connect implementations to date, in which participating users share every single article they read on the news site through Facebook. This functionality is basically what Facebook is going to be enabling and pushing to a mass of content sites now.

(In fact, Facebook had already built a version of this real-time automated sharing tool for “canvas” apps that run within Facebook, having launched a “games ticker” in August.)

Another thing to look for Thursday is how Facebook handles the contextualization of this flooding stream, since Web users consume mountains of content these days. Every once in a while I look at my own browser history and I’m shocked at how many pages I visited in the span of a few minutes.

According to sources, Facebook has built some interesting new interfaces around chronological views, consumption histories and item grouping.

We’ll make sure to look for that, and we’ll also be listening for whether Facebook addresses how advertisers and sponsored stories fit into the ticker.

On that note, team AllThingsD will be at f8 Thursday (tune in at 10 am PT here and/or to the Facebook live video stream) and will provide coverage and analysis throughout the day to overshare our content, too.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Related posts

• The Big Picture of Facebook f8: Prepare for the Oversharing Explosion
• Facebook’s f8 2011: This Is Your Life
• Big Media Hands Over Its Locks and Keys to Facebook
• What Facebook Has Announced So Far: The Timeline — And Verbs
• Get Ready, Facebook Apps Will Ask for Your Permission Only Once
• Facebook Gets in the App Discovery Game with “Graph Rank”
• Live: Facebook Answers Some Questions About its New Social Order

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

No rest for the weary D conference producers!

Which would be Walt Mossberg and me, since we are now hard at work — after a very successful ninth D: All Things Digital — on our newest event: AsiaD.

An international confab — this one will be held October 19 to 21 in Hong Kong — is a big deal for us and we’re making sure it is up to snuff for our audience there.

That begins with the speakers, which we will start announcing now and continue to as we add them onto the roster. As we have said before, we’re going for a lineup of both Asian and U.S. speakers, as well as demos from the region, with a focus on the critical emerging market.

That’s why with smartphones in ascendance globally, having Andy Rubin, who runs Google’s Android efforts, is a no-brainer. The longtime mobile exec is at the top of an aggressive push by the Silicon Valley Internet giant to dominate the important sector across the world.

Speaking of domination, we are asking Alibaba Group’s Jack Ma onstage to talk more about his efforts to make the company a powerhouse in China and elsewhere. His recent bare-knuckled fight with Yahoo over Alipay, as he has built a wide-ranging Internet giant, should make for an interesting interview.

Expect a deep dive into what makes the future Web work with Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey, who is someone breaking new ground as he tears down old digital paradigms. With Twitter, Dorsey redefined the real-time world and how the virtual one communicates; with Square, he is upending the payments arena, even as others try to upend him.

Nvidia is not only a pioneer of graphics chips, but now its processors are widely used in the latest mobile devices. That’s why its founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has a lot to say about the future of the fastest-growing sector of computing, from smartphones to tablets and whatever’s next.

And Asus Chairman Jonney Shih has presided over the Taiwanese tech giant since the early 1990s. Most recently, the company pioneered the netbook market and is now plunging deeply into the tablet business, making Shih perfect to discuss these key issues in Asia and around the world.

As usual with D, there will be more big names to come — and you can find out more here.

According to sources close to the situation, Wal-Mart Stores paid just over $300 million in cash for Kosmix.

The six-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based company–which has built a social media platform that organizes content by topic–has raised $55 million from a large group of Silicon Valley venture firms.

The acquisition by the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant was announced earlier today.

Wal-Mart did not disclose terms of the deal, which is focused on building out its social and mobile e-commerce offerings.

The price for Kosmix is a pricey one to do so, but traditional retailers need to jump into the digital market now dominated by app-happy, smartphone-wielding customers.

Kosmix will join the newly formed @WalmartLabs, the company said.

Kosmix was founded by the team that sold pioneering e-commerce company Junglee to Amazon in 1998.

After that, Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman raised $55 million in funding from Time Warner Investments, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DAG Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, and angel investors Jon Miller and Ed Zander.

As eMoney’s Tricia Duryee wrote earlier today:

The company may be best known for powering TweetBeat, which it defines as a real-time social media filter for live events. It also operates Kosmix.com, where people go to discover social content by topic, and it operates RightHealth, which it claims to be one of the top three health and medical information sites by reach.

One interesting aspect of the deal: Accel’s senior partner Jim Breyer–who was not the principal VC in the Kosmix investment–is on the board of Wal-Mart. Presumably, he recused himself from the decision.

Late last month, BoomTown posted about a huge venture funding effort by the high-profile and even more highly designed social media reading app for the Apple iPad, Flipboard.

Today, its co-founder and CEO Mike McCue confirmed the $50 million round at an eye-popping $200 million valuation, in a wide-ranging interview at the start-up’s Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“We’re obviously thrilled, because we think it confirms our focus that people want a beautifully designed way to interact with content and to share it,” he said. “And there is a lot more to come–on a scale of one to 10, we’re just at a two or three.”

The bulk of the new second round of funding–Flipboard had previously raised $10.5 million–came from New York-based Insight Venture Partners.

Insight’s Jerry Murdock said in an interview that he was excited about the idea of “social endorsement” that Flipboard was pioneering.

“We back great entrepreneurs and Flipboard is that and also in an obviously unique position to solve a problem of media consumption in the digital age,” he said. “The sky is the limit. Or more precisely it is the best environment to consume curated real-time content for Twitter and Facebook, because of the user experience and social endorsement integration with the content.”

Insight is also an investor in Twitter.

Also stepping up in the new Flipboard round is Comcast’s venture arm, as well as previous investors, including Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Twitter co-founder and product guru Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, the ubiquitous Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

“From a Comcast perspective, we’re intrigued with Mike and what he’s doing with content aggregation,” said Amy Banse, Comcast Interactive Capital’s new head. “We think we can learn from him and he from us.”

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard launched to much attention in July.

The elegant Flipboard–which McCue recently told me in an onstage interview at the South by Southwest conference in Austin had zero revenues thus far–has changed the game on the consumption of social media.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In its current offering, there are pull-quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of linked-out content. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on a social networking or microblogging site.

McCue said the new giant pile of cash will be used to increase its 32-person staff to about 50, international expansion, small acquisitions and more product development on more platforms.

The next in the arena will be the iPhone version of Flipboard, said McCue, followed by one for the Google Android mobile operating system eventually.

Left unsaid, of course, was the need for funding to fight the likelihood of increased competition in the hot space for delivering both professional and social content to consumers on a wide range of devices.

Rivals are varied, such as Silicon Valley’s most adorable news reader start-up Pulse and also Zite, a news reader which was recently sued for copyright infringement by a group of major publishers.

There are bigger potential players, such as Google, which is trying to find various ways to move into the social space.

In fact, said several sources, Google and others have made acquisition approaches to Flipboard, which has instead opted for raising more funding and staying independent for now.

McCue declined to talk about that, but did note that he is not surprised by publisher interest, especially of the worried and wary kind, in the arena.

“Anyone not respectful of others’ content is going to get in that kind of trouble,” he said, noting Flipboard has struck deals with 17 big publishers so far, including this morning’s announcement about a partnership with Oprah Winfrey’s and Discovery’s OWN cable network. “There is not one half to this equation.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

McCue said advertising will be the key to Flipboard’s business plan in the future, although it’s not clear if the company will ever sell advertising itself.

Rather, it will partner with publishers seeking better distribution in the explosive tablet and smartphone market, where Flipboard has been gaining traction quickly.

But until that is sorted out, there is now $50 million more in the Flipboard kitty to figure it all out.

“With this funding, we can grow at the right pace and have a lot of flexibility to get the product right,” said McCue. “And, that’s the most important thing.”

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.

The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below.

Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”

Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.

“The Zite application is plainly unlawful,” said the letter to Zite CEO Ali Davar, noting all kinds of copyright violations.

In a phone interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Davar said Zite would comply with the letter by shifting the content from its “reading” mode to a Web one, which points to publisher sites.

“It’s a bummer that they did this, but we expected it,” he said.

In a comment he posted below, Davar also wrote:

“Zite’s goal is to work with publishers, not to be antagonistic. The few publishers that have contacted us regarding the reading mode view we have complied with their requests and simply switched over to web view. We’re talking to publishers right now to find a win-win for them monetarily and to at the same time preserve the great user experience.”

For now, it’s lose-lose, and the letter is a dramatic shot across the bow of all the many news readers now hitting the market in the wake of the popularity of the Apple iPad tablet.

The social media-focused Flipboard and the news-oriented Pulse are two others, both of which have claimed they are working with publishers.

But Pulse wrangled with the New York Times over misuse of its RSS feeds and copyright issues, which has since been settled.

Zite showed up earlier this month, a product of a machine-learning technology start-up called Worio, which is based in Vancouver, Canada.

The aggregator of personalized content, which has $4 million in angel funding, gets its cues from a user’s interests.

Zite’s technology originated at research at the University of British Columbia several years ago.

In an interview with NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes a few weeks ago, Davar seemed sanguine about publishers.

Wrote Gannes:

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Flipboard itself is likely to add more personalization features; the company bought real-time social discovery technology from Ellerdale and has yet to implement much of it.

Vancouver-based Zite is well-funded, with $4 million from angels and Canadian grants, but it doesn’t have business relationships with publishers. The app lays out pictures and articles, stripping out everything else, including ads. Davar said he doubted this would be a problem. “It would be shortsighted for publishers to think of Zite as us versus them,” he said.

Short-sighted maybe, but legally lethal definitely, as you can see by this cease-and-desist letter, as well as a video from Zite on how its app works:

Letter to Zite _03 30 11_ –

Zite: Personalized Magazine for iPad from zite.com on Vimeo.

(Full disclosure: New Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

Yesterday, BoomTown had a cheap Chinese lunch and a chit-chat with Groupon CEO Andrew Mason in Silicon Valley–but not about what most people want to talk to him about.

That would be the departure of the Chicago-based social buying site’s President and COO Rob Solomon and who is on the very short list of candidates the hot start-up will replace him with.

Oh, I tried to get him to ‘fess up about all that, but Mason would not bite, except on his Kung Pao Chicken.

Instead, all he wanted to talk about and show off is Groupon’s latest real-time deal innovation, which it is calling Groupon Now–and which Mason has been touting a lot of late.

“It’s deals in a time window linked to a location,” said Mason. “Until now, no one has had the assets to fix a merchant problem that was viciously subject to a chicken-and-egg situation.”

By that metaphor, Mason means real-time deals by location, rather than via emails, doled out and paid for immediately, taking advantage of perishable retail inventory.

And, of course, using the burgeoning smartphone phenom via an app with only two buttons:

“I’m Hungry” and “I’m Bored.”

Which pretty much covers most of humanity’s main complaints.

The company is rolling Groupon Now out to thousands of merchants in early April, first in Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

“Even the most popular restaurants and businesses are never completely full,” said Mason. “Groupon Now can help them even out the flow of customers.”

It’s this push and pull that Mason hopes will move “Groupon 1.0″ to the next level.

More importantly, Groupon Now is the start-up’s attempt to thwart rivals hot on its heels, as well as grow into the gazillion-dollar valuations being bandied about for its possible IPO.

But all of those competitors have moved into the real-time space too, from LivingSocial Instant to offerings from OpenTable, SCVNGR to Yelp to Foursquare. And, of course, there are also big efforts coming from both Facebook and Google, whose $6 billion offer Groupon turned down.

Now, no surprise, everyone is second-guessing that decision, putting a lot of pressure on both Groupon and, especially, Mason.

Who–despite all the hype and attention he has received–still has that prenaturally calm Midwestern affect.

“It is more important that we are the ones bringing relevant deals to consumers from our merchants,” he said. “That is all that matters.”

That’s the upshot of a new blog post from the search giant, summarizing the state of the display ad market, and specifically a growing interest into “real-time bidding” for display ads.

Google has been focused on real time–which lets buyers and sellers match up specific pieces of ad inventory, at great volume and speed–for a couple of years now. That’s why it relaunched DoubleClick as the AdX exchange, which specializes in RTB, in 2009. And that’s why it bought Invite Media, which helps buyers use RTB, last June.

All of that prep won’t help Google unless ad buyers actually embrace the technology, but Google says that’s coming. Here’s a sample from Google’s post, which cites a survey of ad buyers that Google and Digiday conducted in the last few weeks (RTB = “real time bidding”):

• 88% of buyers plan to buy via RTB in 2011, up from 75% last year.
• 47% of media buyers say that the benefits or RTB will increase their overall digital advertising budget this year (16% said it would not, 37% were unsure).
• Spending on RTB is quickly moving out of the “test budget” range: 79% of buyers estimate that more than 10% of their digital display budgets will go to RTB in 2011. 33% estimate that 50% or more of their digital display budget will go to RTB. And 7% estimate 90-100% of their digital display budget will go to RTB.

Worth noting that while Google is slapping itself on the back for its foresight to get into real time, these numbers should also hearten the entire crop of ad tech start-ups focused on real time (and their investors, who have been plowing serious money into the field).

And another aside: While Google and other real time proponents play up the efficiencies the technology creates, lots of publishers I talk to are wary about real time, because they assume that “efficient” equals “less money spent.”

Google’s retort: No way! Or, more specifically: Yes, some inventory may get cheaper–but some may get more expensive, as buyers find exactly what they want and pay up for it. And overall, the spend is going up for real time right now: It says its publishers that use real time are seeing revenues jump 188 percent compared to the money they make using traditional ad networks.

To me, that sounds a lot like the pitch that ad networks themselves have made (“We’ll turn your unsold inventory into cash”). And now lots of publishers are uneasy about the effect that ad networks have had on their pricing power. But if Google’s right, they’re going to adopt real-time pricing sooner than later.

Many of the major location-based social networks launched in early 2009, including Latitude. But Latitude was different: Instead of asking users to manually check in, it continuously displayed their locations on a map in real time. The specificity of that information meant Latitude was primarily used for location-sharing with close friends and family.

Due in part to Google’s heft, the service is relatively popular; now available on all the big smartphone platforms, it has 10 million users who participate each month, compared with six million registered users for Foursquare.

Still, in the past year, just about every local-social pundit and competitor has announced a desire to go “beyond the check-in.” In that context, Latitude’s move to catch up seems oddly timed.

Ken Norton, senior PM for Latitude, justified today’s change by saying Latitude users have been asking for check-ins. Plus (and this is no small thing), Google is associating check-ins with its Google Places project, which means Latitude now has a business model: Connecting its users to local merchants.

Google is not facilitating Latitude-specific deals yet (as companies like Facebook and Foursquare already do), but Norton said there’s nothing stopping merchants from giving a discount to people who check in frequently.

What’s different about Latitude’s version of check-ins? There are a few innovative tweaks that some users may prefer. Google will automatically detect when users are stationary in a place it considers a business, and send them a notification asking if they want to check in.

Also, (with user permission) Latitude supports automatic check-ins for common venues, as well as supporting “checking out” of a place when the users’ location indicates they’ve left the building.

However, users cannot add locations; so, for instance, they can’t check into their homes (unless their homes are already businesses with Place pages).

And while Latitude is hopping on the trend, how about a sprinkle of gamification! Based on their participation, users can qualify to be a “Regular,” “VIP” or “Guru” of a specific establishment. However, there is no leaderboard or public acknowledgment of such users, yet.

Users can publish their locations to their public-facing Google Profile, if they want to share beyond their Latitude friend network. It’s expected that Google will increasingly include these public profiles in new social product launches.

The capability to check in on Latitude is only available on Android to start (through the new Google Maps 5.1 app), but should be coming to the BlackBerry, Symbian and iPhone, said Norton.

Asked whether creating a real-time search engine is a viable start-up business, Campbell answered quickly: “No.” His company’s pivot is the latest of multiple efforts in the space; last year, OneRiot gave up its search business to pursue real-time advertising, and Ellerdale sold to Flipboard to help add relevance analysis to its social magazine app.

The exit of Collecta and its competitors from real-time search is remarkable given they had swarmed to the space only a couple of years ago.

In 2009, many entrepreneurs and their investors bet that real-time search was the next frontier, recognizing that search engines were having trouble handling the onslaught of status updates and fresh information streaming onto the Web from Twitter and elsewhere.

Given the companies’ emphasis on speed, perhaps it’s not surprising that they failed and moved on so quickly.

Campbell would not say how many employees Collecta had laid off as part of the change, but he maintained the company has plenty of money in the bank from the $4.7 million it raised last spring from Dace Ventures and True Ventures. Mashable reported earlier today in its story about the Collecta changes that co-founder Jack Moffitt is no longer with the company.

Campbell said Collecta will apply its “very serious technology” to other real-time projects, but it will not become a real-time ad engine like OneRiot.

Who’s left in real-time search? There are still a few, including Wowd and Topsy.

Topsy’s tweet search is much more comprehensive than Twitter’s own, and it serves half a billion queries per month, mostly through its API, Topsy co-founder Rishab Aiyer Ghosh told NetworkEffect via email today. And while Google and Bing also index tweets (and Bing has an extensive relationship with Facebook), they have not fully incorporated social updates into their core search engines.

“With TweetMeme, CrowdEye and Collecta all pivoting out of it, Topsy may be the only real-time/social search engine left,” Ghosh said. He maintained that there’s still an opportunity to build an independent real-time search engine “done right,” despite the competition dropping like flies. Topsy has raised $15 million in funding from investors including BlueRun Ventures, Ignition Partners and the Founders Fund.

Earlier this week, I motored the Mini down to the Googleplex in Silicon Valley to visit with entrepreneur Shan Sinha.

He headed the start-up DocVerse, which was acquired by the search giant in March for a reported $25 million to $30 million.

Since then, Sinha has been ferreting away on scaling up DocVerse’s product, which allows users of Microsoft Office documents to collaborate in real-time on the Web.

Its new name: Google Cloud Connect.

About 4,000 companies quickly signed up to be early testers in the preview program, and Google said it had thousands of requests to be notified when it becomes available, which will be in a few weeks.

DocVerse was founded in 2008 by Sinha and Alex DeNeui, who both used to work at Microsoft. It raised only $1.3 million in venture funding from Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal and Naval Ravikant.

Google’s acquisition of it was yet another shot across Microsoft’s software bow, along with a range of mashups of cloud computing and productivity applications.

For example, Google has been pushing its own cloud-based Google Docs to compete against the Office juggernaut.

For its part, Microsoft has committed itself to moving its hugely popular productivity suite–which includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel–into the cloud, in order to protect its software hegemony.

Why? Simultaneous group-editing and collaboration online is the future of Office.

Clearly, the race for productivity applications is in the cloud.

So–along with Cloud Connect –Sinha has been put in charge of deploying a $50 a person package of them, including Sites, Gmail, Docs, Calendar and Video, to millions of business users.

Here is Sinha talking about all of that and more in the video interview I did with him:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110114/docverse-now-google-cloud-connect-head-shan-sinha-talks-about-biz-apps/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110104/chartbeat-says-the-rise-of-the-machines-wont-be-so-bad-if-youre-a-cyborg/ http://allthingsd.com/20110104/chartbeat-says-the-rise-of-the-machines-wont-be-so-bad-if-youre-a-cyborg/#comments Tue, 04 Jan 2011 15:46:17 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=27571 Tony Haile has a vision of the future, and it involves turning people like me into cyborgs.

And Haile thinks this is a good thing! It’s part of his pitch for Chartbeat, a Web analytics start-up: He says that very soon “content producers” like yours truly are going to be faced with the choice of becoming robots–that is, replaced with algorithms and machines–or sticking around and injecting ourselves with big helpings of technology and data.

Chartbeat is supposed to help people like me with the cyborg route, by providing real-time information about the way the stuff I make performs on the Web: How many people are looking at a given story, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying, etc.

Until now, most of Chartbeat’s 3,000 customers have handed that information over to managers and editors. But now Haile is rolling out Newsbeat, a tweaked version of the service that’s supposed to be delivered directly to rank-and-file stuff-makers like me. He’s been working with Web publishers like Gawker Media, Fast Company and Time Warner’s Time Inc. to get the rollout ready.

I’m not entirely opposed to my coming transformation, by the way: Unlike some of my peers–and these tend to be older peers–I like the idea of knowing more about the way people consume the stuff I make.

And it’s inevitable, anyway. On the Web, it’s impossible not to be exposed to performance data. The only question is what kind of data, and how much.

But still. I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do with all of this data. The version of Chartbeat that All Things D already uses gives me plenty of personalized information about my stories, and it’s narcotizing to sit around and watch my numbers flick up and down all day.

And if I were running a very big Web site, like, say, the Wall Street Journal, which also uses Chartbeat (and, like this site, is owned by News Corp.), I could put some of that data to work. I could figure out which stories I might want to highlight on the homepage, and try to analyze why others aren’t performing as well as they could, etc.

But from my worm’s-eye view, I don’t know what I’m really supposed to make of my Chartbeat report. Chartbeat tells me that my scooplet this morning on Rock Band is doing well, which is gratifying. But I could also get that information, with a longer delay, via services like Adobe’s Omniture or Google Analytics.

And in any case, then what? That information can’t help me make more scoops, or more interesting stories. And in the end, I’m pretty sure that’s the only way I can I do a better job.

Haile disagrees, of course. So let’s let him make his own case in this interview, which we conducted in the semi-busy hallway outside his office yesterday.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110104/chartbeat-says-the-rise-of-the-machines-wont-be-so-bad-if-youre-a-cyborg/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110104/holy-start-up-pileup-social-networking-gets-professional/ http://allthingsd.com/20110104/holy-start-up-pileup-social-networking-gets-professional/#comments Tue, 04 Jan 2011 14:30:09 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=1931 The same variety of apple has apparently been falling from trees all over Silicon Valley, hitting Web entrepreneurs on the head and inspiring them to create better ways to connect personal and professional social networks.

Beyond the directory-style LinkedIn, that could mean facilitating professional profiles on social sites, pushing job postings through networks, introducing contacts, soliciting referrals and sharing resources.

Part of the reason this idea has been so resonant with Web entrepreneurs–and investors too–is the trouble they’re having with hiring qualified people to work at their own companies.

(Unlike in other parts of the world right now, unemployment rates are not as much of a problem among techies.)

Assetmap, a pre-launch San Francisco-based start-up, for example, wants to help companies and nonprofits understand what assets they may have at their disposal through their networks.

These connections already exist, but they’re often unexploited, according to Assetmap co-founder Nathaniel Whittemore, who let me in on a bit of what he’s doing.

Whittemore told NetworkEffect the failings of sites like LinkedIn include “forcing a distinction between personal and professional that is becoming less and less obvious and failing to recognize that the one-to-one friend-based social graph isn’t the only graph that has value for business.”

Whittemore and co-founder Danny Moldovan hail from the world of social entrepreneurship. Former Northwestern classmates, they had both been at the fast-growing activism platform Change.org.

They have teamed with Jayson Vantuyl, co-founder of Engine Yard, the Ruby on Rails hosting service. At the moment, they are funded by friends and family while looking for outside capital, and plan to launch this spring.

There are many early companies in this space with fancier pedigrees.

Top Prospect, a social recruiting site that rewards users with $10,000 or more for helping friends find jobs, was funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, Ron Conway, David Goldberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Rick Thompson, Chamath Palihapitiya and other angels.

Also based in San Francisco, Top Prospect was founded by Rotem Perelmuter, who formerly sold an online radio service to MTV Networks during the dot-com boom (and more recently ran a hedge fund). The site is currently in open beta.

Delicious founder Joshua Schachter’s Tasty Labs, which has gotten money from Union Square Ventures, hasn’t said much about what it is doing, but is also working on something similar to the idea of an asset map.

Elsewhere, BranchOut, which bills itself as offering “your professional profile on Facebook,” raised $6 million from Accel Partners, Floodgate, Norwest Venture Partners and many angels.

And Hashable, a network for introductions, raised $4 million, also from Union Square Ventures.

And Namesake, from Ad.ly and Newroo co-founders Brian Norgard and Daniel Gould, offers a pretty site for “opportunity routing,” with features such as a real-time stream and chat.

It goes on–other young start-ups in the space include Sumazi, Pursuit, Identified and Gild. (You knew this would happen: Gild turns the social recruiting concept into an online game.)

It wouldn’t really make sense to combine social and professional networks by starting from scratch, so these sites are built on top of existing networks like LinkedIn and particularly Facebook. If you want to try them out, be prepared to cough up those Facebook Connect credentials a whole bunch of times.

(Cute explainer graphics above from Assetmap, Top Prospect and Identified, respectively.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110104/holy-start-up-pileup-social-networking-gets-professional/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20101116/gogobot-ceo-travis-katz-talks-about-beta-launch-of-social-travel-site/ http://allthingsd.com/20101116/gogobot-ceo-travis-katz-talks-about-beta-launch-of-social-travel-site/#comments Tue, 16 Nov 2010 16:00:12 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=37340

Last week, BoomTown sat down with former Myspace exec Travis Katz to talk about the private beta launch of his new start-up, Gogobot.

No, it’s not a robot from Google–it’s a social travel site, which uses friends to enhance the travel-planning experience.

The name means nothing really except that it sounded energetic and adventurous to Katz, with a bit of tech mixed in.

While in a bit of a stealth mode, Gogobot has been a bit of an open secret in Silicon Valley.

Katz and CTO Ori Zaltzman–most recently the chief architect of Yahoo BOSS–started the company earlier this year with a small team.

It garnered $4 million in venture funding from Battery Ventures, Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and angel investors Chris DeWolfe, Keith Rabois and Oren Ze’ev.

Gogobot rides on top of social networking behemoths such as Facebook and Twitter.

Said Gogogot in its press release:

“Unlike other travel sites, Gogobot connects users with friends and people like them for travel advice and links the advice they give in real-time with maps, pictures, pricing and descriptions.”

Essentially, it feels like Facebook for trips, but with really good images.

Currently, Gogobot links users to hotels and other information, but eventually its business plan is to complete reservations and garner lead generation revenues.

We’ll see how it goes, but the online travel business, despite being huge among consumers, certainly could use some updating and organization–and some innovation.

Here’s the video interview I did last week with Katz–who ran international operations for Myspace–talking about where Gogobot is traveling to:

And here are a pair of screenshots for the service (click on the images to make them larger):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101116/gogobot-ceo-travis-katz-talks-about-beta-launch-of-social-travel-site/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101108/sb-nation-raises-10-5-million-in-khosla-ventures-led-series-c-round/ http://allthingsd.com/20101108/sb-nation-raises-10-5-million-in-khosla-ventures-led-series-c-round/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 08:02:36 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36898

SB Nation, the Washington, D.C.-based sports blog and news start-up, has just completed a $10.5 million Series C round, which is being led by Khosla Ventures, according to sources.

SB Nation has already raised about $13 million in total venture funding from Accel Partners, Allen & Company and Comcast Interactive Capital, as well as from angel investors such as Ted Leonsis and others in Silicon Valley.

Accel and Comcast will also be participating in the new funding, sources said.

People familiar with the situation said SB Nation’s post-investment valuation, after its most recent round last summer, was about $30 million, making the new one at least double–if not triple–that.

The big new investment is predicated on the boom in traffic to sports blogs, such as SB Nation, which recently launched 21 regional sports sites.

With a mix of professional and user-generated content aimed at engaging passionate fans, SB Nation now has 290 topical sites and real-time content–all with a big dollop of social tools to spur online conversations and engagement.

While it has been around since 2003, founded by Daily Kos’s Markos Moulitsas and others, the start-up has been aiming more recently, under the leadership of former AOL exec Jim Bankoff, at the sweet spot of local sports coverage in newspapers.

The new funds will be used to fuel growth, enabling more investment in SB Nation’s technology platform, its bloggers, mobile, local, advertising sales and a few relevant acquisitions.

Here is a video interview BoomTown did in May with Bankoff about where SB Nation was headed:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101108/sb-nation-raises-10-5-million-in-khosla-ventures-led-series-c-round/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20101026/the-my-fill-in-the-space-reset-is-here-as-social-network-morphs-into-entertainment-hub/ http://allthingsd.com/20101026/the-my-fill-in-the-space-reset-is-here-as-social-network-morphs-into-entertainment-hub/#comments Wed, 27 Oct 2010 05:56:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36209

Empty bracket or no empty bracket: Will it work?

That’s pretty much the big question at News Corp. tonight, as its much beleaguered social networking site, Myspace, rolls out a new beta version aimed at shifting its fortunes.

And how will it do that? By moving dramatically away from its roots as a social networking site–and far, far away from powerhouse Facebook–and becoming a “social entertainment” hub aimed directly at the Gen Y audience.

That means heavy emphasis on the sharing and discovery of music, television, movies, games, videos and photos from within Myspace and without. There is also an upcoming new mobile site and better apps for smartphones and tablets.

And it also includes a new logo that features “my” with an actual fill-in-the-space bracket after it.

By the way, it’s now “Myspace”–dropped second cap–rather than the old “MySpace,” and the new color palette is black, not blue.

It is a bold, if risky, move, which could result in a dramatic decline of users or–despite the grim reality of second acts on the Internet–reset Myspace to begin a new cycle of growth.

For sure, as you can see from the screenshots below, it is a cleaner, hipper and much more attractive offering, with a tile format, ridding Myspace of its longtime cheap and noisy feel.

You can still toggle to a list or video view of the homepage.

Still, Myspace continues with the irksome moving parts, such as continually updating live notifications and real-time rolling number tickers that move constantly as people share various content.

It sort of reminds me of that national-debt clock in Times Square in Manhattan, but not as riveting.

Amid the better ability for bands and artists to more easily attract fans and promote themselves on Myspace, regular users can also become social arbiters–called “curators”–by active and useful sharing of their tastes.

And, perhaps most important of all, you can bring in a lot of outside sources, broadcast out to Facebook and have a two-way feed with Twitter.

Behind the scenes, Myspace has also done a major overhaul of its tech structure, which has been much maligned. In fact, it was once described to me as being made of “bubblegum and baling wire.”

Here’s an appalling stat, for example: There have been 117 different Myspace logos created for the service.

We’ll see how it goes, but here are videos Myspace did about the launch, including a logo-ganza:

And here are more screenshots than you ever would want (click on the images to make them larger):

Finally, here is the official press release:

MEET THE NEW MYSPACE

Myspace Debuts New Brand, Beta Website and Suite of Products That Focus on Social Entertainment for Gen Y

Beverly Hills, October 27, 2010 – Today Myspace announced a new brand, beta website and a suite of products that together redefine the company as a social entertainment destination for Gen Y. Myspace is creating a rich, highly personalized experience for people to discover content and connect with other fans who share similar interests. The entertainment experience will span music, celebrities, movies, television and games and will be available through multiple platforms, including online, mobile devices and offline events.

“This marks the beginning of an exciting turning point for Myspace. Our new strategy expands on Myspace’s existing strengths–a deep understanding of social, a wealth of entertainment content and the ability to surface emerging cultural trends in real time through our users,” said Mike Jones, CEO of Myspace. “Myspace is unique in that it is powered by the passions of our users, who program the site by expressing interests, sharing tastes and knowledge around particular topics, and scouting out up-and-coming subcultures. This is the just the first step and there will be many more features, programs and improvements to come.:

Specifically, Myspace will provide people with the ability to:

• Discover and engage with Myspace’s broad array of programming, including originals, exclusives and content from around the Web.
• Express, collect, and display their creations and interests on their profiles and through sharing tools.
• Connect to other fans with similar tastes.

Myspace will also focus on promoting curators–a subset of its audience whose reputation and knowledge around particular entertainment topics and emerging cultural trends make them uniquely influential–by supporting them with the resources, tools and a platform to expand their reach within the Myspace community.

Newly Designed Beta Site

Myspace has completely rebuilt its website, with a new visual identity and product features that put content center stage. From the color palette to the way the site is organized to the improved navigation, everything has been redesigned to help people easily find relevant content.

The redesigned Myspace welcome page showcases fresh content as it bubbles up across the beta site in real time. Additionally, once a user logs in to Myspace, the page will instantly populate with content based on the individual’s interests, creating a unique, contextually relevant discovery experience.

Registered users can now also toggle between three different views of the homepage, each specifically designed to display their stream in the way that resonates most. These include:

• List view: Traditional view
• Grid view: A magazine-like format
• Play view: A video format that allows users to watch, forward and resize their updates to full screen

To complement the online experience, Myspace will soon release a mobile version of the beta site, accessible on any mobile browser. A new Myspace app for iPhone and Android devices will follow later this year.

New Products

Myspace has released a suite of initial features that empower people to discover, collect and display entertainment content, while also offering tailored recommendations. These features include:

Topics–Myspace features more than 20,000 entertainment-focused, dynamic pages organized around topics. These pages provide a centralized location to view aggregated information about specific subject matter from a wide variety of news sites and blogs including MTV, Los Angeles Times, Access Hollywood, New York Times, Village Voice and Just Jared.

Content Hubs–These comprehensive entertainment destinations are specifically dedicated to movies, television and celebrities. The pages combine programmed editorial with trending articles that feature news, videos and photos from various content partners. Additionally, each individual article within the hubs recommends related content and topics. Hubs focused on games, comedy, sports and fashion will be revealed in the coming months.

Personalized Stream–The new stream automatically learns what to feature based on a user’s preferences and habits, so they see more of what they love and less of what they don’t.

Recommendations–This feature recommends relevant topics and other fans based on algorithms that learn the type of content a user views, listens to or watches and from whom or where they discovered it.

‘Right now on Myspace’–This feature shows trending content in real time on Myspace, helps fans find recently added music and videos, and lets them listen or watch right from the interactive chart. Myspace uses these trends to inform recommendations that promote discovery and engagement.

Discovery Tab–This always accessible tab combines videos that friends are watching with what’s trending in real time on Myspace. Scroll to the top of any page and the new Discovery Tab drops down as a horizontal film strip.

My Stuff TabMy Stuff is an easy way to see all that’s personal to a user – their profile, photos, videos and uploaded content, structured as a drop-down menu with different content areas.

Badges–This feature recognizes and rewards curators and fans for their social activity around entertainment topics on the beta site and promotes them with badges – graphic icons that appear in a user’s stream.

New Brand Identity

Myspace has also introduced a new logo that captures its revamped brand identity and values. The bracket in the logo represents a space where people can express themselves, enabling users to personalize the logo and make it their own–just as they can throughout Myspace.

The newly-designed Myspace begins rolling out today in beta and will be available to all users worldwide by the end of November. New users will have immediate access to the beta site. For more information, please visit www.myspace.com/newmyspace

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101026/the-my-fill-in-the-space-reset-is-here-as-social-network-morphs-into-entertainment-hub/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20101021/using-twitter-to-read-investors-minds/ http://allthingsd.com/20101021/using-twitter-to-read-investors-minds/#comments Thu, 21 Oct 2010 21:20:51 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=31390 Keywords and patterns in the torrents of data sent each day via Twitter might be the key to predicting the movement of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, according to researchers from Indiana University and the University of Manchester. They’ve developed an algorithm to determine the mood across the service, and are working on tying it to real-time data.

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