And guess what? Like many other startup visual layouts today, it’s beginning to look a lot like Pinterest.

Three-column design spreads the content — photos, video, etc. — across the whole screen instead of relegating it to the single column Google+ uses today. Something cool: Photos and video are dynamic, sometimes spreading out over the entire column view.

Like Instagram and Twitter, of course, Google+ wants to co-opt hashtags into its service more deeply — but with a slightly different take on them. Google can scan one of your entries — text or photo — and impressively add a few hashtags it thinks relevant to your post (delete-able, obviously). Click the hashtag, and you can go down the rabbit hole of conversation based on that given hashtag.

So it’s pretty! Now to see how many people actually want to use it.

RELATED POSTS:

• Shoot the Moon: How Google Turned a Hodgepodge of Upgrades Into a Show of Strength
• Google I/O: Music, Maps, Messaging and More
• Larry Page Takes the Pulpit to Praise Technology, Snipe at Competitors
• Next Google Maps Update to Include Better Venue Search, Waze-Like Rerouting
• Google Gives Search a Deeper Voice and Adds Reminders and More to Google Now
• With Revamped Hangouts, Google Aims to Unify Messaging
• Google+ Gets a Bit More Pinteresting
• Google Chrome: 750 Million Active Users, Synchronized Web and Mobile Browsing
• Coming Soon From Google: A $649 Samsung Galaxy S4 Running Stock Android
• With Sights Set on Spotify (And Pandora), Google Launches a Music Subscription Service
• Google on Android: 900 Million Activations, New Tools for Developers Coming
• Google Doubles Down on Music Subscriptions, Which Means Google Isn’t Serious About Music Subscriptions
• Where Are They Now? Google I/O 2012 Edition.
• At I/O, Google Tilts Toward Android Services Over Android OS
• Google Downplays Expectations Ahead of I/O Developer Conference
• Will Google Deliver on Its Nexus Q Promise? Not at This Year’s I/O.
• Ahead of I/O, Google Wallet Drops Plans to Introduce a Physical Card
• Google Goes With Unified I/O Keynote (But Will It Unify Its Products?)

It’s a big buy for LinkedIn, costing a cool $90 million, according to the company.

The app, which collects news articles from a range of topics chosen by users and presents them in a clean, stylish format, rose to the top of Apple’s App Store ranks just a few years ago, quickly becoming a favorite among the many newsreaders currently available. Pulse currently claims more than 30 million users globally who read more than ten million stories daily using the app.

But more than that, it’s yet another move by LinkedIn to expand beyond being just a static resume service for recruiters and professionals. Spearheaded by executive editor (and former Fortune and Wired journalist) Dan Roth, LinkedIn has made major strides in pushing original and partner content through the site, aiming to keep users returning and engaged on a regular basis.

“We believe LinkedIn can be the definitive professional publishing platform — where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content,” LinkedIn SVP of product and user experience Deep Nishar said in a company blog post. “Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision.”

In that vein, the company launched its “Influencer” program late last year, essentially asking big names in business, entertainment and politics to write original think pieces that users can read on the site. And, in Twitter-esque fashion, users are able to “follow” those influencers across the site, so that only the content users want will appear inside their respective feeds. (Not surprisingly, the move came only months after Twitter cut off LinkedIn tweet syndication, which provided LinkedIn with most of the content flowing through the system up until that point.)

And of course, let’s not forget LinkedIn Today, the company’s news aggregation service which also brings users tons of fresh stories on the regular.

Engagement, after all, is pretty much LinkedIn’s key theme for 2013. As the site undergoes multiple design revamps across user pages and the company’s massively profitable recruiting products, LinkedIn is trying to escape its image as a one-off, sparingly used online resume service. It wants to be the home page for professionals, including the place where those pros go to catch up on the biz news they care about.

So a service like Pulse, which lets a company know exactly what sort of stuff its users want to read and care about, is likely pretty valuable to what LinkedIn is trying to do.

Yes, engagement is good for the overall health of the site, and for keeping recruiters abreast of the latest movements and activity for the 200 million people who use LinkedIn. But it has another side effect: The more page views and user activity coming in, the more potential to bolster LinkedIn’s ad business, one of the company’s three revenue streams.

LinkedIn wasn’t the only one who saw Pulse’s value. As we reported previously, sources said Pulse was in discussions with Yahoo, Microsoft, Gannett and even Amazon at points.

Ultimately, LinkedIn emerged the victor. Now we get to wait and see just exactly how the company wants to make Pulse work for it.

LinkedIn gave at least one answer to this on Wednesday morning: Juice up your largest revenue-driving product.

The company debuted a redesigned version of its Recruiter product, an update solidly in line with the company’s revamped consumer-facing profile pages introduced late last year.

It’s pretty much a de-uglifying of the company’s previous version of Recruiter, which, while obviously heavily used by talent recruiters, was just plain unattractive to look at.

But yes, it’s also more than that. Aside from making the old page look quite similar to users’ profile pages, LinkedIn has placed heavy emphasis on the search bar, located at the top-left-hand corner of the page. Scroll down the page, and the search box follows you persistently. Hover over the box, and a history of your saved searches and some auto-suggested options will drop down in the menu below.

It’s pretty clear from the update this morning that strengthening search is a priority. Part of LinkedIn’s power is much akin to Google’s: People who go to the sites have a clear intent, whether it be to find a potential new job recruit, or in Google’s case, to find the price of a fine French Camembert (or whatever it is people search for).

At the same time, LinkedIn — like Google — must remain “sticky.” Instead of having its users visit the page and then immediately leave after finding a result, adding features like suggested searches, the suggested “people you may want to hire” section and an increased focus on messaging give the company a better chance at increasing engagement in the long term.

The aesthetic revamp of Recruiter is long overdue. As I noted previously, out of LinkedIn’s three revenue streams — subscriptions, ads and “talent solutions” — the talent solutions product is the company’s largest revenue driver, responsible for $161 million in revenue during Q4 of 2012. That was a massive 90 percent year-on-year jump, but I questioned at the time how the company could sustain that rate of growth in the long term. This redesign is the first step in that direction.

The redesign seems to have worked for the consumer-facing products. After the profile redesign last year, “All the metrics we care most about are way, way up,” said Parker Barrile, senior director of talent solutions products.

Eager headhunters should expect the new version of Recruiter to roll out next week.

And then there’s LinkedIn, one company in the minority of consistently strong tech market performances over the last few years. Since the company debuted on the NYSE nearly two years ago, it has spent most of its time on the market moving in an upward trajectory (save a nasty period in mid-2011).

This afternoon’s expectations are little different. The Street consensus is positive on its earnings report, with an average estimate of $279.5 million in revenue — nearly an 11 percent quarterly sequential increase — and an EPS of 19 cents.

Why so bullish? Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia attributes some of his positive outlook to new products debuted over the last quarter, citing an increase in overall user engagement.

“We believe new features such as Professional Insights (ability to follow thought leaders) and Linkedin Today (a social news curation product that provides members with news most relevant to them) would have helped increase engagement,” Bhatia wrote in a research note to investors this week.

Coupled with the site’s overall design refresh last fall, LinkedIn is focused on its engagement issue. The company saw a 2 percent sequential decline in page views last quarter (down to 9.4 billion, which is certainly no slouch). Part of the problem is the perception that LinkedIn remains an online resume, something you update with your most recent career information and then don’t return to. (Or “set it and forget it,” as Ron Popeil might say.)

Obviously that’s not what LinkedIn wants, and it has beefed up its efforts to increase engagement over the past year. Now users are prompted to leave feedback on each others’ profiles in the form of “endorsements,” essentially a “Like” for someone’s ability to do something (I, for example, get endorsed for journalism by my connections). Or take the little profile completeness progress bar on the right-hand side; LinkedIn wants you to keep coming back, to add content to your page, and to stay up to date on what others are doing.

That’s not an easy feat. Perhaps, as every other Web company seems to believe these days, the answer lies in mobile. LinkedIn’s unique mobile-only visitors jumped to 25 percent in Q3, nearly double that from a year-ago quarter. If the company can continue to bolster its mobile apps on Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone, we could see that mobile growth sustained. I’d keep an eye out for mobile numbers in today’s earnings release.

We’ll have coverage of LinkedIn’s numbers this afternoon.

Yahoo appears to be rolling out the newest version of the redesign of its homepage even more extensively across several major browsers, including Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.

As AllThingsD has previously reported several times, the Silicon Valley Internet giant has been working on a new homepage look, designed to improve its declining consumer usage.

The latest look has been present on all my browsers all day, rather than cycling off to the old version as before. The design is cleaner, with a more touchscreen tablet approach, new icons, and a scrolling news feature. With a more mobile feel, it’s slightly different than previous new versions that Yahoo has been testing over the last few months.

After redoing its Yahoo Mail and Flickr photo-sharing service, sources inside the company said that Yahoo is now close to launching the new homepage. It’s part of an effort called Project Homerun and also a larger effort called Project Zed, which will also include more personalization and a focus on bringing in a range of third-party content.

More on what that means soon …

Until then, here are three different screenshots from tonight from Chrome, Safari and Firefox:

In an interview today, Jeff Holden, the company’s SVP of Product, explained that Groupon has mastered serendipity, but it has not always been good at giving people a place to shop for things they are already looking to buy.

“Groupon was the ultimate place where people would buy things that they didn’t know they were going to buy when they woke in the morning,” he said. “Our model was about talking to merchants, agreeing on a deal, then running the deal. Then it would disappear and be gone.”

Today, in New York and Chicago, consumers will start seeing a new homepage, where offers will be browsable and searchable — and won’t disappear. Instead, there will be a catalog of offers spanning categories such as food, spas, health, fitness, home and auto. So far, Groupon has amassed 27,000 deals in North America as part of the new direction for the company.

While this launch may seem like a relatively small move, it is just one aspect of the business that the company must nail if it wants to continue growing its traditional daily deals business. If Groupon is extremely successful in this endeavor, these deals will start appearing in search results on Google or Bing, much like a Yelp page or other local listings site. That does not happen today because of the temporary nature of Groupon’s current deals.

The evolution started about 18 months ago with the creation of Groupon Now, which got merchants to offer deals that could be used immediately. However, with the move being announced today, the Groupon Now category will go away. At first, consumers may not notice a drastic difference because they will continue getting emails, but when they visit the site, there will be a new layout. In the first image below, you’ll notice the new search bar and location field.

New Groupon homepage

When searching for “car,” more than a dozen offers are returned for auto detailing, car washes and repairs.

In the old format, which still exists for most cities in the U.S., there was no search bar, and when a consumer clicked on “all deals,” they would only surface a few options — not the entire database. Holden said merchants have not been nervous about adopting this format, even though it seems like surfacing the same deals every day would eventually hurt a merchant’s brand. “They’d much rather have a unit sold through Groupon than a seat go empty,” he said. “It makes perfect economic sense. The vast majority have participated immediately, and we aren’t hearing concerns from merchants over that.” He said merchants will also have the option of capping how many times a consumer can redeem a particular offer.

So far, Holden says, the new format is performing well. “We are seeing a significant lift from people who experience the ‘pull’ experience,” he said. “It will take time for people to discover it and for it to ramp up, but the immediate embracing of this shows that people were hungry for capability.”

For comparison, here’s a look at the Seattle homepage, which still has the old format:

Old Groupon Homepage

Another week and yet another new design for the Yahoo homepage is being tested out on users — this time, it appears to be one (which you can see below) that looks a lot like Microsoft Windows 8’s touchscreen tiled approach (which is here).

After already putting out tests in the field with infinite scrolling, a simplified logo and giving search more prominence, the Silicon Valley Internet giant is apparently testing an even more drastically different redesign of its key landing page — one that seems to be aimed at being consumed on touch-responsive, non-PC devices.

As you can see from the screenshots below — which a user sent me, and which look exactly like what many Yahoo sources have described to me recently — the design uses big photos tiled across the top of the page. It suggests an ethos that is reminiscent of the new approach by Microsoft, as well as many others, such as Flipboard and Pinterest.

All of these encourage users to reach out and touch, scroll and swoosh. In fact, there are side-swiping arrows on the new Yahoo design.

Also part of the look, which is still being tweaked: More simplified icons for various Yahoo properties, fewer text links, additional social and personalization aspects and — perhaps most importantly — no advertising module at the very top.

That’s interesting, since Yahoo’s homepage is a big moneymaker for the company, because of its huge daily traffic. Thus, any new homepage design will have both massive consumer and financial impact on the company.

Sources said that one possible plan is to move from several 300 by 250-sized ad units to a single 300 by 600, which other sites like AOL have shifted toward. Such a change will not be without controversy for marketers.

It will also present a fresh selling challenge for new COO Henrique De Castro, who arrives at Yahoo from Google next week, and who will be helming sales efforts. (Hey, Henrique — get ready for my upcoming 360-degree profile of you!)

The latest redo is now being iterated under the regime of new CEO Marissa Mayer, under an awfully confident codename, Project Homerun. We’ll see if it is San Francisco Giant’s Panda-worthy, but sources said it is set to be released widely within the next two months.

But, while some new designs that have surfaced have been closer to the current version of Yahoo, the latest design is a more significant shift that would clearly lend itself well to mobile touchscreens, especially on increasingly popular tablets.

Along with Pinterest, Flipboard and Windows 8, other sites have done this, of course, most particularly pioneering content design done several years ago by BermanBraun’s Wonderwall for Microsoft’s MSN portal.

That’s no surprise, since Mayer declared in a recent earnings call — articulating what many desktop-trapped Silicon Valley Internet giants have also done recently — that Yahoo was going to also veer toward a “mobile first” sensibility.

“Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said in the third-quarter earnings call.

Here’s what that seems to mean for Yahoo, with the new homepage images, as well as one of the current one to compare:

As part of the unveiling, eBay CTO Mark Carges provided a glimpse of how the company plans to make the shopping experience more social.

“It’s a no-brainer, in terms of where we go next,” he said in an interview.

After it was announced on Wednesday, the new homepage slowly started rolling out to consumers in the U.S. What they will notice first is a more contemporary feel that looks more like a mobile application than it does an e-commerce site. Recommendations will appear based on your past searches, and the algorithms will change as you interact with the feed. In the end, consumers will have ultimate control, so even if you buy razor blades and coffee filters on eBay, you don’t necessarily have to see them in your feed.

Next, Carges said, eBay will be adding a community layer for consumers. Users will be able to share their feeds, or follow other feeds. A good example would be an eBay seller who has created a collection of goods he or she is selling and makes that feed available to others to follow. Motifs could form round comic books, coffee or shoes, for example.

“I’ve been here for four years, and have focused most of my time on making search better,” Carges said. “But shoppers have also said they need browsing and inspiration capabilities. We felt now was a time to bring out a way to personalize passions, whether it is their hobbies or things they like to buy — and bring it to life in the feed.”

The comparison to Pinterest is already worn out, but the personal and social features only accentuate the overlap. Pinterest has done an excellent job in creating a huge community that refers ideas to one another. The commonalities between its homepage and Pinterest are not lost on Carges, but you could nearly see him wincing through the telephone line each time they came up. “It’s also very unique in a couple of ways,” he said. “One is that it’s instantly shoppable. Other sites have highly visual metaphors, but the difference is that we have done it in the context of shopping.”

That is true of “other sites.” In many cases on Pinterest, the item that someone is recommending could be sold out or be three or four clicks deep — which can be way beyond a consumer’s tolerance level. In contrast, eBay wants buying to be insanely easy. As part of the homepage redesign, it narrowed down the number it clicks to make a purchase from four to one.

EBay’s move to a more social and browsable model is part of a broader trend of e-commerce companies trying to become more social. To date, retailers efforts in the space haven’t produced much. Most experiments have revolved around using Facebook to create a more personalized experience. For instance, people who logged into retail sites with their Facebook credentials would, in theory, see recommendations based on their stated interests. And other retailers have come up with nifty ways for purchases to occur directly on a Facebook feed. Even Facebook is trying to figure out commerce, with its recent launch of Facebook Gifts.

Over the past two years, eBay has been investing heavily in social. Last year, it hired Don Bradford as VP of social, and made it one of its four priorities, along with local, mobile and digital payments. Before joining eBay, Bradford worked at Microsoft Live Search communities and MSN Hotmail, and worked shortly at Yahoo, where he was VP of Communities.

Previous social experiments for eBay have included things like group gifts, which allow multiple people to chip in to buy a present. The company has also enabled users to log in to their Facebook account on eBay’s homepage to get product recommendations on past purchasing habits and things you have “liked” on your Facebook page, such as movies, books and music.

While this week’s homepage design isn’t the largest project the company has undertaken over past few years, “it’s the most visible,” Carges said. “The thing we’ve been focused on in the turnaround was under the covers and deep in the tech, search and algorithms. These are things that buyers see.”

One of the looming — but, thus far unspoken — questions about the strategy that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is set to unveil to the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s employees today at 10 am PT is just how many of them are going to be there to push forward the new turnaround plan she’s envisioning.

While it seems unlikely Mayer will mention this unhappy prospect in today’s all-hands meetings with staff, it’s an issue she will nonetheless eventually have to address.

But, despite promising today’s talk would be an “act of radical transparency,” I am guessing any employee-cutting plans Mayer has will remain decidedly opaque for now.

Still, it’s no secret that most analysts and Internet-savvy observers agree that Mayer must make significant cuts in staff in order to move forward, perhaps well beyond the ones that have been made by her predecessors.

And while every single recent Yahoo exec has done layoffs, usually of several thousand, many investors are watching to see if Mayer will make deeper and more company-changing ones.

“Yahoo probably needs to be cut in half,” said one person close to the company, who has told Mayer this. “But no one has had the guts or stomach to do it yet.”

According to Yahoo’s last quarterly report, it had 12,500 staffers, although that underestimates the number since there are also several thousand contractors that the company employs on top of that.

Many think that’s way too many, given the downward growth at Yahoo over recent years and the need to shed non-performing businesses.

One way that previous leaders, including ousted CEO Scott Thompson and interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, had considered cutting staff in a major way was to outsource its advertising tech and search businesses.

But that does not seem to be Mayer’s plan — she’s indicated internally that she wants to invest in both, which will require more staff and lots of money.

Still, there are plenty of areas to aim at, including Yahoo’s outsized number of staffers in general and administrative areas, as well as a number of operating units that have little traction.

The strategy around how to right-size the company will fall to newly installed HR head Jackie Reses, who came to Yahoo with a background in private equity.

(I’ll be writing more about Reses and her unusual role at Yahoo soon — Mayer has also put her in charge of business and corporate development. But, suffice it to say, PE execs know a lot about cutting costs.)

As I said, I’d be surprised if Mayer sullies her presentation about the gleaming future of Yahoo today with the ugly realities of inevitable layoffs. But that does not mean that such choices will go away.

While we await Mayer’s plan to be handed down, let’s recap my recent series of posts on the future of Yahoo under Mayer, who has been on the job for two months now.

Here’s the highlights:

• Mayer is zeroing in on improving Yahoo’s search business and advertising platforms. Efforts include reworking Yahoo’s troubled search deal with Microsoft and possible ad tech acquisitions and also investments.
• Besides all the cultural changes she has made — free food! — Mayer is also, according to an internal memo I obtained, planning on holding the company to strict annual benchmarks of performance.
• She is also initiating a series of product changes, including a major redesign of the home page to make it more of a platform, as well as an email refresh. Mayer is also focusing in on 10 key verticals, such as the powerful Yahoo Finance, and is likely to address the importance of mobile for Yahoo.
• Lastly, she has sicced her top lawyer on leaks, even as she has instituted a policy of minimal interaction with the media. To be fair, there’s little to say about Yahoo right now, so it makes sense on some levels; on others, it’s hard to imagine the riveting story at a public company can avoid press scrutiny.

Whatev! Whatever Mayer does, we’ll do our best to get you even more deets of her strategic vision for Yahoo as it is unveiled.

(Photo courtesy of Yahoo’s Flickr.)

Details of the new site were unveiled in a promotional video that previewed a drastically different, horizontally oriented user interface and a continued emphasis on music, one of the site’s strong points in its nearly 10-year existence.

The brief unveiling comes more than a year after News Corp. (AllThingsD’s parent company) sold Myspace at a half-a-billion-dollar loss to Specific media for $35 million, after suffering through years of a flagging user base, in sharp contrast to the skyrocketing success of Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site.

Redesigns are not new to Myspace’s efforts to kickstart its site’s activity. Last year, Specific media made the rounds to advertisers to make the case for Myspace, billing the site as the “#1 online community music destination,” relying heavily on the existing content rights agreements that it had with the four major record labels. Specific went so far as to call Myspace the “Hulu of music.”

In 2010, there was another attempt to revive the site with then-CEO Mike Jones at the helm; back then, the aim was to create a “social entertainment site” aimed at Gen-Y, Web-savvy users. The redesign was largely ignored by the crowd the company was targeting; News Corp. sold less than a year after relaunch.

We’ll see if the leadership of Justin Timberlake, one of the site’s major backers, can help with the renewed push into emphasizing music as the site’s platform.

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.

The final death rattle of the Digg we once knew sounded last month, when tech development firm Betaworks purchased the site for a price much lower than the $160 million dollar valuation the company once heralded.

Betaworks’ plan: Rebuild Digg “as a start-up: Low budget, small team, fast cycles.” That included a complete redesign, which launched earlier this month, in hopes that a fresh start will give the site a new lease on Web life.

Though noble in its aim, Betaworks’ first efforts may have crippled the new Digg before it has a chance to leave the starting line.

In order to remedy many of the costly issues that the former Digg team suffered, Betaworks shuttled a number of features once prominent in Digg’s past iterations; the commenting system has been nuked completely, and all of the past articles and activities shared by past users have been wiped clean from the site.

The upside is, we’re left with a clean design and some nifty new sharing features that sync between mobile and desktop devices. The larger issue at hand, however, is that Digg’s existing user base — however dwindling and meager it was — is left with no virtual footprint on the site whatever. Profile history, submissions, comments — all gone from the new Digg.

Philosophically, this cuts to the heart of what a social, community-based sharing site needs in order to thrive. Digg is essentially only as successful as the volume and quality of content that is shared by its users; users who want to talk with each other about the items they’ve submitted, to riff on and build off of each new link in the network. This concept of community building has been crucial to competitor sites like Reddit — which is currently flourishing, trafficwise, with more than two billion pageviews served in the month of December 20122011 alone — which still retains all of the items that the new Digg now lacks.

Take a look at the latest stats from online ad network and data analytics firm Chitika, which show a drastic drop in traffic shortly after July 30, the day Betaworks launched the new version of Digg. Chitika measured hundreds of millions of ad impressions across the Web to determine referral rates from Digg and a handful of its competitors. The chart below relays that information as an index, with the highest level of traffic assigned the value “1.”

As you can see, Digg’s brief spike came in the wee hours between July 31 and Aug. 1, then went on to plummet and not return for the remainder of the week. That’s rough, especially in the early days of a highly publicized redesign, when Digg should be getting the initial traffic that it needs to foster the growth of its shattered community.

Compare it to the traffic index of competitors like Reddit and StumbleUpon, and Digg has a heck of a lot of ground to make up:

Now to be fair, Betaworks says it still has that old trove of user data, and wants to make it available for the old Digg’s patrons to access. “We believe that users own the data they create,” the company says on its Web site. It’s dubbed the Digg Archive, and the company is working on a way to unearth user data from the previous Digg infrastructure so that users can access it. By the end of this month, Betaworks aims to “open up an archive website to help users find, read, and share a history of their submissions, diggs, and comments.”

Problem is, how compelling is it to open what essentially amounts to a museum of old data from a network that truly doesn’t exist anymore? Sure, it’s nice to have access to what I did when I was an active user, but if that information has no bearing on the new site, it becomes less relevant and interesting to me. That’s a distinct disadvantage against a site like Reddit, which relies on a “karma” system, with points distributed amongst users based on their link and comment-submission history. It’s what makes some users stand out among others, and what keeps many coming back to the site regularly.

Will Digg’s new approach find legs over time? There’s no telling, but in a time where Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are far into their maturity, the new Digg sure has its work cut out for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AOL Mail’s new design

To his credit, David Temkin, the SVP of mail and mobile for AOL, is completely upfront about the fact that this is overdue. “The market’s changed and people have higher expectations for user experience,” he said in an interview yesterday. “Our visuals and interaction design was dated and suboptimal.”

For me at least, getting an email from an AOL address is like a blast from the past — but 24 million people still use the product. The Mail audience tends older and a bit more female. “It’s almost like flyover territories,” Temkin said about tech-savvy people’s blind spot for AOL.

“A large number of users have been with us since the ’90s,” Temkin said. “Not the majority.”

The most interesting part of this story, for me, is the trickiness of changing a product that people have depended on for more than a decade, without pissing them off. “People using an application for a long time are really sensitive to minor changes,” as Temkin put it.

AOL Mail’s old look

But Temkin, who joined AOL three years ago, said he was doubtful the redesign will raise users’ hackles. Why? Because AOL has actually already rolled it out to many of them. Over the past few months, AOL pushed the redesign to 12 percent of its users, then 25 percent, then 50 percent. Today marks the shift to 100 percent. At each step along the way, user feedback was incorporated and the experience of transitioning users was improved, Temkin said.

The new design itself doesn’t seem too drastically different, though Temkin contended that “every pixel has been changed.” There’s more white space, cleaner icons and integrated Facebook chat. AOL is also committing to freeing up old email addresses that have fallen by the wayside, so active users can get something closer to their own names.

Development on AOL Mail hadn’t totally stood still in recent years, Temkin said. At the end of last year, an 18-month-long infrastructure overhaul was completed.

Growth in usage of AOL Mail has been “down to flat” in recent years, Tempkin said, but that’s similar to the other main U.S. email providers, with the exception of Gmail, which has gotten a massive boost from its integration into Android.

The company plans to revamp its dashboard tools for small-business customers this week, beginning with “local updates,” a messaging system that allows businesses to contact their customers directly.

Businesses can currently offer specials — essentially, deals that show up inside the venue information page when users check in (the most frequent example are loyalty specials, or what Foursquare calls “digital punchcards”). With the new tool, businesses can send out messages to their regulars, updating them on timely offers or deals. I think of it as a targeted sidewalk chalkboard, aimed at customers who have already expressed interest in the business.

“We’ve built this because merchants are seeing tons of visitors, but until now have had no way to interact with their customers directly,” product manager Noah Weiss told me in an interview. “For updates, we’re actually using our own algorithms to decide who their best customers are, based on a number of factors — check-in frequency, current location, how recently you’ve checked in — so you’re only showing updates to the people who care to see them.”

This is important for Foursquare’s maturation, as the company aims to go beyond the “gamified” check in. The company took the “users first, business model later” approach in its early days, using the popularity of a “gamification” model to bolster its user base. But games and badges don’t yield revenue (at least, not directly), and Foursquare has shifted tack in the past year to pitch itself as a discovery engine for local points of interest, focused intensely on businesses.

After paying attention to the user side by relaunching its app, complete with an overhauled UI, Foursquare is tackling the stickier problem of giving its merchant partners better tools to pitch the more than 20 million active Foursquare users.

Previously, merchants have had access to a dashboard with a relatively large amount of customer data: It includes granular information such as male-versus-female breakdown, the most frequent customers, which regulars haven’t checked in for some time and the like. But even though businesses have had this wealth of customer insight, there hasn’t been a way to act on it effectively, outside of blanket specials.

Updates are Foursquare’s first step in giving verified businesses the ability to act on that data from the company’s own dashboard, without requiring those businesses to end up going the third-party social marketing route. (Hearsay Social is one prominent example of this type of company.)

What’s more, it’s a scalable solution. Large corporations or chain stores like Starbucks or H&M can give administrator privileges to individuals at the store and regional levels, as well as push out updates to customers at the national level. So, for example, a J.C. Penney district manager in Seattle can push an umbrella sale to its damp customer base, while another manager in Texas can update her patrons on that day’s deal on short-shorts. It’s contextual, and on a national level, context is king.

Like the company notes in a blog post, expect more of this to come in the future. It’s possible that this is another step toward a fuller, more robust suite of tools for merchants that Foursquare could actually charge for, providing a potentially lucrative revenue stream for the company.

As an aside, it’ll be interesting to watch Foursquare’s next series of moves, given that the problems of social, mobile and local are some of the most relevant to today’s tech economy. Especially relevant is the Yahoo CEO appointment of Marissa Mayer, who formerly served as Google’s VP of local and location services. To say that Yahoo is weak in mobile is a vast understatement, and Mayer could score early industry points as CEO by making a large talent and tech buy in acquiring Foursquare.

For now, we’ll have to wait and see how Foursquare scales its business on its own, slowly trudging toward a viable, long-term monetization strategy.

Six years later, Twitter has grown up. And as the 140-million-plus user service continues to expand to reach mainstream audiences, Twitter knows that it needs to assert and define itself more than ever.

Which is why, when it was announced on Friday that Twitter had ended its tweet syndication partnership with LinkedIn, it signaled Twitter’s continued shift toward controlling the way users experience their tweets. Previously, LinkedIn had a deal with Twitter which allowed for syndication of users’ tweets inside of LinkedIn’s flowing user activity stream. As a result of that syndication, many of the recently added tweet features — expandable tweets, threaded conversations and the like — weren’t showing up on users’ LinkedIn pages.

“Ultimately, we want to make sure that the Twitter experience is straightforward and easy to understand,” wrote Twitter consumer product lead Michael Sippey in a company blog post, “whether you’re on Twitter.com or elsewhere on the web.”

Losing Twitter could hurt LinkedIn’s user engagement, as much of the content flowing through users’ feeds were integrated tweets. LinkedIn assures me, however, that its social news service LinkedIn Today — which was originally powered in part by Twitter — won’t be affected.

“Tweets have not been powering LinkedIn Today for some time,” a LinkedIn spokeswoman told me.

While ending the LinkedIn deal was big, I’ve heard from several sources that we should expect more of the same in the not-too-distant future. Just give a close read to product manager Sippey’s blog post, which went up just minutes before LinkedIn’s post. Sippy’s missive contains some especially strong wording, a harbinger of what’s to come for other developers:

“…we’ve already begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners, for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used,” Sippey wrote.

As Twitter matures, tightening the reins makes sense. LinkedIn’s deal, and other syndication deals like it, essentially works against the entire aim of what Twitter has been trying to accomplish over the past eight or so months. Recall the launch of the “new, new” Twitter, a major visual and conceptual overhaul of the service, which aimed to make it more accessible to the uninitiated. It cut through the jargon that has sprung up naturally in the Twitter ecosystem, instead relabeling different sections as “Connect, Discover and Home.” Viewing decontextualized tweets from inside a partner site, then, loses much of the value Twitter has tried to add.

Not to mention the potential consequences on mobile monetization, an area in which Twitter seems to have excelled where many others have failed. If Twitter experiences on third-party mobile clients lack the same monetization potential as that of Twitter.com and its native apps, it could be a huge pain point for the company’s business.

So, who’s next?

Flipboard, for one, comes to mind. After a user authenticates their social profiles with Flipboard, the app pulls content from disparate sources across the Web — Facebook, RSS, Google+ and, yes, Twitter — in the form of URLs, and repaginates the information in Flipboard’s own custom layout. While the result is a rather attractive social magazine, it displays third-party content in a very distinctive, very Flipboard way. And it looks nothing like tweets which show up on Twitter.com.

Last month, Kara Swisher reported that Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, who also holds a seat on Twitter’s board, was likely to give up that seat, due to Flipboard and Twitter possibly being set on a future “collision course.”

“How users consume and use Twitter is a key part of its future, and that is what Flipboard does well already,” one person with knowledge of the situation told Swisher. “There is going to be an inevitable crossroads for the two companies,” this person said.

Speculation at the time — including my own — involved Twitter’s potential acquisition of Flipboard in order to bolster the microblogging platform’s discovery capabilities. But considering Twitter’s recent actions towards LinkedIn, this may not be the case.

For what it’s worth, Flipboard tells me that this hasn’t been a discussion the two companies have had thus far. As a third-party developer, Flipboard tells me, its relationship with Twitter is strong, and it expects the two will continue working together.

Flipboard isn’t the only one that could be affected. As Sippey’s post notes, it seems that copycat clients — or third-party apps that really don’t add much value outside of what Twitter.com offers — may be on the chopping block: “Back in March of 2011,” Sippey writes, “my colleague Ryan Sarver said that developers should not ‘build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.’”

Take TweetDeck, the service Twitter purchased a little more than a year ago for $50 million, which basically offers a power-user version of Twitter. Historically, its interface has been drastically different than that of Twitter.com, though in recent months Twitter has shown a willingness to change that: The company redesigned the app last year, removing a number of features and streamlining others. Twitter didn’t kill or handicap the service immediately, most likely because the company didn’t want to upset TweetDeck’s vibrant community of very vocal users. But it could very well get another throttling or makeover in the coming weeks.

Other clients that aren’t as popular — Tweetbot, HootSuite and Seesmic — may not be as safe. HootSuite may even already be preparing for a change; The company just launched a series of new app integrations on Thursday.

I doubt, however, that other services which rely on Twitter firehose access for more analytics and enterprise-oriented needs — like Topsy, Gnip, DataSift and Klout — have much to worry about. They’re working with vast amounts of data, completely independent of the user experience. Indeed, Topsy and Gnip told AllThingsD that there was no indication that either company’s relationships with Twitter would change at all.

But Twitter-mimicking developers take heed: There is a sea change coming. And Twitter, not you, will soon be in fuller control of its user experience.

But more than one icon can be too many. At least, that’s the philosophy Twitter Creative Director Doug Bowman seems to espouse. Twitter will lose all superfluous branding images — like said bubble text and “t” icons — offering instead a single, iconic image: A redesigned little blue bird.

Think of it as a sort of brand consolidation, akin to Nike’s iconic swoosh. Instead of the disparate ways Twitter’s brand appears in public, it’ll be one bird, one logo for partners to use and the general public to see. It’s smart, too: Simplicity is a hallmark of brand building, boiling down a product into a single concept, captured in an image.

Simplicity is the key word for Twitter in the company’s maturation process. It aims to become a service that non-techno-savvy users can understand — just look at last year’s complete site overhaul.

Here’s a super-short video on just how simple the new image is: It is composed entirely from three sets of overlapping circles, chopped up to form the new image. Cute. And smart.

First, a successive series of ups: The app scored tens of millions of users via Facebook over a period of no longer than a month and soared to the top of the iTunes App Store.

Then, a few downers. Members of the press (including yours truly) started sniffing around after Socialcam (and rival app Viddy) rose so high up in the ranks in such a short time. Socialcam’s viral growth was due — in part, at least — to successfully gaming the system by incorporating YouTube videos designed to spread like wildfire.

I posed the question then: Now that Socialcam has millions of Web video users and at least a few million app installs, how will the company keep those users around?

The team’s answer is starting to trickle out. As TechCrunch reported earlier, Socialcam released a new design to it Web interface Tuesday morning, an update focused squarely on the social experience. It features everything you’d expect in a modern social Web interface: Friends-to-follow suggestions, user popularity leaderboards and recent friend activity.

But make no mistake: This is more than just a tacking on of better social features.

Think of it this way: With Socialcam’s initial Open Graph integration, Web traffic flooded into the Web app. Yes, that drove installs on the mobile phone, but what Socialcam realized is that it needed to keep its Web experience in top shape to keep its users coming back. That’s entirely unlike Instagram, the photo-sharing app to which Socialcam is compared almost ad nauseum.

“Ultimately, Instagram had an app-focused strategy,” Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel told me in a telephone interview. “Instagram was trying to get people who were using other photo apps to use their app.”

Why? It’s because photos are different; we “consume” them easily with our phones, requiring no more than a flick of the thumb to scroll through scores of snapshots. And if you nail the mobile app like Instagram did, you don’t need to worry about the Web interface (which Instagram, for the most part, clearly ignores).

Video, on the other hand, is a different animal entirely. We’re used to watching video via the Web interface, not our mobile devices. Over the seven-year rise of YouTube, Google has trained us in our streaming video viewing habits.

So as Seibel sees it, the challenge for Socialcam isn’t to compete against other mobile social video apps. It’s to compete against the Web.

“This is really a social video and mobile video vs. YouTube narrative,” Seibel said. “Theoretically, YouTube owns this space. But as our phones have grown into powerful devices for capturing video, YouTube has done virtually nothing to keep up.”

“We’re the first ones to attack YouTube’s flanks,” Seibel said.

Ground zero was getting the user base. Whether or not you agree with Socialcam’s user acquisition strategy is another matter entirely. The first step after that, according to Seibel, is nailing your Web experience — hence Tuesday’s timely update.

And it’s only after mastering the Web that apps like Socialcam can convert its users to a mobile-centric video world. If we enjoy watching mobile videos through our Web browser, Seibel hopes that will inspire us to start shooting our own. After enough of us do that, perhaps they’ll slowly transition to the mobile app.

It’s rather ironic that Socialcam seeded old YouTube videos in its plan to lure us away from YouTube and into fresh, user-generated content. But I guess they had to start somewhere.

Twitter obviously wants to change that. In that vein, the company launched a reimagined Discovery engine on Tuesday morning, updating its “personalization signals” to better include content that you actually care about.

So, for example, specific trending tweets or topics that are popular among the people you follow will surface more easily inside of the discovery tab, making them more readily available for users to find new items of interest. But if you’re a Twitter newcomer, the new engine can point you to other Twitter users you aren’t following, beefing up your stream and thus increasing the site’s stickiness.

Also part of the pitch: Twitter is trying to situate individual tweets within a broader social context — something very difficult for the service to do, given its free-for-all nature. Unlike Facebook — which has Timeline and its own river to essentially create a running narrative of everything that’s going on in your Facebook-ian little world — tweets are disparate, floating around in the ether and waiting for users to discover them.

And with Twitter’s user base at 130 million, sending out upwards of 340 million tweets per day, that’s a lot of room for messages to get lost. Thus far, Storify — a company that Twitter doesn’t own — has done a good job of tweet curation, while as Googler Hunter Walk smartly notes in a recent blog post, Flipboard and ReadItLater also do this very well, and would prove fine acquisition targets.

It’s yet another of Twitter’s series of steps to explain itself to newcomers. Take December’s complete redesign of the site and service, where Chairman Jack Dorsey admitted the company needed to do a better job on being accessible. “Twitter should be usable for people who know the shortcuts and also equally usable for those who don’t,” Dorsey said.