SchoolFeed helps users find out whatever happened to their freshman crush, of course — as well as plan reunions, scan their yearbooks and play games together. It also uses a lot of the standard viral persuasion techniques from Facebook social gaming apps, like rewarding users with virtual coins and gifts, and constantly urging them to add and share with their friends.

Instead of mining school directories, the company reverse-engineers high school class lists by getting its users to contribute their Facebook data. In my experience, the app seems to automatically include all your Facebook friends, regardless of what high school they say they went to.

Former RockYou CEO Lance Tokuda founded schoolFeed last year and is conducting a sort of RockYou class reunion of his own, having recruited former RockYou employees and RockYou investors like First Round Capital, SK Telecom and Nicolas El Baze of Partech. (Crosslink Capital and InterWest invested, as well.)

SchoolFeed really does look and feel like a cross between Classmates.com and a Zynga-style game. Tokuda pointed out that Classmates still makes significant revenue in the age of Facebook. But where Classmates charges its users, schoolFeed plans to monetize through ads and virtual goods. Its first in-app game is Bingo.

Speaking of Bingo, Tokuda told us he’s hoping to attract a relatively older audience with SchoolFeed. That’s in part because Facebook itself already serves as a sort of living yearbook for many younger people.

“We’re targeting people age 36 and older, who graduated before the Internet was born,” Tokuda said.

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

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

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

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

But seriously, Viddy — which makes an iOS app that has attracted celebrity users like Snoop Dogg and Linkin Park, and limits video clips to 15 seconds — has now raised a $6 million Series A round led by Battery Ventures and including Greycroft Ventures and Qualcomm.

Viddy CEO Brett O’Brien says his company is stronger than the competition, for a few reasons: First, Viddy’s in-app editing effects — which include 99-cent premium promotions for content from partners like the Muppets and Linkin Park — help make compelling, shareable content.

Second, the Venice, Calif.-based company is trying more of a public Twitter-like approach than a private social network, so the star users it recruits can bring in their fans.

And third, Viddy seems to have already built a pretty significant audience — with a reported 40 million video views in January.

Some of Viddy’s recently funded competitors included Mobli (where Leonardo DiCaprio is an investor), Socialcam and Klip. Also, though mobile social apps seem to be doing better than ever before, this isn’t a new category; older mobile video start-ups included Kyte.tv and Qik (bought by Skype).

Viddy, which has 10 employees, also took investment from Bessemer Ventures, Sky Dayton, Jarl Mohn and Christina Brodbeck, and is advised by Biz Stone.

Here’s a Viddy shout-out from Snoop Dogg, who is rocking a great Angry Birds hat:

In the two months since Path 2 launched, it has attracted a million new users, according to Path CEO Dave Morin. That’s roughly the same amount Path got in its entire first year.

(Path still has a long way to go; Morin’s former employer, Facebook, announced this week that it has 845 million users, and the social juggernaut has in the past year added “close friends” lists and better sharing and filtering tools.)

Beyond the two-million user milestone, Morin shared a bunch more stats and info about Path’s progress to date.

On the engagement front, he said 70 percent of people who use Path in a week return the next week.

Path users have created over 50 million items of content and half a billion pieces of feedback. The latter is a somewhat inflated stat, because “feedback” is created every time a user looks at content on Path. But for reference, there are 15 million pieces of feedback created on Path per day now, versus 10 million total in the first year, Morin said.

The most common types of content shared on Path are photos, “thoughts” (status messages) and sleep records (users can manually note when they power down for the night and when they wake up in the morning), in that order.

There’s one song posted on Path per second, and the most popular artist is Drake.

Am I getting too “in the weeds” here? How about some geographic data: The U.S. is by far Path’s biggest country, but other fast-growing contributors include the U.K., Germany, Japan, France and Korea.

San Francisco-based Path had 15 employees when Path 2 launched; now it’s up to 25.

What’s next for the company?

Well, it launched tilt-shift photo and video filters this week. Next up are extended platform tools (Path already has a deal to get health data from Nike), smarter friend-request filtering, and perhaps a Windows Phone app, Morin said.

So, perhaps the obvious next question — given Path raised Series A funding a year ago — is when will Path hit investors up for more money?

That answer was more inexact. “Sometime,” Morin said.

(Photo description credit: Dave Morin accepts the 2012 Crunchie award for best design from Google’s Marissa Mayer; (cc) Kenneth Yeung — www.snapfoc.us on Flickr)

As of today, Pulse users can subscribe to a curated feed of trending election news, or follow dedicated feeds around specific candidates or political commentators. (So I suppose you don’t really have to leave the comfortable confines of the filter bubble, if you don’t want to.)

Pulse is available for iPad, iPhone, Android and Windows Phone. It adds 1.5 million to two million new users per month, according to CEO Akshay Kothari. He said those users read more than five million stories per day. Kothari declined to comment on plans to add a desktop version.

Via Kothari, here are the new Pulse news sources: Fox News, the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos and Reason Magazine; plus dedicated political news from previous sources the Daily Beast, the Atlantic, the Atlantic Wire, Slate, Al Jazeera, the New Yorker, USA Today and the Huffington Post.

Included presidential candidates are Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.

And included political commentators are Rachel Maddow, Hendrik Hertzberg, Erick Erickson, John Cassidy, David Brody, Jared Bernstein and David Horsey.

If you had to bet on one environment where social discovery might work, it would probably be college campuses. High concentrations of young people with lots of energy and optimism seem like an ideal hotbed.

That’s where Hyphos, a new Los Angeles-based start-up from some recent college grads, is focusing. Hyphos, which has been in testing at UCLA and University of Connecticut, helps online users find offline activity and event partners. They’re experimenting with calling their college service “At the Pool.”

Be warned, this is a tiny company  – with only a few thousand testers — currently working on raising a seed round. But the Hyphos team seems to be doing some innovative thinking about how to make this all work.

For instance, users get Groupon-esque daily emails, suggesting one person a day in their area based on common interests. “We feel people are much less social than they used to be. Our thought is that by giving a person a day you easily can choose to meet someone,” Hyphos co-founder Alex Capecelatro told me. Hyphos is also trying to help users figure out what to do with each other, by maintaining online event calendars for each campus.

Capecelatro argued that he’s tapping into a renewable resource. “Unlike dating, you don’t get married and you’re done — you’re always looking to do new things,” he said.

You’d think this service might be a perfect fit for suggesting nearby matches based on mobile location tracking, like Grindr/Blendr, Ntro and others in the space. But Capecelatro said he worries broadcasting users’ locations can get too creepy and drive people toward using the service for hookups.

So instead, Hyphos wants to work on building an understanding of where users have been, based on their past activities and maybe build passive location tracking into its apps. Then it will suggest that users should meet other people who tend to frequent the same areas.

Learning to code could be this year’s hot new pastime. Codecademy signed up 320,000 people for its 2012 “Code Year” New Year’s resolution. Stanford signed up 50,000 students for a free online CS101 class starting next month.

Now, Treehouse is looking to help people learn the very practical skill of building a Web site. Code Racer, which launched today, is an online game that pits newbie coders and designers against each other to demonstrate their basic skills — as fast as they can.

Users log in via their Facebook credentials and are paired with other competitors. The music starts, the pulse rises and the race is on.

“You’re going to learn HTML by the sheer force of typing it over and over,” said Treehouse CEO Ryan Carson.

Code Racer is a promotion for Treehouse’s premium products, which consist of exercises and short videos taught by instructors. Facebook, Living Social and Automattic have said they’ll recruit interns based on Treehouse achievement badges.

Lessons cost $25 per month, or $49 per month with additional video resources.

Carson said that Treehouse, which only launched in November, is on track to make $2 million this year and growing quickly.

Treehouse is backed by investors including the Greylock Partners Discovery Fund and The Social+Capital Partnership.

The idea is to provide a resourceful community, as well as a “gamification” service that incentivizes better health. Users can do things like set up and track fitness goals and get SMS reminders to take medication.

The Careverge site is a product of Audax Health, a Washington, D.C.-based company that has raised $16 million from investors including New Leaf Ventures, TIAA-CREF CEO Roger Ferguson, former Aetna CEO Jack Rowe and former Apple CEO John Sculley.

Audax CEO Grant Verstandig said he believes Careverge is the first social network to receive HIPAA compliance, indicating a high level of security for users’ personal health data.

Verstandig, 22, dropped out of Brown University to found Audax, after seven knee surgeries effectively ended his career as a lacrosse player.

His business plan is to make money from health insurers, who give their customers promo codes to sign up for Careverge anonymously, in return for deductions on premiums.

Insurers receive anonymized information about their members, with the intent of reducing costs by having healthier customers. The behavioral-health-focused ValueOptions is one such client.

The trick will be getting users to buy into Careverge’s privacy and security controls. It does seem a little odd to sign up for a site at the invitation of your insurance provider, and trust that your insurance provider doesn’t get to track your participation.

Verstandig said Careverge users can opt to share some of their identifiable information with their insurer at their own discretion; for instance, one Careverge customer invited its members to opt in to get a coupon for a free flu shot.

Audax is already a sizeable company of 53 people, and is raising more funding now, Verstandig said.

Users were told today via email that the service would close Jan. 31, and were offered a data export tool.

Proust had been one of the emerging efforts to create a more personal and meaningful social network. Those kinds of services turn out to be especially hard to grow.

Here’s IAC’s statement on the matter:

Since its launch in 2010, Proust slowly gained users but did not result in an associated revenue substantial enough to maintain operations. We explored several strategic options for Proust, but decided that the best option was to fold its assets into IAC.

For his part, Proust co-founder and CEO Tom Cortese said in an email he was “totally bummed.”

Proust had only formally launched in July 2011. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

The company name is a reference to the French writer Marcel Proust, who famously (to some people, at least!) answered probing questions about himself in what’s come to be known as the Proust Questionnaire.

“On the social Web today we share trivial stuff, but why not go deeper, especially with people you’re closer to,” explained Proust CEO Tom Cortese in a recent interview.

Proust divides life experiences into chapters, presenting users with more than a thousand questions to get them telling their personal stories. Users can choose, quite simply, to make their answers public or private to only their contacts. They can also view their life histories as a map or timeline.

Alternatives to Proust include Path and Storytree. Oh, and Facebook Timeline!

It’s not unexpected that the hot young two-person company would get some cash; in fact, before the round closed, some of it was already reported by ReadWriteWeb.

To be specific, the Ifttt funding was $1.585 million, and came from backers including NEA, Lerer Ventures, Betaworks, Greylock Discovery Fund and CrunchFund.

Ifttt stands for “if this, then that” and rhymes with “lift.” The name’s awkwardness shows a bit of the technical/nontechnical line that Ifttt is trying to straddle.

Users can set up “recipes” to do things like notify themselves with an email when a type of item is posted on Craigslist, cross-post their Flickr photos to Facebook, or archive their Instagram photos to Dropbox.

My colleague, Drake Martinet, who was first to report on Ifttt back in February, called it “digital duct tape.”

Ifttt co-founder Linden Tibbets said this week that the funding will be used to help his two-person operation hire more people. He said some of his goals for Ifttt are to create tools so developers would incorporate his service within their apps (though Ifttt functions on other people’s APIs, it doesn’t yet have an open API of its own), and also to manage the messy smorgasbord of notifications that spray out of social apps. “We could be what RSS could have been,” Tibbets said.

While Tibbets didn’t say how many people are using his service, he did say that, so far, Ifttt users have created 500,000 total tasks that have been executed 90 million times.

The Spool service is made for commuters, travelers and people with limited mobile data plans. It automatically downloads and syncs content between devices when possible. It’s still in limited beta testing, but Spool co-founder Avichal Garg said to expect broader availability in the next few months.

This isn’t just a storage service. Users can store links for their own private use, and also in the process send them to one or more of their Facebook friends.

While Spool might be most easily compared to services like Readability, Read It Later and Instapaper, Garg made other comparisons.

“We’ve built more network effects than Dropbox or Evernote,” Garg said. He added, “This is like a Path for content. It’s not about broadcasting.”

If users install a Spool plug-in for easier saving and sharing, they can also optionally see Spool buttons scattered throughout popular aggregators like Google Reader, Twitter, Quora and Hacker News.

Garg said he is prepared to fight for users’ rights to keep a personal copy of Web content for their personal use. Spool doesn’t work with content from services like Netflix that require a log-in, for instance, and it limits saved videos to 90 minutes in length.

Plus, the San Francisco-based company’s investors include YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and former YouTube VP Kevin Donahue, and the company is already working with attorney David Kramer, who led YouTube’s copyright defense against Viacom.

The intention is to create a shared online space that also serves as a document of a relationship. Ourspot launches to beta testers today.

Not to zoom out too far, but let me set up a bit of context for why I think Ourspot is interesting. Services like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest can turn sharing into a performance. As compared to emails and private messages, which have clearly intended recipients, posting something on a social network changes the nature of sharing because of the possibility that a larger audience will see it.

But there are other benefits to using social tools — they have increasingly pretty layouts, they can compile a record of our activities without much effort, and they have nice mobile apps. And so Ourspot wants to be a social-style sharing site for the people we share with the most — our significant others and perhaps our closest friends.

Ourspot pages are generally designed for two people, and intended to be cultivated over time. Users can share photos, links from around the Web, and notes to each other. The “spots” can be private or public. For better or worse, your “spot” is only as good as the work you and your partner(s) put into it.

Ourspot does overlap quite a bit with things that are already available. For instance, the Ourspot layout looks a lot like the style- and product-sharing site Pinterest — one of the more influential Web designs in recent memory — with tiles of pictures and other posts.

Ourspot also features a user-chosen cover photo, like the new Facebook Timeline.

But Pinterest doesn’t even allow private boards. And we all have had our trials and tribulations with Facebook’s privacy settings and ever-expanding networks of acquaintances.

Ourspot is perhaps more like the personal-journaling app Path, which encourages users to share only with their closest friends and family. However, Path is focused more on users’ original content captured through its mobile apps.

Ourspot is currently Web-only, with an iPhone app in the works. It was built and bootstrapped by Sam Yam and Ruven Chu, who together also created a white-label Groupon-esque service called ChompOn.

Venture capitalists and Bay Area entrepreneurs say local start-ups face extra hurdles in raising money or are denied funding if the companies don’t have what is considered to be a full team of qualified employees — especially engineers. This has traditionally been the case, but the problem has become more pronounced in recent years as the number of solo entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley has grown.

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Squidoo now gets 75 million page views per month, up from 50 million six months ago, according to internal Google Analytics. That’s 50 percent growth on top of a significant base.

While Godin is a well-known marketing author, he doesn’t often market Squidoo. Godin told AllThingsD that Squidoo has been profitable for two years, with a small, distributed staff of 12 and no sales force or biz dev deals. He said revenue is growing as fast as traffic, but didn’t specify how much money that is.

Where Pinterest is all about curation, Squidoo is more oriented towards content creation, though its users cover similar homemaking and how-to topics. A closer Squidoo competitor might be HubPages, which is also a network of content pages that gives authors tools and rewards.

Browsing Squidoo doesn’t make me do cartwheels over all the compelling content, but it seemed worth talking to Godin to get a better sense of why the site is growing so fast.

Here’s more from our phone conversation this morning:

Liz Gannes: How has Squidoo changed since you started?

Seth Godin: We’ve been doing this for six years, and it’s mostly a function of a slow build. I wish I could tell you one brilliant fell-swoop thing that we did worked, but I think more of it is building the trust of a growing community of people who keep coming back and using the platform more and more. We’re not near the scale, but it’s similar to the way Twitter grew, where the first couple years it was there, but then people started telling other people about it.

And Squidoo has the same kind of thing as Twitter, where users are the attraction and they build their own audiences?

We committed at the very beginning to do no outbound marketing at all. It’s all been about people bringing other people. About a year ago we launched a game layer that give people trophies and badges and things and that’s had a significant impact.

If you have a community, do you consider Squidoo a social network?

It’s probably a stretch to call us or Pinterest a social network, the way that you can call the original version of Facebook a social network — but Facebook itself is becoming a place where people post more and more content, so the definitions keep merging. We’ve built in all sorts of things where where users can like each other’s pages and rank each other’s pages and work their way up to becoming “angels” and “rangers” and things like that, so it all contributes to feeling like a place they can spend their day.

Is your audience similar to Pinterest?

Yeah, we have a lot of moms, but I think we’re probably not quite as midwestern as they are. We get tons of traffic from places like Australia and the U.K.. We’re significantly more female than typical popular sites — we don’t really have a big Apple fanboy tech following, but we have lots and lots of pages about wedding cakes and vegetarian meatloaf.

What do you offer that other sites don’t offer?

The structure of the site is that we pay a royalty to charity. If users want to, they can change that setting and keep the money, so some of our users are making thousands of dollars a month doing this, but almost none of them do it for the money.

How do you offer money for content without becoming overrun with spammers and scammers?

We continually downplay the money, because we don’t want to attract those people. Every once in a while casinos or pharmaceuticals will come in and and we shut those pages down immediately. You can’t do things with Squidoo that would be obvious moneymakers.

What was the impact of the Google Panda update [which lowered search rankings for scraping and content farming sites] on Squidoo?

It really didn’t have an effect. We’d like to say it was clean living, but we don’t show all our pages to the search engines. Only a small fraction of them do we expose to robots, and the rest of them you have to know how to find them. So the quality of our site that we present to search is really high. We say to our users, “If you make your page better, your ranking in our system will go up, and we’ll open it to search.”

How would you describe the quality of your content?

The long tail means half of it is above average, and half of it isn’t, and we’ve got more than three million pages. I certainly believe, and I blogged this a few weeks ago, that the most important page on the Web to people is the page they built themselves. The seduction of Facebook is you get to see the page you built and how people react to it everyday. And what people want is help and guidance on how to make their page better. Our best pages, I’d put against anyone on the Web. Our page on vegetarian meatloaf is first or second on Google for good reason.

How do you measure Squidoo’s success?

We believe everyone is entitled to their passion and we try very hard not to tell someone that their passion is boring or isn’t worthy. I think that’s a huge step forward for people who’ve been taught that all they’re allowed to do is follow. … This is a structural shift in the media landscape. This is proof that long-tail content is bit by bit overcoming professionally made spoon-fed media content.

As compared to other social networking sites, Pinterest’s users are more frequently from the Northwest and the Southeast, with strong presences in states that seem to have large hobby-and-crafting populations, Hitwise said. That’s all very logical, but it makes the growth no less impressive.

Pinterest also shares the wealth, since its pins are linked to content sources, which are often e-commerce sites. Sites like Etsy and Nordstrom say Pinterest is a significant and growing traffic referrer.

Pinterest closed $27 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz in October, in a round that many other VCs would have liked to pin down.

For context: In Silicon Valley, you often find fabulously wealthy people going back to the drawing board — hoping for another strike of genius so they can prove they’re good instead of lucky. So-called “serial entrepreneurs” are an exalted local species, and everyone wants to be one.

Here are some of the latest efforts on that front, all of whom seem worth keeping an eye on:

1. Yelp co-founder Russel Simmons, who left the local reviews giant a year and a half ago, is working on an education project called Learnirvana.

It looks like Learnirvana’s first product, Lentil, just came out. It’s a Web tutor program that helps users learn the capital cities of the world or to read Japanese through constant quizzing. The interface is simple and unassuming, and had me recognizing some basic kanji within a few minutes.

A source said Simmons has been dreaming up this kind of product since before Yelp started. Simmons did not respond to requests for comment.

Yelp filed to go public last month.

2. YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, who left the company in its early days to finish grad school (but still made tens of millions of dollars when it sold to Google), has created a travel photography site called Fotons.

Fotons’ “about” page says: “Our mission is to create the best collection of great photos from around the world. With your help we aim to catalogue every notable country, city, building, river, stadium, statue, castle, library, zoo, island, river, cave, volcano — you name it.”

Users are told that they can only upload photos they have taken themselves, and that each picture must be at least 1,600 pixels wide or tall.

Karim said over email that Fotons “is in the middle of some big changes.” In other words, he warned not to look at the current site as a fully baked product. But that doesn’t mean it’s not usable now.

(It should also be noted that both Simmons and Karim worked at PayPal in the early days, and as such are part of the “PayPal Mafia.”)

3. Lastly, and perhaps the most vaguely, 23andMe co-founder Linda Avey — who left in 2009 to start a foundation focused on Alzheimer’s research — has a new company called Curious.

Curious has a only landing page for now, but a source said the company is working on topics around monitoring and sharing personal health information. Avey did not respond to a request for information.

Based on public posts, it seems Curious has three co-founders: Avey; Mitsu Hadeishi, who was previously at DonorsChoose.org; and early blogger Heather Anne Halpert.

Last week, the retired prison guard showed up at a midtown New York loft for an event that connects entrepreneurs with investors to see whether he might get, say, $50,000, from the angels — wealthy individuals who provide capital to start-ups with the potential for fast growth.‬

Mr. Bolden, dressed in a suit and tie, took to the microphone for a two-minute pitch, clutching his crumpled notes of the key selling points for his idea — a police handgun identification signal, complete with a flashing alert. The proposed device is meant to protect plain-clothes officers from friendly fire.‬

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But instead of writing these “SideShows” itself, the company is giving users and TV networks tools to create their own time-stamped text commentary tracks. So a fashion-conscious viewer could plug in product information corresponding to when a character wore an item on screen. Or a sports network could feed live stats alongside a game broadcast.

SideShows will only work for watchers who have DIRECTV and AT&T U-Verse, which have a direct connection to Miso to tell the app what a user is currently watching. Though that’s kind of a big limiting factor, it means the SideShows work with both live and recorded programs.

San Francisco-based Miso recently raised $4 million in new funding led by Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures.

Today, Amplify, which is to be based in a large, historic Venice Beach building, is announcing its plans to incubate and accelerate L.A. tech talent.

Amplify’s investors include Mark Burnett (“The Apprentice” and “Survivor”), Brian Grazer (“J. Edgar” and “24″) and Jarl Mohn (E! Entertainment and MTV); plus, lots of more traditional tech investor types like Accel Partners, BV Capital, Greycroft Partners, Rustic Canyon and Tomorrow Ventures have added to a total of $4.5 million to invest in new companies.

Amplify founder and leader Paul Bricault said he actually tried to start something similar way back in 1999, when he was at William Morris. More than a decade later, he’s finally making it happen, having spent part of the last year visiting other start-up accelerators and learning from what they’re doing.

“L.A. is so dramatically underserved,” Bricault said.

Well, it used to be quite underserved. Today, other newish L.A. accelerators include MuckerLab, Start Engine, UpStart.LA, Science and Launchpad LA.

Bricault said he plans to collaborate with others in the local start-up scene. Plus, he counted 18 start-up accelerators in New York City alone.

Amplify is taking less of a strict class-and-curriculum approach than some other accelerators, instead accepting new companies on a rolling basis. Perks for participants include as much as $50,000 in funding and a three-year hiatus on city taxes.

Tonight, Hipstamatic announced a new app called D-Series (to be released on Thursday), which helps groups of users create communal photo albums.

The idea is modeled on the disposable cameras that partygoers might pass around at a wedding or other event. Only after the “roll” is completed do all the images get downloaded to participants’ phones.

The new app, which, unlike Hipstamatic, is free, is not just like every other mobile photo-sharing app. Friends who have iOS devices and download the app can connect to each other to shoot up to one roll of 24 photos together. Users can then share the communal album to Facebook, Twitter and email.

D-Series is separate from the main Hipstamatic app, but uses the same signature theme cameras available to users through 99 cent in-app purchases.

D-Series fits in a similar vein with other group-photo-sharing apps, like Color (which pivoted to something different) and Divvyshot (which was bought by Facebook and shut down). But it has those signature Hipstamatic filters and flair, which the company attributes to the inspiration of analog.

*For reference, Hipstamatic has 4.5 million users; Instagram has 15 million.

Here’s a video pitch for D-Series:

Hipstamatic Disposable from Synthetic on Vimeo.

Clever Sense’s app, called Alfred, had only launched on Android last week. Alfred first came out for the iPhone in July and the iPad in September. The apps will continue to be supported.

The Clever Sense team will join Google’s local group in order to work on “intelligent, personalized recommendations for places to eat, visit and discover,” said a Google spokesperson.

Alfred had lots of competition as a smarter Yelp app, including Ness and Nosh. It had raised $1.6 million.

I liked a feature Alfred recently introduced that made group dining recommendations based on the preferences of multiple people.