One of the more interesting pieces of news that got pushed deep down in stories in the noisy swirl around AOL’s $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post was the move of its CEO Eric Hippeau back to the investor side.

He’ll be going to Lerer Ventures, which is run by HuffPo co-founder, chairman and major investor Kenneth Lerer.

(In case you wondered: Yes, everyone is interconnected.)

Before landing at HuffPo in mid-2009, Hippeau was a high-profile venture capitalist at SoftBank Capital for many years, starting with his involvement in the legendary $100 million investment in Yahoo at its start.

Hippeau went to SoftBank Capital after selling Ziff-Davis to its parent SoftBank Corp. for $2.1 billion in 1995.

Now he is headed to Lerer, where Hippeau has been an adviser. It which has been run by Lerer and his son Ben–as well as VC and entrepreneur Jordan Cooper–as an angel investing at early-stage seed level.

About a year ago, the New York-based investment fund raised $8.5 million, all from friends, and has focused on 35 start-ups in the city.

Those have included GroupMe, a group texting service, and ad service AdKeeper.

Now, with the addition of Hippeau as a general partner, while still spending down the initial fund, Lerer Ventures is considering a second fund of up to $50 million to allow it flexibility to invest in later stages.

That’s an increasingly common strategy of late, most prominently at Andreessen Horowitz.

“I am really glad to be getting back into investing, since the New York area is especially vibrant at the moment,” said Hippeau in an interview today, who noted that Lerer Ventures also has some investments in Silicon Valley. “And we are really determined to look at changing the way funds are organized.”

And now that he’ll not have a job with the AOL buy–”It has a very good CEO in Tim Armstrong,” joked Hippeau–and having just also stepped down from the Yahoo board, he will have plenty of time to consider all that.

Hippeau listed social, mobile and commerce as big investment arenas, as well as companies related to tablet devices.

“At the Huffington Post, we could see the changes happening to how we distribute our content were becoming profound,” Hippeau said. “It’s a completely different experience.”

I also talked to Ken Lerer, who said that the fund–started off pretty simply–will be trying to define itself more in the coming months before fundraising begins.

“Ben and Jordan are especially plugged into the New York scene–these start-ups were created by their friends,” he said. “And Eric and I bring a different skill set and perspective on top of that.”

Lerer also expressed interest in commerce, as well as local and real-time technologies.

“While it is always an interesting time on the Internet,” he said, fresh from the AOL sale of the HuffPo, in which he was the largest individual shareholder. “But right now is a really interesting time.”

In any case, there is a cottage industry developing for products that help those who want to stop texting and yammering on their phones, but need some help.

In the latest such move, T-Mobile plans to start offering a program for Android phones called DriveSmart Plus that allows subscribers who opt-in to have their phones automatically tell when the user is driving and put the phone into a driving mode that disables most texting and calling features. Calls can be set to go straight to voicemail, and a text message can be sent to people who are calling or texting to let them know that the recipient is driving.

Of course, all of this requires users to opt-in, so it will only help those who recognize that they have a problem and actually want to do something about it. And there are ways to override it, which is useful if there is an emergency or the cellphone user is a passenger in a moving car.

But, hey, it is a start. T-Mobile will offer DriveSmart Plus initially only for one phone–the LG Optimus T–but said it plans to expand the service soon. DriveSmart Basic, a free version of the app, is available for free on some T-Mobile phones, although that app requires users to tell the app when they are driving. DriveSmart Plus, the new premium program, will cost $4.99 per month and covers all lines on a subscriber’s account.

DriveSmart Plus is from a venture-backed start-up called Location Labs. T-Mobile is also launching another Location Labs-developed service, dubbed FamilyWhere, for tracking children or family members via their cellphones. It’s apparently useful for monitoring an elderly family member or keeping tabs on school-age kids (or perhaps tracking that cheating spouse, if they are foolish enough to opt-in to the service).

The only big-name social app joining the “social networking” category at launch is Twitter, which contributed an app that it says is designed for the “mainstream” user and is three times faster than the previous version of Tweetie for Mac, the independent app that Twitter acquired. The new Twitter app is quite elegant, with the rounded corners and UI accents of an iOS app rather than something from the desktop world. Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski says that based on his positive experience with it this morning he’s already deleted the two other Twitter clients on his desktop.

Other than that, the category contains an app for Mashable, the blog about social networking. There are some independent Twitter apps such as Tweetings for Twitter and Itsy. There’s an app for MarsEdit, the desktop blogging software.

That’s slim pickings compared to the social networking category for iPhone apps, where the top free apps are Skype, Facebook and Textfree. Meanwhile, the free iPad social networking app category is led by a couple of off-brand Facebook apps and the official Twitter app.

Facebook has neglected development of its own apps on the iPad and other platforms, so it’s not a surprise that the company hasn’t built something for the Mac app launch. And Skype, as you can understand, already has its own desktop app. Various texting and voice services perhaps make more sense in a phone situation. But you’d think there would at least be a LinkedIn, Tumblr or Myspace Mac app.

Maybe they’ll come later–today’s launch included just 1,000 apps. Or maybe the desktop just isn’t a very social place.

(Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I can link to the Mac apps themselves, as accessing the store requires a software update available only to users of the latest Mac operating system.)

As displayed by its policy of declining to give Google a way to extract user email addresses–which Google called it out on last week–Facebook is clearly worried about Google extending its excellent Gmail product with a rocket booster of emails imported from Facebook for a competing social tool. The timing of all this is coming to a head as the companies seek to release products before the end of the year.

So, is a social network that adds email better or worse than an email service that adds social?

Put another way, if you had to give up your Facebook or Gmail, which would go first?

An email service from Facebook would almost certainly have novel social features and the company’s trademark opt-out viral hooks. The Facebook emails will supposedly include @facebook.com addresses (and probably be the unique usernames that people have set up through Facebook’s vanity URL program). They would also be integrated into other Facebook products along with Office.

Meanwhile, a social product from Google, if done well, is one of the only things that could knock the young Facebook out of its dominance in the category. So many people today already depend on Google (you may have heard of its search product) and trust its brand.

Will Facebook email have Gmail’s hallmark feature, conversation threading? Will some young people who only use Facebook and texting for communication even notice a difference? Will Facebook finally release a better calendaring tool alongside email? We’ll let you know as soon as we find out.

By the way, this comment from Facebook platform tech lead Mike Vernal explaining why Facebook doesn’t want to export email addresses to Google (even though it already sends them to Yahoo and Microsoft) looks a bit different four days later:

Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.