(Photo: Makr.io)

After the tragic loss of one of its core members, the team behind Diaspora--a Y-Combinator-backed open source "anti-social network"--went underground for a while, privately grieving while attempting to keep the well-funded and highly hyped company running. But the startup show must go on: AllThingsD reported today that the Diaspora team channeled their grief into a new site--launched today and called Makr--that allows you to easily remix and distribute photos.

Makr looks a lot like a slew of different products out there, including NYC-based Can.vas and Obvious Corporation's newest platform Medium, while borrowing the notion of a "front page" populated by trending posts from Reddit. Users can upload their own images or remix already posted ones, adding pithy captions. Other users can then like, remix or comment on photos.

We caught Makr cofounder Max Salzberg in a chat on the site while browsing, and he agreed to discuss Makr with us--only after he was done making his bacon, of course.

"It’s kind of like the game Telephone that people played in kindergarten," he told Betabeat by phone. "You say one thing, but the next person hears another thing. We’re trying to think of a simple, easy way for people to be creative. You can play around with a simple quippy thing and then your friends can riff off of that."

"I think that what we’re trying to do is make memes for everybody, so it doesn’t need to be a lolcat or some sort of weird internet comment to be a meme," Mr. Salzberg added. "We think people will use Makr in schools and in workplaces. You can express some sort of emotion and other people can kind of respond in a way that's about creating something."

(We decided to leave the debate over the difference between a meme and an image macro for a later time.)

Makr's front page is dominated by images that are a little self-referential, including a bunch of remixed pictures of the Makr team itself and captions like "Makr.io: Powered by Mariah Carey & Pizza." But perhaps Makr's most powerful idea is the notion of hosting both real and virtual parties where users schedule a time to get together and remix photos. As someone who clings to our computer on Friday nights like most people do a whiskey sour, we can definitely see why that's appealing.

"Most people think technology is mediating you from the real world, but we feel like it’s giving you this opportunity to have another way to hang out with your friends," said Mr. Salzberg

As for the future of Diaspora? Turns out it doesn't really need the team to stick around and run things.

"Diaspora is more of an open-source community project; at this point there’s lots of people all over the world working on it," Mr. Salzberg said. "Makr is our main focus."

At the Meetup. (flickr.com/alextorrenegra)

MEET 'N GREET Monday, June 5, is this month's New York Tech Meetup. Presenters range from Fitocracy to Loosecubes. If you haven't bought tickets, you've got one more chance: There's one batch left, and they go on sale Friday.

MORNING, SUNSHINE News.me has just revamped its morning email, ramping up the "daily briefing" angle. Not only has the company redesigned the whole thing, News.me's editor will be pick three big stories to summarize every morning. Also added: stuff you missed and an image. Because images are snazzy.

SALE SALE SALE For all the pinatics out there: social commerce platform Lyst has debuted a tool that'll allow you to receive an instant sale alert whenever something on your Pinterest boards goes on sale. In addition, Lyst will notify users who pin an item from a store whether that item can be had elsewhere.

GROWING UP We hear that NYC's Lean Startup Meetup just shot past 2,500 members.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER The Startup Genome, a.k.a. the source of those crazy stats regarding New York's high rate of female founders, has launched the Investor Compass, a dashboard allowing users to centralize data about the startups they're working with. It's designed to help investors, advisors, and other interested parties make better decisions, leveraging the 17,000-startup database the organization has already built. For more details, check the company blog.

MOVING ON UP On the heels of launching their new search platform for homebuyers, RealDirect.com is moving into its own new home. The online real estate brokerage is settling into new digs on 21st St. Presumably the new office has plenty of space for all the planned hires: The company just hired three new agents and plans to staff up further, with new people to cover new areas in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

SUNSHINE AND SHOPPING The folks at Tip or Skip, an app billed as enabling "window shopping from anywhere," are organizing a "Tip Crawl" on June 3 at the Brooklyn Flea. Attendees will use the app to snap pics of their best finds.

DIGITAL ATTIC Persnickety about your private pics? None too sure about Facebook's ever-shifting settings? Last week you got a new storage option. That would be miLifemap, a digital storage locker designed to offer families a private place to keep everything important. Though we must confess, we are of the generation that thinks half the fun of having fun is showing off.

GET A JOB GameChanger needs a VP of Marketing. Details are here. Canvas needs a senior Javascript developer. For more, check out this ad. Turntable.fm needs a lead designer. Learn more on their jobs page.

One of Canvas's most popular posts.

Canvas members received a celebratory email in their inbox this morning. The image-driven social website celebrated its first birthday this week, as well as its one millionth post. As a sign the startup is all growns up, Canvas also announced that you no longer have to use Facebook to sign up.  Email notifications "when someone replies or remixes one of your posts" are also now enabled, which should encourage users to visit the site.

When Christopher Poole, the fair-haired boy prince of meme land,  first founded Canvas, it sounded like purposeful departure from his first startup, 4chan. Instead of the malwebolence of the /b/ boards, users were asked to "Keep it safe for work | Don’t be mean | Stay on topic." That may have helped the startup pick up $3.63 million in funding, but it yielded mixed results, at first. (Nazi necrophilia, anyone?)

But that appears to have changed.

A quick look at the most popular posts on Canvas over the past month and past year (admittedly, neither have which represents a big block of time) seem almost PG. The overall flavor is your standard teenage humor and angst, with a bit of a nerdy twist. Oh yeah, and a healthy appreciation of the comedy stylings of one Bill Murray. Whether Canvas's more sanitized offerings will go as viral, however, still remains to be seen.

Nyan Nyan na Nyan na

Canvas, the friendlier, more forward thinking cousin to Chris "Moot" Poole's original meme generator, 4Chan, has just rolled an interesting twist. Up till now Canvas was an image board where users posted pics, remixed them, added badges and shared like crazy. Now Canvas users can add audio remixes, allowing anyone to scrape audio from YouTube and add it on to an image.

Like the rest of Canvas, everything happens in the browser using a set of lightweight tools, meaning images get remixed and re-shared at a rapid clip.

Combining audio with the animated GIFs that populate the site allows users to create miniature films in seconds. It's bleeding edge fun for the new breed of web kids who talk pretty much exclusively through memes. More bad news for us old fashioned letters and words types.

Just to give you a sense of the activity on Canvas, since the post went up this morning, dozens and dozens of audio remixes have been posted to the rapidly growing thread.

StepStruder MK7 (makerbot.com)

So the big news from the last week: TechStars is now 100 percent more Y Combinator, having raised a new fund from investors so it can give every graduate a $100,000 convertible note. But, did anything else happen?

3-D WHAAAT. "MakerBot Industries announced today the launch of yet another innovation to 3D printing, the MakerBot Stepstruder MK7. The most compact and reliable extruder to date, the MK7 produces the most detailed prints ever created on the MakerBot Thing-O-Matic." Woot!

OPENING UP. Canv.as is, the second image-based startup from Christomoot Poole, is in public beta now (as is Google+). Alpha invites went out for Diaspora, that New York expatriated startup still occasionally poking at the fringes of our awareness. But Canvas still has a complex domain and the Twitter handle is @canv_as. Ick!

TIME FROM NYTM DEMO TO FUNDING: APPROXIMATELY SIX MONTHS. "Sitesimon.com is relaunching into public beta today as a new service and announcing its $500K angel investment for the first time. Sitesimon now brings the best content on the web to you, automatically tailored to your interests in real-time. Using a unique combination of social and science (and an awesome new browser add-on), Sitesimon privately analyzes what you browse and who you connect with online to recommend the best content for you. Best of all, it learns from what you’re already doing, so it requires no additional work on your part.

We also raised $500K earlier this year from angel investors Ken Cron (Former CEO, Vivendi Universal Games; Former President, CMP Media), John Ason (early investor in Diapers.com/Soap.com, Ology.com, and Hotlist.com), and Samer Hamadeh (Co-Founder, Vault.com & Zeel.com; Venture Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners). We're based in NYC and currently in the ER Accelerator."

CHOOSE YOUR SLIPPER. A New York startup launches for those of little feet. "Once impossibly hard to find outside of the children's section or grandma's basement, thanks to the Odd Slipper, shoes for petite feet will now be easy to find with the click of a mouse (or heel!) And they'll be on-trend and user-voted.  Since it can be so difficult to find these sizes, we'd love to get the word out through the fashion community and reach those women who are often frustrated with the typical shoe store size offerings. Each week starting tomorrow, the online boutique will unveil new styles for the petite-footed woman to check out, vote on, and comment. Once the feedback is in, the best reviewed styles with the highest amount of votes will be sent to manufacturing. The Odd Slipper will be keeping customers updated as to which styles have been picked up and when they'll be ready for sale." Yay!

WOULDN'T IT BE LOVERLY. Lover.ly is "a visual search engine and cloud scrapbook" for "brides and their to friends search, save, and share wedding inspiration from the best sites online." The founder and CEO, Kellee Khalil, is a top Hashable-using networker and just hired an editorial director: Julie Raimondi, former EIC of Brides.com and Brides Local mag. "Sort of cool to see someone leaving Conde Nast for a startup," startup evangelist and new mediaite Rachel Sklar writes. "Julie was also previously exec editor at The Knot." Congrats!

TONITE: Even though two Ubers are gone, Projective Space rocks on. BYO Game Night is tonight: "We're acting on spur of the moment and can't refuse any opportunity we can grab to bring our friends, fans, and members together for an evening of games and drinks. Mario Kart, Wii Sports, Halo, Poker, Ping Pong, Board Games...We'll have 'em all and definitely encourage you to bring your own, perhaps we can geek out to Settlers of Catan? Generously hosted by PS member and traveling website Wanderfly, there'll be refreshments provided if you can peel yourself away from the screen." Fun!

THE WEEKEND. Hack for the hungry at the NYC Famine Hackathon and check out the multimedia art at the Dumbo Arts Festival. And rest up for YCNYC on Monday. Squee!

image via canvas

4Chan, the image board created by New York's Chris "Moot" Poole when he was just 15, has gone on to generate some of the funniest memes and most destructive communities on the internet. Last year he launched a new startup, Canvas, which tried to recreate the viral language of creating and sharing images without the filth of 4chan. The startup, which has raised more than $3.6 million so far from top flight VCs and angels, opened up to the public today.

Canvas insisted during its private beta that users log in with Facebook Connect and posted a simple set of rules: "Keep it safe for work | Don't be mean | Stay on topic." It banned sexually provocative content, hate speech and insults. The rules seems to be working ... sort of.

Unlike 4chan, which does not archive its posts, Canvas keeps older posts alive and keeps track of what has been most popular over the last year, month, week and day. Betabeat took a look at the most popular posts on Canvas from the last year to get a sense of what kind of community was developing.

A quick four panel post showing YouTube sensation Rebecca Black riding in a car ends with a picture of a completely totaled car. There is no blood, but the narrative of the image is clear. It's violent and mean (and funny).

Another popular image shows a woman standing in a fountain, water pouring up and out from under her skirt. The original caption on the most popular reblog reads "I came. Came buckets." A later version features "Larry the Penis Snake" crawling up the woman's skirt.

So yes, there is no explicit pornography here. And the community does seem to have diverse interests. Recent posts include un-ironic shots of fashion and nature with little or no shocking content. But those posts failed to generate anything like the response that followed the posts which pushed the boundaries of taste.

image via canvas

The simple truth is, sex, violence and race are hot button topics which provide the material for most comedy. Most jokes have an element of cruelty to them, because someone or something is the punch line. Which is why jokes about Nazi Necrophilia are some of the most popular items on Canvas.

It's unclear if Mr. Poole really hoped to create a sanitized version of 4chan with Canvas, or if he only wanted and needed to clean it up enough to get some great funding. It would be foolish to bet against the growth of this kind of image based internet behavior, although its unclear how Canvas plans to monetize. Unlike 4chan, Canvas is paying to host all these images for a while.

No doubt the community at Canvas will change quite a bit in coming months now that the floodgates are open to the public. It will be interesting to see if the most popular posts become more or less aggressive and what kind of features or ads Canvas rolls out to try and generate revenue from its users' activity. Its hard to image any big brands agreeing to appear on the site given the nature of the most popular posts.

"The King of Partying himself will be joining us LIVE on August 10th at 4PM EST to remix images and collaborate with users in #partyhard, so mark your calendars!" says Canvas.

The King of Partying was no less effusive, via his official blog:

Creator of Canv.as, Chris Poole, is a now legendary and infamous Internet wizard. He created the Internet's biggest and most popular photo message board website, 4chan (millions and millions of views). Canv.as is his new project and Chris has invited Andrew to debut his new platform and this event will be one of the first publicized events for the site.

Andrew and Chris have become friends over the last couple years, some of the classic 4chan memes have involved Andrew W.K. and his party hard ways. A few months ago, Chris and Andrew had a live chat on 4chan and got so many people on the site that it crashed! That had never happened before at 4chan.

"Party hard computer madness!" Mr. W.K. tweeted. Now if only he could get Moot and his fans out to the struggling Santos Party House.

What they hackNY fellows were picturing.

Moot (né Christopher Poole) was the latest tech luminary to impart his wisdom and experience, accumulated over the past 20-something years, to hackNY's 2011 class.

Akarshan Kumar, one of hackNY's new fellows, chronicled the experience on his blog New York Summer. In the two-hour talk Mr. Poole covered everything from his personal temperament (“I’m not easily offended. I run 4chan”) to not being friends with your board members.

But Mr. Poole's most trenchant advice seemed to be about picking the right co-founder and the benefits of imperfection. When picking a partner to run your start-up, over-eagerness should be a turn-off. Instead, he told them, go for a hard-to-get founder you're going to have to fight to work with. Mr. Kumar's take away? "If your prospective co-founder wants to sleep with you, don’t sleep with him."

As for imperfection, Mr. Poole said that's something he intentionally aimed for with his latest start-up, Canvas, an image sharing and tweaking website. By building Canvas to function like "something between Paint and Photoshop," it makes users more comfortable creating images on the site. Embracing a lack of optimization is an interesting approach to user experience, but one that certainly seems to have worked for 4chan. Think of it as familiarity breeds content.

Source: Canv.as

Chris Poole-founded, Lerer-backed start-up Canv.as is still in private beta but nudging toward the spotlight with new features and public threads--still, the image editor/meme generator can't shake its connection to its founder's widely-loathed and misunderstood first start-up, 4chan. "Canvas isn't a '4chan-related' site. 4chan is 4chan. Canvas is Canvas," the company tweeted last week at a user who complained that it was "heavily censored" and "we have to behave like school kids."

"I understand Canvas is trying to stay away from turning into 4chan and playing it safe because they’re new, etc blablabla," one user wrote on Tumblr after a Hitler joke was deleted. "But I can’t believe they deleted this for breaking the Code of Conduct. Seriously? So one can’t even make a joke about Hitler or Jews? I don’t see anything hateful or hate-inducing about this post. Fucking USA PC hyperobsession. I am disappoint."

"4chan has an incredible history, culture, language and identity... We want Canvas to have its own culture, identity and language," Mr. Poole told Epoca in an interview, which was translated to Portugese and by Google Translate back to English. "We want people from 4chan, but different people will create a new identity and culture together. The community began with 100 people who we invited and now there are tens of thousands of people. It's like 4chan, which started with 20 people in a chat room, and today, seven and a half years later, has 12 million users. We want to create a space, and continue to improve this space, and work with the community to make it a better place to play with media and hanging out with friends."

Canv.as hasn't done much promotion so far, but recently the company has been seeking more attention. It's pushing popular threads like Draw Me as a Video Game Character, gave out an extra five invites to every user, and added "sharing stickers" to easily publish content to Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon, on top of features like groups and enhanced image editing tools. The site still requires a Facebook login, which discourages some of the rowdier 4channers from swarming it to post Hitler, porn or other NSFW content. (Mr. Poole hasn't entirely rejected 4chan; there is a 4chan topic on Canv.as).