Mr. Williams. (Photo: Wikipedia.org)

Power Literary Hire: Twitter cofounder Ev Williams's new publishing tool, Medium, just added an impressive member to its team. Kate Lee, a former literary agent from International Creative Management (ICM), has joined Mr. Williams's startup as the director of content. Ms. Lee was responsible for plucking several bloggers out of obscurity and giving them book deals. The Observer announced her leave from ICM back in April. In a blog post on the site, Mr. Williams described her job as "encouraging, soliciting, commissioning, and contextualizing interesting ideas, authors, and institutions" and noted that she would be building a small team in New York to help her do that.

Branch Finally Lets You Hang Out With Your Friends: Branch, the social conversations site, just launched a groups feature yesterday. In an email to Betabeat, Branch cofounder Josh Miller described it as "Branch's equivalent of a Follow button." The idea was inspired by the conversations that people have at dinner parties, in which smaller groups form to discuss topics that they care about. On Branch, these groups can be added into a conversation. Branch's example site includes a group featuring Mr. Miller, Medium's Ev Williams, John Borthwick from Betaworks, Michael Sippey from Twitter and Facebook's Sam Lessin. These groups have a possibility to create Bloods and Crips-like warfare in tech. Choose sides wisely.

Christmas Swag on a Million: BaubleBar, the discounted jewelry online megastore, is going all out for the holidays. In addition to its Soho pop-up shop The Bar, the company is partnering with nail polish giant Essie and teaming up with Elle magazine for a guided shopping experience. On Cyber Monday, BaubleBar will be giving customers a free product for every $40 they spend in what it calls its Cyber Monday Gifting Suite. And the "20 Days of Buried Baubles," in which 20 style influencers will offer a daily BaubleBar deal to their fans,will begin on the 30th. You're going to need a new jewelry rack.

Like the Song From Legally Blonde: Peek, the Eric Schmidt- and Jack Dorsey-backed travel site, is launching a new feature called Perfect Days. It allows users to share their ideal 24-hour game plan for a city. Users looking for places to recommend can pull from their Foursquare and Google Places accounts. The site already has some celebrities that have made their own Perfect Days, including designer Tory Burch and prolific tweeter Piers Morgan.

Designers Should Apply to This:  The investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) has announced that it's starting a design fellowship program to help young designers get acclimated to working with startups. The three-month program will pair up designers with some of KPCB's funded startups like Coursera, Flipboard, Klout, Square and Path. Applications are being accepted now and will be taken until January 31.

Makeup Ladies Go to the Net: Chloe + Isabel, the e-commerce jewelry brand, just announced the launch of its new online platform. Instead of just a regular store, the company is now employing an Avon model for direct sales, through which its users can now sell products to their friends and profit. These users can pull photos from their Instagram accounts to better display their products. Prepare to be spammed by your friend's hip mom.

Let's Pretend We're Rich: Zaarly, the online marketplace for goods and services, has just launched a virtual pop-up shop for Thanksgiving. If you burn the turkey, just hire a local chef to cook the meal for you. Or perhaps you're not a very good cleaner: just pay someone to do it for you. Hire a fleet of professional help to impress your out-of-town guests and say, "Oh them? They're here year-round!"

Don't Forget to Rate, Comment and Subscribe: Rightster, a service that helps content providers maximize revenue from online video, just announced that it has broken into the top 10 of the U.S. comScore YouTube rankings. It now owns around 300 YouTube channels. John Dillon, a former software ad exec at Alcatel Lucent, just joined Rightster as its new vice president of marketing.

A Really Pretty Junk Drawer: If your inbox is maxed out with daily deals and coupons from your favorite stores, then Sift is the new iPad app for you. It sorts your junk emails into a scrollable shopping experience. The YouTube demo is an EDM shopping party. Go nuts.

Companies Love Paying for Mobile: Usablenet, the company that makes mobile sites for big businesses, has just been named to Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500, a power list that rates the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and clean technology companies in North America. Started in 2000, Usablenet claims that its revenues have grown 861 percent in the past four years.

Miss E. Jean, if you're nasty.

Celebrated Elle advice columnist and former "Saturday Night Live" writer, E. Jean Carroll is kind of a riot. Or so Betabeat discovered when we called up the 69-year-old author and serial Internet entrepreneur last night to talk startups as she was "having my wine." Maybe it's the red hair or the emphatic voice modulation, but she sorta sounded like a sultrier Carol Burnett.

E. Jean's first startup—2002's GreatBoyfriends.com, which let women recommend a good catch they were willing to throw back—was purchased by The Knot in 2005. Then came the ill-fated Facebook spoof called Catch27.com that let you make online trading cards of yourself and trade your friends for hotter friends. Last year there was FLAAB, where users made a bet to see if they could lose weight and paid up if they failed.

A week ago, she launched a new dating venture called Tawkify that forgoes online profiles for a brief questionnaire, photo, and a chance to let E. Jean—personally!—set you up for a blind phone date. No surprise to members of the New York Tech Meetup list-serve who were recently treated to a lively back-and-forth when E. Jean requested help getting good men to sign up.

(In short, a dubious beta-user named Glen declared the site a failure for an automated call system called Mr. Brooks that set up the date... until he found out the girl on the other end was interested in him, at which point Glen invited E. Jean to dinner.)

We talked to Ms. Carroll about her latest venture, Kenneth Shaw (her better tech half), and why men are the new women.

What was the inspiration for Tawkify?

The inspiration, do you live in New York?

I do.

So you know what the situation is. There’s loads and tons and an overrun of beautiful, accomplished, sexy, incredible, incredibly skilled, affluent, athletic women. They love football! They love everything! And there are less men. So what has happened is in a Darwinian sense, women are now competing for the men, instead of [laughs] the two-and-a-half billion year plan where men compete for women. So the men have now become the women.

Tell me about your previous startups.

There was GreatBoyfriends, which Oprah called “the greatest idea she’d ever heard.” That was a site where women recommended their ex-boyfriends.

Oh!

Yes! It was brilliant! Because why would you throw a guy away just because you don’t agree on religion or you didn’t like how he chewed his food? Then there was FLAAB where people made a bet if they could lose the weight and if they did, they got their money back.

What’s the status of that?

We closed it because, you know what, frankly Nitasha you know waaaaay more about this stuff than I do. Because you do this all day long and I’m a moron, I’m a total moron and I hadn’t quite figured out that you needed a huge infusion of cash on something like FLAAB. On Tawkify, the thing just zoomed, we launched seven days ago.

How’s it going?

We have so many beautiful, accomplished, unbelievable women that we are struggling just to keep our heads above water because we can’t see anything because of all the women.

Who is Kenneth? I saw him named on your website as someone who helps with the matches.

Oh Kenneth! Kenneth Shaw is a Stanford computer genius, who graduated a couple years ago. He was one of those brilliant kids who created one of the most popular Facebook apps in 2006 or 2007, which was called My Purity Test. I found him on Facebook, I just thought it was hilarious.

You worked together?

We did something called the Fuk [Ed note: pronounced fook] Book, which was the largest sex survey of college students in history.

Can you spell that?

F-u-k. It was a survey of sexual practices of college kids.

And what happened with that?

I have more data on the sexual habits of college kids than anybody on the planet is what happened! I was going to write a book, but I was so overwhelmed with the data. Sixty percent of college kids have tried anal sex. That threw me for such a loop, I couldn’t write.

Ha. You were expecting a lower percentage?

I don’t know what I expected, BUT MY GOD! Apparently, porn has had a huge influence, so everyone wants to try it, right? By everybody, I mean dudes.

So that’s how you met Kenneth?

He’s one of those Stanford kids that just doesn’t stop. I don’t know when he ever sleeps. He’s in San Francisco. He’s working for One Kings Lane, do you know Alison—

Pincus.

It’s so much fun talking to you! You’re not like my friends! You know what’s going on. Oh my god!

So how does Tawkify work?

First of all, the stunning thing is, the questions are so simple. Age, sex, where you live, what you’re interested in, what you want, what you do for a living. That’s it! I don’t want to know the five sexy things you keep by your bedside, I don’t want to know any of that! Because I can make a match just from what you’re interested in and what you do for a living and what you look like.

How many people have signed up so far?

Let’s say lots of women. And it’s not that we don’t have men signing up, we have not as outstanding... I can’t match these superlative women with these dudes.

It’s a problem.

What are we gonna do?!

Was anyone on the list-serv helpful about that?

Those guys are so hilarious, I don’t even. No, they weren’t.

They seemed to think you were just trying to promote the startup.

Well, I copped to it immediately, of course! But I just thought I’d put a little thing and it was vicious wrangling for 24 hours. But it was so much fun hearing from them. Actually two of them joined and I set them up.

Oh yeah?

Nitasha, this is hilarious. So what was his name? Glen. So Glen is set up and Mr. Brooks —you know we have a robot arranging everything —the robot calls Glen and says I have your match, it’ll be ready tonight at 10 o’clock. So Glen gets on the phone apparently and interviews the girl!  After it’s over, he writes a report for the list-serv and says “This is the worst! This is abominable! This whole thing sucks!” I say, “Glen, shut the fuck up the girl liked you!” She liked him! Nitasha, she went for him. He ended up asking me to dinner [to talk about the startup]. She immediately wanted to talk to him again. Of course now he loves Tawkify.

What were his earlier objections?

He said this is like being in prison and even in prison, they tell people they have one minute left. Because we cut off the conversations after seven minutes. Oh, yeah. We set you up on the phone, but you’ve got seven minutes because Nitasha, you’ve been on the phone with guys, when they abruptly end, what do you want?

What?

What happens when something’s cut short?

It’s better?

You want more! Right?!

So do people send in pictures?

Oh yes, they have to have pictures because I have to see what they look like. But one of the reason why so many women signed up is because they’re protected. Nobody sees their picture. So creeps and jugheads and assholes are not sending them messages.

Is Kenneth involved with picking matches?

[Laughs] Kenneth is building the site and doing all the tech. He’s working on the fly, he goes all night. He doesn’t drink, he just does energy drinks. He’s amazing. But he does help pick. He tells me who he thinks the cutest girls are —from a guy’s point of view. Now he would choose somebody like Amanda, who is adorable, but I would have overlooked her until I went back and really looked at her and she’s a Jane Austen type.

Have you set Kenneth up?

There are two girls on there that I know that Kenneth likes. I know that he likes them! He’s like 25 and adorable. So he’s not gonna last long.

Are all the women in New York?

Oh no, they’re in Chicago and Florida and LA and New York. I’m trampled! They’re everywhere! Make them go away! And by the way, they’re spending a lot of money for this.

What’s the pricing structure?

$8 for a match. $15 for three matches. But we have a special $99 for hand-holding and many women are going for that because I will talk to them on the phone, find out a little bit about their history and really what they want. Basically, I want to know how picky they are. But, you know what, women are really not that picky. They just want someone to love and go to a movie with and go to a hockey game with.

Well, they say they’re not. But then it’s later revealed they might be pickier than they admit.

Exactly [whispers].

If you’re picking the matches, how are you planning on scaling? Say it really takes off?

No, we’re keeping it small and select. This is not gonna be three million people, this is not going to be Match.com. I am not going near people like this guy who emailed —are you ready for this?­­ This is what he wants in a woman: “Not a whore. Not fat. But an intellectual.” [laughs] Now I am not going to match him! I don’t care how much money he pays me, he is not going to get a match. Not a whore, not fat, but an intellectual?