(Photo: NJ Governor's Office/Tim Larsen)

Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest were hacked this week, after a security breach at customer-service provider Zendesk allowed a hacker to access user email addresses at the three social media companies. [Wired]

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's book marketing plans include "Lean in Circles," in which women study Ms. Sandberg's curriculum for career success. [NYT]

Twitter cofounder Ev Williams talks about when—and when not—to sell your company. [Medium]

Nevada became the first state to legalize online gambling. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may sign a law legalizing Internet gambling in his state as early as next week. [The Washington Post]

If you're a "startup junky," what are you really addicted to? [PandoDaily]

(Photo: Branch)

Conversation platform Branch announced in a post on its blog today that it is now out of invite-only beta and open to the public. With no more wait list, users can sign up immediately to start a conversation or group on Branch.

The startup also announced a host of new features, including the ability to highlight quotes in various branches as a way to reward positive feedback. "We think this serves two purposes," wrote Branch cofounder Josh Miller. "Creating valuable feedback for writers by letting them know when something they write is great, and a helpful signal for other readers by making branches easier to skim."

A new activity feed feature also allows users to see who is listening or watching a conversation they're hosting or participating in. Sorry, y'all: no more anony eavesdropping.

Branch kicked off 2013 by moving out of Betaworks into its own office space on 23rd St. and 3rd Ave. Mr. Miller told Betabeat that the new office is serving as a coworking space for a veritable who's who of New York tech, including "Amanda Peyton and the Grand St. crew, two ex-Foursquare employees doing a banking app, Anil Dash, Gina Trapani and Paul Ford." Medium, the new blogging platform from Twitter founder (and Branch mentor) Ev Williams, will also host its content team out of the Branch HQ.

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.

Mr. Williams, Mr. Peretti and Mr. Miller.

The elevators to the BuzzFeed office are magnificently slow. Each fits about six people comfortably, and they trundle and groan up to the 11th floor, where the company's ops, tech and marketing people sit. "Considering how fast the company moves, it's amazing how slow its elevators are," quipped one dapperly dressed man as we all awkwardly waited for the doors to open.

Betabeat was visiting the BuzzFeed office for the first time to attend a real-life roundtable. Hosted by Branch cofounder Josh Miller, the event included beers and mingling among some of New York's prolific tech reporters and entrepreneurs, as well as a discussion with Twitter cofounder Ev Williams and BuzzFeed's own cofounder Jonah Peretti.

Before the group settled into white plastic chairs in an event-type space outside the kitchen, Betabeat spotted several tech scene staples, like Paul Ford, Anil Dash and Rick Webb. Scrollkit's Cody Brown and Kate Ray, along with Digg CTO Michael Young, made an appearance. Reporters and writers were also out in full force: Pando Daily's Erin Griffith, The Awl's Choire Sicha and Business Insider's Alyson Shontell all nabbed seats towards the front to listen to the talk. TechCrunch coeditor Alexia Tsotsis sauntered in towards the end in a silver sparkly top.

The event was formatted like a real-life Branch, a conversation platform popular among the tech elite that seeks to "empower people to talk about the world around them." Mr. Miller, who has established himself as a prominent NYC tech entrepreneur in the year since he dropped out of Princeton, proved a confident interviewer, though it probably helped that he is close with Mr. Williams and Mr. Peretti, who both advise him on Branch. The trio sat in tall chairs, not unlike the ones you'd see scattered around a Hollywood set, with the Branch banner hanging behind them.

Soon into the talk, it became clear that Mr. Peretti and Mr. Williams--though clearly comfortable with each other--hold a handful of opposing views. Mr. Peretti is disarming and affable, while Mr. Williams is decidedly more staid, his humor held closer to the vest. It was an interesting juxtaposition to see two successful serial entrepreneurs with visibly different interviewing styles forced to come together and interact for a crowd.

Mr. Williams' new project is Medium, which is currently open to a few select users in private beta. Medium allows them to create valuable content that is categorized not by how new it is, but by how good it is.

"We want to get away from the obsession with newness," Mr. Williams said. "I think an obsession with the new overvalues its importance. Whatever you're looking at in Medium, you see the best stuff first, not the new."

Mr. Williams also argued that a person's social circle doesn't validate content or automatically make it interesting. "Valuable content can come from anyone," he emphasized.

Mr. Peretti, whose own website relies heavily on quickly spotting and posting or reframing the new, pointed out that Mr. Williams' distaste for newness is amusing given his history as the cofounder of Twitter.

"Isn't the prioritization of newness all your fault?" he joked. "You're solving a problem you created."

Mr. Williams, for his part, didn't let Mr. Peretti off the hook either.

"I'm not a big fan of aggregating content," he said a little later. The irony of him saying that while sitting in the BuzzFeed office next to Mr. Peretti was not lost on Betabeat.

To be fair, Mr. Peretti does have some rather controversial ideas. For one, he calls the reframing of someone else's scoop a “conceptual scoop,” which is sure to make journalism students bristle. "On social, nobody wants to pass around the rewrite," he argued. Instead, a lot of what BuzzFeed writers do is come up with a new way to frame an existing scoop. He gave the example of a collection of cat pictures, which doesn't mean anything given the Internet's scope of cat pictures. But when framed as "Bet You Can't Get Through This Post Without Awwing," old material becomes new.

Whether you think that counts as an actual scoop probably depends on how much you value breaking news.

Towards the end of the discussion, the topic turned to Twitter and how it serves as a vehicle--"like a railroad," Mr. Peretti emphasized--to deliver news and information. Mr. Williams agreed, but with a caveat; "Most tweets don't have links," he said, and so it's come to serve another niche. "I think it's the best standalone platform for witticisms," he added, making the audience chuckle. "That's a funny word," Mr. Peretti said, sounding ever-more like the pleasantly silly "accidental" entrepreneur he is.

As BuzzFeed first reported (shocker!), Mr. Williams also suggested that a new way to measure a Twitter user's influence could be in the works. Because many Twitter followers are actually fake, perhaps your follower count isn't an accurate way to gauge your influence. Instead, he stated, "The dream metric is how many people saw your tweet."

As Twitter continues to revoke API access and court Hollywood bigwigs, we won't hold our breath: seems like the company has some more serious issues on its hands these days.

Even though both Mr. Peretti and Mr. Williams have impressive track records as serial entrepreneurs, towards the end of the discussion both expressed that running a company is still a lot of work.

"It's still hard," said Mr. Williams. "There's always new stuff to screw up."

It's meeeeee. (Photo: Straight From the A)

We wrote about the sketchy world of fake Facebook fans back in May, but the phenomenon is apparently just as rampant and shady on Twitter. To shed some light on the truth about fake Twitter followers, social media management startup Status People developed a tool that studies a sample set of 500 followers to determine what percentage of them are fake, inactive and good.

Fake followers are suspected spam bots; inactive are followers that haven't tweeted in a while; and good are followers that are actively engaged.

Naturally, our first inclination was to plug in the cofounders of Twitter to see what their percentages looked like. Turns out they have some pretty inflated follower numbers.

Jack Dorsey: 2,060,252 Followers

8 percent fake, 32 percent inactive, 60 percent good
Mr. Dorsey had the most legit follower count, with only 164,820 out of his 2+ million followers being fake accounts.

Ev Williams: 1,504,115 Followers

11 percent fake, 49 percent inactive, 40 percent good
Mr. Williams fared slightly worse, boasting 165,452 fake followers.

Biz Stone: 1,937,599 Followers

18 percent fake, 42 percent inactive, 40 percent good
One word: ouch. 348,767 of Mr. Stone's followers are fake, almost double the amount of his fellow cofounders.

And just because this is fun, here are a few others:

TechCrunch: 20 percent fake, 39 percent inactive, 41 percent good

Marissa Mayer: 18 percent fake, 29 percent inactive, 53 percent good

Mike Bloomberg: 14 percent fake, 35 percent inactive, 51 percent good

Bill Gates: 45 percent fake (!!), 36 percent inactive, 19 percent good

Paul Graham: 6 percent fake, 29 percent inactive, 65 percent good

For the record, Betabeat only has 3 percent fake followers, 19 percent inactive and 78 percent good--though we do possess a slight fraction of followers compared to most of these accounts. Sigh.

The Obvious Offices are located in downtown San Francisco, near the Powell St. BART stop, just around the corner from the Apple store, which is convenient because everyone at Obvious uses Apple products. Macbook Airs, iPads, Magic Mice and Apple wireless keyboards: Tim Cook would not be disappointed.

The space is pretty much exactly what you’d expect a well-regarded San Francisco startup office to look like. It has that modern, industrial feel that is all cool California class: cement walls frame six foot glass windows, fat, exposed pipes and air ducts snake across the ceiling.

On the 8th floor of a building that also includes car service startup Uber, it’s a beautiful office with a beautiful view of downtown San Francisco, but the Obvious employees don’t seem to notice. It is quiet, they are heads down, almost all of the shades yanked down fully to shield the sun from splashing a glare across their monitors.

Josh Miller, the cofounder of Branch, shows us around the office. It is very quiet--you can tell everyone is intensely focused on whatever they’re working on. Some are sitting, some are standing: the matching desks, which are white and shiny and expensive-looking, are adjustable, so you can sit for one part of the day and stand for another.

We Skype this to our editor. “Of course they have adjustable desks,” she shoots back. We are definitely jealous.

Mr. Miller leads us to the end of the office, where a conference room full of windows gives us a breathtaking panoramic view of all of downtown San Francisco. If you look down there, you can kind of see the ferry building, he says. We squint: there it is!

When we look away from the view, Mr. Miller points out the fully-stocked premium wet bar that occupies one wall of the conference room. Top shelf liquors span the bar, and there is a moment where we feel intimidated by their labels: for Mr. Miller, who is just 21, Vladi’s or Franzia is more his style, he jokes.

Finally we settle into another conference room with large windows. There are racks for employees to hang their bikes on. Next to it, one lonely razor scooter--who would ride a razor scooter to work?--hangs sullenly.

“They have a fully stocked wet bar!” we Skype to our editor.

“So does the Observer,” she writes back.

“Nah, just kidding.”

Click through the slideshow to see some snaps of the Obvious digs.