As expected, PayPal released its own version of Square's mobile payments service today. Like Square, "PayPal Here" uses a small dongle that can be plugged into an iPhone's headphone jack as a credit card swiper. Merchants punch in the required amount and customers can choose whether to swipe their card, use the camera to read the credit card number, or even scan a check. Also like Square, the app boasts tracking features for small businesses and allows for direct payment based on location.

However, it's super hard to focus on the pros/cons and whether the eBay subsidiary can squash Square, when all we can picture is Dwight Schrute's moonpie face as he unveiled the similiarly-hued-and-shaped Saber Pyramid.  We're not the only ones who noticed. Verge commenters couldn't stop knee-slapping over the likeness.

Unlike The Office's ill-conceived non-innovation--The tablet computer that slips through your hands!--PayPal's dongle seems to be utilitarian. "The design includes a 'wing' on a hinge to 'stabilize' the reader on the phone when swiping a card," noted the Verge. PayPal's flat rate of 2.7 percent also undercuts Square's 2.75 percent. If you use PayPal's free debit card, however, a 1 percent cash back offer brings the effective rate down to 1.7 percent, the company claims. What's more, adds the Verge, its "app can be used to accept any credit card, debit card, and also track cash — 'any form of payment short of barter.'"

But Square may still have the advantage when it comes to the back of a taxi cab game. It doesn't look like PayPal has come out with an iPad version . . . yet.

When they do, may we recommend the sales pitch stylings of one Jim Halpert?

To pull the right articles from the social media deluge, News.me's iPhone app analyzes the links shared by your friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook to determine what's relevant to you, using some metadata from Bit.ly (another Betaworks company) to help figure that out.

News.me already has a pared-down email product (of the top five links a day) and an iPad app that launched last April, albeit without the Facebook connection. But as general manager Jake Levine told us yesterday, the iPhone app is where things get social. The clean interface displays a nicely-formatted photo, headline, and, immediately below that, what your friends have said about the article, including their tweets and Facebook status updates as well as reactions on News.Me.

To make responses sound more meaningful than a generic "Like," the startup offers a shortlist of other one-word responses, including Ha!, Wow, Awesome, Sad, and Really? As much as it makes us groan a little inside every time a startup thinks slapping on some social = $$$, in this case, it sounds utilitarian. Seeing your friend's response is a great indicator of the likelihood that you'll want to click through--depending on the friend, of course. When Mr. Levine demoed the product to us via Skype, for example, we saw reactions from Reuters newshound Anthony De Rosa (alongside his sister and other Betaworks employees.)

How long did it take them to choose those five little words? "Oh my god a long time," Mr. Levine responded with a combination laugh/groan. "We actually decided on this the day before submissions." He said News.me reached out to five people to brainstorm ideas, including Wall Street Journal and Nieman Labs alum Zach Seward, who offered the following inspired suggestions: Woah, Huh, Damn, Uhhhh, and tl;dr.

The new iPhone app also supports offline reading--phew--and saves articles to your News.me Reading List (you can automatically import your Twitter favorites, as well as integrate with Instapaper and the News.me iPad version). One can always tell which products are built in New York vs. San Francisco, said Mr. Levine, based on how much they care about how it works underground.

News.me's six-man team has a strong technical bent, steeped in news and discovery, including CTO Michael Young, the former lead technologist for the Times's R&D lab, as well as the iOS developer behind Epicurious, and the designer behind Wired's iPad app. Which may be why they offer a thoughtful approach to modern media consumption. "We’re of the philosophy that Twitter and Facebook will kind of form foundational layers of the social web on which purpose-built social networks and applications will emerge," explained Mr. Levine.

"Instagram and Foursquare are the best examples of that," he added. "These are networks that are built for one type of conversation, one type of sharing. We think news is a similar category in that it's big enough to be interesting as a business and it’s a big enough part of people’s day, it helps make important decisions, but its small enough to benefit from a focused network."

News.me competitor Summify was recently acquired by Twitter, and some of its users migrated over to News.me. With other players like Percolate and XYDO moving over to the enterprise side of things, by offering their news curation products to other companies and brands, "We’re the lone vestige for actual consumers," said Mr. Levine.

As for the Summify acquisition, Mr. Levine anticipated that, "The challenge [Twitter] is going to face is that people build their networks on Twitter for a bunch of different use cases, which means that people are sharing a bunch of different types of content so to make meaning out of that content is incredibly challenging from a discovery perspective."

True enough, which made us wonder if you could limit News.me to a particular Twitter list (to keep your movie and food friends, say, out of your tech stream)? Not yet, said Mr. Levine, but they're working on it.