Crushing it on the job listings front.

It’s hard out there for a startup, what with the tech talent crunch and all. A different kind of hardship than the one faced by America's millions of underemployed, of course. But how are you going to recruit a programmer when Facebook can throw more money at almost any candidate worth having? At the seed-stage level, you'll need more than the promise of equity and the ability to work from home.

Well, two well-funded companies have figured out one way to stand out from the pack: cutesy job postings!

Exhibit A: This lengthy listing seeking an office manager for the Obvious Corp.-backed Medium. To better reflect the company culture and to pinpoint the type of employee sought, the position has been dubbed "office host," because:

"Just like that perfect party host, you’ll make sure all the details in our office are organized and that everyone is having a great time every day."

Hmm, “office dorm mom,” sounds more apt--with shades of “office cruise director.” For instance, here's how you start the morning: "As people filter in, your warm greeting and unwavering smile make them forget how much Muni sucks and reminds them why they are excited to come in each day to be with their work family."

The post goes on to outline specific duties like handling invoices, but woven throughout are the more ineffable responsibilities:

Someone stops at your desk to chat about a show they are going to next weekend, a couple others gather and a few of you decide to all go because you’re all just awesome peeps.

Perhaps this listing should have simply read: "Wanted, one Joan Holloway for promising SF startup. Martini ingredients provided."

Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the spectrum, comes this aw-shit-ya'll listing on Hacker News from the incorrigible team at Rap Genius. Title: "Rap Genius (YC S11) Seeks Brilliant Engineers to Build Internet Talmud." The gang is seeking (1) genius Rails programmer, (1) genius iOS/Android programmer and (1) genius front-end developer who can also design. Presumably, no non-geniuses need apply.

To be considered, you must be:

down to help build the Internet Talmud (aka the best hip hop site, the best lyrics site, the best music social network, the best wikipedia for explanations of all of text, etc, etc)

If you sign on, your "pretty serious bennies" will include, "SICK salary & equity. You won't be taking a pay cut to work here (unless you work for a hedge fund...)," as well as "Free bomb health insurance," a new iPhone, a gym membership and unlimited free Seamless.

"SWA-SWAAG!" the posting concludes.

At least no one can say expectations weren’t laid out perfectly clearly from the outset.

(h/t Matt Langer)

(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."

Medium (Screengrab)

BuzzFeed's FWD tech blog has stepped forward to answer one of the most burning questions of our time: where do you find white guys on the Internet? As a service to the caucasian XY-deprived populace, FWD focuses its survey on three somewhat similar bloggy or social networking-related start-ups: Svbtle, Medium and App.net:

How white and male is the early-adopter crowd? As it turns out, quite. White males make up 81 percent of the users at Svbtle, 88 percent of users at App.net, and 61 percent of users at Medium. It appears that Medium is somewhat more diverse than the other two platforms. It's important to note, however, that Medium is the youngest of the three, and has the smallest pool of beta users as well, so the data is less statistically significant.

Contributor Benjamin Jackson writes that the data confirms "the stereotype of the white male-dominated tech industry" and that first adopters of sites like App.net are indeed "often influential [...] tech leaders based in and around New York and the Bay Area."

We kid, but the survey makes striking point about techie concentrations of dudes with--as FWD defines it--"a visibly white complexion." Or, in the case of App.net, men with visibly white complexions and $50.

(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."

Hey girl. (Photo: Tumblr)

Google Maps updated its transit layer and now has scheduling info for more than a million public transportation stops, but that still won't make the F train come any faster. [Google]

Speaking of Google, its Mountain View campus has a 3D pasta printer for its employees. We're not jealous or anything... [TechPP]

What's the deal with Obvious Corporation's new publishing platform, Medium? Nieman Lab breaks it down for you. [Nieman Journalism Lab]

Fresh off the heels of his amusing lawsuit debacle with Charles Carreon, The Oatmeal is putting his efforts into building a museum for Nikola Tesla. [The Oatmeal]

People pirate because it takes three years for Avatar to come out on 3D Blu-ray, apparently. [Gizmodo]