Morning, sunshine! (Photo: flickr.com/photos/wordridden)

News.me's iOS apps are no more. The team is pulling the plug to focus on Digg, thanks to onerous new requirements from Twitter and the fact the service is increasingly a competitor. Existing users will still get support (for now) and the email service is unaffected. [TheNextWeb]

This start-to-finish accounting of Ellen Pao's gender discrimination lawsuit against VC firm Kleiner Perkins--along with the details of her husband's financial difficulties--is riveting and a handy primer for anyone who wants to get up to speed on the case. [Fortune]

“The days when people could be very influential in the blogosphere aren’t here anymore.” Netroots ain't what it used to be. [The Daily Beast]

As companies like Airbnb, Coursera and Uber begin shaking up traditional industries, they're being met with regulatory pushback. Good luck with that, traditional industries. [GigaOm]

In the end, Facebook paid a mere $715 million in cash and stock for Instagram. It's less than a billion due to--you guessed it--the drop in the value of the social network's stock.  [TheNextWeb]

Mr. Rose (Photo: flickr.com/joi)

In the winter of 2004, soon after the husks of once-great dot-com startups had dried and shriveled, a 27-year-old college dropout named Kevin Rose deployed a barebones new site, simply named “Digg.”

It was one of the first social networks in existence. Back then, the term “social networking” hadn’t shouldered its way into our lexicon yet. Facebook was a nascent, walled platform for college gossip; Google was still idly toying with its search algorithm; Twitter wouldn’t launch for another two years.

News itself was a hierarchical affair, largely produced and disseminated by trusted broadcasters and editors. Journalism’s democratizing forces hadn’t congealed, yet; bloggers weren’t sitting front row at fashion shows or making a living off of Google Ads. The idea that a community of Internet geeks could manipulate the news cycle would’ve elicited howls of mocking laughter from the Conde kingmakers.

Mr. Rose, then an occasional tech TV talking head, launched Digg with the notion that it would change all that. Digg wants “to give the power back to the people,” proclaimed Mr. Rose in a 2005 preview of the website on the tech TV show The Screen Savers. By “digging” or “burying” links, users could effectively weed out the detritus and let the news they liked best filter its way to the top. The site’s functionality gave users the power to decide what deserved to be seen, and they were rewarded by spotting links early that would eventually become popular. Diggers garnered further clout by interacting with each other. Real power users began to emerge, enabled by their nimble maneuverings on the platform.

These days, stodgy publications like The New York Times pen fawning profiles of BuzzFeed bloggers and Business Insider newshounds, seemingly entranced by their mystical ability to foresee what will go viral. But Digg’s power users are the predecessors of keen-eyed bloggers, and Digg gave them the platform to broadcast their Internet soothsaying abilities. “The service forced me to get very good at finding news and interesting stories — and doing it fast,” wrote one-time Digg power user, former tech reporter and current venture capitalist M.G. Siegler in a recent blog post. “It also forced me to hone my headline writing skills.... Without Digg, I almost certainly would not be where I am now.”

“It was the first iteration of social news and social sharing,” Aubrey Sabala, an early employee of Digg, told Betabeat by phone. “In a lot of ways it was ahead of its time.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Internet revolution: following a handful of hefty capital rounds, mounting investor pressure put the focus on monetization. And some of Digg’s power users turned to the dark side, allowing advertisers and publishers to pay them for “diggs” so that their content could make it to the front page. In 2009, Digg rolled out a clunky ad experience, much to the chagrin of its fan base, which began to jump ship for Facebook and Twitter. A buggy overhaul of the site released in 2010 was the final straw: Digg crested the hill on its final decline, the majority of the site’s devoted users eventually decamping for Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.

But now Digg, the sleeping--or is it dead?--community giant, is getting the chance to redeem and recreate itself in the moneyed bosom of the New York tech scene, thanks to an acquisition by startup incubator Betaworks. Betaworks, nestled in the Meatpacking district steps away from the Highline, purchased Digg’s core assets just a handful of weeks ago, and set out to recreate the Digg experience from the ground up. What’s left of the Digg brand will be revived by the News.me team, another Betaworks social news startup that has been tapped to resurrect Digg’s decrepit corpse. And they've done it in just six weeks.

It’s an opportunity few startups ever get: to atone for their sins and start from scratch in a safety bubble, protected from the pressures of monetization and investor interests. They can build a purer product this time, learn from the lessons of Digg’s former incarnation, and hone in on accurately catering to the way users consume news.

But with its one-time competitor Reddit miles ahead in the race for relevancy, is it too late?

***

Mr. Borthwick with Mr. Siegler (Photo: flickr.com/techcrunch)

Less than 24 hours before the launch of the new version of Digg, Betabeat arrived at the Betaworks office, an airy, sprawling labyrinth of Apple products and side-by-side desks occupied by work crazed young people. We’d arrived just in time for a chocolate covered banana cart to show up, heralding a quaint office gathering celebrating the new Digg. Jake Levine, the former manager of News.me who became manager of Digg following the acquisition, told us that before the acquisition went through, he talked about Digg in codewords to his teammates. “We called it the banana stand,” he said, referring to a beloved Arrested Development plotline.

“Digg is one of the great iconic web 2.0 brands,” said Betaworks CEO John Borthwick in a clipped British accent, after we’d settled into a corner conference room littered with Betaworks stickers. (Sadly, there would be no frozen bananas for this Betabeat reporter.) Through the glass doors, we could see a red pole strung up with a Guy Fawkes mask, the universal symbol for the hacker group Anonymous. “It helped define a whole new wave of company creation and innovation," Mr. Borthwick went on. "But also this idea of socially curated news is something that they helped create.”

It was a pure idea, but the infusion of capital, coupled with the inherent drawbacks of the Digg voting model, ultimately led to Digg’s demise. “The company raised a lot of money maybe a little bit too fast and couldn’t figure out how to make money and then sort of went through a painful process of growing downwards,” Mr. Borthwick admitted. “Sometimes companies get pumped up like athletes full of steroids, so much so that they’re really strong and fit but they can’t actually walk any longer so they kind of fall over on their own weight.”

In short: mo’ money, mo’ problems.

Mr. Levine (Photo: Twitter)

Digg’s rebirth will also happen in a very different media environment. “It’s 2012, it’s not 2004,” emphasized Mr. Borthwick. “So what Digg needs is to change a little bit.” By scrapping the old code and rebuilding the infrastructure, Mr. Borthwick said that the new Digg will operate at 1/15th of the cost that the old Digg was running at just last month.

Additionally, now media companies that previously mocked the power of online communities are clamoring to plaster their links all over social news sites. Conde Nast snapped Reddit up back in 2006, hoping to expand its web properties, but its DNA never really fit the Conde mold, due to the site’s unwavering dedication to its community and refusal to cater to publishers. Social news communities like Reddit have grown from a barnacle on the side of the Internet to one of its primary content generators. Traffic-hungry blogs like BuzzFeed source a substantial amount of their content right from the trenches of Reddit. And with 2.5 billion pageviews a month, the amount of traffic Reddit can drive to a site in a single day could trounce pageview targets for an entire quarter. (Previously: Loving the Alien: How Erik Martin, King Bee of Reddit's Hivemind, Harnessed the Buzz)

For its part, Digg may have spread itself too thin, attempting to simultaneously placate disparate groups with competing interests. “I feel like when they moved to version 4, they were trying to serve too many constituencies: publishers, the users and the advertisers,” Erik Martin, Reddit’s general manager, told Betabeat by phone. That 4th version, which launched in 2010 and introduced publishers to the site, was so buggy that it crippled Digg’s functionality for weeks. "Many people will tell you that v4 of Digg was the tipping point, and I agree, for a simple reason," Miguel Lopez, a former Digg power user, told Betabeat by email. "It alienated the hardcore users and the community that had formed around the site.... They drove their most loyal users away, and for any 'social' site that is plain suicide."

“The front page went from interesting, to a bunch of corporate sponsored ads and a few threads that managed to squeak through,” wrote one Reddit user in a recent post about what killed Digg. “I didn’t come to Reddit because it was better or because it replaced digg for me, I came here because digg had a sudden heart attack and died.”

So how did Reddit avoid the same tragic fate as Digg? Its algorithms don’t allow users to collaborate and game the system, for one. “The frontpage we designed was a constantly rising and falling list of links (not like how digg and all of its clones just had a chronological format where once something got enough diggs it became #1 on the frontpage--an easily exploitable way to get a ton of traffic),” said Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian in an email. “It's not perfect, as we're always fighting cheaters, but we've also had to explain to an unsettling number of publishers that reddit, unlike its past competition, is not designed to be ‘gamed.’ We've had to reprimand quite a bit of bad behavior that used to be the status quo.”

In a way, Reddit is immune from many of the pressures that Silicon Alley startups are forced to contend with. Being scooped up by Conde did have its privileges. Unlike Digg, Reddit didn’t have to rely solely on ad revenue to sustain itself. Had Digg curbed its hubris and accepted Google’s offer of $200 million for an acquisition in 2008, it may not have had to roll out so many of the premium features--like “Diggable ads”--that drove users away. “We’ve been lucky in a sense with the Conde Nast situation,” admitted Mr. Martin. “It did protect us from having to quickly monetize.”

The new Digg, which will be tweaked with scientific precision at the lab-like Betaworks, won’t have any ads at all--at least not in version one. It will also be free of the clutter that has bloated Digg for years: with no Digg navigation bar and no “Newsroom” feature, it will be image-friendly, lightweight and easy to use on your cell phone. The interface looks a lot like a typical news blog, with a large image and headline dominating the top half of the screen, while other stories collect in neat boxes beneath it.

In a nod to the dominant forces of social media, the number of “Diggs” on a story will also account for the times it’s been shared on Facebook and Twitter, in order to provide a more holistic portrait of what’s popular across the web. This move also has the added benefit of making it much harder for power users to game the system. For version 1, users will have to login using Facebook Connect in order to "Digg" a story, a temporary move that already has some legacy users riled up.

“There’s a lot of attention and pressure and visibility for tomorrow,” Mr. Levine told us of the version 1 launch. “But what we care about is not launch day, it’s the 14 days or 28 days after launch and the iterations that follow.”

“We could have spent six months on it or a year, but we realized that if this was going to be a good product then we needed to get it out the door as quickly as possible,” he added. “The six week time frame forced really hard decisions, to focus on what is the single thing that Digg does well and that users expect from Digg, and how we could do that well.”

***

A few weeks prior to the launch of the new Digg, the Betaworks team published a survey to their blog soliciting user feedback. The consensus was unanimous: 92 percent of those surveyed would not recommend the old version of Digg to a friend. Users wanted the simpler Digg back, the one that surfaced interesting content and enabled a community of diverse individuals to post and respond to stories they cared about.

“I spent a weekend reading through all of the responses, and time and time again they said, ‘I came to Digg to find great stories. I came to Digg to find stories I couldn’t find elsewhere, the weird and the funny and the geeky,’” said Mr. Levine. That’s where the new Digg will start. From the belly of Betaworks, it will eschew revenue models and investor interests and focus on remaking Digg into the kind of site Internet users used to love.

Digg once went in search of monetization, but now the new team behind it wants what the platform was offering all along: a snapshot of the hivemind, a place capable of measuring the Internet’s pulse. Now, the new Digg team has the same advantage that Reddit obtained when it sold to Conde.

“Part of what we want to do is stay as small as possible for as long as possible,” said Mr. Levine. “So that we can continue to be beholden to just our users, and not incentives for monetization.”

On the back of his iPhone case, a black and white “Fuck it Ship it” sticker caught the lamplight just right.

v1 wireframes. (Photo: Rethink Digg)

The clock is ticking for the team at Betaworks, which has promised to overhaul its newly-acquired social news site Digg by Thursday. Today the team published a preview of V1, complete with photos of design wireframes and some hints as to what we can expect of the new release.

Rethink Digg stresses that V1 will adhere to minimalist themes. Many of the bloated features tacked on to the old version of Digg as an afterthought--features that drove many of its users permanently to Reddit--will be lumped off in favor of three core principles: "Top Stories, Popular and Upcoming."

Hmm, that sounds familiar.

Another interesting tidbit: "The experience must be fast and thin. Let users go, and they will come back to you. We optimize for return visits, not pageviews per visit." This means that Digg is looking to build a strong community with return visitors, as opposed to constructing an empire based on unique content. It's a strategy Reddit does well, so it will be interesting to see if the new Digg can also achieve it.

Rethink Digg also says that V1 won't include a commenting system, because getting commenting right is a major challenge, and one they knew they couldn't accomplish in six weeks. Makes sense, since people who have been working on comments for decades still haven't really nailed down a good strategy.

Finally, the new Digg score will be an aggregation of "Diggs," Facebook likes and tweets, in order to "surface 'what the Internet is talking about,' when the Internet is talking beyond the walls of Digg.com."

We're excited to see what V1 will offer--we just hope it can successfully differentiate itself from the all-powerful Reddit.

(Photo: Rethink Digg)

On an aptly named new website called Rethink Digg, the Betaworks and News.me teams proposed a rather ambitious plan today: completely rebuild the ghost town-like social news aggregator--which saw many users decamp for Reddit--from the ground up. Oh, and they're going to do it in six weeks.

"On August 1, after an adrenaline and caffeine-fueled six weeks, we’re rolling out a new v1," starts a post on the site. "With this launch, we’re taking the first step towards (re)making Digg the best place to find, read and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet."

Frankly, we're more inspired by the first graf of that post than we are by anything we've seen come out of Digg in the last five years.

Startup incubator Betaworks acquired Digg just eight days ago. At the time, Betaworks CEO John Borthwick told Betabeat, "We are reverting digg to a startup, expect more things like paperboy."

Digg will be rebuilt by the team at News.me, a Betaworks startup that delivers a daily digest of the news stories tailored to your interests. According to the post, Digg and News.me will eventually be rolled into the same product, and you can expect personalization similar to what News.me offers from Digg in the upcoming months. This matches with an account from a Betabeat source, who told us last week that “News.me will be folded into Digg, but not sure what that timeline looks like or if that’s been absolutely decided.”

The New York-based team plans to adhere to four core concepts while working towards their August 1st launch date, which has a countdown displayed in the right-hand corner of the website:

1. We make it easy to find, read, and share the most interesting and talked about stories on the Internet.
2. The experience must be fast and thin. Let users go, and they will come back to you. We optimize for return visits, not pageviews per visit.
3. Build an experience that is native to each device: smart phone, inbox, Web page. Stories must find the user, wherever they are.
4. Users must be able to share where they and their friends already are — on networks like Facebook, Twitter and email.

The good news is that nothing can really be worse than the old Digg, so the expectations are set pretty low. Plus, we're guessing that bringing transparency to the process will endear a lot of ex-Digg users--and current Redditors--to the new team.

Much like Lena Dunham on last night's episode of "Girls," New York technophiles seem to be embracing their "experimental" side. Some side projects are more facetious than others. But a new leisure pursuit from News.me general manager Jake Levine and designer Justin Van Slembrouck released today falls into the more utilitarian camp. Welcome to the Last Great Thing. Each day for a month, the duo plan on featuring a single link to the last great thing someone saw online.

The twist is that the site is "purposefully ephemeral," Mr. Levine told Betabeat by email. "There will be no archive. What's visible on Tuesday won't be findable on Wednesday." As far as gimmicks go, the disappearing link tops "by invitation only" in our book. We already feel a sense of panic over missing something great! Today's entry from Clay Shirky is off to a stellar start.

Mr. Shirky links to a YouTube video from a Muslim-American college student Tasneem Afridi called "I Don't Understand White People," that delves into the some of the issues explored in recent essays about "ironic racism" or those Shit ___ Girls Say videos, but in a more intimate, personal way.

Tomorrow's entry will be from Hilary Mason, chief scientist at Bit.ly. "We want contributions from people that move conversations forward. And we want to provide a kind of space for reflection that's missing from other types of aggregation," said Mr. Levine. The idea was to give submissions a "focus that's missing from our fast-moving streams," he said, citing Mr. Shirky's video entry. "It hasn't made it's way into the "memestream," but it's incredibly important. There's not a single person who wouldn't benefit from watching Afridi's video."

Mr. Levine said he was inspired by Branch, a fellow Betaworks startup making its prodigal return to NYC soon, and Robin Sloan's new iOS app Fish. "Lastgreatthing is for something abnormally good, something personal, something to love, something worth returning to," he said.

It's not all fun and hobbies, however. "If it 'works,'" said Mr. Levine, "We'll be looking for hints as to how we can scale and distribute this type of content throughout our product suite. The experiment in some ways at the intersection of our editorial efforts (Getting the News series) and the applications we're building."

And yes, in case you were wondering, this side project is also tied to the learning-to-code fever currently infecting Silicon Alley. "I'm particularly excited for it because Justin, our designer, and I built it without dev help!" Mr. Levine exclaimed. "Part of the reason I ended up at Betaworks," he added, "is because I made a little app and sent it to John Borthwick."

What's that? We think we just heard the sound of 100 new sign-ups for Code Year.

Stacy London of What Not to Wear has a new startup called Style For Hire. (Source: Phil Plait via Wikipedia)

SHUTTER. Luminance is not your average photography conference. Instead of focusing on the latest gear, this two-day program will bring together experts at the forefront of the technology we use to create, manipulate and share our images. Among the speakers are Behance founder Scott Belsky, Hipstamatic cofounder Lucas Allen Buick, Google's Chris Chabot, Pulitzer prize winning photographer Barbara Davidson, Tumblr CEO president John Maloney, Facebook Photos engineer Srinivas Narayanan and the School of Visual Art's David Ross. All speakers will present a 20-minute TED-style lecture.

TOE, HEEL, TOE, HEEL. What Not to Wear's Stacy London is the cofounder of a just-launched site that aims to connect personal stylists with the stylistically clueless. Style For Hire stylists will perform a "closet audit," provide personal shopping services or create new outfits out of clothes a customer already has—that's called closet shopping. Now women who aren't lucky enough to be on the show can still have their closets—and lack of fashion sense—torn apart, but without the benefit of a judgmental, national audience.

FREE LUNCH. Rickshaw Dumplings, Mexicue and Wafels & Dinges are giving away food tomorrow to all Fondu users. Download the the micro-reviewing platform for restaurants, create an account and head to West 4th and Greene Street from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. to get your grub on. Sorry to all you Android or yet-to-adopt-a-smartphone users out there—Fondu is only available on iOS.

INCUBATE. The Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, a program that provides startup with access to seed capital, mentors and coworking space, is taking applications until April 29th. Brooklyn Beta's summer camp for designer-developer teams is also taking applications through May 31. The 12-week program fosters connections between talented  people, invests $25,000 in participating companies and has advisors from top companies like Kickstarter, Airbnb, Union Square Ventures, Etsy and many others.

HACK 'ROUND THE CLOCK. ZocDoc HQ  will be the launching point for April 24th's 10gen 24-hour hackathon. The event, which begins at 568 Broadway at 6 p.m., will focus on working with MongoDB. Hack away until breakfast the next day at 9 a.m. and then hack your way to the post-awards afterparty at Von Bar.

DEVBOOTCAMP. DevBootcamp is a 10-week program that brings non-programmers up to basic programming level via an intensive curriculum. It's in San Francisco, but the organizers invite national and international students to apply. Participants include an aerospace engineer, a kid "straight out of highschool," a math teacher and finance grads, making for a veritable DevBreakfastClub. "The spring cohort finished two weeks ago, 7 out of the 16 looking for jobs have so far had job offers," DevBootcamp's Lachy Groom wrote in an email. "Almost everyone has had an exceptional amount of interviews (I think the average might be 8 each). We're expecting a very high job rate within the next few weeks."

NETWORK. Entrepreneur Week, an event that brings established entrepreneurs, industry leaders and investors together to foster opportunities and relationships, began on Monday and will continue through tomorrow. Tickets are still available for some of the week-ending talks and events. Check 'em out here.

BLOG WAVE. Tidal, a company that provides tools to bloggers and publishers to help them share and be shared on similar blogs, just announced its 250,000 post milestone and three new partnerships. Tidal is loading up the Sony Music Popmarket Backstage site with reviews, photos, users and content creators eager to promote and share. Neighborhoodies, a T-shirt and hoodie company, is moving from textiles to terabytes as Tidal breathes life into their site with style posts, restaurant write ups and travel tips all focused on NYC. Finally, Seatgeek, a third party tickets site, is getting the Tidal treatment as well, as members talk about tour dates and their favorite and most anticipated shows.

NET-WORKS. Things just got a little bit faster on Staten Island. AT&T recently announced the expansion of their 4G LTE network which means mobile internet could be up to 10 times faster on those devices.

LUNCH MONEY. Education startup 2tor has obtained a $10 million line of credit from Comerica Bank.

COLLIDE. Kaleidoscope, a new way to shop for street fashion by browsing a mix of submitted and professional photos, is now on iOS.

MOMMA. Shapeways, a platform for creating and sharing 3D designs, is holding a Mother's Day make-a-thon. Participants can turn any flat two-dimensional design into a three-dimensional plastic or metal work of art. For Mother's Day, it certainly beats a stale store-bought card. Order by April 22 for metal and April 29 for plastic to get those gifts in time for dia de los madres.

JOBS. Bitly needs a new sales research associate. Acclivity is looking for a UI/UX designer and Python back end developer. Send a snazzy email. What's Watched has an opening for a sales director with three years of experience. Email Burr. News.me would like new senior iOS  and Python engineers. Torsh needs a technical cofounder and chief architect to develop web and mobile apps.

The new Behance

HOP SCOTCH. New York City based Next Jump, a company that strives to better match consumers with businesses, has raised over $500,000 to bring technology into more than 750 classrooms. The campaign, which started late last year, funds projects submitted through DonorsChoose by shoppers on OO.com, Next Jump's discounts and deals website. The initiative has already impacted the lives of 85,000 NYC students, most of them in needy public schools.

TARGET MARKET. PeerIndex, the social influence marketing platform, has raised nearly $3 million in Series A funding led by Antrak Capital. NYC resident and former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer also invested in the round. PeerIndex, whose CTO is New York tech evangelist Sanford Dickert,  seeks to identify "influential individuals" on social media and "facilitates sampling interactions between brands and these influencers." Sounds effective—but kind of creepy.

TECHATHON. "April's" New York Tech Meetup is on March 27 at NYU's Skirball Auditorium with News.me, The Birdy, SpotlessCity and HotM-FakeGirlfriend.co confirmed to demo. The event will once again be streamed to New Work City and General Assemb.ly. Get your tickets here.

REHANCE. Behance relaunched yesterday and, boy does it look good. Now users will be greeted with a new landing page and an "explore" tab that allows users to filter their search based on medium, equipment used, creative field and location. Of course, they've also added a Facebookesque "activity feed" where other people in the Behance network can share and curate other work they like. With the goal of removing obstacles between artists and projects, the Behance platform aims to make showcasing and promoting creative work easier and more efficient. It allows for syndication and integration into ProSite, a Behance owned custom portfolio building platform.

SELL, SELL, SELL. Fab really doesn't need any more publicity—the company announced their three million member milestone at the London Web Summit—but we thought we should at least point this out: in under nine months, Fab has sold a million items. That breaks down to 2.6 sales a minute.

START 'ER UP. Business Insider's Startup 2012 Competition is coming up on May 3. Ten lucky startups will present to a VC panel for a chance to win $25,000 in cash and $50,000 in services. Applications close March 30.

CRAIN BRAIN. Do you know of a business that's over three years old with less than $100 million in the bank? If so, it's eligible for Crain's New York Business Top Entrepreneurs competition. The winner will appear in a May issue of Crain's. Enter your favorite (or your own) startup here by March 23.

DATA RESTRAINT. As a part of its Data Transparency Week, the Wall Street Journal is inviting developers to a code-a-thon to create "web tools that promote data transparency and control." Entry is free and $500 travel stipends are available, but the event is "open only to qualified participants," so if you don't know your   from your href just stay home. The event is April 13-15. For more information and to apply, click here.

TURN YOUR HEAD AND CASH. Startup accelerator Blueprint Health wants to help entrepreneurs improve the wellness industry with a three-month long startup bootcamp program and $20,000 of seed capital. Qualifying startups will have access to a shared work space, mentorship and angel and VC investors. Apply by June 8 here.

PUTTING UP WALLS. Banters, the platform devoted to saving life's quotable moments, just rolled out the site's newest feature: walls. Just like Facebook, Banters walls allow anyone to contribute but privacy controls give the user the option to approve quotes before they're made public.

ADAPTING. Mike Finnegan is the new VP of client services at social media ad company Adaptly, which handles social media for PepsiCo and News Corp. among others.

SAGE WORKS YOU. Sageworks is currently hiring for a number of positions including senior software engineer and, media relations associate, junior software developer and network engineer. Check out all the available jobs here.

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.

Lean with it, rock with it

In a certain way, the web is a terrible medium for trying to read articles. Your browser is full of distractions like Twitter and email that need constant attention. Which might be why users of News.me, the betaworks service created in conjunction with the New York Times, read an average of six times more articles on their tablets than they do when browsing News.me via the web.

"The experience on the tablet is more immersive, more contextual," said Jake Levine, general manager at News.me. "When the iPad first came out everyone was complaining about how you couldn't multitask, but I think more and more publishers and app creators are coming to see this as an advantage." 

The new iOS has push notifications, which have enabled some amazing features like Foursquare radar. "I think there is a lot of potential there, but it may come at the expense of the focus we found among our tablet readers," said Mr. Levine.

Another trend that has popped up among News.me readers is heavy usage on days that break their typical routine. "People have very set patterns of news consumption, but we are seeing that when this changes, around a holiday for example, users want to be able to understand what they missed." If the people you follow on Twitter represent the average amount of information you want to consume each day, those are the best guides for what you missed. "On News.me, users are looking to tap into their social graph to surface the most relevant stories, the ones that got people talking, as they play catch up."

The massive sales of Amazon's Kindle Fire over the holiday weekend have many in the tech blogosphere declaring a new era in the tablet market. But Mr. Levine says that News.me will continue to be iOS and HTML5. What is interesting to him is less the hardware platforms than the new social networks. "I look at my Facebook account and there are hundreds of people who were relevant to me when I joined five years ago that I have no connection to now. I think for News.me, we're going to be paying close attention to the smaller, splinter networks that are forming around very specific activities."

(http://saulhansell.blogspot.com/)

Betaworks just got an entrepreneur-in-residence with some old and new media cred: Saul Hansell, former Timesman and the founding editor of the Grey Lady's Bits blog just announced he's coming aboard. Mr. Hansell headed up AOL's freelance network, Seed.com (now "in the process of reformatting" and not giving out any new assignments, hm) before AOL bought the Huffington Post. "Seed is in fact thriving and will continue stronger than ever as part of AOL’s Advertising.com group, which is devoted to providing the best tools to online publishers and marketers," Mr. Hansell wrote at the time. 

He continued:

I am very proud of what we achieved at Seed over the last year. And I’m just as proud of what we didn’t do. Despite our reputation as “hellish scheme” dedicated to “slapdash, disposable content churned out en masse,” we didn’t pollute the Web with millions of articles that would be embarrassing even in a high school newspaper.  Rather, we worked on ways to respect our creators and our audience by creating formats that delivered lively, useful and reliable information that writers can produce efficiently. You can see the results in articles like these: What Is Christine O'Donnell's Religion?, Giardia in Dogs: What You Need to Know as a Dog Owner, and Jack Daniel's Drinks: 4 Drink Ideas From a Bartender.

Right! So: Seed was a big flop seems to be what he's saying there, no? Either way, Mr. Hansell became Big News editor for HuffPo in May. That lasted a little under six months. Now, Mr. Hansell joins his old buddy John Borthwick at what is obviously a better job, EIR at Betaworks, a company that is not crushing the creative spirits of its employees.

But wait! It's not that, Mr. Hansell insists: "I know my friends in the technology press well enough to suspect some of them will see my move as part of a broader trend at AOL. I’m not sure the easy take is the right one. Based on my experience, I am more bullish on Tim Armstrong’s clear vision of a company built from the ground up for online journalism and the potential of AOL’s many assets to achieve that vision."

Indeed. HuffPo, while ruthless and depraved, has given AOL a breath of new life—Arianna Huffington's newsroom is fast-paced, agile, inventive and we're told, has been given a lot of control over its better halves in the rest of the AOL empire.

At any rate, with Mr. Hansell's wide range of experience going from NYT to AOL, he should fit right in at the incubator/innovation lab that has produced publisher tools such as Chartbeat and SocialFlow as well as consumption tools such as Findings and News.me.

[via AllThingsD]