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. Lessin

Of the many announcements to emerge from F8 --Spotify is now integrated with Facebook! Netflix is now integrated with Facebook! You can "watch" and "read" things instead of just "like"ing them! Things are just really different, okay?Good luck not friending your Mom, because she'll be on there soon!-- was Facebook's Timeline.

Rather than having to hit "Older Posts" again and again, Timeline lets you stalk with the greatest of ease by arranging a user's information in chronological order. As AllThingsD's Ina Fried notes, it also lets you pick a big, About.me-like cover photo for your life story.

Mark Zuckerberg introduced the feature with pictures of a toddler Zuck in pink tie and suspenders--and nary a thought about privacy in his head. But from the looks of the Facebook blog, it was former Brooklyn boy Drop.io founder Sam Lessin (now a product manager at Facebook, which acqui-hired him in last October) who was in charge of the feature. And after watching the video introduction to Timeline, Betabeat has a feeling we know at least one source of Mr. Lessin's inspiration.

Watch this sentimental "A Life on Facebook" video from last November.

And just try to tell us it doesn't remind you of this sentimental video explaining Timeline, minus the puking, cheating on the girlfriend and getting caught on Facebook part, of course.

"Having to give up on your company sucks for a month or two and it hurts forever, but it is not failure – if these teams are absorbed back into the world of cubicles and are allowed to return to the jobs they walked away from in the first place, that will be failure, and failure at the community level. When you meet the founder of  a failed business, reach out your hand, pick them up and do everything you can to keep them involved in our community... because our community depends on it."

Mr. Barnes’s plea reminded us of a reoccurring theme we’d heard while reporting on New York’s geek gap. In "Raiders of the Last Nerd," this week’s feature on tech recruiting, Kinda Sorta Media’s Rex Sorgatz offered Betabeat an ominous-sounding take on the struggle to hire local talent, “If you want a CTO, you have to go to, like, Tel Aviv.” But we didn’t have the space in the paper to really delve into why.

In his experience, Mr. Sorgatz said it wasn’t so much that New York was short on rockstar coders. Rather, it’s a side effect of the entrepreneurial bug gone viral. “People now run four-person companies where they may have otherwise led a five-person tech team in a twenty-person company.” (Is this a good time to say we told ya so? No? Okay, just checking.)

As evidence of this epidemic of Markus Zuckerbergius, Mr. Sorgatz offered up a recent incident between a “prominent start-up in town” and TechStars, a high-profile start-up accelerator. The prominent start-up got upset after TechStars convinced a recruit they wanted to hire for a top product position to launch his own company instead.

Charlie O’Donnell, who works with Mr. Barnes at First Round, noted the same phenomenon. “There’s more of a displacement than there is a shortage. If you just looked at all of the available appetite for developers, then you could say, yeah, there’s more money in ideas chasing after good people,” he told Betabeat, adding “But not all those ideas are good ideas.” Mr. O’Donnell, who now spends a third of his time helping start-ups in First Round’s portfolio staff-up, didn’t seem to think it was a lost cause. “To me the fact there’s anybody left working as a developer for Fox News over in Midtown, tells me there’s still work left to be done.”

The flip side of start-up fever, of course, is that not all of those wanna-be Zucks are going to make it. “There are a lot of people working for companies that are going sideways, companies where the writing’s on the wall,” said Mr. O’Donnell. Skeptics about the value of getting paid in equity, take note. “That’s the nature of the seed and angel stage market, not all of them are going to make it to a Series A. That’s where most of them drop off, because it’s the most risky point.” This also happens to be the point where Mr. Barnes is hoping founders who did make it past the valley of death will swoop in with job offers to keep the lost souls from wandering back to the corporate world.

Mr. Sorgatz offered a similar vision of the future. “It’s impossible that the rate of success stays as high as it has been, and many of these start-ups are going to have to decide if they are going to be viable companies, and I suspect a lot of them will not be. I would not call it the bubble bursting, but there will be a shift in the talent.”

It’s a cyclical process, explained Mr. O’Donnell. That’s why you’ve seen so many acquisition hires from start-ups launched a year-and-a-half ago. (Like Brooklyn’s Sam Lessin, whose start-up Drop.io was purchased by Facebook in October... mainly to acquire Mr. Lessin). “It’s saying, ‘Listen, we’ll put a little money in your pocket and make you feel good about that little product you started. Don’t feel bad you ended on a zero.’”

So next time you hear about a start-up with a questionable concept or execution, think of it less as a doomed-to-failure, and more as a rising talent pool for your own (no doubt rock solid) idea keeping you up at night.