Mr. Davis (Photo: twitter.com)

Kohort, a social network for groups, launched last month jam-packed with friends of founder and former venture capitalist Mark Peter Davis.

But less than a month after launch, Mr. Davis took to the company's blog to announce that they have decided to "decided to run Kohort with a smaller team, a leaner approach."

AllThingsD's Peter Kafka expects the company to lay off almost all of its 15 employees. Dwolla founder Ben Milne announced yesterday via Twitter that Kohort builder Shane Reisner has already started working at Dwolla.

Users are certainly feeling the pain too. This week, a user in the New York Venture Community group (the group was in fact founded by Mr. Davis), University of Washington professor Brian Rowe posted an announcement titled "Has Kohort Died":

I know that "fail fast" is a mantra these days, but I always figured it was followed by "fix quickly". Seems like the site's been broken for a while and not much in the way of communication indicating when these things will be fixed. Not sure how you keep customers this way.

As a comparison github is really good about communicating when things go wrong and keeping everyone abreast of the status.

Mr. Davis quickly responded in a post called "Kohort is Alive & Kicking":

In response to the prior message, we're aware of the few bugs on the site & we'll be working to address them as we continue to push forward with new features.

More to come.

- Team Kohort

Before launch, the company netted $3 million from a investors like IA Ventures, RRE Ventures, ff Venture Capital, David Tisch and David Cohen, so they probably have a bit of cash to burn out. Once the user base starts checking the site for signs of life, however, it's hard not to hear the pivot sirens blaring in the distance.

Mr. Davis (Photo: Twitter.com/mpd)

Today, Kohort, the super-stealth social network for groups, emailed early adopters who had registered usernames and asked them to officially join the site. Last year, Betabeat told you that Kohort, founded by former venture capitalist Mark Peter Davis, netted $3 million from a number of high profile investors like IA Ventures, RRE, FF Capital, David Tisch and David Cohen. The supposed "Meetup killer" made its beta version public back in July.

The site is based around public and private groups. Kohort lets group members post to memos to the group, much like a bulletin board. These memos are supposed to help organize meetups and group activities. Original plans called for a way to put similar groups into networks, but that remains to be seen in this early version.

One kitschy feature for moderators is the ability to change the title of group members to anything that they wish. For example, a group named "6AM Club," led by Ben Weller, a senior developer at Kohort, calls all of its six members "Broey Bros":

None of these people look like any bros that we know.

The site does almost everything Meetup.com does, but surprisingly, it has turned out to be a more efficient version of Google+. In order to organize groups, Google+'s forces users to manually place all of your friends into circles that remain private and only seen by you. While this is good for splitting up your friends into friends and frenemies, some people just don't want to put the effort into categorizing their friends. The site has definitely suffered because of this.

But on Kohort, the circles (or "groups" in this case) are the central organizing point--your friends join the groups that they know they should be a part of, or join ones they're interested in anyways. Group leaders can also send out invitations to all of the people that they think should be group members. Add some nice chat capabilities, and Kohort could poach Google's tech industry user base and have something really special on their hands.

It might be more user-friendly that Google since you don't have to do the organizing manually. Of course you still have to rely on organizers to do the heavy lifting for you. It's hard to tell what the site will look like because right now it's all groups related to Davis.

The three most popular and active groups on the site so far are the Columbia Venture Community, the New York Venture Community, and the Harvard Venture Community. Davis is the founder of the first two of those enture communities.

There are definitely some groups on the site not focused on tech which show potential for a really personal user experience. For example, this one:

This fraternity alumni group is one of the site's featured groups and is organized by none other than Kohort's CEO, Mr. Davis. Group members are labeled as "Snus," which is a TFM. Guess you can take the VC out of the founder, but there's no way you're taking the frat out of the boy.

(Image: West McGowan)

A study conducted at the University of Missouri's School of Journalism seems to indicate that if friends say you're hot in comments on a Facebook or Tumblr pic, others may agree.

Professor Kevin Wise and doctoral student Seoyeon Hong showed 100 students several photos of one person. They discovered something interesting about how people reacted to the images:

They found that photos with "social cues," which are photos that show the subject's personality, work better than static headshots. Positive comments from friends also made the photos more appealing to the students than those with negative remarks.

The survey is reassuring, because it seems to indicate people take in more than physical appearance when checking others out online. People develop an impression based as much on your pursuits and social ties as your looks. In her write-up about the study, Ms. Hong also included a good guide to best practices in dealing with noxious profile pests like "funny" cousins or friendly but still secretly bitter exes:

No matter what the profile owner does to tailor their Facebook page, comments left on their page from other users should be monitored as well. Positive comments are very helpful, but negative remarks can be very damaging, even if they are silly or sarcastic.

That's Ms. Hong's measured way of saying that if your fourth grade boyfriend trolls your Facebook photos and teases you about your haircut, others will be more likely to agree that yeah, that's a pretty ugly mullet.

The commercial Groupon would rather you forget.

The average cost of a 30-second Super Bowl spot is up this year from $3 million in 2011 to $3.5 million, which means advertisers are even more desperate to make those millions count. Even though 100 million people are expected to tune in live to the game, there are other eyeballs to grab. According to Reuters, for example, "Consumer research forecasts that 60 percent of fans watching the Super Bowl will also be tied into a second screen such as a smartphone or tablet."

Thus, in what sounds like an Alex Blagg sketch waiting to happen, advertisers are rolling out the social media strat.

It's true that for some reason--that always seemed a little strange to us--the Super Bowl elevates the act of people trying to sell you things into art or entertainment. Hence, brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Audi, are just trying to build on the fact that fans will already be talking about their commercials on social media and, they hope, organize the response to try to measure it.

According to Reuters, Twitter hashtags are the obvious choice:

"Coca-Cola's TV commercials, which will air during the first-and second-quarter breaks, will center around its computer-generated Arctic polar bears watching the game. The bears will then be brought to life on Twitter, Facebook and on a dedicated Website doing such things as responding to fans and commenting on the game. They will even have their own Twitter hashtag --#GameDayPolarBears -- for fans to follow."

Pepsi is taking it one step further with a commercial featuring "X Factor USA" winner Melanie Amaro--first time we've ever heard of her!-- singing "Respect." Using the Shazam app, viewers of the commercial can download a free video of the performance onto their phone. Whereas Volkwagen is also going to hashtag route:

"This year, Volkswagen's Audi is hoping to win more creative kudos with a spot that taps into the "Twilight" teen vampire pop culture phenomenon. The 60-second spot, which will air during the first break in the game, will highlight the new 2013 Audi S7 and its LED headlight technology, which has unfortunate consequences for a party of young vampires.

Audi hopes to continue the conversation about the ad via the Twitter hashtag #SoLongVampires."

Hopes being the operative word. If Occupy Wall Street has taught us anything, it's that you can try to institute a universal hashtag, but that doesn't guarantee it'll stick. Take Groupon's unpopular Super Bowl spot last year, which featured Timothy Hutton segueing between the Tibetan people's political struggles and $15 off at the Himalayan Restaurant in Chicago. Groupon might have gone with #GrouponSuperBowl, but most viewers went with #FAIL.

A startup called Ourspot launched in beta today with a novel proposition: Take Path's 50-person limit and cut it down to size. Like way down.

The network lets couples or close friends privately share links and content with each other that also serves "as a document of a relationship," (yup, singular) says AllThingsD's Liz Gannes. And there you were thinking they'd run out of ideas for social networks!

"Ourspot pages are generally designed for two people, and intended to be cultivated over time. Users can share photos, links from around the Web, and notes to each other. The 'spots' can be private or public. For better or worse, your 'spot' is only as good as the work you and your partner(s) put into it."

Noting the Pinterest-like layout of the profiles, Ms. Gannes points out that even absent the actual, you know, network part of social networking, there are other benefits to social tools:

"They have increasingly pretty layouts, they can compile a record of our activities without much effort, and they have nice mobile apps. And so Ourspot wants to be a social-style sharing site for the people we share with the most: our significant others and perhaps our closest friends."

Let's leave aside, for the moment questions like Is this just a glorified vacation photo album? or Can't that kind of sharing be accomplished by looking at the person next to you in bed? or What happens when you break up? and move onto the real significance here: This is great! Just think about it, if couples have a new and glorious way to share with each other (other than email, IM, text, face-to-face and handwritten love notes) they're less likely to clog up your Facebook and Twitter feed with their treacly anniversary declarations or dutiful retweets or humble-brag date recaps. Misanthropes, say thank you.

To use a couple recent examples, questions on the app range from "Occupy wall street or Tea party? whos going to win in 2012" to "Hahaha!!?" with an image of a LOLCat. As before, users can weigh in with a thumbs up or down and a comment.

The social network aspect seems largely branding-related, as the newly-named app isn't yet introducing different features. Betabeat talked to CEO Dan Kurani about Thumb's surprisingly impressive user engagement, why he calls it a social network, and his favorite thumb joke.

According to Mr. Kurani, the average question on Thumb gets a staggering 70 responses, with the first response coming in about 6 seconds. Although he declined to share the number of downloads, he did note that his September numbers—125,000,000 opinions to 2,000,000 questions—had multiplied, and that the average user spends three and a half hours per month on the app.

As for what, exactly, is social network-y about the app, Mr. Kurani responded via IM: "After you ask a question that is opinion-based (what do you think of this shirt? what do you think of Bob Marley?, Do you like Starbucks?, etc.) and you see the 70+ folks that responded with comments, sentiment (thumbs), and their profile information you can immediately chat with the people that think like you (or you can just give them a star for giving you good advice)."

On Thumb, the equivalent of a Facebok profile page is a little different. "It is populated primarily with their top advisor categories, number of votes, and star ranking, etc. (folks love this, almost like a game)," he said. "We don't show the questions they ask or the responses they give, however, a new feature coming will allow them to openly express their opinions, curate, and enter groups very naturally."

Mr. Kurani said the name change was necessitated by the company's move into the mainstream.  "It was hard to change because Opinionaided had a lot of meaning to us. It took a little while for us to fall in love with Thumb, but we did."

After watching the TechStars reality show, we remain skeptical that investors didn't demand that he scrap Opionionaided immediately. But Mr. Kurani assured us, "We decided to change it proactively, came up with a name, presented it, and most of [the investors] loved it immediately (and the ones that didn't called back within a few days and said that it was perfect)."

As far as technology scaremongering goes, this story is pretty egregious. First, the lead: "Can an online algorithm track down your child?" both exaggerates the danger of an automatically-generated Klout score and creates the false impression that an algorithm that tracks users on the web, some of whom are minors, is a new or unusual thing when in fact web browsing habits are tracked by an innumerable number of advertisers, market researchers and spammy directories.

The minor profiles cited in the story were created by crawling users' Facebook friends, a feature Klout no longer employs. Klout has also started allowing users to delete their profiles. So while Klout still remains spammy at its core, this article, which feels like it was written by a 90-year-old intern, falls short in its indictment--and the writer doesn't even mention the #OccupyKlout movement.

via Gentleman's Quarterly

It's been less than two months since Facebook rolled out it's stalking, sorry subscription feature and it's already revealing telling personal insights about our "friends." Which, we have to imagine, is just how privacy, um, trailblazer Mark Zuckerberg wanted it.

But a tipster alerted Betabeat that it might also reveal something about Zuck himself.

In addition to subscribing to the Facebook feeds of his own employees and engineers, pundits like Jeff Jarvis, as well as journalists like Nick Bilton, Farhad Manjoo, and Fareed Zakaria, Mr. Zuckerberg subscribes to the Facebook feed of gamine Glee actress Dianna Agron.

In fact, Zuck subscribed to Ms. Agron's  feed, which currently features her Halloween costume (a "Reptar") and posts about her "spirit animal" (co-star Harry Shum Jr.) before subscribing to any of the luminaries above. Even before subscribing to fellow mogul Arianna Huffington!

But don't go thinking his pop culture interests are limited to wholesome musical numbers. Before Ms. Agron, Zuck signed up to see Snoop Dogg's feed. Since it's Zuck's world, of course, you can find him under Calvin Broadus. Makes sense. With my mind on my money and my money on my mind is the perfect backdrop for IPO dreaming.

Lloyd Blankfein likes this.

Networked Insights, a startup that helps marketers make media buys by analyzing cues from social networks like Facebook and Twitter, has raised a $20 million round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management. That's the same Goldman division that shopped around private shares of Facebook before media attention and government scrutiny forced them to take it back. In Networked Insights's case, the Facebook connection is indirect. The company's SocialSense platform looks at social data to help brands like Kraft, MTV, and Samsung figure out cost-effective media buys on TV, mobile, or social. But to differentiate from competitors like L.A.-based MarketShare, which also raised this year, AllThingsD reports that Networked Insights' "pitch is that it’s particularly good at picking up cues from Web users on sites/networks like Facebook and Twitter."