Google made a relatively quiet announcement today regarding how it’s pushing the developer ecosystem forward around Google Now, its intelligent personal assistant for Android devices. The company has begun extending mark up tools for emails from select partners, which help highlight flight schedules, hotel bookings and various types of reservations, to make sure that Gmail can spot that information and use it to auto-generate helpful reminders in Google Now.

The extension of the platform tools available to Now partners was announced by Google’s Baris Gultekin, who was one of the creators of Google Now, which sprung out of a project he came up with in his so-called “20 percent time.” He spoke with Google’s Louis Gray ont he Developer Live video stream which ran throughout the I/O conference this year.

Gultekin was talking about ways in which Google is working to improve the quality and relevancy of the recommendations and data it surfaces. The project sounds like it’s fairly limited for now, but asking for help from the input sources of data seems like a smart way to supplement Google’s own data detection algorithms that are working to flag interesting data for Now’s use on their own data center side. Doing all the heavy lifting themselves might be more impressive, but if reaching out to partners can help improve user experience, then there’s no reason not to extend that hand.

No word yet on whether Google will eventually make those mark up tools available for different types of data or open them up for public use, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where that happens, allowing developers and startups to provide the option of delivering all kinds of relevant information to users from their apps and services on Android. Then again, that has the potential to become overwhelming for users, so we might see a more metered, gradual approach.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google continues to increase the reach of its Google+ platform, and today the company is launching a new mobile content recommendation service powered by Google+. These recommendations will appear as small widgets at that bottom of the screen as users browse a news site that has enabled this service. Google’s launch partner for this service is Forbes, but others can implement these recommendations by just adding a single line of code to their mobile sites. Recommendations, Google says, can appear regardless of whether a users are signed in to Google+.

As Seth Sternberg, Google’s product manager for the Google+ platform told me last week, the team set out to create an “awesomely seamless experience to find more content” on the mobile web. On mobile sites, he argues, publishers often see high bounce rates because users have a hard time finding interesting additional content to read on a site once they have finished reading an article.

These recommendations, Sternberg told me, are based on social recommendations on the site from your friends on Google+ (only if you are signed in, of course), what the story you just read was about, the story’s author and some of Google’s “secret sauce.”

The new Google+-based recommendations, interestingly, only appear once a reader slides back up on a page. This, Google’s analytics show, is a pretty good indicator that a user has finished reading a post (even if there is still more text left on the page). The recommendation widget then slides up from the bottom and one extra click brings up more relevant items for the page. The other option is to show the widget after a user scrolls past a configurable CSS entity.

Publishers will be able to manage the recommendations widget from their Google+ publisher accounts. From there, they can decide when exactly the widget should appear and manage a list of pages where the widget shouldn’t appear, as well as a list of pages that should never appear in recommendations.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Anthony Noto, the global co-head of Goldman Sachs’ global telecommunications, media and technology group in investment banking, took the stage at this morning’s TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 event to talk about the IPO market, trends, and other topics related to tech companies going public. In one interesting portion of the conversion, Noto offered his opinions on what startups should look for when they’re ready to hire their first CFO.

Noto, for those unfamiliar, has a diverse background in the industry. Before serving as co-head of the Technology, Media and Telecom (TMT) Group at Goldman Sachs, he was co-head of the Global Media Group for TMT Investment Banking. He rejoined Goldman Sachs in 2010 after serving as the National Football League’s executive vice president and chief financial officer for nearly three years, where he oversaw finance and strategy functions, including corporate development, labor finance, operational finance and accounting, tax and treasury. And before the NFL, Noto was the Internet, Entertainment and Cable Equity Research analyst and business unit leader for the Communications, Media and Entertainment Equity Research team at Goldman Sachs. He has also worked at Lehman Brothers, as brand manager at Kraft Foods, and was a U.S. Army Ranger.

One thing Noto stressed, when making his recommendations about what kind of person founders should consider for the CFO position, is that it should be someone you can trust. Whether or not it’s someone who has prior CFO experience is not as important, he explained, saying instead that what this person really needs is the “intellectual capacity and conviction” and is someone who can tell you when you’re wrong.

“The CFO of 50 years ago was an accountant and controller and they made sure that the numbers were audited appropriately and they were disclosed and disseminated appropriately,” he said. “Today, a CFO needs to be more of an operating CFO,” Noto added, “someone who’s using the financial data and the data of the company to help drive strategy, the allocation of capital, and the management of risks.”

You need a partner on your side who can help you make decisions, he said. Questions that you should ask yourself about your potential hire include, “Are they a leader? Can they use data to drive decisions? Can they command respect? Can they drive credibility and hold people accountable?”

And when should a company hire a CFO?, asked panel moderator TechCrunch’s Colleen Taylor.

If it’s an early stage company with less than a hundred people, you don’t need a world-class CFO, said Noto. You need partners and advisors to help guide you.  ”But as you start to enter the point of needing to generate revenue and needing to raise capital, because you can’t do it easily and efficiently, you need a CFO,” he concluded.

Watch the video below for more of his thoughts on what makes a company a tech company, what IPOs were right on time (LinkedIn, Yelp), and what the IPO market will bring in the future.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook plans to announce its 2013 first quarter earnings tomorrow after the stock market closes.

Analysts expect earnings of 13 cents per share on revenue of $1.44 billion during the period of Jan. 1 to March 31. In Q4 2012, which included the holiday season, Facebook had earnings of 17 cents per share on revenue of $1.585 billion.

Here we’ll review the changes Facebook made in the first quarter across each of its areas of monetization.

Ads

Last year advertising made up 84 percent of Facebook’s overall revenue. In the first quarter of this year, the social network introduced new targeting capabilities and made a number of adjustments to the look and performance of its ads. The company also continued to ramp up the amount of ads in News Feed and on mobile, adding a three-in-one “Pages You May Like” unit and a new type of Page-Like ads to the mobile feed.

Partnerships with data vendors Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom and BlueKai opened up the opportunities for advertisers to reach new audiences based on third-party data, such as offline purchase behavior. This feature was in limited beta during Q1, but rolled out more widely as “partner categories” earlier this month.

Lookalike Audiences, which help advertisers target users similar to those in their Custom Audience databases, was another exciting new beta feature for advertisers last quarter. Facebook launched it globally in March.

A tool that was available for most advertisers throughout the quarter was conversion tracking. This allows advertisers to measure and optimize their ads leading off-Facebook. It’s particularly important to direct response advertisers and app developers.

Other improvements for DR advertisers were an increase in the size of link previews in News Feed and a redesign for mobile and desktop, which could make ads larger, more visual and even more effective. Facebook also launched a small test to introduce Facebook Exchange Ads in the desktop feed just before Q1 ended.

Tests of the “Promote Page” button, which rolled out globally today, might have started to have in impact on SMB advertising last quarter.

Game Payments 

Developer fees from in-game purchases make up the vast majority of Facebook’s payments revenue. In Q4 2012, only $5 million of its $256 million in payments revenue was from sources besides games.

Facebook announced last quarter that more than 250 million people play games on Facebook each month. The company also said it has seen an increase in users who spend money in Facebook games monthly.

Facebook did a number of things in Q1 to optimize its channels for game discovery and promotion. It tweaked the recommendations bar on canvas games to increase installs 5x over the last several months, improve the bookmarks bar menu 17 percent, notifications 15 percent, and App Center 30 percent. The company also promoted games in a homepage banner earlier this year and started running new News Feed stories about the games a user’s friends play.

However, Zynga, which has made up a large portion of Facebook’s payments revenue in the past has seen drop-off in revenue as players shift to mobile. That could have an impact on Facebook as well, though the social network has been seeking to diversify its platform with international developers and a better range in game genres.

Gifts

Facebook says that it expects Gifts to continue to grow slowly, but believes it could be a big business over time. For now, the company is working to get the user experience right. It is for the most part limited to the U.S., though at the start of April, Facebook began letting international users buy gifts for their friends in the U.S. That happened after Q1 had ended so it wouldn’t have an effect on revenue.

At the end of January, the social network introduced Facebook Card, a resusable gift card that can be loaded with balances for different retailers when a user’s friends buy them gifts through Facebook. It launched with very few partners, Jamba Juice, Olive Garden, Sephora and Target. Since then, Facebook has added Walgreens, Burger King, Outback Steakhouse and Staples, but awareness of Facebook Card still seems very low.

Facebook has expanded its overall Gifts inventory significantly and added many more options at lower price points. The company ran a promotion to give users $4 off a gift of $5 or more. This enabled users to send users to, for example, send a $5 Starbucks gift card for only $1. The social network also heavily promoted Gifts around Valentine’s Day, created a new dashboard with a user’s purchase history and prompts to buy more gifts for friends, as well as began inserting Gift calls to action within News Feed next to stories about friends with good news.

User Promoted Posts

Another small revenue stream is user Promoted Posts, which enable users to pay to get their personal posts to the top of their friends’ News Feeds. Facebook said this feature made up the majority of its $5 million non-game payments revenue in Q4 2012.

This February, Facebook expanded the feature to allow users to promote posts their friends made.

Paid Messages

At the end of 2012, Facebook announced a small test that will allow some users to pay to send direct messages to another user’s inbox rather than their “other” folder. This started as a very limited test in the U.S., but has expanded to the U.K. now as well.

Most messages cost $1 to send to a user’s inbox, but for some celebrities and popular figures, Facebook is testing higher price points, up to even $100 to message CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

E-commerce is booming, but shopping for clothing online can still be a challenge. Unlike many consumer products, clothing is personal and often needs to be tried on for fit. Plus, there are numerous options available via the web, so sometimes it’s tough to even know where to begin with an online shopping expedition. Two companies from TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Alley are addressing these problems by offering personal stylists and recommendations online. One, Stylit, is targeting women and another, Black Tag, is focused on men.

Stylists-as-a-service? Yep, it’s that kind of thing.

Tel Aviv-based Stylit’s co-founder and chief stylist Maya Kramer has a decade’s worth of experience in the fashion industry: She’s worked as a stylist herself, as well as a personal shopper, photo shoot producer, boutique owner, fashion writer, styling instructor, model and even TV personality. Her clients have included Vogue, Sak’s Fifth Avenue, Microsoft, Glamour, Target, Victoria’s Secret and various celebrities, designers and artists. Others on the founding team include CEO Yaniv Nissim, CTO Michael Gutkin, and lead engineer Shilo Ayalon.

“We feel that personal styling was not accessible to everyone,” explains Kramer. “Stylit solves this.”

After signing up on the website, users are prompted to fill out a questionnaire, detailing their budget, body type, and personal tastes. Stylit’s personal shoppers will then curate a selection of outfits based on these answers. The outfits, sent out on a weekly basis, don’t just include the clothing, but also accessories like shoes, bags, hats, jewelry, etc. Users can choose to buy the outfit and/or the individual items, or just pass altogether. But to help the stylists better learn their own personal tastes, users are also asked to rank the outfits they’re sent, allowing the recommendations to improve over time.

Unlike with many stylists in the offline world – and even some found online – there’s no charge to use Stylit’s personal shopping service. Instead, the company is monetized through affiliate sales for now, though Kramer explains that longer-term, the company could work with brands directly to help them connect with those who best fit their target demographic. In addition, the company wants to eventually build each of their users their own personalized stores that provide items that fit their body type and style preference, says Kramer, who calls this bigger vision a “Pandora for online shopping.”

The stylists work for the site on a freelance basis. This differentiates the service from those offering more of a crowdsourced approach to fashion inspiration, because it’s about making a personal connection and learning about a user’s individual tastes to find unique outfits built just for them.

Founded in April 2012, Sylit launched into beta this January and now has around 1,000 users.

Meanwhile, Palo Alto-based Black Tag takes a similar approach with online styling but with a service that’s targeting men and their fashion needs. Explains co-founder and CEO Damon Pace, “I hate shopping and have a hard time finding products that fit me because of my height,” he says. “People should be able to shop together and it should be more personalized.”

He and co-founder James Greene have been working together on various products since 2005, and decided to build Black Tag to scratch their own itches, so to speak. The service just launched today.

After signing up, users fill out a quick profile offering details about their budget, height, weight and body type, among other things. They can then follow brands and other personal shoppers on the service who can recommend items, and they can also make requests for specific items, such as a tan blazer or a blue sweater, for instance. Users can also sign up to become personal shoppers themselves, which makes the service a bit similar to the female-focused shopping site The Hunt, which also defers to the crowdsourced model of connecting passionate online shoppers and fashionistas with those in need of hope.

The site also features a social shopping component, which allows users to shop with their spouses, friends or others with similar interests.

Before today’s launch, Black Tag had run a private beta with some 750 users. The site currently offers more than 700,000 items, from 6000+ brands and more than 60 stores. Like Stylit, the service is free to use and  generates revenue through affiliate sales. But, adds Pace, “we believe there are many different business models in e-commerce that have yet to be discovered.”

Black Tag is a bootstrapped service and still needs a little polish in some areas. But given its target demographic, how “pretty” the site looks right now may not be the top concern, just so long as it works.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Sina Weibo, the micro-blogging platform that took root among China’s white-collar class, may be worth more than $3 billion today after Alibaba agreed to pay $586 million to buy preferred and ordinary shares in the company.

The deal creates a strategic alliance between Alibaba, which runs the eBay of China, and Sina Weibo, which is kind of like a Facebook-Twitter hybrid. Weibo grew to 46 million daily users and earned $50 million in advertising revenue last year, according to an SEC filing last week from parent company Sina. It was 12 percent of parent company Sina’s total advertising revenue.

Like Twitter and Facebook, Sina Weibo has gotten a lot more aggressive about pushing in-stream or news feed advertising. Last week, they announced a new product called “Window Recommendations” in partnership with Alibaba’s Taobao. In that integration, about 3 to 5 ads featuring Taobao goods get pushed into a Weibo stream.

The two companies say the deal happened so that both companies could better connect Alibaba merchants to their Weibo users and followers and experiment with new ideas in social commerce. The partnership could bring $380 million in advertising and e-commerce revenues to Weibo over the next three years, Sina said. Alibaba also reserves the right to bump its ownership up to 30 percent.

It’s interesting because no such equivalent partnership exists in Western markets. E-commerce companies like eBay and Amazon have basic Facebook integrations but no deep strategic investments.

Alibaba is also making the deal as it’s expected to go for a very highly anticipated IPO. The company recently did a management re-shuffle, putting in Jonathan Lu Xaoxi as its new CEO, after founder Jack Ma stepped down.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Twitter #Music got its big public debut today, and at first blush the service is visually impressive, and well-designed with smart, opportunistic integrations. Those integrations, with Rdio and Spotify, completely change how the app works for users who have active accounts with either service, vs. those who don’t. And the biggest winners here might just be Rdio and Spotify, since the app experience reinforces just how strong they and other discovery services like Songza really are.

Consider that without Rdio and Spotify, you’re not going to be able to access full tracks through Twitter #Music, only 60-second iTunes previews. That means you can’t just set it to play for a certain category and leave it on the background, without having an extremely jarring experience. Instead, you need to actively monitor what you’re listening to, making it the opposite of a lean-back experience.

Second, you can use Twitter #Music without a Twitter account, but you’ll be limited in terms of what you see. That’s because your recommendations, when not culled from the general public data of top trending artists (the “Popular” tab) or up-and-comers (“Emerging”), is instead drawn from the pool of artists you follow on Twitter. It turns out I follow exactly zero artists on Twitter music, and that’s not surprising, given that I use it primarily for work. You can rectify that in-app, but only by following artists on Twitter through it; they’ll show up in your standard Twitter feed, too, and there’s no way to keep them separate or quiet that noise. If you’re not interested in Top 40, or in what Twitter IDs as “emerging” talent, you might find yourself at a loss as to what to do in the app.

Even if you have Spotify or Rdio access, and your music tastes agree with Twitter’s, or you follow a wide range of artists, you’d still probably be better served going straight to the source. Rdio and Spotify both offer their own charts, as well as recommendation tools like albums identified as in “heavy rotation” among your network, which is built separate from your network on either Twitter or Facebook, which means you can build it exclusively to reflect people with similar musical tastes, instead of for more general purposes. Plus, with those subscription streaming services, you can access playlists curated by others for nearly any genre, mood or topic you can imagine.

Going even further afield to something like Songza, which is pure recommendations, you find even better discovery tools. Being able to drill down by mood and genre makes it so that recommendations on Songza feel a lot more varied and spontaneous, but remain more focused on areas you’re likely to enjoy. It also features full tracks by default, and is available on iOS and Android, as well as desktop. 8tracks offers a similar experience, and is also available across all three platforms. New entrant Piki from Turntable’s creators is also a strong contender, with a social network also based solely on musical taste, where you can build your own network by selecting from users within your Facebook or Twitter networks, or outside of those within Piki itself.

Twitter #Music is great-looking, both on the web and on the desktop, and it works well enough once you have an active Rdio or Spotify account. In that regard, it’s very good for Rdio and Spotify, since it should funnel new users to those services. And it’s very good for Twitter, since it essentially becomes a big potential ad platform targeting music labels, which have money to spend. Plus, as I quickly found, it should drive users to follow new artists if it doesn’t annoy them into shutting down the app instead. But for the average user looking for a way to discover new music, the field is rich and Twitter #Music’s current capabilities are relatively paltry.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a veteran game designer, creator of leading game design blog What Games Are and creative director of Jawfish Games. You can follow him on Twitter here.

There’s a reason why games and organized crime have often gone hand in hand. The thrill of the win, of achieving – often with money attached – has long proved a lure that society felt the need to control, like a drug. Games of chance, Poker, horse racing, sports betting and many others brought quixotic pleasures to many and bankruptcy (or worse) to some. There was always money to be made in the shadows for those happy to work in them.

That shady aspect still exists in the games industry today. While there are some highly ethical game makers out there who conduct their business in a manner befitting their ideals, there are also plenty who dupe and deceive to profit from an audience. Some are merely morally gray, maintaining that since games are a tough market and the cost of user acquisition is high, they have to be scrappy. Even if they don’t personally like it, it’s just how life is.

But beyond that typical red-ocean thinking, you can always rely on some developer or publisher to eventually take things too far. Like water flowing into every nook and cranny of a given platform, some will use their powers for good while others will figure out how to use a game as a form of arbitrage to extract as much value as possible. And you may say “well that’s business”, which it sometimes is. Yet shady actions can have far wider impact across the industry than is generally realized.

Take, for example, the practice of selling virtual goods in children’s games. Free-to-play games are very popular across all segments of the market, but the ability to sell items from within a game has the potential to deceive. While the notion of permitting players to financially participate as much as they want to is neat, many don’t fully realize what that means. Parents in particular are often unaware that their children know their iTunes passwords until big bills caused by their little angels buying $1000 worth of virtual game goods surface. And good luck getting a refund.

Because of course there are shady game makers out there who think it’s okay to put a $99 item in a game aimed at nine year olds. Of course they have an entirely self-reinforcing rationale for why this is permissible. Of course they use words like “choice” and “parental responsibility” to justify their actions. And yet they come across as weasels. In fact they ARE weasels. When this sort of nonsense goes on long enough, outsiders start to step in.

Government agencies like the UK’s Office of Fair Trading are starting to take a strong interest in free-to-play games. The OFT is an official consumer advocate group whose judgements can be far-reaching, and their recommendations often form the basis of legislation designed to clean up particularly egregious industries. This may serve as a wake-up call for the industry to self-regulate before regulation comes a-calling, or it may just be the tip of the iceberg. If, for example, the United States’ Department of Justice decides to do likewise, who knows how far that could go.

The problem for most of us who make games is that shady tactics tend to poison the well. The difference between the ideal of Facebook games (play together) and the practice (notify and spam repeatedly) is why social games stalled, for example. What could have been the most amazing platform change in gaming in a generation instead became a haven for sleazy lowball tactics designed to make a quick buck or an exit sale. Facebook’s early (and continuing) mistake lay in not taking an active-enough hand in managing their platform, preferring to let evolution sort it out.

The sale of crappy gamification “solutions” is another example. Through the work of writers like Sebastian Deterding, gamification has developed into a very interesting idea (with a variety of caveats, which I have written about before). Yet, regardless of where you stand on it, gamification has started to invert in large part because of the revelation that it mostly doesn’t work. There are many shady companies out there offering solutions that are little more than packs of GIFs and experience point tables, and of course that sours companies on trying gamification more than once.

It’s for reasons like these that I tend to strongly support Apple’s firm stance in governing the App Store. To some writers (like my Twitter buddy Keith Andrew at Pocketgamer), Apple’s control is only about maintaining profits and an iron-like grip on its customers, but I think there’s more to it than that. Apple takes an active hand in surfacing interesting apps because that’s important for the life of its platform, for the perception among users that iOS is where you go to find all the good stuff. The good stuff often needs a helping hand in the face of legions of developers hawking identical software with large advertising budgets.

Apple also bans or forbids certain apps on the basis of not wanting to dilute that conversation. Apps are not permitted to look like app stores, for example, or to use push notifications to advertise. Apps are not permitted to use incentivized installs. Apps are not permitted to deceive, in other words, or at the very least this is strong discouraged. And Apple seems as though it’s about to crack down on a number of apps that have been treading softly in these areas without directly violating them.

Apple seemed to realize early that shadiness would be problem that had to be curtailed or else the platform itself would be under threat. The risk to iOS of allowing it to be gamed or balkanized – as Facebook had – may not have been plainly apparent at the time, but in retrospect very much so. This is why the AppGratis-es of this world are heavily monitored. AppGratis appears to be just a typical example of needing to reign in wayward practices that would otherwise lead to bad places. Strong rules and enforcement is why iOS remains a vital development platform, and the one that users trust most. But of course, there are side effects.

Chief among them is censorship. As a medium, gaming is trying to come out of its teenage years and stop being regarded as mere entertainment. Some game makers want to feel that they stand shoulder to shoulder with writers, moviemakers and musicians in being regarded as artists, but regulation gets in the way.

In the old days it used to much worse. If you wanted to make games on a non-PC platform, such as a console, you had to factor in the risk that the platform might say no. The platform’s owners might not have even allowed you to have a dev kit to try unless your proposed game fit with their content strategy and guidelines.

These days platforms rarely exercise that kind of power and game making has become much more democratic, but there’s still a ways to go. Games like Sweatshop are banned according to content guidelines that would be considered unthinkable in book or music markets. The burgeoning zinester movement (artists who create games and related interactive art to explore a variety of issues) feels unwelcome and unlikely to become an Editor’s Choice because their work is not exactly PG13.

Unfortunately, like the Mob, shady game makers always be with us. There will always be someone who regards platforms like iOS as an opportunity to scavenge. There will always be someone who looks for the breaks, the wedges and the opportunity to behave like sharks. And they will always have a mealy mouthed rationale to justify their actions. None of us wants more censorship, or for games to be regulated to death. Most of us want the medium to thrive and grow and become as fully expressive. So as an industry it behoves us to establish codes of practice and police ourselves. Otherwise someone else will eventually do it for us.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As a recent new mom, I make finding the best products, toys, food, and more for the baby a full-time job. For example, when I was shopping for baby strollers, I emailed anyone and everyone who had a baby in the past two years and created a Google spreadsheet of all the top strollers, with prices and ratings and reviews from friends. The fact is that product recommendations from fellow parents are invaluable. SunnyBump, a new Chicago-based startup that has been incubated by Lightbank with $375,000 in funding, wants to bring these conversations online. The site is essentially a Pinterest for expecting/new parents where you can actually purchase items straight from the site.

You can discover, collect, share (or “bump”) and buy all types of products related to your new baby. You can follow other people, read reviews and recommendations/advice from the community of parents, industry experts, brands and manufacturers.

Similar to Pinterest, each user has a profile where saved and shared items will appear, and users can also create themed collections. Users can even create a baby registry or “wish list”of gifts.

As the founders explain to me, one of the unique aspects of what they are trying to do is actually get expert advice on products, and have partnered with parenting experts such as Baby Gizmo, Sara Haley, Grandparents.com, and Lactation Partners to source products.

From a monetization standpoint, baby product manufacturers like Bugaboo, Baby Jogger, and Bumbleride, are also participating in the site to showcase their recommendations.

As we mentioned above, what separates Sunnybump from some of the competitors (including Pinterest) is that you can actually buy all the items listed on the site online. Brands like this, say the founders, because recommendations and sharing can turn into real conversions.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

On the back of a new analytics product designed to help brands and others better track how well their pinned content is progressing through Pinterest’s millions of pinboards, today the image-based social network is rolling out a new redesign. This is the new look with bigger pictures and more discovery features that it first began testing back in January, with the proviso that if it proved popular it would roll it out more widely. Today, it said it would be turning it on for everyone, with invites to all appearing soon.

The main idea here is that the new look with bigger pictures and more linkage focuses on discovery, and specifically getting people more engaged and pinning on the site — engagement being one of the key metrics for social networks like Facebook and Twitter as well. The importance for Pinterest with engagement is that it potentially helps it justify further down the line how to charge for services like analytics and marketing opportunities. These are areas where currently the company does not take any revenue at the moment.

Some of those new features include the ability for users to explore pins on someone’s board without leaving the page they are visiting, as well as more links to related pins to those you’ve already pinned. This will come by way of discovery tabs alongside the main pictures, as illustrated in the screenshot below. As Josh pointed out in January, giving users options for more content discovery right on the page where they are already has been an important lesson from the likes of YouTube, which has used this to keep users from sampling one video and then bouncing somewhere else altogether.

Similarly, users will be given pinning recommendations based on what other people are pinning similar to what you are flagging on your own board. Pinterest says that the recommendations feature is also soon getting rolled out to its iOS and Android apps.

Pinterest has a challenge ahead of it. As it evolves into the next stage of its life — specifically as a revenue-generating business — it will have to add more bells and whistles, which may include more forms of commerce, or ads or something else altogether. The opportunity there is obvious — one that $338 million in venture backing clearly also sees — but so is the fact that putting all that into Pinterest could take away the clean-yet-massively-full-of-information feel that Pinterest has today. Indeed, it’s telling that lead product designer Jason Wilson writes in the blog post that the basic idea is to “make things simpler and cleaner, without requiring you to learn anything new.”

Other changes, he notes, are bigger pins, better ways of navigating back through your browsing in case you start to feel lost or to engrossed in checking out other people’s boards. “Now, when you scroll through pins and click on something that interests you, the back button lands you right back where you were no matter how far you’ve gone,” he writes. This may also be something that brands and those who are trying to attract people to their landing pages as much as their individual pins may have requested.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch