Watch Path CEO Dave Morin on TWiST Today at 1pm PT



Today on This Week in Startups, Path co-founder Dave Morin speaks candidly about what he learned from Path 1.0's luke-warm reception, why he believes in the slow product movement and how he's managed to stay on Mark Zuckerberg's good side, even with a competing product.

Dave, who was one of the original members of the Facebook platform team, met with Host Jason Calacanis in CNET's San Francisco studios last week for this special interview. While at Facebook...
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Discovr Hits 1.5M Downloads, Launches Movie Discovery App


The company behind music discovery app Discovr, which recently hit 1.5M downloads, just launched Discovr Movies for iPhone, iPad and Mac OS.

"It was the single biggest request we kept hearing from users," Filter Squad founder and CEO David McKinney tells LAUNCH via email. "We just got heaps of people asking us to make Discovr Movies."

Discovr Movies features an interactive map of movies, making it easier to discover new ones from a data set of nearly 500K titles.

"People intuitively understand the...
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Trade NBA Player Shares and Make a Profit with StarStreet


Sports stock market StarStreet, which launched back in September for football season, has just opened its NBA market so you can buy stock and invest money in "shares" of professional basketball players.

It works by investing in the players you think are going to have a good season and if you're right, you'll make real money. In order to start trading, you must first deposit between $5 and $5K to your account via a credit card or PayPal. If you make a deposit now, you can get a 20% cash bonus to trade with. StarStreet takes 4% commission on the sell side of each trade and covers all PayPal fees.

For the current NFL market, there are 700+ traders -- about 20% of them who are active every single day -- but expects more for the NBA market, StarStreet CEO Jeremy Levine tells LAUNCH via email.

"We're expecting more and more traders as we're improving our product and the trading experience almost daily," Jeremy says. "...Some people are seriously...
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Google+ Boosts Stream Control, Adds Brand Page Admins



Google+ just shipped a load of new features including a volume slider to adjust how posts from specific Circles integrate into the stream, notifications that are easier to understand and the option to add up to 50 people as administrators to a brand page.

"Oh, cool," Robert Scoble writes on Google+. "Google+ finally included its first form of noise control this morning. Good first step. Now we need Gmail-style filtering on top of this."

The volume slider lets you control whether you want to see more or less...
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Occupy Movement Generated 2.8M+ Retweets in 75 Days


The highest peak in Occupy-related Twitter activity occurred around mid-November when word got out that NYPD started clearing Zuccotti Park and the UC Davis campus police pepper sprayed protesters, according to Klout statistics.
 
Klout analyzed retweet data of Occupy-related content from Twitter between Sept. 15 and Nov. 29 and found that peaks in activity, unsurprisingly, correspond to important events in the movement.

The first day of the Occupy Wall Street movement, where an estimated...
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Make Sweet Beats with Electronic Drum Machine Shirt



Think Geek has created an awesome wearable drum machine where you can make your own drum loops and layer beats on top to build a complex rhythm. 

The fully-playable t-shirt drum machine offers nine different drum kits with seven professional-grade drum sounds. It also comes with a mini amplifier that clips onto your belt.

To use, you simply tap the drum pads on the front of the shirt to create a rhythm. You can make...
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Social Discovery Engine Top10 Launches Music App on Spotify



Recommendation and discovery engine Top10 recently launched a Spotify app for users to create and share top 10 playlists with friends and other users on the platform. In order to access the apps, you will need to download the Spotify preview version.
 
Users can easily click and drag tracks to make top 10 playlists based on artist, genre, era and more. There are currently 2K+ top 10 lists in the app that you can browse and subscribe to.

When you create a Top 10 Kayne West Songs playlist, for example, Top10 will add it to the collection and from there, you can compare your playlist to those of other users. Once you create a playlist...
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Facebook Timeline Launches on Mobile Devices, But Not for iOS



Facebook's Timeline is now available on the mobile site, m.facebook.com, as well as the Facebook for Android app. Users on iOS can still access the Timeline from the mobile site but it is not yet included in the native app. 

"Mobile timeline starts with your unique cover photo," the Facebook blog states. "As you scroll down, you'll see your posts, photos and life events as they happened, back to the day you were born. Photo albums and other posts are horizontally swipeable, so you can quickly view multiple photos or posts inline without leaving timeline. You can also swipe through the views at the top of your timeline to navigate to your map, photos, subscribers and more."

Posts now appear in several different ways on the mobile Timeline. For instance...
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Delicious Revamps User Interface, Improves Discovery with Stacks

Delicious just updated its design to change how users see content and enhance discovery through Stacks.

"We’ve begun a comprehensive overhaul of how the Delicious UI deals with information density and hierarchy, while applying a clean, consistent style," the Delicious blog states. "Giving Delicious an interface flexible enough to add new features moving forward was a strong consideration. It required us to take into account overarching themes like how content types get presented (stacks, links, actions, and so on) to minute details like a consistent button style."

Delicious Stacks, which launched back in September to offer users...
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Twitter Service Is Down (video)

When Twitter goes down... from Kosso on Vimeo.

[UPDATE 3:11pm PT: Twitter service is back in working order. ]

Twitter is currently down, but engineers are trying to fix the issue.

"Users may be experience some issues with our service; our engineers are currently working on this issue," Twitter wrote. 

When you visit Twitter.com, the site reads, "Something is technically wrong." Tweeting from TweetDeck, however, does seem to work. 

The International Business Times reports that Twitter has been...

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Gmail for iOS Adds Scribbles Drawing Tool, Custom Signatures



If you have ever wanted to send an email with just doodles or scribbles, now you can with the Gmail app for iOS and Gmail for mobile devices. 

"In the Gmail app and Gmail for mobile you can now open up a canvas and scribble a message that will be attached to your email," the Gmail blog states. "It's perfect for sending a quick sketch that is hard to express in words or adding a fun graphic to make your email more personal."
 
Scribbles offers 10 different colors, three brush sizes, lines, erasers and spray paint.

As The Next Web notes, "you can now have arts and crafts time inside of your Gmail app."

As part of the update, you can also set a custom signature for...
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Google+ Integrates Hangouts In-Stream, Opens 'On Air' to More Users

Google+ users can now hangout from any post and even better, broadcast and record their Hangout to watch later on YouTube.

As part of Google+'s effort to go "beyond the status update," the social network added a Hangout button underneath every post. When you click Hangout, Google+ will add an invitation to the comments stream.

Google+ is also opening the On Air feature to hundreds of more public figures, celebrities and other users with a large following on Google+. By integrating with YouTube, Google+...
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Sync Google Chrome Settings Across Multiple Devices with Latest Stable Release



Google has extended syncing functionality of Chrome to its latest stable release of the browser. Users with Chrome beta have been able to do this since November, but now all Chrome users can sync bookmarks, extensions and other settings across multiple devices.

For those who use Chrome on a shared computer, you can now create a separate profile to make Chrome personalized to you. When you sign in to Chrome on a different device, those settings, extensions, apps and bookmarks will be there waiting for you.

"Keep in mind that adding new users to Chrome isn’t...
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Facebook Wants You to Enable Secure Browsing to Protect Account from Hackers


If you're worried that you'll see porn or violent images the next time you login to Facebook, or fear that someone will be able to access your private photos, you can now easily enable secure browsing right from the Facebook homepage.

"To always view Facebook over a secure connection and help prevent hackers from accessing your info over public networks, turn on Secure Browsing now," the box states.

If the box does not appear when you first login, you...
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Experience Tsunami-Affected Areas of Japan with Google Street View

国道398号線, Onagawa, 牡鹿郡, Miyagi Prefecture, Japan.

Google just released a digital archive of the areas of Northeastern Japan affected by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami via Google Maps Street View and a special website entitled "Build the Memory." 

"A virtual tour via Street View profoundly illustrates how much these natural disasters have transformed these communities," Street View Senior Product Manager Kei Kawai writes on the Google blog. "If you start inland and venture out toward the coast, you’ll see the idyllic countryside change dramatically, becoming cluttered with mountains of rubble and debris as you get closer to the ocean. In the cities, buildings that once stood proud are now empty spaces."

The "Build the Memory" site features before and after...
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The Average Facebook User Knows 73.2% of Friends


Do you ever wonder how many of your Facebook friends you actually know? WhatsHerFace-book.com is a quick, personalized game that helps you figure that out and helps you to increase your privacy online.

"People are getting smarter about their privacy online," the game states. "By now we all know how to restrict our profiles so that only friends can see our personal information. But after 3,4,5+ years of social networking, do you still even know all your friends?"

To see how many of your friends you actually know, you must first connect the app to Facebook. When you hit "Go" you will have 90 seconds to...
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