Retickr, a social news reader application for Mac OS X, received a big update today, as well as a new round of funding. The startup just closed its Series A of $1.5 million led by the Lamp Post Group, the investors who had previously put $150,000 into the company’s seed round.

The app, which combines RSS, social networking updates and news, is not your standard feed reader, but rather attempts to personalize your news reading experience the more you use the product.

Explains Retickr co-founder Brian Trautschold, “information overload is an epidemic – content is being created faster than ever before, and people can’t keep up.” But he clarifies that his startup is not a simply a news reader – it’s a big data company. “We are focusing on an algorithmic approach that we believe should be individual-centric…our API learns what people read, like or dislike, and share. As we roll personalization out, users will begin to see content catered to them, and discover news they would have missed before,” he says.

The idea for a personalized, ever-learning news reader is not a new one, but these days, it’s more common to see such things launching as iPad apps, not as desktop software. (See, for example, Evri for iPad or News360). Retickr plans to address other platforms too, including web and mobile, but started with the Mac app instead.

With the updated version of the Retickr app (ver. 2.0), which rolls out today at noon (ET) on the Mac App Store, you can now sync your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader feeds and then incorporate those streams into “playlists” along with the news feeds from over 85,000 sites that the service crawls. This addresses one of users’ bigger complaints about the earlier version of Retickr’s product: an inability to import OPML files or sync with Google Reader. Done!

The app will appeal to the social dashboard user base (TweetDeck users, e.g.), but aims to help cut down on the noise of the real-time streams with customized controls that let you configure how fast news scrolls by. But the name “Retickr” comes from the app’s key feature: its news ticker. The ticker is reminiscent of an older product called Snackr, which I happily used until I couldn’t stand its Adobe AIR-ness any more.

A word of warning for serious RSS connoisseurs, however: Retickr took forever to import my 1,000+ Google Reader feeds. It’s unclear if this was an issue with the alpha version of the product I was using, or a serious bug that still needs to be addressed. But with a million and half now in the bank, I expect the issue to be resolved soon.

If you want to see what your friends or contacts are up to, you can check out Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram for a realtime feed. But what if you want to read news about your friends? That’s a little bit trickier, which is why Newsle was born. Axel Hansen and Jonah Varon created the site in early 2011 as a way to find out more about what their friends and people they met at school were up to during the summer, and beyond. At the time, Hansen and Varon were sophomores at Harvard, but they’ve since taken leave and have moved to San Francisco to focus on Newsle full-time. (Sounds like a familiar story, doesn’t it?)

At conception, Newsle mostly focused its efforts on becoming an archive for interesting (older) news about friends and people you care about. (You can read Erick’s early coverage here.) But, in testing the idea with its some 10K beta users, the founders discovered that it turns out most people have friends who are in the news every single week. And this doesn’t just apply to those in the tech industry, nearly everyone has an acquaintance or five that appear in local papers, blogs, and beyond.

The startup’s beta users wanted a better way to keep track of their friends, loved ones, and contacts popping up in the news in realtime. So, Newsle has been heads-down in stealth mode for the past nine months building technology to enable this kind of news-based friend-tracking, and the new version officially launches today.

In its new garb, Newsle has basically built a massive RSS feed crawler that processes more than 100K news sources every day, culling together over 1 million articles from major media outlets, blogs, as well as local publications. The startup allows you to then pull your Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts into its engine so that it can serve you a stream of news content that focuses on the people you want to stay in touch with. Users can then Facebook message or tweet the people they’re following directly from Newsle’s web interface. Or they can drill down, set more specific alerts that get sent to their inbox daily, weekly, and so on.

Users can not only follow their Facebook and LinkedIn friends, but also choose from a list of celebrities, comedians, actors, and business people, staying on top all news related to Lady Gaga. It sounds a little stalker-ish, but it’s a great tool for, say, startups looking to keep tabs on VCs, or for my many fans to keep track of my posts. (You’re welcome!) The founders tell us that they really wanted to pick up where Google Alerts leave off, focusing on friends and people we care about.

As Erick pointed out, if Newsle sounds familiar, it’s because the idea has been tried before in various incarnations, most notably Rohit Khare and Samil Ismail’s now-defunct Angstro, which eventually morphed into Knx.to to be later acq-hired by Google. Previous attempts haven’t been successful, but Newsle has a great UI to recommend it, works well, and looks snappy.

Obviously, tackling the enormous amount of news content out there on the Interwebs is no easy feat. The service will really live or die based on how relevant the content is that it serves to its users. Right now, since quite a few other TechCrunch writers are my friends on Facebook, Newsle is serving me their posts on TechCrunch, but if you’re looking for news about those people, and not written by those people, that could be a strike against. It’s no easy thing to separate the equivocating metadata or profile information that comes with bloggers’ news posts.

The founders have been hard at work creating and fine-tuning these disambiguation algorithms that allows Newsle to, among other things, distinguish between commonly occurring names in the news and those who are actually your friends. With so much content coming into its silo, that can be tricky.

But that’s where funding can come in handy. Newsle is officially announcing today that it raised $600K in seed financing from Lerer Ventures and SV Angel. The startup is using its new capital to hire engineers to help in tweaking its algorithms, and to launch mobile apps (which should be going live in the near future).

Newsle is still early in the process and hasn’t yet solidified its monetization strategy, but one can imagine that a service like this would be appealing to businesses, especially to marketers and sales people. The founders also said that they will add further local news sources as more users come on board, and they get a better sense of which particular outlets are most in demand.

While the goal has really been just to build an open-ended resource that allows people to track news about their friends, it also wouldn’t be surprising to see the startup eventually offer more targeted, subject-specific content and tracking.

For more, check out the new, new Newsle at home here, and let us know what you think.

140 Proof, a startup that says it delivers targeted ads to more than 50 social apps, is adding a video ad unit to its lineup.

Like the company’s existing 140-character text units, the videos can show up in the social stream of any app running 140 Proof ads (and yes, they should work on mobile). Users should be able to click and watch the video without leaving the page, rate it, and bring up a feed of all the tweets mentioning the advertiser’s hashtag.

Co-founder and CTO John Manoogian III told me via email that 140 Proof’s biggest advertisers have been asking for video ads “for a long time.” He pointed to several things that make this a good move for the company. For one, it allows brands to deliver video ads targeted at people with a specific interest, and to deliver those ads in a social stream. For another, it places the videos in the perfect context for further sharing. Manoogian even pitches this as a way to help your standard TV commercial stay relevant.

“The new video ad unit lets brands get more value out of that expensive 30-second TV commercial that lots of viewers AREN’T SEEING, seeing since they’re now watching shows on Tivo or Hulu or (ahem) BitTorrent,” Manoogian says. “The social video ad unit lets brands reach those users in a context where they are already looking for ‘the next big thing’.”

The company is also sharing some numbers about its recent progress. In 2011, 140 Proof says that it increased revenue by 700 percent, that the average media buy across all customers doubled, and that it tripled its headcount by 300 percent. During that time, the company also raised a $2.5 million Series B from BlueRun Ventures and others. Advertisers include UPS, Nike, Victoria’s Secret, and many others.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Done right, it can also help the imitator tap into the zeitgeist and pick up more followers as a result.

That looks like it might have been some of the logic behind the relaunch of the website of Easy Living, a UK magazine published by Conde Nast, which relaunched this month with a Pinterest-like grid interface on its home page.

To be clear, the site is not about Easy Living turning into a social network itself — there are no followers in different categories, and users cannot “pin” content on the site (not yet, at least) — but the borrowing of the image-based layout, big on images and shorter on text, is unmistakeable.

There are others that have noted how Pinterest has affected the development of web-based content: sites like Quora have topic boards, for example, that also speak to the evolution of content discovery from straight linear timelines to those based on subjects.

This could be one of the first examples of a magazine’s website taking that to heart. It’s a fitting one: Easy Living’s subject matter is squarely in the area of lifestyle, home and fashion, three areas where Pinterest has particularly done well, picking up millions of pinners in the process.

The drive to make magazines more in the mold of hot web properties is something that we may see a lot more of in future, as publishers take tips in their attempt to keep their readers (and advertisers) loyal in the face of a wave of sophisticated (and free) online content. Let by companies like Pinterest.

At Conde Nast, this looks like it is just one part of a big push that Conde Nast is making into digital: today the publisher revealed in London that it is now selling 200,000 digital editions of its UK magazines, and now has 965,000 Facebook fans for its various magazines. Those magazine’s twitter feeds, it said, has nearly has many followers.

It now has a total of 13 iPhone apps, but it looks like tablet content might be a major point of investment in the months ahead:  it said that Vogue UK will start publishing a monthly iPad edition from September; and that 28 percent of its readers now own a tablet, with that number even higher among some of its titles: in the case of Wired UK, 50 percent of its readers own a tablet. With GQ, it’s 42 percent. Smartphones still blow all that out of the water: 90 percent of Conde Nast’s UK readers use smartphones, with more than half of them iPhones.

Still, there is more opportunity to get those mobile types more engaged in Conde Nast content: the company says that only 10 percent of its site traffic is coming from mobile devices.

Twitter, Facebook and other social networks have long counted on the rise in smartphone usage to help fuel their growth: that trend, however, seems to also be taking a toll on mobile carriers — specifically in the form of revenues.

The analyst firm of Ovum, part of the Informa Group, has estimated that operators lost $13.9 billion in SMS revenue in 2011, as a result of their customers using services like Twitter and Facebook to message each other instead of the carriers’ own text messaging services. A separate report from mobile analytics firm Bytemobile has also charted huge growth in the use of social media on mobile — with operators getting virtually no benefit as a result.

Bytemobile, using data it gathers from its tier-one carrier customers, found that the average mobile user spends around nine minutes per day each on Facebook and YouTube on mobile. YouTube, being a video service, generates 300 times more traffic on data networks. In both of those cases, it notes, neither service generates any mobile operator revenue.

There is a caveat, of course: carriers are still making money from people using their phones to use social networks: users are, after all, still buying 3G and 4G data plans; and many (but not all) carriers also roll public WiFi connectivity into those plans.

It’s questionable, though, whether that incremental data revenue for tweets, status updates and check-ins, and the more substantial data usage from services like YouTube, are able to offset the loss from the more lucrative messaging services that operators built up and still count on for revenues.

It appears that the figure is gradually growing: Ovum points out that a $13.9 billion loss works out to some nine percent of messaging revenues for carriers worldwide, a rise from the six percent of revenues lost in messaging revenue to social messaging in 2010, when carriers lost $8.7 billion in SMS revenues to social media messaging.

Ovum’s suggestion? For carriers to work more closely on making their messaging and other services more collaborative — that is, more partnerships with social networks so that they use the carrier infrastructure to underpin their own communication tools.

There is some of that happening already, particularly in developing countries. France Telecom-owned operator Orange last week announced that it would be launching a new way of accessing Facebook in developing markets, using USSD functionality on GSM devices. It is offering this as an extra paid service to users.

But by and large, operators have missed the boat in more developed markets, where smartphones and mobile apps are the order of the day.

There is still an opportunity in those advanced markets. Carriers, if they got the lead out, could act as mobile app developers and make their own clients to access those social networks, which link in better with the services they already have in place — say for messaging or billing services. That’s something that has been relatively untapped so far.

Storify has become one of the best ways to create stories from social media — the startup says it has been used by 22 of the top 25 news sites in the United States, and that its users have curated a total of more than 3 million social objects. Now, you can do that curation from your iPad.

The company was already mobile, in the sense that stories (which are essentially timelines of content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and more) created with Storify tools could be viewed on smartphones and tablets. But with the new Storify iPad app, you can do more than look at a story — you can create one on an iPad, too. In fact, co-founder and CEO Xavier Damman argues that this may be the first great app for content creation (rather than consumption) on the iPad.

That may be selling (say) some of the drawing apps for the iPad a bit short, but when Damman and his co-founder Burt Herman demonstrated Storify on the iPad a couple of weeks ago, I was impressed by how perfectly suited it seems for the tablet. There’s a responsive, drag-and-drop interface for moving social network updates into the timeline, so it really feels like you’re building something with your fingertips. You can see the interface in action in the video below.

Most of Storify’s traffic comes in the form embedded versions of stories on major media sites, and while the vision isn’t limited to journalists (brands, for example, like to use Storify to illustrate and amplify a particular message), Damman and Herman lay out a plausible scenario where a reporter could use Storify for iPad to file a story.

For example, imagine a reporter at a conference who, instead of lugging their laptop around, just breaks out their iPad to curate the social media version of what’s happening, which in turn is embedded on their website. Damman and Herman are hopeful that the app will see serious usage at the upcoming South by Southwest conference — which is, of course, a hub for social media sharing, if not oversharing. If you’re wandering around eight or 12 hours at a time, it’s easier to share the experience via iPads rather than a laptop with only five hours of battery life.

“We always talk about how social media empowered people to create content,”  says Herman (a former journalist himself). “It’s getting simpler and simpler, from 300 words to 140 characters. Now we’re overwhelmed by all this media, so this is the next big step — the curation of all that media that’s out there, extracting the meaning in the noise to tell stories.”

Damman says his team has been focused for the past seven months on creating a great experience for the iPad, though he isn’t ruling out expanding to other platforms like Android in the future.

Storify’s investors include Khosla Ventures.

…. Whether or not Facebook’s in-house analytics product, Insights, is working. Due to product changes in recent weeks, the tool has been particularly slow to update with the latest metrics, as the site’s creator, PageLever, has discovered. The startup uses Facebook’s API to provide an advanced custom interface for page owners who are trying to track impressions and a variety of other key numbers. Because of the problem, it has been getting all sorts of questions from clients lately asking a slightly different question: “Why isn’t PageLever working?”

Yes, WhyIsFacebookInsightsNotworking.com doesn’t actually try to answer what its name would seem to indicate. Only Facebook engineers working on the tool know exactly why Insights is not functioning at any given time, after all, and they are probably busy working to fix it instead of dealing with questions.

As cofounder Jeff Widman tells me, the real goal is to direct his clients — and anyone else in the industry — to a single site for a quick answer, instead of having to deal with one-off support tickets like they have been. Normally, as he and the site both note, delays take around 48 hours. (And clearly, the inspiration for it comes from the web standard, DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com.)

Longer term, Facebook could provide its own version of WhyIsFacebookInsightsNotWorking.com if it can’t get updates happening more regularly. The social network took a similar step in recent years in response to platform stability issue, introducing a general “Platform Live Status” note at the top of its developer blog. But obviously, since the company is months away from an IPO and working hard to lure in as many marketers as possible, it needs to get this situation taken care of ASAP. Otherwise, the analytics tool and the developer ecosystem around it are going to dampen the buzz.

There’s a lot of noise in our social media channels. I’m busy clogging up your Twitter feed with my deep thoughts, your friends are sharing their millionth baby picture on Facebook, and Scoble is filming startups in your living room on Google+. There is an unfathomable amount of data being produced every second, as social networks, apps, chat, etc. now facilitate real-time communication and sharing — making email feel like the Pony Express. This makes it nearly impossible for people (and their businesses) to stay on top of — among other things — the real-time communication happening between their customers.

What’s more, sharing has really gotten out of hand. The ease of real-time communication and sharing has now outpaced our ability to filter the noise into non-teeth rattling signals. There are hundreds examples of real-time data interpretation applied to outputs of noise, and social media dashboards are the answer to the social sharing part of the problem. We just covered Nimble, a company that’s essentially taking on Salesforce with an enterprise equivalent of social CRM for the little guys, i.e. startups and SMBs.

Bottlenose today released their own v2.0 of their intelligent social media dashboard, and it’s an interesting and more visual alternative to Nimble. MG covered Bottlenose last year when the company was still in stealth mode and was just focusing on funneling Twitter streams. Co-founded by Noah Spivak, who’s already become known for his data plays, like Twine and Live Matrix, and Dominiek ter Heide, Bottlenose now filters Twitter, Facebook, and RSS, creating a unified stream that puts those networks in one place.

The goal, though, is not only aggregation, it’s about understanding what each message is about at a granular level so that it can build a robust profile about you and your interests to help you discover relevant information you might have missed, new friends, articles, and so on. Just like Nimble.

The cool thing about Bottlenose is that it gives you the opportunity to set sophisticated alerts and uses action-based rules to help you get on top of the noise, regardless of whether or not you’re actively engaged in the app or not. It can even take actions for you, like a helpful browser-based social media butler.

So there’s a lot going on under the hood, but the experience is light and fast — it doesn’t feel like your browser is carrying sandbags, thanks to Bottlenose containing a breezy concoction of HTML5 and Javascript. The social butler I mentioned before (or “Assistants”) now live in the left column of the app, learning about your interests as you go, offering personalized suggestions for filters that you may actually care about.

This is all part of Bottlenose’s core technology, called Sonar (hence the dolphin references), which has been significantly improved in version 2.0, now representing a really interesting, visual browsing experience. When you’re in the app, Sonar takes up the right portion of the screen, presenting personalized, relevant tags in a graphic layout. They’re layered in concentric circles, with those closest to the nucleus being the most important, but you can see the visual tree layout of your conversations, clicking into each one to learn more.

Beyond the new column view with “Assistants,” Bottlenose 2.0 also now allows you to consume pictures, video, and read articles in-line within your streams (all embedded in the UI), and there’s more author and message context so you can view author data inline, threaded conversations, bios, and so on.

Users can also now write lengthier messages, and Bottlenose will carry messages that exceed the character limit into a “metadata payload” that others can expand. Oh, and there’s plenty of Twitter info to keep you occupied, influence, interests (all semantically inferred) — instant dossiers on the people you care about. Hooray!

Bottlenose already has 10K+ users in beta, with 100K more on the wait list, and the team says that users have been spending an average of 11 minutes in the app per visit.

The startup will be opening up third-party developer access (APIs) very soon to enable plugins, new functionality, integrations, and all that good stuff. Once that happens, Bottlenose could really take off.

The app is still in somewhat limited beta, but for those looking to get access (I recommend checking it out), head over to the homepage, sign up, create an account, and if you’re prompted, use “Getsonar” for the access code. Oh, and if you have a Klout score over 30, you’ll get in automatically. Let us know what you think.

With stories of Terminator-esque Google glasses making headlines these days, you’d think a basic task like screen sharing would be something that’d be pretty well solved by now. But while there are many different ways to share your desktop (or some portion thereof) with your friends or coworkers, more often than not the process isn’t something you’d call easy.

It’s bad enough that many people (including me) often find themselves steering their peers around computers the old-fashioned way: voice instructions over the phone (“Okay, now look in the Dock, do you see the Settings button? The one with metal gears, right. Click that…”)

ScreenLeap, a new startup out of the latest Y Combinator batch, wants to make this process a lot less painful, so that next time you’re confronted with an issue that could be better dealt with via screen-share, you actually take advantage of it. And to do that, they’re offering a product that’s about as straightforward as it gets: click a link, and you’re looking at your friend’s screen.

Of course, ScreenLeap is far from the first company that’s looking to take on WebEx and the other well-established screen-sharing platforms — competitors include GoInstant, which debuted at TC Disrupt SF back in September, JoinMe, and even Google+, which offers screensharing as part of its Hangouts feature. So what sets ScreenLeap apart? Co-founder Tuyen Truong says that it’s the only service that uses JavaScript and HTML in its viewer, which means that just about any browser — including those on smartphones — can view a broadcast without having to install any additional software.

Conversely, competitors like JoinMe (which is part of LogMeIn) use a Flash-based viewer, which won’t work on many smartphones (including, famously, any iOS devices), so they require standalone mobile apps. And while GoInstant doesn’t use Flash (in fact, it doesn’t require any downloads), it’ll only let you share a browser screen, and not content from other apps.

From the viewer’s perspective, ScreenLeap works great. You click the link (or enter a short PIN on ScreenLeap’s homepage) and you’re looking at the sharer’s screen within a few seconds. Unfortunately the experience isn’t quite as straightforward for the person who wants to share their screen — they’ll need to download and run ScreenLeap’s Java applet, a process that’s quick and relatively painless, but is a significant hurdle nonetheless (some people are wary of running such applets, especially if it’s from a site they’ve only recently heard about).

The site itself is the epitome of a minimal viable product. It looks pretty generic (to the point that I might initially assume its homepage was an ad of some sort), and from a functionality perspective it’s missing some obvious features, like the ability to create screen-shares that are restricted to certain users.

But the design issue is easily remedied, and the company says user accounts (and permissions) will be coming in the next few weeks. Another obvious omission is audio: at this point ScreenLeap is for visual sharing only. But Truong says the service has found that many people are already having a phone conversation when they launch the service anyway.

At this point ScreenLeap is free, but down the line the company plans to utilize a freemium business model, with certain additional features available for a price. Truong says that ScreenLeap is hoping to appeal both to businesses — who have traditionally been the main users of screensharing software — and consumers, who he believes are an untapped market. He likens the current situation with screensharing to the quick rise of the camera phone, as the ubiquity and ease-of-use of smartphones have led to people snapping photos far more often than they would otherwise.

He’s less certain about what they’ll be screensharing, but expects that users will demonstrate use-cases in the coming months. Personally, I seriously doubt that screensharing will see anything near the boom mobile photos have, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a more modest uptick as it becomes easier to do.

Finally, one interesting anecdote. ScreenLeap’s four founders are Tuyen Truong, Lawrence Gentilello, Steven Liu, and Allison Huynh, and two of them — Truong and Gentilello — were founders some thirteen years ago of a site at Stanford called Steamtunnels. A site that featured an online version of Stanford’s (print) Facebook, and had aims that were very similar to what Facebook.com eventually became. Alas, Stanford’s faculty wasn’t receptive to the idea. From the Stanford Daily:

As the site’s “About Us” page stated in 1999, “Let’s face it, the Facebook is an integral part of Stanford’s social structure: you poured [sic] over it freshman year getting to know your class, and now it remains a desktop reference more cherished and abused than your Webster’s Dictionary…we put the Facebook online.”

However, only a week after the release of the beta version of the site, the trio said the University pushed for Steamtunnels to shut down, citing potential Honor Code violations and removing Gentilello and Truong from academic advising positions

Facebook’s Timeline is a cool idea, but as a representation of my life, it doesn’t have much to say about my experiences before 2004. Now, in its own small way, viral content site BuzzFeed is trying to change that.

Specifically, it’s adding buttons in a few posts to take advantage of the Timeline’s ability to backdate content. The first post with this feature asks, “What Was Your First Computer?” For example, you could say that your first computer was an Apple II, and that you got it in 1978, and that would be added to the relevant section of your Timeline. Another post asks, “What Toys Did You Play With As A Kid?“

“Facebook didn’t exist in the 1980s and 90s so we never had the chance to post about our love of Pepsi Blue, the Tandy 1000, and Boyz II Men,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti tells me via email. “We wanted to help BuzzFeed readers complete their Timelines with all the meaningful experiences from their formative years.”

Of course, this also allows BuzzFeed to publish nostalgia-baiting posts that drive traffic through social sharing — after all, that kind of socially-driven traffic is both BuzzFeed’s bread and butter, as well as one of the main reasons for any startups to build Timeline apps.

I think there could be some fun ways for other sites to use the backdating feature, but I haven’t seen any yet. Peretti says his team had to work closely with Facebook to make this happen, and that BuzzfFeed might eventually extend this feature beyond its main site.