Today, the Banters social experiment has officially come to a close, as the startup’s co-founder Lauren Leto said via blog post today that the team will be no longer actively working on the site beginning June 1st. However, in spite of its tumultuous road and final splash into the deadpool, the news came with a silver lining. Both Leto and her co-founder, Patrick Moberg, will be taking up residence at Betaworks, the New York accelerator that has incubated or funded startups like bitly, Chartbeat, SocialFlow, News.me, Kickstarter, TweetDeck, and many more.

As for some background, it was a little under two years ago that Texts From Last Night co-founder Lauren Leto and partner-in-crime Patrick Moberg launched Bnter, a simple way for people to share text, IM, and chat messages with their friends in a public forum on the web.

The startup was backed by a cast of well-known angel investors, including Founder Collective (Chris Dixon), SV Angel (David Lee), High Line Venture Partners (Shana Fisher), and more. It later was the subject of some drama with Spark Capital and Tumblr, but came out alive and continued to iterate.

While it initially focused on SMS, it later broadened its scope to let users share any sort of conversation, including GChat, in-person chat, email and more, and launched both iPhone and Android apps, a bookmarklet, in-depth Twitter integration, and supported Facebook Chat, Foursquare comments, GroupMe, etc.

In spite of its full roster of available integrations and cross-platform functionality, Banters suffered from a clunky user experience, as its original model required users to launch the app or visit its home page, open a new post, attribute another user to bring them into the conversation, filling out various message boxes, adding tags — and then, at long last, posting. It had become too much like a CMS and had lost the lightweight feel of an SMS tool.

Recognizing this process was arduous for users, Banters launched a new version of its iPhone app in January, which leveraged Siri’s technology to input conversations and quotes. The idea was to make adding a conversation to the app as easy as snapping a mobile photo. Along with its new iPhone app, the startup added more functionality, including a “like” button, activity stream and an ‘Explore’ tab to help surface the best conversations.

And because it’s original name “Bnter” was tough for some to pronounce, Leto and Moberg changed the startup’s name to “Banters.”

Unfortunately, try as they might, Banters ran its course. Leto said in a blog post today that, although its user base has been passionate, the platform simply hadn’t gained the traction, or user base, the co-founders had hoped it would find.

As a result, beginning June 1st, the team will no longer be actively working on Banters. “We’re not outright closing the site down any time in the foreseeable future,” Leto says in her post, “but, for the sake of prudence, we’re encouraging our users to export their data here.”

Although Banters is hitting the deadpool, its co-founders are moving on to new projects. Leto says that she had long been a fan of “Findings,” Betaworks’ tool that offers “a straightforward, intuitive way to share and discuss quotes from books and the web.” Seeing that Findings and Banters share similar goals, Leto and Moberg will be joining Betaworks this summer.

Leto will become the General Manager at Findings, while Moberg will become Betaworks’ “Hacker-in-Residence.”

Of the new move, Leto says:

It’s never easy to stop working on an idea after having invested so much into it, but I’m thankful that we’ll have the opportunity to keep working on a product that closely aligns with the mission we set out with at Banters: to harness the timeless power of quotes and words, and share them in ways that have only recently been made possible by technology.

It’s unclear to what extent the kerfuffle with Spark Capital handicapped the team’s ability to raise another round of capital, but as Sarah points out in the post, by the time of the botched funding, Leto had “reportedly cut her salary to zero to help the make the company’s ends meet.”

Regardless, the experience didn’t end positively for either side, and it seems that Banters never found that new round of capital it needed to keep the fires lit. Nonetheless, it’s great to see that the two co-founders have landed in a great spot and will, in some capacity, get to continue working on the idea.

For more, see Leto’s blog post on the shuttering of Banters here.

As a culture, we are getting ever-more accustomed to using social networks as our primary hubs for all information, and that trend is leading to the rise of yet more services constructed like social networks to improve accessibility: one of the latest in that line is DoctorsElite, a new site aimed at linking up patients, general physicians and specialists through a social network framework to make it easier for people to find specialists in certain fields when they need them.

Started by a group of physicians working with other medical advisors and technology experts, DoctorsElite is entering the market bootstrapped and with a database of some 500,000 doctors and centers for advanced treatment in the U.S. — and with some strong firsthand experience of why the founders think this service fills a gap in the market.

What DoctorsElite is trying to do differently is that it is focused on being first and foremost a directory for doctors in specific fields — with that half-million strong database a good start. The database can be searched by diagnosis, treatment and speciality and then, beyond that, subspeciality, and is free to use by patients and their families. Patients also have a secure area where they can store their own medical records to keep them in a centralized place — accessibile by themselves as well as their doctors.

DoctorsElite is also offering a secure section where doctors can communicate with each other to find specialty care for their patients and advice from other doctors — which can be done in open forums or through direct messaging. Doctors and patients have free access to their own profiles, with additional services coming with fees.

As with many startup ideas, DoctorsElite came out of a direct need that the founders themselves experienced firsthand. One of them, a Gulfport, Mississippi-based interventional cardiologist called Cyril V.K. Bethala, had been working in a hospital that was closed down during Hurricane Katrina — not before Bethala himself got stranded in the hospital for days during the peak of the Katrina crisis.

With patients and doctors fleeing the area, it became impossible to track medical histories for millions of patients and for those patients to connect with doctors. Bethala wanted to create a system that could bypass crises like this in the future — and go one better by improving communication in the medical industry, all of the time.

“Every area of the country experiences natural disasters or other events that make connecting doctors and patients a challenge,” he said in a statement. “And even under normal circumstances, it can be difficult for patients and doctors to locate the right specialty care, particularly for uncommon or rare diagnosis.”

All too true, but whether that will be enough to propel DoctorsElite forward as a company remains to be seen: It’s joining a space more crowded than an ER on a Friday night: other sites offering social networks for patients and doctors include Sermo, Doximity, CareZone and HealthTap – the latter picking up $11.5 million from Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures and the Mayfield Fund, among others, last December. Then on the more general medical portal front, there are more established sites like WebMD.

Other founders include Bethala’s physician brothers Vivian K. Bethala, a gastroenterologist, and Vasanth K. Bethala, also an interventional cardiologist, as well as Yashashree Bethala, an internist.

General Motors plans to stop advertising on Facebook, says The Wall Street Journal according to “people familiar with the matter.” But I spoke to a source close to Facebook that characterize GM’s efforts as “taking one swing and deciding to quit.” My source says GM’s efforts weren’t social enough, focusing on building apps rather than launching social ad campaigns that spread by word-of-mouth.

So what went wrong, and does Facebook need to offer more flexibility to advertisers?

Facebook was reportedly unable to convince GM that its ads are an effective way to reach consumers. GM Marketing Chief Joel Ewanick reportedly told the Journal that the company “is definitely reassessing our advertising on Facebook, although the content is effective and important.”

The auto maker supposedly spends a total of $40 million on Facebook, including $10 million on advertising, so the GM pullout won’t have a significant effect on Facebook’s $3.7 billion in revenue. However, it’s certainly awkward to have this news break just a few days before Facebook’s IPO. (And the timing probably isn’t a coincidence.)

I’m guessing GM doesn’t see things that way, but it’s worth noting that Facebook has highlighted successful auto campaigns in the past. For example, there was a Kia campaign that led to a 13-percent increase in awareness for the Kia Soul, as well as a Mazda check-in deal in the United Kingdom that led to a 34 percent increase in sales of Mazda MX-5 during one of the campaign months. Isolated anecdotes? Sure, but at least they show that Facebook isn’t totally inhospitable to car companies.

If we take my source at their word, the GM news may also point to the fact that even if Facebook can work for large advertisers, there are challenges in bringing those advertisers on-board. Facebook executives themselves have said they’re moving away from traditional advertising to a new model, with ads that are built around stories. It’s a compelling idea, but for some traditional advertisers, it may be more appealing to just show a big, glossy ad — like the one that Ford ran on Facebook’s logout page.

[Additional reporting by Josh Constine]

Imgur has a little piece of my heart.

On long days (or really any day), as news picks up and I’m writing like a work horse or when news screeches to a halt and I’m bored out of my mind, Imgur is there for me. Paired with the imaginations and (sometimes creepy) senses of humor of my dear colleagues, I get a fun little surprise every hour or so in the form of a hilarious photo or gif.

But I’m not the only one to enjoy the photo-sharing service. The company just announced that it’s reached 2 billion page views a month, up from 1 billion page views a month on February 1 of this year. Imgur has also surpassed 3 million daily uniques — a milestone in and of itself.

Back at the Crunchies at the end of January, Imgur won the Best Bootstrapped Startup award. Founder Alan Schaff then explained where he sees Imgur fitting in in the crowded photo-sharing and hosting space, explaining that an image is different from a photo. “You would put your photos on places like Facebook or Flickr,” said Schaff, “but if you just have an image – which can be like a screenshot, a meme, something you hacked together in PhotoShop – you need a place for those too. We want to be that place.”

Clearly, this approach is working. Users are currently uploading half a million images a day, and viewing over a billion images a day — that’s a 1,200 percent increase since the beginning of 2011.

Much of this is possible thanks to a service called EdgeCast, which Imgur tapped into in June of 2011. It’s a content delivery network that helps ensure Imgur users enjoy quick upload times and no outages.

And we’re glad the partnership is working out so well for both parties. I, personally, can’t imagine a world without images like these, previously hosted on Imgur, but re-uploaded to our servers:

Editor’s note: Hussein Fazal is CEO of AdParlor, an ad management and technology company for Facebook campaigns. AdParlor manages over 1 billion daily ad impressions on Facebook for clients such as Ubisoft, SEGA, Groupon, OMD and Starcom.

I must say that I have been a little bit disappointed recently in the many, many, many analysts who have been knocking the Facebook valuation with very limited insight into what is going on with their advertising business. Their revenue potential is as strong as it has ever been and the social network continues to grow its users and roll-out innovative advertising products.

While there are many things that Facebook can do to drive revenue related to display, search, and mobile – let’s take a look at three immediate steps Facebook could take to ramp up revenues from its 500 Million+ monthly active users on mobile devices.

1. Show more Sponsored Stories in the mobile news feed – A sponsored story is a piece of news that you would see in your news feed anyways – turned into an ad. It is relevant, social and most people who see a sponsored story wouldn’t even recognize it as an ad. Simply put – sponsored stories work. Looking at campaigns AdParlor has run across numerous verticals show that on average, sponsored stories have a 17% higher click-through-rate and a 38% higher conversion-rate than regular marketplace ads.

When sponsored stories were first introduced they were only shown on the right-hand column. They were then rolled out into the news feed on the web version of Facebook. At fmc they announced that they would begin to serve sponsored stories on mobile, and on April 26th it seems to have gone live. However, most users have seen few if any sponsored stories in their mobile news feed as Facebook is slowly rolling this out while monitoring user experience. Facebook can easily flip the switch on this, increasing the volume of sponsored stories it shows in the mobile news feed and increase their mobile revenues.

2- Combining Location & Offers – A while back Facebook attempted to compete with Groupon and other daily deal sites by creating a deals product. They quickly shut that down for multiple reasons – and then re-emerged recently with an offers product. These offers are coupons which any page owner can create for free – and will begin to appear in a user’s news feed on the web. The real benefit will start to roll in when Facebook begins to serve these offers in the news feed on mobile devices to users who are near the store providing the offer. Even though an offer is free to create – if Facebook can leverage location-based mobile offers – page owners will begin to see the ROI and will purchase ads and sponsored stories against these offers to get more distribution beyond what is given for free. Additionally, brands will now have a very clear path to seeing ROI when buying fans. The investment question around the value of growing your fan base – at least for physical location retailers – will be answered. This is sure to increase the ad spend these companies will make on growing their fan base.

3 – Open up mobile device-specific targeting – There is currently a Facebook broad category targeting option for mobile devices. Advertisers can choose between Android, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone. However – this targeting simply means that a user has accessed Facebook through one of these devices. Creating an ad and selecting this targeting will show ads to these users – however they could be accessing Facebook via the web or even a different device. If Facebook were to tweak this and allow advertisers who select iPhone to have ads show specifically ON the iPhone to a user accessing Facebook from their iPhone – this would mark a significant opportunity. Specifically – one of the largest advertising categories on mobile devices is for apps – and the massive gaming subcategory. If Facebook were to enable actual mobile device-specific targeting – iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry application developers could then leverage Facebook advertising to drive application installs – taking the user right from the click of the ad into the corresponding app store. It seems that right now Facebook wants to limit mobile ads to be sponsored stories in the news feed for many reasons – to maintain user experience, to keep users within Facebook, and an effort to make it not feel like advertising. Given this – it is unlikely that Facebook would allow ads from the mobile news feed to direct users anywhere outside of Facebook. However – the opportunity is there – and the revenue potential is huge.

My first-ever Disrupt was a year ago, almost exactly. I had just started working for TechCrunch and Disrupt NYC 2011 was my initiation, of sorts. I had heard of Disrupt before — but witnessing the Battlefield first-hand, from the front row no less, is a totally different beast.

Every uncertain moment or slip-up during a presentation left me worried, and each triumphant joke or wondrous moment made me clap as loud as the folks in the back. Looking back on that time, a handful of startups are still locked safely away in my memory, the most prominent of all being Sonar.

That’s because the second I heard the concept, I knew it would be a big deal. Considering a host of new apps on the market that do similar things, like Highlight and Crowded Room, I was right. But as Disrupt NYC 2012 (tickets here) draws nigh, I couldn’t help but wonder what life has been like for Brett Martin and his social proximity company since launching on the main stage just a year ago.

I set out on a mission to find out the answer, and Brett Martin was kind enough to oblige.

Here’s the interview in its entirety:

TechCrunch: So tell me what it was like to launch at Disrupt last year.

Sonar: Well, first of all, Disrupt is an amazing, unbelievable, could-not-have-imagined-a-better platform for launching a company. Like all the startups involved, we hadn’t told anyone what we were doing until the moment Sonar launched. We didn’t know what to expect, or if the reaction would be good. But the response was amazing.

We had all of these people talking to us about how excited they were about what we were doing. Whether it was advertising or recruiting or PR, people picked up on the fact that Sonar would change industries. The platform gave us the opportunity to get out and start fast.

TC: So what have you been up to since then?

Sonar: More of the same. We get to meet the leading VCs, and brands are knocking down our door trying to partner with us. We’ve done a couple select partnerships with companies we really like that fit our vision. One was a partnership with Wired Magazine, where we provided personalized product recommendations in their pop-up store for anyone based on their online identities.

SXSW was amazing this year. Because of the press we got early on at Disrupt, everyone already knew what we were doing and wanted to talk to us. Our space really heated up, but everyone knew about us as the early proximity social network because of Disrupt.

Another thing we noticed about launching at Disrupt is that it offers a huge mobile platform. We launched at the Battlefield, and by the next day, when we went on stage for the finals, we were being used in 35 different countries. And what’s awesome is that that global reach has persisted through today. Because of the way Sonar works, people from everywhere are using it trying to connect.

We’ve also been growing. We went from a three-person staff at Disrupt to nine people now, and we’re still hiring developers for back-end, front-end, and mobile.

TC: So what do you think a Disrupt launch did for your company?

Sonar: Simply put, it gave us the opportunity to cement ourselves in proximity social networking. It was the first time people had heard about this type of thing. We have some more exciting stuff in the works that’s not ready to go out.

TC: I think one of the greatest things about the Battlefield is the Q&A. It can make or break a presentation, and with hard-hitting judges like Michael Arrington and Marissa Mayer up there, it can probably be a really stressful moment. Do you feel like the Battlefield Q&A helped you refine your product, or would you say it was a hindrance in any way? In short, how did you feel about the Disrupt Q&A during your launch?

Sonar: This is how I see it: if you’re a startup CEO or founder, it’s your job to be able to answer difficult questions on the spot in front of thousands of people. Disrupt is a great place to separate the weak from the strong. It really is a battleground — a rite of passage. If someone didn’t have a great launch it won’t kill the company. Companies aren’t built on a launch.

And one more thing: Arrington is a big teddy bear. I don’t know why people are so scared of him. He’s big and cuddly.

TC: How would you say Disrupt participating played into your platform with the media?

Sonar: Disrupt got the ball rolling. Every major media outlet out there covers us. A few weeks ago we got a call from MSNBC to talk about the JOBS act.

I find that the most common thing people say when they meet me is “Oh, I’ve heard of Sonar. I saw your video from Disrupt.” That video is a lot of people’s first perception of Sonar. So it’s a good thing the pitch went well.

TC: I guess my last question is more for new entrepreneurs than for you specifically, but there are hundreds of young entrepreneurs and startups headed to the city this week to be a part of Disrupt, whether they’re in the audience, in Startup Alley or on stage for the Battlefield. What advice would you give to them?

Sonar: Know your pitch. Practice what you’re going to say, of course, but don’t forget to listen.

Listen to the judges, listen to the announcers and the way you’re being presented, and listen to the crowd’s reaction. There are so many interesting, thoughtful people out there, and Disrupt is the opportunity to get in front of them.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.

Last month, Facebook drove 160 million visitors and 1.1 billion visits to third-party apps, an increase of 100 million visitors and 780 million visits from the month prior. Thanks to the size of its user base, and the increasing power of its funnel, Facebook is now able to, in a sense, play kingmaker, choosing what types of apps and content see traffic from its news feed. As Josh points out, this is true for content of all stripes, whether they be photos, games, or news readers — or the most recent and perhaps most-buzzed-about evidence: Open Graph video apps.

Since integrating with Facebook Timeline, the “Instagram for video” competitors, Viddy and Socialcam, have exploded. Viddy’s “Timeline Bump” saw it surpass some big names in its rise to the top of the App Store rankings. Since integrating, Viddy claims to be seeing 500K new users a day, and last week confirmed that it closed a $30 million series B round at a reported $370 million valuation. Viddy’s success could be due to the Instagram Effect, a great product, its celebrity backers, or, perhaps more likely, it’s due in large part to its Timeline integration and Facebook promoting its content. Though some would say it’s a combination thereof.

Either way, Viddy and Socialcam are hardly alone. Flixster has seen referral traffic jump to 480,000 hits a day, up 10-fold from the prior month, while BranchOut’s recently launched, Facebook-integrated mobile app saw traffic leap from one million monthly active users to 12.5 million MAU. Unsurprisingly, app developers and websites are eager not to miss the train — the Open Graph/Timeline Lift. The latest additions to the cavalcade of integrators? The cult favorite community-directed Q&A site Quora and the fast-growing, increasingly popular non-profit educational video repository Khan Academy.

In a blog post last week, Quora announced its integration with Facebook Timeline, allowing users to more easily share their Quora activity with their Facebook friends. Users simply go to the homepage or their their Settings page, connect their Facebook account, and enable Timeline.

Once that’s done, Quora-ers can share questions, answers, posts they upvote, and people they follow to Facebook, with that content aggregated by type in a widget on their Facebook profile. In turn, Facebook friends will see the most interesting stories you’ve interacted with on Quora right in their news feed.

Of course, those who might be hesitant to enable this feature for the sake of avoiding spamming their friends’ feeds with every instance Quora activity, however, users will generally only see the five most recent upvotes, questions followed, etc., a cap that’s intended to keep the integration from overwhelming your profile. Generally speaking, the stories that do show up tend to do so because a number of friends all upvoted the same story.

On top of this, Quora also added a bit of granularity to its sharing options, as users can now share to both Facebook and Twitter when creating new questions, answers, and posts. You can choose whether you want to share a particular answer, for example, by checking/unchecking the Facebook and Twitter options.

The more Facebook is able to filter by relevancy to show stuff that’s created, shared by, and popular among your friends, the more addicting the experience — and this integration — becomes. At least that’s the intent anyway.

In terms of Quora, specifically, from my experience, it really can be a nifty enhancement to discovery. Frequently, we dont have the time to spend hours combing through the database, so Facebook integration provides a great alternative for finding those gems that would otherwise go unseen.

For Facebook, the appeal is transparent. Any mobile app or web platform that has a highly engaged audience becomes a great potential source of ad revenue. Quora, which definitely qualifies in terms of an engaged audience, sends its clickable Q&A content to news feeds and Timelines, whereupon Facebook can serve relevant ads, promoting brands and experiences you and your friends are already interacting with and, as Josh points out, as users move towards mobile, Sponsored Stories can keep the same model and become a big source of revenue.

In turn, Quora just raised $50 million at a reported $400 million valuation, which D’Angelo says will be used to scale and expand its platform. If AppData is to be believed, 20K daily active users and 180K monthly active users log in to the site through Facebook Connect — a small fraction of its total number of users. No doubt with deeper Facebook integration in place, Quora could see this number increase significantly — it’s a win-win for each side.

And considering that, as Josh describes at length, Facebook is controlling the news feed like an editor, curating the content its users see in their feeds and profiles, the close ties Quora’s founders have to Facebook could be a boon for its content on Facebook.

Of course, as mentioned previously, Quora is not alone. Yesterday, Khan Academy joined in on the fun, also announcing via blog post that it has added integration with the new Open Graph protocol to enable users to display their badges on their Facebook profiles.

For a little context for those unfamiliar with Khan, as users work their way through the platform’s repository of 3,200+ micro lecture video tutorials, they can earn badges for becoming proficient in three different skills or by quickly (and correctly) answering five quiz questions in a row, for example.

With its new Facebook integration, users can now click the “Share” button on any badge, and, once permission is granted, the badge will appear on users’ Timelines. (This share functionality also works for Twitter and email.)

After a user shares a couple of badges, just like the Quora Timeline experience, a dedicated section will appear in your Timeline, in this case for Khan “Badges Earned.” Users can, thankfully, edit or remove that view and if you’ve collected and shared more badges than can fit in the view, you can customize which badges appear and change settings for individual badges.

Not unlike Foursquare, if a user clicks on a particular badge (in this case on Facebook), they’ll be taken to a page that describes the steps it takes to earn the badge as well as a complete list of all badges offered by Khan.

Many educational platforms are on a mission to make their content more social and shareable, and this is an action taken by Khan Academy with that goal in mind. The badge experience adds a gamification element to its experience, but what good is collecting badges if you can’t show them off publicly to all your friends? It’s a great way to encourage competition among students, and for Khan, it offers an opportunity for exponentially-increased brand exposure.

Khan’s educational videos have racked up millions of hits on YouTube, but its name still remains relatively unknown outside of tech and educational circles. Now, with users displaying the badges on their Facebook profiles, friends that have no idea what Khan Academy is can click on those totally sweet badges (that’s a bit of snark, Khan definitely needs to work on these) and instantly walk through the process it takes to earn them, and, in turn, they are introduced to the Khan platform.

It would be surprising if content from both Khan and Quora didn’t get big play from Facebook curators. Both sites are fundamentally educational in nature (although perhaps a little more loosely used in Quora’s case), engaging, and have dedicated and active user bases. Badges and Q&A’s may be a little harder for Facebook to monetize that game apps and videos, but they both still provide tons of data on the user’s interests and behaviors during interaction on Facebook, with a peek into those behaviors outside of its network.

All in all, it will be interesting to see how much of a bump Khan and Quora receive from their respective Facebook integrations, and we will try to relay that info if and when they’re willing to share. But if Viddy, Socialcam, BranchOut, Flixster and many more are any indication, the Facebook Lift is coming soon.

For more, find Quora’s blog post here and Khan Academy’s here.

What’s the best way to manage our conversations across all the websites and social networks we’re visiting? William Mougayar, founder and CEO of Engagio, says that it’s through a Gmail-style social inbox — after all, that’s the interface we use to handle most of our communication already (not that everyone’s happy about that), and heck, it’s the way many of us read our social network updates already.

Now Mougayar is taking that approach a step further. Instead of accessing their Engag.io inbox in a separate website, users can install a Chrome extension, then read Engag.io as a separate folder within Gmail itself.

I installed the extension earlier this morning, and yes, I can report that Mougayar isn’t kidding about it being Gmail-style — each social network message or update looks like an email, and each conversation is threaded, just like their email counterparts. You can reply to messages from within Gmail, as well as sharing, viewing, and “liking” them. It’s also pretty much identical to the existing Engag.io interface, but again, the new context makes a difference — it’s no longer a separate website that you have to visit, but instead just another folder in your inbox that you have to keep up with.

Engag.io can integrate with Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Hacker News, Tumblr, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and more. I only wish it had a Priority Inbox like Gmail, so that it wasn’t dominated by random people tweeting my articles. (I love people tweeting my articles! It’s just not that awesome to browse those tweets in an inbox format.)

The company is tackling the discovery problem in other ways. Today it’s also unveiling a Engagement Discovery Dashboard, where you can find friends and follow their conversations as well. This turns Engag.io into a social network, of sorts, rather than just a tool for managing your presence on other networks. (In concept, it sounds a bit like FriendFeed, though the interface is completely different.) Mougayar says that this is a good way to find the “signal from the noise” amidst social network fragmentation, because the fact that an update led to a larger conversation is a good sign that it’s interesting and relevant.

Together, Mougayar says the updates mark a new phase for the company: “It’s almost like Engag.io 2.0.” It’s also adding support for managing multiple accounts from one network, which can be particularly useful for brands and other businesses.

The company has raised $540,000 in seed funding from Rho Canada with participation from Real Ventures, Extreme Venture Partners, Bullpen Capital, Fred Wilson, Mike Yavonditte, and other individual investors.

Honestly.com, a startup that allowed professionals to submit anonymous reviews of their coworkers, has been pretty quiet for the past couple of years. Turns out that’s because the company has been busy reinventing itself. Today it’s unveiling a new product and a new name — TalentBin.

Co-founder Peter Kazanjy says TalentBin addresses one of the big problems with Honestly, namely the lack of content. Rather than relying on users to create all the reviews, TalentBin looks at the content that already exists on the Web — specifically, people’s activity on a variety of social networking sites. Kazanjy calls that activity your “professional exhaust,” and argues that it contains lots of relevant information about your professional interests and accomplishments. So TalentBin aggregates a person’s activity across sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Meetup, Quora, Github, Sourceforge, and Bitbucket, then uses that data to create a searchable profile for recruiters.

Comparing the product to LinkedIn’s recruiting tools, Kazanjy says, “we’re kind of like that for the rest of the Web.” In other words, recruiters can use TalentBin to take their search beyond LinkedIn, finding new candidates and new information about existing candidates.

For example, Kazanjy says he conducted a search for Ruby on Rails in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he found 4,500 matching profiles on LinkedIn, 156 profiles on BranchOut, and 22,000 profiles on TalentBin. He also argues a TalentBin profile can be much richer than what you’d find on LinkedIn or a traditional resume. A profile might just say that someone was an engineer at Company X and then at Company Y, with no additional detail, but TalentBin might show that they’re constantly tweeting and posting on Quora about Ruby and therefore rank them highly in a search for Ruby engineers. And since recruiters theoretically get a better sense of your real interests and passions, that may mean you’re more likely to get approached about jobs that you actually find exciting.

For now, TalentBin is focused on technical talent, but Kazanjy says it could expand into other fields where this data is relevant, which he predicts is “any knowledge worker.”  It’s also entirely recruiter-facing for now, meaning that only recruiters see the profiles, but Kazanjy says it might add features that allow people to see and correct their profiles in the future. (Coderwall is also trying to create an aggregated profile and reputation system for programmers, but rather its model is inverted, starting out as a site for coders then maybe eventually moving into recruiting, and the name, at least, implies that it’s pretty focused on programmers.)

Recruiters can access TalentBin via the website, or as a plugin to Human Resources Information Systems, Recruiting CRM programs, or Applicant Tracking Systems.

This is actually the company’s second rebranding, because back in 2010 it changed its name from Unvarnished (at the same time it announced $1.2 million in funding from First Round Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Charles River Ventures, and others). Hopefully this will be the last. Kazanjy says early signs are positive — even though today is the official relaunch, TalentBin has been in private beta testing for months, and already has 60-plus corporate customers including Intuit, Groupon, and Yahoo.

There’s currently a heated battle being waged between three of the biggest on-demand music streaming services — MOG, Spotify, and Rdio — each of which is trying to capture our hearts and ears by offering the best mobile experience for tunes on-the-go. You can check out Josh’s in-depth comparison of the battle for mobile supremacy here. While it wasn’t Josh’s top pick for music streaming on the tablet, Rdio is today taking a big step forward, launching a completely redesigned music listening and discovery experience, starting with the web and its desktop apps.

While the company initially unveiled its plans for its new listening experience at SXSW, today marks the first time the new Rdio will be available to all. Beginning right this very moment, Rdio says in a blog post, the new look is live for you to test, poke, and prod. The new look and feel, the company believes, will make it faster, more social, and easier to use, with notable features and upgrades including better “Collections,” drag and drop playlist creation, personalized “Heavy Rotation” functionality, and private playlists.

The company has been busy extending its service across Europe, launching in Spain and Portugal in February, but all the while, it’s been focused on creating a new, better user experience to keep users engaged in the face of the heightened competition and growing popularity of MOG and Spotify. As Rdio says in its blog post, the site’s new look is meant to transform it into something “more than just a boring spreadsheet of songs.”

That starts with making browsing and discovery in one place — i.e. making navigation something that isn’t quite so time consuming. In the new design, music, playlists, and a user’s network are all now under one view. And, speaking of playlists, one of the most requested features, Rdio says, has been the ability to add whole albums to playlists, so today the startup will begin offering this functionality on both the Web and in its desktop apps.

The new Rdio also allows users to browse a continuous stream of albums, and easily return to the place where they left off. What’s more, a la Facebook and Spotify, users can now access a “People Sidebar” to see what their network is listening to in realtime, with one-click listening. If you want to know why an album or song is appearing in top charts, or why it’s showing up in the new “Heavy Rotation” category, you can find out simply by hovering over photos to see which of your friends listened to the song, and inspired its being served up for you to see. The new People Sidebar also lets users easily find and follow Rdio’s influencers, like top artists, critics, record labels and brands.

Another highlight is Rdio’s new drag and drop functionality, which lets users drop music into playlists or share with their friends on the fly. Of course, with sharing overload becoming the norm, people want to have options beyond their public and collaborative playlists, which is why Rdio is now offering the ability to create private playlists with a few drag-and-drops. And if you feel the need to share those private playlists, you can do that now, too.

As on-demand, streaming music options battle for our ears, staying even with competitors is paramount — just as it is to continue iterating on the experience of social listening. We’re only just beginning to play around with Rdio’s new features, but at first look, this is a big step forward for the Rdio experience.

For more, check out the new look here, and take a peek at the video below: