Gaming has evolved from single-player to head-to-head to massively multiplayer, but it’s also retreated from public arcades to isolated homes. Today’s launch of the Xbox One makes the whole console experience social, not just the gaming itself. You’ll still be battling other humans, but how you communicate with them and choose what to play is about to change.

Think back 20 years ago, before home gaming devices became the powerhouses they are today. You’d go to an arcade, and the way you’d discover what was fun and popular was looking for which game cabinet drew the rowdiest crowds. I remember discovering Street Fighter 2 in a hotel arcade while on vacation. I couldn’t even see the machine, as it was surrounded by older boys swearing like sailors at every Haduken and thousand-hand-slap.

I knew I wanted to play that game. And when I finally got my turn to get beaten mercilessly as the mob swelled around me, it didn’t feel like I was doing anything nerdy. I was partaking in a new culture, a new community.

That’s the promise of the new Xbox One’s trending section. It surfaces games, apps, video on demand, and other media popular with your friends and the whole Xbox user base. Gamers won’t have to go searching for reviews to see what’s the hot new first-person shooter. The wisdom of the crowd will clue you into what game has captured the zeitgeist, even if you’re playing alone in your basement. Microsoft also hopes to turn word-of-mouth recommendations into an algorithm that shows you what to play next. Because the suggestions come from friends, you might trust them enough to buy a new sports game like NBA Live ’14, listen to a classic album, watch Firefly, or try out a fresh app like Hulu.

Microsoft is also bringing these custom recommendations somewhere that was never really social: television. Live TV can be piped into your living room through the Xbox One; its TV guide features a trending section too. While we’ve gotten used to intelligent suggestions for video-on-demand thanks to data crunchers like Netflix, Xbox one could show you what sports match or awards show your friends and the whole world are watching right now.

Microsoft will have to figure out who your real friends are, possibly through social network integrations, and how to use other factors like geography to massage the trending picks. There will also be privacy design challenges to face, as not everyone wants to share what they do with their controller. But if Xbox One Trending succeeds, it could make games and television viral in a whole new way.

Snap back to the arcade, and 10-year old me is learning all the naughty four-letter words. Each time someone sees their health bar go red, they let out a stream of angry obscenities while onlookers let loose cuss-modified cheers for the victor. But it wasn’t just the sounds. You can hear kids swear at each other all day on Xbox 360 Live. It was the look of anguish in a defeated combatant’s face, the relieved body language of the winner whose reward was one more game and “a new challenger!”

Xbox One’s new Skype group video chat feature means you can play face to face with friends around the world. It’s infinitely more vivid than the audio and text chat capabilities of the Xbox 360. Smile at each other after a successful dungeon raid, or dance around as you brag about your touchdown in Madden. Skype for Xbox goes beyond games so you can watch TV, use apps, and more while having a conversation. Social doesn’t even need to be banished to a second screen. Xbox One “Snap Mode” lets you use voice commands to open video chat in a slide-out, overlaid window on the edge of your TV.

Skype for Xbox takes video chat and puts it in your comfiest chair. Rather than hunching over your laptop, leaning back on your couch could inspire long conversations over your console. You might – *gasp* – even pause your game to chat full screen with your little brother back home. Or it could usher in a new era of simultaneously consumed content, where you having distributed viewing parties for sports and movies rather than cramming your friends in the same room.

Xbox One also comes equipped with automatic, background matchmaking that lets you watch TV or play another game while you wait for a new opponent with a gaming DVR so you can record and share videos of your greatest triumphs or most gruesome game-overs. More people posting those videos to Facebook and Twitter could push serious console gaming ever further into the mainstream.

Of course, some gamers might not want social invading their safe space. Some may use it as a safe space to turn off their good graces, be a bit more primal, and just relax. Pings from friends wanting to Skype chat might be an interruption. Fighting alongside or against other people is all the social interaction they want. But the occasional eye-to-eye encounter could make gaming more fulfilling. If you’ve ever stayed up late playing only to feel a bit empty afterwards, you see the hole a more social Xbox could fill.

Gaming has become a bigger industry than movies. Mobile phones and social networks are bringing games to a wider audience than ever. Yet there’s still a stigma that it’s the realm of unwashed shut-ins and anti-social misfits. The Xbox One and the next generation of social consoles could change that, so even if you play games alone, you’re not a loner anymore.

Microsoft’s Don Mattrick pulled back the curtain on the Xbox One at a live event at the company’s Redmond campus, and it wasn’t long at all before the talk turned to software. One application in particular has been the subject of speculation for months, and SVP Yusuf Mehdi confirmed that Skype (which, if you recall, Microsoft acquired for $8.5 billion nearly two years ago) is part of the Xbox One experience.

As you might imagine, the Xbox One Skype application allows users to participate in group video chats with their fellow users using the Kinect camera — so there are opportunities for a natural type of ongoing conversation, one that won’t require you to chat for 30 minutes and then disconnect. This could be an “always on” situation.

You can answer a call by saying “Xbox, answer call” and then the video screen slides in from the right. Since the Xbox One aims to be your all-in-one “Home Entertainment System,” Skype is going to play a huge role in the overall experience. The demonstration showed a group Skype conversation happening while watching a video, with video quieting down a bit once the call is connected.

Microsoft has always talked about being the hub of the living room, and it seems like the newly announced Xbox One is the device that brings its vision to reality. The game-changer with this Skype integration is that you can watch a television show or play a game while carrying on a conversation. This has been attempted, mostly as a “second screen experience,” but to make this a seamless reality is a huge step forward for Microsoft. Until now, you were constrained to the functionality of a particular game supporting voice chat, but this gives you a more personal experience no matter what you’re doing on your Xbox.

In July 2005, I created Mashable.com on a WordPress blog. In 2007, I created the @mashable Twitter account. In the beginning it was a feed of my personal thoughts and actions. Mainly, I was posting what I was having for lunch. But when I started sharing links to Mashable articles, I saw real engagement. Quickly, it evolved from my personal stream to the Mashable account that more than 3 million of our readers now follow

In the early days of Twitter, our job was to explain and translate the new technology; helping our readers understand how people were using the platform for political action, for marketing and for charity. Of course, our mission remains the same: Helping people understand how they can make their lives better through innovation. Read more...

About.me, the online identity platform that spun out from Aol* at the beginning of the year before acquiring the one-time Digg spinout Wefollow, is now lifting the curtains on its plans to generate revenue, with today’s debut of About.me Premium. Via this new, paid tier to the service, the company is adding some of the more advanced features users have requested, including domain mapping, Google Analytics integration, the ability to remove the About.me branding, and more, for a $4 per month fee. And that’s just to start.

This is the first time About.me has charged users for any aspect of its service, co-founder Ryan Freitas tells us. With today’s release, the site will begin to offer features aimed at professional users, like the ability to display their About.me page on their own custom domain name – the most in-demand user request to date, he says. The site will walk users through the process of adjusting their DNS settings to map the new domain to their page.

To accompany this change, Premium users can also remove the branding on their page, which includes the “about.me” logo and the top navigation bar entirely. However, branding won’t entirely disappear. A small button at the bottom will still say “me,” pointing those who are interested to more details about the About.me service.

Users will also be able to check site statistics using Google Analytics, and jump to the front of support queues with priority email support. The company isn’t yet committing to a guaranteed turn-around time, however, because they’re currently unsure what user support volume will be. But Freitas says the company has always taken support seriously, and is now staffing up on the customer service side of the business.

The company also announced its future plans with Premium, which speaks to how it will integrate the technology acquired by the purchase of Wefollow, which today still serves as a discovery tool that helps Twitter users find others to follow by interest.

“There will be a secondary tier that allows for people who want to be discovered,” explains Freitas. “We’re going to be able to create a paid tier using the algorithms from Wefollow to promote [users] into a variety of different mechanisms that we’ll be unveiling over the next few months,” he says.

This will include a search directory, similar to the one Wefollow offers today, as well as tools that will allow premium users to pay for better search placements. “That will probably be one of the first things we roll out – improved search and promoted search,” Freitas adds.

About.me is working on improvements to its mobile application, which launched around a year ago. The app today serves more as a mobile-optimized way to use About.me’s service, by allowing users to create personal pages, discover and network with others, and similar to another startup called Highlight, it also helps you find nearby people. That latter feature – serendipitous discovery – hasn’t proven to be as successful a use case as originally thought, however. On mobile, the app needs to find a way to have a regular draw – something that would addict users to have them checking it or using it often.

What that might be is a little bit up the air, but when we asked Freitas if the company would ever want to inch into the “social contacts” space to compete with apps like Brewster or Cobook, for instance, he didn’t rule it out.

“I think there’s a defined space for mobile apps that try to handle contacts,” he says. “I think that if we were to do something, we would take a little bit of new tack on it…We know we have a little time to experiment, but we know we need to update the app.”

Premium tiers for the social service aren’t the only potential sources of revenue for About.me. Though the company today offers a variety of page customization tools, it’s in desperate need of complete themes where everything from font choice to background images is chosen for those users (ahem) lacking design chops.

Freitas agrees that’s an avenue they want to explore, noting that the WordPress theme marketplace model is “fantastic,” and that there is a “cohort of users who needs our help, and would love to be able to purchase those things.”

But that’s further down the road.

The new subscription-based Premium tier, however, is live today. You can sign up from the About.me homepage here.

Disclosures!: About.me’s previous owner, Aol, is TechCrunch’s parent company. CrunchFund, a fund backed by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, also invests in the startup. 

You've had some fun with Vine, but now you want to get serious. Here are 12 tips to turn you into a Vine pro.

With Vine, you have six seconds to really impress a viewer. Thankfully, six seconds is more than enough time to dazzle someone, tell a story or share a laugh. These tips range from technical best practices to creative guidelines

1. Visualize the Final Product

Before you start your masterpiece, have a good idea what your finished Vine is going to look like. This might seem like obvious advice, but it will help make your shoot more efficient and give you an opportunity to really think about the structure of your creation. Some Viners sketch out their Vine frame-by-frame in a notebook, while others just have an idea in their head. Find what works for you. Read more...

Nearly one million people are affected by natural disasters each year. In the U.S. alone, some 400 people die from disasters that cost the economy $17.6 billion. Helping respond to these cataclysmic events, social media is now a go-to tool for those effected by disasters

One in five Americans has used an emergency app. Of those Americans effected by natural disasters, 76% used social media to contact friends and family; 37% of used social media to help find shelter and supplies; and 24% used social media to let loved ones know they're safe.

A Facebook group is helping the victims of the massive Oklahoma tornado, which killed 51 people and left many homeless, get their belongings back

On its trail of destruction, the tornado has blown debris from houses — including people's personal belongings and important documents — many miles away.

The Facebook group asks members to post photos of any items or documents that were blown into their yard, so that they can be returned to the rightful owners

SEE ALSO: Terrifying Eyewitness Videos of Oklahoma Tornado Go Viral

"I'm just trying to help. I couldn't imagine losing my kids' pictures," Leslie Hagelberg, the group's founder, told The Huffington Post. Read more...

Does my music do better on Facebook or Twitter? Where should my next tour be? Is my new song too repetitive? Musicians can get free answers to these questions and more from BeatDeck, a Y Combinator analytics company launching today. BeatDeck plans to license this data to labels and music stores to help them sign and recommend tomorrow’s superstars. Yep, BeatDeck is an enterprise music startup.

Everyone (who isn’t a cold-hearted robot) loves music. That’s led lots of entrepreneurs to start companies aiming to help listeners discover new artists and songs. But the fact is that selling music is a tough business. Selling what music to listen on someone else’s service is even tougher. BeatDeck is different. It does nothing for the listener. Zero consumer products. Instead, it focuses solely on the music industry — the artists, the labels signing them, and the stores selling them.

The first part of the equation launches today on BeatDeck.com. Artists sign up and connect their social media accounts like Soundcloud, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Last.fm. This lets them track their performance and compare it across channels, as well as see their fans’ age, gender, and location demographics. Artists also get fan influence and sentiment breakdowns thanks to reputation measurement and natural language processing.

For even deeper analytics about their music, artists can share their songs to social networks through BeatDeck’s publishing system. This gives them a heatmap of which parts of their songs users are skiping to, pausing at, or rewinding to so they can listen again. Conversion metrics indicate which channels best turn listeners into fans, and where they’re getting reshared. It’s valuable data mosts indie rockers don’t have the skills or time to track by hand. It could tell them where to book their next tour date, which part of their song to pitch for commercials, and which social networks they should focus on.

That’s phase one. Soon, BeatDeck will start selling enterprise licenses for its data to record labels and A&R departments (the people who decide which artists a label or management agency should sign). BeatDeck will let them monitor their artists and find new ones to catapult into fame. “We’re already in talks and worked out a couple of deals for enterprise solutions” says BeatDeck co-founder Josh Mangel. He explains that with just six big customers, which would have to include most of the big record labels, BeatDeck can be a sustainable business.

“Sustainable business” isn’t what being a startup is all about, though. BeatDeck will need additional revenue streams to truly succeed. Luckily, I was able to squeeze out of Mangel that the company is working on making its data useful to online music stores. One day it could have iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon paying it to tell them whose music to recommend to you. BeatDeck could tell them that people who try to listen to screechy industrial dubstep hero Skrillex, but pause 20-seconds in, should be recommended a lesser known artist like Robert Delong who is somewhat similar but easier to listen to.

There are plenty of music stores out there that could benefit from these kind of insights. BeatDeck will be battling it out with fellow music analytics services Next Big Sound and Musicmetric. However, they charge artists to monitor their music, and most musicians can’t afford to pay. BeatDeck’s free analytics for artists could win it lots of sign-ups who will fill it with data it can sell. It’s going to be a long, hard road convincing independent musicians that they need analytics, and bundling their data into something lots of companies want to buy.

In the end, the hope is that BeatDeck can help fledgling artists grow and get noticed by the bigwigs. Mangel concludes, “Right now the business isn’t really fair. Artists are not getting big because they’re talented, but because they’re backed by a lot of money. We want to make the music industry a meritocracy.”

The bookend to Yahoo’s Big News Day — a major refresh of its photo sharing site Flickr — will see the company drop its Flickr Pro pricing tiers as part of a bid to compete better with Facebook/Instagram and the rest of the crowded market in the online photo space. But it is not getting rid of paid tiers altogether: it’s keeping an ad-free tier, called Ad Free, as well as a tier for power users, doublr, respectively priced at $49.99 and $499.99 for a year of use.

The Ad Free service, at $49.99, will do away with the advertising the runs along the right side of the current photo feed — and if today’s discussion of what Yahoo intends to do with ads on Tumblr is any indication, ads that may be appearing soon within your photo streams.

The doublr service (again with those dropped vowels… this had to have played some small role in warming the company to buying Tumblr), priced at $499.99, gives users 1 terabyte of extra space, on top of the 1 terabyte that they will already get free as part of a Yahoo account.

The Pro tiers — priced at $6.95 for three months, $24.95 for 12 months and $44.95 for two years — included unlimited uploads and storage, as well as no ads, and a particularly mean-spirited allowance: those who did upload pictures could download more than just a smaller version of them. (Meaning: those who didn’t pay up wouldn’t get the full copies until they did. Their originals have always been stored by Flickr.)

From what we understand from a person close to Flickr, dropping Pro isn’t going to make much difference to the company because Pro never did very well.

“It has always been a relatively small percentage of the overall user base,” our contact says, adding that while now-distant past CEO Terry Semel had made a big push on premium services, after his departure (and actually during his time) there was “virtually no investment made” in trying to develop or push the Pro tier.

Nevertheless, there are now currently Pro users wondering how exactly Yahoo will be compensating them for the rest of their annual subscriptions. Yahoo notes that as part of the changes it will be removing “pro” badges beside people’s names and people can no longer gift pro subscriptions. Strangely, in a bit of an AOL subscription move, Yahoo says it will continue to offer renewable subscriptions to pro to “Recurring Pro users.”

The Pro tier did have another role to play. Today, CEO Marissa Mayer recounted how the small-image download was what prompted her to rethink Flickr altogether. “When we looked across our services we asked, why are we doing that? That started a thought experiment,” she said. The decision was that Flickr no longer wanted to offer “degraded” images. “We keep your images and you have high resolution images everywhere which is a huge differentiator.”

But in the age of Dropbox, BitTorrent, Mega and more, there are so many places to store pictures online today: will anyone really want to pay such a premium price for that place to be Flickr and Yahoo? In any case, as one person has pointed out already, why users wouldn’t just register for two accounts rather than pay for the extra space?

In the meantime, Flickr users are taking a page from the Tumblr book of user reviews, and laying out their vitriol about the changes over here.

The new Flickr is live.

Smack-dab in the middle of Yahoo-Tumblr aqcuisition day, Yahoo is holding a major press event here in NYC. But announcements coming out of this event aren’t related to Tumblr as much as Flickr, the photo-sharing database and social network acquired by Yahoo in March of 2005 for $35 million.

Today, Flickr gets a huge revamp including a totally new look and feel, focused on three different things. First, there are no more bits of text or blue links, but rather a grid layout of huge pictures in full resolution.

Second, stemming from the updated iOS app recently, which yielded 25 percent more uploads, the company is also announcing a brand new Android experience, catching the Google version of the Flickr app up to the iOS version.

Finally, Flickr looks to get even “biggr.” The company is expanding storage for your photos, by quite a bit. Flickr is offering 1 terabyte of free storage for every Flickr user. Yahoo made it clear that no other Internet company in the world offers a free terabyte of storage. That’s the equivalent of 537,731 photos.

In terms of the UI redesign, the new photostream has a justified format grid layout, complete with a header photo and a Timeline-style profile for users. On the top left, next to the photostream button, you can also click into Favorites and Sets.

But what are photos without sharing? Users have an easy share button to send photos out on any of their favorite social networks, including Tumblr.

Most importantly, Flickr has fiddled with the picture page to give a black background and a fullscreen image for every single photo page. The site has been revamped to give easy-click access to the next photo in the set or photostream, even in full-screen mode.

Adam Cahan, SVP of Mobile and Emerging products at Yahoo, announced that Flickr currently has 89 million users who have shared over 8 billion photos. That’s a lot of pictures.

Mayer explained that most of the changes happening at Yahoo concerns users’ daily habits, which explains why the company has put so much focus on the Yahoo Home Page, Yahoo mail, and the Yahoo weather app. In a number of ways, these products are energized and enhanced by photos.

Yahoo’s, and particularly Marissa Mayer’s, tweaks to its overall service and the Flickr experience has helped build out both platforms, but there are still questions over Flickr’s ability to generate revenue and, perhaps more importantly, compete with photo-sharing behemoth Instagram.

It’s worth noting the timing here: Yahoo just bought out one of the biggest and most popular blogging platforms around, and Flickr is a huge resource for blogs in general. But how will Yahoo integrate the two to build out use of both and make both experiences more seamless?

“We have a nice set of the creator brands,” said Mayer. “Photographers and writers. With that, there is natural set of opportunities that arise between Flickr and Tumblr and we’ll deal with that as it comes.”

Alongside Flickr’s product announcement news, Mayer revealed that the company would be setting up shop at a new NY office in Times Square, in the New York Times building, which will hold all 500 employees based in NY, along with room for expansion to 200 more employees.