Tumblr’s “Literary Community Organizer” Rachel Fershleiser has family who read TechCrunch. And Tumblr founder David Karp think it’s the “greatest thing.”

So do we.

Update: We originally thought this email was a missive from Karp’s family. Thank you Scott Kidder for setting us straight.

How silly is @TechCrunch? They confuse emails to @RachelFersh with emails to @DavidKarp techcrunch.com/2013/05/21/all…—
Scott Kidder (@skidder) May 22, 2013

via “Tublr”, TC

Image Tumblr

OK Go (the band behind hit music videos like “This Too Shall Pass” and “Here It Goes Again”) launched its very own game for iOS and Android earlier this month.

You can play the game, titled Say The Same Thing, with one of your friends or with a randomly chosen player. (If you sign up now, you can also participate in a temporary promotion where people are randomly selected to play with a band member.) Each player types in a word, then you see what the other player said, and you use that as prompt for another word. As the game’s title implies, you win when each of you enters the same word.

It helps if you understand the other player’s interests. For example, I was playing with Graphicly‘s Micah Baldwin — after several rounds, I entered “Perry White,” he entered “Smallville,” and we won by both entering “Lana Lang.”

I also got a chance to play the game with OK Go’s lead singer and guitarist Damian Kulash. (Like how I just dropped that in casually?) I don’t want to give away exactly what happens in the video, but I will say that we totally nailed it.

This isn’t just an app that OK Go stuck its name on, either — Kulash said it was programmed by the band’s guitarist Andy Ross. Apparently band members play a live version of the game together, so eventually they decided to turn it into an app:

At some point we realized, hey, there’s no reason why we need to just put out songs. We can put out everything we want — we make videos, we make shows, why not make apps. … We’ve always been interested in tech as a sort of canvas. We try to make art for the world we live in, and this is where we live now. We live on Skype, we live on our laptops and on our phones.

Traditional recordings of music live in this space really well. Like, we’re making an album right now that will be finished sometime this summer, and we’ll probably put it out in the fall or maybe in the winter, and it’s great to listen to on your phone, it’s great to listen to on your laptop, but there’s all these other things that your laptop and your phone can do that musicians 30 years ago couldn’t imagine and artists 30 years ago couldn’t imagine. I think working in these spaces has always been exciting to us, and we’re just lucky that we have a programmer in our band, because it means that we can test things out like this.

In November, Jive Software acquired Bay Area cloud-based, collaborative task manager, Producteev, to boost its social business platform. Going forward, as Alex wrote at the time, Salesforce.com and Jive will increasingly butt heads as they compete for mindshare in the enterprise. With Producteev’s multi-platform task-management system, which allows users to create tasks from emails and collaborate around projects in teams, Jive acquired a service that was already beginning to compete with Asana and Salesforce.com’s Do.com.

Producteev has been quiet since the acquisition, but that changed today, with the announcement that the startup is launching a revamped version of its social task management platform. The biggest change, founder Ilan Abehassera tells us, is that the new Producteev targets larger companies (naturally, given its acquirer) and is entirely free. Yes, this means that companies of any size will be able to use Producteev for free — no strings attached.

The founder tells us that, in spite of the “By Jive” addendum to the company name, Producteev continues to operate as a startup and remains a standalone offering inside Jive’s product ecosystem. The team is still working on integrating the task management platform into Jive’s products, which it hopes to have completed by the end of the year. It’s not clear yet how pricing will change (if at all) once the integration is complete.

When asked “why free?” the founder said that he believes “tasks are the most basic, fundamental part of getting work done” and, as such, are “the way into the enterprise.” For that reason, and for ease-of-adoption sake, Abehassera takes the “fewer barriers, the better” approach, as going free offers Producteev users (and beyond) a more frictionless pipe into Jive.

The platform has been free to individuals up to this point, but this move is clearly something that the company has wanted to do for some time, and now that it’s under the Jive umbrella, it has the latitude to do so, especially with integration coming this year. As of now, there are no Jive products that I’m aware of that are available for free (forever), so the likelihood that its social collaboration module comes without a price? Not high.

The changes evident in the “revamped” Producteev are notable, and the team has been working on the new version of the platform for the last 11+ months. The result, the founder says, is that Producteev has pretty much been rebuilt from scratch. Firstly, that means Producteev added a lot of scalable tech on the backend to allow for new users coming over from Jive’s other products — with more to come once the products are integrated.

The new backend is also relevant considering that, since its inception, Producteev has really been focused on startups and small teams. But its newest iteration sees it re-tooled for larger companies and allows them to more effectively break up teams into smaller groups (and collaborate within those groups).

Jive is currently working on a new task-management module/dashboard to integrate into its enterprise social networking platform, and as of now, its collaboration and task-management capabilities leave plenty to be desired. Producteev’s new features help shore up that gap and fit into the new social (and social collaboration) image it’s trying to sell to its clients and compete with the likes of bigs like IBM (and Salesforce.com).

In addition, the new design, which includes its apps for the web, iPhone, Android and Mac, introduces the notion of “Networks,” allowing users to collaborate with their entire company — something that wasn’t possible in previous versions. Producteev has also added Dropbox integration so that users can quickly attach Dropbox files to tasks and activity feeds on projects, which enable users to see updates on projects in real time.

Users can also now assign tasks to multiple teammates, tag tasks for easier filtering later on, follow individual tasks and take advantage of one-click filtering.

All in all, Producteev is starting to look more like a quality, enterprise-grade social task-management system. Granted, it’s still not all the way there, as the platform isn’t something you’d use if you’re working on heavy-duty industrial design projects — completing the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, for example. But for most other uses, this is a welcome upgrade for Producteev. And now that it’s free, it wouldn’t be that surprising to see this take off in the same way Yammer did before Microsoft got a hold of it — at least until those integrations hit the pavement.

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.

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. 

TeamSnap, a company that provides tools for managing sports teams, has today announced that it is acquiring Weplay, a social networking site for athletes, parents and coaches to help facilitate coordination for events, games, practices, etc.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Trinity Ventures-backed startup, Teamsnap, is an online tool aimed at making practice scheduling, conditioning sessions, team rosters, payment plans, etc for all amateur sports. It tracks everything from parents’ payments for big tournaments all the way to who’s bringing the sliced oranges.

So far, the company has raised a total of $4.3 million, including its latest round in February for $2.75 million.

According to the release, Weplay had raised even more, a total of $15 million since its launch in 2008. The service acts as a social network with similar functionality to Teamsnap, wherein parents, coaches, and kids can coordinate practices, games, etc. for sports teams.

Teamsnap claims that it will take over Weplay’s “customer base and technology” in the acquisition, though it’s unclear if the Weplay team will migrate over to Teamsnap or if this is the end of their Weplay chapter. It’s also unclear if Weplay will be rolled into Teamsnap or stand alone as its own product.

We’ve reached out for clarification, but haven’t heard back yet.

The release states that Weplay has over 2.25 million customers which will migrate over to the Teamsnap platform. The acquisition should bring Teamsnap’s total userbase to 5 million users in 195 countries.

The deal makes sense considering just how similar the two platforms are. There are a growing number of services like this out there, and not one has risen to the top as a dominating force. Perhaps some consolidation will help Teamsnap reach that peak.

Change.org got its start in 2007 as a social network for non-profits and for project-based giving. For years, growth was slow for the fledgling social action platform, but, over the last year, that changed dramatically. Change.org has grown from six million users in early 2012 to more than 35 million users today, and, as a result, has become one of the largest and fastest growing companies of its kind.

In fact, this growth has led Change.org to take on its first round of outside financing in its six-year history. The company announced this morning that it has taken on a sizable $15 million investment led by the Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam.

The firm, which has also backed platforms like Meetup and micro-lending giant Kiva.org, will be taking a minority (and non-controlling) stake in Change.org, even without the promise of a traditional liquidity event — as the company has expressly stated that it will not sell or IPO.

Other investors in the round, which brings the startup’s total capital to around $20 million thanks to previous angel investments, includes Uprising, a new “mission-aligned” San Francisco-based fund, among others.

Part of what makes Change.org unique (and appealing to investors) is that, unlike many others mission driven companies of its ilk, the startup is decidedly for-profit and is certified as a B corporation. It’s a similar approach to the one taken by sites like Rally.org, though it runs counter to an exciting new wave of non-profit startups, like the much-buzzed about Watsi, for example, wich is Y Combinator’s first not-for-profit incubation.

Change.org Founder and CEO Ben Rattray tells us that both becoming a for-profit company, while simultaneously proclaiming that his company will never go public or seek an acquisition, aren’t decisions that were made lightly. Not, at least in the latter case, to simply to attract attention. Rattray and company are on a mission to prove to startups, investors (and the world) that it’s possible to build a socially-minded, mission-driven business without being a non-profit. A business that can have a real impact, but also make money and afford to hire the same level of talent that the Facebooks and Googles of the world attract regularly.

That’s been a stigma that non-profit and mission-driven organizations have had to wrestle with for some time. While a whole new generation of people have grown up on the social activism of Twitter, Facebook and Reddit and want to make a difference while making money, the perception that it’s impossible to do both remains.

“If we’re going to build real tools that help people create change, we need to generate revenue,” the founder says. “Many of my friends told me I was crazy to seek venture capital, but if we want to be fast, to build an innovation-focused business and create the kind of scale you find in the for-profit world, we need this capital to help us get there.”

Now that it’s reached 35 million users, Change.org wants to encourage more social enterprise investors and help evangelize for the development of a third, alternative means of creating liquidity. Whether it’s stock buybacks or some form of dividends, mission-driven businesses need a method that allows them to remain independent without seeking a one-time liquidity event.

Granted, the founder continues, these kind of social enterprise businesses are working over the long-term, 15 to 20 year windows, which is beyond the scope of most venture capitalists. “I have no doubt this is going to change, that eventually more investors are going to start backing socially-conscious businesses,” Rattray says, “but that support probably won’t come from existing funds; instead, it may come from sources like large foundations.”

Either way, by focusing on being fast, on hitting scale and generating revenue (the company hit $15 million in revenue in 2012), the founder says that the company has made an effort to offer comparable compensation to the big tech companies, even if it can’t offer the same perks on the equity side. Instead, it uses a different hook: Join us, and you can actually help make a difference in the world.

This hook, whether it appeals to your or not, has seen the company grow to over 170 employees in more than 18 countries over the last year. But, even if Change.org eventually runs aground, Rattray tells us, the key is to show other startups and investors that there’s opportunity to create big, sustainable businesses within this space, which offer social and financial returns.

When asked what pushed Change.org to the tipping point early last year, which has led to those 35 million users (nearly half of which are international), the founder credits simplicity. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, he said, the company focused exclusively on petitions; in other words, making it easy for users to create and sign digital petitions.

While this may sound too simple, or like it just encourages “lazy clicktivism” instead of true activism (as Liz points out), Rattray says that the key has been embedding its petition tech within social communities.

Twitter and Facebook have emerged in the last five years as remarkably effective advocacy and community organization tools, but they’re not built to harness real, sustained social movements, the founder says. By embedding petitions within social communities and by allowing people to find out what kind of movements or campaigns are happening now, are happening locally and by highlighting the most effective campaigns, Change.org can go beyond just being a simple “online petition site.”

Skeptics may roll their eyes at that statement, but SurveyMonkey, now a billion-dollar company, would probably say the same about surveys. And, for Change.org, when 35 million people have used the site, it doesn’t really matter, does it?

Last week we reported that MessageMe, one of the latest messaging apps to hit the smartphone market, had picked up a $10 million Series A round of funding, and today, the company is officially confirming the news, along with some more details on how it’s been doing in the 2.5 months since it launched. It now has 5 million users across both iOS and Android — a five-fold increase on the 1 million that downloaded the app in its first 10 days.

MessageMe aims to carve out a name for itself by offering more ways than the rest of the pack — which includes WhatsApp, Line, KakaoTalk, Viber and Facebook (from which MessageMe gained some notoriety when it was restricted from using Facebook’s social graph API to find friends to use the app) — for users to communicate with each other on its messaging platform. In its case, this is done through notifications via text messages, but also pictures, doodles, video, voice, location and music sent from one user to another. Altogether, usage of these has risen three-fold, to 1,500 per second from 500 65 days ago.

From what we understand, although MessageMe is partly founded by people with extensive gaming experience — Arjun Sethi and Justin Rosenthal both worked together at social games company LOLapps (acquired by 6waves in 2011) — it will be messaging, not games, that will be the revenue driver for the company. Also: no plans to add in advertising, nor to charge for the app. Instead, it will build out premium messaging features such as stickers and money transfers.

The latter is shaping up to be a particularly interesting area, with not only Google swaggering into the ring, but as of yesterday Square as well, alongside a number of other companies like Venmo and established names like PayPal and Western Union already dabbling in features like this.

As we reported last week, and as confirmed by the company today, this latest round was led by John Lilly, the former CEO of Mozilla who is now a partner at Greylock; Lilly now joins the board of LittleInc Labs, makers of MessageMe. Other investors in the round include previous backers True Ventures (where MessageMe was first incubated), First Round Capital, Google Ventures, SVAngel, Resolut.vc, Andreessen Horowitz, and Social+Capital Partnership. The company’s angels also include Airbnb’s Brian Pokorny, Hiten Shah, Eric Wu and TinyCo CEO Suleman Ali.

The company is still in an early and small stage: currently there are only 10 people working for TinyInc Labs.

I caught up with co-founder Sethi to speak a little more about the direction of the company:

About those greyed-out tabs on your app. When are you launching stickers and money?
We’ll start rolling out new features in about a month, although we’re already doing some staged rollouts in beta. Stickers will feature our own content, as well as branded content, from companies that we’ll be working with. Money will be done in partnership with someone. A lot of the new features will come first on Android. Although it’s an app that we launched only last week, it’s easier to add and develop new features on Android.

What about Windows Phone and BlackBerry?
We are taking a close look at all the platforms out there, including web, Windwos and BlackBerry. We’ll see where most of the demand is and what users are asking for to decide what the next step will be for MessageMe.

Talk to me a bit about your thoughts on paid messaging services like WhatsApp or those that rely on adds for revenue.
There is no paid version planned. We’re definitely adamant on keeping it free, simple and fast. We’re also not doing any banner ads or third-party data stuff. We want to make sure that everything you do is private and secure. Even with premium services, you will pay or have option to opt out before you see or use it — that will come into play with how we roll out stickers and accessing content.

WhatsApp (200m+ users) has stolen a march on the messaging apps world with its seemingly global appeal, with Facebook Messenger also doing this to a lesser extent. Meanwhile others have a very regional focus. Where do you sit in that spectrum so far?
Outside of the U.S. most of our growth has been in Europe, and the UK specifically. Most of the usage so far is of a younger demographic.

What message apps do you use?
Besides MessageMe, I use WhatsApp because that’s what’s popular in South Africa [where he hails from] and also BBM. Because I worked in Asia, I also use KakaoTalk for friends in Korea and Line for friends in Japan. I think you’ll always have fragmentation, just as you still do in email [that begs the question of interoperability....]. Then again, I’m not your average user, but I use Line as heavily as MessageMe.

Browser maker Opera’s first WebKit browser has exited beta. The full launch for the browser previously code-named Ice adds a few additional minor updates to the meaty feature-set demoed at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow back in February.

The new updates in this full launch version of the Android browser are as follows:

• Toggle navigation bar from top to bottom
• Wrap text when you zoom
• View active tabs in full screen
• Search and navigate with a responsive address bar

The Android browser represents a huge shift for Opera as it moves its business from technical development to product-focused development, leaving its Presto framework behind and adopting the de facto standard WebKit engine, plus Chromium — a move Opera confirmed in February. Update: Since then Google has announced it’s forking WebKit as Blink. Opera confirmed to TechCrunch that while the current version of its Android browser is built on WebKit/Chromium 26 it will be moving to Blink once it arrives in the Chromium code (due in Chromium 28, it says).

At the time of its WebKit switch announcement, Opera argued then that ditching Presto and adopting WebKit frees up its engineers to focus on product development in a bid to stand out in the increasingly homogenous smartphone browser space.

The other issue for browser makers is that they are fighting with apps for users’ eyeballs. Research put out by mobile analytics firm Flurry in April found that U.S. Android and iOS owners spend an average of 80% of their time within apps, and just a fifth (20%) within mobile browsers. Moving the needle back in the direction of the browser is Opera’s goal here.

Key features of Opera’s Android browser include a content discovery feed that can be accessed by swiping right from the home screen — a feature clearly designed to encourage users to spend more time inside the browser, and less time using social networks and apps like Twitter which also incorporates a  personalised discovery feed to try to keep users within its apps, supplementing its even stickier social content.

Opera has also leveraged its data compression expertise for the Android browser with an “off-road” mode that can be toggled on to reduce data consumption in order to improve browser performance when network coverage is poor, or lower data costs when roaming.

Gestures and a light coloured user interface round out Opera’s offering here. According to Google Play the browser has had between 10 million and 50 million downloads in the past 30 days, and appears to be sustaining users’ interest with no sign of a big drop in interest yet. Its Google Play rating is currently 4.5 stars with close to 350,000 ratings.

Screengrabs below.

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.

Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week’s I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts.

The Android version has all of that, and one new feature — a new location section.

Where the Anroid app really shines is with the photo capabilities. The updated Google+ app now has the auto backup, highlight, enhance and “auto awesome” functionality that the desktop version has. It’s really handy to be able to enhance your photos directly within the app, rather than waiting until you get back to your computer or relying on Google to do its magical synthetic wrinkle removal, even though it’s cool.

To make it easier to “make plans and meet,” Google+ has broken “Locations” out into its own section. Now, when you share your location with certain Circles, your friends can easily find you by tapping on that section. Naturally, it drops everyone’s location onto a Map, which makes it seamless:

Location is something that hasn’t been a great piece of Google+ to date. The service currently picks up where you are and asks you for your explicit location, not really telling you who will get to see it. With the Location section and controls, it’s easier to manage and can turn into an experience similar to that of Foursquare.

The stream is getting all of the features from last week, too. The auto hashtags will let you drill into new content, hopefully sucking up all of your free time. It turns the Google+ experience into something like Wikipedia, where you can just keep tapping on relevant content and hopefully find some new people to follow along the way. While you’re not going to get the new three-column layout on your smartphone, the drilling down is actually fun.

We’ll await the iOS update, but expect the same items to find their way into that version. All of these enhancements are made to entice you to do a little bit more in Google+, as the company doesn’t really expect you to jump ship from one network to another. The features are more complementary to one another in this update, giving a better experience to new users, which is the most important demographic for Google to focus on right now. Those of us who have tried Google+ already have our minds made up as to whether it’s useful or not. It’s the stragglers who haven’t seen it from the beginning that need to be wowed.

How much of Tumblr is porn, and what is Yahoo going to do about it? On the latter, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer spoke to its plans for addressing content that is not “brand safe” earlier this morning on a call about its $1.1 billion acquisition of the site, saying that Yahoo will need to have “good tools for retargeting,” and will “monetize in a way that is tasteful.” But as for the former, it’s often been something of a black box – there simply wasn’t publicly available data.

However, now, we may have some answers. According to an analysis of Tumblr’s 200,000 most-visited domains, 22,775 of them are adult – or 11.4 percent. The analysis was performed by web measurement firm SimilarGroup, a company which raised $2.5 million earlier this year with the intention of competing with Alexa’s stronghold in web rankings.

The measurement firm analyzed the volume of visits to these adult subdomains, and found that 16.6 percent of the traffic that visits Tumblr takes place on adult blogs.

In addition, 22.37 percent of incoming referral traffic from external sites to Tumblr is from adult websites, making that the leading category for referrals. Meanwhile, 8.02 percent of outbound traffic from Tumblr goes to adult websites.

Below are some screenshots from SimilarWeb Pro, which shows Tumblr data from the past year (May 2012 to April 2013), detailing the breakdown of referrals and outgoing links:

Neither Tumblr nor Yahoo responded to requests for comment, as of publication time.

Tumblr’s secret to successful growth back in the early days, was in fact, its adult content. In some circles (read: mainstream users, typically men), it’s what the site is still known for today. Anecdotally, this is the kind of thing I hear all the time when I bring up Tumblr among members of this not-so-tech-savvy group: “Oh, you mean that porn site?” Uh-huh.

To be fair, any site that relies on user-generated content is going to have a porn problem – even Instagram and Pinterest get dirty at times. But Tumblr seems to be better known for it than the others.

Still, Mayer is right – it’s a matter of targeting Tumblr’s ads correctly when they do go live, to make sure that porn and brands are not living side-by-side on the same page.

All Things D broke down why Tumblr’s porn stash is not a problem for Yahoo, explaining that Tumblr’s ads appear in the sidebar of the Dashboard – the home page feed where people follow the blogs they’re following. Another type of advertisement called “spotlight” ads, promotes Tumblr blogs in a directory of suggested account. Neither of these types of ads are hitting the users who come to Tumblr for the adult fare.

That’s because, users in search of Tumblr’s adult content are usually doing just that – searching. (And with the “Safe Search” filter turned off, course.) These folks don’t see Tumblr’s ads now unless they actually subscribe to adult sites. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be immune to all the ads in the future.

Mayer also discussed today Yahoo’s future advertising plans, saying that it may work with bloggers to provide ads that run with their permission, and plans to integrate Yahoo’s search functionality on Tumblr’s site, too. In other words, Yahoo will need to be very careful when rolling out its additional ad formats to make sure brands and pornography don’t get too tangled up.

After all, it would only take one screenshot of some supposedly family-friendly household name next to a video of “hott girlz doing xyz” to cause major controversy and possibly harm to Tumblr’s own brand.

Currently, brands marketing on Tumblr aren’t worried about the adult content, says Hayes Davis, CEO of Union Metrics, whose company now tracks over a 100 million events on Tumblr per day, including posts, reblogs and likes, out of Tumblr’s over 107 million blogs and 50 billion total blogs.

“Tumblr is becoming a strategically important marketing channel for these brands, and they are making large investments in the platform. Just this year, we’ve signed up brands and agencies that represent myriad industries, including higher education, entertainment, fashion and beauty, sports, consumer products, travel, technology, news and retail,” says Davis.

Marketers love the viral engagement and staying power around branded content on Tumblr, he explains, saying that posts live for far longer on the site than on other networks. That data point was also hinted at in Tumblr’s own reveal today that out of the 50 billion blog posts on the site today, only 5 billion are original content – the rest, presumably, being the re-blogs (re-sharing another’s content on your own blog).

But as for the NSFW content, according to Union Metrics, “it frankly never comes up in any of our discussions.”

Time will tell if that still remains the case in the future.

Also of note? Mayer just blogged this:

After announcing its deal to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion, mostly in cash, Yahoo today started to lay out some of the details for how it intends to make use of the property while trying to stick to its promise “not to screw it up.” Expect more advertising by next year as well as more Tumblr content on Yahoo properties, but more of a cautious step as to how Yahoo will deal with some of Tumblr’s more NSFW content.

Here are some of the more interesting details revealed in the call:

What are Tumblr ads going to look like? Tumblr apparently made only $13 million in revenues last year but CEO David Karp apparently thinks the site is “ready” to make more now that it understands its users, according to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. But she also noted that they will be working from a challenged position, not just because of user resistance but because Karp himself has been “skeptical” about online ads.

In the conference call, Mayer made an early reference to how Tumblr would be able to make good use of Yahoo’s advertising technology, in ways that fit Tumblr’s so-far successful, image-based, quick-blogging, youth-oriented format — what she called “native advertising formats.”

As one example, she pointed to an ad format that Yahoo launched at the end of April, in-stream ads that it runs on its news pages. “On Tumblr we feel we can monetize in ways that are meaningful and add to user experience,” she said. She cited the Tumblr dashboard, or as she called it, the inbox for the blogs you follow. “Today Tumblr already does some ads in that feed. We would like to look at that and understand how to introduce more ads where the ads fit the expectations and follow that form and function.” She also noted that Yahoo may possibly work with bloggers to provide ads that will be run with their permission.

On top of this, expect to see more search ads: there are also plans to integrate Yahoo’s search functionality into the site as well. “We think there is a complelling search story,” said Mayer. “Their body is 50b posts and 5 billion posts of original content so search is already vast. We see an opportunity to integrate with search and provide that. That’s one area we are excited by the acquisition.”

Throughout this, a focus on trying to be Tumblr-centric about whatever Yahoo tries to do there. “It’s not a choice between creativity and monetization,” insisted Mayer.

So when are those ads coming? CFO Ken Goldman said that ad revenues from Tumblr will be “modest” this year — the acquisition is not expected to close until the second of of 2013 — but that they will “ramp up” in 2014 “and beyond.” “We do think those revenues will start monetizing materially [and] will contribute to revevenues in 2014 and beyond,” he said on the call, “not just standalone for Tumblr but also incrementally, helping Yahoo to growth.”

Porn? The NSFW, notorious part of Tumblr was never referred to by name, but an analyst did ask about what Yahoo, while courting mainstream brands to market to that attractive Tumblr audience, would do about content that is not “brand safe”. “The richness and breadth of the content… is what makes it more exciting,” enthused Mayer. “In terms of addressing concerns around brand safety we need to have good tools for retargeting.” [Another acquisition, methinks? In any case, no outright announcement that Yahoo intends to get rid of all those sites that Tumblr has more or less accepted into the fold.]

Mayer continued: “Tumblr is now at the point that they do know what it is and what makes sense to monetize in way that is tasteful.” She also mentioned due diligence but also something else, effectively implying that Yahoo will figure out a way of getting around the NSFW content and serving ads where they want them to go, because that’s what the advertisers want: “There are a lot of marketers eager to participate in Tumblr platform and the demographics,” she said.

What does the $1.1 billion “substantially in cash” mean? Goldman noted that it’s effectively an all-cash deal, save for some shares in Yahoo for David Karp. He also noted that Yahoo still has “ample cash” for more acquisitions and investments, to the tune of about $6.2 billion. These will not likely be along the lines of Tumblr in terms of size. “This is an exceptional company and team,” she said of Tumblr. At 300 million monthly unique users, Yahoo is paying about $3.67 per user for the acquisition.

Complementary properties. Mayer made a lot of the fact that Tumblr and Yahoo actually fit “really beautifully together,” like South America and Africa, in her words. In addition to Yahoo skewing older and Tumblr skewing younger, “We are strong on sports, finance and news; Tumblr’s strong on architeture, travel and fashion. We need great tools for content publishing and creation. They have them. Tumblr prides itself as a home for brands. Yahoo is all about brands.”

Tumblr comes to Yahoo. While a lot of the expectation so far has been about how Yahoo may mess up or spiff up or monetize up Tumblr, another theme that emerged during the call was the idea of Tumblr content going out to Yahoo properties — a way of attracting users to Yahoo that may not have gone there before.

“Our strategy is to let Tumblr be Tumblr,” said Mayer. “There are some who will always prefer Tumblr and will never come to Yahoo. [But] as we pull Tumblr content into our news feed and media experiences it will cause them to become that much more interesting and richer and will cause more to come to Yahoo. I imagine engagement will improve as we incorporate that content.”

Flickr. There is a separate news conference today that will likely concentrate on updates to Flickr, but today Mayer appeared to douse out speculation that it will be a move to begin integrating its online photo site with Tumblr in any way: “In terms of how the content of Tumblr evolves it depends on the creators,” Mayer said in answer to a question of what this acquisition will mean for Flickr. “It’s something that we will turn our attention to in the future. It will provide great storage, but we will see how those two cousins should relate to each other.

Image: Tumblr (where else)

Sprint has decided to get deeper into the social and mobile space, announcing today that it has acquired Handmark and its subsidiary OneLouder. The acquisition is meant to beef up its Pinsight Media+ advertising group, specifically.

Through Handmark, OneLouder has built social apps like Twitter clients Tweetcaster and Slices, and Friendcaster, a Facebook client. The acquisition price hasn’t been made known, but it’s a huge win for the Kansas City tech space, a place that I visited just a few weeks ago.

Sprint hopes that this acquisition will bring a more “entrepreneurial spirit” to its mobile program, hoping to lure developers to use its own advertising platform. Mike Cooley, VP of New Ventures at Sprint shared: “The business, culture and technology they bring will be a huge asset to our business, and ultimately the customers of Pinsight Media+.”

Through building all of its apps, OneLouder found a niche in advertising, having its own team that has worked on the ad platform and used its own apps to test it out. This deal also brings Sprint some strategic partners like CBS, which has a sports app powered by OneLouder. Tying the work that OneLouder has done on its ad platform with Sprint’s customer base should juice its mobile advertising efforts immediately.

The great thing about the acquisition is that Handmark and OneLouder will stay in its current home of Kansas City, serving as an example of what a budding tech hub it really is. Sprint has been trying to get involved with the KC tech crowd, as all of the activity surrounding Google Fiber has inspired companies to be formed and money and time to be spent on building communities and refocusing on making the area attractive to both coasts as an alternative base.

Ok, admittedly, the headline is a slight misrepresentation. However, in the best online dating tradition, not only did it hopefully catch your attention but it has more than a grain of truth, too.

YouLike, a startup backed by the founders of Turkish eBay clone GittiGidiyor (which in 2011 was acquired by the online auction giant for $217 million), describes itself as an interest-based social network and dating site that takes into account a user’s dislikes, as much as what they do like, when helping to find like-minded people to friend or date.

Unlike a lot of other dating sites that ask you to fill out a lengthy and data-heavy questionnaire or simply pen an open-ended profile, YouLike presents a series of fun questions ranging from what activities you love or hate, your food and entertainment tastes, or your relationship preferences. Each question requires a simple multiple choice response — “love”, “like”, “dislike”, “hate”, or “skip” — which forms the basis for how YouLike matches users.

This home-grown approach to generating a user’s interest graph is also intended to produce less so-called dirty data that simply importing a user’s Facebook ‘Likes’ (a technique used by other dating sites and interest-based social networks) can produce. Not only is the site intentionally starting out clean, but Zuckerberg’s social network famously lacks a ‘Dislike’ button, which for YouLike’s match-making purposes would only tell half the story. After all, they do say that opposites attract.

So, for example, YouLike might ask a user to rate an activity related to “cooking” or “shopping”, or to express their disposition to “waking up early” or “never being late”. Other questions drill down to a user’s dating preferences more explicitly, such as “a guy should always make the first move” or whether or not “kissing on the first date” is the done thing.

This data is then employed when visiting another user’s profile. Members can compare their rated likes and dislikes with those of a prospective match. The results are displayed as “you both like”, “you both dislike”, “you like but he/she dislikes”, and “you dislike but he/she likes”.

The idea is to surface not only a user’s interests but their “morals, habits and beliefs… and the things that make them angry or happy,” says the Istanbul-based startup. Arguably that’s a much better reflection of how people really click (or don’t) in real life, since not all differences of opinion or taste are weighted equal in importance and aren’t necessarily a deal-breaker when it comes to matters of the heart.

However, whether or not this amounts to enough of a USP for YouLike to cut through the plethora of online dating sites (or broader interest-based social networks) that already exist is a different question entirely. It’s also a question that YouLike isn’t shying away from. “Online dating is a highly saturated industry with many competitors fighting to find people looking for love online,” says YouLike co-founder Levent Gültan. “Many start-ups try to differentiate themselves by playing the innovation card, however very few to none has successfully replicated the track record of OkCupid or HowAboutWe.”

As canned statements go, that’s an unusually honest appraisal of the status quo and the difficulty faced by any new entrant in the online dating sector. But that isn’t stopping Gültan and YouLike’s other co-founders, which include Ersan Özer who previously founded a Turkish dating network, from giving it a shot. In the end, however, the site’s success will ultimately hinge on if users like, dislike or skip it entirely.

YouTube turns eight years old today, reminding each of us in some odd way how young or old we really are. Remember, the company launched back in 2005, the same year that Michael Jackson was found not guilty of child molestation, and Lance Armstrong was winning his seventh Tours De France, and Arrested Development was still on the air.

A lot has changed since then, but YouTube’s growth remains strong as ever. YouTube announced that its community now uploads more than 100 hours of video to the platform every minute. Minute. That’s the equivalent of four days worth of video every sixty seconds.

But of course, the supply makes sense when you consider the demand. YouTube claims that more than one billion people across the world come to YouTube for content each month, which comes out to nearly one in every two people who have access to the internet.

Here’s a little perspective on growth: Two years ago, YouTube revealed that users were uploading 48 hours of video each minute, and last year it had grown to 72 hours. Eight years in, YouTube is still a growing platform, while Facebook may be slipping amongst younger and fresher social niche applications.

Meanwhile, YouTube opens up new possibilities for startups who want to leverage its massive, active user base and content library. Telecast, in particular, comes to mind, as the betaworks company helps makes all those billions of videos discoverable and curated on mobile devices.

Here’s what YouTube had to say about it, in the official blog post:

And so, on our eighth birthday, we’d like to thank you for making YouTube the special place that it is. For showing us how video can create connections, transcend borders and make a difference. For clicking these links even if you aren’t sure what they’ll be, but you trust us. In short, thanks for making us better in big ways and small ones, too. We can’t wait to see what you come up with next.

We’ve all by now heard about how Yahoo is trying to get some “cool” with a supposed $1 billion purchase of hip blogging platform Tumblr, but it may be a moot point if Tumblr’s users fail to stick around post-sale.

Microsoft and Facebook may be trying to make a move ahead of Yahoo, Tumblr may be inching ever closer to running out of cash, and (despite that) may not be afraid to play a little hardball. But here’s something you’re not hearing much about: Tumblr’s users are almost universally unhappy with the news that the site might get sold to Yahoo. And they may let their fingers do the talking, and the walking.

Do a search on Tumblr for “yahoo” and you get a stream of distress, interspersed with the occasional bit of helpless resignation, and some calls for activism. The voices of reluctant acceptance (usually because of the aforementioned cash situation) or anything like positivity are few and far between. No outright enthusiasm.

(Daddy!) See for yourself.

It’s a problem that extends to some of Tumblr’s oldest users.

“If Tumblr goes to Yahoo, I will seriously consider moving my personal blog to Medium, if that’s possible,” Alexia, co-editor over here at TC, told me. She’s had a blog on Tumblr since June 2009, and, while not part of that coveted 18-24 age bracket, is a significant representative of that other cadre of important users: digital influencers. “I don’t know exactly why, but my Tumblr is a part of my identity. And for whatever reason, I don’t want to identify with Yahoo.”

Some have tried to start a petition, with a goal of 5 million signatures, although others are cynical about whether this will actually have any effect.

User attrition is not something to be dismissed, especially when it appears to be underpinned by wider usage trends on the site.

When I wrote a post in January about what might come next for Tumblr as a business (it focused on how it could make money; not how it might need to get sold because it doesn’t), I noted that in the prior month, December 2012, it had 167 million visitors and nearly 18 billion pageviews worldwide (Quantcast figures). The trend over the last six months are down, however: in the U.S. page views are down 21% to 5.3 billion, and uniques down 5% to 76 million. Worldwide the picture is better but still not growing: pageviews are down by 4%; uniques are down by 3%.

Not a sinking ship, but not a zippy little speedboat, either. Yahoo’s MySpace, indeed.

Image via Tumblr