"It's a huge concern for creative bloggers," said Amy Anderson, who blogs on the arts and crafts site Crafter Minds. "I don't think Pinterest does anything to help protect copyright besides removing content when people ask."

Pinterest is able to avoid violating U.S. copyright laws thanks to a provision in the Internet Service Providers Act, which gives immunity to sites that publish information provided by others, according to Aaron Messing, an associate with OlenderFeldman LLP in New Jersey. As long as Pinterest continues to comply with a provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act that requires it to remove content when asked by the copyright owner, users are free to continue pinning any images they find on the Internet.

Pinterest did not respond to a request for comment, but its Web site has instructions for requesting the removal of copyrighted content.

"If they were manually showcasing content and/or putting this content up themselves, they would definitely be in violation and break their protections," Get.com co-founder Steven Fruchter said in an email. "Since their users are the ones 'pinning' content, which is then downloaded and served via Pinterest's servers, they are considered a user-generated site, which only needs to take down content after they receive a take down notice by the copyright holder."

Among many Pinterest users, as well as several artists who have had work pinned on the site, a code for giving proper credit is developing. Artist Laura C. George said Pinterest has no way of knowing if links tied to images link back to the original artists' Web site, but so far Pinterest users have been better about giving credit than Tumblr.

"That being said, it's still awful that I might discover a new painter on Pinterest and not be able to find them. To not know their name or have their website," she said. "It's truly an awful situation...it seems impossible to enforce this type of rule on such a huge site with thousands of members and billions of pins. They would have to check the link to every 'original' pin and research to make sure it was the original. That's insane."

Now, along comes Spool, which promises to do much of the same link-saving as Read It Later and Instapaper, with the added perk of being able to do the same with video. We've been playing around with Spool, which remains in invite-only mode, for the past several days and found that it works (mostly) as advertised.

We also have invites available for those of you who want to try Spool out but don't want to wait around for an invite of your own.

CEO and co-founder Avichal Garg said he and co-founder Curtis Spencer came up with the idea when they noticed there was no guarantee they'd be able to pull up content on their phone, or be able to access the same bits of content across multiple devices.

Garg and Spencer are calling the technology behind the service SpoolBot, which Garg described as an artificial intelligence and computer vision engine. By residing on a server, SpoolBot can essentially translate content on a Web page into a format your device can understand. Garg said it was also good at keeping pace with changes on the sites where content is culled.

"What we wanted for ourselves was a simple way to have our favorite content always available, without worrying about which device I'm on (my Android phone vs. my iPad), where I am (inside, outside, home, work), or what kind of media it is (text, pdf, video)," Garg said in an email. "With one click you can save content from any of your devices, and that content shows up on all of your other devices too, is available offline, and is converted into a format that will work for you. So you don't need to worry about Flash and you don't need to worry about whether your phone has a PDF reader."

The one exception to that assertion that I found after a weekend of accessing a wide range of content in New York City's mostly WiFi-free subway system on my iPhone, iPad and laptop were YouTube videos, which can only be accessed with an Internet connection because of licensing agreements. As an aside, it also seemed as if YouTube videos accessed through Spool had more advertisements than when the same video was accessed straight through YouTubes site, and it was trickier to skip over ads using Spool than it is on YouTube.

I also didn't like that I couldn't tag videos and content or organize it into lists: my only choices were Unread, Read, Favorites and Archived. Garg assured me that adding some sort of organization and classification system was on the firm's to-do list and should be available within the next few weeks.

Saving material on Spool was, for the most part, easy. A Google Chrome extension allowed me to save videos and other content with one click. Setting up the widget on other devices was slightly more time-consuming.

Spool also connects to DropBox, allowing you to save content in a folder on DropBox and then have it automatically saved on your Spool. Users can also push content to Facebook from the Android app, the webapp, and the Chrome browser extension, with plans to add the feature to the Firefox extension and iOS app.

Users cannot, however, push content to Twitter. "We used to let users Tweet out from within the app. We've removed this feature because very few users used it," Garg said. "We're going to soon launch a feature to let users tweet links at us and we'll put those URLs into Spool."

Spool will remain in it's beta, invite-only phase at least until the Spring. ReadWriteWeb readers, however, can try Spool out without waiting for an invite.

Pinterest's users are 80% women, according to recent data from Google Ad Planner, as presented by Ignite Social Media. The site is biggest among the 25-34 age range, followed by 35-to-44-year-olds. These site's popularity among people in their late 20s and early 30s is illustrated (quite literally) by the proliferation of images related to wedding planning and home decor.

There's nothing inherently female-centric about Pinterest. At its core, it's an image-sharing service that lets people curate their favorite visual stuff from across the Web. It just happened to have caught on particularly strong with the young female demographic group. The site is just beginning to take off, though, and its community could evolve in any direction moving forward.

Gizmodo described the service as a sort of "Tumblr for ladies" and cited internal staff discussions in which the men expressed confusion and uncertainty and the women expressed enthusiastic approval. That's just anecdotal evidence of course, but it's supported by numbers from the likes of Google and ComScore.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, the guys are a little more receptive to the Pinterest and its potential use cases. In "A Guy's Guide to Pinterest", Dave Copeland outlined why the site isn't exclusive to women and detailed his own experience getting started with it. Fellow colleague Jon Mitchell thinks Pinterest actually tackles sharing better than Google+ does, in part because it lets users follow things more granularly and selectively than Google's "circles" model.

"It helps me bookmark visual things, which I only had text-based ways of doing before, and that has proven to be a surprisingly large amount of the stuff I take in on a daily basis," Mitchell told me in an IM conversation.

Personally, I've been using Pinterest somewhat passively for a few weeks, checking in semi-regularly and periodically pinning stuff. I've started focusing on curating imagery and content related to "the future of music" since that's a topic I track quite closely at ReadWriteWeb. I've also started a board dedicated to Instagram photos taken in my neighborhood in Philadelphia, figuring it's worth experimenting with the value of local-centric content on a fledgling social service like this.

I'm still waiting for that "Ah ha!" moment in which I realize why I'd want to use Pinterest on a daily basis, but so far I'm digging it and I certainly understand the value people see in it, regardless of gender or age.

Pinspire is, after all, the latest venture of Germany's Samwer brothers, who have been developing copycats of popular sites and selling them off since 1999, when they sold Alando to eBay for $50 million. More recently, they started and sold GroupOn clone CityDeal to GroupOn and Zynga clone Plinga to Zynga.

We've reached out to Alexander, Marc and Oliver for comment, but they are publicity shy (last fall Oliver agreed to an interview with TechCrunch, then walked out). We're also trying to see if Pinterest has a comment on the startup or any interest in buying it. We'll update if we hear back from them.

One of the keys to the success of Rocket Internet, the Berlin-based incubator the brothers founded, has been identifying Web sites that have taken off in the U.S. but have yet to globalize and find a strong, international following. The brothers launched the clone as a beta in November, and if history is an indicator, will hold it just long enough to develop a loyal, overseas following.

Already valued at more than $200 million, Pinterest remains in invite only mode, which is one of the ways Pinspire is trying to one-up its look-alike competition. And Pinspire, for its part, has a relatively loyal following in its own right, with more than 11,500 fans of its Facebook page.

I was, of course, quickly corrected. According to Ad Age, Real Simple magazine is already getting more traffic from Pinterest than from Facebook, and small and big businesses alike are exploring ways to use the site to connect with consumers. It makes sense: Pinterest has a clearly defined demographic, with 59 percent of the site's visitors in a recent 12-week period being women between the ages of 25 and 44.

"I believe that it varies from other social sites because of the amount of visibility you receive," said Lauren Van Grouw of Confections by Shara's Paperie, which has been using Pinterest to promote products since November. "Most platforms require a friendship or acceptance to be in place before your content can be viewed. However, with Pinterest, you are able to reach a larger audience than ever imaginable."

The site is still in invite-only mode, and there are rules against blatant corporate promotion, but several companies are finding ways to connect with customers and would-be customers on Pinterest in ways they can't on other social networks.

Sharing Ideas On How To Use A Company's Products: Whole Foods is getting around the blatant self-promotion ban by creating food-porn Pinboards that clearly encourage people to use their products. Pinboards with titles like "Super HOT Kitchens" and "Who Wants Dinner?" are aimed at getting people into the kitchen (via an implied trip to their local Whole Foods).

Contests: Several companies are holding Pinterest contests. Most notably, Land's End wrapped up a giveaway last month where 10 Pintrest users received $250 gift cards for creating pinboards of their favorite Land's End products. Pinterest "is a simple way for new customers to be inspired by Lands' End Canvas and click through to find those products," Land's End spokesperson Michelle Casper told Jennifer James of Mom Blog Magazine.

Make Products Accessible: A lot of users have been using Pinterest to share photos of dreamed-for decadence: the perfect last meal, an extravagant, over-the-top wedding or the dream vacation. Picking up on that trend, vacation rental service HomeAway has started posting photos of its properties in an attempt to show viewers dream vacations may be within reach, according to HomeAway spokesperson Jordan Hoefar.

"The content our social media team puts on Pinterest differs from other networks because there's a greater emphasis on the uniqueness of images in order to capture the user's eye and help them realize their vacation fantasy can both be a reality and also affordable, which leads to them going to our website, browsing more than 625,000 vacation homes and sharing possible homes for future stays," he said in an email.

Of the 16 people Pinterest said I knew who were already using the site, 14 were women. Over the course of the first day, five more women I know added me and I suddenly felt like I had ventured behind some secret curtain. That is not surprising: in December, Mashable reported that 59 percent of the site's visitors were women between the ages of 25 and 44, and that 58 percent of its visitors in the previous 12 weeks had been female.

Pinterest is a visual pin board where you can collect images you find on the Web and arrange them in categories with links back to the original site. It's been described as being like a binder or folder that you use to store everything you clip from magazines and newspapers, but you have the added advantage of seeing what all of the people you are connected to have been clipping and saving.

"Our goal is to connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting. We think that a favorite book, toy, or recipe can reveal a common link between two people," the Palo Alto-based company says in its Mission Statement. "With millions of new pins added every week, Pinterest is connecting people all over the world based on shared tastes and interests."

Once I had added a few people and pinned a few images, the second thing I noticed is that my main feed resembled the walls of the college apartment I shared with three other guys in the mid-nineties. We barely had enough money for books and beer, so our decor was mainly posters thrown out by video rental stores (remember those?) and stuff torn out of magazines.

We added the images as we found them, each making our own contributions over time. They were occasionally enhanced with a hand-written comment (often crude) on notebook paper and taped to the image. After four semesters of living there every inch of available wall space (as well as the back of the toilet seat) was covered with found items.

I didn't really "get" what we were doing with the walls of 17 Southpoint Drive, but I liked it. And after just a few days of playing with it, I'm not sure I "get" Pinterest just yet, but I like it. If creativity is defined as taking two or more seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts and finding a way to link them together, Pinterest may be a breeding ground for visual creativity.

Getting Going

Pinterest is still an invite-only site, although existing users can invite friends and I had my membership within a day after requesting one through the main site. I logged in with Facebook the first time and then connected my Twitter profile to my Pinterest site. Pinterest let me add people I already knew and recommended some others who seemed to have interests similar to mine.

After my profile was set up, the last step was adding the "Pin It" button to the bookmark bar of my browser. The Pin It button lets me quickly post photos I find on the Web sites I visit. (I will say the feature does have some trouble recognizing photos on certain sites, but the problem was occasional and nothing that too debilitating.)

First Impressions

One of the more pleasing aspects of Pinterest is that it's new enough to be free of marketing and advertising (although that's likely to change). The site design lends a "quiet" feel, and puts more of an emphasis on the photos instead of the captions and comments users are required to write to accompany them. That's a stark difference from most other social networks I use, where the emphasis is on the pithy comment accompanying a video or photo, and users often have to click on the image to make it bigger.

I can arrange the images I find into categories, which is a feature that has proven popular with brides planning weddings and wanting to remember the visual details of the dress, the centerpiece or the wedding photo poses they want. Others have used it to curate recipes they want to try cooking or craft ideas they want to make, and articles touting new ways to use Pinterest are now an almost daily occurrence.

Multiple Ideas = Multiple Uses

In addition to following curated lists, it didn't take long for me to figure out ways I could personally use Pinterest. So far I've mainly had fun just browsing images and seeing how other people use Pinterest, but it does seem to hold some advantages over the other sites I've been using to store links and found items from the Internet.

Like a lot of tech writers, I am fashion-challenged when it comes to my wardrobe. Pinterest is a way to keep track of looks I like and find them the next time I go clothes shopping online. I can set up a gallery of my favorite blog posts, or links to the photos of articles I read and liked. I can make a gift registry so people will get me the perfect gift, and I can keep a separate lists of gifts I'd like to give (like I said, I wonder how long Pinterest will remain free of marketers). I like to cook, but often when I clip a recipe sans photo, the list of ingredients isn't enough to jog my memory on why I wanted to try the dish in the first place.

Arik Hanson has interviews with 15 top Pinterest users on his Communications Conversations blog, and those seasoned users have far more ideas on how to use Pinterest than this rookie. It's interesting to note that almost all of the respondents say something about using it to collect ideas and thoughts that interest them.

Links can point to all kinds of things. Most of the time, we'll probably never need to visit a link again. But there are plenty of links we want to keep, even if it's just to remember them. How do we keep track of saved links? Where do we put them? I talked to Jori Lallo, developer of Grove.io and a link-saving side project called Kippt, to learn about the future of the bookmark.

ReadWriteWeb: How did you decide on the features of Kippt, and how do you distinguish it from other bookmarking services?

Jori Lallo: "We didn't actually plan to build a bookmarking service. We made our first prototype service about one and a half years ago over one or two days. It was a quick hack project for an app contest.

"We both bought iPads right when they came out, both me and [Kippt designer] Karri [Saarinen]. We were constantly emailing links to ourselves. So, we just wanted to build a really simple list of links where we could save stuff from the Web and from the iPad's browser.

"It got pretty okay traction for a hack project. After that, we were thinking about how to evolve the service beyond that and how we use these kinds of services."

Beyond the Chore of Tagging

"We both had been opposed to the traditional tagging. I find it to be pretty hard for a user in the sense that you have to create your own topology or map of the tags you use. Tagging is really good for hardcore users, but if you don't [take] the time for tags... I think many Delicious users have been in the situation where you have more tags than you have links. So, we wanted to do things simpler.

"I've found that just plain folders actually work pretty well. That's why we chose lists for the service. When we were building the new iteration of the service, we wanted to approach the problem from the workflow perspective.

"We wanted to build a medium between Instapaper and more heavy bookmarking services, and that's why Kippt is pretty simple at the moment. We're planning to add social sharing features later on, when we have more time. But right now, we're just trying to get the base product right."

What's Wrong With Bookmarking

RWW: When you say "medium," do you mean something between a temporary, time-shifting app like Instapaper and a big link taxonomy like the bookmarking services?

JL: "With 'bookmarking,' it's kind of a disliked term. People have a habit of saving stuff that they don't necessarily go back to anymore. I used to use Delicious quite a lot, but I rarely went back for my links. I guess that's partly because of their tagging system. Also, their search wasn't too good, at least some years ago. I don't know what the situation is nowadays.

"But now, with Kippt, I have lists for projects, like Web development, design inspiration and so on, and I actually go to those lists way more often. I find it a little bit more accessible."

RWW: Is Kippt's 'inbox' meant to be a more temporary workspace, then?

"Inbox, for me, is where I save stuff I need to do later, or I need to process. I don't want to think about the categorization now.

"My girlfriend actually uses Kippt in this way. At the start, she just saved everything in her inbox and just started thinking about the categorization after that, once she had more stuff there."

Link Saving Vs. "Read Later"

RWW: What about the 'Read Later' section?

"We don't want to build a full-featured reading experience within the app, but we still added the 'Read Later' list as a default, because it's a nice place to just put in articles that you can read and from there drag and drop to more permanent lists later on. I find that works pretty well for my personal use cases."

RWW: It seems like bookmarking services still have a niche appeal, while dedicated read-later services are catching on. Why do you think that is?

JL: "I think there has been a trend moving away from bookmarking stuff, probably because Google is pretty good nowadays for finding the things you need. When I've been talking about the app with people, it seems that some people are really into bookmarking, and some people just don't get it at all anymore after the read-later services.

"It's not for everyone, but some people, at least, love bookmarking services a lot."

RWW: What is it about those people?

JL: "I think it's about attention span. Some people, who are really fast, especially entrepreneurs, seem to like the Instapaper kind of approach. This is just my personal stuff I have noticed. I still feel there's a need for more permanent storage.

"Links are more than they used to be in the early 2000s. You have more information about them. And now we have this whole new generation of [richer Web] services."

RWW: It's not just static HTML documents anymore.

JL: Yeah.

Keeping Links Forever

RWW: Do you think that keeping Web links forever is something everyone should do? Does the Web work like a bookshelf in your house, where keeping things around, even just for nostalgic purposes, is something people are going to do?

JL: "I think they're already doing it quite a lot. When we first launched Kippt, we didn't have any kind of importing mechanism, and that was by far the most requested feature."

JL: "Yeah. I think that people have the tendency of wanting to keep their stuff, even though they wouldn't use it, but they still like to keep it. That's the same thing we've seen with [Lallo's other project, hosted IRC chat service] Grove.io. People are saving their IRC logs for years and years. I guess that's the nature of human beings.

"We welcome people to use our service to save links forever, especially if other services don't have good search, and we're improving the search in Kippt. That's one of my top priorities at the moment.

And we're probably going to add some kind of tagging layer on top of the lists because people are asking for it. I think tagging might work pretty well in hashtag form, some kind of way that's more modern. Especially on top of the lists and search, it wouldn't be the main way of categorizing stuff."

RWW: So lists are where the links live, but tags are just a way to quickly find them?

JL: "Yep."

The Browser Vs. "Apps"

RWW: Do you think that the browser is a better place to work with links than separate, native apps like Instapaper or Evernote?

JL: "I actually agree on that, just by experience. We wanted to push Kippt out really quickly. That's why it's so simple. After the launch, we got tons of feedback and feature requests. They mapped out with our plans really well. But one thing I noticed was that no one was asking for the mobile [app] stuff. This kind of service is more important when it's in your browser.

"[Native versus Web] depends on the situation. It's the content that matters. I'm making [Kippt's mobile view] in Javascript, but it's going to be a Web page mostly, not try to mimic native apps. Personally, I hate the mobile Web apps that try to look and feel like iOS apps. In almost every case, they fail pretty miserably."

Play around with Kippt for a few minutes, and you'll see. Bookmarking as a chore is only for hardcore Web librarians, but anyone who uses the Web wants to keep links around for one reason or another. Instapaper and the like are great dedicated reading services, but they're designed around that use, not for storing and retrieving your favorite links.

Kippt just sits as a layer in your Web browser. It's like a bookshelf for keeping and organizing the Web sites and apps you come across. Its two modes are the most useful part; you can save to the inbox for "I'll get to that later," or if you already know what shelf a link belongs on, you can save it straight there. Not everything is an "article" on the Web anymore. Websites are increasingly "stuff." Don't we all need a place to keep our stuff?

Check out Kippt at Kippt.com. You can follow @KipptApp and @JoriLallo on Twitter.

In a blog post, Quora said that it decided to introduce boards when it realized that people were more interested in finding the most interesting and informative answers written by other users. They weren't actually using the site for what it was intended, which was asking questions and writing answers. Boards function as another way to organize this type of content, rather than clustering on question-and-answer boards. To create a Quora board, go to "create board" (you can make as many as you want), then post the board. You can also follow other boards.

Similarly, on the new Delicious you create stacks organized around specific interests, and then you can follow other stacks.

The goal of Delicious' redesign was to appeal to more mainstream users. Quora writes that its new goal "reflects the broader system we are evolving into: to connect you with everything you want to know about."

As both Quora and Delicious organize around interests rather than questions-and-answers or keywords, both of these sites transform into visually focused topic-specific channels, which look a lot like StumbleUpon's redesign. It's true that the social Web has become too cluttered. But is this the best way to organize it?

Are Quora and Delicious doing it wrong? Or is this just how the social Web is evolving? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Pinterest is a fast-growing, visually focused social bookmarking site that grabs mainstream social networking users. CEO Ben Silbermann, a West Des Moines native, said that the first people to understand and use the site were women in Des Moines, Minneapolis, Houston and, later, Chicago.

In fact, AdAge spoke with Shannon King, GM of digital for Real Simple magazine, who said that Pinterest has referred "more traffic to the site than even Facebook."

Where does that leave Delicious? Trying to figure out who its new core audience is post re-design, especially since tech geeks are pretty much over it.

In an attempt to make stacks more visually appealing, Delicious has staggered them to look just like Pinterest's.

YouTube Co-Founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen bought Delicious from Yahoo earlier this year with plans to make it more appealing to mainstream users.

Will the latest Delicious overhaul officially push it, and social bookmarking, mainstream?

"It's all about discovery, discovery of ideas, clips, people and other related materials. Over time we hope to conceptually connect peoples' findings to enable discovery," says BetaWorks Founder and Findings.com Co-Founder, John Borthwick. "We aren't collecting what people are reading right now on their devices (e.g. Kindle). We are collecting what they annotate."

Findings users can make their post streams public or private, and everything syncs with Kindles and the Kindle app so that users can easily gather their notes and drop them into the stream. It's easy to tweet or Facebook posts from Findings, too - or just post them to a Tumblr blog. Nothing will ever be misquoted because everything comes directly from the source - Findings actually won't allow you to cut and paste text in, but you can write notes in the designated notes box. Findings is powerful and intimate, combining the social bookmarking feel of Delicious and the books-focused social network GoodReads.com. The experience of clipping a note to Findings is sleek and easy to do with the bookmarklet - just highlight text and click the button, and it will quickly import into Findings.

Findings is the brainchild of writer Steven Johnson, BetaWorks Founder and CEO John Borthwick and Findings Co-Founder and Developer Corey Menscher.

It all began in 2004, when Johnson wrote a blog post about Devonthink that delved into the idea that eventually became Findings:

"The other thing that would be fascinating would be to open up these personal libraries to the external world. That would be a lovely combination of old-fashioned book-based wisdom, advanced semantic search technology, and the personality-driven filters that we've come to enjoy in the blogosphere. I can imagine someone sitting down to write an article about complexity theory and the web, and saying, 'I bet Johnson's got some good material on this in his 'library.'"

Shortly after that, Johnson wrote an article for the New York Times Books section, entitled "Tool for Thought," which alluded to the idea of better "tools for thinking."

These ideas converged in the creation of Findings.

How the Findings Metadata Works

The metadata from the page is dropped into the data model, placing long-form reading clips into a social context and "giving them that marginalia that we're used to in the real world," says Borthwick. Every clip that someone makes on Findings has its own canonical link.

"We did a first version at BetaWorks three-and-a-half to four years ago, but never pushed out a public version of it," he says. "Four years ago there weren't Kindles or iPads, and ereading was something people were talking about but not doing. So we waited."

In 2011, John Borthwick, Steven Johnson and Corey Menscher finally thought the world was ready for Findings. "People are clipping, finding stuff, the concept of a central repository where you can pull in lots of things you think are interesting clip-wise, and then build a social context around it."

Findings is now live.

The StumbleUpon Widget can be used by publishers to surface content on the site with the best shelf life. The widget will come in three sizes and requires a line of script to be embedded on to a webpage. The widget will surface stories and videos suited to the users' interest based on what has been rated highly by the StumbleUpon community of 15 million users.

When a user is on a page with a StumbleUpon widget installed they will see links that are tailored to their interests. The company touts the widget as a way to fill unsold ad space on and spark interest in exploring the site, thus increasing page views and time spent consuming content.

StumbleUpon claims to be the largest non-Facebook referrer of social media traffic. The company is not specific, but that would likely include Twitter, Reddit, Digg, XYDO and other similar tools for publishers. As of April 2010, StumbleUpon funneled twice as much traffic to publishers as Twitter. The user base is predominately between 18 and 34 years old and split 54% male to 46% female.

StumbleUpon has a couple of other publisher products as well, including badges (which look like any normal share button) and a URL shortener (su.pr). The company claims that publishers get 20-25% more traffic from StumbleUpon when they institute badges.

There are a few drawbacks for publishers. A lot of publishers choose to self-aggregate content within posts or certain locations within their sites. The StumbleUpon widget would take that control from them and automate through the company's index. Another drawback is widget/badge/button fatigue. Share buttons and third-party widgets have to be maintained by publishers and the more of them there are, the more of a time-consuming process it becomes. While the StumbleUpon widget takes up space where there would otherwise be nothing (or unsold ad inventory), it is another piece of real estate on the page.

Increasingly, it is hard to justify clutter for the sake of utilizing empty space. Facebook and Twitter both have widgets as well, and those ecosystems have millions more users than StumbleUpon does. Sometimes, simpler is just better.

If you are a publisher, does the StumbleUpon widget seem like a good idea? Do content consumers care about clutter on a page? Let us know in the comments.

The company also announced that it has a new CEO as Mark Johnson replaced founder Ali Davar as chief executive. Davar will step into the role of president "where he'll lead the publisher relations team to explore innovations in publisher monetization," according to a post on Zite's blog.

In a post on his personal blog, new CEO Johnson says that his goals are to improve the quality of Zite's recommendations, improve the sleek user interface and work with publishers on monetization strategies.

"I liken where Zite is to the early days of search: everyone loved search engines because they allowed us to sift through the rapidly growing web, even though most searches ended up in failure," Johnson wrote. "Similarly, Zite's personalization isn't perfect, but we've made a breakthrough advance."

Johnson has been an advisor to Zite (before it pivoted from "discovery engine" Worio) for two years before becoming the CEO today. He has worked with Microsoft on Bing and other search related startups such as Kosmix, SideStep and Powerset. From a technology perspective, Johnson is a good fit to be the CEO of Zite because the app uses its Worio search background as the basis for the iPad Magazine. Zite crawls content sources much the same way that a search engine would and returns results to the application interface. Zite also uses social media feeds to bring in content and has a recommendation engine similar to "music genome project" created by streaming music service Pandora.

Instapaper was launched in January 2008 by the co-founder of Tumblr, Marco Arment. In fact Arment has only just gone full-time with Instapaper, announcing last month that he's moving on from Tumblr after 4 years as its lead developer. He has big plans for Instapaper as a business, as you'll discover in this interview.

Richard MacManus: So you've just left Tumblr and you're working full time on Instapaper now. Are you turning it into a business?

Marco Arment: Yes, that's correct. It's more continuing it as a business, because it's kind of always been one. Just now I have more time to spend on it.

RM: How did you come up with the idea for Instapaper and what was the inspiration for it?

MA: I'd just gotten an iPhone in the fall of '07. I would find things during the workday that I wanted to read, but I was at work - so I really couldn't. I would skim articles [or] I would open a tab and never go back to it, until my browser crashed and then I forgot about it. Or some other non-solution to this problem. [chuckle] And then similarly, I had to commute on the train everyday for about an hour or two. When I was on the train, I had my iPhone and I could browse the internet - but only before it went underground. There were a load of things I had to read.

So I made Instapaper just for myself, really, and didn't even tell anybody about it for about three months after I made it. I just used it myself, just because I wanted something to use to temporarily store those links - so that I could save them at work and read them on the train.

That's how it started and it was very, very basic. In the beginning, there wasn't even a text view. And the reason I got the text view was because mobile Safari [on iPhone] would kick pages out of memory if you load it too much. And so what I was trying to do was load a bunch of pages at once, before the train went underground and before I lost my connectivity for about 25 minutes or so. The text view allowed me to store more than in the mobile browser, because they were much lighter.

Also when I would scroll on the iPhone, I hated if I accidentally lost the alignment in the column I was reading. It would accidentally scroll drag me a little bit and I couldn't scroll it up again. [chuckle] So I made it single-column reading.

I told a couple of friends about it, about three months in, and they loved it. So on January 26th, 2008, I made my initial blog post about it and it just exploded! It was popular very quickly, far past my expectations. I wasn't sure if anybody else would find it useful. [laughter] I figured that I just thought of myself, that it's useful to me but... I was very pleasantly surprised by its reception.

RM: What was the time period between the time that you came up with the idea and when you launched Instapaper in January 2008?

MA: It was about three months.

RM: So it was a very quick development process...

MA: Yeah. I developed the basics of the service in about two nights. It was a very basic service. And I already had a lot of the framework. I already had a lot of that written for other things, including Tumblr. It was in a language I already knew and a framework I already knew. And so I made the entire first draft of the service, I guess you can call it, in about two nights.

How the iPad Version Was Developed

RM: And when did you come up with the iPad version of Instapaper and the idea of integrating that with iPad apps?

MA: I was already doing all these weird mobile Safari apps, so I jumped right on the opportunity to make a real app as soon as it came. I was in the iPhone store on day one, of course. Sorry, actually on day two or three. [chuckle] I tried to be there on day one but missed it. Anyway, so I was in the iPad store right in summer '08 when it launched.

So when the iPad was announced and the SDK for it, I knew I needed an iPad app in addition to the iPhone app. I also decided pretty early on that I would make a universal app which would work on both - preferably optimized interfaces for each one - and that was only half done [at the time the iPad was announced]. The question was really whether I wanted to release that in advance of the launch of the iPad, so it would be there on day one. But I would never have a chance to actually try it on an iPad before submitting it, which is certainly a risk. Or I could wait until after I used an iPad physically and optimize it, then submit it afterward.

I chose to go with the option of having it there on day one [i.e. releasing it before the iPad launched] and taking that risk. And it worked out alright. The first version was functional. It was not pretty, but it worked. And yeah, there were some buttons which were badly placed, the colors were way too bright, the screen was much brighter than I thought it would be. So I made a few tweaks and released an update, a couple of weeks later.

RM: I'm finding the Instapaper app very useful on iPad, for example when I'm using Flipboard and I can save articles I find there to read later on. I like the integration with other apps in the App Store as well.

MA: Thanks. That's been a huge benefit for Instapaper. The first app I ever made was for Tweetie for iPhone. Now, almost every mobile Twitter client and almost every mobile feed reader has a 'Send to Instapaper' feature.

RM: What are the main usage patterns that you've noticed so far with Instapaper - and has anything surprised you about how people are using it? Whether on the iPhone, or iPad or even on the web.

MA: Yeah, there have been few surprises. One of the biggest was when I first launched the iPhone app, I thought that it would just be people who are already familiar with the web app - that they'd want the iPhone app to go along with it. Okay, that's pretty much the way I use it. I use the web app first and the iPhone app as an accessory to it. And what surprised me was from the very beginning - and it still holds true today - how many people do both the browsing and the reading on the iPhone. Instapaper is really optimized for browsing on the computer and then reading on the iPhone. But a lot of people just do everything on the iPhone.

Another big surprise was that the iPad has taken off like crazy. At least half of my paid app sales are from the iPad, which given the size of its relative installed base (iPad versus the iPhone), that's a pretty impressive number.

The iPad has proven to be a better device for reading content than even I expected. I had high hopes for it, but I thought it would be about the same for reading as the iPhone. And it ended up that a lot more people find the bigger screen more comfortable. So a lot more people are reading web content on the iPad than on the iPhone.

RM: Yes, that's certainly been my experience. So is the success of the iPad what prompted you to go full time on the business?

MA: Oh sure, that was a huge part. Especially because the iPad sales [of Instapaper] have more than doubled my overall sales since the iPad came out. So it finally gave me enough momentum to take it full time.

RM: Right. And are you hiring other people in the business?

MA: Not at the moment. I do have a contractor who edits the front page editor's picks, also called "Give me something to read." It's the popular, good, long form stories saved by users. So I have a contractor who does that. But otherwise it's just me.

In the future I might hire employees to help out with certain things, but I have no immediate plans to do that.

The Future of Instapaper

RM: Let's discuss the future of the product. Do you plan to expand to other delivery platforms, or are you going to stay focused on iPad and iPhone?

MA: For now, I'm certainly focusing on the iOS platform and also on the Kindle. I really do like the Kindle a lot. It's a much smaller market, but it's a very devoted and very hardcore market - people who really love reading. So right now it's iOS and Kindle. I don't have any immediate plans to support Android or Blackberry, or other mobile platforms directly. But what I'm going to do is make a full feature API, so that other people can write clients for those if they want to.

Right now there are a few Android clients that are unofficial, but because there's no good official API they have just kind of scraped the site to try and make it work. And it's worked with mixed success. So hopefully a real API will encourage better clients to be made.

RM: Will Instapaper add more social sharing and curation features in the near future? [hat-tip Justin Houk for suggesting this question via Twitter]

MA: That's a good question. One thing I do want to do is have better export support for services that will help you with long-time archival. Things like Evernote, Delicious and Pinboard. So I definitely want to add those. I wouldn't really classify any of those, except maybe Delicious, as social though. And Delicious, while it is technically social, I don't think it's really used like that as much anymore - if it ever was. So I want to add features that help people with their own organization.

I also want to add features that help people with information overload management. I don't want Instapaper to just be another bucket for the thousands of items that you have deal with and that you feel obligated and burdened by. That's the last thing I want. So what I really want to do is give people tools to help them manage information overload [so] that it's not a burden, that relieves them of stress rather than adding to it.

Regarding social features, I have a few draft ideas in my head of some kind of sharing features. For the most part they're very, very alpha stage. But even in my head there's something I roughly want to do. It's the kind of feature that before I was doing this full time, which was only two weeks ago, I would never have had the time to do non-essential features like that. Now that I have time to do that sort of thing, I will probably explore those options in the future.

Traffic from visitors in the U.K. (arguably a smaller market for Digg) declined by 34%.

While Digg has now stabilized the site and added numerous features that its users were asking for, it's hard not to notice that the level of activity on the site has also declined. Currently, it only takes about 200 diggs for a story to appear in the daily top 10 list, and quite a few stories on the front page regularly get fewer than 30 comments.

Reddit Traffic: Only Up 2.6% (Updated)

While there has been a lot of talk about how the service's competitor Reddit would profit from Digg's decline, Hitwise only noticed a relatively small increase in traffic to the site. While there are surely numerous Digg refugees who found shelter on Reddit, overall traffic to the site only went up 2.6% since the launch of the new Digg. (Update 2: I just got an update from Hitwise. Reddit saw 2.6% growth in the U.K. according to Hitwise. For the U.S., Hitwise saw a 15% increase in visits to the site.)

Update 1: Reddit's lead developer Christopher Slowe just contacted us with updated traffic numbers for reddit. According to these numbers - which come directly out of Google Analytics - Hitwise's numbers for Reddit are wrong. Overall, traffic to Reddit increased 24% over the last two months (mostly during the month since the Digg relaunch) and these numbers are holding steady.

While Pearltrees only allows users to display connections in a relatively simple tree structure, Trailmeme offers its users more flexibility. Earlier this week, the projects manager Venkatesh Rao showed us a number of nifty examples for what users can do with this flexibility. This trail, for example, visualizes sites about the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by arranging sites in the form of an oil rig.

Besides allowing users to create their own trails, they can also browse and search other users' trails. On its front page, Trailmeme highlights those collections that are especially popular among its users.

The company offers a toolbar for Firefox and a universal bookmarklet for creating trails, as well as plugins for WordPress and - in the near future - MediaWiki. Sadly, Trailmeme doesn't currently offer the ability to embed collections on other sites.

A New Kind of Publishing

As Rao told us, the main goal behind Trailmeme is to allow users to "navigate the web via well-curated trails," but given the projects connection to Xerox, it doesn't come as a surprise that there is also a publishing angle to this tool. Trailmeme offers users the ability to print trails and save them as PDF files. As Rao told us, in the long run, the team is also considering to offer publishers the option to monetize their efforts and sell printable version of their trails.

Will Users Care?

Overall, Trailmeme is an interesting tool (though it lacks the visual appeal of Pearltrees and browsing trails often feels a bit sluggish), but it remains to be seen how many users are actually interested in curating their bookmark to the extend that Trailmeme and similar tools expect them to do. For most users, Google has already replaced regular bookmarks to some extend. If done well, however, an expertly curated collection on Trailmeme or Pearltrees can provide a lot more value than a simple list of links on Google or Delicious.

After Digg-founder Kevin Rose revealed Digg's July traffic numbers on his blog, Reddit administrator and programmer KeyserSosa publicly requested that the "entire mainstream media" quit with the diminutive adjectives already, as Reddit looks to have more traffic, not less, than Digg.

In July, Reddit claimed that experts were "misunderestimating" its traffic and it didn't know why. According to Reddit programmer Mike Shiraldi, a number of third-party Web traffic measurement services were grossly underestimating its traffic. According to its own numbers from Google Analytics, Reddit saw "more than 8,000,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days and 400,000,000 pageviews" when we wrote about their traffic measurement issues in July.

In his blog post, Kevin Rose revealed that Digg had "200+ Million page views in July" - a number that seems to contradict what Reddit sees as persistent attempts by the mainstream media to minimize its impact and relevance in comparison to other social bookmarking sites like Digg. As one user notes in the comments, Reddit has only 1/20th of the staff, but the numbers seem to show that it has at least 40% more traffic.

See a full-size version of the image here.

As a caveat, we have to note that this data is based on referral traffic from Digg and Reddit to Statcounter's network of participating sites. By default, traffic from Digg and Reddit to these sites tends to fluctuate widely. While the severity of Monday's swing in favor of Reddit does indeed point towards trouble for Digg, we will have to monitor this trend for a few more days to see if it remains stable.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Digg vs Reddit Market Share

Standoff

What is clear, though, is that Digg's users are not backing down - and neither is Digg's management. User revolts are nothing new for Digg, but this time it looks like Digg's management is not prepared to back down. According to former Digg engineer Ian Eure, Digg may not even have the ability to roll its service back to the old version anyway. Digg's CEO Kevin Rose does promise, however, that many of the old features Digg's users are now clamoring for will come back in one form or another. The question now is if the site's most fervent users will come back once all the issues with Digg v4 have been resolved, or if they will simply move on to another site like Reddit.

At 8 a.m. today, Twitter shut down basic authentication forever and, if your Tweetdeck or other Twitter app doesn't work, there's likely something you can do - update.

For those on the user end of things, the switch to OAuth means both a better and more secure experience with third-party Twitter applications. No longer will you have to wonder if a semi-sketchy looking website is going to steal your password, because they will not be asking you for your password. You sign in with Twitter, on twitter.com itself, and approve each app or website as you go, with a simple "approve" or "deny".

Twitter notes in its blog post that you can always review what applications you have granted access to your account by looking at the Connections section under your settings. If you haven't updated to the latest version of a Twitter app, you may find that it is broken and need to update for it to continue working.

As we explored when Twitter first started testing OAuth as a solution to its security woes, with this new system you will never have to cringe and give your Twitter password out to a stranger again. Another way to say that might be, never hand out your Twitter user name and password, ever again, as this switchover negates that process. And while it makes everything more secure, you'll want to be aware that clicking "approve" means you're giving that app carte blanche, read/write access to your Twitter account, so you should still weigh whether or not you want to give that particular application access before saying okay.

As for developers, the transition to OAuth from basic authentication has been a long time coming, with multiple emails sent out in the developers' group, so many apps are already using the new system. If you have somehow missed all the hubbub over OAuth, then that's what's happening, and Twitter will no longer allow third-party apps to use basic authentication.

AddThis: Now Sharing with the Mobile Web, Too

You're probably know about the AddThis button even if you don't realize it - it's the orange "Share" button that's nearly ubiquitous across the Web these days. Acquired by the widget creation platform company Clearspring in late 2008, the button was already the most popular of its kind on the Web. The acquisition, said Clearspring, would allow AddThis to reach 300,000 publishers. That number has long since been surpassed. Today, AddThis is installed on 1.5 million websites.

Implementing the button is easy, which is partially why it's been so successful. It's also incredibly easy for the end user to access as well.

From the company's website, publishers need only select their service and style of button in order to get embed code ready for copying-and-pasting onto any website or blog. Those who choose to register with the service can also get built in analytics, too.

What's New?

Prior to today, however, AddThis was not well-designed for mobile use and touchscreens, which is what makes this new release all that more exciting for dedicated mobile users like ourselves. On many websites, it's been more difficult than need be to find an easy way to tweet a link to an article we just read or post a link to Facebook, for example. More often than not, the link simply wouldn't get shared if the publisher didn't have some kind of built in, touchscreen-enabled tool for doing so already installed.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, one less link posted to Twitter is not a major issue, but it did make the mobile Web feel more clunky and less developed than its desktop counterpart.

AddThis aims to change that with the button's new mobile functionality, which automatically opens Web browser windows for you, with default (but still editable) text filled in. (And don't worry, there's no auto-tweeting/sharing here!) It also now integrates with the built-in email clients on the mobile devices themselves, allowing you to privately share the link with a friend whose address is stored in your contacts list instead of publicly broadcasting it to the Web.

Try it Now: No Code Update Needed

You can see the demonstrations of the new AddThis in these two YouTube videos here and here.

Alternately, you can try AddThis yourself by tapping the "Share" button below this post from your mobile device. We didn't even have to update our code to make this happen - it just works.

This is only one of the many upcoming "new features, experiments and products that help to tackle the problem of mobile sharing," reports Clearspring's Justin Thorp via email. Dare we hope for dedicated native apps next?

But Flattr is diving after a particularly elusive pearl. So far no one has discovered a sustainable system for collecting micropayments from Web users to support those who make the articles, videos, websites, infographics and other diversions we all love. And many have died trying.

So why does Flattr think it will do any better?

Flattr is basically a "Like" button backed by money. And money talks. Flattr has taken to heart the lessons of its micropayment predecessors, providing a seamless way to pay and being careful not to ask users for too much. But its creators have also been influenced by social bookmarking sites like Digg, Facebook, StumbleUpon, which have been infinitely more successful getting people to use them.

Users sign up for a Flattr account and deposit a certain amount each month. As they browse the Web, they will see "Flattr" buttons next to all kinds of content. The company says you can Flattr any "thing" - blog post, blog, video, photo, etc. If a Flattr user likes a thing and the creator of that thing has a Flattr account, the user can click the Flattr button to donate money to the content creator.

The number of Flattrs is calculated and displayed, just like Diggs, Tweets and Likes, so Flattr also becomes a measure of how popular a piece of content is. Flattr displays the most popular things on its website. You can donate whatever you want and the money is distributed evenly among all the things you click in a month and Flattr, which gets 10%.

Discouragingly, Flattr's concept is similar to at least two recently folded startups. Contenture (July 2009-January 2010), from the makers of Clicky Analytics, divided user donations across all the sites in its network, on which users could browse ad-free and have access to other premium features. TipJoy (November 2008 - August 2009), a Y Combinator startup, let users decide how much to donate by entering an email address and a "tip," which was a pledge to pay up once TipJoy tallied their tips into a lump sum.

Flattr faces two problems. First, the site will depend on users to submit their own content - not taking credit (and profit) for the content of others. It's easy to imagine the creator of a song or video having no idea that his or her creation is being monetized via Flattr. Second, users must be ready to voluntarily pay for content they can still get for free.

Flattr is in private beta, but the tech news site TechDirt has already signed up to be a guinea pig. This article already has 15 Flattrs.