Google Glass will likely be immensely useful for doctors, field workers, and other service providers. But for ordinary people, it’s disorienting and nerdy. 

But that hasn’t stopped developers from responding to Google’s request to build applications for Glass. Owners of the device now have a nifty news aggregation app dubbed “Thirst Droplet,” released today by Thirst Labs.

Thirst believes the investment in Glass was worthwhile and will help it reach “Generation C” (the “C” stands for “connected.”) Either way, it reportedly only spent around three days developing features for the app.

Thirst has already unveiled its Android and iPhone apps for personalizing and curating the news. Follow topics on a mobile device and the web, and Glass will send a push notification when it’s trending on social media. Hundreds of thousands of topics — such as “Oprah Winfrey,” “49ers,” or “Google” — are currently available for you to follow.

The Glass app takes the news experience step further, giving you the opportunity to listen to an entire article. You can also flag an article for future reading and email it to yourself straight from Glass. You can also “like” or “dislike” a story.

Thirst has differentiated itself from other news readers with its language processing tools. Rather than asking readers to discover news, the it automatically finds and presents the most relevant content in what Thirst says is an engaging way. The company tracks millions of data sources — blogs, social media, and so on — to determine whether news is trending.

Don’t miss the explanatory video below to see how the app works.

The Thirst news app for iPad

“Under the hood, you don’t read the same feeds as Google Reader. We find the topics relevant to you,” CEO Anuj Verma said in a recent interview with VentureBeat (pictured above), hitting on how Thirst differs from competing news apps like Flipboard and Pulse. “You don’t really have to hunt for the content.”

Similarly to news aggregation app Pulse, which LinkedIn recently acquired, Thirst Labs was formed by college friends. The founders are a pair of University of Berkeley, California grads who share a passion for UI, UX, and developing algorithms.

San Francisco-based Thirst Labs has raised $950,000 in seed funding from BlueRun Ventures, Steve Newcomb, and Jason Krikorian.

Top image // Google Glass

We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

Mass Relevance, a startup that brings calm to a crazy sea of social activity, is rolling out a new digital mosaic product today at SXSW that essentially builds an image using tweets, Facebook updates, photos, and even Vine videos.

You may have seen Mass Relevance’s platform and not even known it, as it’s been used several times to help manage the flow of tweets for broadcast television or streaming events, such as President Obama’s Twitter Town Hall. The company’s technology allows its clients to manage a list of questions sent to someone on stage or on camera, conduct polling in real-time, display a stream of the best social updates, and much more. In fact, Mass Relevance has even been powering the Q&A sessions at SXSW, which has netted the company compliments by nearly everyone on stage who has used it.

The new digital mosaic (called Dynamic Mosaic) integrates real-time social content from multiple sources — including content from Instagram, Facebook, Vine, Twitter, and Google+ – that automatically curates the stream of activity into something that’s visually pleasing and digestible to an audience. Brands that use the company’s new product have control over the experience, too. That means they can choose to flow sponsored and specific accounts to the foreground to promote messages, sponsors, and personalities. (Check out an example here.)

“Social curation and re-display is still very much a new frontier,” Mass Relevance founder and CEO Sam Decker told VentureBeat. “Social integration is typically approached in two ways:  1) Highlighting the content itself, for example a stream of Facebook posts and Tweets, or a photo wall of Instagram content, or 2) … not necessarily show[ing] the content itself, but rather visualiz[ing] how social conversations are trending by criteria like volume, keyword mentions, or geography.”

When I heard about Dynamic Mosaic, I immediately thought of a socially curated mass of content that would be displayed in the form of Abraham Lincoln, but apparently this isn’t the case with Mass Relevance’s new tool.

The mosaic flows from left to right, allowing about 2 seconds for photos to be paused and 6 seconds for automatically played vine videos.

The Dynamic Mosaic is the first platform to really show the market potential of Vine, the short-video social network that Twitter purchased a few months ago. Within days of the acquisition, Decker said, Mass Relevance’s platform was able to source, curate, and re-display Tweets in real-time that had Vine-embedded videos.

“What’s particularly interesting about how they are displayed within the Dynamic Mosaic is the way the experience automatically detects when Vine videos are embedded,” Decker said. “The motion of the experience will slow down to allow the video to play before streaming to the next piece of content — whether it be a Tweet, another video, or photo.”

Decker said there’s a huge opportunity for Vine:

“It’s more about the opportunity that Vine holds for major brands using the platform to create social experiences within their ‘owned’ digital properties. Now, major brands can leverage real-time video sharing gaining fast adoption within the market. The main difference between Vine and other social video clips is really the brevity — you’re only allowed 6 seconds. The short length of Vine videos force the user to focus on creativity with a less-is-more mentality. … What’s more, Vine is easily integrated into a platform and device where consumers are already spending increasingly long amounts of time — Twitter and mobile respectively. The sharability factor is high, as followers can quickly consume and amplify Vine videos throughout the social sphere.

One of the first clients to use the new Dynamic Mosaic will be IMAX, which is planning to show off a socially driven mosaic experience during SXSW’s Film Intermission party, with a video clip of its mosaic in action to go live tomorrow.

Founded in 2011, Austin, Tex.-based Mass Relevance has over 200 clients and has worked on many high-profile media properties,  including Marvel’s The Avengers, American Idol, X-Factor, 80 Plates, and The Voice.

Don’t have time to obsess over the latest fashion trends? Launching today, a new service called Ajent is bringing curated style options to busy professionals.

Most e-commerce sites focus on breadth and offer a massive database of fashion items, typically imported by the community or a developer scraping the web. Polyvore, for instance, is updated with over two million new items each month. 

But San Francisco-based Ajent feeds its users just one “look” per day. Sign up for free, and receive a daily email with trendy style suggestions, home decor options, and more.

Today’s look is “Emerald”; users can peruse a shortlist of affordable deep green shirts, a kimono, pants and shoes, and even plan a trip to the Emerald Isle.

Ajent’s founder Meghan Higney (pictured above) hit on the idea for the site when she was bedridden for several months after breaking her back. The former private equity professional said she felt “overwhelmed” by the clutter on the Web and yearned to have a personal style hunter to source the best deals, delivered straight to her inbox.

So Higney quit her day job to develop the site and daily newsletter. She tested the beta on 200 users — men and women — and brought on a team of five staff members, including a front-end designer and several fashion editors. Each day, Ajent’s human editors pore through magazines, street style blogs, arts and culture, and more for inspiration. 

Ajent is a bootstrapped effort, and the next step is to hire engineers to build an algorithm (inspired by Netflix or Pandora) to offer personalized style recommendations. This will differentiate it from sites like Stylefeed that help users curate fashion by searching for deals from their favorite designers.

“The really interesting piece will be when Ajent brings you items on a day-to-day basis that you have told us specifically to look for,” said Higney over coffee. Ajent will also be aware of users’ size, budget, and style preferences.

To make money, the team is also considering rolling out a concierge-style service. If you’re looking for a leather skirt for spring, an Ajent style hunter will source the best deal and style from the Web and offer suggestions for items that will complement the look. It’s a similar business model to Zirtual, a virtual assistant service that is growing quickly and recently raised funds from Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh, among others.

In the future, Ajent will also benefit from building its own buying and selling platform, so users won’t be redirected to an external site if they choose to make a purchase.

In a recent interview, Forerunner Ventures‘ founder and managing partner said the key for the next wave of e-commerce sites is to “focus on augmenting the traditional shopping experience.”

And it’s one that many retailers haven’t yet woken up to.

“E-commerce retailers are used to a world in which they have products for sale, put them on the site, sell out, and take them down,” Curalate founder Apu Gupta told me yesterday. “But now all the stuff that people are pinning continues to live on Pinterest long after the products are gone. And we’ve discovered that once a product gets popular, it continues to get more popular.”

During the recent Black Friday weekend, Curalate reviewed a number of top retailers’ websites. The team was shocked to find that 48 percent of their top ten most popular products on Pinterest actually led to dead links — expired pages. The pages no longer even showed the product that had originally been pinned … much less offer it for sale. So when people — interested, eager consumers — see something they like on Pinterest and want to buy it, far too often they are clicking through to the original product website only to hit a brick wall, Gupta says.

And this isn’t just a problem for one or two year old pins. Brands like H&M and Forever 21 are built on rapid inventory turns, sometimes as quick as weeks or months. Even more traditional retailers typically turn their inventory over seasonally, meaning that products pinned just a few weeks or months ago could already have expired.

So what’s a busy retailer to do?

“It starts with handling 404s better,” Gupta said, referring to the error code a webserver engine returns for a page that cannot be found. “But also, if a product sells out … don’t take it down. Leave it on the site, so at least the page is there and consumers can maybe order it … get on a waiting list.”

Even if that’s not possible, there are alternatives.

“Or the page can say say that the product is out of stock, but here are some suggestions … maybe some other things that are on Pinterest from our brand that are getting really hot.”

Technologies to make this easy for retailers are available now, but e-commerce managers need to become aware of the possibilities. That’s what Curalate does, Gupta told me: Identify the products that are resonating with consumers, and highlight them to brands.

“Images are the new currency of social engagement,” Gupta says. “But as images replace words, brands can’t understand that … you can’t do a text search for images. We’re the first to be able to do that.”

As Pinterest continues to grow — and as perhaps 70 percent of its users visit the site to look for shopping inspiration — knowing how to manage old inventory and assess consumer demand in a very visual world becomes more and more important.

The most surprising results? Parents want apps for very, very young kids. And they very definitely want iPad apps … not iPhone.

KinderTown is an iPhone/iPad app that’s also a store. Basically, it’s providing a service that Apple can’t … or won’t. The team behind the app searches for the best educational apps for kids, which they then run through educator tests and parent reviews. Only apps that pass the requirements for usefulness, educational quality, and value enter KinderTown.

With 17 million iPads and 26 million iPhones sold just last quarter, KinderTown has plenty of potential customers — including many who haven’t even entered school yet.

In fact, of searches that specified age, nearly all of them included kids under the age of five, and almost 40 percent were for kids age three and under.

Source: KinderTown

Age range of educational app searches. Numbers sum to more than 100 because parents can choose ranges.

Additionally, though vastly more iPhones have been sold than iPads, and iPhone’s 650,000 apps outweighs iPad’s 250,000 by an almost 3-to-1 margin, most parents are looking for iPad apps, not iPhone.

Almost three-quarters of searches are for iPad apps alone. Only 6.3 percent are for iPhone-only apps:

Source: KinderTown

App parents search for by iOS platform

Apparently, iPads are parents’ default choice for educational apps. That makes some sense — I have three children myself, and I’m much more likely to hand over the iPad than my phone, which is for work and business and personal information.

Finally, and this will be of particular interest to app developers, of those searches that specified subject area, math and language were by far the most popular, both coming in around the 35 percent mark. Art came in at almost 15 percent, and science and social studies brought up the rear.

Source: KinderTown

Subjects by popularity

One more chart, for those who might be considering building an educational app for kids. KinderTown further breaks down subject area data into categories. Here are the top 1o:

Source: KinderTown

Top categories on KinderTown

Looking for more details? View the entire report here.

Image credits: Serhiy Kobyakov/ShutterStock

Cull TV, a site that features curated playlists of music videos from indie artists, has been acquired by social video network Twitvid, the companies announced today.

Cull TV is sort of what the internet version of Mtv would probably look like if it was still about music instead of godawful teen reality shows staring quasi-famous celebrities. The site’s user interface is focused on a full “lean back and watch” experience, similar to watching a TV channel. Videos are curated by members of the community as well as an in-house team, but  you can also create your own music video channel stream by adding videos that you’ve watched on the site or elsewhere. The site has over 2 million videos in its library and features 25 standard channels. Cull TV is primarily for discovering new content, which is why its a perfect fit for Twitvid.

“Cull TV is an intelligent, connected social service that can curate content in a different way than what we’re doing on Twitvid,” said Twitvid founder Mo Al Adham in an interview with VentureBeat.”We plan on adding that technology and know-how from (Cull’s) team into the site over the next few months.”

Twitvid relaunched from a complimentary video site for Twitter into a completely new social video network back in December 2011, as VentureBeat previously reported. Users can check their stream of video content from sites like YouTube, Vimeo and others that are shared by friends on various social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook. Twitvid users can also create their own custom channel of content that others can tune in to watch. The site currently brings in over 15 million unique visitors per month.

As part of the acquisition deal, Cull.tv will remain in operation for now, but its future hasn’t been determined, Al Adham said. And while Twitvid will gain a strong community of music video watchers from the new acquisition, it’ll also get Cull TV’s underlying curation technology. Twitvid’s stream is already optimized for video content, but it’ll probably gain a greater degree of sharing and discovery functionality.

Founded in 2009, the San Francisco, Calif.-based startup previously raised a $7 million round of funding from Azure Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson in September 2011. Financial terms of the Cull TV deal were not disclosed.

“Social media has been built on top of social networks, and the two are different,” Scoop.it co-founder and chief executive officer Guillame Decugis told VentureBeat. Decugis says that people want to express themselves in social media, but there’s too much noise. “I think we’re moving back to a web where quality matters again.”

The Scoop.it search algorithm helps you find great content, but it’s the human touch that makes the Scoop.it experience so sticky, because a person can understand the relationship between items and pick out what’s important much better than any machine can.

The term “curation” has been floating around lot lately, and Scoop.it is far from the only company in the space. Startups like PearlTrees and Curated.by are just a few of the dozens of such tools out there. “We’re unique in the sense you have the ability to create a magazine,” says Decugis. Scoop.it gets more than 2 million visits per month, and traffic is growing by 35 percent month.

To get a feel for what Scoop.it does, check out some of the great topic pages passionate Scoop.it users have curated on space exploration, violins, street art, tools for learners and scientific discovery. There’s a lot more interesting violin-related content on the web than one might initially suspect, and Scoop.it topic pages are a great way to collect and share this bounty. Decugis uses his own topic page to document the impact of the iPad on the media.

The company is beginning to experiment with a premium model that will allow businesses and others to embed branded versions of their topic page onto their own sites. Insightful, intelligent curation around a topic will demonstrate expertise for a business owner or a guru, and they can also generate pretty strong SEO for themselves. The premium version of Scoop.it will also include an analytics tool that can be accessed for a monthly fee.

Scoop.it has received $10 million in funding from Partech International, Orkos, Elaia and IRDI. Partech is an investor in VentureBeat.

Here’s how it works: Digg takes content from a number of sites it curates, such as tech news blogs and news sites, and adds it directly to the “Newswire” in each Newsroom. Digg ranks those stories by how new they are and how much of a “signal” they have — which is a hodgepodge metric derived from the number of times readers have Tweeted the story and shared it on other sites.

Digg users then vote up or down the stories on the Newswire as they see fit. More popular stories appear on the front page of the Newsroom for typical readers. Digg users who discover interesting stories through the Newswire earn points and reputation badges that help them reach the front page more often. It’s a way of rewarding power users who add positive content to the site, Digg chief executive Matt Williams told VentureBeat.

“There’s way too much for me to get my arms around on a daily basis,” he said. “The focus on Newsrooms is to bring forward the most relevant news as measured across popular opinion and refined by top contributors across Digg.”

That reputation system is also designed to discourage “gaming” the site, where social media promoters take advantage of the Digg’s algorithms to artificially promote certain stories and drive traffic to sites, Williams said. A combination of the transparency on the site — for example, you can see all the top contributors for a newsroom on the side of the site — hard-to-obtain badges, and a required verified identity (like Facebook connect) should prevent artificial promoters from gaining a foothold, he said.

“At launch, and then over time, there are a number of things we’ll do that will thwart nefarious gaming and let the real contributors have all the fun,” he said.

While Newsrooms will be a major focus for Digg moving forward, the site is not abandoning its typical “top news” stream that includes content everyday Digg users submit and vote up organically. The Newsrooms are entering a closed beta starting today, Williams said. Digg has been working on the feature for the past five months.

A large number of Digg users migrated over to competing news aggregator Reddit after Digg’s fourth design revision. The site has spent a lot of time trying to earn those users back by bringing back popular features like the “Bury” button, as well as taking other steps to differentiate itself from Reddit. Digg still has around 17 million monthly unique visitors and 1 million daily unique visitors. Reddit also includes subcategories for content — such as Technology, which also appears as a Newsroom on Digg — but they are not automatically curated.

“If you look at music, who was popular last year, it was Rebecca Black, and that sucks — not many people actually want to see that,” Williams said. ”I think we’ve found an interesting way to separate out what’s most meaningful from popular.” 

The “friend connections” metric the company cites is what distinguishes Rolling.fm from being an exact clone of similar music curation service Turntable.fm — which, by comparison, experienced 140,000 registered members in its first month.

Rolling.fm and Turntable.fm are the first of a new breed of socially enhanced music services. The sites act as virtual dance clubs where people take turns playing music. However, Rolling.fm has considerably better communication features, like tabs that list everyone in the room, a tab for Rolling.fm friends and another for private messages.

“I think that one metric (friend connections) really defines how we’re positioning ourselves and how users are using our service,” Rolling.fm CEO Nhon Ma told VentureBeat. “Our initial hypothesis was: Music is the commonality that brings everyone together but ultimately people interacting with each other would make it more fulfilling.”

In keeping with its social discovery experience, Rolling.fm launched a new “buy a drink” feature. Using credits obtained by being a good DJ, users can purchase other members a drink for playing a run of consecutively good songs in a music room, having a cool avatar or just wanting to start a conversation.

Ma said eventually the company would like to add more virtual elements that mimic a real-life experience. The company also wants to branch out into video curation, as we previously reported.

The New York-based startup is a part of social media advertising startup Tenka, which was founded in May 2010 by Ma, Thomas Chau and Tim Zhou. The company has an undisclosed amount of funding by Great Oaks Venture Capital with additional angel investment by Jeff Fluhr.

Turntable.fm turns its users into DJs who can share musical tastes within specific virtual rooms classified by subject or genre. Only five DJs can share music in a single room, but anyone can enter a room to listen. All users within that room can rate song selections as “Lame” or “Awesome.”

After extensive testing by dozens of people for about a month, the company wants to release the Turntable.fm iOS app next week, according to the report. The report also notes that streaming music over a WiFi connection is working fine, but there are still problems when streaming music from a 3G connection (as provided by wireless carriers like Verizon and AT&T).

As indicated in the screenshots (below) obtained by TechCrunch, the application itself adopts nearly the exact functionality as its desktop counter-part. Integration with Facebook and Twitter are still prominent in the iOS version, but links to digital music services (iTunes, Spotify, Rdio and others) seem to be missing at first glance. However, it’s possible those links will pop up on the device by touching a specific portion of the screen. In any case, they aren’t in the screenshots.

Turntable.fm’s entrance into mobile devices is a big step for the company because it is now able to compete on even ground with other music startups such as Pandora, Slacker Radio and Spotify.

Turntable.fm gained over 300,000 registered users just two months after its launch in May 2011. The startup, which was founded by Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen, raised initial angel funding from Chris Sacca. More recently the company reportedly closed a $7.5 million round of funding led by Union Square Ventures.

Image via TechCrunch

The search giant’s social network — which delivers data in bite-sized chunks thanks to the use of Circles — is built for early adopters somewhere between 21 and 27. Facebook has become a glorified phone book, while Google+ is the place where we go to communicate with friends. I can’t speak for everyone else, but more than half of my Facebook friends have already completed said migration.

On Facebook, you typically run into the problem of over-sharing. There’s no filter on the regular News Feed, so you have to basically parse through every single story until you find something of interest. The Top News feed is a little better about this because it picks up on heavily-commented stories or stories from profiles you actively follow, but there’s still an enormous amount of content. We’ve become really efficient at finding relevant information through both systems, but it’s still a broken way of doing so.

On Google+, curation happens at both ends — the person posting and the person reading — through the site’s Circles feature. Instead of having a single friends list, Google+ makes its users divvy contacts up into smaller lists of friends. You can then pick which circles to specifically view content, or view all circles at once.

For example, there are two ways I can get information about Baseball: I have a “Baseball” circle that I populate with friends that regularly talk about Baseball. When I click on the “Baseball” circle, it’s immediately populated with those friends and I can quickly sort through it to find relevant information with less noise.

On the other end, I know that many of my friends have their own “Baseball” circles, to which they post content related to Baseball. I know that when I select my “friends” stream, I’m going to receive content from those posting in “Baseball” circles (or, in the case of one friend, the “infamous Beisbol” circle.)

Some of the circles can get incredibly specific. I’m part of a coveted “beard” circle, an elite group of individuals with beards. The owner of said circle issues a Beard of the Day post.

My own circles include specific circles for PR officials that are trying to stalk me to better refine their pitches. There’s a circle for the competition — which includes the likes of MG Siegler of TechCrunch and Ben Parr of Mashable. I have my own circle for friends with beards — only epic ones, which should be obvious by the name: “AAAAAAWWWWW BEEEEAAAARD.” I have a circle for my family, too, though for some reason it felt oddly appropriate to add former VentureBeat executive editor Owen Thomas to that circle.

VentureBeat’s Jolie O’Dell, who joined the team yesterday, remains unconvinced by Google+. Her argument is that it doesn’t appeal to the middle ground, and circles are too complex. It’s true that Facebook has simplicity going for it, but that simplicity also carries a cost with savvy individuals who know how to use a network as well as they know how to ride a bike.

That group of Google+ loving misfits are early adopters who generate more content in an hour than most people do in several days. It’s also a group that has to deal with over-sharing on sites like Twitter and Facebook, both of which tried to tackle the issue. Facebook tried pushing Lists and Groups, but those didn’t work easily enough for most people. Twitter expects you to curate the people you follow and also lets you add people to “lists,” but Twitter’s public nature means isn’t a very good tool for following what’s going on with your close circle of friends.

Google+ falls somewhere in between Facebook and Twitter, and it works like a charm. There are also a number of other benefits that come along with having billions of dollars of revenue thrown behind it. For instance, Google+ isn’t populated by advertising — yet — and there aren’t that many spam accounts. As a whole, the experience feels more refined and there is less noise from individuals I’m less interested in following.

Google+ already has more than 10 million user and 20 million visitors, which it picked up in 16 days. Twitter and Facebook both took around two years before they hit 20 million users. Those sites didn’t have billions of dollars in revenue and some of the best engineering talent around when they launched, but that shouldn’t take away from Google’s accomplishment with Google+.

Looking to help consumers and businesses find and share relevant, original content, Thoora launched today at DEMO Spring 2011.

The company was created not only to aggregate content from both traditional and social media resources like Twitter and Facebook, but also to filter and rate the content based on relevancy. The content is then delivered to the user for curation, which includes the ability to group by topic and share.

There is no shortage of companies that are aggregating and curating content. Companies like Curated.by and Scoop.it allow individual users to search by topic and share content with their networks. And companies like Loud3r and Daylife give publishers the ability to group content and push it to customers. Thoora might have an advantage over some of the competition, as its own algorithm filters content by over 100 different “signals,” which include things like total number of articles on the topic, site rank and Twitter activity.

The Toronto, Canada-based company, founded in 2008, currently has 14 employees and has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from Rogers Ventures.

StumbleUpon lets users jump through websites by adding a navigation toolbar to the top of every website visited. Users can vote up the site and comment on it, and then immediately “stumble” to the next website without too much trouble. Registered users can pick a number of topics they are interested in and StumbleUpon delivers content that fits those themes whenever they jump to the next website.

Like news aggregators, StumbleUpon it an attempt to solve discovery problems. There is quite a bit of content on the Internet — so much so that the number of available web addresses has officially run out ahead of a revamp that will increase the number of available web addresses. Since there is so much noise, users flock to sites like news aggregator Reddit and StumbleUpon to curate their news and content and help users find just what they are looking for.

StumbleUpon’s announcement comes fresh on the heels of Reddit’s recent traffic announcement that the news aggregator had more than 1 billion hits in January. A number of other startups, like app discovery tool Appitalism, have popped up to try to tackle the problem of content and application discovery as well.

StumbleUpon also recently launched an Android application designed to solve the same discovery problems that applications have. There are already more than 300,000 apps on the iPhone App Store, and more than 1,000 more appear daily. There are also more than 115,000 apps on the Android Marketplace, according to AndroLib.com. So even on application stores there is a lot of noise — and users need some tools to curate their content and help point out new applications.

The company was launched out of Canada in 2002 and didn’t move to the San Francisco Bay Area until 2006. It was acquired by eBay a year later for $75 million — though it has since been taken private. The San Francisco, Calif.-based company raised $1.5 million from Google’s founding investor, Ram Shriram, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, Topic founder Ariel Poler, and angel investor Ron Conway.

That sounds similar to promises I’ve heard from many other companies, for example the content-sharing service Twine (which was acquired by Evri) and personalized news-reader MeeHive (which was shut down by parent company Kosmix).

But Kapur said previous attempts have just “nibbled at the edges” of the bigger problem. Gravity is part of the latest wave of companies trying to manage the ever-growing flood of content on the Web, he said. The first great innovation for handling all that content was search engines, followed by sharing on social networks.

Kapur argued that the next solution is embodied by music service Pandora — instead of asking users to search for music or recommending music based on the preferences of friends, Pandora plays songs that you’ll probably like, based on what it knows about your own taste and interests. Kapur said Gravity is like Pandora, but for the rest of the Web, not music.

Specifically, Gravity has built out a language model (it currently contains 100 million phrases, Kapur said) showing how different interests fit together. So Gravity knows that the phrase “free throw” is related to basketball, which falls under the broader category of sports. Then for each user, Gravity can build out an “interest graph” of everything you seem to be interested in based on public social network content — your messages on Twitter, your check-ins on Foursquare, your status updates on Facebook, and so on.

Gravity is launching its first product today, called Twinterests, which builds an interest graph based on user’s tweets and allows them to compare those interests to their friends’. Coming soon is The Orbit, a personalized Web newspaper.

These are really just demonstrations of Gravity’s technology, however. In the long-term, Kapur said he wants to turn Gravity into a service for Web publishers to personalize content for their readers. Imagine coming to VentureBeat and hitting a “personalize” button, then watching the page rearrange itself to highlight the stories that are of greatest interest to you.

Kapur previously served as the chief operating officer at MySpace. Gravity was co-founded by two other former MySpace executives, Jim Benedetto (former senior vice president of technology) and Steve Pearman (former senior vice president of product).

Gravity has raised $10 million from August Capital and Redpoint Ventures.

Pearltrees

Pearltrees is a free online social network that allows users to tag (or “pearl,” in the site’s parlance) content on the Web and share it with others who have similar interests. Users create pearltrees which house the individual pearls, or pieces of content, so that you can keep them all in one place. Other users can see your pearls and opt to stay updated on what content you’re finding. You don’t need an account to view what someone’s tagged, but only registered users can create pearls or follow someone’s pearltree.

Several other companies could be considered competitors, including recent DEMO company Pinyadda, whose offering gathers and organizes Web content relating to a user’s specified interests.

The recent round of funding was led by European entrepreneurs and angel investors based in France, Switzerland, Germany and England. It brings Pearltrees’ total funding to €3.8 million (US$4.6 million).

The Paris-based company launched at French technology and startup conference LeWeb in December 2009.