In fact, gamification boosts commenting 13 percent, social sharing to Facebook, Twitter, and networks 22 percent, and content discovery by a massive 68 percent.

“Sharing and comment are good for business, obviously,” Gigya marketing manager Victor White told me last week. “So having gamification tied in to to sharing and commenting is really valuable.”

Gigya offers social infrastructure services that gamifies sites as well as providing services like social login. According to the company, it touches 1.5 billion users monthly, and half of the ComScore 100 use its services.

Adding gamification to a site, of course, means giving users points, badges, status, and rewards for engaging in desired actions. Done thoughtlessly, it can seem random or manipulative. Embedded intelligently into the core of a site’s purpose, however, it can enhance the user experience and significantly boost both engagement and user growth.

But you have to be careful, White says.

“We have limits in place so users can’t ‘game’ the system and so they don’t spam all their networks in order to level up,” he said.

“Leveling up” is a term from gamer culture, where in order to achieve higher status, gamers must defeat multiple levels or engage in sometimes repetitive tasks. Apparently, some people do this on gamified websites for status, to get some kind of physical reward, or simply to hit the leaderboard.

Commenting and sharing are pretty obvious and simple. But the activity feed is something that many sites have not yet incorporated. It provides a form of social proof, White says, that a site and its content are worthwhile.

“It allows users to see what other socially connected users are doing on the site,” he said. “For example, ‘Victor just shared this article to FB.’ That’s a method of really increasing content engagement, and if you’ve integrated gamification into that, the user has more incentive yet to check it out.”

It also helps brands to identify and target their biggest fans, as they now can tie demographics to actual behaviors. For example, not only does a particular user live in a California and likes the Golden State Warriors, she’s also your top social sharer and has a ton of influence in her online network.

That’s why Pepsi used the solution for Pepsi Soundoff for X Factor and Super Bowl social media promotions, White says. And the social part is critical.

“Gamification needs to be tied to social,” White says. “It’s often thought to be social inherently, but it’s not – there’s a difference between getting a badge, and getting a badge and sharing it. One is social, and one is not.”

photo credit: compscigrad via photopin cc

Netflix’s lack of social features in the U.S. has been a glaring problem over the last few years. But today, the streaming-video company is taking the first steps towards fixing that.

Netflix will finally begin rolling out social sharing features via Facebook integration today, Bloomberg reports. Some international markets have already had access to Facebook integration, though that was an earlier version that didn’t allow them to choose what they shared.

We’ve known that the social sharing feature was coming since December, when the U.S. Senate and House passed a bill that would allow Netflix to share its users’ viewing habits. Netflix fought hard to to amend the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, which was initially meant to protect customers’ video store rental history but had no specific rules for video rentals.

Once you opt-in to the feature, you’ll see two new rows on your Netflix homepage that show what your friends have been watching. You’ll also be able to comment and and post on your Facebook Timeline about films you’ve been watching, according to Bloomberg. International users will eventually get the new sharing feature as well.

“You are in control of what gets shared,” wrote Cameron Johnson, Netflix’s director of product innovation, in a blog post announcing the features today. “You can choose not to share a specific title by clicking the “Don’t Share This” button in the player. You can also visit your “Social Settings” in “Your Account” on Netflix.com to turn on additional sharing to Facebook or stop sharing altogether.”

Netflix dabbled in social early on with its Friends feature, which launched in 2004 but was killed in 2010. Netflix VP of product management Todd Yellin claimed fewer than 2 percent of Netflix users actually took advantage of the feature — which wasn’t a huge surprise, since it was a fairly half-assed implementation. It was tough to figure out who your friends actually were, and the interface was horrendous. In the end, Netflix chose to focus on its video service rather than continue struggling with its own social feature.

Below, you can catch a glimpse of the new social features:

Photo: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings via Ben Lucier/Flickr

The digital news magazine app Pulse has always been good at making sense of the many information sources available online, but now it wants to cull the insanity of your social circle to find only the most popular articles and links.

Today the service is rolling out a new feature called Pulse Highlights that you use to create a tab of news based on what’s popular among those in your social circle. Basically, any news story that your friends have shared or saved excessively will pop up within the new Highlights tab, which you can access from the “save stories” tab in the left sidebar.

The new feature is basically an iteration of what the old version of Digg (pre-Betaworks) attempted (and failed) to do. You can also think of Pulse Highlight as a curator similar to Facebook, only showing you the news stories and shared links from within a feed based on your reading habits and interactions with the social network. However, Pulse may be able to put a fresh spin on things since its focused entirely on news stories rather than all social interactions.

“Is a story’s worth based on number of shares? We believe in quality over quantity: We don’t think an article needs 500-plus ‘likes’ to make it interesting, inspiring, or share-worthy,” said Pulse founder Akshay Kothari about the new feature. “Highlights is based on your personal network, so if a close friend or family member cares about a story, you’ll see it in your feed.”

Stories that appear in the Highlights tab show who initially shared the posts, and you can track conversations about them via push notifications. You can also add posts to the Highlights tab or share to your social networks.

The new features is available today via Android devices and should roll out to iOS devices in the near future.

Web sharing tool provider ShareThis has added a new tool to its lineup with ShareNow, which allows publishers to provide automatic sharing to channels like Facebook and Twitter without having to build a customized social reader.

ShareNow, which is in beta in the ShareThis Labs, acts as a small widget on any webpage and can help publishers provide a frictionless sharing experience to social networks for readers. Ideally, the solution can increase social activity, page views, and level of user control. Readers can “share, delete, and re-share” without leaving a publisher’s website.

“We’ve always been all about giving people the flexibility to share the content that moves them, whenever and however they want,” ShareThis CEO Kurt Abrahamson said in a statement. “And we want to make things as simple as possible for publishers to offer their readers that flexibility. Until now, there was no way for publishers to enable effortless sharing on their sites without custom development on the social network itself.”

The company said ShareNow promises:

• Ease of implementation: Enable effortless sharing without creating a custom solution
• In-site content management: Continually share or delete shares without having to leave the publisher site
• Seamless click-through to shared content: Recipients of shared content can simply click through to read without having to install an additional social reader app
• Visibility and awareness: The ShareNow widget is always present next to the content, gently alerting readers whether the content has been shared
• User control: A simple “on” and “off” switch allows users to enable or disable automatic sharing and re-share or delete shares without navigating away from the page

Photo credit: Igor Zh./Shutterstock

The question, of course, is how.

Working with social infrastructure company Gigya, Indigo sharply increased social sharing and doubled social traffic from all sources, including Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest … in just two months.

“We’re going through a massive transformation into becoming the book lover’s lifestyle store,” Indigo director Dave McLean told VentureBeat. “That includes home and lifestyle products.”

As the company works through the transformation from books to the bookish lifestyle, Indigo wanted to engage with clients and invite them into the brand evolution. That’s where Gigya came in. Gigya provides social plugins, gamification tools, and extensive social data that helps sites find and reward top fans.

“We wanted three things,” McLean said. “A tool for customers to become more engaged, insight into which new products where worthy of being pinned, and the ability to reach the global Pinterest marketplace.”

When Indigo launched Pinterest sharing tools in early March of this year, the company saw an almost immediate 78 percent jump in social sharing and 218 percent leap in social traffic.

“It spawned a sharing frenzy,” McLean told VentureBeat.

Indigo credits three things for the instant Pinterest success.

First of all, the site’s core demographic is women in their 30s and 40s, which matches up with Pinterest fairly well. Secondly, the company’s new products were highly pinnable: visual and appealing. And thirdly, Indigo credits Gigya for the tools that made it happen, simply.

But it wasn’t all about sharing. Using the Gigya tools, Indigo is also finding out what content is worthy of being pinned, and feeding that data into the innovation and product development process on a weekly basis, helping the company decide which products to carry and market.

And sales results? I asked Indigo about sales from social traffic.

“We do track sales as a result of social traffic, but so far social referred revenue still represents a small portion of overall revenue,” McLean says.

The company says it’s still early to decide what social commerce really means and how it works.

“We’re in the first inning of a 9-inning ball game,” according to McLean.

But one tidbit of data the company will release: Conversion rates for Pinterest traffic are 50 percent higher than conversion rates from other traffic. That’s not just social traffic but all referred traffic, and that’s a major increase.

This is something we’ve heard before, and it’s good news for Pinterest and retailers, though perhaps not as good for Facebook and Twitter.

Mclean says the company, which also runs 240 physical locations, is still just learning to understand social.

With results like these, Indigo is obviously off to a good start.

Image credit: Stefano Lunardi/ShutterStock

Web-clipping and bookmarking tool Clipboard is dressing up in its best new features and making a grand public debut today. The site, which has been invite-only since it launched in October, is finally open to anyone who wants to sign up. It is also introducing a new Boards feature, which lumps items into collections by tags, as well as a few other new tweaks.

Clipboard lets you bookmark, collect, organize, and share web-clippings. It’s not limited to images — it clips text, audio, animations, and fully formatted sections of webpages with links intact. You can keep your clippings private and use it as a self-organization tool, Evernote and Delicious style, or share them with a select group or the world. You can also follow other users and checkout their public clips.

A Pinterest Board (left) and a Clipboard Board (right).

Though Clipboard founder Gary Flake bristles at the comparison, his baby obviously has a lot in common with visual bookmarking juggernaut Pinterest. There’s the basic clipping concept, the image-heavy irregular-grid layout, and the buttons to like or re-share a bookmark. Even the star new feature, Boards, begs a comparison to Pinterest’s Boards, what with the exact same name and almost identical design (pictured right).

But comparisons are beside the point. Clipboard takes what Pinterest does well and expands on it, improves it, and I think infuses it with a new level of usefulness that is missing from the shallow, all-social site.

Computer scientist Flake has thought extensively about what he calls the “sharing landscape,” coming at it from the uniquely cerebral background you’d expect from a former technical fellow at Microsoft. He’s carefully considered the other major players and the different motivations of their user bases.

“What you put on Facebook is to a great extent what you want other people to think about you. What you put on Pinterest is more about your aspirations,” said Flake. “Clipboard is much more about getting stuff done. The focus of our DNA is first and foremost to be good for one user, and then be social, and then be aspirational.”

Clipboard accomplishes this by having more useful content than Pinterest. Where a Pin might show a pretty image of a cake recipe, you still have to click through to get that list of ingredients. Clipboard displays the full recipe along with any relevant in-text links. It also shifts the focus from exhibitionism to useful tool by being private-by-default with social options instead of the other way around.

“We respect users’ privacy more than anything else,” said Flake. “You own the data and you are lending it to us. It’s your stuff, not ours.”

Click to enlarge

Flake was kind enough to sketch up this awesome chart (right) showing where Clipboard falls in the ecosystem of sharing and clipping tools (we love it when founders draw diagrams for us). It is ambitious, able to collect complex data instead of just images, and works as a solo or a social sharing tool.

Currently, Clipboard is just focused on wooing new users and getting established, but Flake has something rare in Silicon Valley: a plan to monetize his product that isn’t based on selling the company. One option is to take “the intent and the context and how that’s presented and turn that into a similar alignment of interest.” That means Clipboard could one day use your data to serve you with offers, products, or ads that are right up your alley. Other possibilities Flake is considering are an enterprise product and revenue sharing.

The young company has already rolled up a couple of competitors, Amplify and Clipmarks, but faces stiff competition from the revived Delicious and Snip.it. Clipboard has received funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Betaworks, Index Ventures, CrunchFund, SV Angel, First Round Capital, and others.

The numbers don’t lie. Third-party developers, who played a large role in Twitter’s early growth and buzz, just don’t matter.

The passive-aggressive blog post is a Silicon Valley art form, and Williams, who helped push blogging into the mainstream with his earlier startup, Blogger, is surely a master of the medium. A chart Williams includes (pictured below, with a few annotations from yours truly) tells the story: After Twitter introduced its own iPhone and BlackBerry apps, on top of its own website, SMS, and mobile Web versions, it now controls the top five most popular ways people access Twitter. No third-party app amounts to more than 4 percent of Twitter’s audience — and the most popular of those is TwitPic, a photo-sharing service.

“You’ll also note that third-party clients continue to play an important role for many people,” Williams writes in the most anodyne of tones. He gives a nod to services like TweetDeck, which power-user social-media marketers adore for pumping out their endless messages to followers. And 300,000 apps connect to Twitter using a technology called OAuth, which allows them to broadcast messages through the service. Foursquare, the fast-growing location-based check-in service, is a notable example; users can announce to their friends on Twitter when they arrive at a venue.

But those followers, by and large, are getting those messages on Twitter.com, which is used by 78 percent of Twitter’s audience. One in seven are going to Twitter’s own mobile website. And Twitter’s text-messaging service still reaches a bigger audience than users of Twitter’s iPhone or BlackBerry apps.

The real question is who Williams wrote this blog post for.

One possible audience: Twitter’s developers, who continue to be restive after Twitter moved to buy the leading iPhone app, Tweetie, and announced its intentions to take over key functions currently provided by third parties, like TweetMeme’s button for publishers to share stories on Twitter, now rendered outmoded by an official Twitter sharing button. By sharing these statistics, Williams effectively puts them in their place, reminding them that while they may still have their uses, they don’t drive Twitter’s value anymore. Twitter’s a casino, and while a few developers may make money, the house always wins.

The other audience: Would-be acquirers. Google Friend Connect, a technology used by the search giant to link its properties to other Web services is mentioned as a third-party app. But it only counts for 2 percent of Twitter’s audience. If Google wants to get Twitter’s juice, in other words, they can’t just hook up to its servers. They’ve got to get serious.

There’s no reason to believe Google and Twitter have renewed acquisition talks, as PaidContent founder Rafat Ali suggested yesterday — on Twitter, naturally.

But Google desperately wants to counter Facebook in social media. Twitter’s the only player with a meaningful social network anywhere near Facebook’s scale. If Google’s long-rumored Google Me social product doesn’t pan out, if its shopping spree of social acquisitions doesn’t coalesce into a coherent strategy, will buying Twitter be its Plan B?

Williams, who sold his Blogger to Google, surely knows how this game is played. Consider his post just another smart move.

[Photo: Joi Ito]

After ten iterations of iTunes, Ping marks Apple’s first step into the social realm. Jobs played it off as a simple way to discover music by following friends and artists. But he also called it a “Facebook plus Twitter for music.” With Google, Apple’s new archenemy in the mobile world, eyeing its own version of Facebook and Twitter, it’s likely that Ping is a part of much larger strategy for Apple.

iTunes has always been a hub for Apple, bringing together its devices like the Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, with content: music, movies, TV shows, apps and books. But while it’s great software, it has always lacked something that is a major part of the way we consume content: people.

Others have been quick to notice the gap and jump on it. Last.fm, for example, launched a social network around music many years ago which tracked and shared music you listened to on iTunes with friends. MySpace offered a way to connect people around content like music and artists, and grew into a social network of mammoth scale. While Apple products like the iPod have been a popular way to experience content in the past, the discovery of that content has often taken place elsewhere — the places where our friends hang out online.

So, Ping looks to bridge the gap between what iTunes has to offer — music — and where people discover those offerings — namely social networks.

But music is no way near the end-all-be-all for iTunes: The store sells everything from movies to TV shows, podcasts, books/audiobooks, and apps today.

This means that Apple would be short-sighted in looking at Ping as just a music-discovery tool. More likely, it sees it as a way to get serious about social, something it has never paid much attention to. It’s mastered the technology, the content, and now, it is going after the most important layer: people.

Today, on its launch date, I can follow my friends and artists on Ping, see the kind of music they’re consuming, and what they have to say about it. But in the future, it’s inevitable that I’ll also be able to see the movies and shows they’re watching, the books they’re reading, and the apps they’re using. In other words, it’s a social network based around content and consumption, not status and comments.

This should be news to Facebook and MySpace. The former has tried to be a neutral platform for sharing content, while MySpace, with an early lead in Hollywood’s movies-and-music scene, has tried to reinvent itself around the “socialization of content.” But with 160 million users and millions of songs, movies, shows, apps, and books, Apple has a far more direct connection with content. On Apple’s products, people don’t just talk about content. They consume it. And, intriguingly, they pay for it — something that social networks have struggled to capitalize on, often by sending people to iTunes to buy content, in exchange for a share of the sale.

There are implications for other players besides Facebook and MySpace. When giants fight, startups get trampled. Blippy, a service that tracks purchases, lets you see what others are buying on iTunes. Miso and Tunerfish, two startups in the social TV space, let you track what friends are watching. If Ping were to start tracking activity other than music, there would be little incentive to use such services.

Apple must surely be thinking it’s time to cut out the middlemen. Who needs partners when you’ve got 160 million friends?

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After Twitter spent its formative years just trying to stay operational, the San Francisco-based microblogging service seems to be entering a new creative period. Twitter wants you to make more friends — but the fast-growing startup also seems to be finding smarter ways to cultivate allies.

The site’s developers have spent the last week trying out a number of new features on the homepage and users’ profile pages, in addition to debuting an official Tweet button to make it easy to share Twitter posts on other websites.

Twitter hasn’t entirely escaped its unstable past: Its Tweet button accidentally made websites that had implemented it inaccessible shortly after its rollout.

Perhaps to avoid such debacles, Twitter is rolling out new features progressively to small groups of users, a standard practice in the Web industry — but that means not everyone will see them when logged in. But together, they paint a picture of Twitter seeking to get users more engaged with the service.

Most users earlier in the week noticed a ‘Who to follow’ section on their homepage. Taken right out of Facebook’s popular ‘People You May Know’ which suggests friends on the social network, the feature assembles a list of users similar to those you already follow.

Similarly, some also reported seeing ‘You both follow’ on other users’ profiles, and its inverse, ‘Also followed by’. Facebook has long listed ‘Mutual friends’ on its profile pages. It’s a handy way to compare how much you have in common with other users in terms of the people you follow, while the latter is a good way to check for validation of a user from those you follow. Both can be useful indicators when considering whether to follow a particular user.

Kris Colvin from FreshID reported seeing a section called ‘Included in’ on her Twitter profile. Colvin said it appeared to be based on data from Tlists, a site that crawls Twitter lists to identify authoritative users on Twitter and categorize them. It then creates new lists to categorize that user. For example, Colvin’s Twitter profile shows “Included in: Advertising & Marketing, Social Media, Kansas City.” The categories link to Tlists lists.

That Twitter would integrate its site so closely with a third-party service is surprising. In the past, Twitter has acquired startups developing useful Twitter-based services, like the Summize search engine, or simply imitated their work.

Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist who invested in Twitter, warned third-party developers who were merely “filling holes” that Twitter would soon grow to take their place. In May, Twitter bought Tweetie and rebranded the app as its own official offering for the iPhone, while simultaneously also launching its own BlackBerry app to displace market leader UberTwitter. In the same month, the company also revealed its ‘Promoted Tweets’ ad model, putting weight on similar sponsored tweet offerings like Ad.ly and TweetUp, and later condemned their existence by barring third-party ads out of user timelines in APIs.

The Tlists integration suggests a new, more cooperative approach, as CNET’s Caroline McCarthy noted about Twitter’s new Tweet button, which was developed with help from third-party sharing service TweetMeme.

With Twitter pushing for ubiquity and control over its branding and reach, the challenge for the company will be to carry out its interests while tapping its active and engaged developer base. It may have well discovered that the fastest way to fill a hole is to hand a friend a shovel.

The news was first reported in TechCrunch. Cofounder Philip Kaplan confirmed to VentureBeat both the funding and the valuation. New investor August Capital led the round, with participation from Charles River Ventures, which incubated Blippy and led its seed round.

The company’s basic concept, where users can automatically broadcast purchases from their credit cards, has drawn a fair share of skepticism. Is a credit-card statement something people really want to share? It’s still too early to know whether the idea can appeal to a mass audience. Kaplan did say Blippy’s user base is “growing pretty fast.” He declined to provide specific numbers, but pointed to traffic data from Compete showing 125,000 unique visitors in March and steady growth.

Kaplan added that Blippy has been “listening to both our users and non-users” about how to make them more comfortable with the service. The team has already redesigned the site once, and among other changes has tweaked the process so users can approve each purchase before it’s shared. Most users still choose to share their data automatically, he said, though they might only show purchases from a specific credit card or website.

The company also plans to launch an application programming interface soon that will allow developers to use Blippy data in other web applications.

Blippy has now raised a total of $12.8 million. It has 10 employees.

“We’re going to keep things lean,” Kaplan said. “We will expand the team as needed. It gives us the freedom to be able to invest in expanding the site, expanding the services, marketing, business development.”

As Facebook pushes to make its “Like” button a standard on the Internet, not just its own website, Meebo, a smaller startup based in Mountain View, Calif., is trying to solve the problem through a new Web standard called Extended Authentication, or XAuth. And it’s got Google in its camp.

“It’s about giving [users] the services they care about,” said Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg in an interview with VentureBeat. And also, crucially for Meebo, it’s a chance to show users an ad.

Meebo is best known for its online chat rooms, which let people sign on to a variety of instant-messaging services to communicate with each other. But it’s expanded its offerings with an intriguing advertising offering. The Meebo Bar, a toolbar that publishers place on their site, features a persistent ad as well as links that allow users to drag pictures and links to share them with their friends on a variety of services, from Twitter to Facebook on down.

The trouble for Meebo and its publishing partners, which include the likes of Time Inc. and MTV Networks is picking which services to show a given user. One might guess that Digg would work for a site with a young, heavily male audience, or that Reddit would be appropriate for a more tech-savvy audience. Or you could actually figure out which sharing services a user belongs to and only show those.

But hitting the top 20 sharing sites one at a time would slow page loads to a crawl. XAuth could offer “a lot more performance for the sites,” said Joseph Smarr, a social Web engineer at Google who helped develop the standard.

Supporting the XAuth standard fits well into Google’s strategy of pushing open Web standards. But it also could help Google slow the growth of Twitter and Facebook, both of which are pursuing separate strategies to make their social sharing services integral parts of other websites. By making it easier to include second-tier sharing services — a category that includes the controversial and underperforming Google Buzz — XAuth could make Twitter and Facebook just two easily replaced sharing options, rather than services hardcoded into websites.

Microsoft, Yahoo, MySpace, Disqus, and a handful of other players are also supporting the standard. What they all have in common: They’re not Facebook or Twitter.

The challenge with XAuth: privacy. Even though it’s fairly easy to discover that a given person belongs to, say, Facebook or LinkedIn with a simple Web search, there’s something creepy about a third-party site knowing all the services you belong to. There’s the potential for a backlash similar to the one Google faced with Buzz, which turned Gmail users’ private contacts into a public social network. Google had to rapidly change course and make much of the information it exposed about its users private again.

XAuth will have a website, XAuth.org, where users can disable the service altogether. But that means users will have to opt out of the service instead of explicitly opting in.

The Hollywood Reporter, which features the Meebo Bar, plans to adopt XAuth, but the service is not yet live on that website. (A mockup of how it might be implemented is featured above.)

Google’s Smarr acknowledged that XAuth could raise privacy concerns, but pointed out that the service as implemented by Google only informs website publishers that a given user has a Gmail account.

“I always think back to when people got freaked out when they realized you could do a Google search and find out about them online,” said Smarr. “There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of user education [needed].”

And that may be the ultimate challenge for XAuth. Facebook and Twitter’s single-service implementations don’t require a lot of education. You’re already on Facebook, right? Why not share things there?

“There are all these questions that have to be answered,” said Smarr. “The status quo is not good for anyone, because we end up shutting out users who use one of the smaller sites. There has to be some mechanism to experiment to find the right balance.”

With Facebook and Twitter aiming to dominate the sharing of content, experiments like XAuth are becoming an urgent matter for everyone who’s not them.