The founding developer of the popular blogging software WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, shared some of his thoughts about what’s next for the platform today. WordPress is completely open source, but Mullenweg founded the company behind the business arm of the product, Automattic.

At the paidContent event today, Mullenweg shared that a new “radically simplified” version of WordPress will be available soon.

On his blog, Mullenweg took things a step further, discussing what he calls the “fourth phase of our evolution.”:

WordPress was first for pure blogging, then became embraced as a CMS (though some people still deny this), is seeing growth and innovation in being used as an application platform (I think we’re about a third of the way through that), and just now starting to embrace social and mobile — the fourth phase of our evolution.

Mullenweg aims to help make WordPress “shorter, simpler, and faster”, making everyone in the word a publisher with the click of a button. He mentions the importance of mobile and social being the future of WordPress, and that we can start seeing the direction the software is going in its official iOS and Android apps.

How will Mullenweg re-imagine and “radically simplify” WordPress as we know it today? “Even though I’m thinking about this all the time I don’t have all the answers yet — that’s what makes it fun.” he shares.

WordPress is set to turn 9 years old this Sunday, and it’s amazing to see how far the platform has come. I can truly say that without WordPress, I’m not sure if I’d be writing this post and have the ability to share it with all of you.

A few weeks ago, the Google Chrome team launched a new app in its store called My Chrome Theme, which allows you to create and share your own custom theme for Google’s browser.

Today, the team shared that My Chrome Theme is now available in 36 more languages, making it more accessible to everyone who wants to get in on skinning Chrome.

Once you install the app from the Chrome Store, you simply upload a photo and start changing around the colors for the browser’s taskbar and such:

Once you’ve gotten your theme ready to share with the world, the app provides you with a link to send out to all of your friends. Socializing the browser a little bit more is a nice move on Google’s part, especially since desktop browsing is such a personal experience.

Since it’s an easy tool to use, anyone can create a theme. If you don’t think that browser personalization is an important feature, you haven’t talked to people like my mom. She’s all about making everything on the computer her own.

➤ My Chrome Theme

Sharing music is becoming a favorite social feature for many people with Facebook introducing the News Ticker and deep integration with apps like Spotify and Rdio using the Open Graph platform.

Letting people know what you’re listening to and what music you’ve purchased is a great way to not only let your friends know what you’re interested in, but it’s a great way for artists to sell more music and nab new fans.

Google Play is getting some social treatment thanks to a Google+ integration called “Shared With Me” that is an automatically generated playlist of all of the music your Google+ friends have shared with you on the service. This functionality lets you take advantage of the fact that if your friend buys a song, you get a full listen for free.

Here’s what the Google Play team had to say about Shared With Me:

Just like your email inbox, there’s a handy count of everything you haven’t listened to yet. Those tracks are bolded in the playlist. You’ll see a thumbnail of the person who shared the track with you and the first few words of their Google+ post. You can sort this list by song, sharer, duration, album, artist, or even price, and delete any tracks or albums you don’t want to see there. If you love what you hear, each track has a buy button so you can own it too.

Music you buy and share will show up in the “Shared with me” playlists of the people in your Google+ circles.

When you go to Google Play, you’ll see the new playlist on the left hand side:

Along with the song and artist information, you’ll also see who shared the track with you. Right from this playlist you can give the track a listen and of course buy it for yourself if you like.

➤ Google Play

The social mobile app boon is thanks in large part to Facebook and it’s Open Graph platform it launched last year at f8.

Many apps have seen explosive growth and engagement thanks to sharing actions on the Timeline of Facebook users, and the social network has shared some astonishing numbers that support the trend.

According to Facebook, it sent 160 million visitors to mobile apps totaling 1.1B visits:

- Facebook sent more than 160 million visitors last month to mobile apps (up from 60 million in late February).
- These mobile visitors were responsible for more than 1.1 billion visits to mobile apps in the same time frame (up from 320 million in late February).
- Seven of the top ten grossing iOS apps and six of the top ten grossing Android apps are integrated with Facebook.

One of the apps that has Facebook to thank for its growth is social video sharing site Viddy. The app has grown its userbase to over 16M users, with the majority coming once videos and actions started appearing on its member’s Timelines.

The integration of Facebook was a huge jumping off point for iOS-only-at-first Instagram, leaving many Android users feeling left out until they got their own version of the app.

Facebook integration, once only helpful for easy sign-up and login, is doing more than driving new users to apps. Mobile content from the apps are seeing an increase in visits as well. Movie review app Flixster says that its visitor numbers have risen 10X since it launched its Open Graph integration just four weeks ago.

As expected, more of Google’s products are getting the social treatment with Google+ functionality. The latest project to get further “Plussed” is Gmail, and the features are actually quite handy.

The “people” widget that shows up when you hover over one of your friends in Gmail, will now include thumbnails of recent photos and videos they’ve posted on Google+, along with the other recent updates they’ve shared.

Here’s what the team had to say about the feature:

Gmail and Google+ are both great places to share images and videos with your friends, and we’re always looking for ways to make this easier. We’ve been showing recent Google+ posts in the people widget for some time, and a few weeks ago we added the ability for you to share YouTube videos from your email to your Google+ stream.

Today, we’re expanding recent Google+ posts in the people widget to include thumbnails of the photos and videos shared in the post. We’re also making it easier to share inline images in emails — just hover your mouse over the image in your email and you will see an option to share it on Google+. We’re still rolling out the update, so if you don’t see it yet, sit tight.

Here’s what the people widget might look like once the feature hits your Gmail account:

The ability to share an inline image from your inbox by just hovering over it is a handy addition to the share button that Gmail added for Google+ last year.

This is further proof that Google is all about social, and there’s no turning back now. It’s also further proof that when people are using any Google product, they’ll also be a Google+ user, whether they visit the destination site or not.

The social profile network About.me, which was acquired by AOL in 2011 is continuing to expand its usefulness with a new iOS app that makes interacting with people easier.

About.me for iOS displays your profile beautifully on your device as well as tag people as favorites and find people that are close-by. We haven’t heard much from the product as of late, but it’s clear that AOL is not done adding functionality to it.

If you don’t already have an About.me account, which serves as a virtual business card for you, you can sign up from within the app or just login to your existing one.

On the main screen, you’ll be shown featured profiles much like you are on the current site:

As you dig a bit deeper into profiles, you’ll notice that you can share the people you find on Facebook, Twitter, or via email. This is neat if you’re looking for a new designer to hire at your company and want to exchange notes on potential recruits:

Since you can plug all of your social accounts up to the service, like foursquare, Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, it’s a good way to socialize with new friends as well. The app also lets you update your own account information quite easily.

The new functionality, called “Who’s Nearby?”, is more of a feature we’d see in an app like Highlight, allowing you to explore the network of folks who have a profile based on where they’re located. This is an ultra-social feature and it’s interesting to see AOL taking the product in this direction, since there’s already a lot of competition:

For me personally, I don’t use the site as much as I used to. It was fun at first to change your “cover photo” which is a beautiful high-resolution profile picture, but once you’ve connected all of your services, there’s not much of a reason to go back to it. It’ll be interesting to see if this new app kicks up interactions between users, or drives anymore traffic to the blogs that are hooked up to it.

➤ About.me for iOS

As someone who isn’t ingrained in the culture of advertising, I felt like I was in a foreign land at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco. That is, until every other word I heard at the conference was “social”. Now that’s something I feel comfortable talking about.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of discussion about ROI, CPC, CPM, and all of the other usual advertising jargon. But for me, it felt like the advertising community was just getting its feet wet with monetizing social services, even though Facebook and Twitter have been around for quite some time now.

The problem with advertising on social properties is that its users are continual moving targets. When I’m on Facebook, it’s easy for me to leave Facebook quite often. As soon as someone posts a link, I’m out of there. The same goes for Twitter. What advertisers and marketers haven’t quite grasped yet is the concept of engagement.

Even though Facebook has over 850 million users, they’re not sitting back watching ads like those who are watching the Super Bowl. They’re changing the “channel” constantly, and the response to that has been to track those users wherever they go. That’s not going to cut it, so brands are going to have to actually dig in and do some long tail work if they want to grab eyeballs and clicks.

Take us with you!!!!

One of the concepts that was kicked around quite a bit at ad:tech is engagement with potential customers through rewards. By making your marketing message “shareable”, you can give people incentives to carry your message with them wherever they go. That’s the smart way to do things, and if brands start giving things out to people for watching their ads or mentioning them on their Timeline, that’s where some money can start flowing.

Take a company I saw this week for example, it’s called Fanzy. The company created a Facebook app that lets customers not only become fans of a brand, but want to become an even bigger fan by way of rewards.

By creating “super fans”, you’re cutting out the need for spending ad dollars on “remnants”, meaning the crap that is leftover on ad networks that only get in front of people who will probably never click on a link you pay to display, or buy what you’re selling. By engaging people, brands can focus on the folks who can really spread the word about them and their product.

Fanzy got it right and I hope that advertisers paid attention. Something tells me that they didn’t, though. “Engaging” people sounds like hard work, because it is. It’s also something that a company has to adopt throughout the entire staff, or at least the teams that interact with customers. It’s much easier to pay a crap-ton of money for a bunch of display ads and *hope* that people click on them. It’s all advertisers know, and it’s the only option that advertising networks have given them.

Engage or die

A flashy ad unit isn’t going to do the trick to get people’s attention any more on the web, it’s a completely different ballgame now. The TV ads we see now are laced with hashtags and requests for Likes on Facebook, it’s becoming commonplace.

What companies have to really figure out though is how to turn those hashtags and Likes into continual business, interaction, and word of mouth. That’s the “everything else” that comes along with the social web, and I don’t think advertisers are prepared to deal with it yet.

Just being on Facebook and Twitter has turned into the mad rush to get a website up in the 90′s, and it’s not enough anymore. Having intelligent and friendly people behind those accounts continually engaging your customers are the only way to keep them.

No matter what new fancy and flashy ad unit some advertising network comes up with, you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and engage. Otherwise, kiss your marketing dollars goodbye.

I’m here at the ad:tech conference in San Francisco and one thing is certain; as hard as Silicon Valley is working to create new social products, the advertising industry is working that much harder to keep up with the innovation.

Monetization is a dirty word when it comes to social services on the web, however, most of us forget that to create a sustainable product and business, making money from users is the only way to survive. Sure, you can raise gobs of money like Twitter, but even it has introduced its own ad model to rake in some cash to stay afloat.

In an era where everyone expects something for free, asking someone to pay a monthly fee for their Facebook account seems absolutely absurd. How can Facebook make money then? Advertising, of course. The problem is that the advertising model that has kept the web making money is old and isn’t performing as well as it has in the past. We’re all trained to skip over certain types of ads, and at some point our eyes simply won’t “see” them anymore.

How are these social services going to make the ads more relevant and interesting to us? Our data, of course. All of the things that you “Like” on Facebook and retweet on Twitter will be factored into the type of advertising that you see. The closer the ad is to your actual interests, the better chance there is that you’ll click. Makes sense, but it’s starting to kick up dust when it comes to privacy.

Recently, Senator Al Franken gave a speech where he delivered the line:

…accumulating data about you isn’t just a strange hobby for these corporations. It’s their whole business model. And you are not their client. You are their product.

We don’t mind telling Facebook who our friends are and what TV shows that we like to watch, but now that it wants to make money, people are starting to fuss about it and now realize how important their privacy online may be. It’s a fine line, and when it comes to social services that we pour private data into, it’s all fun and games until they try to make a buck off of us.

That leads us to the ad:tech conference, advertisers and companies who display ads are trying to come up with the right way to get us to “pay the bills” without creeping us out or turning us off completely.

Just how many companies are working on solving this problem? Take a look at a report compiled by a company called LUMA Partners, called the LUMAscape:

If you click through and see how all of the parts fit together, there are companies that sit as middle men between social networks and ad networks, middle men for those middle men, and more. I spent about a half hour last night digging through this mapping and it made my eyes cross.

At the end of the day, we’re going to be shown advertising whether we like it or not. Take “on demand” television for example. When I watch a TV show or Movie on Comcast, they don’t let me skip through the commercials. That’s my way of paying to see the content. Sure, if I wanted to see it ad-free, I could go to a service like iTunes and pay for it, but I enjoy “free”. Free comes with a cost, and that cost is our eyeballs and data.

There are companies here at ad:tech who are trying to make the advertising model more interactive though, while keeping our privacy safe. Companies like Google track our activity as we surf the web and display ads to us based on those preferences. It’s getting them into a bit of trouble though, and that behavioral tracking and ad display is starting to freak people out.

One company that’s paying attention to this space is called TRUSTe, and it launched an advertising platform at the conference that allows consumers to opt out of specific types of ads and give some feedback to advertisers on what they’d rather see. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we have today. Here’s an interview that my good friend Jake Ludington did with TRUSTe’s VP of Product, Kevin Trilli:

What Trilli keys in on is the fact that users are starting to think about their privacy and the best way to handle those concerns is to give consumers choice in return. Again, ads aren’t going away no matter what, so is this type of “choice” good enough? It’s the best option that I see right now, simply because users are already behaving in a social way on platforms like Facebook. Giving its users a choice on what they’d like to see, and how they’re targeted, is the best way to interact.

The more transparent the industry is, the quicker it can grow and monetize. Yes, thinking about being a “product” is a bit scary as a user, but as long as we have control over how our information is shared and with who, we can settle into the idea that this is nothing more than having to watch ads when you fire up On Demand on your TV.

The march towards merging all of Google’s products continues, and this time it’s Google Contacts that’s getting the social treatment.

The Google Contacts team announced last night that address book information will start being displayed on your friends Google+ profiles, if you have them stored.

This is a pretty handy update and doesn’t require you to add or remove any information on your end, since the details are completely populated from the visitors Google Contact account.

Many of you, like me, use Google Contacts to manage your personal address book (contacts.google.com). If that’s the case, then starting today we’ll include this contact info on your friends’ Google+ profiles — for your eyes only, of course.

This way, if you have your roommate’s new phone number in Google Contacts, it’ll also be available when you stop by his profile. Just look for the new “Details from Google Contacts” section.

There are no privacy concerns as this only shows up for the viewer, which is a more secure way to handle this information than Facebook does. Facebook lets users optionally share their contact information and then choose who they can display it to.

It’s becoming clearer that Google is starting to use its services in harmony, rather than make us jump from one browser tab to another like we’ve had to do previously.

Yes, it’s March Madness time. The time where everyone who attended a popular college magically becomes a basketball fan.

Google is getting into the college basketball mix with some fun initiatives this year, led by some Google+ interaction, Google Earth tours of stadiums, and handy search tricks.

First things first, the company has projected its winner based on the thing it knows the best, search volume. According to Google, the NCAA Tournament winner will be (drumroll), Kentucky. I’m not going to agree or disagree, but we’ll definitely revisit its picks when the tournament is all said and done.

Head on over to its projection page and you can see the road to the championship supported by which teams are Googling the most.

Since search is such a huge part of what Google does, the company has pointed out that you can follow your favorite teams just by searching for them. For example, this search for Duke shows the results of their last game and the date and time of their next one:

To follow your favorite teams on Google+, the team has created a circle of all of the teams who have a page. Feel free to follow all of them, but prepare yourself for a stream full of “ra ra”.

Additionally, ESPN will be hosting live hangouts on Google+ throughout the entire tournament starting on March 21st with Doug Gottlieb as your host. This is a pretty big deal for Google as I think that hangouts can become a bigger part of the TV watching experience, allowing viewers to interact directly with on-air personalities.

Finally, the company has released a really cool Google Earth video that serves as a tour for all of the locations where games are being played:

That’s quite a commitment to March Madness for any company, I’d say. This campaign reflects Google’s new focus on social, as well as bringing all of its assets together in harmony. With Google+, search, Earth, and YouTube, you’re getting an early look at how integrated all of Google’s services will be moving forward.