Lucky sort is a two-year-old data analytics service that “makes huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize.” According to a post on their website, Lucky Sort says that several team members will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter’s revenue engineering department. It appears that Lucky Sort will be shutting down.

“We’ll be helping current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter,” says Lucky Sort CEO Noah Pepper

Welcome aboard, @luckysort! luckysort.com

— Twitter (@twitter) May 13, 2013

“Two years ago I started Lucky Sort with several friends. Our goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis…in building Lucky Sort we had an enormous amount of support from friends, employees, advisors and investors. It has been uplifting to have so many people help us and it highlighted just how much business is a social endeavour,” says Pepper.

The new look is all about discovery, as Pinterest wants users to spend more time browsing and pinning. To this end, Pinterest’s new look strongly affects individual pin pages. These “close-up views” now feature other information for people to use as a springboard for other, similar content.

Each individual pin page now features pins from the same board, pins from the same source, and a widget for “people who pinned this also pinned,” which Pinterest notes is exactly what it sounds like. Each of these new content boxes allow users to discover new content from similar users.

Pinterest says that they hope to bring these additions to their iOS and Android apps soon.

Pinterest has also made some updates to how you navigate around the site:

“We wanted to make things simpler and cleaner, without requiring you to learn anything new. What you’ll find are some subtle but useful changes, like bigger pins, so you see more of what you love. We also responded to some feedback from pinners who told us they hated losing their place while browsing. Now, when you scroll through pins and click on something that interests you, the back button lands you right back where you were no matter how far you’ve gone.”

Improving discovery is important for users, but it’s also important for the site, who is looking to show potential marketers that Pinterest is worth their time. Earlier this month, Pinterest debuted an analytics tool for site owners. Currently free, Pinterest Web Analytics shows site owners how many people have pinned from their site, the reach of those pins across Pinterest, and the traffic referred to their sites from Pinterest.

With the (currently) free product, site owners can track how pins that come from their site perform on Pinterest. Site owners can see how many people have pinned from their site, the reach of those pins across Pinterest, and the traffic referred to their sites from Pinterest.

The web analytics also show site owners info on the most repinned, most clicked, and most recent pins so that they can accurately judge what kind of content is most popular in the present. “For example, if you have a travel blog, you’ll be able to see whether people are pinning your ski vacation posts or beach vacation posts more,” says Pinterest.

The new Pinterest Web Analytics is only available for verified websites. If you’re looking to verify your site’s Pinterest presence, check your settings page. Once you verify your site, click on “Analytics” in the menu on the top right-hand side (with Pinterest’s new look). And that’s it. The service is currently free to any and all verified profiles.

“Today’s announcement builds on the set of tools we offer for website owners including business accounts, Pin It buttons and board widgets. We think that these tools will help website owners understand what’s working for them and what’s not so that they can create even better pins in the future. We even updated our business site with new tips and case studies to make things easier. Over the coming months, we hope to add new tools and more detailed insights, so let us know what else you would like to see,” says Pinterest.

It’s no secret that Pinterest is looking for ways to monetize, and slowly implementing more tools for businesses on the site is a first step. Laying down the groundwork for personalized analytics could help Pinterest show businesses the value of the service, if and when the site choose to get into the advertising game. Plus, the analytics service by itself could possibly generate revenue for Pinterest, considering the company keeps expanding its features so that it could offer additional services for a premium fee.

Available today, Foursquare for Business is a standalone iOS app that allows business owners who manage a location on Foursquare to post updates, check analytics, and manage specials.

As of now, the most useful aspect of the brand new app is the analytics. Business owners who have already claimed their location on Foursquare can view recent check-ins and tips – so they’ll know if Susan B just told other users that the spicy beef sandwich is to die for or if the thai noodles are cold and icky. Business owners can also see stats for all-time check-ins, likes, and view “recent top customers.”

Businesses can also use the new app to post photo updates, and then easily cross-post them to Twitter and Facebook. When a business posts an update on Foursquare, anyone and everyone who has ever checked-in or even looked at their page will see the update in their stream – no subscription or “follow” necessary.

Lastly, the app lets businesses manage their specials. Note that I said “manage.” Businesses still have to create the special on the web, but once it’s created they can manage it with the app. This is a limitation, but one that we expect Foursquare to deal with in the coming weeks. The app did just launch, of course.

As of now, the app is only available for U.S. businesses.

[h/t The Next Web]

“One of the most shared pods from our first release was our colorful social network visualization, writes Wolfram Alpha’s John Burnham in a blog post. “We’re extending this idea to help you better understand how your social network fits together. To start with, we’re showing you a new visualization that highlights friends based on the way that they fit into your network.”

“Let’s take an example,” he continues. “Say you’re a college student. You might have a group of friends from college, and another group from your old high school. If you’ve got any college classmates who also went to your high school, we might label them on your report as social connectors, because they connect two otherwise separate groups of your friends.”

Wolfram Alpha specifies five different network roles: social insiders and outsiders, social neighbors and gateways, and social connectors.

“Social insiders and outsiders are opposites,” explains Burnham. “A social insider has a lot of friends in common with you (e.g. your girlfriend since freshman year); conversely, a social outsider is someone with whom you have few or no mutual friends (e.g. that girl you met horseback riding in Romania). Social gateways and neighbors are also opposites: a social gateway contact has a lot of friends that are outside your network (e.g. the editor of your college newspaper), whereas a social neighbor has few friends outside your network (e.g. your identical twin). Social insiders and social neighbors sometimes overlap, as do gateways and outsiders—but not always. For example, a social outsider simply may not have enough outside friends to be a social gateway.”

They’ve also added color coding for various properties (relationship status, age, sex, number of likes, etc.), and the ability to filter your network by things like location and age. The offering can also show you geographical data about your network based on the locations of your friends.

There are also some various aesthetic changes.

Finally, Wolfram Alpha has announced the addition of Facebook Historical Analytics, which enables it to start collecting info to be able to show you the evolution of your Facebook profile over time.

In case you’re still waiting to gain access to Facebook’s Graph Search (which you most likely are, considering the slow roll-out), you might have fun playing around with this in the meantime. To use it, just go to Wolfram Alpha, search “facebook report,” and click “Analyze my Facebook Data.”

Note: it does appear that Wolfram Alpha is having some trouble meeting demand for access to this feature at the moment. I’m getting the message: “We’re sorry, with all the requests we have hit our limit for Facebook API calls. We are working on resolving the issue. Please try again later.”

Interestingly enough, I remember having similar trouble using the Facebook report when they first launched it.

Google has now teamed up with a handful of companies to provide its “first wave” of Tag Vendor templates. Companies involved include: comScore (Unified Digital Measurement tag), Turn (Conversion Tracking and Data Collection tags), Media6Degrees (Universal tag), Bizo (Business Data Insight tag), and Neustar AdAdvisor.

“One of our favorite features of Google Tag Manager is the ability to add new tags to your site using a tag template instead of copying-and-pasting code — and we’ve just made tagging even easier with several new built-in tag templates,” said Google Tag Manager product manager Laura Holmes. “Just add a few key details to the template, and Google Tag Manager will automatically generate the correct code.”

Google says it will be adding more supported tags to the list, and is actually taking requests, so feel free to let them know what you want to see added.

“We’ve added full ad-hoc date filtering, so you can drill into any date or date range from your Tracker’s history, and access to lists, so you can view (and sort) the full list of posts, contributors, curators and tags in the Tracker UI,” Union Metrics says in a blog post. “These are the first of many features to come that will make it even easier to pinpoint precisely how and where engagement happens on Tumblr for what ever your tracking.”

“We love Tumblr and we especially love the diversity and creativity that goes into making it the wonderful place that it is,” the company adds. “And we know that not everyone works at a company with the budget for these plans. We’re working on more analytics offerings for everyone, including a version for anyone interested in measuring their personal blogs.”

The offering provides insights into post and note volume, top contributors and curators, analysis of posts and tags, post engagement details, and trackers for monitoring Tumblr presence.

The offering comes in Standard, Premium and Max plans. It’s $499 a month for Standard and $999 a month for Premium. You can contact Union Metrics for a quote on Max.

Users can upload data by using a self-service API or solutions created by independent app providers like NEXT Analytics, AutomateAnalytics.com GA Data Uploader, ShufflePoint In2GA, or Analytics Canvas.

The imported data can be viewed in a new report called Cost Analysis in Traffic Sources, and in the new Attribution Modeling Tool.

“These reports show you how all your digital marketing channels are performing compared to each other, so you can make better decisions about your marketing programs,” says product manager Laura Holmes.

Cost Data Import will roll out over the next month, the company says.

“When viewing your real time reports keep in mind these changes,” notes Linus Chou from the Google Analytics team. “If the numbers are lower than you are used to, check your filters to see what traffic is being excluded. And if you use real time for debugging, be sure to use an unfiltered report for that purpose.”

“Real Time has always been great for rapid testing and debugging of your tracking code and now with profile support you can do the same when creating profile filters,” add Chou. “When you change the filters in your profile, you should see the effects in the real time reports within a couple of hours. We are working to make this even quicker going forward.”

Profile support will be available for both web pages and App profiles, so users can see mobile SDK traffic in real time. The feature will be rolling out over the next couple weeks.

On a related note, Google says it is seeing seven years worth of engagement with the Real Time Analytics feature every day.

The “Views” report has been enhanced to show more time watched data .”Estimated minutes watched” can be seen from the Views report. Users can also choose other data options from the “Compare metric” drop-down.

The beta version of the Annotations report lets you view data on the performance of video annotations, with additional insights on viewer click and close rates.

YouTube has also brought back Date Slider, which lets you adjust the date range and see how videos performed for various time periods.

“You can average data across time with rolling totals for 7- and 30-day totals. Instead of seeing changes in weekend traffic and other cyclical data, rolling totals will smooth the trends to help you see overall growth without the distracting spikes and dips,” says YouTube product manager Ted Hamilton.

Additionally, the metadata section for videos and channels now instantly provides data like lifetime views and video duration, the video hovercard shows a thumbnail of a video and basic info when hovering over a video link, and Compare Metrics gives users more ways to compare trends and patterns across different metrics.