“With the Discover page, we’re making good on our promise of helping you choose what to listen to when faced with millions of songs,” says Gustav Söderström, Chief Product Officer, at Spotify. “We’ve made your listening experience more personal, more social and more current.”

The Discover tab features a bunch of different ways to find new music as well as more information on music you currently love. Personalized recommendations suggest artists and tracks based on what you’ve listened to and who you’ve followed. You’ll also see the music and playlists shared by your Spotify friends. And a related music feature also gives you suggestions on what to play next, based on the song you’re currently listening to.

Spotify harnesses the power of Pitchfork, Songkick, and Tunigo (which they just purchased) for these recommendations. According to the company, it’s now available for everyone on the web and will continue to roll out to Spotify’s desktop and mobile apps in the coming weeks.

Check it out today over at play.spotify.com/discover.

What they’ve done is tweaked their discovery and search functions to provide a single steam of information – tweets, users, activity, trends. According to Twitter, it will all be in one place now.

The Discover tab now aggregates all kinds of activity into one stream on both iOS and Android. Twitter has also added the ability to access activity and trends from the top of the Discover tab.

Search has been updated in a similar fashion:

“Search results now surface the most relevant mix of Tweets, photos, and accounts, all in one stream (similar to the stream in Discover). We’ve also added a new search button to Twitter for iPhone, letting you search from anywhere within the app. (This button was already available in the Android and iPad apps.) Look for the magnifying glass icon next to the button you use to compose a Tweet,” says Twitter.

Twitter has also updated the @connect tab, which now defaults to showing all types of interactions. You can go into your settings and set the default to simply show @mentions if that’s what you want.

Also, they changed the way the apps manage links to outside sites. If you click on a URL inside a tweet, you now go directly to the site no matter where you are in the Twitter app. Before, you would have to tap the tweet as a whole, go to and expanded view, and then click on the outside link to be directed out.

Twitter says that the updates should be available in both the App Store and Google Play, but as of the writing of this article neither seem to be available yet. We’ll let you know when they drop.

The mobile discover tab now features media-rich tweets that allows users to preview photos and article summaries without ever tapping on the tweet.

It’s all thanks to Twitter Cards:

“Using Twitter cards, you’ll now see Tweets in Discover with links to news and photos rather than the former story previews which were not interactive. And supporting Twitter cards on the backend means we can more directly improve the user experience in our native apps, too. You’ll see content from cards partners display as a preview in the stream, so that you’ll get headlines and publication names for story summaries and photo previews rather than shortened URLs,” says Twitter engineering manager Daniel Loreto.

The mobile Discover tab has also become more like the desktop Discover section. Now you can “view all tweets” to see relevant content from users in your network.

“We want Discover to be the place where you find the best of that content relevant to you, even if you don’t necessarily know everyone involved,” says Loreto.

Twitter has also improved on their search function, for both the desktop and mobile experience. Photos and videos are now front and center, as Twitter has placed them above the tweet stream in search results for people, events, and hashtags.

Twitter has also added the ability for users to see the context behind the tailored ranking of search results.

“About a year ago we launched tailored ranking of your search results, but until now you couldn’t see why a specific Tweet might matter more to you. Now you can see context like who favorited or retweeted right there in the Tweet,” says Twitter.

You can download the new version of both the iOS and Android apps today.

Today, the company has announced an upgrade to the Discover tab that will provide a media-rich tweet stream. It’s “what’s happening now, tailored for you,” says Twitter.

Here’s what they had to say on the Twitter blog:

Last December, we introduced Discover to bring you essential information from the web. This May, we added stronger signals and a new design that made it more personal for you with better stories and Tweets from people you know.

Now we’re improving Discover again: when you visit the Discover tab on twitter.com, you’ll see a continuous stream of Tweets, which automatically expand to show you the most relevant stories and most engaging photos.

The big change here is that now, the tweet stream shows the tweets already expanded with media, either in the form of articles, photos, or videos.

Mobile seems to be unaffected by this change. Twitter says that the new Discover tweet stream will roll out to users gradually.

16 national retailers already accept PayPal. These include: Home Depot, Abercrombie & Fitch, Advance Auto Parts, Aéropostale, American Eagle Outfitters, Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Guitar Center, Jamba Juice, JC Penney, Jos. A. Bank Clothiers, Nine West, Office Depot, Rooms To Go, Tiger Direct and Toys “R” Us. Obviously this new partnership will add to that list significantly.

“It’s astonishing to think that in less than a year we’ve brought PayPal to the point-of-sale at more than 3,000 brand name national retailers in the U.S., launched a global mobile payments solution for small businesses with PayPal Here, and announced relationships with leading terminal vendors all over the world,” says PayPal’s VP of Retail and Prepaid Products, Don Kingsborough.

“The market has been looking for leadership as the payments space evolves and we think this relationship starts to deliver it,” he says. “It is a milestone for PayPal as it enables us to innovate at scale.”

Merchants won’t have to make any hardware of software upgrades to offer PayPal, so it should be a pretty painless process.

Implementation of the partnership (in terms of in-store availability) begins next year.

Today, Google discussed a new way to save cards to Google Wallet, beginning with Discover, the first card issuer to launch an implementation of its new Save To Wallet API for Payment Cards. Google says it is working with other card issuers.

“Discover securely transmits all required information directly to Google Wallet,” says Google Payments Commerce Business Development Manager Frank Young. “You can then select your Discover Card to be the primary method the Google Wallet app will use for in-store purchases, or when shopping online from Google Play or other merchants that accept Google Wallet.”

“You’ll continue to earn rewards on every purchase you make,” he adds. “Discover has also provided Google Wallet with card imagery for the Discover More Card, so you can easily identify your virtual Discover card in your mobile wallet.”

To save a Discover Card to Google Wallet, simply go to discover.com/googlewallet, sign into your Discover account, click “Add Your Card,” sign into your Google account, and you’ll be all set.

Learn about the Save To Wallet APIs here.

Discover is a component of the Omniture Online Business Optimization Platform, and is a solution that Omniture claims can accomodate all levels of business users by generating everything from simple reports to more complex methods of data aggregation and analysis.

The features included in Discover 2.0 include:

– Real-Time Segmentation: Allows users to create and simultaneously compare multiple customer segments and key performance metrics to identify and optimize the most profitable customer segments

– Multi-Dimensional Site Analysis: Provides visual analysis of site navigation by customer segments using color, size, movement, position and volume which help businesses to improve site design to drive an increase in desired customer actions such as: revenue, subscriptions, form completion, pages viewed, trips booked, etc.

– Virtual Focus Group: Provides deep insight into the unique site experience of an individual customer within a selected segment to better understand their requirements and preferences in order to make changes in real-time site design, content and promotions to enhance the customer experience

– Advanced Fallout Analysis: Allows users to dynamically build and analyze the effectiveness of online processes to more effectively improve customer conversion or understand content interest

– Dynamic Path Flow: Helps interactively explore unique customer paths to optimize content placement and page navigation

"Multiple analytics platforms and technologies can create big reporting problems for companies," said Bill Gassman, research director for Gartner. "Industry advances in data integration, business intelligence and analytics make it possible for users in different roles to work off a common set of information. With shared information comes greater insight and better decisions."

"Discover is superior to other approaches because of its virtually unlimited power, flexibility and ease-of-use," said Brigham Graff, director of website marketing, Overstock.com. "Now, we can get real-time insights to create customer segments on-the-fly and make immediate changes to our marketing campaigns that maximize every dollar of our online advertising investment."

"To effectively compete today, businesses need a faster and easier way to identify and respond to new business opportunities," said Josh James, CEO and co-founder, Omniture. "As new customer interaction channels proliferate and the impact of search marketing continues to grow, Discover is a lifeline that can unlock the incredible insights hidden in data so businesses can more clearly see and focus on what they need to do to win."

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• Forrester: Digitizing the Human Experience
• How Discover Card Is Connecting With Customers
• Charlene Li on Social Computing
• Oh, The Humanity!
• Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop Per Child

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Christopher Carfi, CEO and co-founder of Cerado, looks at sales, marketing, and the business experience from the customers point of view. He currently is focused on understanding how emerging social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networking are enabling the creation of new types of customer-driven communities. He is the author of the Social Customer Manifesto weblog, and has been occasionally told that he drives and snowboards just a little too quickly.

Mashable’s Pete Cashmore pointed out the nascent MySpace clone populating the Internet. The new site, called YoungFeds.org, describes itself as “an online and live destination for young professionals working in and with the federal government to meet, network and advance.”

Maybe going to Georgetown Law means you don’t hear about places like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Live Journal, Xanga, Multiply, or any one of Yahoo’s seemingly endless social networking locations on the vast Internet. It doesn’t seem likely though.

There is a single post on the site’s blog, posted by GoodGovGuy welcoming visitors to the site. GGG wrote that the new site is an effort of the Council for Excellence in Government.

If you’re as cynical as the typical hack writer, the first thing that entered your mind just then was, “Council for Excellence in Government? Must have just launched.” It actually debuted in 1983, but asking when they might get started would probably be rude.

Geico supports the YoungFeds.org site too. I learned something new, namely that Geico wasn’t the name of a CGI gecko, but an acronym for Government Employees Insurance Company. Geico is one of Warren Buffett’s centerpieces in the Berkshire Hathaway cornucopia of companies, so there’s a pretty good chance my tax dollars have helped fund some of Buffett’s and Bill Gates’ bridge games.

One feature of YoungFeds.org, the 35 < 35 group, forms an advisory board for the site. These are 35 people under the age of 35 described as "a group of informal advisors who help us with content ideas, write articles and opinion pieces, and even "guest blog" for us." They come from a variety of federal agencies, including Cabinet-level departments.

The social networking features one might expect to see, like personal profiles, don't seem to have a place on the site. It's kind of hard to "meet, network, and advance" when the closest thing to a social networking tool seems to be the calendar listing a Young Government Leaders event at Health & Human Services tomorrow night.

Maybe they have a lot of functionality under the hood that we civilians can't see. But if the inside is like the outside of YoungFeds.org, they need to bring a couple of extreme programmers in-house who know Yahoo well and can plug in all kinds of social networking API and widget goodness into the site.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Are you among the thousands of professionals who have a newsletter that doesn’t get results? … Do you struggle to get your newsletter out to clients and prospects on time every month?

Yes? Then maybe you are guilty of committing one or more of the following deadly newsletter sins:

1. You spend hours surfing the ‘Net, researching for an article, getting ‘screen sucked’ without any apparent value

2. You format it yourself using your Outlook email program

3. You send your ezine from your email program

4. You get business cards of people you meet at events and add them to your subscriber list

5. You manually add and delete email addresses from your list

6. You manually send subscribers a welcome message, thanking them for signing up for your ezine

7. You miss your monthly or weekly ezine deadline and send it out ‘whenever you can’

8. You only send it out whenever you have a new product or service to announce

9. Your ezine consists mainly of sales copy, with a clear call to action: buy your product

10. Your ezine is purely information-based, with interesting articles, but with no reference to your products or services, and no call to action

Okay, I’m exaggerating here, I’m sure you are more sophisticated than that!

You may already use one of the list management services such as Constant Contact or Aweber and would never think of committing these ‘faux pas’! Or perhaps you still print out and mail newsletters, and have decided to start emailing your company newsletter to save costs.

You have a list of people you’ve met at conferences and trade shows, and are not sure if it is permitted to add them to your subscriber list. Maybe you’re scratching your head wondering where you’ll find the time to do your electronic newsletter (“ezine”), so you keep putting it off.

So many questions! If you are an entrepreneur or a small business professional learning how to use the Internet, you already know how fundamental an emailed newsletter is for your online marketing.

How do you learn all this while still managing your business and other marketing tasks?

Did you know that you can send out your ezine through your shopping cart, if you have the right one?

These are some of the advanced secrets that insiders use to get better results from their ezines. Emailed newsletters are getting more complex, with laws regulating what you can and cannot do. The percentages of opened email rates are getting lower each year. Yet ezines are still a fundamentally effective way to market your products and services onlineif you do it right. If you follow best practices of successful ezine publishers on the Web, you will reap many benefits.

When your readers receive your ezine regularly, they have a chance to get to know you. You will be seen as a credible expert in your field. They will be ready to call you for products or services. They may even forward your ezine to colleagues, increasing the number of people you reach. You can communicate to a global audience. Some readers will convert to clients; others will propose joint venture business opportunities. Your business will grow as will your list of subscribers over time.

Caveat: you must do your ezine right, according to best practices. Otherwise it will become a time- and energy-consuming task instead of effortless marketing. Be wise and invest in learning how to do an ezine that gets results.

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For more leading edge ezine tips go to www.coachezines.com. You can also subscribe to Newsletter Nuggets at http://www.newsletternuggets.com. To learn more about using ezines and other tools like blogs, go to www.blogsquad.biz. Patsi Krakoff, Psy. D. is writer and Internet Marketing expert with over 7 years experience marketing online.