Facebook has acquired Storylane, a relatively young social network focused around telling stories, for an undisclosed sum.

Storylane announced the acquisition in a blog post Friday, noting that the service will wind down and the team will join Facebook. "After a lot of discussions with Facebook about how our teams might work together to have even greater impact, we are announcing today that the Storylane team will be joining Facebook," Storylane's founder and CEO Jonathan Gheller wrote in the post.

Facebook confirmed the acquisition in a statement provided to Mashable: "The team from Storylane will be an incredible addition to Facebook. Their previous work showcasing real identity through sincere and meaningful content will make them a perfect fit at Facebook."

We've heard from a source that the five-person staff at Storylane will join Facebook's Timeline team, reporting to Sam Lessin, who heads up the "Identity" product group at the company.

Storylane launched in October with the goal of prompting users to share meaningful stories from their lives. The service is perhaps most similar to Medium, the publishing platform launched last year by two of Twitter's co-founders. Gheller was ambitious in his goals for the service, telling Mashable at the time that the service was trying to "build a library of human experiences by crafting a community where people can share things that really matter."

For those who did share stories on the service, Storylane plans to roll out tools to help migrate those posts to other sites. Gheller also says Facebook will not be getting any of the company's data or operations as part of the acquisition.

Here's the full announcement Gheller made to the Storylane community:

Two years ago the team behind Storylane began working to help people connect in more fruitful and meaningful ways. We took on a mission – trying to help people better communicate who they are and what they care about, improve the way we do business with each other, find love and make new friendships. And at the heart of this work has always been our drive to build a more genuine online identity.

After a lot of discussions with Facebook about how our teams might work together to have even greater impact, we are announcing today that the Storylane team will be joining Facebook.

This is an exciting opportunity. Facebook’s mission of connecting the world has always been at the center of our work, and like our friends at Facebook, meaningful connections are what our team is most passionate about.

The beautiful stories you have decided to share with us are yours to keep and share in however way you want. We are building tools that will help you migrate the content to other services if you so desire. I will be in touch with you about those specific tools later, but I can confirm that Facebook is not acquiring any of your data; and we’re working to make sure you can migrate your content in a manageable way.

We want to give special thanks to our investors who supported us and encouraged us to dream big. It has been an absolute honor to work alongside such an outstanding group of people. Our journey as a young company was made possible by their commitment and patience. Without their guidance we would not be in a position to further our mission through Facebook.

Most of all, I want to thank our users. Your passion, sincerity and willingness to share, has made Storylane the incredible experience that exists today. We have learned so much from you. Your ideas and creativity will stay with us and inspire us on the next stage of our journey.
Image courtesy of Storylane.








































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A new nonprofit led by the world's first space tourist is mounting an ambitious plan to launch the first manned mission to Mars in 2018, a voyage that could include an adventurous married crew.

The project, led by American millionaire Dennis Tito — who paid his own way to space in 2001 — aims not to land people on the surface of the Red Planet, but to take advantage of a rare planetary alignment that would allow a relatively easy, quick flyby of Mars.

Tito announced the private Mars voyage plan today at the National Press Club, where he held a press conference to launch his new organization, the Inspiration Mars Foundation, to back the mission.

Tito hopes to choose a space capsule and rocket from among those already on the market, and modify them to carry two people to Mars and back in 501 days.

And to combat the loneliness and isolation that would doubtless set in during such a mission, Tito is proposing something that's never been tried before: sending one male and one female, preferably a married couple.

"When you're out that far and the Earth is a tiny, blue pinpoint, you're going to need someone you can hug," Tito told SPACE.com. "What better solution to the psychological problems you're going to encounter with that isolation?"

Rare Mars Opportunity

The mission is designed to capitalize on a launch opportunity that opens in January 2018.

"There are rare opportunities to actually go out to Mars and come back in a relatively short time, about 1.4 years, or 500 or so days," Tito said. "If one misses those opportunities, then typical flight times would be two to three years."

Though he admits the plan faces numerous challenges, Tito says it's doable.

"I've seen others come out with fantasy missions that in no way will actually occur," he said. "I didn't want to fall into that."

Before forming the Inspiration Mars Foundation, Tito gathered a group of scientists and engineers to study the potential mission. He hired Paragon Space Development Corporation, which has expertise in life support systems, and space medicine expert Jonathan Clark of Baylor College of Medicine, to look into what would be needed to keep two crewmembers alive and functional in a small capsule for more than 500 days.

The team used the private Dragon space capsule, built by commercial firm Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), as a model, and found that the mission is feasible. There are caveats, however: For one, SpaceX has not yet launched people on the Dragon, only cargo.

Life Support

For another, the mission will need novel life support systems and radiation protection technology to keep the crew alive and healthy.

Tito likened the challenges in equipping an existing spacecraft for the mission to outfitting an empty house.

"We can buy the house, but the walls are bare, and there's no furniture," he said.

Unlike the leaders of some private space endeavors, Tito said he doesn't expect to make any money off the expedition.

"This is a philanthropic mission," he said, adding that its primary goal was to inspire the nation with the excitement of space travel, and to test out some of the technologies that will be needed later for a Mars landing voyage."When this mission is completed, I don’t end up with a company. I'll end up a lot poorer actually."

Tito, who started off as an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, and later made his fortune through an investment company he founded, plans to fund the Inspiration Mars Foundation himself for its first two years. To raise the rest of the necessary funds, including the cost of the rocket and space capsule, Tito hopes to enlist private donations.

Though he acknowledged that the entire project would be challenging, Tito said he was confident that he and his team would be able to pull it off.

"I think this is the real deal," Tito said."It doesn't mean it's not difficult. We've got a long way to go to make it happen. But it's certainly a doable thing. I'm absolutely committed to make this happen."

First Space Tourist

Tito himself made history in 2001 when he became the first space tourist. He reportedly paid $20 million to the Russian Federal Space Agency for a seat on a Soyuz space capsule bound for the International Space Station. Tito's eight days in space set the stage for six other space tourists to follow him, all through deals with Russia brokered by U.S. firm Space Adventures.

Meanwhile, NASA itself is chasing Mars, with a new space capsule called Orion and a new heavy-lift rocket called the Space Launch System (SLS) in development to carry astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit. The space agency has said it hopes to land people on Mars by the mid 2030s.

And other private outfits, such as the Dutch company Mars One, also hope to mount the first mission to the Red Planet. Mars One aims to land people on the planetin 2023, and eventually to establish a long-term colony there.

Image courtesy of the Inspiration Mars Foundation

This article originally published at Space.com here

Pinterest's motto is that "no matter what you're interested in, there's a place for it here," but Austin Phillips has found this to be problematic for creative professionals using the service who want to find very specific content.

"I started talking with a lot of other designers and creators, asking 'Do you use Pinterest? Do you like it? And the overwhelming response was that they use it, but don't like it because it's too cluttered," Phillips told Mashable. "If you want to find design, photography or videos, you have to sift through recipes and other stuff you're not interested in."

With that in mind, Phillips and his wife Natalia decided to create a new social bookmarking site in their spare time geared specifically towards professionals who focus on "the visual side of creativity," like designers, photographers and illustrators. The end result was The Matboard, a website that launched publicly earlier this week after several months in beta.

The Matboard's mission is to inspire creative professionals with collections of ads, magazine designs, illustrations, infographics and more curated by a community of like-minded users. There are more than 2,000 items currently posted to the site, though a little more than half of those were selected and uploaded by Phillips and his wife. Like Pinterest, these visuals are presented in tiles, or "boards," organized into various categories and the site offers social integration with Facebook and Twitter. But the team has also made a conscious effort to move away from some of Pinterest's design elements, including foregoing having comments show up on top of each picture to reduce clutter.



"I didn't want it to be another Pinterest, that was never the intention," Austin says. In fact, he says he originally had the idea for the site four years ago (before Pinterest launched) while studying graphic design in college, but he ultimately decided to "put it on the backburner" for awhile. A few years later, Austin, a designer, and Natalia, who works in marketing, partnered with a programmer and bootstrapped development of the site.

In addition to serving as a source of inspiration, Austin says The Matboard will help creative professionals build and share visual portfolios of their work, similar to Behance. Going forward, he says the service will start to fine-tune what users see based on the styles of work that they typically browse through to ensure that they only see things that are relevant to them.

Images courtesy of The Matboard





































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