Pixable, a photo viewing aggregation service, has won praise for the smart way it organizes photos and orders them by relevancy for users. Now, we’re seeing that users are catching on in a big way and have turned the iOS mobile app into a daily addiction.

The New York City company told me it recently eclipsed the 1 million download mark on iOS, with almost of all of the downloads happening in the last few months of last year. But while noteworthy, that’s something that a lot of apps are able to pull off. What’s really interesting to me is how sticky Pixable has become for users, who are engaging continuously at a pretty impressive rate.

Pixable says that its users are viewing 100 million photos a month and opening the app on average 11 times per month. Some 60 percent of those users are still active on the app since it launched in April while 60 percent of users also use the app on consecutive days.

The Pixable app primarily aggregates Facebook and Twitter pictures, with fuller support for Facebook right now. It organizes photos into various categories such as top of the day, week or month, new profile pics, most recent photos. Pixable also aggregates Instagram, Flickr, yFrog, Twitpic photos and YouTube and Vimeo videos within a user’s Twitter feeds.

Where Pixable shines is in how it uses machine learning and algorithms to process more than 70 signals, helping it to surface the most relevant pictures for users. It will try to measure the affinity between users and the strength of their relationships, taking into account things like common schools, or cities and how much they interact. It will also look at “likes” and comments to determine if it’s a picture that a user wouldn’t want to miss.

Inaki Berenguer, Pixable’s CEO and Co-Founder, said photos have changed from being a way for people to hold on to memories into a form of communication. It’s almost like email now, he said, with Pixable setting itself up as a smart mobile inbox for photos.

“Photos are about telling friends what you’re up to you or you see something funny or eat something and you take a picture. People are broadcasting all the time, but there’s too much noise. Pixable organizes all these photos and brings order to them and sense to chaos,” Berenguer told me.

Pixable, which raised .6 million in November, said it’s also introducing hashtags into the service, so users can tag photos to organize them for later viewing or they can use them like hashtags on Twitter, adding a layer of metadata to a picture. It has also added a mobile web version of the service.

In my earlier profile on Pixable, I wrote how I liked Pixable’s approach, helping people see the photos that matter to them. As we live more of our lives online and through social networks, we need ways to prioritize all this content and filter out a lot of the noise. Pixable still has more to do to more fully integrate pictures beyond Facebook and Twitter, but I like its initial start and so do its users.

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convert MP4 to AVI

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Foursquare has been shifting its sights from the present to the future, looking at how it can help recommend where people should go — but the location-based network is also finding a lot of opportunities in the past.

I sat down with co-founder Dennis Crowley to talk about a slew of announcements the New York City-based company has put out in recent days, and one interesting thread was how the past has played a role in a couple of the more prominent updates. For example, the new ability to check-in to events like sporting games, concerts and movies provides a lot more color to people’s check-ins and gives them a better sense of what they were doing when they checked in.

It’s not only helpful for brands and Foursquare partners, but it helps build what Crowley calls “augmented memory,” assisting people in remembering what they’ve done in the past. Foursquare has already embarked on this by reminding people about the last time they checked-into a location. But with event check-ins, Foursquare can preserve memories more fully, serving more as a digital scrapbook or journal.

“In the same way people keep concerts stubs or movie tickets, we can do it digitally,” Crowley said.

Foursquare's curated lists

Foursquare’s new curated lists, introduced this week, also leverages the past by giving people the ability to put together lists of places they’ve gone to and share them with others. Users can grab locations they’ve been to and toss them into these lists, making their check-ins part of a lasting resource or recommendation for others.

Foursquare has also worked with Bravo TV, the History Channel and others to leave historical tips at interesting locations. Now, it’s finding that politicians are interested in the same kind of thing, using Foursquare to remind people of their past accomplishments. For example, President Barack Obama, who joined Foursquare this week, will not only be using the check-ins to chart his movements but will be leaving historical location-based information tips about his past accomplishments at various places.

Looking back and preserving the past is not Foursquare’s sole focus, but it’s interesting to see how Foursquare and others are able to find value in these past check-ins. The big promise of Foursquare is still in prediction and recommendations, but all this past data and the mechanism for tying it to locations is proving valuable in its own way.

Event check-ins

The major value of previous check-ins so far has been in feeding Foursquare’s Explore feature, which recommends places for people to go based on their past visits. Crowley said Explore has shown people the value of preserving their check-ins, because it leads to smart suggestions about where to go next. He likened it to Mr. Miyagi, from the Karate Kid, slowly teaching his student how to fight using simple lessons.

“We asked people to check in, which is like painting the fence. Now we’re teaching karate,” Crowley said. “It all goes into a recommendation engine that knows what you like and what else you’ll like.”

The next step for Explore, he said, will be to help people plan more for the future. Explore suggests places based on the present tense, but in the future Foursquare is looking at allowing people to do more complex planning with Explore that takes into account the interests of friends that users plan to go out with.

In a lot of ways, Foursquare is not confined to just one use case. It’s finding there’s a lot of interesting things that happen when you focus on location. Crowley compared Foursquare to a machine that’s being put together in increments, a process that’s quickened recently. The company is now up to 70 employees and the increase of the latest ten hires has helped pick up the pace of updates, contributing to this past week’s flurry of news.

Crowley said the company is still working out its revenue model and sees its daily deals partnerships with companies such as Groupon and Living Social as part of the solution, but not the main engine in the future. He said the big key will be in providing tools for merchants, to help them manage and improve their relationship with customers. Foursquare provides those tools right now for free, allowing businesses to offer their own specials and get analytics back on user visits. But in the future, Foursquare is looking at charging for those tools, though there is no time frame for that, Crowley said.

“We’re now getting to the point where Foursquare users are expecting venues to participate and as we get more mainstream, merchants will find a way to get on board,” said Crowley. “There’s no countdown clock (for charging merchants) it’s when we’re ready. A lot of products are being developed and when we feel like the tools provide value, we’ll think about that.”

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Fresh from its million in funding, note-taking and memory service Evernote is preparing for its first ever developer conference next month, where it will outline its broader strategy and how it plans on becoming a 100-year company by building a productivity platform.

The Evernote Trunk Conference on August 18 in San Francisco signals a new phase for the Mountain View, CA company, which has grown to 12 million users and is adding a million new users a month. While the company has offered an API to developers since 2008, it is now finally embracing its role as a platform and is prepared to talk about how it wants to proceed with its ecosystem of 6,000 developers and 600 third-party apps and products.

I talked with CEO Phil Libin about the upcoming conference and where the company is going and he explained Evernote is in the midst of a shift, from one primary application that focuses on memory to a broader platform play that looks to increase user productivity. Evernote will pursue some of this on its own and through acquisitions and will look to developers to play a big role in advancing this goal.

“I expect us to be a much broader company than where we are now. The idea is Evernote is going to have lots of applications to deal with the external brain and your memories. We’ll go from one app on lots of platforms to a family of products and services that play off a theme of the external brain.”

He said a key distinction will be in how it emphasizes productivity. He said while people turn to Zynga or Facebook to kill time, he wants to vie for the other half of people’s time. And so Evernote will be focusing its messaging and its strategy on getting things accomplished through Evernote, anything to do with furthering life’s work, from eating at the best restaurants to working on a research product.

“If we think that makes you productive, that’s part of the Evernote experience. Our value proposition has been in remembering. Put into the external brain and you can always get it out. That’s been our core message. But that’s been phase one, get out what you put in. Now phase two is getting out more than you put in, being smarter and having a system that augments your natural intelligence. It’s expanding from memory to a real external brain.”

Libin said the company will share more details at the conference and will try to be very transparent to developers to help make clear where the company is headed and what opportunities it finds interesting. The conference will feature a series of interviews with people including:

• Gordon Bell, a principal researcher at Microsoft working on lifelogging and cloud computing whose ideas helped inspire Evernote.
• Tim Ferris, an angel investor and a bestselling author of the The 4-Hour Workweek.
• Guy Kawasaki, founder of Alltop and bestselling author.
• Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital who has invested in Square, Youtube, Tumblr, Evernote and other startups.
• Michael Hyatt, a publisher, speaker and writer on topics relating to leadership, productivity and Evernote.

The conference will also feature sessions aimed at helping developers build off of Evernote’s API. And the company will also be announcing the winners of its developer contest.

If you’re interested in attending, the first 50 GigaOM readers can register here and get a 50 percent discount with the promo code: “ETCGIGAOM”

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