Who needs an awards show to tell us what movies and actors fans prefer when we have Twitter? In yet another partnership with the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, IBM is turning its skills in social-media sentiment analysis to Hollywood awards so the world can see which movies and stars are generating the most buzz on Twitter. IBM has done similar analyses of both the World Series and the Super Bowl, and although they’re no doubt part of a marketing effort to demonstrate its big data prowess, the projects are pretty fun and rather insightful.

It’s new Senti-meter, which appears as part of the Los Angeles Times‘ interactive and ongoing awards section called “The Envelope,” ranks movies, actors and actresses based on the number of tweets about them and the sentiment contained in those tweets. For example, as of its last update on Jan. 28, the Senti-meter showed Hugo dominating in number of tweets, but Midnight in Paris generating the most-positive reaction. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, however, appears to have the best balance between number of tweets and positive tweets.

It’s easy to take fan sentiment with a grain of salt if you’re a movie critic, but if you’re a studio, being able to quantify the types of movies and stars fans prefer could mean big bucks. When I spoke with IBM SVP of IBM’s Software and Systems Steve Mills in October, he told me IBM expects to do billion in analytics revenue by 2015, and he expects social-media analysis to be a big driver of that growth.

Anyone into betting on the various awards shows might find this particular project useful, too. It’s hardly predictive analytics, but the masses might know something: although the New England Patriots were favored in last week’s Super Bowl, sentiment swayed in the last few days to New York Giants quarterback — and eventual winner — Eli Manning from Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.

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The latest board shakeup comes on the heels of founder Jerry Yang?s resignation from the board and ex-PayPal/eBay executive Scott Thompson?s hiring as CEO in January. On Twitter, Dealbook?s Evelyn Rusli reported that a source, pointing to Thompson and Webb?s shared history at eBay, called Yahoo?s overhaul ?a soft eBay takeover.?

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At the D:Dive Into Media conference, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told Peter Kafka that Google has all the data it needs to present Twitter data in its search results right alongside Google+ results. That has been the latest public response from Twitter after Google recently began pushing its own social network in search results while keeping out Facebook and Twitter.

“Google crawls us at a rate of 1300 hits per second… They’ve indexed 3 billion of our pages,” Costolo said. “They have all the data they need.”

Costolo went on to say that the dispute between Google and Twitter was never about money, as it’s been reported previously. Instead, he said that the disagreement between the two companies wasn’t limited to the financial disagreement. “Both of us wanted a value exchange where it wasn’t just about money,” he said.

Other interesting info from the keynote:

• On the company’s decision to allow country-by-country takedowns of tweets, Costolo said: “We want to be able to leave the content up for as many people around the world as possible,” while operating within the boundaries of laws in the countries in which it operates.
• On Twitter’s reasons for not participating in the SOPA/PIPA blackouts, Costolo said, “When you’ve got a voice like Twitter, you don’t take the batteries out of the microphone,” he said.
• On whether or not Twitter is a media company, Costolo said it is in the media business. Specifically, he said that Twitter is a distributor of traffic to other media companies. “We’re one of the largest drivers of traffic to all sorts of other media companies,” Costolo said.
• “One of the reasons we’ve got so many [celebrities]… is that they can interact directly with fans,” he said.
• Costolo said that Twitter was tremendously valuable for television, as it has become the focal point for television conversation and also extends the conversation about TV shows. “I think it will be commonplace to use Twitter as the focal point on the second screen,” he said.
• “Maybe 10 years from now, people will look back at my tenure and say, ‘Gee, what a moron.’”
• “I don’t think about how can I extract as much value out of this platform as possible… It’s about how can I create more value,” he said.
• Costolo doesn’t appear to see much value in second-screen social apps, repeating again the thought that Twitter would be the focal point for TV viewing in the future.

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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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As a young CEO of a growing company, I find that the most valuable insight I’m gaining these days has been from other CEOs. Certainly this realization isn’t revolutionary – YPO, EO, Mindshare and a host of other organizations are set up just for this kind of knowledge exchange.

But who has time for that? This is a social media world. We’re live in 140-character sound bites. So I decided to ping my favorite CEOs via Twitter to see what kind of wisdom they could drop on me. Here’s the great advice they shared.

Daniel Ek, CEO, Spotify

Figure out what the top five most important stuff is, focus relentlessly on that and keep iterating. Less is more.

Dennis Crowley, CEO, FourSquare

Don’t let people tell you your ideas won’t work. If you have a hunch that something will work, go build it. Ignore the haters.

Sarah Prevette, Founder, Sprouter

Just do it. Get it out there, absorb the feedback, adjust accordingly, hustle like hell, persevere and never lose your swagger.

Sarah Lacy, CEO, PandoDaily

Follow your gut. it may be wrong, but you won’t regret it if you fail. You’ll regret it if you ignore your gut and fail.

Craig Newmark, Founder, Craigslist

Treat people like you want to be treated. Apply to customer service.

Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO, VaynerMedia

Do work for your customers, not for press or VCs. The end user is what matters long term.

Matt Mullenweg, CEO, Automattic

Only reinvent the wheels you need to get rolling.

Jason Goldberg, CEO, Fab.com

Pick one thing and do that one thing — and only that one thing — better than anyone else ever could.

 Alexis Ohanian, CEO, Reddit

Make something people want. Then give more damns than anyone else about it and you’ll make something they love.

Chris Brogan, President, Human Business Works

Buy @ericries’s book. Beyond that? Build a platform. This is the big year.

Matt Howard, CEO, ZoomSafer

Startup wisdom: The number one job of a CEO is to not run out of money.

Brian Wong, CEO, Kiip

Always be learning from others. Whenever you meet someone, you don’t want something from them, you want to learn from them.

Seth Priebatsch, Chief Ninja, SCVNGR and LevelUp

Something my dad taught me: Ask forgiveness, not permission!

Hooman Radfar, Founder, Clearspring

Give away the wins, own the loses. Your job is to curate greatness.

Alexa Hirschfeld, CEO, Paperless Post

Users and employees are key predictive indicators of a company’s success; press and investors generally months behind.

Got some other great wisdom for your fellow CEOs? Leave me a comment!

Peter Corbett (@corbett3000) is the CEO of the creative agency iStrategyLabs, and is the founding organizer of DC Tech Meetup.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Search Engine People Blog.

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