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The whole “flash sale” phenomenon is interesting. Traditionally, the idea of “impulse buying” has been viewed as a somewhat bad thing. Purchases are supposed to be thought out and studied — made only after you’ve considered things for a while, right? The Internet has flipped that idea on its head. But that’s not a bad thing.

Bloomspot is one of the newer players in the flash sale scene. Launched in January of this year, they currently cater to three cities: San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. But unlike competitors in the space, they’re not all about as moving as much of a product as possible in a short amount of time. Instead, they’ve about creating relationships between clients and customers. The features (they don’t call them “deals”) are simply the first step to facilitate this relationship.

And Bloomspot also differs in that they’re going for a very specific type of both client and customer: luxury hotels, restaurants, and spas that cater to more affluent, mature clientele. And now Bloomspot has just raised a $9 million Series A round of funding to further pursue this market.

I sat down with Jasper Malcomson, Bloomspot’s CEO and co-founder (and a former manager of travel and commerce at Yahoo), to talk a bit about the service today. He has very clear vision for what he wants the company to go after. They’re not trying to be Jetsetter, selling people dreams of traveling around the world on a whim. They’re trying be cater to the more practical-minded but still affluent audience who perhaps just want a weekend getaway.

Bloomspot is focusing on places people want to go already — such as a winery in Napa Valley — but hesitate for whatever reason. These aren’t places across the world, these are places relatively close by. By giving them a limited-time offer attractive package, it pushes them over the edge. It’s not so much about deeply discounting rooms as it is about adding experiences on top of the price (such as spa treatments, etc) that make it that much more appealing.

This idea is important because Bloomspot isn’t aiming to become the way that everyone can experience luxury cheaply. They just want to entice the people who would likely be suited for these types of places, to go. The venues love that because they know that these type of people will fit in with the overall experience and will still be willing to spend the money on other things like food once they’re there.

In other words, they won’t be cheap.

And, if those people enjoy the experience enough, the likelihood that they’ll come back greatly increases. In that regard, Bloomspot is almost like an interactive advertisement or a try-before-you-buy service for these venues.

“The long term way to attack the space is customer quality,” Malcomson says. In group buying, that doesn’t matter because a merchant doesn’t care who buys an article of clothing as long as it’s sold. It’s different with these more experience-oriented clients that Bloomspot deals with.

And Bloomspot offers them a way to help move unsold slots if it’s a slow time of the year or business is down for whatever reason. Bloomspot just needs a few days to put a new feature in place.

Malcomson says that 68 percent of Bloomspot’s audience is 30 years old or older. You can compare that to group buying sites where around 70 percent of customers are 18 to 35. Again, affluent and older, that’s what Bloomspot is going for.

Bloomspot gets a 30 percent commission on sales pretty much across the board, no matter which feature they’re selling, Malcomson says. This means that they’re already pulling in a fair amount of revenue, though they are not yet profitable.

While Bloomspot is currently live for the three aforementioned cities, they will also be launching in Boston and Washington D.C. on October 3. After that, Chicago, Dallas, and Houston are up next.

This Series A round of funding was led by Menlo Ventures with participation by seed investors True Ventures and Harrison Metal.

This $9 million is on top of the $2 million seed round from March 2009 that included investors Jeff Weiner (CEO of LinkedIn), Erik Blachford (Chairman of TerraPass and former CEO of Expedia Inc.), and Brad Garlinghouse (President at AOL, Consumer Applications Group).

One Kings Lane isn’t just a hot flash commerce site. It’s a hot commerce site that has been backed by Kleiner Perkins, First Round Capital and Reid Hoffman. And cofounder Ali Pincus is married to Mark Pincus of Zynga fame.

The site launched in May 2009 and offers users deeply discounted high end home furnishings via daily sales. Like Groupon most of the inbound traffic comes from daily emails sent out to registered users. And repeat buyers are basically camping out on the site, driving 80% of total orders. The really rabid ones don’t even wait for the email, they just hit the site at 8 am to buy stuff before it sells out.

Revenue is nicely up and to the right, up 500% over last year. New CEO Doug Mack started in May when the company had 30 employees. Today they have 65 and are hiring like crazy.

They’ll announce three new executive hires tomorrow – Ed Komo as vice president of engineering, Jim Liefer as vice president of operations and Yulie Kim as head of product. This group has experience from Walmart.com, eBay and Hotwire…and in the case of Ed, the dreaded Jigsaw.

I’m a customer of One Kings Lane, and have made a few purchases for my new house. They always have really interesting curated stuff for sale at every price range, and they buying process is simple. Like Groupon and Gilt they seem to have found a business model that really works.

It works so well, in fact, that it isn’t out of the question that the Pincus household could have not just one but two IPOs in the coming years – Zynga and One Kings Lane.

Mack is aggressively building out his executive team, he tells me. They are recruiting a VP Marketing and a CFO right now. So if you’re looking, they may be the right fit for you.

One month ago, Facebook unveiled Facebook Places, its long-awaited location feature that lets friends check-in to real-world venues. Unfortunately, Facebook’s main website still hasn’t quite caught up to the new feature — for example, there’s still no way to get an at-a-glance view of where your friends are. Places also has a few shortcomings that normal users might not have noticed, including the fact that adding an application to a Facebook Place Page is a pain.

It’s possible to do it: Facebook is willing to port over the apps you have installed on your normal Facebook Page once you provide it with documentation proving you own the venue in question. But Facebook hasn’t done anything to showcase which applications actually make sense to include on a Place Page, and it’s unnecessarily difficult to find the option to install an application to a Place Page yourself. TechCrunch Disrupt finalist Appbistro wants to help.

Appbistro offers a marketplace for Facebook Page applications, allowing developers to charge for their apps (which Facebook doesn’t facilitate) and for users to review the apps they’ve used. Today the site is launching a section dedicated to applications that are suited for Facebook Places — at this point, there is no comparable section in the official Facebook Directory. Note that you can actually install any application to a Place Page, but many of them don’t make sense, which is why Appbistro is curating them.

Appbistro is also making the flow for installing an app to a Place page a little easier than it currently is. Normally, it’s pretty straightforward to install an app to a Facebook Page directly from Facebook: you find the application and hit the ‘Install to my page’ button. But there isn’t currently an ‘Install to my Place Page’ button, which means you have to go through a roundabout process of navigating the directory using a link at the bottom of your Facebook Places Page. Yeah, it’s extremely confusing.

The install flow for installing an app using Appbistro is a bit more straightforward, mostly because you don’t have to go hunting for the directory. That said, it’s not perfect — at one point you have to click an “Install on Facebook” button in two different places, which isn’t intuitive.

In yet another executive departure, David Ku, who’s been with Yahoo since 2002, is leaving the company. His most recent title was SVP, Advertising Products.

Yahoo confirms the departure:

Yahoo! confirms that David Ku, SVP for Yahoo’s advertising products group, has decided to leave the company. He’ll be working very closely with Mark Morrissey, who will expand his current role as SVP of the Search Alliance transition to include this group.

In the eight years David worked for Yahoo!, he led strategy and execution across a number of key advertising product areas, ranging from the launch of Yahoo’s Search Marketing Platform (Panama) and APT platform, to playing an instrumental role in the Yahoo! Microsoft Search Alliance agreement. We thank him for all of these contributions and wish him well on his next endeavor.

This isn’t just another run of the mill departure. Like Ash Patel, who left Yahoo earlier this year, Ku was both a long term Yahoo’er and was known as a guy who gets things done.

I can’t imagine what morale must be like over there right now.

At this morning’s launch of IE9, Microsoft tried to reignite the browser wars with its latest iteration of Internet Explorer. You can test drive it yourself by downloading the beta version on BeautyOfTheWeb.com, but if that sounds like too much effort, you can also sit back and watch our video tour with Senior Director of Internet Explorer, Ryan Gavin. Video above.

A post has just gone up on Diaspora’s blog revealing what the project actually looks like for the first time. While it’s not yet ready to be released to the public, the open-source social networking project is giving the world a glimpse of what it looks like today and also releasing the project code, as promised.

At first glance, this preview version of Diaspora looks sparse, but clean. Oddly enough, with its big pictures and stream, it doesn’t look unlike Apple’s new Ping music social network mixed with yes, Facebook. A few features they note:

• Share status messages and photos privately and in near real time with your friends through “aspects”.
• Friend people across the Internet no matter where Diaspora seed is located.
• Manage friends using “aspects”
• Upload of photos and albums
• All traffic is signed and encrypted (except photos, for now).

But no matter what Diaspora looks like now, the point is to have many different versions hosted all over the place. Some will look different than others — so it make sense to have a simple, clean base to build off of.

The team notes that the public alpha of the project is still on course for October, and will include Facebook integration off the bat, as well as data portability.

“Getting the source into the hands of developers is our first experiment in making a simple and functional tool for contextual sharing. Diaspora is in its infancy, but our initial ideas are there,” the team writes today. “Much of our focus this summer was centered around publishing content to groups of your friends, wherever their seed may live. It is by no means bug free or feature complete, but it an important step for putting us, the users, in control,” they continue.

Diaspora is a particularly interesting project because it was first unveiled at a time when Facebook was facing a lot of user backlash due to privacy issues and changes being made. This helped the project raise over $200,000 in crowd-sourced funding via Kickstarter.

Of course, Facebook continues to grow and is now well past 500 million users, as much of the controversy that existed a few months ago has died down — as expected. The project also faces the hurdle of trying to popularize an open source project — these projects often sound great on paper, but doesn’t work too well in practice. That said, Diaspora is still interesting, and we’re rooting for these guys to pull it off.

Developers, get building — you can find the code on github here. But note their warning:

Feel free to try to get it running on your machines and use it, but we give no guarantees. We know there are security holes and bugs, and your data is not yet fully exportable. If you do find something, be sure to log it in our bugtracker, and we would love screenshots and browser info.

Earlier this year we wrote about Grogger, a CMS that would allow blogs to crowdsource their content. That product didn’t work out — publishers didn’t want to have to change to a new CMS — but the company has now pivoted to tackle a related problem, and it’s got a new name: Kapost. Today the company is announcing that it’s closed a $1.1 million Series A round led by High Country Venture and Highway 12 Venture, with Zelkova Ventures, Kal Vepuri, Tango, David Tisch, Jason Kiefer, and David Cohen participating (the company was also a part of the TechStars Boulder program).

So what exactly is Kapost? CEO Toby Murdock describes it as a newsroom platform that publishers can use to manage content submitted by a large number of contributors. Murdock explains that many online publishers that feature content from many contributors, like The Huffington Post, have to build their own custom systems for managing, editing, and eventually publishing this incoming content — Kapost wants to fill this niche. And unlike Grogger, which required publishers to tie a new CMS into their workflow, Kapost will integrate with existing CMS solutions.

At this point the product is still pretty early — it includes core functionality like assigning stories to authors, but some of the more advanced features, like distributing payments to contributors and editorial calendars, are still in development. We’ll have more Kapost as it continues to build out its featureset.

While the new design of Twitter.com itself is big news, just as big is what it means for the Twitter ecosystem. I’m not talking about the third-party clients that have similar features to the ones Twitter just rolled out, but rather the partners that Twitter is (or is not) working with to bring more content directly into their environment.

Specifically, I’m talking about Twitter’s initial 16 partners: Dailybooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, Twitvid, USTREAM, Vimeo, Yfrog, and YouTube. Each of these services now has content which can be viewed directly from Twitter.com — potentially taking pageviews away each of them. Why on Earth would they agree to that?

Some of those companies have already given their diplomatic answers — that this way will be better for the end users. That’s undoubtedly true, but many of those sites rely on the advertisements they show alongside the media they host. Such ads will not be shown on Twitter.com. So again, why agree to do this?

I spoke with Jason Goldman, Twitter’s Vice President of Product, yesterday after the announcement about this. His answer was fairly interesting. He notes that many of the major picture and video companies early-on started showing the value of having their media embedded elsewhere. YouTube and Flickr were two examples he cited.

“Those strategies increased the value of their brands,” Goldman said. And while obviously, YouTube and Flickr don’t need too much help expanding their brands any more, the smaller players could certainly benefit from this. If you see a friend sharing a picture on Twitter via Twitgoo or Dailybooth, you might decide to sign up for those services yourself so you can do the same, is the idea.

Goldman reiterated that Twitter wasn’t going to allow these partners to show their own ads next to the pictures in the new right-side pane on Twitter’s site, but thinks the pictures themselves are almost like a great branding ad for the services themselves.

He also noted that they’re not going to stop YouTube or the other video service from running pre-roll or post-roll video ads in their embeds — so the videos services will retain one way to monetize this embed view.

Obviously, Twitter is open to doing more of these deals with different content partners as well. The Kickstarter and Kiva deals are particularly interesting because they don’t involve embedded media, but rather embedded content. Expect to see a lot more of those. In fact, I’m going to not go out on a limb and guess that a lot of the location services will start showing content in the right-pane on Twitter.com shortly. Foursquare is already integrated in a similar way into Twitter’s iPhone app.

In their quest to make Twitter.com a more seamless experience for users, Twitter is also creating a new sort of mini platform. Previously, their platform was entirely off-site, with the right-side pane, it’s now on-site as well. I suspect we may see some interesting ideas spring up around this.

While the phone itself launches in October, Seesmic has just posted a preview video of what the Seesmic app will look like on the Windows Phone 7 platform. Seesmic recently launched Seesmic Desktop 2 and hinted that there would be a Windows Phone 7 app coming shortly. The above video highlights some of its features including Dashboard, Search and Spaces.