Ping.it, an Oslo, Norway-based startup, has been around since 2009 and has experimented with a number of business models, but it launched in public beta this week as a content discovery service. Ping.it’s main feature is “probes,” which it describes on its blog as “small apps which go out and retrieve information from across the Web on behalf of the user. They can be created, edited, shared and subscribed to – all by Ping.it users.”

“I see Ping.it as a new step forward in content discovery using elements from traditional RSS Readers and social media,” founder Marius Lian told me. “Google Reader was discontinued for a reason – time to move on.”

Kandell’s appointment comes as BuzzFeed, best known for cute kitten collages, is ramping up its ambitions to be a force for serious journalism. To that end, it has created partnerships with the New York Times and and brought on high-profile hires like Doree Shafrir from Rolling Stone as executive editor and Ben Smith from Politico.

BuzzFeed has already shown its longform aspirations with 10,000-word essays on topics like the military, Mitt Romney’s father and “Can You Die from a Nightmare?”. Kandell will work with in-house and freelance writers to expand those offerings and, in his words, show that “conversation-provoking longform journalism and profiles that have long been a staple of magazines are as vital as they’ve ever been”.

The site’s longform goals are intriguing because the genre is associated with prestigious print magazines like the New Yorker and not the viral, hyper-active fare that makes up a typical BuzzFeed page (see typical BuzzFeed cat image at right). Will the site be able to overcome the belief of many writers and readers that the best longform originates in print?

There is also the question of whether longform journalism is economically viable for BuzzFeed, or if the project is instead a labor of love. We’re hoping it will be both in the long term but, for now, it will be interesting to see how the “native advertisers” that are BuzzFeed’s bread and butter respond to the site’s larger literary ambitions.

To learn more about BuzzFeed’s longform plans, see “Kings of longform: New Yorker, the Atlantic … and BuzzFeed?”

The company on Thursday said that it had purchased the small New York startup for an undisclosed amount (in its first acquisition), adding three new technical hires.

Kingfish Labs, which has raised $500,000 from Lerer Ventures and Softbank Capital (both of which are also Buzzfeed investors), was launched about a year ago to process natural language on Facebook to figure out user interests and match up members for dating.

Jon Steinberg, Buzzfeed’s president and COO, said the company plans to apply that underlying technology in its efforts to create and seed social ads for its brand clients.

“A big part of what we do is extend those [brand's] campaigns and seed them in paid units on Facebook and Twitter,” he said. “We’re going to use that same technology to determine the interests of Facebook’s users… and target Sponsored Stories more granularly, based on those interests.”

Aside from sharing investors, Buzzfeed co-founder Jonah Peretti also worked with Kingfish co-founders Jeff Revesz and Rob Fishman at Huffington Post. Revesz and the other two technical former Kingfishers will join Buzzfeed’s engineering team but Fishman will not be joining the company.

Image via SocialHype