Last night, the New York Times dropped a juicy little tidbit into its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink daily update of the board mishegas at Yahoo around the deliberations yesterday over two competing private equity bids to buy a partial stake in the company.

No, not the one about Jeff Jordan — former eBay exec, OpenTable CEO and now VC at Andreessen Horowitz — possibly taking a big role at Yahoo if the firm’s bid with Silver Lake prevailed — which was mysteriously removed very soon after it posted (’cuz he will not, so good move, NYT!)

I mean the one about the venture firm’s big-kahuna partner, Marc Andreessen — who will indeed take a board seat and play a strong role in Yahoo’s future if his bid wins — getting a possible competitor in the Silicon Valley savior section of the ongoing show.

That would be in the form of Reid Hoffman, the well-known entrepreneur, VC and angel investor, who the Times said had talked with TPG Capital, Silver Lake’s rival in the Yahoo bidding, about becoming a possible partner.

Wrote the Times:

“TPG has held discussions with Greylock Partners, another venture capital firm, about a possible alignment, two people said. TPG is hoping to draw on the expertise of Reid Hoffman, one of Greylock’s partners and the founder of the professional social network LinkedIn, these people said.”

Translation: If Silver Lake has a tech icon of substance on its team to give uber-geek appeal to its offer — dagnabbit — then TPG was going to raise with another one, whom the very same Times reporter who wrote last night’s article recently nicknamed “The Start-Up Whisperer” in a recent glowing profile of Hoffman.

While I am still trying to grok what a start-up whisperer exactly means (and how someone as self-effacing as Hoffman would react to such a twee moniker without snickering), it’s a move that has likely already irritated Silver Lake.

After all, TPG aiming at nabbing Hoffman is akin to two crazy neighbors trying to one-up each other in holiday-lighting lawn decor. (You have a singing Santa, so I’ll have a singing Santa — and I might even add a Lady Gaga-themed crèche for good measure!)

But it’s not a bad instinct, either, to get your own live-action Silicon Valley legend, even if it is only half true in Hoffman’s case.

Because, according to sources who know such things, while Hoffman and TPG have had conversations, there have been no commitments, and nothing is close to being agreed on to link the pair.

That could certainly change, and quickly, but Hoffman or Greylock aren’t currently in TPG’s proposal to Yahoo.

That’s in contrast to Andreessen, who is all in (I am not even going to bother with “sources said” here, since everyone and my mother has seen the proposal) with Silver Lake on the deal to purchase 19.9 percent of Yahoo for about $16.50 a share.

As I reported earlier this week, for Silver Lake’s money and expertise in fixing broken things, the bid includes: Silver Lake getting three board seats; cash going to a buyback of stock or granting of a dividend to shareholders; the ability to select a CEO; approval of its strategic plan for Yahoo, and its solution to come to terms with Yahoo’s unhappy Asian partners; and all the purple wearables you could ever hope for (perhaps Yahoo’s best asset, IMHO, especially worn by such obviously cool dudes, as seen here).

Also, controversial Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang gets to stay around on the board (but only if he becomes very, very quiet, so as not to rile the activist shareholders).

TPG’s bid is less formed, although its price is slightly higher. And the PE firm has yet to check the “Big Geek Included” box.

Hence, the floating of Hoffman as a contender to take on Andreessen, who was once dubbed the “Golden Geek” by Time magazine.

I hope TPG does, soon, since what a matchup it would be!

But, for now at least, the pair — who share big investments in a range of Web companies, most especially Facebook (Andreessen is on the board of the social networking giant, and Hoffman was an early investor and adviser) — are at peace.

Dagnabbit.

In a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission concerning its upcoming IPO, Zynga is expected to unveil two key management and board changes at the online gaming phenom:

Chief Business Officer Owen Van Natta — who came to the San Francisco-based start-up several years ago to help CEO Mark Pincus grow it and develop it — will step down from his job and become a strategic adviser focusing on major partnerships. He’ll still remain board member at Zynga, but will give up millions of pre-IPO shares by moving out of his operational role.

And director and venture investor Brad Feld will leave the the board, which VCs sometime do as companies move to a public offering and add members with more specific business experience.

In his place, longtime entrepreneur and investor Sunil Paul, who founded a company called FreeLoader with Pincus many moons ago, will join the board.

Zynga confirmed the changes to me in a statement by Pincus:

“Owen is a valuable business partner. He’s made great contributions to Zynga and continues to be an important part of our team.”

Sources said the changes related to Van Natta around are not part of a recent controversy around a Wall Street Journal story about clawing back of some share options grants of early Zynga employees who had become less involved in the company. While the company cannot actually take back already vested shares owned by those staffers, the article has put a lot of scrutiny on Zynga and raised questions about how to cope with the kind of hyper-growth some Internet firms experience.

That’s certainly been the kind of rocket ride Zynga has been on, as it has grown from a small social gaming company on Facebook to a high-profile public company.

Zynga is in the final stages of its IPO process, answering questions from the SEC that are typical. If all goes well, Zynga execs are expected to go on a road show after the Thanksgiving and go public by the end of the year at a market valuation of close to $20 billion.

That was different from when Van Natta officially got to Zynga in the spring of last year — after a rocky experience running the doomed Myspace. At the time, he told me at the time that planned to be focused on scaling the business and did not consider himself a long-term operating executive.

Since then, he has helped Pincus hire a series of experienced gaming execs, including a chief operating officer, a chief marketing officer and others.

Zynga was Van Natta’s third high-profile Web company in recent years. He was a top early exec for Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook until early 2008, and in 2009 he took over News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, a job that lasted less than a year.

Early in his career, Van Natta was also was a top strategy, marketing and deal exec for Amazon, which bought an early social networking start-up called PlanetAll that he worked at.

It will now be interesting to see what Van Natta does next, but it is unlikely he will take a permanent position. He is a longtime angel investor in Silicon Valley, including in hot start-ups such as Asana and still holds a significant stake in Facebook.

But, in moving out of his job at Zynga, he will be giving up many millions of shares of a rich trove he was given when he arrived at the company. That said, Van Natta already owns millions of accelerated vested shares and will get another large grant as a board member.

Translation: Don’t cry for Mr. Van Natta, Silicon Valley — he made $42 million last year from Zynga shares alone.

I am here at Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale, Calif., to check out “Product Runway,” which is the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s attempt to show that it can still innovate.

First and foremost is the launch of Livestand, a personalized news reader that is similar to Flipboard and a variety of other rivals, including — soon — Google.

It’s Yahoo’s attempt to present a business-as-usual feel — amidst a long and agonizing and very public strategic overview that might also include the sale of the company (or not!), in the wake of the recent firing of its last CEO, Carol Bartz.

It has caused a lot of trauma inside Yahoo, which can’t help with innovation.

But we press on!

In other words, despite the three-ring circus going on outside, Yahoo wants you to know it is still hard at work.

We begin:

10:35 am: As the strains of U2 die out, Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving takes the stage, which is actually set up in the company’s cafeteria. I can smell lunch being made nearby and I am hungry.

Apt — Yahoo certainly needs to show off a lot of cool stuff or its fate will be cooked.

No pressure, Blake!

“Personally, I am more bullish on Yahoo today,” he said. “What is Yahoo? Simple. It’s the premier digital media company. Period. Stop.”

Oh, if it were only that easy.

10:46 am: Irving pulls out his favorite slide, which looks like a chemistry test. It lists the various elements of the product strategy, with things like personalization, mobile, premium.

Now to Livestand, which is available on the Apple iTunes app store right now.

Don’t all rush at once!

Irving notes that Livestand is more than just an app — it is a platform.

In other words, Yahoo wants to help publishers publish online. Kind of a Facebook of content.

If Yahoo can pull it off, that is. (And, of course, unless Facebook decides to do the same.)

10:50 am: Livestand is an HTML5 “personalized living magazine.”

“This is the way Web pages are going to look,” declares Irving. Which is to say, heavy on photos, swoopy navigation, a television screen-like interface.

Irving uses the example of Surfer magazine, which is a good idea since waves always look pretty. Especially in a video-in-frame with Kelly Slater in Hawaii.

But, in essence, for anyone who has used Flipboard for years now, none of this is entirely different.

10:54 am: The look of what would be the Yahoo News page is actually much more interesting, since it is clearly a whole lot better than the Web page.

Irving also shows off a “living ad” — in this case, an unusually snuggly couple on a couch. It is cool, but creepy.

When launched, the ad has tap points. Irving — naughtily declaring about what is an ad, “I’ll tap that” — taps the lady’s butt, which would also have been my move. We learn about the jeans, of course.

10:58 am: Irving then shows off the ability to add feeds.

Next, something called “Cocktails.” First up, a developer tool called Yahoo Mojito and Yahoo Manhattan, which is a hosting service. The company will open-source both the technologies in 2012.

Irving brings up Mike Kerns, VP of Personalization & Social, who came to Yahoo when it bought the innovative sports fan site called Citizen Sports.

“We like to ship sh#t,” he notes. I like Mike Kerns immediately.

Kerns intros C.O.R.E. No, it is not a secret government organization that takes out fussy bloggers, who might be more critical than Yahoo execs would like.

In fact, it stands for “content optimization relevance engine.” Of course it does.

Simply put, C.O.R.E. is trying to link the right content or whatever to the right consumers and who likes what. Ladies like this, dudes like this. Apparently, “men of multiple ages” enjoy stories about golden chicken.

11:11 am: Kerns is moving on to social, especially its integration with Facebook. While much touted, sources tell me it has gone slower than expected in terms of use, but that it is improving.

Kerns talks about the idea of matching content to conversations to interests and, well, you know — the now exhausting world of modern media consumption.

The world in which you can no longer simply read an article and enjoy it — you must comment, share, discuss, parse, tweet.

Does anyone remember when you read something cool and just kept it to yourself?

Forget it, pal! It is a full-information society now and you better get on board and start poking your friends about every little thing.

(Personally, I plan on becoming a hermit in 3 … 2 … 1.)

11:18 am: Now Tim Parsey, who is Yahoo’s design head. He is hands down the most delightful exec the company has had in a while, mostly because he loves to smirk adorkably.

He shows off Yahoo’s first original design, which was a dull list. And then another really bad logo. But Parsey loves it! It’s kitschy!

Smirk attack!

Parsey moves into what has to happen now, which is to deliver a much more emotional experience and a much better designed one. He uses words like “humanism.”

Say what? He is right — Yahoo has for too long completely ignored design as an important part of the experience.

That’s why Flipboard was so quickly touted — it was pretty and fun. And it is why everyone is simply forced to love Apple products.

11:22 am: Parsey even has a code for it, called REM — for rational, emotional and meaningful.

He shows off a weather app. People take photos and they can be used in the app. Then Yahoo Mail for the iPad, whic is also handsome with photos and video. Livestand, also pretty.

“Great way to differentiate,” says Parsey. He calls it “one Yahoo!” Indeed.

11:35 am: I’ll admit it. After Parsey-fest, I zoned out for a sec when IntoNow dude, Adam Cahan, comes up.

Donut emergency!

Back to IntoNow, it’s the television indexing service that Yahoo bought in April.

Essentially, more ways to watch the media — in this case, video — and do 53 other things at the very same time. Memo to humanity: We will all be paying continuous partial attention for the rest of eternity.

Like I said: Hermitage!

11:41 am: Product dude Irving is back, making a point that, despite all the public mishegas, Yahoo has been busy at innovating.

A redo of email, better search, social “Facebar” with Facebook, Flickr for Google Android.

Irving is correct — Yahoo’s engineers have been hard at work and deserve kudos for doing so, even with attrition issues, stock declines and questions about the company’s very future being debated daily.

The problem is that too many of these improvements are mostly incremental and essentially table stakes for tech companies, most of whom have introed many more significant innovations in the same time frame as Yahoo has.

Google did Android, Google+ (as well as some notable failures). Microsoft did Kinect, Windows Phone, Windows 8. Amazon did Kindle Fire. Facebook did a range of major updates, as it has grown like a weed.

And there’s Apple. You might have heard of the iPhone and the iPad.

You get my point. Yahoo’s Product Runway today is well done, but what it really needs to be is just the beginning of a take-off.

11:48 am: Now Q&A time.

The first question is what took so long to get Livestand out, the second is why should people use Livestand since Flipboard and others have already been around for a dog’s age.

I ask about design — mostly because I want Parsey to use the word “delicious” a lot — and also about all the turmoil around the company and its impact on product creation. (I decide not to mention that Yahoo blew its acquisition of the bookmarking site, Delicious, and then sold it.)

Parsey delivers on the delicious scale, noting that Yahoo must have one design experience and yet has a lot of different interfaces. In other words, it cannot be Apple, but it can feel a lot more cohesive.

Irving talks a little bit around the obvious elephant in the room — the future of Yahoo — noting that the product staff was trying to focus and forget the storm going on outside.

“We have dreams about what this company can be,” says Irving.

You and me both, brother.

12:04 pm: More questions that are too detailed for my tastes, since they have delivered lunch and I can see it and I am ravenous.

As Parsey might say: It looks deliiiiiccccious.

Now, let’s hope Yahoo can do even more tasty stuff.

Adam Lashinsky, Fortune magazine’s high-profile Silicon Valley reporter, will be penning a book titled “Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired — and Secretive — Company Really Works.”

An expansion of a well-read article that Lashinsky wrote for the publication earlier this year, the book will be available on Jan. 18, 2012 from Business Plus, an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

Lashinsky’s will be the second Apple tome to be coming out that will shed more light inside the workings of Silicon Valley’s most iconic company.

In November, former Time Inc. writer and editor Walter Isaacson’s much anticipated biography about Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs will be released by Simon & Schuster.

“Steve Jobs” has been written with cooperation from Jobs, who has not done so in the past.

Lashinsky said in an interview today he did not garner Jobs’s help on the book, but did manage to get a deep inside look at the company.

“Doing an unauthorized book is harder,” said Lashinsky. “But what you get is well-reported information, which is outside the message Apple wants to deliver, and there is so much good stuff, this company is worth far more than an article.”

Lashinsky has been a longtime reporter in tech, including covering Apple, a company that is notoriously secretive and difficult to report about.

Still, Lashinsky has written a lot about the maker of the groundbreaking Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad devices, including a piece in 2008 about recently installed CEO Tim Cook, titled “The Genius Behind Steve: Could the Operations Whiz Run The Company Someday?”

Inside Apple will be more about the entire company, which has vaulted from near death only 15 years ago to become one of the most highly valued companies in tech and, in fact, globally.

The publisher promises a lot of insidery facts, including, “how Apple creates killer products, forges intense bonds with consumers, and gets what it wants from suppliers … the lessons about leadership, product design and marketing are universal, and they should appeal to anyone hoping to bring some of that Apple magic to their own company, career or creative endeavor.”

Lashinsky said these are important lessons for others to explore.

“So much of what Apple does stands decades of business teaching on its head, because they just don’t do things the way other companies do,” he said. “The rest of the business world might want to pay attention.”

Indeed, they should.

The arena for news readers on tablets and smartphones is competitive, with high-profile efforts such as Flipboard, Livestand from Yahoo, AOL’s Editions and start-ups such as Pulse and Zite.

The reason for CNN’s acquisition interest — as well as look-sees from several other publishers — is not a surprise: As readers turn more toward using these mobile devices to consume content, big media companies are trying to acquire the technology to serve up their fare to them.

It is a dicey arena, though, where content aggregation meets (and crashes into) content lifting. Vancouver-based Zite, for example, was sent a cease-and-desist letter in March, by a panoply of media companies (not CNN!) alleging various copyright violations.

That happened right after it was launched, with $4 million in funding from angel investors and Canadian grants and an innovative personalized article-picking algorithm.

As Liz Gannes wrote then:

[Then] Zite CEO Ali Davar describes the iPad as a way to “emancipate the technology” his team originated at research at the University of British Columbia.

It had previously been put to work in a browser plug-in called Worio. And, as you might have guessed, browser plug-ins are a tough business.

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Last week, a Canadian site called Techvibes first wrote about the possibility of the sale of Zite to CNN, which is based in Atlanta and owned by Time Warner.

In a press release, CNN said Zite would remain a standalone unit, as a wholly-owned subsidiary of CNN, and that CEO Mark Johnson will continue to run Zite’s operations, but now in San Francisco. CNN also said that Davar will remain an executive director and Mike Klass will continue as CTO.

In a statement, Johnson said: “Zite is thrilled about combining forces with CNN to create a world-class news discovery platform. In CNN, we have found a partner who shares our vision and passion. Being part of the CNN family gives us the capital to grow Zite’s business and continue to innovate in the space.”

Facing a barrage of negative press about its upcoming IPO, Groupon CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason took up a pen to counter critics of the social buying service.

Especially under scrutiny has been the Chicago-based Groupon’s accounting of its finances — along with worries that its torrid growth is slowing — both of which Mason addressed in detail in a pugnacious email memo to his thousands of employees.

Specifically referencing a recent article speculating that the daily deals site was running out of money, Mason said, in part:

“While we’ve bitten our tongues and allowed insane accusations (like in the article above) to go unchallenged publicly, it’s important to me that you have the context necessary to brush this stuff off.”

Mason also took on the controversial ACSOI — or adjusted consolidated segment operating income — metric that Groupon used in its initial filing and later stepped back from.

“The reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate ACSOI (no, it’s not the same reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate our Superbowl ad), is that we think it actually does a pretty good job at describing our marketing expenses in a steady state — we just didn’t realize there would be so many skeptics,” wrote Mason.

Mason also took some aim at competitors, such as LivingSocial and Yelp, in the email.

As for the public offering, which is expected next month:

“If there’s a silver lining, it’s that we’re almost on the other side, and the negativity leaves us well-positioned to exceed expectations with an IPO baby that, having seen the ultrasound, I can promise you is not one of those uglies.”

Then again, that is exactly what a dad-to-be would say about his baby, whatever it looked like.

Mason, when asked about the memo, declined to comment.

There is a lot more than that, so here’s Mason’s full email for all you pencil pushers to peruse:

Dear Groupon,

This weekend, I did a Google News search on our company — my first in awhile. The first story that popped up was called The Fall of Groupon: Is the Daily Deals Site Running Out of Cash? I laughed when I read the headline (in the car by myself, weirdly). First — with this article, the degree to which we’re getting the shit kicked out of us in the press had finally crossed the threshold from “annoying” to “hilarious.” Second, I was struck by the irony — I had just finished a board meeting last Wednesday saying this to myself: I’ve never been more confident and excited about the future of our business.

I realize that this sounds like the kind of thing that CEOs say when they’re trying to pep people up. First of all — I’m all about not pepping people up. If you don’t believe me, just ask my fiancée, Jenny “why don’t you ever say anything nice about me” Gillespie. Want another example? Look at the magazine covers in our lobby, which are there to make you sad by reminding you of the impermanence of success.

I’m going to spend the rest of this email explaining why I’m so excited. You need some ammo to argue back against your blog-reading “friends” (silently argue in your mind, that is — you can’t actually say any of this yet), and I’ve been told that the “what have you ever done with your life that’s so great?” rebuttal isn’t working as well for you guys as it has for me.

While we’ve bitten our tongues and allowed insane accusations (like in the article above) to go unchallenged publicly, it’s important to me that you have the context necessary to brush this stuff off.

I’ll summarize my excitement with four points: 1) Growth in our core business is strong 2) Our investments in the future — businesses like Getaways & NOW — look great, 3) We are pulling away from competition, and 4) We’ve built a great team that I would pit against anyone. In other words, all the stuff that one would want to look good? It looks good.

Many of the long-term unknowns of our business are becoming known, and we like the answers. I will now elaborate in a level of financial detail that will give Jason Child a stomach ulcer.

1. GROWTH IN THE CORE BUSINESS

Thanks to a tremendous effort by our sales team, August in the U.S. is shaping up to be a pivotal month. It appears that will revenues grow by about 12% over last month (which is a lot), while we cut our marketing expenses by 20% in the same period.

Beyond their obvious goodness, these numbers are important because they answer one of the main criticisms thrown at us in the past few months, relating to a metric we put in the S-1 called ACSOI (adjusted consolidated segment operating income) to help people understand how we think about marketing expenses. The reason everyone in the world seems to hate ACSOI is that it makes us look magically profitable by subtracting a bunch of our customer acquisition marketing costs from our expenses. The reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate ACSOI (no, it’s not the same reason we didn’t realize everyone in the world would hate our Superbowl ad), is that we think it actually does a pretty good job at describing our marketing expenses in a steady state –we just didn’t realize there would be so many skeptics. I think it’s worth going deep on this one more time — brace yourself.

Our internal forecast shows two different types of marketing: what I’ll call “normal marketing” — which is NOT excluded from ACSOI — and “customer acquisition marketing,” which is. The way Groupon spends on marketing is unique in three ways:

1. We are currently spending more than just about any company ever on marketing — in Q2, we spent nearly 20% of our net revenue on marketing, while a typical company spends less than 5%. Why do we spend so much? The simple answer is “because it works.” But thats only part of what makes our situation special.

2. Our marketing — at least the customer acquisition marketing that we remove from ACSOI — is designed to add people to our own long-term marketing channel — our daily email list. Once we have a customer’s email, we can continually market to them at no additional cost. Compare this to Johnson and Johnson, McDonald’s, or most other companies. If I’m a Johnson, and I’m trying to sell you a box of Band Aids, I have to keep spending money on commercials and magazine ads and stuff to remind you about how sweet Band Aids are, even after you’ve bought your first box. With Groupon, we just spend money one time to get you on our email list, and then every day we email you a reminder of the sweetness of our metaphorical Band Aid. There is no cost of reacquisition — that’s unusual (and we created ACSOI to point that out). If Johnson wanted to follow the Groupon strategy, he would have to start a free daily newspaper about bandages and then run Band Aid ads in it every day.

3. Eventually, we’ll ramp down marketing just as fast as we ramped it up, reducing the customer acquisition part of our marketing expenses (the piece that we remove in ACSOI) to nominal levels. We are spending a ton now because we’re acquiring as many subscribers as we can as quickly as we can. We aren’t paying attention to marketing budget (just marketing ROI) in the way a normal company would, because we know that even if we wanted to continue to spend at these levels, we would eventually run out of new subscribers to acquire. So our customer acquisition spend drops severely to reflect the fact that eventually we’ll run out of people we can add to our email list. We view this internally as a very large one-time expense and then our job forever after will be to continually convert these subscribers into customers and to make sure our customers keep buying from us. Ongoing, the normal marketing dollars we spend are not something we would remove from our internal calculation of ACSOI.

I tried my best to explain this simply, but it’s not lost on me that if you actually understood this, you probably had to read it three times. It’s not easy stuff. It’s much easier to assume that we’re goons. So people can be forgiven for being suspicious. In fact, feel a little bad about how downhearted the critics will be when we don’t turn out to be a Ponzi scheme — those are good impulses for journalists to have, and I hope our non-evil ways don’t destroy their spirits.

Anyway, there’s a reason that I just went on about ACSOI. One of the questions that skeptics ask is, “when you ramp down marketing, won’t revenues stop growing as well? Aren’t you just buying growth?” Over the past several months we’ve been consistently reducing our marketing spend and yet revenues are still increasing at a significant pace. In Q1 of this year, marketing represented 32.3% of our net revenues. By the end of Q2 it had fallen to 19.4%. And it has continued to fall over the past several months all because we’ve been investing in our own long-term marketing channel — our email list.

Internationally we see the same trends — marketing is down, but revenues are up — every country is either losing less or making more. Even in young markets like Korea, where we’re still making massive investments, we’re seeing unprecedented growth. We started building our Korean team this January, despite the presence of two competitors that were larger than any we’d previously battled from behind. Thanks to the brilliant execution of the Korean team, we are set to be the market leader within months. We’ve never had a country grow as fast as Korea!

What about our joint-venture with Tencent in China? Did you read the article that Gaopeng’s CEO has kidnapped the first born children of all our employees and is putting them to work building a laser beam he’ll use to slice the moon in half? It turns out that that one isn’t true either. China is definitely a different market, but every month we inch closer to profitability. As has been our strategy in launching other countries — Germany, France, and the UK, included — our China growth strategy was to hire quickly and manage out the bottom performers. So far, that strategy has improved our competitive position in China from #3,000 to #8. Will we one day reach the dominant status we enjoy in most (come on, Switzerland!) other countries? It’s too soon to tell, but there’s no question in my mind that we’re building a business that will be around for the long haul.

2. NEW BUSINESS LINES ARE BOOMING

Travel and Product are enormous opportunities. After only a few months, they’re already making up 20% of revenue in some countries. We sold $2M worth of mattresses in the UK — in one day! Groupon Getaways will do $10M in its first calendar month — which you might think is awesome, but we’re actually disappointed with those results because we know how much better we’ll be doing soon.

While there’s still a ton of work to do, Groupon Now! continues to see weekly double digit growth. The model works and I believe it will play a major part in the future of our global business as more merchants and customers join the marketplace.

3. WE ARE PULLING AWAY FROM COMPETITION

If there’s a question I’ve received from Groupon skeptics more than any other, it’s, “how will you fend off the competition — especially massive companies like Google and Facebook?” I could give a dozen reasons to bet on Groupon, but it’s impossible to predict the future or the actions of others. Well, now the sleeping giants have woken up — and the numbers are showing that what was proven true with literally thousands of other competitors is just as true with the incumbents of the Internet: it’s kind of hard to build a Groupon. And since anyone with an Internet connection can track the performance of our competitors, I can be more specific:

Google Offers is small and not growing. In the three markets where we compete, we are 450% of their size.

Yelp is small and not growing. In the 15 markets where we compete, our daily deals are 500% of their size.

Living Social’s U.S. local business is about 1/3rd our size in revenue (and smaller in GP) and has shrunk relative to us in the last several months. This, in part, appears to be driving them toward short-sighted tactics to buy revenue, like buying gift certificates from national retailers at full price and then paying out of their own pocket to give the appearance of a 50% off deal. Our marketing team has tested this tactic enough to know that it’s generally a bad idea, and not a profitable form of customer acquisition.

Facebook sales are harder to track, but are even less significant at present.

My point is not that our competitors will fail — some may actually develop sustainable businesses, or even grow — after all, local commerce is an enormous market. The real point is that our business is a lot harder to build than people realize and our scale creates competitive advantages that even the largest technology companies are having trouble penetrating. And with the launch of NOW, I suspect our competition will have an even harder time in light of the natural barriers to entry that are needed to build a real-time local deals marketplace.

4. OUR TEAM

This is the fluffiest of the four points, but maybe the most important — we’ve built a global team of hungry entrepreneurial operators and seasoned executives that rivals any team I know of. Almost every day, I find myself in a scenario where I silently think, “I can’t believe I got this person to work for me — that failure of judgement is perhaps their single flaw.”

I point out the team because while today the business is strong and it appears we must endure success for awhile longer (despite its impermanence), we will inevitably be challenged with issues we didn’t predict — and when that happens, the quality of our team will be a deciding factor in our ultimate long-term success.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I wrote this email because when I read some of the press this weekend, I realized a rational person could read this stuff and wrongly conclude that we’re in trouble. The irony is hopefully clear: We’ve never been stronger.

And while we’ve refrained from defending ourselves publicly, you’ve continued to create our best defense, with every department innovating new practices that are taking our business to the next level. Thanks for staying tough, determined, and agile throughout this process. For now we must patiently and silently endure a bit more public criticism as we prepare to birth this IPO baby — a breed for which there are no epidurals. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that we’re almost on the other side, and the negativity leaves us well-positioned to exceed expectations with an IPO baby that, having seen the ultrasound, I can promise you is not one of those uglies.

I’ve been as candid as possible — hope this sheds some light on things. Reply with your questions if anything remains unclear. Amidst all this, I hope you remember what we’re doing here — we are making history together. I guess you don’t get to build something that reshapes the local commerce ecosytem without getting a few bruises. I’m so proud of the work we’re doing, and I feel extraordinarily lucky to work on what I think is the best thing that’s happened to small businesses since the telephone We’ve invented something that is catalyzing millions of dollars of local commerce every single day in 45 countries and fills the lives of millions of customers with unforgettable experiences — it’s pretty remarkable.

Looking forward to getting this behind us!

Andrew

P.S.: I almost forgot to address the nonsense about us running out of money in the article above. If you apply the same logic used in the article, you’d have concluded long ago that companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart were running out of cash too. Both have often had payables far in excess of their cash. Finance geeks call this a working capital deficit. It’s normal, manageable and a lot of folks actually believe it’s good thing and would kill to get paid from their customers long before they have to pay their suppliers. We are generating cash, not losing it — we generated $25M in cash last quarter alone, adding to the $200M we had before. In other words, we’re doing the opposite of running out of money.

Speaking of “it looks good,” here is Conan O’Brien with a Tourette’s version of Mason’s new catchphrase:

A few months back, after our staff more than doubled in size, AllThingsD launched our redesigned Web site. Today, we’re taking another step forward by launching an updated social media strategy.

You can explore the new features we’ve added by clicking the button below:

See the new features

But, before you go, I’d like to call out a few specifics that we’re particularly excited about.

The core of our expanded social media presence is the 15 new topic and category-based Twitter accounts. These new accounts — specifically about Apple, venture capital, personnel changes or mobile, to name a few — allow readers to more closely follow topics and companies they care most about.

We’ve chosen to keep the main @AllThingsD account live and real-time, meaning it will still deliver all of our stories within seconds of publishing.

But readers aren’t always awake when the news they care about breaks, so the new topic- and category-specific accounts are optimized through our partnership with SocialFlow, a real-time service for social media delivery.

SocialFlow listens for when the followers of a Twitter account are active, and chooses to tweet the posts that are best. Some articles may be held back for a short time, especially those published in off-hours, although we’ve chosen settings that will keep anything from getting stale and also maximize the relevance of our tweets.

The system is designed so that readers following our main @AllThingsD account can also follow others without being overburdened by additional tweets.

Following multiple accounts just means you’re more likely to see news that is important to you.

Aside from Twitter, which we know to be popular with our readers, we have also expanded our use of Facebook.

At the main AllThingsD page, we curate and offer commentary on some of our more topical and consumer-focused stories. Clicking “Like” on any of our pages will put our updates into your news feed along with your other friends.

Finally, I’m inviting you to interact with me on the various social streams. While tweeting at me via my personal Twitter account will get my attention most quickly, I’m also available to you via Google+, Facebook and also by sending an email.

Most of all, I encourage you to click the button below. It will take you to our new subscribe page, where you can follow any of the new accounts and customize how you get your news from AllThingsD.

Again, here’s the button to get you started:

See the new features

AllThingsD has undergone a lot of changes in the past year that Walt and I are truly proud of, and today we are posting together about changes to social media on the site.

Social media, especially Twitter, has been a major part of the AllThingsD operation since our earliest days. We have always encouraged our writers to be active on the medium — something we continue to do.

That’s why we are launching 15 new Twitter accounts that break out our coverage into categories, as on our site, and also around specialized topics we know our audience follows closely.

Now, in addition to following the main @AllThingsD Twitter account for up-to-the-second updates, our readers can follow accounts that feature only our stories about Apple, venture capital, personnel changes or mobile, to name a few. We hope readers will customize their experience so that AllThingsD can be as useful a resource as possible.

In addition to the Twitter accounts, we also have newly refreshed Facebook pages, and we’ve enabled LinkedIn sharing of our articles as part of becoming one of its recommended news sources.

You can have a look at all the new social features at our brand-new social subscribe page.

We’re adding all of these features while maintaining respect for the personal privacy and data of our readers. Therefore, all social media implementations on AllThingsD require the reader to take an explicit action to share.

You might think this level of disclosure is overboard, but we think it’s the right thing to do.

We’ve also brought on Drake Martinet to be our social media editor.

As social as Walt and I can be, Drake will be your point of contact for questions, concerns and comments about social media and its use on AllThingsD.

If you want more specifics about what we are up to, I encourage you to read Drake’s post on the social media changes. He covers some of the tools and services we are using, as well as explaining a little more about the thinking that went into our new social strategy.

If you have any questions, we encourage you to tweet Drake (he’s @withDrake on Twitter) or reach him at his email here.

Please also see our new features here by clicking this button:

See the new features

Thanks,

Kara and Walt

Google+ kingpin Bradley Horowitz has joined the board of Wordnik, which has also just raised another round of funding of $8 million.

It’s the first board seat ever for Horowitz, who has been a bit busy of late launching the search giant’s first successful social networking product.

Wordnik, which claims to have the word’s most complete map of the language you are currently reading, was founded by Erin McKean, the former editor in chief of the New Oxford American Dictionary.

On its Web site, Wordnik notes it has “billions of words, 965,125,300 example sentences, 6,690,770 unique words, 223,693 comments, 168,573 tags, 121,180 pronunciations, 61,144 favorites and 936,294 words in 30,038 lists created by 70,054 Wordniks.”

Its grand aim is to be the company that powers definitions and context for publishers of all kinds around the Web — from blogs to articles to even tweets — much as a mapping company might render navigational information.

The aim of owning the world’s largest word graph is ambitious and innovative, although the effort to create a viable business out of it all will be its next job. Wordnik now has 18 employees at its San Mateo, Calif., HQ.

McKean gave a demo of its Smartwords feature at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference in 2010, after it had earlier raised $4.8 million from a number of venture firms and other angel investors.

Here’s an interview I did with McKean, Horowitz and Wordnik CEO Joe Hyrkin, who came on board in March, this weekend outside Buck’s in Woodside, as well as the video of the D8 demo of Wordnik:

And here is the official press release about the new funding and Horowitz appointment:

BRADLEY HOROWITZ NAMED TO WORDNIK BOARD;
WORDNIK RAISES $8 MILLION IN SERIES C FUNDING

Horowitz Accepts First Board Appointment; New and Existing Investors Support Wordnik as it Takes Innovative Word/Context Discovery Capability to the Marketplace

SAN MATEO, Calif. – July 25, 2011 – Wordnik, maker of the most innovative word navigation system, today announced that Bradley Horowitz, Vice President of Product Management for Google and longtime Silicon Valley executive, would join its board of directors. This is Horowitz’s first board appointment.

In addition, Wordnik has raised $8 million in its third round of venture capital funding, led by new investor Lucas Venture Group. Mohr Davidow Ventures, FLOODGATE, Baseline Ventures, Roger McNamee and additional private investors also participated in this round, which is earmarked to fund strategic growth as Wordnik builds out a range of new product and service offerings. This Series C investment brings Wordnik’s total funding to $12.8 million.

One of the most highly respected executives in the high-tech industry, Bradley Horowitz oversees product design for Google’s social and communications efforts including Gmail, Blogger, Picasa, and the recently launched Google+ Project. Before joining Google, Horowitz led Yahoo’s advanced development division, which developed new products such as Yahoo! Pipes, and drove the acquisition of products such as Flickr and MyBlogLog. Previously, he was Co-Founder and CTO of Virage, where he oversaw the technical direction of the company from its founding through its IPO and eventual acquisition by Autonomy.

“I’ve devoted my career to finding and working on innovative technologies,” said Horowitz. “In accepting my first Board appointment, I now have the opportunity to help guide Wordnik, a company that started with an incredibly innovative word navigation system, as it continues to offer deeper access to discovery and meaning across digital text. I know it will be a very rewarding experience.”

“Wordnik has changed the way consumers discover and interact with words by providing the most relevant context and meaning available anywhere,” said Joe Hyrkin, CEO of Wordnik. “With this investment from our longtime VC partners and strengthened by the addition of Bradley Horowitz to our board, we enter an exciting new phase for the company, building out our core technology and creating new leveraged offerings for a wide variety of content and commerce partners. Bradley brings us both great product insight and industry expertise, and will work with our founders, Erin McKean and Tony Tam, on future innovation.”

Wordnik was launched in 2008 with the mission to help people unlock the value of words and phrases and to discover what information is most personally meaningful. Wordnik’s technology provides additional access to content and context from a wide range of sources including the world’s most respected dictionaries, Wordnik users, and from unexpected places like Twitter and Flickr.

“Wordnik.com has offered consumers an easy way to gain more meaning and deeper context around words – kind of like a ‘GPS for words,’” said Jon Feiber of Mohr Davidow Ventures. “The next frontier for Wordnik is to bring the power of Wordnik to a wide range of publishers and other content providers by providing the most relevant discovery experience for their users. We think Wordnik will quickly establish itself as a valuable asset to its business partners, in addition to its continuing as an exceptional consumer site.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110725/googles-horowitz-joins-board-of-wordnik-as-online-dictionary-site-garners-8m-more-in-funding-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110705/yes-that-is-a-cat-on-the-head-of-a-soon-to-be-public-company-ceo-and-of-course-its-groupons-andrew-mason/ http://allthingsd.com/20110705/yes-that-is-a-cat-on-the-head-of-a-soon-to-be-public-company-ceo-and-of-course-its-groupons-andrew-mason/#comments Tue, 05 Jul 2011 23:11:04 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=94668

Do you think Zynga’s Mark Pincus would put a cat on his head for a national magazine shoot? Or LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner? Or, perish the thought, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook?

But the wacky stylings of Groupon CEO and co-founder Andrew Mason seem to demand it.

Thus, straight-faced, he appears in a very long article, titled “Letter From Chicago: Groupon Therapy,” in this month’s Vanity Fair magazine with a very fat tabby cat clawing onto his noggin.

There’s also a shot of Mason in the equally kooky “Michael’s Room” at Groupon HQ and the expected plethora of ironic hipster anecdotes, such as the opening one about Mason almost giving a spotted pony to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on a visit.

According to the piece:

“He had originally planned to give the mayor a puppy, but decided that a pony would be even more memorable. ‘I mean, it’s such a heavy thing to gift someone,’ he said, laughing. ‘I thought it would be funny to give it to somebody as busy as the mayor.’”

Buuuuurnnn!

Otherwise, it runs through all the whistlestops of the basic Groupon story — about its aggressively non-corporate nature, the pros and cons of using the social buying service, the insidious copycat competitors, the famously rejected $6 billion Google acquisition offer and, finally, the splashy upcoming IPO.

Also, as usual, the fretful worries about Groupon’s staying power, as evidenced by the Emma Stone-tastic cover tagline:

“Is Groupon This Year’s Facebook? (or Next Year’s Pets.com?)”

How about let’s be a little more creative and say neither.

Moving along, of course, plenty about the lovable Yogi Bear of a CEO, Mason, who apparently plays the accordion (who knew?), but who one close friend insisted was also highly disciplined and serious.

Of course he is, but not for lack of trying to seem not so much that way.

As he is quoted in Vanity Fair telling a group of new Groupon employees at an orientation session: “As we get bigger, instead of being like most companies, conforming and becoming more normal, we want to become weirder.”

With that cat on his head, this month at least: Mission accomplished, Andrew!

You can also check out more Mason funster times in this video of a very entertaining interview I did with him at the ninth D: All Things Digital conference recently:

(Photo credit: Martin Schoeller, exclusively for Vanity Fair.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110705/yes-that-is-a-cat-on-the-head-of-a-soon-to-be-public-company-ceo-and-of-course-its-groupons-andrew-mason/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110509/demand-ceo-richard-rosenblatt-talks-panda/ http://allthingsd.com/20110509/demand-ceo-richard-rosenblatt-talks-panda/#comments Mon, 09 May 2011 13:29:19 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=43637

Last week, after he turned in better-than-expected earnings and tried to explain to a worried Wall Street how the search algorithm changes at Google, called Panda, were significant but not devastating to his business, BoomTown had a short phone interview with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt.

To ask even more questions about Panda! Grrrrr…

Actually, Rosenblatt was as cordial as ever about what is a hair-pullingly critical issue for his newly public company, which has really been under investor and other scrutiny from the get-go about the way it handles content.

Which is to say very much differently than traditional media companies had done in the past, with an eye on how to optimize traffic and advertising revenue by using tech to know exactly how much each piece of content online is actually worth and how much it should cost.

Them’s been fighting words for a while, with accusations by detractors of Demand’s system that it is little more than a “content farm,” producing poor quality fare.

Rosenblatt has battled that charge all the way through a lucrative IPO, but the company definitely got caught in the Panda maelstrom, as Google has tried to cull out bad results (and make itself look better, it must be said).

This has put Demand in an awkward position–trying to minimize the damage, real and perceived, created by the changes, and also making sure Google does not become even more aggressive by tut-tutting those changes.

It’s a delicate dance for Rosenblatt, as you will see from my handful of questions (especially since Demand’s stock has been badly hit):

Q: What were you trying to communicate in the call, especially since investors seemed very focused on Panda?

A: I was trying in the simplest way to explain the way we figure the relationship of how much traffic to ROI (return on investment) and RPM (revenue per 1,000 impressions).

I think the best way to assuage the worries is to just keep on growing our business and traffic.

What I also wanted to show was that third-party data sources should not be relied on.

We did get affected, for sure. But I was not just being optimistic, we wanted to use that to really understand what we can do better.

We really need these kind of signals to shake things up.

Explain what you are doing to improve quality–does that mean longer articles or paying more for content to get better stuff?

A: There are some topics that do not deserve more than 500 words, and some deserve more.

But we’re not going to make content that is expensive just because, except maybe for marketing purposes. It has to make financial sense at the scale of our current business.

We would spend more on a post on “How to Build a Deck,” for example, if Home Depot were interested in sponsoring that content.

Q: Given Google’s shift in its algorithm, are you shifting your distribution, such as toward social and mobile?

A: If you look at where trends are going, that’s where we are going to be.

Everything is shifting quickly to mobile and social and we will shift in the same way.

It used to be there were not a lot of places to make content for, and now we have a lot more choices.

If you are out there with our data and our assets, you change as the market changes.

Q: How are you changing the continued perception that Demand is a content farm?

A: I don’t think anyone has defined what a content farm is and I am not sure what it means either.

We obviously don’t think we are a content farm and I am not sure we can counter every impact if some people think we are.

The only way we are going to do that is continued growth in revenue and showing that we are doing this for the longterm.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110509/demand-ceo-richard-rosenblatt-talks-panda/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110414/headless-lawsuit-in-topless-blog/ http://allthingsd.com/20110414/headless-lawsuit-in-topless-blog/#comments Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:46:02 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42621

On some level of journalism, I guess anything could happen.

At least that’s according to a recent article by Business Insider’s Henry Blodget about an alleged “mole” at Twitter who was allegedly spying for Google, specifically about an exec the microblogging service was trying to poach from the Silicon Valley search giant.

In a decidedly splashy, hello-traffic, ALL-CAPs headline–THE SEARCH FOR THE “TWITTER MOLE”: All Eyes On John Doerr“–Blodget pointed his J’accuse finger at the legendary venture capitalist as the culprit.

Based on…

Well, based on nothing, it appears, except rank speculation and what appears to be no attempt to get Doerr to comment.

And, while it’s not my cup of tea, whatev, I suppose.

Except when I read down to the bottom and landed on this gem:

We have talked to several sources familiar with aspects of the situation. Thus far, we have not been able to confirm either assertion.

First, no one has even confirmed that Google was tipped off in advance of Twitter’s poaching effort, much less by a Twitter mole.

This doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

And later still:

So we haven’t been able to confirm the “high-level mole at Twitter” story. And we think there’s a good explanation for why there might not be a mole at all.

Secondly, we have talked to no one who has any evidence other than the logic above that, even if there is a Google mole at Twitter, the mole is John Doerr. One insider we spoke to, in fact, dismissed the idea out of hand.

Say what?

It’s kind of like thinking that a sparkly Civil War-era vampire falling in love with a moody chick in the Pacific Northwest and flying through the pines all day and mooning over their cruel fate was real.

Okay, that was a Hollywood movie called “Twilight,” but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen!

Thus, Doerr–a tough customer to be sure, capable of all kinds of sharp-elbowed behavior–is guilty until proven innocent?

Or just not guilty at all, but let’s just say he might be anyway, without a shred of evidence, because it could have happened!

(Courtroom confession: It was All Things Digital‘s Liz Gannes, who did it on the blog with scoop on the Twitter talent raid effort of Sundar Pichai!)

Speaking of evidence, less than a week later, Javert–oops, I mean, Blodget–was back in another kangaroo court performance with another terrifically loud headline:

“The Guy Who Says He Owns 50% Of Facebook Just Filed A Boatload Of New Evidence–And It’s Breathtaking.”

Breathtaking, I guess, if you are in that fantasy teenaged girl mode, but deeply suspect if you are anyone with a modicum of journalistic responsibility.

It is perfectly fine for Blodget to dredge up the copious emails from a man named Paul Ceglia–who alleges he possesses a contract that he struck with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg at the time of its creation–and analyze them.

And it is certainly notable that a credible law firm, DLA Piper, has taken on the case for Ceglia and it does seems unlikely that it would have done so without doing some level of due diligence.

In fact, in an interview with Am Law Daily, DLA partner Robert Brownlie, international co-chair of the firm’s securities litigation, said: “At first I shrugged it off as incredible. I would not have gotten involved and DLA would not have gotten involved if we had any doubts about the facts or evidence in the case.”

That was, of course, countered by Facebook’s lawyer Orin Snyder at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, who said in a statement that the Ceglia allegations were part of “a fraudulent lawsuit brought by a convicted felon.”

By the way, in fancy-lawyer parlance, that translates to a liar-liar-pants-on-fire defense.

So, microwave the popcorn and get ready for the drama, because no question, it is clearly going to be juicy all around with a whole lot of social networking poking!

In fact, such a case is tailor-made for Blodget, who has always been a very gifted writer with a nose for sharp-edged analysis.

It’s too bad, then, that he did not hone his knife to such an edge when it comes to Ceglia, giving him much too much credibility based on what could be fake emails, especially since they come from a man with a history of fraud.

History, in fact, that Ceglia is depending on in this case, since Zuckerberg most definitely has one in regards to partnerships gone bad.

Thus, Zuckerberg has been sneaky before, ergo he’s sneaky here.

That’s no surprise as a legal tactic, of course, and I threw in the “ergo,” since I too want to play Perry Mason in a blog.

But. More to the point, while Facebook was certainly hard-nosed in dealing with both protracted and high-profile legal challenges from the Winklevoss twins and also Eduardo Severin, I don’t think I have ever seen the company explicitly say evidence was completely fabricated, as it is alleging Ceglia’s emails are.

As I said, I have no idea if they are or they’re not, but I do know this: While those emails are certainly bombshell in nature, they are designed to be so precisely because it is a lawsuit in which the principal is trying to shame Facebook into settling.

None of that seems to concern Blodget, who concludes at the end of the post:

“In short, to us at least, the emails don’t read ‘fake.’”

In short, to me at least, that’s for fake-email experts and the courts to decide.

The real fact of the matter is, who knows? I certainly don’t, although I do know it’s terrifically easy to file a lawsuit and claim just about anything you like.

And the same seems to be true–more and more these days and not for the good–for blogs too.

As for me, I need to get back to my goal of proving that sparkly vampires do exist.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110414/headless-lawsuit-in-topless-blog/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20110330/when-media-giants-attack-cease-and-desist-letter-to-news-reader-zite/ http://allthingsd.com/20110330/when-media-giants-attack-cease-and-desist-letter-to-news-reader-zite/#comments Wed, 30 Mar 2011 22:24:14 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42209

A panoply of big media giants sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Zite, the Apple iPad news reader app.

The Washington Post, AP, Gannett, Getty Images, Time, Dow Jones and many other media organizations were part of the action, which you can read all about below.

Zite bills itself as a “personalized iPad magazine that gets smarter as you use it.”

Not smart enough, it seems, to avoid copyright complaints from the content creators the app sucks in.

“The Zite application is plainly unlawful,” said the letter to Zite CEO Ali Davar, noting all kinds of copyright violations.

In a phone interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Davar said Zite would comply with the letter by shifting the content from its “reading” mode to a Web one, which points to publisher sites.

“It’s a bummer that they did this, but we expected it,” he said.

In a comment he posted below, Davar also wrote:

“Zite’s goal is to work with publishers, not to be antagonistic. The few publishers that have contacted us regarding the reading mode view we have complied with their requests and simply switched over to web view. We’re talking to publishers right now to find a win-win for them monetarily and to at the same time preserve the great user experience.”

For now, it’s lose-lose, and the letter is a dramatic shot across the bow of all the many news readers now hitting the market in the wake of the popularity of the Apple iPad tablet.

The social media-focused Flipboard and the news-oriented Pulse are two others, both of which have claimed they are working with publishers.

But Pulse wrangled with the New York Times over misuse of its RSS feeds and copyright issues, which has since been settled.

Zite showed up earlier this month, a product of a machine-learning technology start-up called Worio, which is based in Vancouver, Canada.

The aggregator of personalized content, which has $4 million in angel funding, gets its cues from a user’s interests.

Zite’s technology originated at research at the University of British Columbia several years ago.

In an interview with NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes a few weeks ago, Davar seemed sanguine about publishers.

Wrote Gannes:

The free Zite app imports a user’s Twitter tweets, follows and Google Reader subscriptions, offers lists of pre-made categories, and then solicits feedback and refines over time a list of topics and sources the user is interested in. It features articles based on their popularity, number of shares from a user’s network and topic relevance. (Davar said he thinks a person’s Facebook network data is too heterogeneous to reliably recommend articles, so it’s not included as an option.)

Flipboard itself is likely to add more personalization features; the company bought real-time social discovery technology from Ellerdale and has yet to implement much of it.

Vancouver-based Zite is well-funded, with $4 million from angels and Canadian grants, but it doesn’t have business relationships with publishers. The app lays out pictures and articles, stripping out everything else, including ads. Davar said he doubted this would be a problem. “It would be shortsighted for publishers to think of Zite as us versus them,” he said.

Short-sighted maybe, but legally lethal definitely, as you can see by this cease-and-desist letter, as well as a video from Zite on how its app works:

Letter to Zite _03 30 11_ –

Zite: Personalized Magazine for iPad from zite.com on Vimeo.

(Full disclosure: New Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110330/when-media-giants-attack-cease-and-desist-letter-to-news-reader-zite/feed/ 12 http://allthingsd.com/20110228/viral-article-atd-on-ad-age-digital-a-list/ http://allthingsd.com/20110228/viral-article-atd-on-ad-age-digital-a-list/#comments Mon, 28 Feb 2011 08:15:11 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=41078

Today, All Things Digital made it onto Ad Age’s Digital A-List, which also includes Groupon, Buddy Media and Virgin America.

BoomTown loves Virgin America’s digital stuff (plus the hip food) .

Actually, Ad Age’s Nat Ives was very nice to us too, nailing what we’re about:

“All Things D has become a particular sort of powerhouse in the overheated space devoted to tech news. It’s part of Dow Jones, so it’s got that gravitas. But it’s got the speed and humor of a blog.”

Yes, quick and funny and very heavy–that pretty much sums up ATD.

You can read it all here.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110228/viral-article-atd-on-ad-age-digital-a-list/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110118/quora-question-and-answer-social-network-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20110118/quora-question-and-answer-social-network-review/#comments Tue, 18 Jan 2011 23:38:35 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1602 If brief communications like Twitter’s 140-character messages, Facebook status updates and text messaging leave you longing for more substantial discourse, you may be in luck. This week, I took a look at Quora, a question-and-answer site that encourages thoughtful—even long-winded—discussions.

Quora (Quora.com) was launched about six months ago by two former Facebook employees who wanted to create a forum where in-depth questions could be posed and answered. Users vote answers up or down according to how good they are, the idea being that the best answers get pushed to the top of the queue by the community of users. Few of these questions can be answered with a simple yes or no. For example, one question asks, “What role did social media play with regards to the revolution in Tunisia?” (See here for the answer with the most votes: http://3.ly/8Gqf.)

One thing to be wary of: There’s nothing that qualifies the most popular answers as accurate, nor do people who write the most popular answers necessarily qualify as experts. This could lead to confusion or even danger, like medical questions that are answered incorrectly. Quora users are required to register their real email addresses, and some answers are more believable than others according to who answers, like the CEO of Netflix answering a question this past fall about how much the company spends on postage per year (answer: between $500 million and $600 million).

As soon I signed up for Quora by submitting an email and password, I walked through steps to “follow” certain topics that interest me—like technology, journalism, media and news—so whenever those topics are discussed, the related questions and answers appear on my Quora home page. I also linked my Twitter and Facebook accounts to my Quora account, which clued Quora in on some topics or people that might interest me according to the information in those accounts. Once these accounts are linked, it’s a lot easier to share Quora questions or answers with people on Twitter and Facebook.

People, like topics, can be followed. If someone I follow posts a question, answers a question or votes an answer up or down, this activity appears on my Quora home page.

Though Quora may sound simple, I found it uninviting, geeky and poorly explained. The site lacks instructions on how to use it; people just have to figure it out as they go. For example, a newcomer might not know that Quora answers can be voted up or down by seeing two tiny triangles that appear beside each answer. If I select the up triangle, this indicates I voted for that answer, and news of this vote is shared on the Quora home page of anyone who follows me. A number beside each answer indicates how many votes it has received so far. But unless you’ve used the site for a while, you wouldn’t know any of this.

After a few weeks of use, I found I preferred using Quora less for asking my own questions and more for reading other people’s questions and answers about topics I liked. I occasionally voted on answers to show whether I supported them or not. One user asked me a direct question, which I answered. I asked a question of the Quora community, but no one replied.

I found Quora’s questions and answers to be rather smart and entertaining. Its Silicon Valley roots are evident in its numerous technology-related questions and answers. I typed “tennis” into a box at the top of the screen and one of the first questions that surfaced was “Is tennis popular in Silicon Valley?” Instead of that question, I selected “What is the history of tennis’s strange scoring system?” and read the answer with the most votes, which seemed right to the best of my knowledge. Interestingly enough, this answer also included a link to a related article on Wikipedia.

But compared with the rest of the Web, where images, videos, animations and sound entertain website visitors, Quora’s text-filled pages can come off feeling a bit like textbook reading assignments. This is because all but a handful of questions are answered with just text. Video isn’t enabled on the site, though founder Charlie Cheever told me that this might be possible in the future.

Another problem with Quora is that most people who use the Internet are conditioned to rely on search engines like Google, Bing or Wikipedia for queries, typing the right key words to get the intended results. And people are often searching for quick answers that take just a couple seconds to read.

Plenty of other question-and-answer forums exist, like Yahoo Answers, which has been around since 2005, ChaCha.com and Ask.com. Facebook introduced Facebook Questions to a small number of its users over the summer, but when asked, a company spokeswoman wouldn’t say whether or not this offering would be available to all users anytime soon, if at all.

Quora’s combination of social networking (following topics and people) and in-depth answers helps differentiate it from those services.

Private messages can be sent from one user to another through Quora, and new messages are indicated with a red number that appears over your personal “Inbox” at the top of the Quora site. Likewise, when new notifications appear on the home page, a red number is shown above Home at the top of the page. This home page can be viewed in one of three views: Your Feed, All Changes or Followed Questions; users can toggle between these views.

Only people who have created accounts can browse the Quora.com site, though links to content can be opened by anyone. This differs from Twitter.com, which can be visited and searched by anyone regardless of whether or not they have a Twitter account. Quora also lacks one central home page where everyone can go to see every Quora question and answer, or which answer received the most votes on the entire site. Mr. Cheever told me that the site deliberately tries to keep your world small so you can focus on the topics or people you follow.

Quora relies on its community members to police one another, like Wikipedia, and less than 100 users are also granted administrator privileges to do more serious operations like deleting answers that use hate speech or other offensive remarks, which aren’t permitted according to the site’s policies. Every edit made to an answer is logged in the Quora system for everyone to see. This helps users understand an entry’s history on Quora.

This site doesn’t put much emphasis on interaction with others, though you are notified whenever someone follows you and you may be prompted to suggest topics for someone who starts following you. Like Facebook and Twitter, a list of users who you might want to follow is suggested in Quora.

For now, Quora feels like a website designed for techie insiders without instructions for mainstream users. But its smart community, intriguing questions and way of showing users just the content they want to follow will keep people coming back to the site. With a lot of polishing, Quora could be a social network people use every day.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110118/quora-question-and-answer-social-network-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101107/aol-yahoo-hookup-not-so-much-right-now-but-bankers-spinning-much/ http://allthingsd.com/20101107/aol-yahoo-hookup-not-so-much-right-now-but-bankers-spinning-much/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 05:39:52 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36869

While a merger of AOL and Yahoo is a fervent dream of bankers looking for fees, the reality is a little more–shall we say–premature.

In fact, it’s likely it was just those dealmakers, looking to gin up some activity, who are behind the latest spin-riffic article in The Wall Street Journal that reports on machinations by AOL to hire unnamed advisers to carry out all kinds of complex deals.

Actually, it is the complexity of any of those deals that has put a lot of the takeover, buyout, merger and other scenarios that center around Yahoo–with a side of AOL, as well as News Corp., Microsoft, Yahoo Japan, the Alibaba Group–on ice.

Among the issues being grappled with: Onerous tax implications around a variety of deals; a need for complete cooperation from too many players; and the realization that a hookup of AOL and Yahoo might cause more problems than it solves.

“It looks great conceptually and everyone gets all hot and bothered,” said one prominent investor who did his own strategizing about Yahoo and AOL. “But when you actually do the numbers, you hit a pretty big wall of impossible.”

Still, any whiff of a deal makes for a spate of overreaching stories in the press, such as the Journal’s, which sources at both Yahoo and AOL tell me started out as one about how the pair were in preliminary merger discussions.

They are not, unless a call or two between AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz on how to handle the hubbub constitutes preliminary.

It doesn’t, of course, unlike serious merger discussions the companies held several years ago, well before the arrival of either Armstrong or Bartz on the scene.

The Journal story then apparently morphed into one about how AOL was on the hunt to figure out what to do–especially about Yahoo–by hiring new advisers.

Actually, the company has had its same old one, Allen & Co., since it was spun off from Time Warner last year. It has since also retained Bank of America.

Yahoo’s longtime banking adviser has been Goldman Sachs, which was re-engaged more than six weeks ago, only due to all the incoming attention.

That would be from other bankers, private equity firms and others, many of whom have ginned up a variety of schemes and have then pinged both AOL and Yahoo.

Curiously, this kind of activity was reported extensively a month ago here and in the Journal too.

Read the Journal article on October 13:

“AOL Inc. and several private-equity firms are exploring making an offer to buy Yahoo Inc., according to people familiar with the matter, devising a bold plan to marry two big Internet brands facing steep challenges.”

A bold plan to marry? You might want put the honeymoon reservations on hold for now.

That’s because interest does not mean result, especially when it comes to merger scenarios (and, if you are bored, you can read a whole bunch BoomTown came up with in late September).

But, in fact, because the big Yahoo-AOL deal is harder to realize in practice than in theory, things have quieted down and there are no proposals being evaluated by Yahoo or offered by AOL.

And, thus, the dealmakers must begin to chatter again to get things hopping.

Ironically, both boards of AOL and Yahoo should be considering a spate of ideas–however outlandish–to spur growth and innovation in their lackluster businesses.

And, in truth, if some very big players, such as Microsoft, got involved, the smoke around both AOL and Yahoo could someday become a real fire.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns both this site and the Journal.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101107/aol-yahoo-hookup-not-so-much-right-now-but-bankers-spinning-much/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20100712/what-ebay-rich-whitman-really-wants-to-do-is-direct/ http://allthingsd.com/20100712/what-ebay-rich-whitman-really-wants-to-do-is-direct/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:53:27 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=30477

It’s worth checking out an article in the New York Times today that points to a very questionable, but–as it turned out–politically savvy angel investment made by former eBay CEO and now Republican candidate for California governor Meg Whitman.

The piece, by Michael Luo, alleges that Whitman’s $1 million investment in late 2008 in a Hollywood entertainment company called Tools Down! Productions was made to ease a prominent Republican strategist away from working for her rival for the GOP nod.

That would be Steve Poizner, who lost to Whitman in the recent primary and who was close to working with Mike Murphy. Instead, with a little help from the piles of cash Whitman made from eBay (EBAY) stock, Murphy never took the job.

Well, not the Poizner job, at least. After telling people he was sick of politics and then getting the Whitman money days later for his still credit-free movie production company, Murphy became an adviser to Whitman a year later.

The bigger story the Times is touting, but does not quite deliver, is the advent of super-rich candidates in races this round, including another tech exec, former Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina. She won the California GOP Senate primary.

This kind of thing has happened before, of course.

But what’s interesting is to see Silicon Valley’s digitally enabled moneybags step up to the very stained political table and jump right into the game.

What’s next? Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin buying everyone in San Francisco lattes for life to become mayor? Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s bid for president of the United States, via the leveraging of embarrassing photos from the social networking site?

And thank goodness Bill Gates of Microsoft (MSFT) never wanted to run for office.

The Whitman campaign told the Times that the investment was disclosed and justified in that she had ample entertainment interest from her days as a strategic planning exec at Disney (DIS) and also as a board member of DreamWorks Animation SKG (DWA).

Which is exactly what they would say, of course.

Thus, perhaps it is time to take a moment with Jimmy Stewart in a video clip from the classic film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” of his most potent “Lost Causes” scene:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100712/what-ebay-rich-whitman-really-wants-to-do-is-direct/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100709/yahoos-media-chief-jimmy-pitaro-talks-about-the-upshot-of-contents-future/ http://allthingsd.com/20100709/yahoos-media-chief-jimmy-pitaro-talks-about-the-upshot-of-contents-future/#comments Fri, 09 Jul 2010 18:43:18 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=30392

Whilst in Santa Monica, Calif., this week, BoomTown stopped in at the YahooPlex for a quick chat with the Internet giant’s Jimmy Pitaro, who is VP of media.

The focus was a high-profile blog called The Upshot, Yahoo’s effort to delve deeper into the new push to determine content selections based on search.

While some consider such efforts as a “democratizing” of the news, others are more concerned about relying on algorithms to determine the best coverage and the implications for a society guided by its own searches.

That has not stopped the trend from growing, with companies such as Demand Media using freelancers to create millions of articles. Yahoo recently bought a competitor, Associated Content, to jump into the game.

The Upshot is a little different, essentially using analysis of popular search words or topics to inform the news staff.

Articles are then produced for the Yahoo blog based on this audience data, on a wider range of coverage than the more typical how-to articles produced using this method.

In this video, Pitaro dismissed worries that Yahoo (YHOO) coverage would be guided solely by a formula for user-driven, advertiser-coddling, money-making-only content, but it is clear the idea of using search as an editorial tool is the wave of the future as far as Yahoo is concerned.

Here’s the interview:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100709/yahoos-media-chief-jimmy-pitaro-talks-about-the-upshot-of-contents-future/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20100628/exclusive-tyra-banks-picks-demand-as-americas-next-top-digital-business-model/ http://allthingsd.com/20100628/exclusive-tyra-banks-picks-demand-as-americas-next-top-digital-business-model/#comments Tue, 29 Jun 2010 03:00:30 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=29960

Well-known modeling icon Tyra Banks has struck a partnership with Demand Media to create a new digital brand focused on fashion and beauty.

The deal between the Santa Monica, Calif.-based online content maker and Banks’s New York beauty and entertainment company, Bankable, will include the development of a Web site, online video offerings and mobile applications.

“Their strategy, team and technology are outstanding, and the company has developed a unique method for quickly creating popular online platforms by providing visitors with exactly the kinds of content they’re looking for,” wrote Banks in an email to BoomTown tonight. “It became clear to us that Demand Media has developed something truly innovative and that they would be the perfect partner as we work to grow Bankable Digital into a significant part of our business.”

The deal with Banks is a high-profile one for Demand, which is seeking to expand its content to more premium offerings.

“This is where media is going,” said Demand CEO Richard Rosenblatt. “We’re going to link our huge amount of content and writers to her ethos around beauty inside and out.”

As part of the deal–which is not unlike the Livestrong health and fitness site created by Demand and cyclist Lance Armstrong–Banks is receiving shares in Demand, which is widely expected to file for an initial public offering in the near future.

“What Oprah did for television, we think Tyra can do for digital content in the fashion, health and beauty space,” said Joanne Bradford, who was recently hired by Demand from her job as the top advertising sales exec at Yahoo (YHOO) to turbocharge its premium advertising efforts.

This is exactly in that wheelhouse, mashing up a well-known celebrity with the vast stores of content Demand produces from its army of search-fueled freelancers.

Banks has certainly become an entertainment powerhouse since she retired from her supermodel days.

But while she is developing books too, Banks has been focused mostly on television, with her own talk show, “The Tyra Banks Show,” which just wrapped up after five years, as well as the megahit, “America’s Next Top Model.”

The most recent show she is producing is called “True Beauty” on ABC, in which good-looking contestants think they are being judged for beauty on the outside, but are actually being scored based on their kindness and other inner attributes.

Currently, Banks’s Web site is mostly promotional, although she also has a potentially large online fan base, with 1.6 million Twitter followers and an inspirational self-help image that is likely to translate well in a more interactive setting.

Whether that will bring big bucks or not is uncertain, of course. So far, Bradford said Demand has not signed up advertisers, but added that this is just the kind of site they will welcome and have been asking for.

“Advertisers are looking for new kinds of content online to be associated with,” she said. “We think Tyra has the kind of message that will attract a really engaged audience online.”

In fact, Banks said she plans to be very engaged in the creation and operation of the online destination.

“Anyone who knows me knows that, once I commit, I’m in 100 percent,” she said. “I plan to be very involved from the early design stage to the choice of videos, articles and special features, to the launch and marketing of the site.”

Here’s the official press release, and below it, the full video of Rosenblatt talking about Demand’s strategies around content, in an interview at the eighth D: All Things Digital conference earlier this month:

DM Bankable Release FINAL2

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100628/exclusive-tyra-banks-picks-demand-as-americas-next-top-digital-business-model/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100420/icyte-web-pages-for-keeps/ http://allthingsd.com/20100420/icyte-web-pages-for-keeps/#comments Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:20:22 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1185 What do you do if you come across an interesting online article or Web page but don’t have time to read it? You could bookmark it for a visit to the page at another time, or email the URL to yourself in hopes of eventually getting around to reading it. But since the Web is ever changing, a link that works one week might be useless the next.

This week, I tested iCyte (icyte.com), a smarter way of compiling data from the Web. Rather than relying on live URLs, this tool saves a Web page’s content, just as it looked when you first saved it, even if that Web page later shuts down or is no longer retrievable. It also saves any highlighted markings you’ve made on a page. ICyte is a free Web browser add-on that, once downloaded, works with Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Versions for Apple (AAPL) Safari and Google (GOOG) Chrome browsers are planned for May.

There are several existing products that offer to organize digital data in one central place. Among them are Evernote and Springpad, which save a greater variety of content (documents, emails, reminder memos and voicemails as well as some Web-page data) in various places. ICyte focuses specifically on saving Web-page content.

Sharing Research

It encourages people to share Web research with others by inviting them to join a project (iCyte’s term for a collection of Web pages saved on its server), comment on the content and share notes with one another.

For the most part, I liked using iCyte. I created a free account and made several projects filled with “Cytes” (saved Web pages), naming projects according to what they contained, like Tech Stuff and To Read, where I saved a bunch of online articles I wanted to read but didn’t have time to finish. I also used it to create a project with a friend called Silly News, where we shared news articles and Web pages with videos on them in a common space and commented on each other’s pages. People who want to participate in sharing and commenting on iCyte must also create accounts for themselves. ICyte is currently limited to browsers—whether on computers or on smartphones—though the company is considering making an iPhone app.

Once the iCyte add-on is downloaded onto a Windows PC or Mac for use in Internet Explorer or Firefox, two tiny icons that look like an eye and a list appear unobtrusively to the side of the browser’s address bar. When the eye icon is selected, it saves the opened Web page into a new or existing project and lets you add details like notes and word tags.

To save a highlighted section of a page, just highlight it with your cursor before hitting the eye icon, and that text will appear highlighted in the saved Cyte. By selecting the icon that looks like a list, users can open or close a left-side panel displaying a list of all saved Cytes. At the top of this list, and from the iCyte.com home page, a search box lets users comb through all public Cytes or just their own for specific terms.

With a click on the iCyte icon, Web pages—with highlighted text—can be saved as they originally appeared.

Viewing Cytes

Though the ability to highlight and save Cytes only works with the Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers, users can log into their iCyte accounts and see their saved or shared content using any browser. I did this using Chrome and Safari browsers on Windows PCs and Macs, and I also accessed my iCyte account on an iPad with its Safari browser.

By default, Cytes are saved as private projects, visible only to their creators. But in one step this privacy setting can be changed so the Cyte is shared publicly for the iCyte community to view and comment on. I browsed several public Cytes and found a few that I chose to save to my own account for reading, like an art history Cyte one user saved from a Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Web page.

Blue Bar Feature

Each Cyte has a blue bar across its top that shows who originally saved it and on what date. The blue bar also tells you whether you’re viewing the page with marked highlight on or off. A button lets you view the page in a live view, which may or may not be the same as what was saved depending if highlights were made, if the page has changed, or if more content has been added to it—like new reader comments on a blog post.

I found it easy to share Cytes with friends using a variety of methods, and a single Cyte can be shared from a private project without allowing someone access to the other Cytes saved in the project. I shared Cytes via Facebook and email, though links to Cytes can be shared in other ways like on Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and MySpace—or by using a shortcut to embed the link on a Web site or blog.

The Highlights

I didn’t use the highlighting feature much, but I could see it being a real boon for people doing research and saving Web pages for specific content. Also, by highlighting text before sharing Cytes with others, users can more specifically point out what they like or find useful in a particular article or Web page.

The version of iCyte that I used is free and a company representative said each user’s profile information is kept private and not shared with third parties. ICyte doesn’t currently include built-in advertisements; instead, the company plans to roll out subscription-based Enterprise and Pro versions. The Enterprise version costs $195 a year and the Pro version is still in the works.

If you use the Web as a research resource or simply like saving articles, videos and other online materials, iCyte could be a great tool for organizing and sharing all of that content.

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100420/icyte-web-pages-for-keeps/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100204/what-if-facebook-ever-got-serious-about-becoming-a-news-aggregation-vampire-well-it-would-be-a-sparkly-one/ http://allthingsd.com/20100204/what-if-facebook-ever-got-serious-about-becoming-a-news-aggregation-vampire-well-it-would-be-a-sparkly-one/#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:11:42 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=24060

Here are two quotes that got me thinking about what would happen if Facebook–whose user base is inexorably marching toward 400 million–ever got serious about the news aggregation business.

First, perpetual apple-cart-upsetter Mark Cuban raised everyone’s hackles this week by taking aim at online sites that aggregate news from other sources, especially Google (GOOG).

Among other colorful things Cuban said during a keynote speech:

“Google is a vampire, and you run scared. There is no reason to be indexed in Google….You haven’t gotten anything back except that you’ve turned into zombies….You’ve got to realize they’re vampires and you can’t be the dumb blonde showing your neck.”

Then, yesterday, in a fourth-quarter earnings call, AOL (AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong, answering a question about the renewal status of its search deal with Google, talked about how other outlets, especially Facebook, are now more important than ever to getting traffic for his company’s content.

“Our strategy on distribution is not relying on search,” said Armstrong. “Fragmentation is our friend.”

It was a curious way of putting it, but the message was clear and correct–it will be increasingly obvious that consumers are inevitably moving away from the only-search paradigm to that of discovery through social and other jacked-up affiliation networks.

Of course, this puts a site like Facebook in the catbird seat, given that vast seas of rich data flow through it all the time.

In fact, Facebook is already one of the bigger sources of traffic to media sites, behind just Google, Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO).

That’s because, at any given moment, Facebook users are trading bazillions of links to articles, blogs, videos, photo images and more, pointing the way to their friends in a giant did-you-see-this mosh pit.

While this is dispersed widely all over the social networking service–on the Wall, on fan pages, in email, in comments–one has to wonder what would happen if Facebook ever decides to start corralling the information with some kind of aggregation method.

Could it pick the most linked and emailed stories of the day? Could it select the most popular photos? Could it tell you accurately what its little slice of humanity was buzzing about on a minute-by-minute basis?

Of course it could, but as more of a new sparkly “Twilight” vampire than the scary old-time one Cuban described.

Not that it will. I once queried Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg about the idea that Facebook could make some sort of newfangled competitor to the still-powerful Yahoo News.

No, she replied pretty flatly, noting that the whole service was already about people sharing all kinds of news and information with their friends.

But, it is clear to me, that–much as Google moved into the automated new business–Facebook could do the same anytime it wants to and create what would probably be one of the top aggregation sites for any topic on the Web.

The Silicon Valley phenom certainly could not be as easily de-indexed as Google by worried media companies, because the skeins of information are so enmeshed that separating them is impossible. And why would you?

In his speech, Cuban urged traditional media creators to stop the aggregation madness.

“Show some balls,” he said. “If you turn your neck to a vampire, they are [going to] bite. But at some point the vampires run out of people’s blood to suck.”

In a deeply socially connected world though, it’s a very different story. And in that world, vampires really do live forever.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100204/what-if-facebook-ever-got-serious-about-becoming-a-news-aggregation-vampire-well-it-would-be-a-sparkly-one/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20090402/yahoo-telenovela-to-get-the-vanity-fair-treatment/ http://allthingsd.com/20090402/yahoo-telenovela-to-get-the-vanity-fair-treatment/#comments Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:00:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=11428

Misguided managers, Luddite corporate raiders, a dramatic hostile takeover from a software giant, a revolving door of employees, a dash of Internet moolah and a tough-talking lady CEO to the rescue! And even some Googzilla action thrown in for good measure.

Of course, it has all the elements of a good story for Vanity Fair magazine!

Actually, Yahoo (YHOO) has all the elements of a good Mexican telenovela, but it’s only a magazine article that is apparently in the cards to chronicle the stumbles and bumbles of the Internet giant.

According to sources at both Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo, well-known Silicon Valley scribe and author Alan Deutschman has contacted the companies about a piece he is doing about the company–and, presumably, its tangles with various Web powers like Google (GOOG) and Microsoft–for the Condé Nast-owned Vanity Fair.

BoomTown’s efforts to contact Deutschman to find out the particulars were, alas, unreturned as yet.

But it goes without saying that our site’s huge archive on Yahoo’s hijinks–with much more to come soon, including memos I tag with secret codes too, much as sources tell me Yahoo does these days under new CEO Carol Bartz to prevent leaks–is free of charge to him for research.

Until then, here is my personal favorite Yahoo-related video about the awkward dinner former CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang finally had with me after a year of haranguing:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090402/yahoo-telenovela-to-get-the-vanity-fair-treatment/feed/ 0