Yahoo has bought Summly, the mobile news reader app founded by a young British entrepreneur.

In a statement, the London-based company said it had bought the tiny outfit, which will close its app. The price was not disclosed (although I will try to find out soon enough). But the company had been seeking additional funding recently at a big valuation, in stark contrast to its small size (less than one million downloads), staff (five) and business model (zero revenue).

(Update: Sources tell me Yahoo paid just about $30 million for Summly, mostly in cash, with 10 percent in stock, for three employees.)

AllThingsD.com reported in December that Yahoo was looking closely at the startup, with CEO Marissa Mayer meeting with its founder Nick D’Aloisio. As we noted then, Yahoo was aiming at trendy mobile “acq-hires” to give the sleepy Silicon Valley Internet giant some sizzle and improve its moribund mobile offerings.

Mayer has been buying up a range of similar small mobile startups, largely for their teams of talented and innovative engineers. And, at a recent employee meeting, its M&A head Jackie Reses said the Silicon Valley company was looking at two significant purchases and a half-dozen smaller ones.

Said Yahoo: “Founder Nick D’Aloisio and the Summly team are joining Yahoo! in the coming weeks. While the Summly app will close, we will acquire the technology and you’ll see it come to life throughout Yahoo!’s mobile experiences soon. We’re not disclosing purchase price or other terms of the deal.”

Yahoo mobile head Adam Cahan wrote a blog post about the deal, as did D’Aloisio, who also tweeted news of it:

@summly has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo!! Excited for the next chapter of Summly! Thanks to all who have supported me.

— Nick D’Aloisio (@nickdaloisio) March 25, 2013

News readers have been getting snapped up of late. CNN acquired Zite for $20 million in 2011, while we reported that LinkedIn was in the midst of buying Pulse for upwards of $50 million.

The 17-year-old D’Aloisio created the high-profile news reading app, which garnered much attention in the last year in the mobile space, which is probably what attracted Yahoo to it.

As I wrote:

D’Aloisio — who looks like he could easily be a member of One Direction if this tech thing did not work out — is perhaps a perfect storm for Yahoo, which is seeking to show that it can attract innovative, young entrepreneurs to the company, while also looking to strengthen its nearly bare mobile cupboard.

Summly is all that and a bag of (fish and) chips, with a very slick app for the Apple iPhone that has become one of the more popular in the App Store since it was re-launched last month. The company has said it has been downloaded 500,000 times.

It deserves the attention, as it is a pleasure to use — think an even hipper version of Flipboard with some more sass. The handsomely designed app summarizes news stories — all using a natural language processing algorithm — in only a few sentences and in under 400 characters. Users can then swipe through topics and stories quickly and click in to be directed to the full story on the original news site.

Summly originally started as a prototype app called Trimit, which soon garnered attention and seed funding from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing’s investment firm. In no time, it had a range of other investors, ponying up about $1.5 million, including trendy ones like Ashton Kutcher and tech types like Zynga’s Mark Pincus, Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.

Since then, it has been striking content deals, including with News Corp. (which owns this site) and others, which seem to be attracted by its investor pedigree, its solid technology and — perhaps most of all — its media-darling founder.

To get an idea of the adorable hip factor involved, here’s a really clever video D’Aloisio did with actor Stephen Fry, who is also an investor in the startup:

Summly Launch from Summly on Vimeo.

It’s a logical move when you look at the data. In November 2011, one-fifth of posts uploaded to newsfeeds were photos. Today, every other status update is a photo. My math friends tell me it that it’s hard to meaningfully show percentage gains when you start with a really big number. Even with my quantitative limitations, I have to believe Facebook qualifies. Last year it told investors (as part of its IPO roadshow) that users were uploading more than 300 million photos every single day, and from that very large starting point photo activity just jumped 150 percent in 15 months. So much for the law of large numbers.

If you’re a brand, though, it’s not the fact that photo-enabled devices will soon outnumber humans on the planet, or that we’re piping all those pictures into social media. The important trend is that consumers are looking at them. In other words, your art-directed fashion spreads have a lot more competition these days.

There was a time when professional photography had a monopoly on our attention. When mass media meant national magazines, TV networks and big-city newspapers, only deep-pocketed corporations could afford access to large audiences. Back then it made economic sense to build your story around professional-grade photography: A single print ad would reach millions of readers, so a few tens of thousands of dollars spent on art and photography chewed up only a negligible percentage of a campaign’s costs. And for a few generations, this approach worked great.

It turns out, though, that cost-to-produce and magnitude-of-consumer-delight don’t plot analogous curves in an Excel graph. In fact, it’s hard to find a direct correlation between the two. A photo that captures something important or interesting or timely wins our attention — regardless of who took it or how much it cost to make. It also turns out the spans of our attention are shrinking. Google economist Hal Varian observed as far back as 2010 — before SnapChat, and back when we uploaded a mere 30 million photos to Facebook every day — that we pay less attention to stuff when we consume it online. “The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day.”

So corporate storytellers need to master a new narrative technique. It’s as if they need to shed those florid sentences that played so well in Victorian novels and dial it down to the Hemingway-esque. The good news: This new approach to storytelling still employs a language in which brands are fluent: Photos. There are three ways that brands should modify their visual storytelling.

One, feeds move faster than print magazines, so you need to tell your story in a series of frequent episodes, anecdotes and updates — not the grand gestures of Ogilvy or Draper. Photos are the currency of social media, but it’s a currency doled out in nickels, not twenty-dollar bills.

Two, let photos do more of the talking for you. Humans process visual information much faster than we process text. And when we’re online (remember those stats from Hal Varian), we navigate more quickly from story to story. If you’re going to capture attention in a digital landscape, you have to do it fast. So steal a page from the playbooks used by Pinterest, Flipboard, USA Today’s new design or the NYT’s TimesCast: Use visual content instead of words to invite consumers into the story.

Three — need I say it? — let them interact with your story, let them re-mix your assets and choose their own adventures. Let them steal your photos so they can more easily share them with friends. Let them explore inside your images to find links to products, deals and related links. And let them contribute their own. If the Web conversation is going visual, encourage them to talk to you in the local dialect — images snapped on their phones looking for a place to be uploaded.

Chas Edwards joined Luminate, the worldwide leader in interactive images, in 2010 as chief revenue officer and head of publisher development. Prior to Luminate, Chas served as publisher and CRO at Digg, and before that he was the co-founder (with John Battelle), publisher and chief revenue officer at Federated Media Publishing (FM), a next-generation media and publishing company that develops content marketing strategies for leading brand marketers. He blogs at http://ChasNote.com and @chasnote.

Lost in the sauce of the national work-from-home debate of last week that engulfed all things Yahoo, was a fascinating tidbit that several employees passed on to me from a recent Friday FYI meeting at its Silicon Valley HQ.

At the gathering, CEO Marissa Mayer talked briefly about the new telecommuting arrangements for some staffers, including the controversial new work-from-home memo that HR head Jackie Reses had issued that day.

But when Reses — who also wears another corporate hat as head of M&A at Yahoo — spoke she mentioned to the crowd that Yahoo was working on two “significant” acquisitions and about six smaller talent “acqhires.”

“It was kind of odd to telegraph it in such a big forum,” said one employee of Reses’ comments at the meeting in late February.

The revelation was unusual, to be sure, but perhaps not a surprise, given the recent run-up in Yahoo stock, its healthy cash position and, most of all, its need to add meaningful growth to the current efforts at turnaround.

And while some of its recent buys have been interesting and focused on improving its moribund mobile efforts, they have also been very small. And, as one high-ranking exec there told me, they “don’t move the needle in the way we need to in bringing in senior talent or loads of users or serious revenue.”

Indeed, while Yahoo shares have benefited greatly from the impressive performance by Alibaba Group in China, which is clearly on a roll, many think that showing actual improvement in its core business will be critical in the months ahead.

While making changes to Yahoo’s homepage and email, as well as cutting products, has been done, it is not yet clear what the impact is; the changes are aimed more at holding on to consumers rather than exciting them with new offerings.

Yahoo could also create its own new products to wow the masses, but that has been harder for it over the years. (Remember Livestand? Yeah, not so much.) In any case, an innovation infusion of such a large magnitude will take some time, given Mayer has to get the right people into place to do so.

Thus, a big purchase of an exciting new company with prominent leadership seems more likely than not and sooner than later. While Mayer has not articulated her vision for the new Yahoo in anything more than general ways, what she buys will say a lot.

Thus, sources said that Yahoo has been looking at a range of such acquisitions, in a number of categories such as advertising tech, mobile monetization and, of course, consumer “daily delight,” which is a phrase Mayer has used a lot.

It would be bold if Mayer went all out and made a mega-buy that would shake up the competitive landscape. My first choice for that is Pinterest, the scrapbooking phenom that was just valued at $2.5 billion in a new funding round. Mayer has also shown a lot of interest in blogging superstar Tumblr, while at both Google and Yahoo, as well as Foursquare, the well-known location app. Of course, there is also the troubled gaming giant, Zynga.

All are very pricey and would face rival interest, but such a move would be akin to Facebook’s billion-dollar blockbuster purchase of Instagram. Many now think that was prescient and cheap, given how important mobile photos are to the current digital ecosystem.

The list of possible big deals goes on: Hulu (which needs a tasty content element to make sense) as a video play; Millennial Media or Jumptap for mobile advertising; Quora for social answers; Flipboard for social media consumption; Rubicon or PubMatic, for ad targeting; and many more.

But all of those begin at the billion-dollar or more range and I have checked with a number of these and come up peanuts. Still, there are a whole lot of choices for Mayer and Yahoo in the $200 million to $500 million price range.

Here, Yahoo has the financial strength to make at least two of these significant purchases that Reses mentioned, as well as developing a much better reputation for Yahoo to keep real talent interested.

As one prominent startup exec, who had told me he never would consider selling to Yahoo in the past, said recently: “They are no longer complete losers, although Facebook and Google and Apple and Amazon are still cooler.”

Hey, it’s a compliment, even if it’s a back-handed one, so it will be interesting to see who finds Yahoo cool enough.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner John Doerr has joined the board of Flipboard, the mobile-based social media magazine, as an adviser.

“John has been a long-time supporter and adviser to Flipboard and it is fantastic to have him on the board,” a Flipboard spokesperson told AllThingsD. “We feel very fortunate to be working with him and everyone at KP.”

Doerr’s move into an advisory role at Flipboard, first noted by Owen Thomas at Business Insider, is a natural one, as Doerr has had an existing relationship with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue over the years. McCue founded and subsequently sold Paper Software to Netscape in 1996, where he went on to work on and evolve the Netscape browser with Doerr again acting as adviser. McCue also founded TellMe, backed again by Doerr and Kleiner’s funds.

Another Kleiner partner, Eric Feng, recently joined Flipboard as the startup’s new CTO.

McCue was a board seat holder at Twitter before he was asked to leave over what the microblogging site saw as eventual conflicts of interest. Doerr often showed up to Twitter board meetings in an advisory role, but never held an official seat.

The news also comes in the wake of the departure of former Kleiner partner Ellen Pao, who was terminated from the investment firm for “performance issues.” (Pao also happens to be suing the firm, alleging long-standing sexual harassment issues.)

Ask any marketer — nostalgia sells. It’s longing paired with the passage of time, a sense of how things were once “better,” or at least different, than they are today. Bottle that feeling, and you’ve got a potential customer in the bag.

It’s why Timehop — the mobile app that serves up a daily summary of your past social activity on Facebook and Twitter from years ago — is so powerful. And it’s also likely why USA Today has partnered up with Timehop, and is now delivering users relevant news from the past in their daily Timehop updates.

It works like so: Anyone familiar with Timehop knows that the service will send you a little notification each morning, letting you know that your trip back in time to view your old status updates and tweets is ready. With the new partnership, users will see a significant, newsy item from the past, and the contemporary story matched to that day. So, for example, you may see what the state of the Mars rover mission was six years ago, and a story about where the program is today.

“What Timehop is doing is trying to work with the long tail of content and resurface it,” USA Today social marketing director Mark Smith told me. “Here, USA Today is trying to do the same thing with news content, and the ability to bring back old, iconic headlines to people on a daily basis.”

It’s not always the “obvious” moment, either. While an item may have been a huge deal say, three years ago, perhaps the lasting news value of it was nil. “We’re looking for those small moments that turn into something bigger,” Smith said.

There’s an obvious draw for USA Today to be included here: All of the past stories inside the app will link out to a USA Today piece hosted on the publication’s site. It’s a small way of driving an extra bit of traffic out to the paper’s daily site. (USA Today wouldn’t tell me what the terms of the deal were with Timehop, or what the app got in return; my guess would be some sort of affiliate fee.)

To be honest, I was a little shocked to hear of the partnership between the two organizations. Timehop is a small startup run by only a handful of entrepreneurs, while USA Today is an institution. I don’t often see major publications take chances on small tech-centric startups.

But I’d imagine that’s part of the attraction here. As Timehop is still fairly under the radar of the mainstream, it’s a way for USA Today to toe the waters of what social affiliate marketing can do, without going “whole hog,” as it were. And the paper has proved experimental in the past, as one of the first major news publications to partner with social magazine Flipboard.

Smith is bullish on Timehop’s sharing prospects, as users can push out their past statuses and moments to Facebook and Twitter from inside the app. And, like Timehop’s makers, Smith and his paper are banking on more users being charmed as time goes on.

On a personal note: It really is a charming app, popular within the tech circles for surfacing all the old, stupid stuff we’ve updated our statuses with over the years. We’ll see if the newsy touch can add the same feeling.

Indeed, when I wrote that Facebook was to introduce its own version of a Snapchat app last week — a mobile messaging application that allows users to send self-destructing text, photo and video messages to one another — many began writing their Snapchat eulogies.

Not so fast. While Facebook’s new Poke app shot up to No. 1 in the App Store for its first few days on the market, it has settled back down to spot No. 39, according to the latest numbers on Apple’s App Store leader board.

Part of this has a simple explanation. For the first few days after Facebook released Poke, the company inserted links to the App Store into users’ news feeds, prompting them to download the new app. That sort of distribution power is rivaled by few, as the news feed is literally front and center for every single one of Facebook’s billion-plus users. That, combined with the release day press blitz, pushed the app to the top of the charts.

But now Facebook seems to have taken that placement out of the feed. That’ll obviously sink the download rates for the new app. And it has only been out for a few days, so it’s not necessarily a measure of the app’s long-term growth.

Still, it says something that while Poke rests at No. 39, Snapchat currently sits in fourth place on Apple’s Top Free Apps list. It has the benefit of having been the go-to app for ephemeral messaging for months, not to mention the word-of-mouth power that Poke can’t attain in just a few days.

The larger issue here isn’t just about Snapchat vs. Facebook. It’s about cloning services in general. We’ve seen Facebook copy apps and other start-ups many times before; the Questions feature aped Quora’s style, while Deals was supposed to be a Groupon killer. Same with Google, whose Currents brought out forecasts of the demise of Flipboard, while Google+ made many tell Facebook to be wary.

How did all those turn out? Well, Facebook killed Questions a few weeks ago, and all the other clone products haven’t exactly dominated the competition. (When was the last time you used Currents? Ever?)

The lesson: A giant competitor playing in your space does not mean you’re dead in the water. If you’ve got a year-long head start, a loyal user base and a firm grasp on the technology you’ve built, it may not make a difference if Facebook or Google rips your app off (and in the case of Poke, it’s a straight feature-for-feature rip).

Obviously this Snapchat vs. Poke thing will take time to play out. Just remember, even for a behemoth like Facebook, there’s no such thing as a sure thing.

“It’s Time. Demand a Plan to End Gun Violence,” reads the ad, which was signed by a plethora of major digital players.

They include, in part: Lerer Venture’s Ken Lerer (who organized the effort); SV Angel’s Ron Conway, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Skype President Tony Bates, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, adviser Bill Campbell, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, Findery’s Caterina Fake, Emerson Collective’s Laurene Jobs, Code Advisors’ Quincy Smith, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Zuckerberg Media’s Randi Zuckerberg.

In addition, there is a large-scale social media effort under way for Demand a Plan, which signee and venture capitalist Fred Wilson likens on his blog to other Internet-wide campaigns.

“Like the PIPA/SOPA efforts last year, this effort is diverse, distributed, chaotic, and hopefully effective and powerful,” he wrote.

Here’s the ad itself:

This is a massive move and also a risky one. Yahoo’s homepage sees about 170 million daily users who click in to do a variety of things. That huge traffic means that advertising placements earn big bucks from marketers — which inside sources said is typically upwards of $350,000 for a prime placement for a day, rising in price depending on complexity.

Thus, making any dramatic change to the powerful homepage is a big deal for Yahoo’s bottom line, especially in the important fourth quarter, when big advertisers spend a lot of money online and expect big results.

And the latest versions are certainly a major shift from Yahoo’s older look, with the latest using an interactive tiled approach at the very top that suggests the design spawn of Microsoft’s Windows 8 and Flipboard’s elegant social reading app.

As I noted last week, along with experiments in infinite scrolling, a simplified logo and giving search more prominence, Yahoo’s homepage change seems to be aimed at being consumed on touch-responsive, non-PC devices.

That’s no surprise, since Mayer declared in a recent earnings call that Yahoo was going to veer toward a “mobile first” sensibility. “Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said.

She also has to aim at being a reliable digital company, it seems. In a bit of unlucky timing — even as Yahoo prepped the home page redo, as well as major overhauls of other products — its hugely popular Fantasy Football offering went down right as eight games were about to start at 10 am PT.

Yahoo acknowledged the slowness in its servers on Twitter, noting: “We’re still working to fix fantasy server issue & will update ASAP. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience & appreciate your patience.”

Fantasy Football fans were livid, although this has happened before, especially to those who waited to do their lineup. But some were also funny about the screw-up, as you can see below:

Yahoo Fantasy Football site is down. The Republicans were right; America has officially collapsed. The apocalypse is upon us.

— Steve Fuller (@fullsteve) November 11, 2012

Dear Google, please develop a fantasy football platform. That will end Yahoo! as we know it. Love, Long Suffering Yahoo! Fantasy users.

— WFAN Audio Clips (@WFANAudio) November 11, 2012

As of two hours ago, Yahoo said it was still working on the problem. Presumably, it will be the first fix-it challenge for new COO Henrique De Castro, who starts this week.

Hopefully, Yahoo will not have such problems with the homepage rollout, once the final version is selected.

Until then, please check out two images of yet another version, which is similar — although not the same — as the one I posted last week. In the latest design, for example, the swooshy scroll at the top is smaller and a 300 by 250-sized ad unit is back in place at the top. Overall, it is a little bit more conservative, although still streamlined.

Here they are, along with a more dramatic one from last week and also a recent Yahoo homepage:

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(Mark Sanchez photo: Debby Wong / Shutterstock.com)

Another week and yet another new design for the Yahoo homepage is being tested out on users — this time, it appears to be one (which you can see below) that looks a lot like Microsoft Windows 8’s touchscreen tiled approach (which is here).

After already putting out tests in the field with infinite scrolling, a simplified logo and giving search more prominence, the Silicon Valley Internet giant is apparently testing an even more drastically different redesign of its key landing page — one that seems to be aimed at being consumed on touch-responsive, non-PC devices.

As you can see from the screenshots below — which a user sent me, and which look exactly like what many Yahoo sources have described to me recently — the design uses big photos tiled across the top of the page. It suggests an ethos that is reminiscent of the new approach by Microsoft, as well as many others, such as Flipboard and Pinterest.

All of these encourage users to reach out and touch, scroll and swoosh. In fact, there are side-swiping arrows on the new Yahoo design.

Also part of the look, which is still being tweaked: More simplified icons for various Yahoo properties, fewer text links, additional social and personalization aspects and — perhaps most importantly — no advertising module at the very top.

That’s interesting, since Yahoo’s homepage is a big moneymaker for the company, because of its huge daily traffic. Thus, any new homepage design will have both massive consumer and financial impact on the company.

Sources said that one possible plan is to move from several 300 by 250-sized ad units to a single 300 by 600, which other sites like AOL have shifted toward. Such a change will not be without controversy for marketers.

It will also present a fresh selling challenge for new COO Henrique De Castro, who arrives at Yahoo from Google next week, and who will be helming sales efforts. (Hey, Henrique — get ready for my upcoming 360-degree profile of you!)

The latest redo is now being iterated under the regime of new CEO Marissa Mayer, under an awfully confident codename, Project Homerun. We’ll see if it is San Francisco Giant’s Panda-worthy, but sources said it is set to be released widely within the next two months.

But, while some new designs that have surfaced have been closer to the current version of Yahoo, the latest design is a more significant shift that would clearly lend itself well to mobile touchscreens, especially on increasingly popular tablets.

Along with Pinterest, Flipboard and Windows 8, other sites have done this, of course, most particularly pioneering content design done several years ago by BermanBraun’s Wonderwall for Microsoft’s MSN portal.

That’s no surprise, since Mayer declared in a recent earnings call — articulating what many desktop-trapped Silicon Valley Internet giants have also done recently — that Yahoo was going to also veer toward a “mobile first” sensibility.

“Yahoo will have to be a predominantly mobile company,” she said in the third-quarter earnings call.

Here’s what that seems to mean for Yahoo, with the new homepage images, as well as one of the current one to compare:

Chernin and Qatar Holding aren’t commenting on financial details, but people familiar with the transaction say the Arab state is putting around $100 million into the Chernin Group. Earlier this year, Chernin struck a separate financing deal with Providence Equity Partners and other backers.

Last month, news reports placed Chernin in talks to combine his firm with Endemol and Core Media Group, two powerful reality-TV producers. Chernin wouldn’t discuss whether the new funding deal would end those talks, or even acknowledge that the conversations existed. “I have no interest in commenting on what’s essentially a rumor,” he says.

Chernin does say he’ll use the new money in the same way he plans to use the money he had already raised — as “firepower” for a strategy he had already laid out: Build up media assets in emerging markets like China, produce film and TV shows in the U.S., and make investment bets on media/tech companies like Tumblr, Flipboard and Pandora.

He says Facebook’s IPO struggles haven’t changed the last part of that thesis. “I think it’s probably made the landscape more attractive, because valuations have gotten more attractive,” he says.

Chernin was News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch’s longtime lieutenant, and left that company in 2009 with a signficant production deal; News Corp. also owns this Web site.

Here’s a highlight reel from a chat I had with Chernin about a year ago, when he appeared at our Asia: D conference in Hong Kong:

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121108/peter-chernin-rounds-up-another-100-million-this-time-from-qatar/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20121003/twitter-rolls-out-surveys-and-reminds-us-why-it-cares-about-consistent-user-experiences/ http://allthingsd.com/20121003/twitter-rolls-out-surveys-and-reminds-us-why-it-cares-about-consistent-user-experiences/#comments Wed, 03 Oct 2012 14:30:43 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=256695 Here’s an interesting new feature for Twitter advertisers: The chance to survey users directly.

Twitter is rolling out the tool today, which it will provide for free to some of its biggest advertisers and will eventually offer more widely.

It’s a straightforward idea: Some users will see a tweet asking them to take a survey, and if they click on it, the message will expand within their timeline, and trigger a brief series of questions.

Nielsen will work with Twitter to audit/analyze the results. Twitter hopes that it will be able to use the feature to convince advertisers that they’re getting their money’s worth, and to help them tweak and optimize their campaigns.

For the rest of us, the tool is a good reminder of why Twitter is intent on controlling the way Tweets are displayed, and maintaining  a “consistent user experience” throughout the service — even if it upsets some partners and developers.

That’s because the surveys are essentially small multimedia presentations, and Twitter can only deliver them through its own platforms. This will work on Twitter’s Web site, mobile sites, mobile apps, etc. But it wouldn’t work on, say, Flipboard.

And, while short, text-based surveys aren’t the most amazing things in the world, you can see how Twitter could use that same technology to present much more interesting experiences. Note, for instance, that the company has already shown its interest in e-commerce a few times, most recently via an American Express campaign.

Twitter started out constrained by a 140-character text limit. But it’s clearly set on augmenting those messages with lots of other bells and whistles.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20121003/twitter-rolls-out-surveys-and-reminds-us-why-it-cares-about-consistent-user-experiences/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120924/exclusive-twitter-eyeing-media-bigs-including-hollywood-mogul-peter-chernin-for-board-seats/ http://allthingsd.com/20120924/exclusive-twitter-eyeing-media-bigs-including-hollywood-mogul-peter-chernin-for-board-seats/#comments Tue, 25 Sep 2012 03:07:10 +0000 Kara Swisher and Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=253688 Twitter is now interviewing a series of well-known media players for its board, as the San Francisco online social communications service seeks to increase its ties to the entertainment industry, according to sources close to the situation.

And one of the top director candidates is well-regarded Hollywood exec Peter Chernin, said several sources.

He is an obvious choice, having been a top exec at News Corp. for many years. Since he left in mid-2009, Chernin has forged a successful film and television career, producing such hits as “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “New Girl.”

But, unlike many media execs, he has also focused on garnering much deeper digital experience.

Chernin was key to the formation of the Hulu premium online service, for example, and is also a board member of the Pandora streaming music service. He has also been making digital and media investments in Asia.

(And, interestingly, although apropos of nothing, Chernin’s former boss, Rupert Murdoch, has become an avid tweeter, too.)

Sources said Chernin has not decided if he even wants such a board seat, and Twitter management is still only in the early stages of its board effort, presumably to replace Flipboard’s Mike McCue.

The entrepreneur left the board earlier this year, after it was clear that his social media app and Twitter were on a collision course (or an acquisition one, depending how you looked at it).

But the addition of a media-savvy director — or even two — also makes sense in the context of the past year of Twitter’s evolution.

The brainchild of Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, Twitter first began as a microblogging social network.

While it did attract a lot of attention due to its celebrity tweeters — such as actor Ashton Kutcher and famebot Kim Kardashian — the management and board of Twitter is largely tech-centric in experience.

But, more recently, the service has taken its shape as a consumption-based media company, where some 40 percent of its user base read and consume content rather than create it. That is to say, they watch, but they don’t tweet.

Such a strategic direction is a natural extension for bringing in more advertising spending from outside partners, especially big media companies that have both the eyeballs and dollars that the company is hoping to attract.

Twitter is now commonly used throughout the media space in a variety of roles, from branding to audience-gauging, and also sometimes even as a plot device.

(That said, you won’t catch CEO Dick Costolo outright admitting Twitter’s media-company status; he still wants the Silicon Valley cred of being valued as a technology giant first.)

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment on any effort to bring in new directors; Chernin has not yet responded to a query for comment.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120924/exclusive-twitter-eyeing-media-bigs-including-hollywood-mogul-peter-chernin-for-board-seats/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120915/friendster-founder-jonathan-abrams-is-back-and-he-wants-to-bring-you-your-tech-news/ http://allthingsd.com/20120915/friendster-founder-jonathan-abrams-is-back-and-he-wants-to-bring-you-your-tech-news/#comments Sun, 16 Sep 2012 00:38:36 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=250926 Famous and successful tech entrepreneurs often seem to pride themselves on staying out of the fray of tech news and blogs. They don’t like to admit to taking time out of their busy lives to tune in for all the daily excitement (such as it is).

Not Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams. This week he beta-launched his own tech news aggregator, Nuzzel.

Photo credit: Flickr user tychay

Nuzzel is a purely social news aggregator. There’s no machine learning, no topics, and no set-up process beyond connecting Facebook and Twitter. The site, which Abrams built entirely himself, has a surprising quotient of customization and polish. He said he is launching in order to get users, raise money and hire people to do things like build mobile app versions.

The main page of Nuzzel is a personalized list of stories, ranked by recency and the number of friends who posted links to them. Users can opt to get an instant summary of relevant stories for as short a time as an hour or as long as the past week. (Nuzzel isn’t limited to tech news sources, but readers of such sites are the initial target audience.)

Users can also look at other people’s Nuzzel feeds from their point of view or get a news summary for a particular day that’s already passed.

And there’s a nifty option to view content that you may have missed because it was not posted by any of your friends, but it was posted by your friends’ friends that you do not follow.

Versus other aggregators like Flipboard and Prismatic, Abrams says Nuzzel is more about social. “I absolutely believe that the social signal is the proxy for relevancy,” Abrams told me. “This is not half-assed social.”

In the past two years of helping run the start-up coworking space Founders Den, Abrams has become a meticulous student of tech news — both the substance and the form. He shares links to 10 or more news stories on any given day on Twitter and Facebook, and while coding Nuzzel he personally worked through the kinks of links from various publishing platforms. In the weeks leading up to Nuzzel’s launch, Abrams emailed me all sorts of tiny questions about things like why AllThingsD had changed the permalink on a particular story.

Yes, there are already a lot of perfectly good tech news aggregators. Abrams doesn’t disagree, and he incorporated some of his own favorites like TechMeme, Reddit and Hacker News into Nuzzel. So, for instance, a story that has been featured on Hacker News that turns up on Nuzzel will automatically display a link to the relevant Hacker News comment section, since those tend to be pretty rich and active.

Abrams — who also owns Nuzzle.com, but prefers the more distinctive spelling — told me that social bookmarking is an idea he’s had on his mind for years. In fact before Friendster, his first company was the bookmark-sharing tool HotLinks back in 1998. It was “too early and too nerdy,” he says now.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120915/friendster-founder-jonathan-abrams-is-back-and-he-wants-to-bring-you-your-tech-news/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120828/tenuous-relationship-with-twitter-aside-flipboard-reminds-us-its-alive-and-well/ http://allthingsd.com/20120828/tenuous-relationship-with-twitter-aside-flipboard-reminds-us-its-alive-and-well/#comments Tue, 28 Aug 2012 19:46:00 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=245738 Changes are afoot in the Twitterverse. As the company’s API remains in a state of strange, undefined flux, outside companies who use it now find themselves questioning just how reliable it is to build a business on Twitter data.

Flipboard is arguably the most prominent third-party company put in an awkward position (so much so that, as I’ve reported previously, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue stepped down from Twitter’s board earlier this year). Due to the way the company displays tweets, I’ve heard from multiple sources that it is in line to hit Twitter’s chopping block in the not too distant future.

All that said, Flipboard doesn’t want to sit back and let the rumors swallow it up. Coming off its second birthday, the company released a slew of new stats on how well it has fared over the past year. It’s most likely a bit of wagging the dog, hoping press outlets and Flipboard enthusiasts take the growth and numbers at face value without considering the implications of what a Twitter-less Flipboard may look like in the future.

Still, the numbers are impressive for a young, mobile-only start-up. The company has added 15 million users over the past eight months, a 300 percent increase from the end of 2011, and is now up to 20 million total users. That includes 1.5 million people using the Flipboard apps daily across more than 200 countries around the world. Not bad.

What’s unclear, however, is whether or not that 20 million number means registered users or actual active users. If it’s just the number of folks who have signed up, it isn’t that impressive — after all, a service is only as good as its retention rate. But if it is indeed 20 million active users of the service, it’s a nice surprise, a seeming answer to the “Is Flipboard dead?” question that is on many folks’ minds. I’ve asked Flipboard for clarification, and I’ll update this if they get back to me.

Update, August 29, 5:47 PDT:A Flipboard spokeswoman got back to me, saying that the 20 million figure is the number of people who have actually used Flipboard, rather than just installs or downloads. Still unclear how many of those are active, but the consistently active (and most revealing) metric that Flipboard notes is the 1.5 million user number. (/end update)

If (or should I say, when) Twitter chokes off Flipboard’s API access, the momentum of its large user base could keep the app afloat for some time. But McCue and his team will need to figure out another stream of content to make up for the loss of tweets. It seems Google+ is where Flipboard is aimed at the moment — we’ll see if that’s enough.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120828/tenuous-relationship-with-twitter-aside-flipboard-reminds-us-its-alive-and-well/feed/ 5 http://allthingsd.com/20120823/prismatics-sleek-newsreader-now-available-in-an-app/ http://allthingsd.com/20120823/prismatics-sleek-newsreader-now-available-in-an-app/#comments Thu, 23 Aug 2012 16:00:32 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=244358 Prismatic, the interest-based newsfeed start-up that aims to better personalize reading and news discovery, launched its iPhone app on Thursday. To stand out among the glut of newsreader apps currently available, Prismatic prides itself on extremely fast browsing and a refined user interface with creative use of gesture-based navigation. Most interesting is the use of local inputs that serve up news content based on your location.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120823/prismatics-sleek-newsreader-now-available-in-an-app/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120801/the-future-of-twitters-platform-is-all-in-the-cards/ http://allthingsd.com/20120801/the-future-of-twitters-platform-is-all-in-the-cards/#comments Wed, 01 Aug 2012 12:00:37 +0000 Mike Isaac http://allthingsd.com/?p=235232
On June 29, Twitter VP of Product Michael Sippey posted a foreboding 439-word letter to the company blog, broadly sketching the direction Twitter’s platform is headed.

Upon its reception, most of the public attention focused on a single passage, which stated that Twitter will soon introduce stricter guidelines to its developer partners in the coming weeks, limiting the ways in which outsiders will be able to use Twitter’s rich, ceaseless stream of data.

This was a big deal. Countless numbers of smaller start-ups rely on access to Twitter’s public-facing feed, using the tweets in their own businesses for any number of reasons. If the terms of access were to be altered significantly, it could impact the livelihoods of thousands. The company didn’t elaborate on what exactly those guidelines would be, and has said little else since. The key takeaway echoed in one repeated word: Consistency. Twitter’s future plans strove for consistency across the platform.

Naturally, Twitter developers across the Web proceeded to freak out. Of the many third-party app developers I’ve spoken to who have massively popular apps that depend on Twitter, all of them have told me they have received no guidance from Twitter beyond Sippey’s original post.

While members of the press scramble to cover Twitter’s most recent dustup involving the censorship of a reporter, speculation in the developer community continues to run rampant, and many accuse Twitter of being unnecessarily opaque.

But amid the confusion of the past month, nearly all have overlooked the section of Sippey’s post which holds the key to Twitter’s future: Cards. Twitter’s new Cards technology allows third-party developers to create richer, more compelling — and, above all, visually consistent — content inside of Twitter itself.

Therein lies Twitter’s goal: A rich, consistent Twitter experience for every user. When the hammer drops and Twitter changes its guidelines, those apps that can’t deliver this consistency will no longer be able to integrate with Twitter. The most likely candidates to go first, according to multiple sources, fall into two camps: Third-party-client apps which essentially reduplicate the Twitter stream — such as Tweetbot, Echofon and Osfoora — and news reader apps like Flipboard, which re-renders Twitter data to create a different visual experience of a tweet entirely.

The answer lies in the cards.

Cards on the Table

The mandate to crack down on developers comes straight from Dick Costolo — no doubt feeling the pressure of being the company’s third CEO in almost as many years — who is charged with the task of making profitable a company backed by hundreds of millions in venture capital and valued near $8 billion (see Googler Hunter Walk’s excellent post for more on this). Right now, Cards are the long-term bet in continuing to bolster monetization efforts.

First, let’s back up a bit. What are Twitter Cards, exactly?

In effect, they are the technology behind expanded, multimedia-rich tweets. With the addition of a few lines of code, publishers, brands and developers can create better tweets showcasing their content inside of the Twitter stream. For example, when sites like AllThingsD and the New York Times tweet a link to a story, a “summary” Card shows a fancier version, like so:

Developers can also push out media-based tweets, which include full photos and video that show up inside Twitter’s stream.

Though any developer may apply to use Cards, currently only major publishers — like the New York Times, the Huffington Post, CNET and others — big brands like Nike and Nascar, and high-profile media apps like Instagram and YouTube are able to take advantage of it. Twitter is restricting access initially, working with select partners on a slow, cautious rollout.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Right now, it rests on these developers’ shoulders to make their Card-enabled tweets work across official Twitter clients: Twitter.com, the Twitter Android and iOS apps, and Twitter’s mobile Web site.

The problem is, there are far more clients than the official ones: Tweetbot, Echofon and Osfoora are all popular alternatives, among many others. And right now, the tweets that use Twitter’s shiny new Card technology don’t show up in their rich new form inside of these third-party clients.

For Twitter, this is awful: The company needs its new, media-rich tweets to appear the same to everyone, not just to those using the official Twitter apps.

This could mean death for those third-party clients. According to multiple sources, when Twitter introduces the new set of API guidelines, the days of these apps are likely numbered.

That also goes for many news aggregation apps as well, according to my sources, with the very popular Flipboard being the most notable among them. The writing has been on the wall for Flipboard for some time — enough that Mike McCue, the Flipboard CEO who also occupied a seat on Twitter’s board, seemed likely to relinquish his board seat, back when Kara Swisher first reported it in May.

Multiple sources confirmed to me recently that McCue is indeed no longer a Twitter board member.

Quality Control

Here comes the burning question: Why are Cards and visual consistency so important to Twitter? Is Twitter’s obsession with good design so extreme that it is willing to risk alienating its developer community at large?

In three words: No, but sorta. This section from Sippey’s post gives us a further hint at the “why”:

“Twitter cards are an important step toward where we are heading with our platform, which involves creating new opportunities to build engaging experiences into Twitter. That is, we want developers to be able to build applications that run within Tweets.” (emphasis mine)

Building apps to run inside a platform. Sound like any other major social companies you’ve heard of?

Yes, it does: Cards are Twitter’s own version of a Facebook-like Open Graph. Just as developers’ apps look, feel and function better when integrated into Facebook’s Open Graph, third-party developers can use the Twitter Cards technology to build apps into Twitter. As Sippey alludes, pictures and media are just the beginning: Twitter wants developers to create all kinds of apps — it just wants them to do it on Twitter’s terms, inside Twitter’s visual constraints.

Indeed, while Sippey’s post read as a warning shot — which, to some degree, it certainly was — it is also a call to arms for developers to take to Twitter’s platform in a different way than they have before. Twitter even plans to amp up its efforts in bolstering its developer ranks, listing multiple developer evangelist and advocate positions on its recruiting site.

The direction in which tweets are evolving is a deviation from Twitter’s modus operandi. The company has prided its service on its simplicity: Stripped-down, text-only messages. And, for years, Twitter has resisted doing anything that would complicate the simplistic appeal. For the company to give an about-face and turn toward media is a major sea change — and if Twitter can’t be as simple as it always has been, staying consistent is the next best sort of insurance.

And if these other unofficial clients can’t (or won’t) use Cards, that cuts Twitter’s plan off at the knees.

Promote This

Looking good has its advantages: Better-looking tweets will send more traffic back to publishers and more eyeballs to brands, while Twitter users get the benefit of a better in-stream experience.

But that’s not all Twitter gains. Rich tweets give brands more bang for their buck when buying Twitter ads. Take Promoted Tweets, one of Twitter’s top ad products, as an example: A regular Promoted Tweet gets pinned within users’ streams, where users may or may not click on it. But if you compare that with a Promoted Tweet that includes an embedded, custom-made app or video clip inside of it, my guess is you’ll see engagement levels rise in the latter case. Give advertisers the chance to stick more bells and whistles into their ad, and it’s an easier sell.

Right now, Twitter is taking a conservative rollout approach, partnering with a handful of high-profile developers to create a fancy first round of well-produced tweets. It’s akin to mobile app Path’s recent approach with its Nike FuelBand integration — Path worked with one partner to produce one well-integrated partner experience within the Path app.

And herein lies the advantage of reining in the platform: The less room Twitter gives developers to play with the API willy-nilly, the easier it is for Twitter to create better experiences within Twitter.

In other words, enough building innovation out — it’s time to innovate in.

Choices

The road ahead is foggy. And it is unclear whether Twitter’s API changes to come will immediately ax a wide swath of apps completely, or whether developers will be able to adjust to Twitter’s new rules of the road. Perhaps if Twitter can give developers the proper guidance, it won’t be a third-party-app bloodbath.

I’ve been told by a few sources that even Twitter is still figuring this out. Right now, a source says, the company is facing a series of choices as it stares down the path it has chosen.

Some of those choices are easy: Ending the LinkedIn partnership was a no-brainer, sources say, as Twitter received little traffic back from those tweets syndicated in LinkedIn’s stream. (It should have ended much earlier, I’m told, but the occasional quick phone call from LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner had a way of convincing Dick Costolo to keep the partnership in place.)

Instagram, which will most likely soon become property of Facebook (after the FTC gives the okay), was also an easy choice, sources say. Facebook is Twitter’s competition for ad sales, plain and simple. Coupled with the social graph, any access Facebook has to Twitter’s interest graph could make Facebook’s ad targeting exponentially better, and therefore far more lucrative for advertisers. (It also probably didn’t hurt that Facebook set the precedent of cutting off its competitors when it did the exact same thing to Twitter years ago.)

Other decisions — like cracking down on developers and third-party apps who until now have enjoyed positive relationships with Twitter — most likely won’t be so easy for the company to make.

But Twitter has proven tough thus far, and is most likely to continue taking flak to see its plans through.

Meanwhile, Twitter runs the risk of watching developers depart the platform, perhaps seeking refuge in alternatives like Facebook or — dare I say it — Google+. There’s even a new kid on the block that aims to do it a better way, opting to build a real-time platform like Twitter, wholly unsupported by ads. Dalton Caldwell, a Silicon Valley familiar, has pitched App.net as a paid service for app developers who don’t want the pressure of advertisers bearing down on the network over time. It is ambitious, and idealistic in the extreme (perhaps, many would say, to its own detriment).

Or, developers can continue to do what they’ve been doing: Watch, wait, and let the cards fall where they may.

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