For obsessive Gawker watchers and redesign doom-mongers: the 35.6m uniques in Jan 2012 is record and 55% up from last April’s nadir.

– Nick Denton, via Twitter, almost a year after Gawker’s controversial redesign

“We run the iPhone and iPad teams separately from the Web team, and the Web team had fallen behind,” said Paul English, co-founder and CTO.

The goal with the site’s design has always been to provide a simple layout, so that users can easily sift through thousands of flights, hotels and car rentals to find what they are looking for quickly.

But up until now, the focus wasn’t really on being beautiful, English said. The new look tries to incorporate a clean and attractive design.

After eight years in business, English said this is the most significant redesign of the site (check out the gallery below to see how the site has changed over the years). But only the most die-hard users are likely to notice many differences. Rather, the larger significance is that mobile is influencing the Web, and not the other way around.

Increasingly, this may be the case in the travel industry as so much of the traffic now comes from phones and tablets. Kayak said more than five million applications were downloaded in the nine months ended in September, a 97 percent increase over the same period a year earlier.

In early testing, English said conversion rates are higher and completion times are shorter as a result of incorporating mobile designs — which, by nature, are always built with speed and ease-of-use in mind. “They [customers] are more confident to compete the purchase because we haven’t worn them out.”

View the slideshow

Here’s some of the more notable changes:

The unibrow is gone: Internally, the company refers to “the unibrow” as the black bar that stretched across the the top of the page that said “Search One and Done.” Now at the top of the screen are several tabs, such as Flights, Hotels, Cars, etc.

Similar to iOS: The iPhone and iPad designers released a new iPad app about a month ago. In the new Web site design, they leaned on the design to bring a consistent typeface and coloring to the Web site.

Fewer ads on the site: When users are looking at photos of a hotel or viewing a map, they won’t see any ads. “Obviously, ads are an important part of the way we make money, but advertisers have gotten clever, and sometimes the ad is jarring and has animation,” English said. Kayak is issuing all-new guidelines that requires advertisements to blend with the site. “If you do a good job, it should be content. If we are showing you ads that are extremely related to what you are doing, it’s useful.”

Most of the changes will go live today, with some of the others — like the new ad guidelines — taking more time to implement.

English declined to provide an update on the company’s IPO. While it continues to file financial updates with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Kayak told AllThingsD in September that it was putting its plans on hold.

The new layout puts additional content and context inline within tweets, rather than off to the side. It’s also supposed to be 500 percent faster than Twitter was three or four months ago. And it looks different and sleeker; for instance, the navigation bar is now on the left instead of the right.

Nope, this is not a new product or feature — which by now seems to be Twitter’s least favorite thing! — but rather a conceptual and visual redesign.

Twitter contains four key functions, said the company’s co-leaders Jack Dorsey and Dick Costolo, addressing a gaggle of media from Twitter’s new industrial chic, uninsulated and barely renovated new headquarters in San Francisco.

The functions are tabs across the top bar in the new design: “home” — that’s the timeline of tweets, which you can click to expand; “connect,” signified by the @ sign, as in a user name; “discover,” a.k.a. emerging and relevant topics and activities, signified by a hash sign; and “me,” which are profile pages.

“Discover” is actually something new — it’s a tab dedicated to links and media that Twitter has determined are globally interesting as well as personally relevant to a user’s interests. It’s a lightweight algorithmically curated news aggregator, with snippets of text from linked stories and content embedded inline.

Also, select brands — 21 at launch — have access to “enhanced” profile pages, which have wide banners at the top and the ability to feature a single tweet above the regular timeline. Here’s one for Pepsi.

Dorsey said the design is meant to make Twitter more approachable and accessible. Early active users created the @ and # conventions, which have become key to the way Twitter works, but many users have no idea what they mean.

“Twitter should be usable for people who know the shortcuts and also equally usable for those who don’t,” Dorsey said.

Users can “unlock” the new experience by downloading the newest versions of Twitter’s mobile apps for iPhone and Android, or they can get it through Twitter’s Web site over the next couple months, Costolo said.

Here’s an info page about the launch, which Twitter is calling “Fly.”

Here’s what my new Twitter.com homepage looks like:

And here’s a before (today) and an after (architectural rendering) of what the new Twitter office cafeteria looks like.

The company is rolling out a newly redesigned Web site that features a new logo, new colors and an integrated “Explore Box,” or search engine, that had previously only been available in beta.

StumbleUpon has also signed up 250 partners for channels on the site, which will act as verticals users can “follow” in order to get the interesting content they want. The partners include such Web sites as Yelp, Gilt Groupe, Vanity Fair and Funny or Die, as well high-profile names like actor Jim Carrey, athletes Mariano Rivera and Paul Pierce, and late-night TV host Chelsea Handler.

While StumbleUpon is getting a face-lift and adding some boldfaced names, it isn’t changing any of its back-end technology: Users will still “stumble” from site to site, which will be served up to them based on StumbleUpon’s algorithm that factors in interests, likes and your friends’ interests.

StumbleUpon founder and CEO Garrett Camp said the redesign was spurred by feedback the company was getting from users in focus groups. Basically, while the users liked the site’s signature stumbling action (which I previously called a procrastinator’s friend and insomniac’s dream), they wanted easier ways to follow their favorite brands and content.

“Some of the words we used when describing StumbleUpon were surprising, adventurous, exciting, and when we put our logo in brand in front of test users, they weren’t saying that,” Camp said. “We wanted to make it that for them, while also simplifying the site.”

StumbleUpon launched in 2001 as a way for people to find interesting content on the Web. In 2007, the company was acquired by eBay for $75 million. Then, in 2009, Camp, his co-founder Geoff Smith and other investors bought the company back and took it private again. The site went through a minor refresh then, but these new updates mark the first major visual changes to StumbleUpon since it was created. The company currently claims 20 million users and more than 1.2 billion stumbles per month.

While recent data showed that StumbleUpon is now the biggest referrer of traffic to other U.S. Web sites — beating out even Facebook for that title — the changes come as giants like Google and Facebook are dominating the Web ad space, with other Web services clawing for more market share, as my colleague Peter Kafka reported earlier. StumbleUpon’s entire revenue model is advertising — around 3 to 5 percent of all stumbles will land on an ad — and the company is uncertain whether these new celeb channels will end up being new ad space.

It’s the Wild Wild Web out there, kids.

The change comes as YouTube beefs up its offerings to compete with broadcast and cable television, complete with original, professionally produced videos. Last month YouTube announced the creation of around 100 online video channels, featuring original programming from A-List talent such as Madonna, Jay-Z and actor Ashton Kutcher.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Of the 25 posts Zuckerberg has published on Facebook’s corporate blog in the past five years — including today’s acknowledging a long-term privacy settlement with the FTC — I count 10 that were written to address complaints. (The rest are his personal celebrations of milestones and new products.)

Here’s a trip down memory lane, looking back at Zuckerberg’s apologies for upsetting users — usually about privacy.

There are some common themes. Zuckerberg almost always tells users that change is hard, often referring back to the early days of Facebook when it had barely any of the features people know and love today. He says sharing and a more open and connected world are good, and often he says he appreciates all the feedback.

Most of all, Zuckerberg seems to take pride in offering an explicit, earnest apology, but doesn’t actually admit he was wrong, just that he’s sorry for how things were rolled out or perceived.

First up, this is a real gem. On August 29, 2006, Zuckerberg made his first Facebook company blog post. It was a pre-apology, warning users of upcoming changes they might not like — I think he was referring to the news feed and opening the site to the general public.

When we’ve made changes in the past, a lot of people have gotten upset and emailed in asking us to change the site back. Change can be disorienting, but we do it because we’re sure it makes the site better.

The next week, users did in fact go bonkers over the introduction of Facebook’s news feed. Zuckerberg famously wrote, “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.”

We didn’t take away any privacy options. [Your privacy options remain the same.] The privacy rules haven’t changed. None of your information is visible to anyone who couldn’t see it before the changes.

Later, Zuckerberg dropped the condescension and admitted “we really messed this one up,” both in messaging and controls for the news feed feature.

Then a year went by without a Zuckerberg blog post. Until…

“Thoughts on Beacon.” This was the infamous feature that automatically shared users’ activities on other Web sites back on Facebook. (The concept has made a return in Facebook’s new frictionless sharing, which is to be rolled out more fully soon.) Zuckerberg wrote:

We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.

After that, Facebook started experimenting with how it rolled out new products. In some cases it picks a group of users to try something first, in others it allows any user to opt in to try something new. Some products go out to every user within the course of a day. There doesn’t really seem to be a standard approach.

People kept complaining — as in the case of the 2008 redesign that made the Facebook news feed a chronological list like Twitter. This wasn’t a privacy uproar but instead an interface change many users didn’t like. Zuckerberg replied it would be difficult for Facebook to support both recent and relevant versions of the news feed (something the site later introduced, then took away, and recently brought back again, by the way).

Then, in early 2009, controversy erupted over changes to Facebook’s terms of use and who owned users’ information. The ensuing discussion merited three Zuckerberg posts.

At the end of that year Facebook made some major revisions to its privacy settings that set off widespread criticism. By this time Facebook privacy was a major mainstream media story.

Facebook eventually responded in May 2010 with a privacy setting overhaul. This time, Zuckerberg went to the Washington Post op-ed page to justify the changes in addition to his usual blog post. He wrote:

Facebook has been growing quickly. It has become a community of more than 400 million people in just a few years. It’s a challenge to keep that many people satisfied over time, so we move quickly to serve that community with new ways to connect with the social Web and each other. Sometimes we move too fast — and after listening to recent concerns, we’re responding.

“Sometimes we move too fast” seemed more of a brushoff than a real apology. “It’s a comment on the execution of a policy, not on the policy itself,” John Paczkowski wrote.

That brings us to the present day, where we have what turns out to be a textbook Zuckerberg apology acknowledging the FTC privacy settlement. This time, Zuckerberg tries to argue that Facebook has done more good than harm on privacy throughout its existence.

“I founded Facebook on the idea that people want to share and connect with people in their lives, but to do this everyone needs complete control over who they share with at all times,” he starts. “Overall, I think we have a good history of providing transparency and control over who can see your information. That said, I’m the first to admit that we’ve made a bunch of mistakes.”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

The new site appears to have been streamlined for use on a tablet computer, online-commerce experts say, indicating that the Seattle-based retailer is trying to improve the shopping experience on Apple Inc.’s iPad — or its own competing device. Amazon is expected to release a tablet in coming weeks, people familiar with the device have said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The obvious comparison is to Google+, the new social network that’s gunning for Facebook by making sharing more granular.

And indeed, Facebook’s new user profile redesign (which is rolling out to one percent of users starting this Thursday) includes a dropdown menu beside new status updates that allow users to post content to individuals, groups of friends or the general public. It looks exactly like Google+.

But let’s not go overboard; Facebook isn’t borrowing the greater Google+ anatomy, like “Circles” of friends and a mix of asymmetrical and mutual relationships.

Instead, Facebook is making a huge number of tweaks to its profile design, many of them aimed at addressing common user complaints.

Facebook seems to realize that the Google+ comparisons are inevitable, but VP of Product Chris Cox fended them off. “These changes have been in the works for six months,” he said in an interview Monday (see the full Q&A here).

“It’s not the kind of thing where we can respond to what Google’s doing in a month,” Cox said, explaining that Facebook had spent considerable time reviewing the changes with regulatory and privacy interest groups. “This really is not at all about Google in any way, it’s about trying to iterate.”

Still, as we’ve previously reported, Facebook is currently in a self-imposed “lockdown” mode to buckle down on shipping new products, partly in response to the launch of Google+.

Some of this week’s changes are subtle but significant shifts, like giving users the ability to use a setting that prevents a photo of themselves — which were uploaded and tagged by someone else — from showing up on their own profile pages until it’s been approved.

Unwanted photo-tagging had previously been one of users’ most common complaints, Cox said Monday. Now, users will be given the option on any such photo to remove the tag, or ask the poster to take down the photo, or block the user entirely.

“We do think it’s important that people can tag anyone and anything,” Cox said, “but on the flip side, your profile is yours — so this is an attempt to get the balance right.”

Another new setting allows users to tag people in photos who are not their friends, so users don’t feel obligated to friend new people just because they met them once at an event and posed for a group picture together.

Just to give a sampling, yet another new feature gives users the option to add place tags to their status messages so they can mention a place they were when something happened in the past. Meanwhile, a semantic tweak changes the descriptor from “everyone” to “public” so users can better understand the potential impact of their content. And the sharing category “friends of friends” has been deemphasized in the new interface as some users found it overly broad and confusing (I know I did!).

That level of extreme detail and seeming haphazardness is common throughout all the new changes, making them too intricate to describe fully here.

Suffice it to say, the main theme is that Facebook is bringing its privacy options off of its nearly hidden settings pages and into the context in which users share content.

The new sharing tools will be available on Facebook’s Web site, its mobile site, and its iPhone and Android apps, but not versions of the social network developed by other companies like the BlackBerry and Motorola Blur interfaces.

This launch seems likely to ruffle Facebook users’ notoriously sensitive feathers given its little tweaks affect so many parts of the Facebook experience. But at least based on the press briefing, it’s not obvious that any one change will be controversial or dramatic. Cox said Facebook has put considerable effort into materials aimed at helping users get accustomed to the new features.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Next week Denton’s Kotaku gaming site will start showing complete episodes of “Retro Game Master,” a long-running Japanese reality/comedy show.

I’m a little fuzzy on what the show actually entails, but as far as I can tell it involves a dude trying to master ancient, NES-era games, and it’s apparently a big hit in Japan and a cult favorite on the Internet.

Gawker Media has bought the rights to the first 12 episodes of the show, which have been dubbed in English, and has the ability to show more if it goes well, says Kotaku editor Joel Johnson. The idea is to treat the show both as “live” TV — a new episode will be made available each Thursday, at 8 pm ET — and as traditional Web video — Kotaku readers can watch the show on demand whenever they like.

Gawker has already made a significant commitment to video, via its Gawker.TV site. But that site is pretty much dedicated to other people’s viral videos and TV clip compilations that Gawker’s staff assembles. Here the company has gone ahead and purchased the rights to videos it will have exclusively in the U.S. (Eric Spiegelman, last seen on this site working on his “Old Jews Telling Jokes” series, put the deal together for Gawker Media).

This is an experiment for Gawker Media, and the publisher hasn’t sold advertising against the show yet because it doesn’t know how it’s going to perform. But if it does work, you should expect to see more full-length shows on different Gawker Media sites says COO Gaby Darbyshire.

So how much does it cost to purchase the U.S. Web video rights to a hit Japanese TV show, anyway? “Not very much money,” says Darbyshire. “Put it this way — it was not an extravagant experiment to make. Surprisingly small.”

Yes, this is AllThingsD.

A whole new redesign of AllThingsD, that is.

The new look is the third since we launched the site in April of 2007 and–trust us–we think you’ll like it a lot better.

There are a lot of reasons for a redo of any site.

In this case, there are many–from wanting to keep it fresh to figuring out a better way to feature the incredible journalism of our many new reporters who have come on board in the last six months to trying to give the reader a more visual experience and much improved navigation.

That’s a good thing, since the site has been bursting at the seams for a while now, as we have steadily and dramatically increased the number of stories we post every day.

So naturally, we’re pretty excited to launch a redesign today that enables us to better display the depth and breadth of our coverage and to showcase the talent behind it.

And, after months of kibitzing with our longtime and most excellent designers at Mule Design in San Francisco, we think we have done that and more.

Some major deets:

BOOMTOWN IS DEAD, LONG LIVE ALLTHINGSD:

As you will see, in the new set-up, all blog posts belong to AllThingsD and no longer operate under a variety of column names.

We thought long and hard about this change, which entailed moving all the content from the various blogs under the single AllThingsD.com moniker.

This will make everything look more cohesive from a branding standpoint. We’re AllThingsD now, and not the blogging nation states of BoomTown, Digital Daily, MediaMemo, Mobilized, NetworkEffect, eMoney and NewEnterprise.

While we liked all those pretty names, it’s become clear that it’s gotten a little confusing to readers that we are one single news organization.

Thus, as hard as it is for me personally–I have been writing under the BoomTown name since before there was a Google–out they go.

CONTEXT IS KING:

One big focus: More contextually relevant opportunities to view our content!

Real people translation: All of our content is now categorized under the list of topics that runs across the top of the site, which are News, Reviews, Mobile, Media, Social, Enterprise and Commerce.

These lead to dynamically-generated category pages. Since our coverage is rarely confined to just one of those, any given post or column will probably appear under more than one category.

Of course, there are rabid Peter Kafka fans, as well as those who cannot live without a daily dose of Ina Fried. Luckily, you can still view posts by writer by using the convenient “view by writer” link at the far right of the navigation bar.

And if that’s not enough context for you, the content on display can be further filtered by the most popular tags of the previous 30 days by clicking on “Trending Tags” on any category page or “Kara (or any other writer) by Topic” on any writer’s page.

BIG AND BEAUTIFUL:

As you can see, All Things D now has a wider layout and a better ability to display videos, photos and embedded documents.

The new wider layout is better suited to big, bold graphics and videos. All of our videos will now be streaming to you at 640×360, and while we’re not giving up on LOLcats any time soon, they will be coming to you at a much higher resolution, and they will occasionally be augmented by professional photojournalism from Getty Images and other services.

But fear not: AllThingsD‘s epic Photoshops–such as the recent Skype-tastic image of Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer above–will continue unabated.

LOOK AT THE PRETTY BOXES:

On the new AllThingsD site, we’re no longer confined to bringing you our content in a chronologically reversed river of posts.

Of course, that’s still available if you scroll down to “Today’s Posts,” and you can even filter that view by clicking on any of the writers to the left.

Our new featured content box at the top of the homepage gives us the latitude to highlight the most important stories as well, and to give them the prominence, longevity and visual impact they warrant.

We’re sure you have a lot more questions and it will take some getting used to the new look. So, the whole staff at All Things D is here for you with any questions, comments and, of course, complaints.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE…:

On a final note: The strong commitment of AllThingsD and the D: All Things Digital conferences to accurate, fair, ethical and pertinent coverage of tech and media news will always be the same. No matter how many fancy new doodads come to the Web, our belief that readers want the kind of high-quality journalism we offer will never ever change.

But we hope you like how we have decided to package that going forward. Once again, please give us feedback about what you like and what you don’t.

Yours in redesign,

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg
Co-Executive Editors, All Things D

Today, after Demand Media beat Wall Street expectations, its execs got on the horn with investors to explain how it plans to beat the Panda.

That would be the beastly name for Google’s rejiggering of its search algorithm, in order to rid search results of poor quality content.

Along with many other sites, Demand has gotten smacked by its raging paw.

Still, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company reported revenue of $79.5 million and six cents a share in adjusted net income.

Wall Street was expecting the company to report about $69.6 million in revenue for the three months, with four cents a share in adjusted profits.

On a GAAP basis, net loss per share was 13 cents compared to 94 cents a year ago.

Here’s the liveblog of the conference call:

2 pm PT: Demand’s investor relations dude came on and I immediately tuned out until CEO Richard Rosenblatt got on the line to talk about the results.

He was as perky as ever, launching right into the meat of the situation–how Demand was going to pretty up its offerings, such as a redesign of its flagship eHow site and its new editorial arrangement with another perky person, food lady Rachael Ray and the also perky fashionista/talk show lady Tyra Banks.

Gone will be user-generated content that Demand used to let people post at will on its eHow site that was, well, less than good.

As in, bad.

Instead, it’s “curation,” “editorial innovation” and feedback cycles.

We old-timers like to call that journalism and copyediting, complete with mean old editors who spiked said copy when it was crappy.

“Let me be clear,” said Rosenblatt, the Google changes did negatively impact Demand’s traffic. But Rosenblatt said the company dug into its content and has been improving it since.

2:17 pm: Now it was CFO Charles Hillard reading the results themselves. I am sorry, Mr. Finance Guy, but I can read it myself, so this is always the time in earnings calls when I check out and spend my time improving my content.

So when I heard words such as “stock-based comp,” I moved on to fixing all the typos that a very nice reader alerted me to, since I was writing too quickly.

Then, I briefly considered writing a high-quality post for eHow on how to write earnings and fix typos at the same time. I am that good.

2:30 pm: The CFO dude finished up and the Q&A with analysts started.

All Panda questions, natch!

Rosenblatt seemed calm, cool and collected.

“We think on this one, they did a very good job,” he said of Google’s search-fixing efforts, trying to soothe the savage beast. “We all continue to evolve.”

Which translated to: Google says jump and we say: “How high?”

Which is then followed by: “Please sir, can I have some more (traffic)?”

More Google algo change questions.

I suspect there is a new tactic afoot by Demand: Bore us into submission about the traffic devastation from Larry Page’s minions with endless questions about algo.

Finally, a question about mobile and international expansion. Apparently, Demand content is going to be translated into five different languages.

Yay! I am readying my version of “How to Boil Water” in French! (“Comment Faire Bouillir L’eau”!)

Mobile is going to be big too for Demand, which it is for everyone.

Then it was onto a question about improving content, including paying its writers more moolah, which would then eat into the Demand cheaper content business model.

I liked that question! I suddenly decided I was going to shift to a lugubrious post on the history of the Maginot Line in 132 parts!

Oops, Rosenblatt said the data has to show that the peeps want those longer pieces.

Back to the boiling water opus!

It’s on to some video questions and then back to search, as in diversifying away from relying on search to get traffic and premium prices for its advertising.

As in, how much are you going to cozy up to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg?

“It’s less about where traffic comes from and more about where they land,” said Rosenblatt, except you just know he sent a lovely floral bouquet plus a hefty selection of citrus to Zuckerberg’s new house in Silicon Valley right after Panda roared.

Rosenblatt deflected a lot of questions in this arena. “We still think that search is a fantastic way” to gain traffic, he said, making sure Google’s Page did not chomp off his hand as he courted his social networking nemesis at Facebook.

But as the old Kikuyu proverb goes: “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.”

More likely, as Mary Chapin Carpenter sings: “Sometimes you’re the windshield. Sometimes you’re the bug.”

We’ll see which is which for Demand in the quarters ahead.

Until then, here’s Carpenter performing her song, “The Bug”:

All of the overhauls are aimed at explaining the service to new users. And in the past, Twitter has tried to do that by showing off examples of what it actually does.

No more. Instead of displaying sample Tweets, or trending topics, the new page simply invites users to “Follow your interests: Instant updates from your friends, industry experts, favorite celebrities, and what’s happening around the world,” followed by a search box.

This is a simple switch, but the symbolism seems important for the service, which is still trying to make itself relevant to the mainstream: There’s no point in showing new users Tweets about people and topics they don’t care about.

This is presumably part of what new/old product head Jack Dorsey was talking about last week, when he discussed Twitter’s need to create “better lines around the products, so it’s more approachable, so that people can get into it immediately, and it’s extremely relevant right away.”

Here’s the new home page that some users are seeing (via Mashable):

And the old one:

And, for old time’s sake, the one before that:

And the one before that:

While no one inside or outside Myspace owner News Corp. expects fireworks and giant piles of money, the tire-kicking for the long-troubled social-networking-turned-entertainment site actually starts Wednesday.

That’s when about a dozen interested parties will finally get a walk-through of the books and more by management and the serious talks begin.

But, said several sources, despite a variety of reports of various interested buyers, no deal for the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Myspace is imminent with any one of them.

Instead, most expect some kind of outcome within two weeks at the earliest.

Among the possibilities is anything from an outright sale to partnership that continues to involve News Corp., which has engaged Allen & Co. to conduct the sad proceedings.

Among those in the fray are, as has been reported, music video network Vevo, owned by several media giants. It is the most prominent strategic suitor for Myspace.

But talks with Vevo are preliminary, as are all others.

In fact, most of the others interested are as expected: moneybag private equity players, such as Providence Equity Partners and Silver Lake Partners. Both have been in discussions with News Corp. in earlier efforts to offload Myspace.

Interestingly, Criterion Capital Partners, which bought AOL’s Bebo social networking site for less than $10 million last June, is not in the bidding as yet.

Neither is Zynga, the San Francisco casual gaming start-up. Various stories had rumored of its interest in Myspace, but they are inaccurate. In addition, neither AOL nor Yahoo seem likely bidders either.

And it goes without saying that the Silicon Valley social networking site that did Myspace in–Facebook–is also not a buyer. So too Google, which–back in the headier days–handed Myspace a fortune as part of an ill-advised advertising deal.

In any case, whoever buys Myspace needs a lot of patience, which seems to have run out at News Corp., where top execs take turns bashing it to shareholders.

That’s no surprise. After a laudable though glacial redesign as a music and entertainment hub last fall, traffic has declined 44 percent in a recent month from a year ago, to 37.7 million unique visitors in the U.S.

Worse still, the News Corp. unit that houses Myspace showed an operating loss of $156 million in the recent quarter, mostly related to a severe drop-off of advertising revenue at the site.

That plunge in fortunes will surely have an impact on the price buyers are willing to pay for the once iconic brand.

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

BoomTown always enjoys the maiden voyage of a newly public company, so liveblogging Demand Media’s first quarterly earnings seems like a must-do.

It’s also the first public outing for CEO Richard Rosenblatt, who has sold off his previous entrepreneurial efforts.

And it seems like a good start, as the Santa Monica, Calif.-based online content company, which had its IPO in late January, finally out to rest some controversy about how much is actually earns by posting $1 million in net income in the last three months of 2010.

Okay, that is a weensy amount, to be sure, but it beat expectations, as well as for revenue, with sales of $73.6 million for the fourth quarter.

Of course, Demand wants Wall Street to look at “Adjusted OIBDA” results, which was up 88 percent, and which it is a much prettier $20.1 million in earnings.

Also on deck, as MediaMemo’s Peter Kakfa noted today:

“Expect to hear at least one riff on whether or not the company feels threatened by Google and changes the search engine is making to push “content farms” out of its results. CEO Richard Rosenblatt insists that his company is not a content farm, and that Google is just fine with his stuff, but I have a feeling the issue won’t go away just yet.”

We’ll see–here we go:

2:05 pm PT: It took me a bit to get into this conference call, since I could not get the live broadcast from the Web site at all and the teleconference operators were snoozing.

And I tuned in just as Rosenblatt (pictured here) was talking about how Demand was helping people get information about how to ripen avocados.

No, really.

(Memo to self: Curb the snotty journalist tone, especially since I love me a good, ripe avocado.)

Rosenblatt, who seems only a little nervous, pressed on by talking about its massive eHow site, as well as Cracked.com and other major branded sites Demand has.

The latest is TypeF women’s health and beauty site, which is guided by supermodel Tyra Banks.

Rosenblatt then linked it all to advertisers and how much they want to spend on sites like this.

“We are not limited to just a few key verticals,” he said, touting its sales staff, including Rosenblatt’s daring raid of Chief Revenue Officer Joanne Bradford from Yahoo.

“The company is well positioned to capture an increasing share of brand revenue,” said Rosenblatt.

2:18 pm: Rosenblatt then zeroed in on the juicy issues, which center around the quality of the content Demand churns out.

Or, as critics have argued, lack of quality.

“The level of specificity is arcane to some,” noted Rosenblatt, using the example of flying paper lanterns and how to make a roof rake as examples of the kind of niche content Demand produces.

Arcane is right, but it takes all kinds!

Plus, insisted Rosenblatt, it’s good! Accurate! Edited! Useful!

He took the gloves off here, which made me want a Demand piece about taking care of leather gloves (linseed oil?).

“We’re just getting started,” said Rosenblatt, about the company and not the glove care tips.

2:24 pm: The CEO turned it over to the CFO, Charles Hilliard, which meant I was off on my critical Web search about taking care of my gloves.

That’s because he immediately said: “Adjusted OIBDA.”

Which-let’s be honest–sounds like a communicable disease.

Essentially, said Hilliard, it’s up, up, up for Demand, in terms of revenue, earnings, page views and more.

You can read all these gory financial details in the press release here.

For some reason, Hilliard is using the retail term, “same store sales,” as a comparison. I covered retails for years, so it is a surprise for this to be the metaphor, but Demand obviously sees itself as a content store.

2:39 pm: Q&A time and the Google-fights-spam question came first!

Rosenblatt said he welcomed it and appeared unconcerned. His avocado-ripening, roof-rake-making, flying-lantern company needed to make no excuses!

The next question is about expansion, including internationally. Sure, Western Europe.

Then, a sneaky follow-up on content farms.

“We consider ourself very white hat,” declared Rosenblatt.

I wonder what the best way to clean a white hat is?

Voila! It’s right here on eHow:

“1. Wash your white hat in the washing machine if it is made of cotton or polyester. Just add laundry detergent and one cup of bleach. Wash the hat using the hot water setting. Do not put the hat in the dryer. The hat will shrink and then it won’t fit your head.”

Call the Pulitzer Prize committee!

(Wait, snotty again! I also love clean, white hats.)

I was so riveted by the white-hat thing, I completely missed the next question, but tuned in again to one about revenue momentum.

Essentially, Bradford–who looks great in a white hat, I might add–is on the case.

Then some internal technical questions and about guidance for Q1. CFO Hilliard said that the company was guiding for growth, despite more public company expenses.

(Needless to say, you can find out about how to run a public company here on eHow.)

The last question was about how much branded advertising will make up total revenue. Between five and 10 percent of 2010, said Hilliard, but it is the fastest category of growth.

And also one about curation of content and use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter for feedback.

Rosenblatt said that feedback can even become content, which will be part of new eHow redesign to come.

Want some tips on that? Of course, Demand Media has the answer, at least to this easy question.

That number could be as much as 50 percent of the 1,100 employees at Myspace, largely based in the U.S., but also in international locations.

While the decision of what cuts to make to its employee base have not been made yet, nearly the entire Myspace staff was given the last week of December off from work to save money. Update: Myspace tells us via email the week off was an employee perk, not a cost-cutting measure.

Sources stressed that management was still working out the details of more drastic cost-cutting measures that owner News Corp. has been wanting from Myspace, as its revenues and traffic have declined.

The layoffs are also part of a larger rethink about the future of the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based company, which has had many difficulties in recent years, including several leadership upheavals and a talent drain, as well as stagnant growth.

Among the many options contemplated has been the sale of the Myspace unit, as has been widely reported. According to sources, Jack Kennedy, EVP of operations for News Corp. Digital Media, has been tapped to explore the sale of Myspace.

Until now, both large-scale cost-cutting and exploration of an acquisition were on hold as Myspace launched its redesign as an entertainment hub, which was rolled out about six weeks ago.

Myspace also recently started user account integration with former foe Facebook.

And the company also revamped its mobile offerings and signed a new search advertising deal with Google (at which time MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka predicted layoffs were around the corner).

But, according to many inside and outside the company, the redesign and strategy moves are not expected to result in a major turnaround of Myspace. Meanwhile, the piles of money the company once got from its Google relationship have also gotten much smaller. It’s not much of a surprise that News Corp. is moving to remedy the situation now.

In fact, during News Corp.’s earnings call in November, COO Chase Carey called attention to Myspace’s ever-weakening performance and said “current losses are not acceptable or sustainable.”

He added: “We judge in quarters, not in years.”

At this point, a sale would be the likeliest save for the media giant.

One juicy rumor that has been going around suggests Facebook game-maker Zynga as a potential acquirer of Myspace. While the two companies had discussed closer ties in the past–back when Zynga COO Owen Van Natta was still CEO of Myspace–those talks went nowhere.

Several sources said a private equity buyer for Myspace is now the likeliest outcome if the online property is sold.

Myspace declined to comment on layoffs or acquisition talks.

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

Last month, the company rolled out a revamped version of Myspace, which is owned by News Corp., publisher of the Wall Street Journal. I’ve been testing it to see what has changed and if it’s worth using. Its interface is cleaner than the old version of Myspace and I found it easy to navigate. It’s also inviting for non-members or people who’ve long-since given up on Myspace. But I can’t definitely say I like it enough to add it to my large list of social networks.

Step one of this site’s rehab was a new focus. Myspace (myspace.com) was redesigned to serve as a source of information about entertainment. People who use it can follow five categories—TV, music, movies, celebrities and comedy—that include more than 100,000 topics. News about these topics comes from sites all over the Web and is arranged on users’ home pages to show loads of information at a glance. A Discovery tab at the top of the page shows content related to trends on Myspace makes suggestions based on a user’s preferences and taste. A spokesman said the Myspace topics can be expanded, but for now, if you’re fonder of, say, books, theater or hard news, Myspace won’t be a good fit.

Step two for Myspace included making nice with its old competitor. It now works with Facebook Connect to pull in people’s Facebook “likes” and interests, which automatically generate customized Myspace pages for new users.

The final step of the Myspace redesign was its emphasis on music. The site still contains one of the largest Web music catalogs that plays full versions of songs for anyone who visits Myspace. New versions of band profile pages look more organized. And all artists with band profiles will have ReverbNation’s FanReach email product integrated into their profile to help them create targeted email campaigns for fans.

Was Myspace’s rehabilitation worth the effort? I’ve been using it for a week and it has taught me a lot more than I knew about things I care about. I had no idea that one of my favorite TV shows, TNT’s “The Closer,” recently said that 2011 would be its last season. Nor did I know that Anthony Bourdain blogs about his role as a judge on “Top Chef Masters.” These items and others appeared on my Home page after I performed the process that the Myspace site refers to as a Facebook Mashup.

The Facebook Mashup does a few things automatically for you, in addition to generating a Myspace page filled with topic-related news. A playlist is created in the Music section of your page that contains artists whom you “like” on Facebook (or whom you indicated while setting up an account). And the Videos section of the Myspace page will reflect your tastes in a list of Followed Channels related to your Facebook preferences.

The Home page can be seen in one of three views—List, Grid or Play—and icons at the top of the screen let users toggle among these views. My favorite was Grid View in the Full Grid View format, visible by clicking a small box at the top of the page.

Some of the content displayed on my Home page was mixed up. For example, a tile representing the story about Mr. Bourdain’s blog (originally posted on Celebrifi.com) displayed with it a photo of actor Tom Cruise, who wasn’t mentioned in that post. Another Tom, Tom Colicchio, chef and a “Top Chef Masters” judge, was mentioned in the post, but that doesn’t explain the mix-up.

Anything that falls into the 100,000 plus topics of Myspace’s realm can be found via a search box in the top right corner of the page, but this box is confusingly labeled, “Search People.” Though Myspace still allows users to search for and friend one another, the label on this search box is puzzling, given the greater reach of the site.

You can watch video content from Hulu.com (of which News Corp. is part owner) without jumping to a new page. And videos also come from other sources like TMZ and the NFL.

Users can earn recognition badges—icons that show up on their page—for their involvement on Myspace, and can become curators of topics, awarded on the basis of users’ involvement and how much other people respond to their activity.

This week, a Myspace mobile app was launched in Apple’s App Store, and an Android app is due out next year.

Myspace successfully reinvented itself in a way that could very well get people using it again, but Facebook’s more personalized social network may be more valuable than a rich library of entertainment content.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/trying-out-a-revamped-myspace/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101210/new-facebook-profiles-primed-for-pranks/ http://allthingsd.com/20101210/new-facebook-profiles-primed-for-pranks/#comments Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:30:52 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=1125 One of the most significant changes in Facebook’s profile page redesign this week was to highlight images–both pictures of users and pictures of their friends. As part of that, users who upgraded to the new profile (more info here) now have a strip of their five most recently tagged photos running right under their basic information.

The crucial feature of Facebook photos is that, by default, friends can tag users in pictures without the users confirming that the pictures are actually of them. So with the new layout, friends can decide what pictures show at the top of a person’s profile. And for the more creative, they have five concatenated pictures in which to do so.

Facebook users are already having fun with this option, pranking each other to show inappropriate pictures and silly sequences of words. BuzzFeed ran an NSFW example of this earlier this week, with one of its users apparently pulling the suggested prank on the Facebook of a fellow named Trent Reznor.

Users worried about their profiles being hijacked for everyone to see can change their privacy settings. (For instance, a user can limit who is allowed to see other people’s photos she is tagged in.)

Top image by BuzzFeed user shwagner.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook on my ethics page.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101210/new-facebook-profiles-primed-for-pranks/feed/ 10 http://allthingsd.com/20101004/breaking-twitter-replaces-ceo-ev-williams-with-deputy-dick-costolo/ http://allthingsd.com/20101004/breaking-twitter-replaces-ceo-ev-williams-with-deputy-dick-costolo/#comments Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:52:55 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24125 In a move that tech types have been murmuring about for some time, Twitter CEO Ev Williams is stepping down and will be replaced by Dick Costolo, the COO the company brought in last year.

Williams says he will focus on “product strategy,” leaving Costolo to handle the nuts and bolts of the business Williams co-founded four years ago. This makes plenty of sense, because that’s essentially the way the company has been running for some time: Williams spent the past few months consumed with the new Twitter.com redesign, while Costolo has been in charge of everything else.

“I am most satisfied while pushing product direction. Building things is my passion, and I’ve never been more excited or optimistic about what we have to build,” Williams writes in his note announcing the move, and that rings quite true: When I saw him in San Francisco last month, he was positively vibrating with pride over the new Twitter.com launch.

Internally, the team referred to the project as “Phoenix,” and the overdramatic code name gives you a sense of how much importance Williams and others placed on the redesign. It’s the first real product launch Twitter has put out in a long time.

But running Twitter is about a lot more than product now. It’s about scaling a team that’s already grown to 300 people. And it’s about figuring how to generate revenue to pay for all those bodies–and to satisfy investors’ very high expectations.

Outsiders haven’t gotten the sense that Williams has been that interested in that kind of stuff for quite some time, and there have been rumblings that Williams would need to take a different role sooner or later.

When Costolo came in from the outside to handle revenue and other non-product projects last year, this became an easy set of dots to connect.

(Actually, Costolo, who has a sense of humor honed as an improv comic in Chicago, did some of the dot-connecting himself a year ago: “First full day as Twitter COO tomorrow. Task #1: undermine CEO, consolidate power,” he tweeted back in September 2009. Thanks to Matt Barash for reminding us.)

Meanwhile, if you’re betting that Twitter ends up selling to a big guy–Google (GOOG) is really the only logical choice, though you could theoretically see Microsoft (MSFT) entering the fray–today’s move makes that option that much more likely.

Williams has already done the first hard part, by handing his company over to a professional manager. Handing the whole thing over to a new owner is a logical next step.

UPDATE: I ran that theory by Costolo and Williams. They disagree!

“I think it’s the opposite,” says Costolo, who argues that he’s taking over the company so that they can increase their chances of keeping it independent “for a long time.”

And Williams says he really does want to build more stuff, and he sounds convincing saying it.

“I never had any absolute ideas that I was or was not the long-term CEO. My goal has always been to play the role in the company that I thought was most important at the time,” he said.

I still think that role will be “guy who sells his company.” But happy to be wrong…

Here’s the text of Williams’s blog post announcing the change:

By all accounts Twitter is on a roll. We’ve redesigned our web site to great user feedback. Our user and usage numbers are growing at a rapid clip all around the world. We’ve launched an early, but successful, monetization effort. And, many top engineers, product designers, sales people and other key folks have joined our quickly growing team.

In fact, there are 300 people working at Twitter today–compared to about 20 when I took the CEO job two years ago. Back then, people were creating about 1.25 million tweets a day–compared to 90 million today. In those same two years, we grew from 3 million registered users to more than 160 million today.

The challenges of growing an organization so quickly are numerous. Growing big is not success, in itself. Success to us means meeting our potential as a profitable company that can retain its culture and user focus while having a positive impact on the world. This is no small task. I frequently reflect on the type of focus that is required from everyone at Twitter to get us there.

This led to a realization as we launched the new Twitter. I am most satisfied while pushing product direction. Building things is my passion, and I’ve never been more excited or optimistic about what we have to build.

This is why I have decided to ask our COO, Dick Costolo, to become Twitter’s CEO. Starting today, I’ll be completely focused on product strategy.

When I insisted on bringing Dick into the COO role a year ago, I got a lot of questions from my board. But I knew Dick would be a strong compliment to me, and this has proven to be the case. During his year at Twitter, he has been a critical leader in devising and executing our revenue efforts, while simultaneously and effectively making the trains run on time in the office. Dick can be even more effective at this now because Ali Rowghani, Adam Bain, Mike Abbott, Katie Stanton and Kevin Thau joined our leadership team this year and are having a big impact. Given Dick’s track record as a three-time successful CEO, I’m confident we can make this a smooth transition.

I’m extremely proud of how far Twitter has come in the last two years. And, I couldn’t be more excited about where our amazing team will take it next.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101004/breaking-twitter-replaces-ceo-ev-williams-with-deputy-dick-costolo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100929/kindle-sales/ http://allthingsd.com/20100929/kindle-sales/#comments Wed, 29 Sep 2010 20:32:15 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=49702 Since the Kindle’s launch in November of 2007, Amazon hasn’t been particularly forthcoming with the device’s sales figures. Trumpeting the latest iteration of the Kindle as “the fastest-selling ever” is about as specific as it’s gotten. So coming up with a yearly sales forecast for the Kindle is no easy task. But that doesn’t stop analysts from trying.

The latest to hazard a guess: Barclays’ Douglas Anmuth, who estimates that Amazon (AMZN) will sell about five million Kindles this year. Driving those sales, the device’s latest redesign and its more appealing $139/$189 price point.

“We expect Amazon will sell more than 5 million Kindles this year, going toward 11.5 million in 2012,” Anmuth says. “We believe a bifurcated market has clearly developed between more expensive, multi-function tablets and cheaper, dedicated eReaders. We expect the Kindle to maintain and even grow share of the eReader market, while Amazon’s Apps strategy enables the Kindle store to be the leading eBooks seller across a wide range of devices. We project total Kindle related revenue to reach $1.7 billion this year and grow to $4.3 billion in 2012.”

An interesting bit of crystal ball reading, particularly in light of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s prediction this past summer: “I predict we will surpass paperback sales sometime in the next nine to 12 months. Sometime after that, we’ll surpass the combination of paperback and hardcover. It stuns me.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100929/kindle-sales/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100505/google-now-a-bit-more-bing-like/ http://allthingsd.com/20100505/google-now-a-bit-more-bing-like/#comments Wed, 05 May 2010 16:56:27 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=39859 Google has finally caved in and added a permanent menu of search-refinement options to the left-hand rail of its results pages. The feature is being rolled out today, along with a new logo, as part of the company’s most significant redesign in years.

While it might seem a simple tweak, adding permanent contextually relevant left-hand navigation to its results pages is a noteworthy move for Google, which is adopting a design element first implemented by its rivals.

Ask.com debuted it in 2007. Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing launched with it last June and Yahoo (YHOO) added it a few months later.

Not that the company will admit to copping the left-hand refinement menu from any of them. Asked by VentureBeat if its redesign was inspired by the competition, Google (GOOG) senior user experience designer Jon Wiley said it wasn’t.

“I think really the biggest changes and sources of innovation really come from an analysis of what our users need,” Wiley said. “We spend a lot of time just going back to search options or universal search. The way that people have been using those particular tools and features gives us a lot of insight.”

Hmm…

And what of the changes to Google’s logo? They’re largely unremarkable: The elimination of drop shadows and a punching up of its colors. Said a company spokesman: “The refined logo exemplifies our thinking and our design process. We took the very best qualities–personality and playfulness–and distilled them into brighter colors, simpler shapes and softer gradients.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100505/google-now-a-bit-more-bing-like/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100415/back-to-the-future-trueslant-ceo-lewis-dvorkin-moonlighting-as-redesign-consultant-at-forbes/ http://allthingsd.com/20100415/back-to-the-future-trueslant-ceo-lewis-dvorkin-moonlighting-as-redesign-consultant-at-forbes/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:39:17 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=18652 A weird move that also makes sense: Troubled Forbes Media has brought in Lewis DVorkin, a former editor at the business publisher, as a consultant for a redesign of the Forbes Web site “and other editorial areas.”

That’s a bit weird because DVorkin already has a day job: He’s the founder and CEO of True/Slant, a news network/aggregator/publisher he launched last year.

And it makes sense given that Forbes Media is one of True/Slant’s financial backers. Employees there say COO Tim Forbes has been particularly enamored of True/Slant’s low-cost, high-frequency approach to content generation, so you can read into this move what you will.

DVorkin started showing up at editorial meetings this week, I’m told. I’m also told that both Forbes magazine editor Bill Baldwin and Forbes.com editor Paul Maidment are reporting to him. “All I know is that it means we failed to fix our own problems,” an employee there tells me.

Disclosure: I worked for Forbes for 10 years and worked closely with DVorkin for a couple of those years. He’s smart and a bit scary. His former colleagues at AOL (AOL), where he landed after his stint at Forbes, almost always describe him as “quite a character.”

Reached for comment, DVorkin referred me to a Forbes spokeswoman. But did want me to make clear that he’s still running True/Slant. “I’m the CEO and founder of True/Slant, and we’re having out best month ever.”

Here’s Forbes’s statement:

Lewis DVorkin will be consulting on a redesign of Forbes.com and other editorial areas at Forbes Media.

Though he will be devoting time to this assignment, Mr. DVorkin remains the Chief Executive Officer of True/Slant, an original content news network, which he founded in April 2009. Forbes Media is a strategic investor in True/Slant.

Mr. DVorkin brings to this assignment vast experience in both old and new media platforms and a history with Forbes editorial. He was the Executive Editor at Forbes magazine from December 1996 to April 2000. where he spearheaded that magazine’s redesign, managed the annual Forbes 400 Richest Americans list and created the Celebrity 100 list, both internationally recognized products of Forbes magazine.

During his career Mr. DVorkin was Page One Editor of The Wall Street Journal, a Senior Editor at Newsweek and an editor at the New York Times.

After leaving Forbes, Mr. Dvorkin was Senior Vice President, Programming at AOL, where he was responsible for News, Sports and Network Programming and played a significant role in the launch of TMZ.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100415/back-to-the-future-trueslant-ceo-lewis-dvorkin-moonlighting-as-redesign-consultant-at-forbes/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100409/twitter-will-look-different-in-some-way-some-day/ http://allthingsd.com/20100409/twitter-will-look-different-in-some-way-some-day/#comments Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:39:22 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=18370 The Twitter world is still trying to figure out how to interpret investor Fred Wilson’s “inflection point” blog post about the service’s future. But here’s a less controversial piece of news: Twitter may be getting a new look.

Doug Bowman, Twitter’s creative director, has posted a small screenshot of what he says “may be a significant redesign.”

Drumroll…

Okay! So. When are we doing to see the rest of it? Why will we care? Bowman won’t say. “Not final yet. What we can show without giving away the farm,” he writes.

In the absence of other information, there’s no choice but to speculate wildly about what Bowman is up to. So this may help: Check out the designer’s portfolio, which includes overhauls of Google’s (GOOG) Blogger and Calendar services, as well as Wired News. Enjoy.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100409/twitter-will-look-different-in-some-way-some-day/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100331/youtube-gets-a-facelift-heres-the-memo/ http://allthingsd.com/20100331/youtube-gets-a-facelift-heres-the-memo/#comments Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:50:12 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17926 YouTube is trying out a new look today. You can’t see it yet, but it should be up later this afternoon. In the meantime, you can get a sense of it via an email YouTube sent out to its partners this morning, posted in full below. Or you can check out these blog posts from earlier in the year, when the company previewed the changes for people who read YouTube blog posts.

Google’s (GOOG) video site says this is one of the “biggest redesigns in YouTube history,” but my hunch is that most YouTube users won’t notice any difference at all since they’re paying attention to the video clips and not the window dressing around it.

YouTube is briefing the press a little later today, and a PR rep promises that the email is merely a “condensed sliver” of what the company will be talking about. If true, I’ll update with anything relevant.

UPDATE: Apologies, wasn’t able to listen to the call, after all. If you want to play reporter, you can take a gander at the press materials Google provided (before and after screenshots, metrics to support the change, etc) here.

Dear Partner,

We want to provide you with an update on YouTube’s new video page, which we’ve been hard at work on for the last several months. You can read more about it here:

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/01/video-page-gets-makeover.html

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/02/latest-changes-to-video-page-new.html

On Wednesday, March 31st we’re happy to let you know that we’ll be transitioning all YouTube videos to this new video page.

As a result, we’d like to highlight a couple items that will be of interest to you:

* The channel banner placement will change: Branding on the video page moves to a more prominently placed (albeit smaller) banner on top of the video, substituting for the text channel name and link. Please upload a graphic with the following dimensions: 25px (height) by max 170px (width is flexible up to this amount). Instructions on how to edit or change the
banner are here:

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?&answer=172994

This banner will continue to link to your channel. Please update your banner if you have an arrow pointing to the subscribe button or another area on the page.

* The “Subscribe” button will move to a more prominent location at the top of the page: As you can see in this blog post:

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/02/latest-changes-to-video-page-new.html

The “Subscribe” button will now be at the top of the page, to the right of your channel banner…so it will stand out even more :)

* We’re introducing a new “see more videos” pane: This new “more videos” area on top of the video allows for seamless exploration of content from your channel; click on the arrow next to the number of uploads to access a grid displaying all of your channel’s videos. This makes it easier for users to browse your whole library while watching one of your videos.

This new video page makeover is one of the biggest redesigns in YouTube history–and we’re excited to make YouTube a better place for you and your content!

Lastly, we want to remind you that YouTube sends occasional product-related email communications that are relevant to our Partners. To ensure that you’re eligible to receive our updates, check your Email Options settings within your Account and opt in. You can see the instructions on how to do this by following this link:

http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=176643

Still reading? Okay, here’s your Easter egg, a classic Spencer Davis Group YouTube recommended to me this morning:

[Image credit: Kevin Dooley]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100331/youtube-gets-a-facelift-heres-the-memo/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100315/for-npr-the-ipad-means-a-new-app-and-a-new-web-site/ http://allthingsd.com/20100315/for-npr-the-ipad-means-a-new-app-and-a-new-web-site/#comments Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:27:04 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=17393 Like many media companies, National Public Radio is scrambling to prepare an app in time for the iPad’s April 3 launch.

But the standoff between Apple (AAPL) and Adobe has prompted NPR to take on another engineering project at the same time: It is building a version of its Web site designed specifically for the iPad.

So if all goes as planned, iPad users who want to listen to NPR programming will have a couple choices next month. They can:

• Download a free iPad-optimized version of the broadcaster’s popular (two million downloads) iPhone app. Or
• Use the iPad’s browser to visit NPR.org, which will detect that it’s being viewed with Apple’s device and serve up a custom-built site. This means no trace of Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash, which is used to power graphics and media on the site.

I’ve heard about a handful of other big publishers who are altering some but not all of their Web sites to create iPad-optimized versions.

That’s what The Wall Street Journal–like this Web site, the Journal is owned by News Corp. (NWS)–is doing, for instance: Visitors to the newspaper’s front page will see an iPad-specific, Flash-free page. But those who click deeper into the site will eventually find pages that haven’t been converted.

Kinsey Wilson, who oversees digital media for NPR, says he has been able to create a new version of his Web site–while keeping the existing one up and running for other visitors–because of the site recent redesign, which split up the data that powers the site from its presentation layer. In English, this means NPR can swap out the site’s facade while keeping its plumbing and foundation intact.

Just as important: NPR only runs a smattering of advertising, in the form of sponsorships it sells to a handful of marketers. This means it doesn’t have to worry about how to handle the Web ad ecosystem, which depends on Flash. Wilson says NPR has locked up a launch sponsor for both the iPad app and the custom site.

So what will the app and site look like? Alas, NPR won’t let me see a demo or look at mock-ups, i part, I gather, because the network is still building the things.

But here’s something to chew on until launch: Wilson says that while iPhone apps are a “very intentional experience”–you load the thing up and seek out specific content–he thinks the iPad will be a “lean back device.” That’s traditionally the distinction multimedia types use to differentiate between a computer and a TV. Intriguing.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100315/for-npr-the-ipad-means-a-new-app-and-a-new-web-site/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100310/video-back-to-the-future-at-myspace-or-just-another-retread/ http://allthingsd.com/20100310/video-back-to-the-future-at-myspace-or-just-another-retread/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:19:58 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=25316

Earlier this week, BoomTown visited MySpace HQ in Beverly Hills, Calif., to interview its new co-presidents, Michael Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, and get a look-see at its evolving revival plans to stop the social networking ship from sinking further.

Thus, I got a tour of a storyboard-like room at MySpace, where the team is trying to formulate the “discover and be discovered” motto it is now using, which is pretty much its old motto restated.

Can the old become new again?

In fact, a lot of the plan does sound a lot like shades of the past at MySpace, focusing on a younger, artistic demo with a heavy dose of pop culture.

Jazzed up, of course, with the latest social networking hooks, a cleaner user page redesign, topics pages, a focus on sharing content of all kinds, especially music, games and entertainment, and more.

That includes a new Today on MySpace, or TOM, to greet new users, rather than the famous analog Tom Anderson, co-founder and former first friend to all. Get it?

It is all part of a very slow-moving effort to turn MySpace into a socially-charged entertainment hub, which is now being led by Hirschhorn and Jones.

They took over management immediately after News Corp. (NWS) execs suddenly fired CEO Owen Van Natta last month.

The pair reported to Van Natta, and now they essentially share his job to revive MySpace, which has lost ground to fast-growing and more innovative sites such as Facebook.

Still, it is not a small enterprise, with upward of 100 million monthly visitors and just above $350 million in annual revenue.

Here’s a video of the tour I did in which the pair describe some of what they have been up to, which seems to center, most of all, on turning back the clock and returning to MySpace’s roots.

Is a proper retread–which is completely dependent on keeping talent and executing well–enough to stem the losses if there are enough newfangled features to make it all feel fresh?

Or not?

Time will tell, but here’s a sneak peek:

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

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