Stowe Boyd

big mouth, cool hunter, futurist

September 7 2010

Surprise! Twitter Ecosystem Attracting Less Investment

For a piece coming from an analyst firm with the work ‘insight’ in its name, you’d expect a bit more insight offered and not just numbers.

CB Insights has determined that ‘pure play’ twitter start-ups are getting less funding than formerly:

Pure-Play Twitter Startups Attract 50% Less Venture Capital and Angel Investment Than Last Year » CB Insights

As Twitter’s popularity has grown with users, we wondered if this popularity translated into more investment by venture capitalists and angel investors into pure play Twitter startups?  CB Insights’ venture capital and angel investor data suggests that venture capitalists and angels may be a bit less sanguine about the Twitter ecosystem than they were last year.  This is the opposite of what we saw in an earlier analysis for another hot ecosystem – Apple’s iPad and iPhone ecosystem – which saw a 220% increase in funding vs. last year.

First, the bad news…Last year (from June 2008 to May 2009), we’d seen $21.6M fly from venture capitalists and angel investors to pure-play Twitter startups.  In the June 2009 to May 2010 timeframe, the investment funding dropped over 50% to $10.4M.

Now, the good news…The number of investment rounds held nearly flat with 11 rounds in our analysis of last year vs. 10 rounds in the more recent timeframe.  This does, however, show that average amounts invested by investors has dipped fairly dramatically going from nearly a $2M average round last year to just over $1 million more recently.  We also saw a high degree of collaboration between angel investors and venture capital firms on these deals and that these pure-play funded Twitter startups were going to a diverse array of industries.

There are lots of theories on why the amount invested has dipped with the most popular explanation being a feeling of uncertainty by application developers and investors alike about the direction Twitter will go.  More recently, compounding the uncertainty are acquisitions by Twitter of the likes of Tweetie and Summize (filling holes on its platform)?  Time will tell if these moves will drive investors to be even more cautious about the platform?

Oh, damn: not ‘time will tell’; not that lame line.

The post links to Fred Wilson’s incediary Twitter Inflection Point post of last April, in which Wilson (an investor and board member of Twitter) throws down the gauntlet, and basically warns the Twitter ecosystem that Twitter will be filling the self-created ‘holes’ in the product, and many niches in the Twitter ecology will no longer be viable for third-party vendors.The following week was the Twitter Chirp conference, where Ev Williams announced the acquisition of Tweetie to be the Twitter client on iPhone, as well as a Twitter developed Blackbird client.

So, there is ‘no time will tell’ involved. Here’s what I wrote after Wilson’s comments and before Chirp:

Twitter Raising The Infrastructure: App Builders Better Run For The Ultrastructure

Here’s what is happening: Twitter is consolidating its position at the center of the ecosystem it has engendered, and as part of that functionality that is deemed necessary to the infrastructure is going to be built by them, or at least owned by them through acquisition.

The old model had a lot of holes, like search, clients, Url shortening, pictures, and geolocation. These niches had many players trying to establish themselves, creating a rich ultrastructure above the platform:

Twitter started to buy some companies to fill glaring holes (like Summize for search) and they have built some parts of other capabilities (like their own URL shortener for direct messages), but mostly the maps was still a mess.

Now, they have bought Tweetie, built a client for Blackberry, and they are moving toward a new theory of where the platform begins and ends:


Of course there is no saying that Twitter will leave the line there. They are going to have to make their roadmap clear at the upcoming Chirp developer conference, so that third parties can make reasonable investments in new applications without the fear that Twitter will step on their toes.

However, I am making a bet. I am sure that Twitter realizes the value of analytics: the treasure of information about the flow in Twitter can’t be treated as a side show, because it is the show. Therefore, I am predicting that Twitter will build or buy technology to capture all sorts of information — what links are streaming by, who’s using what hashtags, and sentiment about brands — this is enormously valuable. Acquisition of companies like Radian6, bit.ly and a few others would make sense, especially considering the value to large companies, media, and even political parties.


The other ultrastructure niches really make sense as independents. Consider games: they come and go, like hit music, and it requires a big sprawling community of developers. Not a good fit inside a single monolithic company. The same is true with communities, like Stocktwits. And obviously, niche apps.

***

So, Wilson’s shot was heard round the world, and now Tweetie is part of the new Twitter infrastructure.

This won’t mean the end of competition by players like Tweetdeck or Seesmic. These have large and dynamic communities of users. But we have to see how Twitter plays this nesw game. Will they use the same APIs as everyone else, or will they exploit their knowledge and access to the inner workings of Twitter’s technology to make their own offerings faster and more reliable, a sort of Microsoft approach? Will Twitter transform itself into a Salesforce-like platform, with hundreds of integrated offerings, but owning the CRM heart of the platform?

So, investors are steering clear of those potholes, and maybe even areas like analytics, which Twitter will want to move into, even if they haven’t done anything yet. The future is very cloudy, and the investors are looking for lower risk bets elsewhere, which doesn’t concern Twitter’s shareholders.

It does suggest that Twitter might be served by an IPO, however, since that would be the cheapest way to attract the capital it needs to build its own ecosystem of services as a competitive strategy against Facebook and other social networking giants (like Apple and Google).

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September 3 2010

Steve Jobs Told Me So Says Jason Calacanis

Jason Calcanis says he spoke with Steve Jobs about the Facebook flare-up. Whether he did or not, what he posted in his email newsletter is dead-on:

via email

Anyway, here is what Steve Jobs is thinking during the keynote:

Now, certainly you’ve heard about Apple’s huge data center in North Carolina. You know, the one that reportedly cost one *billion* dollars. Experts say that Apple’s data center cost roughly double what Google and Facebook spent on similar facilities.

Apple’s massive, cash-generating successes have come from soup-to-nuts services like iTunes and the iPod, the App Store and the iPhone. It’s a logical conclusion that Apple would want to take on the social and search layers next.

PING is not music service; it’s a social network precursor.

Game Center is not a game matching service; it’s a social network precursor.

The largest and most-loved Apple product line—to the tune of over 275 million units sold—is the iPod. Their second biggest revenue success is the iPhone, of course. In order to use it, you need to put in a credit card.

Facebook and Twitter have users. Apple has customers.

The difference? Customers give you their credit card number.

Jason goes on to suggest that Jobs should acquire Twitter and Zygna: maybe so. He doesn’t mention Netflix, which I think is more central to his long term goal: the battle for the living room (see Social TV: The Future Of TV Is Social).

But it is clear that billions of iPod, iPhones, Mac, and iPads form an awfully large base of users to start with, if you are launching a new social network.

I remember trying to convince Adobe to roll out an instant messaging product in the late ’90s, since Adobe’s free player was on 98% of computers. They told me they didn’t want to be in that business.

Jobs clearly wants to be in the social network business, and with one giant step he has gotten pretty close to the front of the pack.

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September 2 2010

Exclusive: Facebook Blocked API Access to Ping After Failure to Strike Agreement, So Apple Removed Feature After Launch | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD →

Kara Swisher reports that Apple/Facebook deal fell apart just as the Ping announcement was being made:

According to sources familiar with Facebook’s platform, the social networking giant essentially denied Apple’s Ping access to application programming interfaces that would allow it to search for an iTunes user’s friends on Facebook who also had signed up for Ping. Normally, this API access is open and does not require permission. That is, unless some entity wants to access it a lot. In that case, Facebook requires an agreement for reasons primarily centered on protection of Facebook user data and, of course, infrastructure impact. With 160 million iTunes users, that could mean a possibility of a lot of impact. Sources said Apple (AAPL) and Facebook conducted negotiations about an agreement, but could not come to terms. At the launch event in San Francisco yesterday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs complained to me about what he called “onerous terms” that Facebook had demanded for the friends connection and suggested using search or email to add friends to Ping.

I don’t blame Facebook for balking, since Ping is going to pull a lot of traffic.

iTunes Ping: Social Music

Apple has rolled out the long-rumored and much awaited social iTunes in the form of Ping.

Ping is a streaming, social network-based suite of capabilities that has been integrated across the world of iTunes, in a way that is reminiscent of early versions of Last.fm, and using the now standard open follower model popularized by Twitter.

To use the service, an iTunes 10 user has to click on the new Ping label in the left sidebar of iTunes, in the STORE area. Then there is some setup, basically geared toward what should be presented to followers and privacy controls on followers:

Once this is set up the user has a minimal profile with location, bio, name provided by the user and some musical genre categorization offered by by iTunes, along with streams of actions taken by the user, like buying music, liking albums, and purchasing tickets for concerts:

(I did include an avatar, but Apple is still ‘processing’ it. I wonder if humans are eyeballing it for nudity or something.)

I followed a few celebrities, like Dave Matthews, and I sent out a call on Twitter, and got a few followers and following set up, for experimental purposes. Now when I look at ‘recent activity’ there are actually posts and activities from inbound stream (=those I follow).

(mostly everybody is following, and not doing much else yet.)

The integration of concert information associated with artists is very cool, and suggests how Apple expects social commerce to be a main source of revenue:

The instrumentation for Ping is spread throughout the store, so anytime you are looking at music for sale you will be able to ‘like’ it, rate it, buy it (d’uh) or write a post (stream based) or review (album based).

In the future, all online commerce will be socialized.

I find the fact that reviews and posts aren’t the same thing sort of strange. But we’ll have to see what gives after some more rooting around.

Lastly, everything I am saying about music could be extended to the other sorts of media that iTunes markets: TV shows, movies, books, whatever. But it hasn’t been at this point.

I have only fooled with Ping for an hour or so, so my empirical analysis will have to be delayed for a few days, at least. However, the largest glaring gap to me right now is the fact that my own music — the stuff I have on my hard drive — isn’t part of the Ping experience. If I want to ‘like’ or post about something I am playing on my local iTunes instance I would have to open the store, find the song or album there, and then make my gesture. This is just a pain, but could conceivably be remedied when Apple allows me to upload my music to that enormous cloud server park they are building. Then all my music will be indexed, cross tabulated, and sharable.

Recall that a few weeks ago a new release of iDisk that included the tantalizing capability to stream audio from the cloud to my iPhone or MacBook (see Apple Takes A Baby Step Toward iTunes In The Cloud). There is no doubt in my mind that we are headed in that direction.

Imagine a future release of Ping where I could share playable playlists, or live stream a Stowe Boyd radio station, or I could listen to a new track recommended by a friend and comment on that streaming recommendation. Or imagine streaming movies in sync with my son Keenan, with Facetime heckling superimposed so it is like a living room experience, although he is in his bedroom at college.

Apple is on the threshold of something fundamentally transformative. It turns out that some commentators agree:

Om Malik, Why Ping Is the Future of Social Commerce

Ping may function like a cross between Facebook and Twitter for iTunes by allowing you to follow celebrities, create social cliques and get artist updates via an activity stream. I think it could have tremendous impact on social sharing and commerce.

From a content perspective, there are three different types of media we love to talk about: movies we see, music we listen to and books we are reading. These are accepted social norms. In fact, many relationships are made on the basis of collective love of a movie and many friendships have started with mixed tapes.

It makes perfect sense for a music service to be social. I’m not alone: The popularity YouTube, the fast-growing MOG and the sadly defunct iLike and Imeem show that people gravitate towards music as a common, collective experience. A recommendation from friends on Last.fm often resulted in me buying many-a-few music tracks. My friends who listened to Thievery Corporation turned me on to The Broadway Project and Chris Joss, which I ended up buying on the iTunes store or via Amazon’s MP3 store.

This click-and-go-somewhere-to-download model of affiliate links can never match a unified experience. Amazon, for example, encourages bloggers and others to link to things they like and then get a piece of the action. This separates social from commerce and treats them as two discrete activities. On the post-Facebook Internet, I don’t think anyone can afford to keep these two actions distinct.

I agree with Om, and obviously Amazon will have to rethink its ‘enormous catalog’ model for commerce, and scramble to make it all social. And Apple and its competitors will have to provide hooks so that I can take my Ping stream and embed it in my blog, direct it to Twitter, and so forth.

I have been saying for years that ‘in the future, all online commerce will be socialized’, and Apple is showing how this is going to be realized.

Apple apparently considered integration with Facebook, but couldn’t come to terms, according to Kara Swisher. Strategically, Facebook is likely to become a direct competitor with Apple, so Jobs is playing go with Zuckerberg, and has won this game.

Amazon might make the devil’s bargain with Facebook to counter Jobs, but that’s a matchup that might just not do much. We’ll have to see if Bezos is impatient.

But there are many doubters out there too:

Sam Diaz, Ping: Apple should leave social to Facebook, Twitter

Ping is an interesting idea and music is something that we have been sharing with friends for the longest time. It strikes me as interesting that Apple has come up with a way to allow people to “share” their music tastes but not the music itself - which I never would have expected Apple or the record labels to do. Is this one way to make “sharing” music OK?

Apple is good at what it does - hardware, software, design and, of course, marketing. But social networking? Even if it is tied to music, I just can’t see widespread adoption of Ping - even if it’s forced on us through iTunes.

Man, Diaz will regret this a year or so from now. Maybe he missed the experiment with streaming via iDisk? Did he miss the launch of the new Apple TV? Can’t he imagine a Flipboard channel based on what’s happening in your iTunes network, with embedded videos, photos, music samples?

Another oddball take on Ping:

Chris Matyszczyk, How Apple’s Ping dings Twitter, Facebook

Ping picks at the nice parts of Facebook and Twitter—friending and following—and offers these benefits to its users without the generalists’ pains.

Unlike Twitter, for example, these are all real people. Unlike Facebook, you can just wander around and see who or what you like without having to become someone’s friend and without having to like anything at all.

This is real people with a real enthusiasm meeting in a bar and talking about a subject they love, rather than about a subject they often hate—themselves. There’s very nice music playing in the background, too.

How many truly passionate, fundamental enthusiasms do large numbers of people share? Movies and sports, probably. Books and food, perhaps. (I wonder if there really are all that many.) Right now, these are often all being talked about on Facebook, each fighting with another for sufficient attention across very mixed groups.

It might not happen that hundreds of niche social networks will suddenly become enormously successful as people decide to fragment themselves across their various enthusiasms. But there are a few core subjects that arouse passion, conversation and the spending of money. Music is one. Apple is another.

Why do the passions have to be shared by large groups of people? Isn’t it sufficient that there are many small groups of people sharing passions? Oh, and don’t leave out TV, which is an enormous passion, as are sports. And yes, people will tolerate — or even seek out — fracturing their social being across multiple services: the post-modern identity is a network of identities, a multiphrenic sense of self.

Are these tech mavens completely missing where this is headed?

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Another Facebooking: June Siple Is The Most Recent To Be Dooced

Yet another person is fired for expressing unpopular or impolitic opinions: a high school teacher who was not looking forward to coming back to work in the fall, and said so on hre facebook page.

H.S. Teacher Loses Job Over Facebook Posting

On her Facebook page, (June) Siple called the residents of Cohasset “arrogant and snobby,” and said that she is “so not looking forward to another year at Cohasset schools.”

As the high school supervisor for math and science, Siple was making more than $92,000 a year.”

I think that’s pretty ungrateful, taking that much of the town budget going into the schools, filling up the position, teaching kids when her heart wasn’t in to it,” said resident Sam Green.

In a telephone interview, Siple said she is not apologizing for her comments, but that she is sorry that they went public. She said she was referring to the political situation in the school, which she called “very stressful,” and she said she thought she was only blowing off steam with friends in private.

But back in February, when Siple got sick, she wrote on her page, “Now I remember why I stopped teaching kids. They are all germ bags.”

Siple said her Facebook friends knew it was a joke.

People are so two-faced. Does everyone who is damning Siple believe that they themselves have never made a disparaging remark about work, their customers, or boss? No, obviously not. So the only issue is whether it is made in a private or public forum: not the actual feeling involved.

Once again, people are mistaking morality with etiquette, putting appearances before realities.

Where is it written that you can’t publicly complain about your job? Do we have to pretend that everything is sunshine and flowers?

Radical transparency does not mean that people are invited to share the good things going on in some business or wing of government: it means that we should be free to see into organizations and understand what is truly going on in them.

Tax payers have a right to know what is really going on the schools they pay to support, but that shouldn’t mean that everyone should be mumbling bland platitudes. If a senior teacher like Siple is not looking forward to work the reaction should not be to kill her, but instead to open up what is going on in the school and the relations between kids, teachers, administrators, and parents.

However in our hothouse, accusatory, and reactionary realm of social discourse, anyone like Siple — who expresses discontent with the current system — is burned at the stake, and all the folks with the torches and nooses pat each other on the back and consider themselves good citizens.

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August 31 2010

Facebook is the new AOL →

Jason Kottke made the same statement I’ve been shouting recently, back in 2007: “Facebook is the new AOL”.

However, he did not suggest that social primitives would be built into our future operating environments. He simply stated that the Internet is richer than an app can ever be, so he definitiely had one side of my argument down way back when.

August 29 2010

Blogtalk 2010: Notes And Thoughts On The Social Future

Galway is a lovely place, and I have always wanted to see where ‘the hills sweep down to the sea,’ so Blogtalk 2010 was fun. I saw old friends, and made some new ones. But this get-together reinforced a few thoughts, which wound up in my keynote, as well.

The era of blogging is over: its impact as a goad, a competitive force on print media has been felt, and deeply internalized. Meanwhile, most of the failures of 20th century journalism remain: notably, failing to create open social discourse, and becoming entrapped in the liturgy of journalism while failing to debunk lies and expose injustice. But print media have adopted the trappings of blogging, and have co-opted much of the heat — if any — of the blogosphere.

This has been relatively quick, partly because blogging is really ‘personal publishing’ — low-cost publishing, and lines up pretty well with the one-to-many dynamics of mass publishing. Comments and backlinks are pretty weak sauce when considered in the light of ‘social media’. Blogging, in the final analysis, ten years later, isn’t particularly social. Especially contrasted with social networks and other tools.

Facebook is the new AOL.

Blogtalk was filled with talk about social networks. A representative of Facebook spoke, and was almost orgasming as he related how great all the newest features were. Facebook and Twitter’s growth rates were repeated like kabalistic incantations throughout the event, and the unstoppability of Facebook in particular — its manifest destiny as the basis of all things social on the web — was generally taken as a given.

But social networks as realized today by Facebook and others are closed worlds, silos in which vastly different user experiences are managed. I heard presentations on a variety of approaches to federated and/or open identity management schemes, which could potentially support open and/or distributed social networking models, but these are only of theoretical interest to actual users.

I believe that Facebook represents the high water mark of social networking, as we understand it today, a time dominated by social networking applications, as if our social interaction is something best managed in a single enormous database, whose rows and tables are designed by a small group of developers in one company.

Facebook is the new AOL.

Facebook is managing the chaos of social interaction on the web, normalizing it and standardizing it for us, just as AOL made the web neat and tidy. That seemed a winning proposition in the late ’90s, which led to astonishing valuations for AOL. They acquired Time-Warner using that wealth, and in 2002 Time-Warner wrote off $600M as AOL started to fall. Now, AOL has been spun out, and has no central role in our experience of the web. 10 years is a long time. Time-Warner is now the second largest entertainment company in the world.

The moral of this story is that you can make a business out of simplifying what is chaotic and confusing, but only at the outset. As people become habituated to what at first was scary and headache-inducing, they will move away from controlled experience to more personally managed negotiation of the world.

‘But, all my friends are on Facebook!’ That was true in 1999 about AOL, too. All my friends had AIM accounts, so it was the best place for instant messaging. Until Yahoo and MSN offered audio and then video, and blogging broke loose. And then everything changed with broadband.

And what is going to be the equivalent of broadband for sociality online? What is going to come along to destabilize the Facebook stranglehold on our ‘social graphs’? Simple: sociality has turned out to be the most interesting thing to emerge from the past decade of the web. It’s not all the servers, the cloud computing, the data, or even the explosion of materials online: its the social dimension, and the tools we have built to explore that.

At the same time, we are witnessing an almost unprecedented era of invention around new devices, form factors, and operational premises for computing and communications. Smartphones, tablets, app stores, and the emergence of activities like geolocation, massively parallel gaming, social TV, and so on. These are leading to a deep rethinking of the operating environments we rely on, in our PCs, mobile and gaming devices, and formerly internet-deaf devices like TVs and appliances.

The next generation of operating environments will be social at their core. Our current operating environments are based on standard understanding of things that programmers care about, like files, directories, and access controls. The average person could care less.

We will see social operating systems where following people’s activities, or creating likes, or publishing profiles will all be built-in. These will not be features of apps, or managed as metadata in walled silos. The primitives that structure our social connections will be built into the fabric of the next generation of operating environments, just like file systems, URLs, and HTTP are well-integrated into today’s.

As a result, actors like Google, Apple, the Linux community, and Microsoft — as well as upstarts that don’t even exist yet — will be the implementers of the next generation of social web, with social interaction built into its DNA.

Imagine that I will turn on my next generation iPad, a few years hence, and I’ll be presented with various applications that show views over the streams of information finding their way to me based on my social relationships. But those relationships are not based on application managed information, but related to my device connecting to the web, like getting an IP address today. I would get a social IP, and ping out to all the other entities online, so that information from those that I follow would find me, just as email is routed to me today independently of what email application I choose to use.

There will still be a place for applications to present and augment the basics of social interaction, but they will not be what Facebook is today: a huge social scene whose rules and regulations are managed by the owners of the application, for their own interests.

Clearly, The New York Times, ABC and Apple don’t want to hand the future of our social connection over to Facebook, or any other cabal of software companies. The answer is not in copying Facebook, which seems to be the goal of Google’s Me project. Inevitably, the way ahead is to take the social dimension — at least the core features that have emerged in the social web to date — down into the operating platforms. Actions like following, liking, posting, and reposting have become the core of our social existence. And these core activities should be core to the platforms, not peripheral.

Based on common protocols, vendors of different platforms could still compete based on how they manage these new social primitives along with the other things that devices must do. But just like today’s files — which can move from Mac, to Windows, to Linux, to GameBoy — we would have the ability to network effectively; although in this case, to network socially.

It remains to be seen how quickly or smoothly this transition will be. And in the meantime the dominance of Facebook will make billions for investors. However, the fastest growing segment on Facebook is the 55+ crowd, which suggests that the young and the hipsters will start to defect to alternatives, just like they fled MySpace when the phonies and fogies came in.

Social music and social TV are the two areas that suggest the greatest pressure for a solution at a fundamental — not application, or application framework level.

Facebook’s management may be aware of this, as well. Imagine the scenario where Facebook’s valuation is so high, and the prospects seem so grand, that Facebook acquires an apparently fading Microsoft, and works to fuse Facebook into some version of Windows. Like the AOL Time-Warner merger, I bet it this would lead to smoke but no bang.

Meanwhile, the world will lurch chaotically forward. If cable and entertainment companies develop standards around social TV, and allow experimentation by entrepreneurs to develop social apps that augment TV, we will see some real interesting stuff arise, and the defection of viewers from non-social TV will slow, and reverse. Facebook will see its numbers falling as people start watching basketball, reality shows, or movies with friends online. Likewise, Apple could lead to similar experimentation around social music by exposing social APIs in a future socialized version of iTunes.

This will take years, if not decades, to roll forward. But I maintain this will happen, and that, as a result, Facebook is not the future, but just a very temporary present.

August 2 2010

Tumblr’s Media Direction: Mark Coatney Joins

Mark Coatney leaves his Newsweek gig as a senior editor and joins Tumblr as ‘media evangelist’, working to get media companies more involved in the service:

Jenna Wortham, Tumblr, a New Spin in the Flurry of Social Media

Mr. Coatney, a 43-year-old journalist, is the latest hire at Tumblr, a fast-growing blogging service based in New York that says it has 6.6 million users.

Until last month, Mr. Coatney was a senior editor at Newsweek, where as a side project he headed up the magazine’s social efforts on Twitter and Facebook. Last year he decided to add Tumblr to his repertoire.

“I saw it as an opportunity to talk to our audience in a new way,” he said. On Twitter, he said, “the main feedback comes mostly from retweeting,” or retransmitting an interesting message. On Tumblr, “the tone is a lot more conversational.”

Mr. Coatney quickly cultivated a following on Tumblr for his thought-provoking, quick-witted posts. Often they included commentary that was funny and bordering on acerbic — something he was able to get away with largely because “no one at Newsweek really knew what I was doing,” he said.

The credibility he established among Tumblr users, and the fact that Newsweek was one of the first big publishers to sign on, cemented Tumblr’s decision to hire him, company executives said.

Over the last few months, other media outlets have caught wind of Tumblr, which is free to use. The newest recruits include The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, BlackBook Media Corporation, National Public Radio, The Paris Review, The Huffington Post, Life magazine and The New York Times.

But many of those outlets have done little more than set up a placeholder page. In his new job as a “media evangelist,” Mr. Coatney’s role, and in some ways his challenge, is to help them figure out what to do next.

Mr. Coatney describes Tumblr as “a space in between Twitter and Facebook.” The site allows users to upload images, videos, audio clips and quotes to their pages, in addition to bursts of text.

As on Twitter, users can follow other users, whose posts appear in a chronological stream on a central home page known as the dashboard. Users can indicate that they like an item by clicking on a red heart next to it or “reblogging” it.

Commentators never seem to get down to the core difference between Tumblr and other blogging solutions. As a result, they miss the rich social dimension that Tumblr offers.

I recently characterized this as having both an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ view:

Stowe Boyd, WordPress Releases ‘Like’ And ‘Reblog’: We Need TumbleBacks, People!

The Outside View — When Tumblr users are looking at other Tumblr-hosted blogs, they see several controls that are not visible to non-users. Along with the blog content, they see ‘like’, ‘reblog’, ‘follow’ and ‘dashboard’ icons, like this:


The ‘like’ button (the heart) is a way to create a haptic gesture that winds up on the post’s ‘notes’ list, a history of all the ways that the post has been touched by others.

The ‘reblog’ button makes a copy of the post on the user’s blog, and adds that action to the original post’s notes history.

Clicking the ‘follow’ adds the blog to the user’s list of followed blogs, which is a perfect segue to the second view in the poststream model.

The Inside View — When the user logs into Tumblr (or when they clink on ‘dashboard’ after being logged in), they are presented their Tumblr dashboard, which aggregates posts from all the blogs that the user is following, plus posts from their own blog, and notes that other users’ actions have left on posts. Here’s the third page of my Tumblr dashboard from this morning (I wanted to show a note and the page controls):


The ‘like’ and ‘reblog’ controls are displayed on all the posts in the poststream, and work in the same way as described.

You can see that wakeupfromthedramscene has started following my UnderpaidGenius blog. Other notes also are displayed, although their are none in this page of my poststream:  reblogs, likes, and answers to questions (any text post that ends with a question mark allows for answers to questions to be accumulated).

So, I think Coatney is right to see Tumblr as sitting somewhere better Twitter and blogging. The inside view is based on an open follower model, and social gestures like ‘likes’, ‘reblogs’ and ‘asks’ fill in for much of the communication that Twitter supports so readily. But Tumblr’s rich media — images, videos, audio, and various sorts of text-based posts — make it a more literary, or interests-based medium, especially at first glance.

As a direct result, communities of people with similar interests quickly aggregate, and connect through ‘following’ relationships, in a way parallel to Twitter, but using other parts of the head since it is not an endless stream of text-based tweets and links.

Perhaps because of this media richness, and the media-oriented communities that form within Tumblr, partnerships with media firms seems a natural course to take, especially highly focused publications with tight communities. Consider groups like young parents, avid sports enthusiasts, gadget heads, or social activists: these would be natural communities that could benefit from participation of cornerstone media companies investing in a slightly more advanced infrastructure than comes off the shelf with Tumblr.

For example, a cycling magazine might build a Tumblr-based website (called Wheels) that includes pages dedicated to specific interests, like new bikes, performance training, leisurely cruising, and bike-based holidays. Members of the Wheels community could follow Wheels, and be followed back in turn. Any posts that the community members tagged appropriately would be streamed through these pages, and the best and most interesting might be featured or highlighted on the Wheels topics pages.

At any rate, it would be a straightforward prospect to develop this sort of componentry to offer media companies, and to allow them a means to use the follower model to sharpen their connection to communities, and to do so without becoming yet another Facebook colony.

Note that Wordpress and Typepad have been moving steadily in the direction of Tumblr’s innovation, adopting social gestures (‘like’ and ‘reblog’) and in the case of Typepad, even developing an inside view modeled directly after Tumblr’s.

I recently moved this blog to Tumblr (see Moving To Tumblr Manually: I Must Be Nuts), and I have used the platform for several years on my underpaidgenius.com blog. I have some complaints, but they are actually minor relative to the upside offered by this rich social interaction. I just wish I could convince more of the community that follows my writing here to sign up for a Tumblr account, and experience the rich world behind the outside view that you are probably experiencing now.

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July 25 2010

Facebook Is to the Power Company as ..., Joshua Brustein →

underpaidgenius:

The metaphor of Facebook as a utility has finally caught on (see Facebook Privacygate Continues).

July 23 2010

The Flipboard Dilemma: Who Owns User Experience?

Flipboard burst on the scene this week like a Rodriguez movie trailer, or a new diet drug, and everyone rushed to download (following Scoble’s recommendation). Now that the dust has settled, and the controversy about Flipboard being unready to handle the surge of signups has started to abate, some larger issues are starting to arise from Flipboard’s modus vivendi:

Joel Johnson, Is Flipboard Legal?
Social news app Flipboard was yesterday’s hot new app, despite—or perhaps because of—technical problems that prevented some features from working. But there might be a bigger snag: Is Flipboard scraping content it doesn’t have the rights to?
Flipboard, the new iPad app that renders links from your Twitter feed and favorite sites in a beautiful, magazine-style layout, has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement.
Unlike some similar news apps like Pulse, Flipboard appears to eschew the older syndication standby RSS to instead grab URLs from Twitter and Facebook feeds. While news sources that maintain their own automatic Twitter feeds tend to link the same stories as they do in their RSS feeds, there’s one critical difference: RSS also allows content to be included in the feed, whereas Twitter provides only the URLs that link back to the full website. (Unless, of course, the site only writes 140 character news stories.)
Back in the ancient days of the mid-aughts, there was a healthy debate online about whether or not news outlets should provide full content feeds or simply headlines and excerpts. Rather than rehash that debate—one that’s still ongoing—just remember this: whether a company chose to publish “full feeds” or excerpts, the choice remained theirs.

The fact that publishers have some explicit means of controlling the use of their published materials through RSS (as well as devices like the robot.txt files used to control indexing by search engine robots) has not actually always provided strong enough controls for publishers. Said differently, publisher have still blocked or threatened services like Pulse and Flipboard even when they are only serving up what has been published in their RSS feeds. Murdoch has made the case that search engines ‘bots don’t have the right to index his sites even when robot.txt files indicate that those sites are open for indexing.

This suggests the need for some other mechanism to define what sort of reuse or aggregation rights that publishers care to allow. Creative Commons suggests an example, but it is likely to be considered too coarsely grained, and it doesn’t delve deeply enough into the nuts and bolts of actual reuse.

The rise of tools like Flipboard may represent a new day. Tools that intentionally sidestep RSS, and instead reach through the URL and spider the websites themselves, like search engines do. Search engines build indexes and return snippets clipped from the myriad sites they have visited based on the search queries users enter. But Flipboard is tapping into our social networks — like those that I follow on Twitter — by reaching through the URLs in the Twitter stream, and aggregating what they point to, and rendering it in a magazine-like UX.

But the presentation in Flipboard poses some real business problems. Where’s the ads? Publishers make their money on ads (and pay walls), and so they are going to start to howl if people are viewing their stories with all the ads parsed out.

Perhaps even more contentious will be the response of Facebook and other social services like Twitter. To the extent that Flipboard replaces their UX, they may lose revenue as well. Twitter recently has moved into the realm of building its own clients and does so with the explicit goal of making ad revenue. These social network giants could block access to Flipboard and other tools of this sort, simply because they will resist being treated as a dumb pipe of social messages. Facebook will certainly move aggressively if Flipboard ‘dumbs down’ what Facebook does for users, treating it just as a messaging bus with URLs, pictures, and social gestures embedded in it.

It is relatively simple to extrapolate to a near future in which Flipboard, or some other entrant with similar aspirations, has ginned up a superior user experience, one that involves its own layers of sociality. Imagine that Flipboard can offer its users greater benefits by communicating directly through Flipboard, and not through underlying services like Twitter or Facebook — for example, being able to share Tumblr like reblog capabilities, or some other dimension of sociality that naturally falls out of the iPad experience.

I am certain that Twitter and Facebook would consider this course of events — however hypothetical — with some alarm.I believe that these companies must retain control of their user experience, and they must resist being commoditized by a richer layer of sociality superimposed above their offerings.

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