Content Matters

Tumblr is not a blogging platform

Lots of great information out there on the Yahoo-Tumblr deal, but I keep seeing posts comparing Tumblr to Wordpress and referring to it as a "blogging platform".

While that might be technically accurate, just as you might still refer to Twitter as a "micro-blogging" platform, it reflects little understanding to how Tumblr is used today and why Yahoo is buying it.

First and foremost, Tumblr is a social platform. Users post media to Tumblr and it gets shared. A lot. If you look at their user numbers, it tells a lot of the story. As of April, 2013, Tumblr had 170 million users and 100 million "blogs". In other words, its usage is more like Twitter - where most people who are active on the platform both author/share as well as read content. Contrast that to a platform like Wordpress, where relatively few people author content, compared to the numbers who consume it.

The second key difference is demographics. A recent Pew internet study estimates that 13% of  online users 18-29 use Tumblr vs only 5% of those 30-49. Yet Pew's cutoff at age 18 causes them to miss the key Tumblr demographic - teens and tweens, or to be more specific, female teens and tweens.

Another recent study from Garry Tan using Survata data from Y Combinator shows that of those age 13-18, Tumblr has stronger usage than Facebook.

Surveys and studies aside, I can just ask my 14-year-old daughter for insights. She doesn't use Facebook at all. While some of her friends have accounts, they rarely use them. "Facebook is for old people" according to them (perhaps validated by the fact that her grandmother is now on Facebook using the iPad she got for Christmas). She and her friends are active on Twitter, Skype, Tumblr and, of couse, texting. 

If you ask her or her friends to name a blog platform, they couldn't tell you one. And they sure wouldn't consider Tumblr one. "Tumblr is for sharing cat gifs" was her response when I asked her about Tumblr.

So, what Yahoo is acquiring is not a blog platform. We should immediately stop the calls I've seen for all Yahoo blogs to switch over to being authored on Tumblr. Yahoo is acquiring a highly social platform that is used by (mostly female) millenials to share memes and funny images with friends.

That opens up many possibilities for Yahoo, none of which should involve slapping a bunch of banner ads on Tumblr pages. 

As TechCrunch's Erick Shonfeld points out, "Tumblr is also an amazing testbed for new forms of social advertising. Yahoo can now go up against Twitter in that arena"

 

 

 

 

 

Adds Globe & Mail's Shane Dingman, "Tumblr's main value isn't its flexible blog template, it is designed to be a vector for viral sharing"

Tumblr is closer to Twitter or Facebook than it is to Wordpress, Posterous or other blogging platforms. 

I don't know whether the Yahoo acquisition will ultimately be good for Tumblr (though it's a nice exit for David Karp and a win for the NYC startup scene). But what they are acquiring is a way to begin to enage a demographic that otherwise barely knows they exist. And if they are careful, and let the Tumblr team largely stay independent, they will probably learn more about social media and younger users than they could in any other way. And in keeping Tumblr away from Facebook, Microsoft and other potential suitors, they keep Yahoo relevant in a way that it's not been in years.

 

 

I Moved

I’m thrilled to share that I’ve just joined Connotate as Vice President, Product Strategy. 

Connotate is the leader in the web content extraction space. Publishers, ecommerce retailers, financial institutions, government agencies and others rely upon Connotate to aggregate, organize, analyze and distribute web data at scale.

Connotate agents can mine content from websites, extracting critical pieces of data, then structure, aggregate and organize that information for use in analytical applications. Clients use Connotate to monitor prices on tens of thousands of items, run background checks on potential new hires, and aggregate data to update information services.

In many ways, Connotate is the perfect home for me. I’ve spent much of the past fifteen years helping publishers and media companies create content-driven products. Extracting insights from the web has been a big part of that - from my early days at semantic pioneer ClearForest to harvesting and tagging news and social media content at Alacra. 

While many technology companies have latched onto the big data theme, Connotate has been focused on extracting data at scale since the start. Whether you’re automating background checks, analyzing the sentiment of customer comments or pulling pricing data from competitor websites, Connotate can deliver highly accurate results across a wide range of disparate sources.

Connotate goes way beyond simple web scraping. Today’s complex websites, built with AJAX, Javascript and HTML5 don’t allow for easy content harvesting. The Connotate technology leverages feature-based machine learning with heuristics to do intelligent extraction. And the system is highly resilient. The feature-based approach allows Connotate extraction algorithms to continue to perform accurately, even when website designs change. 

Last year, Connotate acquired Fetch, its largest direct competitor, and is currently positioned for strong growth. There are a number of interesting market opportunities which we’ll be exploring in the coming weeks and months. If you have web data challenges, I’d love to get your thoughts on areas where we might focus. You can reach me at bgraubart-at-connotate-dot-com.

You can read the formal announcement of my joining Connotate here.

Sales Tax Will Have Little Impact on eCommerce

The web is all a-flutter about the likelihood that Congress will start requiring ecommerce sites (and catalog retailers) to begin to collect sales tax in all states. The bill has passed the Senate and now moves to the House, where its passage is less certain.

If it passes, it will clearly be a boon for the states, who now miss out on an estimated $20 billion per year in sales taxes. But it's unlikely to do much for brick & mortar retailers, in their efforts to curb showrooming.

In the early days of online commerce, the avoidance of sales tax was definitely a key factor in helping ecommerce sites generate revenues. In those days, most sites charged for shipping, so avoiding sales tax was a way to offset shipping costs. And, of course, on large purchases, saving 7-8% could be significant.

But today, saving sales tax is one of the smallest value propositions that the good ecommerce sites offer. I'm an active Amazon shopper. My first Amazon purchase was in 1996 - it was for the book Creating Killer Websites and two others. In the years that followed, I rarely went a week without an Amazon box being delivered to my house. I was among the first group of users of Amazon Prime, and remain a member today. 

While the shift of books and CDs to digital form has reduced the number of packages shipped, it hasn't reduced my purchases. We stream Amazon movies via a Roku box, buy our MP3 music from Amazon, use the Kindle app on the iPad for reading and more. And for all but the very largest purchases, I don't bother price-checking. Amazon provides a great user experience, fantastic customer service (on the few times I've needed it) and delivers exactly what I need. So,for me, it's not worth looking around in order to save a few dollars on a typical purchase. I'd rather buy from Amazon.

I've never been a "mall person" and prefer to shop on my own time, typically around midnight when I've finished everything else I need to do for the day. Amazon customer reviews are typically much more informative than the sales reps at a brick and mortar store, while their product selection and inventory are much more complete.

Living in New York, I've been paying sales tax on my Amazon purchases for the past four years. It's had zero impact on my purchase behavior.

While Best Buy is now price-matching ecommerce sites in an effort to stop showrooming, the user experience on Amazon is typically superior. And for those users who don't ask for the price match, Best Buy prices are still 25-40% higher than Amazon on most items.

At the margins, requiring online retailers to charge sales tax may give a slight boost to brick and mortar stores. But for most of us, the benefits of online shopping far outweigh the experience that brick-and-mortar stores provide. 

The Publisher's Guide to Mobile and Tablet Development

During the past 12-18 months I've had more conversations with publishers about tablet and mobile than about any other topic. In fact, it's probably more than the next three topics combined.

The speed in which mobile and table computing are overtaking the desktop is unprecedented. According to Deloitte, more than one in five Americans own a tablet device. And every day, new vendors and agencies come along pitching products and solutions. The result for most publishers is confusion.

In speaking with colleagues at Newstex, I learned that they were seeing the same confusion among many of their customers. 

So, working closely with the Newstex team, I've authored a new eBook, The Publisher's Guide to Mobile and Tablet Development, which is currently available for free download.

The eBook starts with strategy, exploring 7 mobile content business models, noting that many publishers overlook new revenue opportunities on mobile. From there, it aims to demystify much of the mobile landscape, helping publishers understand the differences in platforms and providing tools to simplify issues like the app vs mobile web decision.

The last half of the book provides an action plan to help publishers implement their mobile strategy. Examples and case studies are provided throughout to help you understand the decisions made by other publishers - and their implications.

Whether you've already launched multiple iPhone, iPad and Android apps or are just trying to move past the hype and understand the mobile content space, this eBook provides quick and valuable insights. Download your free copy here.

A special thanks to Tom Shultz of Creative Attitude for his terrific design work.

Facebook Home Could Throw Off Incredible Usage Data

The big thing that jumped out at me from today's Facebook Phone "Facebook Home on Android" event was the potential usage data trove that this could open up for Facebook.

This diagram tells the story:

Under this architecture, Facebook Home sits between the Android OS and your apps. In other words, Facebook potentially gains control of all of the usage data thrown off in "app exhaust".  Of course, that's on top of controlling communications on the phone via Chat Heads and other features.

Of course, the underlying OS has always known about which apps you're using and with whom you're communicating, but this is different, in that Facebook is an ad platform. So, it will be interesting to read the T&Cs to see how Facebook may potentially use the user and usage data it captures.

Do you feel comfortable giving that much usage data to Facebook? Add your thoughts in the comments. 

Facebook Inside: How Facebook Can Win at Mobile

For several years we’ve been dismissive about the idea of an inevitable “Facebook phone”. Apple and Android have won the mobile phone wars and, as Microsoft, Blackberry and others have learned, there are few crumbs remaining.

But if rumors are true, Facebook just may have come up with a strategy for success. 

The Facebook plan is not to build hardware, nor create its own operating system. Instead, the strategy is for a “Facebook Home on Android” app launcher, with hardware built by existing handset makers. 

The idea of a customized version of Android is not new – that’s the approach that Amazon has taken with the Kindle Fire. But the potential impact for Facebook could be great.

Current rumors suggest that HTC is building the initial handset for the Facebook phone. The modified version of Android would provide the ability to launch any existing Android app, but the home screen would be Facebook-centric.

That approach is compelling. If you look at mobile usage statistics, users spend up to a quarter of their mobile use on social networks. For many of those users, having Facebook as their home screen would make sense.

For Facebook, a “Home on Android” could act as a Trojan horse that would allow them to shift increasing amounts of activity to their own platform. At launch, the Facebook Home on Android might simply be your news feed, Instagram feed, games and Facebook chat. Yet, over time, that could expand. Rumors suggest the initial search partner will be Google, but that could easily change. Facebook Maps, Facebook Music or Facebook TV could easily follow.

There are still many unknowns. Will the Facebook Home on Android version be forked, requiring developers to build custom versions of Android apps, or will all existing Android apps work on the phones? Will payments be handled through Google Play or Facebook’s App Center? Will the Facebook Home launcher be made available for any Android phone or will it only run on customized handsets?

We’ll learn a lot more on Thursday, when Facebook makes their introduction. But one thing seems clear - with the Facebook Home on Android strategy, the idea of a Facebook phone no longer seems silly.

Related articles

Facebook Home to be the OS name of Facebook's Android phone?

Facebook's Android Homescreen Could Expose Apple's Inflexibility

Facebook Phone Leak Points To Budget HTC Device, Homescreen App For All Androids

Flipboard's New Curation Platform a Boon for Brands

Last night, Flipboard 2.0 was released. 

The new version includes a curation platform that allows anyone to create a Flipboard "magazine" by curating content and sharing it with others. Here's Tech Readings, a Flipboard magazine I've created this morning.

The user interface couldn't be easier. From any article, simply click the + icon and add it to your magazine.

For the avid RSS reader/curator, this is a great new tool. Against the backdrop of outrage at Google dropping Reader, I realized that between most of my content consumption comes via Twitter and Flipboard these days, with Reader a distant third. With this new curation tool, Flipboard should become an even more important tool for me.

Yet I think the real opportunity for Flipboard will come with brands. As brands move into the publishing space, there's tremendous opportunity for them to create custom magazines for niche communities, using proprietary content, curated external content, or, ideally, a blend of both.

And this potentially creates new revenue opportunities for Flipboard. A professional version of the curation platform might allow brands to have some control over layout, to include their own branding and to package it up as their own branded app.

Those capabilities could also be of interest to publishers and informal curators within the enterprise. 

Flipboard has delivered a great reading experience since its launch. There's an opportunity for them to create a similarly great experience for curation and publishing. I'm excited to see how brands and publishers begin to experiment with these new tools.

 

What Commitments Should Free Platforms Make to Users?

With all the buzz around Google's (GOOG) plan to shut down Google Reader, and the similar outcry when Yahoo announced its intention to kill off Delicious, it's fair to ask the question:

What should users expect from the free services they depend on?

The fact that users are not paying a fee to use a service, doesn't mean that companies are not profiting from their use. The old saying goes that if you're not the one paying, then you are the product. Meanwhile, more and more we are becoming dependent upon the tools we choose. So, before we adopt new services, should we have some level of commitment to what will happen if the company no longer wants to support it?

At minimum, there should always be a way to get your data out of the system. Anything you put in should exportable for use in other services. Delicious offered a bookmark export utility. Google Reader lets you grab your OPML file to load into other readers. But what about other services? Blog platforms generally let you export all your blog posts, but that doesn't necessarily include images and other key metadata.  If gmail or Yahoo Mail were shuttered, there's no easy way today to retrieve your email archive and load it into another email system. 

Should companies commit to a plan to open source a service if they choose to no longer support it? That's a bigger decision and one that companies would not likely offer willingly. But if they want us to put our data into a service that may disappear down the road, perhaps it's reasonable to expect them to do so. In enterprise software, it's not uncommon for large clients to get companies (particularly early stage companies) to agree to an escrow provision, should the company go bankrupt.  Under the b2c model, if a company is monetizing its audience, is it not reasonable to expect there to be a safety net in place should the company be unable or unwilling to provide the service?

Of course, any such clause would likely be unenforceable. But in an environment where a handful of large platform companies (Google, Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Facebook (FB), Twitter) are becoming more deeply entwined into our workflow, a company might gain a strategic advantage in making this type of promise to its users. Just as Google claimed a "Do No Evil" mantra, perhaps there's an opportunity for one of these platforms to adopt a new "leave no user behind" mission statement. Perhaps before the next platform company kills one of its offerings (Hey Twitter - I'm looking at Tweetdeck), they should look to adopt this user-centric approach.

 

Related articles

As Google Abandons RSS, Will LinkedIn Fill the Void?

Google Is Killing Google Reader

As Google Abandons RSS, Will LinkedIn Fill the Void?

Yesterday was a big day for Twitter. First, it handled the huge traffic burst for the announcement of Pope Francis. But that was only the warmup. The big test came yesterday evening when word came out that Google (GOOG) will shutter Google Reader in July. My Twitter feed quickly lit up with pleadings to Google to keep it alive, and to developers to quickly build a replacement.

Of course, I follow a lot of journalists and bloggers, and RSS feeds have long been their lifeblood. Google Reader for them fills the role that newswires once played. But most people have no idea what RSS is or what it does.

Perhaps MG Siegler of the CrunchFund said it best:

Personally, I rely a lot less on RSS than I did four or five years ago. Then, tools like Google Reader and NetVibes were a critical part of my morning routine, right after checking my email. Today, they’ve largely been replaced in my workflow by Twitter and Flipboard. If there’s something important for me to know, chances are it will show up in my Twitter stream. And Flipboard is perfect for keeping up to date on things I don’t follow as closely, leveraging Twitter lists and a handful of RSS feeds.

For those concerned about replacing Reader, there are a bunch of options. Lifehacker was quick to publish a list of alternative RSS readers.

For non-blogger/journos, you might find Flipboard provides a more compelling interface for keeping up. It’s not a workflow tool in the way that Reader is, but for simply reading, it’s great.

The bigger challenge may come down the road if Google shutters its Feedburner service. Feedburner, founded by current Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and later sold to Google, is the tool most blogs and news services use to push out their RSS feeds for syndication. There have been rumblings for quite a while that Feedburner may soon be shut down. That would set off more of a scramble for a scalable solution to push RSS. But someone will fill the void.

A good candidate to fill both the Reader and syndication gaps could be LinkedIn (LNKD).  The company is rumored to be acquiring mobile news reader Pulse News for between $50 - $100 million. That’s just the latest step in LinkedIn’s move to become more of a content company. The recently launched Influencers Program, added to the LinkedIn Today feed has made its news page much more competitive. And while it could stand improvements, the LinkedIn Endorsements feature helps tag people to skills and interests. Combining the business-focused LinkedIn social graph with a flow of news content could enable a more true interest graph. As GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram notes “this kind of “interest graph” targeting is the holy grail for both content companies and social networks.”.

Beyond the news reader side, LinkedIn could immediately gain traction with publishers by launching a Feedburner alternative. An aqui-hire of Feedblitz, Feedity or even IFTTT could position them to pick up the bulk of the RSS syndication market when Google exits.

Going From Unstructured Text to Structured Data Remains Much Harder Than the Reverse

I was reading an interesting article this morning on a new Washington Post prototype tool to automate fact-checking.

The Truth Teller prototype, described as a "Shazam for Truth" sounds very compelling, though taking it from prototype to a scalable solution will not be a trivial task.

But there was one paragraph in the article which jumped out at me as a deep misunderstanding of how semantic technologies work:

You can see a Truth Teller project working well with hard, numbers-driven realities since we already have companies like Narrative Science using algorithms to write sports, real estate and financial news. More difficult though is to take that algorithm and place it against soft, interpretative data. For example — and keeping things current — how sequestration will affect governmental agency X, Y or Z, if at all.

I agree with the basic premise of the paragraph - that as you move from simple, provable facts to interpretative conjecture, it becomes much harder. But it's the first part of the paragraph that I quibble with here. The ability of products like Narrative Science (or the similar Automated Insights) to convert structured data into text is completely different from the reverse process - using technology to read unstructured text and turn it into structured data.

Converting structured data to text is a fairly straighforward process. That's not to say that doing it well is easy - it's not - and companies like Narrative Science and Automated Insights are doing a very impressive job of authoring realistic text. But it's safe to assume that the error rate for that process is near zero. If I provide you with a baseball box score showing that Mike Trout went 3-for-5 with a home run and two singles, 2 RBI and 2 runs scored, you can use these technologies to state that in many different conversational means. In no cases will the information be incorrect - it's just a question of tone and writing style.

Now, take the reverse process - reading a text-based summary of the game and trying to compile a box score. There are many challenges there. Not every at-bat gets mentioned in the summary. The nuances of language means that not every mention will be understood by the tagging engine. A home run might be called a homer, four-bagger, cleared-the-bases, round tripper, goner, went yard, moon shot, dinger or even a tater. Of course, semantic tagging uses many methods to understand text, including the use of vocabularies to capture examples like these. But any semantic text tool will miss or misconstrue some. 

Semantic technologies have come a long way in the past decade. We're able to do things we were only able to dream about a few years ago. But the complexity in scaling any of these prototypes to fully useful applications should never be underestimated.