A wide variety of angel investors participated in the round, possibly emphasizing the “social good” concept Stone hinted at in his intial launch post. Stone, who co-founded Twitter, has only described Jelly as a company with an eye for “social good” that takes advantage of the proliferation of mobile devices.

The investors include fellow Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, U2 musician and activist Bono, Greylock’s Reid Hoffman, former Vice President Al Gore, and Emmy-winning director Greg Yaitanes, among several others.

“They work in divergent fields,” Stone wrote. “Knowledge diversity is something we prize highly and is also something that will be represented in our product.”

Stone has been building up a good deal of ex-Twitter talent at the company, and the funding announcement noted that they would use the addition funding for hiring as they continue protyping a product before launch. Earlier this month, Stone announced that he added a COO in Kevin Thau, the Twitter executive who launched Twitter #music, and a co-founder and CTO in Ben Finkel, formerly engineering manager at Twitter in charge of user growth.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Themes for a connected world: GigaOM RoadMap review
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

“We’re going to be a great place for professional writers to write,” Williams told Wired senior writer Steven Levy at the Wired Business Conference in New York on Tuesday. “The magazine is the analog for what we’re doing.”

Williams noted that he doesn’t think professional writers will be the majority of Medium’s users — “we’re going to be a great place for everyone” — and that he wants to be “careful” about using the word “quality,” since “Medium is actually easier than blogging if you want to write something short.” Nonetheless, Medium is still not open to everybody. The site has five editors who are working to “get great content on the system and help curate what’s there,” and Medium is paying some writers.

Medium recently acquired the Kickstarter-backed journalism startup Matter (cofounded by former GigaOM writer Bobbie Johnson), which publishes long-form science and technology stories, and Williams said that Matter will be a home to other long-form stories as well. “We’re not focused on news,” he said. “We’re focused on ideas and stories that have a longer shelf life, [whether it's] short opinion pieces or long-form investigative journalism. We want that to thrive.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How social discovery is transforming entertainment
• Connected consumer fourth-quarter 2012 analysis
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in mobile

“Ben Finkel is my co-founder here at Jelly. Ben and I have been friends and collaborators for many years. During one of our frequent walk-and-talks around San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Park, we accidentally came up with the idea for Jelly. It was one of those ideas that we couldn’t get out of our heads,” Stone wrote in a blog post on Monday.

Finkel will join Stone at Jelly as CTO of the company, but there is still no word on when Jelly will open its doors. The company is backed by the Obvious Corp., the parent company created by Twitter co-founders and early employees including Stone to incubate a couple of content-related startups like Medium, Branch, and now Jelly.

Finkel originally founded Fluther, a question and answer site that was seed funded by a group of angels including Ron Conway and Marc Andreessen. Stone served as an advisor to the company, and in December 2010, Twitter went ahead and acquired the startup, primarily for the engineering talent behind the company. Finkel then served as a senior software engineer and then engineering manager for Twitter, where he was in charge of user growth.

“Ben managed New User Experience on the Growth Team at Twitter, helping grow an active user base from fifty million to more than two hundred million people,” Stone wrote. That’s certainly no small job, and according to his LinkedIn page, Finkel just departed Twitter last month.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The 2013 task management tools market
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012

Matter raised over $140,000 through Kickstarter, and Williams was one of its 2,566 backers. Matter, which publishes one story of at least 5,000 words every month and sells them for $0.99 apiece, will remain a standalone company following the acquisition. Johnson and his cofounder, Jim Giles, will work as part of Medium’s editorial team, which also includes former literary agent Kate Lee and former Wired.com editor-in-chief Evan Hansen.

In a blog post scheduled to be released Wednesday, Johnson and his Matter cofounder Jim Giles explained what will and won’t change:

“If you already know what we do, don’t expect big changes yet. Our service is an ongoing experiment, but we have no immediate plans to alter the team, the places we publish (our website and the Kindle store), or how much we charge for each article. More importantly, we have no plans — at any time — to stop crafting hard-hitting narratives about big ideas. One of the things that made it easy to join Medium was the knowledge that the company believes in great storytelling as much as we do, and is prepared to support what we do.

But we will be rolling out some changes in the coming months. We’ve already started using Medium to expand on the ideas we cover — see, for example, Amputees & Wannabes, the recent series of commentaries around Do No Harm, our story about people who desire to amputate a healthy limb. We’ll also be introducing some exciting changes at the Matter website — changes that will make the site better for readers, and improve our mechanism for supporting long-form writing.”

Medium, which Williams and Biz Stone launched in 2012, is a collaborative publishing platform that aims to let users write, annotate, read and recommend content in a clutter-free interface. The platform isn’t open to everyone yet; for now, a select group of authors are contributing. Matter is Medium’s first acquisition.

Williams spoke about the importance of long-form content at GigaOM’s Roadmap conference last year. Watch the video here:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• The 2013 task management tools market

Medium is the publishing platform that came out of Obvious. It has been recently growing and hiring staff, and it will now operate as an independent business from Obvious. Williams wrote that he is spending about 98 percent of his time working on Medium, which is adding an editorial-minded staff and encouraging a wide variety of writers to publish posts on the site.

Meanwhile, Biz Stone will be working on his recently-announced mobile platform called Jelly, and Jason Goldman, who was profiled exenstively by Buzzfeed recently, will be working on Branch, another publishing platform.

Williams wrote how they’re currently viewing Obvious in the blog post Friday:

“Turns out, we like focus. We rebooted Obvious in 2011 with a vague plan. We started investing, incubating, and experimenting to figure out what worked and what we wanted to do at this stage in our careers; we just knew we wanted to work together do stuff that mattered.

Among other things, the first few months taught us that we gravitated toward diving in more deeply on a small number of things — rather than having a lighter touch on many ventures.”

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Scott Beale

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The 2013 task management tools market
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012

People are basically good—when provided a tool that helps them do good in the world, they prove it. jellyhq.com/post/466234974…—
Biz Stone (@biz) April 01, 2013

In a blog post titled, “What is Jelly?” Stone didn’t actually explain much what Jelly is, but did hint at a mobile-oriented startup. And yes, the company is based in San Francisco and it’s hiring.

“People are basically good—when provided a tool that helps them do good in the world, they prove it.

Jelly is a new company and product named after the jellyfish. We are inspired by this particular animal because neurologically, its brain is more “we” than “me.” Also, for the past 700 million years, this decentralized structure has been wildly successful.

News of Jelly emerged unexpectedly early so I’ll wait a bit to share more about the team. In the meantime, I’ll say this. Jelly will be for everybody, it will be developed first and foremost for mobile devices, and it will be free. But, it won’t be ready for a while.”

Based on Stone’s past ventures with Twitter and Blogger, it seems likely that Jelly will end up with a social bent. Stone noted that he’ll be focusing mainly on Jelly right now.

He re-launched the Obvious Corp with Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and early Twitter employee Jason Goldman back in June 2011, and so far the umbrella company has launched a few startups, including Medium and Branch, which presumably will be overseen by Stone’s co-founders now.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Will Games Help Google Figure Out How to Be Social?
• Social Media in the Enterprise
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech

Since the “democratization of content” that was created by both blogs and social media is fairly well established now, both Svbtle and Medium seem to be focused on the process of curation and design rather than simply giving writers a new place to publish their content. How they are going to monetize this new form of curated blogging remains a mystery, however.

Svbtle was born last March, when designer and developer Dustin Curtis decided to create what he thought was a more elegant and simple way of posting content (interestingly enough, this is almost exactly the same motivation that David Karp has said was behind his creation of the Tumblr network in 2007). And while Svbtle seemed at first like a personal project involving Curtis and some of his writer and designer friends, it has grown fairly substantially, with more than 200 bloggers generating what Svbtle says in its blog post are “millions upon millions of pageviews” a month.

Svbtle admits it doesn’t know how it will make money

Curtis told TechCrunch that he raised the unspecified amount of funding from a group that includes SV Angel, the CrunchFund and New York-based incubator Betaworks (the startup also got some earlier funding through the Y Combinator program) because he wanted to hire developers, but also because he needed a “cushion for experimentation.” Among other things, the Svbtle founder admitted he doesn’t really have any idea how the company is going to monetize the content it is curating on the network.

As Curtis put it in the TechCrunch interview: “Monetizing content, especially written content, is extremely difficult. I think Svbtle’s biggest innovation will be in this area, but I don’t know what it is yet.” But he provided some clues in a response on Twitter on Tuesday:

You can't make money in publishing by monetizing the content. You have to monetize the delivery system.

—
dustin curtis (@dcurtis) November 21, 2012

Medium is also focusing on curation and design

In many ways, Svbtle seems to be aimed at the same kind of market niche as Medium, the startup that Evan Williams founded last fall after leaving active duty at Twitter — where he was a co-founder and CEO — along with Biz Stone and Jason Goldman, both of whom were co-founders and/or early staffers at Twitter and Blogger. Reinventing blogging seems like a particularly fitting task for Williams, since Blogger (which was acquired by Google in 2003) was one of the early success stories in what was then a brand-new way of publishing and distributing content online.

And like the Svbtle network, Medium seems to be focusing on the curation process as a way of adding value to the blog market: it is invitation-only, although the company has said it plans to open up to more contributors in the future. And Medium recently hired a content editor, former literary agent Kate Lee, whose job appears to be finding new writers and encouraging them to blog on Medium — as well as perhaps finding ways of distributing that content in other forms such as ebooks. But much like Svbtle, the company hasn’t given many hints about how it plans to monetize its network.

Blog networks like Pajamas Media and others were a staple of the early days of blogging too, but most failed to achieve any kind of actual business success — although some managed to earn advertising revenue through ad networks like The Deck and Federated Media, which was an early backer of blogs like TechCrunch and Laughing Squid. The Huffington Post arguably started in the same way, with a core of unpaid bloggers that eventually became a business, and so did Talking Points Memo.

Can Svbtle or Medium find an alternate route to success, possibly by imitating the “artisanal” approach taken by entities like Marco Arment’s The Magazine, which is iOS-only? That remains to be seen. But one thing seems clear: just when you thought blogging was dead, someone comes along to reinvent it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter

“We have a similar mission to public media and good journalism outlets, but this isn’t just about saving public media or saving journalism. It’s about building a place for entrepreneurs to build something that makes people more informed and empowered,” Ford said in an interview Monday.

In other words, Ford is taking the spirit of innovation so ingrained in Silicon Valley and applying that to public information values often associated with outlets like The New York Times or Frontline, and the “future of journalism” conversation so often heard on the East Coast amid its glut of media companies.

Your startup might not have much to do with public radio or publishing, but you might still be a fit for Matter, which launched in San Francisco Monday. In other words, Ford wants to find the next Evan Williams and Biz Stone back when they were hanging out and coming up with an idea that would change the media world forever, when their idea for Twitter was brand new. Or David Karp and Tumblr. Or Perry Chen and Kickstarter. Or whatever else will change how people think about and share information.

Ford, who was an award-winning journalist with Frontline before teaching entrepreneurship at Stanford’s design school and starting Runway at Innovation Endeavors, isn’t going at it alone. While Matter (no relation to our former colleague Bobbie Johnson’s Matter startup) is structured like a typical accelerator, incubating companies for four months and giving them $50,000 in funding, it has backing from KQED, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Public Radio Exchange (PRX). KQED and the Knight Foundation have each put $1.25 million into the initial $2.5 million fund, and PRX will provide strategic support. Applications for interested companies are due by Jan. 6.

In a town populated by plenty of incubators and accelerators, how does Ford hope his venture will stand out? As much as he hopes applicants won’t feel too constrained by the public media focus, he said he thinks that focus will help the companies achieve more, by bringing in advisors who understand the market and challenges it brings, much as Rock Health does with health companies. Ford also said he thinks that having a very small entrepreneur class — only five companies — and a physical work space (something groups like Y Combinator eschew) will help the teams immensely.

“I fully believe that one of the biggest values that we’re bringing, and I don’t see it talked about much in other accelerators, is the culture and community that you build around your startup,” he said. “Money is important because it equates to time and runway. But it’s really about having a place where you can show up, and be better. And be much better rather than doing it alone. Because entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey.”

Ford said they picked the name of the accelerator, Matter, to signify what they are looking for in companies, and also where journalism should go.

“We said, what we needed badly was a brand that talked about what we care about, that preservers the value of public media, that we look back and say, that matters. That stands out in the signals and the noise,” he said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How to navigate the new world of digital advertising
• 10 ways big data changes everything
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

Called Medium, the new collaborative publishing tool lets different people contribute as much or as little as they want to themed “collections” of content. The idea, the founders said in a blog post Tuesday, is that people should be able to publish without “the burden of becoming a blogger” and worrying about developing an audience. The layout looks a lot like Pinterest, but contributions include both pictures and text.

“The Obvious Corporation decided to take on the project of building a new publishing platform from scratch, not just because it’s in our wheelhouse, but because we believe publishing—and media, more broadly—is important. It’s easy to forget this given how much pointless and destructive media is in the world. But there’s also more great stuff than ever before—and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what our smart devices and our networks that connect most of the planet might enable.”

Given the founders’ record of launching popular publishing platforms, it will be interesting to see how users respond to this latest venture. But it seems to be part of a growing trend to provide publishing tools that give people an easy way to express themselves through their own writing or curated content. Tumblr has amassed millions of users with a platform that allows people to post messages or images that are longer than a tweet but shorter than a blog post. Earlier this summer, Huffington Post’s former CTO launched social publishing platform RebelMouse.  And, CheckThis, a publishing platform that launched in Belgium and moved to New York this summer, also aims to give people a lighterweight way to publish online.

Currently, anyone with a Twitter account can read and provide feedback on the new platform but only a limited group of invited friends and family can post. The founders say they’ll open the pool of posters soon to those who register here.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social Media in the Enterprise
• The 2013 task management tools market
• How consumer media will change in 2013

I get too much credit for RSS and for Yelp, but the one thing that I can unashamedly claim to have invented is visual bookmarking, and more specifically the “choose images to thumbnail via a bookmarklet” method that Pinterest is based on. It’s not much of an “invention” per se. It’s a moronically simple thing, but it’s the right moronically simple thing. And given that more than one billion dollars rests on the idea, maybe it’s worth looking back at its history.

Wists’s service was originally dubbed “visual bookmarks.” Later we used the term “social shopping,” since people were mainly using Wists to share wish lists of things they wanted to buy. The original revenue model was via affiliate links. Wists used Skimlinks, the same affiliate aggregator that Pinterest adopted (then dropped).

To use Wists, you signed up and installed a bookmarklet that you clicked on while browsing other websites. This allowed you to collect images by simply clicking on them. You could then add a description, view these images as a thumbnail gallery, and share them with friends. (The site is still running, but it’s an old rickety shell.) The flow was almost exactly the same as Pinterest except that the metaphor was slightly different. Wists was used as a platform to power product blogs, such as Cribcandy and the visual lists site, Oobject.

There were several other visual bookmark sites that later appeared, including Kaboodle, Stylehive and later, ThisNext, but each of these was less like Pinterest in terms of flow.

Right before I moved from San Francisco to New York City, I worked out of the Obvious Corporation’s offices for a week. At the time, the team had just launched Twitter. I visited the re-incarnated Obvious Corp. a month ago, and Biz Stone asked me why I’d shown them Wists and said it was a piece of crap when clearly the concept had legs. Was that a self-deprecating Brit thing? The short answer is that the quick and dirty prototype that I’d partially written myself (on top of a much better version written by Yaroslav Faybishenko) looked like crap. I’m a designer not a developer, so I was embarrassed to show something unfinished — even though I wanted to finish it. It was as if I was an architect and I’d tried to lay bricks rather than design the wall. I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t. If I said it was great (even though I believed in the concept), I could look like a bad designer. And if I said it was crap, it would be hard to acquire the resources to make a good version. The lesson here is only deliver as much as you can finish and do well.

Wists was also too early. The big social networks weren’t in place yet for the site to leverage off of. Still, it started to grow on its own, with exactly the same early adopters that Pinterest attracted five years later — Etsy users, crafts people and, above all, women. It also managed to get reasonable PR. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal covered it, largely because the term “social shopping” sounded particularly lucrative. Instead of raising money, I wanted to bootstrap a lifestyle business and do things on the cheap. My friend Graham Hill had a great time building Treehugger from scratch and exited successfully, and I hoped to do the same. In retrospect, however, no matter how simple the product, a consumer Internet application is not like a content site. It requires bespoke software and scaling, and it needs funding if it’s getting traction.

Lastly, Wists didn’t have the pinning metaphor that people have claimed is important. But despite what marketers will say, this part of Pinterest’s resonance is largely irrelevant, because the craftsters who were early Wist adopters and evangelists got it fine without the pinning metaphor. I suspect that because Pinterest isn’t very different, quantitatively speaking, from some of the applications that preceded it, people latch onto the only thing that is new about it. Pinterest is a success because it is qualitatively different and properly timed. It had proper resources to make it work well and scale at a time when the market was ready for it. The lesson to be learned here is that first to market is not as important as sometimes claimed. Most successful Internet platforms are second or third generation versions of an earlier idea.

So Wists was early, and it was never built into much more than a prototype. Pinterest really works. It’s a good, fast, snappy product that scales with the technical demands caused by “many to many” social features, and that is all there is to it. When people look for the special sauce that helps some sites displace others — why Google trumped Altavista or Facebook beat Friendster — they miss the obvious fact that “simple” and “works” go a long way.

The reason I’m sanguine, however, is that Pinterest’s success with the visual bookmark model has opened up a new crack in the ecosystem that will allow others to innovate further. Traditionally, stores have been both a showcase for a curated selection of items and a place that handles transactions and inventory storage. I think that e-commerce may now experience significant disruption as shops are curated online, separating logistics from showcasing. Online stores will be more like product galleries, and there are opportunities to build platforms for these. In the future, experts with an online “voice,” and people we are genuinely familiar with, may endorse items in lists of curated links. These curators will replace some aspects of celebrity endorsements in retail promotion. E-commerce services that handle the transaction and logistics could then pass a commission on to the curator for each sale — the CPA model of Skimlinks. I believe that this is a long term change in the nature of retail, and I’ll be creating something to fulfill this opportunity at Curations.com.

In a post tomorrow, I will examine the evolution of visual bookmarks and grid sites, and how those websites paved the way for Pinterest’s massive success.

David Galbraith is an architect turned tech entrepreneur. He is the co-creator of RSS and co-founder of Moreover, Yelp, Mocoms and Curations.

Image courtesy of  Flickr user Mykl Roventine.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The state of cross-platform media measurement
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1