GigaOM » content discovery

Tumblr turns toward user-driven discovery with improved sharing, Pocket and Instapaper support

Laura Hazard Owen — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:11:01 +0000

Tumblr is making it easier to save content to read for later, with updates to its iOS app released Wednesday. The updated version of the app now lets users save Tumblr posts to Pocket and Instapaper and share them via Facebook, Twitter and other services. Users can also email the full text of a post to someone else.

The iOS app’s improved sharing features are likely intended to help users drive discovery. Tumblr shut down its Storyboard project, which was designed to surface interesting editorial content, earlier this month. Tumblr CEO David Karp said at the paidContent Live conference last week that the company wants to help users discover this content themselves, but “we don’t want to say what great content is, or these are our favorite blogs.” And the integration with Pocket and Instapaper suggests that Tumblr sees itself not just as a platform for short, image-heavy posts and videos but also as a home to longer text-based content that people will want to stick around and read for awhile.

Separately, Pocket rolled out its own send-to-friend feature last week. The feature lets users email content directly from Pocket’s apps, and if the recipients are also Pocket users, the shared articles will show up within their app.

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What the Last.fm founders did next: scrobble the web

David Meyer — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 11:00:58 +0000

Alongside the U.S.-centric Pandora, Last.fm was a pioneer in the web music-streaming space. Its core function, ‘scrobbling’, even threatened to become a widely-used word at one point. These days the company is trying to find its feet again, but co-founders Felix Miller and Martin Stiksel are onto a new project now, called Lumi.

Where Last.fm was all about recommending new music based on the user’s tastes (which were recorded through the aforementioned scrobbling), Lumi is trying to do the same thing for general web content. Only this time it’s even more of a sit-back experience: all the user needs to do is install a Chrome, Firefox or Safari browser plugin and let it watch pretty much everything he or she does online, barring the secure and private stuff.

“Ever since we left Last.fm, we were thinking about applying this concept and mix of technology on a much larger basis, to help people discover all sorts of content,” Stiksel told me. “How we are trying to do this is by allowing people to anonymously record their browsing data with Lumi to let Lumi know what things you are interested in. It’s the Last.fm concept applied to all sorts of web content.”

The service is very much in prototype phase right now, which is why Lumi is looking for early-birds to try using it over the next few weeks, to see what happens. As with all machine-learning systems, nothing valuable comes out until a good deal of data goes in. Lumi needs to see what people look at online.

Lumi co-founders Martin Stiksel and Felix Miller. Photo credit: Héloïse Faure

“This will take a little time; it’s going to be far from perfect at the start and might be a bit bumpy for quite some time,” a blog post from the pair reads. “But as more content gets introduced to Lumi, we’re sure Lumi will be able to find interesting and relevant stuff for you.”

How does it work? There, the two get tight-lipped, although Stiksel hinted to me that they were “using a bunch of technologies and seeing what works”. What they do stress is that it’s all about effortlessness – it doesn’t require you to rate content, like StumbleUpon does.

Privacy is naturally a concern so, as with other omniscient services such as Archify, Lumi is keen to tout its security credentials. “We assure you that your browsing activity is secure, completely anonymized, and only ever accessible by you,” the blog post reads.

It’s hard to tell how this will turn out. Indeed, I get the impression from Miller and Stiksel that even they aren’t fully sure where it’ll end up – that seems to be one point of this new testing phase. What I can say is that web content recommendation is threatening to become a hot market again, what with the advent of Lumi and Futureful, which we covered last month.

Give it a year or two. It seems a burning question down the line will be this: who’s better at recommending content, machines or your friends?

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Survey: Weigh in on the state of Twitter

Jenn Marston — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 16:46:56 +0000

With 140 million active users, Twitter is inarguably a mainstream communications technology. It is playing an increasingly important role in news and content discovery, and it has spawned a business ecosystem of third-party developers and services creating apps and data analysis. But Twitter is generating controversy around its developer and user policies as it expands, and it feels as though the company is at a crossroads.

Give us your thoughts by filling out the survey below.

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Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:55:19 +0000

Media issues like advertising and discovery along with commerce dominated the activity in social and real-time Web technologies during the first quarter of 2012. Google raised some hackles, Facebook responded to demands from traditional advertisers, and Yahoo got a new chief executive. The quarter also saw Pinterest, the newest social media star, showing signs of staying power; it is starting to be a force in content discovery. This report examines these trends and more, as well as provides a near-term outlook for the next 12 to 18 months.

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NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:39:31 +0000

The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Outbrain raises $35M for content discovery platform

Ryan Kim — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 13:00:41 +0000

Outbrain, a content discovery platform that helps online publishers drive engagement, has raised $35 million in a Series D round led by Index Ventures with participation from existing investors Carmel Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. That brings Outbrain’s total funding to $64 million dollars.

Outbrain provides publishers with links to relevant and personalized content that helps promote their own stuff and highlight interesting content on other sites. Publishers can build more engagement on their own site and profit from paid links that take people to other publishers who advertise with Outbrain. Outbrain’s recommendations are viewed more than 3.5 billion times each month and generate more than 200 million monthly clicks for publishers such as CNN, Fox News, hearts, MSNBC and others.

The new funding will help Outbrain extend further into online video and mobile web, while building up its business development team and expanding overseas.

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How publishers must adapt to multiple content discovery options

David Card — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:43:14 +0000

Last week, companies including Google, Facebook and NetShelter introduced new products and services that, while unrelated, all promise to be new vehicles for web content discovery. And with so many new offerings coming to market, content companies must evaluate whether and how to best use services like news reader apps (Google Currents and mobile Flipboard), social sharing mechanisms, etc., to achieve objectives like audience acquisition, content engagement and revenue.

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YouTube’s new challenge: connecting users & channels

Ryan Lawler — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 22:46:45 +0000

YouTube introduced a new homepage Thursday that puts more of a focus on personalization and social features, highlighting the content that’s most relevant to its users. But it does a poor job of showing off all the new content that YouTube is investing heavily in.

The state of the new YouTube homepage

For YouTube regulars — the people who tune in every day and use the homepage as a way to keep track of content from channels that they’ve subscribed to or those that their friends have liked or commented on — the new design might offer a better user experience. But for more casual YouTube users, who only check the site when someone has shared a link with them or if they’ve searched for a certain piece of content, the new design could serve as a roadblock for content discovery.

Check out the new homepage, which looks about the same whether a user is logged in or not:

It used to be that the front page of YouTube.com was a great place for more casual viewers to see a list of videos that are popular across the site. It was also a way for YouTube to highlight featured videos, and could serve as a way to introduce them to videos they may not have seen or channels they may not have heard of.

How other sites work

Compare the YouTube user experience — which is all about self-selected feeds, subscriptions and friend connections — with what you see on Netflix or Hulu. Those sites use the home page as a starting point to content discovery, whether it be through personalized recommendations, as is often the case on Netflix, or through featured and popular content on Hulu.

In Hulu’s case, viewers can add shows to a queue that allows them to keep track of new episodes when they become available. Netflix users can also add videos to a queue for viewing later, but most of its efforts are centered around providing better recommendations when a user logs in to the front page.

YouTube’s new homepage experience, by contrast, is only about content that you already know you like and want to watch. In that respect, it would be like if Netflix showed a user’s streaming queues as the first point of entry, or if Hulu took the user directly to its list of show subscriptions, without suggesting new or more recent content.

Where are all of YouTube’s new channels?

The redesign might make sense if YouTube were still just a place for users to find viral, user-generated videos or to keep tabs on their favorite vloggers. But the Google-owned site is embarking on an ambitious plan to become a next-generation content company.

YouTube is reportedly spending more than $100 million on 100 new original channels. But you’d never know it, based on the new homepage design. The design provides more social features and a more personalized feed of content, but it lacks the ability for YouTube to showcase all of the new content that it’s paying big bucks for.

YouTube lists some suggested channels on the homepage, but they’re hidden below the fold. It also has a page of recommended and select channels for users to connect with, but once that process is completed, there’s no telling whether users will go back and add more potential channels of interest.

A strategic miss?

In terms of product direction, the latest version of the homepage seems to be just one step further in what has been a consistent move toward greater personalization for users. And let’s be honest — YouTube to date has been doing pretty damn well with that strategy and with its ability to get users to its content. According to comScore, YouTube had more than 20 billion video views in October.

The problem with YouTube’s new homepage isn’t that it’s bad, per se, but that it doesn’t jive with the company’s plans to introduce a new, programmed channels throughout its site. With so much of a focus on personalization and so little focus on discoverability, it’s almost as though its product and business strategies are at odds with each other. After all, why spend so much on original content if you’re going to make it so hard to find? And why redesign your homepage if you’re not going to use it to feature all the great new content you’re acquiring?

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:01:08 +0000

Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically.

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NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:01:28 +0000

Last quarter’s big headline in social media and real-time technologies came from Google, which launched Google+, its first social tech product that seems legit. In the third quarter, things were back to normal. Google+ is still growing, but Facebook’s platform update dominated the news. And as Google+ passed 25 million users and won some raves from the digerati, its competition with Facebook intensified. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Zynga, Salesforce, BranchOut and Foursquare. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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