A few months ago I heard about Wanelo and downloaded the app to give it a spin. At its simplest, Wanelo is exactly like Pinterest — except you can click through to purchase anything posted to the site. But when I first installed the app, I was greeted with photos of cut-off shorts, backless dresses, cat pictures, sparkly nail polish, and the like. It was like a 13-year old girl’s heaven. But it wasn’t exactly my style. I couldn’t figure out how to make the main feed reflect my tastes, and I quickly lost interest.

On Tuesday, the company is altering its formula to help people get into Wanelo more quickly, changing the signup process to show people how to follow brands and people (which I struggled with on the old version), and then showing users their curated feeds as the default page of the app rather than what’s trending generally on Wanelo.

Wanelo was founded in 2010 by CEO Deena Varshavskaya but has exploded in popularity in recent months primarily among teenaged and early-20′s women. The company has grown from 1 million registered users in November to 8 million in May, which wouldn’t necessarily mean much, but the company reports that users spend an average of 50 minutes a day on Wanelo. Even among a small group of users, that’s a lot of time, when you consider people spend about 30 minutes a day on Facebook. And a Twitter search for the word “Wanelo” is essentially a feed of (primarily women) discussing their Wanelo addictions.

Varshavskaya said women in the primary age group for Wanelo were becoming obsessed with the app, and as soon as they opened it, they felt at home among the products shown on the trending page. But for anyone else who doesn’t dig sparkles, it was harder to show them the appeal of Wanelo.

“For them, the feed is an amazing, addictive experience,” Varshavskaya said. “For them it’s an awesome first experience. But the downside is that the trending feed cannot by definition work for everyone.”

It seems the re-design fixes the initial signup challenges, but the obvious question is still how Wanelo can distinguish itself from Pinterest, which has raised a lot of money at this point and is pretty much the default social network for saving images and products on the web right now.

Varshavskaya and Wanelo’s investors, which include prominent names like Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures and Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, are quick to explain their confidence in the company. Wanelo is fundamentally oriented toward commerce and transactions rather than aspirational photos like Pinterest or Tumblr, Varshavskaya said. And it’s true that if you’re looking to purchase an attractive item and want inspiration, Amazon might not be your best bet, and it’s frustrating when you click a link on Pinterest and discover that it’s broken.

So what’s the future for Wanelo? The company seems ripe for acquisition, either by Pinterest itself or another shopping site like Amazon looking to get into social shopping. Pinterest will surely add a commerce component soon, and while it will be a challenge for Pinterest to transition from a site full of photos to a site with shoppable links, it’s surely a challenge the company will try to solve.

And as much as I got into the new Wanelo app, I still found myself saving aspirational items like an $1,800 necklace. Which feels pretty much how people use Pinterest.

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In a recent interview, CEO Steven Kotok explained how The Week has bucked the fate of the troubled magazine industry, and how the publication plans to stay relevant in the future.

An American Aggregator

The idea of a “weekly” news magazine seems quaint in the age of the internet, but The Week has carved out a niche by distilling current events into a smart bundle of excerpts and opinions. It aspires to provide tight writing and snappy headlines that let readers feel in-the-know about news, culture and policy.

According to Kotok, this style of curation was considered a “weird thing” when The Week launched and the site had to persuade advertisers it was viable. Now, nearly publication does it one form or another  – a situation that would seem to erode The Week’s strategic advantage. But Kotok says the publication is still growing its subscription base by catering to a distinct “psychographic” (read: affluent, educated folks) and by promoting a left-right political discourse.

“Kids buy it for their parents and vice versa. You might buy it for your conservative uncle or your liberal nice – it’s a way to get the other side in.”

The pitch appears to be working. The company says it has a rate base of 550,000 readers and annual revenues of about $50 million. It says it has had annual profits of between $4 million and $5 million in each of the last three years.

Most of that profit is coming from home subscription sales (fewer than 1% of its readers come by way of a newsstand) but, increasingly, The Week is looking to the web to make money.

Building the digital domain

With a few exceptions, like the Atlantic, legacy print titles have fared badly online – slow starting and caught between two worlds, they lose to digital natives.

In the case of The Week, Kotok admits it was late to develop a web strategy, but says its site is now profitable. Citing February comScore numbers of 2.3 million unique visitors, he says The Week has surpassed the Economist in two of the last three months.

The Week’s website doesn’t reproduce the magazine’s content but instead offers a stream of smart, snackable news bites along with “Guilty Clicks” from around the web (“Do we really need a drone hoodie”, Ke$ha, etc). The online fare is produced by a separate group of writers that represent about half of The Week‘s 29-person editorial team.

The site earns its keep by selling advertising to major companies like IBM, Xerox and Zurich Insurance but also serves as a vehicle to heavily promote its print cousin. Kotok credits the site with bringing in $1 million a year worth of magazine subscriptions.

On the tablet front, Kotok says iPad advertising and subscriptions (access is free for print subscribers) are producing almost $1 million in sales but that the Apple relationship is difficult. “It’s hard because we’re used to having a reader relationship but Apple controls that. Sometimes they promote you and sometimes they don’t.”

The future: commerce not a tin cup

Having discovered that readers are not put off by price increases — The Week‘s average annual price has risen from $30 to $50 in the last six years — Kotok says he is now focused on revenue rather than subscriber growth. Gift subscriptions, which are a big part of The Week’s business, will be an ongoing source of income but, in the long run, the company still confronts a magazine business that is in wide and permanent decline.

The Week also faces a more immediate challenge in the Post Office’s plan to end delivery on Saturday (the day the magazine arrives in readers’ mailboxes). Kotok says he can meet the Saturday challenge by shifting production schedules, but that the publication is also focusing on developing other revenue streams – a tactic that is becoming necessary to media outlets of all kinds.

For now, he says, that will not include a paywall or donations experiment of the sort being conducted by Andrew Sullivan. Instead, The Week is betting on ecommerce to compliment its editorial strategy. “We won’t put out a tin cup. Many of our subscriptions are gifts so our ecommerce will be too,” Kotok says, suggesting that The Week fans will buy each other t-shirts, books and more.

The Week’s ecommerce experiment will be helped by its 2011 acquisition of Mental Floss magazine, which has an online store that brings in 30% of its $10 million. Items for sale include smart people t-shirts (“Pi Hard,” “Spell Czech”) and quiz books. In its push into retail, the company will be joining the likes of Gawker Media and Thrillist, which are likewise trying to leverage content into ecommerce.

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In case you missed it, here’s Flipboard’s explanation and demonstration of its new capabilities:

It’s not if, but when

Now don’t get me wrong, Flipboard is no Facebook. Its 50 million-ish user base isn’t particularly active  (though I estimate only around 4 million are active, based on ratios from previous public statements). Not yet, anyway. And thank God, or the media/publishing industry would likely have a significant crisis on its hands, as opposed to one that’s somewhat in the distance still.

The reality the publishing needs to understand, though, is that Flipboard has (smartly) maneuvered itself into a powerful position. With the flick of a switch, it could deal a serious blow not only to the traditional old media but also to a variety of digital platforms – Tumblr, Flickr, WordPress, among others – as it pivots from purely curation-based interaction to one that offers users full-blown creation abilities. Indeed, this is likely its only future, since without the agreement of the major content creators, Flipboard would be little more than a collection of Tweets and blog posts.

It’s about money

Currently the ad model Flipboard is using is fine, but it’s fair to say it’s not setting anyone’s world on fire. That could change in a heartbeat, though, if the magazines Regular Joes create take off and real readerships are built. Could the next powerhouse of media come from a bedroom in Delaware?

It’s safe to assume then that the company is actively exploring revenue paths behind closed doors right now: micropayments, revenue-share or even subscriptions. Imagine consumers subscribing to read other consumer-curated magazines, or locking down content only to be opened like mag apps are now, or as in-app purchases per gaming, or even geo-location apps (Grindr). At the end of the day, though, it’s crucial to note that Flipboard has what no other publisher does: love from Apple, and quite possibly the credit card numbers that go with that love.

It’s about attention

Bless anyone in the media for not believing that this move hasn’t just made their job far harder. A reminder: You’ve just received yet another huge set of competitors vying for the same eyeballs you covet. If history is anything to go by, most people already feel quite satisfied parsing news (á la Google News) so this shift should be sending chills of terror through professional curators like editors and writers. After all, going big is likely only a creative ad campaign away for Flipboard.

Another major feature that news reports of Flipboard’s update typically neglected to mention is the bookmarklet capability. The idea is that readers don’t even have to be on Flipboard to still add content, from anywhere on the web. Awesome for users, existentially terrifying (and awesome) for the media.

Content creation is coming

So what to do? True, full-featured content creation capabilities are doubtless coming to Flipboard. How aggressive Flipboard moves in that area will be interesting, as the company obviously has to be careful about biting the hand that feeds it. (In fact several publishers have already pulled back from the partnerships, choosing instead to focus on their own apps). The only way for publishers and the media to fight back then will be to remove articles from the system, or cut a deal. However, I have said it before and I’ll say it again: No paywall will ever be truly successful unless all the competition is paywalled, too.

Either way, we have a glimpse of a possible future and it’s both beautiful and terrifying. For those unconvinced of the power and implications of what I’m talking about, take a minute to check out the custom @themediaisdying magazine that I cobbled together in precisely 33 seconds and you’ll see what I mean. Now imagine what happens when tens of millions of people start doing the same.

Paul Armstrong is owner of Digital Orange Consulting; follow him at www.paularmstrong.net or on Twitter @TheMediaIsDying.

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As we tried to point out in our post, Flipboard’s new version is more than just an evolution, it’s a significant departure from what the service was all about. Until now, it has been about making it easy to discover and consume content from multiple sources, but the new features are all about turning readers into publishers — by giving them curation tools like those used by Flipboard’s own editors.

When advertisers become publishers

Flipboard’s move may seem like an obvious step, and one which combines some of the appeal of services like Pinterest or Tumblr. But depending on how Flipboard decides to proceed with these features, they could be very disruptive indeed. Here’s a couple of ways they could do that:

1) Advertising: Flipboard’s curation and publishing tools are not just for individual users, but corporations, existing publishers and brands — and one overlooked element of the launch is that Flipboard is building e-commerce functionality into the app. Chief technology officer Eric Feng said some advertisers are already creating their own magazines using both their own ads and content from other sources. Those magazines could then be selected and highlighted by Flipboard’s algorithms just like any other effort by a Flipboard user.

We’ve written a lot about the phenomenon of “native” advertising (and will be talking more about it at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York) as well as related concepts like sponsored content and what some call “brand journalism.” The idea is that brands and advertisers now have all of the same tools that traditional publishers used to have a monopoly on — that is, the ability to create and distribute interesting content and reach audiences directly. If a brand can curate content itself, and have its own ads with e-commerce features built in, why does it need a traditional magazine?

Revenue sharing with curators

2) Revenue: Flipboard already has some partnerships with media companies in which it gets to use more of their content directly in the app (instead of showing just short excerpts and then a “web view” in a browser) in return for a share of advertising revenue. When I asked Eric Feng whether Flipboard might consider doing a revenue share with individual users if they create compelling magazines from curated content, he said “that is something we are thinking about doing at some point in the future.” That’s not a promise, but it’s still an interesting idea, and potentially very disruptive in a number of ways.

If Flipboard provides the content and the tools, and the users who curate that content are generating a lot of value in terms of pageviews or “likes,” or whatever metric you want to use, shouldn’t those users get some benefit? Where this gets problematic is how Flipboard decides who gets what share of the revenue. If the ads come from a traditional media outlet, do they get the largest share or does Flipboard? And if media companies don’t want to play ball, does Flipboard just monetize their content anyway, the way Huffington Post and other aggregators do?

The idea that advertisers now have many of the same tools as publishers and traditional media companies do, and that readers and consumers of content also have much more power over that content than they used to, are two pretty inescapable facts about the new media landscape — and Flipboard has just staked a claim to some significant territory on both of those fronts.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / JJ Studio and Shutterstock / Eldorado3D

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As part of its upgrade to version 4.0 of its service, Springpad on Wednesday unveiled a notebook-embedding feature for publishers and brands. The idea is that brands will create notebooks full of relevant content for their customers and then post those notebooks on their websites. Customers can browse and interact with those notebooks just as they would through Springpad’s web and mobile apps, and if they find something they like they can save those notebooks into their own Springpad libraries.

For instance, one of Springpad’s new partners, Glamour, is using embedded notebooks to aggregate everything from beauty tips and shopping list suggestions to specific articles on fashions or product pages. Customers never have to leave Glamour’s site to explore that notebook, but if they want to save the notebook it will be copied into a new or existing Springpad account. There the notebook lives on the user’s library – every time Glamour updates it, the customer’s digital copy reflects the new content.

Springpad co-founder and VP of Business Development Jeff Janer said that brands have long been taking advantage of social media and curation services to promote their content and products, but while Facebook and Pinterest generate an awful lot of traffic, there’s limited follow-through. For instance, many customers may “like” a brand’s Facebook profile, but there’s little chance they’ll return to it after the initial liking. Pinterest is a great way for brands to display their wares in a visually appealing way, but beyond the visual, there are few options for displaying other forms of content.

While embedded notebooks are initially targeted at companies  and advertising agencies that will pay Springpad for the service, Janer said they’re just a first step in the startup’s strategy to make all of its user-organized content portable. Right now a lot of loose information flows into Springpad, gets organized and then stays in Springpad. The company wants to encourage users to take those notebooks outside Springpad’s confines and show the world their organizational labors, Janer said.

Right now, anyone can embed a notebook into a Facebook page, but Janer said Springpad is working with blogging platforms and other social networks to increase its reach. Eventually Springpad hopes to make posting a notebook anywhere on the web as easy as embedding a YouTube video.

Springpad 4.0 isn’t quite a facelift of last year’s 3.0 upgrade, which effectively turned Springpad from a note-taking service into a social networking and collaboration tool. But it is supporting another nifty new feature: intent-based search. Springpad has created new search categories that parse a user’s content based on specific interests or activities.

For instance, if you want to be entertained, you can hit the “watch something” button and Springpad will dig up every movie or TV show you’ve ever “sprung” and display them in a menu. Any movie or show that is available instantly through Netflix will pop up on top. Movies that are available for rent or purchase on iTunes or Amazon will appear next. And finally showtimes and prices for films in the theater will appear at the bottom.

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Chief technology officer Eric Feng said in an interview prior to the launch of the new version that this is much more than just an evolution of Flipboard — it’s a major push into a whole new area, namely curation and publishing of content by individual users. “It’s one of the most ambitious efforts we have ever undertaken,” said the former CTO of Hulu. “It’s been more than 18 months since the inception of the idea, so this is a pretty big deal for us. We were originally focused on discovery and filtering of content, but now we are moving into curation in a big way.”

Flipboard has always had curated topics such as technology and sports, where the service uses a combination of human editors and algorithms — based on frequency of sharing and other metrics — to highlight specific content. In effect, the new tools allow any Flipboard user to take on the same role as an editor and create their own magazine around a topic, and share it with other users.

Reader magazines get promoted in Flipboard

In a nutshell, users with the new features (which are available only for iPhone and iPad currently, but will appear in an Android version soon, according to the company) can simply click a “plus” sign next to a blog post or article they are reading — as well as any video or audio content that appears in their stream — and add that piece of content or “flip it into” to a magazine, which will then be available to them or any other user who searches for that topic.

And Flipboard isn’t just giving users that ability within the app: the service is also launching a bookmarklet that will allow users to pull in content from anywhere on the web — whether it’s a blog post, a news website or Twitter and Facebook — and add it to their custom-created magazine. In a sense, Flipboard is trying to capitalize on the same curatorial impulse that makes people create collections about specific topics on Pinterest or re-blog photos on Tumblr, and in many ways this move is a shot across the bow of those other services.

It’s also clearly a threat to the existing publishing industry, since a Flipboard user can now create their own custom publication using the content that comes from dozens of different magazines, blogs, websites and other sources. So Flipboard is trying to bring publishers in as well and get them to create their own custom magazines — such as a magazine about the Beatles created with archival content from Rolling Stone. It has even built e-commerce functionality into the app so users can click and buy directly from within an article or ad.

But the most subversive aspect of the new features from a media-industry point of view is that they can be used by anyone — including advertisers. If an advertiser can create their own magazine by pulling in their own editorial content as well as content from other sources, and build e-commerce functionality into it, then it gives new meaning to the idea of brands as publishers and media entities.

Bringing users into the editorial process

The new version of the app will have a section called “By Our Readers” in the table of contents, which will include a mix of magazines that have been created by users on a variety of topics — a small group of beta testers (including GigaOM) have had access to this function for several months. As with the other Flipboard sections, some of the magazines that are highlighted will be chosen based on the number of times they have been shared, and others will be chosen by editors.

Like most news-aggregation and recommendation apps such as Pulse and Zite (which is owned by CNN), Flipboard users have always had the ability to share specific stories or items, but the new magazine-creation features effectively allow a user to spend some time creating a collection of content they can then share all at once. Feng used the example of an editor who is getting married soon and created an entire magazine with content about weddings.

In a way, the new version of the app also picks up where Google Reader and other RSS services left off. Instead of just passively consuming text and photos in a chronological timeline or series of folders, Flipboard turns everything into part of a magazine-style experience. According to Feng, many users have already imported their Google Reader feeds into the app, and those feeds will be available once Google sunsets the service in July.

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In his post at Digiday, entitled “Surviving the Media Aggregation Economy,” Morrissey argues that we are trapped in a digital-media environment based on boosting pageviews to draw more advertising, and that this has “taken publishers hostage.” Publishers like Business Insider, he says, have taken this approach to its logical conclusion and generate a lot of their revenue by repurposing content created by others. In one case, Business Insider posted a screenshot of a Digiday post along with a paragraph lifted from the original, and put a new headline on it. Says Morrissey:

“The result: It generated 224 pageviews for the Digiday story. Along the way, BI banked another 1,500-plus pageviews — and that many ‘welcome ad’ impressions along with multiple banners and a ‘native’ video ad. Meanwhile, Digiday’s original post — thought up and executed by our staff — got 2,500 pageviews. Is this a fair trade?”

It’s more efficient to aggregate than create

Morrissey goes on to note that Blodget likes to brag about how efficient his publishing platform is, and how his site gets an average of 180,000 pageviews per day per employee — orders of magnitude larger than many traditional media players such as the New York Times or Bloomberg. But the Digiday editor says much of this efficiency is driven by Business Insider’s repurposing of content created by others (Note: We’re going to be discussing alternate forms of monetization for content at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17). As Morrissey puts it in his post:

“Based on my experience, I can’t help but wonder if BI’s “efficiency” is bought at the expense of others. It’s like European countries bragging about low defense spending while relying on the U.S. to do the heavy lifting through NATO. It’s easy to be efficient when you draft off others.”

The debate expanded to Twitter when Blodget responded to Morrissey’s complaint, and suggested that if the Digiday editor was concerned about the screenshot of the images that appeared in the original, Business Insider would be happy to take them out. But Morrissey said his point was that the whole approach is wrong:

Business Insider argues Digiday should be grateful

Blodget argued that publishers like Digiday should be interested in exposing their content to as many different readers and potential readers as possible, and therefore Morrissey should be glad that Business Insider excerpted the post and included a link — something the Business Insider founder compared to a story that appears at Google News, or to the New York Times running a story based on a Wall Street Journal scoop:

Morrissey said that he was happy to have sites link to his content, provided they drove readers in substantial enough numbers, and that he was a big fan of the aggregation site Mediagazer as well as LinkedIn’s content portal. But in his post he noted that Business Insider had gotten close to 100,000 pageviews from content “aggregated” from Digiday, while the latter got a relatively minuscule 14,000 pageviews from Business Insider’s links.

Aggregation is a reality, whether we like it or not

It’s probably fair to say that versions of this debate have been going on for almost as long as the web has been around: questions about “link juice” and the “link economy,” in which traffic driven by an aggregator is supposed to make up for the alleged insult of excerpting their content, and so on. The Huffington Post used to be the poster child for what some have called “over-aggregation,” but now that mantle seems to have passed to Business Insider. And some believe that regardless of whether or not such behavior is legal or permitted under copyright law, it is unethical:

As I’ve tried to point out before, aggregation or curation is a fact of life in the digital age — just as record companies have had to learn to live with rampant downloading and sharing of music, publishers of all kinds are trying to get used to the idea that their content is no longer under their control. In some cases, aggregation fulfills a useful function, as it did in one notorious case involving a Forbes post by Kashmir Hill that was based on a New York Times feature. In other cases, the usefulness is debatable.

As Morrissey points out in his piece, until the financing model for online media involves something other than pure pageview-driven advertising revenue, aggregation is unlikely to stop. The only protection is to have content whose value can’t be summed up in a screenshot or a paragraph excerpt, and a relationship with your readers that is based on more than just how many pageviews you can generate. (Note: There’s a Storify of Blodget and Morrissey’s full conversation here).

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Zurijeta

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In his post, Battelle describes how his thinking has been influenced by some of the recent offerings Twitter has come up with around broadcast events — such as the “Oscars Index,” (a partnership with Topsy) which tracks the sentiment around the Oscar-nominated movies and personalities leading up to the Academy Awards by analyzing tweets about them. Although he doesn’t mention it, Twitter also recently announced an even more ambitious effort to create a verified “Twitter TV Rating” for TV shows as part of a partnership with media-metrics company Nielsen.

Having lots of data is great — relevance is better

The Federated Media founder points out quite rightly that one of the things that makes Twitter a potential gold mine — both for media companies and for advertisers — is the number of signals that the network can accumulate about users, their behavior and their interests. More than half a billion tweets a day is a lot of data, and somewhere in the midst of that are the keys to delivering better content, and better advertising (which is increasingly becoming the same thing, a topic we’ll be discussing at paidContent Live in New York on April 17). As Battelle puts it in his post:

“Twitter presents a massive search problem/opportunity. For example, Twitter’s gotten better and better at what’s called “entity extraction” – identifying a person, place, or thing, then associating behaviors and attributes around that thing… Real time entity extraction crossed with signals like those described above is the Holy Grail.”

This is fundamentally the same goal that both Google and Facebook are focused on as well: how do you show users only things that are relevant to them, and hide those that aren’t — in real time? Facebook has gotten criticism for the way it tweaks the news feed based on its algorithms, but the reality is that most users don’t want to see everything that streams through their networks. And Google started its Google+ social network, and built it into everything it does, in part because it needs more data signals about its users.

The problem for all of these companies is that doing this is really, really hard — every user’s stream consists of billions of data signals, and deciphering which are meaningful and which aren’t is a complicated business. To get a sense of how difficult it is, all you have to do is look at Twitter’s “Discover” tab, or the “Trends” listings, or look at the promoted tweets and promoted trends that show up in your stream (of course, Facebook is almost as bad with its sponsored pages, and it has orders of magnitude more data).

Relevance is the key to digital media

As Battelle notes, Twitter has gotten better at discovery, and the revamped version of its Discover tab is better than it used to be — and so are the suggestions Twitter sends to users for other accounts they should follow. But the Discover tab in particular is still light-years away from where it needs to be in order for it to be a compelling content-discovery mechanism for users, and the curated email newsletter Twitter sends out is even worse: it shows me Canadian news because I live in Toronto, even though it knows (or should) that I rarely ever tweet about that topic.

Simply put, relevance is the key attribute for any digital-media entity in the 21st century. Newspapers and other traditional sources of content are terrible at suggesting or curating relevant content for individual readers, but no one really expects them to be any good at it — they have zero experience in doing that. Twitter, however, has enough data that it arguably should be much better than it is. And it needs to get there quickly, before Google or Facebook (or god forbid, even Yahoo) get much better.

Coming up with visualizations about the Oscars or highlighting tweets about NASCAR may be useful for reeling in big media brands, but users are going to need a little more than that before they trust Twitter to curate content for them.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn and John Battelle

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When Twitter first released its new API rules in August — and changed what had been guidelines into hard-and-fast requirements about the way tweets are displayed, among other things — the company specifically said that Storify was an example of a service that added value to Twitter in a useful way, and therefore wasn’t at risk of being shut down or restricted like some other applications. Although the infamous “quadrant of death” graph that was published around this time made it seem as though Storify could be caught by the new restrictions, director of platform Ryan Sarver said that Storify was safe.

When I dropped in on co-founders Burt Herman and Xavier Damman recently in San Francisco and asked them about the potential for future conflict with Twitter, they said they were happy that the company had highlighted them as adding value, but both still seemed somewhat uneasy about the future — although Damman’s earlier response to a similar question (asked on Twitter, of course) shows that he sees any competition from the company as a challenge rather than a disaster:

@mathewi we can’t wait. Ask @foursquare what they think of @facebook entering the check-in space. It can only make us stronger. #ona12

—
Xavier Damman (@xdamman) September 22, 2012

Trying to become less reliant on Twitter’s API

I asked Herman about both of these potential issues in a follow-up phone interview — an audio recording of which is embedded below — and he said Storify believes that it is doing something very different from what Twitter might do if and when it offers curation tools, and that it is also about much more than just a way to curate tweets. Herman also said that the company is working on making it easier for users to pull in tweets without having to go through the Twitter API, and that it sees tweets as public information it should be able to gather however it wants to:

“It’s certainly Twitter’s right to do what they want to with their API, and so the more sustainable solution for a company is to figure out ways of doing what they need without using the Twitter API… We don’t want to be reliant on anybody — we want to be the place where you can collect public quotes from any service on the web [so] we’re hoping to make that easier and at the same time not be dependent on anyone’s API.”

That kind of reluctance to integrate too much with Twitter is probably the single biggest negative outcome from the company’s recent changes. For startups like Storify, deciding where to focus their energy is an important task, and the uncertainty around what Twitter might do in the future makes it difficult to know how to proceed. If it could change its mind so suddenly about which apps or services it should support, what would stop it from doing so again?

So one risk for Storify is the potential for unknown future changes to Twitter’s API rules that would leave the service — and its users — hanging, and force the company to either turn off some features or restructure the way it does things in order to get onside.

Storify wants to curate more than just Twitter

A related issue is that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has talked about how the company wants to offer journalists and media organizations tools that will help them curate tweets more easily, the way that Twitter has been doing for its media partners during official events such as the Summer Olympics or the federal election. That sounds an awful lot like what Storify does. But Herman says he isn’t concerned:

“We’re not just tied to Twitter — we really want to be a curation tool for all of the social web, and that includes Instagram and Facebook and Tumblr and YouTube and Flickr and Vimeo and whatever else comes along… it is true that Twitter is a great source of real-time information, but there’s definitely more out there.”

Herman also noted that Twitter’s recent attempts at curation for specific events such as the Summer Olympics and NASCAR seemed to be more devoted to a real-time or social TV experience, and that Storify sees a big part of its value as being the ability to highlight content after an event. “We’re used for real time too, but we’re also about being a record of something that is lasting, not just a reaction in the moment,” he said. “So these are the best things people are saying or photos that are being posted about the topic — things that stand for more than just the second you happen to glance by.”

The Storify founder said that a large proportion of the content within the service still comes from Twitter — perhaps in part because tweets are so short that it’s easy to include a lot of them in a Storify module, whereas people likely wouldn’t include dozens of videos or photos. But it’s also true that the real-time nature of the Twitter stream and the speed with which it flows by is one of the main reasons why curation tools like Storify are so necessary, and that makes it feel as though the two services are joined at the hip. Whether Herman and Damman can successfully separate them remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Umberto Salvagnin

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Woisio wants, instead, to use game mechanics and collaborative filtering to compile a new set of channels, and, in turn, get rid of the traditional middlemen. “Media shouldn’t be mediated,” said the company’s founder Mujdat Ayoguz when he stopped by our office a few weeks ago.

Here’s how Woisio works: The platform offers viewers a number of different channels, called “stages”, including comedy, style , music, politics and so on. Each of these channels is programmed to show clips at a certain time, but users can skip forward or go back and catch up on past programming. There are also local stages, so you can specifically watch clips in the New York politics or Los Angeles music channel. Videos can be up- and downvoted, much like stories on Reddit.

However, unlike on Reddit, votes don’t automatically equal exposure. Instead, they translate to a virtual currency, which the publisher of a video can then use to bid on future air time for other clips. The basic idea behind this: Publishers get rewarded for popular content, and programming becomes a bit of a marketplace. Think virtual stock exchange, but for content curation.

Woisio’s idea is intriguing, but the whole bidding process seems unnecessarily complicated.

The idea is kind of intriguing, especially since every user can also be a publisher. However, the whole bidding process adds an extra layer of complexity that could turn off publishers, and in turn make the whole platform much less appealing for end users.

The other problem of Woisio’s approach is that most of Woisio’s content consists of clips found on YouTube and elsewhere. Turning that kind of material into a synchronous, scheduled experience doesn’t make all that much sense, as Chill.com found out the hard way when it tried to enable real-time viewing experiences around catch-up videos from Hulu and elsewhere.

Still, Woisio may be onto something with its idea of turning curation into a game. Ayoguz told me that he eventually wants to roll out the service all over the world, and then have publishers and communities playfully compete against each other for the right to show clips on the world stage. That does sound intriguing – even if the site’s current setup doesn’t really seem ready to capture the world quite yet.

Woiso’s team of six is based in Turkey and Mountain View. The company has raised close to $1 million in seed funding, and is now looking for additional investments.

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