“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.”

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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

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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.

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It caught the eye of Internet giants and entered acquisitions talks with the likes of Yahoo and Facebook. Facebook clearly values the team and founder Gheller who is known for his ability to correlate data, identity and growth. The company had raised $2.8 million dollars from the likes of Balderton Capital, Sigma Partners, Ariel Poler, Mark Goines and bunch of other angel investors.

On his Storylane page, founder Gheller shared this note:

After a lot of discussions with Facebook about how our teams might work together to have even greater impact, we are announcing today that the Storylane team will be joining Facebook.

This is an exciting opportunity. Facebook’s mission of connecting the world has always been at the center of our work, and like our friends at Facebook, meaningful connections are what our team is most passionate about.

The beautiful stories you have decided to share with us are yours to keep and share in however way you want. We are building tools that will help you migrate the content to other services if you so desire. I will be in touch with you about those specific tools later, but I can confirm that Facebook is not acquiring any of your data; and we’re working to make sure you can migrate your content in a manageable way.

I want to thank our users. Your passion, sincerity and willingness to share, has made Storylane the incredible experience that exists today. We have learned so much from you. Your ideas and creativity will stay with us and inspire us on the next stage of our journey.

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Williams and Stone re-launched Obvious Corp. in June 2012 after they both left Twitter, the company they co-founded with Jack Dorsey. Expectations for both Obvious Corp. and Medium, a collaborative publishing tool and the first product it launched in August, have been high, although the product appears to be growing slowly.

Hansen wrote in his email to friends and family (reported by Mike Isaac of AllThingsD, formerly of Wired) that he would be working specifically on editorial content at Medium, which hired noted literary agent Kate Lee to direct content back in November.

At the moment, Medium is publishing blog posts from a wide variety of writers, technologists, and artists, clearly focusing on quality over quantity and slowly rolling out the ability to contribute. Published stories are divided into “collections” around certain themes, and aims to re-think how writers to publish to the web.

Last year at our Roadmap conference, Williams told attendees “I’d rather be HBO than whoever creates ‘Desperate Housewives,’” perhaps hinting at the type of content strategy that Medium intends to pursue.

This post and its headline were corrected at 4:28pm to after Hansen clarified on Twitter that he wasn’t leading all of editorial at Medium, just science and technology.

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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

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“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.

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According to Williams, “We’re all more sophisticated. The industry is more sophisticated and therefore it’s just a hell of a lot more work — and it’s a different kind of work.” That means he’s graduated from duct-taping servers to designing interfaces that are beautiful and function across platforms.

Williams on modern-day entrepreneurialism:

Check out the rest of our GigaOM RoadMap 2012 coverage, and a full video of Williams’ session can be found here.

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“Twitter is a city company,” he said Thursday at OpenCoSF, a conference meant to integrate city tech companies with the local community. “The company needs to be in the city. It feels gritty to be in the city. It was born in the city and felt important for us to stay in the city.”

Twitter’s move to the still developing mid-Market neighborhood was considered a major win for San Francisco and Mayor Ed Lee, who pushed hard to keep the company from moving south, but dropping the high-tech company in the middle of a long-rundown area has created questions about whether the company will integrate at all into the neighborhood or remained a walled fortress, and whether its presence will make the area unaffordable for previous residents.

Costolo said when co-founder Evan Williams originally mentioned the company’s current building as an option, the realtor didn’t think they’d want to make the move.

“The realtor said, ‘You don’t want to look at that, that’s in a neighborhood… You wouldn’t want to be over there.’”

But Costolo said they were intrigued by the amount of space available in the building, and the degree to which it would let the company expand.

“The building has beautiful bones,” he said. “There are just amazing Art Deco pieces inside of it. And we have the critical mass that we we thought we could move into this space.”

The New York Times published a profile of Costolo this past weekend, mentioning that the CEO has been known to leave work to have dinner with his kids and return back to work in the late evening and encourages co-workers to do the same. Costolo noted on Thursday that positioning the offices in the city created a more central location for work, making it easier for employees to balance work and personal life with more limited commutes.

“I think it affords people a more flexible way to continue to be productive both in their time in the office and out of the office,” he said.

An audience member immediately asked Costolo whether his employees would engage with the neighborhood, or whether they’d remain in Twitter’s offices for lunch — the internal food options aren’t too shabby. Costolo said it’s a tough question, because he wants his employees to get out in the neighborhood, and doesn’t want Twitter’s offices to be a “castle,” but there’s a practical element to having people stay focused near their desks during the work day. He said it’s something the company will continue to work on, with other tech companies watching Twitter’s evolution closely.

“There’s no doubt about it, there’s a huge migration of tech companies to San Francisco,” famed investor Ron Conway said.

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Dorsey returned to the company in March 2011 to help guide product development, arriving with Costolo after being forced out by co-founder Evan Williams back in 2008. Dorsey signaled his delight to return to Twitter, but an extensive profile of Costolo published in The New York Times this weekend reported that Dorsey has now scaled back that role, with fellow employees complaining he was difficult to work with.

Mr. Dorsey’s role has since been reduced after employees complained that he was difficult to work with and repeatedly changed his mind about product directions. He no longer has anyone directly reporting to him, although he is still involved in strategic decisions.

Dorsey confirmed that his role became more limited in January of this year and that he’s returned his attention to Square, although he made no mention of disagreements with co-workers:

In Spring of 2011, Dick asked me to take an operational role overseeing product, design, and brand. Our shared goal was to get those organizations back under him as soon as possible, simply because it was the right thing to do for the company. We moved all of my reports back under him in January of this year after leadership was firmly in place. This allowed me to focus on refining our brand and logo, to work more with Dick and the leadership team on our direction forward, and ultimately return the majority of my time to Square, where I’m CEO.

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