Yahoo was in talks to buy as much as 75 percent of Dailymotion, with an option to buy the remaining 25 percent at a later date. The deal would have valued Dailymotion at around $300 million — but it wasn’t meant to be: Regulators resisted the idea that Dailymotion would be owned by an American company, and wanted to restrict Yahoo’s ownership to 50 percent. Yahoo declined.

This puts an end to what would have been Yahoo’s first major acquisition since Marissa Mayer took over as CEO last July, and it would also have been the company’s first major attempt to compete with YouTube since it shut down its own video hosting service in 2010.

So where is Yahoo going to look next to boost its online video business? Here are a few ideas:

Blip: Blip is one of the few remaining independent U.S. video platforms, and the service has undergone an ambitious transition from a catch-all for online video to a platform for premium serialized content — the kind of stuff advertisers like. This could be a good match for Yahoo, which has eyeballs, but needs inventory to place ads against.

Ustream: The one area in which YouTube is still vulnerable is live video. Granted, the Google-owned video service has been offering live streaming to select partners for some time. But it’s live video section is a mess, and the only bright spots have been large live events. Ustream could help Yahoo to get a headstart in live video, while at the same time providing the company with a site that already offers offers hosting for recorded videos as well.

PPLive: The Chinese video market is huge, with billions tuning in every month. It’s also not exactly profitable, which has led to consolidation, and could help Yahoo to buy one of the country’s many video providers on the cheap. Standalone video properties like PPLive and Xunlei are the most likely targets, and could help Yahoo to build a video business across Asia and beyond. Of course, there’s that whole China thing, but Mayer has proven that she’s not afraid of unpopular decisions.

Flickr: The Yahoo-owned image hosting site has enjoyed a bit of a comeback in recent months. And guess what: Flickr has been offering video hosting for five years already. Video has been a bit of an afterthought for Flickr, but Yahoo could certainly change that if it wanted to. The advantage of this approach would be that all the resources are already part of Yahoo — and historically, integrating acquisitions has been one of the things that Yahoo has struggled with a lot.

Who do you think Yahoo should buy instead of Dailymotion? Leave your thoughts in the comments!

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As my colleague Eliza Kern noted in her post on the new features, Twitter has given third-party apps the ability to add “deep links” to content inside a tweet, so that — for example — if a user includes a link to a photo from Path or Flickr and someone reading that tweet has the Path app or the Flickr app installed on their device, clicking the link launches that app and takes them directly to the content (a link to a download page for the app can also be included).

Twitter can help with app discovery

The benefits of these new features are clear, as Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures (one of Twitter’s backers) and others have noted. For services like Path, one of the hardest problems is discovery — in other words, letting people know it exists, and also making it easy for users to find interesting content within the app. Twitter’s new Card features provide a potential solution for both of those problems, and since the social network has an active-user base of close to 250 million, it could give some services a substantial boost.

Really excited to integrate the new @twitter cards into @circa. This will be a game changer for app distribution.

—
Matt Galligan (@mg) April 03, 2013

The downside of this approach should also be obvious, however, especially if you notice that among Twitter’s partners for these new features there are names like Path and Flickr, but no Instagram. Why isn’t the largest photo-sharing service included? Because it is owned by Facebook, and Twitter cut off the app’s access to a key feature last year — namely, the ability for users to find Twitter friends who also use the service — and Instagram subsequently removed Card support. The company also cut off Tumblr’s access to the same feature, even though Tumblr was an early partner on the Cards rollout.

This is the fundamental difference between Twitter’s current approach to being a platform and its previous approach. In the early days of the service, up until mid-2011, Twitter seemed happy to be at the center of a more or less open ecosystem — one which allowed virtually anyone to make use of the company’s APIs to display or make use of tweets. Many services and apps (including Instagram) grew by piggy-backing on the network in this way.

Then came what one Twitter investor has called a “holy s*** moment”: Bill Gross — founder of what was then called Uber Media — started buying up Twitter clients (including an attempt to buy Tweetdeck, which Twitter ultimately acquired) and appeared to be preparing to launch his own network, one that would make use of tweets combined with a third-party advertising model.

Twitter’s control is a double-edged sword

These moves by Gross and others posed a clear threat to Twitter’s ability to monetize its growing user base — something that was becoming more and more crucial given the multibillion-dollar market value the company had developed after several rounds of financing. So the company started tightening the screws around its network: restricting access to the API, changing what were display “guidelines” into “requirements,” and generally exerting much more control over who got access to the company’s data.

Such decisions caused a firestorm of controversy in the third-party developer community, with some complaining that Twitter had “killed” their businesses. Now, the company is clearly trying to repair some of that damaged goodwill by offering third-party apps and services preferential access to the network, and features like Card deep links — replacing the open ecosystem approach with one that is more a velvet rope: only official partners allowed.

This approach makes sense for Twitter, since it needs to generate revenue from its network, and presumably intends (or theoretically could) collect fees from partners for the additional features they are getting with Twitter Cards, which can also include music links and other content. And as noted above, it makes sense for apps and services like Path to cut a deal in order to get more reach — but just like building integration into Facebook or Apple or any other controlled ecosystem, developers should be aware this is a double-edged sword.

In other words, such an arrangement will likely look like a win-win so long as Twitter thinks you are beneficial to its network. The minute it sees you as competition, it will suddenly become lose-lose — and whatever you have invested in that ecosystem will vanish.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Ljupo Smokovski and Flickr user Rosauro Ochoa

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Within the last year, photo filters and editing have become very important for social networks on mobile, with Twitter attempting to challenge Instagram’s dominance by launching its own filters and editing app, and Yahoo pushing its revamped Flickr app around the same time. People just love sharing photos with their social networks, said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at an event earlier this month, and the competition for photo-hosting has understandably increased.

Google+ said the editing features coming to the iOS app are from the team at Snapseed, which Google acquired back in September 2012. At the time of the acquisition my colleague Erica Ogg wrote why it was a message on Google’s part to Apple, which really liked Snapseed, and why it could ultimately benefit Google:

“So as amusing as it is, Google’s purchase of the company behind Snapseed, an Apple staff favorite, is not just Google trolling Apple. It’s several things. It’s Google understanding the necessity of offering high-quality photo editing within its overall ecosystem; aiming to improve its own current offerings like Picasa; and boosting the fast-growing photography community within Google+.”

Updates to the mobile apps on Monday also include a variety of tweaks and added features like the ability to share your location, improved ability to update communities on the go, and improvements to posts on the Android verison.

It’s not clear that photo editing and filters will necessarily give much of a boost to Google+ (I still don’t see many photos edited with Twitter’s photo filters showing up in my feed just yet), but it’s interesting to see the fruit of a social media acquisition for Google, as well as the future of Google+.

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I gathered data from online app services like AppShopper.com, 148Apps.biz and Apple’s own Search API in order to gain some insight as to what each company has accomplished in 2012.  Each app listed under the company’s name was counted, along with the latest release date, category, number of updates made in 2012, whether or not the app was introduced as a new in 2012, as well as their peak ranking within each app’s respective category.  Here is what I found:

Google – With more than 26 apps in the App Store today, 12 of which have held top 10 most-downloaded spots in the last 30 days, you can begin to see that Google is not solely dependent on Android when it comes to mobile platforms.  Google introduced nine new iOS apps in 2012 like YouTube, Maps, Chrome and Drive, many of which were immediately well-received by Apple’s customers.

Setting the bar for mobile development on Apple’s iOS platform, Google entered into 2012 with an already-strong portfolio of apps in the App Store.  When Apple forced Google’s hand in 2012 by excluding YouTube and Maps from the iOS 6 release, Google responded in kind by delivering two great apps in their place.  The only thing really missing from its lineup is a native music app that can access Google’s online music service.

Yahoo! – Early in 2012, Yahoo! announced that it was pulling several seldom-used app from the App Store.  This move however did not mark the end of Yahoo on the App Store.  By introducing eight news apps in 2012, its total number of apps is currently at 15.  Managing 66 releases, Yahoo has been able to adapt as it currently has 10 apps that have held top 100 positions in the respective categories in the last 30 days. 

An area where Yahoo thrives that Google does not is sports content. By focusing a lot of attention on their successful series of Fantasy sports titles, Yahoo has had quite a year re-defining itself on Apple’s mobile platform.  With its major services like Mail, Messenger and Search well represented as native apps, the introduction of its own branded browser in 2012, and a well received Flickr for iOS redesign, Yahoo is proving to be a much better organized mobile development shop.  While the rest of Yahoo may be in a state of chaos, its iOS team appears to have gained a clearer vision of what mobile means to Yahoo in 2012.

Microsoft – Leading the pack with the most new iOS apps of these four companies, Microsoft added an additional 13 apps to the App Store in 2012, bringing its total to 29.  But it hasn’t seen the same broadly popular reception as its rivals: While almost half of its apps have held top 100 positions in their respective categories in the last 30 days, not one of them has been in in the top 10.  Microsoft needs to step up its game a bit to add new features to its iOS app lineup if it is looking to break into the top 10 with a must-have app.

Despite the introduction of its Windows Phone 8 introduced in 2012, Microsoft clearly has not abandoned Apple’s mobile platform for its own. Microsoft is choosing cater to its Xbox audience in particular on Apple’s platform — it has the highest number of gaming apps for iOS out of the four.  With Office for iOS just around the corner in 2013, there’s hope for Microsoft to have a megahit — outside of its Xbox franchise – on iOS very soon.

AOL – If you just look at the number of app upgrades and releases AOL has managed in 2012 (98!), you would think that it has one of the hardest-working iOS development shops around.  Despite that, this year the theme was simplification: the company managed to clean house by removing several of the 49 apps it had introduced since the first day the App Store was open.  Holding on to just 28 apps overall, AOL has seen nine apps achieve top 100 status.  Two of which, MapQuest and TechCrunch, have held the No. 1 and No. 2 positions in their respective categories in the last month.

One thing you should notice about AOL’s app lineup is the inclusion of dedicated news apps for services like Engaget, TechCrunch and TUAW.  With good amount of news, weather and information services in there lineup, AOL appears to be focusing on what it’s good at: content delivery more than its core search, mail and chat services.  AOL also has a decent music presence with SHOUTcast, PLAY and its own AOL Radio apps.

Most app activity in 2012

Overall, it is clear that each company has aggressively embraced and developed apps for Apple’s mobile platform that they feel are important to their customers.  While Google may have set the iOS app development bar in 2011 by already having a strong presence in the top 10 for so many of the apps they have developed, it does not appear as if the other three followed Google’s example.  While Google opted to double down on iOS development by continuing its focus on creating a native version of its online services, the other three looked to promote their content.  Microsoft is catering to gaming customers, Yahoo has focused more on sports, and AOL is leading the way with news, entertainment and lifestyle information.  While Yahoo has definitely made great strides in turning its mobile agenda around in 2012, it is Microsoft with its 13 new apps and AOL with its 98 releases and updates that were the most aggressive in 2012.  Each of the four have cemented a solid foundation with a much clearer vision in 2012 for what they intend to accomplish in the year to come.

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But Yahoo is ready to compete again in the mobile photo market, which continues to heat up with Twitter’s addition of photo filters this week. Flickr is rolling out a new iPhone app which it hopes can make the photo service a daily destination for mobile users. The overhauled app is packed with upgrades and design changes like better social sharing, photo editing (yes, filters) and discovery tools that finally make Flickr competitive in mobile. But is it too late? I worry that it is, but there’s enough there to make me wonder.

Here’s a look at some of the upgrades:

• Flickr users can now post to Facebook and Tumblr and it has easier sharing through Twitter now. That seems like a no-brainer but the Flickr app wasn’t particularly social before. Now, even the sign-in is designed to rely on Facebook, though users can also log in with their Yahoo account.
• Flickr offers editing tools via Aviary, which also provides the tools for its website. Users can just apply one of 16 filters or they can go deeper with tools for enhancing the shot, cropping it or adjusting for brightness, contrast, redeye, etc. This allows Flickr users to get in on the filter craze if they want.
• The photo viewing experience is improved. Users can zoom in on shots, which are kept in high resolution and they can tilt their phone to go full screen. You can tap on an image to see the details of the shot, kind of like viewing the back site of a photograph. Flickr has applied its justified web view, so images are also stacked up nicely together when viewing a photo set.
• Flickr is emphasizing more discovery of photos. So now, users can get two streams of photos to check out. There’s a Contacts/Group tab that lets you browse through photos from friends and the groups you’ve joined. Flickr recommends photographers and groups to follow if you don’t have a lot of them already. And there’s a new Explore tab that lets you see interesting and nearby photos. I actually like the Explore tab because it’s a pretty awesome set of photos and shows off how Flickr is a repository of really high-quality images.
• Uploading images is easier now since there’s no limit to how many photos you can upload from a camera roll. Previously, you were limited to 10 photos at a time. Also, users can still enter data about a photo and that now includes venue information through Foursquare.

Taken together, this is a huge set of improvements for Flickr. It’s amazing that the previous iPhone app was basically untouched for the last year. The new improvements help Flickr reassert itself as a player but the market has moved on in a lot of ways. People have flocked to very simple mobile photo sharing services like Instagram, Mobli and others. Facebook and Twitter are also very much in the mix. Flickr is still popular with serious photographers but it has to work hard to remind people it’s great for the kind of fun sharing that is the norm now for many smartphone users.

Markus Spiering, Flickr’s head of product, understands that Flickr has fallen behind in mobile. But he said the team has been working to get it right in mobile, which he said is now a huge focus for Flickr. And Flickr is still a popular destination for photo lovers, with 80 million monthly users and more than 8 billion photos. The challenge is for Flickr to regain some relevance in mobile while still being known as a great place to store and manage big, quality photo collections.

“We see Flickr as a place where people want to share photos for the community around photography but we really take care about the image quality and integrity,” Spiering told me. “While we have a lot of these value that are unmatched, what we are now doing is creating a compelling mobile experience for that.”

This is something Flickr should have done from the start. It was a leader in photos before Facebook and Instagram, but it didn’t embrace mobile and social. Doing so now is necessary, but I’m doubtful that Flickr can make up for lost time. Still, it’s nice to see Yahoo shipping some solid updates now. That’s two in two days along with yesterday’s Mail update.

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Social media, once thought of as a tool for bored nerds and marketing gurus, has taken on a whole new role it seems — one that could stand to change the face of modern warfare forever. As BuzzFeed notes in its round-up of Twitter posts from the Israeli army (a sentence I never would have imagined typing even a few years ago), the IDF actually warned Hamas guerillas not to show themselves on the Gaza strip or risk being killed in the attacks that began Wednesday morning, and the official Hamas account responded:

@idfspokesperson Our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are (You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves)

—
Alqassam Brigades (@AlqassamBrigade) November 14, 2012

In the hours that followed, videos of rocket attacks on Hamas strongholds were uploaded to YouTube, and the IDF blog carried a minute-by-minute breakdown of what was happening — how many Hamas rockets it intercepted, a strike by the Israeli Navy, and so on. It looked very much like the New York Times live-blog The Lede, except that it was being published by a military force: the front of the website even looks like a traditional news blog or breaking news site, complete with the usual social-media buttons for sharing content on Twitter, Facebook and other networks.

Not that long ago, CNN was the archetype of war reporting with its real-time video of the war in Iraq. More recently it has become the province of breaking-news blogs like The Lede from the Times, with minute-by-minute updates — or of National Public Radio editor Andy Carvin, sifting through live reports from civilians in Tahrir Square in Egypt and using his Twitter stream like a crowdsourced newsroom. Now, we have to add to that the army as a media entity, as symbolized by the IDF’s official live blog, Twitter stream and YouTube videos. What more could a publisher want? There are even infographics and a hashtag.

Blogging pioneer Dave Winer has written about how social media allows “the sources to go direct,” and we have seen the power that can have when a newsmaker adopts Twitter or a blog, the way News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch has or the Pakistani resident who live-tweeted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But there is perhaps no better example of taking that principle to its logical — if unpleasant — conclusion than what the Israeli Defense Forces did on Wednesday. How does that change the way that wars are waged, or experienced, or covered by journalists? It is certain to do all three.

In print, this looks like extremists. On Twitter, this looks mainstream. Dangerous how diff platforms lead to diff conclusions.

—
Andrew Katz (@katz) November 14, 2012

Governments and armies have always tried to influence the way their battles are perceived, whether by “embedding” journalists or by creating their own mouthpieces — people like Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, who broadcast favorable messages as a way of destabilizing the enemy or turning the tide of public opinion (or both). But now, commanders and their political chiefs have tools at their disposal that would have been almost unthinkable even a decade ago: all the same tools that a newspaper or a TV network has, and probably more. Their message now lives or dies by the same principles.

As more than one observer has pointed out, the main issue when armies become media entities is how to sort out the truth from the marketing spin — and how to ensure that the other side gets fair treatment, even though it may not have as powerful a marketing department. Just as NYT media reporter Brian Stelter has said that having Rupert Murdoch on Twitter makes his job a lot harder, the advent of military publishers will likely force traditional war correspondents to up their game as well — and it will put even more emphasis on crowdsourced efforts like Andy Carvin’s Twitter newsroom.

@mathewi Feels like a watershed moment.

—
Jim Roberts (@nytjim) November 14, 2012

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

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With this new and third version, Instagram has spent most of its energy on the continuous consumption of photos and stories behind those photos. The newest version of Instagram is pinning its hopes on geo-tagging, which is masked in a feature called Photo Map. And with this release, the company might have taken a first tentative step towards a unique business model.

In the new version you can select photos you wish to make public and they get pinned to a location. For instance, if you have ten photos from Helsinki, Finland, they all get clustered together. These clusters are visible as collections on a map. You can see many collections on the map and can tap to zoom in (or out) to get a closer and more contextual view.

With every major release, we pick a theme – and for this one we’ve focused on the browsing experience. We’ve introduced a new and unique way to browse your photos and others’ photos on a map, which means you’re no longer constrained to browsing through page after page of photos. We’ve also worked hard on updating all the screens in our app to be more visually consistent and polished. [From Instagram blog]

There are other improvements in this release, such as a new look for user profiles, the Explore tab, hashtag and location pages. The photo upload screen has been upgraded and ability to fight comment spam has been made more granular. Photo Maps allows you to showcase your photos on a map and also see other user’s maps as well, as long as those are approved by the other users. The list is too long and Instagram’s blog post has more details.

Don’t worry – there are massive improvements in the actual service as well. For instance, your photo feed loads about ten times faster than the older version. There is unlimited auto scrolling and the photos load much faster than in the past. But the real magic is photo consumption.

Location Location Location

“Chronological feed focus has turned data into ephemeral,” said Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram. “So the stuff we share disappears. We wanted to see how we can make it so that the data doesn’t disappear and we decided to focus on geo-data.” Systrom explained that photos often come with other information – who you are with, where you were and that helps turn photo into a “experiencing a moment of time.”

He argues that we often remember places we have visited. For instance, a trip to London or Berlin or New Delhi is something we remember, even though we might forget some individual memories. It is one of the reasons why Instagram has bet on using geo-data as a way to discover photos.

Instagram CEO/co-founder Kevin Systrom shows off version 3.0.

What Instagram is offering isn’t novel. In 2007, the pioneering photo sharing service Flickr had launched a global map-based visual navigation. They wanted to replace search with discovery and Instagram is going in that direction as well. On mobile, text-based search is not an easy option. Instagram wants to use device’s built-in capabilities to help with discovery of the photos. And they are starting off with geo-location.

Of course, normal people don’t care about geo-location. But tell them how it will help them go back into time and share memories, and they are going to buy into the whole geo-location. Instagram’s approach: keep it simple.

This focus on keeping things dead simple is one of the reasons why Instagram has gone from zero to over 80 million members in less than two years. Facebook is buying the company for hundreds of millions of dollars, if the regulators approve the merger. But more importantly, Instagram has become the most popular way of sharing photos on the mobile phones.

Twitter better watch its back

This scale of growth – hundreds of photos uploaded per second and a total of more than 4 billion photos – the company is starting to look like a rival to Twitter as a place for social conversations. Today, Twitter is much bigger, but Instagram is growing at a rapid clip. Instagram has become popular with youngsters who are bypassing Facebook and Twitter and instead communicating via photos and comments on Instagram. As Mark Hall observed on his blog:

I’ve been on Instagram for a while, from when it launched, but it wasn’t until I saw how my 13-year-old daughter and her friends use it that I truly understood it. For them, it’s a replacement for Facebook. They share photos, but those are just points of entry, a way to a conversation. They are status updates, expressed visually.

They tart up their photos and comments using an array of 3rd party apps like Versagram, PicFrame, Emoji. It’s a ping to let your friends know you exist, and what your doing; and you hope for a “like” (a ping back) to let you know you’re not alone on the network. Of course, this is what we’ve all been doing with Instagram. We’ve just been under the illusion we were sharing photos. Seeing the behavior of these 13-year-olds made that clear to me.

We’re not using Instagram to make art. Or to hone our craft as photographers. It ain’t Flickr. We’re just trying to connect with our friends, to start a conversation. Instagram is really a communications platform disguised as a photo app.

Social platforms have always been about communication. Instant Messaging, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter – they are essentially platforms of communications. Sometimes that communication is a smiley face, a blog post, a poke, a retweet or a like. Photos too are an atomic unit of emotion and communicating that emption.

“Photos without metadata are just photos, but with metadata you can start to do very interesting things,” added Systrom. “You can tell the story of your life or events.” The photos created by a smartphone’s camera are packed with metadata and it helps the company start arranging the photos in different ways and encourage new behaviors.

As the number of photos shared on the network increases, Instagram now has an opportunity to view and offer a view into what is happening around the planet at any given moment. The Olympics in London or Oktoberfest in Munich – Instagram hopes that one day it will be able to surface photos of such events by a proverbial swipe. Systrom cautioned that we shouldn’t get too carried away. “We are creating a signal and hopefully in the future we can surface events or news happenings,” he said.

The challenge of course is that Instagram is increasingly populated by folks in their teens and I wonder if they will care as much about telling the story of their life as well some of us old farts. Systrom argued that Instagram has more than teen-members and more importantly, even they would like to share their summer stories and special moments with friends.

A Business Model?

As the company starts to arrange photos into collections based on locations or events, it also can start to create an opportunity to inject sponsored photos (sponsored stories if you may) and start to think about revenues – something that had eluded the company thus far.

A recent report by Simply Measured, a Seattle-based social media research company pointed out that nearly 40 percent of the Interbrand 100 are already on Instagram. These brands could find ways to create new engagement behavior and redefine brand advertising. Of course, all that is in the future – for now, Instagram is hoping that people love the new features.

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In addition, Pinterest enabled in-board play for Kickstarter, Slideshare and Soundcloud, “so you can curate great collections of projects, presentations, and sounds, and play them right there on your boards.”

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“We think simple and automatic attribution is a step forward for the sharing of content online,” the company says on its blog.

You have to be signed into Flickr to see the “Pin It” button. The automatic attribution looks like this:

Pinterest faces ongoing questions over copyright, with sites like Getty and iStock Photo complaining that their images are being pinned to the site without attribution or — perhaps more importantly for them — payment. Today’s new attribution policy could be expanded to other sites (it’s a “a work in progress and we’ll continue to add additional sources,” Pinterest says), but the compensation question hasn’t been answered yet.

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