For example, Bilton says his father insists on leaving him voice-mail messages but the NYT writer never listens to them, so his frustrated parent eventually called his sister to complain, and she told their father to text him instead — and Bilton adds that his mother has progressed to the point where they communicate mostly through Twitter. Is this a son helping his parents adapt, or a rude refusal to meet them on their own turf? Many saw it as the latter:

We have too many ways to communicate

Author Ian Leslie noted in a response on his own blog that Bilton’s description of what’s wrong with modern communication — whether it’s voice mail or texting or Twitter — and his relationship with his parents misunderstands what communication is for. If you look at them as pure information delivery, Leslie says, then they are riddled with problems. But if you see them as a way of socializing with others who are close to us then they look completely different:

“The problem here isn’t just that Bilton unintentionally comes off as rather rude… his argument betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of communication. Writing about computers a lot, he assumes communication is all about the transfer of information from one hard drive to another. That being so, the more efficient the transfer is, the better.”

I think a larger problem Bilton touches on, but doesn’t address directly, is that we have more competing forms of communication available to us than ever before — and not only are different people at different stages in their evolution from one to the other, but people also use them for very different purposes. So for Bilton’s dad, voice mail is a great way of passing on important information, but Nick prefers the real-time nature of texting or Twitter messaging.

The NYT blogger mentions how a whole new kind of etiquette had to be developed around the telephone, and how debate raged over the appropriate way to answer (Alexander Graham Bell preferred the term “Ahoy!,” which just reinforces why we shouldn’t let the inventors of things decide how we use them). But at least people in the 1920s only had one new form of communication to figure out — we have email, voice mail, texting, Facebook messaging, Twitter and more.

Increasingly feel like I don’t want to live in @nickbilton’s future.

—
Jim Maiella (@jimmaiella) March 10, 2013

It gets worse when the person you are trying to correspond with uses all of these tools: I’ve tried to contact someone I know fairly well by email, voice mail, text message, Twitter direct messaging and everything short of smoke signals, and I never know from one day to the next which of those methods (if any) are going to work. We have more ways than ever to communicate, but sometimes that just means more ways to miss each other.

Not every tool works for every purpose

In a lot of cases, I think the problem boils down to one of asynchronous vs. synchronous behavior and expectations. Part of the reason why many people (particularly geeks) dislike talking on the phone is that it forces both sides to be present at the same time, instead of allowing a user to consume or respond to the information at their own pace — or multi-task while they are doing so. Phone calls also have no natural time-span.

The other conflict is over what the purpose of the communication is. Someone who sends a long email or leaves a voice mail asking you to call them back may wish to have a long, rambling conversation purely to socialize, and get offended when you send a curt response (or no response at all). Similarly, if you only ever text or use Twitter direct messages with someone, you may be communicating really efficiently but you miss a lot of the personal nuances that still make up much of human communication.

And then there are the obvious age-related issues: I have tried valiantly to get my mother to use Facebook, arguing that this is a great way to keep in touch — however transiently — with her grandchildren, none of whom has any interest whatsoever in using email or talking on the telephone. But for my mother, email and the phone are her primary means of connecting with the world, and the former was something that took ages for her to get comfortable with. And now that she has grown comfortable with it, no one is using it any more.

All I think we can really say for sure is that this state of affairs is likely to continue, if not get worse. As William Gibson said in a different context: “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” And so we are all at different stages of adapting to this new communications future. Perhaps the one thing we need most is to be patient with those who aren’t where we are.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Steve Woods and Arvind Grover

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Bilton described in a piece for the Bits section of the Times how his posts used to get as many as 50 or even a hundred likes and shares, from users of Facebook who had signed up to get his feed using the network’s relatively new Subscribe feature. But even though the number of users who subscribe has soared from just 25,000 after the feature was launched to almost half a million now, Bilton said that he gets far fewer responses to his posts — sometimes as little as 10 or 15 likes and shares. After paying Facebook to promote his posts, however, that number increased by almost 1,000 percent.

Facebook denies it is tuning users out

I’ve noticed the same kind of phenomenon as Bilton has with my own feed, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. While Bilton has almost half a million subscribers, I have about 75,000 — but I’ve also found that the content I post is getting a lot less interaction than in the early days of the feature. I haven’t experimented with paying Facebook to promote my posts, but I have no doubt I would see the same kind of increase in activity if I did. That’s kind of the whole point (Facebook is holding a news event on March 7 that could include more changes to the news feed).

The conclusion that everyone seems to be jumping to is the same one that Mark Cuban arrived at when he complained in November about the increasing difficulty of reaching his fans on the network: namely, that Facebook is deliberately tuning out (or at least turning down) the signal coming from some users so that it can convince them to use promotional tools like ads and “sponsored stories.” Cuban said he was so irritated by the move that he was diverting almost all of the marketing budget from his various brands away from Facebook to Twitter and other platforms.

Facebook gave much the same response then that it has made to Bilton’s column (as reported by my GigaOM colleague Eliza Kern): it said that it tweaks its ranking algorithms all the time, in order to try and decrease spam and increase the visibility of content that users like, and that this is not an attempt to market its other services such as advertising or various promotional features. An official post on the Facebook site entitled “Fact Check” says:

“Our goal with News Feed is always to show each individual the most relevant blend of stories that maximizes engagement and interest. There have been recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algorithm suppresses organic distribution of posts in favor of paid posts in order to increase our revenue. This is not true.”

Like Google, Facebook is a black box

It’s worth noting that former YouTube executive-turned-venture-capitalist Hunter Walk came up with some alternate theories about why Bilton and others might have seen a dropoff in their likes and shares, including the fact that some of the followers and subscribers that boosted those numbers were spam accounts or bots who have lost interest. I certainly noticed after the “Subscribe” feature launched that I got a lot of spammy responses as well as likes and shares, and those have died down as well. In that sense, decreasing the amount of activity would actually qualify as a good thing.

Zach Seward of Quartz had another theory that I also think has a lot of merit: in a comment on Walk’s post, he noted that Facebook often devotes a substantial amount of energy to promoting its new features — such as the subscription offering, as well as the “social newsreader” offerings that were launched by a number of newspapers such as The Guardian and the Washington Post. But after a certain time, the network almost always tweaks the ranking algorithm so that these new features are downplayed relative to when they were launched, which often causes problems for those who relied on them.

The bottom line, of course, is that there is no real way for anyone to know why Facebook’s algorithm behaves the way it does, any more than it’s possible for us to know why certain pages rank high in Google. They are both a black box, and the way they function is a mystery. As I tried to point out to Cuban, Facebook is entitled to do whatever it wants with your news feed, including using it to convince you to pay for promotional tools, because it owns your news feed — not you. It’s good to be reminded of that sometimes.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Fickr user balakov and Flickr user Pew Center

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The story notes that Systrom’s testimony carries perjury risks or fraud risks if Instagram did indeed recieve offers from Twitter before the sale to Facebook, since if Twitter did not receive a chance to provide a counter-offer, Instagram investors could have lost an opportunity to make more money off the acquisition.

When asked for a response to the Times story, Facebook declined to comment. Twitter has not yet responded for comment.

Any potential legal issues might rest on the notion of whether Twitter’s offer was ever really considered a “formal offer,” which Systrom explicitly denied took place. However, shareholder lawsuits have been filed over less.

Facebook initially announced that it was acquiring Instagram for about $1 billion in April, but by the time the deal closed in September, it was worth closer to $735 million since the value of Facebook had dropped since the company’s IPO in May.

Instagram and Twitter have recently been sparring over photos on the two services, seen as a key component for keeping user attention. First Twitter removed the ability for Instagram users to find their friends through Twitter’s social graph. Then Instagram rolled out profiles for the web, and then removed capabilities for Twitter cards, meaning Instagram photos will no longer show up within Twitter streams. Twitter followed up by rolling out its own version of photo filters the following week.

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However, they are being illogical in believing that they can revive Yahoo and turn it back into a relevant Internet player.

I had outlined my reasons for being a non-believer in a Yahoo turnaround in a post almost a year ago. Nothing really has changed in my mind — not even the new new CEO or the new board member. The only thing that would change my mind would be if the company talks specifics and share a timeline for the systematic changes that need to be implemented.

Yahoo was a giant once — but now it is surrounded by competitors who are vying for the attention of consumers, who are attracted to new sources of entertainment and information, be it Pinterest or Facebook. It has been lagging on mobile and most importantly, it has systematically lost all its technical leadership.

Whenever, I talk to former Yahoo employees, other folks who still work at the company and other Silicon Valley insiders, they all come back with the same sentiment — the problem is foundational and the core of Yahoo is pretty hollow. Others have compared it to an industrial-era giant caught in a bureaucratic cobweb. Ask any 25-year-old young programmer who he or she wants to work for. Yahoo isn’t the name you hear.

An empty cupboard?

Yahoo’s paucity of technical capability was up for all to see this week, when Yahoo launched a mobile app, with filters and stuff. Folks loved it. Nick Bilton was ecstatic about it. Many said it was an end to the tyranny of low resolution, square shaped photos that was imposed by Instagram. Others waxed nostalgic and saw a Flickr Spring.

What I saw: Yahoo using a third party (Aviary in this case) to build the mobile app for Flickr, that one web service inside that still has loyal and passionate users among the snap-happy folks. [I will give them full marks for doing a good job on sprucing up Yahoo Mail, though they certainly took their time with it.]

It is a pretty damning testimonial of company’s technology capabilities that it can’t really build a product. How can anyone turn a company that is lacking in product capabilities and technology leadership into a player? I don’t quite understand.

Yes, Yahoo has made some sporadic buys. It is going to buy more of these small companies to bolster its bullpen, but you can’t buy your way into being innovative. It is a cultural and a structural issue and is a long process. I don’t think this honeymoon Yahoo is having with Wall Street is going to last for long.

But the Yahoo revival starts when the new technology talent makes it the first place to go work — ahead of Pinterest, AirBnB, Twitter, Facebook and even Google. Up until then, all board makeovers and new additions to the top layer of the company are nothing more than eye candy for the stock market.

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So far, Instagram and Facebook have dominated the photo-sharing and upload experience, and their combination this year was one of the most talked-about acquisitions in Silicon Valley. Twitter has been working this summer to monetize its product, cracking down on API use and introducing new forms of advertising, so moving into the profitable photo space makes sense for the company. In fact, Twitter blocked users from finding their Twitter friends through Instagram, signaling the beginnings of divisions between the companies, although it was rumored that Twitter had earlier been interested in an acquisition of the photo-sharing service before Zuckerberg made his move.

As Om Malik wrote earlier this year, photo-sharing is the ultimate social experience on the web, and the medium that makes us tick. It’s what powers Facebook and keeps people tagging and liking and sharing. Photos create a dramatic level of engagement, and for a site like Twitter that’s looking to grow users and brand experiences, having its own compelling photo experience will be key (as seen above with Instagram filters applied to a photo of Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.)

Twitter is also making a play into the media world, and as any website or magazine will tell you, photos are a must-have in the digital media space. Instagram photos of Hurricane Sandy spread quickly across the internet this week, and if Twitter could control how its users communicate text and images in real-time, that would up the ante. Users who leave Twitter to upload and share photos are a missed opportunity for the company.

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Although he was brought back into the company (with much fanfare) to help guide the product’s evolution, Dorsey is apparently not really involved with day-to-day decisions any more. So who is Twitter’s product visionary now, and what does that mean for the future of the service? According to Bilton, the co-founder has stepped back from having more of a day-to-day role within the company, in part because other employees said he was difficult to deal with and found his product direction confusing. As the NYT writer puts it:

“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.”

Who is Twitter’s chief visionary now?

As Bilton describes in his piece, Dorsey — who famously drafted the original idea for Twitter on a notepad in 2006 — left the company under less-than-auspicious circumstances in 2008, after Evan Williams took control and forced him out as chief executive, something Dorsey later said was “like a punch in the stomach.” But not long after Costolo took over as CEO of Twitter in 2010 (and Williams left to start a new startup incubator called Obvious), the company asked Dorsey to come back as executive chairman and help revitalize the product. At the time, Dorsey said on Twitter that he was “thrilled to get back to work at Twitter leading product.”

Over the next year, Twitter redesigned its mobile app and also its website, launching new features that allowed content to be embedded inside a tweet — something the company has since extended with what it calls “Twitter cards,” which allow videos and excerpts of other types of content to appear inside a frame. Some sources close to the company say this effort was the evolution of something called “annotations,” which Twitter promised it would roll out in 2010 but never implemented. Twitter cards are also seen by many as the key to the company’s future revenue plans.

Bilton doesn’t say when Dorsey’s role at the company was scaled back, although reports earlier this year from Business Insider and All Things Digital suggested he was no longer as involved as he had been, in part because his other company — the mobile-payment company Square — had started taking off (it has since become a major player with an estimated market value of $3 billion). And while the NYT piece says Costolo “looks to Dorsey for ideas,” and director of consumer product Michael Sippey also works with him to make sure the product is “Twittery,” it’s not clear exactly what Dorsey has been involved with when it comes to recent features.

What does Twitter want to be when it grows up?

So Twitter now has product leads in charge of consumer features, advertising and international, but it doesn’t have anyone driving the broader vision related to the service except for Costolo — who doesn’t have a product background — and Dorsey in what appears to be a part-time role. Some see that as a bad thing for a startup that is trying to balance the conflicting needs of users and advertisers, something that sources close to Twitter say is causing dissent even within the company. As angel investor Chris Dixon put it when Dorsey returned to the company last year:

“The history of tech companies shows again and again that having a great product-focused founder at the helm has always been the best thing for the company and for its customers/users.”

Twitter has been the target of a lot of criticism from developers and power users recently, for clamping down on the way external apps and services (such as Tumblr and Instagram) use the company’s API, and forcing them to display tweets in certain ways. The company and its supporters maintain that this is not meant as a crackdown on the Twitter ecosystem, but instead is a desire to implement a “consistent user experience” — the same reason the official iPad app was recently replaced, even though some users complained that features they liked were no longer supported.

Users and designers say Twitter’s crackdown on external apps would be a lot easier to tolerate or even support if the company’s own products were more appealing to use. So are the shortcomings in the service and its offerings a result of Dorsey’s vision, or the result of a lack of vision because he has stepped back from a day-to-day role with the company? Either way, those vision problems could cause Twitter even more growing pains in the future as it tries to go mainstream.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Jack Dorsey and Pinar Ozger

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Michael Smith, an economist from Carnegie Mellon, is one person who doesn’t buy the “pirates always win” meme. At a legal seminar in New York last week, Smith pointed to empirical data that paints a more nuanced picture of the piracy situation. He also called out “three myths” he says are clouding the debate:

Myth #1: You can’t compete with free

This myth is often invoked by content owners to justify heavy-handed enforcement measures against piracy sites and individual consumers. After all, why buy a song or movie when you can simply download it for free at a pirate site?

A quick look at the thriving content markets at Amazon, iTunes and elsewhere shows this notion is bunk. All of these sites are competing with free very successfully. As Smith points out, the lowest cost (including free) is not the only determinant of consumer purchases. Factors like reliability, convenience, service and quality also have a very big impact on how we buy content online.

The point here is that paid sites can thrive without snuffing out every single piracy site.

Myth #2: Piracy doesn’t harm sales

This myth holds that that people who use content-sharing (“stealing” if you prefer) sites will never pay for the content in the first place so what’s the harm? Meanwhile, “honest” consumers will never turn to piracy.

Smith pointed to evidence that piracy sites are not benign. In one prominent example, he said that when NBC removed shows from on-demand site Hulu, piracy spiked not only for NBC shows but for other networks as well. Meanwhile, no one went out and bought DVD’s as a substitute for the shows that were no longer available on Hulu.

The bottom line is that piracy sites do affect the market for authorized content.

Myth #3: Anti-piracy initiatives don’t work

Laws that target file-sharing are reviled not just as oppressive — but as ineffective too. The first part of the claim is debatable but the second part is blatantly untrue.

Smith points to a recent study of France’s HADOPI (a new enforcement regime) to argue that anti-piracy laws do work. He noted that the advent of HADOPI coincided with a big rise in legal online music purchases, particularly in genres like rap and hip-hop that experience high rates of piracy. At the same time, much of this increases took place before the law even went into effect; it appears that news about the law caused people to seek out legal alternatives.

The point is that laws like HADOPI (and presumably America’s impending “6-strikes” initiatives) can provide a clear deterrent to piracy. (Whether America can implement a sensible one is up to Congress to figure out.)

So what’s the moral of the story?

People like Smith are not making bold new arguments — they’re simply showing how the piracy debate is still driven by ideology not facts. Both sides in the debate are to blame. On one hand, apologists for illicit file-sharing sites pretend that piracy is inconsequential or inevitable. And on the other, content owners too often rely on lies and fear to protect outdated business models.

Internet pirates don’t always win. And neither do content owners. It’s a complicated back and forth we have yet to figure out.

• See also: Piracy may be commonplace but music’s outlook is improving

Smith spoke at NARM’s Entertainment and Technology Law Conference.

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The Pulitzer Prize win by the Huffington Post for a series on injured soldiers was hailed by some as a victory for the “blogosphere,” a first-time win of the prestigious journalism award by a “blog.” But the fact is that those terms have become increasingly meaningless — especially when describing an entity like the Huffington Post, which has blog-like aspects and also newspaper-like aspects. Meanwhile, traditional media such as the New York Times have also been developing increasingly blog-like features, which is further blurring those dividing lines. What we have now are just media outlets, some large and some small, some of which are online-only and some of which also print things on paper. Can we move on now?

It’s true that the Huffington Post started life as a “blog,” or rather a loosely-connected network of bloggers, as a long profile of the website in the Columbia Journalism Review makes clear. Co-founder Ken Lerer and Jonah Peretti used Arianna Huffington’s broad connections within the entertainment and political communities to pull together an eclectic group of commenters who were willing to write for nothing — and that core group expanded dramatically as the Post continued to grow. That growth was fueled by Peretti’s understanding of online media and chief technology officer Paul Berry’s understanding of how the internet (including search-engine optimization) works.

The HuffPo hasn’t been a “blog” for a long time

But in many ways, the Huffington Post hasn’t been just a blog for some time now. Yes, there are still writers who post their content to the site and don’t get paid for it — which has been the subject of much criticism and even a lawsuit. But the reality is that newspapers also routinely run columns and opinion pieces that are written by outsiders, and in many cases they don’t pay them either. Why? Because those writers see a value in having their content seen by as many people as possible, for personal or professional reasons, just as those who write for the Huffington Post do.

On top of that foundation of bloggers (or op-ed writers, to use traditional media terminology) the HuffPo has built the rest of what would otherwise be known as a newspaper: investigative reporting, such as the series that print veteran David Wood did on injured soldiers, as well as a growing number of regular news reporters and salaried columnists across a wide range of different subjects. As my PaidContent colleague Staci Kramer has pointed out in her own post on the Huffington Post Pulitzer win, the specific medium that any of this journalistic work appears in is no longer as relevant as it used to be.

Did the Huffington Post leverage its web speed and broad reach, including traffic-driving features such as slideshows of swimsuit models and aggregated posts based on stories written by other media outlets, to build the foundation that allowed it to add those traditional journalistic elements? Of course it did, just as many newspapers have. In fact, the history of newspapering — and particularly pioneers like William Randolph Hearst — reads a lot like the rise of the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed and other entities, except with paper instead of bits.

The lines between old and new media are blurring

And while the Huffington Post has been getting more and more newspaper-like, entities such as the New York Times have been getting more blog-like: the relaunch of the medical section of the paper’s website, called Well, is just the latest in a series of similar relaunches that have turned sections of the NYT into blog-style portals. The Bits blog and DealBook are two other prominent examples — writers like Nick Bilton publish their content on a blog that just happens to be owned by the New York Times. As journalism professor Jay Rosen put it in an email to HuffPo media writer Michael Calderone:

[W]hile it’s tempting to see the Huffington Post’s Pulitzer as a ‘big win for new media,’ or something like that, the real story is that these organizations — the Huffington Post, the New York Times, the Washington Post — are becoming more like each other. Old media and new media are increasingly antiquated terms.

The debate over whether bloggers are journalists may have died down somewhat over the past few months, but it still flares up periodically, like a brush fire that just won’t go out. The question “are blogs journalism?” — or similar questions such as “Is Twitter journalism?” — make no sense any more, if they ever did. Are telephones journalism? Are pencils and pens journalism? No. They are just tools. A blog is also just a tool, one which can be used for journalism and for many other things as well. The same tools that allow the Huffington Post or Buzzfeed to post dozens of photos of cute kittens can also be used to tell heart-wrenching stories of social significance, as David Wood has.

And so we no longer have blogs vs. newspapers — we simply have media, and content, and publishing. As Clay Shirky said recently, publishing is no longer an industry or even a job, it is a button. Anyone can do it, for better or worse (and I would argue it is for the better when it comes to journalism). And yes, there is an argument to be made that digital-native media will win more often than print-native, but that doesn’t have to be the case. Does all this make the media landscape more complicated, more noisy, less easy to categorize? Yes. But it also makes it infinitely richer.

Note: We’ll be talking with leaders in tech, media and investing about how to make the most of today’s opportunities at paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads, May 23, at The TimesCenter in New York.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Wesley Fryer and World Economics Forum

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I am in New York, and obviously meeting a lot people in the publishing business. Word on the street is that Nick Bilton, the technology columnist at The New York Times, has just agreed to a deal with Penguin Portfolio for a book about Twitter. The book is slated for publication by the end of 2013. His first book, titled I live in the future and here’s how it works, was published by Crown Publishing.

Bilton, who previously worked as a researcher in The Times’ R&D Labs, currently writes the Disruptions column and covers companies such as Twitter and Square for his paper. So he’s very familiar with co-founders Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and other members of the Twitter braintrust.

While the book doesn’t have a name yet, the pitch is that the book will use Twitter’s story to talk about the post-social revolution in Silicon Valley and how it has impacted the tech industry. Bilton is not responding to my messages. Maybe he is worried that I am going to ask him about the big “six figure” advance he is supposed to have received.

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The wait is over. Instagram has finally arrived on the Android (not all of the phones, but quite a few of them.) And predictably, the reaction to the release of the app has been tremendous – though not everyone is that impressed by it. Either way, it is giving the San Francisco-based company’s user base a nice bump. Instagram had about 430,000 people on the Android-app waiting list prior to today’s release. The company says before today’s launch it had more than 30 million registered users and more than a billion photos have been uploaded so far — that is impressive growth for a company that launched in October 2010.

The New York Times reports that the company is signing up around 2000 people a minute.  That is a whopping 120,000 new users every hour or about 2.9 million in a day.  I have been watching my own follower count on Instagram (you can follow me @om) and it has gone past the 10,000 mark. On a typical day, I add about 25 new followers on Instagram and share two photos. Today was no different. I uploaded two photos, but today I have added about 500 new followers.

On a lark, I emailed Nick Bilton of the New York Times, arguably one of the top Instagram-mers to find out how many new folks he had added: a couple of thousand, he replied back. Many of the folks who I normally follow on Instagram were showing higher follower counts as well. Last time I checked, the app had 4.5 rating on Google’s Play store with 24,550 votes.

It is pretty clear that thanks to the turbocharge effect of Android, Instagram’s user base is going to blast past the 50 million mark in a couple of weeks. Just before the company launched its app in October, I had pointed out that there was going to be a mobile-only, photo-oriented social platform that will challenge the established social giants. It will be a summer to remember for this tiny company.

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