LinkedIn explained the acquisition in a press release, noting that the demand for content on the site that relates to people’s professions is growing, and that the Pulse team can help LinkedIn improve the types of news people are seeing:

“We believe LinkedIn can be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content. Millions of professionals are already starting their day on LinkedIn to glean the professional insights and knowledge they need to make them great at their jobs. We believe we can help all professionals make smarter and more informed business decisions leveraging all the great business knowledge flowing through LinkedIn in the form of news, Influencer posts, industry updates, discussions, comments and more.”

Around the time of the acquisition reports back in March, my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote for paidContent why it would make perfect sense, as the company grows into more of a dual recruiting and media business, with users who are interested in business news. In fact, LinkedIn’s executive editor Daniel Roth will be speaking on our panel about the rise of new media entities next week at our PaidContent Live conference in New York.

Pulse wrote in a blog post why it’s joining the company, pointing again to LinkedIn’s demand for knowledge on its site:

“LinkedIn is the perfect partner as we continue our journey. The company shares our passions and values, our belief in the power of knowledge and elevated discussion, particularly for professionals looking for insights to help make them better at what they do. We believe this important step is the key to an even better experience for our community, and we’re excited for what’s to come.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back

I should note that this isn’t the only reason I’m relatively unconcerned about Google’s decision: I also think there will be plenty of alternatives for those who wish to continue using RSS feeds as their main information diet, including Feedly — which says it has cloned the Reader API and created its own back-end for other services to use — as well as NewsBlur, and a proposed reader client that the new managers of Digg say they are working on for release later this year. Instapaper founder Marco Arment says he remains optimistic about the future of the RSS reader market for much the same reason.

An RSS reader is no longer enough

For me personally, however, the reality is that RSS feeds have ceased to play a key role in my news consumption. I still think RSS is a crucial part of the plumbing that underlies the web — and I hope the death of Google Reader isn’t the beginning of an attack on RSS, as some suspect — but for me it lacks a certain something, and that something is the element of social interaction.

For me Google Reader has been dead since 2009. Here's a post I wrote back then: scobleizer.posterous.com/why-i-dont-use… Social killed it.

—
Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) March 14, 2013

Like Laura, I used to have hundreds of RSS feeds from different blogs, websites and traditional news sources in my Google Reader, and I used apps like Reeder and Feedly as a front-end for those subscriptions, and also imported them into Flipboard and other apps when that was available. But as I built up a number of Twitter lists — separated into different topics and focused on both blog sources, news feeds and individual users in those subject areas — I found I was spending less and less time in my RSS feeds.

The key difference, as New York Times editor Patrick Laforge (and others) have mentioned, is that social news distributed via Twitter and other networks is just that — social. It has a human element that automated RSS feeds simply can’t duplicate (at least not yet). This isn’t just a touch-feely thing either: From a purely informational point of view, social news carries a ton of meta-data along with it, by virtue of the fact that a specific human being chose to tweet a link, or re-tweet one, or comment on one.

A problem with Google Reader is that it won’t read and evaluate the articles for me the way Twitter users do. People are still > robots.

—
Patrick LaForge, NYT (@palafo) March 14, 2013

That social element makes a link more valuable

The nature of my relationship with each of the hundreds of people who are in my Twitter lists is almost impossible to quantify — although I’m sure that data scientists like Prismatic founder Bradford Cross are desperately trying to do so. But my knowledge of them and their interests, and their background or behavior, and the activity in their Twitter stream, all combines to make a single tweet from them with a link in it far more valuable to me than a simple RSS feed.

So it’s not just that Twitter is good at delivering real-time news — where it is, in my experience, as good or better than an RSS reader. It is also particularly good at attaching meaning to that news, by the combination of people who tweet or re-tweet a link or a piece of information. That does as much to help me appreciate the significance of a story as a single post or scoop, and likely more.

That’s why services like Prismatic, which uses the social graph I have developed in Twitter and elsewhere as a foundation for news recommendations, are so much more powerful than my old RSS reader — because they show me things that I didn’t already know I was interested in, and that is the holy grail of information consumption. And it’s why, despite my love-hate relationship with Twitter as a platform, I continue to rely so heavily on it.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Promesa Art Studio and Arvind Grover

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The 2013 task management tools market
• Finding the Value in Social Media Data
• Digg Relaunch Shows How Hard it is to Change Your Game

So who exactly is going to organize the web’s information into a digestible format? That’s still TBD. Flipboard and Zite and Prismatic are just a few solutions (if you look beyond my beloved Google Reader to social, iPad-oriented apps), but they haven’t necessarily won the market yet. Flipboard announced in August that it’s been gaining traction, but that still only translates to 20 million total users, compared to Twitter’s 200 million active users. So the social reader market remains an interesting one to watch.

And one of those apps to watch is Thirst, which is relaunching its product Tuesday as a social reader for news. The company’s first product was more of a social reader for tweets, organizing the ones you missed in a new format. While that product was interesting, it definitely did not jibe with Twitter’s new API restrictions, and Thirst announced it would expand into other types of content after presenting at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference.

Rather than shuffle tweets, the new Thirst app instead tries to do what most social readers do: it presents with you the most popular news stories of the day, lets you select topics and categories that interest you, and read articles within the app. The big question is still traction and users, obviously — you need friends using the app to make sharing and commenting interesting, and your users have to be willing to declare their interests and set up the app. These are significant hurdles, no doubt.

But one of my favorite features in the app is the ability to like or comment on articles, which is reminiscent of the old function on Google Reader where you could like and comment on articles among your friends. Google unfortunately axed the feature despite user protest in favor of rolling out its social product in Google+. It’s smart that Thirst would model that feature in hopes of capturing some of the enthusiasm that the old Google Reader did.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• How to stand out in the app development game

• The trouble with social news: Aldo Cortesi shares his growing discontent with the social news ecosystem and in it, he nails some of the anxiety I have felt about the internet’s new news ecosystem.
• Financial trials of St. Louis Cardinals coach Mike Matheny: What a wonderful story of a baseball coach who lost all his money in the real estate bust and yet managed to keep it together for his family and his team. I have a lot of respect for Matheny, not just for his baseball skills but for coming to terms with this twist of fate.
• Dualtone derby: Okay, I made up the headline, but this story of Grammy Award-winning Nashville label Dualtone is a reminder of why doing things your own way comes with a price that is worth paying. Great story!
• How do hotel reservations work?: In case you ever wondered about it, now is your chance to find it all out.
• The soul of student debt: This is a different, unique take on the student debt that everyone talks about in America.
• The Caucasian king of K-Pop: K-Pop is Korean Pop, as in “Gangnam Style” and stuff, and Brad Moore from Ohio is drumming its beat. Short, sweet piece.
• The D2C Generation: The internet is creating new opportunities for designers who are going directly to consumers and finding success despite selling fewer items.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Digg Relaunch Shows How Hard it is to Change Your Game
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

In case you’re unfamiliar, Techmeme is a must-read news aggregator for Silicon Valley types that also acts as a gold star dispenser for tech writers who vie to appear on it. Rivera, the site’s founder, is thoughtful and soft-spoken in person but comes across on Twitter like this:

Rivera has made an out-sized impression on tech journalism not only as an influencer but also for his use of robot-style publishing. Techmeme and its sister site Mediagazer both rely on online signals to determine if an article should appear and also whether to move it up or down the page. Only in the last four years has Rivera introduced human editors, based in time zones stretching from Bulgaria to Australia, to help the robots do their jobs.

At the event in New York, which was hosted by media company Outbrain, Rivera explained to Business Insider’s Steve Kovach why algorithms will never be able to curate as effectively as humans.

“A lot of people who think they can go all the way with the automated approach fail to realize a news story has become obsolete,” said Rivera, explaining that an article can be quickly superseded even if it receives a million links or tweets.

This is why Rivera now relies on human editors to shepherd the headlines that bubble up and swat down the inappropriate ones. He argues any serious tech or political news provider will always have to do the same.

Rivera is also not enthused about social-based news platforms — sites like LinkedIn Today or Flipboard that assemble news stories based on what your friends are sharing on social media. Asked if Techmeme will offer a social-based news feed, Rivera said don’t count on it.

“People like to go to the New York Times and look at what’s on the front page because they have a lot of trust in what editors decide and they know other people read it. We want to do the same thing,” he said. “There’s value in being divorced from your friends … I’d rather see what’s on the front of the New York Times.”

As for the business of Techmeme, Rivera says the site relies on three forms of advertising, all of which could be considered “native advertising” — the mantra now being preached in publishing circles. Specifically, Techmeme makes money from sponsored posts, job listings and event posts.

Finally, Rivera offered a frank and sanguine take on his plans to tune up his sites for the mobile age.

“I think the mobile site gets the job done but it could be snappier. We should do our own app. But we have 2 developers and one of them is me.”

(Image by Sarah Holmlund via Shutterstock)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back
• The quantified self: hacking the body for better health
• How to navigate the new world of digital advertising

The company on Thursday said that it had purchased the small New York startup for an undisclosed amount (in its first acquisition), adding three new technical hires.

Kingfish Labs, which has raised $500,000 from Lerer Ventures and Softbank Capital (both of which are also Buzzfeed investors), was launched about a year ago to process natural language on Facebook to figure out user interests and match up members for dating.

Jon Steinberg, Buzzfeed’s president and COO, said the company plans to apply that underlying technology in its efforts to create and seed social ads for its brand clients.

“A big part of what we do is extend those [brand's] campaigns and seed them in paid units on Facebook and Twitter,” he said. “We’re going to use that same technology to determine the interests of Facebook’s users… and target Sponsored Stories more granularly, based on those interests.”

Aside from sharing investors, Buzzfeed co-founder Jonah Peretti also worked with Kingfish co-founders Jeff Revesz and Rob Fishman at Huffington Post. Revesz and the other two technical former Kingfishers will join Buzzfeed’s engineering team but Fishman will not be joining the company.

Image via SocialHype

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Takeaways from connected consumer’s second quarter
• Google doesn’t like walled gardens — except its own
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

Before he started Friendster in 2002, Abrams had a couple of earlier startups that were also early to their respective markets, including a social-bookmarking service called Hotlinks, which the Canadian-born entrepreneur started after working for Netscape in the late 1990s — but it launched five years before Delicious became the hot social-bookmarking tool, and it eventually perished in the dot-com crash. Abrams then launched an event-planning site similar to Evite called Socializr, but it too failed to get much traction and was eventually sold in 2010.

Trying to solve the social-information overload problem

At that point, Abrams had moved on to running a San Francisco nightclub called Slide and also an office-sharing and entertainment space called Founder’s Den — but he says he was always interested in trying to solve the emerging problem of information overload that comes with social networks like Twitter, which he had begun using as his main source of news:

“I started shifting my news consumption away from RSS and places like MyYahoo and started using Twitter more and more, but I found even if I checked it a couple of times a day I felt like I was missing so much stuff. I needed some tool that could help me manage everything.”

Instead of checking out one of the other services that were trying to provide filters and recommendation services, such as Zite or Summify, Abrams — a programmer who got his start working for Canada’s famous Bell Northern Research labs — decided to just put together his own, and what became Nuzzel was born. Users log in with their Twitter and/or Facebook profiles and the system’s algorithms go through a user’s activity streams and pull out the news articles that have been shared or recommended by the most number of followers. The service also uses these semantic signals to generate recommended content that hasn’t been explicitly shared by anyone in a user’s social graph.

In my initial use of the service, it came up with some good recommendations and some popular articles, and the site is well-designed and moves quickly — both of which are impressive, considering Abrams has no employees whatsoever, and put the entire site together himself. Users can filter the articles by time or by the number of friends who have shared them, and each post or article or piece of content comes with related tweets below it, any of which can be retweeted or interacted with. The most obvious use case for Nuzzel is the one that the tagline at the top of the service’s home page describes: “News You May Have Missed” — in other words, a catch-up tool for those who don’t have time to read everything.

The market for social-news filters is super-saturated

Abrams is right that this is a market that needs serving, but the challenge is that there are plenty of others already doing so: there are “personalized newspaper” services like Paper.li, apps like News360, Pulse or Zite, and even a service from the grandpa of social recommendations: namely, Digg, which was acquired by New York-based incubator Betaworks and merged with its News.me news-filtering app. Twitter has a stake in this particular game as well, after acquiring Summify, and there are newer dedicated filtering services like Nova Spivack’s Bottlenose and a startup called Prismatic.

The Friendster founder says that he doesn’t want to take the route that some others have taken by trying to make the system too complicated — he says that he isn’t interested in “having it become some kind of PhD thesis in machine learning,” but simply wants to solve a problem for users in as simple a way as possible. And he says he hasn’t tried many of his competitors, apart from News.me (which he says he liked in many ways). “I’m just really focused on my vision, which I think is a little different,” he said, adding that he is hoping to raise some seed financing so he can hire some staff.

The problem for Nuzzel, however, is that while Abrams may think his vision is a little different, the service itself looks very similar to about half a dozen other apps and services that do fundamentally the same thing, and in some cases have had months or even years to develop a following. That’s going to be a difficult thing to overcome, even for the founder of the world’s first social network.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How social discovery is transforming entertainment
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Trapit’s web version has over 25,000 users a day and the company says they spend an average of 16 minutes per visit. The company is based in Palo Alto, Calif. and is venture-backed by Horizons Ventures and SRI International.

As in the web-based version, users start by searching for a subject or URL. They save it as a “trap” and improve its recommendations over time by tapping a thumbs-up or thumbs-down and selecting the reason they don’t like a piece of content. Trapit doesn’t rely on content from social networks, pre-set topics or specific feeds the way apps like Flipboard do.

“Flipboard is essentially an RSS feed,” Trapit co-founder and Chief Product Officer Hank Nothhaft told me. “It’s not bringing anything new to the table. It’s not highly personalized or relevant. We’ve taken the opposite approach. We’re all about user-generated interest, being selfish and really reveling in the things that you like.” Trapit scours content from about 120,000 sources, up from 100,000 last year. In the past few months, the company also cut about 10,000 sources based on user feedback.

The Trapit iPad app lets users share their finds through Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and email, and they can use a “read later” button to create a reading list. Other unique iPad features include Retina display optimization, voice recognition and a reading format that “shares the love with the original publisher” of a piece of content.

Other apps “lift, borrow or steal a good chunk of content and text and present it in their interface,” Nothhaft said. “We set out to create a seamless browsing experience” that serves pages within the app but shows their original design, videos, comments and ads and counts as a site visit.

Coming soon: Publishing partnerships and “source-based traps”

Nothhaft said Trapit is making “a lot of inroads with publishers,” just signed its first deal with a magazine and will add premium content soon — not just “the usual subjects like newspapers with paywalls,” but longer-tail content centered around topics like crafts, cooking and DIY. While a revenue model isn’t decided yet, users could upgrade to the premium content or just buy it buy the piece.

That is the opposite approach that magazine joint venture Next Issue Media takes with its “all-you-can-read” tablet magazine subscriptions and focus on popular publications. “Big magazine content doesn’t make sense in a Trapit context,” Nothhaft said, describing approaches like Next Issue’s as “antiquated” on a tablet platform. “We like the idea of unbundling and breaking a [magazine] issue apart.”

In addition, Trapit plans to add the ability to pull in all posts from a given website. (When I wrote about the company last November, I mentioned that Trapit could not yet replace my Google Reader because I want to read all posts on a few sites and don’t trust an algorithm not to miss something.) “This makes sense to us even though it’s not the core of what we do,” Nothhaft said. “The combination of deep personalization with the ability to follow the sources you really love eliminates the need for multiple [content consumption] apps.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• The state of cross-platform media measurement
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter

Seriously social

Smartr doesn’t just rely on social media sources to help personalize your content; it provides you with social outlets, too. You can chat in real-time with other readers, for instance, which gives you an entirely new way to butt heads over who’s more well-read.

You can also directly blog from within the app, which posts stories to your Smartr feed. You can add a description of your blog, and share your postings to it with other Smartr users or with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr or Posterous. It also automatically creates a web-accessible, Tumblr-type, simple blog, with links back to each story you save, and a “Subscribe” option.

Friends as curators

Smartr also makes it possible for you to use your friends for their particular strengths to help populate your personalized news feed. So, for instance, you can use your existing Twitter list for tech journalists to create a special tech feed of exactly the people you want to hear from — likewise for any Twitter list you have.

Also, you can follow people directly in Smartr. The posts they share will show up in your Smartr feed, and if they’re online, they’ll show up as available to chat in real time about the stories you’re both reading.

Room to grow

Smartr is a good option for those looking for better ways to clear out some of the clutter of Facebook and Twitter and just drill down to stories being shared on those networks, and it has some smart social media features that set it apart from the competition. However, those features need a little more refinement.

For instance, the in-app blogging is a nice touch, but I’m not very likely to use it over something like Tumblr because it acts only as a bare-bones solution. It doesn’t look particularly good, and there’s not much you can do in the way of customization. If the blog itself could stand on its own as a great product, that would really go a long way toward making it feel like a valuable addition to the product. Or, if Smartr just tied in directly to Tumblr in a way that lets you view how your post would look on that service ahead of time, that could be a simpler way to improve the blog function.

That said, Smartr is off to a great start and I’m glad to finally see it on the iPad. Here’s hoping it keeps innovating toward the more social end of the news aggregation spectrum.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Development strategies for the app-developer community
• A near-term outlook for the mobile app marketplace
• Survey: the next wave of enterprise mobility

For starters, Graham, who is on the board of Facebook, noted that he reads our little publication. Then he went on to talk about The Washington Post in the Facebook Era and how he believes big media companies need to evolve. As you might have heard, Washington Post launched a social news reader which features content from a whole slew of sources (not GigaOM, which is kinda uncool, but whatever) such as Sugar and SBNation in addition to content from the Post and some news wires such as the Associated Press.

You may have seen the photos and how un-web like it is. When I asked Graham about the diffusion of the Post brand in the new social reader, he pointed out that it’s by design. His argument — since the Post (and media companies) need to go where the readers are — is that the definition of the information container is going to be different from the traditional brand-centric media packages we are used to: you know, newspapers and magazines.

Graham’s view is that media companies like his need to evolve and move the news to where the readers are. The company’s thinking is outlined in this article on Fast Company:

First, the stories you see in the Reader are not chosen by editors. Instead, they’re chosen by social signals, including which articles you and your friends read as well as information from your Facebook profile and the things you’ve Liked. Those differences reflect two major shifts away from conventional news industry thinking, Washington Post Company Chief Digital Officer Vijay Ravindran tells Fast Company. While the industry has long prided itself on the acumen of its editors, the Post Company now believes that social will play an increasingly large role in how readers find news they might be interested in. “I know what readers my age want,” says the 66-year-old Graham. “But the great mystery is what younger readers want.”

Though it isn’t clear what the revenue model is for this brave new social world, Graham believes they would be foolish not to try to figure out where news is headed. He joked that printing presses that cost more than $200 million are a much bigger overhead than having a team of technologists trying to figure out the future.

Graham said there was one thing he was certain about: No matter how the news is distributed and consumed, the need for news will always be there. The job of the reporter doesn’t change, he said. What changes is how information is gathered and distributed, and that’s a big opportunity for large media companies like his.

He predicted there will be a handful of big companies that will have the scale to have writing staffs and resources to keep producing news as we’ve known it. I don’t necessarily disagree with him. Much as there are a handful of Hollywood studios who continue to produce most of the movies, we could see the news business consolidate further behind half a dozen brands like The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal  and The New York Times. And then there will be freewheeling indies like us who will continue to match their content with their audience.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• How social discovery is transforming entertainment
• NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media