But GIFs aren’t allowed.

Shortly after Facebook’s announcement, I hit my own Facebook page to upload rogue comments of one of my favorite GIFs: a Japanese Chin with eyebrows stuck to its face. But right after I clicked post, the dog with eyebrows didn’t twirl a single time.

A representative from Facebook confirmed that for now, photo comments work for still images only.

Animated GIFs are polarizing among social-media platforms. They’ve had a meteoric rise on Tumblr, where millions of users share everything from cats hiding in boxes to dramatic scenes from Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta. But they’ve  struggled to share space on other big social-media sites.

Twitter famously banned GIFs from profile icon photos in the fall of last year, and will often lock up if a GIF is natively uploaded via its photo service, so the chances of an animated image making its way into the Twitter stream is low. Instagram also lacks animated photos.

Why is the GIF so beloved by users yet so maligned by platforms? A lot of the trouble is the sheer amount of space a GIF takes up compared to a photo — a trouble spot many Tumblr devotees have had to overcome when uploading their own GIFs, as the website has a strict limit of 1MB in file size.

Twitter ultimately nixed the GIF user icons specifically because they were slowing down the API of the platform. Considering the volume of Facebook’s user pool, it’s likely that floods of GIFs would increase load times and even break browsers on occasion.

But these troubles haven’t stopped the GIF from becoming a popular tool for self expression, and I have already seen many Facebook users as disappointed with their frozen photos as I was with poor eyebrow dog.

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Mohit Lad, the CEO of ThousandEyes, talked about his company at our Structure conference in San Francisco, where he was accompanied by Rafal Waligora, network engineering manager at Twitter. Waligora talked about how the company is taking advantage of the services provided, and why the startup presents something unique:

“There is a lot of special things about ThousandEyes,” he said. “It’s very visual. You can troubleshoot very fast. It highlights different problems.”

My colleauge Barb Darrow wrote about the startup’s launch Wednesday morning, where she explained the idea behind the company:

“Traditional performance monitoring tools may be fine for keeping tabs on what’s happening in house, but not so great at what’s happening outside.  At least that’s the thinking behind ThousandEyes, a San Francisco startup emerging from stealth Wednesday at GigaOM Structure.  Built from the ground up to attack this distributed performance monitoring problem, he claimed ThousandEyes does a better job than older tools. In that camp, it competes with offerings from IBM/Tivoli, CA, HP, and NetScout.”

ThousandEyes helps companies determine where problems originate, which is helpful as they’re splitting between in-house IT systems and off-site Software-as-a-Service providers.

Check out the rest of our Structure 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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Royal officials have announced some details on how the public will be notified of the baby’s birth, which is expected in mid-July. From The AP, the officials said the news will come in both old-school and new-school formats:

This will be a mix of tradition and new social media. Officials said a royal aide will emerge from the hospital with a signed bulletin on foolscap-sized paper carrying the Buckingham Palace letterhead. The bulletin will be given to an official, who will be driven to the Palace, where it will be posted on an easel in public view in front of the building. At the same time the bulletin is posted, there will be an announcement on Twitter, and the media will be formally notified. The document will give the baby’s gender, weight and time of birth.

But no, this might not include the baby’s name right away. As The New York Times noted, it takes time to pick a baby’s name, particularly when it’s a royal baby.

We’ve covered all aspects of Twitter’s business, from its growing media ambitions, to its relationship with television, to its role in breaking news. But the fact remains that celebrity announcements — particularly of the famous baby variety — remain a hugely popular type of information. When Beyonce’s pregnancy was announced in 2011, it set a new record for tweets per minute – outpacing the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death.

The report didn’t say which account will break the big news, but @BritishMonarchy is probably a good bet.

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The deal with Viacom will debut at the MTV Music Awards on Aug. 25, where highlights from the show will be tweeted out to viewers along with accompanying advertisements. The Viacom deal is part of Twitter’s new Amplify program, announced in March, that allows companies like Conde Nast, New York Media (owner of New York Magazine) and Discovery to reach viewers simultaneously on live television and a second screen.

The Viacom deal was previously reported by Bloomberg back in April, and we wrote about why the deal would make sense considering Twitter’s current television ambitions. While companies like Facebook are looking to expand real-time options and capture the conversation around breaking news and television, it’s still an area where Twitter excels, as we’ve written before.

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The study, entitled “Mapping the global Twitter heartbeat,” was published in the university’s peer-reviewed journal First Monday in May, and used what is known as the Twitter “Decahose” — which is made up of one-tenth of all the messages sent across the network. Access to the data was provided by Gnip, one of the companies that is licensed to sell Twitter’s full firehose, as part of a demonstration project with computer maker Silicon Graphics called “Twitter Heartbeat.”

For that demonstration, the researchers used the Decahose — which streamed more than 1.5 billion tweets from 71 million unique users during the period from October 23 to November 30 of 2012, an average of 38 million tweets a day — to show a real-time map of global discussion about topics such as Hurricane Sandy and the U.S. federal election. As part of that project, the team created one of the largest databases of global tweets with geographic data included, based both on GPS data and user profiles.

In addition to some interesting data about where most geo-located tweets come from (Jakarta in Indonesia and New York City were two of the top locations), the study looked at what the Twitter data shows about the way that social networks have changed the way we communicate. In many ways, the researchers said, networks like Twitter have “created a world in which a person may speak to another on the other side of the planet with just a few millisecond delay, effectively removing the geographic barrier.”

“Users on Twitter communicate with others both near them and half a world away, illustrating that the role of physical proximity in communication seems to be reduced in the era of social media.”

These maps of real-time connections produced for the Illinois study reminded me of similar maps created with Facebook data, such as the one that Facebook intern Paul Butler produced in 2010 (which appears below) — or the one that data researcher Pete Warden created by scraping Facebook user profiles, a fascinating map of connections that he later had to delete after the social network threatened to sue him for breaching its terms of service.

Although Twitter CEO Dick Costolo likes to talk about the service as the “pulse of the planet,” it’s worth noting that most of the world’s population still doesn’t tweet — and even most of those who do aren’t using it all the time: Twitter has about 550 million users, or about eight percent of the world’s population, but the top five percent account for almost half of all tweets sent. Of the sample the U of Illinois researchers looked at, one quarter tweeted only once.

In addition, the study notes that only 8 percent of all users had location data available. About one percent of all users surveyed accounted for more than two-thirds of all geo-referenced tweets, showing that geo-located are created by what the researchers called “an even more extreme subset of users” than overall tweets. They noted that studies relying on these tweets alone would have a “skewed view of the Twitterverse, especially over short periods of time.”

That said, however, it’s fascinating to see tangible evidence of how social networks like Twitter can help to erase geographical barriers and connect users around the globe in real time.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Dunechaser

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But one replacement product that I wouldn’t use? An RSS news reader from Facebook.

In one sense, it wouldn’t be surprising for Facebook to launch an RSS reader at its press event next Thursday in Menlo Park, as some people have speculated. Anyone using Google Reader has to find a replacement by July 1, and it’s still a pretty wide-open market. Products like Feedly seem to have a head start, but there’s still time for someone to roll out a new product and win over users.

We’ve seen that Facebook has no problem quickly launching products to try to disrupt a growing market, even if it’s not a sure thing they’ll succeed. (Just look at Poke, the company’s challenge to Snapchat.) And between the company’s launch of hashtags last week to improve the real-time nature of the news feed (even if I think hashtags are better saved for ironic conversation), and the addition of new tabs for following people on the new News Feed, Facebook clearly has ambitions to be more of a resource for news. (After all, brands and advertisers love the real-time nature of constantly updated live events and news.)

But as a hardcore Google Reader user, I have no interest in using an RSS reader replacement from Facebook, and there are several reasons why it seems like an ill-suited product for the social platform.

The appeal of Google Reader was that it was a reliable tool for importing and consuming news — one that wasn’t influenced by trends. When I subscribe to a feed, I want to read everything in that feed. With Twitter and Facebook at my disposal, I don’t need another site to see articles that my friends are sharing. I rely on my RSS feeds for work to catch every item of technology news flowing across the internet every day — I need to see everything, not just what’s popular, to do my job. And I follow probably 20-30 blogs about topics like fashion or cooking, where the writers post infrequently but where want to read every one of their posts.

So why wouldn’t I look to Facebook to re-create this experience? Probably because I don’t want my RSS reader to be social — I have Twitter and the existing Facebook for social news. I don’t want all my friends to know that I read fashion blogs on a daily basis. I don’t want the news I read to influence the ads I see on Facebook, or the stories that show up in my news feed. As the Washington Post’s auto-sharing from its social reader experiment showed, people don’t want everyone to know what they’re reading.

Of course, we don’t know if Facebook is launching an RSS reader at all, let alone what it would look like. The company did not have any comment on the matter when we asked. But social sharing is embedded in Facebook’s DNA, so it’s a reasonable assumption that any RSS reader put out by Facebook would have serious social attributes, with a heavy emphasis on sharing.

Sure, there’s room for social news on Facebook. On my account, I “like” a lot of news outlets, as well as journalists and celebrities and business figures. In fact, a quick glance at my news feed would show mostly news stories, and very few posts from my friends. It’s a great way to see what’s popular right now in the news, or to catch an older story I might have missed on Twitter. But social news is a distinctly different experience from what people knew and loved about Google Reader — and that’s a distinction that a company like Digg seems to understand.

As I wrote previously, Digg’s new RSS news reader will likely incorporate some social features but will also serve as a separate product from the popular stories posted on Digg.com. And while Google Reader used to have much-beloved social features, these were complements, not a replacement, for the feeds themselves.

Would it make perfect sense for Facebook to create a dedicated spot on its site for news? Sure. But that likely wouldn’t keep me from searching for my next RSS relationship.

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The model, which lets customers plug in specific information they care about in order to get tailored results, has already proven attractive to investors, and on Wednesday the company announced a new $30 million round of venture funding. Institutional Venture Partners and Venrock led the round, and Deep Fork Capital, GSV Capital and Wharton Equity Parnters also contributed. The company has now raised $46.5 million.

When the New York-based company showed its stuff last year, it had already signed up banks and hedge funds as customers. The Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval of using social media outlets for announcing company news has only broadened adoption.

The use case is pretty clear in financial services, where getting reports as soon as they’re available could provide the justification for trades that could make plenty of money, perhaps more than what slower-informed traders might be able to make. Dataminr’s algorithms take into account factors such as a Twitter user’s location, the user’s reputation, the appearance of news from external sources, market volume and market prices. But much of these back-end calculations happen behind the scenes, so customers see just the important content when they receive alerts.

Dataminr beat major news services by 16 minutes last month following a freight-train derailment near Baltimore. The stock of the freight train company fell after media outlets reported on the incident, and that’s just the sort of thing that shows how Dataminr can come in handy.

Source: Dataminr

However, preventing the reporting of false positives is critical, and Dataminr knows that. Twitter can be self-correcting in the sense that people weigh in very quickly, and that activity informs the algorithms Dataminr looks to as it sends alerts to customers, Ted Bailey, the company’s founder and CEO, told me.

In addition to the financial-services area, Dataminr has also picked up a number of government customers. Now the company wants to get its product into more industry verticals.

Dataminr, founded in 2009, is one of a handful that process the contents of the Twitter firehose and sell services to other companies. Others in that category are DataSift, Gnip and Topsy. It’s one thing to have lots of data coming onto servers and another to get actionable insights on it in real time, and this thinking extends to the Twitterverse, where drowning in tweets doesn’t do much good. That’s why tools such as Dataminr should come in handy much more as the Twitter user count keeps climbing.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user muratart.

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The Oriella Digital Journalism Study asked 553 journalists in 15 countries about their outlook and their publications, and reflects some interesting geographic differences. Here are some highlights:

• 59 percent of journalists are tweeting in 2013, versus 47 percent in 2012.
  

• Twitter use is highest in English-speaking countries, while barely a third of German journalists have a Twitter account.

Here’s a graph that shows the relative popularity of digital and social media tools:

And here is how social media use varies across countries. Note the difference between France and Germany, which is surprising given the reactionary attitudes towards digital journalism often found among news organizations in both countries.

Here are a few other interesting nuggets:

• Citizen journalism is making inroads: A fifth of those surveyed said it carries as much credibility in their organization as mainstream reporting.

• Thirty-nine percent of journalists regards themselves as “digital first” (perhaps the flip side is more striking — 61 percent still regard themselves as print journalists).

In a related release, Robin Grainger, Director of the Oriella PR Network, said the findings suggest that “‘Shorter but quicker’ journalism may afford media brands greater prominence – and consequently greater traffic — in search rankings, news readers and social news aggregator apps such as Flipboard and Pulse News.”

The countries surveyed were Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S.. On average, 37 journalists were surveyed in each country. You can find the report and more here.

(Image by Aaron Amat via Shutterstock)

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The switch comes as the company is looking expand, both in terms of the social media platforms it supports and brands it works with. Starting Tuesday, customers will be able to accept credit and debit cards from both domestic and international customers, as well as send and accept automated clearing house (ACH) payments through Chirpify’s system. Previously, these transactions were processed through PayPal, and sellers would pay both a PayPal and Chirpify fee, which will now be reduced to just the Chirpify fee.

Several companies have tried to figure out the problem of social purchasing, but not everyone has suceeded. Chirpify is probably the best-known company that allows you to buy something by sending a single tweet or posting a Facebook comment: Talk about an impulse purchase. Big brands using Chirpify to sell directly to consumers via social media include Adidas, the Portland Trailblazers, Green Day, and Snoop Dogg (who is apparently a huge draw).

Once consumers create a Chirpify account with all of their payment information (including credit cards or PayPal accounts), they can make purchases on social media by posting a Facebook comment or sending a tweet:

There’s a major revolution going on in mobile and social payments right now, from Stripe optimizing payments for paying people through services like Airbnb or Lyft, to Square re-imagining the cash register for small businesses. At the moment, it looks like Chirpify is making strides when it comes to payments through social.

This post was updated to note that consumers can still connect their PayPal accounts to their Chirpify accounts to make payments.

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We’ve already seen apps like Feedly, Pulse, and NewsBlur gain a whole bunch of new followers as a result of the news, but there’s still one more app we’ll be waiting to try before picking what RSS camp to join in July: Digg’s news reader, scheduled to launch in late June. Digg executives haven’t said a lot about the product, but they shared a few details with me in a recent interview.

While Digg went into a steep decline in recent years that was evident as early as 2009, the NYC-based incubator Betaworks has brought the site back to life in recent months since acquiring the site last July. Digg announced just after the Google Reader announcement that it too would be launching a competitive service, and considering the team’s success in taking the previously defunct social news site and making it relevant again, there’s a good chance that its RSS reader could be a win as well.

I recently sat down in the large, airy Betaworks office in the heart of the Meatpacking District in New York, where the walls are covered in paper lists and small groups were holding brainstorm sessions all over the high-ceilinged space. Programmers and designers sat around the three rooms at different tables, which were organized by company, from Digg to Dots to Instapaper (some of which were just a few people.) When I visited, CEO John Borthwick was busy explaining what Betaworks is all about to a group of visitors through the Open.Co visitor program, and there was Chinese food on the counter from a group lunch. It felt like a more energetic, collaborative version of any co-working space I’ve visited in San Francisco.

I sat down with Jake Levine, formerly of News.me and now the general manager for Digg, and Andrew McLaughlin, the SVP of Betaworks and CEO of Digg, who was formerly a VP at Tumblr, Deputy CTO of the United States, and Director of Global Public Policy for Google. Levine and McLaughlin talked about the evolution of their thinking toward social news, and how the new Digg RSS reader project was a long-planned feature that is essential to Digg’s goal of creating the best social news experience on the web.

The re-birth of Digg

Digg has been around for a while — younger users, like myself, might not remember it from its heyday, when it practically introduced the idea of social news.

Founder Kevin Rose (now a partner at Google Ventures), was the subject of a now-infamous cover of Businessweek in the summer of 2006. Though the company later spiraled downward, caught between the rise of Facebook and Twitter, as Om wrote, it had a lasting impact on modern media.

Parts of the company were sold off to different companies like The Washington Post and LinkedIn, but it was Betaworks that bought the consumer-facing site and reader base for reportedly just under $500,000 dollars in July 2012.

“If there’s any company that understands the real-time nature of the web, it’ll be the people that brought us all these really cool things like bit.ly and Chartbeat,” Rose said when he reflected on the sale.

Re-imagining Digg from lessons learned with News.Me

Betaworks advises and invests in companies that are associated with the concept of social news. Some of its brainchildren, acquisitions and investments include Bit.ly, Chartbeat, Instapaper, SocialFlow, Dots, and Tumblr, just to name a few. CEO John Borthwick, who most recently spoke at our paidContent Live conference in April, has talked about the group’s unique approach to fostering startups, which is to launch them quickly in their early form, then killing the ones that don’t catch hold and putting people, servers and data insights behind the ones that do.

So when Betaworks acquired Digg, the timing couldn’t have been better. The group was getting ready to shutter News.Me in October 2012, in part because of Twitter’s API restrictions that were becoming a burden. But the app, which provided users with the top five tweeted articles among the people they follow on Twitter, had already given Betaworks useful data from news geeks and early adopters that could help the group create consumer-facing news site for a wider audience.

Levine explained that News.Me was an excellent product for the Twitter power users, and while it didn’t ultimately scale into a project that worked for everyone, the data, when combined with the stats from Chartbeat (measuring real-time publishing analytics) and Bit.ly (measuring analytics for links shared across the web), provided some interesting insights.

“We realized that the vast majority of people don’t have access to that kind of news,” Levine said. “But we had the parallel realization that we’d accumulated Twitter data from the 100,000 or so early adopting power users: what they were sharing, and what was shared in their networks. We realized could build an awesome network based on those people who were on Twitter for the people who weren’t.”

So the team quickly put together the new Digg in a matter of a few weeks, stripping down the design to a basic grid of stories that are selected both by algorithms and human editors, and letting users perform a few basic functions like sharing and saving. It was a quick start to putting Digg back on track, but the team’s plans didn’t end there.

How RSS fits into the ultimate plan

While adding an RSS reader might seem like an odd choice for the group re-inventing social news — after all, there wasn’t much in terms of social features on the old Google Reader (Google killed the one social feature the thing had) — McLaughlin and Levine explained that in reality, adding an RSS feed was always part of the plan for Digg. Google’s announcement just accelerated it.

“It was on the roadmap and we knew we wanted to eventually have a more comprehensive way to consume,” McLaughlin said. “We just jacked it up to do that now.”

While the two couldn’t yet reveal what Digg’s reader will look like exactly, and said it’s still in the works, slated for a June launch, they described it as two different parts to one Digg site: one part being the current homepage of socially-driven stories generated by algorithms and editors, and the other being an RSS reader of a user’s feeds, with updated features that someone following blogs in 2013 would want (save to Instapaper options, etc.) The two sections will be unified by a common design.

“For now, it’s aimed at power users and we’ll see if we can nail that. It’s going to be super clean and very uncluttered. Very fast,” McLaughlin said.

Users who don’t want the RSS feature and don’t create logins will still be able to visit Digg.com, so that experience won’t change for people who are happy with it. But ideally, people who care about following particular blogs and news sources will be able to get that kind of news from Digg as well.

“What we’re working on in the Digg reader, and what we think is now the integral part of a good reader, is speedy management,” McLaughlin said. “We’re trying to make it very easy to sort and just distill all of your items, or any feed down to the most popular items or the most popular in your social circles.”

Reading a business?

They said they’re extremely optimistic that a quality news reader could actually make money and create a sustainable business. While Digg’s  reader likely won’t be a paid product at first, they said they could see subscriptions or download fees as a way to make money in the future when the product is more solidified. As of early April, about 40 percent of survey respondants said that they’d be willing to pay for the product — a remarkable number, even if only half of them are telling the truth.

“Our goal is not to make everyone a power user. There are users who want that highly personalized reader experience. But the next year for us is exploring all of the options in that space,” Levine said. “There are plenty of products for power users. Our mission of making the social web more accessible for news discovery is something that transcends just this product.”

For those of us who obsessively check Twitter every day to find and re-tweet the latest news, it might be hard to understand the problem that Digg is trying to solve. But while we may think we have social news figured out, it’s time for a reality check: as of December 2012, only 16 percent of online adults were using Twitter, and far fewer are actually tweeting. If Digg succeeds, it could both attract the power users who care about RSS feeds and power the types of products like Google Reader, and then take that news data derived from those users to create a smarter general news site for everyone else.

Pre-Twitter Digg, say hello to post-Twitter Digg.

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