Just a day after Sky News told its journalists they should not post any kind of breaking news to Twitter — and also blocked them from retweeting anyone but an official Sky News account — the BBC has released a new version of its social-media policies that also requires reporters to file updates to news editors first rather than posting breaking news to Twitter. The BBC’s social-media editor says the policy isn’t as draconian as some critics are portraying it, but the emphasis on protecting the British national broadcaster’s existing news structure is just another example of how traditional media entities are struggling with their relationship to Twitter in an era of real-time, distributed news.

In a blog post at the BBC site, social-media editor Chris Hamilton says that the broadcaster recognizes the value of Twitter as a platform for distributing its content, a way of gathering news and a way of engaging with readers. But for now, he says, the national news network wants breaking news to be processed through its existing news system so that it reaches BBC viewers and readers through the broadcaster’s channels and sites rather than on Twitter. As Hamilton put it in his post:

[O]ur first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches BBC colleagues, and thus all our audiences, as quickly as possible – and certainly not after it reaches Twitter.

Hamilton and other BBC staffers, including BBC World Affairs producer Stuart Hughes, pointed out both on Twitter and in comments on blog posts about the move that the BBC has an internal publishing system called Quickfire that allows journalists for the news service to put content into its system via SMS or email — so that they could theoretically post something for editors and to Twitter at the same time. In other words, Hamilton said, the service is “talking about a difference of a few seconds” between content making it into the official system and being posted to Twitter.

Serve the reader, wherever they may be

That said, however, the focus of the policy update is clearly to put the emphasis on publishing news to the BBC’s existing properties first, rather than on Twitter. Why? Hamilton isn’t quite as clear on that as he is on the specifics of the rules. It could be that the news outlet wants to have news checked first by an editor, so that the BBC avoids the kind of fiasco that occurred when CBS Sports and other media entities repeated the erroneous news that Penn State coach Joe Paterno had died. Or it could be that the BBC is worried about competitive issues, as the Associated Press seems to be in promoting its own “don’t break news on Twitter” rules.

Financial Times columnist John Gapper, who defended the move in a conversation with me on Twitter, said it makes sense for news outlets like the BBC to try and preserve some news for their existing readers and viewers, and added that it doesn’t make sense to employ a journalist whose “loyalty is to his Twitter feed” instead of his organization. In other words, news should be saved for the company in an attempt to maintain its brand (and revenue), rather than being given away on Twitter for nothing.

To me, this puts the emphasis in the wrong place. I think news outlets that encourage their employees to break news on Twitter — such as Reuters, where social-media editor Anthony De Rosa wrote a critical post about the Sky News move — see the value of having journalists who become sources of news for their followers, many of whom may already be readers of their journalism, and others of whom may be potential readers. Whether that news comes after it has hit the wire, or after it has appeared on a BBC website, or whether it is even a retweet of someone close to the events, doesn’t really matter to most people.

One of the realities of a world in which distribution of content — including news — has been fundamentally democratized is that the value of a “scoop” or breaking news update is declining rapidly. The half-life of that kind of news is so short, and it becomes a commodity so quickly, that there is little value in trying to protect it for very long (although some are trying hard to do so via the courts). Look at it this way: if a single tweet from someone on your staff gives away enough of the value of your story that you have to forbid it, you have a lot bigger problems than just breaking news on Twitter.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Lili Viera De Carvalho and Rosaura Ochoa

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Even as some news outlets like Associated Press hire social-media editors to try and figure out how to make use of tools like Twitter for journalistic purposes, others seem to be intent on locking these tools down and removing as much of the social aspects from them as possible. According to a report in The Guardian, broadcaster Sky News has come out with a new policy that bars reporters from posting anything other than work-related content on Twitter, prevents them from breaking news through the service — and even forbids them from retweeting anything that doesn’t come from a Sky News account. As with so many other similar social-media policies, this completely misses the point of what makes Twitter so powerful.

Although it doesn’t link to an actual document, the Guardian story quotes from the Sky News guidelines, which tell reporters not to tweet about stories if they are not “a story to which you have been assigned or a beat which you work,” and says that anything approaching breaking news must be sent to a Sky editor first before being posted. The policy says that retweeting other Sky journalists is fine — provided they are posting updates about a story to which they have been assigned — but it says Sky staff are forbidden from retweeting anything that hasn’t been posted by a Sky News account:

Do not retweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter. Such information could be wrong and has not been through the Sky News editorial process.

Twitter is the newswire now, for better or worse

This is even more draconian than the most recent example of a news outlet trying to lock down Twitter use — namely, the Associated Press newswire, which came out with standards for retweeting that not only mis-stated how the process works on Twitter, but also forbade journalists working for the newswire from retweeting anything without adding a comment to make it clear that they were not agreeing with the person being retweeted. The AP rules also strictly forbid breaking news on Twitter, which ignores the fact (as I pointed out at the time) that for many people the real-time information network has become the newswire.

Since then, AP has hired Eric Carvin to be the service’s social-media editor (Carvin is the brother of National Public Radio’s Twitter phenom Andy Carvin, who turned his Twitter account into a one-man newswire during the Arab Spring revolutions). At a recent social-media event in New York, Eric told me that he was trying hard to convince the wire service that the benefits of social tools like Twitter outweigh the disadvantages. But as with so many traditional media outlets, both AP and Sky chose to focus their policies on what their staff shouldn’t do, instead of concentrating on what they should do.

As we’ve pointed out before, these kinds of rules seem to be aimed at trying to remove the human being from the process, something that may work in traditional forms of media, but fails miserably when using social tools like Twitter. The whole point of using them is to be social, and that means expressing human emotions and possibly even opinions in some cases. The best social-media policies — like the exceptionally minimalist version that Media News CEO John Paton came up with — simply ask reporters and editors to be themselves, but to think about what they post before doing so, and to use common sense and “don’t be stupid.”

Why remove the social from social media?

Sky News says in the email it sent to employees that the guidelines were necessary to ensure that “there is sufficient editorial control of stories reported by Sky News journalists and that the news desks remain the central hub for information.” And obviously, a news service doesn’t want dozens of reporters tweeting rumors and innuendo about major breaking stories, or tipping competitors off to a scoop. But banning staff from retweeting anyone outside the Sky News operation makes no sense whatsoever, as Charlie Beckett of the London School of Economics notes — Sky reporters should be seen as the key sources for information, regardless of where it comes from.

During the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, New York Times reporter Brian Stelter was the first to broach the rumor — on Twitter — that the terrorist leader had been killed, when he retweeted a post from the former chief of staff for Defence Minister Donald Rumsfeld. Some wondered whether Stelter would get in trouble from the Times for retweeting something that hadn’t been confirmed, and for posting it before his own newspaper. But as far as I know, there were no repercussions — and Stelter’s tweet in turn was retweeted thousands of times, and likely broke the news to many.

That’s what Twitter can accomplish if you use it properly, instead of seeing nothing but threats and potential negative repercussions. Like other media outlets that have tried the same approach, Sky News risks removing all the benefits of a powerful media tool by treating its staff as though they were disobedient children. Elana Zak of 10,000 Words has a Storify roundup of some other responses to the Sky News policy.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users and Rosaura Ochoa

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Financial terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but it looks like an acqui-hire more than anything else. Blockboard, which was previously known as BlockChalk, raised $1 million in a seed funding round back in May 2010, and since then the service does not appear to have generated any revenue. The four-person Blockboard team will be joining Klout, and according to the companies the Blockboard product will live on post-deal.

Klout announced the deal in a blog post Tuesday, writing:

“Blockboard has built an amazing local-mobile app that connects neighbors to build stronger communities through technology… With their experience, Blockboard brings an awareness of how social media can be meaningfully woven into the fabric of a local community, as well as a killer mobile app development team.”

Klout kept a relatively low profile for a couple months after some privacy-related snafus last year, so the announcement of the Blockboard acquisition serves as a public relations re-entry of sorts. It looks like Klout is not giving up any time soon, and it will be interesting to see how the company develops on the mobile and local fronts going forward.

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As Facebook draws close to the billion-user mark and a $100-billion market valuation, the giant social network’s dominance has reignited old fears about the decline and fall of the open web. John Battelle argues that we need a manifesto for the truly open Internet in order to rally the troops, but blogging veteran Robert Scoble says it is too late and he has already given up the fight. And longtime technology watcher and investor Esther Dyson says we need to remember that the Internet is prone to cycles of open vs. closed. In the end, the only thing that determines whether a closed model succeeds is the willingness of users to put up with its restrictions. For Facebook, that is both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness.

Not that long ago, the open web seemed to be the default for most users: America Online, one of the longest-lasting of the old walled-garden portals, was mostly an afterthought, used only by older consumers who were tied to its dial-up business (a business that even now continues to provide the lion’s share of AOL’s declining profits). Google was the model of the open web, with its objective algorithms and its commitment to sending users away instead of trying to keep them on its site. Websites and blogs were run on open platforms like WordPress (see disclosure), TypePad or Blogger, and anyone could link to anyone.

Then along came Facebook, which took the ultimate “gated community” approach right from the outset by restricting access to university students. As it grew and expanded, it maintained this walled-garden strategy by making it easy for users (and their precious data) to get into its network but much harder for them to get out — something Google highlighted in an attack on the social network’s data-hoarding policies. And the trend has only continued with the rollout of Facebook’s frictionless-sharing apps, which effectively make the network the hub of personal activity of all kinds, even newspaper reading.

If the garden is appealing, the walls don’t matter

What is the benefit for users that makes them so eager to place their entire online experience in the hands of a single company? The same as it was with America Online: namely, the fact that it provides a friendlier, safer — and ultimately easier to use — version of the Internet for non-geeks. As John Battelle puts it:

The open web is full of spam, shady operators, and blatant falsehoods. Outside of a relatively small percentage of high quality sites, most of the web is chock full of popup ads and other interruptive come-ons [but] in the curated gardens of places like Apple and Facebook, the weeds are kept to a minimum, and the user experience is just . . . better.

For open-web advocates like Dave Winer, there is almost nothing to like about this phenomenon — or, to shift the spotlight from Facebook for a moment, the fact that a powerful, global real-time information network like Twitter is controlled by a single corporate entity. The risks for Twitter users have been highlighted by the company’s announcement that it will censor tweets if asked to do so and by attempts on the part of countries like Brazil (and even the U.S.) to force the company to either turn over data or block specific accounts that they disapprove of.

Open alternatives such as Status.net and the would-be Facebook competitor Diaspora exist, and they have attracted support from the hard-core geek community. But they have made virtually zero impact on the vast majority of Internet users, who seem more than happy to disregard all the warnings about proprietary models coming from open advocates, including the man who invented the World Wide Web.

If there is one thing that we can learn from the runaway success of Apple, it is that the vast majority of users don’t particularly care about abstract concepts like openness or metaphors like walled gardens. What they care about, as Chris Saad of Echo and Dataportability.org noted recently, is that the products or services that matter to them about are easy to use and provide some benefit to them. In effect, they are willing to make a trade-off between the virtues of data portability or the downsides of having a single entity control their experience and the benefit they get from that product or service.

If you stop being useful, users will revolt

If you have a really attractive garden, users are more than happy to spend time there without moaning about the walls or the gates. In a nutshell, that explains Facebook’s dramatic rise: It has made connecting with friends and sort-of friends so easy and provided so many obvious benefits — photo sharing being one of the main ones — that most users have been blissfully unconcerned about giving so much of their personal data to the network. And while some argue they should be paid for their membership, others clearly feel that the trade-off is more than worth it.

So far, so good. But the looming risk for both Facebook and any other provider that wants to control the output of its users — including Twitter and Google — is that even complacent users can become militant when the service they depend on mistreats them in some way. We have seen flashes of that whenever Facebook changes its privacy settings, when Twitter changed its censorship rules, and even when Google started fiddling with its search results to promote its own social network instead of remaining objective about its content. And we see flashes of it when Facebook blocks content, as it has with breast-feeding photos — causing demonstrations by outraged user groups.

While none of these tremors has turned into a seismic shift so far, that doesn’t mean they won’t. AOL seemed so dominant in its time that it managed to convince Time Warner that it was worth $160 billion, in what is still one of the most disastrous technology deals of all time. But it faded because users realized that the benefits of being inside its garden were far outweighed by the downsides and that the open Internet wasn’t so bad after all. Will users eventually come to the same conclusion about Apple or Facebook — or even Google?

For social networks and tools like Facebook and Twitter, the relationship with users is an even more fragile one. Facebook’s 800 million users may seem like an unassailable moat around the giant social network, but if enough of them decide they are better off elsewhere, Facebook will become a ghost town. Twitter could easily meet the same fate. As Mark Zuckerberg prepares to count his billions, he needs to remember that in the end, it’s not open or closed that wins — it’s useful and not useful.

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Marc Andreessen

There’s no question that Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm headed up by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, has become a major force since it was founded back in 2009. The young VC firm has funded some of the best and brightest companies in the tech industry: Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Groupon, Airbnb, Box, Fab.com and Pinterest, to name just a few. And this is just the beginning — Andreessen Horowitz just announced it has raised $1.5 billion in fresh funding to invest in even more startups.

I talked to Marc Andreessen this week to get his thoughts on Silicon Valley, the startup ecosystem, and where the larger tech world is headed in 2012. Here’s what he had to say:

Silicon Valley is still tech’s ground zero

“Our firm is very Silicon Valley focused. Now, we’re not religious about it. We’ll go far and wide to find the best companies and fund them. But there is a magic to Silicon Valley. It’s a lot like Los Angeles with film, New York City with finance or fashion, and Washington D.C. with politics. A lot of people want to work where there’s a critical mass of other people in their field; it’s like a natural force of gravity.

Because the best people in technology keep coming to the Valley, there tends to be a self-renewing property to it. It’s become a place where great technology franchises have been built repeatedly. I would love for there to be a dozen Silicon Valleys around the world. But it’s a very hard thing to replicate.”

When running a VC fund, it pays to walk the walk

“Closing this latest [$1.5 billion] round from our investors was a pretty straightforward process. The key thing is, we’re really focused on the alignment of our interests with the people who invest in us. Each of us at Andreessen Horowitz has a significant personal investment in the firm ourselves. We each pay full management fees and carried interest, so we’re exactly side-by-side with our investors.

We also have a hard commitment that none of our partners will make private technology investments outside of Andreessen Horowitz — you won’t see me investing in a startup as an individual. Our investors really like that, it makes them feel that we’re real partners.”

Tech should learn the language of Washington

“Ever since I arrived in the Valley, there’s been a debate about how the tech industry should approach government and legislation. There’s one school of thought that says we should just ignore Washington and build the future on our own, the idea that we’re going to invent our way out of any problem that comes up. Then there’s the other school of thought, that it’s very important to engage with Washington on their terms, because the industries that are threatened by technology are very good at lobbying. I’ve always been more in the second camp.

Technology is very important and it has a big impact on the world. Politicians are naturally going to want to be involved in something that is that important, and they’re going to try to make laws about it. For every exciting advance we make, there’s someone on the other side that is threatened by it. The oldest and most entrenched industries are lobbying like crazy, so for the tech industry to not participate is just handing the ground to them.

On top of the traditional methods, we can also do new stuff like the SOPA/PIPA blackout, which was a whole new form of engagement and protest. I know that a lot of people in Hollywood were absolutely shocked at the effectiveness of that.”

A startup shakeout is coming, but that’s OK

“There has been a lot more seed funding in the past two to three years. In terms of our own self interest as a VC firm, we want as much seed funding as possible — it presents us with a lot of great opportunities to evaluate for a venture round.

There is going to be a shakeout at the seed stage. A lot of companies will come up for Series A funding at some point, and there are just too many of them to really raise what they’ll need. But that’s not a bad thing. It’s a very small amount of funding they’ve taken on so far, and nowadays a lot of them will have the opportunity to sell as a talent acquisition. It’ll work out fine for them. In the long run, imagination tends to be rewarded, not penalized.”

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Facebook is selling investors on the dream that the company is just getting started — not only with selling ad space on its current product, but in creating nearly an entirely new Internet, one where Facebook doesn’t simply create connections between sites and people but creates many different social products too.

This ambitious goal creates an interesting dichotomy. Although every hot startup wants to be the next Facebook, Facebook needs to be every hot startup as well. To execute its vision of total web dominance, Facebook is recreating and competing with nearly every significant Internet product of the last few years. It’s an unprecedented pivot that threatens Facebook’s core products and may eventually benefit the very same startups Facebook is trying to crush.

Back in the Day

For the first five years or so, Facebook helped users do three simple things: share photographs, status updates and links with friends. But somewhere along the line Facebook recognized two important facts:

1. If it was going to be worth tens of billions of dollars, it needed to attract hundreds of millions of eyes to the site every day. To do this, it needed to be a portal for every type of content, or better yet, the shell for all consumption of that content. In other words, they needed to become the entire Web.

2. New companies, like Twitter and Instagram, were creating compelling social products that not only challenged Facebook’s dominance but threatened to steal users’ time away from Facebook.

If Facebook was going to be more than a destination for sharing updates with friends and family, it had to move fast. And it did.

Unparalleled Ambition

It’s hard not to respect Facebook for its relentless innovation and lightening fast product updates, as well as its fearlessness in pushing the limits of privacy, user experience  and integration with the web as a whole to achieve its vision.

However, if you look at Facebook’s list of 22 (and growing) products– not to mention the thousands of third-party apps — you begin to wonder if Facebook is overreaching and confusing its members.

Over the last couple of years, consumers have been trending towards products with the opposite approach. Simple, stark, and direct sites and apps that do one thing very, very well. We open Instagram because we want to do one easy thing — share a great picture or see our friends pictures. It’s fun. It’s lightweight. It scratches an itch.

What itch is Facebook scratching? Most people I know can’t clearly articulate why they use Facebook. Now that we’ve reassembled our high school physics class, shared every song we listen to, and uploaded every cat video out there, our feeds (we now have two feeds!) have become cluttered news tickers without any focus or context.

Facebook’s expansions of services and connections don’t come with a backup plan. After Facebook realized that we don’t want to connect with close friends and casual acquaintances in the same way, what did the site do? They added yet another new feature so that we could segment the giant list of friends that they pushed us to assemble in the first place. Meanwhile, the easier option is to just declare Facebook bankruptcy and start over on another social network like Path.

That’s the real irony of Facebook’s recent moves. By copying the startups that threaten them, Facebook actually muddles members’ experience so much that it enhances the need for its competitors.

Here’s an incomplete list of companies Facebook is actively competing with:

• Flickr/Picasa/Instagram (pictures)
• YouTube/Vimeo (video)
• Beluga/GroupMe (group messenger apps)
• Foursquare (location sharing)
• Twitter (activity feed)
• Turntable.fm (shared listening)
• vBulletin (groups)
• News.me/Flipboard (frictionless social news/reading)
• Tumblr/Pinterest/etc (share other people’s pictures)
• AIM/GChat (chat)
• Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail (Facebook Messenger)
• About.me/Flavors.me (Timeline)
• Google+, Path (create rings of friends/acquaintances)
• Plancast (events)
• Craigslist (classified listings)

Many of the hottest startups have easy to use, beautiful and elegant sites built around small but significant problems. Several, including Foursquare, Tumblr, Living Social and Groupon, have had astounding results even in the face of Facebook’s attempts to move into their spaces.

Does Facebook really believe it can implement every solution better than its competitors? Does it think its social graph is so much of an advantage that it can sustain a confused and complicated product?

A lot of VCs ask startups what they’ll do when Facebook copies their features. But come IPO time, maybe Facebook’s shareholders should start asking what happens when Facebook tries to do too much.

Edward Aten is the founder of Swift.fm, a social distribution service for musicians. He’s an active startup advisor, blogger and marathoner in San Francisco. Follow him on Twitter @edwardaten. The views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of any Company with which he is or has been affiliated.

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Screenshot of Volkswagen's enhanced Twitter page (click to enlarge)

On Wednesday, Twitter switched on enhanced brand pages for accounts owned by National Public Radio, NBC News, Volkswagen, the Huffington Post, Al Jazeera, and Anobii, among others. This is the first batch of premium Twitter pages from companies other than the handful of launch partners (including Coca-Cola, the American Red Cross, and American Express) who unveiled enhanced brand pages in December.

A quick refresher: As part of the head-to-toe redesign Twitter first announced back on December 8, Twitter said it would give companies, brands, media organizations and celebrities the ability to have “enhanced” profile pages with extra design options and content feed controls. While the general redesign started rolling out to the majority of Twitter users nearly two months ago, the company took a bit more time in pushing the makeover for its first class users.

A Twitter spokesperson tells me the enhanced brand pages “will continue to roll out to advertising partners, as well as other select partners, charities, media organizations, and individuals” over the coming weeks and months. As Twitter gets more serious about generating revenue, it makes sense that it would want to create a more welcoming environment to big-name brands — the types of users who may want to buy more ads on the site after they see how nice their spruced up pages are.

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Shareaholic's survey (click to enlarge)

Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn — combined. That’s according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 referral traffic report, which is based on aggregated data from more than 200,000 publishers that reach more than 260 million unique monthly visitors each month.

In January Pinterest was responsible for 3.6 percent of referrals tracked by Shareaholic, up from 2.5 percent during the previous month. That means the site is quickly gaining ground on Twitter, which drove 3.61 percent of referral traffic in January, down from 3.62 percent in December. Pinterest’s ascent has been especially rapid when viewed through a longer lens: The site owned just .17 percent of the traffic in Shareaholic’s July survey.

Not surprisingly, Facebook is holding steady at the top of Shareaholic’s survey, as it was responsible for more than a quarter of all referral traffic in January. Next in line was StumbleUpon, with 5.07 percent. It bears mention that while the Shareaholic survey is global, in the United States market alone StumbleUpon has in the past unseated Facebook as a top driver of referral traffic.

It’s exciting to see a relative newcomer growing so quickly in the web space. While the web’s more established companies are quite powerful these days, the fact that a startup like Pinterest has successfully established its own foothold shows that the competitive landscape is still alive and mainstream users are open to trying things from new players.

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At the Dive Into Media conference on Monday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the company doesn’t see itself as a media entity, although he admited it is in the media business. It’s not surprising Twitter wouldn’t want to come right out and call itself a media company, since a growing part of its business is working with traditional media companies — including television networks and movie studios — to promote their content through its network. But in most of the ways that matter, Twitter definitely qualifies as a media entity, which is why its decision to selectively censor the user-generated content that flows through its network is so important.

In fact, the criticism Twitter got after its announcement that it would start selectively blocking tweets (if requested to do so by a government or court order) is just more confirmation it is a media company. Its decision drew attention for the same reason that people reacted suspiciously when Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal invested so heavily in the company — a reaction almost identical to the response many had when News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal.

It may be handled well, but censorship is still censorship

When you’re a media company, the question of who ultimately controls the levers that distribute content is a crucial issue. How would readers of the New York Times  respond if the newspaper said it planned to black out certain pages or remove certain articles if requested to do so by a government edict? Probably very much like some Twitter users have responded to the company’s recent announcement (although the NYT and other newspapers don’t print stories if they are subject to a publication ban by the courts, which some might argue is roughly analogous to Twitter’s new policy).

Is it safe to say that #Twitter is selling us out? blog.twitter.com/2012/01/tweets… what if the content provider is from the country oppressing him?—
Mahmoud Salem (@Sandmonkey) January 27, 2012

As a number of smart observers like Jillian York of the Electronic Freedom Foundation and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci have pointed out since the censorship furor began, there is actually a lot to like about the company’s new policy. For one thing, it’s going to be transparent about these demands, and says it will try hard to resist government attempts to block certain topics during events like the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. It’s also relatively easy to get around the country-specific blocking, and the Twitter API would probably make it easy to re-route tweets as well.

That said, however, there is still a lot that remains unclear about how this will work in practice. The company’s approach to such requests in a foreign dictatorship like Egypt or Libya might be obvious, but what happens when the authorities in a place like Britain try to force the company to remove tweets that breach one of its sweeping “super-injunctions” — which prevent anyone from even mentioning that there is a publication ban on information about a certain legal case? How will that work?

What kind of media company does Twitter want to be?

Dick Costolo may want to avoid calling Twitter a media entity, in part because he doesn’t want to jeopardize any relationships with existing media companies like Disney or NBC.And he is right in the sense that Twitter doesn’t create any of its own content in the same way a TV network or a newspaper does. But YouTube doesn’t create a lot of its own content either — does that mean it isn’t a media entity? Hardly. In fact, the filtering and curation and surfacing of relevant content is arguably an even more important media function than it has ever been, and that seems to be the direction in which Twitter is going.

Google also likes to strenuously deny it’s a media company, but it is a media entity, whether it wants to be one or not, and so is Twitter. They may be a different kind of media company — one whose business consists primarily of distributing other people’s content, filtering and curating it, then monetizing the attention around that — but they are members of the media nevertheless. And as Peter Kafka pointed out during his interview with Costolo at the Dive Into Media conference, the fact that Twitter relies primarily on advertising revenue is just another sign of that.

There’s an existing category of media company that looks a lot like Twitter in many ways, and that is the newswire provider — a company like Associated Press, for example. While it also has a lot of staff who create their own content, the bulk of its actual business consists of distributing content from other media entities to various customers. And as I’ve pointed out in the past, when it comes to distribution of real-time breaking news, Twitter has become the newswire for many users.

Because of the way it’s structured, there has always been tension between AP’s interests as a business — including the monetization of the content it distributes — and those of its member newspapers. In a similar way, there is a tension between Twitter’s business interests and those of its content creators: its users. Twitter has its own reasons for making the decisions it does, and the new censorship policy may or may not be the best solution to a bad situation, but that doesn’t change the fact that its users are the ones who ultimately create all that content — and if Twitter’s interests and those of its users get too far apart, it may find it has a lot less content to distribute.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users George Kelly and Petteri Sulonen

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Screenshot of SocialFolders' web app (click to enlarge)

With all the time we’re spending on social media sites, it makes sense that people are starting to get more serious about being able to preserve their activity there in a way that’s easier to look back on for posterity. An app called SocialFolders is aiming to help with that.

SocialFolders, a freemium application that launched last month to let you store and manage any file created on the social web on your own computer, rolled out an integration with Evernote on Tuesday that lets users drag and drop content such as tweets, Facebook updates and Instagram photos into their Evernote accounts.

SocialFolders is calling the Evernote integration a “social memory service” to help you remember all the little social media interactions that have become an increasingly big part of our day-to-day lives. Evernote is a very popular app for helping people keep track of their schedules and thoughts, so this third-party app is a nice added feature to its core service.

Even though social media is thought of as a fun pastime, it has almost completely supplanted physical, more easily archived communication methods such as letters and diaries — our activity on sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram really is reflective of what’s going on in our minds every day. It’s nice to see services such as Facebook Timeline, Path 2, and now SocialFolders that recognize how important those things are and help us own and remember them for the longer term.

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“Google crawls us at a rate of 1300 hits per second… They’ve indexed 3 billion of our pages,” Costolo said. “They have all the data they need.”

Costolo went on to say that the dispute between Google and Twitter was never about money, as it’s been reported previously. Instead, he said that the disagreement between the two companies wasn’t limited to the financial disagreement. “Both of us wanted a value exchange where it wasn’t just about money,” he said.

Other interesting info from the keynote:

• On the company’s decision to allow country-by-country takedowns of tweets, Costolo said: “We want to be able to leave the content up for as many people around the world as possible,” while operating within the boundaries of laws in the countries in which it operates.
• On Twitter’s reasons for not participating in the SOPA/PIPA blackouts, Costolo said, “When you’ve got a voice like Twitter, you don’t take the batteries out of the microphone,” he said.
• On whether or not Twitter is a media company, Costolo said it is in the media business. Specifically, he said that Twitter is a distributor of traffic to other media companies. “We’re one of the largest drivers of traffic to all sorts of other media companies,” Costolo said.
• “One of the reasons we’ve got so many [celebrities]… is that they can interact directly with fans,” he said.
• Costolo said that Twitter was tremendously valuable for television, as it has become the focal point for television conversation and also extends the conversation about TV shows. “I think it will be commonplace to use Twitter as the focal point on the second screen,” he said.
• “Maybe 10 years from now, people will look back at my tenure and say, ‘Gee, what a moron.’”
• “I don’t think about how can I extract as much value out of this platform as possible… It’s about how can I create more value,” he said.
• Costolo doesn’t appear to see much value in second-screen social apps, repeating again the thought that Twitter would be the focal point for TV viewing in the future.
• About 40 percent of Twitter users don’t actually tweet, they just consume. But Costolo was quick to note that more than 99 percent of TV viewers don’t create TV shows.
• On Twitter founder Jack Dorsey: “The fascinating thing about Jack is, he’s got all of these people in the world telling him, ‘You’re the next Steve Jobs.’ …but… “It’s pretty amazing to be as open-minded and humble about the product as he is.”
• When it comes to mobile, Costolo said Twitter had yet to create a good feature-phone experience. “There are lots of places in the world where feature phones are the majority of devices. We need to be on those devices so that when those people upgrade, they’re already active Twitter uses,” he said.
• Costolo downplayed the “palace intrigue” associated with major changes in his company’s board that were reported earlier Monday. He said some people would like to ascribe the changes to “some crazy ninja move” … but he said “the reality is a lot less interesting than that.”

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In a piece in the New York Times on the weekend, media writer David Carr took a look at News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s use of Twitter, and how the media mogul has used it as both a bully pulpit and a soapbox. Carr’s fellow media writer Brian Stelter, however, has a somewhat different view: at a conference on social media at Columbia University, Stelter said that “sources going direct,” as Murdoch has done with Twitter, is one of most disruptive changes that have hit journalism in the digital age, and the thing that “keeps me up at night.” Stelter is right to be concerned — it is clearly a paradigm shift. But is it good for journalism?

As Carr’s story points out, even though the News Corp. founder has only been on Twitter for a relatively short time, Murdoch’s tweets have already provided a huge amount of enjoyment (and ammunition) for media buffs, Murdoch-haters and everyone in between — including media reporters like Carr and Stelter. From his typo-laden missives about Barack Obama caving in to anti-piracy activists over SOPA and PIPA to his Google-bashing and attacks on Governor Cuomo, the combative mogul has made things a lot more interesting. He’s even apologized for the failure of MySpace:

Many questions and jokes about My Space.simple answer – we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons.—
Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 13, 2012

First blogs, now Twitter and Google Hangouts

Murdoch’s ranting on Twitter seems harmless enough. So why does this kind of activity keep Brian Stelter up at night? Because it is just another example of the “sources going direct” — to use a phrase that blogging pioneer Dave Winer coined some time ago to describe what happens when those who are directly involved in the news have the ability to publish their own thoughts, and reach readers and viewers directly. First, that ability came through blogging, and now it has been amplified even further with Twitter and other social tools. It’s all part of what Om has called the “democratization of distribution.”

In addition to saying it keeps him up at night, Stelter said that this ability for sources to go direct is “the generational issue of our time for journalists.” He didn’t elaborate on why he thinks this, but I have a few ideas: for one thing, it removes the need for the journalist as middleman or information gatekeeper. In the past, a journalist could have made a pretty good name for themselves by simply getting access to Rupert Murdoch and quoting his thoughts on Barack Obama or Google — but now, he is providing those himself.

Murdoch is only the latest example of this phenomenon, of course. It arguably began with blogging, which allowed other prominent newsmakers like billionaire sports-team owner Mark Cuban to reach a broad audience directly (Cuban even published his own email interviews with journalists, so he could correct the record). It has continued with early adopters like basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, who announced the news of his retirement on Twitter through a service called Tout. Celebrities have also made use of it to get their own stories out to their fans — or to simply rant, Courtney Love-style.

In the end, this should be good for serious journalism

Over the past year, we have seen this phenomenon accelerate to the point where the White House is doing live discussions on YouTube, taking questions from Twitter during a “town hall,” and now is doing Google+ “hangouts” where the president responds to citizens with concerns about the country. This has gone so far beyond the fireside radio chats that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to communicate his message that it’s almost hard to fathom how much has changed in just a few decades:

So what is the job of a media or sports or political reporter now? There’s no question that we still need them, and in fact we may need them even more — but now we need them to filter and make sense of what is out there, and to probe beneath the surface for the real meaning behind what Murdoch says on Twitter or what a basketball star says about themselves or their career. In other words, we need less of a focus on “scoops” that are three sentences long and have a half-life of five minutes, and more smart analysis. So the reality is that all of those reporting jobs have gotten a lot harder.

In the end, however, that is probably a good thing for journalism — and for consumers of journalism as well. Those who only wish to be distracted by the 140-character rantings of a billionaire now have a source for that, and those who want a little more depth will hopefully get some of that as well. For media companies whose focus is solely on those micro-scoops and quotes from celebrities, however, the future doesn’t look so bright.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Sandy Honig and See-ming Lee

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But targeted advertising is also, by and large, terrible. Just take a look at Google’s recent attempt to be transparent by showing you its ad preference manager, which seems to think everybody who uses it is a middle-aged man working in the technology industry.

And then there’s Twitter.

Oh Twitter. Why are you, one of the great hopes of the social web, getting it so wrong?

You probably know about Promoted Tweets, the company’s attempt to make money from its ever-growing user base. Since September, the company has been slowly rolling the ads out in new ways, selling more units in more countries and pushing them forward so that the ads are deployed straight into user’s timelines.

That means that the service effectively elbows out a single message from somebody you follow with one that somebody else has paid for. But don’t worry: the company promised that “we will display Promoted Tweets in the timeline when they are relevant” and that, “we will expand the rollout only when we feel we’re delivering a high-quality user experience.”

But is it really living up to that claim?

Today it became apparent to me just how abysmal Twitter’s advertising machine remains, even as the company rolls around in more than a billion dollars of funding.

Earlier today, my partner looked at her Twitter stream and saw a promoted tweet that could not have been more poorly targeted. It was for a product from VKernel, a virtualization management service.

New vSphere 5.0 Performance and Capacity Resource page- check it out for a thorough overview on all latest features bit.ly/vsphere-5

— VKernel (@VKernel) January 10, 2012

To say that she has never shown the slightest bit of interest in virtualization is an understatement. In fact, she yelped in dismay when she saw it, because it was painfully out of place. “I don’t understand any of this,” she grumbled.

While it could be a one-off, in fact this seems to be the case for many people. One friend reports that the first ad she saw on Twitter was from Lexus, despite the fact that she doesn’t tweet about cars and doesn’t even have a drivers’ license.

And then there are the Promoted Tweets that look a lot like spam, such as this one from Negri Electronics promising users a shot at a free Android handset if only they’ll follow its account. Crazy, right? An ad in which the advertiser has effectively paid Twitter to help it get more followers on Twitter instead of growing organically.

Now, of course, the problem of annoying ads isn’t exactly new. Television and radio advertising has been doing this for years: interrupting the content we want with financially lucrative content that we don’t. We’re used to it. And it’s still early days for Twitter: targeting could get better as more and more advertisers arrive on the service, and Twitter is undoubtedly trying to improve its hit ratio.

But this isn’t exactly a new issue for Twitter.

It’s been almost a year since the arguments over Twitter’s “quick bar” — an imposing space for advertising that it injected onto its mobile apps and filled with irrelevant information — and little seems to have changed. In a piece I wrote at the time called “Why the fuss over Twitter’s quick bar won’t go away”, I argued that being unable to provide relevant advertising was its biggest problem:

The issue, by and large, isn’t that the Trends bar is a bad idea. It’s that the trends aren’t relevant. This seems so obvious that it causes consternation among users. So that irritation… develops into a series of gripes. Why can’t Twitter do a better job of showing me information that’s worthwhile? Isn’t that the whole point of it?

It’s a fair point. I willingly give Twitter huge amounts of information about myself and the people I am interested in. I’m essentially handing over information that other publishers and platforms would pay for — and yet the best it can offer me is a link to some crap about Sammy Hagar.

Eleven months on, the delivery method appears to have changed, but the accuracy seems just as poor. Promoted Tweets might be making Twitter money, and they might get better over time as more advertisers hit the service … but right now it’s a problem.

The great hope of targeted advertising — the ultimate reason we give up all our data to these companies — is because we want to get away from the TV model. The idea of targeting is that it works better for everybody: the advertiser gets better audience, people get the service they want — and perhaps ads that are actually useful, and the service provider gets to make a little money too.

Right now, that balance is tipped in the wrong direction: Twitter’s making money, but at the expense of users and advertisers. This isn’t the future I thought we’d be getting.

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The New York City company told me it recently eclipsed the 1 million download mark on iOS, with almost of all of the downloads happening in the last few months of last year. But while noteworthy, that’s something that a lot of apps are able to pull off. What’s really interesting to me is how sticky Pixable has become for users, who are engaging continuously at a pretty impressive rate.

Pixable says that its users are viewing 100 million photos a month and opening the app on average 11 times per month. Some 60 percent of those users are still active on the app since it launched in April while 60 percent of users also use the app on consecutive days.

The Pixable app primarily aggregates Facebook and Twitter pictures, with fuller support for Facebook right now. It organizes photos into various categories such as top of the day, week or month, new profile pics, most recent photos. Pixable also aggregates Instagram, Flickr, yFrog, Twitpic photos and YouTube and Vimeo videos within a user’s Twitter feeds.

Where Pixable shines is in how it uses machine learning and algorithms to process more than 70 signals, helping it to surface the most relevant pictures for users. It will try to measure the affinity between users and the strength of their relationships, taking into account things like common schools, or cities and how much they interact. It will also look at “likes” and comments to determine if it’s a picture that a user wouldn’t want to miss.

Inaki Berenguer, Pixable’s CEO and Co-Founder, said photos have changed from being a way for people to hold on to memories into a form of communication. It’s almost like email now, he said, with Pixable setting itself up as a smart mobile inbox for photos.

“Photos are about telling friends what you’re up to you or you see something funny or eat something and you take a picture. People are broadcasting all the time, but there’s too much noise. Pixable organizes all these photos and brings order to them and sense to chaos,” Berenguer told me.

Pixable, which raised $3.6 million in November, said it’s also introducing hashtags into the service, so users can tag photos to organize them for later viewing or they can use them like hashtags on Twitter, adding a layer of metadata to a picture. It has also added a mobile web version of the service.

In my earlier profile on Pixable, I wrote how I liked Pixable’s approach, helping people see the photos that matter to them. As we live more of our lives online and through social networks, we need ways to prioritize all this content and filter out a lot of the noise. Pixable still has more to do to more fully integrate pictures beyond Facebook and Twitter, but I like its initial start and so do its users.

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So much is possible with the digital tools we have today: Google provides information from billions of sources instantly; Facebook lets us stay in touch with friends around the globe; and Twitter allows anyone to broadcast their thoughts wherever they are. But with all this freedom comes a tradeoff, as Twitter’s censorship news reinforced for many this week. In each case, we are essentially at the mercy of the company whose network we are using (and being used by). If Google doesn’t like your name, it can block you; if Facebook doesn’t like your status, it can delete it; and if Twitter gets a takedown request for your message, it will disappear. Our freedom of speech relies on these new information gatekeepers.

On Thursday, Twitter announced it now has the ability to censor individual tweets within certain countries. Although the company made a point of stressing it will only do this in extreme cases, where it is required to do so by law — in Germany, for example, where promoting Nazi principles is a crime — the news produced a wave of criticism from users and Twitter critics about how the information network was “committing social suicide” and caving in to dictators and authoritarian governments. Although Twitter said it would be as transparent as possible, and it appears to be possible to work around the blocking of tweets, the impact of the news was still negative for many.

#TwitterCensorship. Dear Twitter, I face so much censorship in Sudan as a journalist, you were my free and safe space. I'm grieving now.—
ريم ايس كريم (@ReemShawkat) January 27, 2012

Some wondered whether the move was connected to the investment by Saudi billionaire prince Alwaleed bin Talal, while others have been muttering conspiracy theories about Twitter censoring the #Occupy hashtag from its trending topics (which the company has repeatedly denied doing). For every balanced perspective from an observer like Jillian York at the Electronic Frontier Foundation or sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who argued that the policy was positive, there is a rant from someone about how Twitter has failed to uphold its promise as a bastion of free speech. Even high-profile Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei said ”if Twitter starts censoring, I’ll stop tweeting.”

Trust is the currency in our relationship with networks

Google has been riding the slippery slope of user trust recently as well, after criticism that its new personalized search features are an attempt to use its market power to promote its own Google+ social network — something that not only irritated competitors like Twitter and Facebook, but made some (including me) question whether the search giant had turned its back on the promise it made to users in 2004 to provide objective search results. The outcry over the changes then spilled over onto Google’s new privacy policy, which drew fire from privacy advocates and users despite the fact that little had changed.

The common thread in both of these incidents is trust, and the perception on the part of some users — and government regulators as well, in Google’s case — that Google and Twitter are both losing some of what made them unique. In Google’s case, an objectivity or purity in its results, and in Twitter’s case, a sense of freedom and openness (rightly or wrongly) about the network and users’ ability to publish whatever and wherever they wish. Twitter’s changes seemed especially disappointing to some because of how powerful that freedom was during the events of the Arab Spring in Egypt and elsewhere.

Facebook may not have touched off any storms this week on the trust front, but it is an old hand at disappointing users, whether it’s by changing privacy settings without telling them, tracking users even when they aren’t logged in or removing content in what some allege is an attempt at censorship of certain topics. Google and Facebook have also irritated users by requiring the use of real names, which critics argue benefits the companies and their attempts to serve advertisers more than it does users.

Principles are important, but these are businesses too

These are businesses with corporate interests, not triumphant defenders of free speech — and they each provide the bulk of their services for free, and make money by selling their users’ attention to advertisers. General counsel Alex Macgillivray says Twitter is committed to being “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” and the company says it would never use its new powers to block tweets during an event like the Arab Spring, or prevent dissidents in Iran or China from using it to further their cause. But how do we know this for sure? We don’t.

The standard response when someone criticizes Google’s privacy policy or Twitter’s new tactics or Facebook’s changes is “Don’t use them.” But what’s the alternative? Google isn’t just a search engine, but a giant email provider, and has a host of other services people need to do their jobs. Facebook and Twitter are tools that hundreds of millions of people use daily to connect and share with their friends and family — which is why “open source” alternatives such as Diaspora and Identi.ca have failed to gain much traction.

Dave Winer and other open-network advocates have repeatedly made the point that relying on a single corporation, or even several of them, for access to such important tools of communication is a huge risk. But what choice do we have? We either have to try harder to find more open alternatives, or we have to trust that Google and Twitter and Facebook are looking out for our best interests — and when they don’t, we have to make it clear that they are failing, and hold them to account.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Jennifer Moo and Richard Engel, NBC

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Uberpaper founder Dmitry Shapiro

“In a world full of algorithms, we can get a skewed sense of the world when it comes to news,” Shapiro, the tech executive known for founding Veoh and most recently for serving as the CTO of MySpace Music, said in a phone conversation Thursday. “News is an extremely important part of how we experience the world around us. If news has been overly processed by personalization algorithms that essentially pander to us, we can start to believe that the world is a certain way, when it really isn’t that way at all.”

News that’s purposefully impersonal

That problem is exactly what Shapiro’s latest project Uberpaper was built to combat. Uberpaper, which launched to the public this week, pulls all the news from Yahoo News’ API and presents it in a way that manages to be both clean and image-rich: Imagine Flipboard meets Pinterest, but all in a liquid user interface design that works in any web browser. The only social elements to the site come in the form of a simple “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down” button that users are meant to use to show how well-reported or relevant a story was, as well as the ability to comment.

Users can choose to view Uberpaper in 10 different languages, and sort the news according to topics such as World, US, Business, Technology, Sports, Politics, and so on — just like an old fashioned newspaper. In fact, the experience of finding out what’s happening in the world by reading a traditional physical paper is a big thing Uberpaper is trying to replicate. Shapiro put it this way:

“With technology, I think we threw the baby out with bathwater when it came to newspapers. Online news sites today show their content very much like search does — it’s kind of database-y, and formatted in a very linear way. We wanted to bring back the aesthetic of a newspaper, and the serendipity that comes with scanning the news that way.”

Uberpaper screenshot (click to enlarge)

Keeping social in its place

However, Shapiro is quick to point out that he is personally a big fan of social media sites, telling me, “I love Facebook and Twitter, and I’m on those sites all day long. They’re wonderful places to share news, and I don’t think Uberpaper is competitive in any way to them.” Rather, he says, Uberpaper is meant to be a place where people can find fresh news to ultimately go back and share with their friends on Facebook and Twitter — to bring something new to the table, rather than re-sharing stuff that’s already been discovered.

For now, Uberpaper only pulls in news through Yahoo News’ API, which was chosen because it has a very broad base of news sources and topics. More news sources will be folded into Uberpaper in the future, but the expansion process will be very well-considered, Shapiro said. “We’re going to be really cautious as we add additionally sources. We very much want to make sure that we’re not slanting the news in partisan ways, or toward any kind of topic, really — it should be broad and generic.”

Uberpaper was built by the same team led by Shapiro that built Anybeat, the social network that encourages people to use pseudonyms that launched this past autumn. Anybeat, which has $1 million in funding, is still in operation, but right now it and Uberpaper are being run as separate products. Uberpaper doesn’t make any revenue right now, but down the line advertising could be brought in to run alongside the news.

A long shot that’s worth taking

In all, I think Uberpaper is great: Simple, straightforward, and clean, while perpetually brimming with new content. It’s certainly coming out in a tough space — many people already feel like they have more than enough sources of news — but I could see Uberpaper becoming a much-frequented bookmark for news junkies. And in my opinion, any service that’s aiming to put an end to the echo chamber is fighting the good fight.

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