Speaking at PaidContent Live in New York on Wednesday, Tumblr CEO David Karp described the site as a creative platform where users are free to grow an audience and develop talent that has the potential to see success elsewhere, such as the 70 users who turned their blogging skills into book deals. Karp said the company saw three book deals for users last month alone, but the company isn’t viewing that as the only metric of success.

“What’s even more interesting to me than people going through traditional paths are people who are using those new emerging platforms,” he said. “What’s so exciting to me about Tumblr as a media network today is this new generation of creative commercialization tools that are being built on top of these other networks. People who don’t have to go to Harpers to publish the book deal, they can self-publish on Kickstarter instead.”

Karp’s focus on creativity is an idea that extends into the way the company is rolling out advertising. The company recently started rolling out mobile advertising, and is working on making that advertising fit within the existing Tumblr network.

“We focused on higher up in the funnel, the type of advertising that creates intent,” Karp said. “It gives room for the most creative advertisers to create their best work. I think we’ve started to prove it, and see really good examples of it.”

But Karp noted that Tumblr isn’t profitable yet — although he expects it eventually will be — and he noted he has supportive investors for the company, which most recently raised $85 million in venture funding back in 2011. The company gained notoriety recently when it shut down Storyboard, the experimental project in which it hired an editorial staff to highlight and aggregate the best content on Tumblr.

“It’s not a knock on that team at all. We hired a really brilliant team to do really good work. We gave it a shot, we gave it a year. And after a year, we decided it wasn’t the right tool for our toolbox,” Karp said. “It was working in some regards, but not in the we wanted to see it look.”

Tumblr isn’t that focused on the number of pageviews the site is getting, Karp said, although users create 90 million new Tumblr posts per day. Instead, Karp said the focus has moved to time spent on Tumblr — now at 14 minutes per day — and figuring out how to monetize that content as well as helping new users discover interesting content without picking favorites among the blogs.

“We want to give you the stuff you’re going to love on Tumblr, but we don’t want to say what great stuff on Tumblr is. We don’t want to say what great content is, or these are our favorite blogs. We don’t wan to color it too much or scare anybody off.”

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

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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

• Flash analysis: future opportunities for Pinterest
• Pinterest reawakens Napster-style debate over copyright
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications

“Home doesn’t change anything related to your privacy settings on Facebook, and your privacy controls work the same with Home as they do everywhere else on Facebook,” the company wrote in the blog post.

But Om questioned on Thursday whether that’s really the case, since the HTC First phone with Facebook Home deeply integrated will have far more capabilities than a simple Android app, with the accelerometer in the phone having the ability to track how fast you’re moving, or the phone’s sensors detecting the location of your home based on the times of day you’re not checking in:

“The new Home app/UX/quasi-OS is deeply integrated into the Android environment. It takes an effort to shut it down,  because Home’s whole premise is to be always on and be the dashboard to your social world. It wants to be the start button for apps that are on your Android device, which in turn will give Facebook a deep insight on what is popular. And of course, it can build an app that mimics the functionality of that popular, fast-growing mobile app. I have seen it done before, both on other platforms and on Facebook.

But there is a bigger worry. The phone’s GPS can send constant information back to the Facebook servers, telling it your whereabouts at any time.”

However, Facebook reminded users that adopting Home is totally optional, as I noted in my story about the potential impact of the release, and that users who try it can de-activate it any time. Facebook explained that Home will track the apps you have in your Home launcher on Android, and will track when you open those apps, although not the actions you take inside them. For instance, it will see that you open a maps app, but not the directions you enter. And not surprisingly, the company reminded users that they can read about how Facebook uses data at its Data Policies center.

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

• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management

Facebook is going to be launching some new features for its feed on Thursday, which may include new ways of filtering specific kinds of content and possibly new advertising features. Meanwhile, Twitter continues to show you everything, without filtering or ranking it in any way. Which method is better? That depends on how and why you are using it.

Much of Bilton’s criticism revolves around what some call the “subscribe” function, which allows users to get updates from others without having to ask their permission. When it launched in the fall of 2011, it was widely seen as an attempt to copy Twitter’s “asymmetric following” model, since Twitter lets users get updates from whoever they wish — whereas Facebook’s model has always been symmetric, in the sense that users must agree to be friends before they can see each other’s updates. Late last year, Facebook changed the name of this feature to “follow,” which made the similarity to Twitter even more obvious.

Do you want to see everything in your feed?

As an attempt to copy Twitter, the follow feature seems to be largely a failure — at least if the experiences of Bilton and others who have complained about Facebook’s newsfeed, such as billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, are anything to go by. They say they don’t get much engagement, which makes them question whether their content is even reaching their subscribers, and whether Facebook is tweaking their feed so that certain kinds of updates don’t show up as frequently.

The last time this topic came up, when Cuban and actor George Takei were criticizing the network because of the lack of engagement from subscribers, a number of Facebook users attacked the company for filtering their feeds and not showing them all of the updates from pages or individuals they were following. Some users said the equivalent of: “If I subscribe to someone, I want to see all their updates, not just the ones that you choose to show me.”

swipe at facebook: 'there's no algorithm standing between you and your audience' - @adambain gets feisty.

—
Brian Morrissey (@bmorrissey) March 07, 2013

In a nutshell, this is the fundamental difference between Twitter and Facebook: the former doesn’t apply any filters to the stream of updates users get, apart from those required by law — if you follow a couple of thousand users, as I do, then you get all of the updates from all of those users, and they flow past you in a giant river of undifferentiated tweets, in reverse chronological order.

Facebook, however, applies all kinds of algorithmic tweaks to a newsfeed based on what some call EdgeRank (although this isn’t a term Facebook uses internally, according to Anthony De Rosa of Reuters), and therefore some updates are more prominent than others, and in some cases updates may never appear at all. Users have control over some of the knobs and dials that will hide or reveal certain kinds of posts, but there is also a lot of filtering that goes on behind the scenes, which makes Facebook a bit of a Google-style black box.

It’s hard to know what you’re missing

Depending on how you see them, these two different approaches can be a good thing or a bad thing: Twitter’s method is theoretically more transparent and comprehensive, since it is completely unfiltered — but it can also be overwhelming, and the network has worked hard to try and help users cope with this vast stream of content, via things like the Discover tab. Facebook’s method seems a lot more invasive and secretive, but at the same time it can make it easier to cope with the never-ending ocean of content — an average of 2,000 posts a day for each user.

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has a useful analogy for the difference between the two: Twitter is a little like real-time TV news, while Facebook functions more like a DVR that lets you watch things after they have happened (although to some extent the network chooses what to show you, which your DVR doesn’t). They are two very different experiences of a social stream.

While Facebook users might complain that they want to see everything their social graph posts, the reality is that they likely wouldn’t see everything anyway — unless they sat on their computer all day long reading everything that was posted. Most die-hard Twitter users likely don’t see everything their followers post either, unless they watch the network 24 hours a day, and many use lists (as I do) to try and cope with the volume of content that is posted, or services like Paper.li that allow them to “time shift” that content and catch up with it later.

In the end, the question hangs not just on how you want to handle that stream of updates from your social graph, but who you trust to do that management for you: in the case of Twitter, you are pretty much on your own, and that can be chaotic — but there is a certain purity to it. With Facebook, you have some tools at your disposal to manage that content, but the network itself also does a lot behind the scenes without telling you much about how it works. Facebook says it’s for your own good, but how do you really know what you are missing?

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

• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013
• Best practices in optimizing content for social engagement
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012

There was less focus on Facebook’s privacy updates this week when users turned their attention to Instagram’s updated terms of service, and these changes might seem minor by comparison. But the updates represent moves by the company in an area where users have historically had concerns.

The changes, outlined on Dec. 12, include separating app permissions, so that users enabling third-party apps to have Facebook access can more easily decide what information that app can have. The new settings will also remind users where text or photos will show up on Facebook when posted, and will provide a tool that makes it easier to remove photo tags en masse. The activity log will also provide more information so people can see where their data appears across the site.

The privacy conscious will be most concerned by the removal of the ability to hide names from the search bar, a change that the company said would be rolled out over the coming weeks. Facebook notes that profiles are already appearing all over Facebook when users interact with content, so it’s not a total shift. However, it will be interesting to see if users whose profiles start appearing when they were once hidden raise concerns at the new policy.

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

• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013

Monday morning the company released an update to its terms of service, set to go into effect on Jan. 16. The new terms had a good deal of phrases that users disliked, especially related to how Instagram might connect user content with advertising, and the internet collectively freaked out. While some of the response was certainly over-hyped, Instagram eventually realized it needed to clarify, and the company released a note to users on Tuesday afternoon that said it was listening and would alter some of the terms.

The reaction engaged average consumers in a debate that the technology and publishing worlds have been engaged in for some time now: Namely, that when consumers don’t pay to use a service, their data and information becomes the product, and that product can go up for sale (although of course this concept has its limitations.)

On Monday, several journalists and consumers articulated why they found the updated terms problematic, including Wired’s Mat Honan, who like many users, wrote that he was quitting Instagram on Monday:

“The issue is about more than using photos of my baby daughter, or deceased grandmother, in ads. The greater concern should be that the company would forge ahead with such a plan without offering any other option to the very users and data that built it.”

But many others weren’t as sure. Kevin Roose writing for NYMag reminded us that monetizing a user’s content with advertisers is how most social media companies make money, and Instagram is no different:

“Do people even know how the Internet works? The entire point of starting a social-media company is that it gives you the ability to make money by advertising things to people. Facebook does it by selling packets of user data to companies like Wal-Mart. Twitter does it by tacking promoted tweets onto your search terms. Gmail does it by showing you ads for Lean Cuisine next to your mom’s e-mail reminding you not to binge-eat during the holidays.

This is called “monetization,” and we have come to accept it as the inevitable price of getting cutting-edge Internet services for free. But now that Instagram, too, has decided to monetize, we are outraged.”

Artists and professional photographers in particular were incensed by the idea that their creative work might belong to the service that could then re-purpose it:

Oh boy. @Instagram's new terms of service embody just about everything that's wrong with the ad-supported web j.mp/Uav6Dg—
Maria Popova (@brainpicker) December 18, 2012

But once Instagram recanted on Tuesday, clarifying that it doesn’t want to sell your photos or turn you into an advertisement, the resulting reaction was more mixed:

BREAKING: @Instagram backs down on selling photos to advertisers. Sorry, but that they even TRIED is why I’m leaving. apne.ws/12yDfnh—
Tod Maffin (@todmaffin) December 18, 2012

Instagram users are upset content may be used without compensation. Yet people continue to illegally download books & music #HypocrisyIsFun—
The Dark Lord (@Lord_Voldemort7) December 18, 2012

too late. I'm back to Flickr. “@newsycombinator: Instagram's official response j.mp/U79Nld”—
Gen Kanai (@gen) December 18, 2012

Seriously wondering why @instagram couldn't say flat-out "We will never sell your photos."—
Craig Kanalley (@ckanal) December 18, 2012

Spoiler Alert: Instagram already sold all your photos. For a billion dollars.—
Geoff Stearns (@tensafefrogs) December 18, 2012

Nothing’s free. If you’re not the customer you’re the product.—
Mike Monteiro (@Mike_FTW) December 18, 2012

I am sure there is a Great Lesson for all Founders and CEOs to be learnt from the whole Instagram TOS situation …—
Shakil Khan (@shak) December 19, 2012

A clarification of ToS and tardy acknowledgement of user dissatisfaction won’t overcome overwhelming wave of anti-Instagram sentiment.—
Peter Skerritt (@PeterSkerritt) December 18, 2012

Btw, people freaking out over @instagram should read their credit card ToS. They own you.—
Hunter Walk (@hunterwalk) December 18, 2012

Most interestingly, not everyone was assuaged by Instagram’s response. National Geographic, still one of America’s greatest symbols of photography, posted that it was suspending its Instagram account and would close it unless changes take place:

And for some celebrities, the changes still spell concern as well:

might be saying bye bye to Instagram 😞 …hope something changes.—
Kendall Jenner (@KendallJenner) December 18, 2012

And it’s possible that the Instagram terms of service parody account explained the company’s stance best of all:

Hey RT if you're like totally over that whole misunderstanding thing! Please?—
  (@InstagramTOS) December 18, 2012

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

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

The massive growth of a site like Tumblr, which is now bigger than Wikipedia with more than 20 billion pageviews a month (something I have argued should make Facebook more than a little nervous) is even more spectacular when you consider the fact that David Karp — who designed a prototype of the service when he was just 19 — didn’t have any intention of creating a gigantic web company that would one day be valued at close to $1 billion and have over 160 million users.

Create something you want or need

As the Tumblr founder said in our interview, all he really wanted was a tool that he could use to post images and thoughts online. There were image-hosting services like Flickr and micro-blogging networks like Twitter and full-fledged blog platforms like WordPress, but nothing that fit what Karp was looking for or was as easy to use as he wanted. So he built it. A number of other founders at RoadMap echoed that sentiment: build something to fill a need that you have, and if you are lucky then lots of other people will have a similar need, and you will have a useful service.

So what is the takeaway for media companies? It’s fine to say that an entrepreneur should focus on filling a need that they have themselves, but where does that leave a traditional media player? You can’t just redesign a newspaper or a newspaper company from scratch (although people like John Paton of Digital First Media and Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger are certainly trying hard to do so anyway).

What I think you can do, however, is to think about who your user is and what they want, both when it comes to your traditional product (i.e. a newspaper or magazine) and your digital services or products. This isn’t something most media companies are particularly adept at, just as thinking like a startup and focusing on innovation is a struggle for many — in the past, media companies just pumped out content and more or less relied on captive audiences to subscribe to or consume that content, without thinking a lot about what they wanted from it or how they wanted to consume it.

That’s the kind of thinking that results in me-too digital apps that repackage print content with a few digital bells-and-whistles, rather than really trying to understand what users want when it comes to news or other forms of content on a mobile device. And one of my criticisms of the rush to paywalls is that they don’t allow newspapers to really get to know their readers likes and dislikes.

Who are your users and what do they want?

For an example of the opposite, all you have to do is look at what Marco Arment — a designer who used to work at Tumblr and also runs a service called Instapaper — has done with The Magazine, a digital-only and mobile-only editorial product that he launched recently. There are virtually none of the trappings of a digital magazine that has been ported over from the print world, for the simple reason that Arment created it to be digital-native. And it is almost an artisanal approach to editorial content, since he picks the writers and edits it himself, to fill a need that he felt existed in the market.

Another good example of thinking outside the usual boxes is Circa, which Matt Galligan and Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh (who was trained as a journalist before he got into the web-humor business) started as a way to provide news in a different format that works better on mobile — as a series of edited summaries of stories rather than the usual repurposed print or web content. Whether users respond to this idea or not remains to be seen, but at least it is trying to reimagine how we interact with content in a mobile age, and it is looking carefully at what users actually do with it.

Most traditional media companies are happy doing surveys of readers so they can target them better for advertising, but how often do they actually think about — or ask — what those readers really want when it comes to their product? Have they thought as hard about the features as David Karp did when he decided to replace comments with the reblog button? Or are they just pumping out the same kind of content and putting it in slightly different packages and hoping that it works?

Getting to know their readers (or users) better, and understanding exactly what they want and don’t want, isn’t just something that would be helpful for media companies to figure out — it could be the only thing that is standing between them and extinction.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users George Kelly and Zert Sonstige

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

• How Media Companies Can Compete Online
• Facebook’s IPO filing: ideas and implications
• Online publishers: Proceed to checkout

Federated Media founder John Battelle noted in a recent post that the company’s argument in the Occupy case raises a host of questions about what it means when a user owns their content, and what responsibilities that should impose on Twitter. For example, shouldn’t users be able to display their tweets wherever they wish, or connect with whatever external services they choose to connect to? And shouldn’t users be able to get access to all of their past tweets, something Twitter has so far only done in certain special cases with users like Andy Carvin of NPR? As Battelle puts it:

“[T]his builds a case for other ownership rights as well, such as the right to repurpose those words in other contexts. If that is indeed the case, I can imagine a time in the not too distant future when people may want to extract some or all their tweets, and perhaps license them to others as well. Or, they may want to use a meta-service… which allows them to mix and mash their tweets in various ways, and into any number of different containers.”

Two conflicting visions of Twitter

In a sense, there are two Twitters. They aren’t completely separate entities, but two different ways of looking at the company and its purpose — and the tension between the two seems to exist within the company itself, as well as externally. One version is the open network for real-time news and information, which acts as a kind of utility for anyone to distribute their thoughts and content, and it is this Twitter that people like general counsel Alex Macgillivray and CEO Dick Costolo are referring to when they say the service is the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.”

When looked at in this way, it seems obvious that Twitter would want to allow users like Occupy protester Malcolm Harris to control what happens to their content — after all, the network is simply the conduit for those comments, not the owner of them. In other words, it is more like a content-agnostic telecom carrier than it is a traditional publisher like a newspaper. As Twitter said during the Occupy case:

“Twitter’s Terms of Service have long made it absolutely clear that its users *own* their content. We continue to have a steadfast commitment to our users and their rights.”

But we’ve seen another Twitter emerging recently — at first gradually and then with more and more urgency. This version of the network is designed to control access to users’ content by restricting where and when and how their tweets can be displayed, which has meant cutting off the access to a user’s follower graph that services like Tumblr and Instagram used to have, and potentially threatening the way that other services like Flipboard and Storify handle tweets. The obvious impetus for all of this behavior, as we’ve explained before, is the desire to monetize the content that flows through the network, and in order to do that Twitter needs to control it more tightly.

The tension between the two is growing

Obviously, a court’s request for the tweets of a protester and Twitter’s relationship with third-party services are two separate issues. One is a legal situation where the company has to tread very carefully, since there are some significant risks to asserting ownership — including the fact that it could make Twitter liable for defamatory or otherwise illegal statements expressed by users. The company’s relationship with third-party services, meanwhile (it is apparently going to remove support for outside image hosting services next, according to BuzzFeed) is arguably just a corporate concern.

That said, however, I think that at least some of the frustration that users like myself feel at Twitter’s recent changes comes from the tension between these two approaches. On the one hand, the company wants us to believe that it has no interest in controlling or asserting ownership over our tweets, because it is interested in free speech and is just a conduit for our content — but on the other hand, it wants to control what happens with our tweets, and even shut down services that we wish to use to display that content, in order to monetize something that we created. How does that help us as users?

Of course, Twitter has every right to do whatever it believes is necessary, in order to build a business that can justify all the money it has raised from venture capitalists over the past couple of years. But doing so also raises the potential for conflict between what it needs to do for monetization purposes and how users have come to think of it thanks to cases like Occupy. Finding a safe path between those two is not going to be easy — if anything, it is only going to get harder.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Faramarz Hashemi and See-ming Lee

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

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

The Tumblr news didn’t come as that much of a surprise to anyone that has been following recent events, since Twitter has already cut off other apps such as Instagram. In fact, Matt Buchanan at Buzzfeed wrote a post on Wednesday about how the blog network could be the next target for Twitter and within a matter of hours Tumblr lost the ability to connect to Twitter.

In the case of Instagram, Twitter’s removal of those connection rights — which allowed users to find and connect with any Twitter followers who also use the photo-sharing app — seemed as though it might have been driven in part by a desire to play hardball with Instagram’s new owner, Facebook. But Tumblr isn’t owned by a competitor: If anything, the blog network has been a close partner of Twitter’s, up to and including building in support for the newly introduced “Twitter cards” that show expanded information about tweets.

Twitter cut Tumblr off even though it is a partner

Despite those ties, Twitter decided to shut off Tumblr’s ability to show users their Twitter friends, a decision that even one Twitter engineer apparently doesn’t agree with. And Tumblr was clearly disappointed by the move, saying in a statement delivered to a number of blogs:

“To our dismay, Twitter has restricted our users’ ability to “Find Twitter Friends” on Tumblr. Given our history of embracing their platform, this is especially upsetting. Our syndication feature is responsible for hundreds of millions of tweets, and we eagerly enabled Twitter Cards across 70 million blogs and 30 billion posts as one of Twitter’s first partners… We are truly disappointed by Twitter’s decision.”

The key to the move, and to the similar action taken against Instagram, is contained in the only comment that Twitter has so far made publicly about either decision — after cutting off access to the friend-finder ability on Instagram, the company said simply that: “We understand that there’s great value associated with Twitter’s follow graph data, and we can confirm that it is no longer available within Instagram.” Twitter pointed to this statement after the Tumblr decision as well, saying it had nothing to add.

As designer and developer Dustin Curtis of Svbtle described in a post about Twitter’s recent behavior, a huge amount of Twitter’s value to both users and external services is tied up in its follower graph — that is, the index of all a user’s friends and connections, which in turn are a direct representation of their interests. That “interest graph” is what gives Twitter any power it might have to target advertising, to customize search results, to promote tweets, and all the other things it is trying to do in order to monetize its platform and justify its market value.

Unlike Facebook, where users are normally connected with their friends via other means, that interest graph represents all the power that Twitter has over a user. So it’s not surprising the company would want to control that feature as closely as possible, and even turn it into a monetization strategy (it’s not clear whether Twitter asked Tumblr to pay for access or whether it was just removed). The only question now is whether apps like Flipboard — which also had close ties to Twitter, until CEO Mike McCue left the board of directors — will suffer the same fate.

The future is driving eyeballs to television programs

As it cuts off the third-party developers (and in some cases users) who helped generate much of its success, signs of where Twitter is headed are also abundant: They can be seen in the deals that the company has signed with corporate partners such as NBC, which led to an official Twitter hub where curated information about the Olympics appeared — and also caused a significant amount of controversy when the company suspended the account of a journalist who was critical of NBC. In a comment about the partnership, Twitter’s VP for media, Chloe Sladden, said:

“It’s not fair to describe Twitter as a spoiler mechanism. What we saw is that it was an amazing daytime teaser trailer driving people into prime time.”

In other words, despite the critical protests of users who popularized the hashtag #NBCfail — because of the TV network’s decision to post tweets about events that weren’t going to be broadcast in the U.S. for hours — and despite the fact that the NBC deal forced Twitter to geo-block anyone outside the U.S. from seeing anything on its official hub, the company was more than happy with the relationship because it drove lots of people to watch television. As media relationships become a bigger part of Twitter’s future, which they will almost certainly do, that kind of argument is going to define the company’s vision of success.

The only question that remains is whether enough users want Twitter to become that kind of media entity, with all the controls and restrictions and advertising messages that come with it. It’s possible that — as some have argued — the third-party developers who are complaining about their treatment by the company are no longer relevant, and that those users who have been supporting alternatives like App.net are simply misguided. Or Twitter may have miscalculated badly, and sealed its fate as yet another media entity scrambling to promote its ads to a declining user base, just as MySpace did.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

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

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure

We launched Views a couple weeks ago to offer a new way of discovering content on Quora and to let writers get a sense of who they can reach through Quora. While many were really interested in these new stories, we also got a lot of feedback that people weren’t comfortable having what they viewed shared broadly with people following them. So we’re going to stop showing stories in feed about what people are viewing.

Om Malik wrote for GigaOM on the troubling aspects of the “Views” feature, which was launched August 1 and showed when a user had seen a particular post:

This is no different than the passive sharing that has been promoted by Facebook or Path. Now on a closed network like Path, which is based entirely on intimate relationships, I can understand passive sharing. After all, if you have seen my photo or a check-in and I know that, it is okay because you are on my approved list. However, the kind of sharing Quora is promoting doesn’t jive with me.

Under the new “Views,” users did have the option to turn off this feature, and it only tracked topics they were following, not those found through search. But it seems general dislike of the new feature resonated with Quora. In the blog post, Quora explained that it would continue to track “views from feed, topic pages you follow and clicks on digest emails,” but not display in the main feed which posts were read by individual users.

This post was updated at 6:55 p.m. to clarify where Quora will stop showing stories about what users are reading.

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

• NewNet Q1: Content Farms and Niche Networks on the Rise
• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

In Godin’s post, the author and marketing guru says that the world Twitter is choosing to enter by making advertising revenue its primary concern — over and above the interests of its users — is the same world that TV inhabits. The real customers for a TV network or channel, he says, aren’t the users but the advertisers who pay to produce the content, and this same dynamic is present in the newspaper industry as well (which is one reason why the switch to being funded primarily by readers could be so disruptive for that business, as I argued in a recent post about the Financial Times and the New York Times).

Advertising gets in the way of serving users

The problem with a focus on advertising for someone like Twitter, Godin says, is that making what advertisers want the main priority will tend to distort the things the network does — in ways that could run counter to what readers want. As he puts it:

“If they relentlessly sell the attention of their users, they will have a misalignment as they maximize profit. The advertisers will want ever more attention, and the users will want to avoid those interruptions the advertisers are paying for. Tension will keep rising as users feel trapped by a medium with few substitutes that begins to charge an ever higher tax in the form of attention wasted.”

This is a dilemma that Facebook is having to confront as well: it has become hugely popular as a social network that allows people to connect with their friends, but the vast majority of its monetization strategy consists of trying to interrupt and/or take advantage of those connections to satisfy advertisers — something that could effectively poison the well for many users. Sir Martin Sorrel, chairman of advertising and marketing giant WPP Group, has wondered whether advertising as we know it is even compatible with socially-based networks, and others argue that ad models simply don’t suit what amount to communication platforms.

Godin’s solution is similar to Caldwell’s model for his new venture App.net: while Caldwell wants to make user and developer fees the primary revenue source for his network, Godin suggests that Twitter should charge users for a variety of features that only power users are likely to want — things like advanced analytics, verification (which some users have already been given, but only on a case-by-case basis decided by Twitter) or other enhancements. The core of Godin’s argument is that this would align Twitter’s interests and those of its users, which would turn out better for both:

“Every decision proposed will have to answer just one question: what makes our users happier? Free is a great idea, until free leads to a conflict between those contributing attention and those contributing cash.”

Is it better to have loyal users, or giant scale?

Dave Winer, meanwhile, argued in a recent post that Twitter should do the opposite of what Godin suggests: in other words, that it should seek out those power users or people with some kind of celebrity-style following (not necessarily TV or movie celebrities, but possibly technology thought leaders, he says) and offer them a revenue-sharing relationship. One of Winer’s key points is that much of the value in Twitter comes from those users, and therefore they deserve to benefit from the monetization of the value they are creating, in much the same way that YouTube has preferred partners.

Unless Twitter reaches out to try and retain these kinds of users, Winer argues, it could lose them to competing networks — whether it’s Google+ or other offerings that give them what they want (one would-be Twitter competitor, Status.net, got some mileage out of forming relationships with celebrity users, but it wasn’t enough to give the network much traction). In a Twitter conversation with me, Winer also made the point that his proposal isn’t contradictory to Godin’s, and that the network could both charge some users and pay others as part of a different monetization strategy. As Winer puts it in his post:

“Not all your users are the same. Some see their output stream as a work product. Something they care about, learn from, put love into, and use it as a way to gather ideas from others. For some people this will be considered enough of a product that they want to be paid for it.”

In a recent post on the virtues of being free — a post that was a response in part to Dalton Caldwell’s App.net proposal — Union Square Ventures managing partner Fred Wilson argued that the only way for networks like Twitter to reach the largest number of users, and thereby achieve the kind of scale they need to in order to become valuable businesses, is to be advertising supported. And he is probably right about that. But is scale the most important thing? And could the race to achieve that scale actually ruin the network?

Godin and others have a point when they argue that advertising has the potential to distort the relationship between a service and its users — and we’ve already seen hints of how that might play out, in the turmoil around Guy Adams and the suspension of his account after he criticized one of Twitter’s corporate partners. The benefit of the models proposed by Godin, Caldwell and Winer is that they would be as user-centric as possible, and therefore less likely to become distorted. But they would also sacrifice the scale Wilson refers to. Would the trade-off be worth it?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Mark Strozier and Rosaura Ochoa

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

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated