The conversations were taped in the mid to late 1980s by Joe Smith, a former DJ and retired music business executive, and run the gamut from Artie Shaw — the legendary (and difficult) clarinetist and band leader — to B.B. King and Mick Jagger.  Part one of the Yoko Ono interview is a must for any Beatles fan, if only to hear her side of the “Yoko-broke-up-the-Beatles” story. In fact, she says, Lennon was not the first Beatle to want to leave the band. Who was? Listen and find out.

Another nugget: In 1986, Mick Jagger told Smith that the Rolling Stones hadn’t created a good song in ten years. He also talks about the role Andrew Oldham played  – moving the Stones away from their blues core. This is good stuff. (Also, Mick talks with his mouth full.)

Smith taped nearly 200 interviews — the roster also includes music impresario Ahmet Ertegun and superstar producer Quincy Jones.  He subsequently donated them to the Library of Congress, which made the first 25 interviews available this week. More here from The Boston Globe. 

This is definitely old-style audio tape but the hissing actually sort of adds to the whole experience. These are conversations, not staged — there are no preambles or intros. Perfect listening for the weekend. Check them out.

 Photo courtesy of  Flickr user Doctor Noe

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

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

All Grown Up

When I met him last year, the company he had started while still at school was just him. It was essentially focused on summarizing any kind of web page. Since then the focus has narrowed to news, probably because it is a more manageable market opportunity. Summly has managed to raise about a million dollars in angel funding from a potpourri of investors that range from actor-comedian Stephen Fry to Yoko Ono to your usual bold faced suspects from the technology industry.

Investors, frankly, don’t mean anything unless there is a product and a market opportunity that is validated by target customers. D’Aloisio, who has been riding the crest of a media tidal wave, believes that he is onto something new and unique. Why?  D’Aloisio argues that regular news articles, blog posts and tweets don’t allow us to consume copious amounts of news while on our mobile phones, especially since we only have a few minutes to glance at the screen. Tweets eventually lead to a bigger article or just don’t have context. Blog posts and news articles are mostly too long or are packed with cruft. Hence, he has focused his attention on “summaries.”

The company has grown from Nick (who has taken a leave of absence from school) to seven people in addition to about half a dozen people at SRI who have helped develop the technology platform for the new, improved news-focused app. And the back-end changes are there to see – the application (at least in trials) was fast and was able to serve up information rather quickly.

My Tiny App Review

There is a lot to like about the app: it is simple, initiative, fast, clean and extremely well designed. The app comes with pre-packaged categories such as sports, entertainment, business, politics and technology. These categories are represented by large color blocks. (It reminds me of Windows Phone blocks.) You can add your own key words — say, Apple — and a different color block (green) shows up in the app. I am not a big fan of blocks — they look out of place on the iPhone/iOS, but the are simple to navigate.

Latest stories show up at the top, and the ones that are read simply vanish. Want to save, email, tweet or share on some other social network? No problem — press anywhere on the screen and a flower-shaped menu shows up for you to take the necessary action. It is meant to be used with a single hand, with little more than a handful of gestures to navigate through lots of information.

Interested in the latest company funding news? One of the tech blog posts will be summarized into a few words that fit the phone screen comfortably. Want to know what the presidential candidates are lying about? There is a summary for that. You can read news flowing through Twitter and you can pick your news sources. As you shift locations — move from U.S. to U.K., for example, and the summaries change as well. Every time you open the app, the background image changes — a nifty little touch that makes me feel that I am seeing something new, even though nothing might have really changed.

Like I said, there is a lot to like about this app. However, after using it for a few days, I found some inconsistencies. The summaries were generally accurate, but were often nonsensical enough for me to wince. The sources of information that have been curated by the company are predictable and the summaries are bland.

So what’s the problem?

I have this weird way of identifying blow-out apps and services. It is my personal “addicted to dopamine” metric. Twitter has that weird addictiveness. Facebook used to have it (but now it is one giant sprawl of different kind of data.) Instagram was and remains insanely addictive. Prismatic is a drug for infovores like me. The digital services I find the most attractive are the ones that leave me craving more — so much so that I keep returning multiple times a day in order to get my fix.

Summly isn’t there just yet, because it doesn’t provide that constant craving and gratification. Despite the clean design and simple aesthetics, I don’t feel that I need to return to it multiple times a day. It doesn’t feel immediate enough, despite being fast. Many summaries are late, which makes the app feel a little dated.

I am in the news business and headlines, blog posts, tweets, visual information, long-form articles, data visualization — they are my stock in trade. In fact, I consume more information than even I realize. More than 500 blogs are flowing through my RSS reader. My Twitter desktop is jam-packed with lists. As I said, news is my business.

I should be an ideal candidate for a summary-centric service. Summly is something that makes logical sense to me and I want it to be the magic bullet, but so far it remains on the fourth (of seven) screen of my iPhone. In time, I am sure it will move up. I have complete confidence in D’Aloisio and his ability to re-imagine and reinvent what is clearly a much needed app.

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

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• The state of cross-platform media measurement

After a crazy six months, D’Aloisio’s still working on his app — which summarizes stories on the web for you — and last week I caught up with him on stage at London’s LeWeb conference to see how the whirlwind had treated him. And the answer? He’s still as smart as ever… and he’s kept his feet on the ground.

We spoke about the press (he’s had to cut back to focus on the product), his app’s relationships with publishers (good, so far) and, inevitably, school. He had been granted time off to work on Summly, but now he’s faced with a dilemma.

“Over the next few months I have to sit down and really just decide from a life perspective,” he said. “I still enjoy being among friends and in that school environment and so if there’s a compromise where I can be running the company a few days a week and also at school — as long as I can be eligible for university still, I think, I’m more than happy to commit a lot of my time right now.”

Why, though? School is great for some things — but many young entrepreneurs would be forgoing more education if they thought their business would work. Peter Thiel even hates university so much that he has been paying people $100,000 a year to drop out.

You could forgive somebody who had already raised $250,000 for his startup to think the same way. But D’Aloisio explained his thinking to me:

“I really enjoy, beyond computer science stuff, I enjoy philosophy and politics and history, and prior to all this stuff happening — which has been pretty crazy — I’d wanted to do PPE or something along those lines, and so I have a real interest in that and I feel like it would be great regardless of what happens in technology and what I do with Summly to keep that as an option.”

“It’s not like I need a university degree,” he said. “It’s more like I have a real genuine interest in philosophy and stuff and I’d like to one day study it in-depth.”

Judging by audience response, the talk was warmly appreciated — I’m sure more for Nick’s smart, switched-on and approachable manner than my interviewing skills. But if you’re interested, you can watch it and see for yourself.

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

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013
• Podcast: Mobile winners and losers in 2012 and what to expect in 2013

Not quite.

While such accounts are a pain — and Twitter spends significant resources trying to hunt them down — a new study says that the most egregious promoters of Twitter spam could actually be the likes of Lady Gaga or President Obama … and even you.

The study, from researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany, examined more than 40,000 identified spam accounts, and looked into how they tried to achieve success.

“Pretty much everyone on Twitter is targeted by spammers,” says Krishna Gummadi, head of the networked systems research group at MPI-SWS. “But the key question for us was ‘why would someone follow a spammer?’. So rather than focus on spammers themselves, we looked at their support network — the people who helped them.”

And what they discovered was that instead of being supported by other spam accounts — as is common with web-based spam — the egg people were reliant on real Twitter users for their success.

How it works

At the heart of Twitter’s spam problem are two things: the way the social messaging service works, and the way search engines think about the site.

First, Twitter prominently displays follower counts as a crucial measurement of popularity — something Google and others use that number to help determine somebody’s authority. Then, there’s a secondary effect: if you are followed by somebody who is followed by lots of people (what the researchers term somebody’s “indegree”) then your influence increases even more.

This leads to a kind of Twitter-based link farming, where spammers don’t simply target small-time users with just a few friends, but larger accounts with thousands — or sometimes millions — of followers. And unlike the web, where people with high reputation tend not to link to nefarious, spammy sites, many Twitter users automatically follow back anyone who comes their way.

“At the high end, politicians like Barack Obama’s campaign staff, or the UK Prime Minister’s office, these guys tend to follow back because they want to increase social engagement. But they’re following spammers back,” says Gummadi.

That top tier of users is topped by Yoko Ono, who boasts more than 775,000 people on her following list, but includes Gaga (currently following 139,000 people), Britney Spears (416,331).

But perhaps more dangerously, the study found that it was those in the middle of the scale who were causing the most damage by handing spammers credibility.

“The people with very low indegrees of just a few people were not responsible for spammers,” he says. “It was really people with 1,000 to 5,000 followers who were worst — that’s the range where there are a lot of people who follow back anybody. These are the social marketers.”

It’s a well-known grey hat tactic that following more people will increase your own follower count, and many people who try to profit will inflate their figures by following as many people as they can. But those individuals who are just trying to bump up their numbers are not just hurting their clients — they’re ruining search results for the rest of us.

“They want to increase their social capital and they have very similar incentives to spammers,” says Gummadi. “Spammers want to collect links, social marketers want influence. So they end up colluding with each other, even if not intentionally.”

You ain’t no follow back girl

Having identified the most dangerous Twitter users, Gummadi’s team — which included researchers from IIT Kharagpur, India, and UFOP in Brazil — have started exploring ways to reduce the impact of indiscriminate follow-backs.

That’s complicated, because it involves trying to change people’s behavior. But the researchers suggest it may be possible to implement some sort of “collusion rank” to sift out those people who are giving spammers oxygen and demote them. Just like Google’s pagerank can change depending on a site’s behavior, so too could their Twitter ranking if they link to too many spam accounts.

The team recognizes, however, that this may be tricky — because the line between helping a spammer and trying to be a good social network user can be very, very fine. After all, imagine how much time it would take Barack Obama’s team to sift each potential follower for spamminess — and the outcry if there was some sort of incorrect line drawn.

Whatever the case, it is clear to the research team that fighting Twitter spam needs to be about more than just shutting down accounts.

“We’re only beginning to understand spam in Twitter, and we’re sketching a solution,” says Gummadi. “But it does not lie in just banning spammers, because it doesn’t stop the social marketers.”

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

• Web startups: How to guard against security breaches
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013

According to TechCrunch, the headline made the unequivocal claim, “The whole of the Beatles back catalogue will be made available to buy on iTunes, Ono has told Sky News.”

The URL for Sky’s report is still to be found on Google, but now the web page awaiting hopeful Fab Four fans sports a rather glum “Error” message from Sky. So what happened?

9 to 5Mac reports a Sky employee told them that the order to remove the news story “came from the very top.” Meanwhile, EMI Global Catalogue President Ernesto Schmitt yesterday told The Financial Times, “Conversations between Apple and EMI are ongoing, and we look forward to the day when we can make the music available digitally. But it’s not tomorrow.”

So where does this leave us? If Ono is wrong and the story was indeed in error, a responsible (not to mention more normal) response from Sky News would be to retract the original report and explain its reasons for doing so. But talk of directives “from the top” fuels speculation that this is frantic damage control ahead of the special music-themed event Apple is holding later today. If Apple wants to announce the Beatles’ iTunes premiere with appropriate fanfare, the last thing it needs is Ono shooting her mouth off to the world’s press ahead of time.

Consider this: If Ono’s premature announcement proves true, and the Mop Tops are about to appear on the iTunes Store, should we be impressed — or deeply concerned — that Apple can exercise such influence (control?) over a major news organization? Last time I checked, Sky News and Apple are not the same company, don’t share the same board of directors, and don’t have any business dealings with one another. Getting the jump on one of Apple’s best-kept-secrets is any news publisher’s dream, particularly when it’s such big news, of interest not only to the industry but also to the general public. There’s no danger of litigation here; Sky has a source, a fairly reputable source, at that. So why not run with the story?

At this point, all we do know for sure is that 09/09/09 is a red letter day. Apple is holding a special event. The Beatles are launching their digitally remastered back catalogue in (at least) CD format. Harmonix is today launching the much-anticipated “The Beatles Rock Band” on all major console platforms.

For music fans, it’s a big day for announcements and releases. Just not if you’re Sky News — or Yoko Ono.

Stay tuned to TheAppleBlog’s live coverage of Apple’s special music event later today.

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

• How do developers ride the Siri wave?
• Connectivity means making the machine disappear
• Access vs. ownership: Why UltraViolet has already lost