“For the first time in 50 years characters in rock and roll really don’t stand for anything. Music has become more manufactured than a Ford Focus. The biggest movement out of youth culture today is the campaign against drinking bottled water. That’s a sign of a society that has too much free time. Or maybe too much water.” – Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, in Forbes online (5/03/10)
There’s nothing more coveted in journalism than the scoop, from Tajikistan to technology.
But there can be a price to pay for those who would serve up these media morsels. Just ask the 21-year-old man who discovered an iPhone prototype sitting on a bar stool in Redwood City, CA, and then sold it to a technology website. Now he’s discovered he’s “very definitely … being looked at as a suspect in theft,” according to local law enforcement. That’s because if you find a lost item in California and keep it without making “reasonable” efforts to find the real owner, you might be charged with a crime.
That $5,000 Gizmodo paid Brian Hogan will probably just end up being just a down payment on his legal bill. To minimize the pain, he’s apologized to Apple, which is known for zealously protecting its secrets and, true to form, vigorously pursued the top-secret gadget that was accidentally left behind by one of its engineers. As for Jason Chen, the Gizmodo editor, police raided his home and seized his computers and servers. But because of “shield laws” protecting journalists, Chen may have little fear of prosecution. Indeed, from the publication’s perspective, the whole affair could be more dream than nightmare: Jackboot thugs storming the hiding place of our intrepid hero, a nervy scribe intent on airing secrets and serving the public interest. Long live democracy!
At any rate, the scoops continue on, proving once again that the media and lawyers are usually the only winners in the game of human folly. First, Wired.com trumpeted that it had sleuthed out the identity of Hogan and quickly publicized his name. Now CNET reports that a UC Berkeley student named Sage Robert Wallower was the one who helped Hogan find a buyer. The 27-year-old told CNET that he “didn’t see it or touch it in any manner” … adding, “I need to speak to a lawyer … I think I have said too much.”
The Twitter micro-blogging service intends to mature into a formidable animal. Consequently, co-founder Biz Stone recently explained in his blog a new addition to the company’s aviary — Promoted Tweets. Translation: advertising.
It had to happen. Information may want to be “free,” but information providers and platforms don’t necessarily want to be, at least not forever.
Like other Tweets, the Promoted variety will be limited to 140 characters, and readers can respond to them or pass them along (“retweet”). The difference is, business and organizations pay to have placed at the top of relevant Twitter search results. They will be labeled as “promoted.”
Distinct from both traditional search advertising and more recent social advertising, promoted Tweets are start off as regular Tweets (they’re an “organic” part of regular Twitter). Promoted Tweets will also be timely, to connect the user in a real-time event, for example.
Much as Google does with unsuccessful AdWords, Twitter will drop a Tweet’s Promoted status if it doesn’t “resonate” with users (meaning they don’t respond to the Promoted Tweet in some way). Initial advertisers include Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America.
With its new application-laden reading/gaming/writing platform, Apple has once again stuck it to the powers that be, or that were. For in addition to thumbing its digital nose at Flash-maker Adobe, the iPad will speed the destruction of the traditional news aggregators’ all-or-nothing pricing model.
It’s not going to do wonders for the sales of already established e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle or Barnes & Noble’s Nook, either. That’s capitalism, baby.
There had actually been some talk (or hope) that the iPad would be the “savior” of newspapers by reinvigorating the presentation of these traditionally assembled editorial packages (and publishers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have their apps at the ready). But just as the sleek iPod (and its iTunes library) chewed up the already-in-progress disintegration of the record labels’ monopolistic pricing power, the iPad is also more than just a pretty face. It’s savagely opportunistic.
The Internet and its related technologies have disrupted many aspects of information gathering, selling, and sharing. Display is just one of these changes. The very business model for newspapers has been obliterated – now the competition is unlimited for information and its associated revenue. With its easy navigation and multitude of apps, the iPad accelerates this process.
Apple recognized that many music consumers only wanted one or two songs on a CD, and its under-a-buck-per-tune price made messing with pirated MP3 files not worth the effort. Similarly, newspapers might charge per section or per article, as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, and others, have written.
Unlike cable companies that have successfully fought unbundling (for now…) newspapers are no longer local monopolies. But while consumers may be less and less willing to pay for the “news,” they might pay for a good filtering service – that is, a brand that guarantees consistent quality (vetted sources, professional objectivity, intelligent insight, smooth writing).
Rather than be threatened by the iPad and its ilk, publishers should be opportunistic themselves: how has Apple provided them with a new way to monetize their product? How will the advent of iPad-accelerated unbundling affect not just subscriptions, but the real media moneymaker — advertising?
More than 70,000 applications make it possible to post photos, shorten URLs, and do other useful things on Twitter. They are a primary reason why the micro-blogging service now boasts 50 million Tweets a day — up from 5,000 in 2007.
Twitter doesn’t pay the developers who created all this utility and, by extension, the company’s unassailable position. Instead, these folks monetize their work by charging users for the app and/or by selling advertising. But they’re starting to wonder where their next paycheck will come from, for there’s a new competitor on the scene – Twitter itself.
Now that it has achieved ubiquity, Twitter is looking for revenue, and spent part of its venture capital hoard last week to buy Atebits, which makes Tweetie for the iPhone and Mac. It also said it is creating BlackBerry’s official Twitter app.
“The time for filling the holes in the Twitter service has come and gone,” wrote Twitter investor and board member Fred Wilson in a blog post cited in the New York Times (4/11/10). “Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.”
In other words, you take a great risk when you’re an outsider “filling the holes” in someone else’s product — that is, writing code for a corporate-owned platform. Once you’ve helped build the service into preeminence, the corporation may try to buy you (not bad) or bury you (bad). It may also leave you alone, but the likely choices have narrowed. Happens all the time. As cited in the Times report, outside developers helped make Microsoft ubiquitous by creating tools to enhance its operating system. Then the company re-created these tools and built them into Windows, and the outsiders were shut out.
Twitter, a free service, plans to introduce paid accounts for businesses, including a tool for managing corporate tweets with multiple authors – inspired by a similar program developed by an outside firm called CoTweet, which will now have to compete with Twitter for sales.
How should developers orient themselves on this changing landscape? Wilson recommended that they focus on such add-on services as business tools, analytics, or gaming. The new terrain will be further explained and explored at the first-ever Chirp conference for Twitter developers, which starts today in San Francisco.
See: http://chirp.twitter.com/index.html
