Author: Eliza Kern

Yahoo, meet your new users: Tumblr adds sponsored posts, and the grumbles begin
Tumblr hasn’t even been under Yahoo’s ownership for two full weeks, and already the “Yahoo” tag on Tumblr has become a colorful collection of rants and expletives from angry users, many of whom are convinced Yahoo has ruined their community.

Disgruntled users aren’t anything new when a company changes hands. But the complaints by Tumblr users speak to the challenges Yahoo faces in winning over the young audience it acquired and in turning Tumblr into a money maker by introducing advertising where it didn’t previously exist.

Yahoo announced Thursday that it would begin showing ads in the form of sponsored stories on the Tumblr web dashboard, which is where core Tumblr users go to check for updates from the blogs they follow. Tumblr had already introduced ads on mobile back in April, and when Yahoo announced the Tumblr acquistiion, there was no question that its ad network would soon follow.

And just as people complained about large ads showing up on their Facebook feed or promoted tweets from accounts they don’t follow, the complaints about Tumblr’s sponsored posts are already rolling in:

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is clearly betting on sponsored stories serving as a kind of advertising that Tumblr’s users can accept, as she explained at the time of the acquistion:

“David talks wistfully about the ads that he saw as a child, that would make him want to go see a movie or own a particular type of car,” Mayer said when the deal was announced. “He says the current state of internet advertising doesn’t aspire to be as good as the content itself. We think that should change…we’re aligned in those ideals. When you hear us talk about native ads, where the ads are every bit as good as the content, and maybe even make the content better — that’s what we are aiming for. We want the ads themselves to create that aspirational feel that, for example, television ads or movie ads do.”

But will Tumblr users find the sponsored stories inspirational? This is a big open question on all sorts of platforms, not just Tumblr, but it’s probably fair to say that fewer people view Twitter or Facebook as private, creative spaces the way people do with Tumblr. And the more private a space you feel like you’ve created (cough, Instagram), the more intrusive these ads might seem. Yahoo, say hello to your new users. They could be tough customers.

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May 30, 2013
Dots announces iPad and multiplayer versions as the game hits 250 million plays
Dots, the addictive iOS game that came from the NYC team at Betaworks, has continued seeing upward growth stats and is announcing both a native iPad version and a multiplayer option for users to compete against each other.

The team behind Dots plans to announce Thursday that the game hit 250 million game plays, up from 100 million about two weeks ago, and it’s been making rapid improvements to the app since then.

Dots is launching a native iPad version, as well as multi-player option that will let several players play the same board at different times, providing a way for people to accurately compare scores. The new version also accomodates players who are color-blind. And the team said Android, and maybe an un-timed version of the game, are in the works.

Dots came out of Betawork’s hacker-in-residence program, which was designed to test out a variety of startup ideas in a short period of time to see which ones would be a success. Dots was one of the successes, and Betaworks CEO John Borthwick talked about this strategy and at our paidContent Live conference in April.

While it’s unclear how long people will remain interested in Dots, the rapid adoption and transformation of the game over the past month highlights the Betaworks strategy of quickly iterating on a good idea and putting resources behind it.

Our review of the game can be found here, and Quartz has a good dissection of the different ways to do well at Dots (just focus on the squares). The game was created by Patrick Moberg, who was experimenting with different iOS interaction designs and decided to build a game. Dots is pretty simple, giving the user 36 colored dots to connect and remove from the screen before the time runs out, and the game demonstrates the flat aesthetic that’s become so popular in mobile design recently.

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May 30, 2013
Facebook and the very fine line between free speech and hate speech
It’s clear to many people, and obviously to Facebook itself, that the company mishandled the process for removing gender-based hate speech on the social network. The company wrote in a blog post Tuesday that it would be re-evaluating its policies as a result, and has resolved to “do better” in the future.

But even as activists call for Facebook to take action on removing hateful speech from the platform, others will surely criticize the company for making judgment calls when it comes to deciding what is hate speech and what is simply offensive content. Making this call is a challenge, as Facebook has demonstrated. Even in Facebook’s post on Tuesday, it explained that there’s plenty of distasteful or offensive content on the site, but not all of it deserves to be taken down unless it specifically encourages real-world violence or qualifies as hate speech, which can be a challenging thing to define on a platform with 1 billion users.

“There’s a bunch of stuff that stays up because it’s not hate and it’s not inciting violence, but it’s just distasteful,” Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg said at the D11 conference on Wednesday morning. She said the company hopes that users will speak up about content they find offensive, creating the kind of “self-cleaning oven” atmosphere my colleauge Mathew Ingram has written about. Which is convenient, because that means less work on Facebook’s part.

But the company certainly acknowledged that when it comes to hate speech, as opposed to just distasteful content, its current approach was not adequate, as it wrote in the statement it gave Tuesday:

“In recent days, it has become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate. In some cases, content is not being removed as quickly as we want. In other cases, content that should be removed has not been or has been evaluated using outdated criteria. We have been working over the past several months to improve our systems to respond to reports of violations, but the guidelines used by these systems have failed to capture all the content that violates our standards. We need to do better – and we will.”

We’ve written about this issue before, and how companies like Google or Twitter have struggled to establish platforms that allow for free speech and conversations around things like political dissent without going so far as to encourage violence or hate, or skirting any laws. Facebook presents a slightly different challenge than Twitter because it focuses on having users present their real identities, wheras Twitter has fought in court to protect the identify of users who remain anonymous.

Facebook might have apologized and revamped it policies this time, but don’t think for a minute that we’ve reached some resolution on how tech companies negotiate offensive content and free speech.

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May 29, 2013
Are you officially famous? Facebook’s new verified profile feature will judge
Are you a celebrity with a large online audience? Soon, Facebook’s verification feature will determine just how famous you are. The company announced Wednesday that it’s rolling out a new verification feature for prominent celebrities and public figures, obviously quite similarly to Twitter’s verified feature.

The company said that verificiation would be available for a “small group of prominent public figures (celebrities, journalists, government officials, popular brands and businesses) with large audiences,” and that it will begin rolling out slowly.

Twitter has been verifying celebrities and notable people on its platform for years now, and some of those people, particularly celebrities and musicians, have amassed strong followings on Twitter. Facebook has been trying to create more of that relationship between celebrities and fans with its “following” feature for pages and the latest news feed redesign that provides a tab to follow public figures.

The verification will appear next to a user’s profile with a blue check mark (that also looks very much like the Twitter version):

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May 29, 2013
Facebook, Waze acquisition talks break down: which big tech company will step in?
Everyone wants to know: which major tech company is going to acquire Waze, the crowdsourced mapping data company? Well, new reports indicate that it likely won’t be Facebook, with AllThingsD reporting that talks between the two companies broke down over whether the Israel-based startup would relocate to Menlo Park, Calif. among other issues.

Earlier reports this month said that Facebook was interested in acquiring the startup for as much as $1 billion, and as my colleauge Mathew Ingram noted, the combination would have made a lot of sense for Facebook, which is slowly acquiring a good deal of user location data but doesn’t yet have a standalone mapping product of its own like Google or Apple.

So if it looks like Facebook won’t be acquiring Waze, it raises the question as to who might be next in line. Mathew argued that Google would have been stupid to let Facebook make the move, since Google Maps is one of the company’s core products that users know and love — as evidenced by the Apple Maps debacle. Bloomberg reported this month that Google was interested in making a bid, and it’s possible that talks with Facebook breaking down could give the older company an edge.

But Apple would have an equally compelling interest in Waze, considering the still-lagging Apple Maps product, which CEO Tim Cook acknowledged Tuesday night, “We screwed up there.” There’s no question that Apple is still playing catch-up when it comes to building a robust mapping service, and Waze could certainly help further this goal. But is Apple going to make the move? Cook said Tuesday that Apple has not made a bid. But that certainly doesn’t mean the company won’t make one in the future.

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May 29, 2013
Gmail adds another way to sort your email by what’s important
Coming up with the perfect solution for everyone to sort and filter their email isn’t exactly the easiest challenge, as I’ve written before. And a large number of startups have been cropping up — and getting funded and bought out — in their attempts to fix email overload and help people quickly find what’s important. But new features from Gmail that are planned to launch Wednesday serve as a good reminder that even as startups try to fix the problem, some things might be easier if they straight from the source.

The new features will come together as another way to view your inbox, similar to priority inbox or unread first. The new view will allow users to toggle between tabs that show different types of messages: primary (default tab for most emails and meant for friends and family), promotions (Groupon emails, daily deals, etc.), social (email from Facebook, Twitter, online dating sites, gaming platforms, etc.), updates (notifications on things like bills, receipts or statements), and forums (messages from mailing lists and email subscriptions).

Users could already set up folders and filters to send all these emails to the right places, but that can be a confusing, tricky process for a lot of people. Once I enabled the new look, the tabs correctly sorted my emails without any effort from me at all. And no effort is generally something people like. So this could be a nice solution for people who don’t want to deal with new email apps like Mailbox.

Gmail has been working to smartly organize your mail for years now, with answers like labels on the left-hand side and priority inbox, but at first glance this seems like a more intuitive approach.

The new look will be rolling out slowly to users, who can tap the gear icon on the top right of their screen to select “configure inbox” from settings. Once users have enabled the new look, they can choose to add or delete different tabs depending on the type of email they get (so if you don’t get daily deal emails, for instance, you could remove the promotions tab.) The new features will be available on Gmail for Android and iPhone and iPad, as well.

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May 29, 2013
Taskrabbit looks for more revenue with plans to shake up the temp industry
TaskRabbit might have popularized the idea of hiring people looking to make money for menial tasks like dogwalking or grocery shopping, but in an effort to capture a more profitable market, the company is going to begin challenging temp agencies by providing businesses with short-term labor.

The company began targeting businesses as customers for its thousands of employees — or rabbits — across the nation during SXSW in March, when it launched TaskRabbit for business. That announcement allowed companies to hire employees on an hourly basis through the service and hire more than one rabbit at once.

But Thursday’s announcement takes this much further, particularly by handling the paperwork for businesses who want to hire temps, and by providing information like resumes to potential employers, who can pick which ones to hire. This is TaskRabbit’s new goal: to shake up the decades-old temp industry. However, the classic TaskRabbit service for consumers will remain unchanged.

The move makes sense, as charging a business a percentage of a month-long salary will likely be a more profitable and stable form of revenue than taking a percentage of fees paid for a few hours of dog-walking, for instance. Plus, TaskRabbit employees said they’d already discovered businesses were trying to use the service for hiring for temporary administrative positions, so making the option official was a no-brainer.

“The temp industry hasn’t had a lot innovation in a long time, said Victor Echevarria, who heads business development at TaskRabbit. “So we’re moving away from the notion of tasks and moving toward the value of jobs.”

The company has taken in a little less than $40 million in funding, and reported that revenue is five times greater than it was a year ago. TaskRabbit already has 15,000 companies signed up for TaskRabbit for business, and expects more to be joining after this new addition.

This new component will allow TaskRabbits to use a LinkedIn connect feature to pull in their resumes to the site, and they’ll be able to write a cover letter when applying for jobs. Potential employers can input information about the job they’re posting and select the corresponding paperwork (1099 contract employees versus those with W2 forms.) TaskRabbit will then show them the candidates for different positions, corresponding resume information, and then provide the required paperwork.

“The biggest challenge was compliance. Businesses who want to hire temps or even want to hire people full-time, there’s a lot of paperwork and headaches involved in having a compliant workforce,” he said. “A large percentage of the work we put into this was creating a legally complaint solution.”

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May 23, 2013
Mailbox launches iPad app and says Android is in the works
If you were an avid user of the popular email app Mailbox and were worried by the company’s acquisition by Dropbox, never fear. Mailbox isn’t slowing down or turning away from email, as evidenced by Thursday’s launch of the new Mailbox for iPad app and word that an app for Android is in the works.

Mailbox for iPad is the first new product from the company since its Dropbox acquisition, which Om’s sources put above $50 million and potentially closer to $100 million. No matter the exact price tag, it was a significiant deal for the small company, and CEO Gentry Underwood said the transition to working within Dropbox has been remarkably smooth.

The new iPad app will look pretty similar to the existing iPhone app, with a few minor changes to account for the larger screen. Underwood said designing for the iPad is actually a significant challenge, since if you look at it one way it’s an overzized mobile phone, and another way it’s a small computer. Figuring out how to accomodate for the size of the keyboard (or wireless external keyboards), as well as not overcrowding the screen, is tricky.

“We’re trying to create an experience that’s as consistent as possible, that doesn’t misuse all that extra space,” he said, noting that it would be easy to see the larger size of the tablet and cram it with features. “And sometimes it’s like a luxury-sized mobile device and sometimes it’s a desktop replacement.”

Seemingly as soon as Mailbox launched, users were clamoring to download the app, which limited signups and put most people on a reservation list. The full app finally launched to everyone and Mailbox removed the signup list last month. At that point, it was delivering more than 100 million messages a day, and while Underwood said they are reluctant to continue releasing numbers, he said the growth remains strong, and that 40 percent of users hit inbox zero every week.

Mailbox for iPhone and iPad are available in the Apple iTunes store, and a full review of the iPhone app can be found on the GigaOM Pro blog.

Underwood said the company is working on an Android app (the iPad app was in the works before the acquisition), but he wouldn’t say when Android would launch. The company decided to go with iPad first since it was an often-requested feature, and because much of the code was the same for iPad, even if it presented new design challenges, whereas Android would be something of the opposite.

“There’s always this constant tension between, ‘This is great,’ and ‘Oh, there’s so much more we want to do.’”

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May 23, 2013
Report: one in four online teens now use Twitter
What social networks are teens flocking to these days? That’s the billion dollar question as we see companies like Yahoo snapping up Tumblr in an effort to keep a younger audience. But teens are a tough audience to predict, and trends can change dramatically even in a single year.

About 24 percent of teens who go online were using Twitter at the end of 2012, marking a dramatic increase from the 16 percent who were on Twitter in 2011. The new findings on teen social media use and attitudes toward online privacy come from a new report from the Pew Research Center, “Teens, Social Media and Privacy,” that’s set to release on Tuesday. Here’s how things changed in just a year:

Apart from the raw numbers, Pew conducted focus groups with teens across the country to get feedback on how they use different sites. Here are the five most important trends you should know about teens and social media:

1. Teens are outpacing the grown-ups on Twitter

The rise in Twitter use among teens is particularly interesting since adult adoption hovers around 16 percent, according to the latest Pew report on adult social media use. Numbers among online teens are even stronger for African-Americans, 39 percent of whom are on the service (compared to 23 percent of white teens). Teens have shown a remarkable adoption of the service since 2009, when Pew first asked about the site, when only 9 percent reported using it.

2. Public is the new private on Twitter

The majority of teen Facebook users have their accounts set to private, but not so on Twitter. Some 64 percent of teens have Twitter accounts set to public so anyone can read their tweets, with 24 percent setting their accounts to private. Perhaps of most concern, 12 percent reported they didn’t know whether their tweets were public or private.

3. Teens are tired of Facebook, but they’re still using it

The media has been reporting teens abandoning Facebook for years now, but the Pew report finds that like a lot of adults, teens are frusterated by Facebook but stay on the platform because of the integral social role it still plays. The report explains: They dislike the increasing number of adults on the site, get annoyed when their Facebook friends share inane details, and are drained by the “drama” that they say is portrayed frequently on the site. The stress of needing to manage their reputation on Facebook also contributes to the lack of enthusiasm.” Yet 94 percent of them still use the site.

4. Tumblr numbers still aren’t very high

Yahoo might have liked the younger audience on Tumblr when it decided to acquire the site, but teen use of Tumblr is still pretty low. Only five percent reported using the site in 2012, although that’s up from 2 percent in 2011, a decent jump.

5. The subtweet goes mainstream

You heard it here first: 58 percent of teens are making inside inside jokes or sharing “cloaked messages” on social media.

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May 21, 2013
Buying Tumblr might make Yahoo cool — but buying Pinterest might have made more sense
If Marissa Mayer is on a mission to teach kids about her company, which was founded before some of them were even born, buying Tumblr isn’t a bad way to do it. But in all the discussion of Yahoo’s new deal, too many people are writing about Yahoo buying a blogging site, comparing Tumblr to WordPress, when in fact Tumblr is more of a photo site for the youngs.

While buying Tumblr isn’t necessarily a bad deal for the two companies, as my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote, there’s another photo site out there that might have been an even better deal: Pinterest.

In many ways, Pinterest is also building a mobile-friendly photo site just like Tumblr, but Pinterest is also in the midst of constructing the underpinnings for a potentially much more lucrative native revenue experience. Pinterest is oriented around commerce and consumers craving particular items. That’s good for business.

No, buying Pinterest wouldn’t help Yahoo discover its inner tween. It’s a well-known fact that Pinterest is populated mainly by adult women — not exactly the demographic Yahoo needs to attract. And no, considering Pinterest’s valuation as of its last funding round, such an acquisition probably wouldn’t have come cheap. Acquiring the company would require a much bigger departure from Yahoo’s current mass-market advertising into the world of e-commerce and affliate links. It could be a harder sell to the company’s investors, and a bigger transition for everyone.

But if Yahoo is looking to shell out the big bucks for a site with viral growth, visuals to compete with Facebook, and a devoted community of users, Pinterest might have been the better choice. According to a Pew report in December, out of all online adults (which is basically anyone with an internet connection), just six percent of those people visited Tumblr on a regular basis, compared with 13 percent on Instagram (which isn’t exactly for sale), and 15 percent on Pinterest — only Twitter comes in at 16 percent ahead of the others and behind behemoth Facebook at 67 percent.

Less than a year out of beta, Pinterest is a dominant force on the web; a place where women of all ages collect photos of things that inspire them or things that they want to remember or create. For many, it’s a digital wish-list. And because of that, Pinterest sends huge amounts of traffic to online retailers. To be the intermediary between the people and the stores is a good place to be — you’re a crucial link that drives the sales, without any of the hassle of shipping or orders or user acquisitions that come with e-commerce.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann at the company’s new offices in San Francisco.

Pinterest has no business model in place right now — the site is free to join and for brands to integrate with — but that’s just right now, and it likely won’t last. The company just announced yesterday that it is starting to connect photos of items back to the brands who sell them, and it’s not hard to image how this could play out.

Tumblr does have a business model right now based on ads, and it just started rolling them out on mobile users in April. But the company has been reportedly burning through cash and not yet making a lot of revenue, hoping to bring in $100 million this year. But people are usually pretty unhappy about a free product suddenly peppering them with ads — especially if those ads are dropped into a feed that users have created (just ask anyone how they feel about Facebook ads.) CEO David Karp said at our paidContent event just last month that he wants advertising on the site to be native and unobstrusive.

“We focused on higher up in the funnel, the type of advertising that creates intent,” Karp told us in April. “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 that’s a hard nut to crack.

Suddenly, the possible Pinterest model of taking a cut on sales and traffic resulting from users creating digital shopping lists looks a lot less disruptive to the core experience, and potentially more lucrative, than trying to solve mobile display ads for the Tumblr feed. Making money off traffic and sales wouldn’t disrupt Pinterest’s core product, and would generally fit in with the company’s existing user experience, just as promoted tweets are fitting with Twitter’s on both desktop and mobile (a profitable venture so far estimated to bring Twitter $528 million in ad revenue this year.)

So no, buying Pinterest wouldn’t make Yahoo all that hip. But buying the site that has potential to become a strong force in modern, social retail? Seems like a good bet — especially since teens might leave you once Mom joins and you become mainstream.

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May 20, 2013
Pinterest takes a “first step” toward working with big brands
Pinterest plans to announce a new type of pin on Sunday that will highlight a large number of major U.S. retail brands, marking the company’s “first step” in integrating images with associated brands, and making it easier to click through links and purchase items. The move could be the start of a change in consumer perception of the site from a place for wishful thinking to a site where one can purchase those wishes. While this is just a first step, and the company said it is not currently making money from the integration, the power of the companies joining at launch suggests Pinterest could become on par with Facebook and Twitter when it comes to attracting sizable brand marketing budgets in the not-so-distant future.

Pinterest is launching three distinct types of pins, with one type each for food, retail products, and movies. The new format will only work with items pinned from the launch partner sites, but the number of partners is wide-reaching, and will grow. If you click on a food pin, it will now include the ingredient list and relevant information below the photo, auto-generated from the original site. Product photos will show where you can find the item for sale, and the movie pins will show information about the movie such as its rating, cast and release date.

The list of brands participating in the launch demonstrates the strong interest from U.S. retailers in getting on board with Pinterest. Some of the launch partners include: eBay, Etsy, Home Depot, Neiman Marcus, Overstock, REI, Sephora, Sony, Target, Urban Outfitters, Wal-Mart, Bon Appetit, Epicurious, Martha Stewart Living, Whole Foods, Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes, and many others. Companies who want to be included in the program can apply on Pinterest’s website.

A Pinterest representative sought to emphasize that the new pins are not a form of advertising, but are instead supposed to make pins more “actionable,” a term the company has been using for a while now, including in our interview with CEO Ben Silbermann just last week.

“We want to make pinning actionable,” he told us at the time. “Our focus has been to become a very valuable service.”

One major complaint with Pinterest, which has given an advantage to sites like Wanelo or Nasty Gal, is that users frequently share or re-pin the same photo thousands of times, but when you actually click the photo to see where it came from the link is broken.

If more and more companies and popular blogs integrate their photos of inventory with Pinterest under the new pin structure, it could make items more trackable on the site — which would be handy for consumers and crucial if Pinterest wants to eventually profit from the traffic it generates.

And it’s not an insignificant amount of web traffic. While Pinterest doesn’t officially release any stats, a recent ComScore report put the number of users at more than 48 million unique visitors globally, and a February Pew report on social media put the percentage of online adults using Pinterest at 15 percent, which is slightly less than the 16 percent on Twitter, and more than the 13 percent on Instagram — and far more than the 6 percent on Yahoo’s apparent new friend Tumblr.

A company spokesperson said Pinterest is currently not profiting from the new integration with brands. But the strong interest on the part of the companies and the launch of a tech platform to support them paves the way for making money in the future. After all, Pinterest just raised $200 million in new funding — it has to be looking to make money at some point.

It’s an inevitable move for Pinterest to accelerate its growth, as we noted in a story on the small team’s unique symbiosis between design and engineering. But the site needs to make sure it crafts a business model that fits with its content, much as Twitter has built up promoted tweets.

Pinterest is still in the early days of that growth, but all sorts of e-commerce companies, from the startup Wanelo to behemoth Amazon, will be watching closely as this unfolds.

Updated at 9:14 PM to note that the new recipe pins will show the full ingredient list, not the full recipe.

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May 20, 2013
Parakweet uses natural language processing to find value in your tweets
Millions of people access Twitter every month, and the sheer volume of tweets flowing through the company’s platform is remarkable. Different companies have tried to harness the value of those tweets and derive information from the 140 character blips. But it would seem that making suggestions to users about the best book to read or movie to watch based on tweets isn’t an easy challenge.

Parakweet is a company that’s working to use natural language processing to cull through your tweets and make smart, targeted suggestions based on the data. On Friday, the company plans to announce the launch of two products. One is Bookvi.be, a consumer-oriented book recommendation engine, and TrendFinder For Movies, which is a social media dashboard primarily for entertainment companies to monitor conversations around movies. The latter is a paid product that provides the company with revenue, and the former is free for consumers.

“It’s a very hard problem we’ve tackled, which is accurately identifying sentiments,” CEO Ramesh Haridas said. “With 400 million tweets a day, there are 700,000 a day discussing movies, and if you tried text-matching techniques you’d come back with 40 million results. Many movies and books have very common titles, so you’d just drown in data.”

Both products use natural language processing to figure out how common a title is on Twitter, but also how a consumer is tweeting about a particular product, and they make recommendations based on those tweets. For instance, if I tweeted that a particular book is terrible and no one should ever read it, it would look ridiculous for a book recommendation engine to suggest that book to people. So Bookvi.be is structured to recognize the words I’m using in my tweet and know not to recommend that book. Users can choose to have a weekly email send to them with book suggestions, and they can type in their Twitter username to get book suggestions based on the people they follow.

“The bar on accuracy is very high,” Haridas said. “Especially if it’s sent via email, the precision needs to be intact.”

I’ve looked at a good number of social recommendation tools, and this one definitely stood out. For one, it was incredibly accurate — all the books it suggested were books I would actually read. But most importantly, it didn’t require me to create a new social network, or depend on friends for reviews, so you could get a lot of value from it right away. This is the obvious benefit of using someone else’s social graph, but Twitter seems perfectly suited to making content recommendations for things like books. Because unlike my Facebook friends, the people I follow on Twitter tend to accurately reflect my intellectual interests.

Of course, there are the obvious potential pitfalls of building a product around someone else’s platform, although Haridas said they support Facebook and are adding other platforms. But there’s a good deal of money to be made in accurately processing and understanding the words people are tweeting, as evidenced by Twitter’s acquisition of Lucky Sort this week, a similar company that also tries to figure out what people are talking about on social media. As I’ve written before, as Twitter ramps up its advertising products it’s more important than ever for the company to be able to provide brands with more accurate ad targeting which hinges on the words people are tweeting and searching.

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May 17, 2013
Former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, App.net’s Dalton Caldwell join YC as part-time partners
Famed Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator announced Thursday that it’s added a new full-time partner and five part-time partners, and among those five are former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason and App.net’s Dalton Caldwell.

The incubator, which was extensively profiled by the New York Times Magazine recently, has emerged over the past few years as a powerful force in the early-stage startup scene in Silicon Valley. The group has both full-time and part-time partners who advise startups in the program, and Caldwell and Mason are both young, notable faces in the technology world.

Caldwell was the founder of the music-sharing service Imeem and now runs App.net, an open developer network for apps. I profiled Caldwell back in December, when he talked with me about his evolving attitudes toward the Valley ecosystem and the benefit of paid services.

Mason departed from Groupon about three months ago in a fairly memorable firing announcement that included jokes about Battletoads and fat camp. Mason wrote in a blog post that he would be launching a new company when he moves to San Francisco. “I’ve accumulated a backlog of ideas over the last several years, my favorite of which I’ll be turning into a new company this fall,” he wrote.

And in more entertaining news, Mason wrote that he will also be recording motivational business music in L.A. Hopefully he got a coupon for the recording studio fees. From Mason’s blog post:

I came to realize that there was a real need to present business wisdom in a format that is more accessible to the younger generation. It was with this in mind that I spent a week in LA earlier this month recording Hardly Workin’, a seven song album of motivational business music targeted at people newly entering the workforce. These songs will help young people understand some of the ideas that I’ve found to be a key part of becoming a productive and effective employee. I’m really happy with the results and look forward to sharing them as soon as I figure out how to load music onto iTunes, hopefully in the next few weeks.

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May 16, 2013
Jelly raises Series A from investors including Jack Dorsey, Al Gore, Bono
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s startup Jelly still hasn’t revealed a product — it hasn’t even hinted at a direction — but the startup has announced a good deal of news over the past month. On Thursday, the company announced in a blog post that it raised a Series A funding round for an undisclosed amount led by Spark Capital with investment from SV Angel.

A wide variety of angel investors participated in the round, possibly emphasizing the “social good” concept Stone hinted at in his intial launch post. Stone, who co-founded Twitter, has only described Jelly as a company with an eye for “social good” that takes advantage of the proliferation of mobile devices.

The investors include fellow Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, U2 musician and activist Bono, Greylock’s Reid Hoffman, former Vice President Al Gore, and Emmy-winning director Greg Yaitanes, among several others.

“They work in divergent fields,” Stone wrote. “Knowledge diversity is something we prize highly and is also something that will be represented in our product.”

Stone has been building up a good deal of ex-Twitter talent at the company, and the funding announcement noted that they would use the addition funding for hiring as they continue protyping a product before launch. Earlier this month, Stone announced that he added a COO in Kevin Thau, the Twitter executive who launched Twitter #music, and a co-founder and CTO in Ben Finkel, formerly engineering manager at Twitter in charge of user growth.

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May 16, 2013
Why the snap of a photo changed my mind about Google Glass
As a serious smartphone addict who jumps at the sound of an iPhone buzz, I know that I really don’t need more internet in my life. So I haven’t had much interest in Google Glass so far, assuming it would just serve to put more apps in front of my face that my current attention span doesn’t need, and that my iPhone could easily handle.

But this morning when I was walking through downtown San Francisco before Google’s I/O conference, I was crossing a street when I saw a particularly pretty scene of the sun rising between two buildings. Hoping I’d have enough time before the walk signal ended, I dug my iPhone out of my bag, swiped to open the camera, snapped a photo, and then jogged to the curb to avoid getting hit by cars. (Mom, I hope you’re not reading this.)

So a few hours later, when I tried on Google Glass for the first time and said the command “take photo,” instantly capturing a photo of my colleague Kevin Tofel standing in front of me without moving either my head or my hands, I started to see the appeal of Glass.

I’d read a decent amount about the technology since Sergey Brin dropped from a helicopter at last year’s Google I/O, and not only was I sort of confused by the specifics of how Glass works (A camera on your face? Facebook on top of everyday life? How do people see when they’re wearing them?), I was turned off by the severely dorky appearance and the idea of constantly monitoring the things around you. They seemed vaguely creepy and intrusive. I was not attracted to the idea of wearing them as a normal person walking around town.

But even though I only got a short spin with the technology on Wednesday, it only took a few seconds for me to understand why people are so jazzed about Glass.

I put them on my face and was immediately impressed with how lightweight they felt. Despite their futuristic, clunkly-on-one-side appearance, they didn’t feel very bulky or heavy on my face, and it was easy to see the room around me while wearing them. (Even though they weren’t fitted specifically for my face the way they would be if I purchased them.) The screen felt much smaller and unobtrusive than I’d imagined, and it wasn’t hard to swipe the side of the glasses to navigate the screen. But it was the voice commands, and the “take photo” command, that changed my perspective on the technology.

Would I spend $1,500 on them right now? Definitely not. If you need prescription glasses of any kind, it would be hard to combine those with Glass. While Google has launched them in some jazzy new colors, you still look absurd wearing them (whether you’re in the shower or not). This probably makes me somewhat vain, but I’d want them to look cooler and less futuristic before I wore them in everyday life (seriously, embed them in some Warby Parker frames, and I’d be way more down with the idea.)

And once apps start streaming into the glasses, I can’t imagine how seeing New York Times headlines and tweets wouldn’t be distracting while you’re doing things like walking or driving. Of course, none of this even gets into the new etiquette that would have to arise from the spread of Glass.

But despite all the drawbacks, speaking the words for the “take photo” command made me realize that even if wearable computing has a pretty dorky image right now, the potential practical applications for real-life people who don’t consider themselves nerds are endless — once the technology gets a little more refined, and we figure out how to use them in public.

I talked to one Google employee who said she sat in her sister’s graduation and streamed video through Glass to family members from afar, and another who said she uses it to take photos of her little kids when her hands are full. I would imagine it could be huge for people with disabilities, or people doing outdoor sports (Kevin mentioned you could take photos of mile markers while running a marathon.)

“Every time we’ve tried to do something crazy we’ve made progress,” Larry Page said on stage today. So does Google Glass seem a little nuts right now? Sure. But if a few years from now I can snap a photo of a sunrise without having a near-miss with traffic, I’m open to the possibilities.

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May 15, 2013
Apple’s app store hits 50 billion downloads
Apple announced Wednesday that the App Store has hit 50 billion app downloads, a singificant milestone for the company only a few months after it announced 40 billion downloads back in January.

Apple’s App Store downloads and downloads from the Google Play store became roughly even last fall, as Erica Ogg wrote recently, and then in the first quarter of 2013, Google pulled ahead in sheer number of mobile app downloads worldwide. However, Apple got 74 cents for every dollar spent on apps during the that quarter, according to a report by Canalys published in April, and the 50 billion downloads now puts Apple back with a slight lead.

The company announced the number of downloads on the first day of Google’s I/O conference, as Google announced that its Google Play store has seen 48 billion app downloads since launch in late 2008. However, it’s good to remember that app downloads only tell part of the story — someone could download an app and never use it again.

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May 15, 2013
Live blog: Google I/O 2013 showcases Android, Chrome, YouTube and more
It’s time once again for Google I/O, and the company plans to pack a week’s worth of announcements into a single keynote address, so this should be interesting.

Starting at 9am PT, we’ll be bringing you live coverage of Google’s flagship conference. We’re not expecting as major a news event as we have in past years, but there will be no shortage of updates to the company’s plans for Android, Chrome, YouTube, and its cloud-computing services. We’ll have a full contingent of GigaOM reporters at the show bringing you updates both here and throughout the course of the day, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, check out our preliminary coverage of what we expect from Google I/O here.

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May 15, 2013
Dots game from Betaworks hits 100 million game plays in first 2 weeks
Dots, the super-addictive iOS game from Betaworks that launched just two weeks ago, has already hit 100 million games played, Betaworks told us.

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick and Om Malik talk about the future of Betaworks and testing new products at paidContent Live 2013 Albert Chau / itsmebert.com

The game came out of experimentations with iOS interactions and designs, and it’s sort of like a mobile version of Connect Four. The main screen on Dots displays 36 colored dots that users have to connect to remove from the screen, and the simplicity of the game’s design emphasizes the flat aesthetic that’s become popular in mobile design recently.

Dots comes from Betaworks as the NYC technology incubator has set an agressive schedule for releasing beta products each week for six weeks in hopes of seeing what works. Betaworks CEO John Borthwick talked about this strategy and said a game was in the works at our paidContent Live conference last month.

Our review of the game can be found here, and Zach Seward wrote a guide for Quartz dissecting the different ways a user can excel at Dots. (Hint: it’s all about the squares.) The game is free to download from Apple’s app store, with in-app purchases that gives users a few additional features. Betaworks reported that the game hit 25 million games played about a week ago.

Here’s the company’s description of how Dots got started:

About 3 months ago, Patrick Moberg started experimenting with various iOS interaction designs as part of the hacker in residence program. We didn’t set out to build a game, but quickly realized there’s a desire for well designed mobile entertainment so that’s where we focused. Patrick worked for a few weeks to build something that looked beautiful and provided you some level of stimulation. After a few days playing one of the initial concepts, we were all completely hooked. Several betaworks employees and their partners clocked hours and hours of playtime off a fairly rudimentary pilot. Over the next few months, we refined the scoring, design, and overall aesthetic to come up with what we simply call Dots – a game about connecting.

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May 15, 2013
500 Startups announces latest batch of accelerator companies
500 Startups plans to announce Tuesday that it’s picked the 28 companies (about the same number that launched last summer) that will make up its newest class for the summer of 2013. The group got started in mid-April, and will have July demo days in Mountain View, San Francisco, and New York.

Dave McClure’s incubator launched back in February 2011 after 500 Startups had already invested in about 100 companies, and the group is set to hit its namesake number of investments this year, between the incubator and outside companies. This summer group will be the sixth batch of companies to go through the incubator.

The full list of the 28 companies can be found on AngelList, which is now required for companies applying to the program, beginning on Tuesday.

Apart from the list of companies, here are a few facts about the latest bunch:
- Eight of the 28 companies, or about 28 percent, has a female co-founder, and two of those women are CTOs for their companies.
- Two-thirds of the companies, or 20 of the 28, are international, continuing a longstanding 500 Startups penchant for investing overseas. The companies come from a variety of countries including Brazil, Chile, China, Ghana, India, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine, and Vietnam. 500 Startups recently added a partner in China.
- One of the companies called Dropifi is the group’s first investment in an African companies, and two of them, Dakwak and Tamatem, are the first Middle Eastern accelerator companies.
Our coverage of the fifth batch that launched in February can be found here, and we’ll be covering the demo day for this batch in July.

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May 14, 2013
ESPN and Twitter plan to announce partnership for tweeting sports video clips
Twitter and ESPN (dis) are planning to announce a partnership that will allow the social network to tweet out video clips of major sports highlights and sell ads specifically around those clips, providing new revenue opportunities for Twitter and giving ESPN greater visibility for major sports events. The news was first reported in The Wall Street Journal, and will come as no surprise to anyone who’s followed Twitter’s increasing courtship of television networks and the video content they produce.

We wrote about Twitter’s collaboration with a startup called Snappy TV and Turner Broadcasting that allowed the NCAA to tweet out highlight clips from March Madness throughout the annual college basketball tournament, with the clips sponsored by AT&T and Coke Zero, and a Twitter spokesperson confirmed Monday that the ESPN clips will appear in a similar manner inside Twitter Cards. The report indicated that Twitter will be selling advertising specifically around the sports clips that are tweeted out.

The company announced major updates to its Cards technology in early April that allowed for more types of content to appear in the tweets and more app promotion for third-party apps cross-posting to Twitter. The key to Cards is that a user never has to leave Twitter to view the content the Cards contain — everything is viewable directly in stream, which encourages users to stay on Twitter’s website.

My colleague Mathew Ingram and I have written about Twitter’s transformation over the past year or so to become more of a media company, and Twitter’s partnerships with television, music and video outlets are numerous. There were rumors of deals with Viacom and NBC, a partnership with Nielson to measure user activity around television, the launch of the Twitter #music app and following music entertainment show.

For Twitter, all of this content could make tweets more engaging for users who become captive audience members participating in live events. But perhaps more importantly for the company, if it’s gearing up for the IPO everyone expects, video provides an excellent platform for advertising and big brand partnerships that could make Twitter a lot of money.

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May 13, 2013