what’s dying? It’s Not The News; It’s The Paper!
I attended the inaugural Ignite NYC today at M1-5 in the Chinatown area. A crowd of about 350 people turned out and the din was quite formidable at times. But it was a fantastic lineup of speakers and I learned a number of things from the talks.
The last talk in the program was The Future of News by Nick Bilton, who works for the New York Times technology R&D group. Conventional wisdom holds that as more and more advertising moves online, newspapers are a dying business. The carnage happening in the publishing industry seems to bear out this notion. After a brief overview of the history of news, Nick challenged the audience to think beyond this truism. He said that it’s not the news that is dying, it’s just the paper–the medium for its delivery–that is dying.
Newspapers have fallen into a malaise about their financial health and spend reams of one of their most expensive resources, newsprint, writing about exactly this. The problem is: readers really don’t care to read about this and want instead to learn about substantive news that’s going to affect their lives and their communities. Several Internet services–Digg, Google News, NowPublic and outside.in to name a few–have taken a stab at redefining how relevant news is selected and delivered to people. I am hardly one in favor of throwing this important, professionally mandated, socio-political watchdog function entirely to the wisdom of the crowds, but these services are proofs of the concept that news reporting needs to closely examine and adopt some of the value that these services provide.
Some news organizations, such as News Corp are exploring this space aggressively. Others, like the New York Times, are merely coming to terms with the economics of digital media consumption, such as by opening up the paywall that used to surround most of its content. News organizations need to snap out of their malaise, reprogram their corporate DNA, stop attributing their ill-health solely to the shift in advertising and figure out the precise value they are providing to their customers. News isn’t going away anytime soon, and customers will pay for high-quality content that provides them with true value.
Bangalore Bomb Blasts Heard Around The World
Being from Bombay, which has seen its share of serial bomb blasts, I was quite taken aback this morning to read about serial bomb blasts in Bangalore, which has managed to escape them so far. My deepest condolences go to those killed and injured by this act of terrorism. As GigaOM puts it, these blasts may have occurred far away but their echoes will be felt in the global innovation ecosystem, including in Silicon Valley–this is the reality of our globally connected world with Atomized Enterprises. No doubt this will be another unfortunate factor to be accounted for in business continuity discussions.
The silver lining though is that even with nine bomb blasts, only 2 were killed and 20 were injured (the seven bombs that ripped through Bombay in July 2006 killed 209 and injured 714). I have full faith in the resilience of the Bangaloreans and am confident they’ll bounce right back.
twitter’s ‘consummization’ bad for app developers?
GigaOM leads with rumors that microblogging service Twitter might acquire search engine Summize next week.
The blogerati love Twitter and really want to help it justify its own existence. Figuring out a business model for Twitter has become the blogosphere’s equivalent of the search for a cure to cancer. Central to the problem of a viable business model is really defining what Twitter is. Twitter has been defined variously as a personal publishing platform, a message bus and a utility. Each of these definitions lead to different possibilities for business models. Add in Twitter’s fledgling API (Twitter as a development platform?) and its abundant downtime and scaling problems (Twitter as a ransom-extractor?) and we have a whole load of ideas on how Twitter can make money.
Given that most of Twitter’s usage comes from its API, it is no understatement to say that building and maintaining a developer brand is important to the company. With respect to this goal, Twitter’s rumored acquisition of Summize is a step in the wrong direction. To be sure, Twitter will definitely gain from the dependable search features of Summize. But in general, Twitter has long defined itself as a neutral message bus that doesn’t examine the messages it carries. Implicit in this assurance is that it won’t get in the way of developers looking to build on its platform.
Not all companies making platforms need be in the position of competing with their platform developers. Whether or not a company is in such a position can be determined from what it says is the unique value its service provides. For example. the Facebook application platform is a way of leveraging Facebook’s unique data asset, a vast social graph populated by rich profile data. Twitter’s biggest data asset is knowing how conversation flows among its members, which can be a powerful determinant of user sentiment on a given topic at any time. A glance at the applications at Summize Labs shows that these are exactly the kind of value-adds atop the basic Twitter message bus that Twitter had absolved itself of earlier.
If this acquisition goes through, Twitter may gain a new core product and possibly a business model. It still amounts to Twitter backpedaling from its earlier statements and raises the possibility that Twitter itself will get into building applications that cannibalize its unique data asset. Sending such messages to developers building on its platform might lead them to look to other social media platforms, and that definitely can’t be good for Twitter.
Update: The Twitter blog now confirms that Twitter has indeed acquired Summize.
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