NBC News compiled an interesting infographic detailing how people watched the Royal Wedding last week, including data about live video streams, tweets and Tumblr notes. Check it out:
Liking something on Facebook is sometimes like going to a charity event where you “Raise Money for Cancer.” No! That’s not what you meant! You just wanted to draw awareness to the… aw, well, you know the feeling:More »
The explosion of real-time information through social networks and information services like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube has produced a never-ending firehose of content. It has also created an opportunity for tools such as Storify, the curation service that launched as an open beta Monday. Although the aggregation and filtering of the news is something that has traditionally been done by journalists and major media brands, tools like Storify allow anyone to perform the same kind of function, regardless of whether she’s been trained as a journalist — or even think of what she’s doing as journalism.
Storify is a relatively simple-looking tool that allows a user to pull in content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and other social-media services and create a kind of story stream. As I described in a post after the company’s launch as an invitation-only beta last fall, former Associated Press foreign correspondent Burt Herman started the service after thinking about how journalists could use social media during a Knight fellowship (a video interview with Herman is embedded below). I’ve used Storify and it definitely makes social-media curation fast and relatively simple.
There are other, similar services that also pull in Twitter feeds and allow users to create a kind of ongoing story about an event: Storyful is one of them, and Keepstream is another. Storify recently closed a $2-million Series A funding round with legendary Sand Hill Road firm Khosla Ventures, and Herman says Storify collections have been viewed more than 13 million times.
What Storify and similar tools do goes by a number of different name. Some call it “aggregation,” which is a somewhat mechanical-sounding term, and best describes the more automated approach taken by companies like Google with Google News. It’s also a term traditional media sources often use disparagingly when talking about new media, as New York TimesExecutive Editor Bill Keller has when discussing The Huffington Post . Others prefer to call it “curation,” which implies a human being filtering and selecting the best of something and then pulling it together into some kind of coherent whole.
This is the term that many use to describe what Andy Carvin of National Public Radio has been doing with Twitter in the wake of the revolution in Egypt and popular uprisings in Libya. While he doesn’t actually report the news — since he’s thousands of miles away in an office in Washington, D.C. — Carvin selects, verifies and re-distributes the news from hundreds of different Twitter streams he monitors of people who are actually on the ground or have knowledge of what is occurring there. It’s a little like what a news anchor does on television, but with many different sources.
There are other examples as well. This week sees the publication of a book called Quakebook, which is a collection of memories and reactions related to the earthquakes in Japan and the aftermath of that disaster. All the responses were collected through Twitter, and became first an e-book and now a printed version.
We Need Curation More Than Ever
The rise of real-time information sources such as Twitter has produced such an unstoppable wave of content that we need curation and filtering more than we ever have before. And while that used to be something that only traditional media sources did, now it’s something anyone can do, regardless of whether they went to journalism school or work at a name-brand media outlet like the New York Times.
This is part of the reason why Bill Keller and others have reacted so strongly to what The Huffington Post and other digital media outlets do; it represents competition for them as the gatekeepers of information and the trusted oracles of what is important. And that poses a threat not just to their role in the media ecosystem, but to their financial status as well. Is Storify going to do this all by itself? No. But it is part of a much broader trend that is likely to become an even bigger part of the future of media.
The Facebook Like button celebrated its 1st anniversary this week, on April 21st. It’s ubiquity makes it hard to believe that it was a little over a year ago when Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at the third annual f8 Developers Conference to announce the button, which is now integrated with around 2.5 million websites worldwide, with 10,000 new ones being added daily.
While the anniversary of the conference came and went with nary a peep from Facebook, judging by this “f8 partnerships” Facebook Group, there will be an f8 in 2011 (Facebook has confirmed). It’ll be interesting to watch that “f8 partnerships” page in the coming months, to see who, if anyone, gets added from outside the company.
Up until now the f8 scheduling has been somewhat erratic (missing 2009 entirely). There have been a total of three f8s so far, the first one happening on May 24th, 2007, the second happening on July 23rd, 2008 and the third one happening between April 21-22 in 2010. In the meantime Facebook has grown from 24 million active users to almost 700 million.
While the conference typically happens in the summer, Facebook has yet to confirm an actual date for 2011 saying only that it’ll keep me posted. Judging by this year’s latency in announcement time, it’s probable that it will be held in late summer, I’m guessing sometime between July and August.
As AllThingsD’s Liz Gannes reports, Twitter has elected to shelve its Chirp conference this year while Google is once again over achieving with a sold out i/o in May. If developer conferences were like college, Facebook would be like the brilliant student who turned in their work late, but turned it in beautifully.
