Google/Bing payments to Twitter are a double standard

If Twitter, why not the news media?

Did you spot an item just before Christmas that Twitter is now supposed to have pushed into profit?

There’s comment on whether they are actually in profile, whether this will be enough to sustain Twitter and lots more on what else it might have to do, but I want to point out just one thing.

Twitter is (possibly) profitable because Google and Bing are between them giving Twitter $25m to access data which will then go into their search indices.

The data is mostly provided free by Twitter’s millions of users.

Contrast this deal with Google taking data from newspaper websites and putting that into its search engine.  But not giving the newspapers any money.

The news data comes from fairly expensive journalists who investigate stories, check facts and sometimes put their lives in danger.

Twitter, free data = $25m. News, expensive data = Zero.

Now I’m no fan of large news organisations some of whom may be confused about user behaviour on the web, but you know … this state of affairs seems a little strange.

Pay-per-tweet starts/stops in Japan

If anywhere can, Japan can/can’t

Even as I was about to start writing this post about Twitter Japan’s announcement that they’re going to start a pay-to-read tweet service, the news changed. They’re not.

The new strategy seemed to have been announced last week. In the report on Twitter payments I read, one sentence worried me:

…the plan will allow audiences to view some text on all tweets but will charge a fee to unlock access to certain images, external URLs and text.

I can’t think of why I might pay for a service which simply redirects me to other pages on the internet. Maybe that’s just me.

What might work? Maybe economic data? Share tips? But the trouble with any kind of real-time information is that if I’m paying, I want to ensure veracity. But maybe that’s just me.

But now it’s not happening at all. A ‘misunderstanding’ apparently. This is a shame, a commercial service has to make money somehow and limited trials are exactly the place to test new business models.

I would have thought that Japan or South Korea would be a natural place to innovate in this way. Both countries have form. Japan is home to I-mode, a technology that was ahead of its time. 10 years ago it was giving the same kind of browsing experience I get now.

Mobile payments are also far more advanced. And the Japanese are much more used to paying for content, such as cell phone books.

Compare this with Johnston Press’ paywall experiment which begins today. The publisher is hoping to show that because regional news has more value because it’s not available everywhere.

These strategies are cyclical though, as this 2003 Guardian article shows. Here we go again.

HuffPost tests headline efficacy

The one above probably won’t win any awards

Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab is pointing out a very clever strategy the Huffington Post has used to discover which headlines get the best clicks.

It’s been A/B testing in realtime. Half the users see one headline, half see a different one. After a certain amount of time, the headline which has got the most clicks so far becomes the one that everyone else sees.

That’s smart.

Judge orders Gmail account deactivation

Incredible bank screw up, but innocent party is sued. Be afraid.

Mediapost reports that a California judge has ordered Google to release the ownership details of a Gmail account user, and deactivate the account.

A bank in Wyoming wants the details because it has accidentally emailed personal financial records to this Gmail address. It then emailed to try to get them deleted, but didn’t hear anything.

Wired backgrounds the story.

So, just a few issues here then:

I wouldn’t respond if a bank I’d never heard of started asking me to get in touch. That’s called Phishing.

Why was the bank emailing unencrypted files around the open internet?

What would have happened if they had posted the material to the wrong physical address? Would they send the police round to change the locks?

Why should an innocent party lose access to their email in this way?

Definitely not the end of this story yet.

OFCOM’s 9 day consultation period??

Get in quick or lose HD on Freeview

OFCOM are currently requesting comment from stakeholders in the UK’s digital terrestrial TV network.  As tax and licence-fee payers, that’s most of us.

They are being asked by the BBC to authorise a change in the way the new high definition multiplexes are operated to allow for the use of encryption.

I’m not a fan of this plan, many others aren’t either, including Tom Watson MP and other vocal bloggers.

Encrypting HD-DTT risks stunting the growth of high-definition in this country and threatens to criminalise anyone who’s using any sort of non-standard cheap-and-cheerful reception equipment (which by law you are required to have a TV licence for).  If you’re using open source receiver software, you can kiss that goodbye should this change go through.

What amazes me is that OFCOM published their letter on the 3rd of September and want  comments back by the 16th. Err, that’s today!

That’s 9 working days to get comments in on a proposal that has far-reaching ramifications on the way the system of TV distribution works in Britain. Does this indicate that OFCOM doesn’t grasp the serious implications of this change, that it just writes to the ‘industry’ and allows such a short time for responses?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good background to why this request is being made.

And if you’re still reading this today, get some comments off to

Andrew.Dumbreck@ofcom.org.uk

Can cloud services be trusted?

The best person to keep your data safe might be you

Matthew Knell writes about how he used to keep his photos on Kodak’s online service. He trusted them so much, he doesn’t have the originals to many of his pictures anymore.

Now Kodak are charging for their Photo Gallery and the choice is stark: Pay up or your photos get it.

“Stupid to put my photos exclusively in the hands of a brand I trusted? Perhaps. But I believed the hype and trusted Kodak to do the right thing with my content — forever. These were my photos, my data, and I had confidence that they would do the right thing. These were my Kodak memories. I had five years of trusted transactions with this company.”

Interestingly Kodak’s site in the UK still appears to have the original storage policy. But this is likely to change and this won’t be the last freemium service to start charging.

My favourite online video editing system, Jumpcut closed yesterday. This was innovative, collaborative and almost certainly ahead of its time. The ability to remix video simply and quickly is a big loss to creative brains.

And the real shock? Jumpcut was part of Yahoo. It  bought the site in late 2006. I thought this was a very positive move and that the investment would secure Jumpcut’s longevity.

But forever can be a very short amount of time.