I get too much credit for RSS and for Yelp, but the one thing that I can unashamedly claim to have invented is visual bookmarking, and more specifically the “choose images to thumbnail via a bookmarklet” method that Pinterest is based on. It’s not much of an “invention” per se. It’s a moronically simple thing, but it’s the right moronically simple thing. And given that more than one billion dollars rests on the idea, maybe it’s worth looking back at its history.

Wists’s service was originally dubbed “visual bookmarks.” Later we used the term “social shopping,” since people were mainly using Wists to share wish lists of things they wanted to buy. The original revenue model was via affiliate links. Wists used Skimlinks, the same affiliate aggregator that Pinterest adopted (then dropped).

To use Wists, you signed up and installed a bookmarklet that you clicked on while browsing other websites. This allowed you to collect images by simply clicking on them. You could then add a description, view these images as a thumbnail gallery, and share them with friends. (The site is still running, but it’s an old rickety shell.) The flow was almost exactly the same as Pinterest except that the metaphor was slightly different. Wists was used as a platform to power product blogs, such as Cribcandy and the visual lists site, Oobject.

There were several other visual bookmark sites that later appeared, including Kaboodle, Stylehive and later, ThisNext, but each of these was less like Pinterest in terms of flow.

Right before I moved from San Francisco to New York City, I worked out of the Obvious Corporation’s offices for a week. At the time, the team had just launched Twitter. I visited the re-incarnated Obvious Corp. a month ago, and Biz Stone asked me why I’d shown them Wists and said it was a piece of crap when clearly the concept had legs. Was that a self-deprecating Brit thing? The short answer is that the quick and dirty prototype that I’d partially written myself (on top of a much better version written by Yaroslav Faybishenko) looked like crap. I’m a designer not a developer, so I was embarrassed to show something unfinished — even though I wanted to finish it. It was as if I was an architect and I’d tried to lay bricks rather than design the wall. I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t. If I said it was great (even though I believed in the concept), I could look like a bad designer. And if I said it was crap, it would be hard to acquire the resources to make a good version. The lesson here is only deliver as much as you can finish and do well.

Wists was also too early. The big social networks weren’t in place yet for the site to leverage off of. Still, it started to grow on its own, with exactly the same early adopters that Pinterest attracted five years later — Etsy users, crafts people and, above all, women. It also managed to get reasonable PR. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal covered it, largely because the term “social shopping” sounded particularly lucrative. Instead of raising money, I wanted to bootstrap a lifestyle business and do things on the cheap. My friend Graham Hill had a great time building Treehugger from scratch and exited successfully, and I hoped to do the same. In retrospect, however, no matter how simple the product, a consumer Internet application is not like a content site. It requires bespoke software and scaling, and it needs funding if it’s getting traction.

Lastly, Wists didn’t have the pinning metaphor that people have claimed is important. But despite what marketers will say, this part of Pinterest’s resonance is largely irrelevant, because the craftsters who were early Wist adopters and evangelists got it fine without the pinning metaphor. I suspect that because Pinterest isn’t very different, quantitatively speaking, from some of the applications that preceded it, people latch onto the only thing that is new about it. Pinterest is a success because it is qualitatively different and properly timed. It had proper resources to make it work well and scale at a time when the market was ready for it. The lesson to be learned here is that first to market is not as important as sometimes claimed. Most successful Internet platforms are second or third generation versions of an earlier idea.

So Wists was early, and it was never built into much more than a prototype. Pinterest really works. It’s a good, fast, snappy product that scales with the technical demands caused by “many to many” social features, and that is all there is to it. When people look for the special sauce that helps some sites displace others — why Google trumped Altavista or Facebook beat Friendster — they miss the obvious fact that “simple” and “works” go a long way.

The reason I’m sanguine, however, is that Pinterest’s success with the visual bookmark model has opened up a new crack in the ecosystem that will allow others to innovate further. Traditionally, stores have been both a showcase for a curated selection of items and a place that handles transactions and inventory storage. I think that e-commerce may now experience significant disruption as shops are curated online, separating logistics from showcasing. Online stores will be more like product galleries, and there are opportunities to build platforms for these. In the future, experts with an online “voice,” and people we are genuinely familiar with, may endorse items in lists of curated links. These curators will replace some aspects of celebrity endorsements in retail promotion. E-commerce services that handle the transaction and logistics could then pass a commission on to the curator for each sale — the CPA model of Skimlinks. I believe that this is a long term change in the nature of retail, and I’ll be creating something to fulfill this opportunity at Curations.com.

In a post tomorrow, I will examine the evolution of visual bookmarks and grid sites, and how those websites paved the way for Pinterest’s massive success.

David Galbraith is an architect turned tech entrepreneur. He is the co-creator of RSS and co-founder of Moreover, Yelp, Mocoms and Curations.

Image courtesy of  Flickr user Mykl Roventine.

Many simply come home and leave OoVoo on in the background as they do homework or watch TV, sort of like an instant messager app. Friends jump on or jump off, checking in with each other and seeing what’s going on. The person who starts the video chats isn’t obligated to stay on. This is not appointment video: it’s ambient video, running in the background.

Video tells the story

That got me thinking about the evolution video. It’s similar in some sense to how pictures have undergone a transformation. We used to take pictures to preserve memories, using precious film to capture significant moments. But with advent of digital cameras and later mobile phones with cameras, pictures became akin to a casual form of communication, giving rise to services like Instagram and others.

Video chatting and broadcasting is also evolving in a similar manner. We used to think about scheduling Skype chats and video conferences.  Uploading a video to YouTube meant you often edited the video or at least reviewed it. But now, we’re seeing that video is becoming this casual, immediate medium that doesn’t have to convey anything special.

Cheaper broadband+free video services

Jackman believes the rise of ambient video is due to cheaper broadband and the growth of free services that allow users to use video with little regard to cost. The fact that video chatting can increasingly be multiparty also lends itself to this idea of video as an emerging background layer to life.

Google is seeing more people leave Google Hangouts on for long periods of time, according to Iska Hain, a company spokeswoman.

“We definitely see that use case, especially at Google where colleagues will jump into a Hangout from remote offices and we all do work together. Sometimes people do like to just ‘be around’ other people. There are cases of folks turning a hangout on while they go about cooking or knitting or painting,” Hain said.

Foursquare has set up a big screen video portal inside both of its New York and San Francisco offices that are constantly on, allowing people to see each other and organize impromptu meetings.

“I can just go up to the screen and shout someone’s name and they’ll come to the portal,” said Benjy Weinberger, Foursquare’s San Francisco engineering lead.  

Increasingly comfortable with live-sharing

It’s not just with video conferencing. People are increasingly more casual with video sharing as well. I was reminded of this when talking to Bill Nguyen, the co-founder of Color. Color, as we wrote recently, has signed a deal with Verizon to put its live video-sharing app on Verizon phones. The app allows users to start recording a video and alerts their friends that a live broadcast has started.

When I first heard about that, I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of sending out video before having the option to edit it. I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen at the end of that clip. But that’s where things are going. We’ve seen that with other live-streaming services: people are increasingly comfortable broadcasting their lives and letting the world see whatever happens.

Gil Eyal, vice president of marketing for Mobli, a mobile photo and video sharing service, said increasingly people are just uploading videos directly to the service without editing out mistakes or taking a look again at what they’re showing.

“We’re seeing more spontaneous video, it’s all raw and unedited,” said Eyal. “It’s just people being real and video becoming this common language.”

Not everyone is ready for this kind of spontaneous, always-on video world. But it’s a natural extension of the trends were seeing in technology and social media. The barriers separating the private and the public are crumbling thanks to social and technological tools that make it easy to share. The same ideas at work behind Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram, will also spur people to be more open and free with video.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user Tyler Olsen.

Huffington Post Media Group: AOL’s Janet Balis has been appointed publisher of the Huffington Post Media Group, and Moritz Loew has been named head of sales specialist and SVP. Balis, who was once EVP of media sales and marketing at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, was most recently SVP and head of sales strategy, marketing and partnerships at AOL. In this new role, Balis will oversee development of partnerships and strategies for HPMG.

Loew previously worked with MSNBC, where he was chief agency officer and GM of sales for MSNBC Interactive.

The Atlantic: Hayley Romer is now associate publisher, where she’ll work closely with VP and Publisher Jay Lauf and oversee the sales team. Prior to this, Romer worked with Condé Nast Media Group, where she most recently served as executive director of corporate sales.

Everyday Health: Two promotions and three new VPs: Scott Wolf is now chief sales officer and Laura Klein steps up as EVP of sales. Tracy Chapman, Orlando Reece and Andy Jacobson join as VPs of consumer insights, broadcast and digital video sales, and sales, respectively. Wolf joined the company in 2005 to help launch EverydayHealth.com, and has been promoted from EVP of sales. Klein, who joined in 2007, has been promoted from SVP of sales.

Electus: Eli Shibley has been promoted to VP of international media and formats from executive director of the division. Electus also has two new hires: Cyrus Farrokh as executive director of international distribution and production, and Diego Piasek as director of international distribution and production. All three will report to John Pollak, President of Electus International. Farrokh and Piasek come from Shine International, where they served as director of sales and sales executive-Latin America, respectively.

PostRelease: George Carney is now SVP of sales. He most recently was GM/VP of advertising sales and operation at RealNetworks.

Elliott filed the complaint after Google won a ruling this month that forced him to hand over more than 750 website names such as “googlegaycruises.com” and “googledonaldtrump.com.” He claims he needs the names to start a business based on “commerce.. charity, and more.”

The complaint, filed in Phoenix, says that Google is a common transitive verb for internet searching and notes that the American Dialect Society declared it be the “word of the decade.” It also cites a 2010 report in which Google allegedly stated that it could lose its trademark if the word google became synonymous with search. The company first applied to trademark “google” in 1997 and has since received a number of certificates covering the mark.

Brands can lose their trademarks if consumers start treating them interchangeably with an everyday word. Famous example includes “zipper,” “yo-yo” and “aspirin.”

This won’t happen, however, if Google can show that consumers still associate the word with the company.

Here’s a copy of the complaint:

Google Trademark Complaint

On Friday, NBCUniversal and CBS Corp. filed separate federal lawsuits against Dish Network. They joined Fox, which filed its own suit against the satellite TV service provider Thursday, in claiming Dish’s new “AutoHop” digital video recorder feature infringes on their copyrights by deleting their commercials.

Also read: Dish’s “Auto Hop” ad-skipping device in legal showdown with networks

However, with broadcasters loudly signaling their unease with Dish’s new product offering over past few weeks, and litigation widely viewed as a foregone conclusion, perhaps the more interesting development Friday was the public response issued by David Shull, senior VP of programming for Englewood, Co.-based Dish.

Noting that Dish had actually sued the Big Four broadcast networks first, Shull labeled broadcasters’ legal challenges as “absurd and profoundly anti-consumer.”

With networks charging pay TV operators like Dish — and by extension, its subscribers — millions of dollars to re-transmit their signals, Shull noted, “customers deserve to use content they pay for as they wish.”

Shull also said that AutoHop needs to be “put in perspective” — most of Dish’s viewers watch shows either live or the same night they’re recorded, he explained, and the feature only extends to recordings viewed the day after broadcast and must be enabled by the customer in order to work.

And besides, he added, “Customers have been skipping commercials since the birth of the remote control.”

It is here where Dish seems to have a lot of outside support.

Noting that consumers have been trained for over a decade to avoid advertising, noted media technology analyst Richard Greenfield on Friday posted a blog calling for media companies to “innovate, not litigate.”

As Greenfield noted, most DVRs leased to consumers by pay TV providers already have robust commercial-skipping capabilities.

Fair use advocate Public Knowledge also weighed in, with organization president and CEO Gigi B. Sohn arguing in a statement, “Consumers have the right to control their TV watching, using whatever technology is available to them.”

See also: Why Amazon’s Kindle battle with IPG matters

Here’s IPG’s letter to clients:

Dear Publishers,

IPG and Amazon have agreed on terms; your Kindle editions will be available again through Amazon today.

I can’t thank you enough for your input, support, patience, sacrifice, and loyalty over the last few months. I only regret that we weren’t able to make up for all of the lost revenue when your Kindle titles were not available. We will continue to work hard for every last sale so that all of our publishers stay healthy moving forward. For the period from June 1 through August 31, 2012, IPG will not take a distribution fee on Kindle sales, and 100% of the revenue for these sales will flow through to our publishers.

IPG and our publishers also received a tremendous amount of support from much of the rest of the industry, for which we will be forever grateful. I feel that the experience has clarified some things for us and our clients, and that now we are all even better equipped to navigate through this rapidly changing industry. I look forward to sharing these insights with you in the coming weeks, and to continue to work on building your business through maximizing sales and reducing risk.

Sincerely,

Mark Suchomel

Image courtesy of Flickr / bfhoyt

That’s bunk, according to Wired publisher Howard Mittman, who said in a recent interview that apps have proven “incredibly profitable” and touts the publication’s 165,000 tablet subscribers (65,000 of these are pure-digital subs). Mittman adds that Wired readers also spend a significant amount of time with the tablet version and that he “missed the memo” about the failure of apps.

So what’s going on? Is there something special about Wired, or have other publishers simply failed to execute correctly?

To understand, it’s useful to consider the key complaints set out by Technology Review’s Jason Pontin in his influential “Why Publishers Don’t like Apps” essay from early May, including:

• expensive developer costs
• difficulty quantifying subscribers
• an unnatural, walled garden reader experience.

Pontin also decried the vulturous 30 percent bite that Apple took from many sales, a figure that exceeded publishers’ own margins. He concluded that he would toss the apps and instead follow the Financial Times’ example by using HTML5 technology to provide an easy cross-platform reader experience. (The FT this week told pC2012 that it didn’t need a marketing boost from the iTunes Store.)

Wired’s Mittman, however, says that Pontin simply “chose one path that didn’t work out” and that “trail-blazing is not for everyone.” He believes that HTML5 will just be part of a “larger app experience” in which an app is a storefront or gateway for readers to have deeper interactions with publishing brands.

One upshot of this may be that publishers need to try harder to make apps work, but it’s also possible that unique factors make Wired an outlier. These include a techy readership combined with corporate and editorial support for a development team that has been building apps longer than most. Condé Nast, its deep-pocketed parent, may also be betting big in the hopes that Wired’s success can be replicated at its other publications.

Mittman’s bullish stance on apps may also be in keeping with Wired’s famous “Web is dead” cover of two years ago that described how browsers were being supplemented by other types of viewing platforms.

The proof will ultimately be in the revenue pudding, of course. Based on a $20-a-year subscription price, Wired is set to earn $1.3 million on its digital only subscribers (minus any Apple cut). This is hardly earth-shaking but, after just two years, it may be big enough to keep Condé Nast in the app game for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, it seems likely other publishers will continue to join instead the “good enough revolution” (a Wired term, by the way) offered by HTML5.

Newspapers like the New York Times may be piling up revenue from their paywalls, and Warren Buffett may be asserting his undying commitment to the small-town publications he has just acquired, but there continue to be signs that the printing of news on dead trees does not have a great and glorious future — and the latest is the news from Advance Publications that its New Orleans newspaper, the Times-Picayune, will no longer be printed daily. As painful as that decision likely is for the paper and many of its staff, not to mention its print readers, the Times-Picayune is grappling with a reality that almost every newspaper will have to face sooner or later, whether they want to or not.

David Carr of the New York Times broke the news that the paper was considering such a move on Wednesday, and his report was later confirmed by Advance, which said that it was forming a new company to manage both the newspaper and the New Orleans news website NOLA.com and would be letting go an unspecified number of staff, including several senior editors at the Times-Picayune. Instead of being printed daily, the newspaper will now only be available on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays.

Who will be the next one to stop publishing daily?

The Times-Picayune isn’t the only newspaper that is making these moves: Advance announced that three of its papers in Alabama will also be moving to a three-day printing schedule instead of being daily, and another paper owned by the company — the Ann Arbor News in Michigan — stopped printing daily in 2009, dropping to just Thursdays and Sundays. But as Carr notes, the change in New Orleans makes that city one of the largest and most significant American centers to be without a daily printed newspaper, and it raises a question that is probably in the back of every newspaper publisher’s mind: who is going to be next? As journalism professor Jay Rosen put it recently:

Printing itself remains important, and a revenue generator. But the newspaper company that is still organized around that act of production is the company whose stock you should short.

Billionaire Warren Buffett has gotten a lot of attention for buying Media General and its 63 publications in a $143-million deal, as though that somehow ensures a bright future for newspapers. But while Buffett says he is committed to the kind of community journalism that the small papers he is purchasing are theoretically known for, he is a businessman first and a newspaper-lover second — and he didn’t say anything about loving print. I don’t think the Berkshire Hathaway billionaire would hesitate for a second to make exactly the kind of moves that the Newhouse family and Advance Publications are making, or even to shut down the printing presses altogether if necessary.

As Hamilton Nolan notes at Gawker, printing news on dead trees doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense when you look at it rationally — at least, not as a way of delivering breaking news or real-time journalism or anything that would benefit from links, video, etc. Will people still read printed newspapers? Of course they will, in the same way that people still go to the theater or listen to the radio. But those industries are no longer the media powerhouses that they used to be, because the majority of their audience has moved elsewhere — and so have advertisers. And that is the printed newspaper conundrum in a nutshell.

A painful transformation that more will face

These financial pressures have led to what Ken Doctor calls a “forced march” towards printing fewer papers, and it is one that has created a hue and cry in the case of the Times-Picayune, in part because of that city’s history: the disastrous floods of 2005, and the havoc they wreaked on New Orleans, is something the region still hasn’t recovered from. The newspaper heroically continued to publish during the disaster — online at least — and became a lifeline for many, although its subscription levels have declined dramatically since. And this is why some are criticizing Advance and its decision so heavily, including one impassioned open letter that says:

Journalists risked their lives for the city they loved and justly received international recognition for their hard work. It was one the finest moments for your media empire. But you are about to turn that victory into a sad defeat. All of that hard work and recognition is going to be flushed away if the daily paper ceases operations.

Is that really true though? Perhaps the audience for the Times-Picayune‘s news will have to adjust, but if anything the example that it provided when it couldn’t publish in print — when the web was the only medium available — suggests that the newspaper could be just as effective, if not more so, although some seem to doubt this. Is it a painful transition to make? Of course it is, and all the more painful for the unknown number of print journalists who will lose their jobs. But the disruption caused by the web and digital media isn’t something that can be held at bay forever, not even by the sandbag strategy of a paywall.

The harsh reality is that printed newspapers are no longer one of the dominant methods of delivering news and information to people, and arguably haven’t been for some time. That doesn’t mean the skills and expertise of journalists who work for those institutions aren’t valuable any more — if anything, they are even more valuable (although they are also facing a lot more competition from things that don’t even look like journalism). But they need to be done in different ways, and a kind of reactionary, fetishistic attachment to printing things on paper is not going to help. As Betaworks CEO John Borthwick put it at paidContent 2012, media companies need to stop fixating on specific containers for information.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Zarko Drincic and George Kelly

This week’s featured title: ”Bared to You” by Sylvia Day. It’s #20 on the New York Times e-book bestsellers list this week and

What it’s about: The first in a trilogy, this erotic novel tells the story of a recent college grad, Eva, who meets billionaire businessman Gideon.

How it became a bestseller: Day self-published “Bared to You” on April 3, 2012. The book immediately invited comparisons to “50 Shades of Grey,” the originally self-published erotic trilogy that Random House’s Vintage acquired for seven figures in March and that has now sold over 10 million copies. Jane Litte, who runs the romance blog “Dear Author,” writes that “if I were to recommend any book today to readers who enjoyed 50 Shades and was looking for another book like it, this would be the first one I would offer. However, Bared to You is far better written with much hotter sex scenes.”

Like “Fifty Shades of Grey,” “Bared to You” has now found a traditional publisher: Penguin’s Berkley imprint snapped it up this month and has already released the e-book with a new, “50 Shades of Grey”-esque cover. (That’s Day’s original cover on the left and Penguin’s cover on the right.) Penguin will release a paperback edition on June 6. (Day writes a bit more about the Penguin acquisition here, and notes that Penguin’s ability to get the paperback into bricks-and-mortar bookstores was one of the main reasons she signed up with them.)

“Bared to You” is $5.99 on … Amazon  | Barnes & Noble  | Kobo

New York Times bestseller list, week of 6/3/12

Here are the titles in the top-35 that appear on the e-book bestseller list, but not on the print bestseller list (click the link to expand the chart).

USA Today bestseller list, week of 5/24/12

USA Today includes all formats and genres in one list and notes which format of a book sold best. Here are the titles in the top-35 where e-books outsold print (click the link to expand the chart).

• 5 key takeaways from paidContent 2012 (paidContent)

• NBCU Exploring Buyback of MSNBC.com (AdWeek)

• Why Facebook Needs Two Photo Apps (SplatF)

• New Orleans Newspaper Scales Back in Sign of Print Upheaval (New York Times)

• The New Yorker Will Serialize Jennifer Egan’s Short Story on Twitter (New York Observer)

• Google takes down 1.2 million search links a month over piracy, copyright issues (GigaOM)

• Dish’s “Auto-Hop” ad skipping device in legal showdown with TV networks (paidContent)

• New Jersey mayor, son, arrested on charges they nuked recall website (Ars Technica)

• Why rich people are investing in newspapers, again (Poynter)