At first flip, Flipboard is stunning (you have to download the app; the website is a brochure). The free app renders links from top tech and social media sites into a well-designed, magazine-style layout. Flip through content with a flick of the finger. The content-at-your-fingertips interface is intuitive, functional and fun — yet another incremental advance in haptic, information design based on human gestures. Touch screens, the iPad and trackpads move us closer to Minority Report.

But Flipboard is off to a shaky start. The app exhausted capacity within a few hours of launch. Flipboard’s big idea — creating sections for the news that my networks and friends are sharing — fizzled at the start.

I couldn’t add either my Twitter and Facebook accounts. Rather, I was instructed to email Flipboard for an invitation to add content. The shortcomings of the launch made me and other customers cynical.

Without personalized feeds, Flipboard is just an elegant aggregator: a leap forward from Internet sites that look as if they’ve been assembled by computer, which they are, or shoveled by news organizations into a new ditch. Flipboard feeds display-content into images and extended briefs that link to original content. It leaves the impression that content gets love, that it is curated, redesigned or re-edited with care.

Incumbents are staking out traditional ground. After its impulsive tech writer praised the Pulse News Reader, a visual browsing app, The New York Times forced Apple last month to remove Pulse from the App Stores for infringing on its rights. The app, a $4 download, was reinstated after Times feeds were removed.

The impressive part about Flipboard, as well as Pulse, is that it applies a beautiful, interactive metaphor to news access, an alternative to the old syndication standby, RSS. RSS pulls original content and formatting from simple, authorized feeds. Traditional providers embrace RSS because they believe it extends distribution of content prepared for another medium by sending users to their destination sites — which happens only some of the time. Flipboard is just one of a new breed of “feed readers” that ditch the visible plumbing of RSS for their own content scrapers. Those scrapers translate content into visual nuggets that fill the nutritional needs of most news consumers on the Internet. The issue is whether they’re fair.

“Fair Use” — the principal that guides usage and linking to original content — remains the force majeure of the Internet. Aggregators and indexers such as Yahoo! and Google have stretched the limits of fair use on one of the fronts of the unholy war with content providers. It’s a war they’re winning. The weakened providers have settled for a truce that grants them pageviews from links and RSS feeds. But where traditional news providers have largely capitulated in the interests of survival, the new breed of Internet-only news providers are beginning to take exception. One of them, the technology weblog Gizmodo, even questions whether Flipboard is legal: “Flipboard … has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement.”

You can read that sentence in the digital version of Wired, which licenses content from Gizmodo, which supplies content to Flipboard. Presumably, you’ll soon be able to add feeds from your Twitter and Facebook friends linking to the Gizmodo story that appeared in Wired that was picked up by The New York Times and distributed through its RSS feed.

Flip to the next page.

For the record, I own a MacBook and an iPhone 3GS, which I just updated to iOS4.

Paul Allen’s personal spaceship hangs from the ceiling of Building 43. An organic garden supplies produce for healthy cafes across the Mountain View, Ca. campus. There are foosball tables, ping-pong tables and volleyball courts for creative play. There are massage chairs for relaxing; gyms for yoga, dancing and workouts. There are bikes and scooters for people-powered travel between buildings, and a winding path through a whimsical sculpture garden for dog-walking and contemplative jogs. The cubes, yurts and huddle rooms are filled with whiteboards, laptops, lava lamps and large, inflatable balls. Even the men’s rooms are Googlized; messages about groups working on complex problems hang above urinals as if to divert attention from the mundane business below to more Google-worthy issues at eye-level … and the organ between the ears.

I like the environment, but The Atlantic’s James Fallows so loves the the place that he believes Googlers can solve the problem that’s on so many minds these days. He writes that he’s spent a lot of time at the Googleplex over the past year talking with Google strategists and engineers about saving newspapers.

No doubt he passed the garden where
a bronze casting of a T Rex fossil,
a gift from founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, forages among the plants. Fallows has so thoroughly bought
into the cult of Google he reports the company is devising ways to save newspapers from becoming the next dinosaur in the garden.

“Most Internet and tech businesses have been either uninterested in or actively condescending toward the struggles of what they view as the pathetic-loser dinosaurs of the traditional media,” he writes.

Which is entirely wrong.

“Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.”

Which is incredibly naive.

Fallows loses his balance assuming that Google can actually save newspapers. Or wants to. He bought what Google CEO Eric Schmidt sold to newspaper editors at their convention last month: the survival of high-quality journalism is “essential to the functioning of modern democracy.” Like newspaper editors didn’t already believe that?

Fallows acknowledges Schmidt is a family friend and an Atlantic reader. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way that wind blows. He spends many pages arguing that Google is trying to save newspapers rather than killing them.

Okay, Google is working with some newspapers planning to put their content behind paywalls. Those Google engineers are such good friends of journalism and democracy. And their “permanent beta” culture is so innovative ….

But there are a few other reasons, too.

Google knows newspapers are good for Google because they generate information people want to search for. Google gets all the revenue from all those little ads, formerly known as classifieds, that run next to search returns. You know, those ads that paid for the Googleplex just as publishers were shedding reporters. The paywall is another way to get a piece, one story at a time.

Google would like nothing better than for newspapers to stop printing and start selling online ads for as much money as print ads. That has never happened, nor is it likely to happen. Google wants the money anyway, no matter how much or how little. It covets display ads that count for most of newspapers’ remaining revenue. Google would gets its piece through its its ad-serving platform, DoubleClick, which it acquired three years ago and has now integrated in Google systems.

Fallows is right to suggest that craigslist, more than Google, undermined the classifieds money-machine. Craig Newmark’s crime was to make classifieds free and interactive, a wry play that made obsolete a highly-profitable marketplace in the back pages of the daily paper. Google is responsible for ruining the rest of it. Its algorithms blew up the newspaper bundle, exploding content into atoms. Context was vaporized. Newspapers have been unable to reassemble the pieces in a meaningful way or find a price low enough to charge for them. The Humpty Dumpty problem.

Now Google says it is willing to help. What it is unwilling to do is admit that it is culpable. Rather, its execs maintain that Google actually serves newspapers by driving traffic to their web sites from searches. Google has maintained that newspapers ought to charge a lot for the advertising on those pages, but a viable market has yet to materialize for most. So it goes like this:

First, Google unbundles content from the newspaper package and sells it off a piece at a time.

Next, it hastens the dismantling of physical operations — paper, ink, delivery trucks, production and the jobs that support them — as unnecessary, recurring costs of distribution. You get to find your news on Google without getting your hands dirty.

Then, it grabs display ads by serving them through DoubleClick and forcing online newspapers to create more expensive ads since newspapers would have to share ad revenue with Google.

Take that, Apple. Just like the iPad or iTunes, Google could try to impose controls on content-distribution platforms that yield revenue. Let’s take the big slice from those desperate publishers. Who’s your boy: Eric or Steve?

The survival of high-quality journalism? The functioning of modern democracy?
Let’s not leave those questions to the likes of Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs or James Fallows. They confuse important questions with current cliches.

We don’t need lava lamps or inflatable balls to cool-out a business that no longer works.
Journalism and democracy will survive and flourish in new forms and formats that are emerging. That’s an idea worth the investment.

Tabula Rasa [tab-yuh-luh rh-suh] lat., clean slate. The mind before it receives impressions from experience.

TRDC puts experience on the slate. It’s designed to help a range of organizations in Washington’s unique mediascape get in the game. Communications, media, marketing, politics, government, defense, agencies, contractors, health care, energy, environment, NGOs, citizenship.

What’s your app?

We’ll help you answer that question. Check out the program. Read our agenda.

We’ve been waiting for this moment since we bought our first Mac II back in the Dark Ages.

A scant four weeks after iApple introduced the iPad, we played in NYC’s Digital Sandbox by staging the first throwdown on tablet computing. First-movers showed a stunning array of mobile applications for connected citizens and consumers. A talented group of innovators, developers, entrepreneurs and visionaries helped us flash-forward to a new marketplace for mobile engagement.

Beyond exuberance, one million iPads have been sold in a month. This is just the beginning, not just for the iPad but for personal computing on a stunning array of high-concept, high-touch devices heading our way.

Advantage goes to those who move first. As with other moments missed, slackers and laggards are left to compete for scraps, then complain.

Suddenly, everyone has an iPad or e-reader conference to show struggling vintners how to pour old wine into new bottles. Which may be fine for winemakers whose vineyards have gone fallow. Learn how to squeeze more juice out of fermented grapes, then charge more for the stuff. Even if it leaves a bad aftertaste.

We’re vintners of another kind. Plant anew. Cultivate. The terroir is rich, bold and complex. Join connoisseurs of creativity for a tasting from 1-4:30 pm on June 14. The vintage may be inexpensive, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption. Drink up.

Online registration here.

We saw awe-inspiring work, a renewal of the creative passion that helped launch the Internet and its period of technical, entrepreneurial and societal achievement. Old-school publishers such as Popular Science, Zagat and Thomson Reuters rediscovered their game with sharp-shooting apps aimed at connected audiences. NPR and ESPN enhanced experiences that were already compelling online. There were untethered virtuosos, too, such as Electric Literature, the Ghost in the Machine (under development) collaboration, and soloist Rob Kelley’s BeatPad. We’ll revisit and follow the development of their apps in subsequent posts, examining the qualities that make them successful.

More critically, we saw, heard and felt a renewal of the creative passion that helped launch the Internet, the Web and its culture-bending technical, entrepreneurial and societal achievements. In just four weeks since the launch of Apple’s iPad, a flurry of applications has been released to expand engagement, enhance understanding and extend meaning and utility.

Design-driven innovation from a fresh, creative class of developers has delivered a whole new mind for experiencing a world gone digital — high concept, high touch connections that enable us to cope with our unrelenting craving for transcendence.

Finally, we have devices and a number of very good starts that deliver abundance with an aesthetic imperative, as well as a new and better way of organizing things: the new order or order.

Yet, initial responses to our questions were cautious and meek: It is early. We don’t really know. Where’s the money?

Where’s the money?
As a way out of ingenuity, the last response is the first one cited. “Where’s the money?” is the mantra of the unimaginative. A circular question, it is an excuse for inertia, a business plan for standing still. Again. The question is almost as pathetic as its cousin — the position that we won’t invest in an online or mobile strategy until we are certain it works. Good luck with that one.

We weren’t surprised that some who participated in Tabula Rasa, and some who covered it, could not or would not get their minds around the theme of the event: innovation in the emerging Conceptual Age. Mea culpa, we invited discussion at a where’s-the-money session called Good Apple, Bad Apple / Good Business, Bad Business. Given both the dissension over “paid models” and the noisy discourse surrounding it, the topic is a requirement on the conference circuit. Not even a fresh take could take us out of the weeds.

We thought our friend Merrill Brown, the former Editor-In-Chief of MSNBC who’s been dealing with the issue for a coupla decades and currently promotes a freemium model for publishers (some content free, some paid), summed it up rather well: “Putting up a pay wall does not solve your business problem,” said Brown. “Publishers who think they can put their magazine on an iPad and make a lot of money are making a significant mistake.”

We love surprises … almost as much as provocation. Jeff Jarvis didn’t disappoint. We showed the stunning TIME magazine app — high concept, high touch, and only $4.99 issue. The Buzzmachine turned buzz killer:

“I think the TIME Magazine app is the most sinful piece of shit ever,” said a skeptical Jarvis., “The ego of it was unabashedly awful.” On his blog he writes: “It’s worse than the web: we can’t comment; we can’t remix; we can’t click out; we can’t link in, and they think this is worth $4.99 a week. But the pictures are pretty.”

Josh Quittner, TIME’s editor-at-large and one of the creative forces behind its iPad app, gave it back to Jarvis in a blog post called “And the horse you rode in on.”

“Jarvis, a former Time Inc.-er, can be forgiven for the disgruntled, I-hate-my-ex-wife tone that creeps into his rhetoric, whenever he discusses his former employer. It’s tiresome, dude, and intellectually dishonest given that you’re still stumping for your Google book.” 

Turns out the dispute was not about the money, but a little about the distribution of media bundles, a little about concerns that Apple and its partners are attempting to control the “open” web and kill the link econony (Google), and more than a little about Jarvis and Quittner.

Can we turn the page, please?

The Meaning Model
Enough cautious and meek. We need some bold. Why not look at economic issues with the same creativity and integrity as we do conceptual ones? The current “where’s the money” debate is framed by rules developed for the economies and societies, factories and mass production, of the Industrial Age. Forward-thinking enterprises adapted to the atomization and proliferation of content in the Information Age. Now we enter the Conceptual Age with a universe of creators. The new currency is meaning. Off the top, how many business plans can you conceive for a meaning model? Maybe a hundred for, say, anyone?

From Tabula Rasa, we put that first word on the blank slate: meaning. As we reconsider what it means to be human, we’re discovering new metaphors for storytelling, creating new ways to engage, connecting with a world of friends and information, and designing innovations that will guide our lives and shape our universe on almost any device.

Where’s the money?

We’ll answer the question with a better one: Where’s the love, y’all? We put that one to music (Black-Eyed Peas with Justin Timberlake) and video when we started we this crusade back in ought-three. If you don’t know the answer to “Where’s the Love?” by now, you’ll never get the one that asks “where’s the money.”

This is one of those moments – an important shift in digital culture that will be old news, obvious to everyone, a few years from now. There’s an electrifying crackle in the air as digital creatives, businesses, investors and visionaries collide in a mad dash to define the future around the next big thing. Not even the old masters of the universe can stop it. Their hands are slipping off the controls.

There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I may lead them.

Sorry. Your people are leading the way in this universe.

Journey to the Conceptual Age
It’s not just the iPad, it’s the promise of a more personal, more creative, more fulfilling, more inspiring and more beautiful digital experience. It’s the promise of something more human, more wonderful. It’s bigger than Facebook or Twitter or Apple. It’s the next PC, the next smartphone, the next printing press. It’s all of that – in a simple, mobile shiny-new-thing powered by something entirely new to media: human touch. Gigs and hard drives fade into the cloud, replaced by pictures and words and shapes and sounds we can mold like clay. That’s magic. The result isn’t merely something hard and shiny that resembles a notepad. It’s something old, deep and rare: pure joy.

Over the next weeks we’ll continue our journey to the Conceptual Age. We’ll stop at the guideposts along the way, showcasing innovative examples of work defining the creative moment. We’ll conduct activities that show where the moment is leading. And we’ll identify the qualities of design-driven innovation that will determine who flourishes and who flounders.

To get started, we have five questions ….

Samsung’s W960 mobile phone, released in South Korea in March, delivers 3-D video content that can be viewed without special glasses and can be manipulated by turning and twisting the device.

Years before there was the iPhone or the iPad, we saw applications and utilities on mobile devices in South Korea and Japan before there was an app for that here. Which is to say reimagined by Apple.

Now get ready for a three-def physics that could alter Apple’s’ gravity. Technology developed by Julien Flack, CTO of Dynamic Digital Depth, could be built into many mobile devices within the next two years. Flack has spent more than decade converting 2-D content into 3-D in real-time, solving the the problem: the need for special glasses that deliver a separate image to each eye. You can climb inside Flack’s multi-dimensional brain at a Technology Review video

The remaining problem: a shortage of content for the three-def experience. For now, the technology best handles animated, computer-generated content. Thus the current sweet spot: games that simulate 3-D spaces. Just as games are driving adoption of 3-D television screens, they are likely to lead to new interfaces and applications — augmented reality. That could get very interesting across a range of content.

Triple def TVs, which hit stores after this year’s Consumers Electronics Show, require glasses. Phones may provide a better experience. 3-D displays work by directing light to deliver different versions of an image directly to each of a viewer’s eyes. The effect works best over a narrow range of viewing angles, so it is not well suited to television or cinema screens — the places where we’ve first experienced 3-D. But phones are generally used by one person at a time and are easily held at the optimum angle. That’s why mobile multimedia devices may bring 3-D into the mainstream

In addition to Dynamic Digital Depth, based in Santa clara, other companies working on the mobile 3-D experience include 3M in St. Paul, Nintendo in Kyoto, Nvidia in Santa Clara, and N4D in Atlanta.

The Hive at 55 provides work and collaboration space for independent tech and media developers, and serves as both a network and community for developers and entrepreneurs. It’s located at 55 Broad Street in New York. Familiar? It’s the location of the Digital Event Sandbox, Tabula Rasa’s home-for-a-day. The Sandbox is on the fourth floor of 55 Broad.

An initiative of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s MediaNYC2020 plan for the media industry, The Hive opened to freelancers and small business owners in December with shared workspace, meeting space, networking events and business services. It’s a cool concept that’s emerging in urban centers throughout the U.S. and Europe. Check out the concept, take a tour through a gallery and video, or read more in The New York Times’ City Room blog.

Meet and mix with The Hive’s creative community at 55 Broad on Thursday, April 29. Our video and the latest on the program and participants are here.

Register.

As usual, Apple’s marketing has been masterful, right down to putting the iPad into the hands of eight influential reviewers. The fortunate few seem to like it, which is good for them (it is hard not to like cool gifts) and very good for Apple. If you care, Gizmodo has a good take, a comparison chart and links to the Elite Eight.

The rest of the world readies for a gold rush. What company doesn’t have a alchemist developing an iPad app that transforms their content into gold? Or a developer claiming to be Merlin?

The iPad may be the next, great gadget you can’t afford to ignore, but it would be a mistake to think it has the chemistry that changes the qualities of base metals, that it contains the magic elixir of longevity, or that it imparts some infinite and ultimate wisdom to those who hold it in their hands. Drop the sucker and the glass case will break.

Time to get real.

We won’t make the mistake of considering the iPad simply as a gizmo to be loved or loathed by gadgeteers, techies, cool-seekers, opportunists and pundits. We see mass adoption as the next wave of sophisticated, mobile computing platforms and advanced social networks. As mobile phones fundamentally changed the way people communicate, this year’s burst of tablet computing leads to the Internet of Everything Everywhere by the end of this decade, the Device Decade.

tabula rasa [ tab-yuh-luh rah-suh ] lat., clean slate.
The mind before it receives impressions gained from experience

WE’RE CONVENING TABULA RASA to stir innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as to make sense of significant forces that are converging on an informed, alway-on society. We’ve identified a few: the aforementioned Digital Decade, which spreads mobile computing and 10 billion devices throughout the world; and the tablet “burst,” which will likely last a year or two.

Here are some other issues on our agenda:

– Design-driven innovation. DIY and WYSIWYG innovation. The emergence of a new, visual language for seeing the world and communicating among its citizens.
– Publishing and broadcasting imperatives. Can devices fill traditional media’s looming and expanding revenue gap?
– Social entrepreneurship. Apps for companies, nonprofits, NGOs, community organizations and everyday citizens to engage.
– The Mobile-Social Society. How will continuing improvements in mobile communications platforms impact the social structures supporting commerce, finance, governance, health, the environment, transportation, entertainment, science, media and technology.
– Cool-seeking experiences. Techno Laggards and Massive Passives want to share the cool. Meet the huge, new world of connected customers.
– Boys with toys. The tech revolution and app development is skewed by the boys. What that means.
– The future of context. Is there one? Devices, apps and algorythms continue to atomize news and information, separating them from context.
– Channels, controls and trust. Who owns and controls content in all forms, on all devices? Does old wine taste better in new bottles? Should we trust the new gods of media?

With your help, we’ll start to address these issues and report on them. Our colleague Brian Reich, who’s conceived our collaborative “We Think” innovation agenda, will coordinate the initiative for reports and discussion at Tabula Rasa NYC. Contact Brian at brian@littlemmedia.com to get involved

Almost forgot: At Tabula Rasa, you’ll see amazing work and get to meet the creative geniuses who are pioneering the content, design, technology and business of tablet computing. So join the fun on Thursday, April 29 in New York. Register here.

It’s more than an academic question: Apple could become the middleman-of-choice for the publishing business, much like it did for the music industry. Magazine and newspaper publishers who have long fantasized about the day when a digital tablet device could take the place of ink on paper – and sustain the businesses built around text and images – are lining up to roll out sparkling new iPad editions.

The App Store, which can manage transactions for paid apps and serve as a powerful distribution gateway and marketing vehicle to promote best-sellers and favored partners, has strong appeal for magazine and newspaper publishers eager to create new revenue streams and train people to pay for digital content.

This leads to some practical and ethical questions for media companies – and for journalists who work for them. If news companies become business partners with Apple, and they see a strong business interest both in the iPad’s success and the App Store’s approach to content distribution, you have to wonder:

• How far will newspaper and magazine publishers go to keep Apple happy?
• How far will Apple go to keep its publisher business partners happy?

Of course, media apps could fail and the iPad could still wind up as a game-changing device – you won’t need the App Store to view web content through the iPad’s built-in Safari browser.

Yet publishers seem to think that love for the iPad, inheriting and expanding on consumer love for the iPod and iPhone, is going to trickle down into love for digital news apps sold through the App Store.

The scenario implies that Apple will exert extraordinary power to decide which publishers thrive in an iPad app world, and which never make it there in the first place.

So just as the marketing frenzy over iPad everything simmers to a blowout product launch later this month, an alternate narrative is drifting through the net.

Here’s tech visionary Dave Winer:

When to be worried:

When big pieces of our culture flow through one company’s servers. And when suddenly, that company takes an interest in the ideas that are expressed in that culture, shutting off certain ideas, without explanation, without answering questions.

(See the full post)

And here’s Vanity Fair media columnist and Newser.com founder Michael Wolff:

Apple is a strange and dastardly company which, sooner rather than later, we’re going to regret pledging our allegiance to. The latest bit of no-good business is its arbitrary censoring of iPhone apps. This may be piddling, but it’s obviously part of the major control-freakishness that has always lurked below the surface in Cupertino, but which has now become broad-based corporate policy.

(See the full post)

We’ll chat about the dark and glorious future of the iPad, paid content and media companies with Michael next week at We Media Miami. We’ll also chat, later the same day, with Associated Press CEO Tom Curley. AP announced last week that it’s launching AP Gateway, a service that will allow AP to sell articles and video through iPads.

[Disclosure: AP is a We Media Miami sponsor and consulting client and a global partner of iFOCOS]

Oren Michels

With 10 tips for success with APIs

Mashery manages APIs – the software “secret sauce” that helps media companies, retailers, Twitter, Google and others distribute their content throughout the digital universe. The most famous API-du-jour is the Twitter API. That’s the set of instructions and programming code that has enabled legions of independent developers, from companies with names like Tweetie, Hootsuite, Seesmic and Tweetdeck, to create apps and services based on the database of status updates, timestamps, account photos and geo-locations posted to Twitter. The Best Buy Remix API, maintained by Mashery, allows review sites and anyone else to incorporate product information and links to make purchases at BestBuy.com. APIs encourage mashups and wide distribution of content into the atomized universe of digital experiences across a multitude of brands. They fly in the face of traditional media business models built around monolithic branded, packaged, “build-it-and-they-will-come” content products – like web sites. APIs are all about explosive, viral distribution and use of content anywhere – and building businesses around that use. Mashery’s co-founder and CEO, Oren Michels (@orenmichels), will talk more about APIs and how they are driving new digital businesses in a conversation at We Media Miami, our annual innovation conference coming up next month (register here). He’ll be joined by Krista Thomas, head of marketing and communication for OpenCalais, a semantic web and content tagging service from Thomson Reuters that’s also built around an API to encourage widespread use, mashups and innovation by anyone. – AN

1. Company status, trends, milestones.

Mashery is nearly four years old, and has been generating revenue for over three years. We have about 70 customers and over 80,000 developers registered across the APIs we power, about half of whom are active in any given month. We make money the old fashioned way – our customers pay us a monthly or annual fee to use our API management and scaling platform. Major milestones include our founding in May 2006, first revenue in January 2007, and funding rounds closed in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Our investors include First Round Capital, Formative Ventures, .406 Ventures, and a collection of the best angels a CEO could ever hope to work with. 32 employees, the vast majority of whom are based in downtown San Francisco (and we’re hiring!!!)

Like most infrastructure, our primary competitor would be an in-house development team making a buy-vs-build decision. We tend to win against an in-house solution based on time-to-launch (days or weeks vs. months or years), feature-completeness (in-house solutions would skip a lot of what we do), cost, product roadmap, and the need for in-house teams to focus on core technology rather than infrastructure available elsewhere.

2. Some bio/personal background notes about you.

MIT undergrad, UCLA MBA. I’ve spent the past twelve years running online services companies; before that I ran a couple manufacturing companies and a comedy improv theatre company in LA called The Groundlings.

3. What kinds of companies – or which companies in particular – are doing the best at “exploding” their content and expanding their business through massive distribution of information via APIs?

When done right, the API should be a new or expanded distribution channel that extends your existing business model. If you are an e-commerce company, your API should result in more sales. If you are an ad-supported media company, it should drive more traffic or ad revenue. If you get your revenue from subscriptions, you should increase subscribers or decrease churn. If you sell data or data services, you should sell more data by enabling your customers to embed it in their app or service. We have great examples in each of these – Best Buy and etsy in retail, the NY Times and the Guardian in media, Hoovers and Open Calais with data, and Netflix with subscriptions. There are lots of others.

4. Which have struggled, and what are the key difference you’ve observed between the winners who “get it” and losers who don’t?

We worked with one media company that really wanted to make its content available by API, but unfortunately could not secure the rights to do so. Their API therefore lacked sufficient usefulness to spark developer adoption, and they eventually discontinued it.

The key things that differentiate winners are:

1. GREAT developer communication (documentation, forums, etc)

2. Instant developer provisioning – you need to be able to register for and access the API, at least in a sandbox or development version, immediately. Developers have a tendency to show up at 3 am wanting instant gratification – they want to know then and there if the API will meet their needs or solve their problems.

3. Lots of sample apps available. The reason that we saw so many google map mashups a few years ago were that there were a few great examples that got a bunch of attention, and pretty soon it snowballed.

4. Developer-friendly terms and conditions. If you tell a developer that they can’t make money using the API, they won’t waste their time using it. Remember, you’re building an ecosystem, and for an ecosystem to work you need mutual benefit.

5. Open EVERYTHING. The more flexible the building blocks, the more creative the developers can be and the more innovation will happen. If you only have 2×4 red legos, your projects will be pretty boring. Our advice is “open everything unless you have a very compelling reason to keep something closed – don’t keep things closed unless you can come up with a compelling reason to open it”

6. Don’t be afraid of cannibalism. As the saying goes, if you’re not willing to eat your young, someone someone else will eat them for you. It’s hard to have your API extend your business model if you prohibit your partners from also using the very business model you’re already succeeding at.

7. Good developer outreach, evangelism and support – like any community, people want to be part of something active and vibrant

8. A healthy mix of API use by internal developers, large partners who you work with directly, and independent developers who interact primarily through the developer site and ecosystem

9. Fair treatment of developers – you may have to change the rules, but the more frequently you do it, the less likely you are to have a happy, healthy developer community

10. Uptime and reliability – I list this last, since twitter has certainly proven you can build a massive developer ecosystem with modest success at uptime and reliability

5. News companies such as The New York Times, NPR and Guardian have set up APIs to expand distribution and use of their content. What do you think of their efforts – and how might they do more/better?

I’m a big fan of all three, two of whom (NYT and Guardian) are customers. News companies face a challenge on how to monetize content that is syndicated, and are understandably reluctant to provide full-content APIs until they are comfortable that they have found the right business model to do so. NPR has a bit of an advantage there, as a member and community supported nonprofit. But the conversations I’ve had with numerous news organizations – both our customers and our prospects – make me optimistic that they will figure out a model that makes gathering, editing, curating and distributing great news a profitable, sustainable business. It may look a bit different than it does now, but it’s not going away.

6. Paid news content, iPad: What are your predictions?

I was very optimistic about both based on the demo Chris Anderson of Wired did at TED last week. I haven’t bought a kindle primarily because I enjoy news magazines, photojournalism, and great design (whereas my wife, who is more into books than news, loves her kindle). Chris’s demo of the wired prototype on the iPad made me believe that I may be able to ditch the sack of printed magazines I bring on long flights, and in general go to a smaller, lighter bag for travel. I’ll happily pay for that – it is, absolutely, an improvement on what we have today. Of course the devil is in the details. If I need to pay more for the electronic version of a magazine than I pay for the dead tree version, that might be a problem.

This is different, though, than getting us to pay for the website version of news that we currently get for free. There’s no improvement there. For instance, I’m typing this on an 8 hour flight from Europe to the US. No way that the paywall version of a news site would have any value for me – heck, even if I preload pages, I have to remember to download the “single page” version or I can only read the beginning of a story. Good content, available in a great format that can be enjoyed offline, at a reasonable price will do just fine.

My favorite comes from The Madison Avenue Journal, a newsletter/blog for “industry leaders who are interested in understanding how contemporary culture intersects with Madison Avenue.”

To improve understanding, Mad Ave. gave Gutenberg an apocryphal story, establishing a new standard for ridiculous and wrong in just five sentences. If marketers write history, the iPad will no doubt take the idea that lit a fuse on a literacy revolution to a new level. And we’ll be able to tweet Joey G’s 42-line bible in 140 characters.

An editor’s take:

Or so I’ve read. It’s not working for me. Worse – clicking on the Try Buzz link seems to have broken my Gmail/Firefox setup. My various filters and navigation cues – like InBox, Compose Mail – have disappeared.

So why so much buzz about Buzz? The Guardian has a nice roundup of reactions from various well-known tech pontificators. You can imagine the tone first: a mix of oohs and ahs, lists of what’s wrong and what should be added.

Bottom line. Buyer beware. Here are two views:

Daniel Lyons, Newsweek:

“Why, Google? Why take a perfectly wonderful e-mail system and pollute it by adding a zillion new things to it? I’m not looking for more clutter in my life. I’m looking for less. At the launch event some Google exec claimed Buzz is a way to “find the signal in the social networking noise,” but to me it looks like Google is just adding to the noise.”

Jason Calacanis, CEO. Mahalo:

“Google Buzz is brilliant. Like ground-breaking, game-changing brilliant… Facebook is going to see their traffic get cut in half by Google Buzz. This really is game over for Facebook because you know Microsoft and Aol are going to copy Google Buzz as quick as they can.”

Update 1:55 pm Feb. 11, 2010: Now it’s working.