Clubhouse hosted another excellent conversation between Josh Constine and Facebook’s audio czar Fidji Simo. The format continues to sparkle, as I was once again forced to choose between MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O’Donnell and just plain audio. JPA won going away. The talk was crisp and the strategies thick with optimism about the creator economy. Monetization, priming the emergent pump, etc. If this were the Gold Rush, it would be blue skies ahead for picks and shovels and pans.

It remains hard to listen to the creator talk. If this is the moment for creators, then what is the moment for us listening? The question is who gets the short end of the crypto stick, a zero sum game where the losers are the equivalent of who buys high and sells low. I guess in the elegant world of startups, being one and not the other nine of ten is worth it.

It’s still damn exciting to see the outcome at a safe distance from ground zero. Once the tech companies run out of slots at the start of the race, there will be plenty of industries waiting for the early smoke to clear. Walmart, table for two? This is not a live audio story but rather a realignment of the media industries around notifications. Let’s approach the rebuild of the economy and our way of life from the inside out, or backwards in a kind of reverse engineered insight replayed forward like a Beatles guitar solo.

Back before the virus, we thought of life as weekday and weekends, work week or vacation, a series of not-holidays punctuated by long weekends every 6 to 8 weeks or so.We paced ourselves in waves: not liking Mondays to hump days to going to the movies on Friday to watching the political shows on Sunday. Enduring the nightmare that was Trump, sedating us with the binge economy as it surfed the streaming disruption, addicted to our phones and awestruck by the possibilities of the hive mind. Things changed, and then the plague struck.

Now we realized our folly, not in assuming the unassumable but in thinking we had any clue at all of how much time we had to dream about the future. Our belief in technology was still there, but not necessarily how it would work. Saving us was a goal, not a sure thing or even close. We held our breath. And got incredibly lucky. Time inverted itself, and in surviving we found a desperate grace in treasuring our networks of family and friends.

As much as we knew everything was different, we were shocked at how quickly we adapted to the crisis. The rapid deployment of mobile and social technology over the previous couple decades was suddenly ratified, accelerated, and made table stakes. Not surprisingly the tech companies were able to consume the wave; the startup surge was financed by eating its own dog food. Remember Y2K, where it was still not a sure thing there was any real ROI for collaboration, or groupware as it was pigeonholed.

It got a lot harder to say digital collaboration was not realistic. The Cloud made corporate transformation a subscription service going in and pivoting to market fit a viable exit strategy. Startups could scale up without multi-million dollar bets, leaving enterprise incumbents with no choice but to adopt Software As A Service to survive. Consumer laptops, TCPIP, and 2400 baud modems became the platform where continuous innovation found a home, virtualizing the office as a set of familiar services deployed both on desktop and phones.

Notifications became less a source of interruption and more the quickest way to manage the converging streams of work and personal life. These intermittent alerts allowed us to navigate multiple conversations and interactions on an as-needed basis. Collaboration tools orchestrated the abstraction of email with group messaging, video conferencing became a time saver and easy onboarding tool, screen sharing an IT replacement. And all sat on the notification backbone, reducing channel conflict and shifting the social aspects of team engagement to a more personal basis. And then the pandemic happened.

Is it any wonder, the Bowie song asks. Notification etiquette kicks in at daybreak with the overnight roundup, tracks the news throughout while avoiding the repetitive eyeball-baiting of the cable networks, and creates a calendar of things to click on or store for free time or cram for a meeting. No, it’s not any wonder that audio fits more and more into this work-from-wherever climate shift. Notification chimes differentiate between critical alerts, parkable alerts, and ignorable scroll-offs. Newsletters become havens for binging cached 10 minute reads, managing live audio and recorded podcasts, and a rallying point for influencer analytics. This last one offers value for not just creators but consumers, also known as tippers.

The creator bandwagon sounds promising, but who cares which major platform captures the pole position? I like Clubhouse’s work in establishing a complementary social cloud via notifications. I like Twitter Spaces as a driver to squeeze a record button into the UI for all, just as Anchor does for podcasting. I like the idea of Facebook sneaking onto the playing field by allowing Instagram to turn off video. Wow, thanks. I love how Josh Constine seems to have landed in just the right place to triangulate his venture casting chops, reportorial finesse, handy summarizing of the calls, and matter-of-fact direct to podcast strategy.

But these early winners in format and style should soon give way to a more constructive dialogue between creators and their listeners. Newsletter platforms seem to have made the case that a few hit writers will pay for developing tools to support subscriptions, distribution, legal services, analytics, and more. I keep wanting to backchannel directly with specific people in the room, but Clubhouse doesn’t want that to happen natively. We’re live audio, not chat, they don’t say but imply. What if listeners could sign up for receiving (and sending) commentary via some form of group @mention. Moderators could tap into that and invite people onstage to engage with speakers. Organic discovery of talent and impact. Sign me up.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, April 25, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

The current rave about newsletters and so-called or social audio is just the latest version of the story of podcasting. Take the idea that podcasting is experiencing a new wave of popularity and scaffolding. Are you sure? Apple is bent on turning the space into a subscription model, and we’re all going to twist again like we did last summer. Somehow I doubt it. The basic attraction for me is not paying for podcasts. Subscription startups may be an important step forward, but the heart of the matter is talent formation.

Back when they first started, the real charge was the ability to own the whole stack: writer, producer, editor, star, and marketer. Making money for this may have been a future goal, but right now the real power was in figuring out what might work without the intrusion of what people other than yourself thought about the product. Only if something made itself apparent was it necessary to address the needs and wants of the audience.

Luckily, that ruled out about ninety percent of the resulting wave of stuff. There were Ted talks, or what became Ted talks, well thought out verbal slide decks in an 8 minute payload that grabbed, shook, and exacted payment in credibility and validation of the expertise of the artist. Always lurking was the question of what day job the author was moonlighting from. Many self help business books emerged from this.

Then there were the professionals, the public radio folks who knew how to do this in their sleep but were looking for a role not dependent on grant writing or public liberal funding. Reporters who knew how to squeeze out a story, producers who mined their rolodex to fashion a conversation, screenwriters looking for momentum to bank a shot off studio executives to get a pilot or series starter commitment. Eventually this added up to enough successful podcasts to attract sponsorship support from audiobooks and publishing services. Scripted shows became farm clubs for independent talent aiming for the Big Show. This endured for 20 years.

Meanwhile, the Beatles transformed the music business from a vaudeville-like zero-sum game to a Renaissance of control over writing, performing, promoting, and touring. Aspiration was the fuel of the business model, obviating the need for incremental success in favor of explosive momentum and dominance of the media. Hair, boots, sex, striking fear in the hearts of parents and then politicians everywhere. Sgt. Pepper and Kubrick created a version of the future that made everything else pale by comparison. That it all crashed and burned was just one of the risks of what became the startup culture in Silicon Valley and Route 128.

In today’s world of NFTs and Decacorns, free still has a reason for believing. The old guard of the blogging world have reinvented themselves as Lone Rangers in the creator economy. Slap a badge on that podcast and hitch a ride on the promise of endless subscription growth, minus 10% per newsletter sub or 30% for the first year in the AppStore. It’s not the long tail, so what is it? To be sure, the world will endorse the talented solitary surfers, armed with MG Sieglerian talent for the suite spot of the tech zeitgeist, the revolutionary zeal of the breakthrough synthesists of the political, lyrical, and comic survivalists.

How will the media compensate for the loss of their gatekeeper status? For starters, the more the stampede accelerates, the bundlers will storm the economics with constructs that look very much like the magazines and social destinations they replace. As crypto enters the bloodstream, streaming will generate a new measure of success and equity for the artists. Free will still be the driver of the form, but transitional models like tip jars will migrate to social capital to be banked by investors betting on the future success of the talent.

Even this early, some things have to change. The no recording conceit is an artifact of the launch stage, soon to be jettisoned when the effort reaches escape velocity. Clubhouse gains much of its critical mass from who rather than how many are swarming; interesting combinations of speakers and listeners weigh more tellingly than the raw numbers of name guests and moderators. Live is important, but committing to the voice of the artist is a calculation of time, window of opportunity, relevance to the emotion and tenor of the times. And the competitive landscape for that attention spans so many of the medias being replaced or transformed by the application of free.

None of this means the newsletter and conversation startups won’t succeed. Subscribing gives us something to consume to justify the tithe, and most people who drop streaming subs replace them with another service. As these services proliferate, competition drives innovation and expansion into events and paradigm shifts like Netflix and SPACs. Witness TechCrunch, built on just the dynamics Substack and Revue-Twitter now make accessible to a new wave of Arringtons.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, April 16, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

TikTok is taking another step towards directly funding publishers’ content with today’s announcement that it’s financially backing the production of media publisher NowThis’ new series, “VIRAL,” which will feature interviews with public health experts and a live Q&A session focused on answering questions about the pandemic. The partnership represents TikTok’s first-ever funding of an episodic series from a publisher, though TikTok has previously funded creator content.

Through TikTok’s Instructive Accelerator Program, which was formerly known as the Creative Learning Fund, other TikTok publishers have received grants and hands-on support from TikTok so they could produce quality instructive content for TikTok’s #LearnOnTikTok initiative. The program today is structured as four, eight-week cycles during which time publishers post videos four times per week.

NowThis had also participated in the Creative Learning Fund last year and was selected for the latest cycle of the Instructive Accelerator Program. But its “VIRAL” series is separate from these efforts.

NowThis says it brought the concept for the show to TikTok earlier this year outside of the accelerator program, and TikTok greenlit it. TikTok then co-produced the series and provided some funding. Neither NowThis nor TikTok would comment on the extent of the financial backing involved, however.

The “VIRAL” series itself is hosted by infectious disease clinical researcher Laurel Bristow, who spent the last year working on COVID treatments and research. Every Thursday, Bristow will break down COVID facts in easy-to-understand language, NowThis says, including things like vaccine efficacy, transmission timelines, and treatment. The show will also bust COVID myths, provide information about ongoing public health risks, and feature interviews with a cross-section of experts.

Each episode of the will be 45 minutes in length and will also include an interactive segment where the TikTok viewing audience will be able to engage in a real-time Q&A session about the show’s content. In total, five episodes are being produced, and will air starting on Thursday April 15 at 6 PM ET and will run through Thursday May 13 on the @NowThis main TikTok page.

@nowthisTune in to our new TikTok live show VIRAL on Thursdays at 6pm ET with host @kinggutterbaby

♬ original sound – nowthis

NowThis has become one of the most-followed news media accounts on TikTok, with 4.6 million followers across its news and politics channels, since launching a little over a year ago. Because of its focus on video, it’s been a good fit for the TikTok’s platform.

The approach TikTok is taking with “VIRAL’s” production, it’s worth noting, stands in contrast to how other social media platforms are handling the pandemic and COVID-19 information. While most, including TikTok, have pledged to fact check COVID-19 information, remove misinformation and conspiracies, point users to official sources for health information, and provide other resources, TikTok is directly funding public health content featuring scientists and researchers, and then promoting it on its network.

The company explained to TechCrunch its thinking on the matter.

“As the pandemic continues to evolve, we think it’s important to provide our community an outlet to dispel misinformation and communicate with public health experts in real-time,” said Robbie Levin, Manager of Media Partnerships at TikTok. “NowThis has consistently been a great partner that produces engaging and informative content, so we felt this series would be an impactful and important avenue for our users to receive credible information on our platform,” Levin noted.

While the pandemic has driven the topic of choice here, paying creators for content is not new. And TikTok isn’t the only one to do so. Instagram and Snapchat are both funding creator content for their TikTok clones, Reels and Spotlight, respectively. And new social platforms like Clubhouse are funding creators’ shows, as well.

TikTok says it’s not currently talking to other publishers to produce more series like “VIRAL,” but it isn’t ruling out the idea of expanding its creator funding and producing efforts. In addition to its accelerator program, which is continuing, TikTok says if “VIRAL” proves successful and the community responds positively, it will pursue similar opportunities in the future.

You may ask yourself, say the Talking Heads. What is this thing working from anywhere? Or as Google says, work from right here in the office. As the vaccines roll on out, some of us are just not ready for returning to normal. On this edition of the Gillmor Gang, the office is a state of mind, served up by Zoom and Clubhouse. It sounds like Clownhouse, with unlimited fungible bozos on the menu.

Surely we are binged out, election recalled, floating in a vat of VC alphabet soup. SPACs are everywhere and nowhere, water cooled conversations masquerading as big ticket conferences, right wing looneys seeking blanket pardons. And we’re applying for permission to stay home in our digital workshops? Yes, it will probably work for a hot second, but when will the research measure what has really changed. After a year of living a nightmare, some of us are ready for anything but the rest of our lives.

The other day on Clubhouse, they celebrated the life and times of Hal Willner, a record producer extraordinaire who died suddenly of COVID at 64. My Gang colleague Michael Markman sent me a Clubhouse notification suggesting I might want to listen in, and I did. I knew Hal a little bit, worked with him on several of his projects, and made the mistake we all make too often of assuming he or she would be around for the duration. So I clicked on the link and found myself in a room full of people who knew him a whole lot better. It was cathartic to hear them try and describe the guy, his life’s work, his day job at Saturday Night Live, and his magical series of projects pairing the strangest combinations of artists you could not even imagine. But he did.

So when we start to figure out this new world we’ve been propelled into, the normal we are fashioning out of the hints the virus has left us about what’s important, we all knew Willner and the mischievous glint in his eye just enough to wish for just a little more help in the now. His friends were on surer footing in this crazy clubhouse, chiming in from literally all over the world. Some saw him as a mentor, others as a collaborator, me with the twinge of regret for not being remotely brave enough to appreciate the brief window into this gentle giant for the luck of the encounter. I knew he was special, I knew it didn’t matter how or why we all got there at some time, and here was Clubhouse serving up a human experience only possible because people like Hal seized these moments of the days going by.

Yet it’s easy to say these new constructs are built like a house of cards, that the hype will fade, the economics atrophy, the big get bigger. It may all be true, but what part of the really big idea Clubhouse or Medium or Substack is truly vulnerable? There is where it becomes political posturing as much as anything. Just because the current or pivoted business model is suspect doesn’t mean success isn’t lurking just around the corner. If the world is suddenly toxic, does that preclude the idea that adjusting to the emergency can produce new realities that can improve on the nature of conventional reality?

Take Medium for a second. The writing platform announced a blogging flashback, blogrolls, as a new feature to amplify signals of affection for favorite authors. The Medium analytics are harnessed to project an organically-updating list of favorite follows informed by recent updates by the authors. For the readers, this is a convenient hybrid of social and feeds; for the writers an incentive to gain timely traction in the community of what on Twitter we call the social cloud. It is simple in execution but deep in purpose, as it encourages you to post to Medium. The platform has recently pivoted away from funding original content after pivoting away from eyeball-driven advertising, but this new feature could be a way of letting the existing architecture fund the growth of strategic analytics. The more you deliver signal to the follow notification stream, the more you prime the pump of handclaps and time to click metrics, which increases the strength of the blogroll signal and so it goes.

You may ask yourself, what does this have to do with working from anywhere? Well, the idea you can nurture a self-healing community of co-workers through digital technologies is right at the top of the list of things we want to do to bolster the new economy. While audio is seen as subtractive from video, it is additive in terms of broadening the user base beyond so-called creators to the so-called doers, the folks who move the products and services from place to place. It’s radio, a companion stream of news, music, soap box, ideas, alerts, reminders, and coffee breaks that fuels the day and lights the night. It’s digital mom and pop.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 26, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

Messaging is the medium these days, and today a startup that has built an API to help others build text and video interactivity into their services is announcing a big round to continue scaling its business. Sendbird, a popular provider of chat, video and other interactive services to the likes of Reddit, Hinge, Paytm, Delivery Hero and hundreds of others by way of a few lines of code, has closed a round of $100 million, money that it plans to use to continue expanding the functionalities of its platform to meet our changing interactive times. Sendbird has confirmed that the funding values the company at $1.05 billion.

Today, customers collectively channel some 150 million users through Sendbird’s APIs to chat with each other and large groups of users over text and video, a figure that has seen a lot of growth in particular in the last year, where people were spending so much more time in front of screens as their primary interface to communicate with the world.

Sendbird already provides some services around that core functionality such as moderation and text search. John Kim, Sendbird’s CEO and founder, said that additional developments like moderation has seen a huge take-up, and services it plans to add into the mix include payments and logistics features, and that it is looking at adding in group audio conversations for customers to build their own Clubhouse clones.

“We are getting enquiries,” said Kim. “We will be setting it up in a personalized way. Voice chat has certainly picked up due to Clubhouse.”

The funding — oversubscribed, the company says — is being led by Steadfast Financial, with Softbank’s Vision Fund 2 also participating, along with previous backers ICONIQ Capital, Tiger Global Management, and Meritech Capital. It comes about two years after Sendbird closed its Series B at $102 million, and the startup appears to have nearly doubled its valuation since then: PitchBook estimates it was around $550 million in 2019.

That growth, in a sense, is not a surprise, given not just the climate right now for virtual interaction, but the fact that Sendbird itself has tripled the number of customers using its tools since 2019. The company, co-headquartered in Seoul, Korea and San Mateo, has now raised around $221 million.

The market that Sendbird has been pecking away at since being founded in 2013 is a hefty one: messaging apps have become a major digital force, with a small handful of companies overtaking (and taking on) the primary features found on the most basic of phones and finding traction with people by making them easier to use and full of more interesting features to use alongside the basic functionality. That in turn has led a wave of other companies to build in their own communications features, a way both to provide more community for their users, and to keep people on their own platforms in the process.

Sendbird is one of a wave of companies that have identified both that trend and the opportunity of building that functionality out as a commodity of sorts that can be embedded anywhere a developer chooses to place it by way of an API. It’s not the only one: others in the same space include publicly-listed Twilio, the similarly-named competitor MessageBird (which is also highly capitalised and has positioned itself as a consolidator in the space), PubNub, Sinch, Stream, Firebase and many more.

That competition is one reason why Sendbird has raised money. It gives it more capital to bring on more users, and critically to invest in building out more functionality alongside its core features, to address the needs of its existing users, and to discover new opportunities to provide them with features they perhaps didn’t know they needed in their messaging channels to keep users’ attention.

“We are doing a lot around transactions and payments, as well as logistics,” Kim said in an interview. “We are really building out the end to end experience [since that] really ties into engagement. A couple of new features will be heavily around transactions, and others will be around more engagement.”

Karan Mehandru, a partner at Steadfast, is joining the board with this round, and he believes that there remains a huge opportunity especially when you consider the many verticals that have yet to adopt solid and useful communications channels within their services, such as healthcare.

“The channel that Sendbird is leveraging is the next channel we have come to expect from all brands,” he said in an interview. “Sendbird may look the same as others but if you peel the onion, providing a scalable chat experience that is highly customized is a real problem to solve. Large customers think this is critical but not a core competence and then zoom back to Sendbird because they can’t do it. Sendbird is a clear leader. Sendbird is permeating many verticals and types of companies now. This is one of those rare companies that has been at the right place at the right time.”

I use Feedly to work my way through each day’s stream of politics, tech, and media stories. Today, I am greeted with a picture of something called Feedly Cloud and the following message:

Scheduled Maintenance Feedly will be back in less than 30 minutes.

60 minutes later, it still says that. Feedly is built on RSS aggregation of my favorite news sources, things like the New York Times, Washington Post, Techcrunch, Protocol, Deadline, Techmeme, and writers like Om Malik and Benedict Evans. Notice that very few newsletter authors make this list, mostly because they push via email. I wonder if that is because vendors like Substack and Revue want to promote their subscription model, but if so that is shortsighted. It’s not about the subscription, it’s about the relationship.

I pay a monthly fee to Feedly, and I get a piece of the Web I can call my own. If I see something I want to find later, I put it in the read later “folder.” If I think I might want to refer to it in the newsletter, I push it to a Feedly board that I can import into Revue along the right side of the screen. If I want to push a story live to the Telegram stream, I drop it on a board where a series of bots posts it to a chain of locations ending with the @gillmorgang Twitter identity. If I click the Feedly icon, it’s now less than 90 minutes ’til Feedly won’t be back.

Luckily, Revue has a section in the right screen list called My Items, where I’ve added a link to a Rolling Stone story with the following title:

Hear How Beck Turned Paul McCartney’s ‘Find My Way’ Into a Funky Dance Number

Rolling Stone has gone to a partial firewall model with a subscribe button, but kindly leaves access to the Vevo promo video embedded on the Gillmor Gang newsletter link below. Someone on the YouTube page has posted part of the Rolling Stonewalled text Wikipedia-style in the comments section, copied below (Beck speaking:)

I remember hanging out with Paul and his wife Nancy several years ago and Nancy mentioned that she wanted to go out dancing before calling it a night. We ended up at some club in West Hollywood and I remember noticing that Paul and Nancy were TEARING IT UP – really enjoying themselves more than anyone else on the dance floor. Last year when he asked me to remix this track, I remembered that night and wanted to try to recapture that amazing spirit I felt while watching him on the dance floor…sort of my little tribute to Paul “in his groove.” When I then heard the falsetto vocal in Paul’s original track I wanted to lean further into something really loose and funky – I pulled out my Hofner (because of course) and put down a few bass lines…and everything came to life from there. The best part of the entire experience, though, came a week after I’d turned in the remix, when Paul called to tell me he’d been dancing in his kitchen to the track all week.

The track runs 4:56, so a few clicks later I’m probably down to 80 minutes to go.

Maybe this is a more serious problem, I begin to suspect. Is there a business model problem here? McCartney is getting paid. Beck is getting paid. Steely Dan is not getting paid for that wonderful chord, the one where the keyboard stretches out to the horizon and meets the rhythm track. I’m getting paid, too. Click it again, go ahead.

I went back to the original version of this song, a record called McCartney III which the artist has written, played all the instruments, and recorded track by track during the pandemic. It’s fun, reminiscent of the original McCartney I he released to break up the Beatles in 1970. But this reimagining with Beck I like a whole lot better. Paul may have been the cute one, but he always glowed in resonance with John Lennon. “It’s getting better all the time… Can’t get much worse.” Beck doesn’t have the Lennon mordant wit, but he brings a sardonic edge that works in this vaccinated time.

As Joe Biden joked in his press conference the other day about his predecessor, “Oh God, I miss him.” Not really. We’re reimagining how to get back to work from everywhere, and I bet the answer is a lot more like life + than hybrid. On this episode of the Gillmor Gang, Denis Pombriant uses Zoom’s Stop Video button to great effect to opt out of more Fungible talk, non or otherwise. Now you see him, now you don’t. But he can hear you. It’s Zoom’s new Instant Clubhouse effect. Clap on, clap off. Somehow I doubt we’re eager to give that up as a collaboration tool going forward. Clap back on.

Just then, Feedly came back to life.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 26, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

Instagram today is officially launching a new feature called Remix, which offers a way to record your Reels video alongside a video from another user. The option is similar to TikTok’s existing Duets feature, which also lets users to react to or interact with another person’s video content while creating their own. Instagram’s new feature has been in public testing before today, so some Instagram users may have already gained access.

We recently reported on Instagram’s plans with Remix, when noting that Snapchat was developing a Remix feature of its own. In fact, Snapchat is also using the name “Remix” for its TikTok Duets rival that’s currently in development.

On TikTok, Duets are a key part to making the app feel more like a social network and less of just a passive video-watching experience. Users take advantage of Duets to sing, dance, joke or act alongside another user’s video. They will do things like cook someone else’s recipe, record a reaction video, or even just watch a video from a smaller creator to give them a boost.

Meanwhile, TikTok competitors — like Instagram Reels, Snapchat’s Spotlight or YouTube’s Shorts, for example — have launched their short-form video experiences without a full set of engagement or editing features like TikTok has, making their apps feel like pale knock-offs of the original. Remix on Reels is a first step towards changing that perception, by giving users at least one important option to engage and collaborate with their fellow creatives.

To use the new Remix feature, you’ll first tap on the three-dot menu on a Reel and select the new “Remix this Reel” option. The screen will then split into the original Reel and your own new one, where you can begin to record side-by-side with the original. When you’ve finished, you can tweak other aspects of the recording like the volume of the original video or your audio and you can optionally add a voiceover. After applying these or any other edits, you can publish the Remix.

The feature will only be available on newly uploaded Reels — so unfortunately, if you want your older Reels to be duetted, you’ll need to reupload them, it seems.

Image Credits: Instagram

Your Remixes will appear alongside any other Reels you’ve recorded on the Reels tab on your Instagram profile, and you’ll be able to track who has remixed your content through Instagram’s Activity tab.

The feature is rolling out, starting today, says Instagram.

One of the challenges that some would-be TikTok rivals have faced is that they often lack the same robust set of content creation tools, like filters, effects, and tools for repurposing others’ content — like TikTok’s Stitch and Duet, for example. It now appears that Snapchat is working to correct that latter problem, however, as it’s been spotted working on a TikTok Duets-like feature called “Remix,” designed for replying to Snaps. This feature will allow users to create new content using their friends’ Snaps — a “remix,” that is.

Initially, the feature will allow users to reply a friend’s story with a remixed Snap. To do so, you can record your own Snap alongside the original as it plays — much like a TikTok Duet.

The feature, which Snap confirms has launched into external testing, follows Instagram’s public test of a similarly named “Remix” feature focused on Reels content. (It had also tested a version for Stories as a first step.)

In Instagram’s case, the company explains that Remix lets anyone create an Instagram Reel where your video and theirs play side-by-side. This is, essentially, Instagram’s own version of TikTok Duets, a tool that’s often used to interact with other TikTok users’ content. In Duets, TikTok users can sing, dance, joke or act alongside another user’s video; cook someone else’s recipe; record reaction videos; boost videos from lesser-known creators; and more. It’s a core part of what makes TikTok feel like a social network, rather than just a platform for more passive video viewing.

Last fall, TikTok announced it was introducing several new layout options for Duets in addition to the left-right layout, including a new top-bottom layout, a special “react” layout, and a three-screen layout.

Some of those same Duet formats and others now appear to be under consideration by Snap, as well.

In its Remix feature, Snapchat users are presented with a screen where they can choose from a variety of options for combining Snaps — including the side-by-side and top-and-bottom formats, as well as others like where content is overlaid or where you could react to a Snap.

Image Credits: Photo of Snapchat’s Remix feature via @alex193a on Twitter

According to reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, who first spotted the addition, Remix also offers a way for users to tag friends or other people they want to have permission to either remix or share their Snap via a new toggle switch.

Image Credits: Photo of Snapchat’s Remix feature via @alex193a on Twitter (opens in a new window)

It appears that users will be able to access the “Remix” feature from the same menu where you can today either report” a Snap or send it to others.

This menu, of course, is also available from within Snapchat’s new TikTok competitor, known as Spotlight, launched last year.

Though initially, Remix is being tested among friends, we understand that it’s expected to make its way to other parts of the Snapchat app in time. And likely, this would include Spotlight. Much like TikTok, Spotlight offers a video feed filled with short-form, entertaining videos that you can scroll through with up and down swipes, often set to popular music — thanks to Snap’s music industry deals. This would be a natural fit for Remixes, as it’s a common way for users to interact with each others’ content to create a dialog.

Image Credits: Photo of Snapchat’s Remix feature via @alex193a on Twitter (opens in a new window)

Snap confirmed with TechCrunch it’s beginning to test Remix on its app.

“I can confirm that externally we are testing the ability to reply to a friend’s story with a remixed Snap,” a spokesperson said. “It lets you build on your friend’s Snap while recording your own alongside the original as it plays for contextual conversations on Snapchat,” they noted.

The company didn’t offer an ETA for a broader rollout at this time.

The other day, I attended a celebration of one of the pioneers of collaboration technology, Ray Ozzie. The father of Lotus Notes, Ozzie left Lotus and his startup firm Iris after a hostile takeover by IBM, and eventually joined Microsoft when that company acquired his next startup, Groove. By “attended” I mean a virtual event put on by the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. Ray’s peers and partners gathered in a Zoom chat, with a tour of Ray’s early days including amazing hardware like a touchscreen based enterprise chat system called Plato, and these strange things called floppy disks with the earliest source code for DOS and other prehistoric things called operating systems.

At Microsoft, Ray soon became one of several CTOs, and eventually took the role of Chief Software Architect as he helped midwife the company’s move toward the Web and away from its dominant Office suite. Politically, he faced the twin power centers in Redmond: Office and Windows, the latter of which has receded in strategic importance as mobile technologies like iOS and Android took over in the wake of Apple’s iPhone success. But there’s no doubt that Ray’s elevation allowed Bill Gates, who spoke movingly about Ray at the CHM, to pivot to focus with his wife on the philanthropy role at their Foundation. Talk about just in time, as Bill’s voice in the battle against the pandemic has often been a trusted beacon of hope and science in a sea of denial, misinformation, and well, you know the rest.

In his gracious speech, Ray mentioned Gates, Lotus founder Mitch Kapor, and a name less well known to many, Dave Winer. I’m not positive why Dave was called out, but I’m sure it had something to do with Winer’s work championing the development of blogging, RSS, and its attachment extensions that birthed podcasting. In today’s climate of media streaming, newsletters, and live conversation-casting a la Clubhouse, surviving the pandemic means marshaling our tools to work and live more deeply and richly from anywhere. Talk about just in time.

Clubhouse is under attack in the Twitterverse, with some suggesting it’s just another outlet for the noise of social media, or a business idea destined for landfill in the wake of the next shiny object. Clubhouse counterattacked with another overflow megasession from Facebook’s Zuckerberg and the CEOs of Spotify and Shopify. The messaging app Telegram pushed a voice chat 2.0 release with tools for inviting speakers, listeners, raising your hand to speak, and recording built in. The stampede continues, but to what end? Like NFTs, a grifters’ paradise?

Perhaps we’re experiencing a massive multiplayer game where collaborative innovations are being combined and redefined on the fly. One Clubhouse session materialized with one of the big thinkers in mobile, Benedict Evans. After several years as an analyst at Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) , he’s moved back to London and gone paid newsletter with some of his 150,000 plus subscribers to his weekly free version. Struggling as I am with rising subscription costs, I’ve been making do with waiting for some of his firewalled essays to play off in the free version. But here was a session with Benedict and another former A16Z analyst focused on NFTs and crypto, Morgan Beller.

The talk was at a torrid clip, but meta across both the upside possibilities and the context of earlier innovations that seemed heavy on the gamble but paid off. This was vintage Evans in a casual setting where he gave me a ton of signal, bouncing off an analyst I immediately followed after ten minutes or so, adding her to a notification stream the next time she joined in. At one point, the moderator pinged me to invite me to join in, but thankfully I chose the “maybe later” option so I could go back to desperately trying to keep up with the flow. Maybe later when I actually know something by learning from people who live and breathe this stuff. I can’t even be sure what fungible means so far.

It was not your average big ticket press conference; it was access to people steeped in their interests and willing to be measured against the astuteness of their observations. The social following tools ostensibly produce more effective notifications based on providing interruptions the listener is willing to accept. The size of the crowd is manageable (50 -100) and drafts off the characteristics of not just who is on stage but who’s listening and in what combinations. It’s a mixture (I hope) of follows plus percentage of successful clicks on targeted notifications.

This all feels like a mashup of collaborative platforms, menu items in a new operating system where ideas and tactics are tested transparently in the open. Remember our former president, who famously laundered the unthinkable in public as a way of commanding the conversation. The alphabet soup of NFTs and SPACs is difficult to separate from MLMs and such of previous eras, but eventually we’ll figure out what’s real. A good place to start is in the trenches with practitioners of this new arts yakking it up on the new media channels.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 19, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

One clear sign of a maturing platform is when the company exposes the services it uses for its own tools to other developers. Zoom has been doing that for some time introducing Zoom Apps last year and the Marketplace to distribute and sell these apps. Today, the company introduced a new SDK (software development kit) to help developers embed Zoom video services inside another application.

“Our Video SDK enables developers to leverage Zoom’s industry-leading HD video, audio, and interactive features to build video-based applications and desktop experiences with native user interfaces,” Zoom’s Natalie Mullin wrote in a blog post announcing the new SDK.

If you want to include video in your app, you could try and code it yourself, or you could simply take advantage of Zoom’s expertise in this area and use the SDK to add video to the application and save a lot of time and effort.

The company envisions applications developers embedding video in social, gaming or retail applications where including video could enhance the user experience. For example, a shop owner could show different outfits to an online shopper in a live video feed, and discuss their tastes in real time.

Zoom CTO Brendan Ittelson said the SDK is actually part of a broader set of services designed to help developers take advantage of all the developer tooling that the company has been developing in recent years. As part of that push, the company is also announcing a central developer portal.

“We want to be able to have a single point where developers can go to to learn about all of the tools and resources that are available for them in the Zoom platform for their work in development, so we’re launching developer.zoom.us as that central hub for all developer resources,” Ittelson told me.

In addition, the company said that it wanted to give developers more data about how people are using the Zoom features in their applications, so they will be providing a new analytics dashboard with usage statistics.

“We are adding additional tools and actually providing developers with analytic dashboards. So folks that have developed apps for the Zoom ecosystem are able to see information about the usage of those apps across the platform,” Ittelson said.

He believes these tools combined with the new video SDK and existing set of tools will provide developers with a variety of options for building Zoom functionality into their applications, or embedding their application into Zoom as they see fit.

Let’s stipulate the storm of user media (social audio, newsletters, live streaming) is evidence of something real and lasting. When this citizen media migrates to small business and the enterprise, we see that as confirmation, validation. Most of these efforts are in the investment phase, where startups and platforms consolidate ecosystems around the various disruptions.

Clubhouse is moving to a more careful onboarding process that eschews mandatory gobbling of your contacts data and your phone number as a requirement for invitations. Twitter is surprisingly far along on integrating a suite of pilot projects — its Clubhouse clone Spaces, the Revue newsletter creation and distribution tool, and whatever happens to the Periscope live video streaming services the company has abandoned as a standalone.

As the smoke clears, what emerges is a hybrid of work from anywhere and post-pandemic digital collaboration solutions. At the top of the stack, social audio delivers some real leadership in the casual way it captures user attention. While commuting listening is proscribed for at least the next quarter, exercise and mental health breaks pick up a lot of that deficit. Some of the resulting content is appointment focused, keynote events with industry leaders and celebrities. Smaller sessions are organized around self- and group-help concerns, and the usual assortment of get-rich schemes. Much of this competes directly with cable news and podcasts, and will likely absorb the older networks into the new paradigm over time.

You can see this at play in the streaming realignment, where cable-cutting is driving us toward broadband-based consumption of so-called linear television programming. Last night, we ended up switching from Comcast’s video access to CBS’s Grammy coverage in favor of IP streaming via the CBS All Access app (now renamed Paramount +.) The Comcast CBS channel was full of glitches and pixillation; the streaming version rock solid with what seemed like better video and audio quality. On the appointment television side of the equation, old-style network shows like This Is Us and Grey’s Anatomy are finding it more difficult to compete with Netflix, Prime, and other streaming originals. And then there are the kids, who refuse to even recognize anything they can’t stream as relevant.

Moving down the stack from streaming audio (I like that better than social audio as a thing) to the newsletter services, we discover what happens when fragmentation of the media produces too much content and not enough loyalty to a manageable number of suppliers. That loyalty thing is perhaps the new eyeballs, where the stickiness of the relationship is much more desirable for its ongoing lifetime value. Newsletters at their inception were aggregators built to skim the cream of relevant media, in effect replacing the home page and adding a social layer of authority. Now the glut has moved from posts and podcasts to the newsletters themselves.

To differentiate and encourage paid subscriptions, creators are now being wined and dined with tools for managing these microapp sites and competing with magazines and publishers for marquee authors. Newsletter stars start appearing on streaming audio in much the same way that Washington Post and New York Times reporters populate the CNN and MSNBC roundtables. Newsletter’s role as a blend of must reads is shifting to original material and a marketing channel for influence with the streaming audio communities. Twitter’s Revue newsletter tool already lets you drag and drop tweets into the latest issue. It seems a small tweak to use the newsletter as a calendar for upcoming Spaces notifications of events. The company has announced plans for Super Followers who can produce and receive subscribed content via this path between the platform and satellite services.

Twitter hasn’t been Super Clear on how or what video services they will maintain after they sunset Periscope, but closing the loop between streaming audio and on demand video programming gives Twitter a powerful advantage over services like Clubhouse that have fewer pieces of the puzzle. On the other hand, Twitter has to demonstrate newfound ability to launch and integrate the pieces to stay competitive with competitors both visible and in stealth. They include Facebook, Amazon and its growing ad platform, and streaming “Plus” services at a time where subscribers are dropping subscriptions to add new offerings from Disney, Apple, HBO Max, Paramount, and the cheaper free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) networks like Peacock and Hulu.

Working from anywhere is accelerating the streaming media transition. News becomes a notification-driven stream to dip in and out of as the vaccines begin to take hold. Work promotes attention and care of our values, while home brings a time of relearning how to breathe, treasuring our family and friends, and putting time into exploring things we have been fighting to keep alive: the rhythms of history, genealogy, climate change, the possibility that government can work for a change. As our anxiety moderates, we can dip into music, movies, sports, and other expressive uses of the powerful network we turned on to survive. Turn on, tune in, stay home.

Streaming audio can work for marketing, learning, sharing, and monetizing. It can also work for extending our collaboration with music, painting, storytelling, a kind of virtual comedy club, book club, and debating society. I can imagine the return of liner notes to the music experience, a kind of Prairie Home Companion writ small. The Grammys last night were awkward, strained by the exigencies of the virus. But the performances were bunched together, with the wonderful touch of the group of artists sitting on stools campfire-style after their song to listen and rock to the music of their fellow nominees. Clubhouse style.

We’re on the cusp of a powerful change in the way we live and work. Not just out of necessity but of a desire to fulfill the promise of global communication. We’ve laid the tracks of this new age of collaboration. Now we have to figure out what to do with it.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 12, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

YouTube Shorts, the company’s short-form video experience and TikTok rival, is launching today in the U.S. The feature allows creators to record, edit and share short-form video content that’s 60 seconds or less in length, optionally set to popular music. At launch, YouTube has deals with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group and Warner Chappell Music, Believe, Merlin, 300 Entertainment, Kobalt, Beggars, CD Baby, Empire, Peer, Reservoir, OneRPM and others.

Globally, YouTube has agreements with over 250 publishers and labels for use in the Shorts product, it says.

The YouTube Shorts product itself was first introduced in September and has been beta testing in India over the past several months, where it has since seen adoption triple.

Though you may have already encountered the YouTube Shorts “shelf” on the YouTube homepage, the ability to create YouTube Shorts videos was not live in the U.S. until today.

The experience of filming content for YouTube Shorts is very much like TikTok.

Creators have access to tools stop and start recording short video segments with a tap, much like the leading short-form app. They can also select the video’s backing music or sound and utilize a small handful of in-app editing features. At launch, these include speed controls to slow or speed the audio, a countdown timer, text timing capabilities to make text appear on the screen at certain times and, soon after launch, color adjustment filters.

Image Credits: YouTube

But while YouTube Shorts has a clever tool that lets you select the part of the song you want to use in your video, it’s lacking the more intelligent automatic sound-syncing feature that makes TikTok so accessible for beginners. YouTube’s product also at launch lacks a large catalog of special effects — like the AR features or green-screen options found on TikTok. Instead, like Instagram Reels, the initial goal with Shorts is to simply lower the barrier to entry for users who want to create and publish short-form video content on an existing social platform.

On the viewer’s side, the TikTok comparisons are even more obvious.

Currently, the experience can be launched via the YouTube Shorts shelf on the YouTube homepage, which has already been live in some markets, and, soon, from a dedicated Shorts tab in the YouTube mobile app.

Image Credits: YouTube

Once launched, you’ll be taken to a familiar full-screen vertical video experience where you can double-tap to like a video, tap into the comments or share the video with others. You can also subscribe to the creators’ YouTube channel from Shorts, if you find their content interesting.

You can also tap on hashtags in YouTube Shorts that will take you to a page with other videos using the same hashtag. (This, to be clear, is separate from the other YouTube hashtag pages announced recently, which will host both longer-form and short-form content.)

Image Credits: YouTube

Also like TikTok, you can tap on the music icon — in YouTube Shorts, a square icon, not a spinning record as on TikTok — to be taken to a page featuring that same sound. Here, you’ll find all the other Shorts using that sound and have the option to do the same.

Image Credits: YouTube

This “sound” could be a clip from a popular song, original audio or what YouTube calls “remixed” content. The latter refers to how Shorts creators can sample from other Shorts videos to make their own sounds. And, in the months to come, the company will expand this remixing capability across YouTube’s billions of longer-form videos. YouTube creators can choose to opt out of having their original audio remixed for Shorts’ clips, but by doing so they may limit themselves from finding a new audience.

YouTube suggests creators could remix videos to show themselves reacting to their favorite jokes, trying a YouTuber’s recipe or re-enacting a comedic skit, among other things.

Image Credits: YouTube

Since its launch in India, the YouTube Shorts player has passed 6.5 billion daily views globally. However, YouTube wouldn’t say how many creators had adopted the product, nor how many Shorts videos have been produced. But the Indian market is not representative of how Shorts may fare in the U.S. because the country banned TikTok last year, helping to boost other short-form video apps as a result.

YouTube, of course, isn’t the first social platform to copy TikTok. Instagram and Snapchat have done the same with Reels and Spotlight, respectively. But in YouTube’s case, it’s even more critical to offer support for short-form video to stay relevant in a market where TikTok has become one of the most downloaded mobile apps and a preferred tool for watching video content on mobile devices.

“I think Shorts and short-form video has come to feel like a natural progression for YouTube,” noted YouTube’s Todd Sherman, the product lead for YouTube Shorts. “We’re the original user generated video platform. And that was really based around video that’s created on the desktop — digital cameras, desktop computers and video editing software. Now, we’re really keen to take a step forward into this new world of video that’s really native to the phone,” he says. “And it’s really important that we build this in partnership with the creator community…and for that matter, even more broadly, the same goes for viewers and our partners in the music industry,” Sherman adds.

The YouTube Shorts product is still considered a beta, as YouTube expects to iterate on the Shorts experience over time, and respond to user feedback as it develops new features.

Longer-term, YouTube believes Shorts will differentiate itself from others on the market by way of its connection to the larger YouTube platform.

“There’s a two-way door here where we’re building a short-form video ecosystem,” explains Sherman. “You can take a step forward into YouTube or even YouTube Music in the foreseeable future. And then from YouTube, you could also initiate creation into Shorts. That bridging of ecosystems, I think is an important part of this,” he adds.

So far, however, TikTok rivals have often seen creators simply repurposing their TikTok videos for use on other platforms — not developing original content for each of the three: TikTok, Reels and Spotlight.

YouTube Shorts’ video creation tools will begin to roll out to U.S. users starting today, and will expand to all of the U.S. over the next several weeks, the company says.