"We bought Digg, but it was really a carcass," Borthwick explained. They completely abandoned the codebase, which now sits unused and unloved on a Github repository. Last summer, Borthwick discovered Digg was on the auction block, and within a week put together a handshake deal for Betaworks to buy its intellectual property. Once the model of Web 2.0, it eventually became an insufferable repository of internet detritus. Remember Digg? You probably used it sometime in the mid 2000s and then, unless you are a spammer, forgot about it. "The studio function is that there may be people dedicated to ," says Borthwick, "but if something spins up that looks related we can easily send them to that." Or maybe you’d prefer a game of Dots, the iOS Game of the Moment, made by–yup!–Betaworks.Īll of these pieces and companies are somewhat related they share people and data and many of the companies even work in the same studio. Surely you can find something to read between them. And in case I’ve bored you away from this site, Betaworks invests in Buzzfeed, Branch, and Tumblr. Would you rather tell a story of your own? There’s Tapestry, Betaworks’ self-publishing app, and Editorially, a new document manager in which the company has a stake. Or maybe you saved this story to read later, and are now doing so on Instapaper, Betaworks’ recently purchased reading application that’s being rapidly integrated into Digg. It’s possible that Bit.ly link was sent via SocialFlow, an algorithm-driven social media management program that helps brands know when and what to send to Twitter and Facebook. You may have arrived here via another Betaworks product: Bit.ly, the URL shortener that many media companies use not just for its ability to truncate links, but for the insights it delivers about how those links are shared. Chartbeat, which measures the live audience on a web page at any one time–is looking at you right now. You may not be familiar with Betaworks, but you use its products every day. As Betaworks CEO John Borthwick describes his company, he is putting together a puzzle. When it comes to online publishing, Betaworks has its stakes in nearly every aspect of the business: creation, curation, authoring, measurement, discovery, sharing, saving, even gaming. It starts, spins off, buys, and operates companies, mostly in media.
That Digg would even attempt to build a Google Reader replacement speaks to the culture of its parent company, Betaworks. But to rejuvenate that we have to make the verb meaningful again." Digg buttons have remained remarkably resilient around the Internet. "We’ve got to rejuvenate that whole infrastructure.
"I would love to be able to configure the Digg button to just do what I want," McLaughlin says. Theme alert: You are about to read a story about the history and rebirth of a relic of a much more recent Industrial Revolution. A strip where nature is artfully grafted onto an old abandoned rail line, butting up against avant garde architecture, to create something beautiful at once entirely new and constantly changing, with passing of the seasons and minute by minute as we walked through it. The High Line is where the city’s industrial past becomes something entirely modern and, at least in a boutique way, natural. I’d never seen the High Line before, and McLaughlin was clearly thrilled to show it off. It’s a gorgeous sunny afternoon in early May and McLaughlin is walking me along the High Line in New York City, just a few blocks from the offices that house Digg and its parent company Betaworks. Everyone who runs a commenting system ends up killing themselves or shooting up a post office.
0 kommentar(er)
