At the D:Dive Into Media conference, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told Peter Kafka that Google has all the data it needs to present Twitter data in its search results right alongside Google+ results. That has been the latest public response from Twitter after Google recently began pushing its own social network in search results while keeping out Facebook and Twitter.

“Google crawls us at a rate of 1300 hits per second… They’ve indexed 3 billion of our pages,” Costolo said. “They have all the data they need.”

Costolo went on to say that the dispute between Google and Twitter was never about money, as it’s been reported previously. Instead, he said that the disagreement between the two companies wasn’t limited to the financial disagreement. “Both of us wanted a value exchange where it wasn’t just about money,” he said.

Other interesting info from the keynote:

• On the company’s decision to allow country-by-country takedowns of tweets, Costolo said: “We want to be able to leave the content up for as many people around the world as possible,” while operating within the boundaries of laws in the countries in which it operates.
• On Twitter’s reasons for not participating in the SOPA/PIPA blackouts, Costolo said, “When you’ve got a voice like Twitter, you don’t take the batteries out of the microphone,” he said.
• On whether or not Twitter is a media company, Costolo said it is in the media business. Specifically, he said that Twitter is a distributor of traffic to other media companies. “We’re one of the largest drivers of traffic to all sorts of other media companies,” Costolo said.
• “One of the reasons we’ve got so many [celebrities]… is that they can interact directly with fans,” he said.
• Costolo said that Twitter was tremendously valuable for television, as it has become the focal point for television conversation and also extends the conversation about TV shows. “I think it will be commonplace to use Twitter as the focal point on the second screen,” he said.
• “Maybe 10 years from now, people will look back at my tenure and say, ‘Gee, what a moron.’”
• “I don’t think about how can I extract as much value out of this platform as possible… It’s about how can I create more value,” he said.
• Costolo doesn’t appear to see much value in second-screen social apps, repeating again the thought that Twitter would be the focal point for TV viewing in the future.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Facebook is becoming more and more like MySpace, and that’s not a good thing for the media business.

But don’t worry — I’m not gonna predict that millions and millions of people are ready to abandon Facebook for the next hot thing. In fact, this isn’t even about anything that Facebook, or its users are doing. Instead, it’s about the perception that Facebook can help to sell media products that no one wants to buy.

You see, when MySpace was still on top of its game, there was a moment when people thought it could help save the entertainment industry. Countless bands were on MySpace, and many of them found it to be an invaluable tool for communicating with their fans. That’s when folks in the music industry got the idea to use MySpace not only for promotion, but actual distribution as well.

First up was Snocap, the music startup founded by Napster’s Shawn Fanning. Snocap wanted to sell MP3s directly on musician’s MySpace profiles, complete with a widget and a rather complicated backend. Snocap’s pitch was that indie bands would be able to avoid the middle man and directly sell to consumers, and reputable online music platforms like CD Baby joined to give their 200,000 musicians a chance at raking in the dough.

Only, the money never came. CD Baby founder Derek Sivers wrote an eye-opening account of his dealings with Snocap in 2007, detailing how he hired six people to exclusively work on the cooperation — only to receive a measly ,000 check for eight months of music sales on MySpace. Snocap eventually closed shop when its assets were acquired by Imeem in early 2008.

Imeem itself got acquired by Myspace in late 2009, only to be folded into MySpace Music, a service the social network launched in cooperation and co-ownership with the four major record labels. The primary goal of MySpace Music wasn’t to sell tracks like Snocap, but to make money through advertising. And guess what: That didn’t work either. MySpace Music burned through “a lot of money,” observed Greg Sandoval from CNet last summer, reporting that MySpace was thinking about switching to a subscription model.

What does Facebook have to do with all of this? Both sites are obviously quite different, but the similarities are striking if you look at the way folks in the media business are projecting all of their hopes on them. Case in point: I got a pitch for a startup last week that wants to sell VOD rentals from independent filmmakers on Facebook, much in the same way that Snocap wanted to sell music downloads.

The startup in question, Berkeley-based FlickLaunch, actually has a pretty neat feature: Film makers can decide to give any number of views of their movie away for free, only asking users to press the Like button if they want access to the title. That way, 1,000 free views become 1,000 promotional messages in people’s Facebook news feeds, which could potentially reach a huge crowd for free. FlickLaunch also has the benefit of launching at a time when major studios are looking to Facebook as well to boost their online VOD sales. Warner Bros. has been experimenting with renting The Dark Knight and Harry Potter on Facebook, allowing users to pay for the movies with Facebook credits.

However, none of that matters if the product isn’t right. Internet users have for the most part rejected one-off VOD rentals, and opted for Netflix-like subscription plans instead. Netflix has captured 61 percent of the digital movie market, according to recent data from the NPD Group. Apple’s iTunes store, which is the biggest online platform for VOD rentals and sales, only has four percent of the market.

Of course, you can convince yourself that all you need is a better social media strategy to make online VOD take off and put all your bets on Facebook. Or you can face the facts: Facebook may be a great platform that has much to offer for the media business. But it won’t help you sell things no one wants to buy, much like MySpace didn’t help the record labels to preserve a failing business model.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Denis Dervisevic.

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One of the biggest stories of my career — as someone who covered telecom industry — happened fifteen years ago: The 1996 Telecom Act was the start of the liberalization of an industry that had been vertical with very little competition. What followed was an amazing transformation of the staid calling industry — not necessarily for the better.

One of the basic tenets of the 1996 Telecom Act was unbundled access to the telecom facilities of the local phone companies, which meant competing phone companies could access the so-called “last-mile” that led to people’s homes over the incumbent carrier’s network. The change in law created an insane amount of competition, and turned the economics of the business on its head. It led to kamikaze-style pricing of phone minutes. Voice had been the primary source of revenue for phone companies for nearly a century.

The increased competition was coupled with the arrival of Internet and Internet-based telephony. That allowed rivals such as cable companies to further take away voice customers. Skype, Vonage and others only added to the phone companies’ misery. Today, phone companies are happy to give away voice-minutes as long as you buy data from them.

Why do I bring that ancient history up?

Mostly because as I sit in the crowded Virgin America red-eye flight to New York, I’m thinking about the media business and the parallels I see between it and the media industry. In the media industry, we’re seeing an unbundling of a highly vertical business, with the most lucrative parts being siphoned off by Internet-based low-cost rivals.

Indulge me, for a minute. For longest time, things were quite cozy in the traditional media world. The large newspaper and magazine companies managed to survive the arrival of radio and television.

When competition got too intense, different types of media companies merged. It was something that made perfect sense. Time Inc., CNN, HBO — all became Time Warner — and it was a good example of such cross-platform synergy. When they applied the same logic to Internet by buying AOL, it blew up in their face. You’ll see why.

Many of us confuse the media companies as creators of media and content. In reality, their barrier to entry was ownership of distribution platforms. Just as telecoms of the past maintained their near monopoly by controlling the last mile of the network, the media companies maintained their money machine by controlling the distribution network: trucks, radio waves and television frequencies. The arrival of cable loosened their grip, but not as much.

Then came the Internet, which meant the distribution network was no longer under control of a select few. This saw the rise of new media entities such as CNET (now owned by CBS, an old media company.) And just as the distribution network was accessible to all, new open-source tools such as WordPress (see disclosure) came to market, making it easy for anyone to become a publisher of their own newspaper. With that began the great unbundling of the media business: something which continues today.

In the past, a typical big city newspaper would have multiple components: national and international news, sports, entertainment, business, travel, food, and real estate. These segments would bring in readers, which in turn would get the much-needed advertising dollars.

Today, the real estate section of a newspaper has been replaced by Curbed, Zillow and RedFin — with real estate advertising dollars flying away from newspapers to these new services.

For sports, you don’t need the back page; after all, you have SBNation, DeadSpin and ESPN. For technology news, you have TechCrunch; for analysis, you have GigaOM. For food-related stuff, you visit Zagat, Yelp, Epicurious, FoodSpotting and Foursquare. When it comes to entertainment news, PopSugar, Gawker, and thousands of other sites will keep you as busy as you want. Classifieds are for Craigslist. The brand advertising has followed, decamping from the pages of newspapers and television screens to these new media entities. In a post last fall, I wrote:

Because these new media are attuned to the needs of a new kind of information consumer, it’s hardly a surprise that media’s single largest source of revenues — advertising dollars — are getting sliced and diced in pursuit of this elusive, always transforming, info-savvy media consumer. Unfortunately, the media is used to selling page views, impressions and massive audiences: metrics as archaic as drinking on the job and smoking in a doctor’s office.

In 2005, the newspaper industry had revenue of around billion. Today, it is half that amount. The radio and television industry have gone through the same compression. TV advertising declined 21.2 percent from billion in 2008 to billion in 2009, and fell a further 12 percent in 2010 according to the Yankee Group.

On the flip side, the unbundled television experience providers continue to do well. YouTube and Hulu, which doesn’t reveal their sales are growing steadily. (Hulu has said that it is bringing in over 0 million a year, but had declined to comment on profits.) The growth in their audience — YouTube has 101 million monthly uniques and Hulu with 12.3 million monthly uniques — is a very rough proxy of audience’s preferences.

Today, no one cares if Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Network or the USA Network carries House. What matters is House. The show has been unbundled from the distribution network, which in turn has shifted the value to the show and the not the distribution platform.

As Joshua Auerbach of Betaworks had earlier pointed out:

Why doesn’t the traditional model work online? In short, the web is too fragmented (millions of videos, millions of web sites), too loosely coupled (countless hyperlinks, embed codes, APIs), and too nascent (too few revenue models, too little clarity about the future) to fit comfortably into a media conglomerate as they exist today.

The unbundling is also forcing a new kind of economics on the media industry. For the longest time, because the media companies controlled the distribution platforms, they could charge exorbitantly high rates for their advertising inventory. There was a lot less transparency in the system at that time, and arbitrary metrics like cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) became standard for the industry.

That CPM has become a millstone around the industry’s neck in this new Internet-centric environment, which has a lot more transparency (though not as much as we think there should be.) Today’s media industry, regardless of individual companies’ businesses, is a slave to page views and video views. Demand Media and the AOL of today are no different from the low-cost and flat-rate VoIP providers: selling cheap, search-optimized pages for nano-pennies.

And just as SMS, IM, Facebook and Twitter started to siphon away conversation minutes away from the traditional phone system, we are seeing something similar happen to the media industry as well. The chase for page views is going to face a whole different set of challenges from the likes of Facebook, Zynga, Netflix and Twitter. These services are siphoning off attention (and thus time) from what we have so far known as media.

Perhaps it is time for the media industry to come to terms with unbundling and re-imagine the definition of media. If it isn’t the medium, then what is it?

App of the Day: 100 Cameras and I

If you like Instagram, CameraBag and Hipstamatic, then you should definitely try out this 99-cent photo app created by Stuck in Customs. 100 Cameras and I gives you access to 100 different effects to add to your old or new photos. It can turn boring photos into elegant works of art, allowing you to pretend that you actually know how to take great pictures. It’s beautifully designed, and the filters are well thought out. I like that you can share photos via email or on different social networks including Facebook.

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Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. I’m also a venture partner at True.

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Logitech announced two new audio devices today, the Squeezebox Radio and Squeezebox Touch. The Squeezebox Radio is intended to be a portable device, with a built in speaker and wifi capability (allowing access to your music library). The Squeezebox Touch is intended to tie into your home theater system, providing the same type of access (via your home network) to you music library.

That little Touch might be handy to keep on your nightstand or whatever — your whole media library in a little package like that, it’d be perfect for late night reading.

From the press release:

Well, could have been a senior manager—the job seems to have already been filled. Still, let’s talk about it. Best Buy recently posted a job ad on its Web site looking for someone who would be “he primary lead for the Best Buy’s mobile, social, and video marketing and media efforts to drive in-store and online sales, create sustainable word-of-mouth evangelists, and brand loyalists.” Yup, that’s what a senior manager of emerging media does. No soul required, it seems.

You know a job is suspect when the entire Crunch Family (CrunchGear, MobileCrunch, TechCrunch, CrunchCrunch, etc.) qualifies, no questions asked. Here’s what Best Buy was looking for:

• Bachelors degree Liberal Arts, Marketing, Interactive Marketing, New Media, Business Administration or related

• 2 plus years of mobile or social media marketing experience at an Agency director level, strategist level, or brand interactive director level

• 4 plus years People or resource leadership experience

• 1 plus years of active blogging experience

• 250 plus followers on Twitter

A graduate degree is “preferred,” but who needs an education when you have Twitter followers? (Am I right?!)

Too bad the position was already filled. Not that Best Buy would have hired me, given my opinion of it.

via Revolution Mag