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The New York Times, Flipboard, and “platform intelligence”

Very quickly, why I, for one, think the NYT/Flipboard thing is smart.

I sort of take issue with the wording on the above linked Atlantic article….it’s not really about becoming a wire.

It’s about becoming a service. Wire is a bit of an antiquated term and platform intelligence is not really the same thing that the AP does. 

Associated Press sells its work at a very, very high price to newsroom across the country to supplement their own local work.

The New York Times is being smart about what content they put where, and why they want it there.

The NYT/Flipboard deal is also good because it’s a non-Twitter channel. More competition for news system of the future.

— Dave Winer ☮ (@davewiner) June 25, 2012

What I am hoping is happening is they are looking at the bunches of content they create and saying “Where can we put this, and of what use will it be to our audience?”

It’s not that different than what a (good) social editor does. We look at content and say “How can I repackage this to make it relevant to our Twitter/Facebook/Google+/Pinterest/whatever audience?”

It’s high time we step away from our traditional outlets — be it radio, newspaper, or TV — and look at where our audience is and how we can serve them there best. That’s the whole point of iPhone apps and responsive design, right? It’s serving our audience on the mobile platform.

(I’m not thinking of platform in a device sense, I’m thinking of platforms as ways in which people consume information.)

I’ve had long talks with our tech team about how/why we decide to use a third-party app to build or distribute something instead of building it ourselves. Although we build some pretty awesome stuff, there are things we can’t build better, or don’t have the resources to build better.

So, hopefully, this is the beginning of a new era of platform intelligence.

(Side note: Did I just invent a phrase?)