It’s inevitable: The machines are taking over media – but they’ll need the help of the masses.
Kicking off TheWrap’s conference on media and the entertainment industry, TheGrill, Twitter COO Dick Costolo and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner made clear that “machine learning” technology – leveraging information gathered from the raging river of social-networking information, of course – will lead the sea change in the digital space.
In other words, the company that succeeds at converging content, social networking and algorithmic technology to make itself most relevant to the user in real time, wins.
(Click here for video: Twitter COO and Linkedin CEO on Social Networking's Future)
Ultimately, that ability will be technology-based, not the work of human beings or media organizations manually curating content.
In other words, faceless computer servers – and the millions of people interacting with them -- are the editors of the future.
“Going forward, tech will drive media … it will be driven as much by machine-learning and social networking as it will be by curation,” Weiner said.
And Twitter is certainly working on that problem, right now.
“When we launched Twitter’s new interface last week, the intent was allowing users to interface more with Twitter without having to hop off our site," said Costolo. "Over time you’ll just see more and more of that from us.”
LinkedIn is also doubling down on its ability to leveraging its user/publishers: “We’re investing heavily at this point in extracting as much information as possible from LinkedIn,” said Weiner (above; photographs by Jonathan Alcorn).
This tight integration begs the question: Are companies like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn tech companies, or media companies? It’s not an entirely comfortable question for digital leaders like Costolo and Weiner – and they get asked it a lot.
“If the vast majority of revenue is coming from ad sales, you’re in the media business,” Weiner said. “(Ad-based companies) may define themselves as tech companies, but they’re media businesses,” Weiner said. “And that creates some friction.”
Costolo conceded that Twitter is evolving quickly from a tech company to a media company.
“It’s getting so that when events happen, they happen digitally on Twitter. We’re comfortable with that. Over half our employees are engineers and technology people – but we’re certainly becoming a media company.”
Future money will be made on organizing the vast torrent of information that can easily overwhelm even the savviest users – though it was launched in 2006, Twitter processes nearly 100 million tweets per day, with 370,000 people joining the conversation daily.
“A surfer can only organize so much information,” Weiner said. “Google’s mechanism was the algorithm; capable of indexing tens of billions of pieces of information. With social networking now added to that mix, the companies that will generate the most value will (extract it) from that massive stream of information – and with the most clarity.”
