While buying Tumblr isn’t necessarily a bad deal for the two companies, as my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote, there’s another photo site out there that might have been an even better deal: Pinterest.

In many ways, Pinterest is also building a mobile-friendly photo site just like Tumblr, but Pinterest is also in the midst of constructing the underpinnings for a potentially much more lucrative native revenue experience. Pinterest is oriented around commerce and consumers craving particular items. That’s good for business.

No, buying Pinterest wouldn’t help Yahoo discover its inner tween. It’s a well-known fact that Pinterest is populated mainly by adult women — not exactly the demographic Yahoo needs to attract. And no, considering Pinterest’s valuation as of its last funding round, such an acquisition probably wouldn’t have come cheap. Acquiring the company would require a much bigger departure from Yahoo’s current mass-market advertising into the world of e-commerce and affliate links. It could be a harder sell to the company’s investors, and a bigger transition for everyone.

But if Yahoo is looking to shell out the big bucks for a site with viral growth, visuals to compete with Facebook, and a devoted community of users, Pinterest might have been the better choice. According to a Pew report in December, out of all online adults (which is basically anyone with an internet connection), just six percent of those people visited Tumblr on a regular basis, compared with 13 percent on Instagram (which isn’t exactly for sale), and 15 percent on Pinterest — only Twitter comes in at 16 percent ahead of the others and behind behemoth Facebook at 67 percent.

Less than a year out of beta, Pinterest is a dominant force on the web; a place where women of all ages collect photos of things that inspire them or things that they want to remember or create. For many, it’s a digital wish-list. And because of that, Pinterest sends huge amounts of traffic to online retailers. To be the intermediary between the people and the stores is a good place to be — you’re a crucial link that drives the sales, without any of the hassle of shipping or orders or user acquisitions that come with e-commerce.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann at the company’s new offices in San Francisco.

Pinterest has no business model in place right now — the site is free to join and for brands to integrate with — but that’s just right now, and it likely won’t last. The company just announced yesterday that it is starting to connect photos of items back to the brands who sell them, and it’s not hard to image how this could play out.

Tumblr does have a business model right now based on ads, and it just started rolling them out on mobile users in April. But the company has been reportedly burning through cash and not yet making a lot of revenue, hoping to bring in $100 million this year. But people are usually pretty unhappy about a free product suddenly peppering them with ads — especially if those ads are dropped into a feed that users have created (just ask anyone how they feel about Facebook ads.) CEO David Karp said at our paidContent event just last month that he wants advertising on the site to be native and unobstrusive.

“We focused on higher up in the funnel, the type of advertising that creates intent,” Karp told us in April. “It gives room for the most creative advertisers to create their best work. I think we’ve started to prove it, and see really good examples of it.”

But that’s a hard nut to crack.

Suddenly, the possible Pinterest model of taking a cut on sales and traffic resulting from users creating digital shopping lists looks a lot less disruptive to the core experience, and potentially more lucrative, than trying to solve mobile display ads for the Tumblr feed. Making money off traffic and sales wouldn’t disrupt Pinterest’s core product, and would generally fit in with the company’s existing user experience, just as promoted tweets are fitting with Twitter’s on both desktop and mobile (a profitable venture so far estimated to bring Twitter $528 million in ad revenue this year.)

So no, buying Pinterest wouldn’t make Yahoo all that hip. But buying the site that has potential to become a strong force in modern, social retail? Seems like a good bet — especially since teens might leave you once Mom joins and you become mainstream.

Of course, as Om and others have already mentioned, there’s no guarantee this deal will actually be consummated: it could fall apart on valuation, as so many deals do — or Facebook could swoop in with a much higher offer and snatch Tumblr out of Yahoo’s clutches, the same way it did when it stole Instagram away from Twitter last year for close to $1 billion.

Update: According to the Wall Street Journal, the Yahoo board of directors has approved a $1.1-billion all-cash bid to acquire Tumblr.

It makes Yahoo look desperate — because it is

Even if the deal does get done, one of the risks for Mayer and Yahoo is that the company could look desperate by paying more than $1 billion for a site that had revenues of less than $15 million last year (although CEO David Karp has said that figure should hit $100 million this year). That’s an almost bubble-like multiple for a company, and there will likely be plenty of criticism from investors who believe that $1 billion could be better spent elsewhere — in other words, on businesses that would make Yahoo a better return.

But the painful fact is that Yahoo doesn’t just look desperate — in many ways it is desperate. Mayer has made some changes since she took over the ailing former web portal, including the acquisition of Summly and a number of other mobile-focused startups and services, but the company still needs to make some aggressive moves if it is going to jump-start any growth at all. And since Yahoo has about $4 billion in cash on hand, it can arguably afford to make a big bet.

Yahoo buying Tumblr makes sense. Tumblr is only big, cool, newish social platform that Yahoo can afford.—
Henry Blodget (@hblodget) May 17, 2013

For Yahoo, the addition of Tumblr would do a number of things: because of the size and profile of the deal, it would make a major statement about Mayer’s intention to do whatever it takes to revitalize the company, and it would also send a signal to Facebook and Google — and even Apple — that Yahoo is a potential force to be reckoned with when it comes to potential acquisitions. Is doing that worth $1 billion? That’s for Yahoo’s investors and board of directors to decide.

Just as important, it would inject some much-needed life and energy into the somewhat stale lineup of content that the company currently relies on, which caters more to the over-50 set than it does to anyone in the much-desired 18 to 25 demographic. More than any other network, Tumblr is the platform of choice for media-obsessed teens and 20-somethings, who spend massive amounts of time sharing photos and videos and animated GIFs on the site — an engine of potential value that Yahoo desperately needs.

Tumblr gets a massive exit

This doesn’t come without its own risks, of course: As a number of observers have noted, Tumblr’s content contains a large quantity of not only mature or arguably offensive content but outright pornography, which many argue is the source of its massive traffic numbers. How Yahoo (or Facebook for that matter) would deal with this kind of content remains to be seen.

3 q's for Yahoo: 1) Can you convert Tumblr users to Yahoo products? 2) Can you monetize Tumblr PVs? 3) What to do w/ all that Tumblr porn?—
Mark Zohar (@markzohar) May 18, 2013

For Tumblr, meanwhile, being acquired would solve a number of problems — the main one being that the company has gone well beyond the “we’re a startup so we don’t really have to make money” stage, and is facing increasing pressure from the investors who have given CEO David Karp more than $125 million in venture financing, an investment that values the company at about $800 million. Accepting a giant check from Yahoo would take care of that problem in one fell swoop, especially if it was all in cash.

With a major company like Yahoo as a partner, Tumblr could connect its massive audience of users to the firehose of ads and other monetization methods the giant web portal has, and potentially generate much more revenue than it could have by itself. The only lingering question at that point is whether Tumblr fans decide that Yahoo is poisoning the well of social content and community on the site, and decide to flee for greener pastures. In other words, does Yahoo make Tumblr into YouTube — a successful standalone network that can grow and prosper on its own — or does it become MySpace?

The only scenario where a Yahoo-Tumblr combo works is if Yahoo keeps Tumblr separate in the same way Google managed YouTube.—
Mark Birch (@marksbirch) May 18, 2013

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / ollyy and Albert Chau

This idea has come up before, but I was reminded of it when I read a Nieman Journalism Lab post about some research being done by Lee Humphreys, looking at the way that communication — and particularly personal communication, through letters and diaries and other pre-digital tools of expression. Although this doesn’t seem to have much to do with how we use ultra-modern services like Twitter or Facebook, there is a lot more to it than you might think.

Media has always been personal and social

As Humphreys describes it, her research shows that if you look at human communication over a longer period than just the past generation or two, it becomes obvious that one-way, broadcast-style “mass media” isn’t the norm at all — instead, the norm is interpersonal or multi-directional communication that shares a lot more with social media such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook. Rather than creating a new communication style, we are actually returning to one.

“Humphreys said one of the early conclusions from her research is the possibility that the mass media of the 20th century was in fact a blip, a historical aberration, and that, through platforms like Twitter, we are gradually returning to a communication network that indulges, without guilt, the individual’s desire to record his existence.”

For example, Humphreys says that the idea of diaries or journals as private things — which their owners hide underneath a mattress or keep in a secret place under lock and key — is a fairly new one. As recently as the late 19th century, it was common for people to read each other’s journals as a way of catching up with what they had been doing, and in many cases this was done with the author of the journal taking part in the discussion. In that sense, journals were a mix of private and public, in much the same way that social media is.

Although the Nieman Lab post doesn’t mention it, there was also the idea of a “commonplace book,” which was a kind of paper version of a blog, a place where people would keep snatches of text or ideas that they came across, and then share that with others. Famous writers such as John Milton and Ralph Waldo Emerson kept commonplace books, and the phenomenon is seen by many as a prelude to what would become the “remix culture” of today.

The era of mass media is over

The idea that mass media was a kind of historical accident has been raised by others as well, including Tom Standage of The Economist — both in his upcoming book, called “Writing on the Wall,” and in a series of pieces in the magazine about the nature of digital media. The latter described how the interconnected qualities of social media and “networked journalism” mirrored the way that media used to function before newspapers were invented, when the local tavern or coffee house was the center of the information ecosystem. The title of his book, Standage says, also refers to:

“The ominous implications of the rebirth of social media for mass-media companies that arose in the industrial era, predicated on the high cost of delivering information to large audiences. The conclusion of the book is that the mass-media era was a historical anomaly… indeed, it might better be termed the ‘mass-media parenthesis.’”

If this is in fact what we are experiencing — that is, the unbundling or dismantling of a mass-media infrastructure that was constructed to serve the needs of readers (and advertisers) at a specific time in history — then what can we expect? Among other things, probably further downsizing and layoffs and bankruptcies of media companies whose size and cost structure and print focus no longer corresponds to the needs of the marketplace.

And on the positive side, we are also likely to see the growth of new entities that take advantage of the networked, social and smaller-scale nature of the media ecosystem — startups like Circa, for example, or algorithmic players like Prismatic, along with larger entities like The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed. In a very real sense, it is both the best of times and the worst of times.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Feng Yu and Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

Witness the ad industry’s reaction to claims it is dragging its feet on “Do Not Track,” a system to let consumers tell companies not to harvest their online personal information.

“We keep getting demagogued by the FTC,” Stu Ingis, the head of the Digital Advertising Alliance, told AdWeek. The remark came in response to a speech this week in which the head of the Federal Trade Commission suggested new rules might be on the way.

Does Ingis have reason to worry? Perhaps. Consider that after a year of relative silence, the dreaded (in the ad industry, anyway) “Do Not Track” phrase is back in the news on a regular basis. Next week, for instance, U.S. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va)  is holding a public hearing to trumpet his do-not-track legislation. Meanwhile, Microsoft and Mozilla are setting their Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers to block third-party cookies — small, ubiquitous computer programs that record the web pages you visit.

For advertisers, these developments threaten to throw a wrench into an ad system that puts a high value on “retargeted” ads. Indeed, there is already evidence that fewer cookies means lower ad prices.

On the other hand, any type of sweeping law is unlikely. While politicians like beating the privacy drum, the details — and even the definition — of “Do Not Track” are hopelessly complicated. Companies like Google and Facebook (which are giant advertising firms) claim the term is confusing to consumers and, in some cases, have chosen to ignore browser instructions about cookies.

At the same time, these companies are doubling down on ad products that target individual users. Facebook, for instance, now lets customers buy ads based on third party data and is even partnering with retail outlets like drug stores to collect users’ offline shopping information. The social network and other tech companies, which have growing clout in Washington, will lobby hard to prevent any serious change to the current ad system.

Finally, the focus on cookies could ultimately prove to be a red herring in the”Do Not Track” debate. This is because more consumers are using mobile devices to access the internet — and these devices don’t rely on cookies for advertising in the first place.  In response, Apple has developed a sophisticated way for advertisers to target users’ devices while companies like TapAd and Adelphic have found ways to identify users no matter what device they use. In other words, any new “Do Not Track” law that targeted cookies would have a limited effect in a world where marketers follow us on our mobile devices.

The bottom line is there has been more sound and fury than usual about “Do Not Track” but that comprehensive privacy reforms are nowhere in sight.

As Skift reported Tuesday, Google handed over the company to founder Arthur Frommer sans social media accounts. In other words, Google is keeping all of the followers that Frommer’s accrued on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Google+, YouTube and Pinterest. These thousands — or more likely millions — of accounts are valuable because they represent a huge collection of serious travel enthusiasts.

While Google will not keep the Frommer’s name, it’s able to keep the followers by simply changing the name on the account; in the case of Twitter, all of the @FrommersTravel followers are now following Google-owned @ZagatTravel:

This account is now @zagattravel! Welcome. Stay tuned for info on where to go, where to stay and how to explore around the world.

— Zagat Travel (@ZagatTravel) April 9, 2013

The social media data will power Google’s ongoing forays into the travel market in which it offers services like flight and hotel search, and Zagat reviews.

In retrospect, it appears that the social media data may have been Google’s goal along when it obtained Frommer’s from publisher John Wiley & Sons for $22 million in August 2012. The company has not disclosed how it much received for selling the brand back to Arthur Frommer, who intends to relaunch the title’s print editions, which Google decided to discontinue in favor of digital-only offerings.

In response to a question about the social media accounts and the price of the sale, Google provided this response:

We’re focused on providing high-quality local information to help people quickly discover and share great places, like a nearby restaurant or the perfect vacation destination. That’s why we’ve spent the last several months integrating the travel content we acquired from Wiley into Google+ Local and our other Google services. We can confirm that we have returned the Frommer’s brand to its founder and are licensing certain travel content to him.

The new feature, which Bloomberg announced on Tuesday, comes after the Securities and Exchange Commission updated its disclosure rules to say that public companies can now reveal important news on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

For practical purposes, Bloomberg’s decision means traders will not have to monitor a separate screen to watch for companies or executives that announce news on Twitter. While most market-moving news still arrives by way of traditional news wire agencies or official websites, social media sites are becoming an increasingly important tool for distributing such information.

The SEC’s rule to allow social media disclosures comes after an investigation into Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ decision to share relevant corporate information through a Facebook post.

Under the new rule, public companies that want to use social media platforms for market-moving news must first tell investors that they are doing so.

The idea is somewhat similar to those Magnetic Poetry Kits: Users slide preselected words on top of artwork to create a poem. “The whole process takes less than a minute on your phone or tablet,” Storybird posted on its blog Thursday.

Storybird CEO Mark Ury told me that about 20 percent of the works that users created on Storybird were poetry,”so we knew we had demand.”

On the blog, he outlined the reasons that the company is excited about launching a poetry option:

“1. Fits on a phone, so that our members can use it anywhere. We want visual storytelling everywhere, because people and their stories are everywhere.

2. An even simpler storytelling format. Stories are hard to write and take time! Poetry is short and sweet. We used the same creative constraints for Poetry as we did with books: you can do only one thing, but that one thing is fantastic.

3. Poems are hyper social and look great on Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Your friends, family, and fans can easily read, share, and embed them.

4. They’re stunning. Poetry scales from the phone to the desktop (an AMAZING engineering and aesthetic feat from the team) to ensure the art looks great. It uses the same colour algorithms as our book covers and includes a light transparency on the word vessels, which makes the final compositions elegant and rich.

5. As with books and artwork comments, Poetry is designed to be family friendly. The word sets are fixed and were developed by a seasoned book editor from one of the Big Six publishing houses to enable creative expression without creative maligning.” (Ury wouldn’t say who the editor is.)

Storybird, which launched in 2010, has over two million members. The company has raised $850,000 in seed funding and is advised by former Tumblr exec John Maloney. The site operates on a freemium model, selling memberships to teachers and individuals, and also lets users pay to download stories as PDFs or order print versions of their creations. If the poetry model takes off, Ury says, Storybird will “sell downloads to print at home. If those do well, we’ll offer professionally printed cards or small posters.”

Many Storybird customers are schools. The poetry option isn’t rolled out for school accounts yet, but will be available to them soon.

Subscribers who opt in will see what their friends watch and like (click to enlarge).

U.S.-based Netflix subscribers can now connect their Facebook account to the video service, and then be able to view dedicated categories called “Friends’ Favorites” and “Watched by your friends” on the Netflix website as well as through the company’s apps on mobile and connected devices. Viewers can also opt into sharing all of their viewing behavior on Facebook’s website.

The company said on its blog Wednesday morning that it will eventually offer additional social sharing functionality:

“The Netflix social features will evolve with new capabilities being tested regularly. Upcoming tests include capabilities to allow members to explicitly share their favorite titles on Facebook and discuss with their friends.”

There are some privacy provisions that are supposed to prevent over-sharing: Subscribers who opt into sharing their viewing data with Facebook can prevent the sharing of a title “by clicking Don’t Share This during the first few minutes of playback on most devices,” according to a Netflix help page. Titles that have already been shared can also be unshared — but cautious users may just want to turn off sharing altogether before they embark on some late-night B-movie binge viewing.

Netflix first rolled out its Facebook integration in Canada and Latin America in late 2011, but bringing the feature to the U.S. was complicated by a 15 year-old privacy law called the Video Privacy Protection Act. That law was meant to prevent video rental stores from releasing data about the VHS tapes a customer rented, but it also prevented Netflix from sharing data with one’s Facebook friends.

Netflix lobbied heavily to change the law, and Congress eventually amended it earlier this year, giving Netflix an opportunity to add Facebook integration for its U.S. customers as well.

Don’t wait for style guides to catch up

According to Merriam-Webster, “email” should have a hyphen. But that doesn’t mean you should follow the rule. “Even if people don’t quite understand the rule, they’re still going to make a judgment,” said Gail Marie, content editor at ad agency McKinney.

“I don’t think at a digital agency we should be hyphenating ‘email,’ no matter what the dictionary says,” Kristina Eastham, communications manager at digital ad agency Digitaria, said. Similarly, she suggested that using “Web site” instead of “website” can be a marker of uncoolness.

The new sign you’ve made it: You invented a word

“Historically, brands have gained marketing fame by bastardizing English,” Eastham said, mentioning examples like Apple’s “Think different,” the “Got Milk?” campaign and “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.” Now, she said, the biggest sign of success is “if you can work a word into the English language based on your brand or technology” — Googling, friending, liking. “When somebody says ‘Instagram that,’ everybody knows what it means.”

Sean Carton, who teaches about digital communication at the University of Baltimore, noted that Facebook has actually changed the definition of the word “friend.” “Ninety-nine percent of the people you’ve friended are not your friends in the traditional sense,” he said. “They’re just not your enemies.”

Some tech concepts still lack words. “I don’t know what to say when someone writes me an email to introduce me to someone I haven’t met,” Eastham said. “I hate saying, ‘Nice to ‘meet’ you.’ I think it sounds so tacky.”

Carton expressed the desire for a shorter way to say “WWW.” He’s heard someone try “triple dubs,” but perhaps not surprisingly, that hasn’t caught on.

A mistake not to delete…. his first name is Cory. RT @acarvin: Corey Booker on making mistakes on Twitter: never delete your tweets. #sxsw—
Richard Robbins (@rich1) March 10, 2013

What’s next: Text becomes visual

With the rise of visual forms of expression like Tumblr, Instagram, animated GIFs and Vine, brands have to learn to write short and differently (just when you thought you mastered 140 characters…) Fast Company’s Neal Ungerleider said he’s seeing more and more emojis in reader comments on Twitter, and if Google Glass takes off we’ll see text overlaid on real life experiences.

(Editor’s note: The GigaOM Style Council endorses and enforces all the stances advocated by the panelists.)

Images sources: Mlkshk, someecards

As media theorist Clay Shirky has pointed out, the purpose newspapers originally served was to aggregate a wide range of information for readers who couldn’t get access to that information in any other way. A newspaper collected everything from news of events in far-off countries to weather reports, from horoscopes and comic strips and classified ads to cooking columns and political analysis. Around the turn of the century or so, this qualified as a breakthrough information-delivery technology.

Facebook wants to recreate the newspaper

We all know what happened next: first radio news and then television news ate into the market that newspapers used to have to themselves, and finally the internet came along to deliver the coup de grace. The ability to distribute information around the world at virtually zero cost disrupted what was left of the virtual monopoly that most newspapers relied on, and the social web — and what Om has called the “democratization of distribution” it unleashed — has accelerated that process even further.

Now, the functions a newspaper used to perform have been dis-aggregated, unbundled and dispersed: classified advertising is handled by services like Craigslist and eBay, political analysis has been taken over by dedicated sites like Politico and Talking Points Memo, networks like CollegeHumor and BuzzFeed fulfill the entertainment function that comic strips used to provide, and real-time news of all kinds increasingly arrives via Twitter — as well as photo and video-sharing services like Instagram and YouTube.

In a sense, Facebook has been trying to put much of this content back together for some time now. It has reached out to news companies to create things like “social news reader” apps (although that seems to have backfired rather badly), and it has tried to make the news feed a one-stop shop for users who want to find out not just what their friends and families are up to, but what brands or topics they are interested in are doing.

Facebook is doing this for much the same reason that newspapers did: because it makes an appealing package for advertisers. And the social network has a leg up on its legacy competitors in a number of ways, including the fact that it can target users much more precisely than newspapers ever could, based on any number of factors such as their interests, age or location. In other words, Facebook has a far better chance of becoming a newspaper than newspapers have of becoming a social network.

But being a newspaper has its drawbacks

Despite all those strengths, however, Facebook is in fundamentally the same position as newspapers and other traditional media outlets have been for years — namely, trying to aggregate enough interesting content together so that it can appeal to as many eyeballs as possible, and then sell access to those eyeballs to advertisers. And it has done an incredible job of doing this, racking up more than a billion users and levels of engagement that newspapers can only dream of. But it is still a middleman, just as newspapers were.

And the appeal of Facebook and other networks isn’t the only thing that has helped drive advertisers away from newspapers. Brands have also realized that the same media disruption that is killing newspapers gives them the tools to compete with the media outlets they used to rely on — by becoming publishers in their own right, creating their own newsrooms and “brand journalism,” and promoting sponsored content on new-media networks such as BuzzFeed (something we’ll be talking about at paidContent Live in New York on April 17). In other words, Facebook is not the only game in town.

Some prominent advertising experts — including Sir Martin Sorrell of the massive marketing conglomerate WPP Group — aren’t convinced that Facebook is even that useful for advertising, since they see it primarily as a social network designed for entertainment. And the more Facebook tries to adapt its newsfeed so that it becomes more appealing for advertisers, the more likely it is to irritate users who feel their feed is being tweaked and filtered in ways they don’t really understand.

In the end, Facebook may succeed in building the world’s best personalized newspaper — but doing this may not be as valuable as the company or its shareholders might have hoped.

Images courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover