De Rosa also said in a separate interview that he will be adding some new elements to Circa’s news repertoire — including a possible move into more traditional reporting. Galligan said that De Rosa was the company’s only choice for the editor-in-chief position, given what he has accomplished since he became the social-media editor at Thomson Reuters, and his status as a leading source of breaking news during events like the Boston bombings:

“I spoke with Anthony little over a year ago when we were getting Circa started, and gave him some ideas of where we were going, what our thoughts were about where we were going to take news. He was recommended to me by a bunch of people, because he’s always been on the forefront of thinking about this stuff and where news should move… we wanted somebody who could add editorial leadership but also push us forward.”

Reinventing the idea of a news story

As we described in a post last fall, Circa was founded by Galligan and Huh as an attempt to reinvent the news-consumption experience for a mobile device: it provides a summary of the top news stories in a number of categories — but unlike Summly, the news-summarizing app that was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year for an estimated $30 million, Circa’s story summaries are created from third-party news reports by an editorial team of human beings rather than by algorithms.

One of Circa’s unique features is that readers can “follow” or subscribe to a specific story and then get regular updates when there is a new development: instead of having to rewrite the entire story, the way many traditional news outlets do, Circa simply updates the existing entry and alerts users, who can then go directly to the new information. The feature is proving to be popular, Galligan said: during the Boston bombings, close to 30 percent of users subscribed to updates.

De Rosa, who has been social-media editor at Thomson Reuters since July 2011, said he was intrigued by Circa’s “follow” model, and also by other aspects of the service — in part because of a conversation he had with Huh at a media-industry event called NewsFoo before the company was even created. De Rosa said that he and the Cheezburger CEO (who was originally trained as a journalist) shared many of the same thoughts about the future of news.

“I was really interested in a lot of the principles behind it, and I think both of us share the ideals behind what Ben was trying to do — the concept of trying to transform the traditional article format, making articles more useful, thinking about presentation and timeliness, that was distilled into Circa shortly after that.”

Circa may move into traditional reporting

Circa came out of a broader news-reinvention project that Huh started called Moby Dick, which brought together a number of ideas about how news has to change for a digital and mobile age — including theories about how the traditional article format is no longer as useful a way of distributing information to news consumers, something journalism professor Jeff Jarvis and others have also written about (including Dave Cohn, the former Spot.us founder who was the founding editor at Circa and will now be De Rosa’s boss).

De Rosa said that in addition to helping build the editorial team — which currently stands at 11, some of whom are located in foreign countries so that Circa can have a 24-hour news flow — he wants to explore the idea of having Circa staffers do more of their own reporting, rather than just assembling stories based on reports from other news outlets. That extra reporting would likely involve calling primary sources to confirm information, he said.

“There’s no immediate desire to do original reporting, but that might be something I will push for — it doesn’t necessarily mean boots on the ground, but I definitely want to see the newsroom verifying information for themselves, so if we can contact primary sources and make sure that we feel comfortable about the information we’re putting out, I definitely want to ensure that our newsroom’s doing that.”

Both on Twitter and in comments to The Atlantic Wire, former Reuters.com editor Kenneth Li — who hired De Rosa — said that his departure was “heartbreaking” for the wire service. Former Thomson Reuters technology editor Peter Lauria (now at BuzzFeed) said something similar.

Heartbreaking. big loss for us. Big get for @circa RT @Circa: Introducing our new Editor-in-chief: @antderosa. blog.cir.ca/2013/05/28/cir…—
Kenneth Li (@kenli729) May 28, 2013

Big get 4 Circa..big loss 4 Reuters..big congrats 2 AnthonyRT @Circa: Introducing our new Editor-in-chief: @antderosa blog.cir.ca/2013/05/28/cir…—
Peter Lauria (@peterlauria3) May 28, 2013

And De Rosa’s ultimate boss, Circa co-founder and financial backer Ben Huh, also welcomed his newest employee on Twitter:

Welcome to the new world, where managing tweets can lead to the Editor-in-Chief job. Excited to have @AntDeRosa onboard @Circa (cc: @mg)—
  (@benhuh) May 28, 2013

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flick user Jan-Arief Purwanto and Shutterstock / wellphoto

It would be wise not to read too much into those McKinsey numbers, however: virtually all of the available evidence shows media consumption in print continues to decline, particularly with younger audiences, and as a result advertising revenue is disappearing as well. Media companies need to adapt to that fact, rather than trying to pretend it isn’t happening.

According to a post by Rick Edmonds at the Poynter Institute, the research came from a presentation by McKinsey principal Michael Lamb at a recent conference of the International News Media Association in New York. Lamb said that based on data from a number of sources, about 35 percent of the time consumers spend on news consumption is devoted to newspapers and magazines, while TV accounts for about 41 percent and smartphones and tablets account for only about 2 percent.

In other words, the research seems to show that while digital devices account for more than half of the total time that consumers spend with media in general — and about 10 times more than the amount of time they spend with newspapers and magazines — the amount of time they spend with “legacy” platforms expands dramatically when looking specifically at news consumption.

Time spent is not the only important metric

Although Edmonds notes that there isn’t much research out there to confirm McKinsey’s conclusions (apart from a Nieman Journalism Lab post in 2009 that saw Martin Langeveld try to dig into some readership numbers for newspapers), he says that other researchers he contacted thought that the numbers were probably “not far off” — in part because of the “lean back” form of consumption that print media involves, where users often spend hours with a cup of coffee and a paper.

Edmonds also argues that encouraging advertisers to look at these kinds of time-spent numbers might help newspapers and magazines improve their appeal, since time spent is a big factor in where advertisers spend their money. As he puts it:

“The time-spent metric suggests that there is more life in legacy formats than raw audience numbers and falling print ad revenues would imply. Since the ‘dying industry’ meme is part of print’s problem with advertisers, this could be incorporated in a case for the medium’s continued relevance.”

Unfortunately for publishers who might see this as reason for unbridled optimism, however, Edmonds goes on to note that the time-spent numbers “do not solve the basic advertising problem of vanished monopoly pricing power and strong competition from a wide range of targeted digital marketing options,” and that while users may spend less time overall with digital platforms when consuming the news, these shorter digital sessions “may be a more efficient way of consuming news.”

For most, the news occurs elsewhere

I think Edmonds puts his finger on one major problem: namely, the fact that for many news consumers, the “lean back” experience simply isn’t necessary any more. As research from the Pew Center has shown, large numbers of consumers are getting their news from aggregators such as Google News or Yahoo News — or possibly from newer solutions such as Prismatic and Circa and Flipboard — because they don’t have either the time or the inclination to go to a single newspaper source, or read in print. Is a lack of efficiency really a selling point for legacy print publications?

That’s not to say the “lean back” experience doesn’t still have value for many news and media consumers, but the other painful fact is that most advertisers aren’t specifically looking to advertise to news consumers — they want specific demographic segments or topic-specific shoppers, or other kinds of targeting that legacy publishers can’t offer, and they want engagement or “time spent” across a range of content types, not just news.

As Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker has repeatedly suggested in presentations about the evolution of the digital-media marketplace, advertisers are moving to where the puck is going to be — not where it is now. And according to virtually all of the available evidence, even from McKinsey itself, that means mobile and social and other platforms, not print. Publishers can either try to convince advertisers that they are wrong about this move, or they can try to adapt to it.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover

The young Brit created Summly to try and help solve the problem of consuming news content on a mobile device (something a number of others are focusing on as well, including San Francisco-based Circa). The app created machine-generated summaries of news articles, and D’Aloisio said in a phone call from London that he wants to see what Yahoo can do by applying the same kind of algorithmic approach to some of the company’s other news and entertainment content:

“It’s going to be a really fun journey. To see where we can take our technology with Yahoo’s focus on mobile under Marissa Mayer will be really exciting… there is so much opportunity to take these daily habits like weather, news, stocks and sports and use technologies like Summly to really turn them into an A-star experience. And I want to be there for as long as I feel is necessary to get Summly and Yahoo really doing well with mobile.”

Yahoo has a chance, D’Aloisio says

Although Yahoo has been criticized by many (including us) for being too large and slow to adapt to the new age of digital content, D’Aloisio said that he is excited about joining the company, and thinks that Yahoo under Marissa Mayer has a chance to be great again:

“Definitely with the approach they are taking at the moment — they’re moving at light speed, and it’s really exciting to be joining the company at this stage, because there’s so much opportunity in the next 12 to 24 months to take technologies like Summly and the other assets they have, like the newsroom and all of this content, and take it to the larger mainstream.”

The Summly founder said that while many see Yahoo as an also-ran, he thinks the company still has a chance to take advantage of the millions of users it has:

“Yahoo to me, as the founder of a company, is one of the biggest opportunities you could have — it’s one of those classic internet companies… the fact is that they have massive leverage in the industry, they have hundreds of millions of people coming to their content every month, and it’s really exciting to be building for that scale. That’s the exciting thing — it’s the scale that Yahoo brings, and that user base, that I really want to build products for.”

A “surreal journey” at times

D’Aloisio also admitted that he was surprised at how something that began as a hobby has turned out, and how much he has accomplished at such a young age:

“It’s a surreal journey. I guess I always saw this as a hobby — it’s just a passion of mine. And the fact that it’s [resulted in] an acquisition is something I never expected… and it wouldn’t have been possible without Horizon Ventures and Li Ka-shing, who took a gamble on me as a teenager. I really owe it to them and to everyone who has been by my side supporting me.”

The young entrepreneur said he has had a number of learning experiences along the way — including one described in a Gizmodo post from 2011 entitled “How I Made a 15-Year-Old App Developer Cry” — but added that it has been “a really incredible journey,” and he is looking forward to the next chapter with Marissa Mayer and Yahoo. One thing is for sure: If everyone at the company was as eager as D’Aloisio seems to be, the company would have no reason to fear the future.

The most obvious appeal of a purchase like Summly is that Yahoo gets access to a brilliant and charismatic young programmer in founder Nick D’Aloisio, who started the company in Britain when he was just 15. Om met D’Aloisio in Berlin and did an interview with him about the concept behind Summly not long after the teen launched his startup, and described how far ahead he was of many of his much more experienced peers. If nothing else, D’Aloisio might inject some fresh thinking into Yahoo, something it desperately needs.

Nick D’Aloisio

It’s not just fresh thinking about content or design either: while it may not be a blockbuster success story like Instagram or SnapChat, part of what made Summly interesting is that it was an attempt to rethink how we consume content on a mobile device. Circa, which is funded by Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh (and is part of our startup showcase at paidContent Live in April) is another startup focused on the same problem: how does news content need to be rethought for mobile?

Yahoo News may be far from cutting edge, but it still pulls in a fairly large audience — far larger than Google News. If Yahoo can use D’Aloisio and Summly’s algorithms to figure out how to take advantage of that on a mobile device, it could potentially have a winner on its hands. Google has done virtually nothing to optimize its news-reading experience for mobile, and efforts at recommendation or curation apps like Currents have mostly fallen flat.

According to an All Things Digital report, Yahoo may have paid as much as $30 million — primarily in cash — for Summly. That’s a lot for an app that only racked up about a million downloads and hasn’t really taken off in terms of readership, but for Mayer it theoretically accomplishes two important things: it shows that the company is intent on figuring out how content works on mobile, and it sends a message that Yahoo is willing to make acquisitions and bring in new talent in order to fix itself. Whether those efforts work, of course, remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Getty Images / Chris Jackson

Google showed off some prototype apps at the South by Southwest interactive festival that it came up with for its virtual display, including interfaces for photo-sharing and other services that either used voice commands or touch menus that rely on the device’s touch panel (which sits on the side of the headset). One of the apps it demonstrated was a New York Times app — designed by a developer at the newspaper — which mostly just pulled up headlines, but also allowed the user to ask for the story to be read aloud.

Voice interface, real-time, location aware

The voice interface for Glass is one of the obvious differences between it and other devices, although both the iPhone and Android phones support similar features for specific tasks via services like Siri and voice search. The need for audio input with Glass is driven in part by the size of the display, which is probably one of the most significant limiting factors when it comes to content: since it projects only a small virtual screen, there isn’t a lot of real estate for images or large chunks of text.

So what would the perfect news app designed for Glass look like? What follows are a few ideas I came up with — feel free to add your own in the comments:

• Short excerpts: If you have limited real estate, then you need to be concise, so a headline and a short snippet of text would be ideal — at least as a starting point. In addition to Google News, there are already a number of services that are focusing on this approach for mobile devices, including Circa and Summly (Circa will be part of our startup showcase at paidContent Live on April 17). Theoretically at least, news-wire services would be best equipped for this kind of content.
• Real-time updates: In addition to concise summaries of news stories, Circa also offers another interesting feature that would be very useful for a device like Glass, which is the ability to “follow” a story and get real-time updates as they arrive. In a sense, this would be like a news-specific version of Twitter — very short, real-time and likely curated or filtered by an editor, whether a human being or an algorithm or both.
• Designed for voice and touch: As the Google prototype shows, voice is going to be an obvious interface for Glass, and using the touch panel will also be important way of interacting with the content. That means a news app that can be navigated via spoken keywords (next, more, etc.) as well as one that is segmented in some way so that chunks can be chosen quickly and easily with a tap. This would require news outlets to do a fair amount of work with metadata and tagging of their content.
• Location aware: To me at least, one of the most interesting aspects of a mobile device like Glass is that it knows where you are, and thanks to Google’s image-recognition technology, in many cases it even knows what you are looking at. The potential for adding useful information is huge, and Google has provided a glimpse of what that might be like with its Field Trip app, which adds “augmented reality”-style data. News updates and archives could be a significant source of useful information about specific locations, events and objects.
• Prescriptive data: In addition to Glass, one of Google’s more interesting pieces of technology is Google Now, the dashboard it provides on some Android platforms (and may be bringing to iOS) that pulls together information from a variety of sources — calendar, email, photos, traffic — to tell a user what they need to know. Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson envisioned this kind of content in 2011 as part of a future in which heads-up displays appear on objects like mirrors, photo frames and eyeglasses.

Not just news, but useful information

The migration of content to mobile platforms like Glass — which in many ways is just part of the ongoing evolution begun by mobile phones and tablets — poses a number of challenges for traditional and even new-media outlets. The technological know-how to take advantage of Google’s APIs, and to structure and tag content with metadata that will make it useful, is one challenge.

Another challenge is the ability to think of information in different ways: not necessarily just as “news” but specific kinds and formats of news, or even more broadly as simply “useful information” for someone wearing a mobile device. This isn’t something that most traditional media outlets are used to thinking of as important, but they are going to have to start doing so.

That’s not to say every news organization has to suddenly divert resources to the creation of content for Google Glass or other heads-up displays — but it does mean they need to start thinking about what it would involve now, and transforming some of the ways they produce content to take advantage of it. Not only will those skills will be useful for all kinds of mobile devices, but if they don’t start the evolution soon, Google will fill the data gap itself and they will be left on the outside looking in.

Images courtesy of Flickr users Thomas Hawk and Arvind Grover

Facebook made crucial gains in mobile this quarter, one of the primary areas that has been used to evaluate the health of the company since its IPO last year. Facebook saw mobile daily active users (DAUs) exceed web DAUs for the first time in the fourth quarter.

“Today there’s no argument. Facebook is a mobile company,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the earnings call Wednesday afternoon, stating strongly that while the company has made important leaps on mobile, it will not be developing the much-discussed Facebook phone.

The company saw a serious uptick in mobile advertising revenue, which made up 23 percent of its total advertising revenue in the fourth quarter, compared to 14 percent in the third quarter. Mobile is the most important game now for Facebook, as it was for the last earnings report. The company has worked to improve the speed of its native apps in 2012. Zuckerberg highlighted the speed of the company’s apps as a major area of improvement in 2012.

“Often, doing a good job is focusing on basic issues like performance and stability,” he said.

Over the past year, Facebook has focused tremendously on monetization through mobile advertising. COO Sheryl Sandberg emphasized that Facebook is the platform that marketers should consider when allocating their advertising dollars because of the company’s strength among mobile users, obviously contrasting the company to its ad rival Google.

“Facebook is a relatively new marketing platform, so proving that our ads are effective remains an important priority,” she said. “Marketers are realizing that our newsfeed is the most efficient and effective way to reach their customers.”

The company now has 1.06 billion monthly active users as of Dec. 31, as compared to 1.01 billion as of Sept. 30. The company has 618 million daily active users compared to 584 million on average in September, and mobile MAUs are at 680 million compared to 604 million as of Sept. 30.

The company recently released Graph Search, which will likely have its own monetization opportunities, and Zuckerberg was eager to emphasize that while it’s still a beta product, it creates serious long-term opportunities for the company. He took obvious digs at Google in emphasizing Facebook’s collection of personal data and connections that can be used in search, and said the companies had different goals:

“We’re just coming from a completely different place,” he said. “Our whole product is people and structured connections.”

Facebook has gone through a holiday season with the full roll-out of its e-commerce “Facebook Gifts” product. However, the company did not break out revenue from Facebook gifts in its earnings report, stating only that advertising made up 84 percent of revenue, up from 41 percent from the same quarter last year. And the company said only that it is working to figure out how to get people using Facebook Gifts more and making it part of the natural site experience. Revenue from payments and other fees (such as those connected with games) was $256 million, which saw essentially no increase over the previous year after adjusting for accounting changes in December.

This post was updated continuously to reflect Facebook’s afternoon earnings call.

In the interview with Bloomberg (which is embedded below), Mayer listed all of the things that Yahoo doesn’t have — including any proprietary hardware, software, an operating system, a social network, etc. (she could have added a search engine as well, since Yahoo has outsourced that to Microsoft) — but tried to argue that this was actually a benefit, not a disadvantage:

“Given that we do not have mobile hardware, a mobile OS, a browser, or a social network, how are we going to compete? I think that the big piece here is that it really allows us to partner… we work with Apple and Google in terms of the operating system. In terms of social network, we have a strong partnership with Facebook. We’re able to work with some of these players that have a lot of strength in order to bolster our user experience that we offer on the Yahoo site.”

Why would Apple or Google care about Yahoo?

This is a valiant effort on Mayer’s part, but what exactly does Yahoo have to offer Apple or Google in terms of a “partnership” around their operating systems and platforms? The web portal may still have millions of visitors a month who come to its news pages or other sites, but how does any of that benefit Apple or Google? Are they going to pay for access to that? Unlikely. Do either of them — or Facebook for that matter — really care about whether they get anything from Yahoo? Also unlikely.

In her reply to another question, Mayer said that one of Yahoo’s strengths is that it is a player in all of the things that people like to do on their smartphones, whether it’s email, weather, news, photos or sports scores. Those daily mobile habits, she argued, are the key to Yahoo’s success:

“When I thought about the strategy for Yahoo I pulled the list of what people do on their phones in rank order of frequency. If you ignore a few exceptions… the list looks like e- mail, check the weather, check the news, share photos, get financial quotes, check sports scores, play games. The nice thing at Yahoo is that we have all the content that people want on their phones. We have these daily habits. I think whenever you have a daily habit and providing a lot of value around it, there is opportunity to not only provide that value to the end user but to create a great business.”

It’s true that Yahoo still has plenty of users who have Yahoo email addresses, check Yahoo News, share photos through Flickr (especially now that it has an actual usable mobile app) and look at sports scores or go to Yahoo message boards. But it’s also true that these numbers have not been growing very much at all lately — if anything, they have been shrinking, as other players like Google and Facebook and Apple (Yahoo’s alleged partners) carve away the businesses that Mayer is describing. What kind of future is that?

Yahoo’s goal is the same as everyone else’s

Mayer also talked about how the key to Yahoo’s strategy around these daily habits was to make sense of all the data about people’s activities and use that to show them relevant content — in other words, the exact same thing that Facebook and everyone else has their eye on. Yahoo may want to be the “Google of content,” but so does Google. The big problem for Yahoo is that there’s no reason to believe it can do a better job at this than any of those other companies, who have more data and more resources.

Compounding that problem is the fact that Facebook and Apple and even Google are becoming less likely to want to share their data with others, not more. Facebook has been busy for some time cutting off access by outside parties, and there’s no reason to think that will stop — and while Yahoo may currently have a contract that gives it access to the Facebook graph (a prescient deal it signed in 2009), that contract comes to an end fairly soon. So what does Yahoo do then?

Mayer may be staking her future on the idea of outsourcing everything, but it is not a new idea at Yahoo: it is the same kind of approach the company has been taking ever since it decided to turn its search engine over to Microsoft. What does Yahoo actually own? Some pageviews and daily visitors (although it is mostly renting them, not owning them). The problem for Mayer is that the value of that asset is declining rapidly, and it’s not clear what replaces it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Shutterstock / Gl0ck and Yan Arief Purwanto

Today, we launched phase one of our new responsive site design, and the changes we’re introducing to GigaOM and paidContent will ensure that doesn’t happen to you here. At a time when readers are using so many different devices, one big challenge for digital publishers is retaining the quality and consistency of the reading experience not only across devices but also across different operating systems and browsers.

Now, whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, our sites will automatically adjust, rendering the content in the way that best fits that particular environment. We know, for example, that it’s harder to hit a target on the page with your finger than with a mouse, and so if you’re reading us on a tablet, we’ve enlarged the target to make it easier to strike. Similarly, rather than try to cram our entire site onto a 4-inch smartphone display, we’ve removed some content from the mobile view so as to focus the presentation of the most essential information. In all cases, the site simply readjusts to fit the real estate on the screen that you’re on at the time.

Below, you can see how the presentation of an actual story changes as the screen shrinks.

Those aren’t the only improvements that we’ve made. Among the other things you’ll notice about GigaOM and paidContent:

• More curation: If you’re time-stretched, our new “Must Reads” section tells you what you absolutely shouldn’t miss.
• Easier sharing: We’ve made it easier to share not only whole stories and also pieces of content within stories.
• Better performance: Because the pages are lighter weight, they will load faster.
• Crisper display: We’ve added blur-resistant icons and new text-size controls, so there’s no more squinting to read text or straining to hit a small target when navigating the site.
• A cleaner look: We’ve ditched a lot of widgets that had simply built up over the years but no longer serve their original purpose.

For phase one of the redesign, we’ve intentionally simplified the look and feel of the site — it’s more akin to updating the plumbing in a house than redoing the facade. But without reliable plumbing, a house isn’t very habitable. These upgrades pave the way for subsequent phases of this redesign over the next few months that will include more changes in how we present our content.

Finally, I wanted to thank the fantastic team that has been slaving away on the redesign for last several months: our head of product management Raza Zaidi; engineers Casey Bisson, Matt Batchelder, Zach Tirrell and Jamie Poitra; designers Stephen Engert, Arlo Jamrog and Jonathan Koshi; and our product guys Adam Kazwell and Ian Kennedy. They’ve worked long hours — and tested countless iterations in QA — and we think the results are great.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have suggestions or comments (positive or negative), please leave them in the comment thread in this post.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Images courtesy of PlaceIt by Breezi.

Today, we launched phase one of our new responsive site design, and the changes we’re introducing to paidContent and GigaOM will ensure that doesn’t happen to you here. At a time when readers are using so many different devices, one big challenge for digital publishers is retaining the quality and consistency of the reading experience not only across devices but also across different operating systems and browsers.

Now, whether you’re on a desktop or a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, our sites will automatically adjust, rendering the content in the way that best fits that particular environment. We know, for example, that it’s harder to hit a target on the page with your finger than with a mouse, and so if you’re reading us on a tablet, we’ve enlarged the target to make it easier to strike. Similarly, rather than try to cram our entire site onto a 4-inch smartphone display, we’ve removed some content from the mobile view so as to focus the presentation of the most essential information. In all cases, the site simply readjusts to fit the real estate on the screen that you’re on at the time.

Below, you can see how the presentation of an actual story changes as the screen shrinks.

Those aren’t the only improvements that we’ve made. Among the other things you’ll notice about paidContent and GigaOM:

• More curation: If you’re time-stretched, our new “Must Reads” section tells you what you absolutely shouldn’t miss.
• Easier sharing: We’ve made it easier to share not only whole stories and also pieces of content within stories.
• Better performance: Because the pages are lighter weight, they will load faster.
• Crisper display: We’ve added blur-resistant icons and new text-size controls, so there’s no more squinting to read text or straining to hit a small target when navigating the site.
• A cleaner look: We’ve ditched a lot of widgets that had simply built up over the years but no longer serve their original purpose.

For phase one of the redesign, we’ve intentionally simplified the look and feel of the site — it’s more akin to updating the plumbing in a house than redoing the facade. But without reliable plumbing, a house isn’t very habitable. These upgrades pave the way for subsequent phases of this redesign over the next few months that will include more changes in how we present our content.

Finally, I wanted to thank the fantastic team that has been slaving away on the redesign for last several months: our head of product management Raza Zaidi; engineers Casey Bisson, Matt Batchelder, Zach Tirrell and Jamie Poitra; designers Stephen Engert, Arlo Jamrog and Jonathan Koshi; and our product guys Adam Kazwell and Ian Kennedy. They’ve worked long hours — and tested countless iterations in QA — and we think the results are great.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have suggestions or comments (positive or negative), please leave them in the comment thread in this post.

Thanks again for being loyal readers.

Images courtesy of PlaceIt by Breezi.