News today that LinkedIn has acquired Pulse for c$90m had echoes of the recent high profile acquisition of UK-HQed Summly by Yahoo. See Teen dreams of tech. Both take news items and give shorter versions for your iPad or smartphone. When I was reading reviews of Summly I came across the term TL:DR which I now understand stands for ‘Too Long: Didn’t Read’. Here at TechMarketView we have a limit of 300 words on a HotViews post and have sometimes heard the old excuse“Sorry it’s so long. Didn’t have time to write anything shorter’.
The world seems to be rapidly moving towards short items. Whether it is short items on the TV or radio, only listening to one track from an album or, indeed, 140 characters on Twitter.
Readers might also have seen recent rumours about a possible link up between Apple and Yahoo. Nobody is yet suggesting an acquisition; although that would be small beer considering Apple’s massive cashpile. But Yahoo has some rich content. Like Yahoo Finance (that I use all the time), Weather, Sport, News etc. Content is now richly prized - as we at TMV gleefully agree! It also, of course, now has Summly. One observer had the fanciful notion that it was Summly that Apple really wanted so they could present up short versions of emails. Maybe even getting them read by Siri.
Must stop now before I exceed my wordcount.