So this morning I'm drinking my coffee, doing my usual scroll through Feedly (still not totally sold on it, but Google Reader's got its execution date now so I'm shopping around like everyone else), and the top story on basically every tech blog is that Google added a "nose" to search. You type in something like "wet dog" or "campfire" and it pretends to sniff it out for you, complete with a fake scent-strength meter. It's an April Fools joke. It is, and I cannot stress this enough, not a real feature.
I get that Google's done the goofy-product bit for years now and some of it's been genuinely funny. But by 2013 every company with a marketing budget feels obligated to do their own version, and most of them just aren't funny, they're just a press release with a wink attached. My inbox this morning had at least four "totally real" product announcements from companies I follow, and by 10am I'd stopped opening them. If your joke needs a headline explaining that it's a joke, it wasn't good enough to need one.
Anyway. Here's the actual story from the last week that I think is way more interesting than any of that, and it happened Monday so it's already old news by internet standards, but I don't care: Yahoo bought Summly. If you haven't heard of it, Summly's a little iPhone app that uses some natural language processing tricks to condense news articles down into a few hundred characters you can read in about fifteen seconds. Not groundbreaking as a concept, people have tried "shorten the news" apps forever. What makes it a story is that the guy who built it, Nick D'Aloisio, is seventeen. He built the first version of it in his bedroom in London while he was supposed to be studying for his GCSEs, and the reported price on the deal is somewhere around thirty million dollars.
I downloaded Summly back when it first got attention last year, mostly out of curiosity, and honestly the summaries were hit or miss. Sometimes it nailed the gist of a piece in one crisp sentence, sometimes it spit out something that read like it had been run through a blender. I don't think the tech itself is what Yahoo's paying for. I think they're paying for the guy, and for a very loud, very well-timed signal that Yahoo (under Marissa Mayer, who's been buying up small teams and apps at a pretty aggressive clip since she took over last summer) wants to look young and mobile-first again after basically a decade of looking like neither.
Is thirty million dollars a reasonable number for an app most people never used? Probably not, if you're judging it purely on downloads or revenue. But I've stopped judging acquisition prices that way. Nobody bought Instagram for a billion dollars because of Instagram's 2012 revenue either. You're buying attention, talent, and a narrative, and D'Aloisio's narrative (teenager, bedroom, GCSEs, angel funding from Li Ka-shing and Ashton Kutcher of all people) is about as good as narratives get. Somebody in Yahoo's PR department is having a very good week.
What actually bugs me a little, and this is a small complaint so bear with me, is how much of the coverage this week has leaned entirely on his age like that's the whole story. "Teen sells app for millions!" Fine, it's true, it's notable, I get why it's the headline. But he'd been working on this thing since he was fifteen, iterating on earlier versions that flopped, and that part gets skipped over in favor of the number and the age. The interesting part isn't that a seventeen-year-old got lucky. It's that he kept shipping bad versions until one of them wasn't bad, which is a much less flashy sentence than "TEEN MILLIONAIRE."
Also, quick unrelated gripe while I'm here: the BlackBerry Z10 has been out in the US for about a week and a half now through AT&T, and I still haven't seen a single person using one in the wild. Not on the subway, not at the coffee shop, nowhere. I'm not saying that proves anything about how it'll sell long term, but it's a strange thing to notice when you're used to seeing iPhones and Galaxy phones everywhere you look.
Going to go poke at Summly again later today and see if it's gotten any better since last fall. Low expectations, but we'll see.