Adam Levy

Kurt Wagner @ Re/Code - There’s a Shiny New Trend in Social Media: Actual Human Editors “While Facebook has been doing this to your News Feed for years with an ever-evolving software algorithm, the new wave of curators are hiring human editors to get things just right.”

Benedict Evans - Search, discovery and marketing  “Saying that ‘Yahoo’s directory didn’t scale’ misses the point. What we’re really seeing is a trade-off between two problems.”

David Byrne - a great curator beats any big company’s algorithm “Nowadays, everything and everyone can be curated.” Ben Thompson - Curation and Algorithms “Despite curation’s advantages the two biggest content players of all — Google and Facebook — are pure algorithmic plays.”

In the near future I’m going to start unfollowing everyone I currently follow on Twitter. The way I use Twitter has changed since I first joined several years ago and chose to follow friends. Since then I’ve added publications and public figures. Ultimately, I’ve created a very cluttered timeline, which provides a lot of content I really don’t care about. It’s time for some Spring cleaning (before spring ends).

It being Cinco de Mayo, I thought I’d shake up a couple margaritas. 

This guy has hundreds of videos on how to make cocktails. All of them are terrible. Check out his version of a margarita. 

There are so many things wrong with this.

1. Margarita mix! Seriously? If you’re making a margarita at home, and you have limes, do yourself a favor and use fresh lime juice. If you don’t have limes, MAKE SOMETHING ELSE OR GO GET SOME LIMES!

2. Salt the rim. Let’s just dump this glass in a huge thing of salt. Get it all over there. He ends up with so much salt, you can barely drink the cocktail. Getting the salt inside the glass causes it to melt into the alcohol. Not good.

Back to the Future predicted we’d have hundreds of channels by 2015. BINGO!

Hulu has reportedly acquired the exclusive streaming rights to Seinfeld for between $130 million and $180 million. Netflix recently paid a similar amount for all 236 episodes of Friends, which it started streaming at the beginning of the year.

Seinfeld is a staple in the rerun arsenal of networks like TBS and local broadcast network affiliates. The show is incredibly rewatchable, and the steady stream of syndication revenue even caused the studio to delay the show’s release on DVD. Of course, we just saw the same story play out with streaming.

The price tag on Seinfeld -- as much as $1 million per episode -- isn’t only telling of the show’s value, but the amount streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime are willing to pay for exclusive rights to content to help differentiate themselves, draw subscribers, and keep existing subscribers from churning out. Hulu has also reportedly struck a deal with AMC Networks to be the exclusive streaming home of all its future productions like Fear the Walking Dead.

With this deal Hulu is announcing that it’s not to be taken lightly as a second-tier streaming service. It will continue to put pressure on Netflix and Amazon Prime’s content costs.

Snapchat reportedly hired Peter Hamby from CNN to become the company’s “Head of News.” What the duties of the “Head of News” entails is unclear. 

Snapchat’s Discover service, which launched in January, already has at least three news outlets -- including Hamby’s estranged CNN -- sharing news stories with Snapchatters every day. Perhaps Snapchat has seen stronger engagement with those channels than others, and wants to delve into reporting its own news stories.

Discover has been a huge success for Snapchat, with some channels receiving more than 1 million views per day. That’s significantly better than CNN’s television ratings, and the audience skews much younger -- and therefore more valuable for advertisers. Snapchat shares ad revenue with its Discover partners, earning a share of the approximately $100,000 per day each channel brings in in ad spend.

But similar to Netflix, Snapchat has tons of data on its users that no one else receives access to, not even its partners serving up that valuable content. And as Netflix has done branching out into original content by using its user data, Snapchat may very well start to do the same. Originals make Netflix and Snapchat less reliant on media partners, which will continually ask for more money.

We already saw its early efforts in originals with “Literally Can’t Even,” which despite lackluster reviews on the blogosphere received enough attention that Snapchat renewed it for a second season. Perhaps Snapchat can infuse some data-driven feedback to the comedy short to make season 2 better.

Verizon began offering its Custom TV service on Sunday. The new service packages a base of 36 channels with two or more “Channel Packs” organized by niches like Kids or Sports.

Many are claiming that this is a clear sign that the days of paying for 180 channels and watching just 17 are over. To that my response is that this move hardly signals a revolution in how most people will receive and watch television programming.

The issue with Custom TV is that it doesn’t solve the problem cord-cutters and cord-shavers have complained about for years now. You still have to pay for channels you don’t watch.

The most glaring example of this is the News & Info channel pack. It contains both Fox News and MSNBC. Nobody watches both of those channels! You’ll also receive all three C-SPAN channels so you can keep up with all your congressional happenings. 

Even the base package of channels is filled with clutter like QVC, Jewelry TV, and a bunch of Christian programming. These channels pad numbers (36+ channels!) while adding almost zero value.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Verizon’s Custom TV, however, is that it never received permission from content companies to break up the bundle like this. It thinks that consumers will make choices that result in Verizon complying with existing agreements, but it can’t guarantee it. And it’s causing this over a half-baked idea it thinks will appeal to more customers.

Top 10 Hit

#84 on the Chart

I can't tell you how much I dislike Pitbull and Ne-Yo's "Time of Our Lives." The lyrics seem like they're written by a teenager who doesn't understand what not having enough money for rent really means. It glorifies eschewing responsibilities in favor of partying because ... fuck it! You're fucked anyway, right?

LunchMoney Lewis's "Bills" is the perfect answer to the assinine "Time of Our Lives." I've got bills to pay, so I'm going to work. Duh!

Of course, that's not what people want to hear. They want to hear about how they can party all the time and never worry about consequences! That's why PitBull and Ne-Yo are at the top of the charts, and LunchMoney Lewis is at the bottom. 

New details on Google’s planned MVNO were leaked when an app for the service showed up in a Nexus 6 firmware image.

The details outlined by Android Police show Google is intent in abolishing data limits and overage fees. The service will offer data a la carte with additional gigabytes of data allotment available for a flat fee per gig. That stands in contrast to the big carriers, which charge outrageous overage fees and extremely high prices per additional gb, or the smaller guys who simply throttle data speeds down to 2G.

If you don’t use all of your data in a month, it simply rolls over to the next month. T-Mobile started doing this last year, allowing some subscribers to keep their data for up to 12 months. AT&T lamely copied it, offering an additional month to use data allotments. It’s not clear if Google’s data allotments will expire.

Another nice feature is that data allotments can be shared across devices -- a strategy more carriers are moving toward. But with the ability to simply re-up data, it could lead to more data usage on tablets -- an area carriers have been pushing hard to add customers.

Snapchat is halting brand stories.

I never liked brand stories and the opt-in nature of the ad unit. I think the work it’s doing with the surprisingly popular Discovery platform is producing a significant amount of revenue. I also noticed more sponsored Our Stories, which I think makes more sense than stand alone brand stories.

Advertising on Snapchat is more like advertising on TV than on any other social network. It doesn’t provide much targeting data, and it doesn’t provide any feedback to advertisers. As such, it’s only valuable for brand advertisers like Coca Cola or Samsung, which appeal to everyone. Comparatively, Facebook offers very good targeting based on social data it collects.

Synergy, bitches! You know what that means?

Taking a stack of cash and lighting it on fire?

LinkedIn acquired Lynda.com on Thursday for $1.5 billion because “synergy, bitches!”