Yahoo Doubles Down On the Web With ‘Livestand’ Tablet Platform | Epicenter | Wired.com: To use Livestand, an iPad or Android tablet user visits the Livestand homepage, signs in with their Yahoo, Facebook or Google account. Like Yahoo.com, the default page will include a mix of content from Yahoo, including its popular news, sports, finance and celebrity sites, as well as content from other media companies that decide to also publish on the platform, such as Surfer magazine.
Yahoo says it will personalize the mix based on topics you say you are interested in, and then deeper refinements will come from the personalization technology that watches what you read. Yahoo currently uses to make millions of individualized variations on its Yahoo.com homepage.
Nike Run magazine published in Yahoo's Livestand platform.
Yahoo thinks the platform, based on open HTML5 standards, will be easier, cheaper and more flexible for publishers than using custom app creation tools, such as the ones used by Wired magazine and The Daily to create iPad apps.
Yahoo also thinks the platform could help solve online journalism’s revenue woes.
“We see tablets a catalyst that will allow ad dollars to shift from TV and print to interactive,” Yahoo’s chief product officer Blake Irving told reporters and analysts in a call Thursday. “The tablet is something you can lean back on a couch with, and curl up with. So brands can finally match the intimacy that they had with magazines.”
Without naming names, Irving said Livestand’s deep integration with publication’s backend systems and its interactivity will trump currently hot iPad reading apps such as Flipboard, which create tablet “magazines” by monitoring links in Twitter and RSS feeds.
“RSS-like magazines deliver a shallow experience,” Irving said.
Irv Henderson, Yahoo’s vice president for mobile, described Livestand as “your digital newsstand that is continually programmed by your interests.”
“The more you use it, the better it gets,” he said.