US health secretary resigns after website fiasco

Kathleen Sebelius (65), Barack Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary, resigned on Thursday a few months after the disastrous rollout of the ‘Obamacare’ website, healthcare.gov, which became a magnet for criticism of the President’s landmark Affordable Care Act.

Although Republicans, many of whom have been fiercely critical of the healthcare reform policies of the White House, called for Ms. Sebelius’ resignation last fall, she ended her five-year tenure only after the enrolment period ended at the end of last month.

A White House official noted that Mr. Obama would formally make announce that Ms. Sebelius would step down on Friday and that he would also nominate the White House Budget Office Director Sylvia Matthews Burwell to replace her, subject to Senate confirmation.

“The President wants to make sure we have a proven manager and relentless implementer in the job over there, which is why he is going to nominate Sylvia,” said Denis McDonough, White House Chief of Staff.

He added that Last month, Ms. Sebelius had approached Mr. Obama earlier and said to him that the March 31 deadline for sign-ups under the healthcare law “provided an opportunity for change,” and that he would be “best served by someone who was not the target of so much political ire.”

Ms. Sebelius departs from the Obama administration as strong favourite of top Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who defended the Secretary’s record, saying, “From Day One, [Ms.] Sebelius has remained laser-focused on a single purpose: to make health care a right, not a privilege, for all Americans. Her leadership has been forceful, effective and essential.”

Notwithstanding the controversy over the healthcare.gov website, which at points appeared to collapse under the sheer momentum of enrolments last year, Ms. Sebelius also departs with at least part credit for exceeding the ‘Obamacare’ enrolment targets to more than 7.5 million people.

However the website controversy has apparently come at a high political cost for the President and his party, leading to Democrats’ poll numbers to plunge from its highs during the 2013 government shutdown. Some predict that the issue may also fuel Republicans’ midterm elections campaign this November.

Twitter tweaks website to attract new users

NEW YORK: As Twitter looks to broaden its appeal beyond its 241 million users, the company is introducing a redesign of profile pages that includes bigger photos, more user controls and a distinct resemblance to Facebook.

"Moment by moment, your Twitter profile shows the world who you are," the company wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "Starting today, it will be even easier (and, we think, more fun) to express yourself through a new and improved Web profile."

As part of changes coming in the next few weeks, users who access Twitter via the Web will notice larger photos on their profile pages. Besides profile photos on the left corner of the page, the redesign includes a large banner photo that resembles the big rectangular cover photos on Facebook pages. Users will be able to "pin" one of their tweets to the top of the page to give others an idea of the topics they like to tweet about. In addition, tweets that receive the most interest from other users will appear slightly larger.

The more visual look is an attempt to attract people who may be intimidated by Twitter's onslaught of text filled with quirky acronyms, at-symbols and hashtags. The changes come at a time when Facebook is adding features to its site that are Twitter-like, highlighting the way the two companies are jockeying for people's time and advertisers' dollars.

Is Twitter saying a picture is worth 140 characters? Perhaps not. The new profiles don't apply to Twitter's mobile app, which is a more popular way to access the service than the website. Mobile is also where Twitter earns most of its money. EMarketer expects about 77 percent of Twitter's estimated $1.1 billion in advertising revenue to come from mobile this year.

Even so, Twitter has acknowledged that it needs to reach a bigger audience. CEO Dick Costolo described the effort in broad terms during the company's February earnings call with analysts.

"By bringing the content of Twitter forward and pushing the scaffolding of the language of Twitter to the background," Costolo said, "we can increase high quality interactions and make it more likely that new or casual users will find the service as indispensable as our existing core users do."

Costolo also promised more visually engaging content, of which the profile page redesign is just one example. Last fall, the company decided to make users' feeds more visual by including previews from Twitter photos and Vine videos.

Twitter's first-quarter tally of users signaled that growth is slowing on the service. The company added just 9 million new monthly users in the fourth quarter, only 1 million of which came from the U.S. It added an average of 16 million new accounts in each of the first three quarters of 2013.

Twitter said in February that it had 241 million users at the end of 2013. By comparison, Facebook boasts some 1.23 billion users, while WhatsApp, the messaging service Facebook is buying for $19 billion, said it had 400 million active monthly users last December.

Twitter has not yet reported its first-quarter financial results, so it's hard to tell if the slowdown is a sign of trouble or just a blip. EMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in a recent report that Twitter's user base "may be growing more slowly than expected, but the social service has steadily increased its ad revenue and shown that its ads can drive engagement and interaction."

Noah Elkin, executive editor at eMarketer, said advertisers "love the engagement they get on Twitter." That said, he added that the company is still under pressure to grow.

The redesigned profile page, Elkin said, will likely have a "relatively minimal impact" on Twitter's advertising revenue, "unless and until" the company brings the new look to its mobile app.

 

Yahoo new-look website features read-it-later, endless scrolling

The new Yahoo India homepage

Yahoo launched a revamped version of its homepage in India on Friday. The new website features a cleaner look and gives you access to better personalisation features. The new homepage has been modelled on Yahoo’s US page.
Foremost among the new features is endless scrolling. The homepage now loads news stories as you scroll, eliminating the need to click for more content. One can also see local weather, horoscope, trending stories, Flickr photos, stocks and upcoming birthdays (through Facebook sign-in). The new homepage comes days after Yahoo decided to block Facebook and Google sign-ins to use its services.
If you sign in to Yahoo, you can also save stories to read later. Every story has a “Y” button next to it. Stories are saved when you click that button.
“The new Yahoo homepage has a cleaner look, is easy to use and lets you personalise the page to quickly find stories you like. A team of editors picks top stories, while our algorithms show the rest of the stories based on what you have clicked. For example, you’ll see a lot of technology related stories in my feed because I follow tech regularly,” Nitin Mathur, senior director and head of marketing, Yahoo India and Southeast Asia, said.
Apart from India, the revamped homepage is now available in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam.