The Muellers’ similarities are more than superficial. The twins, who are 27 and stand 5'5", share the same bank account. They share the same calendar. They share the same curriculum vitae. The same sexual orientation (gay), brownstone (Prospect Heights) and taste in boyfriends (“over 30”). They share the same profession, and the same specialty (interactive design). They even, in a manner of speaking, share an identity. Email the Brothers Mueller at their shared account, and the only way to tell which Mueller is responding is by whose name shows up first in the signature: Nate & Kirk versus Kirk & Nate.

“We have this little notation,” said Kirk.

“Some people figured it out,” chimed in Nate, who, along with his brother, seems unburdened by matters of selfhood.

One stutters trying to figure out how to address them. “The Brothers, the Brothers Mueller, or ‘the twins,’ or ‘the boys,’” Kirk said.

In the year and a half since the Brothers got their master degrees from RISD—sharing the podium as commencement speakers in 2010—and moved to New York, they have created iPad apps for Martha Stewart and e-books for Vanity Fair and Bon Appetit. Coming soon are a political website for The New Yorker and an iPad app for Newsweek. Whereas most graphic and user-interface designers tend to hand off the technical work, the brothers do it all, relying on Nate’s speed in programming and Kirk’s facility with design.

Their first media world collaboration, a one-off iPad app for Martha Stewart called Boundless Beauty, won the Society of Publication Designers “Tablet App of the Year” award. Shortly after, Time magazine called it the cover of the year for featuring an interactive time-lapse video of one of Martha’s prize peonies, a 10-hour shoot compressed into 10 seconds. The SPD Award dinner was on a Friday. (“We have these crushed velvet pumps,” said Nate. “Loafers,” Kirk corrected. “And it’s the only time you could wear something like that,” Nate finished.) The following Monday, they got a call from Scott Dadich, Condé Nast’s vice president of digital magazine development, about revamping the company’s e-book operation.

“At this point in media, they have a bit of a lore, like, ‘Oh, the Mueller Brothers are coming!” said Melissa Lafsky, the launch editor for Newsweek’s updated iPad edition, which is slated to debut on Jan. 23, with the Brothers’ help. “When they come into the office, people love it because they’re so striking to look at. Everyone does a double-take because they’re so handsome and well-dressed and there are two of them. They’re a presence. They’re sort of the modern Jewish mother’s dream.”

“When Martha met them, her first question was whether they would appear on The Martha Stewart Show,” seconded Gael Towey, longtime chief creative and editorial director for Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.

Not everything about the duo is as identical as it first appears, however. After the first half hour, it comes into focus that Nate’s face is more of an oval. The bridge of Kirk’s nose is more narrow, his physique more slight. Nate’s voice is deeper and a few decibels more nasal—a blessed discovery you don’t make until the next day. “It’ll be hard to transcribe,” they warned, eyeing The Observer’s digital recorder.

“Our collective identity is what matters,” said Kirk.

“We don’t get offended if people can’t tell us apart,” added Nate.

“Gilbert and George, the art duo, they call themselves ‘living sculptures.’ We like the idea of instead of being ‘living decorative objects,’” explained Kirk, gamely.

Before speaking, the twins tend to turn, birdlike, to face each other, often hesitating until they’ve reached some sort of wordless consensus before offering a response.

For all their attention-getting ensembles, the brothers retain a Midwestern equanimity from a youth spent in the suburbs of Akron. “Because we were originally raised Catholic, we have this running joke that for these twin gay boys in Akron, Ohio, our outlet to ornamentation and beautiful things was going to Mass,” said Kirk, recalling that as altar boys they fought over who got to wear the gold sash.

As budding young artists, they read up on the Aesthetics Movement and admired Oscar Wilde and Quentin Crisp.

They came out at different times—Nate first, Kirk years later, but never officially to each other. “I guess we always assumed that the other one was going through the same things,” they wrote in an email. “We would have been more surprised to find out the other one was straight.”

Even among unflappable New Yorkers, the Brothers Mueller tend to draw stares. In the subway or the elevator at 4 Times Square, “we get stopped once a week by people who say, ‘Have you been interviewed for a magazine or newspaper?’ and we just go, ‘Nooo,’” Kirk said, demurely shaking his head.

“That’s what’s fun. They see you maybe as objects? So we get people touching us,” said Nate, miming a hand on his arm, “saying, ‘Do you know that you’re twins?!’ It’s great.”

Indeed, the brothers are just as affable fielding questions about their interactive wallpaper, which was on exhibit at the Chelsea Art Museum and featured stylized versions of a viral molecule, appearing and disappearing between delicate rows of damask ("They're STD viruses!" explained Kirk), as they are entertaining questions about fetish play.

Identical twins tend to receive unsolicited queries of a sexual nature, and in 2010, when Bel Ami, the gay porn production company, introduced the world to the Peters twins, muscle-bound teenage Czechs who begat the word “twincest,” such interrogations took a turn for the lurid.

“It used to upset us a little at first,” Kirk said. “But now we’re very playful with it.”

“My favorite is using ambiguous language,” Nate added.

“They’ll ask questions about us, like do we date the same guy or do you sleep with the same guy,” explained Kirk. “So we’ll purposefully answer, like, ‘Not usually,’ or ‘I don’t know,’ at the same time. Nate will say, ‘Not really,’ and I’ll say, ‘I don’t know.’ It’ll explode their head.”

“And then we walk away,” finished Nate.

Later, they offered a less ambiguous answer by email: “We don’t think there is a need to experiment with something like that when there’s a whole city full of beautiful people.”

As for whether they would date the same man simultaneously, however, they added dryly, “I think it’s the German in us that seeks out efficiency, so what would be more efficient than the both of us dating one person?”

As is befitting a proper wunderkind, sorry wunderkinder, the outside world’s discovery of the Brothers was a matter of happenstance. Martha Stewart was working to develop its first digital issue as part of the early development group for Adobe's new InDesign for the iPad software,  and Ms. Towey contacted RISD president John Maeda.

“The director of the program calls us and says you should probably come down here since they’re looking for iPad people and you’re probably the best iPad people here,” Kirk recalled. The Muellers went to lunch with Ms. Towey and her husband, a fellow designer named Stephen Doyle. “We had a great time and then we looked them up and we were so glad that we didn’t know exactly how big of design powerhouses they are because we would have been nervous wrecks,” Nate said.

“When the brothers walked into the room, I was immediately smitten,” Ms. Towey remembered. “They handed me one résumé, and that did it for me—one résumé. They were clearly smart at marketing themselves. I thought of the Starn twins, and figured that these guys were on their way to stardom.”

Not only did the brothers prove adept at the technical side—finding bugs in the software before developers at Adobe even knew they were there, Ms. Towey said—they made a number of critical design suggestions. Along with other team members, they insisted the peony should be shuffled to the front of the issue.

“They were going to put it in one of the stories and we said, It should go on the cover,” whispered Nate.

“We should be the first to have an animated cover,” concurred Kirk, adding, “The tools were still being developed. The cover almost didn’t go out the door because of some technical difficulties. But we finally got it out.”

After the success of Boundless Beauty, Condé tapped the brothers to make their e-book process more efficient and keep the branding more in line with their individual titles. “They always try and get us full-time,” said Kirk, who also mentioned helping Mr. Dadich with the beta version of Adobe's software. The Brothers, however, prefer working under the Studio Mercury umbrella, where they also dabble in work for the Guggenheim and the industrial design magazine Core 77.

After setting up e-book production workflows at Conde, “once a title wanted to launch a book, instead of taking a matter of weeks, it took a matter of a week,” said Kirk.

With the New Yorker political website, which is slated to launch this week, the Brothers are employing a Studio Mercury specialty called a “liquid layout,” which easily adjusts from “very large monitors all the way down to the iPad, so it scales seamlessly,” as Nate put it.

It’s easy to see how duo’s cooperative spirit is embraced by publishing design teams, but the world isn’t really built for two separate bodies who want to perceived as one unit. “Our accountant hates us,” Nate admitted.

“If we could, we would get one tax ID number,” Kirk added, wistfully. “And one Social Security number.”

Then he volunteered a mid-century cautionary tale of parents who bucked the standard practice of separating twins to foster individual growth. “The story was that because these twins weren’t separated, they didn’t develop separate identities so they became murderers … and gay,” Kirk said. “Society was saying if you don’t have separate identities—”

“—all this bad stuff can happen,” said Nate.

Although the Brothers have shared a wardrobe since high school, they didn’t start dressing alike until grad school, when, they explained, “we merged our working identity under one name.” That meant a combined Facebook profile and Twitter account, in addition to the email. In their old apartment in Park Slope, they had to institute a morning check-in about what they’d be wearing, to avoid showing up in the exact same ensemble instead of slight variations. The problem was solved with a shared “dressing area” in their Prospect Heights brownstone.

“We often wonder if throughout the majority of the day we think the exact same thoughts,” said Kirk. Or maybe it was Nate.

ntiku@observer.com

Lean with it, rock with it

In a certain way, the web is a terrible medium for trying to read articles. Your browser is full of distractions like Twitter and email that need constant attention. Which might be why users of News.me, the betaworks service created in conjunction with the New York Times, read an average of six times more articles on their tablets than they do when browsing News.me via the web.

"The experience on the tablet is more immersive, more contextual," said Jake Levine, general manager at News.me. "When the iPad first came out everyone was complaining about how you couldn't multitask, but I think more and more publishers and app creators are coming to see this as an advantage." 

The new iOS has push notifications, which have enabled some amazing features like Foursquare radar. "I think there is a lot of potential there, but it may come at the expense of the focus we found among our tablet readers," said Mr. Levine.

Another trend that has popped up among News.me readers is heavy usage on days that break their typical routine. "People have very set patterns of news consumption, but we are seeing that when this changes, around a holiday for example, users want to be able to understand what they missed." If the people you follow on Twitter represent the average amount of information you want to consume each day, those are the best guides for what you missed. "On News.me, users are looking to tap into their social graph to surface the most relevant stories, the ones that got people talking, as they play catch up."

The massive sales of Amazon's Kindle Fire over the holiday weekend have many in the tech blogosphere declaring a new era in the tablet market. But Mr. Levine says that News.me will continue to be iOS and HTML5. What is interesting to him is less the hardware platforms than the new social networks. "I look at my Facebook account and there are hundreds of people who were relevant to me when I joined five years ago that I have no connection to now. I think for News.me, we're going to be paying close attention to the smaller, splinter networks that are forming around very specific activities."

Get this guy a smartphone

Aaron Shapiro sees a lot of interesting data as the CEO of Huge, one of the Big Apple's top digital agencies. The jetsetting Mr. Shapiro just made the Crain's 2011 "40 Under 40" list of New York's young business leaders. His firm oversees campaigns and website redesigns for CNN, Reuters and Pepsi. And right now, Mr. Shapiro said, "The tablet market is the top of my mind."

This holiday season tectonic changes are expected in the tablet market, with Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet going on sale at $199. "We have a giant client with millions of unique monthly visitors. Right now the no. 2 browser is the iPad, which really portends the future of internet consumption. Right now, the biggest barrier is clearly price. Amazon can change all that," Mr. Shapiro told Betabeat by phone.

Mr. Shapiro is the author of the forthcoming book-- Users, Not Customers--being published next week by Penguin. "To be successful in this new world, companies have to find ways to engage their potential customers on the internet, which is where they are making their decisions about what to buy and even completing most of those purchases," he said.

The last decade is littered with giants who missed the boat on this. "Look at what happened to Blockbuster. Instead of figuring out the best way to reach their market through the internet, they hired Enron as their technology provider. True story."

J.P. Morgan just revised its sales estimates for the Kindle Fire to up to five million units in the fourth quarter of 2011. Amazon, which will be offering the Kindle Fire at $199, is expected to lose money on every unit, unlike Apple, which books a healthy profit on the iPad. But Amazon knows it can drive massive amounts of media consumption through these devices, dollars that will flow right through their bookstore, e-commerce and streaming video platforms.

"If you look at the pre-sale numbers for the Kindle Fire and the trends we're seeing in terms of traffic, it's easy to image that six months to a year from now, the majority of consumer web browsing will be done on a tablet," Mr Shaprio said. "That's a bigger shift than anything we have experienced with a mass audience since the dawn of the PC era. Companies need to be ready to reach those users."

NY is en fuego for the Fire

There was a reason Jeff Bezos came all the way to New York to unveil Amazon's new suite of Kindle e-readers and tablet devices. Like the iPad the Kindle is first and foremost a device for consuming media, with the new Kindles going beyond the book to offer music, television and movies as well. And the Big Apple's high end publishers are thrilled to have a second dance partner for the party beyond Apple.

As the NY Times reports, Amazon's new Kindle Fire tablet will come with a digital newsstand front-and-center where users can buy magazines and newspapers. To glossy publishers, this sounds like a haven from a digital world dominated by Angry Birds.

“When you’re lost in the middle of 100,000 apps, you only have people who find you when they’re looking for you,” Bob Sauerberg, president of Condé Nast, told the paper. “This helps with getting consumers in. They pick what they want, and we sell them more of what interests them. And everybody is happy.”

Apple has been hoping to introduce its own newsstand for some time, and is expected to announce one within the next month. But Cupertino has struggled to come to terms with magazine publishers over their cut of subscription revenue. And sales of subscriptions on non-iPad devices, like Barnes and Noble's Nook, have already surpassed iPad sales for publishers like Hearst.

This new line of devices are all priced below $200, meaning they are most likely a loss leader to help Amazon establish themselves in the tablet market. So far it seems to be working, with the Kindle Fire and various flavors of Kindle sitting claiming the entire top ten for best selling gadgets on Amazon. Come Christmas time, the tablet market is going to look very different than it does today.

The Kindle, The Kindle, The Kindle is Fire

A huge new player stepped into the tablet space this morning to challenge the completely dominant reign of Apple's iPad. Bloomberg had the scoop before the 200-some live bloggers in Hell's Kitchen could even get started. The device is smaller, seven inches versus ten, and costs just $199 versus the iPad's $499 price tag.

The Kindle Fire, as Amazon's tablet device is called, is missing a lot of things. It doesn't have a camera or microphone, so no Facetime communication is possible. It is WiFi only, which, having used the iPad with AT&T 3G for several months now, we believe is a huge drawback. 3G service makes the tablet a truly mobile device.

Under the hood the device is running a custom version of Android. It comes with a 30 free trial of Amazon's streaming service, Amazon Prime. We assume that the integration between the device and Amazon Prime was a particular focus.

Companies like RIM and HP that tried to challenge Apple in the tablet space have so far come up laughably short. Amazon's massive reach and consumer base could allow it to get the kind of distribution it needs to be the first serious contender, especially at such a low price point. Even if the iPad controls the top of the market, Amazon could grab up massive market share as tablet computers become as common as smartphones.

Oh, and let's not forget Amazon Prime gives folks free two day shipping on all Amazon purchases. While the technorati may scoff, the average consumer could probably find a lot to like about the Kindle Fire. That and it will be running Android, which will give the many, many Droid fans and Google Apps users out there a tablet that is easier to sync with their lives.

Wait, you didn't think Papa Bezos forgot about the upcoming holiday did you? Along with the Kindle Fire he also announced a $79 Kindle and a $99 Kindle touch. Something for everyone!

I totally got to fourth base.

It's a scenario playing out for busy wantrepreneurs across the nation. You settle into bed with your copy of the Tim Ferriss tome, The 4 Hour Body, but can't make heads or tails of the section comparing part of the female anatomy to "an Imperial Guard from Star Wars." Your lady is due home in twenty minutes and you want to make sure to get this right the first time.

Well if you're savvy enough to be reading #4HB on the Kindle, you can ask Mr. Ferris directly. Amazon's new @author feature lets readers fire off questions to a writer's Twitter and Amazon homepage without ever leaving the book.

Amazon rolled out a social network for Kindle readers back in March, which recently earned a rave review from A VC Fred Wilson. Increasingly Amazon is supplanting the forums and reading groups publishers have been trying to build, and doing so with a network scale and hardware integration that few publishers can match.

While the Kindle has been a success and sales of e-books are growing fast, the real tipping point could be the release of an Amazon tablet this fall. Right now Apple dominates the market and the units produced by competitors have fallen flat with critics and consumers. There is a huge market for a number two player if Amazon can deliver a compelling experience at an affordable price.

If they are truly interested in satisfying their customers, of course, Amazon should get a little advice from @tferriss. A "15-minute orgasm" Mr. Ferriss? More power to you.

Last week the service launched its iPad app, and within a few days had broken into the top ten list. "We may just end up killing the website altogether," said Qwiki co-founder Doug Imbruce, only half joking, during a visit to Betabeat's offices on Friday.

Like the news reading app Pulse, which stopped by earlier in the week, Qwiki was in town to meet with New York's blue chip publishers. "A lot of them are looking for more compelling ways to present their content on the tablet and we are looking for great ways to build out our database of topics," said Imbruce. "Different forms of discovery are going to drive visitors in the future, way beyond Google's ten blue links."

Right now most of the entries on Qwiki feel like broad, zoomed out takes on big topics, so integration with major news publishers could add more rich and timely detail. Imbruce says the company is also considering ways to partner with less traditional publishers. "A real estate firm could publish their listings, and our stories on specific cities could start to integrate that data on price and location."It would be interesting to see Qwiki put information like that to work building a deeper dive within a more generic entry like "Denver".

The iPad app already asks users to share their location so it can provide a map featuring Qwikis on local landmarks and neighborhoods. "Qwiki wouldn't have been created if I had not been living in New York," says Imbruce. "I felt like we had to leave for the west coast to grow the company, but man, if Stanford would just hurry up and open that University here I could come home."

Qwiki iPad App Demo from Qwiki on Vimeo.

But when it came to the advertising that would be featured in The Daily, the logical choice for ad placement, Apple's iAd, lost out to the New York start-up Medialets, which provides a similar service with a few key differences. Medialets provides the technical platform for publishers and agencies to collaborate on creating rich media advertising, and instead of taking a percentage of the ad revenue for apps — which is Apple's model, to the tune of 40 percent — they get a small ad-serving fee each time the spot is shown.

"As Apple continues to expand its boundaries into the core parts of many publisher's business, there is a growing opportunity for alternatives," says CEO Eric Litman. "From a technical perspective iAd is very compelling, but in terms of business, it just doesn't fit with the way publishers think about the world."

Founded in 2008, Medialets has since signed on over 100 top media players, including The New York Times, WSJ, CondeNast, Hearst, NY Mag and CBS.

"The entire industry was using Flash, and then the iPad came along and didn't support that, so everyone had to scramble to figure out what the best new tool was," says Marc Frons, who runs the technology group at the NY Times. "Medialets has emerged as a new leader."

Medialets shares detailed campaign reports with publishers and agencies, while Apple has increasingly cut publishers off from user data. And because Medialets relies on HTML5, publishers don't have to worry about Apple versus Android verus RIM. "Advertisers don't want to think about devices, they want to think about audiences," says Litman.

These competitive advantages are showing up in the bottom line. Medialets' premium inventory across iPhone, iPad and Android devices increased nearly 300% in fourth quarter of 2010. To keep up, the company has expanded from five original employees in 2008, to 55 today.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper