Technovia

Twitter, Jaiku, and the future of microblogging

Dave Winer's post on the possibility of having a Twitter Pro raises some interesting issues about the future direction of what Dave and others have called "microblogging" - that genre of services, including Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce and others that enable sending and receiving short, instant posts from a variety of mobile platforms.

First, it's pretty clear from Dave's post that he really sees Twitter as another platform for blogging, rather than anything new or unique. Dave doesn't understand why anyone would choose to receive via SMS, suggesting to Fred Wilson that he get an iPhone rather than use SMS.

This of course misses the point: Twitter, Jaiku and the like are partially interrupt-driven, rather than being pull media like a web site. This aspect of these services is about getting updates from your friends instantly, without having to be constantly checking, checking, and re-checking a site. If I wanted to have to check what my friends were doing, then I'd look to their blogs.

This is a point which Marshall Kirkpatrick makes well in his post about how essential Twitter has become to him. Twitter offers instant updates, which is why it's best used with tools which live outside the web page, like Twitterific or Twitbin.

The second issue is, as I've mentioned before, with Twitter and its like brevity is part of the appeal. I want my friends to be limited to 140 characters. I don't want analysis: I want to know what they're doing, little tid-bits of information they've found and think are cool (although there's better mechanisms for links). These services are about notification, discussion and presence - not providing yet another method for posting random long opinions and essays.

Of course, Dave is simply seeing Twitter through the prism of his own interests, which he accurately sums up when he says "I really only care about the web, and if your cell phone can’t do the web, well, get another cell phone." That's why he wants payloads in Twitter, so that he can replicate the functionality of RSS in the product.

But surely we already have a perfectly good system for payloads - and it's called RSS. Dave, I believe, had something to do with making it in the first place, so I'm surprised that he's forgotten it. There are many methods of getting RSS payloads on mobile phones, although notably not on the iPhone thanks to its lack of third-party application support.

What's more, SMS, IM and email all allow you to include links to payloads - giving you as a mobile user the choice of whether or not you want to download something. Twitter even translates these usefully into short URLs.

My suspicion is that the reason that Dave wants this kind of feature is also bound up in a view of Twitter et al which is more about posting than listening. That posting is more important than listening is obvious from his statement that "if I had to check a box saying that my twits wouldn’t be available on SMS at all, I’d happily check it." For Dave, it's more important that the control should be at the content maker's end, rather than the receiver's.

Compare this with the approach of Jaiku, which allows you to aggregate together virtually anything with an RSS feed into you personal thread - but which also allows people subscribed to you to opt out of each individual feed.

So where do Twitter, Jaiku and the rest go next? I think that it would be a massive mistake to attempt to add more and more features. This isn't a feature race. Instead, its about broadening the tools to as many platforms as possible, so that no matter where you are and what you're doing, you can define the way you receive information and the degree to which it is allowed to interrupt what you're doing.

Technorati Tags:
Blogging, Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Twitter, Jaiku

New Windows Live Writer

If you're using Windows, then you might want to go and check out Windows Live Writer, which has just had an update. It's one of the nicest blogging applications on any platform - up there with MarsEdit for Mac (although that's great for different reasons).

Some highlights of this release:

• Insert videos using our new 'Insert Video' dialog

• Upload images to Picasaweb when publishing to your Blogger blog

• Publish XHTML-style markup

• Use Writer in 28 additional languages

• Print your posts

• Justify-align post text

• Better image handling (fewer blurry images)

TypePad Mobile for iPhone released

And speaking of all things iPhone and Typepad, Six Apart has released a very spiffy web-based iPhone client. Now if only someone would enable Bluetooth keyboard support on the iPhone, I could really do some serious work with it...

Technorati Tags:
iPhone

On the approach of Mr Canter and Mr Winer

Regardless of the in's and outs of the issue, there's something that makes me uncomfortable about Mr Canter and Mr Winer patting each other on the back and claiming to be "the guys who aren't afraid to ask questions".

When was the last time that either of them actually broke a story which exposed something that corporates didn't want you to know? When was the last time either of them told you the skinny on an upcoming product before companies wanted you to find out about it? When was the last time either of them got sued by a company for exposing something?

Shouting at people who're speaking at a conference from the back of the hall isn't contributing anything. I couldn't actually tell you if Marc got an answer, because all he talks about on his blog is about how he's doing a better job of asking questions than journalists.

What that tells me is that Marc is more interested in using this issue for self-aggrandisement than getting answers. And that's sad, given that I'd actually be interested in someone as smart as Marc asking some questions in a way which gets some interesting answers.

Technorati Tags:
Dave Winer, Marc Canter

What's the whole Scoble-bash really about?

Robert Scoble's theory about social media supplanting search was wrong, for a whole lot of reasons.

But that doesn't give people carte blanche to attack him. Attack the guy's ideas. Nothing else is relevant, whether it's his tone, his personal appearance, his previous posts... hell, I don't care if Robert has dubious personal hygiene.

What matters is his idea, and talking about it. What you reply to is his idea. Anything else is just an ad homine attack, and says more about the ignorance and rudeness of the person making the statement than it does about Scoble.

Sadly, there's a significant part of the internet community which values rudeness and ignorance far higher than politeness and ideas. They call it "pushing back", or "fighting back", or "sticking it to them" or "blog pile-ons" or whatever. But whatever you call it, it's just ignorance. It just means "I really don't have anything valuable to say, so I'm going to call you a bozo, so other people will think I'm cool". Or it means It's the language of the playground - even down to some people having "enemies".

Enemies? Over words on the internet? Once upon a time, having an enemy meant being at odds with another country, one which wanted to enforce their way of life upon you, or just kill you. Now it means someone whose words you don't like... although often, you're too ignorant to articulate why you don't like them beyond calling you a rude name.

So, Robert, if you read this: forget them. Carry on trying out new ideas, and don't be afraid to be wrong. Don't be afraid to be a bozo. Because if even one in a hundred of the ideas you try out is right, you'll be doing better than the people who's only contribution is to hoot and call other people names.

Dave: Just let it go!

After giving out an apology to Jason Calacanis yesterday which was peppered with more caveats that you see at the bottom of an offer for free broadband, Dave Winer is now saying that "if he were a mensch" Jason would be apologising to him. And Google. And Nick Denton. And everyone at Gnomedex.

Dave, word of advice: apologising about something, then the next day demanding an apology from the person you apologised to, makes you look silly and petty, and makes your apology look insincere. Just saying.

Does your company earn attention? Or does it buy attention?

Advertising, almost by definition, is about buying the attention of viewers. You pay a vast sum of money to piggyback in a successful magazine or TV show, and you present them with something which gets your message across in a way which is fun, memorable, and/or informative.

The other method of getting the attention of potential customers has been to earn it. You earn atttention by doing the right things, making your products compelling, but also by making your brand compelling too. You also earn it by good customer service, by putting your employees front and centre as experts in the press, and so on.

As we move more and more into an interactive, conversational set of dominating media the opportunities for companies to buy the attention of potential customers through advertising are going to be less and less. With the proliferation of channels, and with the cost of creating compelling ads getting higher and higher, buying attention is becoming less and less effective and more and more expensive.

And, where you can buy attention, you'll need to ensure that the message you're presenting to people is so tightly targeted that it's almost able to earn their attention, simply by being slap bang in the middle of their sets of interests. This is the secret to Google's success: ads with targeting, small, low-cost, but lots of them.

However, the tools for earning attention have never been more democratically distributed, from blogging to Facebook to whatever the next thing is. Every employee in every company is empowered, at least in theory, to help your company earn attention. Every employee can be an evangelist, can connect directly with customers and help you - with each tiny blog post - to earn the attention which it's no longer practical to buy.

The question is: Are you prepared to let them do it? Or are you so afraid of your employees that you'll miss out?

Technorati Tags:
Marketing

And back to TypePad

After several months of having my own Wordpress install, I've decided to go back to using TypePad. The main reason for this is just convenience: TypePad requires less maintenance from me, and doesn't allow me to mess up my installs (which I've done on more than one occasion).

Thankfully, if you're a subscriber to my feed, you won't notice the difference (although you'll notice that TypePad has re-published some old articles to you, which is a pain).

Technorati Tags:
Blogging

The evils of FeedBurner?

Why Feedburner is trouble:

"So now someone at Google 'owns' Feedburner and all their feeds. And they could, if they wanted to, change the feeds to another format, overnight, without asking anyone. Reader software might have trouble working with it. They would say 'Oh but the new feeds work better with Google Reader, and that's the one most people use.' And by the way, more and more that's true these days. But what about other feed suppliers? Do they have to change to work with Google Reader? They will say no, but there may turn out to be practical reasons why they must."

And I could switch my feeds away from FeedBurner within a week. I don't understand what Dave's problem is - it's not like anyone is forcing you to use the service. I use it because it gives me some interesting stats which otherwise I wouldn't have, and sometimes down the line I'll be able to insert, once a day or so, a target ad into my feed. Big deal. UPDATE: Over on Eye on Winer, commenter Tom comes up with the best explanation for Dave's concern:

What I bet keeps Dave up at night is the fact that Google could turn all the RSS feeds to Atom feeds and no one would give a damn. Suddenly there are more Atom feeds than RSS feeds and Dave’s beloved (and possibly largely manufactured) legacy starts to go down the drain.

I don't think they'd actually do that... but clearly, that wouldn't sit well with Dave!

Technorati Tags: Dave Winer, FeedBurner

Joe Wilcox on Writely

I've been using Writely, the rather slick online word processor, since before it was acquired by Google. Joe Wilcox signed up for the service over the weekend, and he's impressed:

Make no mistake, Writely offers all the basics and easily can meet the "good enough" threshold for many consumers or small businesses. Writely fully responds like a desktop application, even though all writing and formatting takes place in a Web browser. There is a right-click context menu for the insertion of formatting or photos and copy, cut and paste. The functions are well organized in the menu bar, and they are task oriented. There also is a "Collaborate" function and another to "Blog." Not surprisingly, Google's blog service is on the list, but not Microsoft's.

You should, in fact, be able to blog from Writely to Live Spaces - both support the MetaWeblog API. But it's no surprise that Google is making it a whole lot easier to blog to Blogger.

Interestingly, Joe compares Writely to Windows Live Writer - a nice, non-obvious comparison.

tags: joewilcox, blogger, livewriter, writely, google