Blogging the Bloggers - Is Twitter the next Netscape?
Dave Winer has been around the tech block; he was a web developer when Microsoft out-manoeuvred Netscape. Over the weekend, Winer was reminded of Netscape after he "read this well-intentioned post by [Twitter's API lead developer] Alex Payne, who is single-handedly grappling with the most vexing of strategic problems on behalf of Twitter, without a clear model of the landscape of the market that's ahead of them."
Comparing Twitter's rise with Netscape's fall, Winer says of Twitter's strategy from here on in: "Much better to get out ahead of it, narrow the focus, welcome the competitors, and reserve for itself the position of the naming authority. It will be impossible to unseat them from this position if they play it right. They can of course continue to operate twitter.com, and with a fully open firehose a bigger competitor might not even find a way into their market. Either way, Twitter must find a defensible posture, they've definitely staked out too much territory, they're spread too thin."
While most people would undoubtedly like to see a fully open Twitter, the service likely has its own reasons for not fully opening itself up. First of all, any number of sites created with malicious intents (such as, oh I don’t know, terrorist ones) could use Twitter’s firehose data to give the service a bad name. Second, Twitter, at some point, still needs a business model to make money, and perhaps the access to firehose data could lead to that. (I’m not saying they’ll do that, but it’s certainly an avenue they could look at.)
"Certainly a big player, maybe even Microsoft again, could move in to
try and make a new version of Twitter that is fully open. But if
Twitter hasn’t died by now, I’m not convinced that it’s ever going to
die. After all, this is the service that was basically unusable for a few months earlier this year, and came back stronger than ever. It’s also seen a number of challengers, ones that were arguably better and more feature-rich (Pownce, Plurk, etc) come along, but fail to match Twitter’s sustained popularity.
Cloud computing and Web 2.0 - the debate continues
Toronto Globe and Mail technology writer Mathew Ingram came back from a weekend away to find that Nick Carr had picked a fight with Tim O’Reilly about Google and whether
the company’s size and market power has been a result of network
effects.
It followed Hugh McLeod's ruminations on whether cloud computing could produce a giant monopoly, larger and more powerful than any company yet seen. O’Reilly argued that it likely wouldn’t: "If cloud computing is a commodity business, then the outsize profits that Hugh envisioned are not going to be there. This is a business that will be huge, but it may be more similar to the web hosting and ISP markets, which are also huge, but not hugely profitable."
In his rebuttal of O'Reilly's post, Carr asks: "Is the network effect really the main engine fueling Google's dominance of the search market? I would argue that it certainly is not."
Ingram deconstructs Carr's argument, saying: "I think part of the problem is that the network effect we’re talking about doesn’t really belong to Google per se — it’s inherent in the nature of the Web. But let’s go back to what Nick originally said: He said that Google’s rise to dominance had “nothing to do with the network effect.” That’s just plain wrong. Google may not have invented the thing that produced the network effect (i.e., the Web), but it came up with algorithms that took advantage of that effect better than anyone else."
Using social media to inspire and delight (and be headhunted by Microsoft)
Writing for The New York Times, Leslie Berlin tells the story of Johnny Chung Lee,
a PhD candidate who was promptly head-hunted by Microsoft after he
posted a YouTube video demonstrating a hack that uses the infrared
camera in a Wii remote and a head mounted
sensor bar to transform a normal video screen into a virtual
reality display which reacts to head and body movement, creating a
realistic illusion of depth and space.
The YouTube video has had more than 6 million views; since then, Lee's been named as one of MIT's Technology Review top innovators under 35 and had a path beaten to his door by all the big names before joining Microsoft. His videos have got kids of all ages fired up about improving human computer interaction and the underlying scientific principles.
Berlin contrast this with what might have been had Lee chosen more traditional methods of communicating his ideas: "He might have published a paper that only a few dozen specialists would have read. A talk at a conference would have brought a slightly larger audience. In either case, it would have taken months for his ideas to reach others."
Touching on the absolute core of what makes social media so very engaging and rewarding, Lee says: "Sharing an idea the right way is just as important as doing the work itself ... If you create something but nobody knows, it’s as if it never happened."
- Basheera Khan
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