The Mobile Web Tablet

I’ve been a microblogger for almost two years, but I’ve spent most of my time on Jaiku. It is just recently that I started to use Twitter more frequently (the key is not to use the twitter.com-page but external tools such as Tweetdeck, more on that further down).

Twitter and Jaiku (purchased by Google in 2008) are similar yet very different services. On Jaiku, each jaik (post or tweet) can be commented and the comments don’t have the 140 character limit of the jaiks. Comment threads that you are part of (have posted to or initiated) will be displayed on your own Jaiku page (mine is erikstarck.jaiku.com). This means that the discussions in the comments take up a large portion of your Jaiku page and attention. It also means discussions can be long and deep (here’s an example).

Twitter, on the other hand, is a much lighter and simpler service. Messages are always limited to 140 characters and there are no comment thread on the tweet. This limitation is one of the greatest strengths of Twitter. There’s no room for longer discussions which keeps the noise down. Most things posted to Twitter is actually surprisingly relevant. It’s self-organising: if you send out too many irrelevant tweets, people will not subscribe to you.

Twitter works on (at least) three levels:

• The global Twitter stream, an enormous flow of everyone tweeting. This stream can be used to catch the global mood of twitters everywhere. There are numerous services trying to dip in to this gold mine of data such as Birdhive, Twisten.fm, Tweeterate or Twitturly.
• Your Twitter friends list. This is a select few number of Twitter fellows you choose to follow. This is that will take up the largest amount of your attention, so as mentioned above, people who send out too many irrelevant tweets will be removed from the friends list.
• The @username addressing directed to a single user. This is a “feature” that emerged from the Twitter users themselves. Using the nomenclature of @username means that it’s a public message with a specific receiver. This is a really interesting development of the previous generation instant messaging systems such as ICQ or AIM, showing most of all a mental shift in the way we use the web to communicate, from private to public.

There is also the #hashtag way of defining a specific subject, making it easier for the Twitter search engines to pick out tweets (for example the ongoing #spectrial). This too emerged from the Twitter users themselves.

Twitter also supports a more traditional direct messaging feature between two users, but I don’t think this is very commonly used.

Another ecosystem emerging round Twitter is the one with all the URL shortener services, Tr.im being a good example (since you only have 140 characters, URLs to web sites must be shortened).

It took me a while to realise the beauty and power of Twitter, mostly because I tried to use it the same way I used Jaiku: with the web based GUI on the Twitter frontpage. It wasn’t until my friend Nicolai showed me Tweetdeck that I got the aha-moment.

Now I see it as a truly disruptive technology, with the potential to improve the way we search, communicate and discover news on the web. That means it’s stabbing against Google, the telecom industry (SMS is a >$100billion business), RSS and old media.

The next generation search engine, the one that will replace Google, is not a smarter machine. The oldest truth of the web is still the most relevant: we are the web. Yahoo! or Microsoft or two guys in a garage will not defeat Google.

No, we will all do it, together. 140 characters at the time.

(I’m @erikstarck, by the way.)

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Disappointing not to see an Android-phone from the Sony Ericsson MWC press conference. But one thing is interesting. For the first time (as far as I know), Sony Ericsson used the internal project name for a phone in public and as part of the launch (at least according to Engadget). The phone is called Idou.

Why is this significant? Well, most companies do like this: before a product is launched it has an internal project name. The final name of the product is decided by the product manager and marketing department right before launch. Up until then, the phone is a secret, so the internal project name can not be leaked. It’s super-secret and very sensitive information.

But now Sony Ericsson is using this name in public, as part of the launch. When I worked for the company a few years ago, this would have been a big no-no. There were (and still are) numerous rumor sites showing pictures of upcoming devices and Sony Ericsson did all they could to stop this. But, this means all the buzz, all the conversation, will be about a product name that’s not “endorsed” by the company. That also means all the Google searches will go to web sites beyond Sony Ericssons control. Sony Ericsson employees will also be forced to use a different term for the same product that their greatest fans are discussing.

That is pretty bad conversation architecture.

I don’t know if this is a shift in the way Sony Ericsson launch their products or just a one time coincidence, but it’s at least interesting that they are lifting the veil just a little bit and opening up to be part of the conversation. It reamins to see if they keep the name when the phone hits the stores, but I doubt it.

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Just realised the RSS feeds stopped working when I switched themes the other day. (Is there a service out there that can tell me everything is OK with my blog? Let me know! ). I switched back to an old theme. Let’s hope everything works now.

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The David Report blog points me to Milan based design company V12 and their concept Canova laptops.

The key innovation: replacing the keyboard part of the laptop with a touch screen.

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Bugs in Android? Photo.

Via MobileCrunch:

Samsung delaying Android offering until late 2009
If you were holding your breath until MWC to see if Samsung would drop its promised Android-based phone, you can exhale. It seems that the Samdroid will have to wait, as they’re still in negotiations with carriers and no hardware has been put forth. Shucks!

How much trouble is there in Android-land? I have gone from sceptic to fanboy and back to a somewhat sceptical position again over the last couple of months.

We’re still waiting for an Android announcement from one of the-five-big-ones-that’s-not-from-Finland. Meanwhile, rumours mixed with official announcements are coming from Asus, Dell and portable media player company Archos to name just a few.

Going from one device to many, from different companies, on different hardware, will be a huge challenge for the untested OS. We’ll see if the mighty Android is up to the task.

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Haven’t I seen this before? Yes, Nokia has had application stores before, but it seems Apple has shown how to do it properly and now the entire telecom business seem to be suffering from a wide spread amnesia.

“Did we have an application store? Really!? You don’t say.”

Oh well, maybe it’s more like a reboot, starting over with a blank slate. We’ll see if Nokia manages to leverage their massive lead in market size for the S60 platform and compete with Android and iPhone. That would certainly be a boost for mobile application developers everywhere.

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The HTC G1 is a pretty good device, showing lots of potential in the Android OS. As I wrote in my 2009 predictions I believe this year will be the year of Android, with devices coming from all major device manufacturers that’s not from Finland.

But, one phone does not make a platform.

Well, in some cases it does, but it’s not the idea behind the Android OS.

The big question is how Android and the Open Handset Alliance will prevent the same fragmentation problems that plagues the Java ME-world as it appears on more devices.

Mobile Stance has a longer post on the subject, even suggesting that Google would benefit from fragmenting the OS as it would move application developers to web based solutions.

Going to be a very interesting year and I really look forward to the next batch of Android devices. Let’s hope they can hold it all together.

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