William F. Garrity

Mike Elgan (@mike_elgan) writes in ITworld the first sensible thing I've heard about the impending "status updates" capability within Gmail. 

Why 'Social Gmail' is no threat to Twitter or Facebook

February 8, 2010 —

[Word] leaked out today that Google would soon announce status updates to Gmail. The knee-jerk media reaction is to assume that Google is competing with, threatening the business of, or replacing Twitter or Facebook. "Watch out, Twitter and Facebook. Google is on your heels," proclaimed the Christian Science Monitor. Other sites spun the story similarly. But the idea is false. First it assumes that Twitter and Facebook are in any way similar, which they're not.

Twitter is a blogging service (a micro-blogging one, but a blogging service nonetheless). Its main purpose is one-to-many broadcasting to an unpredictable collection of humans who have decided to follow. Many Twitter users have zero, one or two followers. Many have tens or thousands. And a few have millions. Although one-on-on communication is possible on Twitter, most people broadcast to their followership, and then maybe use the "direct" Tweet function to follow up on what was broadcast.

Very, very few Twitter users have follower lists that in any way resemble their actual personal social group of family and friends. For example, I have more than 17,000 followers on Twitter, and I have no idea who most of these people are.

Meanwhile, Facebook is about exclusion. Facebook is the social space where, for most people, strangers aren't allowed. And users make an attempt to get every single friend and family member they can to "friend" them and make them part of the social network.

Facebook's friends list in fact do resemble actual personal social networks for many users.

So how on Earth could Gmail possible compete with both of these diametrically opposed approaches to social content?

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Point and Counterpoint about Microsoft and Innovation

Business Insider's Silicon Valley Insider  charts "Total Minutes Spent On Leading Websites Per Month." 

I keep forgetting that Yahoo! is so popular. 

I highly commend to you monitoring the work of the Pew Internet & American Life Project ("Pew Internet"). 

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is one of seven projects that make up the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit "fact tank" that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. The Project produces reports exploring the impact of the internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life.

Two of Pew's current reports are

Social Media and Young Adults

by Amanda Lenhart, Kristen Purcell, Aaron Smith, Kathryn Zickuhr

Feb 3, 2010

Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application.

Internet, broadband, and cell phone statistics

by Lee Rainie

Jan 5, 2010

In a national survey between November 30 and December 27, 2009, we find:

74% of American adults (ages 18 and older) use the internet -- a slight drop from our survey in April 2009, which did not include Spanish interviews. At that time we found that 79% of English-speaking adults use the internet.

60% of American adults use broadband connections at home – a drop that is within the margin of error from 63% in April 2009.

55% of American adults connect to the internet wirelessly, either through a WiFi or WiMax connection via their laptops or through their handheld device like a smart phone. This figure did not change in a statistically significant way during 2009.

Email and RSS subscription alerts available. 

I'm introducing Twitter today to some colleagues.  Some handy resources (some of which have just come my way yesterday or today):

• Should You Be on Twitter?  (Readhead Writing)  Questions to ask yourself to decide. 
• The Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter (Webdesigner Depot)  Outstanding place to start. 
• The Twitter Guide Book (Mashable)  Second place to go. 
• Help Resources / Getting Started (Mashable)  Third. 
• Guy Kawasaki 's notes for demonstrating Twitter.  Sorta idiosyncratic. 

And, search this very blog with "twitter," "microblogging." 

The Gartner consultancy identifies its five social software predictions for 2010 forward.

1. By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.
2. By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.
3. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.
4. Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.
5. Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

Dartmouth folks can get the full report through our subscription here.

From Jim Grygar, "100 Tips Essential to being a Smarter, Better Twitterer."  There are some really useful ones here, in the categories

• For Beginners
• Finding Friends
• Keeping Followers
• Tweeting
• Developing Relationships
• Getting Value
• Snafus
• For Business
• Productivity and Organization
• Beyond Twitter

At Trak.in  (India Business Blog), a compendium of statistics about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc. 

Very Interesting Social Media Statistics: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Linkedin and more…

by News Editor on February 1, 2010

The way we communicate online has gone through a sea-change over last few years – Infact, majority of netizens spend most of their time on social Media / Networking sites. Even though India Software companies are lagging behind in adoption of social media, others are flocking them in large numbers.

Twitter has been a rage over past 1 year, Facebook has become one of the most visited sites on the web, Professionals are flocking Linkedin and keep their profiles updated. Do you want to know the numbers behind these uber-popular social media sites?

EConsultancy recently published following mind-boggling statistics on their blog – Here is a peek into the numbers

Social Media Statistics

• Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours.
• Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis.
• LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide..
• Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis.Six months ago, this was 250m…This means over 40% growth in less than 6 months.
• Flickr now hosts more than 4 billion images.

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Reacting in part to David Carr's "Why Twitter Will Endure" is The New Yorker's  George Packer. 

January 29, 2010

Stop the World

Posted by George Packer

The other day, a copy of the new Baffler came in the mail. Back in the nineties, published out of Chicago and edited by Thomas Frank, The Baffler articulated an anti-cool sort of cool that appealed to young readers and writers on the margins of journalism and academia, subjecting the iconic brands of consumer capitalism to a quasi-Marxist critical scrutiny. During the Bush years it went out of business. Now it’s back, with a table of contents largely devoted to the economic crisis: a perfect moment for The Baffler’s kind of cultural criticism to be revived.

The writers are older, more established than before, the tone is more staid, and the presentation is defiantly old-fashioned. There’s even a blue nylon bookmark glued into the spine. “As the world careens one way we faithfully steer the other,” the editors state up front. “Print is dead, they say; we double down in our commitment to the printed word. Brevity is the fashion; we bring you long-form cultural criticism with an emphasis on stylistic quality.” A little like the appearance of Buckley’s National Review, whose original mission statement, back in 1955, declared that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

Buckley ended up riding history, and even guiding it. I’d like to believe that something with The Baffler’s anti-market world view could do the same. Anyway, I’m glad to see it back, and I’ll try to keep up with subsequent issues, even if I’m annoyed every second or third article by condescension or dogma.

The truth is, I feel like yelling Stop quite a bit these days. Every time I hear about Twitter I want to yell Stop. The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell. I’m told that Twitter is a river into which I can dip my cup whenever I want. But that supposes we’re all kneeling on the banks. In fact, if you’re at all like me, you’re trying to keep your footing out in midstream, with the water level always dangerously close to your nostrils. Twitter sounds less like sipping than drowning.

The most frightening picture of the future that I’ve read thus far in the new decade has nothing to do with terrorism or banking or the world’s water reserves—it’s an article by David Carr, the Times’s media critic, published on the decade’s first day, called “Why Twitter Will Endure.” “I’m in narrative on more things in a given moment than I ever thought possible,” Carr wrote. And: “Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people.” And: “The real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice … the throbbing networked intelligence.” And: “On Twitter, you are your avatar and your avatar is you.” And finally: “There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.”

This last is what really worries me. Who doesn’t want to be taken out of the boredom or sameness or pain of the present at any given moment? That’s what drugs are for, and that’s why people become addicted to them. Carr himself was once a crack addict (he wrote about it in “The Night of the Gun”). Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.

I don’t have a BlackBerry, or an iPhone, or a Google phone, and I don’t intend to get an iPad. I’ve been careful not to mention this to sources in Washington, where conversation consists of two people occasionally glancing up from their BlackBerries and saying, “I’m listening.” I worry that I won’t be taken seriously as a Washington journalist, and phone calls from my retrograde Samsung cell phone will go unanswered. On Amtrak between New York and Washington I sit in the Quiet Car with my phone off, laptop stowed, completely unreachable, and find out if I’m still capable of reading for two hours. On arrival at Union Station, I find someplace to sit near the café in the lobby and get on its wireless network and check my e-mails, since I know that anyone canceling an interview at the last minute would have assumed I have a BlackBerry. More than once, out somewhere in the capital without the Internet, I’ve had to call home and ask my wife to log onto my e-mail account, just in case.

So I can hardly escape the demands of the throbbing networked intelligence, the nonstop nagging of the wired collective voice. Lately, I’ve begun to think—with real trepidation—that I’ll have to get a BlackBerry. I’m well aware that this is a perverse way to act like a political journalist and cover Washington. It’s like doing war reporting without a flak jacket or satellite phone. It’s a temporary and probably untenable compromise between the world of the work and the desire to protect my consciousness from it. Sooner or later, something will have to give. If it looks like I’m drowning, give a shout.

From Jane Hart's Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, a good reading list about Twitter--arranged chronologically by month, with about a half-dozen entries per month. 

In fact, there is a reading list for nearly every learning technology, device, and tool--see here. 

In today's The New York Times,  Steve Lohr on Apple's (Steve Jobs's) philosophy and practice of design. 

Steve Jobs and the Economics of Elitism

The more, the better. That’s the fashionable recipe for nurturing new ideas these days. It emphasizes a kind of Internet-era egalitarianism that celebrates the “wisdom of the crowd” and “open innovation.” Assemble all the contributions in the digital suggestion box, we’re told in books and academic research, and the result will be collective intelligence.

Yet Apple, a creativity factory meticulously built by Steven P. Jobs since he returned to the company in 1997, suggests another innovation formula — one more elitist and individual.

This approach is reflected in the company’s latest potentially game-changing gadget, the iPad tablet, unveiled last week. It may succeed or stumble but it clearly carries the taste and perspective of Mr. Jobs and seems stamped by the company’s earlier marketing motto: Think Different.

Apple represents the “auteur model of innovation,” observes John Kao, a consultant to corporations and governments on innovation. In the auteur model, he said, there is a tight connection between the personality of the project leader and what is created. Movies created by powerful directors, he says, are clear examples, from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” to James Cameron’s “Avatar.”

At Apple, there is a similar link between the ultimate design-team leader, Mr. Jobs, and the products. From computers to smartphones, Apple products are known for being stylish, powerful and pleasing to use. They are edited products that cut through complexity, by consciously leaving things out — not cramming every feature that came into an engineer’s head, an affliction known as “featuritis” that burdens so many technology products.

“A defining quality of Apple has been design restraint,” says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and consultant in Silicon Valley.

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A special report in The Economist  on social networking.  Here's the beginning of the lead article:

SPECIAL REPORT - 2007 ONWARDS

Towards a socialised state

Jan 28th 2010
From The Economist  print edition

The joy of unlimited communication

WHAT will the future of social networking look like? Imagine this: your digital video recorder automatically copies a television show that several of your friends were talking about on a social network before the show went on air. Or this: you get into your car, switch on its navigation system and ask it to guide you to a friend’s house. As you pull out of the driveway, the network to which you both belong automatically alerts her that you are on your way. And this: as you are buying a pair of running shoes that you think one of your friends might be interested in, you can send a picture to their network page with a couple of clicks on a keypad next to the checkout counter.

Networking types like to talk about the idea that there is a pervasive social element in all of the things people interact with. Listen to them long enough and you come away with the impression that your teapot will soon be twittering about what you had for breakfast. Some of the ideas outlined above may sound far-fetched, but a service such as Facebook Connect, which already lets people export their social graph of online relationships to other web-enabled gizmos, suggests they are not completely outlandish. Everything from cars to cookers could ultimately have social connectivity embedded in it.

But when it comes to helping social networks achieve ubiquity, none of these things will be remotely as important as the mobile phone. Using a web-enabled phone to post status updates and send messages is still a niche activity in many countries, but it will rapidly become a mainstream one as mobile-broadband services overtake fixed-line ones in a few years’ time. One estimate by eMarketer suggests that just over 600m people will use their phones to tap into social networks by 2013, a more-than-fourfold increase on last year’s 140m.

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See the link for the list of articles comprising the report. 

John Murrell in Good Morning Silicon Valley  (a great current awareness resource, by the way) on what some folks may consider their root issue with Apple. 

Thanks, but I’m waiting for the DroidPad

Posted by John Murrell on January 29th, 2010

So I was chatting with my buddy and loyal Apple customer JP yesterday, and he asked me if I would be buying an iPad, and I said … wait, let me check the log … I said, “Oh, heavens no. Maybe some sort of slate, someday, but on an open system.” And it struck me that we’d had essentially the same exchange a few years back about the iPhone. Lovely as it may be, I just don’t want to confine myself to Apple’s walled garden. This is partly a philosophical thing, partly a preference for having the maximum number of options, and partly because I’m a tweaker by nature, and Apple products have never lent themselves to tweaking. No knock on Apple and no arguing with the success of its integrated approach. But for my purposes, Apple’s big contribution is to keep driving new ideas into the marketplace so they can find their way into gadgets for the rest of us.

In the case of the phone, I had a long wait before the arrival of the right handset with the right operating system on the right network (and by right, I of course mean right for me). Then the Droid showed up, and I became the very happy owner of a powerful, versatile pocket computer with an open operating system, a beautiful display and apps for everything I need. In the case of the tablet … well, it’s not a pressing issue for me due to certain constraints regarding disposable income, but the wait for worthy non-Apple contenders won’t be nearly as long. In its form factor and niche targeting, the iPad may be a bold business move for Apple, but it’s not the leap in technology and interface that the iPod and iPhone were. This time around, Apple doesn’t have any secret sauce. Competitive processors, touchscreens, operating systems and content services are already out there, and manufacturers have the pieces to start pushing iPad alternatives out the pipeline almost immediately — devices that will come equipped with the features missing from the Apple tablet and will let you roam outside the garden. But, I can hear the Apple fans saying, you’ll never have the cool design and elegant integration that comes out of a tightly controlled environment. Yep, that’s true … and that’s just fine with me. I have no trouble accepting that life outside the wall can be grittier than life inside. The freedom to choose is worth it.

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Mike Elgan posts January 29, 2010, at Computerworld 

Dark clouds gather over online security

The hacking of Google in China reveals an inconvenient truth about cloud computing

Google may have threatened to leave China in order to keep us all from concluding that "the cloud" can't be secured. But isn't that precisely what we should conclude based on the fact that Google chose to leave China?

Why didn't Google just fix the flaw and keep its mouth shut? If it thought it could protect its data and yours, wouldn't it have just done so?

In other words, the whole Google-in-China situation boils down to this: Google may have realized that it can't guarantee the security of its secrets -- or yours.

 

It seems that all our data is moving to the cloud -- especially for mobile computing users. Is it time to rethink cloud computing?

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In the December 12, 2009, Technology Quarterly  supplement to The Economist,  a piece about potential successors to email, particularly as a tool to collaborate. 

Monitor

Better ways to collaborate

Software: E-mail has severe limitations as an online collaboration tool, but it has the benefit of ubiquity. Might it be displaced by something new?

MOST people would agree that computer technology can play a valuable role in helping workers collaborate. Yet they would probably also agree that e-mail, the most widely used example of such collaborative technology, is less than ideally suited to the task. Based on protocols that were created long before the internet took its current form, e-mail continues to thrive for two reasons. It is ubiquitous: your e-mail address, being unique, functions as the internet equivalent of your name, postal address and passport, since it is commonly used to sign into websites. And it is a classic example of a “good enough” tool. It allows people to send messages to individuals or groups, to hold online discussions and to exchange documents and other files. 

But an e-mail discussion between more than a few people can quickly fill the participants’ in-boxes with a deluge of messages, making the argument hard to follow. Collaborating on a document via e-mail can also be problematic, as different versions start to circulate which must then be reconciled. “The dominant mode these days is still to put attachments on e-mails and send them around, and really, nobody is happy with that,” says Andrew McAfee, an expert on collaboration at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet & Society and the author of “Enterprise 2.0”, a book on the subject.

Yet despite recurrent complaints that “e-mail is broken”, little seems to change. Other collaboration tools have popped up in recent years—including instant messaging, blogs, wikis (web pages that users can edit), social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, web-based applications and micro-blogging services like Twitter—but none has managed to dethrone e-mail. Indeed, many of these services rely on e-mail as an underlying signalling mechanism. When someone posts a comment on your blog, sends you a message on Facebook or starts following you on Twitter, how do hear about it? You get an automated e-mail. Accordingly, people commonly use a combination of various messaging and collaboration tools, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, in both their personal and business lives.

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By David Carr in The New York Times'  Media Decoder  ("... an insider’s guide to the media industry...") 

January 27, 2010
 
The iPad: A Media Machine That Opens Up a New Front

Can you create a whole new category merely by changing one little letter? Will the iPad be a bigger game-changer than the iPod, and perhaps have a similarly transformative effect on media providers?

Om Malik, long-time technologist, thinks so. “What you saw today was a media viewing machine, a very powerful one, and it will have profound implications for media companies and publishers,” he said after seeing today’s demonstration.

There’s no doubt that all kinds of media gains allure on the iPad, but the question remains whether Steve Jobs is building a bridge or a gallows for various media industries.

For books, there is not only a gorgeous interface where turning pages is a pleasure – Mr. Jobs seemed lost in the reverie as he lingered over a page turn – but iBooks, a whole new marketplace of books. (To emphasize that a new competition in the book space was underway, Mr. Jobs lingered over a slide of the Kindle, a device that looked like it had been manufactured by Mennonites by comparison, even as he gave Amazon due credit for building out a robust new business.)

But there lies the rub for the book industry. While they are more than happy to have Apple begin paying for their content along with Amazon and all the other e-readers, the tablet has capabilities and horsepower that will make the average book seem very unsatisfying. Not that long ago, I was talking to a publisher about tablets and their ability to play embedded video – recipe books where the chef can be beckoned for an appearance come to mind – and he looked at me with big cow eyes. What if the tablet caught on? After seeing the tablet today, it looks like a big player in the book space, but the book industry will not have anything built for the tablet for several years to come.

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Josh Bernoff in groundswell  ("winning in world transformed by social technologies"--has a marketing emphasis) writes about the increasing incompatibility of formats and services. 

January 26, 2010

The Splinternet means the end of the Web's golden age

The golden age of the Web is coming to an end. Prepare for the Splinternet.

As we all gird for the launch of the Apple Tablet, take a moment to step back and realize what all these new devices are doing. The whole framework of the Web (and Web marketing) is based around the idea that everything is in a compatible format. Any browser, any computer, any connection, you see pretty much the same thing. 

Now with iPhones, Androids, Kindles, Tablets, and TVs connecting to the Web, that's not true. Your site may not work right on these devices, especially if it includes flash or assumes mouse-based navigation. Apps that work on the iPhone don't work on the Android. Widgets for FiOS TV don't work anywhere else.

Meanwhile, more and more of the interesting stuff on the Web is hidden behind a login and password. Take Facebook for example. Not only do its applications not work anywhere else, Google can't see most of it. And News Corp. and the New York Times are talking about putting more and more content behind a login.

Web marketing has grown since 1995, based on the idea that everything is connected. Click-throughs, ad networks, analytics, search-engine optimization -- it all works because the Web is standardized. Google works because the Web is standardized.

Not any more. Each new device has its own ad networks, format, and technology. Each new social site has its login and many hide content from search engines.

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Windows Secrets  ("Everything Microsoft Forgot to Mention") has a piece by Michael Lasky about the lack of 64-bit software for 64-bit operating systems (Windows 7 in particular); includes a brief overview of the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit OSes. 

January 28, 2010

The long wait for 64-bit PC software continues

Even though 64-bit PCs have been available for seven years, the promise of 64-bit computing has been delayed by a dearth of 64-bit software.

The situation is improving — slowly — but many major PC applications remain 32-bit affairs.

Microsoft likes to boast about the extra performance delivered by the 64-bit versions of Windows. Likewise, PC vendors continue to pitch the benefits of 64-bit PCs over their 32-bit brethren.

That's all well and good — and theoretically true — but without software optimized for 64-bit machines, using those more-advanced processors for everyday tasks is like running a Formula One race car on regular gas.

The primary difference between 32-bit applications and their 64-bit counterparts is the size of memory the programs can address. Computers use only two digits (ones and zeros), so a 32-bit program can track 2^32 (2 to the 32nd power) memory addresses — about 4GB. This is the basis of the "4GB memory limit" for 32-bit hardware and software.

A 64-bit PC can track 2^64 addresses, yielding a theoretical memory ceiling of about 16 exabytes — 16 billion gigabytes. Of course, no PC can hold that much physical memory — but the point is, they could. Similarly, 64-bit software is capable of managing truly huge data sets.

The 64-bit flavor of Windows takes advantage of this. For example, the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Ultimate can address up to 192GB of RAM. More prosaically, 64-bit Windows can routinely allocate up to 4GB (and sometimes more) to each software process running on the PC. In contrast, 32-bit Windows XP maxes out at 2GB per process.

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The lack that irks me is Flash.

See this post to Silicon Valley Insider:  Apple makes (almost) just a third of its money from selling desktops and laptops. 

The December 2009/January 2010 issue of Fast Company  has a great chart comparing Facebook and Twitter.  It includes