UberMedia Wants To Outtwitter Twitter?

Seems like UberMedia is considering biting the hand that feeds it:

Mark Millan, Leading app maker said to be planning Twitter competitor

UberMedia, which owns several popular applications that interface with Twitter, is outlining plans to build a social network that could compete with that popular microblogging platform, said three people who were briefed on the plans.

The service would seek to attract users by addressing common complaints about Twitter, such as its restriction on the length of a message and how it can be confusing to newcomers, according to these sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.

UberMedia is a leading developer of apps and Web-based services that help users communicate on Twitter and other social media platforms. The Pasadena, California-based company has amassed a small empire of apps — among them UberSocial, Echofon and Twidroyd — that connect to Twitter and offer features beyond Twitter’s own software.

Together, those UberMedia programs accounted for about 11.5% of tweets sent on one day last month, according to a study by market research firm Sysomos. UberSocial is the third most-popular way to send tweets, behind Twitter’s website and official iPhone app, the study found.
Twitter up to 1 billion tweets a week

TweetDeck is tied with Twitter’s own BlackBerry app as the fourth most-popular software for sending messages, Sysomos said. UberMedia is in talks to acquire TweetDeck, but that deal hasn’t been finalized, according to a person familiar with the matter. Industry website TechCrunch first reported on the talks.

“The audience for TweetDeck is very different” from the people who use Twitter’s official apps, Tony Haile, a general manager for Betaworks, said a year ago. The technology incubator is where TweetDeck started. “We never competed on core functionality.”

Correction: TweetDeck wasn’t incubated at Betaworks, as is the case with many other Betaworks’ companies. It was starting idependently by Ian Dodsworth, the company’s CEO, and Betaworks invested later on.

One interesting angle that isn’t touched upon in this piece are other attempts to wrest control of the Twittersphere away from Twitter, only mentioning previous — now dormant — competitor Jaiku. And no mention of Pownce: now totally forgotten?

Consider Diaspora,  the start-up kicked off on kick starter with $200,000 by a bunch of NYU students. Not setting the world on fire. Or Identi.ca, based on the StatusNet technology. Not a hot property. People are using Twitter because that’s where the people are, or because they never heard of the alternatives.

Of course, if UberMedia wants to advertise an alternative backplane for its tools, some proportion of the Twitter community would be aware of an alternative, but that doesn’t solve the chicken-and-egg problem: people will stay with their network, all things being equal.

So UberMedia would have to build something so much better than Twitter that it is worthwhile to abandon your network, which would have to be an order of magnitude better. relaxing the 140 character limitation isn’t that, by a long shot (and I’m not sure it’s better anyway).

This sounds like a crazy plan to me, maybe born of desperation out of Twitter’s recent business moves — like announcing no new clients could get access to the Twitter API. Perhaps UberMedia is worried that the business for Twitter clients has a dramatically shorter half life than when they got into it.

13 April 2011 9 Permalink

Can Google Go Social?

I have been watching Google’s frenetic quest to find an opening into the social revolution for a long time.

To date, what we have seen are experiments and acquisitions.

Having Gundotra lead social at Google reminds me of President Obama tapping General Petraeus to take on Afghanistan. It feels calming at the moment, but might not actually lead to the desired outcome.

On one one side, half-hearted hobbies that senior management hopes will grow into something great. In this category we have the more-or-less failed social network Orkut and now Wave, which both surfaced from the company’s ‘one day a week’ tinkering culture.

On the other, acquisitions like Jaiku and Dodgeball, which were innovative and groundbreaking, but were allowed to die in red tape, and where the innovative founders — like Jyri Engstrom of Jaiku, and Dennis Crowley of Dodgeball, soon left the company. Or great fat purchases like YouTube, which have proven to be less valuable than market prices.

Then, Google staged a relatively public search for a leader to move them to social. (Despite losing Jyri and Dennis, either of which could have done great things for the firm.) The result? Can’t find the right person. Catarina Fake couldn’t be lured back into corporate deadness, I guess. And Bradley Horowitz, who runs Google Talk, Grandcentral, Blogger and Picasa, wasn’t the right guy, apparently.

So now we have Vic Gundotra annointed as Mr Social, a guy who has made great strides at Google Mobile, getting Android into the market with a bang. But is he Mr Social?

Having Gundotra lead social at Google reminds me of President Obama tapping General Petraeus to take on Afghanistan. It feels calming at the moment, but might not actually lead to the desired outcome.

Om Malik puts it this way: Vic is a great product manager, focused on features. But social is more than a veneer of games, gestures, music, comments.

Om Malik, Slide, Vic Gundotra & The Un-Social Reality of Google

Social is more than just features. I’ve been saying for a while that in order to understand social and win over the social web, companies need to understand people. I’m not sure Google is capable of understanding people on that level, and that’s the reason why the company strikes out whenever it tries. There are rumors Google co-founder Sergey Brin championed the acquisition of Slide. He also championed Google Wave (which is shutting down) and the poorly conceived Google Buzz.

We are in a great migration away from a web of pages to a web of flow, where streams connect us and allow us to share links, comments, photos, games, locations, lists, and even larger social objects in the future. And Google has only had the smallest involvement in that expansion.

Google made a pile by harvesting the latent value of all the social gestures we were leaving around the web in the form of links. These form the core of Page Rank and Google’s search/advertising business.

This was born in the paleolithic of the social web, where mostly we were wandering around as hunter-gatherers, turning over rocks, based on keyword search. The idea of social in those days was to send email alerts to people so they’d remember to read your blog and post comments.

But the social web has grown based on social networks — relationships between people — not hyperlinks between web pages. We are in a great migration away from a web of pages to a web of flow, where streams connect us and allow us to share links, comments, photos, games, locations, lists, and even larger social objects in the future. And Google has only had the smallest involvement in that expansion. But they desperately want in on the next wave, but they haven’t found a formula yet. It’s not Wave or Buzz, obviously. And now they are plotting a knockoff of Facebook: how 2009!

There are many unplowed fertile fields out there, where Google’s scale and engineering soul could do great things. As just one example, modern social network research has shown that the social ‘scenes’ we are situated in — the millions of people that form the ‘friends of my friends’ friends’ network — are the single best predictor of our likelihood to be fat, smoke, or be happy. And by extension, buy Chevrolets, listen to Country music, or read manga. And no services have tapped into that reality, yet, except in the most inadvertent ways. (For more background see Social Scenes: The Invisible Calculus Of Culture, It’s Betweenness That Matters, Not Your Eigenvalue: The Dark Matter Of Influence and Jeff Jarvis on The Hunt For The Elusive Influencer.)

This is why actions like buying Slide are likely to be diversions, like Jaiku and Dodgeball turned out to be. Meanwhile, there are real advances to be made — like building sociality into the operating platforms of the future. Obviously Google is in a position to do that with Android and Chrome, but I honestly don’t think they know what to build.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games (Sarah Lacy/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
• Is Google Going to Kill Buzz Next? (thomashawk.com)
• Google Taps Its Main Man In Preparations For War With Facebook Over Social Media (observer.com)

5 August 2010 4 Permalink

Scoble on Jaiku/Twitter/Facebook/Kyte/Plaxo = something happening you should pay attention to

Scoble provides thumbnails on a bunch of social presence apps, including hints about an upcoming Plaxo release (I am getting a demo on Friday).

The whole sector is heating up, so the October Social Presence Summit is looking really good.

20 June 2007 Permalink

Serendipity 2.0: going fulltime on Dopplr

The folks at Dopplr, who I have not spoken to directly, have apparently built the ‘ships passing in the night’ app that I have cried out for for years (see here, for example).

The premise is simple, plug in your travel schedule, and a bunch of traveling fools as your social network, and bingo: you will know who is going to be in some time (or your home town) when you are.

The interface is clean and simple.

Above you see a list of my trips. Note that I can’t seem to be able to access the RSS feed. Might be a polling interval issue. Dopplr supports iCal subscription from calendar apps.

Above you see my (tiny) set of pals. At the moment, only Petteri, from Jaiku. He invited me to Dopplr. And he’s boring, since he isn’t traveling in the near term, although I just met him, here in San Francisco, the other day.

If you click on a specific place, you see a page like this:

I didn’t add a note, yet.

Above you see a prospective map of my travels. And below, the same itineraries arrayed in a timeline view:

This last view shows one of the snags, I think. The app seems very day focused: I can’t seem to be able to state the time of day that I will arrive somewhere, and that is critical if you are planning to meet for lunch or dinner.

I love the feel of the app, but I will have to wait for a few dozen friends to get into the beta before I can get the feel of it’s actual social usage patterns.

And of course, I need the RSS feed to work. So, I am replacing my old timeline, built using 30boxes, with Dopplr, as soon as the RSS is up.

One last note. Dopplr creates a fuzzy version of your photo to display in a public page. Here’s the stoweboyd page:

It doesn’t look to me like the public page can be disabled at the moment, either.

There is an SMS interface to Dopplr, but you have to text a +44 number, and I decided to wait until they have a US SMS number set up.

More to follow.

27 April 2007 Permalink

New Models Of Work: The Individual Is The New Group, Reprised

I have been talking with a wide range of companies recently that are developing business “Web 2.0” apps. I put the word in scare quotes, because not many of the core principles (or at least what I perceive to be the core principles) of Web 2.0 are showing up in many of these apps.

How many web apps have I seen so recently that provide some sort of intranet, supposedly for small/medium businesses? Way too many, and with way too little differentiation, and hardly any new thoughts about business.

First of all, I believe that because of the way that we live and work the individual is the new group (see my original post on this from January). Stated differently, apps that purport to help us order our work should start by solving the problems of the individual, realizing that one of the issues involved in work is sharing with others.

So, I am amazed to see how many apps continue the old, old ways, where membership in groups is the primary (if not only) notion at work. All of these apps that support projects as a collection of folders into which we move documents and people get access to them through group membership.

Yawn.

Not that this model doesn’t ‘work’. Obviously we have been able to get work done, and to share things, using this model. It’s been around for decades.

But I am more interested in bottom-up organization schemes, both at the interpersonal level and at the tool level.

Just some examples of these ideas, and a few notes about tools I have been trying to use:

• Contrast the notion of Gmail’s ‘labels’ — which are essentially tags — and the typical use of folders and categories in these intranet solutions. In Gmail, I can tag any email with dozens of tags, if I want, so I can aggregate and find it in a variety of ways. An email from a particular client is denoted with the company name, a location, and perhaps a project, task, or issue. As a result, I can pull up all emails related to London, specific project, or the topic of ‘conceptual design’ independent of project. With folders, things are put in one place, and can’t be sliced in other ways.
• Parts versus Wholes — I favor (in principle, since no one has built something like this) treating everything I am fooling with as miscellaneous (thank you, Dr Weinberger, wherever you are), basically a big pile of parts. Here’s a picture, here’s an email, here’s some notes on some topic, here’s a to-do item, and here’s a file (which has parts inside, like slides or sections or spreadsheet pages). What I’d like to be able to do is define assemblages of all the things wearing some tag, or defined by some tag algebra. Imagine pulling together an on the fly assemblage of all the bits in my heap that are tagged ‘conceptual modeling’ and ‘public’, and creating a workspace with that. At the same time, many of those public bits on the topic of conceptual modeling might be included in private assemblages, but they would still be public.
• Flow, Traffic, and kinds of Parts — The explosion of interest in Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, and related flow apps turns certain premises on their ear, but even most users seem unable to articulate what is going on here. One factor is the shift to information flowing through defined social relationships in an asymmetric fashion, away from the symmetric and closed groups of the pre-2.0 era. Another factor is the flow of various parts, not wholes, thought the apps. For example, Facebook does not embed my blog as an element in a portal presentation. Instead, new posts appear as they pop into my RSS feed: a flow of parts instead of embedding the whole. Now, a gazillion sorts of bits are starting to flow through Facebook’s traffic: new slideshows, new answers to questions, new events created, and so on. And we see a similar emergence of types of traffic in Jaiku and Pownce.
• Mobile versus Stabile — The other shift (very early) is toward pulling information from the traffic of these flow apps, and doing appropriate things with it. (I have appropriated Calder’s terms based on the different kinds of statuary: those that move and those that don’t.) If someone updates an event that I am interested in, and that I have added to my calendar. I think what I want is not automated updating a la iCal subscription, but instead seeing the change go by in a highlighted way, allowing me to acknowledge it or reject it. For example, a smart desktop companion app could be reading my Facebook traffic just looking for event information, and I might get a Growlr update popping on my desktop. I want to stay still, working, and have things of interest find their way to me. The world of browsing, where people are mobile and information is stabile, looks very 20th century.
• So a wish list, of sorts:
  
  • Work Management tools that start with individuals and bits, and work outward to assemblages and networks.
  • Tools that allow us to be stabile and make more and more critical information mobile, not vice versa.
  • New models of access and visibility based on networks and tags, not groups and folders.
  • Agreed upon conventions for flow apps to be able to interoperate, not just platform plays like Facebook. I don’t necessarily want one platform with ten thousand services streaming through it. I want to be able to use best of breed solutions, and have them stream together the way I want. As an example, I use Dopplr now to define where I will be geographically, and I stream that information into a specific calendar in Google. I might want to stream things so that my planned travels to various locations would lead to postings in Facebook local networks, and I would like to stream responses from those networks back to the trips in Dopplr. Obviously, this sort of gasketry is impossible today, but given enough interest by the community, and motivations among the developers for maximum network effects might push things in this direction.

At any rate, I am amazed that no one has started to move away from folders and documents in the intranet space, and I am amazed on the other hand that consumer-oriented frenzy in these flow apps hasn’t translated manifested itself in a new metaphor for work based on flow. I guess it’s going to take a while, and perhaps a couple of index apps, before these ideas can get off the ground.

If there is anyone out there pushing these ideas — and I don’t mean just another ‘dead easy to use’ old school intranet app — please contact me. I am willing to believe.

6 July 2006 Permalink