(image ) While the world watches the next coming of Jobs, I reflected on my gut feeling as to the iPad, and why that feeling is inherently one of disappointment (see my predictions 2010 (#5) and my post earlier this week).  

And I'll admit, this one is not entirely logical. But then again, I don't always base my predictions (or my business decisions) on pure logic. Sometimes I just go with a feeling.

So what is my feeling about the iPad? Well, to be honest, it's simply this: I want one. I want to play with it, I want it to work the way I want it to work, I want it to do everything I wish a device like this should do. I am the guy, after all, who wrote his master's thesis on the Internet-connected tablet and its impact on the media business (yes, I really did. In 1991-92).

What? Wait a minute, Battelle, you're saying you WANT one, AND that it's going to disappoint?

Yes, stay with me. Here's why: When Apple introduced the iPhone, I really, truly did NOT want one. And it became a game changing hit. I eventually caved and got one (but don't use it much), and I still have major reservations about the platform. When Amazon introduced the Kindle, I really, truly, did NOT want one. I eventually caved and got one (but don't use it much), and I still have major reservations about the platform.

But the iPad? Oh, yeah - I really, really want one.

Which, to my mind, almost dooms the thing immediately.

Why? Well, because it can't possibly live up to my expectations. I want one for entirely irrational reasons. I want one because it holds the promise of all that might be good, right, and perfectly executed in the world of computing, media, and culture. The iPad is the Obama of devices: It's all hope, inspirational oratory, intelligence, and good intentions.

But as we have seen, a year later, reality (whether business or political) often gets in the way of intelligence. It looks like the iPad will adopt the iPhone approach to apps in full, so that's one more distribution orifice created, for example.

In any case, I'll probably get an iPad. And one year from now, I'll probably be disappointed. Irrationally disappointed, but still, disappointed.

I guess we'll see. I hope I'm wrong. I'll probably be wrong. If I am, I'll cop to it (and reset my gut to boot).

A light day in the media and marketing world, as it seems everyone is holding their breath, waiting for Steve Jobs and Apple to drop the next shoe tomorrow with the launch of the iPad (or iTablet or whatever it'll be called). Speculation over the device dominates the news, with the NYT pondering its impact on "old media" business models (including its own), and endless rumors about its specs from the tech blogs. (including the apparently faked image at top.)

So allow me a few thoughts on Apple's entry. First off, if iTunes and the iPhone are any indication, the iPad will be a closed system, controlled by Apple. As with the iPhone, only approved apps will get to play. And as with iTunes, only those who cut a deal with Apple will get distribution on the new device.

Which means, in essence, with the iPad Steve Jobs will create yet another orifice through which value must run.

A bit of background. Five and a half years ago, before the iPhone became, well, the iPhone, Steve Jobs famously decried the carriers' business model as antiquated and anti-consumer, stating "we're not very good at going through orifices to get to the end user." I was at the conference where Jobs made that statement, and was impressed - thinking that perhaps, when Apple inevitably launched its iPhone, it'd have an open development environment mirroring the web. But I was wrong. (Steve left that tactic to Google and Android.)

Instead, Apple is playing to its core DNA, which is to obsessively control every part of the consumer experience, from the operating system and hardware design to the presentation and delivery of content. Hey, it's worked really well so far, why change now?

Well, because I think this model will lose, in the end. Apple is right to obsess on user interface and design, but over time, open wins. As Tom Evslin put it back in 2007: "Despite his genius, Job’s biggest failures come when he forgets the value of letting other brains in." Elegantly curated collective intelligence will always trump individual genius (at least on the web).

My partner in Web 2, Tim O'Reilly, has framed this discussion as a simmering "War for the Web." I think he's framed it right: everyone now understands that the web is *the* platform for business, and many are now busy applying very old school business models to this new platform: control distribution, control content, control identity, control any place where value accrues. It's the orifices all over again, with Apple leading the way.

I think this is going to be a major theme for 2010 and beyond: how will the web be controlled? Or will it? Is the era of the messy-but-open web coming to a close?

------

Other links of interest:

Playing Games With Customers: Is Foursquare The Future Of Local Search? (Search Engine Land. It might be. It sure is interesting to watch...)

Google releases new Google Voice for iPhone (Reuters. Google is using HTML 5 to go around Apple's refusal to let its iPhone app through the orifice)

Apple's Tablet and the New Splintered Web (Ad Age. Points out how devices are forcing all manner of new approaches to web dsitribution)

Facebook Finally Lands "The World's Biggest Marketer" (P&G to open office in Silicon Valley. I'm on P&G's Digital Advisory Board and can attest to the company's strong instincts to reach out beyond its traditional approaches).

Apple to Sell Ads on iPhones, iPods and iTablets? (Chasnote. This, IMHO, will be Apple's undoing if they approach this wrong. It's not in their DNA. Remind me to write a post about company DNA...)

Risk Avoidance and the ROI of Social Media, Insurance, Guitars and Tires (Forrestor. Money shot: Social Media is like corporate reputation insurance. You pay premiums in the form of building relationships, listening, responding, creating widgets, and building communities. And because you’ve done so, you’ve earned protection that can help should a PR disaster strike—you have an existing group of people who have affinity for your brand and an existing channel in which to reach them.)

Related:

2009 Predictions

2009 How I Did

2008 Predictions

2008 How I Did

2007 Predictions

2007 How I Did
2006 Predictions
2006 How I Did
2005 Predictions
2005 How I Did
2004 Predictions

2004 How I Did

A new decade. I like the sound of that. I'm a bit late on these, but for some reason these predictions refused to be rushed. I haven't had the contemplative time I usually get over the holidays, and I need a fair amount of that before I can really get my head around attempting something as presumptive as forecasting a year.

So I'll just start writing and see what comes.

While past predictions have focused on specific companies and industry segments (like Internet marketing), I think I'll try to stay meta this time. Except for Google, of course, which is still the only company in the Internet economy that can be seen from space. For now. But we'll get to that.

1. 2010 will mark the beginning of the end of US dominance of the web. I am not predicting the decline of the US Internet market, but rather its eclipse in size and overall influence by other centers of web economies. In essence, this is not an Internet prediction, but an economic one, as the web is simply a reflection of the world, and the world is clearly moving away from a US-dominated model.

2. Google will make a corporate decision to become seen as a software brand rather than as "just a search engine." I see this as a massive cultural shift that will cause significant rifts inside the company, but I also see it as inevitable. Google, once the "pencil" of the Internet, has become a newer, more open version of Microsoft, and it has to admit as much both to itself as well as to its public, or it will start to lose credibility with all its constituents. While the company flirted with the title of "media company" I think "software company" fits it better, and allows it to focus and to lean into its most significant projects, all of which are software-driven: Chrome OS, Android, Search, and Docs (Office/Cloud Apps).

This shift means Google will, by years end and with fits and starts, begin to minimize its efforts in media, including social media, seeking to embrace and partner rather than compete directly. This is a significant prediction, as Facebook is clearly Google's most direct competitor in many areas, but Google will realize, if it has not already, that it cannot out Facebook Facebook, but it sure can be a better software company.

3. 2010 will see a major privacy brouhaha, not unlike the AOL search debacle but around social and/or advertising related data. Despite the rise of personalized privacy dashboards for most major sites, there is still no industry standard for how marketing data is leveraged, and there is a brewing war for that data between marketers, their agencies, and third parties like ad networks and measurement companies. Add in a querulous legislative environment, and it's hard to imagine there not being some kind of major flap in the coming year.

4. By year's end the web will have seen a significant new development in user interface design, one that will have gained rapid adoption amongst many "tier one" sites, in particularly those which cover the industry.

Despite nearly ten years of blogging, most publishing sites are still stuck in the mode of "post and push down," which is, frankly, a terrible UI for anyone other than news hounds. Thanks to the three-headed force of social, gaming, and mobile, I think the PC web is due for a UI overhaul, and we'll see new approaches to navigation and presentation evolve into a recognizable new standard.

5. (image) Apple's "iTablet" will disappoint. Sorry Apple fanboys, but the use case is missing, even if the thing is gorgeous and kicks ass for so many other reasons. Until the computing UI includes culturally integrated voice recognition and a new approach to browsing (see #4), the "iTablet" is just Newton 2.0. Of course, the Newton was just the iPhone, ten years early and without the phone bit....and the Mac was just Windows, ten years before Windows really took hold, and Next was just ....oh never mind.

6. 2010 will see the rise of an open gaming platform, much as 2009 was the year of an open phone platform (Android). Imagine what might happen when the hegemony of current game development is questioned - I want open development for Halo and Guitar Hero, damnit!

7. Traditional search results will deteriorate to the point that folks begin to question search's validity as a service. This does not mean people will stop using search - habits do not die that quickly and search will continue to have significant utility. But we are in the midst of a significant transition in search - as I've recently written, we are asking far more complicated questions of search, ones that search is simply not set up to answer. This incongruence is not really fair to blame on search, but so it goes. Add to this the problem of an entire ecosystem set up to game AdWords, and the table is set. Google will take most of the brand blame, but also do the most to address the issue in 2010.

8. Bing will move to a strong but distant second in search, eclipsing Yahoo in share. Of course, with the Yahoo deal, it's rather hard to understand search share, but I measure it by "where search queries originate." This is a pretty bold prediction, given the nearly 7-point spread between Bing and Yahoo now, but I think Microsoft will pick up significant share using cash to buy distribution.

9. Internet advertising will see a sharp increase, and not just from increased search and social media platform (PPC/PPA) spending. Brands will spend a lot more online in 2010, and most predictive models are not accounting for this rise.

10. (Image) This is probably a layup, but one never knows, layups are sometimes the ones you miss: The tech/Internet industry will see a surge in quality IPOs. However, at least one, if not more will be withdrawn as public scrutiny proves too costly and/or controversial. A corollary: There will also be a surge in M&A and "weak" IPO filings.

11. I'm out of my depth on this one, but it feels right so I'm going to go with it: We'll see a major step forward in breaking the man/machine barrier. By this I mean the integration of technology and biology - yes, the same fantasy that fuels the blockbuster movies (Avatar, Matrix, Terminator). I'm not predicting a market product, but rather a paper or lab result that shows extraordinary promise.

12. I'll figure out what I want to do with my book. SOGOTP, so to speak. Three years of predicting that I'll start it is getting a bit old, eh? I feel good about branching back out into more contemplative fields, with FM in a strong position and our economy coming out from its defensive crouch.

As always, thanks for reading and responding. I look forward to 2010, it'd be hard to predict anything other than it'll be a better year, overall, than 2009.

Related:

2009 Predictions

2008 Predictions

2008 How I Did

2007 Predictions

2007 How I Did
2006 Predictions
2006 How I Did
2005 Predictions
2005 How I Did
2004 Predictions
2004 How I Did

First of all, it's either silly or sublime that when you type (or maybe, given Google now personalizes all results, when *I* type) "predictions 2009" into Google my predictions from a year ago are ranked first.  

Of course, when you say "predictions for 2009" it's second.   

But I've already ranted about how the personalization of search is screwing up our collective cultural conscience (search was our social glue, but it's dissolving). Is anyone out there agreeing with me? Anyone?

Anyway. Welcome to my review of how I did in my predictions for 2009. It's been a fun year, because I made some seriously big predictions a year ago, so tracking them is a bit easier than in the past.

So let's get to it.

1. Macro Economy. I predicted: We'll see an end to the recession, taken literally, by Q4 09. In other words, the economy will begin to grow again by the end of the year, but it won't feel like we're out of the woods till next year at the earliest.

I think I got that one right. Not very hard to predict, in hindsight, but remember, this was Jan. 09, and things really, really, really sucked eggs at that moment.

2. The online media space. I predicted: ....will be hit hard by the economic downturn in the first half, but by year's end, will have chalked up moderate gains over last year in terms of gross spend. I think it's possible that Q1 09 will be lower than Q1 08, marking the first time that has happened since 01, if I recall correctly.

Right again. Spending in fact declined year over year in the online space overall. But it has rebounded in the second half.

3. Google. OK, here's one of the biggies. I predicted: Google will see search share decline significantly for the first time ever.

Now, I know many of you will say that I whiffed this one, because Google's search share is higher now than it was a year ago. But before you toss me in the dustbin, remember this: Google did lose share in the middle of the year, though it gained it back. And to my mind, any lose of share is significant. So ... call this one a wash. It didn't last, but it did happen, for a while. Now, watch for my predictions in 2010. Because a lot of deals are up for grabs, and Microsoft does NOT like to lose. AOL, Ask...there's about ten points right there that are a jump ball.

#3 goes on to declare: The media business is more than a demand fulfillment business, and Google must learn to create demand if it's going to diversify. That means playing the brand game - a game that has long been owned by what we call "traditional media companies." Google has become a significant brand advertiser in 2009, in fact, it's a client of FM's in the brand space. And if an ad on the home page isn't about creating demand for a new product, I dunno what is. I go on to prognosticate: Google has a unique opportunity to become a new kind of branded media company. It will fail to do so, mainly for cultural reasons. I think the jury is still out on this. Google is trying to be so many things to so many people, it's hard to say where it's going to land. OS provider? Check. Browser vendor? Check. iPhone competitor? Check. Office suite player? Check. But brand that means anything but search? No check. Yet.

4. In this one I predicted: Google stock will soar in by Q3-4 of 2009, mainly because demand will pick up, and when demand picks up, it's like rain on a field of newly sown wheat.

Well, here's the chart:

I think this one is a big "check."

5. Big one. I predicted: Tied to #3 above, Microsoft will gain at least five points of search share in 2009, perhaps as much as 10. This is a rather radical prediction, I know, but hear me out. I think Redmond is tired of losing in this game, and after trying nearly every trick in the book, Microsoft will start to spend real money to grow share (IE, buying distribution), while at the same time listening to the advice of thoughtful folks who want to help the company improve the product.

Well, it depends on how you do the math, but given the Yahoo deal, I think this one came true. Microsoft did indeed buy share, by doing the deal with Yahoo.

However...

6. I next predicted: Yahoo and AOL will merge.

Oops. I whiffed here. It was a stretch. There's always next year. I could have predicted that AOL would spin out, but that was so damn obvious I decided against it...

7. This one was predicated on #6, so another whiff: in the second half of the year, Microsoft will buy its search monetization from the combined company.

Microsoft in fact is doing search monetization FOR Yahoo. It could have gone the other way, but it didn't. Sometimes the river card doesn't turn your way.

8. OK, my big Apple prediction: Apple will see a significant reversal of recent fortunes. Well, it sure didn't happen in sales or the stock, but I think it's happening with Apple's arrogant attitude toward its app store and network choices. I'd say this one was a push, not wrong, but not entirely right....yet.

9. I predicted: Major brands will continue to struggle with the best way to interact with "social media." They will take budget reserved for media spending (IE buying banners and building out branding campaigns) and start to become publishers in their own right. This was kind of a gimme, in that my company (FM) is doing this for scores of brands, and 2009 was certainly a banner year (no pun intended) for brands as publishers. Open Forum, Starbucks, Microsoft Exectweets, Intel's Lifescoop, P&G's Petside, Asus WePC, and on and on....I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of examples. But I am quite certain this is a major trend and one that is only gaining steam.

10. An agency/publisher prediction: Agencies will increasingly see their role as that of publishers. Publishers will increasingly see their role as that of agencies. ..... It takes both agents to get good media made. A very subjective prediction which again, I think is truly happening. Of course, I can only state that as anecdotal fact. But if you're in the agency or publishing business, I'd love your thoughts in the comments....

11. OK, the Twitter prediction. Now remember, on Jan 1 2009 it was not a slam dunk to say this: Twitter will continue its meteoric rise. This is a very hard prediction to make, because so much depends on the company's ability to execute two crucial - and exceedingly difficult - new features: The integration of search into the service, and the monetization of that integration.

Now, Twitter did have its year of years, growing extraordinarily, but traditional measure of growth flattened and petered out by the second half of the year. Why? Well, third party clients, for the most part, and a failure of the company to convert its media darling status into long term usage. But Twitter has rolled out a cavalcade of new features in the past few months, most aimed at fixing the initial use case problem I've pointed out time and time again.

In this prediction I also said: By the middle of 2009, the integration of Twitter's community and content will become commonplace in well-executed marketing on third party sites. Again, I think this one has occurred, many times over.

12. This is one of my favorites, the Facebook prediction: Facebook will do something entirely shocking and unpredictable. I am not certain what, but it won't have a "status quo" year. It might be a merger with a traditional media company, a major alliance with Google, hiring a head scratcher as CEO, or something else at that level of "WTF!?" As I think about it, it might be as simple as making Facebook Connect truly open, and changing its policies to make it drop dead easy to get data out of the service.

Ummm....check.

However, I also predicted: Facebook will "friend" Twitter and the two companies will become strong partners. Well, you can now updated Twitter from Facebook, so that's a start. But they're not pals yet, so this one is not exactly a hit.

13. My mobile prediction: Lucky #13 is reserved for my eternal mobile prediction: 2009 will see the year mobility becomes presumptive in every aspect of the web. I'm not even going to try to defend this one. I think 2009 was the year mobile eclipsed the PC web in terms of what matters to our industry. If you disagree, I'll see ya in the comments.

14. OK. My last one, well, I whiffed on it - mostly. It was my book prediction. I said: "Lastly, I promise, I will have sold my book and will be hard at work on it. And yes, still running FM too. I think I have a way to do both." Well, I didn't sell the new book to anyone, mainly because once I do, I have to write it. And I can't do that till I feel like FM is really, really in great hands. And guess what...it is. I am still running it as CEO, but now I have a wonderful President/COO, Deanna Brown. And she is a true partner and pro, and I am feeling very, very good about 2010. So give me half a point there...

So, adding it all up, I'd say I did a 10.5 out of 14. What do you think? Did I do alright? And do you agree with my interpretations?

Happy Holidays and New Year to all of you. I can't wait for the next year. I really think it's going to be a big one for all of us.

Everyone knows Kindle is a closed development platform (IE, there's not an app environment that lets developers make the Kindle platform better). Today I saw the news that Google has doubled the number of publishing partners who are now leveraging the company's "Fast Flip" e-reader software, and it got me to thinking.  

First, Fast Flip is software that runs anywhere the web runs, including mobile apps. It has an Android and iPhone version, and I'm sure there will be a RIM version soon. And when Apple's tablet comes out, and any other ebook/netbook competitor to Kindle, I'm sure Fast Flip will be there. Fast Flip is a web native app, and it plays nice with the web, from what I can see. And Google is clearly interested, as a company, in fostering developers to build out on its various platforms, from Android to Chrome to Google's App Engine.

To my mind, this means Google is now in competition with Amazon not just for books, but for all professional publishing products. While it's true that publishers can and have developed versions for Kindle, the fact that it's not an open platform means Amazon has a chokehold on what gets to be on the device. I doubt FastFlip will ever live on the Kindle - though it'd be a win for all if it did, I imagine. And I also doubt that the Kindle, anytime soon, will work in an easy way with the web ecosystem, the way FastFlip seems to (I need to use it more, but it makes sharing and social actions easy, for example).

Another way to think about it is that both Kindle and FastFlip are operating systems for reading packaged goods content. Hence, they compete for the marketplace of people who need those services. Of course, the web is the underlying OS, but FastFlip works like a newsstand of sorts, letting you easily browse products and dive in when you want.

As I noted in my earlier Kindle rant, I find a e-reader like the Kindle ideal for reading periodicals. I wonder, might Fast Flip might steal that market away from Amazon? Might FastFlip become an OS standard on next generation e-readers, netbooks, and mobile phones? A lot depends on whether publishers feel like they can trust Google as an newsstand agent. That's an open question, to be sure.

I'm not as up to speed on this stuff as I'd like to be, so if I'm missing something, let me know.

Some background reading on all of this: (Credit, Oil, IT, and) Paper Ain't Free, So Don't Waste It.

Paul points it out as a failed dishwasher search. Mike complains about automated content as does RWW. And we all have experienced it: The Google ecosystem is failing more - failing to get us what we think we want. Failing to not frustrate us. Failing at the more complicated queries we are throwing at it. Failing to be the Google that we came to love back when the web was small and Facebook was a way for Harvard geeks to try to get laid.

Now, Google's ecosystem is ripe for a quick buck - "content farms" that build article pages cheaply to make a quick buck off AdWords. But these articles, at least for a portion of us, don't really provide the answers we are looking for. (thanks @thejames for the pointers.)

As Paul puts it in bemoaning his fruitless attempt to use Google for a researching a dishwasher purchase:

This is, of course, merely a personal example of the drive-by damage done by keyword-driven content -- material created to be consumed like info-krill by Google's algorithms. Find some popular keywords that lead to traffic and transactions, wrap some anodyne and regularly-changing content around the keywords so Google doesn't kick you out of search results, and watch the dollars roll in as Google steers you life-support systems connected to wallets, i.e, idiot humans.

Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches -- from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons -- churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder.

The result, however, is awful.

Yes, it often is. But I'm not worried about this. Audiences always route around that which they don't want, and when something better comes along as a navigational interface, we'll pick it up, and quick. If Google doesn't figure this out, someone else will, and the cycle will repeat.

The truth is, we're asking far more complicated questions of search than we used to, and we're expecting the same magic we used to get back when the web had magnitudes of order less content. Back in 2002, when we put "dishwashers" into Google, we'd probably find someone's blog who was talking about his favorite models. Now, we have five hundred or more attempts at gaming the keyword itself, each promising a potential answer, but rarely delivering it - at least not if we have a complicated question in mind. For simple answers, content farms most likely do a fine job. But the truth is, we are not asking many simple questions of search. We're expecting a lot more.

And in the end, this is a good thing. Our expectations drive innovation, and I can sense a major breakthrough is coming. To my mind, the essential element required for that breakthrough is human in nature. We need a new framework for search, one that allows us to leverage our inherent ability to converse. And from what I can tell, it's closer than we might think.

2010 is going to be a very interesting year.

I had a birthday a few weeks ago and to mark the occasion, my wife bought me a Kindle.  

OK, yes, I'm a pretty digital guy, and despite writing my 1992 Berkeley Master's thesis on "The Future of Print in the Age of Interactivity" - a thesis that celebrated the rise of a digital tablet fed by a world wide network - I didn't run out and buy a Kindle as soon as they came on the market. In fact, I was rather suspicious of the device, with its cultish clan of devotees and its somewhat insidious approach to purchases (Whispernet is free - just use it to buy stuff!). I actively demurred my wife's consistent implorations to buy one - much to her frustration as a card-carrying member of the aforementioned cult.

I couldn't explain why, but something about the Kindle just struck me as wrong. (Well, the lack of an open development system is one big Why, but it wasn't the elusive Why. I'm getting to that....).

So when my wife handed me an Amazon box to open on my birthday...well it was awkward. I've already purchased two Kindles - both for her (she had to have the second version) - so I knew what was inside the box. But I have severe reservations about the thing, so pretending to be thrilled was difficult. We've been married over 16 years after all.

Then again, my wife was clearly thrilled with her Kindle, and her enthusiasm carried with it the whiff of a movement . Now thanks to her, I owned a ticket to Seeing What The Fuss Is All About.

So we fired the thing up, set up my account, and I began to poke around the Kindle store.

And that's when it hit me, in a very visceral and almost reactionary sense: I never, ever, EVER, want to read a book on this device, at least as the device is currently set up. Perhaps that's a bit too sweeping: Put another way, I don't ever want to read a book that I would ever want to share or keep - one that I'd want to put on my shelf in my library at home.

It was as if I was paralyzed: I literally couldn't even imagine purchasing a digital version of a book, downloading it onto this device, and then reading it there. Newspapers and magazines? Sure - I immediately got the New Yorker, the NYT, and the WSJ, and plan on happily consuming these periodicals and more as time goes by. I might even take a few blogs - but then again, it seems rather silly to pay for something that comes free over the web (wait....oh never mind.)

But books? No way.

Why?

I imagine you have probably figured it out - I was stuck in a physio-digital dilemma - my attachment to the physicality of books was affronted by the idea of digital long-form narrative.

Now, I'll be honest here and say this was a rather uncomfortable place to be, given my career as a producer of texts about the future of digital. What's wrong with me? Am I turning into my (grand)mother? Am I hopelessly out of date? Will I soon be muttering under my breath about how my kids are texting too much and failing to have "real" relationships with their friends?

Yikes. (David Byrne doesn't have this issue, so what is WRONG with me?!)

So I got to thinking about what was wrong with the Kindle, from my point of view. Now, I'll grant that my point of view isn't consistent with most (or even many) folks out there, but I think it bears airing out in any case. And as I pondered why, really, I don't like the idea of reading a novel on the Kindle, it became quite apparent it had to do with the book's physical nature, certainly, but more importantly it's social nature - the infrastructure of our culture that supports a book's social identity through its physical transport. (Countless books have been written about this mystery of the book as artifact, of course...)

It was clear to me that the Kindle breaks just about every one of the unwritten mores of how we, over hundreds of years, have honored books socially. (If this has been said before, endlessly and better by others, please forgive me, and leave a link in the comments...) And as a writer and lover of books, this makes the Kindle nothing more than a glorified Netbook - without the Net.

A few examples:

- You can't share a Kindle book with anyone else. That's just nuts. The sharing of a book is perhaps one of the most intimate and important intellectual acts between humans, ever. I'm not stuck on whether or not that sharing is physical. I'm stuck on the inability to share. It's a crime.

- You can't declare to anyone (including, importantly, reminding yourself) that you've read this book - an obstacle I'll call "the library problem." I love being surrounded by books I've read, and I love the fact that people who come to my office or my home library can see the books I've read. Yeah, part of it has to do with status. And does digital mean that status is going away? I don't think so.

- You lose the serendipity of reading in public (and judging, as well as being judged for what is read in public). This issue has famously been pointed out before, and I do find it rather compelling. A Kindle suffers from a kind of social blindness - no one knows what you're reading, unless they ask. Something important is lost when no one knows what you're reading on the subway, the airplane, or the park bench. The opening salvos of countless relationships will no doubt be lost (though I suppose any number of romances have been kindled by the exuberant declaration of one's love for the Kindle...).

Now, before you consign me to the Luddite woodpile, let me state that I don't think any of these obstacles will stand, over time. We'll figure out how to share books as digital objects, how to quicken The Book into the mercury of digital social relationships.

But I'm deeply disappointed with the Kindle's current lack of understanding of this critical aspect of a book's meaning in our culture.

And I'm pretty sure that ten years from now - perhaps sooner, if Google has its way - we'll look back at the first Kindles as important but ultimately flawed "fish with feet" in our ongoing evolution as a culture that honors what a book truly is. Meanwhile, I'm enjoying my free three week trials of periodicals. We'll see if they convert into paid subscriptions....

The sphere is abuzz with today's news that AT&T is suing Verizon over those apparently quite effective ads which borrow heavily from Apple's tagline - "There's an App for that..." Verizon has created a map that compares AT&T 3G coverage to Verizon's, and then uses the tagline "there's a map for that." (Above is the commercial, here's the map.)

Well, I've been ranting about a real carrier mapping application (executed as a marketing campaign, natch), for nearly three years, and while I've told just about everyone I can about it, so far it's still not done (I know, I know, we should make it ourselves, right? Well, maybe we will!).

Meanwhile, here's the idea. If any of you brilliant coder/UX/marketing geniuses want to go do it, just credit FM and I, ok?

The main value of the program? It provides a place where anyone can put a pin on a map and annotate (with four part ranting harmony if they'd like) where their calls are dropped. A service like this exists - deadcellzones.com - but it's not quite what I had in mind. It's got the guts of what I've suggested, but not the scale, interface, community feel, conversational dialog, or program backing. And by program, I mean a major carrier practicing the true principles of conversational marketing, and owning the dialog - listening, responding, and acting upon the input.

I imagine the program working something like this. A major carrier - let's say AT&T, since it's in the news today - decides to build this app. It then announces the app in a major marketing program via a traditional marketing platform (web, TV, etc.). Say you're on Boing Boing, and you see a STAMP execution that announces the new service - perhaps the ad itself is a widget that allows you to push a pin into the map based on a zip code, or whatever. One thing I know, everyone I've ever talked to has a story about how frustrated they are about dropped calls, and everyone has a list of places that are always dropping calls (for me, it's the tunnels around the GGBridge, Sand Hill Road area, and on and on...). So give them a platform to vent about it.

But wait, there's more! Venting is nice, but what'd be nicer is if your venting actually created change in the world! Imagine that! Well, if you're a major carrier, you *can* do something about it. In fact, folks are always giving carriers grief for not putting up more cel sites, but in many cases, the real reasons they can't have nothing to do with profits, and everything to do with the local city council, or geography, or other factors.

So, here's the play: As the pins pile up, those areas which have the most pins start to get "hotter" in a visual way on the map. And then comes the key part: The carrier promises, in its marketing, to address the top ten "hot spots" each quarter (or month, or whatever period of time makes sense). Note I said "address" and not "fix." Why? Because in some cases, there is no fix. For example, coverage at the North end of the Golden Gate Bridge is permanently bad, because, I am told by folks who know, it's very hard to get permission to place cel sites in the right places (the area is a national park *and* part of Sausalito, a notoriously unfriendly place when it comes to outside companies like cel carriers).

So in a case like the North end of the Golden Gate, AT&T "addresses" the problem by responding on the map itself, providing an explanation of why the company can't fix the problem, and suggesting that if consumers are upset, they might write a note to the Sausalito city councilmembers and/or the supervisors of the national park (and provide links, of course!).

The application is a mashup of sorts, blending Google Maps, crowdsourcing, geolocation, and commenting systems.

The plane is about to land, so I have to post and run. I'll revise this when I get back on terra firma. But I believe that whichever carrier actually executes on that map will, in my mind, really win the game. More on why as I update this.

Last week was big for Twitter. After years of speculation about whether the company was going to have a business model, Twitter announced two deals at our Web2 conference - first with Microsoft's Bing, and second with Google. Details of the deals were not disclosed, but as Google's Marissa Mayers admitted onstage, there were indeed financial terms.  

What those terms might be strike me as secondary to the fact the deals got done in the first place. Sure, they probably consist of some combination of data services fees and revenue sharing, but the fact remains that monetizing a real time search result remains an elusive art, and one that honestly, Twitter does not want to cede to either Google or Microsoft. So while the two battling search giants may toss a not-insignificant amount of Adwords or AdCenter revenue into Twitters' coffers, what really matters is the the traffic these deals potentially represent, and the validation of Twitter's role in the real time universe. That, I'd argue, is priceless.

Now, did Microsoft and Google do these deals simply to lay claim to a hot new service, or were their actions driven by the time-honored principle of "embrace and extend"? More on that in a future post, because I think the question begs consideration in light of where the culture of search and communication is headed.

The fact that both giants have validated Twitter's role in search led me to reflect on the role that Twitter plays in our culture. "To Tweet" is a verb in the process of becoming - not unlike "To Google" in 2002-3, or "to Xerox" in the 1960s. So what does "tweet" mean, really? Or perhaps more to the point, what *should* it mean?

At the moment, "to tweet" means something along the lines of "to broadcast a thought, in real time, using 140 characters of text or less." And while confining tweets to this creative box has been seminal to the service's early success, I'd argue that continuing to do so will most likely consign Twitter to the status of a verbal footnote in our ongoing cultural conversation.

What I'm struggling to say is that definitions matter. Words matter. My anthropological spidey senses are tingling right now, because we're in a cultural moment where we are redefining how we share a moment. Facebook knows this. Google and Microsoft know it as well. And we all know it - explicitly or implicitly, as a culture we are learning to share our moments in real time, irrespective of geography or traditional social boundaries.

So allow me to suggest what I believe the definition of the verb "to tweet" should become: "To share a moment."

In other words, to truly scale, "Tweet" - the verb-in-process-of-becoming, or, alternatively, the verb-that-could-have-been-but-became-instead-a-footnote-in-history - needs to be defined by more than 140 characters of text.

If you abstract what we're really trying to do with the creative box Twitter has imposed upon us, it's this: We want to share a meaningful moment in time. Sure, we don't all manage to do that so well, but I think the essence of what we're trying to do - "share," "meaningful," and "moment" - can easily be abstracted from the creative box in which Twitter is currently confined.

If you've used a tool like Brizzly, Power Twitter, or any of the many other services that unpack and contextualize your Twitter stream, it's clear that a tweet is much more than text. It can be an image, a video, an overheard snippet of speech. In short, it's a moment, captured, imbued with meaning, and shared.

As long as it remains those things, it's a tweet. And as much as I love the SMS-inspired roots of Twitter's origin, it's time for the service to branch out and embrace its essence, and not get stuck in its own creation myth. If it fails to do so, I think any number of its competitors - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or an unborn startup - will recognize and exploit that failure.

So live in the moment, Twitter, and move outside the text box.

PS - I think the same applies to the interface of search - breaking out of keyboard-driven text and more into a conversational interface. I'll have a lot more to say about this in the coming months, as I think it's starting to come together in my head - "The Moment" is a good organizing principle for where I believe things are going in search, culture, technology.

If ever there was a strong meme in search, it's the impact of social: Everyone is talking about how Facebook and Twitter are threatening Google for what I've called the "oxygen" of the web: distribution of attention.  

A little background. Google rose to prominence as the absolute winner in the Internet's distribution game. The de facto interface for knowledge navigation, Google brought signal to the noise of Web 1.0: Sure, nearly everything worth publishing was now on the web, but how on earth could you find that ONE thing that mattered to your query, NOW?

A hundred billion plus dollar business ensued: we all now use Google to find that which we want to find on the web. In particular, Google is great at delivering authority on the web for those things that had already been published and ranked: In a way, Google has become the reference librarian of the web.

But...just searching a reference library is one thing. What about finding things people are talking about right now? And wouldn't it be great if you could cross index that reference library with your social graph, so that people you trusted helped you go from query to decision?

Twitter and Facebook promise that next step in search. Let's tease this out a bit.

We have different modes when we search. Sometimes we are looking for that perfect reference point - an article on how to train a dog, for example, or a how to guide on building a treehouse. But then we hit a critical inflection - we want to validate our reference material with a real live human connection. And Google can't really do that. In short, we want to cross reference what we've learned with the experience of someone we trust.

Before the rise and ubiquity of social networks, the ability to do this was pretty serendipitous - sometimes in our reference search we found humans with whom we could connect and then learn (this happened to me in 1995 as I was searching online for my birth mother, but that's another story).

But it's happening more and more online now, thanks to our ability to use Twitter and Facebook to query our social graph. Through status updates or tweets, we can ask real people that which before we asked Google. And, by reading through the lifestreams of our network, we can discover that which we might never has asked, but nevertheless find interesting.

It's late and I'm working way too many hours to do this line of thinking justice. But I will simply state it this way: Facebook and Twitter, you need to get better at mixing traditional web search with what you've already got. And Google/Microsoft, well, vicey versa. You need to get better at mixing social into your traditional web search.

Whoever does it best, wins.

Update: A new study on the interplay of search and social media can be found here.

Whoever is running these chattering teeth ads, cursing the Internet to another round of Punch The Monkey crap creative and all the consequences therein, STOP IT.  

But it's really all our fault, isn't it? Premium sites run remnant ad networks, and crap like this gets through faster than we can beat it back. We really do need some kind of crowdsourced feedback system so ads as annoying as this one get beat down, quickly, and never show up again, except to those who really want to see them. Who, I imagine, are the same folks who buy Chia pets late at night off infomercial programming.

Oh, wait, there is a feedback button here! But clearly, it's not being used! Why? Because it requires you fill out a multiple choice, ten question form! Which I did, but then returned an error message. That's doubly annoying - I took the time to inform CBS that this ad sucked, and my time was wasted. ARGH!!!!

Hey CBS (and all of us - including FM, which has run this ad due to our relationship with ad networks) these ads SUCK. Stop it!!!!

I had an extraordinary day yesterday, in terms of who I got to talk with. Not only did I meet with several of FM's partners - two Fortune 500 marketers, a major platform partner, and a major blogger - I also got to watch the launch of Ad Stamp and the complete schedule for the Web 2 Summit. But a highlight of the day had to be my chance to steal 30 or so minutes with the founder of DigitalGlobe, Dr. Walter Scott.  

Now why was I talking to Dr. Scott? Well, he's presenting at the Web 2 Summit this year, and I get to work with him on how Digital Globe fits into our theme of WebSquared.

In Dr. Scott's case, this task pretty much a layup.

Now, Web 2 is known for in depth interviews with titans of business like GE CEO Jeff Immelt, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, or former HP CEO and pending Senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina - all of them are coming this year. And it's known for having the stalwarts of the Internet industry represented as well - leaders from Google, Twitter, Yahoo, AOL, Newscorp, and Microsoft will also be there.

But Web 2 is also known, I hope, for the High Order Bit - the short, mind blowing presentation of a new idea or new data that makes you step back and just say Wow.

To me, that's what happened when I really grokked DigitalGlobe, a company with a billion dollar market cap that successfully went public in the midst of the worst recession since 1931.

What the company does is pretty simple, actually. It sends super expensive satellites into space, and takes high resolution, geographic-data tagged pictures of every square foot of the earth. It then makes these images available to anyone willing to pay* (and sometimes to those who can't but really need the data, as it did with the recent LA fires).

Those images are, of course, digital. And they comprise, to echo my writing about search, nothing less than a database of surface reality, albeit from the point of view of outer space. This reality is objective, factual, and indifferent to politics. It can inform a mind bending number of new use cases. If you think about this database from the point of view of an Internet entrepreneur, well, It could become, to wax into a bit of hyperbole, fuel for a whole new ecosystem of value.

Allow me the use of a metaphor, one with which you are all quite familiar.

So think of search. What is search? Well, search is a database of everything that is worth knowing about on the web. It's made by a crawler that pings web real estate and creates an index/database of what it finds. It's served up as an application through a user interface that takes your queries and matches them to the best results in that database.

Simple, but that simplicity largely fueled Web 2 as we know it.

Now consider a new dataset for search, the dataset owned by DigitalGlobe. The "crawlers" are DigitalGlobe's satellites. The "real estate" being pinged is every square foot of the earth. As with the web, some parts of the world are worth pinging more often than other parts. ("We don't hit Greenland very often," Dr. Scott told me. But during the Olympics, the company took a picture of Beijing *once every 8 seconds.* Imagine if this technology was around during Tiananmen). The data that satellite crawler captures is stored in a vast index/database. And that index is served up as a product through a UI, though in DigitalGlobe's case, the UI is not yet scaled to a mass consumer use like Google.

Wait, check that, it is, in a way. DigitalGlobe provides the imagery you see in Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. And while that information is really cool, and provides the foundation for a huge number of interesting applications (and controversy), things get really interesting when you bring two key pillars of search into the equation: Freshness and comprehensiveness.

Freshness is what is sounds like - how often does the crawler check back to the source and see what might have changed? And Comprehensiveness is equally self-describing - but in the case of satellite imagery, it's not so much how *much* of the earth you have in your database (that would be the whole darn thing), but rather, how high the resolution of that data can be.

The data fueling Google and Microsoft's web applications is good, but it's not very fresh, and it's resolution is limited. But that doesn't mean DigitalGlobe doesn't have far fresher data and way better resolution. It does. It just doesn't sell it to Google. (And as I think about the company, I can't help but think Google or Microsoft must be sharpening their pencils, sketching out scenarios for how they might acquire DigitalGlobe. But I get ahead of myself).

Imagine a time when DigitalGlobe's crawlers scale across every square inch of the (interesting bits of the) earth at second-by-second freshness - the way Google's crawlers do for the Web. And imagine a time when the data from this crawl becomes available to all of us, in near real time. Is it possible? Of course it is. You need more satellites, more CPUs, more storage, and some pretty amazing UI and use cases.

Far as I can tell, we have those components already made, just like Google's infrastructure was not so much about its component parts as it was about how they were put to work in the service of a culture changing service.

Is your mind blown yet? Mine is, but then again, that happens a bit more frequently than your average bear, I'll admit.

Back here on earth, I asked Dr. Scott two questions that bear repeating. First, who are DigitalGlobe's largest customers (and how did they use the data)? Far and away, he said, the company's largest customer is the US Government. Why? Well, they buy high resolution data of, say, a particular Afghan village, datestamp yesterday. Then they give that data to soldiers on the ground, who go into that village and ask folks questions like "What were those heavy loads being moved around in the town square by these five men at around noon yesterday?"

Why, might you ask, why doesn't the US use its super secret spy satellites to give ground troops this data? Well, because the information on those spy satellites is classified. It's super secret. But DigitalGlobe's information is commercial, and unclassified. In essence, the US Government uses DigitalGlobe for the same reason it uses FedEx to move military supplies around the world: it's just faster, better, cheaper, and easier.

OK, so there's the answer for why the US Government is such a big customer (and it's not just military, of course. There's NASA, there's NIH, there's Agriculture, you get the picture, no pun intended). What was my second question?

Well, my second question was informed by the concept of search and my rhapsody around the implications of the world as a database. Might DigitalGlobe consider offering a fresh, high-resolution database of its imagery to developers world wide - replete with business rules for commercialization? Imagine the use cases - for the images are not simply images, they are laden with latent meta-data - interpretive data on everything from how crops are growing to how traffic is moving to how governments are treating their citizens.....might DigitalGlobe consider doing such a thing?

"That would be cool," was Dr. Scott's only answer (he is an officer of a public company, after all.)

It sure would be. That would be so WebSquared.

###

*From the company's own product descriptions:

DigitalGlobe’s CitySphereTM product features 60 cm or better orthorectified color imagery for 300 pre-selected cities worldwide. These GIS ready cities are available as off the shelf products and ready for immediate delivery.

With over 37 million km2 of 3 inch to 2 foot resolution color imagery of select American and international markets, DigitalGlobe’s Orthorectified Aerial Imagery is part of our complete offering of the most current high resolution aerial and satellite imagery and the largest library of earth imagery available anywhere. In addition to the largest library of aerial imagery anywhere, we maintain a complete, highly accurate USA basemap at 1 meter resolution or better, with major cities at 6 in to 2 ft resolution.

Regarding this story in the New York Times:

With Bloggers in the Bleachers, Leagues See a Threat to Profits

(and related, my post on "Don't Be a Player Platform Hater"):

I have such a rant in me on this topic but I simply cannot write it now, I'm way too Supposed to Be On Vacation. But suffice to say, you can do two things if you "own content" - like, say, football games (yep, that's content). One, you can cut it all off and hoard it. Or two, you can be the oxygen in the ecosystem. The first allows you to profit but it kills your long-term community ecosystem and prevents, entirely, your product from growing as your supporting community wants it to grow - because in essence, you are refusing to allow your community to have a voice and point of view about your product. It's YOURS, and you'll LIKE IT THE WAY I WANT TO GIVE IT TO YOU!

The second makes you a crucial, life giving element of an ecosystem, but one that is as dependent on that ecosystem as it is upon you. Yes, air is unbreathable without oxygen, but then again, it ain't air if it's ONLY oxygen.

Anyway. Read this piece, and really think about it. Cutting fans off from blogging (or Tweeting, since there are ads there now and will be more*) about the games they go to because they might be getting paid by SBN, or AdSense, or whoever? Are you F'ING NUTS?

Pull your head out, sports guys. It's way better to be the oxygen in the ecosystem. It's a bigger profit opportunity, for one. And it's just a way more fun approach to business, one that feeds more than just your bottom line.

OK, back to vacation.   

*PS, oh yeah, and Facebooking, because, shit, Water Cooler is on Facebook, isn't it?! Yikes, thousands of people talking about football AND WE'RE NOT MAKING MONEY ON IT DAMNIT! And doesn't Facebook show ads next to fans' personal pages? Time to get me a cut of that revenue too, I hear Facebook is making hundreds of millions!

** PPS I am NOT saying that businesses who make it their business to cover and profit from covering sports should not have a revenue model that pays content owners, far from it. I AM saying that content should have an API - and a set of business rules around use of that API. Duh.

Hey, I really like the soundtrack. And it's f*ing true as well.

My beef with this is this simple statement, about 3:42 in. "Social Media isn't a fad, it's a fundamental shift in how we communicate."

True, to a point. What it really is, is the release of how we already communicate, but now at scale. It's not a shift in *how* we communicate, it's a step function in our *ability* to communicate. There's an important difference there. One could argue that means a fundamental shift, but such a statement can be easily misinterpreted as meaning "something totally new in how humans think/work/communicate", and I think that's not quite right. It's us, squared.

I've been meaning to post a long-ish rant on the importance of celebrities taking control of their own platforms, but never gotten to it, in part because I'm not that enamored with the incessant selling of celebrity that occurs in our culture. Yeah, I sound like a grumpy old man, but I can't help myself. It bums me out - not because I don't like celebrities, but because the current approach strikes me as driven by short term thinking.  

If, instead, more celebrities actually used their fame to take control of their own destiny and build a platform for themselves, they'd last longer, be happier, and make more money - perhaps not as much all at once, but more over the long term. And what do I mean by "taking control of their own destiny"? Well, in a phrase, I mean "building themselves a platform through which they effectively communicate with, build, and deliver value to their fan base."

Until recently, those platforms were controlled by others. But now, celebrities can roll their own. And that changes the game, if they chose to play.

Before I explain what I mean by that, let me state for the record that I believe the same is true for all marketing brands. But I get ahead of myself (more on what it means to build a platform for brands in a future post.)

Let's start at the beginning. What, after all, is a celebrity? Well, if you do a Google Image search for the term, you're bound to believe a celebrity is an attractive, well endowed woman. Wikipedia defines the concept thusly: "A celebrity is a person who is famously recognized in a society....There are degrees of celebrity status which vary based on an individual's region or field of notoriety. While someone might be a celebrity to some people, to others he may be completely unknown."

That last part is important when it comes to social media. I've noticed that the class of folks we might call "minor celebrities" have taken to social media far more quickly than those who Wikipedia calls "global celebrities." In fact, the extraordinary embrace of Twitter by A-lister Ashton Kutcher (there, I wrote his name for the first time ever) serves as the rule proving exception - big time celebrities don't often expose themselves in an honest dialog with their fans. Instead, they are handled. They are managed, marketed and controlled like packaged goods, sold through the supermarket aisle distribution outlets of sports arenas, movie theatres, network television, and arena tours.

And because they are treated as product by their managers, they are discouraged to do anything that might smack of honest dialog with their fan base - anything that might feel like "routing around" the manicured image laid out by the business of celebrity.

Case in point is the approach major sports leagues have taken toward both Facebook and Twitter. Recently the NFL and ESPN have banned or curtailed use of either Twitter or blogging or both. (As much as I appreciate ESPN's product, I consider it to be a product of the leagues, not an independent platform for players. From their policy: "The first and only priority is to serve ESPN sanctioned efforts..." Follow the money, after all...).

Following that money explains why these new policies are being put in place. Leagues like the NFL and distribution outlets like ESPN make their money by controlling the output of the product on the field. If that product starts to have a conversation outside of those lines, money, connection, and reputation might be made on those conversations, value that is not being harvested by the NFL or ESPN. That's a threat, and they are treating it as such.

It's no coincidence that the most prolific and natural celebrity users of social media platforms exist outside those manicured boundaries - in sports like tennis (Roger Federer) and cycling (Lance Armstrong, who started tweeting around the time of his appearance at last year's Web 2 conference). These are celebrities who are not handcuffed by powerful leagues or networks, and who naturally gravitate toward platforms that allow them to connect directly to their fanbase.

Does this sound familiar? It should if you're a marketer struggling with how to take your brand online. After decades of manicuring your brands through one-way mass media platforms like television, it turns out millions of people are now talking about your prized possessions online, and you can't directly control the conversation. But a new set of brands have sprung up who seem agile in this environment, and they feel threatening: Think JetBlue and Virgin, over American and Delta. Whole Foods over Lucky. Comcast over AT&T. These "new" brands have taken to social media and are embracing it, warts and all.

I think when it comes to celebrity, the same is also be true. The celebrities who are "minor" now are swarming to Twitter and Facebook, much as unknown bands swarmed to MySpace. Those who have direct, honest connections with their fans will endure. Those who don't might catch the flame of fame briefly, but they will not endure as brands. Why? Because no matter what, the "packaged goods" platforms of movies, networks, and sports leagues are still important, and it will soon be the players and celebrities with a guaranteed base of hard core fans - or followers - who can call the shots with those powers that be. You think Brooke Burke won't get a better deal now that she's in dialog with over a million fans on Twitter? Owning and cultivating your own platform means you no longer are in thrall to "star makers" - together with your community, you make your own star. That's a kind of celebrity I can get behind.

Last week I wrote a post in which I opined a bit about Facebook search. In it I wrote:

Facebook is way more than its newsfeed, and its search play is key to proving that value, and extending it....No doubt building Facebook search today is akin to building Google ten years ago - bigger, most likely, in terms of data, algorithmic, and platform challenges.

If only I had waited a few days, I could have pointed to Fred's piece in Wired, out this week. He profiles the ongoing feud between the King of Search, Google, and the upstart, Facebook. In his piece, he writes:

For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms—rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this "social graph" to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire—rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now.

I agree that of all the contenders out there right now (including Twitter), Facebook has the most data, position, and potential to upset Google's dominance of the web. But I disagree with one premise of the piece, which is that Facebook's proprietary approach to the data it stores presents a blind spot to Google that gives Facebook a competitive edge. Fred writes:

Together, this data comprises a mammoth amount of activity, almost a second Internet. By Facebook's estimates, every month users share 4 billion pieces of information—news stories, status updates, birthday wishes, and so on. They also upload 850 million photos and 8 million videos. But anyone wanting to access that stuff must go through Facebook; the social network treats it all as proprietary data, largely shielding it from Google's crawlers. Except for the mostly cursory information that users choose to make public, what happens on Facebook's servers stays on Facebook's servers. That represents a massive and fast-growing blind spot for Google, whose long-stated goal is to "organize the world's information."

I think it's a major strategic mistake to not offer this information to Google (and anyone else that wants to crawl it.) In fact, I'd argue that the right thing to do is to make just about everything possible available to Google to crawl, then sit back and watch while Google struggles with whether or not to "organize it and make it universally available." A regular damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario, that....

For an example of what I mean, look no further than Twitter. That service makes every single tweet available as a crawlable resource. And Google certainly is crawling Twitter pages, but the key thing to watch is whether the service is surfacing "superfresh" results when the query merits it. So far, the answer is a definitive NO.

Why?

Well, perhaps I'm being cynical, but I think it's because Google doesn't want to push massive value and traffic to Twitter without a business deal in place where it gets to monetize those real time results.

Is that "organizing the world's information and making it universally available?" Well, no. At least, not yet.

By making all its information available to Google's crawlers (and fixing its terrible URL structure in the process), Facebook could shine an awfully bright light on this interesting conflict in interest.

(image) The way some folks' numbers are blowing up on Twitter, it seems to me perhaps we might create two types of Twitterati - those who have purely "earned" audience base, and those whose base has been wildly inflated due to their inclusion in Twitter's suggested users feature, which I wrote about earlier last week.

I'm not usually one to talk about this stuff, but for whatever reason, it's been bugging me. I remember when I started this site, and it started to get noticed by people whose opinion I respected. Then concentric circles of folks found out about it, and it built organically, to the point of being one of the largest blog sites focused on tech and media (that was 04-05, before I abandoned covering news and started pointing folks to Danny and Mike). That felt good - I had earned the respect of an important audience, and my numbers showed it. The same is true of Fred at A/VC, Mike at TC, and many, many others.

But that's not how it's playing out on Twitter lately. I've spoken to a number of folks whose Twitter numbers have recently skyrocketed, and they all have said the same thing - followers may have increased dramatically, but engagement - folks who reply, or click on a link in your tweet, or Direct Message you - increased only marginally. In other words, the system is creating what we used to call, in the magazine business, "junk circulation" - numbers for numbers sake, without a lot of value.

That's a game many have played, and continue to play, in our Comscore obsessed Internet world, but it never ends well. Ever.

And I don't think that is in any way good for the Twitter ecosystem.

Just my two cents.

I've spent a bit of time going back in time lately, at least as far as Twitter is concerned. In short, I created a new account, as if I had never used the service before.

Why? Well, as Twitter hits inflection, it struck me that there was something really, really important that had to happen, in terms of how the service works. As millions of new users try the service, it's crucial that they find something useful when they arrive. If they don't, well, they'll leave.

And leaving they are, if this report from Nielsen is to be believed. Widely picked up last week in the Twitterverse, the report does the math and finds that 60 percent of those who try Twitter abandon the service within a month. That means no matter how steep the inflection, Twitter will soon burn through its available fuel (new user attention) and could fail to hit escape velocity (where escape velocity = a scaled platform at the level of Facebook, Google, or Yahoo).

That got me thinking. What do new users do when they first log into a service like, say, Facebook? Why, they search, of course.

For old friends, for the names of their colleges or high schools, for any kind of social connection that might make sense of the very large universe that is Facebook.

So when Twitter integrated search last week, it was, as I said, a very big deal.

But to my mind, it's not enough.

To explain my point, let me go back to the experience I recently had of creating a new account - going back in time, so to speak, and pretending to be a newbie to Twitter. The service is very easy to sign up for (see the screen shot at left). Once you pass this screen, you can check to see if

your friends are on the service. This is a pretty standard email database lookup, and I have no idea how many folks go through it. I don't have email at any of those services (at least, none with any real contacts), so I passed. (I'd be interested in how many folks do use this service, and how many hit the button to skip this step. If it's a high percentage that use this step, I'd also be interested in what

the experience is like in terms of making Twitter more useful, but I'll have to be blind to it for

this post. I think my conclusions will be valid in any case....).

Next comes the step that I find most interesting, and in its current iteration, most frustrating. This is where the new user gets a

list of folks that Twitter suggests he or she might follow. It's a pretty random list of interesting folks, including (as I write this) John McCain, Fred Durst, Chris Anderson, Oprah, John Legend, and so on. It changes from day to day, but anyone who's ever made it onto the list reports that their followers skyrocket - sometimes by an order of magnitude.

Why? Well, turns out most newbies to Twitter simply hit "follow all" and end up with the list of twenty or so suggested Tweeters as their first set of folks they are following.

Therein lies the problem. Ah, the dinner bell is ringing, when I come back, I'll explain why, and suggest a better way. I'm sure many have already thought about this, but I never claimed to be original, just persistent. And...I really want Twitter to get

escape velocity...because every time a rocket makes it out of the Valley and into the Rest of The World, it feels like the work we all do is worth it.

(Back from Dinner). So why is following twenty or so interesting people a problem? Well, while I am sure these folks are chosen for their general interest and lively tweets (for more, see Twitter's blog post on suggested users), it turns out that it's simply not very

compelling, in the main, to watch these guys tweet. It's certainly not as addictive as finding an old friend on Facebook, for example. It's neat, but it's not going to get folks to come back, over and over again.

What *is* interesting, or could be, is watching folks tweet who you care about. Perhaps they are friends, or family, or leaders in your line of work, or entertainers you love. For whatever reason, they are *your* leaders, and finding them, at least during the sign up process, is entirely too hard.

But it doesn't have to be that way. It strikes me that a few more structured steps in the sign up process could really pay significant dividends for Twitter. Perhaps a "follow wizard" that asks a few questions, and makes suggestions based on input

from the new user. Let us drill down by category: Business:Technology:Internet, or Health:Diseases:Cancer. The ontology isn't very complicated - mapping users to it is a bit more complex, but not impossible.

And encourage folks to put in the names of their friends via search - that's magic when you find a friend who's already on Twitter, and might act as a sherpa of sorts.

There are already a lot of third party services that help users find folks worth following, but new users are never going to find them in their initial interaction with Twitter. incorporating this kind of a service into a newbie's initial experience - even if it's very, very simple - could pay huge benefits in turning around that 60% abandonment number, and soon.

In short, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and right now, Twitter's initial impression does not add enough value. But with a few tweaks, it most certainly could.

I'm a student of history. OK, maybe more like, I am a getting-older journalist following a youngish history, of companies like Apple, a company I covered in the 80s, Microsoft, (late 80s to present), AOL, Yahoo (mid 90s to present), Google (late 90s to present), Facebook (early 2000s to present), and on and on (yes, Twitter is my most recent obsession as a story).

So when I saw this tweet today, well, heck, it brought me back. To this. I first saw the Google Master Plan whiteboard when I went to Google in early 2002 to meet with Eric Schmidt. Love the idea that Twitter now has a whiteboard with its revenue plans, and prominently declared is that wonderful mandate we've all written in the corner; DO NOT ERASE!

Yes, that's a good idea. Don't erase (see my previous post on why).

PS - Google's Master plan also had a "Do Not Erase" in the top left hand corner. So did the "Don't be evil" whiteboard moniker put up across campus in the early days.

The Times runs a piece today citing a media analyst at Sanford Bernstein claiming:

...monetizing Twitter “would be difficult at best and likely unsuccessful.” People who sign up for free services tend to resent a company for trying to wring revenue from the business later. Subscription fees are out of the question, they said, and advertising-based revenues don’t seem to have yielded enough cash flow to make a Web 2.0 property viable.

I agree about one thing - building ad platforms like Tweetsense will be difficult. But nothing valuable is ever easy. Adwords was not easy. Overture was not easy. What Facebook is building is not easy. And TweetSense won't be easy.

But that's the point, isn't it? If it was easy, everyone would do it.

To be entirely clear, Twitter has at least three major potential revenue streams.

1. Tweetsense - AdWords and AdSense like platform for Twitter. This has major scale potential.

2. Branded licensing. This is stuff like Stocktwits, where Twitter could promote and perhaps gets licensing fees.

3. SMS/carriers - deals with carriers to split revenue driven by mobile tweeting.

And there are plenty more.

Analysts who write stuff like this are clearly not thinking very hard about the potential of services like Twitter, nor do they understand the appetite for risk the venture capitalists backing such ideas have. Check this quote:

"Whoever buys Twitter, they wrote, “will likely have to operate it at a loss in perpetuity, or until the next cool Web 2.0 social networking concept comes along and Twitter tweets no more.”

Utterly ridiculous on so many fronts it's hard for me to summon the energy to refute it. The idea of the tweet as the query, the idea of brands wanting to have a commercial "response" to searches (and tweets) on Twitter, these are not small ideas. The idea of real time search, conversational and social search, real time "AdWords" - these are not minor new wrinkles. They are here to stay. Twitter is a very promising service directly in the center of these trends, trends the "analysts" at Sanford Bernstein clearly do not grasp.