A Meaningful Life

Well at 4:30pm today Aust EST it was official. Vodafone wins the iPhone deal.

Do I have to accidentally drop my Blackberry?

Do I divorce my Blackberry and go for the younger more nubile SaaS enabled iPhone?

Might wait a while, let all the cool kids go first.

If I was in Jack Dorsey and Biz Stones I would be monetising their Twitter asset fast, damn fast. Sell it, open it up, whatever it takes. I think they aren’t far away from being standardised out of their current business model unless they can quickly fix their scale problems.

Driven by reliability issues on the Twitter platform, a plethora of conversation emerged this week. Bloggers and tech commentators are turning their conversation to workarounds. It’s as though the conversations and connections in Twitter have become bigger than Twitter itself. The conversation is alive and it wants to fix itself.

One example is Techcrunch’s coverage by Chris Saad of Dataportability.org. His workaround is micro bloggers using tools that are certified as compliant with a microblogging standard (posts of 140 characters and no titles). Users install complaint software on their own servers like you would blog software. He expects this to emerge from the opensource arena.

Personally I disagree, Twitter is successful because it’s easy. Easy to get started, easy to play, easy to have fun. I don’t want to install an app on a server to use a Twitter like product. I love the SaaS Twitter engine and the ecosystem of desktop and websites that have evolved around it.

It’s much like blogging where it’s just a small hassle managing a blog on a server. However, it’s still a hassle. I’d rather someone take care of that for me. My attitude to Chris’s self hosted microblogging application is the same - you’re taking my time away!

Twitter is most at risk from 3rd party application builders who have built desktop apps for Twitter. They are well positioned to build into emerging microblogging engines and thus becoming the microblogging feed readers. In much the same way RSS Readers cover many blog platforms. To do this standards are needed.

So there’s three pieces to the microblogging picture:

1. Platform
2. Reader
3. Standard

I expect one ‘rough’ standard across many platforms the way RSS has evolved. After all who seriously owns a 140 character field limit? How can you protect that?

Microsoft says it has a strategy to take on Google without Yahoo. See the Wall Street Journal story or the CNET story for details.

I don’t think this is over, it’s normal to put some flushing press out there to make the seller feel a little regretful and uncomfortable.

Google is moving fast, time is against Yahoo and Microsoft. Every day that passes saw further options for Microsoft to take as an alternative strategy and possibly a cheaper strategy.

The deal is never good if both parties don’t feel a little discomfort - Yahoo was wanting a mega win. The Yahoo board should have read the shareholders intent and acted on it.

The press highlights all the problems with the deal and the analysts carve it up leaving juicy excuses lying around for Microsoft to justify not paying a higher price.