A blog about location aware services, cloud architecture, mobile applications development on the iPhone, G1, Palm Pre, whatever, plus traveling, microblogging, and other random musings from developers building some secretly cool stuff

As Twitter is becoming more and more mainstream, the conversation about it’s value (or perceived lack there of) seems to be getting louder and louder. Today there was even talk about a Google acquisition. This chatter has made both my non-techie friends and friends in the technorati circle, alike poo poo all things Twitter. For the techie many wonder if it’s over valued, and over played on media outlets like Tech-Crunch and friends, and for the non-techie many just “don’t get it” (at least until they dive in). In fact super twitterer Robert Scoble got so annoyed last night at people undervaluing twitter that he pontified that Twitter is one of the best brands in decades and that the BW article pointing at 250 million is complete undervaluation and it should be more like 1 Billion.

Why?

Because, to steal a line from my good friend @gammill, “Twitter has become an entirely new social behavior”. No it’s not as revolutionary as the Internet, but nor is it just one more “social networking” thing either. If anything its beginning to bring out the type of shift that is akin to the early days of email. Yes that’s right, it’s become an entirely new way to communicate easily with people. Like it or not, the fact is micro blogging is going to the new and maybe even preferred way of communication for a society that’s becoming busier and busier.

Now stop and think about what that means. When email first was invented it was done largely through the caretakings of the University system, which wasn’t trying to financially capatilize on it. That didn’t come until later (and think about how companies like Hotmail still had a giant exit decades after the invention). Now we have a case where a company actually owns the brand and all of the earlier adopters (counted in the millions) around the next shift in communication. You think that’s worth something - you bet it is.

In fact, (epecially lately) there have been a plethora of new companies popping up to work with the twitter api because of it’s value. Here’s just a few:

• Exectweet - connecting top business folks on twitter
• Cotweet - helps companies reach customers through twitter
• Magpie - an ad network for twitter
• Mashable - a tech blog that  sells ad space to show off company tweets
• Tinker: tracks trends to plug into a monitization model for brands.
• As well as a whole slew of iPhone and Android twitter “premium apps” that mobile users are buying in droves

No doubt, I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of other companies that are already making money off Twitter too(feel free to let me know who I missed in the comments).  Scoble even twittered about companies that were already doing millions in revenue from twitter affiliation.  So now stomp and consider what it means if there is already that lucrative of an ecosystem around a company, that’s not making any money on it’s own yet, is partnering with these monotizing third parties through a rather simple API set, and only has 30 or so employees.  What we are talking about here is basically the poster child for how to grow an ecosystem completely organically.  And Twitter is sitting their patiently, holding the keys to it all.

Today news broke that a new alliance to share location across multiple services appeared on the various tech sites. Of course within the techcrowd, anything “open” is cool: open source, openid, etc so I guess open location must be the next cool thing. Most who know me well, know that I’m betting a lot on the capability and consumer uptake of LBS as a whole, so one would naturally think, I’d be loving this Open Sharing of Location Based Objects Alliance business. But I’m underwhelmed here.

The thing is Location Based Services (which I’m broadly including location based social networks within) are so bleeding edge that I’m not convinced that a consortium of startups (with the exception of powerhouse wayn) is going to lead to much. I mean I have to applaud for Aka-Aki, Belysio, Buddycloud, Locle, Moximity, Nulaz, Rummble, Skout, Tooio and WAYN for all playing nicely in the sandbox. But heck these guys don’t even have a website for the initiative yet so maybe the announcement was premature. Or maybe it was just a crafty way for the startups to get some publicity.

If Google (with Latitude) or Yahoo (with Fireeagle) get involved things may change and certainly in the future as we see more divergent uses of location, then an alliance of sharing data makes sense. But for the shortterm most users will apply location awareness in a similar way and are not likely to take the need/data across multiple (similar/competitive) LBS companies.

I’m all for open, and in the longrun this same play could get interesting, but at present, well, nothing to see here…move along.

Source
directionsmag Techcrunch VentureBeat

So everyone is talking about the new Safari 4 beta that was released today; another jab in the reignited browser wars. Which from a consumer standpoint is great because with 4 major browsers out (no I’m not looking at you Opera) we are starting to see some diversity in choice, features, and performance.  From a developers perspective additional browser interest is both a blessing and a curse.  It moves the technology forward in a competitive manner, which for those of us who view the Internet as a “platform”, that is a good thing.  It also mostly is moving standards forward, which again is good.  On the other-hand it greatly adds to our development time.  In fact, I once watched a presentation with one of the leads for Google maps that said  at least half of their dev time is spent on browser compatibility - ouch! And our experience isn’t much different.  So that sort of thing definitely adds up to loss of productivity.  It is what is though, and since Safari is the hot topic of the browser fight for the moment, I thought I’d look in a little more depth at the release beyond the typical technews PR rehash.

Consumer Features: Coverflow & Top Hits + (bugs?)

The flashy consumer features are really about safari’s new UI.  It has a more streamlined interface: the “tabs on top” management I find slightly uglier but far better in terms of usability.  The UI element Coverflow, which most are familiar with either directly through MAC OS or via iTunes and the iPhone, is now implemented directly when viewing your history and bookmarks.  Using it for a few hours I found it works quite fast but I’m underwhelmed.  What would have been really cool is if they would have implemented a quick native rendering version of search using coverflow.  The infinitely cool startup company searchme does this, though I find it a bit slow and memory intensive since its done via web programming.  If apple would buy out searchme and actually implement the thing natively within safari, now that would be cool.

Top Hits feature is also really cool, and I like that it opens by default in a new tab, which for one thing looks nicer then opening a blank page and actually seems quite useful in general.  The only downside is you cant seem to add directly to that page, it really is your most frequently used pages, and I would have liked to had a way to manually override it.

The final UI element is less feature and more bug which is just the occasional incompatibility issues with sites.  I’m currently writing this with the Wordpress editor (which is actually ‘codewise’ tinymce editor) and when I went to insert a link, the normal modal lightwindow view that should pop up just freezes and blocks your ability to do anything after that.  This sort of thing happens with some JS rich sites and its been a show stopper with me using previous versions of safari (couldn’t use google docs for quite some time because it wasn’t “safari compatible”).  In today’s wordpress example I was able to recover my locked window by using the dev tools (more on that in a minute) but still that would normally be a fail for a typical user.  In fact I think Apple needs to work on some sort of compatibility mode so normal users don’t have these sorts of problems.  If those were resolved I do think Safari could pickup even more steam.

Performance testing Safaris new Nitro Engine

Safari 4 Nitroengine performance

So one of the biggest things Safari 3 boasted and now even more so with Safari 4 is that its the fastest browser.  Since fastest seems to be always subjective from a marketing side, I figured I’d actually run it through some real world analysis.  I compared Safari 4 against Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7 and Google Chrome.  To keep the test fair I ran all browsers using the same machine (a dual core 2.2ghz imac with 1Gb ram) running the same OS( windows xp “native” via bootcamp).  I did two tests that measured real world  load speed with caching turned off.  For a basic test I loaded the socialguides blog up in all 4 browsers.  The socialguides blog is a fairly plain vanilla wordpress install with very little JS or other stuff so loading is fairly quick.  I then compared that with socialguides web service that we are currently building which is very JS/AJAX rich to get a feel for the javascript rending and its speed in handling webapps in general.  You can see the graphed results above (load times measured in seconds).  While these tests are far from exhaustive and I’m sure someone like arstechnica will do some real hardcore testing, my own cursory testing seems to indicate that safari is in fact the fastest browser - even beating out Google Chrome.  And well i n my eyes, that alone makes it a winner.

Safari Developer Tools

As a developer if there was one reason I use Firefox as my daily browser, I’d attribute it to my beloved Firebug.  For those of you unfamiliar with Gods gift to web programmers - Firebug, basically lets you edit a website on the fly: you can mess with css styles, edit html, walk the dom tree, debug javascript, and a whole lot more.  There’s an Internet Explorer add on called the IE developer toolbar that is sort of like it, but the IE toolbar is so abysmal comparatively, I shudder to even mention it in in the same sentence as Firebug.  And as for safari…well it didn’t have much.  Because of this, most webdevs I know will do most of their front development on FF first then painfully deal with incompatibilities with IE and safari after the bulk of the debugging has been done on FF.

Now with Safari 4 Apple has been kind enough to include a set of developer tools that seem very much to echo Firebugs functionality.  While it will take some time to really get an accurate impression, the few hours of using it I already like it far more then IEs dev toolbar and almost as much as Firebug.  In fact there are a number of features that I find superior.   I like that it has its own menu which the lack of is a major annoyance with Firebug and the IE toolbar.  I like that you can change the User Agent directly which requires either a different plugin on an annoying “about” hack with FF.  I also really love the network timeline as it helps track down javascript timing problems.  Also the ability to disable images, css, cache, javascript is really useful (though disabling site specific hacks is weird on multiple levels).  And finally the web elements inspector is quite good and almost to par with firebug.  The only thing I heavily dislike about it is that it seems not be able to insert completely new css “test” styles via the rightside pane on the fly, which I use in firebug all the time (though it could be there and i just haven’t found it yet).

Conclusion

Overall between the quickness of speed, the coolness of coverflow and tophits, and the impressiveness of the developer tools, I may be switching over for the first time using safari as my main browser, time will tell, but right now it definitely is in contention.

(one of the original “offending” images)

So for those of you who werent aware, Google got sued in May 2007 for its super cool streetview project. Of course like any dominate company Google gets sued all the time, though I found this one a bit interesting as it touches on privacy issues in an always on, location aware web world.  As the Internet is in a major evolutionary step as we speak - moving from a sort of virtual world, to one that augments the real world - more and more real world privacy issues will come up.

In this case a couple in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania wanted $25,000 from Google because of the “mental suffering involved” when Google indexed pictures of their home (which is located on a private road), and made them available on Google maps and other apps for all to see (obviously without the couple’s permission).  While I personally think the whole “I want 25k for mental suffering” bit is crazy, I also am sensitive to the fact that not everyone is comfortable with total physical transparency in the completely public virtual web world. And in that sense Google’s response to the claim that with “satellite technology complete privacy no longer exists” is a very non reassuring answer for a “do no evil” company (even the answer  is true, legally speaking).

At any rate it seems there was little surprise in the case (even if it did drag on for awhile) as most legal tech experts figured it would get thrown out, and that’s exactly what the judge did.  While, the legality of it is no longer in question it still remains to be seen how much we the consumers are willing to give up our own privacy for the sake of exciting technological advances.

I personally have mixed feelings.  How about you?

Sources: cnet newtechnologydirectory ericgoldman corank