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.

So the mobile app market has been picking up steam for some time since the success of the iPhone.  While most aren’t doing anything innovative, generally speaking centralized app stores are good thing for both developers and consumers alike

With the Mobile World Congress event going on we are getting lots of announcements and date clarifications on all those non apple app stores.  Here is what we got:

• Paid Android Store is finally going live.  Looks like Google is finally taking submissions for paid apps and they could be available as early as next week. Frankly its about time since the store wasn’t that compelling to developers until a paid model existed.
• Nokia is launching their own store.  Called the Ovi, its due out this may ….it looks to be pretty bleh at this point.
• Blackberry is coming out with there application center.  While its been announced since fall and RIM has been taking developer applications for the storefront since a few weeks ago, as far as I know, there hasnt been an actual target date besides “spring”.  It could be compelling with so many blackberry users, we’ll see though.
• The new Palms Pre also will have an app catalog.  The Pre is one sexy little device and could be the dark horse in the smart phone war, and at the very least it should help revive a very much dieing company called Palm.  So I’m keeping an eye on how the WebOS develops.  There is a palm developer site and an official palm development network blog that has some info which, as of today, has some brief info about oreily publishing ch1 of javascript development for webapps on the platform, but it aint much to go on.  As far as I know there isnt even an official launch date yet, only some rumors swirling around a march timeframe.  So until then we’ll have to see how things progress.

I think thats all of the current batch of app stores announced that I know of, if anyone else knows of any, leave a comment.

So I was doing a google search for some documentation on some random header names within the iPhone development kit (stuff about the UIScrollview for whatever worth) and I found google had indexed the entire ebook version of the O’reilly iPhone SDK application Development book.

Now first off this book seems awesome and as one of the devs building apps right when the appstore was released - I probably would have payed my left arm for a hardcopy of a book like this to help get us through some of that initial blind stumbling.  So that said, I’m not sure why the whole thing has been posted  and indexed in google for free.  Mabye its a mistake or some hack copyright violation, or maybe its legit - I dont know as the site that seems to host it seems to be a japanese iPhone developer.  So if anybody believes it is actually just some freeloading copyright violation, let me know in the comments and you’ll have my sincere apology and the link (which BTW is NOT hosted here, I just found it through google) will be taken down immediately.

But until then…get it HERE.

hello, hallo, konnichiwa, hola, sholem aleykhem, salamalekum, buon giorno, namaste, ma nishma, bon jour, nazdar, aloha, ahlan wa sahlan, bore da, guten tag, ni hao, etc etc…

So we are building something.  I guess we are always building something.  But the thing is we’ve already built this one thing and now we’ve begun building this massively cooler other thing thats in someways the same and other ways totally different.  For the past few months we’ve just been in the cave building it.  But now it’s gotten far enough along that we can pull our heads up and blog a little here and there.

I give you fair warning, this blog is likely to be pretty random.  Developer tech nerd stuff with some random business commentary and who knows what else.  It will probably become a little more focused as we come towards launch and start talking about company and product type stuff but for now, well, whatever.