Under-whelmed.

Monday 09 June, 2008

WWDC 2008 will be remembered for the launch — albeit in one month from now — of the worst-kept secret of ’08 and very little else.

MobileMe launched — providing a web-based version of what many other mobile synch tools provide out-of-the-box — that takes over where .mac left off and finally, Snow Leopard — sounding very much like an equivalence of a Windows Service Pack at best.

That isn’t a bad thing, mind. Stability is a sore-point for many Vista users looking for something different and, perhaps, better. But the amount of coverage for things not-iPhone was appalling.

Sure, the iPhone finally makes it to a wider global market without requiring various hacks. However, we cannot buy one now. Buzz surrounding the all-new device will have well and truly peaked before this thing actually hits market.

I awoke at 5am this morning, with expectation zinging over what might await me. I needn’t have bothered. A (not so) new phone, talk of an updated OS and a mobile service all of which aren’t actually here yet.

I really think Gruber has nailed it when he talks of what Apple’s announcements at WWDC this year really mean:

“The physical phone is not the story. A year from now, the iPhone 3G will be replaced by another new model. The platform is the story.”

Yes, it’s clear they are going to sell billions of phones. At circa US $199 how can they not, surely? Although it’s not entirely clear if that is actually based on AT&T contract pricing. It’s anybodies guess what that actually translates to outside of the US and how much it will end up costing to buy outright.

Watching the keynote isn’t all that inspiring. It’s simply going through the motions of officially launching everything we already new and confirming the pre-event speculation for the most part. WWDC ’08 is basically an all-singing-all-dancing version of their future road-map.

And that’s why I feel a little, well, let down by Apple. What they seem to have forgotten in all this new “sans-one-more-thing” world, is that I, the potential user, still need to feel important, that what I’m being offered makes me feel, well, cooler.. and that it really will be worth my time. Sure, there is a strong developer angle here. I get that. But we’re not all developers and as such we still look to these events and keynotes for inspiration.

I need assurance that Jobs and Apple are on the case. That they’ve got mega-cool-shit happening right here and they want me to be a part of it. Being told to wait a month for a yet-to-be-priced phone doesn’t make me feel cooler. Not being told availability or pricing doesn’t make me feel cooler. Not having anything else up their sleeve, really isn’t at all cooler. It’s just not assurance.

So we’ll see what Apple come up with moving forward. One more thing.. just not today.

Twitter Redux.

Tuesday 03 June, 2008

I’ve found it increasingly interesting that commentators believe that somehow, twitter is still — like a bad recurring LSD trip — just moments away from a mass exodus.

Indeed, Twitter has been declared “dead” more often than Jimmy Hoffa and Elvis combined.

“By building up a huge mass of users, Twitter benefits from our existing social connections and their inertia. But as the problems continue, it’s possible that someone else could grab the mindshare – and traffic – that currently belongs to Twitter.” #

It’s more than just the social connection equation. And premonitions of competition swooping in — claiming massive numbers of twitter evacuees — has one rather large flaw. It never actually happens. Why? It’s not for want of trying, surely? Almost everyone seems to believe they have the “winning formula” for a service that will dispatch-and-bury Twitter in a flurry of Web 2.0 candy-coloured craziness.

Yet, despite various attempts, the competition just doesn’t gain traction. And it is because they fundamentally miss-understand quite what Twitter has achieved (and indeed continue to achieve). By seeking to replace Twitter, any competitor will have already sealed it’s fate.

Twitter has captured the hearts — and loyalty — of so many because it has endured still, despite the growth pains, despite the outages and in spite of the competition. There is no doubt that some are frustrated with the continued reliability concerns, colourful tweets about outages are not uncommon — that it encourages communication is clear — even those remarks are made via Twitter.

There is no doubting Twitter was smart from the outset by opening the API and continuing to make steady progress on attempting to bullet-proof the systems in use. That API has unleashed dozens of clients that provide all manner of capabilities. And it allows for increasingly open communication between other social networks, such as Friend Feed and Facebook, not to mention the various and highly creative projects using Twitter to communicate, trend or graph, stalk, punch time or simply just inform.

The increase in communication over very real issues — that any real-time messaging platform will suffer at some point — shows a sense of maturity that is fresh and appealing. That it plays well with others and encourages highly creative use ensures long-term loyalty and helps build tool sets that can become indispensable. Twitter continues to grow and continues to survive, because it thoroughly embraces the culture and spirit that has grown around it.

As we can see, the relatively open Twitter API allows for remarkably creative solutions. By jettisoning Twitter one risks losing so much more than just the simple one-hundred-and-forty character short message service. Far from being at risk of becoming a has-been care of the NextBigThing ^tm I can only see twitter continuing to grow and move forward with ever more creativity.

The smart money is on working with Twitter, and gaining the massive community built around it — ignoring the platform and community it has built, is to invite failure.