Archive for Twitter
by Imran Ali
August 7, 2008 at 5:05 am · Filed under MMS, Twitter, Video, 12seconds
Following on from last week’s coverage of 12seconds, the service’s creators have been running a ’12second Challenge’, posing questions and setting challenges each day that users must respond to or answer in twelve second bursts. A great way of building enthusiasm and publicity for a service…and creating a generation of evangelists.
12seconds have also been talking about a bunch of upcoming enhancements and improvements that’re soon coming to the service. These include…
- Video replies and an improved recorder.
- Enhanced commenting, tagging, grouping & navigation.
- URL shortnening for posting to Twitter.
- Privacy controls.
- Support for third party services - perhaps Facebook and MySpace?
- Mobile integration - this already works well with MMS…perhaps they’re looking at installed apps? Video messaging finally comes to iPhone?
12seconds look like they’re being driven by the needs of their alpha testers, a great approach that’ll ensure they deliver the user experience and product that’s really in demand…now what could the business model be…?
by Imran Ali
July 29, 2008 at 9:27 am · Filed under MMS, Twitter, Video, 12seconds
A few days ago I received a Twitter from my friend Katie, linking to a twelve-second video of her applying some lipstick. This was my first experience of 12seconds,the recently launched Santa Cruz based startup being heralded as the video of Twitter.
Though other services such as Seesmic have sought to emulate the intimacy and immediacy of Twitter in video form, Seesmic always seemed a little too rich and required too much of a user’s attention, in comparison with the simplicity, sparsity and elegance of Twitter.
As its name suggests, 12seconds limits user’s video messages to a couple dozen seconds, encouraging the same charm, inventiveness and brevity that we see in 140-character Twitters. Where Twitter’s limitation was semi-imposed by the limitations of its medium of choice - the SMS - 12seconds’ limit is an arbitrary boundary cheekily described by the service’s creators as ‘an upper boundary for boredom‘…
The scientists here at the 12seconds dodecaplex have conducted countless hours of research to determine the precise amount of time it takes for boredom or apathy to set in during typical Internet video viewing. Our patent pending Electro-Tear-Duct Prongers have determined that exactly 12 seconds of video is the ideal amount of time to keep anything interesting.
However, 12seconds’ limit may actually position the service ideally for mobility. Squeezing twelve seconds of video from a mobile handset’s forward-facing camera into an MMS is probably quite feasible technically, compatible with most handsets - and as a user experience - recieving a few dozen twelve second video messages is no more distracting than hundreds of Twitters!
It’ll be interesting to see if 12seconds recognises it’s mobile opportunity and whether users take to it as they took to Twitter and its rivals.
For me, receiving Katie’s message invoked a similar emotional response as when I first started to use Twitter - voyeuristic and intimate, potentially distracting, but open to many possibilities and user-created innovations.
12second’s is currently in a closed beta public alpha period…here’s hoping for an invite 
UPDATE: I just received an invitation to the public alpha and it seems that mobile users can submit videso by emailing an attached clip or emailing an MMS clip…here’s my first pixellated attempt!
by Imran Ali
July 4, 2008 at 12:46 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Twitter, India, Emerging Markets
“Gup Shup” is a Punjabi term that almost literally translates as ‘gossip’ or ‘chit chat’ - generally with an informal, unrestricted context - and also the central concept of India’s SMS GupShup service, a kind of Desi Twitter for the subcontinent.
The big brains over at Telco 2.0 have just published an analysis of SMS GupShup’s relationship with carriers, that explores…
- pricing multi-party conversations and chats.
- diversified revnue models, including allocation of 60 characters for text-ads in a GupShup SMS.
- using customer data to create value for users themselves, not just carriers.
The piece is actually quite a penetrating analysis of how third parties and service ecospheres can add value to a carrier (to mutual benefit) without neccesarily cannibalising or commoditising existing businesses, and perhaps more interestingly where companies such as Twitter can find sustainable revenues…
Read more at Telco 2.0…
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by Ewan Spence
July 3, 2008 at 5:41 am · Filed under Twitter, Open Source
My old Warrant Officer always used to say (in that low voice of menace) that you should never just state a problem, but state a problem followed promoptly by “here’s what I think we should do.” So if Twitter is Fail-Whaling, then we need another service. Lots of people have said it needs to be de-centralised, that it needs to be replicabla,e it needs to e open-source, using as many standards as possible,
Evan Prodromou has done just that. Welcome to Indenti.ca.And yes that does point to my account there, and not the top, because the site is still in it’s early days, so there’s no direct friend import via your address book (or the Twitter api, heh-he).
That early days is worth pointing out - Identica’s big problem is people may be expecting a full range of Twitter services (heck we expect the full range of Twitter services from Twitter) but I suspect that with an Open Source code base they’re going to get a lot of eyes looking over problems and tweaks - it appears for example Dave Winer is already nudging the code that generates the RSS feeds.
If I was Twitter, I’d hope the big section in their VC pitch addresses an Open Source, Distributed system as a threat, and how they would counter it. If their defence is “we’re the biggest” and “it’s hard to move away from Twitter with your friends” then Identica might be a game changer, if not in the form of the final site, but in the final code-base.
(Cross posted from www.ewanspence.com)
by Darla Mack
June 22, 2008 at 10:17 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Twitter, mobile social networking, Jaiku, Messaging, LinkedIn, Social Networking
One of my mobitopia buddies, Sir Erik Thauvin (lol that’s not really his name but I like calling him that) introduced me to Hellotxt awhile back and my initial thought was this is the place to be for updating all of your social media networks simultaneously… especially via mobile.
You know who you are… you Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Bebo, Facebook and so on people that bounce from spot to spot in order to make sure all of your locations are updated.
That’s where HelloTxt comes in.
HelloTxt is an aggregate of microblogging services through which the user can insert their messages on all main microblogging services in a simply and simultaneous way.
Now although it is web-based, it still offers the solution of multi-service update in a convenient way. Updates can be sent via email gateway, sms gateway or through the users dashboard.
There is a mobile web version of hellotxt (m.hellotxt.com) that does the same thing, however I think it would be much better to have a real mobile client than just having to use the mobile browser all the time. But its still a good solution for quick multi-service updates.
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by Ewan Spence
May 30, 2008 at 4:21 pm · Filed under Twitter, Jaiku, Email, 2008
Last weekend saw The Eurovision Song Contest, where 43 countries choose a representative song, perform it live in a telecast that goes out to upwards of 100 million viewers around Europe (and upwards of 300 million worldwide). I sat down last Saturday to watch the contest, in a room full of Eurovision enthusiasts, lovers, and critics all throwing out their opinions, drinks in hand.
Of course we weren’t all really together – we were logged on to Twitter, throwing out bards about the camp costumes, the immensely tribal nature of pop music, and the incredibly… err… artistic graphics between the songs. Three hours of music and politics (don’t ask, please, simply put all war in Europe stops on the night of the contest and we fight using votes). As one participant said at the end of the gig, “Thank you Twitter, you all kept me sane.”
But the point here isn’t to celebrate the Song Contest (much as I do) As more international events pop up on the horizon, the luster of modern communication tools, especially those with a real time component such as Twitter, Jaiku, IM clients and of course the rather old but still functions even if everything else seems to go down IRC are going to be the place to chat and converse about both international events. The upcoming Summer Olympics are going to be a major stress test of the public’s use of these tools (as opposed to say an Apple keynote). On the evidence of Eurovision, Twitter’s not quite ready yet – the database went down as the event started and it switched to a ‘limited’ service to stay up, but resource management in instant communication can’t afford to be 99.99% up if the one time that everyone wants to talk is when it goes down (because that’s when it’s popular).
One reason why IRC stays up is it is effectively distributed around multiple computers. Twitter, for all the latest bells and whistles, relies on a central point. Modern messaging is going to have to cope with messages of greater bandwidth, with much lower latency, and that leaves very little room for failure. I think it’s a fair bet that any new globally adopted messaging system is going to have a distributed element to it, and dare I say it heavily biased around peer to peer.
Oh and if you want my opinion, Norway was robbed, Ireland should at least have made the finals, and the UK sent a Bin-Man, came last, and were surprised they didn’t do any better…
by Imran Ali
May 26, 2008 at 4:33 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Twitter, Research, Social Networking
Following this week’s publication of a Gartner research report, there’s been some commentary onthe relative growth of SMS messaging and mobile instant messaging clients and services.
The report - profile here by Betanews - speaks of a 19.6% increasein the global volume of SMS traffic (that’s 2.3 trillion messages?)…interestingly, the report highlights South East Asia as the most prolific messagers, averaging around fifteen messages each day. Gartner go on to suggest that the growth of mobile social networks will gradually cannibalise SMS usages as users begin to communicate without the need for SMS as a carrier.
CrunchGrear’s counterpoint to Gartner’s analysis - and one I’m inclined to agree with - is that while social networks and IM networks effectively lack interoperability, SMS’ ‘baked-in’ cross-device and cross-network compatibility will likely slow the cannibalisation of SMS by mobile IM. With the major IM networks polarised around Google+AIM on the one hand and Yahoo+MSNon the other, handset manufacturers and cellcos tend to pick a camp which favours commercial terms, not user needs.
To add to this, unfettered use of mobile IM or mobile social networks is generally enabled through the adoption of generous or all-you-can-eat data plans - which are likely to exceed the budgets of most casual pay-as-you-go users.
As services such as Twitter have shown, there’s still a a lot of mileage and innovation in SMS…with what has essentially become the command line interface of the mobile internet.
by Imran Ali
April 13, 2008 at 9:51 pm · Filed under iPhone, Twitter, Crowdsensing, Activism, Tibet, Flashmob
Seems like last week’s pursuit of the Olympic Flame through San Francisco, by pro-Tibetan protesters, was aided and abetted by local Twitter users.
A digest of Twitters from last Wednesday illustrates how residents of the city torch-spotted and crowdsensed the Renegade Receptacle across the city, helping protesters zero-in on the Combustable Contender. Sadly, the flame Hot-Footed it to safety and the protesters were unable to extinguish the Fiery One.
Flamegate has however ignited global repercussions with various European leaders beginning to decline attendance of Bejing’s opening ceremonies…though our very own Gordon Brown *will* have be around for the closing ceremonies, in order to accept the flame for London 2012.
I did wonder about the irony of the San Franciscan Twitterati standing up for Tibetan freedoms with their Chinese-built iPhones…
by Ewan Spence
April 9, 2008 at 12:16 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Twitter
Twitter is held up by many in the Web 2.0 community as the future of messaging – in case you’ve not come across the service, it allows users to post short updates or messages (no more than 140 character), and then look at the updates (sometimes referred to as “tweets”) of only the people that they have chosen to friend.
But what makes Twitter a good pointer to the future isn’t the website, or the community. It’s the divorcing of the content of the messages from how it is displayed. While the normal way to interact with Titter is through its webpage (http://www.twitter.com/), there are other options that are much better suited to keeping the conversation flowing.
The most obvious one is the leveraging of SMS. With 160 characters available you can send and receive messages to the service with ease, simply through the text interface on your phone. I also suspect that, through bulk SMS purchasing and SMS short-codes, has provided a nice revenue stream. It’s the same content, but with a different presentation.
Twitter also supply a mobile page for the browser in our handset, http://m.twitter.com/, which takes the same content from your friends, but presents it in a much more compacted format, which works well on the smart phone browsers. Same content, different presentation.
And then there are the clients – third party programs that freely take the content out of the Titter web server and present it in new ways. I want to highlight Twhirl here, even though it’s not strictly a mobile app, it is a 2.0 version of messaging in my opinion. Twhirl is a desktop client that presents Twitter as if it was a massive IM like chatroom – and because of that I’ve been using Twitter a lot more, and in the more chatty sense. The underlying structure hasn’t changed, but the client (and others are available) are changing the delivery of the message, and making it more easily accessible depending on where (and sometimes when) you are.
They used to say don’t shoot the messenger – the great thing now is we get to choose our messenger… and the message still gets to us.
by Imran Ali
April 1, 2008 at 4:24 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Twitter, Openmoko, Politics, Android, Activism, OLPC
Last month - I had the good fortune to sit in on Ethan Zuckerman’s ETech 2008 session, The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism, summarising his insights into global activism and his role at Global Voices Online.
Ethan’s a research fellow at Harvard and has spent the last few years exploring activist usage of the web, mobility and social media across the developing world; Global Voices is an aggregated manifestation of bloggers and citizen journalists across this community.
Ethan’s talk was oriented around the notion that tools built for activism generally remain unused whereas mainstream tools adapted and adopted by activists remain the most popular channels; particularly when mainstream services are censored, driving even apathetic users to activism when they can’t reach their favorite sites!
Perhaps Ethan’s key insight was the importance of mobile phones as a light platform for activism and blogging; echoed by another speaker, Joel Selanikio, on Africa as a hothouse for mobile development. Their observations included…
- Egyptian activist Alaa Abdel Fateh’s use of Twitter and SMS to periodically indicate his status, such that when he stops updating, supporters can surmise that he’s being detained and begin agitating for his release as well as ensuring his blog
- Again in Egypt, anti-government activists organised resistance to the arrest of Malek Moustafa simply by coordinating themselves via SMS to block the street at his place of arrest.
- As early s 2004 there were 82m mobile users in Africa in 2004, but even as recently as 2007 only 4.7m broadband users.
- SMS could and should be the principle media for communications and content - from medical information and healthcare records to banking and commerce.
- Limited bandwidth and limited computing power aren’t necessarily barriers for digital innovation.
Though such insights aren’t unique - we’ve covered them previously - they point to an increasing disconnect between the services designed and offered versus those lashed together by the ingenuity of end users - the activism for open government embodied by those such as Alaa Abdel Fateh isn’t echoed by the closed nature of most mobile platforms and networks…I suspect Android and Openmoko will have a more profound effect than OLPC on the democratisation of technology and culture.
[ Note: You can see Ethan Zuckerman’s full presentation at his blog ]
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