The Network Garden - Mark Sigal's Blog

9 logical applications for iBeacons

As much as anything, the Internet of Things is about the rise of smart, connected sensors. Apple's iBeacon harnesses smart phones and super-cheap Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) sensory 'beacons' to bring location-aware services into a bunch of new categories.

They include: 

1. Get a coupon for 10 percent off a TV because you stood in the TV department.
2. Your home will automatically react to you.
3. Your phone will give you a tour of museums.
4. Organize neighborhood pick-up games for kids.
5. Tickets that automatically load as you enter sporting events.
6. Win something for visiting a car dealership.
7. Toys that are aware of each other.
8. Get a free cup of coffee or snack while pumping your gas.
9. Be warned that your bike or car is no longer in the garage.

'How iBeacons could change the world forever' is an excellent article on this topic. Well worth a read. 

Pattern Recognition: Caught Red-Handed; Re-thinking the 'I' in IT; Twitter-nomics

My goal is to write one 'Pattern Recognition' a week. Just the top 3-4 stories that stayed under my skin. Here's what stuck this week:

1. Caught Red-Handed in the LIBOR Cookie Jar: If you wonder why Americans are losing faith in their institutions, look no further than our Banking System, where Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone has done exceptional reporting on the systematic manipulation by Big Banks of LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate. If you are not familiar with LIBOR, it is 'only' one of the most common metrics that lenders use to set lending, credit card and bond rates for consumers, businesses and municipalities. In other words, the fact that major banks could manipulate the rate to grab additional profits, speaks to the endemic corruption across the banking industry. In this particular case, several of the major banks (Barclays, GE Capital and Royal Bank of Scotland are the known names so far) were caught red-handed in bid rigging scandals constructed to skim billions of dollars from the already thinning coffers of cities and small towns across America. This particular industry, whereby the banks help municipalities by issuing municipal bonds on their behalf, is a $3.7 trillion dollar market. If you read HERE, HERE and HERE, you get a sense of the persistent, ubiquitous nature of this type of thievery, where good old-fashioned graft expedites the process. If anything, the challenge for folks like Taibbi is to reduce the mind-numbing numbers and complexities of the transactions themselves into memetic pictures, graphs and narrative that forevermore changes public sentiment about 'too big to fail.' Or, as Stalin once said, "The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic." Money shot from the Taibbi piece: "You find yourself thinking, America's biggest banks ripped off the entire country...every day, for over a decade!"
2. Does IT Still Matter? Ashlee Vance writes in today's Businessweek, 'It Took Less than Ten Years for IT Not to Matter.' In the article, he essentially argues that most companies have no business trying to tackle IT in-house and that they should rent such services, which generally speaking, translates to "trust the cloud."  Talk about confusing attributes with outcomes. As I wrote for GigaOM in a recent analysis of the travails of 'bricks and mortar' retailers (' Retail needs a reboot to survive'), businesses need to differentiate, which fundamentally is about integration. Sure enough, the most successful companies on the planet hugely use IT to differentiate. Thus, if there is any moral of the story from enterprise struggles with IT over the past decade, it's that too few of them had a clear, reasoned understanding of: A) The role that technology could play in their business; B) The cultural barriers to overcome; and C) The specific outcomes needing to be realized to make it worth the effort. Netting it out, a big part of the problem is that the 'I' in IT stands for information, when it needs to stand for integrated, coupled with the fact that most companies tend to be silo'd into business units, which is the antithesis of integration, something that I wrote about in 'DIS-Integrated Systems: A Parable.'
3. Twittter-nomics: Twitter continues its path to maturity. On the positive side, they are building serious conviction about delivering a great and consistent user experience via Twitter Cards, a structured tweet model that I suggested should their path to monetization way back in 2008 (see 'Twitter-nomics: Envisioning Structured Tweets.'). One the other hand, under the double-speak of delivering a consistent user experience, they are starting to clamp down on third-party clients. You know, the same third-party clients that made the Twitter experience so great before Twitter decided to co-opt them. It sucks, but then again, it amazes me how few grok that APIs (and platforms in general) are like toll bridges. They can lift up and disappear, or change their fare structure at any time. Forewarned is forearmed, and free is often too high of a price to pay. 

Tweets, Trends and Matrix Points: Why does Twitter's trending functions Suck so badly?

Watching Henry Blodget's excellent interview of Twitter's Chief Revenue Officer, Adam Bain, last week on how Twitter makes money via sponsored tweets, trends and promotional campaigns, and why they are so much better (from a click-through + engagement perspective) than display ads, I was struck with two conflicting thoughts.

One, Twitter really gets it, and is positively Apple-like in terms of focusing on very few problems and executing them very well. 

And two, given Twitter's execellence, I was left wondering, "Why does Twitter's trending functions suck so badly?"

Case in point, when I look at what's trending now, I am left with the following, which while not completely information-free, is hardly useful.

What I would like, and what I expect is that every time I take action (by tweeting, re-tweeting, replying and/or favoriting), I get information back.

What made me think about this was when I went to LinkedIn today to re-post a tweet I'd made earlier on my twitter account.

Immediately, I saw an in-line message that the link is trending in the Venture Capital & Private Equity Group on LinkedIn.

In terms of context, if I want to find others to "break bread" with on this topic, I now have a real-time place to do it. Similarly, if I wasn't a member of this group, I now see a "like minds" bucket to plug into.

Where can I go with this? The logical next steps are providing visbility to me about:

1. Posts related to this particular topic (think Techmeme without all of the favoritism curation);
2. Other people similarly interested in this topic and what they're reading right now.

Don't get me wrong, though. I am not suggesting that any of these elements are new concepts, or that different services don't exist that implement these features in some way.

What I am trying to frame is the evolution of the web from the linearity of links to the matrixing of multiple traversal paths based upon topicality and user type.

It's about context, and the desire that when I amplify my interest and intent by posting a tweet, that I get a set of traversal paths back for the effort.

It's the ultimate man-machine feedback loop.

Four Thoughts on the WHAT, WHY and SO WHAT of Google App Inventor for Android

There is something enticing about a software toolkit for non-developers; the concept that if you can articulate a workflow or algorithmic outcome, you can "meta-program" it without writing a line of code. 

That's why I think that there is some warranted excitement around Google's App Inventor for Android. It represents a holy grail and a myth at the same time.

I have four thoughts that I would like to put forth for assessing the "WHAT" (what is it), "WHY" (why do we need it) and "SO WHAT" (how is it materially better than current practices) of Google App Inventor for Android:

1. App Builders like this face a classic 1.0/3.0 Conundrum: The question with such solutions is are they powerful enough to solve a REAL problem out of the box, versus merely facilitating a proof of concept. This is analogous to the distinction between a dog walking on its hind legs (impressive, but not compelling) and an organism that functionally walks upright to the point that it can reliably get between Point A and Point B, completing meaningful tasks along the way.  On this one, I hearken back to the Java Bean Box, another component-based model for non-technical users whereby you could pull objects into a runtime sandbox, define the hookup parameters between various methods, and build a finished app. The challenge was that while it was all impressive, in practice to solve a real problem, you needed to enter the bowels of the underlying code, which broke the connection to the Bean Box, meaning that the solution was neither compelling in 1.0, nor scaled to ANYWHERE useful in 3.0.  How does App Inventor for Android reconcile this one?
2. History Suggests the Real Opportunity lies with ISVs, not Laypersons: The success of Visual Basic for Applications (on the Windows platform, which spawned many an ISV, while creating tremendous lock-in advantages) and HyperCard (on the Mac) shows that there is a need for Rapid Application Development tools that find the balance between facilitating specificity for a desired outcome and simplicity of implementation and subsequent refinement, while reconciling the practicality that in most cases, these efforts are 1-5 person efforts.  Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly/Maker cogently argued this same point in 'The iPad Needs its Hypercard.' Given Apple's proximity to so many media/content providers, its failure to move quickly and visibly in this realm presents an opportunity for Google to outflank them.
3. Will Google 'Eat its own Dog Food' by Exposing Core Google Services to this Model? If Google really wants to prove out the efficacy of this model, the most compelling way to do so is by eating its own dog food; namely, but wiring core services such as News, YouTube, Search, Gmail and Maps to the Google App Inventor.  Why does this make sense?  One, the moral of the story from the PC era is that the potency of Visual Basic was not that you could create wholly new apps from scratch, but rather that you could harness and extend Microsoft Office.  Carrying this analogy to the present, extending Google Apps and Services is the most fundamental way to create a 1+1=3 relationship between Android, Google App Inventor for Android and core Google Services. Two, it forces the company to get better at usability and workflow around specific application use cases, as opposed to merely supporting generic workflows, a tendency that often pushes the company towards a fuzzy "NOT EXACTLY" bucket I railed on in 'Google Buzz: Is it Project, Product or Platform?' Three, such an approach pushes the company beyond its somewhat sanctimonious "Open-ish" position, where it pivots between being REALLY open in areas that it wants to commoditize (such as Mobile, Tablet and Desktop OSes) and quasi-open in areas that it sees as proprietary differentiators (Search and Advertising).
4. Why Limit App Inventor to Android? I get it that the primary battle that Google is fighting today is against Apple's iOS platform of 100M iPhones, iPod touches and iPads, not to mention the mindshare battle with developers. Moreover, the App Inventor toolset and runtime are built in Java and tuned to Android's runtime dynamics.  But, if the Google credo is that open always wins and that what's good for the Web is good for Google, shouldn't such an initiative be structured to work great on any mobile device that is HTML 5 ready (i.e. outflank iPhone by making universal apps more/as compelling as native apps), not to mention for web designers, bloggers, micro-bloggers, Facebookers and the like? To be clear, the choice of the naming scheme that Google chose -- App Inventor for Android -- is suggestive of just such a conclusion.

As always, God is in the details (back to my 'Project, Product or Platform' pushback), but kudos to Google for pushing the ball in this direction.

UPDATE 1: Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch does an early test drive of App Inventor, and his thoughts are pretty much what you'd expect at this stage of the game.  

UPDATE 2: Google is shutting down App Inventor, which was both entirely predictable, and smart to do sooner than later. One year of life then and "done" (it was announced mid-July last year).

Related Posts:

1. Google Buzz: Is it Project, Product or Platform?
2. Open "ish": The meaning of open, according to Google
3. Decomposing Google News and Making it Social

 

iOS and OpenDoc: Everything Old is New Again (Apple and the "last mile" to true Mobility)

  
There was a brief period in the late 90s when computing had the potential to be almost Widget-like, simultaneously Composite, Distinct, Rich and Unified.

This was a divergent computing path from the homogeneity of Microsoft's Windows computing model, which by then was well on its way to winning the Personal Computing Wars. 

Pioneered by Xerox, but spearheaded by Apple, the divergent path was called OpenDoc. 

OpenDoc was premised on common document "data sets" and integrated, but autonomous, "workflow structures."  

In the fallow period before Steve Jobs returned to the Company in 1997, OpenDoc was a relatively big push by Apple (read about it HERE).  

That stated, OpenDoc's failure was total, best evidenced by Jobs putting a bullet through its head almost immediately after he returned.

But, I would argue that the moral of the story on OpenDoc is less a case of a solution in search of a problem, and more a case of poor execution meets poor timing on the wrong platform.

Specifically, I would assert that today's APPLE -- with the iOS Platform of 100 million mobile devices and 150 million credit card-validated consumers -- is very well-positioned to solve the meta-problem OpenDoc pre supposes.

Case in point, this post was a stream of thoughts shuffled between Pages and Mail on my iPad; and then on to my MacBook Pro, with final push off to the Web, where you are reading this. The end-verdict (for me, at least) is that in creating this post on iPad, there is still too much friction from a workflow and data flow perspective.  

And don't even get me started on the kludgey-ness of mashing and syncing data repositories and managing information lifecycles, which are still somewhat primitively handled in this model.

The bottom line is that, as configured, it relegates the device to "lite" content creation and data input when the iPad has the potential to be so much more, given all of the nooks and crannies of times, tasks and activities that the device has inculcated itself into my life (and many others, per the recent 'The State of iPad Satisfaction' Survey).

As such, none of my current truths mitigate my core belief that we are on the cusp of completing the "last mile" to rich, persistent information mobility; a domain where compute, communications, gaming, media playback and media creation tools are literally at your fingertips.

Exciting times, to be sure.

Related Posts

1. Five reasons iPhone vs Android isn't Mac vs Windows
2. Understanding Apple's iPad
3. The Google Android Rollout: Windows or Waterloo?

Open "ish": The meaning of open, according to Google

 

In 'The Meaning of Open,' Google's SVP, Product Management, Jonathan Rosenberg, simultaneously acknowledges the fuzziness of what exactly "being open" means and owns up to the fact that Google isn't all the way there. 

Give him credit, though; he actually attempts to provide some definitive table stakes for how Google is trying to walk the talk (his communication originated from an internal memo to Google staffers; it's definitely worth a read):

There are two components to our definition of open: open technology and open information. Open technology includes open source, meaning we release and actively support code that helps grow the Internet, and open standards, meaning we adhere to accepted standards and, if none exist, work to create standards that improve the entire Internet (and not just benefit Google). 

Open information means that when we have information about users we use it to provide something that is valuable to them, we are transparent about what information we have about them, and we give them ultimate control over their information. These are the things we should be doing. In many cases we aren't there, but I hope that with this note we can start working to close the gap between reality and aspiration.

First, let's give the company props, as they deserve major kudos for even being willing to open up their proprietary core as much as they do (think how a company like Yelp avoided having to re-create the wheel or throw a sinkhole of costs to incorporate rich mapping functionality into their service, thanks to the relative openness of Google Maps). 

At the same time, I have to roll the eyes a bit, as it all feels like selective adherence to the openness credo.

After all, it’s not like crown jewels like the search index are white boxes for consumers to granularly control or repurpose, or for brands/publishers to do the same. 

And of course, the company exercises fairly tight control over what data is shared and what is proprietary to Google. For example, all of these years later, nobody really knows what “open” Google makes in the AdSense/AdWord model (an arbitrage of asymmetric control of information, if there ever was one), yet by contrast, “closed” Apple’s 70/30 split with developers is pretty transparent in the realm of App Store.

And while Android is open source – because, if Android marketing is to be believed, it just makes sense, leading to more diversity and more consumer choice – the Google apps that ride on top of it are not open source, which to me fits the old mantra of “be open where commoditization is the goal, be closed where proprietary differentiation is the goal.”

The ends justify the means, with a touch of 'do no evil' (or not too much).

All that said, a great company relative to the rest, and the dialog on openness is certainly one worth having.

UPDATE 1: John Gruber of Daring Fireball chimes in re Google's openness manifesto, and is less charitable than I, saying, "It’s the biggest pile of horseshit I’ve ever seen from Google. Basically, he’s spewed 4,000 words to say that “open” is always good and always wins, Google is always open, therefore Google is always good and will always win. And please don’t worry your pretty little minds about things like Google’s search or ad algorithms or the specific details of how its data centers work, all of which things Google could not possibly be more secretive about. Because if you think about these things, you’ll see that Google isn’t open at all about certain financially lucrative areas where it has built huge technical advantages over its competitors, and that’s not possible, because Google is always open."  In a word, "ouch." What do you REALLY think, John. :-)

UPDATE 2: Great piece in Gawker that argues that Google is becoming a bit delusional in believing their own PR a wee too much.

UPDATE 3: While some will understandably quibble about the fuzziness of Google's announcement (HERE and HERE), give Google credit for finally revealing their rev share with Publishers on AdSense (68% to the publisher for content ads and 51% for search ads).  If I am gonna challenge their selective approach to openness, I have to acknowledge when they share data on the crown jewels.  Way to go, guys!

UPDATE 4: Can you say, "Do as I say, not as I do?" Today, word leaks out from the court documents in Oracle v. Google patent case, that Google advises its rank and file NOT to develop in the open, and favors Android developers that play by Google sanctioned rules with early access to Android SDKs, builds and what not. The cherry on top of this shit sundae is that HTC sues Apple today for patent infringement based on ownership of patents obtained just last week from...wait for it...Google. I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning...It reminds me of...Google.

Related Posts:

1. Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best
2. Holy Shit! Apple’s Halo Effect
3. The Chess Masters: Apple v. Google 
4. Android’s ‘Inevitability’ and the Missing Leg 
5. Built-to-Thrive - The Standard Bearers: Apple, Google, Amazon

Is Facebook a Brand that You Can Trust? (Guest Column @ O'Reilly Radar)

In light of the Facebook's past consumer-unfriendly initiatives, its recent 'privacy' settings change should serve as a wake up call to its 350M users that they are entrusting a Fox to guard the Hen House; a truth that is destined to erupt into a crisis for the company. 

Read the full post HERE. 

Except from the article follows:

Isn't it about time that we started holding our online brands to the same standards that we hold our offline ones?

Case in point, consider Facebook. In Facebook's relatively short life, there has been the Beacon Debacle (a 'social' advertising model that only Big Brother could love), the Scamville Furor (lead gen scams around social gaming) and now, the Privacy Putsch.

By Privacy Putsch, I am referring to Facebook's new 'Privacy' Settings, which unilaterally invoked upon all Facebook users a radically different set of privacy setting defaults than had been in place during the company's build-up to its current 350 million strong user base.

To put a bow around this one, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), not exactly a bastion of radicalism, concluded after comparing Facebook's new privacy settings with the privacy settings that they replaced:

"Our conclusion? These new 'privacy' changes are clearly intended to push Facebook users to publicly share even more information than before. Even worse, the changes will actually reduce the amount of control that users have over some of their personal data." EFF adds that, "The privacy 'transition tool' that guides users through the configuration will 'recommend' — preselect by default — the setting to share the content they post to Facebook, such as status messages and wall posts, with everyone on the Internet, even though the default privacy level that those users had accepted previously was limited to 'Your Networks and Friends' on Facebook."

via radar.oreilly.com

UPDATE 1: As predicted, Facebook finds itself in a bit of a shit-storm over their blithe unconcern for the privacy and data protection rights of its users.  Read about it HERE.

Related Post:

1. Why Facebook's Terms of Service Change is Much Ado About Nothing

What's a @TimOReilly Tweet worth? 5850 clicks, 100 re-tweets and counting

 

I wrote a post on Friday for O'Reilly Radar on my thesis that the Apple's Media Tablet is targeted at the bag carrying consumer (think: purses, backpacks and briefcases). (Check out: 'It's in the Bag! The Apple Tablet Computing Device.')

It garnered decent readership engagement on Friday/Saturday, and I was able to track 1,300 or so clicks via Bit.ly, 10 or so re-tweets via Tweetmeme and another 15+ comments between Friday night and Saturday.

Then, I wake up Sunday morning to see that ANOTHER 1,500+ clicks have occurred, plus another 50 or so re-tweets.  

What happened? 

Then, it dawned on me; an unprompted (but appreciated) tweet on the post from Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media.  

Before the dust had settled, 5,850 clicks and 100 re-tweets verified, directly resulting from Tim's tweet.

How's that for social leverage?

Related Posts:

1. Anatomy of a Post: Breadcrumbs, Tweets and Call Home Functions
2. How Social Media Works: It's About Breadcrumbs and Conversations 
3. Thought Streams: From the Analog to the Digital World and Back 

Posterous: The Copy-and-Post Revolution in (Micro) Blogging

A friend of mine, who has achieved repeated success in high-tech startup land, said something profound that has stuck with me ever since.  

He said that if you want to be successful, focus on segments where <10% of the crowd currently adopts the solution, and by virtue of dramatically simplifying the approach, you can toggle adoption rates to closer to 90%.

The most basic example of this precept in action is Twitter, which has taken the otherwise (relatively) complex process of blogging, and made it as easy as typing 140 characters.

But, as Twitter proves, knowing HOW to post is not the same as knowing WHAT to post, which brings me to a second axes in the 'Changing Adoption Rates' axiom; namely, that if you can convert Infrequently Performed tasks into High Frequency ones, the utility you are delivering to your target user will go through the roof. 

Posterous: Copy-and-Post in Context

Enter Posterous, a micro-blogging tool (it's free) that does a few things really well:

Creating Posts is as Easy as Copy-and-Post:  What this means is that let's say that your are reading a great article at ESPN.com on Ron Artest's early play as a Laker.  You can simply scroll your mouse over a favorite picture or blurb from the article, and click the Posterous bookmarket which creates a Short Post that looks like this (click on graphic to see full size view).  From this window, you can change the title, add personal comments, refine what's included in the post, etc.  

The elegance of this model is that I now find myself effortlessly creating 4-7 posts a day on my Posterous blog, netgarden's posterous, versus the 2-3 posts a week that I create on my "serious blog," The Network Garden, which is more focused on long-form articles.

Creating Posts in Context is Intuitive and Simple: What this means is that creating a post from excerpted content, such as a comment, picture, video or blurb is done in a manner that retains a clean anchor to the contextual boundaries of the original article (click on graphic below to see full size view).  By that, I mean a link is automatically incorporated inline within the Posterous post to the original content, and any excerpted text is clearly offset from your personal text in the post (example HERE).  Plus, the post is date stamped, and tags and new comments are easily added to refine the context moving forward.  

Moreover, subsequent edits to the post are brain dead simple via a WYSIWYG web based post editing tool. One use case that I have found particularly compelling is turning comments that I have written in response to other people's posts into Posterous posts.  Here, I  simply scroll my mouse over my comment, click the Posterous bookmarklet, make my refinements, and I now have a Comment Post (example HERE).

Autoposting Connects the Dots to Twitter and Facebook: For those of us that have multiple social media accounts (think: Flickr, Twitter, personal blog, Facebook), there is always a dilemma of where to post what, and whether to replicate posts across multiple sites.  This dilemma is even more vexing since, whereas Twitter tweets are limited to 140 character text and links, Facebook posts can include pictures, text and video of variable lengths, and personal blogs are as custom as you want to get. Here, Posterous really shines, giving you the ability to autopost your posterous posts to one or more services, defaulting the title of the post as the Twitter tweet, and giving you a measure of granularity on a post by post basis to autopost or not (you can also autopost after posting if it was a post that you opted NOT to originally autopost, a method I use when I have queued up multiple posts that I don't want to blast my friends and followers with in rapid succession).  Two nits here, though, are that: 1) I would like to see Posterous add a character count in the Short Post title so I know how many characters I still have available so my tweet is not clipped; and 2) I would like to see better granularity of WHAT is autoposted to different services, since the handling methods between Facebook and Twitter, as an example, are so different.

Post by Email Intelligently: Ironically, one of the core differentiators of Posterous is one that I don't use, but the idea is that Posterous makes it easy for you to send an email with an attachment, such as a bunch of photos, and it will not only convert the email into a nicely formatted post, but it will take the attachment(s) (in this case pictures), and render them as a slide show, or other intelligent container, as appropriate (see below).

Simple Analytics/Management Dashboard: The analog that you can not improve what you don't measure was clearly not lost on the folks at Posterous, who not only give you a decent, simple dashboard for tracking which posts are popular, but also the product is exceedingly 'forgiving' in letting you tweak and refine your posts after the fact. My only wish list item here is that Posterous make it easier to view the traffic history of all of my posts on one page (versus limiting to tracking five posts on the main Manage screen).

 

Futures and Wish List: If you can't tell from my comments above, I REALLY like this product, but even excellent offerings can get better, so in no particular order:

1. Scheduling Posts: When you read as much as I do, and you read in blocks of time, you will often find that 5-6 articles may inspire you to post in a short time period.  Doing so, however, mucks with the signal-to-noise ratio of your audience, which a post scheduling option can remedy.
2. Better Handling Logic for Twitter and Facebook (plus LinkedIn support): As noted above, I would really like to see a character count(down) in the Short Post UI so that I know how many characters I have left to play with to refine what will be auto-posted into a tweet. Better granularity of output handling for Facebook and support for LinkedIn (which I understand is coming) is on the nice-to-have list.
3. Related Posts:  When you accumulate a library of many posts, you often find that a given post was inspired by one or more other prior posts.  In my main blog at The Network Garden I reconcile this by manually creating a Related Posts footer with title and links to 2-5 posts.  This has done wonders in terms of cross-pollinating my content, and certainly could be even more powerful if it was algorithmically generated (the latter is a nice to have, though).
4. Hot Pages/New/Popular/Recently Viewed/Related: Today, very little about Posterous feels like a community, other than it providing an automated conduit to your OTHER social services.  While the service features an Explore Posterous option for newbies, it would take very little work to create a top level auto-generated page with tabbed views that spotlights What's Hot (featured), New (recently posted), Popular (in terms of viewcounts and/or comments); or Recently Viewed (recently viewed posts).  Similarly, as Posterous supports tagging, it would be relatively straightforward to cloud up tagged data across Posterous sites to show visitors Related Content, as a way of deepening engagement for visitors and creating cross-pollination across Posterous sites. This could even be a reciprocity option for site builders, ala a linkshare program.
5. Bit.ly support: Posterous supports its own URL shortening domain, post.ly, but to the extent that bit.ly is more of the standard, has wider integration with Twitter/Facebook client apps, and deeper all-around analytics functions, this is pretty important. 
6. Deep Profile: Social media is all about finding like minds based upon shared interests, and the user profile is the jump point where a lot of the traversal happens.  Posterous is pretty one-dimensional in this area, and should get better over time. 
7. The Library of the Commons: I have put a lot of clock cycles into ruminating on the question of what happens when you catalog (in short post form) the universally shared index of photos, videos, business listings, wikipedia entries, product listings, etc. proliferating across the web. My thesis is that you end up needing some kind of rolodex, what I call an Infodex, to organize, manage and share these listings.  Needless to say, this is a bucket that Posterous could add a lot of value around, or as a platform play, could facilitate third-parties creating like apps around. A simple start might be a list building tool that allows users to flag favorite posterous posts and organize them into Top N Lists.
8. Mobile Applications: There is a lot more value than simply facilitating Picture Posts that Posterous could capture around Places and Products, to name two low-bar examples.   

Posterous is free, so do check it out and to get an idea of the delineation between "serious blog" and posterous blog, check out netgarden's posterous, in addition to The Network Garden.

Related Posts:

1. The Library of the Commons: Rise of the Infodex
   
2. Envisioning the Social Map-lication
   
3. The Mobile Broadband Era: It's About Messages, Mobility and The Cloud

The Library of the Commons: Rise of the Infodex (guest post @ O'Reilly Radar)

Somewhere between the realm of Personal and Shared media lies the realm of the Universal. 

The realm of the universal is something that I call the Library of the Commons, a global repository of user-generated and crowd-sourced media and information. 

Services that logically nest in the Library include: Amazon Reviews, Yelp, YouTube, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Flickr, Tweets. 

This post not only provides a framework for understanding the Library of the Commons, but suggests a federated listing model that I call the Infodex - a kind of next generation Rolodex - for housing, organizing and sharing such listings.

Read the full post HERE.

Related Posts:

1. Pattern Recognition: Makers, Marketplaces and the Library of the Commons
2. Envisioning the Social Map-lication
3. The Mobile Broadband Era: It's About Messages, Mobility and The Cloud

Anatomy of a Post: Breadcrumbs, Tweets and Call Home Functions

Some time back, I wrote a post called 'Social Media - It's About Breadcrumbs and Conversations' that was an attempt to show how mastered content (think: videos, blog posts, pictures) could become viral by being used as comment fodder in responding to other people's posts, discussion group threads and within social networks.

I built upon those concepts in a post called 'Why I Blog: It’s about Brand, not Bread' where I attempted to spotlight how blogging for most is less of a monetary source than a brand, identity, online visibility and conversational flow cultivation tool -- assuming that you have something substantive to say.

Now, thanks to URL shortening services, like bit.ly, you can get analytics visibility on which breadcrumbs generate what clicks (sidebar: I call a comment made in the comment section of another person's post that references a post you wrote, including the URL and a call to action, a breadcrumb).

With that as a backdrop, consider a post that I wrote last week called 'ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy' which, as the title suggests, is an analysis of the iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview.

To promote it, I did a couple of separate tweets, posted a copy of the post on my O'Reilly blog, responded to articles on the Apple event with comments on 15+ blogs and major media pubs, referenced my post in status updates on LinkedIn and Facebook, and referenced the post in the comment sections of two different mobile discussion groups within LinkedIn.

What is interesting is that the majority of general purpose tech blogs generated less than 3% of the clicks; LinkedIn was about double (the groups were a big factor there); and the Apple-centric blogs, as expected, drove the biggest traffic kick.

Somewhat surprisingly, WSJ's All Things Digital generated almost as much traffic as the Apple-centric blogs.  Facebook and Twitter yielded me very little click goodness based on the data.

You can view the actual analytics data here: http://bit.ly/info/ANdMz or just check out graphic below.

"Right Here Now" services: weaving a real-time web around status

I just had an AHA moment.

Fred Wilson of A VC wrote an intriguing post, ‘Hasn't It Always Been About Status?’   In it, he asserts that the “status update” has become the ultimate social gesture (think: Twitter tweets, Facebook status updates, LinkedIn updates).

I read this post when it originally ran, and pretty much agreed with Fred’s points, but then moved on.  Intuitive, but not earth shattering.  Or so I thought.

But then, I activated a feature within Facebook that allowed my Twitter tweets to update my Facebook status automatically, in the process notifying everyone in my social network. 

(Ironically enough, this one feature add materially increased the utility value for me of Facebook, which has done a good job of finding the balance between being an optimized, integrated walled garden and an open platform.)

That was the AHA moment when I started to see how you could bi-furcate a personal, brand or community messaging strategy between global broadcasts and targeted narrowcasts, and how all sorts of new status clients will emerge to make this process manageable.

Reduction as a Powerful Generator of Focused Activity

In Wilson’s post, he presents a three-legged stool to explain both the import and destiny of status updating.

On one leg is the premise (articulated by Joshua Schachter) that reducing services to the simplest user experience possible is a powerful generator of focused activity. 

Why?  It’s the antidote to the truism that when you raise the bar a half inch, you lose 90% of the audience.

On the second leg is the status message itself, a construct that is at once completely ad hoc and at the same time gaining structure (think: handles, transformers and payloads). 

Owing in large part to Twitter’s exposition of rich APIs, we are seeing all sorts of interesting service integrations (e.g., the above Facebook example and video tweeting services, such as Twiddeo, an effort by my company, vSocial), plus client side application innovation across Mac, Blackberry, iPhone, iPod touch and PC device environments.

This is the third leg of the stool, and Wilson concludes that the emergence of status as the ultimate social gesture is destined to be “very good for third party Twitter clients who will now be able to become status clients.”

He concludes that “we are going to see continued innovation in and around the status message; (namely because) we can use filtering, semantics, identity, social graphs, and a host of other important technologies to weave a real-time web around status.”

I think that he is right, and to frame this one, the rest of the post focuses on one such innovation example.

Right Here Now Services: Status Meets Location with Context

Form follows function.  A few weeks back, my friend (and former business partner) Steve Lee, who runs product management on Google Mobile Maps, took me through a demo of their new locative status service, Latitude.

He showed me how they had thought through things like visibility control and privacy (they did a REALLY good job here – kudos!), and even plugged in status updating.

The basic idea behind Latitude is two fold.  One is that most people don’t use GPS, and besides it’s deeply inefficient from a power utilization perspective.  Battery life is everything on mobile devices. 

Two is that because of this, mechanisms to share location status with family and friends are unreliable, not to mention, lacking in privacy controls.

With Latitude, Google has come up with a systematized approach to making location visibility work both effortlessly and securely so you can share your locative status in real-time with those that matter in your social network, across cellular and Wi-Fi networks, in a carrier independent and battery efficient fashion.

Now, imagine Status and Location as social application ingredients that can be combined together to create new application compounds using additional ingredients, like People, Places, Localities, Times, Topics and Events.

The composite that results is what I call "Right Here Now" services.

Here are some examples:

1. You are hanging out near South of Market (in San Francisco) on a Saturday night and you want to see if any friends from school (or work) are nearby and want to grab a beer. 
2. You are listening to a compelling speaker at a trade show and in parallel, kibitzing virtually with others in the room (and those who couldn’t be there but are engaged nonetheless).
3. You are watching the Lakers play the Celtics on TNT, high-fiving with other Laker fans and trash-talking with Celts fans who are also watching the event, some in their living rooms, others at sports bars, still others physically at the game.
4. You just heard about a disaster in Anytown, USA, and want to reach out to people physically located right now where the disaster happened to get news from ground zero.
5. Or, as pathetic as it sounds, you are single, looking to mingle and doing what my friend calls the “lookup and hookup,” which of course brings new meaning to the (twitter) term Direct Message.

Similarly, it is easy to see how such mechanisms might become tune-able to filter down communication channels based on delimiters such as specific interests, trust, and even thresholds, such as audience size and "friend of a friend" degrees of separation.

The Medium Truly is the Message

Marshall McLuhan famously once said that, “The Medium is the Message,” suggesting that the medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.

In the case of status update messages, they are becoming a medium in their own right, increasingly containing much more informational goodness than simple text. 

Specifically, they are gaining structured actions that allow you to compress long URLs into  TinyURLs/Bit.lys; handles to enable auto-recognition of links to pictures, songs, videos and other media; categorization support so that you can add those you are following to groups; save favorite items of interest; and to archive referenced links for offline browsing, which is ideal for mobile/mobility devices.

Moreover, status clients are gaining search and trending functions, and newfangled status overlay services, like StockTwits, are building their own smart codes using hashtags (#NAME) and other symbols to identify things like stock symbols ($AAPL) and to frame recurring conversational topics of interest (#Watchmen).

Today, a lot of this nascent structure is ad hoc, which has the benefit of being organic and community defined, and thus, authentic. Plus it sticks to Schachter’s axiom about simple user experiences generating lots of focused activity.

But what it doesn’t provide is a reliable, predictable framing mechanism for easily plugging into conversational threads and persisting contexts beyond the HERE and NOW. 

But, that is a topic for another day.  Rome wasn't built in a single day.

(follow my rants on the real-time web via Twitter @ http://twitter.com/netgarden.)

Related Posts:

1. Twitter-Nomics: Structured Tweets (and a Business Model for Twitter).
2. Envisioning the Social Map-lication: An application that systematically connect the dots between me, my content and my network.
3. vSocial launches Twiddeo:  Twitter meets video, and vice-versa.
4. Why Openness May Not Be Best: Android versus iPhone (a Guest Post I wrote for GigaOM).
5. Mega brands, online communities and “three walled” gardens

What it Means to be a "Social" Media Center: Boxee, Apple TV and Square Connect

(reprinted from my blog at O'Reilly)

I keep waiting for the magical convergence box in my living room. You know the one; it’s the Web TV that actually works.

In Boxee (social media center), Apple TV (iTunes in my living room) and Square Connect (iPhone/iPod touch based Universal Remote), I finally see the framing for a Smart, Connected Living Room to emerge.

Never confuse 'Chicken Parts' with a living, breathing Chicken
First, a disclaimer. While Boxee, Apple TV and Square Connect are conceptually designed to work together, and while I am optimistic that the user experience will get better, today the gestalt is more ready-made for techies than less technically proficient types.

And to be clear, the user experience matters a heck of a lot here because, let’s face it, you only want to build and manage one media library.

For one thing, you need to gracefully support modal “tune-ability” and informational “volume controls” so that users can easily shift from lean forward (social and interactive) to lean back (passive-viewing) mode.

From a usability and workflow perspective, this implies that I can make a few wizard-type of customization decisions and combine Broadcast channels with Internet Media and my Personal Libraries (photo, music and video libraries) in a few clicks.

Structurally, it means unified media access, archival and playback mechanisms; namely one player engine that is skin-able and customizable via well labeled “knobs and levers” that are template-driven where practical.

Fundamentally, this is Programmable Media. I can channel-ize it into segmented content containers, rate it, review it, enrich it (via Service Overlays) and give it the dewey decimal categorization treatment.

By Service Overlays, I mean that there is a messaging layer that runs coincident, but out-of-band, to my media. Messaging data can be simple URL links, information feeds, data repositories, email messages, tweets or service specific events, such as who else is watching this content Right Now.

Imagine a message that is able to contain a “payload,” and that payload can be information, media or conversations/discussion threads.

Moreover, the envelope that this message is stored within exposes a set of contextual “handles” so that decisions such as ignore, archive or elevate can be proactively handled for you based on simple rules.

Built on top of this model is social interactivity. With pretty much no effort, I can broadly see What’s New, Popular, Talked About, Related and Right Now filtered by friends, local distinctions, special interests and/or on a network-wide basis.

I can then plug in to it (e.g., watch video, join a conversation), grab it, tune it, re-tweet it or just give a shout out - all without leaving the couch.

Where the Rubber meets the Road
At this moment, the Social Media Center’s potential and reality are not quite one and the same. Much of this is functionality is in the composite wish list bucket versus being robust, well integrated and fine tuned.

As such, I am left to hearken back to a quote from Federico Faggin, whose critical contributions at Intel led to the game-changer that was/is the microprocessor.

Faggin once spoke to the ‘inevitability’ of certain innovations, noting that, “Because these inventions have a certain inevitability about them, the real contribution lies in making the idea actually work.”

So how does this apply to the Social Media Center? While I believe that the advent of the Social Media Center as a mainstream extension to the living room is inevitable, If done wrong, or poorly integrated, the experience becomes a bit like the Radio Shack 100-in-1; novel, but not compelling and certainly not engaging.

After all, the typical consumer (and even most early adopters) is not willing to perform unnatural acts to improve the way they experience media. This stuff just has to work (and work together).

Someday soon. Until then, what follows are thoughts on each vendor's offering.

Boxee
Fred Wilson (the VC who backed Twitter) has a good explanation for why he chose to invest in Boxee, but suffice it to say, they are not lacking for ambition.

In addition, give them props, as they appear to be natural communicators and good listeners, which suggests both a rapid product improvement path and solid entrepreneurial muscles.

Plus, Boxee is designed to run on top of a Mac Mini or Apple TV, which suggests market awareness and industry realism (i.e., they are pragmatically picking their battles, and which wheels need re-invention).

And Fred Wilson is a smart guy, so from where I sit, that is an important vote of confidence.

At the same time, the system is decidedly at the Alpha stage (as it is labeled, to be clear). Case in point, it wrecks utter havoc on my MacBook Pro. Probably not the optimal system for running a media center application, but truth be told, for a lot of us, that will be the first staging ground for Boxee before moving on to a dedicated box.

The user experience is a bit cluttered for my taste but it’s easy to see where tons of user and usage data will accumulate via this model, and there are all sorts of interesting ways that that data can be sliced up and presented to users to catalyze new discoveries.

In fact, this data-centricity is a great way of maximizing stumble upon factors without requiring a user to have lots of friends using the system, avoiding a potential chicken-and-egg that a lot of social powered solutions face.

Under the hood, a preset could express a default set of network-wide views until you have at least N number of friends or Y amount of programming history.

On the data visualization front, this screams out for there being a natural use of "leader boards" and tickers of all kinds (i.e., information feeds - tweets, quotes, scores) as a way of spotlighting Local, Right Now, and Related information flows pertaining to available media options. This again increases stumble upon and enhances the information richness of the media services themselves.

One simple example is to enable within the system a “short post” extension to media items so that Boxee users can extend programming notes with comments, ratings, tags and links to related resources, as well as share them if they desire.

Over time, the meta-information surrounding the media becomes as valuable as the media itself.

Logically, Boxee might consider building a Facebook or Flash-based user badge that can be embedded in blogs etc, to showcase a user’s last N number of programs watched on Boxee, Favorites, Recommended content, etc.

Ala DirecTV’s great DVR Scheduler feature that allows you to schedule programs to record from your mobile or PC/Mac, Boxee should seriously consider enabling users to open up a portion of their playlist to friends: A) so they can share programming WITH you; and B) so they can grab programming FROM you.

Plus, it’s not too hard to imagine where such a model might serve for enabling synchronized “social” viewing activities with live/broadcast media, such as sports related content.

All in all, Boxee has a lot of promise, but also, a lot of work ahead to realize the hard part of making their many ideas actually work, caveat-free.

Apple TV
On the one hand, Apple seems to have settled on Video Rental Store and iTunes in your living room as the primary “jobs” that Apple TV is designed for.

And in the most recent earnings call, Apple CEO Steve Jobs asserted pretty firmly (in response to an analyst question on the topic) that Apple TV would remain just a hobby of Apple’s versus a strategic and material revenue-producing cornerstone business for the company.

This raises serious questions about Apple’s commitment to drive innovation in the platform during the year ahead, especially since they did only limited enhancements over the course of this year.

That said, Jobs has thrown many a head fake before so I would take his assertions with a grain of salt.

My skepticism frankly is fueled by the fact that Apple has built up a thriving ecosystem around its iPhone and iPod touch platforms, and the premise of scaling that ecosystem to include the Apple TV sandbox just makes sense.

Along these lines, part of me wonders if there is any path for Apple to embrace Boxee and fold their efforts (either via business deal or outright acquisition) into a formal platform play on Apple TV and Mac Mini.

This would give their developer base an opportunity to choose to develop for any combination of iPhone/iPod touch, Mac and Apple TV.

This assumes a long-term convergence of iPhone and Apple TV code bases, defining explicitly supported workflow models, extending developer tools and adding App Store integration, but it would allow Apple to leverage the same set of relationships over and over, and leverage is generally a good thing.

It’s a great way to accelerate their hobby into the next gear, IMHO.

Square Connect
So where does Square Connect sit in this equation? Square Connect’s vision is to leverage the iPhone and iPod touch as a Universal Remote, not just for controlling your iTunes library on your Mac or Apple TV (as Apple’s Remote application does), but for all of your living room and media center peripherals as well.

As the iPhone/iPod touch does not have infrared controls built into it, the way Square Conntect’s DOTCONTROL solution works is by placing a Wi-Fi powered hardware gateway that converts between the iPhone/iPod touch’s Wi-Fi interfaces on the one hand, and the infrared interfaces of peripherals on the other.

One bit of goodness around such a model is that your iPhone is now programming aware (thanks to the gateway), meaning it knows when you are watching the Laker’s game on TNT and when you switch over to ‘Dancing with the Stars.’

This opens up the door to your universal remote being able to automatically serve up to your iPhone live feeds, scores and other social functions (e.g., who is watching now) when you are watching the Lakers, and audience scores and dance impressions when you are watching DWTS.

The Social Media Center. It’s coming to a living room near you. Just in time for cocooning season. ☺

Related Posts:

1. Apple, TV and the Smart Connected Living Room
2. Wall Widgets: Fixed Wireless at Home
3. Middleband Channels: Television content-aligned services
4. Innovation, Inevitability and Why R&D is So Hard
5. DirecTV’s DVR Scheduler Rocks!

iPhone's Lingering Raspberry

I can't take my iPod touch seriously as a typing/text-based input device until I  can 'save drafts' and do 'copy and paste.'

I see this as pretty binary relative to the aspiration of being able to input fully formed, type-written thoughts.

What's the point if you can not easily edit your words?

For now, this segment of RIM's (Blackberry) business is safe. 

Love the iPhone 2.0 platform and my iPod touch, but my Blackbery 7130 'aint going anywhere.

Related Links:

1. iPhone 2.0 - What it Means to be Mobile: a detailed summary of my experience to date with the iPhone 2.0 platform.
2. iPhone 2.0 - swinging for the fences: an analysis of the WWDC Keynote by Steve Jobs.
3. iPod touch: the first mainstream Wi-Fi mobile platform?

iPhone 2.0: What it Means to be Mobile

(Note: As past posts of mine have underscored [see below – Related Links], the promise of a caveat-free mobile platform is a game changer on par with the advent of the PC.  I won’t re-state my arguments here.  Read some of the posts below if interested.)

On Friday, after about a dozen hours of trying, I was finally able to upgrade my iPod touch to iPhone 2.0 software (for those who don’t know, Apple servers were completely overwhelmed coping with what proved to be 1M iPhones purchased in the first three days of iPhone 3G availability.  By contrast, the original iPhone took 74 days to reach this same sales threshold). 

What follows are some random observations about the experience from a consumer perspective, how the reality post-upgrade lined up with the pre-upgrade promise/hype, and implications for the mobile universe moving forward.

1. App Store brings the concept of friction-free impulse buying into the mobile realm by making over the air purchase, download and installation of iPhone/iPod touch apps/services one-click (plus password) easy.  I expected as much, but the good news is that I have not been remotely disappointed. It's instant gratification, pure and simple, and an unqualified “AHA” moment.
2. I have bought three gaming applications (Trism – a very cool, highly-addictive ‘touch and motion’ based puzzle game; Crash Bandicoot – an entertaining racing game with excellent graphics and audio; and Motion X Poker – a simple, elegant, beautifully-crafted poker game using dice for $4.95, $9.95 and $9.95, respectively), and can only say WOW!  While Apple has obviously made some trade-offs relative to what dedicated handheld gaming systems offer – most basically, lack of a gaming controller/inputs – iPhone/iPod touch is simply awesome as a mobile gaming platform.  Obvious areas to watch from an innovation perspective here are games that leverage the social and connected attributes of the devices, and games that support multi-player.
3. There are a boatload of free applications accessible via the App Store (plenty of crap, too, I imagine), but so far I have only installed four free applications, all non-gaming apps.  They are: Apple’s Remote Control application for controlling your iTunes library on you Mac/PC/Apple TV (kind of cool, depending on your set-up); Pandora, the internet radio and music discovery service (incredible, a logical extension to your formal library on iTunes); AOL Radio (again, a logical extension, some of my favorite mainstream radio stations accessible wirelessly via my iPod touch); and Twitterific (a nice, but somewhat clunky, front end to twitter).  Given that the backlog of iPhone SDK developers is already in the thousands, it seems clear that Apple will need to come up with better filtration tools to enable consumers to recommend, rank and detail the good, bad and ugly of a given application.  This is the signal-to-noise ratio challenge, as you know the axiom about opinions being like assholes, and adding to the noise is the fact that there are already reports of developers trying to ‘game’ the system.  Apple should learn from Amazon here. 
4. While I have heard some lament that the iPhone 3G doesn’t add a lot of new functionality ‘other than 3G’ that kind of misses the point.  First off, for iPhone 1.0 owners, this is the prototypical early adopter conundrum.  New versions tend to be cheaper AND more powerful.  Get over it. If speed isn’t that important to you or 2G is good enough, the real magic is in the software upgrade anyway, and it runs on iPhone 1.0 and iPod touch devices, so don’t upgrade the hardware if you don’t need the speed.  If, however, you don’t have an iPhone, then faster speed, GPS support, improved enterprise-readiness and the ability to run iPhone SDK powered apps is manna from heaven.  Similarly, some have quibbled that the iPhone 2.0 Software does not add a ton of new features per se, but again, that misses the point.  The upgrade from a software perspective is essentially what enables the iPhone/iPod touch to work end-to-end from app creation (via iPhone SDK) to placement in App Store to the purchase, download and installation of new apps to the iPhone/iPod touch without breaking stuff.  Experientially, this just works in a seamless and simple fashion, no small accomplishment, to be sure.
5. Rumors of iPhone being a Blackberry killer are greatly overestimated, in my opinion.  For one, while Apple has made some serious headway in terms of enterprise-readiness, the reality is that its support for advanced IT functions, is somewhat lacking.  As such, individuals, workgroups or verticals that are pre-disposed to buy all things Apple will likely be the early adopters of iPhone in the enterprise, and yes, this will take a bite of out Blackberry’s business.  But, the lion’s share of enterprises are NOT pre-disposed to all things Apple, Blackberry is rock solid and already the standard in most of these companies, and legacy is hard to dislodge.  More to the point, what Blackberry is best at – being an INPUT device with a real keyboard – iPhone is only adequate at.  Conversely, as an OUTPUT device, iPhone is without peer so it is somewhat of an Apples and Oranges (nee Blackberries) discussion that will play out over time, not in a single act.

Before wrapping up, let me spend a few minutes on the Pandora application for iPhone/iPod touch, as I think that it is suggestive of the real power of mobile applications; they can be media rich, hybrid composites (of a device layer, a web front end and a service layer), leverage the ‘wisdom of crowds,’ easy to customize based on your direct feedback and be integrated with other services.

For example, the first time that I launched the Pandora app after installing it, I was prompted to paste a set-up key into the Pandora web site, which activated the service on my iPhone and provisioned a web-based custom dashboard on the Pandora web site.

From either the web site or my iPod touch, I could now create a custom radio station by simply typing in the name of an artist or song.  Pandora uses this 'seed' data to set an initial context for the type of music I like.  Typing in the band ‘King Crimson,’ for example, led to songs by King Crimson, of course, but also similarly psychedelic bands like early Genesis, Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, and plenty of others that I had never heard of.
 

Moreover, Pandora’s player controls make it easy to give any song that is playing a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, which refines subsequent song plays. 

Also, a thumbs-down automatically ends that song and takes you to the next song.  What is interesting is that while you can forward to the next song without rating it if you don’t want to listen to it, you can only jump without rating six times per hour in a give radio station. 

I am not sure if this is to force the integrity of rating songs you like/don’t like (versus just channel surfing) or if the long-term play is to make fast-forwarding a premium service.

Similarly interesting is the concept that Pandora is not designed to create one über station for you, but rather, a bunch of specialized music channels.  If you think of a custom radio station as an intelligent thread (i.e., a perpetually-optimizing related songs playlist), that would seem to have all sorts of applications relevant to product recommendations, news recommendations and/or social recommendations (people with similar interests). 

The key point is that if you can do the same thing with different information media types as Pandora proves that you can do with music that opens the door to recommendation systems as the next generation beyond search. 

From this perspective, one could very well imagine the day when I can pick a topic, provide some thumbs-up/thumbs-down feedback, and then follow the intelligent threads, archive the keepers and mine it when I need it later.

To be clear, this is not a new concept but mobile seems tailor made for such a model to take root.

A final note on Pandora in terms of other things that I like that are worth emulating:

1. Algorithmic transparency: you are just a click away from finding out why a given song was recommended to you.  A cool add in this regard would be to enable deeper engagement and introspection by allowing you to up-level from the media player playing an individual song to the full album and/or across to the other albums of the same performer.  There may be licensing restrictions that preclude this today, but this could also be the fork between a free service and a premium service.
2. Bookmarking of favorite songs: how many times do you hear a song you like, not know the name of it, and never find it again?  With Pandora, in a click you can bookmark the song for future listening.  Plus, I am a click away from buying the song or album at iTunes or Amazon’s MP3 store, thanks to integration with these services.
3. Sync to Web: Similarly, cool is the fact that all of the actions that you take on the iPhone/iPod touch sync back to your web front end, and vice versa, meaning that the service is a composite of all of your actions.  This is suggestive of an area that Apple can evolve its MobileMe service, inasmuch as if it is sync’ing all of your data, it can give you tools to better categorize and then magically do all of the sync’ing between Web, Mac/PC and iPhone/iPod touch, and provide recommendation buckets to you.

Bottom line: I love the Pandora concept of simply inputting a categorized favorite as a contextual starting point and then thumb-upping or downing your way to a ‘predictable’ recommendation filter.  I also love the fact that it feels like Pandora has found its true calling as a mobile application, as Internet radio is cool but not compelling in a PC environment, but in a mobile environment with a touch based controls, it feels akin to what TiVo did to TV.  It reinvented it.

UPDATE 1: App Store apps not really Apple Tested and Approved - While Apple is ostensibly the gatekeeper in terms of specific applications finding their way into the App Store, in practice it is not testing every app, delving into every nook and cranny.  To be clear, in a more open platform like Windows, MacOS, etc., you have NONE of these controls but the point is that consumers who assume that App Store apps are Apple tested and approved, are sleeping with a false sense of security, as underscored by the recent de-listing of the the multi-player gaming app, Aurora Feint.  The app has a community feature, which if turned on, delves into the user's Contacts List, sends it to the developer's servers in an unencrypted fashion and then uses that data to recommend other friends who might be available to play the game with.  The bugaboos are lack of transparency that the developer was doing this and the fact that personal data is being sent unsecurely.  In this case, more a by-product of an amateur developer working with limited time and resources than something nefarious but it suggests some measure of caveat emptor necessary as a consumer. See 'Network Borders' link below for more fodder on the topic of Apple's governance role.

UPDATE 2: Apple's App Store sees first month sales of $30 million (via AppleInsider) - Users of Apple's new App Store have downloaded more than 60 million programs, generating a total of about $30 million in sales since the service launched one month ago, according to Apple chief executive Steve Jobs.  In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published early Monday morning, Jobs revealed that while the majority of those applications were free, the App Store still raked in an average $1 million a day from pay-per-download programs -- or an estimated annual sales rate of $360 million.  "This thing's going to crest a half a billion, soon," he said. "Who knows, maybe it will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time. I've never seen anything like this in my career for software."

Related Links:

1. iPhone SDK - mobile reasons for optimism: why the iPhone Universe is a big deal.
2. iPhone 2.0 - swinging for the fences: an analysis of the WWDC Keynote by Steve Jobs.
3. iPod touch: the first mainstream Wi-Fi mobile platform?
4. Envisioning the Social Map-lication: where all of my stuff (contacts, music, content) converge into the cloud and back to Me.
5. iPhone Universe: Network Borders, Kill Switches and the Core Location: why Apple proactively governing third-party applications via backdoor kill switches and the like is a good thing.