Monday, March 23, 2009

The Power of Twitter

In today's Mercury News Larry Magid talked about his use of Twitter and how based on his experience he "didn't get it" but feared he might be missing something. And yes indeed he is.

Twitter is huge and here's why. It's Real-time search.

So many times a simple idea turns into something huge. Just as Tim Berners-Lee's simple idea of the URL morphed into the Internet so it will be with Twitter.

So what is Twitter's simple idea and why is it significant?

From a simple technology perspective Twitter is Publish-Subscribe SMS. It combines the publish-subscribe communication paradigm with real-time of instant messaging.

Publish-subscribe is a many to many broadcast protocol. I publish, many people listen. In fact as a publisher I don't need to know who is subscribing. If I have something interesting to say I can publish. If you find what I say interesting you can subscribe. This communication has its roots in the written word from cave dwellers hieroglyphs, to books, to newspapers, to websites to blogs and now to Twitter. Each technology transition from hieroglyphs to twitter has made publishing more immediate. Now by combining Publish-subscribe with SMS it's virtually real-time.

Additionally Twitter has opened up the network of subscriptions so that anyone can see who is subscribing (following) to who. Given the nature of social networks this means that interesting news has the ability to reach virtually everyone in six retweets.

This is significant because I can use Twitter to find what's happening in real-time and be alerted if something I care about happens when it happens. For example, just this morning using Twitscoop I was alerted to Lance Armstong's crash and injury in Spain.




Twitter is born of the same Cluetrain manifesto empowerment that drove blogging to prominent mainstream status. You can think of Twitter as real-time blogging. Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder described his creation as

”… an idea to make a more ‘live’ LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it.

Already Tweets have evolved from “I’m having breakfast” and “I’m watching it snow” to a powerful tool for building brand and a great way to keep up with what you’re passionate about. And because Twitter is open there is a whole industry for tools to help make Twitter even more effective. Now media giants like CNN are using such tools as a sort of police scanner to be alerted to the next news story. CNN broke the story of The Turkish airline crash which it was alerted to it by Twitter.

While Google, Yahoo and others tried to perform real-time search through their "Alert" function it does not work adequately. The main reason is their alerting mechanisms are based on repeated search of the database they build through "crawling" the Internet. The delay in that approach means that alerts to matches can be considerably later than real-time as I pointed out in this blog post, Cutting Through The Incessant Barking. Real-time works with Twitter because it limits Tweets to 140 characters which is exactly an SMS message.

As with any simple idea that drives a paradigm shift the number of use cases continues to grow only limited by the imagination of its users. While it took 20 years for Tim Berners-Lee's simple idea of the URL to morph into the Internet I think Twitter will be mainstream in a matter of years.

You can follow me at http://twitter.com/RichardTreadway.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Twitter Search About To Eclipse Google Blog Search



Since my realization that that Twitter could rival Google for real-time search I've been tracking various topics using Twitter search and I must say the results have been impressive. Steve Rubel noted in this post the Twitter is about to pass Google blog search. Using Compete.com's service I ran my own comparison shown below. Google's blog search is actually trending down at -3.2% compared to Twitter search's growth at 32.8%



When I was helping PubSub in 2005 everyone in the blog search space was waiting for Google's blog search to join us and Technorati. Many predicted Google's entry would mean the end for other competing blog search engines. My own experience with Google's blog search is largely disappointing. Many of the responses to my alerts are days if not weeks and in some cases years old.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

RIA Round Up - March 14th, 2009

Here is this weeks round up. A collection of RIA articles and blog posts relevant to the market and technology trends.

Business Case for RIA

Virtual Panel on "The Current and Future State of RIA"
Impact

By Staff Writer, March 04, 2009

Info Q has just conducted a Virtual Panel on “The Current and Future State of RIA” featuring the thoughts of many individuals from well‑known and well‑respected companies in the space such as: Mozilla, Curl, Java, Microsoft and Adobe. Each spokesperson was provided with a series of questions relating to whether RIA technologies have “made it”, what the optimal user experience of the RIA should be, what other applications will be driving RIA technology adoption, as well as an overview of the various RIA frameworks and languages.

It's Time To Update The Enterprise Software Licensee Bill of Rights!
Forrester

By Ray Wang, March 05, 2009

With the market now in favor of the enterprise software licensee, its now time to update the Enterprise Software Licensee's Bill of Rights to include newer topics such as virtualization, SaaS and subscription pricing, newer usage based pricing models, open source, and vendor lock-in avoidance. As mentioned in a call to action in a December 2008 Monday's Musings, this groundbreaking report, originally published in December 2006, will be updated to reflect current market conditions. The goal - improve this reusable contract negotiation model that cuts across the 5 key phases of the software ownership life cycle:

RIA technologies and the downturn
ZDNet
By Ryan Stewart, March 05, 2009

The news is a pretty depressing place right now but there was a small article in the Economist about how the Fashion industry is responding to the downturn that caught my eye. Towards the end of the article the Economist mentioned how designers are looking for ways to leverage digital distribution:

Technology Comparisons

Flash is Dominating the Landscape, but Silverlight is Growing
InfoQ
By Abel Avram, March 10, 2009

A RIA statistics page is publishing the numbers of browsers having RIA plug‑ins installed on a daily basis. The RIA space today is occupied by Flash but Silverlight is catching up.

RIA User Interfaces

The Weekly RIA RoundUp for March 9
Inside RIA.com
By David Tucker, March 09, 2009

This week the Flex SDK gets some bug fixes, iLog releases a new set of visualization components, the new version of jQuery UI was released, Microsoft provides some guidance on Silverlight development, and a talk on the future of Rich Internet Applications. All this and more on the Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

Microsoft heralds Silverlight‑Eclipse link
Info World
By Paul Krill, March 09, 2009

Microsoft is touting support for its Silverlight multimedia application technology in the Eclipse open source tools platform.

Schwartz Explains Sun For You Part 2
SD Times
By Alex Handy, March 06, 2009

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, has been laying out the case for his company's future in his blog recently. Earlier this week, he gave a broad overview of his three‑ or four‑part talk. This is part two of that series. Go watch if you're interested in the company.

Framework for Flex Developers Goes Open Source
Dr. Dobb's Journal
By Staff Writer, March 05, 2009

Farata Systems has open sourced its Clear Toolkit 3.1 framework for developing enterprise Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java. Sun loses Apache and Spring vote on latest Enterprise Java

The Register

By Gavin Clarke, March 05, 2009

Updated: Sun Microsystems' rocky relationship with open source over Java is again in the spotlight, after it lost support of two influential groups for the latest update to enterprise Java.

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Twitter The Next Google?


I recently read with interest Chris O'Brien's column, How Twitter could be a threat to Google. At first the headline gave me pause, "yeah right and how's that?" As a novice Twitter user I hadn't seen the connection. Then I got it. Real-time search.

Back in 2005 I spent a year helping a small start-up called PubSub with ambitions to be the next Google. PubSub was the creation of Bob Wyman who had studied the problem of real-time search and realized that in a publish-subscribe model the solution is to store the queries and match them against the published data. He called this "prospective search" because you're essentially saying "Tell me when this happens." Google search is "Retrospective search" as it searches what has already happened. Surely the argument went, the prospective search world must be as big if not bigger than the retrospective world.



But unfortunately in 2005 the Internet had few real-time publish-subscribe data feeds. One such data feed that was experiencing exponential growth was blogs. So PubSub's first popular use was as a real-time search service for blogs. PubSub's many followers used the service to track mentions of anything of interest as it occurred in the blogoshpere - providing immediate notification and the opportunity for immediate response.

While Google, Yahoo and others tried to perform real-time search through their "Alert" function it never worked adequately. The main reason is their alerting mechanisms are based on repeated "retrospective search." The delay in that approach means that alerts to matches can be considerably later than real-time as I pointed out in this blog post, Cutting Through The Incessant Barking

Unfortunately for all of us at PubSub and everyone that had grown to depend on the service our efforts suffered and untimely death.

But now the real-time search concept lives again with the latest publish-subscribe phenomenon Twitter. Twitter is born of the same Cluetrain manifesto empowerment that drove blogging to prominent mainstream status. Twitter is real-time blogging. Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder described his creation as

”… an idea to make a more ‘live’ LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it.

Tweets have evolved from “I’m having breakfast” and “I’m watching it snow” to a powerful tool for building brand and a great way to keep up with what you’re passionate about. And because systems like Twitter and Facebook are open there is a whole industry for tools to help make them more effective. Now media giants like CNN are using such tools as a sort of police scanner to be alerted to the next news story. CNN broke the story of The Turkish airline crash which it was alerted to it by Twitter.

Hopefully with the $35M in venture capital Twitter can accomplish what PubSub couldn't. I look forward to the day in the meantime I'm becoming a Twitter power user. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/RichardTreadway.