Microsoft and the Twitter Imperative
May 7, 2009
I found Nicholas Carlson’s “Microsoft Must Buy Twitter” here an interesting analysis. My thought was that deal makers would have a day at the State Fair if Apple, Google, and Microsoft began a bidding war over Twitter.com. Mr. Carlson offers five reasons why Microsoft has a Twitter imperative. I can’t reproduce the five points here, but I can comment on two of them and invite you to navigate to Mr. Carlson’s article to get the full story.
Mr. Carlson suggests that Microsoft can’t make its dream of attending Google’s funeral a reality with Yahoo as its principal weapon. Microsoft needs the T bomb; that is, the Twitter user base, buzz, and monetization opportunity. I find the idea intriguing, but Microsoft has not made any progress in closing the gap between itself and Google in Web search. Now the GOOG is aiming at Microsoft’s enterprise business. Twitter could be, in my opinion, an expensive distraction that leaves Microsoft vulnerable in a business sector it can ill afford to see slip downhill.
Twitter is, Mr. Carlson implies, will get more expensive. So, buy now and save. Twitter is definitely hot at this moment. The challenge for a company like Microsoft is to acquire something hot and then prevent it from getting cold. Hot properties in the hands of big, slow moving entities often lose their zippiness. My hunch is that if Microsoft owned Twitter, Twitter would be surpassed by another real time messaging service and quickly.
Microsoft may buy Twitter. That opens the door for another Twitter and Microsoft is poorer and more vulnerable as a result. Microsoft needs to leapfrog to stay where it is. An acquisition won’t do the job in my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, June 7, 2009
Microsoft and Search: Interface Makes Search Disappear
May 5, 2009
The Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog here published the second part of an NUI (natural user interface) essay. The article, when I reviewed it on May 4, had three comments. I found one comment as interesting as the main body of the write up. The author of the remark that caught my attention was Carl Lambrecht, Lexalytics, who commented:
The interface, and method of interaction, in searching for something which can be geographically represented could be quite different from searching for newspaper articles on a particular topic or looking up a phone number. As the user of a NUI, where is the starting point for your search? Should that differ depending on and be relevant to the ultimate object of your search? I think you make a very good point about not reverting to browser methods. That would be the easy way out and seem to defeat the point of having a fresh opportunity to consider a new user experience environment.
Microsoft enterprise search Web log’s NUI series focuses on interface. The focus is Microsoft Surface, which allows a user to interact with information by touching and pointing. A keyboard is optional, I assume. The idea is that a person can walk up to a display and obtain information. A map of a shopping center is the example that came to my mind. I want to “see” where a store is, tap the screen, and get additional information.
This blog post referenced the Fast Forward 2009 conference and its themes. There’s a refernce to EMC’s interest in the technology. The article wraps up with a statement that a different phrase may be needed to describe the NUI (natural user interface), which I mistakenly pronounced like the word ennui.
Microsoft Suface. Image Source: http://psyne.net/blog4/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/microsoftsurface.jpg
Several thoughts:
First, I think that interface is important, but the interface depends upon the underlying plumbing. A great interface sitting on top of lousy plumbing may not be able to deliver information quickly or in some cases present the information the user needed. I see this frequently when ad servers cannot deliver information. The user experience (UX) is degraded. I often give up and navigate elsewhere.
Real Time Conversations: The Next Big Big Thing
May 3, 2009
Short honk: real time conversation is the next big thing. You will want to read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s “The Man Who Made Gmail Says Real Time Conversation Is What’s Next” here. The source is the person who coded up Gmail in one day and then knocked off AdSense. (My hunch is that he had help from other Googlers.) Now Paul Buchheit is a Xoogler, working at FriendFeed. For me, the most interesting comment in the article was:
The father of the best web email program on the planet believes that a real-time streaming interface for simplified aggregation of conversation and content from all around the web is going to join the handful of tools we use regularly, like email, IM and blogging.
After reading the article, I had three questions. First, why hasn’t Google been more aggressive in this market space? Maybe Mr. Buchheit was a voice unheard? Second, will services such as FriendFeed leapfrog Google the way Google hopped over Yahoo a decade ago? Finally, maybe Google knows something about the fragility of real time conversation systems that elude lesser minds?
Stephen Arnold, May 3, 2009
Veratect: Trend Prediction
April 30, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to the New Zealand Herald’s story “Tech Start-Up Picked Up Swine Flu Trends ‘Weeks Ago’ here. The story carried a Seattle dateline, so this may be old news. The story reported that
Veratect, a two-year-old company with less than 50 employees, combines computer algorithms with human analysts to monitor online and off-line sources for hints of disease outbreaks and civil unrest worldwide. It tracks thousands of “events” each month – an odd case of respiratory illness, or a run on over-the-counter medicines, for example – then ranks them for severity and posts them on a subscription-only web portal for clients who want early warnings.
Veratect extracts information from online sources and online data flows. If you are interested in the company, you can obtain more information here.
Stephen Arnold, April 30, 2009
Twitter Quitter
April 28, 2009
Short honk: I heard quite a bit about how lousy Twitter.com is at the Boston Search Engine Meeting. Now those Twitter bashers have some ammo for their argument. Mashable, the bible of the real time mash up sector, reported 60% of Twitter Users Quit Within the First Month. Click here to check out the stats.
Stephen Arnold, April 29, 2009
Twitter: The No Fear System
April 27, 2009
I like Twitter, and I like to read what others says about the system. I even enjoy looking at the different applications built around Twitter. Unless a challenger enters the list soon, Twitter.com may become a winner due to a lack of competition, indifference, or relevance to those in the know. The article “Twitter’s Real Edge: It’s Not Scary” here. I have to admit that I have not been frightened of online services. I may have to take a different point of view since the alleged Craigslist.com stalker has emerged from the Internet underworld. I think “scary” as used by the TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy connotes “easy” or “not technical”. I agree. Pervasive computing flows on operations that can be handled without much effort or thought. Call home. Push a button. The more users Twitter.com attracts, the more difficult it will be to get a hooked sender of Tweets to try another system. Google is easy and the company, until recently, hid much of its rocket science technology. Google’s approach was to give the user training wheels with his or her searches. Twitter.com does much the same thing for text broadcasting. For me, the most interesting part of Ms. Lacy’s write up was this passage:
But that’s only part of it. I think the key to Twitter’s mainstream celeb success has been the asynchronous, non-committal nature of the site. As Facebook and MySpace grew, we all experienced that social pressure akin to seeing someone on the street that you know, but don’t want to talk to and wondering how you can politely avoid them. Most people who indiscriminately add “friends” just because they asked don’t wind up really using Facebook to connect with actual friends, because they don’t want to over-share photos, contact information, or videos with “friends” who are essentially strangers.
Now Twitter is easy and an intelligence resource.
Stephen Arnold, April 27, 2009
Twitter Power
April 27, 2009
I was going to ignore the article “The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter” but I thought, “I may as well take a look.” The story appeared in TechRadar.com here. the article provides the reader with the basics of signing up and sending Tweets. But deep in the write up was a gem. For me, the most interesting comment about Twitter’s horsepower was this passage:
Google’s recent outage is a good example of this. For about an hour back in January, its malware detector started claiming that every website ‘may harm your computer’. Before Google had a chance to respond, before blogs had a chance to write posts, Twitter users had already done the important investigation – that yes, it was a problem on Google’s end, that no, it wasn’t spyware at fault – and broadcast it.
I found this a good example of the importance of real time messaging.
Stephen Arnold, April 26, 2009
Twitter Power Search
April 26, 2009
I have scanned a flurry of Twitter news stories. A Twitter book is finally here. A San Francisco journalist asserts that there will be many Twitters. An outraged netzien wants no more Twitter.
I ignored these stories to look at a service to which one of my readers alerted me. Navigate to http://www.twitterpowersearch.com and explore Tweets organized by Twitter and other services. I spent some time watching the Tweets flow by. Seemed interesting to me.
Stephen Arnold, April 26, 2009
Twitter: New Whipping Boy
April 18, 2009
I never watched the whipping scenes in pirate movies when I was a kid in central Illinois. The whole pirate shtick (????) scared me. Pirate life looked awful. Small ships. Scurvy. Rats. I saw a cat-o’-nine tails in a museum when I was in college and I shuddered. The nine tails referred to what looked like leather strips with metal tips or claws. The idea of whipping is bad. Whipping with nine claws buries the need on the badness scale. Here’s what one of these corrective devices used by the British Royal Navy in the 17th century looked like.
Poor Twitter, the steroid charged child of SMS, is now a whipping boy and the pundits and mavens are using the cat-o’-nine tails to make their point. Coverage of Twitter has morphed from “What use is it anyway?” to “Twitter is evil.” The Tyra Banks’s incident in New York allegedly made use of models less than 5 feet seven inches Tweets. For more information on this remarkable tea party or flash mob, click here.
I loved the headline “Twitter Sucks” in the New York Observer where nothing is “sacred but the truth”. You must read the story here. In a nutshell, Twitter is over exposed. The “trough of disillusionment” is that Twitter is lots of short messages. Most of the messages are banal. But some of them contain surprisingly useful information. Aggregated, the Twitter stream can make interesting ideas assume a form that can be prodded and examined.
Should Twitter be whipped with a cat-o’-nine tails. Sure. That’s the way the world today works. But my view is that Twitter is an example of how real time messaging broadcast to others on the network can trigger unanticipated opportunities or challenges. Twitter may suck. Twitter may be trivial. But one thing is clear. Twitter is going to spawn quite a few real time search innovations. Twitter, like PointCast, may end up the big loser in a month or a year, who knows? But push technology did not die with PointCast and BackWeb. Twitter is an example of a service that neither telcos nor the likes of Google were able to put in a box and control.
Stephen Arnold, April 18, 2009
Twitter: Now a Thought Leader Gets It
April 16, 2009
I was delighted to read Steve Espinosa’s “How Twitter Will Win Local Search” here. The story appeared in Silicon Alley Insider. I have been reluctant to post my specific views of Twitter because I sell these addled ideas to even more addled clients. But when something runs in the pulsing “blogosphere”, I want to call attention to the information. One useful function of Twitter is providing very timely, quite specific information about local activities. At lunch, one of the goslings monitors Tweets flowing in real time from Twitter users in the Louisville area. (We don’t get many Tweets in Harrod’s Creek. Ground hogs and possums have yet to acquire iPhones.) Why is this important? The young goslings at ArnoldIT.com use it to locate lunch specials. One of the perks of putting up with the addled goose is a company provided meal at a sit down restaurant every work day. The Twitter thing works like a champ, and it gave me the confidence in my new Google: The Digital Gutenberg to assert that the Google may find itself on the outside looking in with regard to real time search.
Mr. Espinosa said:
You actually have a profitable revenue source that may not be the end all be all model, but will be a huge chuck of revenue that does not interrupt the user experience but actually makes it better.
I think he may be on the trail leading toward a business model. A happy quack to him for posting this analysis. The trick to understanding real time search is to think in terms of the utility of lots of eyeballs and users who may have an answer to a particular, location-centric query. The next step is to think about monetization options as Mr. Espinosa has. Will Twitter be the winner in this space? Who knows. Will some company emerge as an oxygen hog? Absolutely.
Stephen Arnold, April 16, 2009
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
