chris dalrymple - blog

What MySpace does ok, Facebook does better. What Twitter does ok, Jaiku does better (and even Facbook does ok).

I think the biggest problem a lot of new web ventures are having (or are going to have), is that there's a huge overlap between rival platforms: Whereas previously technologies like Blogger, Wordpress, Movable Type etc all did much the same thing (just with different levels of success), there was little need for each platform to talk to each other - it was all just published on the web for everyone to see.

Now though everything's about networks and communities, but with a focus on communities within specific platforms - My Myspace account can't talk to my Facebook account. If I have a twitter account I still have to incessantly tell Jaiku and Facebook What I'm Doing.

This is all exacerbated by the proliferation of new apps which do the same as the old one, but a little bit better. As soon as you've got to grips with one cool new toy, it's replaced by another.

Until these platforms open up a little more (and sure, Facebook is welcoming new developers, but with fairly strict Ts and Cs) then they can only have a limited lifespan. If startups want to be around for the long haul, they need to open up properly, to talk to each other easily.

Either that, or the Next Big Thing will be a site which pulls every kind of social app you could use together, easily, in one place. Bloglines for the myspace generation if you like.

Labels: facebook, jaiku, myspace, twitter, web 2.0

NickWilson's wife is just being rushed to the hospital after her waters broke, and he's Twittering it!

Possibly the world's first Twittered birth?..

Good luck Nick and Ivana!

editOk, so searchengineland beat me to the punch, and it turns out probably not the first!

Labels: twitter

Just Web 2.0.

Or something equally apt. Just listening to NickW's latest podcast where he talks about, amongst other things, how 'microbrands' are nothing new, it's just now there's a snazzy name and a lot of buzz about the whole concept (and for the record Nick, I don't like Gaping Void either).

Well, I think that's pretty much the same all over the web tbh. Virtually everything out there has been done before, it's just now there's a new implementation, a bit of snazzy ajax (which incidentally has been around for years in itself - now it's just been rebranded), and people are all over it again.

What suprises me though, is how little ability people seem to have to predict the success of these trends. Take Twitter (and I *promise* this is the last time I'll blog about that bloody site) - a lot of people are downplaying it, writing it off as just another childish fad which people will grow tired of. Well wasn't the same thing said about blogging?? And IM? And probably the whole Internet?

My point being (and there is one somewhere here. If you dig deep.) that it's easy to be cynical about this stuff. And with all the crap that Web 2.0 generates it's probably wise to a certain extent. But maybe we're too concerned that we'll get burned by the latest toy that we miss the wood for trees. And that's why we need the early adopters to get drawn into the hype so that we can join in when in looks sensible and safe. But maybe we should just hold our breath and dive in every so often.

Labels: microbrands, twitter, web 2.0

Everyone seems to be talking about Twitter at the moment (I think in no small part thanks to the excitement around it at SXSW), and just to stand out from the crowd, I will too.

It's definitely the Marmite of web 2.0 applications. A lot of people love it (or at the very least are addicted), but a good many are looking down their noses and tutting loudly at it (so maybe more like crack than Marmite).

If you don't know then Twitter sits slap bang in the middle of the 'cool web 2.0 ap' category - basically a way of telling the world what you're doing at that moment (with the immediacy being at the core). It's a nifty little tool, highly addictive to boot, and doesn't look like it's going away fast.

It's evolving too - whilst some people are using it firmly for it's intended purpose of answering the quesion 'What are you doing', there are a great deal who are using it as a kind of blog meets IM - publicising your latest thoughts via short, IM style messages. This is encouraged by the functionality which pings you with all the latest twitters on your friends list via IM (gmail chat in this case) or on your mobile. You can then reply to these twitters (the format of using a '@username' to direct a twitter at someone seems to have developed, e.g. '@distinctly: stop talking about what you had for tea'), opening up a dialogue.

What this does mean is you have to be more particular about who's on your friend list than, say, your bloglines subscriber list, as the updates are more intrusive and more frequent than a feed reader. Nick W seems to have picked up the Twitter ball and run with it recently - along with Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel and a good few others he's twittering(?) with a lot of good links, as well as pointing to new posts on his Click Influence blog.

Dave Winer points out a good use for this - working on group projects. Being able to constantly, and quickly let people know what you're woking on seems like a great use for the tool, especially if the team isn't based in the same room. I'm sure there are lots of other uses too, it will just take a while for them to be found.

What's clear is there's plenty of room for this to evolve beyond it's original intention (although I'm sure it's makers will claim they had this in mind all along), but in this way there are a lot of similarities to blogging, after all isn't one of the most regularly voiced criticisms of that medium 'who wants to read about what someone's just had for their tea'? There are always going to be comments you don't want to read (the public timeline gives some perfect examples), but it's when the right people get hold of it that these things come into their own.

But then I could be wrong. The novelty of the immediacy of Twitter may have just kicked in and I could well be bored of it in a few weeks (days? hours?) time. This could be entirely correct.

Labels: sxsw, twitter