English: Jack Dorsey and Barack Obama at Twitter Town Hall in July 2011 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I’ve already written here, it’s natural that companies go into entrenchment mode when they need to switch from growth stage to monetization stage. Twitter is no exception. It was nice to have an awesome communications and messaging platform that many developers could use to build their apps on. Ecosystem has created many different apps for use-cases both on consumption and on content creation side.

But now the game has changed and this is not an amateur league anymore. Twitter needs an IPO and in order to make that omelet it is more than willing to break some eggs.

Unfortunately it will take at least a few years for anything competitive to emerge. And I am sure it will offer a different paradigm than Twitter does today.

Twitter’s move toward greater content control concerns experts

With Twitter’s recent moves pointing toward “media company,” there is a growing concern among technologists that a trend for greater content control will compromise both innovation and Twitter’s future in favor of short-term profits.

via: www.mercurynews.com

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• More Twitter awfulness (scripting.com)
• Is Twitter’s ad focus at the cost of innovation? (ibnlive.in.com)
• Twitter Is Building An Ad Business At The Expense Of Innovation (businessinsider.com)

Image via CrunchBase

Unfortunately I don’t think there is an alternative to Twitter. No service that would be exactly like Twitter (think Identi.ca) would be able to rouse enough users to be viable alternative.

What is need is a different service that would be able to start pulling air out of Twitter ecosystem. And right now there doesn’t seem to be any contender. When it will come it will look so different to Twitter, we won’t even know.

Lately I’ve been looking at Pair and Avocado. Those are services for couples to keep in touch. They use well known ‘communication language’ of short messages and images which we’ve learned while texting and tweeting. The use case is much narrower which offers opportunity for innovation (Pair’s finger-kissing for example). Maybe those are the services where innovation needed to disrupt Facebook and Twitter will come from.

Is There an Opening for an Alternative to Twitter?

As Twitter strives to become a more lucrative business, it is arguably getting less consumer and developer friendly. The introduction of “Promoted Tweets” and the growing crackdown of how its API can be used by third-parties are indications how Twitter operates is changing.

via: blog.sysomos.com

Related Articles

• Twitter mimics Facebook, kills own ecosystem – ZDNet (blog) (zdnet.com)
• Hey Twitter: API Management = Developer Management (sys-con.com)
• Twitter is a Corporate API (scripting.com)

Thunderbird (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Just as I went from Evolution to ThunderBird they decide to deprecate Thunderbird.

I am a believer in local copy of all emails (and still having a cloud option!). Call me old-fashioned if you will. Since I often work on emails offline (on planes or in foreign countries where I don’t have unlimited data plan), it comes really handy. It seems I’ll have to find a new client that will cope with my 8Gb mail archive. But not sooner than in a few years, and who knows what happens till then.

Mozilla Deprecates ThunderBird

Mozilla is cutting development on ThunderBird. And where’s Chandler when you need it? Seriously though, it’s probably an inevitable move from Mozilla. Desktop email clients that look like Outlook are a legacy product. And Mozilla has to husband its scarce resources very carefully these days.

via: platformwars.blogspot.com

Related Articles

• Mozilla Abandons ThunderBurd Thingy (olivetechnews.com)
• Mozilla to freeze Thunderbird innovations (phys.org)
• Mozilla Pulling Out of Thunderbird Email Project (hothardware.com)
• Mike Conley: No, that’s not “it” for Thunderbird… (mikeconley.ca)

After control of users will be complete, the main “exploitation” stage of social networking will start.  That one will last until these networks get disrupted by next big thing. And then the cycle will repeat.

Twitter cuts off service to LinkedIn – CBS News

Tech Talk (Credit: Twitter/LinkedIn) (CBS News) Twitter, the micro-blogging site, has cut off tweets on the professional social network LinkedIn, ending a two-year partnership. Twitter is a website that lets users broadcast 140-character status updates, or tweets, in real time.

via: www.cbsnews.com

Related Articles

• Twitter and LinkedIn Part Ways (techie-buzz.com)
• Everybody needs both Pinterest and LinkedIn (biznology.com)

Europe (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 1991 in Slovenia there was an administrative erasure of about 20k people. They were deprived of their residency status and through that of their basic rights. Now The Erased have won a major court victory at European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg entitling them to reparations. Is it just a matter of time when similar cases are going to be fought around social network accounts?

Facebook delisting can be traumatic

Diana Frerick felt as if her heart had stopped on Valentine’s Day of this year when Facebook pulled the plug on her profile page. The former Cedar Rapids resident, who now lives in Phoenix, Ariz., was one of many Facebook users who have mixed a healthy dash of business with social networking.

via: thegazette.com

Related Articles

• Facebook users beware: Don’t use the word ‘Book’ (news.cnet.com)
• Employer vs Facebook: Is there a point to privacy settings? (zdnet.com)
• Is Facebook In Breach Of EU Law And Its Own Terms? The Vote Is On But Is Facebook Being Fair? (facebookprivacyandsecurity.wordpress.com)
• How Facebook users judge you (study) (zdnet.com)

What’s interesting is all the analytics (here offered by Radiant6) that provides a very clear feedback on what the brand is gaining and losing by taking a stand. This also means we’ll have more analytics-based brand shaping in the future. Software might soon make predictions such as “if you endorse message z your sales will raise x% in California and fall y% in South Carolina”.

I am not yet sure if I like the over analyzed world we live in.

In any case , cheers to Oreo!

Oreo Pride: Facebook Post Causes Social Media Stir

Image from Oreo’s Facebook page In conjunction with Pride Month, Oreo Cookies made waves on Facebook on Monday evening by coming out firmly in support of gay rights/marriage. Posting a picture of a rainbow colored Oreo (which looks delicious, by the way) featuring a caption reading “Proudly support love!

via: www.radian6.com

Let’s see what comes out of that.

You Think You Have It Hard? These Tech Entrepreneurs Are Building A Startup Scene In The Middle Of An Economic Disaster

ATHENS, GREECE — It’s a big cliche at this point, but it’s always said that the greatest companies are forged during periods of the greatest economic hardship. If that’s the case, I probably met some of Europe’s top business leaders last night when I spent part of an evening getting to know the Greek internet startup scene.

via: www.businessinsider.com

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• Greece economic crisis creates “new homeless” (cbsnews.com)
• The Only 5 Industries That Are Booming In Greece (businessinsider.com)
• Greek Start-ups? Nope, That’s Not an Oxymoron (inc.com)

United Kingdom (Photo credit: stumayhew)

Sanity did prevail at the end. 9 year olds can keep taking photos of their lunches. And UK gets to keep the title of (relatively) free country for a few more months. That is until draconian new internet surveillance laws are passed.

The whole story made people go extatic – 9 year old child can change the world by the use of technology and social media. We didn’t have to wait long for the predictable to happen – empire struck back. Establishment tried to shoot the messenger. Or at least prevent her from shooting of photos of her food.

Then another predictable thing happened – even more public uproar. This finally caused the the sanity to prevail. Everybody gets to live ever after and establishment can live another day to fight even more bizzare battles in the future.

The whole story reminds me of a safe-breaking exploits of Richard Feynman. After disclosing the fact that safes are unsafe and demonstrating that they can be opened the general in charge sent out a note “Don’t let Feynman approach any safe”.  There wasn’t any social media at the time, so the problem was solved. And even if there was social media it probably wouldn’t be reporting from the depths of Manhattan project.

Ban on 9-year-old school food blogger is reversed

Well, that was quick. Following an enormous media (and social media) storm, the ban on 9-year-old Martha Payne’s Never Seconds blog about the dinners on offer in her school has been lifted. As we reported earlier, Scottish Martha was banned from taking photos in the school dining hall, thus killing her blog, after it attracted newspaper coverage.

via: thenextweb.com

Related Articles

• UPDATED: Scottish town council shuts down 9-y-o girl’s wildly popular school lunch blog (boingboing.net)
• Let them eat cake, but no cameras: British council gags 9 year old school lunch blogger (thenextweb.com)
• Ban lifted on 9-year-old Scottish blogger who posted photos of nasty school lunches (mercurynews.com)
• Richard Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (fourhourworkweek.com)

Firefox icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I started using Mozilla browser more than 10 years ago I would have never imagined what will become of it. It was crashing, it was slow, user experience was horrible. It seemed like the web browser wars are over.

However our open source heroe persisted. Year after year they have improved the code and made it suck less every day. And eventually in late 2000s there was a breakthrough and Mozilla in the form of Firefox returned to fame. For the moment Firefox was the winner. However since then a new kid on the block appeared – Chrome.

Now Firefox is getting back into the game! Will number 13 be Firefox’s lucky number?

Firefox 13 is better

The latest version of Mozilla Firefox was released on 6 June, and is supposedly much faster and safer than the open source web browser. The new Firefox has also adapted its home and tab pages to have a similar layout to other browsers they compete with like Chrome.

via: 2lix.com

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• Firefox 14 Beta Adds SSL Google, Click-to-Play Flash and Autocomplete URLs (news.softpedia.com)
• Firefox 13 released – now using SPDY by default (h-online.com)

Hope gives us reason to invest energy today for the prospect of brighter future. It energizes us to act instead of stand still. When leading teams one of the most important things to do is project a realistic plan of the future that we are going to achieve together. We must not just hope, but also believe that the place we’re going to end up in is going to be a good place.

The Role of Hope in our Lives

Hope is the default setting for human beings….just look at the children around you. It’s just that life has a tendency to chip away at it…as we go through life. But when you think about who engages you, which bosses you love to work for, which brands create loyalty…they all have one thing…they trigger hope.

via: www.theengagingbrand.com