Friday, September 03, 2010

Is The Mobile Web In A Category Of Its Own?

Image representing John Battelle as depicted i...Image via CrunchBase
To me the answer is obvious. Of course the mobile web is a category of its own. Where have you been these past few years?

Twitter, FourSquare: Mobile Web Thingies

Fred Wilson responded to my blog post this morning. He declared we are in resonance.

Fred Wilson: Mobile First Web Second

John Battelle responded disagreeing with Fred.

John Battelle: It's All The Web

Of course it is all one web. But we are also all one humanity. Why do we talk of different cultures and heritages? Why do we talk of white and black and brown and yellow people? To acknowledge and respect and celebrate those various heritages is not to deny the wholeness of humanity.

I am in disbelief that John Battelle said what he said. Where has he been these past few years? The mobile web has so taken off. It is not possible he missed out on that.

The meme that the web is dead that has really taken off recently in some circles does not go well with me. I don't think iPhone apps are anywhere close to competing with the larger web. The iPhone apps enrichen the ecosystem, but they are a small subcategory.

Dead Web?

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Information Overload And Twitter

Image representing Evan Williams as depicted i...Image by The Economist via CrunchBase

Twitter, FourSquare: Mobile Web Thingies
San Francisco Chronicle: Twitter Creator's Quest: Bring Order To The Chaos

There are people who argue Twitter should not try to be their email substitute. I come from another angle. I think Twitter ought to try and become our information overload engine. It should be our email, our news reader, our search engine, our social graph. It should attempt to be everything. Because I got only so much time in my day but I don't want to be missing out.

That is not to say Twitter should be the only engine. There is plenty of space for many engines. But there is something very sweet about 140 characters. But the Twitter of today is not delivering. It spent long months scaling poorly. And during those long months it totally skipped out on the adding new features part.

Sometimes I wonder if Twitter has not had the wrong CEO from the very beginning. Evan Williams should have been the Chairperson, Jack Dorsey should have been the CEO, and who is Biz Stone? The person inside the company in whom the DNA of the company exists, that person is Dorsey.
GigaOm: Ev Williams: Twitter Will Actually Help Information Overload: Williams, an unusually theoretical CEO ..... compared Twitter to email, where information overload can be incapacitating ..... “The problem with email is that it’s sender-driven, and sender-driven media doesn’t scale” ..... recipient-based media can scale better “in a world of infinite information” ..... “Google is very good at ‘I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer,” he said. “Twitter is more ‘I’m interested in many things, I don’t know what I need to know.’” Where Google is more likely to be gamed by a company like Demand Media ....... scaling that system so you don’t have to pay attention to everything, but you don’t miss the stuff you care about
Reclaiming My Twitter Account
Towards Threaded Conversations On Twitter
Twitter: The Obvious Missing Features
Chris Dixon On Twitter: Not Impressive
Twitter Has To Scale The Signals
Twitter Does The Deed: Ads
Twitter Acquires Tweetie: The Drama
Twitter Need Get Work Done
Twitter Needs To Eat Into Its Ecosystem
Measuring Your Twitter Influence

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