Why Doesn’t Twitter Steal Job’s App Store Model?

Om Malik recounts recent flaps surrounding the Twitter ecosystem, and drives home a key point: Twitter still doesn’t have much of a business model. He recounts a number of companies that prospered based on business model innovation — including Apple’s App Store — but doesn’t thread the needle:

Om Malik, What Is Twitter’s Problem? No, It’s Not the Product

In the end, that business model ends up defining how companies get built over a long period of time. It is also a good way to avoid the problems of tomorrow. From the way I see it, Twitter’s troubles are not going to be over till it settles on a business model and then starts to shape its identity and organization around that model. When that will happens is anyone’s guess!

Since Twitter slapped Bill Gross on the wrist for attempting to monetize the Twitter stream, why doesn’t the company set up a way to do it in partnership with Twitter?

Today’s news — that Twitter has screwed down the Dickbar so that it doesn’t cover tweets — suggests that Twitter is still rooting around for an revenue model. And until the company has figured it out, they continue to flounder.

Why not a straightforward app store model? Let companies monetize by building apps that integrate with the Twitter platform, but require those companies to share revenue for app sales, advertising, subscriptions? Why not steal from Steve Jobs? After all, he famously said

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Can Google Go Social?

I have been watching Google’s frenetic quest to find an opening into the social revolution for a long time.

To date, what we have seen are experiments and acquisitions.

Having Gundotra lead social at Google reminds me of President Obama tapping General Petraeus to take on Afghanistan. It feels calming at the moment, but might not actually lead to the desired outcome.

On one one side, half-hearted hobbies that senior management hopes will grow into something great. In this category we have the more-or-less failed social network Orkut and now Wave, which both surfaced from the company’s ‘one day a week’ tinkering culture.

On the other, acquisitions like Jaiku and Dodgeball, which were innovative and groundbreaking, but were allowed to die in red tape, and where the innovative founders — like Jyri Engstrom of Jaiku, and Dennis Crowley of Dodgeball, soon left the company. Or great fat purchases like YouTube, which have proven to be less valuable than market prices.

Then, Google staged a relatively public search for a leader to move them to social. (Despite losing Jyri and Dennis, either of which could have done great things for the firm.) The result? Can’t find the right person. Catarina Fake couldn’t be lured back into corporate deadness, I guess. And Bradley Horowitz, who runs Google Talk, Grandcentral, Blogger and Picasa, wasn’t the right guy, apparently.

So now we have Vic Gundotra annointed as Mr Social, a guy who has made great strides at Google Mobile, getting Android into the market with a bang. But is he Mr Social?

Having Gundotra lead social at Google reminds me of President Obama tapping General Petraeus to take on Afghanistan. It feels calming at the moment, but might not actually lead to the desired outcome.

Om Malik puts it this way: Vic is a great product manager, focused on features. But social is more than a veneer of games, gestures, music, comments.

Om Malik, Slide, Vic Gundotra & The Un-Social Reality of Google

Social is more than just features. I’ve been saying for a while that in order to understand social and win over the social web, companies need to understand people. I’m not sure Google is capable of understanding people on that level, and that’s the reason why the company strikes out whenever it tries. There are rumors Google co-founder Sergey Brin championed the acquisition of Slide. He also championed Google Wave (which is shutting down) and the poorly conceived Google Buzz.

We are in a great migration away from a web of pages to a web of flow, where streams connect us and allow us to share links, comments, photos, games, locations, lists, and even larger social objects in the future. And Google has only had the smallest involvement in that expansion.

Google made a pile by harvesting the latent value of all the social gestures we were leaving around the web in the form of links. These form the core of Page Rank and Google’s search/advertising business.

This was born in the paleolithic of the social web, where mostly we were wandering around as hunter-gatherers, turning over rocks, based on keyword search. The idea of social in those days was to send email alerts to people so they’d remember to read your blog and post comments.

But the social web has grown based on social networks — relationships between people — not hyperlinks between web pages. We are in a great migration away from a web of pages to a web of flow, where streams connect us and allow us to share links, comments, photos, games, locations, lists, and even larger social objects in the future. And Google has only had the smallest involvement in that expansion. But they desperately want in on the next wave, but they haven’t found a formula yet. It’s not Wave or Buzz, obviously. And now they are plotting a knockoff of Facebook: how 2009!

There are many unplowed fertile fields out there, where Google’s scale and engineering soul could do great things. As just one example, modern social network research has shown that the social ‘scenes’ we are situated in — the millions of people that form the ‘friends of my friends’ friends’ network — are the single best predictor of our likelihood to be fat, smoke, or be happy. And by extension, buy Chevrolets, listen to Country music, or read manga. And no services have tapped into that reality, yet, except in the most inadvertent ways. (For more background see Social Scenes: The Invisible Calculus Of Culture, It’s Betweenness That Matters, Not Your Eigenvalue: The Dark Matter Of Influence and Jeff Jarvis on The Hunt For The Elusive Influencer.)

This is why actions like buying Slide are likely to be diversions, like Jaiku and Dodgeball turned out to be. Meanwhile, there are real advances to be made — like building sociality into the operating platforms of the future. Obviously Google is in a position to do that with Android and Chrome, but I honestly don’t think they know what to build.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games (Sarah Lacy/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
• Is Google Going to Kill Buzz Next? (thomashawk.com)
• Google Taps Its Main Man In Preparations For War With Facebook Over Social Media (observer.com)

Tim O’Reilly Interviews Bill Gates

Tim O’Reilly posted his pre-interview thoughts about his interview of Bill Gates at the Mix conference, here, and the full transcript of the discussion is buried in this page, at Microsoft’s site.

There are a few places were Tim seems to try to dig into the particulars of Microsoft’s Web 2.0 meanderings, like this question about the possible directions for Outlook:

TIM O’REILLY: So how much is that part of your strategy? We talked yesterday a little bit about Outlook and how it seems like there’s this enormous potential to sort of blow away really the crude offerings of the social networking sites, because at the end of the day Outlook for many people is a reflection of their real social network, rather than this kind of, hey, are you my friend, will you be my friend; you can actually tell who you communicate with.

BILL GATES: Well, I think we’re not going to turn Outlook into MySpace.

TIM O’REILLY: I’m not talking about MySpace, but -

BILL GATES: You’d actually like it to be this idea of your contacts, who you communicate with. There’s a lot of rich data that Outlook sees that can help you in your communications, and that definitely is something we want to do driving forward. The idea of making it easy to see schedules, see multiple schedules, the traffic kind of activity you had, we have some of that in this next version of Outlook, but we could go a lot further in the idea of the communication network.

TIM O’REILLY: And you have some of that in the live contact feature in Messenger as well.

BILL GATES: Right, so that if someone updates the contact, then it automatically can come down onto your local store.

But, I wonder, why doesn’t Microsoft try to turn Outlook into the world’s most potent business social network, instead of just a Plaxo replacement? It staggers the mind that Gates turns away from a big, and tangible opportunity (one that could lead to who knows what), and instead continues the endless strategy to win all wars with all competitors. In this one interview, we wander from OS strategies, to handhelds, tablet PCs, the iTunes/iPod dominance of the music business, games, navigation in cars, and everywhere else.

Microsoft continues to define its strategy as winning all of these critical battles, and gaining leverage through that. But Microsoft cannot possibly win all of these wars, and it is certainly falling behind in areas where it can’t afford to lose. The recent announcement of Vista slipping past Xmas is just one glaring example. Sony mismangement of the PS3 is giving Microsoft breathing room in the games area, but, as Om Malik recently pointed out, that is more than countered by the near monopoly of Apple in the music player space, and the likelihood of Apple’s dominance in the ongoing battle for the livingroom.

But more interestingly, the inheritors of all the cool Web 2.0 apps companies — Google, Yahoo, and eBay — are moving at a blinding rate to sew up the future. Del.icio.us, Flickr, Writely, and the other legion apps companies, have built what may be an unassailable innovative lead that Microsoft, middle-aged and slow-footed, may not be able to close, no matter how many times they reorganize engineering management. Google is moving forward with a vision of the Web OS, and planning how to get that onto our devices; Microsoft continues on with a smaller, parochial vision, of getting Office onto the Web, and holding onto all those paying customers in companies everywhere. The new offering from AjaxWrite, pushed Mike Arrington to ask the question “Will things like AjaxWrite have an impact on Microsoft’s Office revenues over time? Yeah, it must. Even so, Bill Gates says that he just doesn’t understand our infatuation with thin client versions of Word.” Mike had lunch with Gates at Mix, and was struck by his unresponsiveness to this market dynamic:

[from So I Had Lunch With Bill Gates Today]

I asked a few questions, specifically about what Microsoft’s plans are around an online version of Office. Bill responded at length without really giving an answer. He did say that he thought people were too infatuated with the thought of an online version of Office, but that they were really focused on the idea of cloud storage for office files. This fits right in with their strategies around Office Live, of course…

I think it represents an obsession with big picture, dinosaur, Soviet-style five year plans to conquer the world, while smaller, more agile Web 2.0 companies are nibbling away the edges of the Empire by rolling out apps that will support migration from the big cash cows that Microsoft is basically banking on: Office and Windows.

The stock market answered the slip in Vista’s release by paying 72 cents less a share for Microsoft stock, now at $27.02: a 3% loss. I am predicting — despite what the pundits say — that continued erosion of the core of their business will lead to an additional 20% or higher drop in that stock price before year’s end.

Too many battles to win means that they will surely lose. Their fate is to become the IBM of the 21st century, and to be eclipsed by some upstarts who did not even exist when they were in their heyday. It’s not a terrible fate: IBM is still a large, and successful company. But they aren’t the dominant force in technology that they once were, back when mainframes were a hot new idea. In the future, we will think that desktop applications suites were a neat idea once upon a time, too.

[Update: 2:47pm ET 24 Mar — Mary Jo Foley points out that now Office is going to be delayed as well, so things are actually worse for Microsoft than I reported this morning.

Join us at mesh

Mark your calendars for the upcoming (and rescheduled) mesh — Canada’s web 2.0 conference - Toronto May 15 & 16. mesh will bring together great keynotes and speakers, including Om Malik, Paul Kedrosky, Andrew Coyne, Michael Geist, Tara Hunt, Paul Wells, Steve Rubel, Jason Fried, Stowe Boyd (yes, me), Amber McArthur, Ren Bucholz, Andrew Baron, Chris Messina, David Crow (whew!) and many others. Organizers include Rob Hyndman, Matthew Ingram, Mike McDerment, Stuart MacDonald, and Mark Evans.

Looks like a great conference, and a great venue. Toronto is a fabulous city.

[Long aside: I truly love Canada: even before my sister moved there and became a ‘landed’ immigrant after living in Toronto 20-odd years, I had traveled much of the country. In the past few decades, I have been to the country literally a hundred times or so, and I am increasingly enamored of this very foreign country so close by. I also hope that if I continue to say nice things, I will be allowed to emigrate, which looks like a better and better idea considering America’s political situation and progressive global warming. Although Toronto may be one day be under water as the Great Lakes slowly turn into a giant inland ocean.

/Message: The Power Of Blogs

Richard Lusk of Foldera did a demo of that company’s technology yesterday at ETech — it almost doesn’t matter what the technology is or does for the purpose of this discussion, although it looks like a very cool collaboration tool — and made a statement that I found astonishing. He attributed the buzz around his product to the posts made by various prominent bloggers — Michael Arrington, Om Malik, and I were mentioned several times in his discussion — which have led to one million (yes, million) people signing up at his site. He also said thet he is now getting 300,000 searchers (Google, Yahoo, etc.) finding their way to his site everyday.

Wow.

Dabble - Del.icio.us for Video?

 

Well, I guess it’s lucky that my “New Visionaries” video series has been delayed a bit, because I interviewed Mary Hodder back in November for that, and if we had rolled out the videos one per week starting 1 Jan, that episode would have played a week or so ago. Which might have stealed some thunder from the apha release of Dabble (formerly called Bloqx). [Note: The series will be rolling out starting in a week or so… delays at Podcast.com.]

Om Malik has a long write-up, but the short version is that Dabble allows us to be video aggregators, tagging videos wherever we find them. Mine will have to wait for a response to my signing up for the alpha.

Way to go, Mary!

[pointer from Susan Mernit]

Andy Abramson on Yahoo Messenger For Mac

 

The long anticipated Yahoo Messenger for Mac is rumored to be imminent, acoording to Andy Abramson:

[from Yahoo Messenger for Mac]

I heard through the grapevine that the in production version of Yahoo Messenger, that is being rewritten from the ground up, for the Macintosh will include Video.

I’m also hearing that the USA launch of VOIP with Y! Messenger is likely within the next month or so, and certainly before VON in March. It seems Yahoo has internal promotional programs that new product releases need to fall into.

Looks like you can download it from ca.yahoo.com, now.

I was out to visit the Yahoo folks a few months ago, talking about their big picture thoughts about VoIP, and I was peeved that Mac stuff is released months later than Windows. Glad to see them get there.

Om Malik riffs on Andy’s post, disclosing that a new Mac sensibility may be at work in Yahoo. Apparently, the new CPO, Ash Patel has switched to Mac, at least as a companion to his Windows machines.

I believe this will be the year of the switch for Mac, especially once they work the kinks out of the duo Intel architecture, and get a foolproof means in place to run Windows apps natively.

[Update: 10:09am PT — I downloaded the Yahoo for Mac from the Canadian Yahoo. Has a webcam button, but I don’t have my iSight with me to experiment.