Apple, Twitter, And The Social OS

Mathew Ingram wonders — apparently based on some thoughts by Barry Ritholtz — whether Apple should spend $10B and buy Twitter:

Mathew Ingram, Should Apple buy Twitter?

Apple’s best effort by far at adding those kinds of social elements came when the company integrated Twitter at a deep — and for Apple, a fairly radical — level into the operating system on the iPhone and iPad (and even into its new desktop OS, OS-X Mountain Lion). Never before had Apple built support for a third-party service into its devices and software in such a fundamental way. This helped fuel rumors about an Apple acquisition, just as Ritholtz and others have used it to justify such a deal: if Apple wants to integrate Twitter so deeply, why not just acquire it so that it has full control?

The fact that Apple likes to control things from end-to-end is well known, which is just one of the reasons why the deep Twitter integration was a bit of a surprise. But does it really need to own Twitter in order to get the benefits of that integration? I don’t think so. It can get all the positive aspects of Twitter support without having to own the company — and it doesn’t have to worry about the hassle of maintaining a third-party service that is used for a wide variety of different purposes that Apple has no real interest in.

Not only that, but buying Twitter could actually harm Apple’s attempts to integrate more social aspects into its devices, because it would make it even less likely that the company would ever strike a similar deal with Facebook — something it has tried to do a number of times. It could be that Facebook has no intention of ever partnering with Apple, and the two may wind up becoming adversaries as their interests converge, but acquiring Twitter would likely remove any chance of the two ever working together in even a small way.

So, Mathew comes down pretty strongly on the negative side of a possible acquisition, but omits the long-range view: the next generation of operating systems will be social at the core.

Most of today’s operating systems are still based on 1990 thinking. They are based on WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer). They don’t know about the Web, so users have to move back and forth from their local store of docs and files to the cloud, a thousand times a day. And the biggest surprise of the Web has been the rise of social, which is supported on our computers through apps.

All of these limitations will be attacked in new operating systems, which will be web-aware, post-WIMP, and inherently social.

Apple is headed into a battle with Google, Facebook, and maybe Microsoft (Windows 8 looks pretty good), and one of the primary areas of contention will be building social primitives into the operating environment.

Google will build its social architecture in Android. Facebook will become more than just an app platform: it will become a mobile OS. Windows 9 or some future version will incorporate some approach to social. And iOS and Mac OS X have started to move this way by including Twitter in the mix, as a fundamental social protocol.

Apple should pay the $10B for Twitter, and make it into the social layer of its OSs, and as the social framework of its apps. For example, Ping in iTunes could be rewired to rely on Twitter, fixing its design as Barry Ritholz points out, and future social TV and second screen apps could be based on Twitter, as well, which makes sense because Twitter is the leading second screen app today. The coming battle for social TV will be hugely important, and Twitter really positions Apple in that space.

So, Mathew is being too conservative, because he thinks Apple may want to ‘work with’ Facebook in the future. But that can’t be where Apple is headed.

Google Is Distorting The Google+ Numbers

When asked, Google executives say Google+ has 50M sign ups, and 100M active users over a 30 day period. But they are stretching things a bit, to be generous:

Nick Bilton via NY Times

Although these numbers sound impressive, the catch is that Google Plus-enhanced properties include YouTube, the Android Marketplace and Google.com, the company’s flagship search engine. Yet Google contends that these numbers illustrate that more than 100 million people have signed up for a Google Plus account and are now actively engaging with Google Plus-related products across the company.

In a view from outside the company, a report released last month by ComScore, the market research firm, says Google Plus users spend about three minutes a month on the social network. By comparison, ComScore says that people spend an average 405 minutes a month on Facebook, the service Google Plus is trying to displace.

Google may be trying to plusify all of its properties, but unless people start acting like there is a real, deep, rich social experience in there, it’s just not going to displace anything.

Windows 8 A Springboard For Enterprise Facebook?

If today’s enterprise Windows users move onto Windows 8-oriented hardware, enterprise workgroup software might become very very differetn:

How Windows 8 Transforms Enterprise Computing - Quentin Hardy via NYTimes.com

Windows 8 could mean a lot of changes for business computing, in particular touch computing, like the swipes on an iPad. Microsoft appears to have adopted a refreshing awareness of current events, and with a nod to Apple and Google, designed a user interface that is also centered on apps. If you don’t like that you can go back to the old drag-and-drop desktop-era screen, but it is the new default.

H.P. is not talking about its future designs, but Dell sees the next version of Windows encouraging sales of ultrabooks. These lightweight laptops running Windows 8 are likely to adopt touch screens, like an iPad, while keeping the keyboard preferred for working on things like corporate spreadsheets. “Our view is that the mobile endpoint devices will become more important,” said David Johnson, Dell’s vice president of corporate strategy. “When you are creating content, a keyboard is critical.” For other things, like reading a newspaper, he says, the keyboard might go away.

In the demo, Microsoft showed personalization features that included instant feeds of information from Web-based accounts, including Facebook and Twitter, as well as Microsoft’s own cloud-storage system, called Skydrive. There is every reason to think that an enterprise version of this idea would instantly load updated workflow and task information that is stored elsewhere. That could be very attractive to companies, possibly leading to system-wide upgrades.

Mr. Sherlund said he thought the integration with Facebook, in which Microsoft bought a 1.5 percent stake for $240 million in 2007, could mean that Facebook could begin to have a workgroup function, something Google is also after in its Google+ social networking software. “With the touch capabilities thrown in, this is all about the cloud,” he said.

Imagine Microsoft building an enterprise Facebook, and attacking the work media market with it. Given their position with Office and Sharepoint, they could make a lot of trouble for Yammer, IBM, and the two dozen other start ups and established players trying to dominate that exploding market.

However, I wonder if Microsoft can move fast enough. I won’t rule them out, though.

But the real battle here is Windows 8 versus iOS (and Mac OS X) and versus Android.

The ultrabook niche — especially the arrival of convertible ultrabooks, like Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga — will have to compete against the iPad and MacBook Air. These devices have touch sensitive screens — like the iPad — but also allow a conventional keyboard to be used, as well.

My prediction is that Apple will develop a convertible product — what I call the iAir — and it will become the next killer device, the one that defines the post-pc era.

The Point Of Social Leverage Is Mobile?

I see that my old friend, Keith Teare, has written a guest post at Techcrunch, making the case that Facebook and Google have inherent ‘structural’ problems in the way they manage information sharing which have become starkly apparent with Google’s new privacy policy and Facebook’s endless privacy issues.

Keith Teare, Google, Facebook, Privacy — And You

There is a big structural problem for both Google and Facebook as they contemplate the product consequences of consumer reactions to their product roadmap. In a centralized platform it is incredibly hard to create easy-to-understand controls that give each user the ability to control, at a granular level, what they share and who with. Grand policy shifts, like that which came out of F8 and which we are now seeing from Google, tend to assume all users are the same and will want the same thing.

In reality, users are more complex. I might want to save a private video to a personal storage space one moment, share something with a select group of friends another moment, and broadcast something to the world five minutes later. The web services infrastructure that both Facebook and Google are based on does not easily permit such fine grained control for users without also imposing serious effort. As we all know, that leads users to stick with the default settings most of the time.

So, despite good intent by the teams at both companies, one-size-fits-all decisions are the norm.

Mobile to the rescue?

Structural problems usually require structural solutions. What it seems consumers are asking for is a world in which we all know what we are sharing and who with — but where we don’t have to do a huge amount of work to achieve that. Google Circles seems to be a nod in this direction as are Facebook’s groups. But neither is really easy enough or sufficiently integrated into the flow of the products to really solve the problem. Both require a huge management overhead.

As I argued earlier this week in “Google, Look Out Behind You!“, the spread of smartphones may be part of the solution here. Hundreds of millions of consumers are now carrying around connected still and video cameras with lists of contacts in the address book, often already organized into meaningful groups. Decentralized decision-making is very easy when there are decentralized software clients under the unique control of each user. The ability to be private one moment, selectively share the next and then publicly broadcast a few minutes later is easy to achieve in this decentralized software architecture. And service providers can never become bad actors — simply because they do not own our information or the full social graph. The cloud becomes a means of delivering messages to the phones and the place where we store our media. But it’s not the place we need to trust to make decisions about what gets shared and who with.

So, Keith broadly paints a picture — users being forced into an oversimplified social architecture by Google and Facebook in which groups (or circles, which are a slightly different take on groups) are the mechanism of sharing — and hints that the problem is intractable for web-based social tools.

The answer is smartphones, he suggests: our personal devices, which we already use in myriad ways to connect with and share with others. He must believe — without saying so explicitly — that the solution lies in observing what we share and with who on our smartphones, and to refine that natural body of information into a bottom-up determination of who’s who in our world.

Imagine a Venn diagram of dozens — or hundreds — of sets of friends, where any friend could be in zero to all the sets, and all the sets are constantly in flux. And without us having to create all the scaffolding for it to work.

Obviously, Teare is not content to wave his hand at this: he’s started a company to actually build the solution:

Keith Teare, Seed and Series A Funding

just.me is a new architecture built on top of the mobile, and particularly the smartphone, ecosystem. It doesn’t take the web as its starting point, it takes the highly personal and ever-present mobile Internet as its starting point. As such it is focused on defining a new consumer software experience, not replacing an existing one. It is also focused on the freedom that comes from placing social tools on a device the consumer fully controls, and not building a big cloud service that owns or acts on the consumers data. We don’t know all of the questions this gives rise to yet, never mind all of the answers. But we are really excited about building on this new ecosystem and learning with users as we go.

I’ve been suggesting that the next wave for social networks is the social operating system — where exactly the problems that Teare is talking about are solved by building social primitives into the foundation of our online experience — but Teare is pushing at a transitional step, based on the mobile device as the logical point of leverage in the transition to the next generation of social tools.