Uber Media Foiled By Twitter

Arrington reports that Twitter will buy TweetDeck for $40-50M.

This is an odd, defensive acquisition. Uber Media had been reported as locking up the acquisition of Tweetdeck, but Twitter wants to quash any chance of Uber moving forward with plans for an alternate network to Twitter based on the user communities of Tweetdeck, Echofon, and other clients.

The client vendors are scared because of Twitter’s expansionist moves into waht was formerly a thriving ecosystem, which Twitter undermined by acquiring Tweetie, and then aggressively stating that no new clients would be allowed to access the Twitter API.

Looks like a good cash out for Ian Dodsworth and the Tweetdeck guys, although I am betting — no matter what Twitter people will say — the Tweetdeck product is headed for the scrapheap. If Twitter wanted to develop (or acquire) a multi-panel Twitter client like Tweetdeck they would have rolled that out already. Therefore, this is not a tactical product acquisition, but a strategic blockage of Uber Media’s plans.

UberMedia Wants To Outtwitter Twitter?

Seems like UberMedia is considering biting the hand that feeds it:

Mark Millan, Leading app maker said to be planning Twitter competitor

UberMedia, which owns several popular applications that interface with Twitter, is outlining plans to build a social network that could compete with that popular microblogging platform, said three people who were briefed on the plans.

The service would seek to attract users by addressing common complaints about Twitter, such as its restriction on the length of a message and how it can be confusing to newcomers, according to these sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.

UberMedia is a leading developer of apps and Web-based services that help users communicate on Twitter and other social media platforms. The Pasadena, California-based company has amassed a small empire of apps — among them UberSocial, Echofon and Twidroyd — that connect to Twitter and offer features beyond Twitter’s own software.

Together, those UberMedia programs accounted for about 11.5% of tweets sent on one day last month, according to a study by market research firm Sysomos. UberSocial is the third most-popular way to send tweets, behind Twitter’s website and official iPhone app, the study found.
Twitter up to 1 billion tweets a week

TweetDeck is tied with Twitter’s own BlackBerry app as the fourth most-popular software for sending messages, Sysomos said. UberMedia is in talks to acquire TweetDeck, but that deal hasn’t been finalized, according to a person familiar with the matter. Industry website TechCrunch first reported on the talks.

“The audience for TweetDeck is very different” from the people who use Twitter’s official apps, Tony Haile, a general manager for Betaworks, said a year ago. The technology incubator is where TweetDeck started. “We never competed on core functionality.”

Correction: TweetDeck wasn’t incubated at Betaworks, as is the case with many other Betaworks’ companies. It was starting idependently by Ian Dodsworth, the company’s CEO, and Betaworks invested later on.

One interesting angle that isn’t touched upon in this piece are other attempts to wrest control of the Twittersphere away from Twitter, only mentioning previous — now dormant — competitor Jaiku. And no mention of Pownce: now totally forgotten?

Consider Diaspora,  the start-up kicked off on kick starter with $200,000 by a bunch of NYU students. Not setting the world on fire. Or Identi.ca, based on the StatusNet technology. Not a hot property. People are using Twitter because that’s where the people are, or because they never heard of the alternatives.

Of course, if UberMedia wants to advertise an alternative backplane for its tools, some proportion of the Twitter community would be aware of an alternative, but that doesn’t solve the chicken-and-egg problem: people will stay with their network, all things being equal.

So UberMedia would have to build something so much better than Twitter that it is worthwhile to abandon your network, which would have to be an order of magnitude better. relaxing the 140 character limitation isn’t that, by a long shot (and I’m not sure it’s better anyway).

This sounds like a crazy plan to me, maybe born of desperation out of Twitter’s recent business moves — like announcing no new clients could get access to the Twitter API. Perhaps UberMedia is worried that the business for Twitter clients has a dramatically shorter half life than when they got into it.

What Is Bill Gross Up To?

Just saw that Bill Gross’ UberMedia acquired TweetDeck.

Gross must believe that there is an advertising option that he can thread across all these Twitter clients: UberTwitter, EchoFon, and now TweetDeck. There is no great business model in Twitter clients, per se. There’s dozens of competitors with largely undifferentiated products, and no real way to make serious money, even with some kind of pro product.

Gross seems at times to be pivoting the company wildly, and has a confusing acquisition strategy going on, as well as a third name for the company.

We’ll have to see what he pulls out of his hat when FollowMe, some sort of advertising mechanism, one that could be the key to his Twitter expansion.

Tweetdeck’s Deck.ly: Not Quite Liquid Email

I recently wrote a post called Liquid Email, in which I made the case for a new paradigm of email, one subordinate to streaming media like Twitter:

Imagine a liquid model of email, based on Twitter being my preferred context for communication:

1. I receive email in Gmail. 
2. A new Twitter client (or a new version of Twitter) — let’s call it Liquidate — captures all my incoming emails from Gmail, and drops a shortened link into my stream for each, with the subject line as the tweet, and associating the email address of the sender to their Twitter handle, if known.
3. The fact that this is an email would be made obvious in the UI, and I could open the text of the mail — and bring it right into context — by clicking on a link.
4. I could read the email text, and then respond to the sender either by a Twitter message, direct message, or another email, depending on the circumstance, and based on various criteria, like whether the sender has a Twitter account.
5. If I opt to reply by email, the client would send that into Gmail, and I would always have Gmail as a repository, if I want to search there.

In essence, I would be treating email messages as just a long format tweet, and using Gmail as an appliance to carry that message from my streaming context out to a world that has not completely switched to Twitter or liquid media. But the activities associated with ‘email’ would be carried out in the streaming context, and the email would be just another sort of media pulled into and then pushed out of the stream. And again, I would always be able to go to Gmail directly, if needed.

Almost immediately after writing that post, Nick Reynolds commented on it, saying that Tweetdeck had something in the works along those lines. 

It turns out that Iain Dodsworth and crew had been working on Deck.ly, which bears similarities to what I was alluding to as liquid email, but not quite.

Deck.ly supports longer that 140 character Twitter messages, but does not integrate email in any way.

In the soon-to-be-released version 0.37.0 of Tweetdeck, when you type beyond 140 characters you are no longer warned that the message is too long. You will simply see the count of characters go beyond zero, as in this case below:

When other users of Tweetdeck see this post, it looks like this, with a ‘read more’ link appended:

When you click on the link it takes you to a Deck.ly page, showing the entire post.

Currently, the limit for Deck.ly posts are 5000 characters.

A non-Tweetdeck user would see the tweet slightly differently. Here’s the same tweet in Twitter, where a ‘… (cont)’ suffix is inserted into the text before the URL.

(By the way, I don’t think this is good microsyntax. Better would have been just the URL and the ellipsis, since the ellipsis can be encoded as a single character (option-; on Mac), with more of the original tweet showing.)

Oddly, Deck.ly doesn’t collate a strem of long posts under the user’s identity. There is no www.tweetdeck.com/twitter/stoweboyd, although all the long tweets I create are formed with that as the head of the URL, like http://www.tweetdeck.com/twitter/stoweboyd/~b47T4.

Final Thoughts

Deck.ly is a good idea, and workably implemented. I think that a fuller realization of Deck.ly will include an aggregated stream of all of a user’s long posts, but otherwise I like what I see.

Deck.ly could also form the basis of a liquid media communication solution incorporating email, too. But that’s not their aspiration at the moment, I guess, although I am hungry for that to be built by someone, if not Tweetdeck.

related

• Tweetdeck officially unveils Deck.ly, for tweets longer than 140 characters (the next web)

Liquid Email

We are rapidly detouring into the web of flow, leaving the static web of pages behind. (Or more accurately, covering the web of pages with a layer of liquid media, so that we will increasingly not notice the static URLs down there, except as IDs that can be used to fetch content, and yank it into the liquid context of the web of flow.)

Paradoxically, the places with the strongest flow will seem the most calm, because we won’t be jumping from the stream to the browser and back again a hundred times a day: we will stay in the stream: media content will be harvested, and pulled into context for us.

I am using the term liquid media to represent this new soupy, swirling, turbulent cascade of various media types being pulled into the streaming mess of today’s social media. We see images resolved in Twitter clients without leaving the Twitter stream, and Flipboard yanking articles free of their moorings on the NY Times or Wired, and previewing them for us in the article stream. Every sort of media will be pulled into the flow: soon, television will be repurposed as yet-another-media-type and played in the stream like audio is now.

This is all happening because we will naturally gravitate to the place with the fastest tempo, because the best stuff appears there first. Paradoxically, the places with the strongest flow will seem the most calm, because we won’t be jumping from the stream to the browser and back again a hundred times a day: we will stay in the stream: media content will be harvested, and pulled into context for us.

I think this is going to happen next with email.

Email has its own context: the inbox, the email apps, Outlook. The metaphor is now second nature to us: email comes in, from anyone having our email address, maybe is filtered and categorized, but mostly is shown as a chronological list of discrete messages. If we are lucky, our email tool ties together email threads, although that mechanism is semantically flawed, because a single email can deal with many topics. As a result, email is as messy as we are. But more structure won’t help email. The problem is the metaphor, and as a result, how the metaphor channels our thinking about communication.

Using a beta version of Nimble has caused me to think about a fusion of Twitter and email. That product manages to support both email and Twitter, but not in the way that I am envisioning, although the app is inventive and likely to be a good social CRM offering.

Imagine a liquid model of email, based on Twitter being my preferred context for communication:

1. I receive email in Gmail. 
2. A new Twitter client (or a new version of Twitter) — let’s call it Liquidate — captures all my incoming emails from Gmail, and drops a shortened link into my stream for each, with the subject line as the tweet, and associating the email address of the sender to their Twitter handle, if known.
3. The fact that this is an email would be made obvious in the UI, and I could open the text of the mail — and bring it right into context — by clicking on a link.
4. I could read the email text, and then respond to the sender either by a Twitter message, direct message, or another email, depending on the circumstance, and based on various criteria, like whether the sender has a Twitter account.
5. If I opt to reply by email, the client would send that into Gmail, and I would always have Gmail as a repository, if I want to search there.

In essence, I would be treating email messages as just a long format tweet, and using Gmail as an appliance to carry that message from my streaming context out to a world that has not completely switched to Twitter or liquid media. But the activities associated with ‘email’ would be carried out in the streaming context, and the email would be just another sort of media pulled into and then pushed out of the stream. And again, I would always be able to go to Gmail directly, if needed.

The question of how much of this email should be public and how much kept private is a very complex one. I am not advocating a general policy of taking all emails and automatically sharing them with all followers, per se. On the other hand, I might start using slight Gmail-supported variants of my email address for different constituencies — like stowe.boyd+public@gmail.com versus stowe.boyd+private@gmail.com — and at the same time tweeking Liquidate to take the appropriate actions with the associated messages. 

Imagine the scenario of an interaction with customer support at Cablevision. I might want to have that discussion completely in the open, with all tweets and emails available for my community to observe. On the other hand, my interaction with a bank or my realtor might be better kept confidential.

And in such a situation, I would want the email text to be publicly available, or published to a public location. Today, Gmail doesn’t support that, but Liquidate could do that: taking emails — that are all private today — and publishing those that I have marked as public.

And I will just close with an observation: this scenario of use makes sense because the continuity of communication is more important than the communication mode. If I am having a Twitter conversation with a pal, and I need to write something six paragraphs long, it’s annoying to write ‘taking this to email’, and then switch to my email tool. The thread of discussion is broken, and is never tied back together.

I think Google, Microsoft and Apple would both be well-served to implement liquid clients like this, well-integrated with their email services, and also coupled to winning social streams like Facebook and Twitter. Google should have done something like this instead of Buzz, I think. But I bet that the email giants will wait too long, and some upstart, like Nimble or Tweetdeck, will hit upon the right combination of features that comes to define the next generation of email tools, based on a metaphor along the lines I have sketched out.

Anyone working on a product like this should certainly contact me.

A Useful Bit Of Microsyntax: RE

The new release of Tweedeck was released yesterday, and Iain Dodsworth and crew implemented (along with a long list of other new features and improvements) a small bit of microsyntax that he and I discussed a month or so ago: RE.

RE is based on the everyday notion of a RE — ‘in reference to’, or ‘with regard to’ — that business folks have used for decades in memos and email.
In the Twitter context, RE is similar to and complements RT. RT, as we all know, makes a copy of a tweet, and creates a ‘@username’ reference to the author of the original tweet, and prepends a ‘RT’ indicator at the start. RE, on the other hand, creates a URL that points to the original tweet, and does not copy any of the original tweet, and prepends ‘RE’ at the start.

The idea is that the user creates a RE with the intention of commenting on whatever the original tweet contained. Imagine that my pal @gregarious has tweeted something like this:

I think Jeff Pulver’s #140conf sounds great. Wish I were there.

and I might RE in this way

RE http://bit.ly @gregarious is one of many who wishes they could have attended the #140conf this week