blipvert

Much has been written – wrongly, I believe – about how Twitter lacks a business model. I reckon that anything that changes the scene as profoundly as Twitter has doesn’t need to have a business model. Certainly not at the start, and, quite possible never does. That isn’t to say that Twitter is condemned to be an eternal sinkhole of money and man-hours. Rather, that most business minds lack the foresight to intuit what this new thing can best be used for.

Just a few minutes ago I was “followed” on Twitter by DealsDirect.com.au, which is one web site that I allow to spam me every morning with their daily sales brochure. It’s mostly cheap plastic crap that’s turned out by the thousands of factories in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, but some of it – particularly the Manchester – is of good quality. (Some of the electronics on sale aren’t so bad – and most of that is made in China, whether you buy it from Apple or Lenovo.)

At the moment that I followed DealsDirect.com.au on Twitter – turning a one-way relationship into a bilateral connection – I had a brain wave. I immediately understood how Twitter can make their business model pay: they can charge for sending rich-media Tweet. I wouldn’t necessarily ever have the need to send a rich-media message, but DealsDirect will want to send mixed media messages, messages of arbitrary length, every time they reach out to me. It’s not enough to spruik a product with words – pictures are necessary. A “click to buy” button is necessary. And given the analysis that’s possible by looking at my tweetstream, it should be possible for the canny retailer to offer up exactly what I need, when I need it.

I don’t know that this would be a big change, technically, for Twitter. I rather doubt it would be. It would force a change on the various Twitter clients (Twhirl, TweetDeck, etc.) to accommodate the rich text messaging.

And, hey, I would pay for rich text messaging, once in a while. When it’s important. And if it’s easy and inexpensive to do so, I’m sure many of the other Twitteratti would do the same thing.

This morning, as I cruised through the normal feed of websites, I came to the front page of Talking Points Memo, which normally features short posts on the left, and some video coverage on the right hand side of the page.

This morning that video was an imbedded Qik video, an interview with comedian Harry Shearer (Mr. Skinner, to you Simpsons fans), recorded at the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

Recorded on a mobile.

Sure the quality stinks. If they’d used a thousand-dollar consumer-level HD camcorder (such as my own Canon HF-10), the video quality would be fantastic. But the folks at TPM already know that there is no “gold standard” for video. They are using an external, handheld microphone, which means they’ve grasped the importance of sound recording. In video, sound tells the story.

I wonder just how many other of the “Big Tent” bloggers are using Qik at DNC08.

With the advent of iPhone, there’s been a rise in talk about the “mobile Web”. The Web itself has been mobile for several years – at least since I strapped a wireless modem onto the back of my Palm Pilot (this would have been 1998 or 1999) and started surfing.

What we have now isn’t precisely the mobile Web. It is mobile, and some of it does involve the Web (or, more precisely, HTTP), but that is not the whole of the story, or, in eighteen month’s time, will that even be the biggest part of the story.

I’ve already installed my first 3G killer app on my iPhone – SimplifyMedia. It became immediately clear – just over the course of a 30 minute walk to the grocery and back – that I would blow through my rather meager 500MB Vodafone data cap very quickly using SimplifyMedia. Streaming media is just too irresistible.

Streaming media is not specifically a Web technology. It integrates well with the Web, it can even be delivered via the Web, but it is not the Web.

Qik and Flixwagon, which both provide live video broadcasting from my iPhone, do post those videos to a website. But very little of the Web is involved in moving the video stream from my iPhone to their respective sites. So, once again, this is not the mobile Web. This is something else.

And I’m convinced that using the term “mobile Web” will only constrain our ability to entertain the possibilities for pervasive 3G networks.

I’ve been using WordPress for my blog for the past three years. Although I have occasionally dived into it – adding a few themes or plugins – only recently, with this blog and this other blog have I really started to explore what’s possible.

Over the last 24 hours, as I updated all three of my blogs to WordPress 2.6.1, did I have a good look around both at the management interface for WordPress, and for the incredible number of plugins available for it. WordPress is clearly a viable ecosystem now, with thousands of plugins, thousands of themes, and something like 70 million users.

Which means I made the right decision, three years ago.

Best of all, upgrading – which has ever been the bane of WordPress users – has gotten easier and easier. I am going to try the Automatic Updater plugin next time I upgrade. It broke my blog the last time I used it. But I reckon it’s all a whole lot cleaner now. And if that’s the case, then WordPress will be damn near perfect.

Just finished reading Om Malik this morning. I rather like his take on the developments of the business and technology of Silicon Valley. But I liked him better pre-heart attack, when his world was smaller, when he wrote about things he cared passionately about, and when he didn’t make his posts a lame attempt to promote his own forthcoming events.

Note to those of you who blog: I am already giving you my very precious attention. That should be more than enough. If you spruik mercilessly, you’ll drive me away. And I doubt I’ll be alone.

If you think so, then just use this nifty tool David Wallace created. You can get me in one nicely wrapped package!

And the RSS is available here.

Thanks, David!

So TechCrunch, normally the font of all human wisdom and understanding, gives us this:

But the power of Twitter is more about how many people are following you than how many you are following. It is about pulling together an audience and talking to them directly, and letting them reply directly in a way that seems intimate but is still quasi-public.

How can I say this…? Um, NO! !FAIL! BZZZT! TRY AGAIN! YOU SIR, HAVE MISSED THE POINT!

Am I making myself clear?

Sigh.

I am followed by ~1500 people. I follow ~1000 people. Preferentially Australians, but if you’re interesting enough — even as a North American — I’ll follow you.

Why? Because what you have to share with me is of far more value to me than anything I might share with you. I thrive on the input of a thousand other people. Your insights and observations have immense value. And yes, it takes time and effort and winnow out the wheat from the chaff, but it’s not impossible.

It seems to me that in the hyperconnected era, that’s a very important skill to possess.

So no, TechCrunch, Twitter is not a popularity contest. It is not a way to get teh “Thoughts of Chairman Mark” out to a vast and unknowable audience. It is, instead, a way for me to experience the best and highest thoughts of a multitude of others. Something that was never possible before this point in time.

Which may be why TechCrunch failed to recognize it.

Sometime last year I bought a 350 GB SATA drive for my telly, which is already jam-packed with smaller drives, ranging from 200GB and up. At that point the telly crossed the 1TB threshold for its storage. I considered that a singular event, and reckoned it would be some time before I actually filled it all up.

And while it’s true that I haven’t filled the whole thing, each of its several partitions have become filled enough that things are due for a massive reorganization. I already had to split the videos across two partitions, something I had never wanted to do.

Today I went out and bought a one terabyte disk drive – it’s an external USB 2.0 drive, the run-of-the-mill 3.5″ variety.

It cost me $199.00 – GST inclusive.

I have now nearly doubled the online storage capacity of the telly. With one purchase. A purchase which cost me significantly less than any other drive I’ve purchased for the telly. Ever.

Woah.

Much has been made of the enormous sales iTunes App Store has garnered in the first few weeks after its launch. Steve Jobs was recently quoted as saying it may generate Apple a half a billion dollars in revenue year, perhaps even a billion.

Which begs the question: why hasn’t this been done before? It should be possible – nay, easy – to tie software distribution to an OS license key (that god-awful 20-character string you have to manually type in during a Windows install) which would provide the same level of minimal “FairPlay” security you get with an iTunes song or a signed (legally distributed) iTunes App Store application.

And certainly there is a huge market for applications that cost between 99 cents and $9.99 which perform useful things.

How is it that Microsoft hasn’t married those two ideas together? Even with piracy, if you make things cheap enough and easy enough to get to, people will pay for them. iTunes is proof of that, and the iTunes App Store is further proof.

So, will I be buying my MS Office OSX components at $59.99 a pop this time next year through some version of Live Mesh? I rather think so, because Microsoft takes 100% of that sale. Which means they’ll likely earn more on that sale – at a lower price – than they would through the channel. And yes, another $59.99 for PowerPoint, another for Access, another for Excel. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Expect it. Soon.