Archive for June 27th, 2008
Bill Gates coverage delivers 1109 articles today alone. This has to hurt the stock. Susan Decker in the news for unknown reason. Intel sticking with XP, hates Vista. Microsoft to buy Powerset. Slow PS3 sales being blamed on thing or another. Should Microsoft be busted up? Rethinking the old idea. Oracle may get $1 billion over SAP suit. Virgin Mobile buying Helios.
Click to listen:
The latest online craze is the social network, and Twitter is/was among the most popular of them all. Twitter, for those you living in caves, is an online micro-blogging social network application that allows users to blast 140 character messages to the world. You can follow other people’s “Tweets” and others can follow yours.
Recently, though, Twitter has become more famous for being unavailable then for the impact it has made on the social networking market. The “Fail Whale” is quickly becoming an internet celebrity, and if you go to Twitter you are more likely to see him, then your tweets.
Online “celebrities”, such as Leo Laporte, and Kevin Rose have made a game out of seeing how many followers they can get, and who will have the most. They are both well over 30,000 followers. Politicians, most prominently Barack Obama, have been using twitter to be “more in touch” with the younger constituents.
Twitter, although having no real monetization plans, seems to continue to be valued at higher and higher dollar amounts, allowing them to continually receive funding. In May, they received 15 milion dollars, based on a valuation of $80 million, and again just a few days ago, they received another round of funding. This time Twitter referred to itself as a communications utility, and Spark Capital and Bezos Expeditions bought into it. No one is saying how much, but it appears that it was more then the last round.
So, with all this support, and all this money being thrown at Twitter, why do we see the whale every day. Just this morning I received the following messages via Plurk :
“Twitter is down again”
“Fail Whale for the Lose”
“Twitter = Epic Fail”
“I deleted my twitter account”
“I am so done with Twitter”
“Twitter is still down.. they might as well pull the plug and walk away.”
This is just this morning, and this is just from someone who has about 100 followers on Plurk. That is a small cross section of the real social networking scene.
So, can Twitter survive when it is quickly getting a reputation for being a failure? Will they be able to compete in a market that is quickly seeing better and more stable alternatives to Twitter?
While the twitter funding rolls in, the users are left to wonder what the money is being spent on. Surely not hardware since they have continued to have more outages in the month of June. Obviously not on staff members to improve scalability… since as I said, still having outages.
The Web 2.0 frontier is showing promise of being the dot com revolution that should have happened in the late 90’s, where internet companies are provided funding and actually make money, but when I see Twitter, I just seem to go back to the 90’s when people with good ideas got tons of money and then sat around wondering what they should do with it all…
For those of you tired of riding the Fail Whale, stop over to [ Plurk ] , it is more fun, more interactive, more stable, and simply more then Twitter.
iTunes 7.7 was seeded to developers last night, which means that the App Store is quickly on its way. Along with that the iPhone SDK Beta 8 was also made available to developers.
Several sources have reported that version 7.7 of iTunes will provide quite a bit of tasty goodness, such as the obvious :
Use iTunes 7.7 to sync music, video, and more with iPhone 3G, and download applications from the iTunes Store exclusively designed for iPhone and iPod touch with software version 2.0 or later
Less obvious, and a little more exciting …
Also use the new Remote application for iPhone or iPod touch to control iTunes playback from anywhere in your home — a free download from the App Store.
I am almost as excited for the App Store, and the version 2 upgrade of the iPhone as I am for the new iPhone 3G release. So, Steve Jobs, get it out to us!