Solar OP Technology Blog

Twitter made a lot of waves over the past few months. From a voyeuristic, “I’m eating”, “can’t sleep” kind of ‘lifestreamer’, it has become a news media sensation. Earlier on it was just early earthquake reports. But Twitter hit big with the Iran elections, leaving dust to most traditional news channels in terms of realtime coverage of event and popularity amongst readers . That’s one hell of a powerful medium.

Wag The Dog is a brilliant 1997 satire, starring some big names (de niro, Hoffman), about a U.S. president inventing a war to increase his chances to win the upcoming elections. The president’s staff calls in a famous Hollywood producer to create a non-existing war (see trailer below, it’s a great, smart, funny movie).
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It’s been a very busy technology news day, with Twitter’s stolen documents making most of the headlines (we reported the story earlier today). tFeeder, the realtime, Twitter-powered technology news aggregator, identified Techcrunch’s post on the subject as a Boiling story about 3 minutes after it was first posted by Michael Arrington .

• Twitter has become tech bloggers favorite punchbag. Everyone’s badmouthing them, for good reasons. Techcrunch were first to break the story, having received stolen Twitter documents from the alleged hacker. They are now in negotiation with Twitter lawyers about materials they are publishing. Other blogs and media outlets also received the docs, but TC promised they’ll publish some of those soon. Several docs are already published here and some financial forecast here.
• Mahsable also got their hands on the Twitter documents, but chose not to publish any of them.  They published two stories on the Twitter documents, taking it straight at Twitter.
• Security was the main topic of the day, as Firefox 3.5 (the browser I’m using) has a huge security hole in it. Mashable offers a workaround, and FF should release a patch soon. A great day for security companies.
• Facebook is also having a great day - not only a competitor (Twitter) seems unreliable and vulnerable, FB added 50 million new users in the past 3 months. Impressive.

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While we were trying out the new mobile version of tFeeder (it was actually our first tFeeder news we got on our mobile), we discovered a BOILING story - Techcrunch got a hold of confidential documents from Twitter.
Appearently, Twitter was hacked a few months ago, and the hacker sent the documents to Techcrunch. Techcrunch Michael Arrington did this numerous times in the past - publish documents that other bloggers would not dare publish. He states in the post that he will release some of the documents.
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A few years ago, when technology blogs started becoming popular, I used to waste a lot of time visiting each blog, trying to find interesting technology stories. Then RSS became popular, and as most tech blogs started offering RSS subscription, much of the time spent on visiting each blog was reduced to a short, periodic visit to my RSS reader, looking for interesting technology stories.

But as time went by, I realized that RSS was not enough. Although it offers a simple way of accessing a large amount of content, it lacks one major feature - ranking. The RSS protocol was never meant to include any information in regards to the quality of each story. There were many other options to find hot stories (such as Digg), but in the past few months, there’s a new kid on the block - Twitter. And as most technology bloggers would agree - Twitter is becoming a powerful a recommendation engine, particularly useful for promoting interesting technology stories.

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It seems like this days our world needs to be defined in 140 characters (we are trying to fight this). Google is a great company and any product it offers is worth at least a blog post. One of the latest released products is Google Wave. You must have already heard or read about it, but still, I couldn’t find anywhere a good definition, in less than 140 characters, of  where Google Wave innovates.

Google defines wave as :

.. a tool for communication and collaboration on the web

but that sounds so late 90’s - communication? collaboration?? that’s web1.0 stuff.
Google sure got a lot of hype around Wave, some calling it an MS office killer, some Twitter buster, and some claiming it will become the ultimate project management tool. I’m not sure yet if I see the added value in using Wave. As a stand-alone product, which adds real-time features to email and lets you easily share pictures using drag-and-drop, it seems to me as a natural evolution of Gmail, no more.

I believe what can make Wave a true game-changer will come from a 3rd party developer, someone who will leverage Google Wave’s API to create a new type of web service, possibly mashing Wave up with other web services.

And the truth is, I think I might have a killer idea, the next Twitter. And that’s why I need your help - I requested a user for the development sandbox and still waiting for confirmation. If you happen to have a sandbox user, I’d love to get an invite!

To understand Google Wave with minimal effrot, read this great Google Wave F.A.Q.
If you have more time to spear, here’s the Google Wave live demo.

Look for furture post on the Wave app I plan on building, register to t our RSS feed.

Doing research for the Techcrunch story (Michael Arrington liked that post), I unintentionally found a real gem - Techcrunch introduction of a new web 2.0 service - Twttr (the original name, they later changed it to Twitter). The service was a side-project of the Odeo team, a startup that created a podcast search engine.

It’s truly amazing to see, in retrospect, how far an idea, which very few people could initially understand, can go. Even Michael (TC) lacked the foresight to identify the real strength of the service - people sharing trivial daily activities publicly.  . He says:

There is also a privacy issue with Twttr. Every user has a public page that shows all of their messages. Messages from that person’s extended network are also public. I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website.

There are some very interesting (and somewhat funny) comments on that post:

I do not understand the utility of adding the SMS messages to a public webpage or making messages from my network public. I would have to pass on that type of offering. The ability to make messages private should be added asap.

i do not want to be woken up at 4 a.m. because my friend got drunk and decided to text Twttr with “asdl im at barasdf sooo drunksalkfjs”

I think this is the dumbest thing ever! Who would want all their personal text messages on a public website for anyone to read and track?

Odeo was a failure from the get go. No revenue model. I asked their VC - CRV - what the revenue model was a year ago and he said “to sell to someone bigger.” Okay, that was a web 1.0 answer, and now we get Twttr - an even dumber idea with no revenue model, but a 2.0 concept

Not innovative and not focused. Twttr sounds like a disaster in the making

You’d have to agree that some of these comments are still relevant, despite Twitter’s amazing success.

You can read the original post here.

One of Twitter’s first homepage designs - go get a barf bag. It’s ugly!

We’ve had enough. Sure, Twitter is cool. Everyone’s using it. But the more you use it, the more you realize something’s wrong. You can’t point it out. Well, let us point it out for you - 140 characters are not enough. It’s too limiting.
So we hereby declare Project Tweeti 500. The goal? convince Twitter to cancel the 140 characters limit it currently imposes upon its users, and allow messages as long as 500 characters.

To show support for our goal, all you have to do is add a comment bellow, that says Tweeti 500 (all other comments for this post will be deleted). Please leave a valid email address and name. We will maintain a count of the comments in our homepage, hoping we can make a difference.

The official Youtube Clip - The Tyranny Of The 140

Aside from commenting this post, please use the SHARE button below to spread the word amongst your friends. Every comment counts!

To stay up to date on Tweeti 500 progress, register to our RSS feed.

It seems like these days everyone tweets (except for me, I hate Twitter). I won’t be surprised if people start having 140 characters conversations  (I’m sure mobile companies would hate that idea). And to be honest, to this day, I can’t understand why would anyone want to express themselves in such a limiting medium.

Twitter has been around for a couple of years. When it first came out, it was a geek thing. Many asked themselves what was the point of twitting. You want to share something with others? Write a blog, send an email, call a friend. Never the less, Twitter caught on like a Californian wildfire.

Much of the blame on Twitter’ss success can be attributed to tech blogs. They pushed it early, when no one else was really interested. They thought it was cool and used it to complement their blog’s content. Whenever a blogger felt lazy, they’d just twitt something meaningless and make their news-addicted, Ritalin-induced readers momentarily happy.

But then something unexpected happened - Twitter started becoming more popular than the blogs that created all the buzz around it. Readers attention span became shorter and shorter. The crowd wanted quick, short updates. And before you know it, blogs became arcane - too much information, too infrequent updates, too late. Bloggers had to adjust. How? by writing shorter posts, more frequently. On a long enough timeline, they’ll turn to yet another Twitter account.

When that happens, many blogs will disappear. Readers will become less interested in long, insightful articles. They’d want the punchline, without the setup, and the sooner they get it, the better. Bloggers will shift from producing quality content to looking for instant, exclusive content. And they will lose, because a single blog, as powerful as it may be, cannot compete against the gigabytes of information generated by the crowds at any given moment. Today,a tech blogger has his ’sources’ within a company that leaks exclusive inside information. Tomorrow, that source will just twitt the news, anonymously. Twitter shortens the time information flows from the point of creation to the point of perception by cutting the middleman (bloggers, reporters).

You could argue that what bloggers do is reduce the entropy of systems like Twitter - with so much information flowing out of Twitter, it’s almost impossible to filter out the noise. Google reduced the entropy of the world wide web, using a unique, very simple idea - use weighted backlinks to determine the quality of a data source (e.g. Pagerank of a web page). The next Google type service will be able to identify the most reliable, accurate and timely sources of information on Twitter, and present it to users. I’m sure there are already services trying to achieve this, but when one of these services will create the wow factor (the same one that Google created when it first launched), news, sports and technology blogs will become totally irrelevant.

In one of our next posts, we will try to describe how such a service, our BlogBuster, should look like. Register to our RSS feed to read more about our Twitter BlogBuster and other technology news.