Open and closed, Part II—Microblogging

Microblogging is one of those things that’s hard to explain to the uninitiated, and doesn’t really begin to make sense until you’ve used it for a while. It’s like instant messaging, only public. It’s like a bulletin board, only for short messages. It’s a status update system. It’s a very small blog. It’s…well, it’s hard to explain.

The granddaddy of the microblogs, of course, is Twitter. Twitter has been much in the news of late, not only for its random crashes and frequent unavailability, but also for its recent infusion of venture capital from the likes of Jeff Bezos. Twitter’s popularity has spawned a multitude of competitors, all of whom have tried to differentiate themselves from Twitter by adding features.

Pownce, brought to you by Kevin Rose, the creator of Digg.com, offers file transfer and the ability to send messages to selected groups of people. Jaiku, from a team in Finland, added the ability to follow RSS feeds and introduced threaded replies. It showed great potential until Google bought it and made it invitation-only, which effectively killed whatever momentum it acquired after tech journalist and podcaster Leo Laporte made a well-publicized switch from Twitter, bringing with him his audience. There’s Friendfeed, which also has RSS aggregation ability plus commenting, and the quirky Plurk.

What all of these services have in common is that they are silos—closed systems, vertically integrated and walled off from the outside world. Twitter has taken some criticism for its frequent outages—which have become so common that the “fail whale” image it displays at such times has its own Wikipedia entry (Wikipedia entry deleted as of 2008-07-15)—but all of them are potentially subject to the same issues of reliability. Just last week, though, a new competitor went public that has the potential to be radically disruptive.

The new entrant is Identi.ca, a Canadian offering that is based on an open-source microblogging platform known as Laconica. I’m no programmer, but as I understand it, the idea behind Identi.ca is that individuals or companies can download and install the Laconica software on a server and run their own microblog, and all these microblogs can interact with each other and with Identi.ca. Suddenly, you’re not in a silo, you’re part of a distributed network of microblogs, and if one fails the others can go on undisturbed.  This means, in theory at least, that the kind of scaling issues we’ve seen with Twitter won’t be a factor. It also means that you can be on one service, and a friend can be on another, and you can still see their status updates and follow their posts.

Of course, right now Identi.ca is the main user of the software, but there is a list on the Laconica website of other servers running Laconica, and there is no reason to think there won’t be more.  The Laconica software is open-source, so anyone can maintain or develop it, and then donate those changes back to the community. It’s essentially the same model used by the Linux community and the popular browser Firefox, and it has been shown to work well.

The only fly in the ointment, if there is one, is the numbers. Right now, Twitter is still where the majority of users are, but the “cool kids”—the developers, programmers, and open-source advocates who can see the potential of a distributed microblogging network—are already moving towards Identi.ca (here’s one example). In the first 24 hours it was public, Identi.ca registered over 8000 new users and posted more than 19,000 status updates. Clearly, the early adopters are interested.  What is needed now is for regular users to adopt it as well.

So, I’m doing my part. I’m moving to Identi.ca as my main status blog, and I’m asking my friends, family, and anyone who reads this to join me over there.  At the very least, register an account there and get your preferred username while it’s still relatively new and uncrowded. I’ll still be posting my sutff at Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, etc. through the miracle of Ping.fm, but I’ll be hanging out at Identi.ca. It isn’t feature-complete yet—things like an SMS gateway and direct messaging are still to come. But it’s evolving rapidly, and so far shows impressive stability. The main developer is responsive, and the community (the Identi.cans?) is ever so congenial.

Won’t you join me?

Open and closed, Part I(a)—iPocalypse

I can’t move on to Part II without saying something about today’s disastrous rollout of the 3G iPhone.  Apple is normally very good at providing an excellent customer experience, but today provided a cautionary lesson to Apple in what not to do.

For starters, it’s been said, fairly in my opinion, that the Achilles heel of the iPhone is the linkup with AT&T.  When we’re talking about AT&T in this context, we’re really talking about what used to be Cingular. The old AT&T Wireless was absorbed by Cingular a few years ago, and since then the former AT&T network has been obliterated in favor of the ex-Cingular GSM network, which was definitely not ready for prime time, at least not in my area—and their customer service was singularly (Cingularly?) bad.  For example, when I complained of bad reception, I was told that my office, which lays directly next to one of the two major highways between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and is in a city of over 100,000 people within a broad valley, was in a “tough area.”  Gee, thanks.

Anyway, it looks like today’s problems were caused not by AT&T, but by Apple itself.  There are conflicting stories out there, but it appears that Apple’s iTunes activation servers went down at a very inconvenient time. Imagine standing in line for several hours, finally purchasing the phone, having your number ported over, and then not being able to activate the thing.  Nice.

The basic problem here is something that has served Apple very well up until now: Apple’s insistence on controlling every aspect of the user experience.  While this has allowed Apple to craft a consistent look and feel across multiple computing platforms, in this case it worked against them in a big way. Most of the time, when you buy a GSM phone, it’s a simple matter of taking the SIM card out of the old phone and putting it in the new one (or, in the case of a new customer, activating a new SIM card).  In this case, an extra step was inserted into the process, because Apple does not want you to use the phone in ways that Uncle Steve disapproves of—and, apparently, because of concerns over unauthorized unlocking of the phone. Because the price of the iPhone is being subsidized by AT&T, AT&T wants to make sure you activate the phone on the AT&T network, and there is doubtless a contractual obligation on Apple’s part to help ensure that this happens, and that iPhones are used only on AT&T’s network.

This, of course, is a losing battle.  There’s an interesting corollary to the music industry here.  The record companies would love it if everyone bought the same music over and over again.  This is why they initially pushed so hard for digital-rights management (DRM).  This led to Apple selling music files through the iTunes Music Store that were hobbled by DRM and were consequently unable to be played on anything but an approved iPod by the person who originally bought the music.  Predictably, various methods were found to strip out the DRM from tracks purchased through the iTunes store, and ultimately the record companies were forced by consumer pressure to offer DRM-free tracks through other merchants.

Like the record companies with their music, Apple and AT&T are following an outdated business model. Instead of locking down the iPhone six ways from Sunday, what Apple should do is fairly obvious, at least to me:

1. Sell the iPhone as an unlocked and unsubsidized GSM phone.  The initial iPhone proved that people were willing to spend large sums of money for an Apple-branded phone that just worked.  Why not let them?
2. Permit its use on any GSM network.
3. Either sell it exclusively through Apple Stores, or offer it through multiple providers.
4. Develop and market a CDMA version of the iPhone that can be sold via Sprint and Verizon. In many areas of the USA, those are the most complete and reliable networks; why not take advantage of them?  Palm and Blackberry manage to do both GSM and CDMA versions; why can’t Apple?

Of course, for those who just can’t wait for this eventuality to take place, there is an option.  But then, if you read Part I, you already know that.