I'm baffled too, especially since bloggers and analysts offered up plenty of ideas in the past few years about how Twitter could make money. But Twitter instead spent its time saying it was going to wait to figure out a new, innovative way to make money and then... shock and awe, settled on advertising.
As for Twiter as a business, I'm baffled that it's been so long and they still can't come up with a way to make serious money. But they have enough VC money to keep running for a long time. Maybe they will figure something out.
today's rate of information exchange has to have an effect(sp?) on my brain chemistry. I reall the pre-fb days on Internet Evolution and post FB days..
Twitter? I use it mostly just to "amplify" my blog posts, meaning every time I blog something it automatically gets fed out to Twitter. But I don't spend a lot of time reading my twitter stream and seeing what's going on. And I rarely just write a Tweet on its own. Not sure why.
@Nicole, Dan: I tend to shut down on the weekends and come back to a backlog. But I try to make it my business to know what's going on, so maybe that's why...
@Mary I don't want to see the "it's all my fault for the axe" email. in doing so, I've also missed the IE emails HOWEVER I see all of your posts on FB like page
@Mary, it's not that well organized. Had to switch her off completely for a while, now letting her back on for specified purposes. She complained that she was losing blog followers. 11.
Nicole, exactly! We went to Utah for a ski trip a few weeks ago. I brought no laptop, and didn't check email on my phone. (Well, once I looked). Anyway, at the end of the 5 days, I'd missed nothing. Which I guess says a lot about how unimportant I am. But still. Nothing!
I like to actively disconnect and then come back a couple of days later and see how unimportant everything was that I would have otherwise been obsessively checking.
We have twins, age 6. It scares me to see how much they love to play games on smartphones and iPad. I thnk they got it from their parents, which makes me sad.
@Mary my email abandonment started when I dropped the ball one too many times with my boss at CBS and dipped my head in the sand like an ostrich. we're friends on fb but she doesn't "talk shop" on fb so..
I wrote recently on my blog that I have this terrible fear that my kids are going to grow up and remember me as a guy who lived in their house when they were growing up and was always staring at a phone.
SkyDrive is one thing I haven't experimented with yet. I keep thinking I'm going ot have days and days to just play around but every day the people at newsweek send me work to do. Gah.
Dan, I like the idea of one-stop cloud shopping. I've compromised for the time being by using Protopage.com, a customizable desktop/RSS reader which at least allows me to keep all my links to various cloud locations in one place, well organized.
Here's what I do with email. Anyone who knows me, I give out my gmail address. Both personal and professional. Then I have a NewsweekDailyBeast email address but the only people who write to it are people who I don't know and who are just sending in random story pitches. 95% of what hits that inbox is stuff I can delete without even opening.
the few times I've logged into my main email acct(hotmail) to look for files, I've covered the screen with my hands to not see the highlighted emails from "important contacts".
Here's what I want: all my stuff in one place in the cloud, and I can get it from any device. Phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, TV. Why is that so difficult? Right now I have photos all over the place, home movies all over the place, plus Dropbox, Google Docs, Carbonite, Mozy, iCloud. I used to have .Mac and then had MobileMe. Good grief!
I'm also waiting for the Year of the Linux Desktop to happen. Anyone have any idea when that's going to happen? Back in 2005 people were saying Windows would be dead and gone by now.
Funny thing, voice commands on Android are really good. And voice commands on Kinect with Xbox are good too. You need to give actual commands with Kinect, can't just talk naturally, but still, it works.
I saw a headline recently about how nobody is actually using Siri. I think Siri works really well on a 30 second TV spot. In real life? Not so much. Nicole, Apple wtihout Steve is fine in the short term, not so great in the long term.
jwallace, yes there are fewer apps in Windows Phone environment but honestly I'm not a heavy app user so I'm not the best judge here. If I can do FB, Twitter, a few other things, I'm fine. Heavy app explorers might hit a wall. Funny thing when I met with the Xbox team is they say they are NOT trying to get a zillion apps on Xbox. They just want a few apps, very well selected, to provide a curated experience. I think that might be a good idea. Who wants to turn on the TV and have 500,000 apps to sift through?
I can't deal with Bing. It just doesn't seem to produce the search results I'd anticipate with Google. On the other hand, Google Search's new attempts to answer my questions rather than give me search results are pathetic. And annoying.
I was kind of put off when Google went to that "Search Plus Your World" thing and all those crazy results about my friends started showing up at top of results.
I do love the Windows phone's IE. so much improvement. My question tho @DanLyons is have you noticed a current disadvantage in the Windows "app market"? and if so, how soon before it self corrects?
Nicole, re: month of microsoft, i was surprised by how easy it was to switch. i missed my android phone for maybe a few days and then forgot all about it. Loving the 2 Windows phones I have. And using Windows 7 on a new machine is a great experience. I'd only used it on a very old underpowered machine. Also, I find Windows 8 really cool and interesting. I was surprised by how much I liked it
This should be a glorious period for journalism, with this huge appetite for content. Ironically, it has resulted in journalists being encouraged to create content for free.
what role will facebook timeline search and "storytelling"(new search) have. will it be opened to 3rd party apps or even bohemoths like Google and Bing?
I think there's way too much content out there. YouTube has these staggering stats about how much video is uploaded every minute, hour, day, etc. -- one guy there at YouTube told me recently that even if you just look at the "professional" content being put on YT, there's so much that even the YouTube people can't keep up with the content that's being created.
I think Google is at risk of turning into Microsoft. They have a great core business. But search was a business built for the Web as it looked in 1996. In a world of apps and walled gardens (Facebook) Google's search business becomes less and less powerful. They're casting about for a new business but I don't think they've got it yet. I love my Android phone but Android is really just another way to protect search, to keep people using Google search when they move to mobile.
I read that flexible dispalys are about to hit the market. In 5 to 7 years I predict that sponsored fb and twitter feeds will be on coke cans. okay, in 10 years.
Dan, here's a question I had earlier. Re the ongoing river of content, isn't there just too much content out there now? Are we reaching saturation point?
@Kim Davis: And to elaborate, I think there's always a blog that will speak someone's language perfectly. So while the content may be similar, it's the language that defines the audience.
where he claimed that blogs "are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective", claiming that Groklaw was primarily created "to bash software maker SCO Group in its Linux patent lawsuit against IBM, producing laughably biased, pro-IBM coverage".
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Recently, the Obama administration has been of two minds where privacy rights are concerned. On one hand, you have an administration that vowed to veto CISPA and mandated open data for government websites. On the other hand, you have an increasingly out-of-control Department of Justice on a fishing expedition at AP and demanding legislation to let the FBI wiretap private, encrypted communications and levy fines if a company fails to comply.
The apartment and house sharing service, Airbnb, now requires members to verify their identities by demonstrating a presence on the web, and by either scanning a government ID or entering detailed personal details. Other enterprises should take a close look at Airbnb's verification policies.
Facebook advertising is a lightning rod. It seems neither brands nor consumers are 100 percent happy about the social media site's policies, placement, or procedures. But the real controversy about Facebook ads and promotions is over whether they work.
By now, you've most likely heard about the 3D-printed gun that Texas-based Defense Distributed demonstrated last week. But we haven't heard the last about the censorship war that began soon afterward.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
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