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Leo Babauta of Zen Habits fame has ditched email and will primarily use Twitter:

… the people I communicate with the most are (mostly) on Twitter. What I love about Twitter is that it’s very limited (140 characters), so you have to keep things brief, and also there isn’t the expectation that you’ll respond to every message, as there is in email. Friends can DM me on Twitter for personal communication.

I find the using Twitter part more significant than the giving up email part.

Over the past year, I’ve observed that I’ve stayed in touch with friends and contacts from my undergrad and postgrad days (and former colleagues) who are on Twitter. I’ve found that I communicate at least once with everyone about once a week. Those who aren’t on Twitter have more or less fallen out of touch.

Twitter is definitely the best reflection of our expanding social networks and shortening attention spans. Telephone conversations lasted 15+ minutes. Reading and responding to an email takes perhaps 5 minutes; a tweet (or Facebook Wall post) takes seconds.

Finally, having these channels of communication has let us grade our social network according to closeness – I still call up my closest friends occasionally – those calls last upwards of an hour. I write to a slightly larger set of people with “what’s up lately” emails, and maintain a level of ambient Twitter-fed awareness of an even larger set.

Yesterday and today
The Web has been through two major evolutionary stages, and we are seeing some major activity in the third evolutionary stage.

The first was the “early web” – through most of the 90s and until the dot-com bust. People accessed content through directories and portals, and the content itself was static web pages.

The second was what was dubbed (retrospectively) “Web 1.0” [1] Search went mainstream, and we also began to see a lot of dynamic content (think classifieds on craigslist and books on Amazon).

The third stage is what we’ve called “Web 2.0” in its early forms and “social media” as focus has shifted from a loose set of open standards and technologies (RSS, OPML, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, CSS, HTML5, Webkit, Flash, SyncML, OAuth) to the services that have been built with them.

Within this latest stage of evolution, developments in the last three years or so have been about putting together the guts of what Tim O’Reilly called the “Internet Operating System” to truly integrate the Internet into our daily lives. We’re reaching a stage of maturity with these internals (that is, growth/focus/interest is slowing), and are seeing an acceleration in the activity around applications and services built on top of them.

Tomorrow and beyond
But I think there’s still tremendous competition for some platforms that will form the guts of the Internet Operating System. Fred Wilson talks about aspiring to be a platform:

I think, that if you don’t want to be [an Internet] platform, then I don’t know what you should be aspiring to be. I mean, I don’t know that there is anything else that you would want to be.

The search system is pretty much Google and the location system is Google Maps. The iTunes Music Store and YouTube are the digital entertainment system, and Twitter makes an extremely strong case for the messaging system. But there’s still no dominant payment system for the web. There’s still no dominant scheduling/calendaring system yet, no dominant remote storage system and most critically, no identity system. And this is nowhere close to being a complete list.

As a parent, can you subscribe to your child’s school’s football coaching team calendar with the playground location embedded, sign up for it by paying the fees through your mobile phone and have your car’s GPS give you turn-by-turn directions to the ground on practice days following the least-congested route based on real-time crowdsourced information? Not yet.

Until these systems are in place, there is an upper limit on what we can make applications do, how deeply we can integrate these applications into our physical world. The “next Google/Twitter/Facebook” is going to be a company that creates a credible missing platform.

The top-level applications that build upon existing platforms will be either be single-purpose applications (Evernote is one example) or “glue” companies, those that tie platforms together. Don’t expect to see a billion-dollar company out of them in their current form. [2]

[1] The analogy with the World Wars is hard to miss. Until WW2, the First World War was known just as the Great War. Until sometime in 2005, “Web 1.0″ was just the Web.

[2] That’s not to say that they’re not worth investing in. I’m saying that next-generation services can only become mainstream once the plumbing is in place – and to take advantage of new platforms, these top-level applications will need to evolve significantly.

Related stuff around the web you ought to read:

Techcrunch announced PubSubHubbub, a protocol to speed up delivery of RSS and Atom feeds (5 August 2009)

Dare Obasanjo on Google’s possible stab at an identity solution, the WebFinger protocol (15 August 2009)

Being able to choose to be contacted by either voice, IM or SMS is an extremely attractive proposition. Using all three from the same device, though, is the holy grail of unified communication. With VoIP, smartphones and IM, we might be getting pretty close to that.

Right now, your instant messaging contact list, and your phone/SMS contact list are disparate and independent. Your contact’s IM status tells you nothing about where he/she is, or if he/she can take a call. Is it possible to

• Integrate both contact lists into one?
• Set one real-time status that all your contacts can check?

The answer will, very soon, be yes.

Same Network

A mobile phone is already capable of making calls, receiving SMSes and running an instant messaging client. But since phone calls and SMS are sent over one network type (Voice) and Mobile IM over another (GPRS/EDGE/3G), there’s no unification between these services.

However, when WiFi coverage is widely available, or when you can make and receive calls over your packet-data oriented 3G network, the line begins to blur, and then altogether disappear. Applications like Fring, which integrate your phone contacts list and Gtalk list, already make that possible. If you can make VoIP calls, you can talk to your contact by voice or text.

The Possibilities

At that point of time, your status message indicates you real-life communication status. One could, for instance, check if a contact is open to receiving SMS only, or having a short IM conversation, or receiving calls, or none at all. This goes beyond the “Available”, “Busy”, “In a meeting” statuses.

If you’re on a phone call, your IM status could indicate that automatically, so people getting in touch with you could leave you an SMS/IM message without having to first call you and check if you’re busy on a call. You could indicate if you’re driving, sleeping or having dinner and have it show up on your friends’ mobile chat list.

If you’re in a meeting, simply setting your IM status to “Busy” could automatically cancel all calls made to you and pop up an IM chat box on your caller’s phone so he/she can send you an IM instead.

Stretching this, implementing a multi-way voice conference wouldn’t be any different from a multi-way chat. Additionally, with text-to-speech and speech-to-text, some participants could write and read text, others could speak and hear voice – in the same conversation (say one’s in a movie hall, the other is driving – they’d never be able to speak with today’s state of tech).

Adding location to the mix throws up some interesting possibilities. If you can display your location as part of your IM status, your friends nearby could sign up for notifications and call you to meet up – all from the same device. Or if you’re waiting to call someone until he/she reaches office? Set an alert for when your contact’s location changes to his office locality.

Conclusion

Not only are we “integrating voice and data” – that’s been on the cards for long – but we’re also integrating people and devices, using features of one to enhance our experience with the other.

How long do you think it’ll be before we get here? Will telecom companies try to block this, given that they won’t be able to charge per-call any longer?

(This post began as a reply to a comment question on my previous blog post about iPhone 3G. It’s also a complete re-write of an earlier post.)

My experience with the Internet on my Nokia N82 has been more than satisfying, but that might well be a result of my usage pattern. Your mileage may vary. And yes, my ideal internet-access device would be iPhone, but I’ve already written about why iPhone is a no-no for me.

Email

During my commute, I process email I received the previous evening and overnight. Since the ride is frequently too bumpy to type fast, I avoid replying until I’m in my office (though I send the occasional one-sentence reply through the app). I use the Gmail App to label, star, archive and delete email.

Bulk processing email like this is faster on the Gmail App than it is on the desktop! The Gmail App has handy shortcuts (press 7 twice to delete, 8 twice to mark as spam and delete, 9 twice to archive, “*” to mark as star. It also pre-fetches email so you don’t wait for minutes on end for pages to load.

Feeds and updates

The Google Reader interface for iPhone works just as fine on the S60 browser. With prefetching, ability to star, share, share with notes, and mark entire feeds and folders as read, I can process feeds as fast on my phone as I can from my laptop. I also catch up on Twitter with the S60 browser. m.twitter.com is fast, and doesn’t feel like you’re compromising on the experience because you’re using a mobile-adapted interface.

Microblogging

The same S60 browser and m.twitter.com let me send tweets while on the go. I’d love to post via SMS, but the facility seems to be “unavailable temporarily” since May at least.

News

I use Google News India and the New York Times mobile page for Indian and World news respectively. Both sites have awesome mobile interfaces, and render very well on the S60 browser.

Incidentally, you can view pages either in landscape or portrait mode by just tilting the phone using the built-in accelerometer on the N82. I scan tweets in portrait mode and my feeds and news in landscape mode.

Social Networking

A few months ago, Google release a mobile-adapted interface for Orkut. Like all of Google’s mobile services, Orkut mobile is simple and well-designed, with support for viewing profiles, photos, scrapbooks, birthday reminders and activity updates – all of what you’d use on the web. I don’t see much support for communities or applications, and I’d prefer it stay that way. I don’t like Orkut’s implementation of either.

Instant Messaging

I’m not a big fan of instant messaging, and certainly not one of those who’s online but “Busy” all day long. If I do have to ping someone on Google Talk, though, Fring is the app I use. The competition (apart from Ebuddy) tends to be either horribly designed or terribly engineered. Or both. Fring lacks notification on the phone’s front screen (For Nokia, I can imagine using Active Standby to display “New IM from so-and-so”. Google’s managed it with their Search Box).

It’s also a VoIP client. Rohan writes in: “My phone is WiFi-enabled and I have a Skype unlimited connection. I’ve configured Skype within Fring, so when I connect my mobile through WiFi to the local LAN, I can make almost free voice calls (VoIP calls) to 32 countries using Skype on Fring.”

The Series 60 Browser

All of my mobile web access is now through the default vanilla yet stunningly capable S60 browser. It has support for multiple windows – invaluable for opening links to websites from Twitter, support for SSL (when I check Gmail from the browser), one-click zoom in/zoom out, and the mini-map feature – viewing the entire page, reduced, on your screen, and scrolling through it instead. Invaluable for scrolling through long pages.

What’s your mobile applications list? And how does it fit into your daily lifestyle?

Seth Godin quotes Gavin Potter about the 21st century being about ’sorting out demand’. “When your messages reach the right people at the right time in the right way, magic happens”, Seth says.

Social networks are changing that. In fact, Facebook and its ilk are obviating the very need for traditional STP (segmentation, targeting, positioning).

Why? Because one, Facebook has made it easy for developers to create applications that run inside of the social network itself. Think the ever-popular Scrabulous. Two, there is a massive swarm of people on Facebook that represent every possible demographic, spanning all sorts of likes, dislikes and tastes. Last, the viral nature of communication makes it easy for information to spread through the network.

This means that marketers can now stop thinking of how to segment and reach out to their audience. Once an application’s been created, simply “drop” it into the network; the swarm will pick it up. The network will figure out the target segment by itself. It’ll definitely reach the segment the marketer had in mind; chances are it’ll also reach several other audiences that the marketer didn’t anticipate.

The flip side is, of course, the utter lack of control. Apart from the application, both positive and negative feedback could spread alarmingly fast too. The latter could prove fatal in the early stages of distribution.

In a sense, this is similar to viral marketing campaigns carried out over email (Yahoo!’s and Hotmail’s campaigns about their own service by tagging on a small line at the end of every message) and other channels. However, back in those days, all a marketer could do was spread a message to “pull” the audience to the advertised service. Today it is the application/service itself that’s being spread.

There’s no Pull, no Push, only Release into the Wild.

Facebook’s Beacon brought some spice to the tech community, which had been longing for some juicy stuff to blog/discuss/pontificate about since the iPhone’s launch several months ago.

Beacon is (was?) part of Facebook’s new online ad system which shared a user’s actions on other (partner) websites with all his/her Facebook friends. (If you rent a movie on Blockbuster, your friends will be notified via Facebook’s mini-feed). Scary, eh?

So in addition to the flak that Facebook was already getting because of the havoc its “Applications” have wrought, it was criticized soundly for making Beacon the insidious nightmare that it was. I kind of lost track of that story after a few weeks (the tech blogosphere, like most of modern society, has an incredibly short attention span), but there were reports that Facebook had rectified most of what was wrong.

At around the same time, Google unveiled what it thought was a whole new chapter in social networking – now, your shared items in Google Reader would automatically show up in the Google Reader feed list of whoever was on your Google Talk list (and you could see their shared stuff). Privacy advocates made a tremendous amount of noise yet again.

However, Dave Winer at Scripting.com had a word for those who screamed blue murder when Beacon surfaced:

[t]here are thorny issues here, but we want these companies to give up control of our information, and we don’t want them to be overly scared of public opinion as they do it…[but] most important, I want them to give me control of my data.

Indeed. Almost all web-based applications we use today are personalized to some degree. So inured are we to this personalization; we don’t even notice it anymore. Until something like this pops up. Why do we love some applications and hate some? When does a feature cross the privacy line?

Here’s a look at some popular Internet applications/services:

Application/Service	User info collected?	Personalization requested?	Personally identifiable info shared by default?
Amazon’s recommendations	Y	N	N
iGoogle	Y	Y	N
Google’s personalized search	Y	N	N
Orkut/Flickr	Y	Y	Y
Google Reader’s shared items	Y	N	Y
Google News	Y	Y	N
Facebook Beacon	Y	N	Y
iTunes Music Store	Y	N	N
YouTube	Y	Y	Y
Digg/Del.icio.us	Y	Y	Y
Gmail	Y	Y	N

As we see, the only two applications that have run into privacy troubles (Google Reader’s shared items and Facebook’s Beacon) are the ones where personalization was not requested, but information was shared anyway. Then there are the annoyances like Google’s personalized search, that displays India-tailored results for me because it knows my location (and there are several times – more often than not – when I don’t want this). There are other beauties of design like Amazon’s recommendations – that give me personal, useful information without needing to know anything at all about me.

Making sense of it all:Internet application services seem to divide themselves into three degrees of personalization:

1.) Personalization based on viewed contentAmazon’s recommendations (“people who bought this also bought…”), eBay, Digg, del.icio.us. Here, user information in either aggregate or anonymous form is enough to offer a customized experience.

2.) Personalization based on purely personal informationMost of Google’s services offer this degree of personalization – iGoogle, personalized search results, Google News, Gmail. In all of these cases, the service provider (or application vendor, depending on how you look at it) has access to a ton of information about the user (think Gmail), but relies on that information bank alone for the experience.

3.) Personalization based on personal and group-level informationHere’s where both controversies have arisen, and, unfortunately, here’s where most of tomorrow’s applications will likely be slotted. Orkut, Flickr, YouTube and other community-based applications.

Concluding:An application can move from one degree of personalization to another. I can visualize Amazon, for instance, forming a community where individual book purchased can be used as recommendations (PQR in your friend network bought…). Or Google News, for that matter.Whether or not you land in a privacy soup will depend on where you choose to draw the line.

Some time later: What role does owning a lot of web real estate play in this game of personalization?

Steve Rubel talks about the significance about the new “Friends’ Shared Items ” feature on Google Reader. I was about to write about this, but Steve’s put it better than I’d planned.

The popular RSS reader now lets you easily see what your friends are sharing from their river of news and allows you to do the same. This turns Google Reader into a social network, complete with profiles… (Google) is tapping into the Gmail address book and using it to transform all of its static services into on-the-fly communities.

Well it’s true. I find myself logging in to Reader more often because I’m interested in reading what my friends have found interesting (in addition to what they’re blogging about). But most importantly,

Social networking isn’t just about a few standalone sites but a bunch of different address books that actually make the entire web more social.

Which is exactly what makes Facebook such an attractive acquisition. Not just for the opportunity to server ads on its pages (Microsoft’s planted its flag firmly there), but to drive traffic to _other_ properties for serving more advertising.

I’ve been thinking of the difference (and similarities) between Y! Answers and Wikipedia, and then about Yahoo!’s true strength. Excerpts from an email I wrote a friend:

… if you can get inputs from not only patients, but medical practitioners, medical students, this could be huge. There are innumerable startups out there trying to build up a comprehensive directory of medical knowledge – the Answers model could complement a static medical database by being a naturally up-to-date, action-oriented database.

I am beginning to see Answers as a product that, if properly monetized, can be larger than Wikipedia, (an alive, multicolored, thriving Wikipedia) in that it can include topics that can never be adequately addressed on W.

Wikipedia is just that – an encyclopedia of facts. Answers is that as well as experiential.

I also see a grand intersection between this and a social network. In fact, Answers is one dimension on a massive online community… an ongoing series by Rajesh Jain on how Facebook is being construed by its founders to be a social Operating System, whereby services are being built on top of Facebook APIs. Perhaps Answers can build on top of this.

… Facebook would be a great acquisition for Yahoo! Y!’s advantage over Google (or MS or AOL or similar) is that it has always been community-based – right from the time Yang and Filo built their directory based on recommendations from their friend network, to more recent initiatives like My Yahoo!. What better than what has become the social network in the US?

One a broader level, the train of thought in last paragraph above is probably more in tune with Yahoo!’s true strength – its community. It has built an interactive community while Google hasn’t (the latter has legions of users, but little by way of a community). That’s why Flickr and del.icio.us have been Yahoo!’s most successful acquisitions, and which is also why Facebook and SixApart (Movable Type, LiveJournal) would make equally great buys for the big Y!.