I recently wrote about Twitter's business model as ultimately enveloping ever greater parts of its developer community. [Twitter Is The Black Hole Of The Twitterverse...] After all, why leave money on the table? Why not produce the best desktop client, or mobile client? Why let others build lucrative businesses out of your community? That seemed to be the way things were moving for Twitter after one of its engineers Tweeted: "If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)" Khris Loux, co-founder of JS-Kit Echo, a commenting service, writes that Twitter has a choice of being a tyrant, or a benevolent king. How Twitter Can Become A New Bre

A report by Mashable that walks through data researched by Barracuda Networks Labs speaks volumes on what I call a new class of web user.  The fanatic, engaged early adopter. We (SiliconAngle labs) were storing and analyzing twitter up until July 2009 until the project moved over to Bing. The reported data from Mashable is pretty much on the money. Mashable reports: Barracuda Labs also analyzed Twitter’s growth over time, and the numbers are consistent with previous reports that show while Twitter grew like wildfire in early 2009, it has dramatically slowed down in recent months. Going back further to early 2008, the report estimates that the microblogging tool grew by just 0.31%. However, with the quick rise of media coverage

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a little gathering of geeks taking place in my home state, starting this week, called South by Southwest. Naturally I’ll be down there attempting to bring relevance from the chaos which generally is that event. I’ll be assisted by Michael Sean Wright, Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and a cast of dozens. You’ll be able to find my primary coverage here at SiliconANGLE, but also showing up on the TWiT Network, The Inquisitr, Nicefishfilms, Rizzn.com, and elsewhere. In the mornings, I’ll be roaming the halls of the convention center hunting down interviews, and in the afternoons, Michael and I will be anchoring a few hours of live coverage from the Texas Coworking Studios, followed by Leo’s regula

John McCrea and Chris Messina are joined by special guests — Don Thibeau of the OpenID Foundation and Drummond Reed of the Information Card Foundation — to discuss the launch of the Open Identity Exchange, the result of a year-long collaboration between the two foundations. Watch HiRes. Links related to this episode PC World's coverage of the announcement: Open Identity Exchange backs U.S. gov't privacy guidelines From the Financial Times blog: One step closer to a single sign-on for the web The official press release from the Open Identity Exchange: Open Identity Exchange Launches at RSA

This is an issue that I simply cannot wrap my head around. Spec work appears in the design field infinitely more times than any other industry. It absolutely floors me that people think that it is even remotely ethical to build their businesses by tearing down ours. Mark Hemmis’s comment on AIGA policy statement on spec work The past couple years have seen an increase in the use of crowdsourcing by companies to procure design assets. It works like this: Requesting organization posts a request for submissions to a design crowdsourcing site (e.g. 99designs,crowdSPRING, MycroBurst, etc.) Interested designers review the request, and create their entry They submit their entry to the site Requesting organization selects

Google has officially started a war.  With the launch of their life-streaming product this week, Buzz, competitors with established mail products such as Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL are now officially on notice.  Get social - fast. Buzz is Google’s response to Twitter.  For those of you that have tried the product, you will quickly see that the best part about Buzz is the fact that it is integrated with Gmail.  Aside from that, there is no massive innovation relative to established ‘Lifestream’ products like Facebook and Twitter that enable you to socialize around user’s activities.  You can follow people’s updates, they can follow you, yadda yadda.  I will say, however, it was very slick how they pre-populate some of that

Gabe Rivera's Techmeme is the news reader of choice for much of the Silicon Valley tech-setters -- more so than Techcrunch because it has a much wider selection of articles. I often see Gabe at press events, he has a press pass like other journalists. But is he a journalist? After all, he doesn't write any of the stories that appear on Techmeme. It seems that the Austin based conference South By South-West (SXSW) doesn't think he's a journalist because it refused to give Gabe a press pass. Does SXSW think that Gabe's Techmeme is a simple news aggregator and therefore not media? Probably. But Gabe is not just a software engineer with a news algorithm and a server. He's better viewed as the editor-in-chief of Techmeme with a large staff o

A friend of Art and I, Dr. Melissa Clothier, put a post up on her blog today talking about an interesting trend in society fueled in part by social media and our ever splintering layers of technology: Rent-a-friends: This Rent-A-Friend concept is intriguing. So rather than fussing with some person with a boring, involved life-story, call up Joe and go to the movie. You hang out, talk about the movie, have some temporary company and then, boom, done. No sordid break-up stories. No diatribes against back waxing and Representative Massa. No queries into your grandma’s health. No enduring pictures of the kids, or worse, vacation. From the original post at the Las Vegas Sun: We’re lonely. One in four people said they had no close friends

Are you working on a new community with big time bells and whistles that caters to a niche that you just know has been waiting for a place to call home? If so, I encourage you to push ahead full steam. But, let me caution you first. Your new community, no matter how great will not change habits. What I mean by this is you will not be able to stop potential members from posting on Facebook or twitter or their favorite Ning community.  If you are assuming that your new community will become the new gathering place for those belonging to the niche, I think you will be disappointed. Can you make it a great destination with robust content and interesting discussions? Absolutely. I know from experience what that kind of commitment can do

First of all, yes, it is a slow news day. Typically, I don’t take my news queues from Techcrunch, particularly when it has to do with pop-culture reporting. Still, a post there regarding an odd choice by new-Twitterer Conan O’Brien is worthy of note. Conan O’Brien, as you know, was forced out of late night television some time back. We talked here a bit about the prospect of him taking his act online, but we were thinking in terms of an online video show. As it turns out, he’s decided to simply take his act to Twitter. Since then, he hasn’t followed anyone back, despite having amassed well north of half a million followers in a few short days … that is until today. About two hours ago, Conan said: “I've decided to follow so