MHALLVILLE

For people who build things based on the Twitter API, and who love Twitter, there has been some wringing of hands since this post by @sippey last week about Twitter taking more control of their user experience.

The gist of the concern is that Twitter seems to be increasingly focused on developers using their API to build more value within Twitter (and specifically within tweets), and that Twitter apparently would like their partners to be less focused on building on top of Twitter. As @sippey says in his post:

Twitter cards are an important step toward where we are heading with our platform, which involves creating new opportunities to build engaging experiences into Twitter. That is, we want developers to be able to build applications that run within Tweets.

There seems to be an assumption, at Twitter and among passionate third-party developers, that Twitter has to choose between being an API-driven message bus or a company that increasingly controls the full experience end-to-end.

That’s a false choice.

There is a simple historical precedent for the kind of ecosystem Twitter can and should build: it needs to think about the underlying message bus that Twitter powers as an OS, one that supports a wide range of applications built on top of that. Windows, Mac OS, and iOS are the models, not advertising-supported web portals.

Thought of that way, there is no reason why Twitter shouldn’t and can’t be in the application business as well as the OS business. Not just one application, but many applications. Just like Microsoft and Apple have produced Word, Keynote, iMovie, iTunes, PowerPoint and Excel.

Trying to provide an end-to-end, all-encompassing user experience in one client for Twitter is a fool’s errand, especially as we move towards a more mobile-based Internet. It’s going backwards. Fred Wilson got it exactly right in his post this weekend:

Mobile does not reward feature richness. It rewards small, application specific, feature light services. I have said this before but I will say it again. The phone is the equivalent of the web application and the mobile apps you have on your home screen(s) are the features.

That is why Facebook should (and it looks like will) break its big monolithic web app into a bunch of small mobile apps. Messenger, Instagram (not yet owned by Facebook), and Camera are the model for Facebook on mobile.

Bingo. Somewhat ironic that Facebook has figured this out first.

But there is no reason why Twitter shouldn’t and can’t take a similar approach. Twitter shouldn’t want to have just one app; they should make many single-purpose, best-of-breed apps. Build them in-house, or buy the best apps out there.

Because they control the OS — the Twitter message bus — Twitter will always have built-in advantages and should always be able to create best-in-class applications that often beat third parties. That’s fine. Do that, and let the third party ecosystem fill in around those opportunities.

After all, the best ecosystems (including coral reefs) are those where everyone’s interests are spelled out, and where the each organism gains something from the others.

I wrote this post for the Vodpod blog a year or so ago, and thought I would repost here as it ties into a number of trends and themes on the blog.

Are people cutting the cord (i.e., getting rid of their cable or satellite TV)?

With Apple TV, Google TV, Boxee (the Boxee box is launching this week) and Netflix streaming coming to a huge array of devices, including most importantly the Wii and Xbox and PS3,  the challenge to the traditional television business is now present and very real.

But that threat isn’t about people cutting the cord. Instead, we’re adding a cord  — to the Internet.

The television business in the U.S. has been one of the one of the most profitable walled gardens, and one with the highest walls. Historically, it’s been difficult to get video programming on to your TV that wasn’t supplied by a cable network or television broadcaster or movie studio.

With our new Internet cord, though, we can get instant, on-demand access to programming on our TVs from places like YouTube, Vimeo, blip.tv and 1000s of other sites. The popularity of Netflix streaming — which, by some now figure accounts for 20% of all downstream traffic during the 8-10PM prime time window despite the massive limitations of their library — gives us a taste of what’s to come. On the Internet, we have 10,000,000s of clips to choose from. And that’s coming to a TV near you.

The history of cable television shows how this is likely to play out. As new programming sources are added, the amount of time we spent watching television goes up but the share owned by incumbents goes down. The amount of time we spent watching the traditional broadcast networks plunged as hundreds of new channels were added to cable networks. As we begin to watch more programming from the Internet, with it’s almost infinite supply of programming, cable and broadcast television companies have much to fear. (Graphic Source: tvbythenumbers).

For most American households, the television provides a hard-to-resist gravitational pull once we get home from work (source: Nielsen Webinar). Television viewership surges during the “prime time” hours (whereas usage of the web typically peaks in the afternoon, when people are still at work).

As it becomes as easy to watch YouTube as ABC on our televisions, what we watch during prime time will change. And this presents a huge threat to traditional broadcast and cable television, given prime time viewing accounts for 50% or more of total revenues from advertising for many cable and broadcast networks.

Arguing about “cutting the cord” misses point. That may, or may not, happen. But we’re definitely going to be adding a cord as we plug in our Apple TVs and Google TVs. And that will change things forever.

In February, I wrote this post on Jason Kilar’s treatise on video licensing economics (a great 101 if you’re interested in media licensing).

In Kilar’s post, he makes a big stink about rights owners demanding a per user per month fee for their content (something that is standard in cable deals between folks like Comcast and channels like ESPN). I speculated that Kilar was pushing this out of fear — that he was worried about this big pot of money Netflix could spend on simple fixed-fee deals (instead of per-month, per-user fees), an area where Hulu doesn’t have the cash to compete.

Reading Megan McCarthy’s piece tonight on The Atlantic (hat tip @persingerscott) makes me think it was a more nuanced, and much bolder, move — indeed, a smart bit of chess playing by Kilar. As McCardle points out, when media companies push for traditional cable-style per-subscriber per-month license fees (accompanied by hefty guarantees of course) it puts enormous pressure on Netflix’s margins. Kilar (and Hulu) know that.

Whereas similar demands (which most certainly are being made) to Hulu are less painful for them. Hulu’s subscription offering is, at least at this point, non-strategic. It’s a nice to have. The main game for them is advertising. So they can better afford to advocate these stye deals, which in turn are painful for Netflix to digest.

I don’t know, of course. what Kilar was thinking, but it’s all a good reminder that there is a fascinating battle being waged right now for digital media rights, and that even an entrenched digital incumbent like Netflix is struggling to keep pace with the rapidly changing terrain.

I haven’t seen it in action yet, just screenshots from people who have it enabled on their developer accounts. But, as Zuckerberg described the Timeline in his keynote I couldn’t help but think of a novel  from 11 years ago that I re-read this spring.

That would be “Turn of the Century” by Kurt Andersen, released in the midst of our First Big Tech Bubble of 1999, and in particular the protagonist George Mactier’s always-inventing brother-in-law who “proposes a chain of franchised, “mall-adjacent” cemeteries with video markers instead of headstones.”

Just like OnionSkin jeans in Super Sad True Love Story, Facebook Timeline-powered digital headstones are bound to happen. Bank on it.

Last night I watched Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line.”

Some movies you watch, enjoy, have a few laughs, are diverted from life for an hour or two. Others stay with you for days, weeks, months. The best, like the best novels, make you think about the Big Questions — the meaning of life, what is love, what is it to to do good, to live a good life. “The Thin Red Line” is like that.

It debuted in late 1998 — the height of Monicagate, when the American economy was booming and so many of us were seduced by the narcotic of easy money in the Dot Com boom. The film was an affront in so many ways to that era, and even though it was nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture, it of course lost out to a movie that more accurately captured the zeitgeist of the day, the amusing trifle “Shakespeare in Love.”

But that doesn’t matter. We’ve forgotten about “Shakespeare in Love” – it had all the staying power of an amuse-bouche – but great works of art endure, and indeed grow in their importance and impact. They change lives. But it takes abundant courage to make them.

That’s a lesson to keep in mind in our world here in the Valley, particularly in the era of increased froth, where the siren song of greed rings louder than ever.

Are you going to make something great, and enduring, that makes peoples lives better? Like Apple, Google, Wikipedia, WordPress, flickr, Square, Twitter, Kickstarter, Bandcamp, the Khan Academy (and, I hope, Showyou)?

Or, do you just look at business as a way to make a quick buck? Do you just want to start a grilled cheese franchise?

You are what you do.

Sorry, but if you’re a Republican you ought to be disgraced and ashamed that this man is running at the top of the polls for your party. What a joke.

When I first moved to San Francisco in 2005, I pretty much instantly became an Oakland A’s fan.

So many things about the A’s reminded me of the baseball team I grew up with — the 1970s and early 1980s era Baltimore Orioles. The terrible 1960s era multi-purpose concrete monstrosity, Memorial Stadium, an offense to the George Will purists but a delight to the rest of us. The team full of superstars and cast-off renegades; Jim Palmer and Cal Ripken and Eddie Murray, but also characters like Rick Dempsey, John Lowenstein, Tippy Martinez and the incredible and irascible manager Earl Weaver. The mostly blue collar fans, from a decaying industrial port, seeking hope and meaning missing from their daily lives by pulling for their team and reveling in wins by their underdog, small market team. With the A’s, I saw a link to all that.

I’m still an A’s fan and will be an A’s fan — American League, baby! —  but I’ll confess to really, really enjoying these 2010 Giants. Brian Wilson in particular is a blast to watch, and reminds so much of my Orioles heros — John Lowenstein (the platoon outfielder with the gift of gab) and Rick Dempsey.  They’re the team the A’s ought to have, and all credit to Brian Sabean who has done a better job of being Billy Beane than Billy Beane. At least this year.

In tomorrow’s NY Times, Maureen Dowd essentially blames Barack Obama for the craziness of the Tea Party and the rise of crazy people who are now running as Republicans for the US Senate:

Obama’s bloodless rationality has helped spawn the right’s bloodletting of irrationality. His ivory tower approach to the nation’s fears and anxieties about the economy gave rise to a tower of angry babble.

You gotta be kidding me. It’s stunning that the NY Times pays her a salary for these kind of stupid, intelligence-free turds.

There are so many things wrong with this, one hardly knows where to start. Is Dowd trying to out-insane Christine O’Donnell?

Calling Vanity Fair — would you please send Maureen back to Saudi Arabia for six months for another assignment on burqinis?

Apple (blue, up and to the right) vs. Microsoft (red, flat-lined) stock performance since 2005.