Despite the new mobile OS being heralded as a return to form for Microsoft, the main features of WinPhone 7 aren’t the ones I’m most excited about. Instead, there’s a whole clutch of features that I think are going to be incredibly useful for anyone who uses their phone for social networking. The big one is the way that the phone integrates all your contacts from various networks into one place. While it’s great to see Facebook and Windows Live statuses sitting side by side, I’m hoping to see plugins for Twitter and maybe LinkedIn appear on here as well. I’m also hoping that it’ll play nice with Google’s Mail, Contacts and Calendar push services, although these will probably go through an Exchange-style interface.

The People hub: OS-level social network integration

The great thing for me here is that I can unlock the phone and see what’s going on – I don’t have to treat each service separately by going into it’s individual app. Since I started heavily using Twitter, I’ve almost abandoned Facebook and the huge number of contacts I have there. I’m hoping that centralised services like this will help to bring me back the other way and reconnect with my Facebook friends. More than this though, I’m hoping that it’ll allow for some great cross-pollination of ideas. Being able to forward posts from one service to another would be incredibly useful.

The other great thing for me is the integration of XBox Live. It finally means that the people I hook up with for videogaming don’t get treated as a separate entity but instead get pulled in to my other social networks. The inclusion of multiplayer gaming on the handset is great news as well – I think that turn based games such as Chess, Poker and even Civilization will work well on the platform. Although gaming has taken off in a big way on the iPhone, it still remains very much a single player affair. By introducing social gaming to the platform’s core, more multiplayer titles should start to emerge.

The Game hub: Finally, XBox Live integration

The way that WinPhone 7 draws social networks together and integrates them is a big plus. Microsoft aren’t the only people who have spotted this trend – Google recently launched their Buzz service in order to achieve much the same thing. The key difference though is in the level of integration – Microsoft are unifying the networks together, but not adding anything further on top of it. Google on the other hand are encapsulating all merged content with a Buzz wrapper, allowing comments and ratings to be added on almost anything regardless of where it came from. The key challenge for Google will be to mimic the level of integration into Android in a way that doesn’t upset an established userbase – not a straightforward challenge at all. There’s also a groundswell of opinion that goes against

I’m looking forward to getting some hands-on time with the Windows Phone when it comes out later this year. While it’s unlikely to be an iPhone killer, I think that having an alternative way of doing things and a different product in the market can only be a good thing. I think it will encourage more people to take the smartphone plunge, sitting alongside the iPhone and Android as a viable option. That said, the next smartphone battle isn’t going to be for users. With several directly competing platforms each competing for a developer’s attention, getting them on board and developing apps for one system in favour of another is going to be challenging.

The problem is that as gaming takes on more co-operative multiplayer aspects, it becomes less a discrete or isolated activity and more a part of that player’s social network. Although the underlying technology is different, there’s not much difference between challenging a friend to a game of Scrabble on Facebook or inviting them to play a few rounds with you on Street Fighter 4 on a console.

Uncharted 2: one way Twitter flow.

When you move to MMO or virtual world gaming, a player might build up a list of tens or even hundreds of social contacts based on the various activities that player might take part in. A player might also have a social network on Facebook, Twitter or Bebo that’s completely isolated. Where games do connect with social networks, it’s all one-way.

There are ways around this problem: PC gamers can run their games in a window in order to track their various social networks. Console gamers have it slightly easier – the Xbox 360 for example has integration with Windows Live Messenger but it’s limited to that single service. It’s not an elegant solution, which is why many gamers turn to separate devices to monitor their social networks.

The interesting thing is that this kind of activity, where you’re displaying small snippets of personalised information to a user, has been around for a while in the smartphone and web industries. A widget engine, can create an environment for small applications to run, which can then interface with services running on the internet. All you would need is for the widget engine to be incorporated either into the console or the PC operating system. Developing and publishing widgets is then a fairly simple affair.

There are several challenges that immediately become apparent when trying to encourage widgets as a platform for displaying external information in-game.

• Controlling the user experience: Developers are keen to refine and protect the look and feel of a game. System alerts are acceptable, but others are kept to the background. There’s no reason though why developers couldn’t extend the widget API in order to control look and feel, allowing widgets to blend in with the game interface. There are even imaginative ways this could be used, such as projecting messages onto in-game scenery before fading away, or adding Flickr photostream images as poster backdrops.
• Gaining mindshare: Persuading developers to take this on might be challenging. There is evidence though from the PC gaming platform that gamers are willing to learn the skills needed to customise their own gaming experience. These customisations can be shared with others, and there are already established networks such as Curse.com available for users to upload, rate and share addons.
• Allowing shutoff: Just like when you watch a film at the cinema, sometimes you want to switch off contact from the outside world. Features like whitelisting for important messages or contacts might also be an idea.
• Being extensible: New networks and utilities come online all the time, and it’s important for any framework to be flexible enough to cope with new additions. Likewise, being able to control which networks you interface with is pretty crucial.

Games have already started publishing updates to social networks. If these changes come into play, our social networks can start updating our games as well.

iPhone: Complex kit

I’ve recently handled a number of queries from friends and family about problems with their iPhones. These issues can be as simple as the battery indicator not updating. They can also be as serious as the phone not waking out of standby to alert you of an incoming call, or refusing to charge or sync when docked. While some problems can be ignored, others can make the phone unusable.

The good news is that in all the cases I’ve seen, the iPhone has been easy to fix without any professional help or even opening the device.

Symptoms that I’ve seen include:

• Refusing to charge, either when docked for syncing or plugged directly into the mains
• Refusing to sync when docked
• Not updating battery/signal strength
• Apps not loading, or attempting to load then crashing
• Not receiving incoming calls
• Not receiving text messages, or the receipt being delayed

Notifications: They all add up

The reason for all these problems is usually straightforward. Almost all phones have two halves – a radio side which manages the network connection and a user interface side which controls how you interact with the phone. As smartphones become increasingly powerful, the software they run grows in complexity. They behave more like mini-computers than simple mobile phones, running a range of apps developed by third parties. They can accept incoming connections and push notifications. All of these require a slice of the phone’s limited resources to use

If a phone runs out of resources it might not be able to handle a request. This request might be an incoming call or message, a push notification, a charging signal or launching an app. You can try to free up resources by pausing the music player or closing some web pages. This isn’t always effective – you might be using an app that has a memory leak, meaning that resources are never freed up when the app is closed.

One advantage the iPhone 3GS has over the 3G and original iPhone is the internal memory available. The 3GS has 256MB of internal memory, compared to 128MB in the 3G and classic iPhone. As a result resource conflicts should in theory occur less often on the newer 3GS.

Power cycling: a hidden trick

The solution is probably what you’d expect if you were dealing with a regular computer – in most cases simply switching it off and on again will do the trick. There are two ways you can do this:

• Hold down the power/lock button for about 5 seconds. A “slide to power off” button should appear. Switch the phone off, then switch it back on once it has finished shutting down
• If the “slide to power off” button does not appear, hold down the power/lock button and the home button (the one with the square on it) together for about 10 seconds. The phone should shut down instantly. You can then use the power button to restart the phone normally.

There are also some steps that you can take in order to keep your phone running smoothly and should be part of your regular maintenance cycle.

• Restart the phone to clear out any memory leaks. You should look to do this at least once a month.
• Be ruthless about push notifications and deactivate the ones you don’t really need.
• Regularly clean out the emails you have stored on your phone, archiving them offline if you need to.
• Remove apps that you’re not using, or tried once but never re-used. You can keep them in iTunes in case you want to use them again.
• Track your app usage – if you continue having problems, it might be down to an app you commonly use. Try to narrow it down from your usage patterns and feedback the app has received on iTunes and elsewhere
• Try not to have too many web pages open – close down the ones you’re not using.

It’s worth pointing out that these aren’t faults with the iPhone. The issues it faces are the same as with any other complex computing device that runs third-party apps. Recognising it as such, instead of the more simplistic mobile phones we’ve grown up with, helps to shape how we keep the device running smoothly. Just like with a computer, persistent problems may be an indication of needing to restore the phone from a backup or even reformat it completely to factory defaults. You may have a hardware fault, in which case it’s well worth going back to either the store you bought it from or your local Apple store. Hopefully though, these tips above will help you in being able to eliminate most of the common problems.

Ever heard of the phrase “end-to-end”? It’s what service providers use when trying to test out new products that they’re looking to bring to market. They test out every step of the process, be it order fulfilment, streaming entertainment or real-time data services. Part of that process is about catching the weakpoints and improving them, but it’s also about ensuring that adequate customer support mechanisms are there in order to catch things when they go wrong. Your perfectly designed product may start to fall apart when unexpected system behaviour creeps in, especially if the interactions between systems are complex and non-trivial. It’s therefore surprising when a firm seems to have dropped on this.

It became inevitable that Google would release the Nexus One once the period of “dogfooding” was completed. I’ve heard it more eloquently put as “drinking one’s own champagne”, but the process is the same. It may have been that this was little more than a holiday gift to its employees, as there’s little time to test anything between it starting on 12th December and going on sale on 5th January, especially with Christmas in the middle.

On paper the Nexus One has all the makings of a great phone. An OLED touchscreen, noise cancelling microphone and full speech-to-text tick a fair few boxes, along with a 3D capable display and turn by turn navigation. There is the glaring omission of multitouch and the limitation of only 512MB being made available for app storage, but on the whole it’s a solid package. Where things start to come unstuck is in the overall “service wrap”, or how you’re looked after as a customer once you have it.

As Google is selling the phone directly to customers, the margin of responsibility has become blurred. Early indications are that Google, htc (the manufacturer) and T-Mobile aren’t clear on the structure of this relationship themselves, with customers being the ones losing out, both with reception issues and ordering/storefront problems. Unsurprisingly there’s been a bit of a backlash from this, with some consumers feeling bitter about forking out $530 for a device that costs $174 to make.

Google are learning the hard way just what it means to have your name on the hardware, and how having integrated support for that hardware is important.It’s for this reason, above the technical considerations, why going for an iPhone or Palm Pre may be a more sensible choice at present. The bleeding edge is exactly that, with various improvements required before that edge becomes dulled. That said, there’s no reason why this is a bad thing for Google, Apple, or the smartphone market in general.

The competition between Google, Apple, Palm and RIM is certainly a good thing for the smartphone marketplace, and for consumers in general. With it quality should go up, while the price of this advanced technology should go down. Firms like Motorola who plan to use Andriod for all their future devices may feel threatened by Google’s stance. This may provide Microsoft with an opportunity to move back into the game when it releases Windows Mobile 7 later this year.

A gap is also emerging between smartphones such as Apple, Palm and Andriod, and those made by other firms such as Nokia, Samsung and LG. While the low-tech and low end area of the market can be a legitimate place to target, it’s usually where handset margins are squeezed. Traditional phone manufacturers need to be wary about being squeezed into this space by newcomers dominating the smartphone end. Richard Scoble probably has the right idea when he says that there is more likely to be competition between the web-friendly smartphone sector and the boxed-in group in the middle of the market. These phones with Facebook and Twitter apps “built-in” are likely to be squeezed out of the market as smartphones move to the middle-range.

There. I’ve said it. It’s painful to admit, I know, but it’s the honest truth. My 32 inch HD ready TV sits languishing in the corner of the lounge, gathering dust aside from the occasional visit to the XBox or DVD player. My radio hasn’t been switched on since… well.. come to think of it I don’t even know where it is. I haven’t had premium TV such as Sky or Virgin Media in two years, nor do I feel compelled to get one.

It’s the same story with newspapers. I used to religiously read one during my morning commute. I’d pick up a copy of the Times if I was after something to read on the way in to work, or the Evening standard if I wanted to catch up with news on the way back. I always used to focus on the same three sections: world news, business news and technology. The sports supplement would usually be discarded if there was no mention of Rugby or Formula 1, which was most occasions. Nowadays, I don’t even bother with reading the freebie Metro.

That’s not to say I don’t like the broadcast media industry. I think that there are some incredibly creative people there, who produce some very good quality work and understand their businesses and markets very well. I think that they work hard at what they do and deserve credit – and reward – for it. I’m in no way saying I want something for free – on the contrary, I want to spend money on it. I guess it’s the model of broadcasting itself that I’m no longer a fan of.

It’s tragic in it’s own way – technologies and mediums which once dominated my life now lie dormant, while others have taken their place. I get a collection of podcasts delivered to my iPhone every morning. I pull down the latest news articles, find out what people are chattering about on Twitter and check my email inbox for alerts. I don’t feel any less informed – in fact sometimes I feel that the amount of information I have is still too much – so why should I worry?

The trouble is, there are certain bits of mainstream media that I miss. Some of them are particular shows such as US crime drama, sci-fi series and so on. Some of it is the opinion and comment that I used to listen to, not so much for guidance on how to think but for the chance to examine their argument and try to counter it. I miss the opinion articles from newspapers for much the same reason. I think social media has largely made up for and replaced the 2nd item – the interactivity of it means that people can really engage with your opinions much more meaningfully than before.

So where does that leave me with the mainstream media? I mean, I still want bits of what they have to offer, it’s just that I’m not sure I agree with how they want to charge me for it. I guess it’s to do with the way it’s all packaged together – news is bundled together with comment, sport is bundled together with business, and X Factor is bundled with Top Gear. The stuff I want is lumped together with a large amount of stuff I don’t want, which makes me feel like I don’t get value for money. On top of that I’ve got to make sure I’m there to consume it when it’s being broadcast, otherwise I’m likely to miss out. Yes, I know that there’s iPlayer and Sky Plus, but one doesn’t contain all the content that’s broadcast and the other costs extra on top of a regular subscription (Plus my landlord won’t let me have a dish, but that’s another story).

So far this must have sounded like a full-on wingefest against mainstream media, but I do feel that they still have an important role to play. I’m not afraid of giving them my hard-earned cash as long as I’m getting the kind of service I’d like to have. If I’m taking out a contract with you, I have to feel that all the elements that make up the service you offer me are of value.

I should be clear, I don’t want to turn to torrents. They’re a hassle to set up, there’s risks attached unless you set them up very carefully and the results can be hugely variable. I’d rather have something else that worked for me, but had the breadth of content that I’d really go for. It’s also got to be reasonably priced – as an example iTunes wants £50 for the entire current season of House MD or £2.50 per episode, which makes little sense to me. I’d rather pay something much lower and get a “x number of watches” deal before buying it on Blu-ray later on. I’d also want to watch it on the device of my choosing – something like either my laptop, a DLNA/UPNP box if I splash out on one or similar. Instead of offering me variations on a bundle theme, offer me real pick-n-mix. Bundle in different ways – prepay more, get more show credits, that kind of thing.

I’m left with a question – am I asking too much from all of this, am I being unreasonable here? Is it strange of me to want mainstream media to change from being a broadcaster to a widecaster, helping me discover both popular and niche content in a variety of formats? Am I strange in wanting to pay them money to do this, and should just go for the freebies while I can? Is there another way of doing this, or a service already available that I don’t know about?

All I know is that I have cash in my pocket ready to splash out on the right kind of service. Of course, a market of one is probably no market at all…

One particular emerging service is open authentication. Groups such as the OpenID Foundation have emerged in order to promote a common set of standards for developers to use, while several decentralised OpenID providers have sprung up. In essence it all sounds like a good thing, with a site visitor benefiting by being able to use an existing username and password combination. The developer also wins by only having to use a set of freely available modules in order to support authentication instead of designing it themselves from scratch. Everything sounds perfect, right?

As you’ve probably guessed, there is a fly in the ointment. That fly is the relentless barrage of security nightmares that we face every time we switch our computer on and connect with the outside world. Everything from phishers to keyloggers are out there to try and find a chink in our virtual armour or our achilles heel. All of them lie in wait, hoping for a whiff of a password or a hint of a credit card number that they can then trade in underground markets. Don’t think that videogames are immune from this as well – indications are that credentials for World of Warcraft accounts can sell for up to twice as much as a set of credit card details.

Of course, the next step is to look at where your open authentication might be used. A collection of social networking sites might not be that big a deal – both Facebook and Twitter are setting themselves up as identity providers. At the moment, all that you’d be likely to lose is your reputation if someone managed to gain access to your Twitter account, particularly if you have a large number of followers. If it becomes possible to access your web-based email through the same service then suddenly all the other websites you use with a “forgotten your password?” function suddenly become vulnerable as well. This might expose things like names and addresses of friends and family members, which other online communities you visit and how you access them, and so on.

Paranoid yet? Potentially you should be, but that doesn’t mean that a solution can’t be implemented. Two-factor authentication has been kicking around for years, with reliance on something you know (a password) combined with something you have (a fingerprint, a retina scan or a key-ring with a digital display that changes every minute) in order to get around keyloggers and phishers sniffing your credentials out of the ether. Trouble is, fingerprint and retinal scanners are expensive, while it’s difficult to make a case for sending out tokens and dongles when a firm is effectively supplying a free service to customers.

There is another option. With the mobile phone becoming an increasing necessity in our lives, it’s becoming safer to assume that anyone using popular online services has one. As a result a number of free apps have emerged in order to support two-factor authentication, most notably from Blizzard Entertainment and Verisign. With these, the only cost is in developing the app itself before uploading it to the handset supplier app stores.

Twitter has also been moving towards OAuth as a way for granting applications access to a user’s account. The trouble with such techniques though is that they still fall back on the standard username and password, except that the user is logging in to Twitter directly instead of the website requesting access. It also grants access permanently until removed, meaning that the third party now has continual access to your details instead of the time required to support the transaction. For occasions where regular access is not required, the use of OAuth tokens is not suitable. That doesn’t mean that OAuth should be scrapped entirely – for apps that regularly need access to our individual identity data, a periodic refresh mechanism is fine. Sitting it alongside a solution that works for those one-off moments, or even to approve regular-access apps/OAuth tokens, would be a good move.

But why bother going to all this expense? At the end of the day, it’s about two things: the damage that someone misusing your credentials can cause, and the amount of time it’ll take to fix them again. Having to fix either of them is unappealing, yet whenever we use open authentication we run the risk of this happening. It’s crucial that this problem is addressed as part of the move towards identification services in order to maintain confidence in the social networking infrastructure as it moves to support them. Without it, all it takes is a couple of large scale compromising incidents for growth in the medium to stall.

As always, comments are welcome. If I’m wide of the mark or spot on, feel free to add your thoughts.

The question then evolved to one of business – should businesses just soak up followers, never follow up and just tweet broadcast, or should they use it as a tool to engage their followers and respond to queries as well? This one’s a trickier question to answer, and really needs to be broken down into chunks in order to understand how businesses are using Twitter already and how they can develop this in the future.

The passive monitor

It’s no secret that firms already monitor the internet for discussions involving them and their products. References cropped up during the twitter discussion, while anyone who runs a blog or similar will have seen the various media monitoring firms scan their articles whenever a particular business name crops up. It’s natural for this to extend into publicly viewable social networks such as twitter, where keyword searches are easy to perform and can provide instant results on what people are saying or linking to when discussing the firms they interact with. For some businesses, this is as far as their involvement with social networks goes.

The broadcaster

In previous years, it was the email newsletter, the RSS feed or the “news” webpage that kept customers informed about new products or services that a business was launching. Nowadays, Twitter feeds and Facebook fan pages are beginning to replace RSS as the medium of choice when informing customers about recently added product lines. News publishers are starting to use Twitter to announce new articles, with even blog authors getting in on the act of announcing when a new post has gone up. It’s a simple idea, but it only uses one half of a social network’s potential. Users become familiar with the concept of two-way communication, and can quickly get turned off if it becomes too businesslike or mundane.

The engager

Possibly the hardest trick to master is becoming more engaging with customers using social networks. Customers prefer businesses that follow them back, and perceive that those who don’t are usually unengaging broadcasters. Customers prefer to have relationships with the businesses they use, and some of them are now starting to use Twitter as a natural extension to this. Having said that, people understand that not all firms should be on Twitter and that it largely depends on what typeof business they’re in and what they’d use the service for.

The main concern when a business looks at using Twitter is cost – will it require substantial investment to engage with customers over Twitter? There’s no reason to suggest it would – customers already have access to their suppliers via phone, email or even face-to-face in a high street store. Corporations may be fearful of a deluge of complaints heading their way through social networks, without realising that their great power is being able to gain instant feedback and respond to everyone at once instead of having to send out individual replies.

One thing that all forms should be aware of is how customers want to engage with them and being able to cater for that. It doesn’t mean having to set up shop on every single social network, but making sure that the business has a suitable presence on ones that customers are using already is a sensible move. It’s what separates your local family butcher from a local electrical retailer – you would expect the latter to be more responsive to social networks than the former. It’s also sensible to understand what your customers prefer to use each medium for – do they prefer to phone up to discuss billing issues, do they prefer the high street store when looking to make a purchase? How does it interlink with other ways in which you support customers online – do you provide self-service or self-help online, or even live chat support? With each of these things, the likelihood of customers contacting a business via Twitter about these issues is reduced.

The future

Indications are that Twitter and social networks in general should be examined by all firms seeking to put together a communications strategy that involves some online aspects. Their strategic choices on how they build and use online presences will affect how customers perceive them, and should be considered carefully. One thing is clear though – more study and research is required in this area in order for businesses to become more comfortable with how hey handle this medium.

Communications constantly change. Call centres, email responses and online help tools are all examples of how business has needed to evolve in order to keep in contact with customers. All the indications are that this will continue to happen, with instant messaging, Google Wave and VOIP all becoming potential additions in how customers may want to interact. Social networks form a part of this evolutionary change, and it is important for business to keep them on the radar when forming plans. The challenge will be making sure these plans are developed and constantly refreshed as the communication landscape changes.

The Soon I’m referring to in this case is about the imminent release of Google Wave into public beta, following several months of developer-only sandbox access. If you’re interested in more detail about it and one and a half hours spare, you might want to watch the initial developer conference presentation here. In brief, it’s a new communication method that Google hopes will eventually replace email as the protocol of choice. Instead of an email essentially being a file that’s sent from one person to another, a wave is a conversation stored on a central server that you invite people to edit. You can embed media into a wave like photos, video and applets in the same way that you can embed them in an email, but again a single copy is held centrally. Changes are tracked much like a wiki, and several people can edit or add to a wave at the same time. Updates can even be displayed character by character in real-time.

All this sounds pretty reasonable when you’re sitting at your PC at home or at work. We have solid, reliable Internet connections that we tend to rely on. They’re perfect for apps that completely exist on the Internet, where you go to a website with your browser and know that by and large, what you’re doing will work. It’s why there’s been this huge resurgence of thin client computing, where whole teams have a very basic PC with a browser installed, accessing every system and application through the browser. All the storage is done on a collection of servers, with modern networks and infrastructure taking the load. Google have even designed Wave so that different businesses and organisations can have their own installation, with Wave servers across the world talking to each other when information needs to be shared between them. To achieve this, all the protocols and the majority of the software will be open sourced.

Look ma, no wires!

Web apps are fine when you have a solid, stable Internet connection.But what happens when you want to access your Waves while away from the office or travelling on vacation? The MaxTatton Blog poses this type of question by pondering why Google haven’t sought to integrate Wave into their Android mobile operating system and making it a unique selling point of the device.The difficulty is, it’s not as simple as simply providing a mobile-tailored version of the Wave website. There are people who like to access their email offline, like the Blackberry user who clicks out replies to messages on the Tube or the road warrior who checks his email archive for key items. These are people who understand that the Internet is not always there for them, and who need communications mechanisms that understand and support this.

While it’s likely that there are engineers working away in the background on this, it becomes a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Do you rush out and support a protocol that has little early adoption in the hope to foster growth further, or do you hold back on development until you have more certainty that the investment is worthwhile? Where would the tipping point be if development was held back, and what would it look like? Should it be Google’s place to develop a mobile interface, or should it be left to other developers? Do you start building Wave to Email or Wave to IM bridges first, or do you look to run access to each technology in parallel? All these questions start brimming to the surface as soon as you look at integrating it with your existing organisation, and there’s no easy answer to any of them. That said, Google shot itself in the foot when it announced that it wouldn’t directly support Internet Explorer.

Catering for the client

Any kind of mobile wave client would need to evolve some kind of push and sync capability in order to work for most heavy email users. Products like BlackBerry, GoodMail and so on cater for instances where a handset wanders out of coverage, catching up when it reappears and re-establishes a connection. They involve a datastore of communications that’s held on the device and allows the user to browse messages whenever it’s convenient. Apple do a similar thing with the Visual Voicemail service on iPhone – messages are downloaded as audio files and saved on the handset to play back whenever they’re needed. Looking at the Wave architecture though, all of this sync-federate-journal work is performed by the central server, in concert with other Wave servers hosted by other organisations. As a result, any Wave for Mobile capability is going to involve running what looks like a mini Wave server in it’s own right, playing sync and catch-up when it can.

Syncing email in itself is a relatively straightforward task – you push out an alert to the handset that tells it there are emails to pick up, the handset connects and downloads the waiting messages. Comparing that to a journaled XML document where the user may only have visibility of small chunks, and things start to get slightly more complicated. Start allowing editing to happen in real-time, with updates being broadcast character by character, and the complexity grows even further. Part of the job of any mobile Wave service is to cut down the data sync to only what’s needed to maintain cohesive communication. This is partly to ensure that the average handset owner doesn’t get bombarded with update alerts continually, but also to make sure that the data connection doesn’t get saturated with updates that don’t really add value to the message. Saturating the connection may be more of a struggle with a 3G or WiFi connection, but many current email devices only use 2G for communication in order to extend battery life. In addition, WiFi hotspots are limited and 3G coverage focuses on urban areas, forcing 2G as the network capability to design for.

It’s clear to see that the mobile client is already becoming a complex beat in it’s own right, just in order to be able to update and sync itself with the central Wave server. Throw in the additional controls that most enterprise IT managers require, such as password management, remote lock & wipe and so on, and it becomes a substantial project. Even then, the developer will need to work out if his client can interface directly with the Wave server, or if some form of middleware or bridge will be needed in order to provide a suitable level of service.

If not soon, then when?

It’s clear that Google needs to get an overall solution together for Wave that involves not just the server and desktop, but the Mobile user as well. This solution needs to be able to cater for situations where data connectivity is a scarce and intermittent resource but can still deliver a good user experience. That’s a big challenge, particularly for an engineering team that’s currently working at full tilt on either developing the mobile OS further or refining the Wave server infrastructure. As Lars Rasmussen mentioned during the Developer presentation, Google are looking to the developer community to fill in the gaps and as far as gaps go, this one’s huge. Once the server code becomes open sourced, there may be an increase in development from other third parties.

One thing is clear though, if Google wants to make this technology a success, it’s going to need to do more than give away Android phones to get other big players interested.

But of course, you know this already. It’s all well documented, well understood well publicised. We get that media in general is having a hard time of late. We appreciate it, feel sorry for them, but move on.

News Corporation: expanding the use of paywalls

There is one interesting nugget to the tale though. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is looking at monetising it’s news organisations. This means that much like you’d pay for a newspaper, you’d pay to access content on their website. While this itself is nothing new – the model is already used on the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, the spread to other more mainstream publications is interesting. By their very nature though, mainstream content has more news agencies devoted to it. Given the choice, I suspect most readers would prefer their generic news to be free rather than having to fork out for it. This leaves media in a rather precarious position – what is it that they produce that readers feel is worth paying for?

For me it’s tied in to the magazines I read, the websites I browse and the podcasts I watch or listen to. I rarely if ever by a newspaper these days – almost all the latest information can be reached on my iPhone as I’m heading in to work, and I can even tailor it to my interests. For me the real value of a journalist isn’t being first with the news, it’s about having a unique opinion or a novel insight on things. It’s about being able to share your opinions and insights with an anonymous reader in an engaging and clear manner, all the while being able to reason your thoughts with facts and examples. For me it’s also the one thing that doesn’t decay with time. A journalist’s thoughts at that moment, captured on a page, are worth preserving.

Which brings me neatly round to the second half of this topic, the crowdsourcing project known as Wikipedia. Over the years, the world’s biggest online encyclopedia has needed to develop content policies in order to avoid promoting hoaxes and hosting inaccurate and in some cases libellous material. The key policy in this case is regarding the verifiability of information:

The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true. Editors should provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged, or the material may be removed.

This means that almost every Wikipedia article has references at the bottom of it so that readers can verify what the article states. Being an online encyclopedia, many of these references are online sources that have previously been vetted for accuracy and reliability. They almost act as referrals, taking readers from the encyclopedia article to the reference material used to make it. It’s at this point where the idea of news agencies using paywalls to charge and gate access to their content, breaks the process of creating and updating articles.

Wikipedia relies on volunteers in order to produce and maintain articles, and while they’ll happily donate their free time, it’s fair to say that producing good quality new content is a lengthy process and hard work. Once you start asking these volunteers to fork out for subscriptions to publications in order to research a story, several things may start to occur. The most obvious one is that the charging organisations get fewer citations in encyclopedia articles, leading to fewer referrals and fewer page impressions. A more subtle effect though is subjective bias creeping in to articles, particularly if those media organisations that elect to charge have a similar political leaning. There’s also the reduction in volunteer workforce if only some of them are able to afford to maintain online media subscriptions and yet have the free time to work substantially on article content – it adds a tilt on a formerly level playing field. Finally, there’s this whole verifiability aspect – how can a casual reader verify a fact if the source material is hidden behind a digital subscription?

At the end of the day, I feel emotionally that erecting a wall around content is somewhat of an anathema to me. It breaks the foundation of being able to freely construct webs of linked pages that take a reader on a journey from one website to another. It hearkens back to a darker age of the Internet when walled gardens, content portals and gateways were the modus operandi instead of the open access service we have today. More than that though, it means that there are creative, insightful people out there whose opinions I will never read. Not because I’ll never stumble upon their work, but because their work will be squirreled behind a paywall beyond my sight.

Putting the imagery of battling industry heavyweights to one side for a moment , it’s worth focusing on the intricacies of the deal itself. It’s interesting that TechCrunch reports that the deal is more about talent rather than product acquisition. With this, we’re more likely to see FriendFeed slowly wound down as a separate service as Facebook incorporates more of the former’s capability. This means that all of the aggregation and real-time feed management that currently resides in FriendFeed will eventually find it’s way into Facebook in one form or another. Users already use Facebook to comment on links, articles and posts made by their friends, so FriendFeed doesn’t really add anything new here.

It’s Reveloution that comes close to explaining why the deal is important, but relegates them to the bottom of a five-point list. Ask anyone that manages a portal, website or other content respository and they’ll tell you that one of the most important concepts they work on is how visitors can discover content, either through an external search or by traversing the site once they’ve entered it. Journalists and marketers want their content to be discovered by as many people as possible, while advertisers and site designers want to maximise the relevance and opportunity for advertising alongside it. Make it easy for a user to discover more content that’s meaningful to them and the theory is that they’ll return to read more content housed there at a later date. They also recognise that conversations happen around content, but that unlike older mechanisms such as blogposts and forums the conversations are shifting to areas such as Twitter or Facebook that can potentially be much harder to mine for feedback. Again, these conversations are happening in real-time (linking back to the importance of real-time search).

All this is good stuff, but it doesn’t exactly show where the industry is heading. And although a few key components are highlighted, it doesn’t exactly round off the idea. To get to that, it’s probably worth looking back on an older technology – portals. Back when Yahoo and Google were fighting it out, the concept of personalised search portals emerged. The idea was that you’d set one as your homepage so that every time you launched your browser, you’d have content that was relevant to you. Their two products – iGoogle and My Yahoo! – are still out there and being used, but have failed to make an impact on the world’s browsing habits. They’re underpowered and underpersonalised, relying on a more generic approach. And it’s in this area where the Facebook-FriendFeed tech can really shine. Imagine that your homepage is filled with content from across all areas in which you have an interest, all tagged and sorted for your convenience. Things that your friends have found might have conversations attached, encouraging you to delve deeper. You might find something and want to alert others to it yourself – the key thing is that be it a blog post, status update, news article or anything else, you get the opportunity to discover it, share it and discuss it in one place. And by incorporating all this in one site like Facebook, it provides even more opportunity to provide advertising around it.

So that’s the deal, but what about the tech? The key thing about a portal is providing interconnects for people to drop in their own content, and there are signs that Facebook is already moving in this direction. By providing support for a multitude of apps from image feeds to multiplayer games, Facebook is moving away from being a service that people consume and towards a platform that developers create their own services to run on. This is most evidenced in games like Mafia Wars, a micropayments based MMO game that is available via Facebook amongst other methods. It’s not a world apart to imagine some of our favourite content providers developing small facebook apps or even just facebook-friendly feeds to sit on our portal view in a similar way. The trouble is, running a portal requires awareness of the symbiotic nature of the many services we use, and it’s not exactly clear that Facebook understands this.

While it’s clear that some analysts see this as an opportunity for Facebook to take on Twitter at it’s own game (or that it’ll even prompt Google to push for a buyout of Twitter), I’m not so sure that it’ll happen or even that it’s needed. Nowadays, web content can be commonly exposed through APIs. Both Twitter and Google have a set of APIs that allow developers to wrap services around them, from user authentication to automated status updates. It’s one of the reasons why there are tens of iPhone Twitter apps each offering a different experience, while there still remains just one for Facebook. But by leveraging the power of these APIs, it becomes far more possible to generate a tailored experience. And should Twitter fall out of favour and be replaced by something else, all a portal would have to do is access those new interconnects or APIs presented by whatever replaces it.

It’s thoughts like this that make the recent announcement of Facebook Lite all the more confusing. Although it’s purportedly intended for users in India, China and Russia where broadband isn’t commonly available, it also has a very similar look and feel to the web view of Twitter. While producing a lite version of Facebook is commendable, I just can’t help but feel they should be focusing on what makes Facebook a unique experience, instead of trying to ape another service that already works well. Facebook doesn’t need to compete with Twitter, it just needs to think smartly about how it can integrate Twitter’s open services into it’s emergent platform.

If Facebook’s serious about becoming the home of all our networks and not just our social ones, it needs to open up a little first. The web connoisseur of today is a fickle beast that doesn’t much care for limitations or walled gardens, yet values being able to integrate or mash-up services for a personalised experience. Facebook currently have the momentum, but there’s always some startup working out of a garage somewhere that may just beat them to it.