Author: josh

How Twitter Will Make Money

The topic of how Twitter might make money is so popular these days that people are writing Onion-like parodies of news stories announcing Twitter’s plans. That particular story was a really popular link on Twitter today.

But the question remains: how will Twitter make money? I think I know at least one of the ways they’ll do it, and I’m surprised that more people aren’t talking about this.

I discovered a service called I Want Sandy a year or two ago and became a user almost immediately. The gist of the idea: Sandy is your virtual assistant, reminding you of tasks and appointments as you like. The interesting part wasn’t just that Sandy kept your calendars and to-do lists organized, but that she did it all through a human-readable text-based interface. I could send Sandy an email saying something to the effect of, “Remind me to buy milk tomorrow at 5pm” right in the subject line of the email. (I believe she also had an IM interface, and of course a web interface.) And sure enough, tomorrow at 5pm I would get an SMS message (if that was my preferred method of communication) that reminded me to buy milk. Simple. Human. Useful! I found myself being confident to take on tasks and make promises knowing that I wouldn’t forget things. Sure, I’ll ping you next Tuesday about that. (Send message to Sandy.) Oh, your birthday is when? (Send message to Sandy.) You get the idea.

When Twitter came around, the folks at I Want Sandy were smart enough to register the ultra-short @s Twitter name and allow people to send messages to Sandy through that interface. I was already on Twitter and it was a convenient way to augment the service. I could be reminded of events and to-dos through Twitter direct messages too, instead of just SMS and email.

Fast-forward to November 2008. The company who runs I Want Sandy, Values of n, announced that they were purchased by Twitter. And the CEO, Rael Dornfest, became a Twitter User Experience engineer. Aha! I Want Sandy went offline in December 2008 and is no longer functional.

It seems nearly a sure thing to me that if Twitter has acquired all the intellectual property behind I Want Sandy that they’ll be integrating it with the service. It seemed to work so well that I’m not sure how they’d improve it besides tightening and deepening the service’s integration with twitter.com, but we’ll see. I’d love it if they offered it for free to make Twitter more palatable and useful to more people, but I could easily see paying $1 / month to get reminders from Twitter over SMS (or whatever) because I personally know how useful they were to me, and I know the gaping hole their absence has left. Twitter has stated that they won’t be reducing the value of their service by charging for Twitter features that are currently free. This would certainly be something over and above what is built into Twitter, and offering it as a premium, for-pay service wouldn’t reduce the value of Twitter in anyone’s mind.

So that’s my guess on at least one way they’ll make money. We’ll see if I’m right!

iPhone OS 3.0 – Accessory Ideas

The iPhone OS 3.0 presentation that happened on Tuesday really got me thinking. There were a lot of exciting announcements that are being loudly touted by the press: the arrival of a rather elegantly designed Copy and Paste to the OS, Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) support, CalDAV support, new application payment models, and device-to-device interactivity are a few favorites. These are all pretty big announcements. But the biggest announcement of the show wasn’t the addition of Copy and Paste, but something Apple is just calling “Accessories.”

Let me explain briefly what “Accessories” means for those who don’t know, and then I’ll tell you what I see in this idea’s future.

Up until now, the iPhone has had only a short list of ways in which it could interact with other devices. You could sync it with iTunes, pair it with a Bluetooth headset for hands-free phone conversations, or plug it into a music speaker system with a dock connector. It’s a simple, highly-focused list.

But what if the iPhone could talk to other kinds of hardware? Any kind of hardware? Apple gave a very safe example for starters: a custom application that would allow the iPhone to control a hardware equalizer built into a particular iPhone-compatible music speaker system. But later in the presentation, Apple showed the idea is much bigger than that. The iPhone could soon connect to things that aren’t necessarily music-related or phone-related at all. They asked us to imagine medical devices being assisted by the iPhone. Like a blood pressure cuff wherein the traditional display (which sometimes requires its own cart and custom computers) is replaced with just a cord and a dock connector. Custom software on the iPhone would display all the relevant readings from the cuff (on a large, high-resolution color screen no less), just like the current stuff does. But since the iPhone platform is so powerful, why stop there? Record the readings over time, advise the patient based on trends, and wirelessly send the collection of reports to a doctor from anywhere in the world with a click of a button. Now we’re talking. None of the blood pressure monitors I’ve ever seen could do that.

Keep in mind, also, that these new accessory connections work with both the dock connector or a Bluetooth connection, depending (I assume) on your application’s bandwidth and latency considerations. The cord doesn’t necessarily have to be there.

So what else could be done with this? I’ve come up with a few ideas. I’d love to hear yours.

Mobile Magnetic Strip Reader

It’s not easy to process credit cards wirelessly. If you want to sell something to people without a big Point of Sale cash register system and store walls around you (like, say, at a garage sale) it would seem you’re limited to taking cash. Not anymore. Hook a magnetic stripe reader up to the iPhone, write some software, and take credit card payments wirelessly from anywhere. I would be shocked if Apple wasn’t using these by November of this year in their stores to increase the number of points of sale and mitigate holiday shopping congestion. I think they’ve previously (embarrassingly) had to use Windows Mobile to do this.

Device Firmware Updates

Ever had a device whose software could be updated, but you never bothered to do it? My TV has an update to its software right now that I haven’t applied. The instructions require you to hook your PC’s serial port up to the thing with a custom cable (note: it’s not Mac compatible), run some software, etc, and you just don’t want to lug your machine downstairs, get out the cable, and go through the whole thing. What if you could just deliver the device firmware over Bluetooth through the iPhone? No portability problems, no cable, and a nice multi-touch experience that trounces whatever they created for the PC. Suddenly, all your devices can add features and fix problems by using the iPhone as the conduit to the Internet. Devices of tomorrow might come with some minimal additional hardware (Bluetooth, a dock connector cable, whatever) that leaves their future functionality a bit more open and flexible, just like the current flexibility of your computer or iPhone. They don’t now, but they will. And when they do, we’ll really start to see how things can change quickly. There’s no reason you can’t update your coffee maker or your toaster.

I understand these things were functionally possible before. But no one does them because it’s a pain and it’s hard. When Apple steps into these kinds of areas, industries change. Why do you think Congress only started to have opinions about locking cellphones to certain networks when the iPhone came out, when it was a practice that was many years old? Buzz is worth a lot, and the iPhone has it by the truckload.

Internet-connected, Highly-portable Barcode Scanner

Remember my old idea about using the iPhone to price compare? Well, the iPhone’s camera isn’t good enough to scan an average barcode in a store. Android has several apps out that do this now, but the iPhone requires that you enter the barcode digits in manually in order to provide similar functionality. Yuck. But that’s over now. Someone will definitely be making a barcode scanner that connects to the iPhone and talks to a specialized piece of software. If it’s cheap and small, it’ll be very interesting. Not because it hasn’t been done, but in part because it’s on a popular device.

Augmenting Standalone Devices

The Canon digital camera we use most around our house doesn’t have GPS built-in. It’s a bummer, because knowing where photos were taken is a powerful and useful feature (supported by iPhoto ’09, no less), but to me, it’s just not worth paying thousands of dollars for a new camera that has built-in GPS. So why not write the camera’s software to tether to the iPhone (wirelessly or not) and get that data from the phone while pictures are taken? I get GPS data on my photos without having to build the cost of GPS into the camera. Everybody wins! Except people who own cameras today. OK, no plan is perfect.

My Driveway & My Job

At the risk of being overly-metaphorical and seeing symbols where none exist, I’d like to show you my aforementioned driveway. During my job search, I’d occasionally go out with a shovel and an ice pick and work on it a little. There were a few days, like today, where the weather warmed up and made a bigger difference than anything I was able to do with my puny ice pick.

I wish I had a “Before” shot from even two days ago, but this is what it looks like today:

My Driveway, February 9th, 2009

During my job search, I came upon an early-stage startup called The Table Project that really excited me. I found myself wishing it already existed so I could use it immediately. I interviewed with them, they felt like a fantastic fit, they offered me the Lead Web Developer position, and that’s what I’m starting this Wednesday, February 11th.

I cannot believe how blessed I am to be spending my days at the intersection of the Church and social networking. I’ve always loved writing code, but who’s ever heard of sanctified code? God never forgot me in the midst of the deep darkness of the last few weeks. In fact, I think this job is why I lost my last job. Does that mean it’s a guaranteed success? No. That just means it’s what I’m supposed to be doing right now. It’s more than I deserve, and I am so thankful.

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow,
Praise Him, all creatures here below,
Praise Him above, ye heavenly host,
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Amen.

Green Grass and a Clear Driveway

Last night I had a dream. In my dream, when I woke up the next morning, it was as though May had come in the middle of January. The snow had all melted overnight, the grass was green and growing, birds were singing, the sun was shining. I remember noticing my driveway in particular–there was not a scrap of ice or snow on it. It was perfectly clear and drivable. I knew I wouldn’t have to gun it while backing out of the garage anymore just to be sure I’d make it through the thick patch of snow and ice that had been there the day before.

And yet, there we all were on January 17th, only a few days after the coldest day in five years. The green grass was somehow wrong. It shouldn’t have been like that. It was supposed to be cold. People started worrying, saying, “It got 50 degrees warmer in one day. What if it happens again tomorrow, and the day after that?” and, “See? I told you global warming was going to kill us all!”

But I just enjoyed the weather. I wished everyone else would calm down and accept the blessing of not having to deal with the literally-deadly wind and cold we had endured only days earlier.

I’m pretty sure the dream has something to do with the mental state I’ve been in lately. My brain is crafting some pretty clever metaphors on its off time. Last Wednesday, on the 14th, I was laid off from Enclarity. My position was eliminated. The Vice President of my division called me into his office and told me that they were scaling back significantly in their web-related efforts, and that I and many others were being let go that day. I don’t want to risk revealing anything I shouldn’t about Enclarity, so that’s all the detail I’ll give about what happened, but I’m very happy that I left on good terms, and they made it quite clear they’d take me back if they could.

In the 24 hours after I was let go, Minnesota experienced the coldest weather it has seen in five years, Stephanie’s car got stuck in a ditch, Caleb got sick and vomited seven times from 1am to 4:30am while Steph and I tried groggily to nurse him back to health and back to sleep, and I struggled (and twice failed) to move all my personal data off the MacBook Pro I had used while at Enclarity and into a smaller hard drive in an older, non-portable Mac mini.

It seemed everything I touched was covered in thick ice and snow, making each decision riskier and more likely to fail, making simple tasks more difficult, sucking the joy and heat from life. But then, the dream. It reminded me of this passage from Zechariah 13:7-9:

“Awake, O sword, against my shepherd,
against the man who stands next to me,”
declares the Lord of hosts.

“Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered;
I will turn my hand against the little ones.
In the whole land, declares the Lord,
two thirds shall be cut off and perish,
and one third shall be left alive.
And I will put this third into the fire,
and refine them as one refines silver,
and test them as gold is tested.
They will call upon my name,
and I will answer them.
I will say, ‘They are my people’;
and they will say, ‘The Lord is my God.'”

Refining Fire, You are welcome here. Come, test, consume and purify.

Mike Rowe on Discovery, Realization and Lamb Castration

I saw this video tonight (via @siracusa) and was absolutely blown away. The video is a bit over 20 minutes long, but it blew my mind and I want to share it with you.

I want to be absolutely clear about this: I pay a lot of lip service to respecting farmers. (My father’s father, who lived in Forest City, Iowa, was a farmer his entire life.) I talk about how important factory workers and construction workers and mechanics are.

But when it really comes down to it, I am one of those elitist jerks who thinks that he’s better than a blue collar job. In my mind (and in more subtle behaviors) I degrade manual labor. I just want to confess that and point out that if we, as a society, keep making more and more people like me without making more people like the folks mentioned in this video, we’re in big trouble. I don’t know exactly what or how to change, but I’m very personally interested in the topic.