GMail, the Web OS client. Again.
Earlier today I talked about file-sharing and its relation to IM and Social Networking. I finished the post pointing out that Google was way ahead of the game with IM integration in GMail.
Just breaking is this post mentioning that Google Docs will support PDFs.
If it’s not obvious, I’ll reiterate it.
GMail, in combination with other Google Apps, is the read-write-web client of the future (or present).
It is the cloud client that’s being called for around Twitter and blogs. No worries, there is still room for smaller companies to innovate on niche markets.
Twitter is the bubbles, not the bath
Q: what will be the first twitter post to get picked up on techmeme and who will post it?
I answered that Twitter was itself a conversation aggregator of sorts. Actually, I said:
Twitter is the bubbles, not the bath.
Fred is right in thinking that some Tweets will be newsworthy, especially in crisis situations, but for the most part, aggregating those conversations needs to happen in real-time, like with Track, a feature that allows you to follow keywords.
This results in affinity groups forming around keywords which represent concepts and memes.
If the aggregation isn’t in real-time for a service like Twitter, it has lost a lot of its steam.
TinyURL is dead. . .
It’s no big revelation that file-sharing is a popular online activity and the ways to do it are countless and evolving.
Email attachments, P2P services and vertical silos like YouTube rank among the heavy hitters.
Twitter users don’t have a built in way to share files. They generally put the media object somewhere on the web and point a TinyURL at it.
It has been suggested that we could embed metadata into the TinyURL. This metadata will tell a user the destination when they scroll over a link. Maybe we could also embed mime-types into the links to show us the fact that a link is to a video, photo or other media object.
Many folks, including Dave Winer, have worked to make the process of sharing media on Twitter more integrated. By creating third party services that sit on top of Twitter and its API, photo and other sharing has become more accessible.
A purist like Steve Gillmor might say this effort is unnecessary and the TinyURLs work just fine. On the other hand, Gillmor might point to LiveMesh, a Twitter-like service, but juiced up to handle not only our text-flows, but our media-flows as well. I’m sure Steve will tell me how I misinterpreted him on the next Newsgang call. ; )
Now, there is a lot of talk about XMPP being an important part of the “Social Network Backbone” and I couldn’t agree more.
Let me quote myself from October, 2005, the day this blog was created:
I no longer believe in the web. . .
So what do I believe in? Instant Messaging. Once we add social network and RSS features to IM applications, this will be the only platform we will ever need. At that point, we will emerged from the wormhole we are now traveling in.
I firmly believed we have almost arrived there with Twitter. The question remains how and where the ancillary features are implemented and/or integrated.
If you look up the archives of the Jabber/XMPP developer mailing lists you’ll see the conversation of in-band and out-of-band file-sharing has been a hot one for years.
File-sharing over IM already has legs, but as the IM protocols become more and more intertwined with our social graph we can expect that the “IM attachment” will become bigger than the inter-office email attachment. . .
Or will it just be a TinyURL?
P.S. Look at GMail to see how far ahead Google is integrating IM and filesharing.
GMail, the WEb OS client.
Interesting post by Arrington about the Google event where they announced GMail labs.
Arrington aks a great question, “What about third party developers?”
Steve Gillmor asks whether this is the beginning of a persoanlization play.
Of course this gets me thinking about Twitter.
But really it’s a much larger and important question that is in the background here.
Is GMail the client for all our social networking needs?
I’m willing to bet it will be.
Amyloo’s Widget
Twitter vs. Pownce: The Great Debate
Latest Gangbuster: Twitter vs. Pownce
The (open) future of news
Fromg the aforementioned gangbuster blog : with a little price of breaking news intermixed.
new paradigm (and blog)
Will be hashing out some thoughts over at http://gangbuster.org/blog in case any of y’all care to join that conversation.
Twitter is TechCrunch is the Blogosphere
Twitter seems to model TechCrunch:
and TechCrunch eerily seems to model the blogosphere as a whole:
Is this meaningful?
Social Database Twit.io
Embryonic but working:
