Seven Reasons Twitter is Important but not Innovative

Twitter is mostly warmed-over email. Don't misunderstand. This isn't coming from a naysayer; I've always thought that email was a killer app, albeit a mature one. Here are seven reasons why Twitter isn't innovative, though it is important as a highly successful medium. Twitter will morph. In the meantime, in significant ways, it's more business as usual than transformational.

1. Twitter's core component is not radically different from a short broadcast email. Text. Retro. Not that text is bad!.


2. Short messaging itself isn't new. Forget SMS -- remember text paging?


3. Instant isn't new. Forums, email, wikis --even Sharepoint -- allow for messages to be received within seconds of being posted. Not as fast as Twitter, but fast.


4. Followers and Friends may grow with the speed of a California wildfire, but social networks originated with listservs and shared email lists.


5. Twitter's notion of discourse threads is still emerging. Consider what effort it takes to follow a reply to a reply, especially if some time ("older") has passed between the posts. Twitter's instantaneity can be offset by intervening content clutter.


6. Twitter's succeptibility to spam is similar to email. Follower lists at this stage of Twitter's evolution are easy for bots to harvest.


7. Like email, Twitter hasn't found a better way than the hyperlink to connect to the broader net. The hyperlink takes you to the browser, which puts you back in Google's sweet spot, such as it did for email/Gmail.
   
   

Microsoft Compact .NET Framework vCard Success Story

Recently I purchased a special purpose Windows Mobile tool that allows for import and export of contacts using the VCard standard. Produced by PocketKai, this utility makes excellent use of the Microsoft .NET compact framework. In fact, the installer footprint for the application is only 192KB, and the \Program Files\vCard Manager folder is only 114KB. (On my HTC PPC6700 device, memory is at a nuisance premium).

My requirements Before email became the killer app that it now is, and before spam mandated the presence of marketing email addresses in the address book, Activesync and other synchronizing tools were adequate. Now my address book is huge, with 2715 contacts (and counting). I need a small subset on the phone. Further, I have a different set of requirements for work vs. home contact management. The vCard is perfect for this. I can mark contacts by category, import/export by category and then synchronize a selected folder between mobile, desktop and cloud locations. On the mobile device, a zip of all 2800 contacts, in vCard format, can be stored in removeable flash memory (not subtracting from precious main memory). Then I can draw from that folder to insert / export a contact from Windows Mobile as needed. PocketKai, at the attractive price point of $8, does the trick.