So one of the thoughts that naturally occurred to me is that there’s at least some small chance that Cylon.local won’t be coming back; perhaps the resurrection ship was simply too far away when the dreadful moment arrived.

I’d just bought a Mac Mini for my parents this past Christmas, so I already know the value proposition of replacing it with the latest model.

But, while I’m entertaining the notion of replacement hardware, it occurs to me that Dell rolled out a competitor a few months ago, called the Inspiron Zino HD. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m quite happy with the Mini’s performance over the last four years, and I’d be happy to keep it for as long as it’ll stick around with me, but any sensible man would think to check in on his options.

So I Google mac mini dell and learn the product’s name. Another query with its name serves up a link that takes me directly to the Zino’s product page on Dell’s website.

I’m checking out the product description, the product porn (the photos gallery), the product video, and their convincingly-constructed selling points — everything’s looking pretty swell. “Not bad-looking,” I find myself thinking, “It’s got native support for HDMI… it’ll run Boxee and iTunes… what’s it cost?”

And then it hits me like a brick between the eyes:

There’s no way to buy this computer from this page. While many manufacturers have individual “catalog” and “shop” pages for any given product, it’s astounding just what a pain it is to actually get from the Zino’s “catalog” page, to its “shop” page in Dell’s online store — there wasn’t a single link on that page to take me straight to a purchase opportunity.

Here’s a screenshot of the full page, so you can hunt around for yourself:

Salesmanship fail

And what makes this perhaps most embarrassing of all is the fact that Dell’s primary sales model has been direct-to-consumer, from the day they opened their doors for business.

I do believe that Apple perceives a risk behind allowing this particular piece of software “hijack,” as it were, the iPhone user experience, particularly as the Google Voice service will likely become wildly popular amongst the demographic of folks who are attracted to products like iPhones. I must also note that Apple themselves pulled quite a similar customer “hijacking” trick on AT&T with the iPhone.

So if anyone knows the smell of this type of usurpation, it’s Apple. They’re also right to fear it.

I ultimately get exactly why Apple attempted to block it: to paraphrase the late father of a past girlfriend of mine, if you’re not pulling at least one foul per game, you’re just not playing hard enough.

It’s all a game of strategy, folks, and the stakes in the competition for slices of the burgeoning mobile Internet device market are pretty damned high.

Arrington does make one claim, however, that I just can’t get behind. He writes:

[Apple is] jealously guarding control of their users and trying to block Google and other third party developers at every turn from getting their superior applications in front those users.

The first half is spot-on, but the second half is very wrong—they are not fearful of developers offering better software than their apps. Apple doesn’t care, for example, about superior stock tracking, weather, or memo programs.

They do care about Safari, Phone, Contacts, Calendar, Mail, Messages, and iPod, App Store, and iTunes applications: they are the signature apps of the core iPhone user experience.

If Google Voice takes over the dialer, a significant problem is introduced: people may likely start demanding that the phone experience is designed around the Google Voice service. In such a case, Apple will have lost control of the UX of this core component of the product, as they would then have to choose between two paths:

1. chase after the Google Voice UX requirements, OR
2. consciously choosing to ignore it, causing customers that want it evaluate switching to an Android phone.

Apple are specifically looking to control the core user experience of the device, but that’s what Apple does, and what’s more: that’s what we (largely) want them to do! Their passion for that sort of thing is directly attributable for the design excellence of their products.

In any case, the ref is on the field, and we’ll get a call on the game play. The only certainty here is that—whatever call the FCC ultimately makes—the outcome will be interesting.

My call: offensive holding.

As the music and newspaper industries will attest, those who adapt quickly to changing consumer and business demands will thrive in our increasingly digital society and worldwide economy.

It’s one thing to hear the tech nerds of the internet speak of the RIAA’s clueless clamoring into the digital phase of the digital publishing landscape, but quite another to see such a high-profile politician so plainly paint the RIAA as a poster child embodying the inability to adapt to changing market realities.

I can’t help but speculate that this imperative takes aim at two birds with one stone. I find it difficult to imagine it to be mere coincidence that California-based Amazon dropped their Kindle DX — introduced with a marketing message explicitly speaking to its value proposition to text book publishers — with such an uncanny confluence of timing.

Some Terms

Throughout this post, for the purpose of simplicity, I will use the term brand to apply to all types of public personae, whether organization or personality.

I will also be speaking about a brand’s domain of interest, by which I intend to refer to the plurality of whatever industries and/or disciplinary fields that are relevant to the brand. I’ll use it in this singular form as a blanket concept, covering all topics of interest to the brand.

Finally, I’ll be using the term market to refer to any and all entities to whom a brand seeks (largely competitively) to offer a value proposition, and who interest — in whole or in part — in the brand’s domain of interest. In the case of a company, their market is naturally their customers, clients, etc. In the context of an organization, its market may be composed of the members it seeks to attract, or the community that it seeks to serve. Finally, a market for an individual’s own brand can consist of one’s prospective employers, clients, students, an educational institution, or grant or fellowship for which he or she may wish to apply.

Why Even Bother With Twitter?

Before I get into the any of the how, let’s invest a moment to get on the same page with respect to the why, since the means must be evaluated against whether or not they advance your efforts towards the desired ends.

This is material that’s been covered the world over around the Web, so I’ll keep this concise:

The goals are currency and reputability.

Currency here refers to the state of maintaining continuing familiarity with the ideas and topics relevant to the conversations presently taking place in the brand’s domain of interest. Currency helps a brand focus its efforts to remain relevant to its market, and is maintained by consuming incoming information.

Reputability refers to the brand’s reputation within the context of its market. Its measure exists only in the eyes of the brand’s prospective market, so it can only be built and developed with public action. On Twitter, this means publishing, or tweeting.

And so the value-proposition that participation in the Twittersphere offers a brand is that it can help the brand stay at the top of its game, and give the market a sense of the brand’s voice, relevance, and even competitive acumen.

But how can a brand engage with Twitter to realize these goals?

Currency Through Consumption

We’ve already covered the idea that keeping current with one’s domain of interest equates to consuming relevant information.

The trick, of course, is ensuring the “relevant” part — there’s just so much “information” vying to get attention, it gets difficult both to know which sources to pay attention to, and to discover new sources worth following.

Basics: Follow to Consume

Crafting a good set of accounts to follow is the most fundamental way you can use Twitter to keep abreast with the various conversations taking place in your brand’s domain of interest.

1. Follow liberally. Especially when you first start. Remember that one of the great things about Twitter is that it’s real easy to unfollow. Unlike joining a mailing list, you never have to worry about not being able to unsubscribe from notifications, etc.

   So, if you come to realize that a blog you love has a Twitter feed, follow it. When you stumble upon someone that seems to be making great tweets (eg, you find they get re-tweeted often), follow them. When you attend a great lecture and find out the speaker has a Twitter account, follow them. If some organization that’s relevant to your domain of interest has a Twitter feed, follow them. Did you just learn that someone new is following you? Review their recent tweets and consider following them as well. Get the picture?

2. Periodically identify people to unfollow. That is, you should consider if anyone’s just been tweeting about how they hate being stuck in traffic, or how they fear they’ll never learn to say “no” to dessert.

   The more people you follow, the more effort you’ll find it takes for you to focus on the information that is relevant to you. This might mean giving Ashton Kutcher or Oprah a pass. Or not, if their work interests you.

Your goal, over time, is to compile a list of people, publications, organizations, etc. to follow that consistently put out useful material — ones that share relevant links, post meaningful insights, etc. Of course, very few will be all great all the time, but you get the gist: keep the signal-to-noise ratio leaning much more heavily towards signal than noise.

Advanced: Trends, Hash Tags, and More

Apart from the relatively passive act of following particular users, it is possible to engage in alternative, more engaged modes of consumption on Twitter.

1. Check out Shared Links. This may sound obvious at first, but it’s worth mentioning explicitly. Note that most URLs are shortened (more later), so the link’s immediate value may not be apparent from the link itself.

2. Note Hashtags. A hashtag is any word in a tweet that starts with the # symbol, such as #politics or #superbowl. Hashtags are used to define certain words in a tweet as keywords, much like tags on Flickr or a blog.

   - <strong>Hashtag Links</strong>. Many Twitter client applications (though notably not Twitter itself) render hashtags within tweets as clickable links. Clicking a hashtag's link in such a cases will produce a global Twitter search results page, listing the most recent tweets containing the hashtag in question — this can be an excellent way to hunt down links to additional information about a topic someone has tweeted about.
   
   - <strong>Hashtag Searches</strong>. Hashtags can be searched for, as well. A hashtag search can offer different results than a non-hashtag search because hashtags declare _intentional classification_. Searching for "calculus", for example, may yield results which include tweets complaining about how difficult someone's homework is, but searching for "#calculus" will show only tweets whose authors have declared to be _about calculus_.
   

3. Check in on Trends. “Trends” are basically terms that are used with a high frequency on Twitter, within a given window of time (say the last 2 hours, 24 hours, etc).

   Trend terms on Superbowl Sunday may include the best (or worst) player in the game, the company that aired the best commercial, etc; while trend terms on New Year’s Eve may include champaign, resolution, resolve, happy, healthy, and midnight.

   Mashable has a list of various tools for checking in on Twitter trends, from websites, to apps for your mobile phone.

4. Hashtag Trends. You can even follow trends of hashtag assignments.

As you might expect, the basic and advanced activities feed each other. Exploring hashtags will occasionally introduce you to new users potentially worth following, and following interesting users will introduce you to new hashtag topics.

Because of the way these modes of consumption relate to each other, the consuming information on Twitter carries a very different (and potentially greater) value proposition than, say, following the headlines on your favorite news sites or blog using an RSS reader, since Twitter subscriptions give you the chance to learn about someone’s work before the mainstream news sources even get their act together to pick up on it.

Reputability Through Publishing

Now let’s get into the tips for making the most of your publishing activities, to give you that street cred you’re looking for. Let’s start with these very basic guidelines:

1. Public Isn’t Private. Keep your tweets topical. Remember that you’re on Twitter to build a brand, whether this brand is your company, organization, or yourself. I would even especially emphasize this point then the brand is yourself. You’re tweeting to pimp your brand’s relevancy to, mastery of, and involvement whatever its domain of interest may be.

   - _Do_ personalize the wording on your tweets. It's even usually appropriate to proclaim emphatic love or strong distaste for things in your tweets, _as long as these things are somehow relevant to your domain of interest_. This cultivates and expresses your _editorial voice_, which makes reading your tweets more interesting; no-one likes to read sterile posts, after all.
   
   - _Do not_ make the mistake of using your brand's Twitter account to air your laundry by posting about deeply personal stuff. If you wanna tell the world that your mother is annoying, or that your boyfriend is a douche bag, go update your Facebook status. Or create a separate, _personal_ Twitter account, if you simply must tweet it.
   

   Again, if you’re not using Twitter to build a brand, this piece of advice doesn’t apply… but then, why exactly are you still reading this article…?

2. Stay on Topic. Keep the majority of your tweets relevant, at least in some way, to the brand’s domain of interest. It’s absolutely acceptable to bend the rules of “relevancy” from time to time — again: a little variety or deviation will spice up your feed with a bit of personality. And consistent deviations can add layers to the brand (particularly an individual’s personal brand), but exercise care with that and try to hit 90% on-topic or better, if you can.

3. Share Your Discoveries. Did you have an interesting conversation? Tweet the conclusion, conundrum, or topic. Share the links of any interesting article or website you encounter that is relevant to your brand’s domain of interest.

4. Share Your Work. Do you have a blog? Make sure you tweet links to your posts. Did you get some press mention? Post a tweet about the experience, and follow it up with a link when it gets published online.

5. Shorten Your URLs. Use services such as http://tr.im, http://is.gd, or http://tinyurl.com to reserve as many of the 140 allowed characters in a tweet for use in your message.

6. Engage. The greatest potential value from a social medium like Twitter is derived from the act of engagement.

   - <strong>Reply</strong>. When someone says something interesting or posts a good link, reply to them.
   
   - <strong>Consult</strong>. Are you stuck on some complex or nuanced question? Ask your followers.
   
   - <strong>Challenge</strong>. Or perhaps just come up with a great rhetorical, thought provoking one? Pose it to the folks following you.
   

7. Mentions. A mention is simply the inclusion of another user’s Twitter name, prefixed with the @ symbol, in one of your tweets. Here’s an example tweet with a mention:

   Meeting with @luvinspoonfuls today to discuss recipe software.

   Twitter automatically turns those into links that point to the twitter profile of the mentioned user, so mentions can be a powerful cross-promotional tool. As a rule of thumb, whenever you’re talking about someone who also has a presence on Twitter, make sure you include a mention for their Twitter user, even if the message is addressed to a third party. They’ll thank you, and more than likely mention you later.

8. Re-tweeting. A re-tweet (or RT) is the act of posting someone else’s tweet verbatim, in such a way that it includes attribution of its source. RTing is great because it accomplishes a few different things:

   - It's a mention, and therefore carries promotional value for the original author
   
   - Pimping other users with RTs casts you in a more social light to your followers, and helps reassure them that the brand is, in fact, participating in a dialogue, rather than just beaming self-promotional messages blindly out into the cosmos.
   

9. Use Hashtags. Categories the topics of your tweets with hashtags. Note that some hashtags can even be funny, like #painfullyobvious or #wtf. I like to hashtag inline, when I can, as in the following example (which also includes a mention):

   Awesome new #website: http://data.gov – I’m really impressed with the @whitehouse… Now THAT’S #technology in #government !!! #amazing

The key to building a reputation for a brand on Twitter is constructive participation in the community of users who share interest in the brands domain of interest.

Conclusions

These are the basic activities for building the strength of your brand on Twitter. I omitted certain ideas that may be relevant only to corporate brands, etc, but it’s really all about ways to engage in a dialog with your brand’s market.

I should note, also, that participating in the so-called Twittersphere is only a small (if potential-packed) part of the brand building social media publishing equation. I would also recommend maintaining a blog of some sort — ideally on the brand’s own website — to which longer-form content can occasionally be published; 140 characters isn’t a hell of a lot of opportunity to effectively convince people that you know your shit.

Finally, have fun! Get out there and meet people — engage them in person. Share your energy and ideas with them, and listen to the thoughts and insights they respond with. There’s no substitute for a lively conversation over a beverage.

Further Reading

• http://mashable.com/2009/04/20/twitter-strategy/ – 7 ways of approaching Twitter publishing
• http://mashable.com/2009/05/20/twitter-personal-brand/ – how to build your brand
• http://twittley.com/ – a Twitter-integrated version of digg (pimp your links)
• http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/25/viralheats-real-time-social-measurement-tool-analyzes-content-on-twitter-youtube-and-more/ – analytics for advanced Twitter publishing activity

He writes:

The formula behind the iPod Mini was simple: Apple made a smaller, cheaper device with more or less the same technical specs as the original iPod from October 2001.

[...]

So here’s how I see Apple applying its iPod strategy to the iPhone. At some point the iPhone will expand to two form factors:

1. A high-end iPhone with the same basic size and price as previous iPhones, but with significant new features…

2. A new, lower-priced, smaller, and more adorable iPhone, with more or less the same technical specs as the original iPhone. Given that those specs include the 320 × 480 display, I wouldn’t expect something tiny…. Shrink the iPhone’s forehead and chin and make it thinner … is what I’m thinking. Existing iPhone apps would run just fine on the new device, as it’d have similar, if not identical, CPU performance and RAM to previous full-sized iPhones. [emphasis added]

Reading the piece got me thinking back on the concerns I had about Palm’s fragmentation of both their prospective developer communities, as well as consumers, should the rumors of their introducing “Pre Lite” to the market.

Note the points where emphasis has been added. There are two reasons for Apple to aim for roughly the same specs as the first generation iPhone when it introduces additional models:

1. a device with such specs will be significantly cheaper to produce more than two years later, and
2. it helps ensure maximal compatibility of existing apps with the prospective newer members of the product family.

Apple has been very clear that minimal hardware variance is an explicit concern in their iPhone product design strategy (and, even their platform strategy for all devices running iPhone OS, or what I've been calling Touch OS X). Naturally, since the devices in the product family must continue to evolve, it’s impossible to entirely avoid hardware variance, but the more that the devices in the iPhone product family can have in common, the easier a job developers will have creating and testing the apps they make and sell.

By contrast, the Android platform is beginning to get its first dose of non-trivial woes around hardware variation issues, but more on this later.

There are plainly over a billion reasons that Apple would want to maximize the extent to which apps remain compatible across their entire product family of iPhones, and screen size and shape is one of the critical details to keep consistent in the mobile world, where developers (at least the competent ones) take great pains to make every last pixel count.

And for platforms like iPhone OS (and even Pre’s webOS) that are designed so meticulously around the user’s direct physical interaction with the screen, screen size is not a detail to be varied willy nilly.

Android(s)

Android is the finest example of a maturing platform that can lend some insight to the situation. The platform is thoroughly modern, and is in a phase of its life comparable to the iPhone’s. On the one hand, the Android SDK is older than the iPhone’s, but the platform didn’t offer any consumer grade phones until last fall, when T-Mobile’s G1 started shipping.

The platform has seen its release of version 1.5, and a number of new devices running Android are poised to enter the market in the coming months.

Andy McFadden published a post on the Android Developers blog, entitled Backward compatibility for Android applications. As one can infer from the title, the article offers advice to Android developers about how to handle backward compatibility for their apps, and suggests they consider whether or not they will actually even attempt it.

He concludes:

You must test your application on every version of the Android framework that is expected to support it. By definition, the behavior of your application will be different on each. Remember the mantra: if you haven’t tried it, it doesn’t work.

Now, allow me to assure you — with over a decade’s worth of experience in web development — that testing my work across just three browsers has been a colossal pain in the ass.

Understand that I had just linked to the first five arbitrary upcoming Android phones that I discovered as I searched around the Web, and that’s frankly just the tip of the ice berg. The market is expecting dozens of different Android phones (and even netbooks!) to show up in the market in the coming years.

And so I am loathe to imagine the experiences Android developers will endure in their attempts to publish their apps for use on multiple different models.

Repeating: if you haven’t tried it, it doesn’t work.

I am not trying to knock Android, by the way. There are many things that excite me about the goals of the platform, but I think it’s fair to say that — despite Google’s launching the Android Market — these platform’s goals will be a greater boon to device manufacturers than to application publishers.

The manufacturers will realize significant benefits from having a modern operating system and API:

• they are afforded the freedom to further innovate upon and customize themselves, or just use the “vanilla” version on a lower-end device;
• the software platform will continually mature and advance, without them spending a dime on R&D
• the talent pool of skilled developers from which manufacturers can build their product teams will continue to grow

Android developers seeking to earn a living publishing third-party applications for the platform, on the other hand, will be grappling with some very complex decisions regarding which devices they intend to target, since they’ll generally want to ensure their app has the broadest potential customer base (or, at the least, a non-trivial one). This will consequently require them to constantly keep tabs on at least two critical bits of information:

1. how well each phone is selling, and
2. whether owners of the phone model(s) in question are likely to buy apps for their phone, at all.

Apart from the burden of keeping abreast with this information, developers will be stuck making their decisions retrospectively. That is, if app publishers intend to leverage such information to make informed decisions about whether or not to invest in development efforts to target any particular model, they can only do so after there is information to collect.

Forecasting becomes tricky.

Consider the attempt to capitalize on the opportunity to make your app one of the first available on a given new device: do you invest development effort and QA resources on the unproven, or do you wait and see how the phone sells, and who’s buying it?

It isn’t to say, however, that these considerations that are impossible to deal with. Certainly the publishers of third-party applications will develop, over time, a good feel for how to handle such considerations. I can also foresee the rise of products and services that promise to deliver reporting of all relevant stats. Regardless, the mere matter of even having to contend with such complexities certainly does raise a non-trivial barrier of entry for the entrepreneurial indie outfit.

This is especially true for the one-man operations that we have seen thriving in the iPhone application scene.

Intuition tells me that the OSS application scene will fare better on Android than the entrepreneurial independent publishing scene will. This is especially so with respect to achieving broader device compatibility, since OSS efforts will be able to crowdsource their development and testing efforts.

There are — at the time of this writing — 35 for-pay apps available in the Android Market, since Google enabled payment functionality for developers in February.

But, to be fair, Google’s primary motives for putting the Android platform out into the world was to loosen the iron grip the mobile telcos have been maneuvering to exercise over internet access available through their data networks; fostering a healthy entrepreneurial landscape for indie developers was a peripheral concern (if ideal outcome). To be certain, the only way for Google’s goals to be realized is to get as many different manufacturers (and, by extension, devices) on the Android bandwagon as possible, so hardware plurality was always necessarily a leading concern.

Yes, the matter of hardware variety stands to be a dreadful pain for the indie developers, but it’s a key element of the Android strategy.

Palm and WebOS

The idea behind launching a “lite” version of the Pre is to introduce a lower-grade — and, importantly, cheaper — device running on the same WebOS platform as the Pre. This lower grade device will necessarily a have a differing hardware configuration, including a different screen size, according to reports.

If this is true, and Palm carries on with this strategy, they will be lining up a family of products, straight off the starting line.

But you can’t leap into the race in fifth gear.

After reading Gruber’s reflections on how Apple grew the iPod from a single product into a family of products, I’d started thinking about how the efforts of putting together such a family calls for both time and, most of all, planning.

From a business perspective, releasing such a low-tier WebOS phone would be both naïvely ambitious for Palm to take on this family development endeavor so early in the platform’s lifetime, and that such a move will prove a marketing disaster, likely taking the wind out of the Pre’s sails before she even managed to leave port.

From an engineering perspective, Palm seems to be choosing to take on the worst of Android’s worst problems, without any of the contextual details that make hardware diversity a good idea for Android.

But the Pre is a particular product.

Although WebOS can one day emerge as a compelling platform, this can only ever happen if the Pre first succeeds on its own merits as a product. And so Palm will need to play matters closer to the iPhone’s playbook, than to Android’s.

Google has the money and time to invest in developing a grand multi-device platform. They also have partners.

Palm, however, is in a far more precarious situation.

A decision to go to market with a “Pre Lite” within months of the Pre’s introduction would essentially be Palm hedging their bets, on account of the iPhone clearly kicking ass and taking names in the high end.

I’m sympathetic to the fact that it may seem like a good enough idea on the surface, but by chasing both ends of the market from the start, however, Palm would risk overextending themselves and winding up with a watered-down, lowest-common-denominator technology, in a worse place than Mobile Java.

And that would be an awful place to be.

The “Pre Light” is—at the least—something Palm are thinking seriously about; its introduction would naturally move would be an attempt to capture both ends of the market.

But if the Pre is to stand a chance at saving Palm from extinction, they need to put all their product design effort and muscle behind crafting and refining exactly the thing that the Pre is, rather than trying to make the crazy new whizzbang that aims to be all things to all people.

Palm needs to focus their efforts like a laser on the Pre.

They essentially need to enter the arena boldly, charge straight up to Apple, and deliver a swift, mighty blow where it counts—then they can suss out how they’ll manage to land a few more.