Twitter: we control your redirects

Starting this morning, Twitter seems to have pre-empted all URL-shortening services in favor of t.co for all Tweets sent through its network. I noticed this not only because all the tweets I follow are t.co infested, but also because Tweets I sent this morning shorted via bit.ly were re-shortened via t.co.

This is not exactly what Twitter said it was doing. The most recent (August 5) posting to the developer blog by (“developer advocate”) Taylor Singletary announced:

Beginning August 15th, when a user tweets or sends a direct message containing a URL 20 characters long or greater (the length of URLs wrapped with t.co), the URL will automatically be converted to a t.co-wrapped link. We will eventually wrap all links, regardless of length, but until then there's nothing you need to do to support this change. When we're ready to wrap all links, we'll give you plenty of time and make another announcement.

OK, so it’s 2 days early. But more importantly, the 20-character limit means that effectively all links are being rewritten: bit.ly, lat.ms, nyi.ms. (Note that the “http://” costs everyone 7 characters, whereas “www.” only costs 4)

Interestingly, the tweets are being sent with the t.co, those tweets link to the t.co if you copy the link on the Twitter website, but are being shown using the original URL. So the tweet I sent this morning from @openITstrat looked like this when I sent it:

NYT obit: CCNY prof Daniel McCracken (1930-2011), who wrote best-selling Fortran and Cobol texts http://nyti.ms/rjixBb (I owned both)

but on my client looks like this:

NYT obit: CCNY prof Daniel McCracken (1930-2011), who wrote best-selling Fortran and Cobol texts http://t.co/PpFFjXV (I owned both)

On Twitter.com, it looks like this:

@openITstrat
Joel West
NYT obit: CCNY prof Daniel McCracken (1930-2011), who wrote best-selling Fortran and Cobol texts nyti.ms/rjixBb (I owned both)

with the nyti.ms actually a t.co link if you click on it. (Of course, the website tweets are shown in the extra-ugly “New Twitter” that I fought to avoid for months.)

TechCrunch said that this week would include a test of the new service, but this appears to be no longer a test.

As is common for Web 2.0 companies that use indirect monetization (NB: Google, Facebook), Twitter is being disingenuous as to their reasons for eliminating the customer choice and control over URL links. It’s not about saving 2 characters, and it’s really not about URL security. (The fact that they can remap a URL into a t.co and back shows that they can automatically detect what URL is being linked).

After Twitter announced its plans a year ago, Alistair Croll summarized the real reasons in a posting on the O’Reilly site:

Twitter has been open with its data from the start, and widely available APIs have created a huge variety of applications and fast adoption. But by making their platform so open, Twitter has fewer options for monetization.

The one thing they can do that nobody else can -- because they're the message bus -- is to rewrite tweets in transit. That includes hashtags and URLs. Twitter could turn #coffee into #starbucks. They could replace a big URL with a short one. And that gives them tremendous power.

Twitter recently announced a new feature that makes this a reality. The t.co URL shortener -- similar to those from bit.ly, awe.sm, and tinyURL -- might seem like a relatively small addition to the company's offering. But it's a massive power shift in the world of analytics because now Twitter can measure engagement wherever it happens, across any browser or app. And unlike other URL shorteners, Twitter can force everyone to use their service simply because they control the platform. Your URLs can be shortened (and their engagement tracked by Twitter) whether you like it or not.

In other words, Twitter wants to control all the web analytics for URLs sent via its service, as a way to increase it monetization to support its planned IPO.

Is there some reason why Twitter can’t just admit to this in an honest way, rather than wrap it in a rhetoric of psuedo-customer concern? Is there a shortage of honesty among Web 2.0 companies? (NB: Facebook, Google, etc.)

People know that free services have to be paid for somehow. Unlike Lt. Kaffee, I can handle the truth and I imagine most customers can too.

After 30 years, is the IBM PC reign ending?

Cross-posted from the IT History Society blog.

Thirty years ago, the International Business Machines company introduced its first general-purpose personal computer, the 5150. (The IBM 5100 and DisplayWriter were also personal computing devices, but most people don’t count them as a first.)

Although I have written about August 1981, I would have forgotten about the anniversary except my friend Tom Pfaeffle linked a BBC article on his Facebook account. Most significantly, the article cited a blog posting by Mark Dean, an IBM executive who was there at the beginning:

It’s amazing to me to think that August 12 marks the 30th anniversary of the IBM Personal Computer. The announcement helped launch a phenomenon that changed the way we work, play and communicate. Little did we expect to create an industry that ultimately peaked at more than 300 million unit sales per year. I’m proud that I was one of a dozen IBM engineers who designed the first machine and was fortunate to have lead subsequent IBM PC designs through the 1980s.

What’s grabbing the attention is Dean’s claim that we’re already in the post-PC era:

It may be odd for me to say this, but I’m also proud IBM decided to leave the personal computer business in 2005, selling our PC division to Lenovo. While many in the tech industry questioned IBM’s decision to exit the business at the time, it’s now clear that our company was in the vanguard of the post-PC era.

I, personally, have moved beyond the PC as well. My primary computer now is a tablet. When I helped design the PC, I didn’t think I’d live long enough to witness its decline. But, while PCs will continue to be much-used devices, they’re no longer at the leading edge of computing. They’re going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs.

The remainder of the posting goes on to discuss IBM’s success in the “post-PC era” and his own career trajectory from IBM Research to become CTO for IBM’s Middle East and Africa operations in Dubai.

I wonder if the claims of the post-PC era are a bit premature. I own a tablet too, but I’m writing this on a (Mac) personal computer because it has a bigger screen and a keyboard. It’s possible that we’re heading to the post-Windows, post-Mac era — one where the personal computers have a slightly different form factor but a new (smartphone or tablet) OS.

Still, as Tim Bresnahan and Shane Greenstein established in the late 20th century, computing platforms decline (or die) only when replaced another platform. So the idea that the PC will be replaced by something new is nothing new, but just another round of Schumpeterian revolution that claimed minicomputers and workstations — not to mention the mainframe businesses of the BUNCH.

MetroPCS demonstrates the risks of leapfrog strategies

I was briefly an Android (and MetroPCS) user during the past week, but found the reality of the MetroPCS LTE service (and the Samsung phone) didn’t match the promise.

I got my first digital phone in the late 1990s when I switched from AirTouch to Sprint. I was with Sprint for about 14 years until I quit Sprint in May over high prices and a lousy phone replacement policy. Since late last year I’ve been assuming that I’d switch to MetroPCS (if I were working in San Jose or LA) or Cricket (if I were in San Diego).

I’ve been a particular admirer of MetroPCS, which combined the Cricket (Leap) business model with aggressive price cutting and clever branding to become the 5th largest network owner in the US. (Most importantly, they’ve also pressured the Big Two to be less outrageous in their pricing.) My biggest gripe was their misleading “$40/month” advertising — which (ala Sprint and the other Big Four) is not available to smartphone owners.

When I got the job in LA County I considered the various Android phones on MetroPCS and quickly settled on the Samsung Galaxy Indulge: it was one of their few Android LTE phones, and the only one with a keyboard.

As a result, after settling into my new job and living quarters I decided to give MetroPCS a try. For the past week I was a MetroPCS customer with the Galaxy — until I took it back Tuesday afternoon.

There were several reasons why the reality was worse than the promise.

First, the battery life on the Indulge was truly terrible. The store manager tried to warn me that his friend had problems with the Indulge, but it was even worse than he said. On Monday, I had the phone on in the morning for an hour (with WiFi on), checked email twice and lost half my battery life. Even without making phone calls, there’s no way I’d make it through a whole day. And when I had it plugged into the car adaptor, the phone got very hot — suggesting (as with 2G and 3G) that first generation 4G phones have serious power consumption problems.

The battery life was exacerbated by the need to turn down the screen saver. My most common search experience was the screen went blank (on a 30 second timeout) before I could get the answer to a simple Google search.

But the last straw was the poor LTE coverage. When the phone was in 4G range, it seemed to have good performance. (Other users reported 2.4 mbps, but I never formally measured it). However, it was not in range at my East LA County residence, and at various places on SoCal freeways. It was also (as expected) not in range when roaming to Cricket territory in San Diego. In those cases, it fell back to 1x (which users estimate is under 0.1 mbps).

For me, Metro’s gamble to leapfrog 3G for 4G was a failure, because the price was to fall back to completely useless 2.5G data service. All the other carriers have some sort of 3G coverage which would have been fine for my use case.

In fact, the most useful thing about the exercise was to crystalize my use case for my first post-Treo, post-Symbian smartphone:

• Email — both gmail and Exchange
• Traffic maps
• Web browsing, especially news
• Google searches

That’s about it. Yes, I installed Urban Spoon and Shazam — and my daughter would want to play Angry Birds — but the phone would be perfectly fine without those.

The one frill I tried was the wonderful new music streaming app — Yahoo! Music Radio — which is a partnership with Clear Channel and its Radio.com. I would eagerly install and use the player just for one station — LA’s K-Earth Classics (KRTH HD2) — which plays the 60s oldies that the iconic 101.1 used to play until it switched from boomers to Generation Jones and 70s music.

However, using a phone for music streaming requires good battery life (or a handy power adaptor) and an unlimited data plan. A 56K MP3 stream two hours a day on every weekday would use up 800mb/month of a limited download budget. (MetroPCS only allowed 1 gb/month for its $50 plan).

I considered swapping the Indulge for another phone, but it’s their only Android phone that does LTE. The other Android phones also didn’t have physical keyboards, and my one week MetroPCS trial confirmed my suspicion that a physical keyboard is an absolute must for typing without looking at the screen. The company’s weakness in Android phones is (IMHO) the main problem of their recent financial difficulties.

The story had a happy ending, at least for me. The company’s MetroPromise means you can take the phone back for a full refund if you follow their conditions. I did follow the conditions, and got my money back with just a long wait due to an understaffed local dealer.

Boy Dell was wrong

October 6, 1997, Jai Singh writing in CNET News.com:

When it comes to the state of Apple Computer, everyone has an opinion.
…
[T]he CEO of competitor Dell Computer added his voice to the chorus when asked what could be done to fix the Mac maker. His solution was a drastic one.

"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives.

August 9, 2011, John Paczkowski writing in All Things Digital:

A new milestone for Apple. The company briefly overtook Exxon Mobil as the world’s most valuable company Tuesday, edging past it after days volatile stock market trading. Earlier today Apple’s market cap rose to $341.5 billion, just above Exxon’s $341.4 billion for a few moments before slipping back down again. …

An astonishing achievement for a company whose market cap bottomed out at $630.9 million back in 1982.

Incidentally, at $341.5 billion, Apple’s market cap is more than twelve times that of Dell’s $26.54 billion.

Why aren’t the Dell shareholders rioting with pitchforks in Round Rock? They’ve lost more than 70% of their investment since January 2000 and more than half of the value of the stock in mid-2008. Meanwhile, Apple stock is 5x its 2008 peak and 14x its price in early 2000.

Crowdsourcing microtasks to mitigate poverty

The most novel talk at this week’s IPEG conference was one by Maradona Gatara on mobile crowdsourcing in Africa. It was fascinating on so many levels: on new approaches to crowdsourcing, on the role of mobile phones in economic development, on ways to tackling crippling poverty in LDCs, and even on the theory of the firm.

Maradona started with the explosive growth of mobile phones in Kenya — 100x from 2000 (200k) to 2010 (20m). However, unemployment is nearly 50% for a population of 38.5 million.

He described a crowdsourcing service (txteagle): imagine Amazon Mechanical Turk pushed to a mass LDC market with payments under a dollar. Txteagle was started in 2009 in Kenya and Rwanda, and now covers 17 African countries.

He listed two sample needs. One is medical transcription: 2 minutes of transcribing an audio snippet into a SMS message; Kenya has an advantage here because English is an official language. The other is software localization, building a vocabulary dictionary (e.g. for the 60 different languages in Kenya); the speaker is asked to translate a specific word.

Txteagle adds its value by partitioning a client task into microtasks, dispatches questions and collate the answers. The service does QC by comparing multiple solutions for the same problem, and also builds rating of the quality of the submitters.

In addition to microtasks, the other unusual wrinkle is that the service targets the unbanked — those who lack a bank account but have a cellphone. The service is built on a mobile banking platform (M-Pesa), created by Safarifone subsidiary of Vodafone, the largest European network operator. He estimated mobile banking is $7 billion/year in Africa, to the point that existing banks are partnering with M-Pesa to reduce cannibalization.

So translating one word might be KYD 0.30. He mentioned that an unemployed single mother of four could raise USD 7.50 (KYD 7.00) for three hours of work — enough to feed her family of five for 2-3 weeks. (Like many poor Africans, she doesn’t pay rent because she lives in a squatter community).

There is a long body of research on telecommunications infrastructure in LDC economic development, and a more recent literature on wireless infrastructure being more suitable than wired.

Now there’s the idea (also appealing to Nokia) that mobile phones provide banking of the unbanked. Mardona estimated that 364 million Africans will have cellphones by 2012 (not all of them poor). Obviously the other African operators will be providing their own banking services.

From the audience came a very provocative question from Sebastian von Engelhardt. Years ago, Coase said that firms form because it’s not practical to organize and monitor a series of small tasks. So to what degree do such microtask architectures push the natural boundary of the firm. (During lunch, we also debated what impact it has on the nature of employment — is it complementary or substituting for employment here in Africa.)

Maradona is now completing his master's thesis on what factors cause poor Kenyans to use (or not use) the service. I believe he’s also going to do some work to define the potential market, particularly in East Africa (Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, Nigeria).

He’s also working to develop (or join) a consulting practice facilitating such mobile crowdsourcing. He expects to get interest both from firms seeking crowdsourcing and possibly governments/NGOs seeking to use these income streams to ameliorate unemployment and poverty.