All Things

With calls for yet another government bailout, right after the last one, it’s hard for Americans not to be really frustrated about the state of the domestic car industry. I’ve been watching its decline my entire life. It’s kind of like watching the slow decline of Sears (starting maybe a decade later), which was so big and dominant, it’s taking a very long time, but when it comes the end may be pretty ugly.

For a business starting out so high on the totem pole, it can be quite a challenge to acknowledge a severe turn of events. This happened in the car biz by the late 1960s, but I really think Detroit is still - after four decades - in denial. They’ve never had their Sputnik moment, their Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Instead, they’ve been like the frog in the pot that’s slowly warmed up.

Congress has made sure the frog stays reasonably comfortable, but for how much longer? American cars have improved quite a bit in recent years, but do GM, Ford & Chrysler get it yet about how relentlessly competitive the auto biz is nowadays?

They need to entirely overhaul their company cultures, because it’s not going to get any easier by just surviving to 2010 or whenever. Detroit automakers must get rid of their quick-fix mindset and adopt company cultures that embrace continuous improvement and place engineering & quality above marketing. Otherwise all the king’s (president’s?) men aren’t going to be able to put humpty-dumpty’s brand back together.

Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh really hit the nail on the head recently when he pointed out that a company’s culture and its brand are really two sides of the same coin (Video, quote at about 9:20). Detroit doesn’t seem to get this. Unless they overhaul their entire businesses, then their brand message is never going to stay aligned with reality for long.

Cadillac is just one example. Way back in 1990, the GM division won the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award, and appeared to be on its way to establishing a quality reputation for its product line. Sadly, the other day I was looking at the current Consumer Reports, and several of Cadillac’s most prominent models are listed as not recommended by CR because of less-than-average reliability.

Maybe today’s Cadillacs are quite a bit better-made than those of a decade or two ago, but so are Toyotas, not to mention Hyundais and even Kias. Consumers are smarter, too.

I know there’s some folks in Detroit who’ve been working really hard for a long time trying to make things better and I’ve been rooting for them as much as anyone, but until the leaders there get past the idea of just surviving the current crisis and start thinking strategically, any government bailout is probably just money down the drain. It’s the culture that’s got to change.

I just left a comment on Rex Hammock’s blog rexblog, where he questions whether Marc Andreessen is right to say the demise of the New York Times is inevitable.

It’s probably safe to assume the Times will end up quite different from what it’s been in the past, which very well may upset a lot of folks, but that’s not to say it’s a doomed enterprise. I see two key issues to their survival: how willing are they to embrace new technology (& kill off the old when necessary) and - as I’ve already suggested - will they aggressively look for ways to combat information overload?

Marc Andreessen’s blog is certainly one of the best, nevertheless I’m not so sure it’s wise to write off the NY Times. They appear to be one of the few old-media companies that really seems to get the first requirement, embracing new technology, especially in the time since they became an early adopter of RSS.

Since then, they’ve added some video, made their content free, and now become an investor in Automattic (purveyor of WordPress). Besides, they’ve got a great global brand.

I recall someone arguing about a decade ago that as technology improves, most all colleges (as with textbooks) will end up using lectures by just a few star professors from top schools, that the internet would effectively raise the value of the top “global” brands, while lowering the value of most local brands.

I’m not sure if this is correct, but if so, it might seem to likewise apply to top media outlets, provided they were aggressive about adopting new technologies to spread their content. At the same time, all media players need to be looking hard at how to better package/deliver/archive their content, so that users can access and recall it as efficiently as possible.

Otherwise, the entire media biz is going to have a hard time growing, as we rapidly reach a limit to how much more information we can absorb in this new attention economy.

Business Week Senior Writer Stephen Baker has been soliciting comments for an upcoming story on blogging/web 2.0, and his summary of the responses so far is pretty much on the money.

My main concern, as noted earlier in Twitter & Taking Info Overload Seriously, is that information overload has ALREADY become a big problem, is rapidly becoming worse, and few media folks (or anyone else) are taking it seriously.

I remember back when USA Today started publishing, how it was criticized for publishing in a short-article format. Comparisions were made to TV news, with accusations of dumbing down complex issues. Some feared it would be the beginning of the end of serious journalism.

Well three decades later, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are still cranking out in-depth articles. These are now available to anyone in the world with internet access, so those fears were certainly exaggerated.

Nevertheless, while both have been aggressive adopters of internet technologies and online presence, they - and other media - may struggle financially if means aren’t developed to help us better find, track, and consume the information we need, and then suitably record/re-publish it. This is a critical business concern for the publishing and advertising industries.

While USA Today-type capsule summaries are one way of dealing with information overload, we also need to be able to manage effectively more in-depth information sources, too. There really is a rapidly-growing stream of valuable, specific content being produced now, and we’ll never really be satisfied with any solution that simply restricts, without helping us access, more of this content than we can currently.

Indeed, the continuing growth in the number of channels of information is staggering. We’re going to need powerful tools to manage that. There’s much more to be said about this, but what we really need is a vibrant conversation about how best to handle information overload. What’s the crux of the problem - how do we define it? What kinds of tools would be truly helpful?

Here’s the comment I left on Steve Baker’s blog:

Information overload is a BIG problem, and I’m amazed how little that reality has registered with most people and with journalists and other media folks.

The answer isn’t simply read less, because the availability of quality, specific and useful information (that you need or really want for your job, life, etc.) is exploding.

What’s missing are powerful tools to help us manage this information in a convenient, non-redundant and timely manner.

Information is coming in - and in the case of bloggers, flickr users, etc. going out - from so many directions that organizing/integrating all that is going to become a big aspect of social networking, and computing/telecom in general, in the near future.

Dana Blankenhorn has posted an interesting article discussing how open source software is being divvied up among top software companies (IBM, Google, Microsoft) in a way reminiscent of Japanese keiretsus. She argues that only these three seem to have the “size, scope and ambition” to play in this space, though Sun also continues to seek such a dominant position.

According to the article, in American usage “keiretsu” has become a term describing a much looser form of business association, with one large company and a number of smaller ones beholden to it in various ways. The Mozilla Foundation’s dependence on Google would be a good example, a relationship of substantial ties between independent entities.

Years ago, I was thinking open source might end up being its own “keiretsu”. Nevertheless, I guess it was inevitable that it would instead end up fragmented and mostly beholden to big companies. Blankenhorn cites the examples of IBM-Red Hat and Microsoft-Novell as other instances of such ties.

On the other hand, if these big companies do things right, open source software can advance and still end up producing a thriving ecosystem. IBM’s relationship with the Eclipse Foundation is a prime example.

It seems that key to the whole process is how a Big Co. views the software product lifecycle. If it accepts that functionality gradually will become commoditized, it will view open source as the likely end-point for most proprietary software. Such a strategy/outlook will result in the Big Co.’s typically releasing the source after some years/decades, with the intent of building still-proprietary software and services on top of it.

IBM did that with VisualAge (now Eclipse), and has also worked hard at promoting the open-source Linux operating system. On the other hand, Microsoft seems to want to milk its Windows operating system forever, which makes it hard to play well in the open-source world.

While it may seem wasteful, companies such as Apple have shown that a steady discarding of old technology can do a lot to promote innovation. I keep waiting for more companies to follow their example.

Evidence continues to mount that “creative destruction” is indeed a key process in a healthy economy. Peter Drucker argued that companies ought to continually make way for the new by killing off old products, rather than waiting for the market to do it for them. Henry Ford’s reluctance to part with the Model T, and its nearly destroying Ford in the process, is the classic case study on this.

With software, however, there’s a difference, since many software products are foundations for other systems (software or hardware), or integral to the use/retention of valuable data produced by them. For this reason, it’s not as simple a matter to remove a program from the market. Software may be used for many different purposes by different customers. Some may be able to switch quickly to new products, but others would incur great cost.

Consequently, it seems inevitable that users are eventually going to demand some kind of protection from software vendors - or else from government regulators - that a software product’s source code be made open source if the product is abandoned. At the least users would be protected, and possibly the product might see further development by others (WordPress, successor to b2, is in some respects an example of this).

More interesting, however, are the more state-of-the-art open-source projects such as Linux and Eclipse, that promise innovation and a product that is “built right” for the future in a platform-agnostic way. Knowing that a software product will be here to stay, because the source is available, seems to be such a strong draw that many of these best-of-breed projects have been able to attract top talent to contribute, often on a volunteer basis, as well as substantial support from Big Co.’s such as IBM.

For the software industry to thrive and not just reinvent the wheel, we need strong and viable foundations to build on. If these Big Co.’s are willing to kill off the revenue streams from their old software somewhat before it dries up, their code may well retain importance, or even grow in dominance as Eclipse has. This can offer a strong foundation both for services and for additional products higher up the stack.

Moreover, it will produce an overall healthier software industry ecosystem, since the underlying code will continue to be developed, increasing the value of it and everything higher up on the stack, due both to stability and to greater innovation.

Mashable and others have been reporting that the venerable Classmates.com site is now about to do an IPO (initial public offering), at a valuation of $125 million. Started in 1995, Mashable’s Pete Cashmore says Classmates deserves credit for being the first social network, begun two years before the now-defunct Six Degrees.

While it may seem old, dull and boring to the digerati types (and it’s not Facebook), Classmates might still be pretty interesting to average users, if they are smart about making the right enhancements. I like Classmates; they continue to be slowly but steadily adding folks from my school classes. I’ve only communicated with a few, but think the site still fills a viable need (I’ve had virtually NO success locating anyone my age - 44 - on Facebook or other networks yet), and they’ve got the market share/critical mass to make it work.

As others have noted (generating considerable controversy), the big social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook appear to be attracting different sorts of users. While Facebook is now pulling in a lot of older technically-inclined users, the large bloc of non-technical older Americans is pretty much being left out. Obviously Classmates is too specialized to serve all their needs, but it’s the kind of simple and inviting format that would likely appeal to a lot of average folks.

My main complaints are with the pricing and the speed of the site. Classmates needs more functionality to be free and to get away from the True ads, which seem to be their main advertiser. I suspect if the site were faster to navigate and search, folks would spend more time there. Monetizing a site nowadays with AdSense, etc., generally isn’t too difficult, so I don’t see why they couldn’t offer more free functionality and still be viable.

Of course, any school-oriented site should have plenty of ways to generate well-performing ads (though even Facebook doesn’t seem to have succeeded at this, yet), but I suppose Classmates could also keep their paid subscriptions. In the several years I’ve used Classmates, I haven’t seen many people going this route, because you have to pay so much up front just to try it for a short time.

If sites like Classmates are going to have a paid subscription model, then they should by all means offer a less costly middle tier (above the free tier) and segment their market between those who don’t mind paying $20 or more to try out a site that may (likely) disappoint vs. those of us who aren’t willing to risk much until we know we’re going to get our money’s worth!

As with any social network, the key is users returning to the site on a regular basis (Facebook’s strength). Classmates is good about sending weekly emails announcing new members from your classes, but the site is slow to load and navigate, and when someone does try to communicate with you, you can’t even see it without paying a considerable amount for a subscription.

Obviously, basic communication features should be free. Maybe subscriptions could add the option of a blog page or other customization, the opportunity to have a page for that particular class, etc. There are so many possibilities, the site ought to be worth $125 million, considering the number of users (50 million) that they’ve signed up.

A few other ideas for added functionality (maybe some of this exists already but could be enhanced and made more visible):

• Stores for sale of school related merchandise (shirts, stickers, etc.)
• Alumni association pages. My high school’s alumni association has become much more active and is now even conducting a campital campaign to raise money for improvements! With the internet, these activities are much easier to do, and a site like Classmates provides a key ingredient - finding and keeping in touch with people.
• As I’ve written about elsewhere, it’s still VERY hard to locate your former teachers, and Classmates already offers this functionality (membership for teachers, etc.) but it’s almost completely ignored. They need to make a push to sign up teachers, which I suspect would stimulate a lot of other interest, and maybe a fair amount of free media coverage.

As I hinted at above, I find Classmates interesting in part because it’s so different from the sorts of things that the Silicon Valley crowd get excited about. The Valley folks have brought us a lot of good things, but also have some huge blind spots. A large part of the country is moving MUCH more slowly onto the internet, and there’s still not that much available on the net for for folks who didn’t grow up using it.

Classmates isn’t Facebook, but I really believe that there are still a lot of great business opportunities on the net for serving older folks (which, as far as the internet goes, is pretty much anyone over 35). Even though they have a lot of disposable income, many of these users are still fearful of doing too much, of making purchases online, etc. Sites that seem stable and “safe” have a certain appeal that a wild and woolly site like MySpace could never offer.

Since I posted my Initial Thoughts About the iPhone, Dave Winer has described his experience after four weeks, and it’s not too favorable:

iPhone, month 1

He describes, for instance, how he couldn’t quickly retrieve a phone number from an email and return a call, and is generally unhappy with the iPhone’s email function, as well as its touch-screen keyboard.

Worse, in an interesting observation Winer notes:

“It also seems we’re going to have a long-term discussion over whether it makes sense to have a “mobile web” or take the iPhone trade-off, more effort to use its web (lots of scrolling and pinching), but making the whole web accessible, mobile sites or non-mobile sites. I think what Apple has attempted is noble, but it’s not going to work. The screens have limited resolution, and even if they didn’t, even if they could cram a billion pixels into every square inch, there’s the limit of how much detail our eyes can see and how big our hands are.”

It does seem that some people’s eyes and fingers fit the iPhone’s diminutive size better than others. I’ve long felt that the trend toward ever-smaller devices is a mistake. Early in the Treo’s development, when Palm (or probably it was still Handspring) was eagerly describing how wonderful it was that they were going to make it yet smaller, I got frustrated enough to write them about it, but to no avail.

If the iPhone starts to falter, it will be in no small part due to its form factor, and maybe then handheld device makers (besides Blackberry) will finally start to listen. Many devices, especially phone devices, are TOO small, and keyboards are important to a lot of folks, especially for texting and email, and must be gotten right. Some users seem to like the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard, but clearly it’s not for everyone.

Winer, who’s been involved with Mac software since the early days with the ThinkTank and More outliners, and seen both the good and bad sides of Apple, concedes that “the iPhone is much prettier than a Blackberry and feels better in your hand. I’m not mocking Apple for that, style matters, esp in a personal device.”

He figures that “the iPhone, if it attains success, will reach it the way the Mac did, after the initial fatal flaws are removed, in the “iPhone Plus” or whatever.” Indeed, a lot of folks seem to have forgotten that in 1984, initially Mac sales were good, but soon stalled after the early adopters (including myself, even though I’m not usually such) bought theirs. The original Mac was not really a very useful machine until the memory was bumped from 128K to 512K.

I’m sure that Apple is already working to fix many of the first-generation iPhone’s deficiencies, and will do it faster than Apple did in 1984-7 with the Mac. Nevertheless, the question remains whether they’ll be open to more radical changes - such as a bigger device with a bigger screen and real keyboard - which may be necessary to pull in a lot of the Blackberry’s users and other folks no longer in their twenties.

Internet Duct Tape (formerly EngTech) has an interesting post about proper use of categories and tags in WordPress. Eric says:

“One of my first and longstanding complaints of WordPress is that it does not understand the fundamental difference between tagging and categorizing. Categorizing is like taking all of your socks and putting them into drawers based on colours. Tagging is like sewing a little label on your socks that says when you bought them, how to wash them, … Categories add organization and tags add semantic information. A category can be a tag, but if you use your tags as categories you’ll eventually have a right old mess.”

This is an interesting question because in my experience, there’s never just “one” right way of organizing or presenting information. To find an appropriate way to organize something, you must consider the use and the user.

The goal with tags, categories or whatever scheme is to organize the information in a way that you or another familiar user can find everything, while presenting it to a new user in a way which allows them to easily assess what all is there and then navigate through it to access what they’re particularly looking for. Consequently, I think it depends on the blog how many categories or tags are appropriate.

In my WordPress blogs, I use multiple categories with each post, so I guess that means I’m using them like tags, not true categories. This and my other Blogsome (WordPress) blog, RealCurrents, each have a few dozen categories, used like tags, but it’s not too hard to scan them all as they’re listed on the right side of the page.

My personal blog Light Side on Live Spaces is only allowed one category per post, but that’s OK for a simple blog like that, though I still find myself wanting to add a category every once in a while. If I had a lot of photos on that site, then I’d certainly want a good tagging system, however.

Closer to the other extreme is my aerospace blog (currently still on Xanga), in which I like to note all kinds of esoteric things and so have close to 200 tags,

http://www.xanga.com/AeroGo/tags

so folks can look up specific aircraft, certain famous individuals, manufacturers, etc. This tag cloud really functions more like an index.

For those who want to use categories more properly, as unique groupings, Eric’s post links to an interesting and fairly lengthy discussion by Lorelle VanFossen, Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags. She says that

“In the simplest of terms, I think of categories as the table of contents for your blog, a kind of general outline that directs visitors to general topics that you blog about. Tags are more like the index page of a book, a list of key words people will use to search for specific terms.”

She also includes a helpful discussion of how limiting yourself to a small set of categories can help you focus and really think through the purpose for your blog. Nevertheless she notes that she ended up including one category as a sort of “catch-all”, giving it a vague name, “Web Wise”.

Regarding tag clouds, I’ve noticed several ways of presenting them on various sites, typically with the more popular tags in larger type. While that’s a good idea, many times the tags are organized in a rather unhelpful way. I even saw one site where they were in a spiral!

For a site like AeroGo, where it’s likely that the average user is not looking for one of the top 10 tags, it would be better if Xanga presented the tags not only alphabetically as currently, but also in orderly columns, as in a book’s index, though keeping the varying font sizes. This might be overdoing it for many sites, but it would be interesting to see an experiment on a big site like Flickr of several different tag cloud presentations and the resulting click-through rates.

Like Google’s simple but (truly) helpful index, I wonder if on a lot of sites an alphabetical, index-like tag cloud might produce better results, though a simple tag module added to a page wouldn’t have room for all that. In any event, as the “semantic web” becomes more of a reality, I suspect more detailed tagging systems will gain value and prominence, as they help users drill down to the specific information they’re looking for.

Astroprof’s Page has an interesting discussion of the difficulties of science journalism.

I think the quality of science coverage is improving at many of the major newspapers at least. As Astroprof mentions, Mark Carreau has, for example, done a good job for the Houston Chronicle. Perhaps it’s a positive outcome from the Challenger tragedy, but it seems that about that time many of the media outlets here in Houston started giving a lot more attention to manned spaceflight. The “main” industries in Houston have long been oil & gas and real estate, but for quite a few years now space has also been accorded that sort of status by the Chronicle and several of the TV and radio stations.

An experienced, knowledgeable science reporter is hard to replace. I subscribed to Science News for years, but after Dietrick Thomsen and Jonathan Eberhart left, the physics and space coverage were just not the same. I doubt most publishers have the means to get into a bidding war for the limited supply of top talent, and no one could expect a relatively new science journalist to be able to match their reporting.

One of the problems with science and tech journalism is that folks in these fields often expect journalists to do all the work. Such a mindset would seem ridiculous in politics, where there’s whole staffs of hacks feeding carefully-crafted sound bites to the media and identifying “talking points” for their candidate’s every appearance.

Businesses likewise spend vast amounts on marketing and public relations, but most researchers, and even technical staff inside many businesses, somehow don’t seem to think these functions are part of their job. Of course, a lot of engineers, scientists and programmers aren’t that good at communications skills, or just plain don’t like to talk about themselves, but somebody in these research groups and engineering departments needs to take up the role of communicator, so the outside world can understand the value and needs of their efforts.

Journalists are under a lot of pressure with the kind of deadlines that most of us couldn’t even imagine, so it’s only smart to realize they’re going to need some help. That’s one of the things I’m trying to do with some of my sites, particularly AeroGo (for aerospace and engineering education) and RealCurrents (for current events), in which I’m trying to provide important but little-known background information and to point out things deserving more attention (which I generally categorize with the tag “Press Coverage Holes”).

Where there are failings in science/tech journalism, beyond just ignorantly trying to cover a field the reporter knows nothing about, I’d say that one of the biggest problems is that of naively swallowing pronouncements from big research groups without knowing what is going on elsewhere. We saw some of that a few years ago, for example, with some coverage of the Human Genome Project, that focussed too much on the government research, ignoring Celera Genomics’ private effort that ended up getting done first.

The result is that journalists are often lacking in understanding about the overall policy and business aspects of research, and consequently end up focussing too critically on superficial technical aspects. We saw that just this past week, when many media outlets were talking about the possible abandoning of the International Space Station, due to computer problems - what was a rather remote possibility, technically, while saying not a word about how NASA’s busily going about building a station they expect to abandon anyway, not too many years after completing it.

It seems to me that journalists ought to be a little easier on programs that suffer technical glitches that are really just part of the normal course of research & development, but be discerning enough to realize when an effort has really lost its way or when a policy has serious unresolved issues. With so much needless technical criticism, a lot of R&D managers are understandably gun-shy about the press, which just perpetuates the disconnect to journalists described above.

I ran across a post, The Attention Crash on Steve Rubel’s blog Micro Persuasion. In it, he argues that the real danger isn’t another .com financial bubble bursting, but rather individuals hitting a wall of information overload:

“We are reaching a point where the number of inputs we have as individuals is beginning to exceed what we are capable as humans of managing. The demands for our attention are becoming so great, and the problem so widespread, that it will cause people to crash and curtail these drains. Human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.”

I agree that there’s still a lot of life left in this tech deployment cycle. At the same time, I’m amazed that the media and society at large still don’t seem to be taking information overload seriously.

There’s been such an explosion of both work and leisure information, not to mention creative tools, games, etc., yet you don’t notice many people outside of the GTD blogging community talking about it. We obviously are going to need some more sophisticated tools than just raw RSS feeds, and these folks seem to be about the only people seriously exploring that. There’s so many GTD-related productivity and project management tools, that I’m having a hard time getting them all sorted out.

In other words, we need a lot of innovation in order to develop tools for handling information overload, and so we should be seeing a lot of experimentation taking place. Right now most of that is happening in the GTD community. I think we should also expect to see a variety of tools tailored to particular individual styles. That’s an area I’ve done a great deal of research in, and hope to see its application to innovative productivity tools.

Beyond GTD, Twitter is clearly generating some of the loudest buzz currently, mainly as a social networking site, where it seems to have great potential. A lot of folks have criticized it as the worst example of pointless info overload but I think Twitter, or something like it, could actually be a tremendous tool to help deal with overload, both by making inputs timely without interrupting (using the web interface, anyway) and by forcing inputs to conform to a quick summary so you can judge whether it’s worth a further look.

Of course, most folks don’t get that yet. I see tweets saying “This is great” and just a link, giving me no idea what it’s about. Others send out a half-dozen or more pointless tweets a day, clogging up my friends page. Some news sources such as the New York Times, commendably quick to get on board, nevertheless send out the same update on multiple channels. All this “noise” reduces Twitter’s usefulness, but even in just the six weeks or so that I’ve used it, I’ve already seemed to notice a certain sort of evolution going on, with many (not all) folks starting to effectively pre-screen their tweets and limit them more to ones that would actually be helpful to others.

I think eventually we’ll see people going to multiple accounts (”channels”?), one with personal info and more security, another with interesting links (as Robert Scoble has already done with his Scoble’s Link Blog), and another with updates from all one’s own blog posts, important comments, etc. The last purpose is how I’m primarily using my own Twitter account, aeroG, at present.

The main point is that Twitter, as with so much of the web, is a grand experiment being done on a huge scale, and it’s likely to evolve rapidly in the coming year or two. If Rubel is at all correct, then we should expect to be seeing a lot more of these tools coming along shortly, to help us sort out not only our increasingly complex lives and connections, but also the huge flood of information that increasingly threatens to overwhelm us, or at least to drown out the truly valuable information tidbits that these tools should help us to find and track.

I started out writing this as yet another comment to my earlier post about Twitter, but think I’ll make it a separate post. In any case, here are two good articles about serious uses of Twitter that I found from a post on the Setting Contexts blog:

The Top 5 Ways Smart People Use Twitter

What Twitter Means for Marketers

Regarding the 5 uses in the first article, I’d add:

1. Marketing & Communication: It’s interesting to just look at Twitter and quickly see what so much of the buzz is about. I do think there’s a good chance of picking up on tech or consumer trends much quicker, if you’re listening to the right folks. A good tool for finding those “right” folks is an obvious key add-on to the service.

2. Microblogging: Not everyone’s brain works this way, but for me there’s a lot of times I want to throw out a random thought, question or link that might be of some benefit or deserving of further investigation (e.g. by a journalist). I’ve added my Twitter account to my Technorati blog list, so now there’s a somewhat decent chance these thoughts might get discovered, though Twitter does need an automatic ping function.

3. Business Networking: I’m hopeful about this; I do well in one-on-one conversation but don’t stand out in a crowd. There’s a lot of folks I’d like to connect with that I’ve never had an immediately compelling enough reason to do it, though it would probably be beneficial for both sides.

4. Breaking News & Getting Scoops: I got this part as soon as I saw the CNN logo on Twitter. Unfortunately, I don’t think most news outlets have figured out how Twitter could drive traffic to their sites. As with RSS, the NY Times is at the forefront of this.

5. Streamlining Your Electronic Inboxes: I’m really hopeful that Twitter can help to reduce the email onslaught, since reading a Twitter update is so instant. I made a suggestion about this, for example, to Kristin at French Word a Day last week, as I thought it was an excellent example of a daily email service that could benefit from a Twitter update.

As I noted before, I expect we’ll see a whole lot of other uses emerge for Twitter, since in essence it’s a whole new basic form of communication. Here are a few more interesting examples of Twitter applications I’ve found recently:

Austin Weather

Kansai Train Announcements

French Practice

Interesting Links Forwarded by Robert Scoble

Twitter Timer

Also someone reportedly found some help after a car accident: Thoughts on Twitter.

Finally, with regard to the second article mentioned at the beginning, there’s this interesting assertion: If Markets Are Conversations, Then Twitter Is Money.

I’ve been reading about the rekindled Microsoft/Yahoo talks; perhaps it’s a good sign. It just seems so obvious that Microsoft doesn’t yet understand the internet, and so inevitably can’t really take it seriously enough. It’s got a dozen years of half-hearted efforts under its belt and not much to show for it, other than the dominance of Internet Explorer, which continues to slowly lose share to Firefox.

A BBC report quotes one analyst, Matt Rosoff, as saying, "I do not understand what Yahoo would get out of the deal, including that there are people there who don’t want to work for Microsoft." Well, that really says it all!

Nowadays, there are a lot of people who are trying to get away from Microsoft. After 27 years of being their customer, and 23 years of using a Mac, I’ve learned to pick and choose their offerings, rather than just drink their kool-aid and swallow the whole enchilada. I don’t at all want them to go away, but it would be really nice if they would be honest with themselves, accept what their true strengths and weaknesses are, and stop trying to be all things to all people, in order to keep most all the pie to themselves. That strategy is just not working anymore, and after years of disappointments, the reality is starting to be generally acknowledged.

As I’ve noted before, I thought MSN Spaces (where I have my personal blog) was one of the better things they’ve done, but they’ve made it increasingly Windows-centric as the Live Spaces rollout has continued, which has made it clunkier and more difficult to use, at least for non-Windows/IE users. I don’t expect Microsoft to be Apple, but after all their years of vaunted usability testing, they still don’t get basic design principles.

Everyone knows that Toyota’s cars aren’t that stylish, but they’re well-made, and Toyota (as it has recently) will put the brakes on to ensure a consistently high-quality product. Microsoft isn’t going to have the style of Apple, but they need to develop some decent processes like Toyota, so they can produce a quality product that meets customers’ needs.

Quality is a long-view strategy. In the short run, Toyota sells a bit fewer cars because they last longer, but in the long run, they sell a lot more, and pretty soon even more than GM. Bill Gates once said that his favorite business book was Alfred Sloan’s My Years With General Motors, but the days when one company could dominate a global market and put out mediocre products, in a strategy of planned obsolescence, are long past.

At least Microsoft is reaching out to a company that has some insight. I’ve always thought Yahoo was a bit clunky itself, but they are innovative and do understand the potential of the internet. Maybe Microsoft is at last acknowledging that they don’t get it, and that their culture needs to change.

I suggest that they start by returning to a more inclusive strategy on their online offerings. Don’t automatically expect users to be running all Microsoft software (e.g. IE and Windows), and so don’t penalize users who are using some MS software, just because they aren’t using all Microsoft software! In an era of open source and global markets, all that strategy will do is ensure that eventually no one will be using any Microsoft software.

Microsoft has to accept that they can no longer expect to get the whole pie, except for the crumbs, and that they better be glad for whatever share than can get, without coercion. They still have a lot of talented people; if they revitalize their culture and get their processes right, they could still do really well, and I hope they manage to pull it off.

As I did earlier with the Education category, I’ve decided to generally put articles related to the Christian Church and various religions in another space, in this case my blog RealCurrents. That’s where I’ve just posted a discussion of the management issues behind the controversy reportedly flaring up over churches attempting to move to a more “purpose-driven” approach promoted by pastor and author Rick Warren.

This controversy raises an issue which is common to all organizations - the tension between decentralization and centralization, between external results and internal order. This is a central problem in management, similar to how the paradox of free will is a central issue in philosophy. I note, for example, how Intel’s Andy Grove discusses the subject at length in his book High-Output Management.

Anyone interested in management needs to be very much aware of this inevitable tension between mission/projects/results and function/bureaucracy.

Years ago, Apple ran an ad with a bunch of lemmings all following each other off a cliff. After all, why think when it’s so easy to just NOT think? Well, here we go again. This year it seems like most all the major blogging/social networking services are one by one getting blinded in the headlights of MySpace.

As if we really need more of the lowest common denominator! There’s so much opportunity for innovation in this area, yet everyone wants to be the same. I’ve complained previously on my MSN (now Live) Spaces blog about Microsoft in this regard, and now the latest casualty apparently is Facebook.

With only 10 million users after two and a half years of operation, I guess Facebook just feels like a failure next to MySpace. Never mind the fact that they own the campus network space, they would rather throw out that distinctive so they can compete head-on with everybody. Usually these sorts of commoditization strategies don’t end up being as profitable as the competitors expect (the airline industry comes to mind).

Perhaps the Facebook users will again make a big fuss. Maybe management will listen, but chances are, based on the past history of fast-growing tech companies, they won’t. Most keep determinedly going in the wrong bone-headed direction until they go right off the cliff.

Xanga, which I use for my blog AeroGo and perhaps my favorite of the bunch, is likewise feverishly adding multimedia features, to compete not only with MySpace I suppose but also Flickr and YouTube. So far these changes seem mostly positive, but if Xanga can add these features so readily, they will very likely end up as standard on all sites.

Hasn’t anybody (or at least any VCs) noticed that there are a lot of people out there who don’t like MySpace? I mean really, it’s pretty raunchy by and large. It’s as if there was a town full of nice, somewhat distinct neighborhoods, yet all the developers were racing to fill these places with trashy businesses and dumpy apartments.

So why don’t any of these sites carve out a unique identity for themselves? I think the only plausible answer is the dramatic, rapid growth of MySpace. Why have 5 or 10 million users when you can have 100 million? Of course, these users apparently are also spending a lot of time on MySpace and so, presumably, potentially a lot of dollars.

Nevertheless, it seems that money is best made on the net by tightly targeting customers, not with mass marketing, so I suspect sites that are oriented around specific topics, activities and user demographics will ultimately yield a superior return. As I’ve noted before, these social networking sites need to differentiate themselves and find niches where they can thrive, as Facebook has (even if they don’t grasp the value of this).

Let me use Facebook as an example, since it has done the best job of targeting a very large yet tightly-defined niche (high school and college campuses). College students in particular have so many things they have to (or want to) buy, that the marketing/advertising opportunities seem almost endless, both at the local and at the national or branding/name recognition level. Everyone from the local pizza restaurant to students selling used textbooks to Hollywood film studios will want to target their users.

I’m not in school so I don’t use Facebook and don’t know how good a job they’ve done of capitalizing on this opportunity, but the folks developing (and funding) these sites need to remember that traffic often, but not always, equates to sales. Ultimately, it boils down to trust. I suspect that MySpace, as many city centers did, will begin to collapse of its own weight as many head to the “suburbs” of seemingly safer sites like Xanga and others.

The planned growth ideal for urban development might in fact be a useful metaphor for these social networking sites, which may do best if they concentrate on growing at a sustainable pace with a clear demographic or interest group in mind. Users need to come to trust these sites and feel safe in them. Then they will end up spending a lot more time and money there, and for the long run.

I wrote about Ford’s selection of former Boeing Commercial Airplanes President Alan Mulally as its new CEO on my blog AeroGo. As I note there, I don’t agree with William Clay Ford’s assertion that there are many parallels between Boeing’s recent challenges and Ford’s.

In a narrow sense, maybe yes, you can say that Ford needs to renegotiate union and supplier contracts, etc., but really Ford Motor Co. has been its own worst enemy, and is much more a victim of its own ineptitude and lack of decisiveness as any external circumstances. It was only a few years ago that it was the strongest of the Big Three, and now it appears to be the weakest.

If you want to draw parallels, a much better comparison could be made between Ford and Apple Computer than Ford and Boeing. As a long-time Apple user, I can assure you that Apple has long been its own worst enemy. Even when Apple did make outstanding products at intelligent price-points, for years it would suffer severe logistical problems that cut into the potential gains. Even in recent years, I suspect continuing skepticism of Apple’s ability to ramp up production of hot products is one reason folks underestimated its iPod business for so long.

The difference with Apple now is that it finally has a clear, focussed direction for its products and the brand is healthy again. In the same way, Ford needs to make up its mind what kind of car company it is and develop clear differentiators for each of its brands, whichever ones it decides to keep.

It wasn’t too many years ago that William Clay Ford was declaring that Ford was going to be a leader pushing for better fuel economy and lower emissions. Along came a few problems, and apparently that vision was tossed, and now, with gas prices up and highly dependent on truck sales, the failure to follow through on that vision is really hurting them.

Product-driven companies like Apple and Ford must set a course and stick to it long-term, and not constantly adjust to every external up and down, whether in the market for their products or their stock. Even recently, nearly a decade into Apple’s turnaround, analysts were calling Apple’s plans for the Mac unrealistic, that they needed to focus on market share, etc. Of course, the reality of the computer business has long been that significant market share gains are made on the mistakes of one’s competitors, mistakes which are all too common, and which even Microsoft has been making of late.

In other words, stability and staying the course are far too under-rated. On the other hand, there is one crucial difference between Apple and Ford - even when things were their worst, Apple had large cash reserves, something Ford may not be able to count on. But any “quick fix” that damages the Ford brands will probably just end up making things worse.

The sad thing is, William Clay Ford’s “greener” vision for Ford may well have been on the mark, and it’s a shame they didn’t stick to it. Perhaps a return to his vision coupled with Mulally’s demonstrated management ability can turn the company around. As with Apple, there’s probably a lot more life left in the Ford, Lincoln, Volvo and Jaguar brands, at least, if they can set a clear direction and stick to it. For a few years things may not look so good, but a consistent product vision will eventually yield leading products and strongly-differentiated brands.

“It has to be about the experience, not just the rides.” - Mark Shapiro, new CEO, Six Flags Inc.

Though on a much smaller scale, it was one of those moments like the Challenger accident that jolt you, imprinting in your memory where you were and what you were doing when you heard the news. In my case, I was with my son last September, on our way to seeing the Astros play the Florida Marlins, when the report came over the radio. Six Flags Astroworld was going to be shut down and the land sold for redevelopment.

Now real estate development and redevelopment has long been, together with the energy industry, the lifeblood of the Houston economy, but this time it didn’t seem like good news. I was about 5 years old when the park first opened, and as a child I loved it. Perhaps even more than the rides, I was fascinated by the original world theme of Astroworld, where it was divided into sections resembling the American west, the Orient, the Alps, an old-style main street, etc.

Before the park became crowded with rides, there was a sizable “lagoon” that helped to divide the areas, but unlike EPCOT’s simple circular layout with a lake in the middle, the sections had been carefully designed (as at Disneyland, etc.) to hide much of the other parts and transition seamlessly so you felt more like you were immersed in a single section at a time (this was much easier before the rides got so much bigger).

In essence, the theme park design allowed a visitor (especially a small child who was likely to be overwhelmed with all the inputs) to feel like they were in a certain place in the world, and then a few minutes later to experience a whole different environment (except for the humidity). My favorite ride was an alpine sleigh ride, a mild roller-coaster type experience that went through a sizable manmade mountain which was very cold. Besides impacting even temperature and humidity, the ride gave a child a trip to the mountains, something far outside the Houston experience (Colorado has become something of a Texas colony for this reason).

After a decade or so, the world theme design began to break down. A new roller coaster was built and a large arcade area put in, which perhaps generated a lot of revenue but really didn’t fit (and was pretty tacky). Every year a new ride would be built to use as a selling point to draw people back, and so the lagoon and other open spaces were used up, and the mountain was torn out as well (I suspect the sleigh ride was a considerable maintenance hassle). The park became increasingly crowded with rides and people (since there was less open space) and over the years basically transitioned from a theme park to an amusement park.

Nevertheless, a trip to Astroworld could still be a lot of fun, and with the many fairly new rides and crowds, I think most people were surprised that it closed. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t any warning, and I wonder why city leaders (apparently) didn’t make much effort to hold on to it (to be fair, the news came just weeks after Katrina, and they certainly had their hands - and the Astrodome - full). I was glad I’d taken our large family the year before, the only time we all went together.

Well, I’m still upset that Astroworld has closed, but at least now, thanks to Business Week, I know who to blame. But maybe all will be forgiven if new Chairman Dan Snyder and new CEO Mark Shapiro (from ESPN) do what the article says they’re setting out to do. Rather than focussing just on the rides, they seem to realize the need to emphasize the experience. In other words, theme parks, not simply amusement parks.

One would think the chance to remake dozens of parks would be more exciting than running a sports network or the Washington Redskins (Snyder’s other business). Each park is its own little world, and building and exploring worlds are activities that fascinate a lot of people (see the cover story for the May 1st BW for more on that).

Considering the following three points, I can’t help but wonder if the problem with parks today is that, like Astroworld, they’ve morphed from Walt Disney’s vision of theme parks into simple amusement parks:

1. Customer experience management has become all the rage in marketing. Customers today are buying an experience, not just a product or service.
2. People are overworked and overstressed. When they get a chance to take a break, they are going to want to be in a whole different place doing something totally different than their normal routine, but without a lot of hassles.
3. Fuel and travel costs are up, and many are likely to stay closer to home on their vacations, and these breaks are tending to be shorter but more frequent. Relatively few Americans routinely take long vacations nowadays.

With all this in mind, it would seem that there would be a business opportunity for theme parks catering to folks needing a simple way to take a break and spend time with their family. I hope the folks at Six Flags actually do invest more in the experience and less on giant roller coasters.

A lot more effort needs to be put into design and creativity, and the hassles need to be ironed out and guests given things to do besides just standing in long lines for big attractions. Parks need to be fun, relaxing places for adults and places of wonder for kids.

And by the way, Messrs. Snyder and Shapiro, if you do work out a good formula for a modern theme park, it would be nice of you to try it out here in the Houston area.