Tim Bray, on how he got hired by Google:

“The process started with Dan Morrill who led me to Mike Winton who led me through the notorious Google Interview Process. I think I talked to eleven people in the course of my day there, failing one logic puzzle but acing the what-does-a-browser-actually-do test. Then they made an offer and I accepted and here I am. By “here” I mean Vancouver; I’ll be working remotely.”

Think about that for a second: Tim Bray, a man who co-edited the XML and XML namespace specs, who is smart enough to have been Tim Berners-Lee’s appointee on to the W3C Technical Architecture Group, who co-chaired the Atompub Working Group of the IETF… had to do some logic puzzles to get a job at Google.

Either they were serious, and he could have failed the tests and not got the job, in which case they are stupid; or they made him jump through hoops for form’s sake, in which case they were wasting the time of a super-smart guy (as well as their own).

Words actually fail me.

(Photo by Rob Goodlatte)

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One of the things that fascinates me about the way that the smartphone market is developing is whether it is following a similar path to the PC market. It’s easy to see the conflict between Apple and Google, for example, as a re-run of Apple versus Microsoft – and draw the conclusion that the end result will be similar.

I don’t think the analogy holds as strongly as some commentators believe, but there are some interesting areas where Android looks increasingly like Windows. One example of this a what some companies would call “value-added software”, which consumers often call “crapware”: additional software which customises the user experience or (in theory) adds additional “free” functionality to the supplied product.

On Android, this manifests itself as “user experiences” like HTC’s SenseUI, but it’s not only manufacturers that want to play this game. Consider, too, the kinds of software added by networks like Vodafone:

“Vodafone has flagged up the forthcoming release of HTC’s Android-based smartphones Legend and Desire on its network next month.Legend will come with Vodafone’s 360 content and social networking portal pre-loaded.”

And this is just the start. The temptation for networks to “differentiate” themselves by skinning, amending and otherwise tampering with Android is going to be pretty intense – they’ve done much the same in the past with customised versions of non-smart phones, and they’ll do the same again with the “open” platform of Android.

Of course, the problem with this “value add” is that it rarely adds any value for the customer. The “problems” these kinds of add-ons are designed to solve are usually more to do with operator revenue than customer need.

Thus, Android is beginning its spiral into the world of crapware, software which serves no real purpose other than to give marketing people a “differentiator” which doesn’t really meet a customer need. And just as it has on the PC, the situation will get worse before it gets better – with the unfortunate issue that crapware is even harder to get rid of on a phone than it is on a computer.

(Image from louisvolant)

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If I’d have been one of the residents of Sandwich, I think I’d have found this terrifying. Particularly Button cabs.

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Steve Rubel points out that Instapaper just added a real killer feature:

“Earlier this week it quietly added a killer new feature. You can now email in URLs or newsletters and it will save them to your Instapaper account for perusal later. I find this invaluable. ”

I can’t actually wait to see what Marco comes up with for Instapaper on iPad. It may well be the killer application for use with it.

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Another YouTube Revenue Guess: $1 Billion in 2011:

Since Google releases almost no information about YouTube’s financial performance, the best we can do is make educated guesses. Here’s another one: The word’s biggest video site will be generating more than $1.1 billion in revenue by 2011, and Google will keep about $700 million of that.That estimate comes from Citigroup’s C Mark Mahaney, who notes that the site continues to grow, and that it’s placing more ads on more videos. No news there.Mahaney is good enough to explain the logic behind his estimate, and it’s a fairly simple one: He takes MySpace’s revenue-to-page view ratio and applies to YouTube.

So he makes a guess about MySpace’s CPM (he notes it’s “estimated”), applies a guess that this *might* be similar for YouTube (ignoring the fact that a video site is not the same as a social network site), guesses that the mix between CPM and CPC ads is the same on both sites, and then guesses that comScore’s figures are correct. He then throws into the mix a complete guess on YouTube’s costs ($300 million sounds massively low)… and publishes this as “analysis”?

How much are CItigroup’s clients paying for this, exactly?

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I don’t often link to Daring Fireball, basically because I assume that you’re all reading it anyway. But in his post on Tits and Apps, John perfectly summarises the challenge that faces Apple in maintaining its mindshare with mobile developers:

Apple sees the App Store as an aspect of its brand. Developers see the App Store as the entirety of the Cocoa Touch platform. This is a significant conflict. Developers, if rejected from the App Store, can freely deliver whatever content they choose through MobileSafari — but you can’t reuse compiled Cocoa Touch apps that way. The work invested in a native app can only be recouped through the App Store.

The obvious answer to this – and, I suspect, the long-term solution – is to have more than one App Store. The Apple App Store would, like Apple’s physical and online stores, be quality goods selected by Apple. The other store (or stores?) would be more free-form, with levels of gauranteed quality which differed from those Apple set.

You would expect that any store which Apple allowed into the walled garden of the iPhone would have certain limitations. For example, the apps wouldn’t be allowed to use private APIs, or contain malware, and I would expect Apple to continue to check every iPhone app for this (and take a cut – less than 30%, but not nothing).

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Android App Store Is 57% Free Compared to Apple’s 25% – app stores – Gizmodo:

App store analytics firm Distimo recently released a bunch of juicy info about the major mobile app stores, and the results are pretty interesting. For one, Android has a much higher proportion of free apps.

Or, to put it another way, you’ve got even less chance of making money on Android than you have on iPhone.

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In an interesting piece on the problems at MySpace under Murdoch, Om Malik mentions this:

Kevin also mentioned that Murdoch, and every large media company, need to think like startups.

Good advice – but only to a point. The fact is that News Corp (like all major media companies) can currently make more money online creating products which leverage other assets they own than standalone digital-only properties.

One simple example: a site tying into Avatar will have an instant audience and massive opportunity for cross-promotion and cross-sell, as long as it doesn’t suck. It won’t take years to build audience, won’t have large ongoing costs, and won’t need to have much in the way of work done on visual identity. It’s an instant money-spinner.

So if News Inc was developing digital-only properties from scratch, as I’m sure it will do in the future, “think like a startup” is good advice. But most of the time, it needs to “think like a corporate” – creating digital properties based on other media, linking them all together, and using the power of old media to create instant brand identity in the digital space.

(Picture via World Economic Forum)

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Sergey Brin On His Six Months Using Google Buzz:

“Extracting signal from noise is one of our core competencies, it’s one of the key things we do in our web search product every day. And I think that now peoples’ personal communications are getting to be on a scale comparable to that of web search, so those technologies are becoming far more critical.”

And this is the bit that I don’t understand about Google Buzz: There are few actual tools to manage the flow of information you’re going to get from it. There’s no tagging of shared items to help filtering. You can’t filter out one type of content from someone you follow, so (for example) you can’t hide Twitters that you might already see in Twitter. And so on.

Overall, I’m fairly upbeat on Buzz as a long-term project. It’s easier to understand and use that the abomination that is Google Wave, and once the initial shouting has stopped, it’s a useful method of link-sharing to contacts. Viewed that way, rather than as some kind of Twitter/Facebook competitor, it’s a nice add-on to Gmail.

And, of course, it will help a lot when every other Buzz isn’t about Buzz.

(Photo of Sergey Brin by jdlasica)

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As you’ll know if you follow me or this blog on Twitter, I’me a voracious Twitterer. I also can’t stand Adobe Air applications, which means that my options for Twitter applications are somewhat limited.

There’s a few around, of course. Tweetie is good, but hasn’t been developed for a little while and lacks support for “modern” Twitter features like lists and native retweet. Echofon has a lot going for it, but its support for multiple accounts is limited and, I find, a bit frustrating. And Socialite frustrates me, as it often seems to make my Mac show the beach ball of doom.

Looks matter

Given this, I’m quite surprised that Kiwi managed to evade me for so long. In its default state, Kiwi looks lovely – and you can skin it to make it look like pretty-much anything you like, too. Themes are created using HTML and CSS, so even non-coders like me can create something unique if they so wish.

Kiwi timeline view

But Kiwi is a lot more than a theme-able simple Twitter client. At its core is a concept that will be confusing at first, as it’s called “Accounts”. But Kiwi accounts don’t simply mirror Twitter accounts: Each one in Kiwi can contain multiple Twitter accounts which then appear in the same timeline.

What’s the point of this? First, if you have multiple accounts for home and work, it allows you to keep them separate without having to have numerous columns dominating the screen. For example, I have both ianbetteridge and technoviablog (personal Twitter accounts for me and my blog), and accounts which I have access to for work purposes. Kiwi allows me to keep them apart easily.

The power of accounts and rules

If that was all Kiwi could do, I’d have stumped up the $9.99 in an instant. But Kiwi accounts are more powerful than this, because each account can also contain Twitter searches on any keyword, plus the timeline of specific Twitter accounts. For example, I have set up a Kiwi account which lists all mentions of “#gtd” and “omnifocus”, as well as listing all the tweets from and to GTD founder David Allen.

Kiwi Accounts Window

Accounts are displayed in a little floating window, which you can set to sit on top of all other windows on your Mac if you want. The window shows whether you have unread items in each account, and you can set how you’re notified of new tweets on a per-account basis. So, for example, I have the account which includes my personal Twitter streams set to show me new replies and direct messages, while other accounts just display a little red dot next to the account in the floating window. This flexibility means you’re never interrupted by things which aren’t important to you.

Kiwi accounts thus give you a fantastically powerful tool for following specific topics on Twitter. But it also means some of your Accounts – particularly ones which include searches for common keywords – could get very busy indeed.

Thankfully, Kiwi has an answer to this: Rules. Set in the preferences, rules let you use regular expressions to filter tweets, either highlighting them with colours, marking them as read automatically, or – most powerful of all – hiding them. For example, if I want to search for every mention of “iPhone” but want to avoid tweets comparing it to Android, I can set up an Account which includes a search for “iPhone”, followed by a rule which hides all tweets mentioning “android”. Job done!

There is, however, a small but important limitation to this: Rules are applied to every account. This means, in my example above, tweets in all my Accounts which mention Android would get hidden, rather than just my iPhone search account. Hopefully this is something that will be expanded on in the future.

What’s missing?

What doesn’t Kiwi have? At the moment, the biggest missing item is support for lists, something that will be included a little further down the development line. There’s also little in the way of account management capabilities: You can follow someone who appears in your timeline that you’re not following, but you can’t unfollow from the timeline.

Although there’s support for Bitly URL shortening, at present you can’t link this to a specific Bit.ly account, so you don’t get the benefit of full tracking of stats either.

With most clients, for me, this would be a deal-breaker. But the power of the accounts and rules features, coupled with complete control over notifications and an interface that just works exactly how I’ve dreamed a Twitter client would make Kiwi a winner. If you want a powerful Twitter client and aren’t keen on Air, it’s well worth the low price.

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