E-Piphanies

Is Twitter Useless After All?

I have seen the future of Twitter, and it is Google Wave — which trumps Tweeting by allowing “the merging of documents, feeds, photos, e-mail, instant messaging, [and] event planning” in real-time.

Twitter is many things, I suppose, but one of its highly-touted functions is to give its users a sense of the temperature of the Web, an immediate and almost visual sense of what topics of conversation are hottest and most vital. Right now, the hottest topics shown under Twitter’s “Trending Topics” are “three words after sex,” “things mummy said,” “lies girls tell,” and “TGIF.”

To read more please see Is Twitter Useless After All? on BNET.

Palm's Pre Emerging As iPhone Threat

Palm's last, best gasp may be in fact a lifesaver. The Pre drew early rave reviews, and the news keeps getting better as the device nears launch date.

The better news for Palm is that Verizon has also committed to shipping the Pre once the Sprint (NYSE: S) exclusivity window expires in 6 months, which means Palm isn't betting its future on a network that is hemorrhaging customers at an alarming rate.

To read more, please see Palm's Pre Emerging As iPhone Threat on InformationWeek.

Google Wave Crashes Over Microsoft

With Wave, which Google previewed for developers at its I/O conference yesterday, developers can for the first time create Web-based applications that compete with Microsoft in terms of quality (while utterly trumping it on price). It also creates the conditions for customers to comfortably shuck off the shackles of installed software — including Office and other Microsoft products — in exchange for truly lightweight hardware like netbooks or advanced smartphones, without sacrificing the richness of their computing experience. If it gets the kind of developer love it should, Wave is just the first of a series of a breakers that will loosen Microsoft’s grip on the desktop, and may also render Adobe wholly irrelevant.

To read more, see Google Wave Crashes Over Microsoft on BNET.

AT&T Styling On New Pair Of LTEs

AT&T’s reaction to Apple playing footsie with Verizon was to buy a cute pair of pumps of its own. If you haven’t seen those nice LTEs, they’re over by the Ferragamos, Jimmy Choos and GSMs.

AT&T not only admitted that its network wasn’t doing the iPhone (or any other smartphone) justice, but promised to remedy the shortcoming in very short order. The carrier announced plans to start testing LTE — the acronym for Long-Term Evolution, the generation of broadband transmission that will succeed 3G — in 2010, and to begin full-scale deployments in 2011. This schedule puts AT&T on a par with, if not slightly ahead of Verizon’s LTE roll-out plans.

To read more, please see AT&T Styling On New Pair Of LTEs on BNET Technology.

AOL - Time Warner: Worst Merger Ever?

Time Warner (NYSE: TWX)'s decision to spin AOL back out as an independent company is the closest thing we'll get to an admission that the marriage between old-world Time Warner and new world order AOL never worked out.

Time Warner + AOL was doomed for a lot of reasons (cultural mismatch, unclear objectives for the merger), but none was more flagrant than the fact that the people who concocted the deal subscribed to the notion that bigger is always better.

To read more, please see AOL - Time Warner: Worst Merger Ever? on InformationWeek.

Apple Building $1B Server Farm For What?

Apple has finagled a $300 million tax cut from North Carolina lawmakers in exchange for investing $1 billion over nine years for a so-called technology “hub.”

The deal is as shrouded in mystery as an Orson Welles movie, with dark subplots and hidden agendas. The bill has been written with a single company in mind, but doesn’t name it.

To read more, please see Apple Building $1B Server Farm For What? on BNET.

How Microsoft Can Beat Google In Search

Would-be Google competitors in Web search make two fundamental mistakes that doom their efforts from the outset: one is competing with Google on its own terms, and the other is drumming up hype that their search engines can’t possibly match.

But Microsoft’s new Web search engine, apparently dubbed Bing, may well avoid both pitfalls and emerge as a true giant-killer.

To read more, please see How Microsoft Can Beat Google In Search on my BNET blog.

Nokia Flubs Ovi Store Opening

Nokia’s launch of its Ovi mobile application store was a fiasco, and bodes ill for the world’s leading handset vendor’s hopes of catching up with Apple. As paradoxical as that statement seems, Nokia is indeed chasing the momentum and cachet Apple enjoys, in large part because of the very iTunes App Store that Nokia was unsuccessfully aping with the Ovi Store.

To read more, please see Nokia Flubs Ovi Store Opening on BNET.

Online Advertisers Targeting Our Kids

The economic mess has come home to roost. I mean literally come home, as in vendors are trying to worm their way into every available keyhole and Internet connection to squeeze more dollars out of our kids.

It used to be that the Federal Trade Commission regulated how advertisers could deal with kids, but that was in the days before laissez-crap-on-our-heads became the national philosophy and "show me the money" became our unofficial motto.

To read more, please see Online Advertisers Targeting Our Kids on my InformationWeek blog.

Twitter Jumps The Shark

Now this one really caught me off guard: Twitter is going Hollywood.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone confirmed multiple media reports (probably re-Tweeted thousands of times) that, “Twitter plans to launch an unscripted show that will put ‘ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format.’”

Never one for half-measures or modesty, Stone suggested that “Twitter’s open approach might have the power to transform television.”

Twitter users, being nothing if not witty, have already suggested a number of titles, including The Curious Case of Benjamin Twitter, To Kill A Tweeting Bird, Crouching Tiger Hidden Twitter, Tweetlejuice, Burn After Tweeting, and of course, Edward Twitterhands. But the question is, why?

To continue reading, please see Twitter Jumps The Shark on my BNET blog.