I took the above Instagr.am photo the other day when I was in Baltimore waiting to hop on a plane back to London. I obviously arsed around selecting all manner of different silly filters before deciding the one above was most appropriate. Why, I don’t know. That’s instagr.am for you.

I snapped the photo as I wanted to remember Delta. The photo is the top corner of a Delta Airlines advertisement in the current Fast Company magazine. The advert points out that Delta now has a ‘new way to listen’ which ‘means a new way to help’. Yup. Delta is now on Twitter.

By now, we all know what that means: An instant (and usually highly informed) response mechanism.

Taking a look at Delta’s Twitter account right now, you can see they’re very busy already responding to customers.

Indeed I’d go so far to assume that tweeting Delta will get you a quicker response than phoning them — for most standard enquiries.

Delta’s gone somewhat further than most companies on Twitter, though. They’ve gone 24/7.

That’s right — you can tweet them anytime.

Good.

Brilliant, actually.

Which brings me to Vodafone. The company has long been leading the way when it comes to ‘e’ stuff — their e-forum team are second-to-none and their response times (and resolution rates) on Twitter are legendary. It took other operators months and quarters to even get to grips with the whole concept of actually talking with their customers.

I remember having a bet with Ben Smith over at Wireless Worker about whether T-Mobile’s rather ‘green’ Twitter account would engage in any banter whatsoever with him. The team running it instructed the person-on-the-keyboard to ignore all messages except those specifically relating to a T-Mobile issue. Ben tried to engage — you know, say hello, ask them how their day was going and so on. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I bet him a meal at Claridges if he could get a response out of them.

Vodafone, Three, Orange, o2 — they’d all banter with you. Not excessively, mind you, but you know, enough to say hello. T-Mobile did the social media equivalent of sitting in the corner with a face like thunder for months on end. Thankfully they have lightened up nowadays.

My problem, though, is that to my knowledge, no mobile operator in the UK runs a 24/7 Twitter account. This is an arse for me. I routinely ask @VodafoneUK questions during the day — sometimes questions that inform or related to the content here on MIR — and I always get a prompt and helpful answer. This facility stops at 5pm. Or is it 6pm? I can’t quite remember.

Actually I just looked.

So it’s 11pm now, and that tweet was 3 hours ago… so Vodafone does 8am-8pm daily.

That’s reasonable. It’s better than I expected actually.

I’m pretty sure ThreeUK doesn’t do that. Let’s have a look:

Ooof! SIX hours ago? Come on Johanna!  What’s that.. it’s 11pm now, minus 6… ThreeUK stops Twitter service at FIVE pm? (Although after a quick scan of their feed, I’m pleased to see, incidentally, that they do recommend Hullomail). Come on Three! What’s going on!

Let’s look at o2/Telefonica, what are they doing?

Well it looks like they were still going at 10pm. Impressive.

How about T-Mobile?

Well there you go. T-Mobile were live until 6pm. That’s an hour better than Three.

What about Orange?

Unfortunately the team at Orange didn’t sign-out, although the fact their last message was 6 hours ago leads me to assume they’re doing similar hours to ThreeUK.

Well then.

Deary me.

It’s not good news, operators.

I think the absolute minimum should be 8am ’til 8pm. I think ‘good’ would be 8am until 10pm. Ideal would be 24/7. Surely it can’t be that expensive, given the value you’ll be able to add to folk?

Ok.

So I suspect that most British people will NEVER tweet their mobile operator beyond, say, what, midnight… I’m sure there are some statistics that each operator could show in this regard. But come on — folk are generally awake and operational until 10pm. Why not extend service to those hours? You might even have time to do a bit of brand building through some back-and-forth chats with customers. The sort of interaction that’s difficult to do at midday when there are hundreds of enquiries flying in.

And finally… let’s talk days. Monday to Friday doesn’t cut it, folks. Weekends too, please.

Is this too much to ask?

More from David:

In the post, I wondered what noted social media expert James Whatley made of it. James is Engagement Strategy Director for 1000heads. He was kind enough to send me an email with his viewpoint. If you’re supervising or managing your company’s social media strategy, take note.

Here’s James….

- – - – -

Ewan,

In short; you’re spot on.

This really isn’t of any benefit to you, the devoted twitter follower of old or really to anyone else who makes up the sub-20,000 follower list. This competition is quite meaningless. I mean, what about the folk who have been with them since the start?

MotoMobile (I would imagine) has probably been through some tough old times in the past… *cough* motorola razr *cough* …and pre-android at least, one would imagine that they were pretty close to the brink. Building up a following of 20k+ followers is no easy feat, admittedly. To have got this far they must have had at least some kind of engagement strategy to build this up, right?

This strategy, with the right PR behind it, may well raise the profile of the presence significantly (as those who care not for the brand or the conversation sign up and race to be that 20,000th follower) but the quality of engagement will surely dip.

A better idea would be to offer a free device – at random – to any one of their 20,000 followers once they’d hit the magic number.

This competition doesn’t incentivise me as much as it doesn’t you… and I don’t even follow them.

There is no engagement here. No long term plan. This is simple carrot and stick. But the carrot isn’t for you, for all your hard work and support – it’s for the next donkey that turns up (who hasn’t done a damn thing).

MotoMobile’s tweet is poorly worded, it may as well say – “To thank YOU for YOUR support, we’re going to give a Moto device to SOMEONE ELSE!”

I could go to town on the lack of personalisation, the poor use of the Twitter B/G, the lack of intent to make their presence work that little bit harder… but that’d be too easy.

At the time of writing there are eight of your followers who have called you on this MotoMobile (and that’s not including Ewan and his post) -

http://twitter.com/mariobutter/statuses/20157994452
http://twitter.com/kartracer3886/statuses/20157541502
http://twitter.com/mobilevation/statuses/20157137867
http://twitter.com/MuslimGirl11/statuses/20157137552
http://twitter.com/agousetis/statuses/20156944877
http://twitter.com/fonixmunkee/statuses/20156939441
http://twitter.com/keyboardxbully/statuses/20156887935
http://twitter.com/mosherjm/statuses/20156882005

– Will you respond?

A recommendation:

Fair enough, it is quite difficult to retract a competition once it’s out in the public domain. So I would advise MotoMobile should stick with it but, once complete – open a new competition/giveaway to the participants of your MotoPic Monday entrants. Creating content AND raising the profile of one your weekly features.

Or maybe even (as one of Ewan’s commenters suggested) give a new (and maybe even better) prize out for free to one of your followers at random. Do this live, using Qik. Not only demonstrating your honesty and transparency but also showing off one of the best apps available for your device.

That wouldn’t be too hard… would it?

- – - – -

Nice recommendation James and thanks for taking the time.

I’ve got a social media question for you this evening.

Have a read of this tweet from MotoMobile:

We’re nearing the 20,000 follower mark! To thank you for your support, we’re giving a Moto device to our 20,000th follower!

Now the chaps behind the Moto twitter service are really smart. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying what they and the MotoDev team over the months.

But here’s my problem… How does that tweet help me?

How does it incentivise me? How does it help me beyond clearly stating that I’m entirely irrelevant because I’m already a follower?

If anything, it renders my position to mute acceptance.

Unless, of course, I decide to unfollow them and try to actively become the 200,000th follower. I suppose there is some small merit there.

Shouldn’t these kind of prizes — and I’ve seen them used by many, many companies — be changed around to make it a celebration of Moto’s success by giving a prize to a random existing follower?

I wonder what Mr Whatley thinks. James Whatley is Engagement Strategy Director for 1000 Heads. I’ll ask him and see what he reckons.

What’s your view?

I checked-in to the event then headed straight over to Mr Smith to say hello. He was arsing around with his laptop. Looking up, he briefly said hi, before advising, “Never, ever get an integrated SIM module on a Dell, this thing never seems to work.”

The holding area began to fill up. A chap by the name of Gary Gale came by and handed me the obligatory sticker sheet.

“You might remember me,” says Gary, “We had a frank exchange of views over BlackBerry AppWorld on Twitter a while ago?”

“Shit!” I think, “Errr,” I say to Gary, “I… errr, was I a little bit direct?”

I began to remember the episode and actually, I think Gary did have a good point — I just disagreed. Turns out Gary was a speaker too. I hadn’t connected the Twitter name Vicchi with Gary Gale, top man at Yahoo Engineering for Geo Technologies. Gary’s presentation was all about WOEIDs, something I knew nothing about until he stood up and explained them. Fascinating — highly relevant to the Twitter developer audience and expertly delivered. You can catch Gary’s WOEID presentation here.

So Twitter developers — that’s what Devnest is all about — anyone who’s interested in creating services and mashups with Twitter would do well to go along. The Organisers had done a phenomenal job — the place was packed.

Michael Camilleri came bounding over to say hi. Michael is one of the chaps behind FooCall (See last week’s post: “International calling for… FooCall“). It was good to see him. As we were discussing the state of British Venture Capitalists (in the context of this post), Paul Webster of Critical Path arrived to give us a glimpse into what’s coming with ShoZu. I agreed not to spill the beans though. Steve Kennedy popped over to say hi and pointed out that he almost bought a ton of Critical Path email services when he was supervising business development for Demon back in the good old dotcom days. Steve presented his business, DBVU, to the audience later in the evening — the company provides centralised analytics and monitoring for MySQL database servers. Very smart indeed.

With oodles of pizza having arrived and been consumed along with a good amount of beers, we headed into the auditorium and got started. I was wondering precisely how my presentation would be received, given the copious amounts of iPhones on show.

Angus, one of the organisers, had asked me to give a kind of ‘state of the nation’ about mobile development, so I’d worked to create something like that, with due deference to the fact that most of the people in the room could write and deploy a desktop Twitter app in 180 seconds. Mobile might not be their forte, but I was working on the basis that they could easily adopt various mobile platforms with a low amount of friction, so I decided to keep it pretty high level.

The thrust of my argument was — yes, iPhone is great; Android..yeah… but please, please, please remember the fact that Nokia makes 1.4m handsets a day. A *DAY*. And don’t forget BlackBerry, either. And while you’re at it, a lot of the other platforms such as Vodafone 360 would be delighted to work with you.

Here’s the presentation:

The other presenter that evening, Paul Kinlan, was talking about Google Buzz. Paul is Developer Programmes Engineer at Google and, goodness me, he knew his stuff. I managed to keep up with most of the REST and CURL stuff — essentially he was outlining how Twitter developers could make use of the various Buzz APIs now becoming available. Very smart indeed.

I missed the majority of the buzzzy.com pitch, but essentially they’re providing a search interface for Google Buzz. I doubt it’ll be long before they’re snapped up.

Todd Chaffee delivered his pitch, “Social Media ROI in 140 seconds” and had me thinking carefully about the ROI issues with social media. Fascinating stuff. If you’re interested in the field, Todd’s presentation is here. Definitely talk to him.

There’s been some great feedback from the event — I’d like to thank everyone for taking the time to write a tweet regarding the presentation. It’s very kind of you. Instead of flooding my Twitter feed with ‘thank you, thank you’ messages, I have decided to cut’n'paste your messages and put a link into your Twitter profiles here on the site:

bensmithuk @3mobilebuzz Yep. Listening to @ew4n now. #devnest

vicchi I want @ew4n‘s tee-shirt #devnest http://twitpic.com/17rh3j

chaffeet 30% of mobile apps are still developed for RIM according to @ew4n at #devnest 7.

richardBarley @ew4n banging the drum for Symbian at #devnest. Great stuff and good to hear

iamdanw Being pitched at to develop apps for symbian again. Shame symbian is an awful app environment, for both users and developers #devnest

(Dan, I agree, but do check out qt.nokia.com — Qt is really going to change things for the platform)

stevekennedyuk Great talk by @ew4n about mobile state of play – it’s all about Symbian #devnest

ketan @ew4n I would’ve stayed with nokia but ui and sync with my computer for email/music much easier on iPhone #devnest

(Fair point Ketan, but remember, you’re using the equivalent of a Fisher Price handset — capable, but the one-thing-at-a-time user model drives me nuts)

vicchi Just heard @ew4n equate Vodafone 360 with wife swapping. Never thought #devnest would be this much fun.

natts Amusing yet realistic talk by @ew4n at#devnest – iPhone only has 14% of world smartphone market in 2009 – http://bkite.com/3np10

michchapman At #devnest listening to @ew4n. Hmm when would be a good time to sneak out for more pizza?!

MarkABaker Fart apps is where its at. via @ew4n at #devnest

docstuart Enjoying first visit to #devnest, great first talk from @ew4n

ketan @ew4n great talk on mobile app development! Thanks. #devnest

MarkABaker missed recording @ew4n presentation at #devnest shame as execllent. Will ask him to do it again later on.

becva great first presentation from @ew4n #devnest

richardBarley Great talk from @ew4n on state of mobile development landscape. #devnest

nuxnix After @ew4n s talk at #devnest I am thinking the unthinkable – switching my iPhone. No not back to Symbian, but to give Android a try

@ew4n great presentation on #devnest yesterday

micrypt @ew4n Thanks for the splendid talk at #devnest yesterday. http://slidesha.re/9MRW10

Thank you everyone for your patience and attention — and thank you to the organisers for inviting me.

By the way: The organisers of Devnest have a 48-hour hackathon event coming soon, all focused on twitter. It’s called WarbleCamp and it’s on the 8th and 9th of May in London. Plus, it’s free. All the details you need are here: http://warblecamp.org/.

Finally, kudos to the sponsors of Devnest: PayPalX, Inuda, Sun Startup Essentials and Multizone Limited.

“Bring it on!” I said.

So I shall be there from 6pm this evening — if you’d like to come along, entry is free, but you do need to register.

There is also free pizza, beer and good networking — supported by new sponsor, PayPalX.

Here’s the agenda:

Agenda

6:00 pm – Pizza, Beer, Networking

6:30 pm – Developer talk

* Ewan Macleod – @Ew4n – Mobile State of the nation for developers
Ewan is Editor of Mobile Industry Review, http://www.mobileindustryreview.com He will illuminate the topic of which mobile platforms you should place your social media application development bets on?
* Gary Gale – @vicchi – Twitter’s use of our WOEIDs and associated technology
Gary is Director of Engineering in the UK for the Geo Technologies at Yahoo! which provides the tools and technologies that drive user location, geocoding, location identification and disambiguation within Yahoo!, both internally and via public services
* Paul Kinlan – @paul_kinlan – Introducing Google Buzz
Paul is Developer Programmes Engineer at Google. We are delighted to welcome google to our devnest community and hear and see and ask about what they are doing.

7:45 pm – Break, Network Time, 15mins

8:00 pm – 140 second show and tweet demo/preso

* Andras Serfozo – @SubZtep
* Tim Whitlock – @timwhitlock

Places available for sign up on the night. You have 140 secs to explain something, show something, or argue about something.

8:30 pm – Activities and events

* Chirp, an update on UK plans to attend the official twitter developer conference featuring @devmission
* WarbleCamp. the unofficial free twitter developer unconference @nuxnix

War·ble: n. a sound made by European Twitter devs when they work out the cost of going to @chirp

9:00 pm – Pub The networking continues…

The event is also kindly supported by: Inuda, Sun Startup Essentials and Multizone Limited

I look forward to seeing you there…

Here are some quotes right off the press from some mobile developers. (I have removed names).

- “I’d like to know how much of my revenues they’ll demand.”

- “I like the ease of billing and the potential of micro-payments.”

- “I suspect they’ll take 30% just like Apple / Nokia etc. I hope it’s not more than that.”

- “It’s just another App store – we WILL develop for it, obviously, but only because I’m yet to see which store will capture the minds of consumers.”

- “I very much like the concept. Especially if one SDK works across a number of MNOs. That would be really cool.”

- “Is this too good to be true? It sure looks like it.”

- “If they were REALLY thinking of developers, they’d be finding a way to reduce the amount of work we need to do across the various mobile programming languages. Perhaps they are, I can’t quite work it out yet.”

- “Interesting, interesting… that’s all I have to say until you tell us more, Ewan.”

I’m aiming to have more information soon! If you’ve got a comment or opinion, drop me a note — ewan@mobiledeveloper.tv.

(I regularly tap up people for live reaction — if you’d like to be on that list, add me at ewanmacleod@gmail.com on Google Talk or ewanjmacleod on Skype.)

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If you’re a mobile developer — or an internet developer with designs on mobile — today’s news deserves a sit-down analysis and big think by you and your colleagues.

How would you like an entirely managed method of reaching up to 289 million users worldwide via Vodafone’s own ‘app store’ with the billing taken care of?

I’ve put ‘app store’ in inverted commas because, although there isn’t a mention of the term in their official announcement, that’s more or less what it’s promising to be. Or, at least, that’s a quick summary from me.

Vodafone have done a rather good job of the announcement, so instead of re-writing it, here it is:

Vodafone is to stimulate a new generation of mobile internet applications by providing internet service developers with a single point of access to Vodafone’s global customer base.

Developers will only need to create internet applications once in order to reach millions of Vodafone customers on any device and will be able to charge for it directly through Vodafone’s billing system. This will provide internet content partners, such as the media or game developers, with a cost-efficient and effective micro-payments system to reach all customers on mobile devices.

Vodafone will also provide partners and developers with customer controlled access to other network capabilities, such as location awareness, enabling them to create even more innovative mobile internet services and applications.

The move will be accompanied by a framework to provide customers with transparency and control over how their information is accessed and used.

The scale of the initiative will provide partners and developers with an unparalleled opportunity to increase their revenues from the mobile internet, while delivering services to Vodafone’s 289 million customers. Vodafone will also benefit from any uplift in sales under a revenue-share model.

The benefits to third-party developers and internet companies include:

- A single point of access to millions of Vodafone customers across the globe
- Faster time to market for new products and services across several operating systems and handsets
- Enhanced revenue stream opportunities
- Simplified micro-payments for services through the use of Vodafone’s existing billing systems

The benefits to customers include:

- A greater selection of more compelling internet applications and services
- More convenience and greater flexibility in paying for new services
- A simpler and more intuitive mobile internet experience
- Consistent quality of service across the entire Vodafone footprint

Vodafone will enable developers to use its direct billing capabilities to permit customers to pay for services wirelessly through their existing Vodafone pre- and post-paid accounts rather than having to input sensitive credit card data into multiple application stores.

This is expected to give customers a convenient and highly secure payment option for the different services on offer, as well as encourage greater take up.

By giving developers access to location awareness capabilities, Vodafone will enable a new generation of highly personalised user-activated and controlled services and applications that are tailored to meet the customer’s immediate requirements.

Vodafone is making the enhancements through the creation of a set of network Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) which will enable developers to build capabilities such as direct billing and location awareness into their services.

The APIs, which provide a link between the applications and the Vodafone network capabilities, will work across the entire Vodafone footprint thanks to a new layer of management technology based on Service Oriented Architecture.

Vodafone will start to offer access to selected network enablers through the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) initiative, which is designed to help developers create useful widgets for a combined audience of up to one billion customers (across the four JIL partner networks). JIL is due to release a website and a Software Developer Kit in the summer. Vodafone is also exploring a range of other ways to expose its network enablers to the broadest possible audience.

“Vodafone is making these changes to make it easier for third parties to develop attractive new services as well as bill and support our customers through our network capabilities in all markets,” said Vittorio Colao CEO of Vodafone. “By giving them simple access to our global customer base and network assets, such as direct billing and location awareness, we will help them to make more money while providing our customers with the innovative services that they want.”

I’ve got a lot of questions. This sounds rather good. Especially the join innovation lab concept.

Can they pull it off? And whilst we’re talking about 289 million customers (or, potentially a billion), how realistic is that considering X million of them are currently sporting rubbish Motorola RAZR handsets? What does this mean for Vodafone support of Nokia’s Ovi? What exactly are Vodafone going to have to put on every handset to support this?

Or are we actually talking about a sooped-up set of mobile web pages that, whilst sounding good (especially to nervous shareholders looking for a response to Apple), isn’t actually going to blow any doors off this year, next year, or this decade?

I hope those questions — and more — will be answered initially in today’s 3pm call. I’m also going to see if I can get some interviews on camera soon.

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We’re putting on an event this month in Paris, France. I’ll have more details soon — but I can say that the event will be in the last week of this month and it’s set to feature some of the hottest mobile developers in France.

Much like the previous Developer event we held back in January (at Mobile Industry Review), we’ll be interviewing every single attendee, doing some show-and-tells demonstrating their applications and publishing those in a special edition of Mobile Developer TV.

France has always had a pretty decent mobile development industry — but it’s been severely hamstrung by the day-to-day realities of the European market (e.g. working with the likes of Symbian, trying to generate revenue via premium rate text). The iPhone changed all of that, though. At Mobile Monday Paris in March, I saw a community of 300+ developers electrified by the opportunities offered by the end-to-end iTunes platform.

It’s most certainly not all about iPhone, especially in such a Nokia-centric country and continent, but iPhone is, of course, garnering the lion’s share of attention and support from newly revitalised investors.

So I’m looking forward to visiting Paris. I’ll have more details up soon, we’re just confirming the date and venue.

Meantime if you’d like to come along to the event, just drop me a note (ewan@mobiledeveloper.tv) and I’ll keep you updated.

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If you’re interested to see what we’re playing with, you can check out the demonstration logos (and weigh in with your comments) at this url.

I used 99designs.com to commission an identity for Mobile Developer TV. I’ve long been fascinated with the concept proposed by 99designs. Here’s how it works; You commit to spending a particular amount of money (say $200). You publish your brief and 99designs take your money. Then designers from all over the world compete for your business by submitting their designs.

Very cool indeed.

We’ve had 66 entries in total so far. You can see which ones I’m favouring at the moment by checking out the star-ratings on each. I’d welcome your perspective!

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Mobile Monday Silicon Valley was fantastic this evening. There was a huge turnout on an uncharacteristically rainy San Francisco evening for the Location-Aware app demo evening.

Skyhook Wireless kindly underwrote the bar and gave a pitch at the beginning of the series of presentations, outlining their rather excellent range of location services available to mobile developers. I managed to catch Skyhook’s Director of Marketing, Kate Imbach, on camera discussing the merits of their offering. Suffice to say if you’re a developer and you’d like to integrate location based services (e.g. Find Me) into your app, definitely, definitely talk to Skyhook.

Here are the companies who presented:

• Crazymenu.com – Launched their iPhone (lunchtime) online restaurant discovery and ordering facility. I really liked their concept. I’m going to look for it in the iPhone app store.
• Cristdrive – Their application, Voilà, will simply and elegantly tell any of your online services where you are, right now. $0.99 in the app store.
• Retronyms – Couldn’t make it for some reason so Kate from Skyhook did her best with their presentation. They’ve got a rather interesting GPS game by the name of Seek ‘n Spell going live. Check their site.
• Wertago – Showed off their app offering city nightlife in the palm of your hand. Nice!
• Geoterrestrial – GPSToday, a comprehensive Windows Mobile application offering an array of GPS related services. If you’re into location services, definitely check out what they’ve created — amongst other features, it’ll sit in the background and continually tell folk where you are.
• HearPlanet – Dale Larson’s audio city guides deliver location information that really speaks to you. You can, as the site puts it, ‘leave those bulky tour books behind and let HearPlanet (iPhone) show you the way. Get it on the App Store. It’s the #2 rated Travel app at the moment and they’ve had almost 500k downloads so far.
• Life360 – Trades on fear. But in a good way. Their mobile (and desktop) services deliver you instant safety, security and peace of mind. I’m going to get this for my wife and I. Google Latitude helps show where we both are.. but I want more than that. I particularly like their ‘find your family in an emergency’ facilities.
• Carrrmatey by Lionebra –> Brought the house down. So much so that I filmed their pitch. I think the audience were really taken with the pirate theme. It’s a really smart utility that records where you left your car, reminds you to return at appointed times (for meters) and guides you back to your car — rather useful if you keep on forgetting where you parked.

I managed to get some good video interviews tonight — I was going to hold them back until we’ve launched with the nice new look and feel, but it’s al about content, right? I’m going to aim to get the first lot of videos up tomorrow morning.

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Mobile Tron is Matthew Bennett’s inaugural mobile event for San Francisco and it’s taking place this Thursday at a rather swish design gallery art space (”Receiver Design”). The Facebook event is here and you’re welcome to come along if you’re into mobile and you’ve got something to say.

I’m taking the camera equipment along so if you’d like to get on camera for Mobile Developer TV (the launch is coming shortly), come along.

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My name is Ewan and I’m founder and Editor.  You can find out more about me here.

After Mobile Industry Review turned subscription-only back at the end of March, I’ve been looking around for other projects to commence.  Mobile Developer TV started off as a concept in the back of my mind about 6 months ago.

Here’s the Background

I’m founder and editor of Mobile Industry Review (”MIR”), one of the world’s most influential commentators on the mobile industry.  The site published daily news and opinion for almost 3 years, reaching a core audience of 250,000 industry executives and fanatics.  MIR’s feed is integrated directly into the intranets of many mobile operators, handset manufacturers and mobile service companies.  Super reach, super influence.  Witness, for example, our ground-breaking video of the never-before-seen Nokia Test Labs in Farnborough (Over 175,000 people viewed it within days of publishing). Or take a look at the recent post I published about iPhone centric developer mindset in Silicon Valley, picked up by MocoNews, VentureBeat and the Washington Post.

I thoroughly enjoyed producing the site with a team of brilliant contributors.  In March 2009, I turned MIR subscription-only, providing the site’s on-going feed to one company.  The nature of the company’s requirement developed to the point that I was able to engage a small team of writers to deliver the on-going service.  I still retain all MIR rights and content — including the domain names and the site’s extensive reach — so I’ve been looking for another project to put these resources to good use.

Why Mobile Developer TV?

I really, really enjoy producing online video features. There’s something about ‘TV’ that you just can’t match with the written word.  It’s about seeing the person (or people), visualising their excitement and seeing just how passionate they are about their products and services. I did a lot of experimenting with the Mobile Industry Review Show — the MIR Show — and after a good few hundred hours of stress and learning, I think I’ve more or less perfected the art of brilliant online video production: Top quality HD cameras, excellent HD video hosting, super-expensive microphones — in fact, the best equipment you can buy, a bit of creativity in the editing studio (Final Cut is excellent, but iMovie, although frowned upon from the professional sector, is extremely quick).

Marry this passion for online television with my fascination with the mobile industry — and more specifically, with mobile development — and it didn’t take me long to hatch the concept.  And here it is!

The Aim

I’m going to meet the best and the brightest in mobile development — and I’m going to put them on camera.  I’m aiming to publish one TV show per week to start with.  Each show will centre on one or two people in the mobile development space.  iPhone App developers, certainly.  But I’m interested in the whole spectrum — from Blackberry’s App World, to Nokia’s Ovi, to Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace and beyond.

If you’ve ever seen any of the interviews I’ve produced in the past, you’ll know I like to keep myself out of the picture. It’s not about me, it’s about the interviewee.  In some cases I’m aiming to do a straight interview — me to the right of the camera pointing the microphone and asking questions.  In other cases, I’ll do a walk-about or a show-and-tell with the developer.

I’m interested in talking to and profiling:

• Mobile application developers
  (Platform agnostic: iPhone/Blackberry/Nokia/J2ME/Samsung/Microsoft/Android)
• Companies whose primary business is NOT in the mobile space — but who have developed or are developing mobile applications.
  (For instance: A travel company launching an iPhone app, dotcoms launching their own apps — eg. Lastminute’s FoneFood app)
• Companies who supply services to/work with mobile developers
  (Example: Providers of mobile advertising, debug/testing)

Video will comprise most of the content here on Mobile Developer TV — however in my research over the past months, it’s clear that, whilst there are a lot of developers in Silicon Valley and London (my two primary locations), there’s a considerable geographic spread of developers.  Only today I was talking to developers from Ohio, Johannesburg, New Zealand, Ukraine, Paris and Scotland.  I’d like to be able to fly into meet each — that might be a bit of a challenge in the short term though.  So to supplement, I’ll aim to publish text interviews and profiles regularly.

One developer I spoke to suggested recording his own interview on video, answering my questions to camera with his own facilities — and sending it over to me to publish.  I think it’s a super suggestion and I think we’ll do that.

Can I profile you?  Contact Me!

I’m based in London and San Francisco so I’ll be producing the majority of in-person videos from those locations.  If you’d like to feature, drop me a note.  I’m ewan@mobiledeveloper.tv — this is the best way of contacting me.  But you can also phone/text me.  My mobile numbers are:

+44 7769 658104 (UK)

+1 415 200 9515 (US)

… (I’m happy to hear from PRs too.)

Don’t Be British

Please don’t be British — that is, sit at the back and hope I’ll come across you.  I really will do my best to find mobile developers and companies to profile — I’ve already got a big list from working with MIR — but I am most certainly no genius.  So I need your help in order to profile you — I need to know you exist. So please do drop me a note if you’re keen to be profiled.  At the very least I’ll aim to send you out a list of questions to answer by email that I can turn into a profile piece here on the site. (Who are you, what are you creating/have you created, what platform, why, what challenges have you had, and so on).  Ideally I’ll arrange to meet physically to interview you on-camera and perhaps produce an application walk-through.

Got News?

If you’ve got a particular topic of announcement that you think mobile developers and those working in related fields should know about, knock me over an email right-away.

Design

I’m doing a Robert Scoble at the moment — that is publishing with a default WordPress Theme.  I’ll update it as we progress.  The content is way more important than the theme and that’s where my focus is at the moment.

Editorial Policy

As for editorial policy, I’m aiming for a macro view of mobile development.  I don’t plan on publishing code level discussions, or discussing the finer points of the Symbian operating system.  Instead, I’ll be looking at the commercial aspects of the mobile applications development sector along with the trends I’m witnessing.  The overriding focus is, of course, on profiling developers.  I’m particularly interested in talking with one-man-bands:  The chaps (and ladies) who’re single-handedly driving the massive change sweeping the industry.  That said, I’m also keen to talk to the business people — the product managers, the executive teams — about the challenges and successes in the field of mobile applications development.

This is a work in progress so I’d welcome your feedback, either below or by email.

I’ll be syndicating the output through the public feed on Mobile Industry Review so if you’re already a MIR RSS subscriber, you’ll start to get updates shortly.  You can also catch blog updates via the new Mobile Developer TV Twitter account @mobdevtv.

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Here’s a pic:

I was Palo Alto for a few meetings, one with a mobile titan (ID not public alas). The chap was running 30 minutes late (”Don’t worry, I’ll hit up* the Apple store”, I told him). I’d arrived in by the rather efficient ‘CalTrain’ early anyway so I strolled up University Avenue toward the Apple store.

I was having a look in the shop windows during the stroll and realised I was passing the Verizon Wireless store.

“Screw it,” I thought, “I’ve got some time, let’s go and have a look at Mr CDMA’s offerings.”

I arrived into the store and was immediately greeted by a lady with a clipboard. This is the way things work in America. At least, it’s been my experience with Sprint as well as Verizon.

(Conversations paraphrased from memory)

“How may I help you today?” the nice spritely shiny lady asked, clipboard and pen poised.

“Er I’m British,” I said. Best to get that off my chest.

She did a slow knowing nod.

British = Useless to Verizon. They either want to spend a good 20 minutes selling you a two-year credit agreement (and a handset) or get you out of the shop as quickly as possible with a prepay deal.

But if you’re foreign it’s a no-go. They don’t want your business. You need a US social security number to get started with them. This is fair enough — there are 303 million folk in the country, enough to be getting on with.

Even if you offer to prepay a 2-year contract in advance (e.g. $200 for a Storm on $80 a month is $2120. Offer them $3,000 up front and they’ll decline. Their system, I’m told, doesn’t ‘work that way’).

Anyway. I explained I was British and the lady put down her pen and let me pass.

Normally she’d have been ticking various boxes relating to what I was looking for. Then she’ll hand the resulting form to a sales chappy who, suitably briefed, will help me out.

I took a stroll about the place. I admired a few handsets. I glanced once or twice at the Storm, their handset du jour. Well, actually, their handset du year.

I had a look at the LG Versa.

“Can I help you, sir?”

I turned and found a helpful looking sales chap on my elbow.

“Er,” I said with continued embarrassment, “I’m sorry, I’m British, so… er…”

“Oh,” the chap said, eyes widening.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding, “It’s prepay or nothing, I know.”

I hung my head slightly as the chap nodded with me in sympathy.

With a tough of benevolence, he said I should ask him if I needed any help.

I thanked him.

“Alas, I’m a pariah,” I mumbled to myself, gazing over at the Samsung Omnia on the shelf. Windows Mobile, I know, but it thought it’d be worth a look. I went back to the Storm.

$199 on a 2-year contract.

I started selling it to myself.

“You have a duty to, you know, play about with these things,” I reasoned, calculating whether I really wanted to spunk something like $2,000 on ‘playing about’.

I only found out later that you could get a Blackberry Storm for $449 up-front on a month-to-month agreement. That, provided Verizon would have done a deal with an alien like me, would have bee interesting. I’d still have had quite a problem swallowing $449 unless I was aiming to use it as a primary device.

My key issue is that I’ve never actually used a Verizon handset for more than a day or so — and they’ve been rubbish prepay handsets. I’ve never really tried out the Verizon data network, for example. So I was warm.

But luckily for my bank balance, nobody tried to sell me a month-to-month Storm.

In fact, they’re not selling the Storm in Palo Alto. Although it’s on display, it’s not for sale. The sales team will do their best to avoid selling you one.

Is that a sweeping statement? Yes. Of course Verizon are selling Storms — by the bucketload by all accounts. Just not to me. And definitely not to the customer who came in after me.

I was pondering the possibility of a Windows Mobile handset when I heard a chap come into the shop. I glanced round as he approached me and the salesman who’d (sensibly?) given up on me.

“Hi,” he said, “I’m after a G-3 phone, the Blackberry Storm?”

“Right,” said the salesperson, “Well…”

“This is it here, is it?” the buyer said. He’d walked straight to it and was ready for the sale. He’d clearly seen it on television or been recommended it. The fact he got the ‘G-3′ (”3G”) bit wrong indicated an element of normob (”normal mobile user”) in his makeup. He knew what he wanted. He knew 3G, however you said it, was the way ahead. He was fondling the device and wanted to buy one.

“Er, you don’t want the Blackberry Storm,” said the salesman to the surprise of the buyer, “It’s buggy,” he continued.

“Buggy? Ah yeah..” said the buyer. He’d heard of that too and asked, “When will they bring out a software upgrade?”.

“Errrrr,” said the salesman, “Is it a touchscreen phone you’re looking for?” he said, beckoning the buyer to the other side of the store.

I missed a bit of their conversation — but I could make out the fact the salesman was trying to sell him some type of LG touchscreen.

The buyer did some quick evaluation before walking back to the Storm.

“Nah, tell me about the Storm?”

“It’s buggy, you don’t want that,” the salesman said.

“Right, but it works?” said the buyer. He clearly *just* wanted one. He was giving all the I-don’t-mind hints.

At that point I left the store.

I couldn’t handle it.

I was having a lot of trouble keeping my mouth shut and not slapping the salesman with a handy wet fish a few times.

As I left, the buyer was fondling the Storm clearly in I WILL BUY THIS PHONE mode. I think the salesman had relented at this point as I just caught, “Well, the touchscreen clicks when you press on it, the iPhone doesn’t have that,” as I walked out the door.

Well I never.

Palo Alto, spiritual home to Silicon Valley (and actual home to, amongst others, HP’s worldwide headquarters). By all means discourage the good normob people of Shitsville, Middle America, to avoid getting the Storm (they’ll only return it when they can’t figure out the keyboard). But in Palo Alto? When the chap strides in demanding a Storm? Give him one. Be pleased he’s aiming to swap from T-Mobile (he was) to Verizon instead of T-Mobile or, worse… the iPhone collective that is AT&T.

An interesting experience.

In the interests of fairness I am going to see if I can swim the myriad Verizon Wireless PR channels and get a hold of a Blackberry Storm to use for a month or so. I’ll keep you updated.

Meanwhile I encourage you to pop into your nearest Verizon store and ask for a Storm and report back your experiences. My experience today must surely have been an exception.

* “Hit up” — a fancy wanna-be-cool American way of saying “visit/talk to/connect with”.

Of course AdMob are also hugely active in the application monetisation space with well over 1,000 iPhone applications carrying AdMob inventory. What’s good to know is that in many cases, AdMob is writing cheques (or ‘checks’) in excess of $10k+ to a lot of developers. (Indeed, some of the more popular apps are knocking back hundreds of thousands in AdMob revenue.)

So this evening’s event was both an introduction to AdMob’s iPhone related services, a panel discussion on the hot topic du jour (iPhone App Discoverability) as well as the opportunity for developers to network with each other.

The panel featured the following luminaries:

Mike Kerns, CEO, Citizen Sports (Sportacular)
Jonathan Zweig, CEO, Jirbo / Epic Tilt (ESPN Cameraman, many others)
Ben Lewis, Founder, TapJoy
Alan Wells, Zynga

Here’s a pic:

The always reliable and informed Richard Wong (far right in the blue shirt), General Partner of Accel Partners was moderator. If, by the way, you’ve come up with a genius mobile service, you should be talking with Richard. Right now. They’re hunting.

My evening began on the boulevards of San Mateo — a rather picturesque series of boutique shops and pizza restaurants (I think I walked by about 10 pizza outlets on the walk from the station). I used the always reliable Google Maps on my N95 8GB to navigate the 10 minute walk from station to venue. (In a show of solidarity I thought I should bring my UK iPhone to the event — but in an uncharacteristic effort to avoid being nailed for £7/meg in data from o2 UK, I’ve had it set to Airplane mode, so I’ve been using my TMO USA sim in my N95.)

I arrived about 15 minutes early so the Benjamin Franklin Hotel wasn’t quite ready. I spotted a chap standing outside with his iPhone and I theorised he might well be one of the 150 developers attending the event. I struck up a conversation. Turns out that the chap — Steffen Frost has been working with iPhone app development since May 2007. He came up with the concept 1st of May 2007 and had $100k+ seed funding within two weeks. Nice. His product? Carticipate. They’ve basically fixed car-trip-sharing by iPhone.

Here’s a pic I snapped of Steffen:

“Show me!” I said as he described the concept. Within seconds he was showing the functions. You can browse the trips already being made in your area and ask to ride-share. Or if you’re heading somewhere yourself, you can advertise your trip and see if anyone else wants to join you. Smart. They’ve had some substantial interest from a lot of big companies wanting to sanitise their employee commuting traffic (amongst other applications).

“What’s your next platform?” I asked Steffen, “After iPhone?”

“Android,” he replied. “How about Nokia?” I asked.

“Yeah, well…”

Suffice to say he was severely unimpressed by the current Nokia offering.

That wasn’t a unique viewpoint. I’ll come to that later.

The venue opened a few minutes later so Steffen and I popped in. Jeff from 148apps, (the iPhone review site) had written his Twitter ID on his label — so I promptly copied and began marching around the room thrusting my hand out and asking questions left, right and centre.

Goodness me it’s iPhone, iPhone, iPhone. Obviously this was an iPhone developer meetup — but I was fascinated to see how insular, how wholly-iPhone the development community is here in Silicon Valley.

“What’s your next platform?” I asked another developer.

“Er… probably Android,” he replied, after a bit of thought.

“Right… and, after that?” I prompted.

“Well,…” he replied, the conversation trailing off to the point that we both stood there in silence for a few seconds.

I remembered myself and spluttered out “Blackberry?”

“Well…” he replied again. A nice way of saying no.

Ok.

“What about Ovi?” I asked. Hopeful. I was expecting either a venomous “GET OUT” or a knowing nod.

“Ovi? What’s that?” he looked at me confused.

“Er, the Nokia offering — their app store?”

He and his two colleagues who’d now joined us looked horrified. As though I’d taken their iPhone and nailed it to the wall.

“Nohhhkeeaaaa?” They asked. I’m sure their minds were drifting to the $29.99 bollocks-handsets they see on display in the mobile operator stores. The rubbish ones — the glorified mobile telephones complete with alarm clocks. (Think the Nokia 2100 series).

“Er LIKE NO,” said the chap’s colleague, as the other two nodded vigorously.

Interesting!

I thought I’d try out a killer stat on them.

“So 17m iPhones on the planet — Nokia reckons they’ll have the Ovi Store on 400m handsets by the end of 2010.” (I was paraphrasing — this is more or less accurate.)

Blank looks.

Nobody cares.

It’s a fascinating experience walking amongst these developers. They’re the cream of the cream. They’re the Stanford drop-outs (or not – “I did my first and second degrees at Stanford” said one chap”). They’re conditioned by the Silicon Valley mentality to think big, BIG BIG. This is where the innovation is. It’s easy to see why the Valley is the centre of everything.

At least it’s the centre of iPhone development.

There’s only so much you can do when you’re sat in a dark office in London waiting for the ‘your app has been accepted’ email from Apple. Compare that to one panelist’s throwaway comment, “We’re really tight with the Apple guys.”

And tight is good. Tight is the way ahead. Almost every chap I met has a friend-of-a-friend who works at Apple. Or knows a ‘guy’ at Google. Or whose dorm mate knocked out a $10k/day Chess app for the iPhone.

As I walked around the venue, I bumped into Omar, AdMob’s founder. I’m still ridiculously embarrassed — I haven’t got over sitting next to Omar in a dinner in San Francisco last September and asking him ‘what he did at AdMob’ only to find out he was the founder. OH THAT OMAR!

I found Omar in good spirits. He was on his way up to commence proceedings. It says a lot when the CEO and founder of AdMob took the time to pop along and introduce the event. He outlined his company’s commitment to mobile developers and platforms such as the iPhone before swiftly handing over to colleague Mike for a quick AdMob FAQ, namely:

Q: Can I monetise my app with AdMob?
A: Yes. Lots of people are already (1,000+ apps using AdMob).

Q: How much money can I make?
A: It’s very dependent on the application and it’s use case, but, for the sake of argument, assume $0.15 net revenue per customer.

The audience sat in silence, gobbling up the information as Mike delivered it. It was very smart to give some basic revenue examples. Some apps are clearly making a heck of a lot more than $0.15 per customer, but if you’re looking for a ready reckoner of what you might be able to achieve, having this information is really valuable.

Next? The panel. It would be fair to represent the panel as iPhone Developer Rockstars. They’re operating in the mythical space of more or less continual Top-50 App Store billing. As I sat taking in the panel debate I was mentally calculating just how many application downloads the four guys accounted for. If you’re looking for confirmation of rockstar status, witness this panelist quote:

“We worked out the other day that one of our applications has been played by our users for 2,000 man years so far,”

Shit.

Moderator Richard Wong did a super job of asking a series of pertinent questions to the panel around the issue of application discovery. Once you’ve got your app accepted, do you blow a load of money (on, for example, AdMob) to get your app discovered on the launch day? Or do you play a longer game? Can you really monetise with ads? (Yes).

One point I really liked was, I think, made by Ben Lewis of TapJoy. He explained that customers had emailed in saying they were finding it difficult getting above level 30 in one of their games. So they responded by making levels 30-40 easier. In doing so, they found that their ad-impressions flew off the charts. If you’re displaying ads at the end of levels, it makes sense to ensure that the majority of users can progress to an array of levels.

Panelist Ben caused me to rethink my stance on Apple’s micropayments. if you recall, Apple’s next OS version, 3.0, introduces the capacity to extract micropayments from consumers using your applications. Ben commented that whilst a 30% revenue share for the hosting of the App Store, credit card processing and so on was fair enough, taking the exact same share for micropayments ‘just wasn’t cricket’, as we say in Britain. The point being that Apple aren’t doing any more work, other than the transaction processing.

Now to the good stuff.

For months — possibly even years — I’ve been banging on about the iPhone platform finally unlocking the opportunity for developers. Not everyone has been agreeing with me. Indeed quite a few purists in Europe have continued to assert the apparent superiority of the Symbian/Nokia platform for development. And whilst there’s certainly an argument to be had there, it’s — fundamentally — all about money. And there’s a reason Silicon Valley is going nuts for mobile. (Where ‘mobile’ equals ‘iPhone’). It’s the 800 million iPhone downloads, 70% of which are revenue generating. It’s the fact that you can, theoretically, become a millionaire overnight by developing a successful iPhone application, even though there are only 17m iPhones in existence.

So having been a diehard make-it-easy-for-developers chap, it was rather exciting to be surrounded by a few hundred of the Valley’s iPhone geniuses.

Panel questions arrived. I’d already been mentally willing Richard to pick me when he eventually opened the panel up to audience questions.

“Right, any quest..” he began. I shot up my hand.

“Ewan!” he said.

“Hi, I’d like to ask you about…”

I was getting stuck in.

“Wait a moment Ewan, introduce yourself for the audience,” prompted Richard.

Ah. Yes.

I couldn’t wait to ask my question.

“Given that Nokia expects to have their Ovi store on 400m handsets by the end of 2010, are you looking to develop for that platform?”

The moment I mentioned ‘Nokia’ I could feel the audience bristle.

One of the chaps on the panel looked at me — that ‘what the fluck’ look.

“Er, no,” he said.

He passed the microphone.

“No,” said the next chap.

“Er, we’re thinking about it,” said another.

“Errrr NO,” said the next.

Geez.

I felt like a pariah as the panel began to dissect their reasoning. The path to cash is unclear. It’s a massively fragmented handset population. It’s not centrally controlled and beautiful like the App Store. The Ovi Store doesn’t appear to be that ‘easy’ to work with. The capabilities of the development platform are unknown (at least within the Valley)… and so on.

Judging by the response of the audience and the other developers I spoke to after the panel, the ambivalence to Nokia’s Ovi offering — and the offerings of the other manufacturers — is echoed across the Valley.

Blackberry was mentioned once or twice. Surprising, given the amount of Blackberries in use across the States. But when you consider that a whopping amount of devices are corporate devices that are locked to prevent downloads — and that Blackberry App World isn’t pre-installed as yet — you can see why it’s getting little attention from this community.

Another surprise was the lack of Windows Marketplace discussion. Yes this was an iPhone developer meetup but you’d expect — or at least I expected — most developers to be reasonably platform agnostic or at least looking at other possibilities. Out of the 150 developers there, a show of hands revealed only one chap who had worked on the Windows platform.

This will change. Effort is driven by monetisation. If Ovi, Blackberry and Windows Mobile deliver on their promise, I’m sure the majority will give them the time of day. But right now it’s iPhone, iPhone, iPhone and I don’t blame them.

Read the rest here:
Ewan MacLeod: SXSW – where everybody knows your Twitter name (via FriendFeed)

Read the rest here:
Ewan MacLeod: SXSW – where everybody knows your Twitter name (via FriendFeed)

Read the original here:
Ewan MacLeod: “Twitter’s grown 1,689% from February 2008 to February 2009 compared to FB’s 114% growth. Someone’s been eating their Weetabix…” (via FriendFeed)

The rest is here:
Ewan MacLeod: “How to tweet your way out of a job http://tinyurl.com/d5372c deary me!” (via FriendFeed)

I did a little yesterday — and I’ve been doing a test with bit.ly as well — to measure the ‘return on investment’ of Twitter.

The click-through stat (along with re-tweet) is probably one of the most effective measures of the responsiveness of your followers.

As of yesterday, 597 people followed @ew4n (my personal account) and 634 followed MIReview (the site’s account).

Based on the stats I looked at yesterday over a 24 hour period, MIReview has a higher click-through percentage.

Almost exactly 40% (40.37%!) of followers clicked on MIReview’s Tweeted links.

Whereas only 33% clicked a link sent out via my ew4n personal account.

Immediately I can justify that MIReview has been, historically, an account that you follow if you would like site updates. So logically, more folk are going to click through on this account than via my personal one (which features more friends and other interested parties who might not be particularly turned on by mobile, for example).

Interesting, interesting.

On reflection there’s not that much difference. 7% difference.

But then this was just an arbitrary trial yesterday. I wonder what the results would be measured across hundreds of tweets?

Who made money in the gold rush? The hundreds of thousands of folk who went to find gold? Or the people who sold’em spades?

Enter my new business.

I will sell you 1,000 followers for $99 on-off fee. Payable by PayPal.

You won’t get 1,000 added to your list in 20 seconds. Oh no. That would look suspect.

Instead we’re going to automate the following process over 2 weeks. You’ll get 15 joins in the space of two minutes.

And then you’ll see join notifications come in every 20-45 minutes until you’ve got a glorious 1,000 new followers.

But don’t worry, each of the accounts that will follow you has it’s own picture, biography and publishes one or two updates per week. They’re all given genuine names so that if I look down your follow list, I’d never know you’d bought 1,000 of them.

If you’d like to upgrade your account to ‘GOLD’ status — that’s $100 a month — every follower will click on any links you provide in your Tweets. For a one-time $500 fee, we will also provide you with 250 extra Facebook friends and 200 LinkedIn contacts.

Further, on a random basis, a random number of your 1,000 followers (between 56 and 367) will retweet your Tweets to their followers. Helping boost you up the charts and make anyone following you think you’ve got a massive, massive cock.

We’ll be launching soon.

Not quite.

I’m just working on the messaging now:

Are you rubbish? Do you have only 200 followers or less?
Do your friends look at you in the gym and think, ‘what a shit number of followers he’s got?’

Well, no longer. Not with our new patented TwitFollowGrow service. YOURS for just $99.

But order now.

Supplies are limited!

You and I both know that if I actually did this, I’d make a ton of money. How many PR firms, social media experts and bloggers would take one look at this offer and get their PayPal details out?

Tons. Tons. Tons.

The correspondent is named Ruth Barnett. I trust she is equipped with a shit-hot array of 30″ screens and a decent internet connection, along with a heck of a lot of iPhones, Blackberries and so on (for when she’s on the go). She’ll need the same equipment at home too. Twitter doesn’t switch off at 5pm. Indeed I reckon they’ll need a team of people working under Ruth.

You can follow Ruth here.

One assumes that if you’ve got a juicy news story, or if you’ve just been in a train crash (or the like), you can Tweet Ruth and within seconds you’ll be taken live.

I wonder who owns the RuthBarnett Twitter account? Sky or Ruth? If Ruth leaves, does Sky lose the huge network of people she’s about to create?

As ever, Mike poses issues that get my brain ticking away:

But it also raises interesting issues. The mainstream news media is watching us on Twitter. We in turn are watching them. But unlike the old days, you can block people on Twitter. Will Twitter users start to block journalists they don’t want to be followed by? Will news outlets start to not declare their Twitter profiles, or order to avoid this?

How long before someone finds a derelict airplane in someone’s back yard and snaps a TwitPic with a funny quote — and finds the whole of the world’s mainstream media knocking at their virtual front door wanting to know where to send the camera team?

As per Mike’s comments, I too welcome Sky News to the Twittersphere. Good to see the innovation.

“stole a march on traditional media when it was the first outlet to publish dramatic pictures of the Turkish Airlines crash”

The report continues:

Moments after the plane crashed at Amsterdam’s Schipol airport on Wednesday morning the news was appearing on Twitter, iReport’s International Correspondent Errol Barnett said.

So Twitter nailed the international mainstream media? Again?

Well no.

Not quite.

SOME users of Twitter were on the ground when it happened. One, it seems, took a picture. One assumes that they Tweeted or Twitpic’ed the picture up to the internet. CNN then found out about it. Somehow. Then CNN checked with Dutch officials and confirmed the news. Then they took the Twitter picture ‘to air’.

This is really, really smart.

But there’s also about a billion different flaws with the approach.

If I was on the scene with ZERO Twitter followers, I sent in a Twitpic called DSC0101112.jpg, you’d never know about it.

Not unless I gave some context in my message. Like ‘plane crash in Amsterdam here is a picture:’ followed by the Twitpic URL. Or not unless I ‘atted’ the CNN iReport team.

You also need to be really smart with the text used in your Tweet so that people monitoring the public Twitter search system find the stuff. I imagine the CNN social media chaps have got permanent searches going on all the time like ‘plane crash’ and ‘nuclear missile’ or similar.

But Twitter isn’t an outlet. The frontpage of Twitter has absolutely NOTHING on the Turkish Jet Crash. So Twitter didn’t beat the Reuters photographer. Twitter replaced the Reuters/AP photo journalist platform and enabled CNN to get hold of the images.

Setting aside the obvious human tragedy of today’s news, the medium and the possibilities of Twitter are getting more and more exciting.

At some point I will be there when Paris Hilton falls out of a nightclub with Prince William, both naked, both kissing passionately and both holding previously unreleased Nokia N98 16 megapixel mobile handsets. And I will have my N95 8GB there, fully charged, with my 3G+ Vodafone data network poised to take my pixels to ShoZu and from thence to the world.

Have a read of the CNN story here.

I’m experiencing a renaissance in ‘value’ for mainstream media. I can’t be bothered to read through every single public twitter message and piece together what happened. Instead I’ll leave it to a journalist (or should that be ‘social network analyst?) to do the research and knock it together into a decent commentary that I can consume. I value that. Standby, I’m willing to bet The London Times will have an overview online in a few hours.

@Ew4n Unfollowing.

I am continually mystified and delighted at the manner in which people use Twitter, I really am.

If you’re viewing my output on to Twitter as utter arse, there’s an unfollow button.

I am certainly annoyed when people send total bollocks into my Twitterstream (“Just having breakfast. Super.”). Rubbish like that doesn’t help my day and I am wholly unwilling to, as colleague Ben Smith puts it, ‘overlook it’. I have to read and process every single Tweet that I’m looking at.

Here’s how it works:

I read the person’s name or handle. I read their text. It’s ONLY when I have read, processed (and hopefully understood) their message that can I can ascribe value to it. Annoying. But this is how it goes. Twitter is currently binary. You either follow someone. Or you don’t. It’s that simple.

But if you’re totally flucked right off with my twitter stream, there’s no need to send me a public reply to tell me you’re unfollowing.

All that does is focus my razor sharp attention on you. If that was the goal — and I’m sure there’s an element of that — then if I didn’t think you were an arse two minutes ago, I most certainly think you are now.

The real thing that mystifies me is that by *publishing* your ‘unfollow’ message — to all your followers — you give me instant advertising. You’re saying ‘I’m not following him’ — at which point all your followers have to have a wee look and make a value judgement as to why. About 5-10 minutes after the Tweet, I had a heck of a lot of people add me as a result.

Weird.

It’s one for the ‘why does Twitter *actually* rock’ pile…

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Hey Ewan,

Think I’ve found one of the best reasons why Twitter rocks. I tweeted this earlier:

Dear GitX: if I click “delete branch”, I’d like to confirm that before it actually happens.

Oh no! I just deleted a whole load of code!!

*GitX is a frontend to the version control system, Git, by the way.)

A couple of hours later, I received this tweet from the creator of GitX:

@simonmaddox sorry about the GitX branch deletion. You can try git-resurrect (http://tinyurl.com/d33ufk) to resurrect the old branch

While I’d already realised that Time Machine is awesome, it’s great to see that you can have direct access to the developers of whatever software you use, without looking like a tool on a random forum or IRC channel..

Cheers,
Simon

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Couldn’t agree more Simon. What a brilliant example of the power and usefulness of Twitter. Thanks for sending this!

If you’ve got examples similar to Simon’s experience, send them in to me.