BEST OF THE WEB: Is Twitter too big to succeed?

One of the biggest questions Silicon Valley entrepreneurs face is how to make their businesses profitable. Many are accused of focusing too much on building communities rather than sustainable products and as a result they aren’t creating long-term business plans.

This new piece in New York Magazine examines that same problem. It describes the casual atmosphere of the Twitter headquarters, with an “open-air hive of cubicles” but notes some dissatisfaction with its progress to become profitable.

This longer piece examines what Twitter is trying to do – make sense of the billions of tweets that are happening every day. But it highlights what the writer, Joe Hogan, believes to be an undercurrent of anxiety at the company.

“A person with close ties to the company says the morale inside Twitter, especially on floor three, has been low,” Hogan says.

“In the hothouse of Silicon Valley engineers are the coin of the realm and what they want, in addition to a financial stake, is to put their stamp on a winning company, even if it means working for one of the thousands of tiny start-ups developing applications for Facebook or Google.

“Twitter, while sorting out its strategy and management problems, has hired hundreds of new engineers even as it’s taken its sweet time rolling out new features those engineers can lay claim to.”

The piece contains a variety of views on whether Twitter can make it big and whether it can exist alongside Google+ and Facebook.

“Twitter has proved valuable for aggregating real time news or snarking about celebrities on TV —two pretty big businesses, but maybe not quite $8 billion big and certainly not enough to meet the earth-size ambitions (Jack) Dorsey has in mind.”

It’s a fascinating piece and well worth reading for the latest perspective on what was once Silicon Valley’s hottest company.

Say goodbye to text messages

When Apple announced iOS 5 earlier this year one of the most welcome features was a new app that allows users to send messages to fellow iPhone users over the internet without using mobile networks.

The instant messaging system, called iMessage, owes a lot to BlackBerry Messenger and is one of the key features in the upcoming software. But there’s a larger story here – that telecommunications companies may start seeing revenue from text messaging deals disappear.

Plenty of telcos still offer deals with text messaging bundles. This piece in The Atlantic takes a look at those and at what might happen now that the iPhone – which has a large penetration rate in Australia – offers an alternative system.
The piece focuses on America but it is relevant here as well.

“Cell phone carriers argue that with the competition they face over voice and data rates charging for extra services is the only way they can maintain profits,” the piece says.

“Similar to the sea of airline fees and banking charges, these arguments only work when the prices are meaningfully related to the service being provided.

“When you look at the math that hardly seems true of text messages and the loss of that revenue seems entirely fair.”

Although text messaging costs are calculated differently here it’s well worth thinking about what might happen to the humble text message now that plenty of alternatives are available.

The origins of scareware

You’ve probably had it happen to you. A security pop-up box appears on your computer telling that, sadly, your computer is simply filled with viruses and it needs to be scanned.

You click yes but it turns out that the security pop-up was a virus and is now infiltrating your computer so deeply that a full reformat is required.

It’s called scareware and has been around for several years. But this new piece from Wired takes a good hard look at some of the biggest perpetratos – two men, Sam Jain and Daniel Sundin, who since the early 2000s have appeared on Interpol’s fugitive list.

The piece takes a look at the pair and how they created an empire of scareware under the name of their company, Innovative Marketing.

“Unlike other young Internet entrepreneurs who built big businesses at the start of the new millennium the story of Sam Jain and Daniel Sundin hasn’t been told in fawning profiles or books or in movies directed by David Fincher,” the piece says.

“Yet in a perverse way IMI could be considered one of the most remarkable start-ups of the past decade.

“This duo’s knack for social engineering has been as brilliant as anything Facebook ever rolled out and IMI’s nimble, iterative approach to software development and marketing produced innovation on an almost weekly basis.”

This type of scareware has prompted hundreds of copycats and still plagues computer users today. It’s a problem that won’t go away and this story on how two men got the ball rolling is definitely worth a look.

The iPhone 4S is all about Google

There were plenty of Apple fans who got excited about this week’s iPhone 4S announcement, with many eager to see the latest hardware and features.

But there’s one point many have overlooked – that the announcement was also as much about Google as it was about Apple.

This piece on the New York Times takes a quick look at what exactly was going on during the announcement. Apple has to compete with every new Android smartphone that shows up each month and it’s getting harder.

“The Android phone is available on almost any carrier at almost any price,” Forrester Research analyst Charles Golvin said.

“And now the big growth in the smart phone space is not coming from people that need a new phone every three weeks. It’s your brother or your cousin or your aunt,” he said.

Apple has been the dominant smart phone player for a long while but with the iPhone 4S that position may be starting to change.