If you’re wondering about the reach of Twitter (clocking in at over 3 million users now) consider the tragedy that’s happening right now in Mumbai. Apparently the police (and perhaps the attackers) are not only aware of Twitter — it’s also part of the problem.  The Indian government is asking that the #mumbai hashtag be shut down.

What’s more, with Twitter being an excellent medium for short messages but lacking the space for details, Internet users are now repurposing Wikipedia to maintain a frequently edited page.

Abstract: Network effects are powerful and scary.

The clouds just keep rolling in. Microsoft has thrown their hat in the ring with Azure which deserves notice because Ray Ozzie is behind it. Amazon just released a CDN service. With recent coverage in The Economist and every major newspaper, even my local news tonight, cloud computing appears to be here to stay, judging by the marketing feeding frenzy.

There have been some recent well publicized outages that have generated some concerned opinion.  Something struck a related chord when I read an excellent interview by Stephen Strogatz about network effects in Seed magazine:

I have this general concern about entering this networked era, which we’re clearly already in. For example, the power grid used to not be a grid. It was just a lot of isolated power stations. When there was trouble people would just close down the power plants and repair whatever the problem was.

But now that there’s a grid, when something bad happens at one point in the grid, and you use the defense strategy of just shutting down that plant, it can have propagating effects. It can put too much load on other plants, which may cause them to shut down. And this is exactly what we saw here in the northeast when we had the 2003 blackout. Or think about what is happening right now in the market, where there are all kinds of propagating, cascading failures in our market and financial systems. So, I’m just thinking that you may be opening a Pandora’s Box

[Read more]

Mark Dowds and I just finished the Beyond Technology event in Vancouver, BC. Lots of folks wanted the slides, so here they are.

My content focused on the outside community — how to find and join conversations that your market, customers, and partners are having. Mark’s presentation looked at the cultural changes within organizations, and how social networking can help capture learning and promote sharing of knowledge within companies.

It was a very interesting discussion, with lots of follow-up both online and off.

From the Register, by way of Broadsight, it seems that Google has patched an issue with Android that interpreted text you type as commands. So you can type “reboot” and reboot the phone.

Really? Really?

I mean, I’ve heard Android is supposed to be an open platform. But if the tale is true — and there isn’t some kind of double-backflip configuration knob you have to fiddle with to make this work — it’s a big deal.

Consumer electronics don’t like to be open. Openness breeds complexity. The iPhone is criticized for being closed, but it’s usable (despite this post to the contrary) in part because it’s locked down. The button-bar iPhone resembles nothing so much as the old Compuserve menu. It took us years to move from consumer adoption of buttons to comfort with the open web.

If you let humans play with the guts of things, they tend to break in new and creative ways. Social engineering is the new hacking; now that many operating systems are patched and scanned, hackers exploit human weaknesses to send drive-by malware links to Facebook users. (Good thing the bad guys are after Warcraft passwords, then.)

But back to Android. Apple locks it down; Google opens it up. One approach delivers a seamless experience, the other so much flexibility you can hurt yourself. Apple assumes people will use its devices on a busy New York subway, jostling for handholds and bouncing in purses. Google assumes people will hack together scripts and plug-ins, finding new ways to use tag clouds and APIs. Apple partners with monopoly-scale carriers; Google lobbies for free spectrum.

The two philosophies couldn’t be more different. It’ll be fascinating to see whether integration trumps flexibility, or vice-versa.