Web Entrepreneur William Kasel

Gmail is down

Gmail has been down for quite some time. I was in the middle of writing an important email, and BAM! I tweeted Mike Arrington, but im sure he already knew. Yikes, im pissed. Look at the twitter search http://search.twitter.com/search?q=gmail, ive also read in some comments on the TechCrunch blogpost, that MobileMe, and supposedly Facebook is down.

Far from — Twitter, while having a brilliant idea, lacks many features, necessary for survival. In reference to the TechCrunch article posted yesterday, It really seems true that people could care less that twitter is always down, which proves the loyalty twitters userbase has.

Twitter almost appears to have the Google, simplistic, thing going for it, but could that arrogance hurt them in the long run? The user base isn’t so much loyal, as it is dependent. There has yet to be something out there that takes twitter on in a really intuitive way. Of course there is identi.ca,  but unfortunately, they lack the biggest feature that keeps the tweets rolling in — the existing user base, and network. If Twitter had a way to export your followed, and followers, then we would see the end of Twitter in the upcoming months.

The network Twitter provides has even spawned comments by some of the nets top bloggers, quoting Michael Arrington of TechCrunch as saying “I now need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.” (TechCrunch, 08). It’s not the excellent service, it’s the network. Port the network somewhere else, and anything can survive.

As quoted from the geek cult classic Pirates of Silicon Valley “You survive by making people need you, then when they need you they have nowhere else to go.” That is probalby the most relevent line to twitters continued success — It is both the question, and the answer. How will Twitters castle crumble?

Social Media is obviously the driving force behind web 2.0, and how much better of a way to embrace social content than to open your site to developers? It goes back to the original Fast Company article on Ning, and the Viral Expansion Loop. Get members of the social graph to make something, that makes the parent node to the other nodes (people). Obviously, Facebook did this with their developers platform, and It has paid off well for them, and been highly embraced.

I have always been, and still remain the biggest proponent of the the developers platform, but it seems like the buzz is dying, and the community is being filled with garbage — usually clones, and over-simplified apps. One suggestion, and one that I always believed in, was the social graph allows good things to bubble to the top, in sort of a democratic way. But, think about first mover advantage, with companies such as RockYou, and Slide. They were able to jump in before there were anti-invite groups started to shut down the application platform all together.

The simple truth is the platofrm has been abused, and Facbook is suffering. Their grand idea is slowly slipping to commonplace. What does Facebook need? I don’t know. If they start cutting apps, then there would be an uprise, but something needs to be done. I am glad to see they are cracking down on the big dogs.

Maybe facebooks new redesign will help stop the mess facebook has with the applications, but with that set to launch July 16th, I wouldn’t expect much.

As posted on TechCrunch today there is a mysterious grey box on gmail? Wonder what it is? I left a few comments…

“Its the portal to the Google Flux Time Capacitor — Highly credible sources tell us Google has created a way to travel through time via their unique application system. Currently it is only available through google maps, but plans to unveil a full-scale hardware version are in talks, sources say Microsoft has already announced its version, which will take you back to windows BEFORE it crashed every 10 minutes. Our source also tells us that Steve Balmer plans to use it to re-grow his ever-expanding bald spot.”

and:

on a serious note, i think it is a google radio — they are going to allow you to listen to music via gmail, and any other google system, are they going to take on pandora?

We will see…

Here is a link to the original post:

http://blogoscoped.com/forum/134961.html

and the techcrunch it article:

http://www.techcrunchit.com/2008/07/05/the-mysterious-grey-box-on-gmail/#comment-823

What do I think it is? Well, aside from a bug, which is what it probably is, I think it is something to do with music or radio player, the id of the object is “sound_frame”. As much as I would like this to be a cool service, changes are it is just a goof.

Ohh well, better luck next time.

Surfing TechCrunch today, ran across this interesting video. Basically, some new media (internet) publishers, and traditional media (print) argue the ins and outs of the future of the more traditional media such as NYT, NewsWeek, which they claim “will not be around in 5 years”, and the Wall Street Journal.

David Carr, of the New York Times, jumps on Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch an what seems to be a rant of very personalized anger regarding new media. I’d love to hear some comments on this.