My thoughts on the keynote this morning and the new iPhone, all rapid fire like.

• There are a lot of people out there saying that the announcement of the new phone isn’t enough. I suspect that because a certain blog bought a stolen prototype and splayed it on their site for the world to see that some of the excitement behind the reveal was lost. This unveiling though was a hell of a lot more impactful than the 3GS reveal.
• I can’t wait to see what is done with the gyroscope. No one is talking about that now but i think it will end up being huge.
• All reports indicate a ridiculously thin phone, which is always cool.
• Love that you can now shoot AND edit your video on the phone and that from all appearances it is easy to do.
• The forward camera is made much cooler, obviously, with the new video chat feature (face time). Pretty awesome how you can swap from forward to rear camera on the fly.
• Lots of people complaining that the video chat only works under Wifi. Don’t think it is that big of a deal, have you ever tried to make a call with 3G? That doesn’t even always work

I probably won’t upgrade for a while, not for lack of desire but because my work pays my iPhone bill now and i just got the 3GS. I also kind of want to see which of these new technologies (retina display especially) get rolled into the iPad.

My theory on the iPad is simple:

This is a device that is first and foremost for early adopters. It is also for people who, if given the choice, would rather read news, visit sites or play games on their phones than their laptop. If you enjoy your iPhone and like touching things as opposed to moving around with a mouse, and if you like self contained applications as opposed to web browsers, then odds are you would like the iPad.

Over the past few months, i have been shunning my mac book pro in lieu of reading news sites on my iPhone, especially when at home. I just enjoy having quick access to well designed applications that were stripped down and simplified, that i could navigate with my thumb or forefinger only. Apps like the iPhone Facebook one for example, or CNN or digg.

It is a somewhat accurate comparison that the iPad is a giant iPod touch. I can can only say that while it is larger version, it doesn’t lose anything by merely being bigger. It actually gains a lot from more real estate and like i said, if you like the iPhone you will also love the iPad. Does that mean you should buy one? I don’t know. I do know however that i will probably use this more than my laptop when not doing work related functions.

Lets get one thing out of the way from the outset. Just because I think retweets (much like hashtags) are more or less workarounds for the failings of Twitter as a communication tool, that doesn’t mean they aren’t effective. One of my most popular posts on Examiner, the 5 reasons Facebook is better for marketing than Twitter, benefited greatly from retweeting. In an evening, the viral spread of the link to that post, almost entirely through RT’s amassed me over 1,000 views. Not bad when you think about it, really.

But the reason retweets came into existence in the first place was because Twitter users got frustrated with not being able to share the tweets they found with their friends. Unlike Facebook, favorites are buried on Twitter. You could look at a users “favorited” tweets but let’s face it, no one does.

Again, same thing with hashtags. People started to use the hash symbol in conjunction with keywords or abbreviations (#sxsw for example denotes South by South West) in order to provide a more efficient way of searching for related conversion on Twitter.

There have even been businesses form around the concept of retweets. TweetMeme and ReTweet.com are just 2 services which track the most popular conversations on Twitter based upon the number of RTs they get. You can even get into the act by clicking on the retweet button accompanying each post on this site.

Project Retweet

Project Retweet was announced today Twitter as an official way to deal with retweeting. Essentially, the ability to re-tweet a tweet on your timeline will be included in the standard Twitter web UI as well as through API calls that third party developers can take advantage of.

Mashable wrote a great post about how these changes will affect what people have come to know about retweeting. Now, it will be possible to see messages from people you don’t follow in your twitter feed – something I am not looking forward to as I have recently pruned about 800 people from my followed list.

I feel for the company’s which developed their own tools to facilitate this non-standard way of sharing tweets. However, I really feel bad for Twitter in that they feel forced to engineer hack workarounds to obvious flaws in their product. These do not feel like well though out changes.

At this point though, I am not sure if I really need it.

Notice, I didn’t say I am not sure if I really want an Apple tablet. Of course I want one. But having an iPhone and a Mac Book Pro already in my laptop bag, what value could I possibly get from a tablet computer (and don’t say that I’d just look really cool because I am cool anyway, of course).

Some of the fake prototypes of the device that have surfaced leave more questions than answers. For example, how comfortable would it be to type on a glass screen? How would you even hold an oversized iPod touch device? Would you sit it flat on your lap? Well, that doesn’t seem like it would be that comfortable.

I am an Apple fanboy, that is for certain. I’m tempted by every new product they introduce, but this one just doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense for them. And, I wonder about the alleged $700 price tag. Surely they could command a larger price when you can’t even get a 32gb iPod touch for less than $400 and that has a 3 inch screen and no camera.

Would you buy an Apple tablet?

Wow, so Twitter is a success but it needs to be completely rethought?

I know, I’m far from being the first person to criticize Twitter on a blog. However, I want to discuss an angle and offer a potential solution for reinventing Twitter into a tool which can be useful, monetized and ultimately, meet the needs of the people who use it every day.

“What are you doing?”

To begin, I will revisit the original intent behind Twitter, as stated time and time again by its founders.

Twitter, as a web site and service, was created to allow people to answer (and share their answer) to a very simple question: What are you doing? It was meant to be an evolution of the “status update” that instant messaging clients or social networking giants Facebook and MySpace popularized. It wasn’t, however, designed to BE an instant messaging or chat client. That is how Twitter has devolved (note: not “evolved”).

Twitter – the chat client that wasn’t

Now, I’m not saying that a chat client is a bad thing. Chat is actually a very good thing – I use chat all the time. Some of the best chat clients let me talk to people, on a real-time basis, organize my friends into lists and keep records of those conversations in a threaded view for review later.

Does Twitter do that?

The answer is kind of, but it needs a lot of help. Third party applications like Tweetdeck, or Tweetie attempt to organize a mess of followers into a pseudo list of contacts. Services like Twitter Search (formerly Summize) attempt to give you the ability to scan conversations for keywords. There are even bot applications that will answer tweets for you, greet new followers or send direct messages. But even with a thriving third party developer community and APIs, Twitter is a feeble chat client.

Try as they might, Twitter the “company” has failed to remedy the problem. They put limits on the number of followers one could have, and when the service gets overloaded (as recently as Michael Jackson’s passing just a few days ago) features on site get turned off so that the entire service doesn’t come crashing down.

Problems and solutions

Here is the biggest problem though in my opinion. I follow roughly 220 people, but 99.9% of them aren’t talking about something I care about when I read my Twitter feed. These folks may have said something at one point in time that interested me, which is why I started following them. However, as I sit here today, writing this post, I can tab over to my Tweetie window and find not a single conversation that I’m interested enough to engage in. Not even one.

First and foremost, I think Twitter the “company” should shoot for making Twitter the “web site” into a chat portal. Now wait a minute, I just wrote 400 words describing why Twitter is a sucky chat client. That’s right — well, the reason is because it wasn’t created to be a chat client. But that’s how people use it, so it may as well move in that direction. Besides, how many monetization models are there for a status update site – none that I can think of.

People love to chat on Twitter, but as I pointed out, at any given time you may (but probably won’t) find people talking about something you care about. That’s why Twitter needs to move towards being more topic focused and less “follower” focused.

At the end of the day, does it really matter who has the most followers? Does it matter that I follow 220 people but almost never read what they have to say? Does it matter 923 people follow me, and do the people on the other end of MY tweets care about what I write? People care when its a topic of interest to them, and that’s where Twitter could potentially shine (and make some money).

It’s about the conversations stupid

Make Twitter about conversations and build on the things that Twitter does so well – mobile, extensibility and ease of use. Eliminate the follower/followed model and instead, create spaces for chatting on specific topics. Twitter search and trending topics are a great first step. Look at the Iran Election – hundreds of thousands of people all talking about a specific topic. Me? I didn’t care so much, so let me opt out of those messages – instead of flooding my feed with hundreds of messages on a subject I don’t want to read (my only option was to shut off Twitter or unfollow, which I did).

How about a system where you sign in, and opt yourself in to topics. Perhaps utilizing the existing Twitter framework you could specify keywords or create your own topic. From there on out, you will continue to receive on-topic tweets until you change your settings.

From a business standpoint, companies would be able to sponsor certain topics and invite people in to communicate. That’s really what businesses want anyway – people to opt in to messaging. Those companies would pay Twitter to have perhaps a permanent (or time limited), branded keyword topic on the site and Twitter would promote those conversations in much the same way they promote trending topics.

Regardless of how it might shake out, Twitter is going to need to embrace the chat model fully and modify their tools in order to make it a servicable application for talking online OR they need to fully embrace it being a status update system and get really creative about how they make money. Right now, Twitter is pretty much straddling both world’s and not doing an exceptional job at either.

There were three things I saw or heard of this week that on first “glance” I was skeptical of.

The first was Project Natal from Microsoft. Anything Microsoft does these days makes me skeptical. I wrote a blog this week for work on Bing, Microsoft’s new “decision engine” and why we didn’t need it. After a few days of playing with it, my mind hasn’t changed. Bing is like Mahalo on steroids, but at the end of the day, it is still like Mahalo.

The premise of Natal, a new video game controller for the XBOX 360 is essentially that of the Wii’s controller — an interface that lowers the barrier to entry for people who are initimidated holding a joystiq. Now, I am not sure I have ever met the folks who these controllers are designed for, but none the less, Natal basically turns your body into a control mechanism for playing a game. It does it by using some cameras. I was skeptical, but the truth is that Natal is pretty damned cool. Some of the technical demos showing off the way it works will blow you away. I especially like the one with Milo, a computer generated boy who can read your facial expressions and act accordingly.

I’d never wave my arms to “fake fight” with a computer game but, the applications for Natal are pretty much limitless.

Next up was Google Wave. For a long time I’ve been saying Google just needs to focus on search. Then I saw Google Wave and realized that, yes, the folks working for the big G are pretty smart. Wave is basically email “reinvented” for today. It has a lot in common with a Wiki and an Instant Messenger client, while maintaining some of the traditional functions of email. Its really hard to explain, so watch the tech demo of Google Wave to get a much better idea. Really excited about it coming out!

The final bit of erased skepticism came from an agency web site that a coworker of mine posted to our internal work Twitter. This web site is done completely in video, and uses clickable hotspots to navigate. The video I saw was hosted in You Tube, but my guess is that it would work anywhere. One thing I hadn’t considered about this site was just how portable it was. You could basically load it on a Flash drive if you wanted, since it is just a video essentially. The agency in question was Boone Oakley out of North Carolina. Bravo guys!