The War For the Web

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 61

On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.

It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links.

if you’re posting web links (Bit.ly, TinyURL) to your Twitter feed and using the Twitter Facebook app to share those updates on Facebook too, none of those links are hyperlinked. Your friends will need to copy and paste the links into a browser to make them work.

If this is a design decision on Facebook’s part, it’s an extremely odd one: we’d like to think it’s an inconvenient bug, and we have a mail in to Facebook to check. Suffice to say, the issue is site-wide: it’s not just you.

As it turns out, it wasn't just links imported from Twitter. All outbound links were temporarily disabled, unless users explicitly added them as links via an "attach" dialogue. I went to Facebook, and tried posting a link to this blog directly in my status feed, and saw the same behavior: links were no longer automatically made clickable. You can see that in the image that is the destination of the first link in this piece.

The problem was quickly fixed, with URLs in status updates automatically now linkified again. The consensus was that it was in fact a bug, but it's little surprise that people suspected otherwise, given the increasing amount of effort Facebook puts into warning people that they are leaving Facebook for the big bad unsafe Internet:

All of this is well-intentioned, I'm sure. After all, Facebook is attempting to put in place privacy controls that allow its users to manage the visibility of their information -- and the Web's expectation of universal visibility is not necessarily the best default for much of the information posted on Facebook. But let's not kid ourselves: Facebook is a new kind of web site (or an old kind redux), a world of its own, playing by different rules.

But this isn't just about Facebook.

The Apple iPhone is the hottest web access device around, and like Facebook, while it connects to the web, it plays by a different set of rules. Anyone can put up a website, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone's permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple's blessing.

There is one glaring loophole: anyone can create a web application, which any user can save as clickable application on their phone. But these web applications have limits - there are key capabilities of the phone that are not accessible to web applications. HTML 5 can introduce all the new application-like features it wants, but they will work only for web applications, and can't access key aspects of the phone with Apple's permission. And as we saw earlier this year with Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application, Apple isn't shy about blocking applications that it considers threatening to their core business, or that of their partners.

And now, of course, we see the latest salvo in the war against the accepted rules of interoperability on the web: Rupert Murdoch's threat to take the Wall Street Journal out of the Google search index. While most people have repeated the existing wisdom that to do so would be suicide for the Journal, a few contrarian observers have noted the leverage Murdoch holds. Mark Cuban argues that Twitter now trumps search engines when it comes to breaking news. Even more provocatively, Jason Calacanis suggested, a few weeks before Murdoch's announcement, that all big media companies need to do to cut Google off at the knees would be to block Google, while cutting an exclusive deal with Bing to be found only in Microsoft's search index.

Of course, Google wouldn't take that lying down, and would likely make its own exclusive deals, leading to a showdown that would make the browser wars of the 90s seem tame.

I'm not saying that News Corp and other mainstream media publications would adopt Jason's suggested strategy, or that it would work if they did, but it is becoming clear to me that we are heading into a bloody period of competition that could be extremely unfriendly to the interoperable web as we know it today.

If you've followed my thinking about Web 2.0 from the beginning, you know that I believe we are engaged in a long term project to build an internet operating system. (Check out the program for the first O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in 2002 (pdf).) In my talks over the years, I've argued that there are two models of operating system, which I have characterized as "One Ring to Rule Them All" and "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," with the latter represented by a routing map of the Internet.

The first is the winner-takes-all world that we saw with Microsoft Windows on the PC, a world that promises simplicity and ease of use, but ends up diminishing user and developer choice as the operating system provider.

The second is an operating system that works like the Internet itself, like the web, and like open source operating systems like Linux: a world that is admittedly less polished, less controlled, but one that is profoundly generative of new innovations because anyone can bring new ideas to the market without having to ask permission of anyone.

I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the "small pieces loosely joined" model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects.

One of the points I've made repeatedly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of systems that get better the more people use them, and that over time, such systems have a natural tendency towards monopoly.

And so we've grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we've been readying ourselves for one dominant social network.

But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I've been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications. I noted this first with speech recognition, but it's had the biggest business impact so far in location-based services.

A few weeks ago, Google offered free turn-by-turn directions for Android phones. This is awesome news for consumers, who previously could get this only in dedicated GPS devices or with high-priced iPhone apps. But it's also a sign just how competitive the web is getting, and just how powerful Google is getting, because they understand that "data is the Intel Inside" of the next generation of computer applications.

Nokia paid $8 billion for NavTeq, the leading provider of such turn-by-turn directions. GPS-maker TomTom paid $3.7 billion for TeleAtlas, the #2 provider in the market. Google quietly built an equivalent service, and is now giving it away for free -- but only to their own business partners. Everyone else still has to pay high fees to NavTeq and TeleAtlas. What's more, Google upped the ante by adding in such features as Street View.

Most interestingly, this move sets the stage for the future competition between Google and Apple. (Bill Gurley's analysis is an essential read.) Apple controls access to the dominant device of the mobile web; Google controls access to one of the most important mobile applications, and so far, is making it available for free only on Android. Google's prowess is not just in search, but in mapping, speech recognition, automated translation, and other applications driven by huge, intelligent databases that only a few providers can offer. Microsoft and Nokia control comparable assets, but they too are Apple competitors, and unlike Google, their business model depends on selling access to those assets, not giving them away for free.

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we'll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we've enjoyed for the past two decades. But I'm betting that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

And it's time for developers to take a stand. If you don't want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don't wait till it's too late.

P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

I'll be speaking on this topic in my keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York on Tuesday. I'll look forward to seeing many of you there.

It's in the Bag! The Apple Tablet Computing Device

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 26

In the past 25 years, the personal computing revolution has evolved from tethered (desktop) to luggable (portable) to joined-at-the-hip (mobile).

Via the iPhone Platform (including iPod Touch), Apple has set the bar for mobile computing by seamlessly integrating computation, communications, and media across hardware, software, and service layers.

No less integral, Apple has significantly evolved ecosystem development models by cobbling together developer tools, media relationships, marketplace/e-wallet functions, one-click software distribution, explicit platform governance, and a simple, but compelling, approach to sharing revenue with developers.

But, the pièce de résistance has been a touch, tilt, sensor, and virtual keyboard-based user interaction model that has rendered the traditional physical keyboard plus WIMP-based model (i.e., windows, icons, menus, and pointing device) as so last century, the proverbial horse-and-buggy to Apple's Model T.

The end result is that the iPhone has become the first truly personal computer; more personal to its owners than the PC ever was, a truth that bubbles to the top again and again when you talk to the 50M (combined) iPhone and iPod Touch owners.

Thus, the core thesis of this article is two-fold. One, that while Apple remains committed to cultivating its position in the legacy desktop /portable segment via the Mac, they understand that they will never be the leader of the PC market.

Two, given their dominance in mobile computing platforms, Apple will expand upon their iPhone strategy by attacking an "undefended hill" (an HP axiom) that's less hospitable to desktops/portables; namely, the bag-carrying consumer (think: purses, backpacks, briefcases, and the like).

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iPhone Killers, Blackberries and Chicken Parts

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 5

There is an unfortunate tendency to confuse delivering a bunch of 'chicken parts' with producing an actual living, breathing chicken.

MG Siegler, over at TechCrunch, has written an excellent article that shines a light on the cycle from hype to disappointment that goes with being dubbed an 'iPhone Killer.'

BlackBerry Storm, Palm Pre, the G2, and now Droid have all been touted as contenders to the mobile computing crown, yet the iPhone continues to kick butt.

No less, Apple has levered its market leadership position with iPhone (and the iPod Touch) to create a halo effect on the rest of its business, generating bottom line results that are industry-defining (see analysis of Apple's Q4 results HERE).

Meanwhile, conventional wisdom, shaped by the history of Apple vs Microsoft during the PC Wars, tells us that Android is 'destined' to be bigger than the iPhone worldwide.

And to be clear, would-be iPhone slayers are indeed establishing strategic positions that have the potential to become compelling and differentiated within the mobile market. Examples include:

• Android: We are more open than Apple;


• RIM: We are more enterprise-ready;


• Palm Pre: We are more web-native;


• Android, RIM, Nokia, et al: We are a heterogeneous device platform.

But, alas, there is a fly in the ointment. Many of the above solutions are at a functional stage where they still fail to deliver a 'more than the sum of the parts' experience - at a time when Apple is clicking on all cylinders from a product innovation and new product pipeline perspective.

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Rebooting the Book (One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time)

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 30

"It is August, 1927, and Al Jolson is industriously, unwittingly, engaged in the destruction of one great art form and the creation of another...In four short years, the 'talkie' will completely subsume the silent movie." - from The Speed of Sound by Scott Eyman

The "Come to Jesus" Moment for the Book Business
In the age of the always on, it's fair to ask, do people read anymore?

Web content, video games, iPhone apps, Facebook sessions, YouTube videos, iTunes libraries, and Hulu media programming drive significant portions of our clickstream activity throughout the day.

Talking on the phone, emailing, and other forms of messaging sop up huge chunks of our free time, too.

As a consequence, book sales are stagnating, and have been for some time (this coincides with declines in all forms of print media - news and magazines included).

In big box retail land, Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble, is on life support. The independent bookstore is a shrinking breed, with less than 10% of the market.

Meanwhile, Amazon is the book industry's boogeyman, given their market share and proximity to the customer's wallet (the all important "billing relationship"). And the Kindle e-Book reader has the potential to entirely dis-intermediate the book publisher or, minimally, exert even stronger pricing power over them.

More terrifying, the book industry has no idea how to effectively market a book in a world devoid of bookstores, save for the hail-mary of an Oprah recommendation.

"Media doesn't matter, reviews don't matter, blurbs don't matter," says one powerful agent. "Nobody knows where the readers are, or how to connect with them."

And owing to a decades-old "consigment logic," unsold inventory is "remaindered." This is a euphemism for the practice of shredding unsold books and magazines. Not exactly green-friendly.

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Who's Winning the Smartphone Wars?

by Raven Zachary | @ravenme | comments: 7

The short answer - Microsoft and Nokia are slipping, RIM and Apple are gaining. It's too early to tell with Google. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

Last week, UK-based analyst firm Canalys, released its findings on smartphone market share based on Q2 2009 unit shipments (see "Smart phones defy slowdown"). Before sharing Canalys' findings, there are two important points to understand:

• How market share is defined is based on the numnber of units shipped during a particular period of time, not the number of active users of a specific smartphone platform, which is the installed base. These are commonly misunderstood terms. To determine the share that any particular smartphone platform has of worldwide active smartphone users would require aggregation of data from all of the mobile network operators. Good luck with that.
• The results of these reports are not reflective of how well a company is actually doing in terms of profit (see "A Visualized Look At The Estimated Revenues Of The Top Cell Phone Manufacturers" as an example).

Canalys covers a number of topics in their latest smartphone research, but the one topic are I want to focus on is "Global smart phone market by OS". Which companies are shipping the largest number of plastic phones into the world is less interesting to most of us than which mobile operating systems are winning. Dell vs. HP is not as compelling as Microsoft vs. Apple, in the personal computer market. LG, Fujitsu, and Samsung, three successful handset manufacturers, generally are not fully part of the smartphone conversation as they have historically licensed smartphone operating systems from companies such as Microsoft (this trend is changing to include more diverse licensing partners and increased in-house OS development).

Symbian (Nokia) accounts for half of the smartphones shipped in Q2 2009, followed by RIM, Apple, and Microsoft. Compared to the same quarter in 2008, Symbian and Microsoft are losing smartphone market share, and RIM and Apple are gaining significantly. Apple's growth percentage over the prior year is artifically inflated due to contraints in availability of the original iPhone just prior to the release of the iPhone 3G in Q3 2008. Minus that event, it would have been closer to RIM's annual growth percentage.

Even though Nokia has a 50% smartphone market share right now with Symbian, I think they are the most vulnerable of all the major players covered by Canalys. Symbian is a mobile operating system struggling to be modern with a developer ecosystem that seems to be far more fractured and unmotivated when compared to the excitement I see regularly from Android, iPhone, and BlackBerry developers. Microsoft's Windows CE and its variants have been in the market since 1996, and on smartphones for nearly a decade, yet has not been able to effectively remain competitive recently. And while Android has shipped on just over a million smartphones during the quarter, that's still impressive considering the small number of devices that it's currently available on, especially due to the number of pre-announced devices that wil be coming over the next few quarters.

Surprisingly absent in this data are other Linux-based mobile operating systems, which must fall into the ambiguous "Others" category, along with mobile operating systems, such as Palm Pre. The fragmentation of the various Linux mobile operating system efforts, including handset manufacturer specific implementations, is doing more harm than good right now in terms of market share growth.

APPLE is EVIL, You're All Fanboys and other half-truths

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 32

There is a meme afoot. Apple is evil. Its arrogant ways and dependence on the cult of personality are to be its demise. Developers are said to be unhappy. And, Apple Secrecy Doesn’t Scale.

Google-ification is the way, the RIGHT way.

The Apple Way can’t possibly persist ad infinitum.

You Apple fanboys; you just don’t get it. Ol’ Steve (Jobs) is fooling you again into buying his sugar water.

You’re just too dumb to realize it.

But, you know what? It’s a crock of sh-t!

In the here and now, Apple's success is unparalleled, and the engine is humming better than ever on multiple vectors - products, margins, developers, profits and consumer engagement.

Simply put, the goodness of Google-style openness, and the good tidings it provides for consumers and creators, does not in anyway invalidate, lessen or neutralize the effectiveness of Apple's proprietary, integrated, secretive, totalitarian-style approach.

Contrast Apple’s product birthing, operating discipline and market realization process with…ANYONE. That speaks volumes, I think.

That’s why in the burgeoning iPhone, iPod touch and (soon) iPad Tablet mobile broadband device ecosystem (46M units, 65K apps, 1.5B app downloads, 8B song downloads, and counting), unless and until there is a better alternative, the lion's share of developers will bitch in the morning and double down in the afternoon...on all things Apple.

All of that said, a paradox for Apple is this. For Apple, it's never about total units. It’s about value, differentiation, leverage and margins. Let others chase unit counts at all costs.

For developers, however, at a certain point it DOES become about units, if for no other reason than once enough numbers are installed on a given platform, it’s market share that is worth pursuing (by building native offerings for).

The part that is invisible is that at some point an Android gets ready for prime time (John Gruber ponders this one well in his post 'The Android Opportunity'); or a Pre-type of device establishes a real beachhead with developers; or RIM gets a clue in terms of an apps/ecosystem strategy, and all of the sudden, Apple is having to play defense. At the present, it is just running up the score.

We really can’t definitely say WHEN the alarm bell will sound. But, to be sure, it’s a WHEN, not an IF.

Why? One size doesn’t fit all when it comes to mobile broadband.

The day is coming, though, and that is a good thing, inasmuch as lack of competition leads to sloth where product innovation matters are concerned.

Disclaimer: I generally (but not always) prefer the type of integrated, fully formed solution that Apple delivers to what feels like a more 'lowest common denominator' oriented approach by Google. Your mileage may vary.

Related Posts:

1. Apple, the ‘Boomer’ Tablet and the Matrix


2. The Scorpion, the Frog and the iPhone SDK


3. Analysis: Apple June Quarter Earnings Call

The iTunes App Store Rolls with the Travel Season

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 3

Sometime last week, the iTunes app store passed 70,000 unique apps (70K apps have appeared in the app store since it launched). One of the fastest-growing categories in the U.S. iTunes app store has been Travel, displacing Education to move into the top 5 largest categories. Welcome to summer vacation!

Next to the Book category, Travel is the most competitive category, with each seller averaging about 6 unique apps during the most recent week. A quick inspection of recently released Travel apps included a lot of travel guides -- which like the Book apps, are fairly easy to create compared to apps in other categories.

The other milestone I wanted to highlight is the iPhone's growing importance to Apple's bottom line. Two years after its launch, last quarter was the first time the iPhone surpassed the iPod in terms of revenue:

In a recent conference call, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer noted that one of the main reasons for developing the iPhone was the anticipated drop-off in sales of iPod products. What's been impressive is how things worked out exactly as Apple hoped: the transition from one product line to the next has been remarkably smooth.

Data for this post was through the week ending 8/9/2009, and covers the U.S. iTunes app store.

Old Media, New Media and Where the Rubber Meets the Road

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 11

Analog (old) media is all about managing scarcity by controlling distribution, the net effect of which is to enable publishers to price access to their “toll roads” as they see fit.

Digital (new) media, by contrast, is premised on the assumption that the tools for content creation, selling, distributing and marketing enable meta-professionals and prosumers to create a surplus of “good enough” content.

This content, in tandem with un-tethered distribution and pretty good search/retrieval functions, operates in complete disregard for the old media-based pricing models that preceded it.

As such, when the forces of analog media collide with digital media, as they have in music, newspapers, yellow pages, books and magazines (and are beginning to collide in television and movies), a brutally efficient “creative destruction” process occurs.

Simply put, if the digital forces can assemble a “good enough” version of the un-tethered content, then in most cases, the analog media provider is in deep trouble (read: devastating business model disruption).

Understanding Media Disruption

My once-beloved San Francisco Chronicle has been “hollowed out,” reduced to a thin pamphlet, thereby accelerating their subscriber attrition.

Why PAY for content that is less deep, less differentiated than I can get online elsewhere for FREE? It's a vicious cycle.

My once-favorite local news station, KRON, no longer has sports on the weekends; it runs more syndicated content and requires that its reporters operate their own cameras to minimize cost. It's definitely struggling. KNBR, which is the sports radio station that I listen to, tells a similar story.

Do you even know anyone who actually uses the Yellow Pages anymore? That would have been unfathomable when I was growing up.

Now, Google is the Yellow Pages.

On some level, it really is as simple as saying that Craigslist killed the classified ads business, which in turn, killed the newspaper business.

The music business was once supremely cool. Records were cool. The whole chain between record producers, tour promoters and record stores was pretty cool.

Remember record stores? Whither Tower Records. Heck, even Blockbuster is standing on some wobbly legs.

Strangely, it's not that the music suddenly is less good. In fact, I probably listen to as much music as I ever have.

It's just that the "disruption" cow has left the barn (and is living in my iPod), and there is no turning back.

In this case, there are just too many incentives for the performers to maximize their online availability and shift their monetization to other sources, like touring and merchandising.

As a result, the music producer/promoter has been pushed to the backseat (for now).

(Un)Differentiated Media

It seems that the only safe havens are highly differentiated media creators that can’t readily be replicated elsewhere, such as the type of original programming one sees on HBO (e.g., check out: True Blood); the vertical/demographically targeted cable channels (where old media distribution rules still promulgate); and big budget movies, where production values (and production costs) are out of the reach of meta-professionals.

That is what makes the furor playing out with AP, all the more interesting.

AP is a syndicated content and news distribution service that makes its money offering infill content to (traditionally) analog media sources.

In the online world, however, the digital form of AP’s fee-based media is fodder for enabling digital publishers to link to, reference and excerpt from these same stories, typically without paying a nickel to AP.

Now, AP wants to turn back the hands of time by limiting/restricting access to and usage of that content.

Meanwhile, digital media advocates are citing fair use, and you just know that this can’t end well for AP, as their product is fundamentally undifferentiated.

That is not to suggest that they have no case, at least karmically speaking, but it's akin to arguing about oxygen. This is the atmosphere that they operate within.

The media industry would have to exercise a collective re-set to turn the tide on this one. Maybe they will, but I am skeptical.

Re-thinking The Audience and Your Product

Extending the conversation further, Fred Wilson’s post, ‘Monetize The Audience, Not The Content’ (read the comments section) presents a conundrum.

On the one hand, I totally agree with the objective of building your business around your audience.

But, I also think that a true solution needs to reconcile how the product or service evolves to achieve differentiation in such a universe; and that is a bigger challenge.

Here, my specific assertion is that while not all content is created equal, a whole heck of a lot of it is fundamentally undifferentiated.

In the case of The New York Times (a high profile pub that Fred regularly writes about), there are a few star writers, but none of which are such must-reads as to drive users to pay for access to them (hence, the failure of NYT's Times Select).

I love reading Frank Rich; Maureen Dowd is pretty entertaining; and Thomas Friedman is thought-provoking. Plus, there are 6-7 other times throughout the month that I find myself reading a Times article.

But, I've seriously never considered paying for access to them, and when the Select thing was in effect, and folks like Friedman were behind lock and key, I mostly forgot about them.

Case in point, whatever happened to Howard Stern after he left broadcast radio? Is the King of All Media even relevant anymore?

Don't tell me how much he is worth now. Tell me this. What happened to his audience?

It's a hard truth, but while there are 10+ good “enough” quality news/opinions sources for every news story of the day (and they are easy to find and well-indexed vis-a-via Techmeme and Google News), there is no "good enough" cheap/free alternative to the Ridley Scott directed, Christian Bale starring action movie.

As such, the NYT’s of the world face a real paradox. Their brand is their content, and without continuing to cultivate their content and innovate the way it's presented, which costs money, they have no durable audience.

Thus, I think a better path is to:

1. Come up with well-defined linkages between online and offline workflows. For example, print subscribers get access to deeper analysis, better tools for saving, excerpting, sharing and finding related content;
2. Create new types of media/engagement units that reward loyalty, communit-ize it, perhaps game-ify it;
3. Re-think segmentation (and pricing) across high-end, low-end, hyper-local, and vertical-specific distinctions, and re-work the product accordingly.

Apple, Record Labels serve up 'Cocktail'

So it seems fortuitous, that as I am updating this post, word filters into the blogosphere that Apple's long-rumored Tablet computing device is due in September (the Friday rumors said Q1, 2010), and that Apple is working with the record labels to re-invent the packaged music experience for the digital realm. Smart!

Here's an excerpt from the article:

Apple wants to make bigger purchases more compelling by creating a new type of interactive album material, including photos, lyric sheets and liner notes that allow users to click through to items that they find most interesting.

Consumers would be able to play songs directly from the interactive book without clicking back into Apple’s iTunes software, executives said. “It’s not just a bunch of PDFs,” said one executive. “There’s real engagement with the ancillary stuff.”

New York Story

Ending where we began, creative destruction has had a field day with the media business (and by virtue of its association, advertising as well).

To get to the other side intact, the NYT’s of the world have to figure out what they are that a focused, less expensive blogger, prosumer or meta-creator can’t emulate.

With brutal efficiency, this truth will separate those that can meaningfully, unquestionably differentiate from those that can’t.

Prognosis: more hurting ahead; then the industry finds its footing, begins a renaissance, and gets back on offense.

Related Posts:

1. Digital Media Rules: The Open Sourcing of Information
2. Apple, the ‘Boomer’ Tablet and the Matrix
3. How Social Media Works: It's About Breadcrumbs and Conversations
4. The Programmable Fan Site: A New Media/Ad Unit Model
5. Flip Video News Network: Crowd-Sourcing meets CNN

Four short links: 24 July 2009

Copytweet, MacMarket iShare, Open Source Under Fire, and OLPC War Stories

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Are Tweets Copyright-Protected (WIPO) -- According to an Internet posting on blogherald.com by Jonathan Bailey, every time a new communication technology emerges, it shifts the copyright landscape, and new copyright issues that do not fit existing intellectual property (IP) standards arise. With Twitter, for example, while its terms of service clearly state that tweeters own anything they post on the service, the 140-character limit to a Twitter post makes it almost impossible for the work to reach the level of creativity required for copyright protection. In the same vein, titles or short phrases usually cannot be protected since their length contributes to their lack of originality, as defined by copyright law. A roundup of the copyright issues raised by Twitter, which is a little like a roundup of the climate issues raised by ants.
2. Apple Has 90% Revenue Share Of >$1000 Computers (Ars Technica) -- wow. (via publicaddress on Twitter)
3. Open Source on the Battlefield -- Fortunately, SFC Stadtler knew how to use open source software. Using found hardware, like a laptop pulled from the trash, and wires pulled from collapsed buildings, he was able to establish a wireless network between the towers and the home base. He was able to install freely available voice-over-ip software on this recycled hardware, which turned the computer into a wireless telephone. The soldiers were now able to communicate with each other and the home base. At no cost. (via Jim Stogdill)
4. Sweet Nonsense Omelet (Ivan Krstić) -- Horror stories from the inside about the shoddy suppliers of OLPC hardware. Thinking back, there’s a hardware incident I remember particularly fondly: one of our vendors sent us a kernel driver patch which enhanced support for their component in our machine. They chose to implement the enhancement by setting up a hole which allowed any unprivileged user to take over the kernel, prompting our kernel guy to send a private e-mail to the OLPC tech team demanding that, in the future, we avoid buying hardware from companies whose programmers are, direct quote, “crack-smoking hobos”.

Apple, the Boomer Tablet and the Matrix

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 47

I have written here, here and here about Apple’s inevitable assault on the Tablet market. What I hadn’t factored until recently is how symbiotic such a device would be for Baby Boomers.

Why Baby Boomers? Well, for the same two reasons that this demographic is unlikely to embrace the palm-sized iPhone en masse.

One, such a bookish-sized tablet device – I’ll call it the Boomer Tablet – would be tailor-made for home Wi-Fi setups, thereby obviating the mobile access costs associated with iPhone, a significant barrier for a generation that is programmed to keep mobile bills within a tight spending range.

Two, because a larger-form factor device would offer Boomers a bigger viewing screen and “lifestyle” settings, like fatter keys and a more forgiving keyboard to ease input, and wizard-like shortcuts to simplify recurring tasks.

This is key, because with the onset of age, Boomers’ motor skills have become less precise; their vision has become poorer; and their eyes get tired easier.

As such, the premise of them plugging away on tiny keys and peering into the tiny screen of a mobile device like iPhone/iPod touch is a non-starter.

By contrast, the Boomer Tablet offers a superior input, viewing and playback environment for accessing your iTunes library, personal media, syndicated content services, iPhone Apps and presumably, Mac Apps; something that the 70M+ Baby Boomers in the US who are aged 53-73 would likely find compelling.

Moreover, if Apple put a video camera in the device – not a stretch since they are doing it in the iPhone GS – it could make video conferencing and VOIP ubiquitous in a relatively short time (Skype already has a client for the iPhone/iPod touch). What better way to stay connected to distant loved ones?

As alluded to above, it seems logical that the Boomer Tablet would either run legacy Macintosh applications in an unmodified fashion, or perhaps support a new kind of ‘port-able’ Mac App built around the Cocoa programming framework and powered by Apple’s forthcoming OS X upgrade, Snow Leopard.

What I am envisioning is a runtime layer designed to offer formal convergence and partitioning paths between iPhone and Mac systems, enabling application builders to make runtime design tradeoffs relative to a coming Hardware Matrix of Apple device form-factors, a topic which I will get to in a bit.

Contenders to the Boomer Tablet Throne

Before I ponder the Hardware Matrix, let's first look at the contenders to the Boomer Tablet market segment. It really underscores the richness and fertile nature of this market, while providing a window into the strategies of three really great companies (if interested, check out my post ‘Built to Thrive - The Standard Bearers’ on Google, Apple and Amazon):

Amazon Kindle Wireless Reading Device: Amazon has built a physical device that is focused on doing one job really well – reading e-books. Moreover, Kindle leverages their strong position with print publishers, and of note, Amazon has shown device-neutrality by coming out with a software-only version of the Kindle. (I am currently reading ‘Married to the Mouse’ on my iPod touch. It delivers a solid user experience.)

This Switzerland-like positioning suggests that in the long run, the hardware version of Kindle may be more about Amazon jump-starting the e-book market than aspiring to be a hardware player.

That said, Amazon certainly has the assets (Marketplace, Media Relationships, Cloud Services, Associates) and market credibility if they ever wanted to position themselves as the more open alternative to the iPhone Platform.

Google Android Netbook: In Android, Google has built an open source OS, Middleware stack and SDK for building next-generation mobile devices.

Moreover, Google has a decent track record of cultivating ecosystems through open APIs, product evolution and stick-to-itiveness.

While a primary thrust of Android is outflanking the iPhone gauntlet, a logical fork is the high volume, low-margin Netbook segment, where Google assets like Search, Maps, Apps, Analytics and the forthcoming Wave unified messaging platform could leverage their Chrome browser to collapse the boundaries between desktop, web and mobile realms.

Moreover, as an open platform, Android has the potential to nurture a hobbyist device market around robotics, information devices and kit builders (see my post on Maker Faire for more detail on this topic).

iPhone/iPod touch: The numbers speak for themselves (40M devices, 1B downloads, 50K apps). But, beyond the numbers, iPhone Platform is a game-changing system from a development, distribution, monetization and user perspective, a conclusion supported by my own direct experience – having written 20+ articles on the iPhone Platform; owning an iPod touch; talking to a ton of iPhone App developers; building an iPhone optimized web application (Twiddeo.com) and working with another iPhone based startup (SquareConnect).

As noted earlier, the main downside to the current iPhone/iPod touch, relative to the Boomer segment is the relatively small form-factor.

Needless to say, a bigger form-factor would obviate these limitations, while having the built in leverage of the iPhone Ecosystem.

The Hardware Matrix: LCD v. HCD

Take this one to the bank: the Hardware Matrix is coming.

What is the Matrix? Envision a world where the Mac, Apple TV, iPhone, iPod touch, Boomer Tablet and iPhone Nano (rumored), respectively, all leverage a common SDK, plug into the App Store and integrate with Mobile Me (in addition to iTunes), and you understand that this implies all sorts of hardware abstraction decisions.

No less, this implies Apple partitioning the platform that supports these form-factors between device-specific functions, open Mac-like layers (i.e., download apps from anywhere, build any kind of apps), and managed/closed iPhone-like runtime layers (App Store is THE marketplace with a singular SDK, formal APIs, and Apple GOVERNANCE policies).

Simply put, the Matrix presents a potential hornet's nest of technical, user experience and ecosystem decision, and as such this is Apple’s biggest Achilles heel in the next few quarters; namely, how they execute forking (and no less important, de-forking) between form-factors.

Connecting the dots, I believe that Snow Leopard is the conduit OS where these things converge, but that's a total guess, based on the assumption that derivative form-factors are a given; that App Store and iPhone SDK are the best practices approach with the biggest developer ecosystem; and that Apple's best way to win in the Mobile Broadband Era is by making their products work together in a more than the sum of the parts fashion around a common Mac OS X.

And as Cocoa has won out as the programming and human interface model for Apple going forward, they have to already be preparing for this fork.

Why not then grease the skids for all of those iPhone App developers to suddenly wake up one morning and realize that they can sell into the Mac market with very little extra work? Wouldn’t that be a nice upside surprise?

At the same time, you can see how realization of this path brings with it all sorts of lowest common denominator vs. highest common divisor trade-offs, which is why it’s such an Achilles Heel; albeit one with tremendous upside.

Case in point, a recent post by The Silicon Alley Insider looks at how hardware differences between 3G and 3GS will potentially splinter the App Store.

This is why I would say to anyone who wonders why Apple hasn’t jumped into the Tablet/Netbook market yet that it’s because there is a LOT of work to get it right in terms of navigating the Matrix, let alone getting the user experience right.

As to the end game, John Gruber of Daring Fireball described it best in his 'WWDC 2009 Wrap-Up':

The technical keynote has for as long as I can remember been titled "Mac OS X State of the Union." This year the title changed to "Core OS State of the Union."

Hence the symbiosis: Apple now has two full-fledged developer platforms, Mac OS X and iPhone OS, derived from one core system…But look at their vectors — their relative rates of growth — and ponder how much longer until WWDC begins to feel like an iPhone developer conference with a Mac developer track. My answer: next year.

With Apple, once exclusively the Mac Company, the only constant is change.

Related Posts

1. Start in the Middle: The "Jobs,""Outcomes" and "Constraints" Innovation Model
2. Apple, TV and the Smart Connected Living Room
3. iPhones, App Stores and Ecosystems
4. Is the iPhone Platform Destined to Disrupt the Packaged Software Industry?
5. Analysis: Apple WWDC Keynote - Punishing the Wizard, Part Two

The Next Wave of iPhone Apps

by Raven Zachary | @ravenme | comments: 9

This is the biggest week of the year for iPhone users, as Apple released iPhone OS 3.0 on Wednesday and will be launching the new iPhone 3GS on Friday.

The iPhone OS 3.0 Software Update provides a significant number of enhancements to the operating system including spotlight search, cut, copy, & paste, voice memos, support for landscape keyboard usage in Mail, Messages, Notes, and Safari, MMS and tethering for carriers that support these features (AT&T late summer for MMS, tethering TBD), and dozens of other improvements. The update is free for iPhone, and $9.95 for iPod touch. Just plug your device into iTunes and you will be prompted to upgrade. If you're upgrading a second generation iPod touch, iPhone OS 3.0 will activate the Bluetooth chip that has been dormant since last September.

The new iPhone 3GS includes a faster processor, longer battery life, video support, an improved camera (3-megapixel), voice control, a digital compass, and conveniently in the same form factor as the iPhone 3G so that you won't have to buy a new case. Models will be available at $199 (16GB) and $299 (32GB) if you qualify for the discounted hardware upgrade pricing. AT&T announced on Wednesday that the hardware discount will be extended to iPhone 3G buyers from last July, August, and September. If you stood in line for an iPhone 3G last summer, you won't have to wait a full year to buy the iPhone 3GS at the lower price.

In addition to the iPhone OS 3.0 Software Update and the new iPhone 3GS, there is a third and equally exciting aspect to this week - the rollout of the next wave of iPhone apps, based on the new iPhone SDK provided to developers in March for iPhone OS 3.0. This SDK provides iPhone developers with some major new features for use in apps including Push Notification Service (PNS), in app purchasing, peer to peer connectivity over Bluetooth, in app maps, turn by turn navigation, accessories support, iPod library access, audio recording, streaming video, in app email, support for cut, copy, & paste, undo, and much more.

If you have an iPhone OS 3.0 upgraded device and you're interested in trying out this next wave of iPhone apps, I have included a representative list of iPhone OS 3.0 apps below. If you know of any others, please post them as comments with associated links. I expect the list will grow rapidly over the next few weeks. NOTE: All of the app links below will launch iTunes, or if you're viewing this blog entry from your iPhone OS device, the links will launch the App Store app.

iPhone OS 3.0 Applications:

• AP Mobile by The Associated Press: Push Notification Service (PNS)
• Tap Tap Revenge by Tapulous: Push Notification Service (PNS)
• Star Defense by ngmoco: Push Notification Service (PNS)
• MLB.com At Bat 2009 by MLB.com: Live video streaming
• Sonifi by Sonik Architects: Peer to peer connectivity over Bluetooth
• Leaf Trombone: World Stage by Smule: Peer to peer connectivity over Bluetooth
• Bomberman Touch 2 - Volcano Party by Hudson: Peer to peer connectivity over Bluetooth
• Flick Fishing by Freeverse: Peer to peer connectivity over Bluetooth, in app purchase
• Enigmo by Pangea Software: In app purchase
• Light Riders by DS Media Labs: iPod library access
• My Brute by Bulkypix: iPod library access
• Things by Cultured Code: In-app email, cuy, copy, & paste, undo support
• Gokivo + Yahoo! Local Search by Networks In Motion: Turn-by-turn navigation, in app purchase
• Recipes by Whole Foods Market: In app maps and email, support for copying text. [Disclosure: My company, Small Society, developed this app in partnership with Whole Foods Market.]
• AroundMe by Tweakersoft: In app maps

If anyone knows of any accessories-based iPhone 3.0 apps that have already launched on the App Store, please leave a comment. This was the one major iPhone SDK 3.0 addition I could not find on the App Store.

Four short links: 10 June 2009

App Wall, Negroponte Switch, Data Exploration, Inadequate Innovation

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. Apple's Cool Matrix-Style App Wall (TechCrunch) -- a huge collection of icons for many of the apps available in the App Store, arranged by color. Apparently, when someone purchased one, that app’s icon would pulsate. An App Store version of Google's search globe. Information visualization makes activities meaningful, beautiful, and useful, but not necessarily all at the same time. (via dubdotdash on Twitter)
2. The New Negroponte Switch -- "Designing things that think they are services, and services that think they are things". Matt Jones presentation gushing with great ideas for the "Web Meets World" change. I love the evolving printed map they made for the British Council at Salone di Mobile. A five course meal with port and insulin shots for thought.
3. Odesi -- web-based data exploration, extraction, and analysis tool. (via scilib on Twitter)
4. The Failed Promise of Innovation (Business Week) -- I have a post building up inside me about how irritatingly of the mark this article is. Until that post erupts, however, you'll have to just read it yourself and form your own view of its flaws. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if outside of a few high-profile areas, the past decade has seen far too few commercial innovations that can transform lives and move the economy forward? What if, rather than being an era of rapid innovation, this has been an era of innovation interrupted? And if that's true, is there any reason to expect the next decade to be any better?

NiN's Rob Sheridan on iPhone Application Rejection

by Timothy M. O'Brien | comments: 11

In this interview with Rob Sheridan (@rob_sheridan), Nine Inch Nails' Artistic Director, Rob discusses the experience of getting the rejection letter from Apple, and what effect it has on the band's plans to build community applications on the iPhone platform. You'll hear Sheridan express an uneasiness that Apple can act as judge and jury without providing any transparency into the approval process. Rob spoke with me from Florida where Nine Inch Nails is getting ready for a tour with Jane's Addiction that kicks off on May 9th in Tampa, FL.

What is a headlining, often controversial industrial rock band to do when nameless censors at Apple decide that content downloaded by an iPhone application contains "objectionable content"? Yesterday, the world found out, as Trent Reznor (@trent_reznor) tweeted:

When a band like NiN encounters arbitrary censorship, they raise the issue in the public forum. In this case Trent Reznor tweeted and blogged about the issue expressing his dissatisfaction with the decision and drawing attention to the fact that the "objectionable content" in question is a song named "The Downward Spiral" currently available via the iTunes store. While comparing Apple's obscenity standards to Walmart's war against profanity, Reznor pointed to similar inconsistencies in a previous round of censorship:

I can understand if you want the moral posturing of not having any 'indecent' material for sale--but you could literally turn around 180 degrees from where the NIN record would be and purchase the film 'Scarface' completely uncensored, or buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto where you can be rewarded for beating up prostitutes. How does that make sense?

While Apple's rejection of an application based on arbitrary and inconsistent standards, is nothing new, the attention being paid to this particular rejection is significant and could prompt Apple to add more structure and transparency to the iPhone application approval process. On Monday, Aidan Malley of AppleInsider reported that Apple may be prepared to allow explicit content with the introduction of more capable parental controls in the iPhone 3.0 OS update.

If you are wondering what all the fuss is about, here is a walkthrough of the NIN:access application from Trent Reznor and Rob Sheridan which was posted by the ninofficial YouTube user:

Four short links: 16 Mar 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

Non-interop earphones with DRM, HVAC swarms, paperprints, and product constipation at GOOG:

1. Apple iPod Shuffle (3rd gen) -- "Surprise: the only third-party headphones that will work are ones that haven’t even entered manufacturing yet, because they’ll need to contain yet another new Apple authentication chip, which will add to their price." It's interesting to see Apple prioritising the different interactions with the device: the ease from using standard connectors is less important than how it looks (no buttons!), and both are less important than securing those hardware margins by tithing every corner of the aftermarket thirdparty addon space. I hope users revolt, but I suspect it'll be viewed like the needless diversity of power cords--a non-fatal inconvenience and irritation. I can only imagine the state of mind that thinks it is acceptable to irk a million people so as to be able to make a few bucks on each set of third-party headphones.
2. Managing Energy with Swarm Logic -- intelligent HVAC gear that wirelessly communicates, figures out the individual power cycles of each appliance, then coordinate (with no central control) to figure out how to optimally run the appliances for maximum efficiency.
3. Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners -- Ed Felten's latest work of genius, cranking the contrast on scans of paper at different orientation to produce a texture from which can be calculated a fingerprint that survives printing, crumpling, and moisture. (via bos)
4. Tim Armstrong to Head AOL (Battelle) -- interesting quote from former Googler, "It's very hard to take risks at Google."

Four short links: 25 Feb 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

Amazon, Apple, Science, and Databases:

1. Amazon's Wheel of Growth -- a fascinating diagram in the middle, the flywheel of customer experience driving sales driving sellers driving selection which drives experience again, and all the while lower costs allows Amazon to deliver lower prices and thus lower selection.
2. iPhone Sketch -- stencils to use when sketching your iPhone app's screens.
3. The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research -- thoughts on the value of feeling stupid ("I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid") and how PhD programs don't prepare students for that feeling. "Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'." (via Titine's delicious stream)
4. First Key-Value Storage Meeting Held in Japan -- yet more work being done with modernized DBM technology. As Joshua said in his delicious comment, plenty of systems I've never heard of before. (via Joshua's delicious stream)

Four short links: 23 Feb 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Work in Small Batches -- I'm obsessed by the pursuit of quality, but at human scale and not in the stultifying ISO9001 process. The ever-wonderful Startup Lessons Learned blog ties together Toyota Quality, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Deployment, with good explanations of why it works. (I'm reminded of "yes it works in practice, but can it work in theory?")
2. RSS Hits the Big Time -- the stimulus bill requires government departments to offer Atom or RSS feeds of how they spend the money. The "omigod wow RSS in law!" comments remind me of when I first saw a URL on a billboard: it was the all-digital world impinging on my real physical world (or vice-versa). Reminded of William Gibson talking about our fleeting separation of digital and physical worlds.
3. Objective C Internals -- talk by Kiwi Foo Camp alumnus and recent emigre (Pixar's gain is Australasia's loss) about the innards of Objective C. I always find that I understand language features better when I understand an implementation mechanism for them.
4. Prime Minister Delays NZ's Insane Copyright Law -- the delay isn't the important bit, it's the committment to abolish the bad law if the ISPs and the recording industry can't reach an agreement. I was at the press conference, twittering furiously, and it was quite clear that the PM felt the law was crap and if the two parties hadn't been mid-negotiation then it would have all been repealed. Optimism!

Four short links: 2 Feb 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 4

1. Songs off the Charts -- Johannes Kreidler's audio visualizations using Microsoft Songsmith. Reminds me of Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency where the amazing spreadsheet program could produce happy jingles or funereal dirges based on a company's revenues. (via Ben Fry)
2. PWN! YouTube -- elegant URL hack: replace "www." with "pwn" in a YouTube movie URL and you'll be given links to the Google content server location of the movie so you can download it.
3. Apple iPhone and Microsoft Surface -- the interesting folks at Stimulant have written the code to connect an iPhone to a Microsoft Surface. It recognizes one or more iPhones on the Surface and lets you display different things on the iPhone. In the demo you see an iPhone on a photo showing you a sketch version of the subject of the photo. The zoom is very smooth.
4. Flickr, Getty, and the Greater Good (Phil Gyford) -- "Flickr and Getty Images, the stock photography giant, are launching a new scheme which enables people to market some of their Flickr photos as stock photography through Getty." Phil points out that CC-licensing and Getty-listing are mutually exclusive, and Flickr will switch the licensing on a photo to "All Rights Reserved" if you list with Getty. The first way people think of to profit from commons are to enclose and sell them. But the commons are a lot healthier when you make money by adding to them, not taking from them.

Four short links: 19 Jan 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

Hello from Whakapapa, a ski resort in New Zealand. These four links come to you via the wifi at the "highest hotel in New Zealand", which serves as a useful reminder that no matter how unremarkable one might seem, anyone can have a claim to fame if only they work at it.

1. Apple Show Us DRM's True Colors - the EFF checks out where Apple has DRM in its products and discovers that in most cases it has little to do with piracy and more about eliminating legitimate competition. DRM is "bundling" for the 2000s. (via stinky)
2. Rules of Database Aging - this is so true. I think everyone who read this said, "this is so true". Cue Santayana quote.
3. Blog Converters Released - apparently Google has Data Liberation Front that has released a converter to let you switch between Blogger, LiveJournal, MovableType, and WordPress formats for blog archives. When they add Twitter, they might make Tim Bray feel better about Twitter. (via waxy)
4. Hana - an absolutely beautiful screensaver for OS X (other platforms soon, I hope) that simulates every flower it shows. I could try to justify this as tied into the growing trend of simulations as the skills of simulation drive more fields of life, but really it's just pretty. And who doesn't need a drop more pretty in their life?

10,000 iPhone Apps

by Raven Zachary | @ravenme | comments: 2

Two services that track the iPhone App Store - AppShopper and 148Apps, announced on Saturday that there have been over 10,000 iPhone applications released on the US App Store. The number of currently available applications is just shy of 10,000 due to discontinued apps and a few that have been pulled by Apple (e.g. trademark disputes, terms of service violations, etc.). AppSherpa believes that it will only be a few more days until there are 10,000 iPhone applications available for sale on the US App Store. Total international App Store numbers are not being tracked by anyone outside of Apple, as far as I can tell.

Quick stats highlights from the first 10,000 iPhone applications:

• Games are the leading category, accounting for one in four of total applications. This reinforces Apple's recent marketing campaign around games.
• $0.99 is the most common price point, although one in four applications are free.
• The most expensive application currently for sale is iRa by Lextech Labs for $899.99. This is video surveillance application that integrates with a number of CCTV systems.
• The entire iPhone App Store catalog could be purchased for just over $30,000, although there's only room to fit 129 of them on your iPhone or iPod touch at any given time (148 apps in total, but that includes the default applications from Apple).

Ben Lorica and Roger Magoulas in the Market Research Group at O'Reilly Media have been doing an excellent job tracking the iPhone applications market. You can see some of this work on Ben's Radar posts. I am looking forward to seeing an update from Roger and Ben now that we're crossed the 10,000 mark.

Asynchronous Multiplayer Mobile Gaming

by Raven Zachary | @ravenme | comments: 3

With all the news on Friday about Apple's release of iPhone OS 2.2, there was another iPhone news item that got less attention than it deserved. Two young iPhone developers, Danielle Cassley and Jason Citron, released the sequel to their much-acclaimed iPhone puzzle game, Aurora Feint. Aurora Feint II: The Arena (iTunes link) introduces the concept of 'casual asynchronous massively multiplayer online gaming' for iPhone. That's a mouthful, merging a number of distinct terms into one. Let's break that down into its individual pieces:

• Casual games have simple rulesets and can be played in a short amount of time, such as Blackjack or Mindsweeper.
• Asynchronous games allow for people to participate without playing at the same time, such as turn-based games like Chess or Scrabble.
• Massively multiplayer online games have persistent, shared worlds, such as World of Warcraft or for you parents of youngsters out there, Club Penguin.

This combination of gaming elements is very appealing in the mobile market. It's a perfect lifestyle fit. People want to play games in short increments of time. This may be during a commute on public transit or waiting in the doctor's office. People want to play games on their own schedule. Not every player in a game can dedicate the same period of time to participate. People want to play games with real people, especially people they know. A shared game world provides this opportunity.

Aurora Feint II accomplishes this through the use of 'ghosts'. A human player builds up a character in the game world that has the ability to act autonomously while the player is offline. The player's ghost can be challenged in the game world at any time, and when the player returns to the game world, the ghost can be controlled directly. It's a novel approach and solves a number of problems with people wanting to play with their friends on their own schedules.

Casual asynchronous massively multiplayer online gaming is going to be a hot market for game developers and it's a natural fit for mobile devices. Expect to see more iPhone titles like this in the near future.