Some time back, I wrote a post where I asserted that Apple (and Steve Jobs) has done such a good job of teaching us to expect magic that when they merely execute, we hammer them because…well it isn’t magic.

I called this knee-jerk response, “Punishing the Wizard” since, where I come from, discipline, execution and proof of same are to be celebrated (what’s not to like about — Step One: make great products; Step Two: wow your customer/developer base; Step Three: print money; Step Four: repeat Step One?), but that’s not how we think when it comes to Apple.

Thus, it is with little surprise that I find myself dubbing today’s keynote, “Punishing the Wizard, Part Two.”

Consider the general tenor of blogosphere analysis on today’s event, which ranged from “F-ck AT&T” (well-deserved, IMHO) to “Yawn” to “Uh, oh, where was Jobs?”

Now to be fair, part of this is simply our culture of “buying on the rumor” and “selling on the news,” which is to say that today’s announcements (essentially, Snow Leopard, new MacBook Pros, iPhone OS 3.0, iPhone 3GS, $99 iPhone 3G) had largely been discussed, disseminated and re-assembled into a series of plausible best guesses well in advance of the event, so the shock and awe was less than it might otherwise have been.

Hence, some of this disappointment is akin to reading a “spoiler” in a movie review immediately before watching the film; gums up the element of surprise.

But, there are several nuggets from today’s keynote that underscore strategic narratives worth pondering in the days, weeks and months ahead:

1. Apple is Playing Block the Kick with Focused Intensity: iPhone is the unquestioned leading device platform and ecosystem in terms of delivering a best of breed Mobile Broadband experience, albeit with Palm Pre and Google Android offering their own bits of goodness and differentiation.  By preemptively: A) Upgrading iPhone OS 3.0 and SDK (see my analysis HERE); B) Replacing iPhone 3G as the flagship with iPhone 3GS (faster CPU, adds video support, better camera); C) Dropping the price of iPhone 3G to $99 to capture the low-end of the market; and D) Adding the ability to purchase movies, TV shows directly from iPhone to better leverage its iTunes Media portfolio (versus requiring download & sync from Mac/PC, as is the case currently); Apple is doing everything humanly possible to remain on offense, and prevent the competition from finding its footing; namely, a market wedge/niche that can serve as the beachhead to slow down Apple’s momentum. Plus, the $99 entry point on 3G appears to be the lower margin product that Apple had alluded to months back in discussions about not leaving a pricing gap for the competition to outflank them.
2. Pushing OS X Snow Leopard as a $29 Upgrade is Recognition that its ‘Halo Effect’ Opportunity Window (may be) Closing: Vista has been a debacle for Microsoft, and it has opened a door for Apple to grow OS X powered systems from 25M users in 2007 to 75M this year (inclusive of iPhone/iPod touch devices). But, Windows 7 is getting closer to release (October 2009), and in the interim, Microsoft is intelligently bifurcating their strategy and messaging between being the enterprise standard (we support everything, we’re legacy, legacy never goes away, there is no “serious” enterprise alternative) and the consumer standard (we’re cheaper than Apple, ubiquitous and “good enough”) as a way to stop the bleeding. My guess is that Apple sees their ability to meaningfully differentiate on the desktop as a window that is closing, and as such, need to make Snow Leopard ubiquitous, presumably both to drive converts (esp. as the economy improves) and as part of a push to go after securing new Mac developers before Windows 7 ships (iPhone developers not currently developing for the Mac represent the low-hanging fruit).
3. AT&T and Apple – This Can’t End Well: While there is no question that the exclusivity deal with AT&T provided the launch pad for Apple to create the afore-mentioned wizardry with iPhone, and of course, the rich subsidy is heroin for consumers and Apple alike, there is also no question that the relationship can’t end well (or is highly unlikely to). Why? One, today’s announcement spotlighted the liability side of the AT&T relationship; namely, a great phone on a crappy network with an iffy track record of customer care, not to mention, a carrier and supplier who are at strategic cross-purposes. Case in point, the audience booed the moment they realized that a touted tethering feature, which allows you to seamlessly use your iPhone as a broadband modem for your Mac/PC, won’t be supported by AT&T; and another feature, MMS support, will ship later than with other carriers. Two is the simple fact that the way people buy mobile devices is through their carrier, and as long as Apple is selling exclusively through AT&T, that means that the Verizons, Sprints and T-Mobiles of the world have to sell something other than iPhone, which is the number one way Android and Pre will find its initial market. As was the story with the PC, at some point, mobile becomes a units game, so Apple must counter this one as soon as humanly possible, lest the volumes accrue to the carrier independent device makers.
4. The (Hardware) Matrix is Coming: What is The Matrix? Envision a world where the Mac, Apple TV, iPhone, iPod touch, iPod HD Tablet (rumored) and iPhone Nano (rumored), respectively, can 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 PC-like layers (i.e., download apps from anywhere), and managed/closed runtime layers (App Store is THE marketplace with a singular SDK, APIs, etc.). This is The Matrix, a potential hornet’s nest of technical, user experience and ecosystem decisions. 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 unified, but more than the sum of the parts, fashion. This would be another reason to push Snow Leopard NOW at $29; namely, so that when The Matrix emerges, and there’s a requirement that all interconnecting devices run Snow Leopard to work together seamlessly, it’s less disruptive of a proposition than it might otherwise be. And more to the point, it offers developers the largest potential installed base to develop for (i.e., the 40M iPhone/iPod touch owners PLUS the ~35M OS X powered Mac owners).

Looked at from this perspective, today’s keynote may come to be known (with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight) as the keynote that was The Calm Before the Storm.  Stay tuned.

Related Posts:

1. Punishing the Wizard: On Apple and Jobs
2. ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy
3. PC 1.0, iPhone 3.0 and the Woz: Everything Old is New Again
4. Built-to-Thrive - The Standard Bearers: Apple, Google, Amazon
5. iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems: On Recipes for Successful Developer Platforms
6. Holy Shit! Apple’s Halo Effect: How and why gravity has become Apple’s friend

“The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.”

I know, I know.  Proprietary is Evil.  Open is Good.

But, not so fast, my friend.  I am here to tell you that there are only three reasons to embrace open standards.

Thus, if the definition of the situation regarding the standard that you are contemplating embracing does not fit within one (or all) of these three buckets, do yourself a favor, and choose a different path:

1. Indisputable Market Momentum: Front-line products or services supporting the standard are shipping (or imminently will be).  Don’t get fooled by pledges that products will support the standard in the future, or a company hedging its bets by supporting the standard on a third-tier, obscure offering.  This is all about tangible, meaningful proof.
2. Clear Technical Leverage: Does the standard solve a real problem that eases your development cycle TODAY?  Too often, a standard promises to solve a meaty problem down the road, but in practice, does nothing for developers today.  Be vigilant and discriminating in assessing if there’s a “there” there in the present.
3. Brand Awareness by the End Customer:  While the media will often tout a given standards-based approach as a game-changer, customers rarely care, unless the product solves a specific, well-understood problem for them. Thus, this is a two-part question. One, does the customer REALLY care?  Two, do you know who the actual decision maker to buy your product is (technical buyers and non-technical buyers often have very different criteria)?

Duh, sounds obvious, right?

Yet, I am amazed how often the rank-and-file diss a particular approach as proprietary, as if being differentiated and having a fig leaf of defensibility is something to apologize for.

Or worse, they tout a so-called standard when it is neither widely embraced in real shipping products nor offers compelling technical leverage or explicit marketing advantages.

When confronted with such folk, approach them as you would the door-to-door salesman who’s pushing an unwanted trinket, and simply say, “Thanks. Not interested at the present time.”

Related Posts:

1. On Intellectual Honesty: Seeing things as they really are
2. “Strategic” versus “Win-able”: The 1.0/3.0 Paradox
3. The Paradox of Developing New Products and Services
4. Product Sanity Check: Vitamin, Aspirin or Penicillin?
5. Guest Post for GigaOM - Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best

This is a post on how the iPhone 3.0 is destined to accessorize our mobile future.

But first, a little context is needed.

My old business partner, James Blaisdell (then: CTO/Co-Founder @ Rapid Logic; now: CTO/Co-Founder @ Mocana) lent me a really awesome book of stories about the early days of startups called ‘Founders at Work.’

The book, which is essentially a series of interviews, captures the lessons learned and the seminal moments in the birthing and maturation of companies like PayPay (Max Levchin), Hotmail (Sabeer Bhatia), Apple (Steve Wozniak) and a couple dozen others.

Because Jessica Livingston, the author of the book, is one of the founding partners of seed stage venture fund, Y Combinator, the framing and focus of the narrative is much more applied than a typical tell-all book. The nuggets contained within are insightful and actionable, and the reading is immensely enjoyable.

In any event, last night I was reading Jessica’s interview with Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak.

Serendipitously, my wife and I are regular ‘Dancing with the Stars’ viewers, giving us a chance to see another angle of the man known as the Woz, who is one of the Celebrity Dance Performers this season.

Reading Woz’s story, I was transported back.  To a time many years ago, when my brother and I were regulars at the Byte Shop in Santa Monica, one of the first personal computer stores; a time when the essence of a PC – smallish form factor, keyboard, monitor, graphics, storage/input mechanism (back then, a cassette recorder) had not yet been fashioned.

When I first encountered what was to become the PC (circa 1977), companies like Altair and IMSI were beginning to bring computing to the realm of hobbyists, but frankly, it was an abstraction until I saw the Apple II. (Side note: We ultimately got a TRS-80, affectionately known as the “Trash 80”).

The Wozniak interview is a window into a time when the industry was completely and utterly dependent upon hardware innovation; before it became such a commodity at the hardware layer that the software could only be so differentiated.

That is, until iPod and iPhone.  More on that in a minute.

But first, consider this excerpt, which frames Woz’s decision to support 8 hardware expansion slots in the Apple II, a prescient decision, which enabled the advent of the floppy disk, printer and modem connections, graphics support and local area networking expansion:

Wozniak: We had a real argument over slots…I had designed a clever system on the suggestion of a friend—Allen Baum again— that decoded 8 slots you could plug little computer boards into. Each board had the ability to have its own programs on it running in its own addresses, and it didn’t have to have all the normal chips to decide, “Well, if the addresses are such and such, I will respond to them.” That was done on the main board…Every computer I’d ever seen, some of its greatest things came because of boards plugged into it…We had to have 8 slots. And it turns out that it was very important; it was very beneficial. Because we came out with a floppy disk. Not only that, other people came out with cards that put 80 columns of text on the screen so you could see more. People came out with extra memory cards, people came out with other languages in cards, people came out with cards that had CPM. People came out with cards to connect all kinds of equipment in the world, to operate your house over your power lines. It was just a world of cards. Many people had their Apple IIs filled up with cards, every single slot.

Read the entire interview with Steve Wozniak HERE, as Woz’s thoughts and experiences are beautifully articulated.

iPhone 3.0: Accessorizing our Mobile Future

Flash-forward, if you follow this blog, you know that I have written extensively on the iPhone/iPod touch platforms, most recently separate posts on:

1. The interplay of the App Store and the underlying developer platform with Apple’s ecosystem cultivation play in the success of iPhone/iPod touch (FACTOID: App Store is approaching a $1B run rate business for Apple);
2. An analysis of the iPhone OS 3.0 Developer Preview a week or so ago.

From my perspective, one thing that may not have gotten enough attention related to the iPhone 3.0 Preview was Apple’s opening up of the 30-pin connector at the base of the device for third-party hardware accessories (and applications that take programmatic advantage of the inter-connect).

Why do I say not enough attention? Well, the iPod accessory business itself is already a $2B market, and there has really been no such thing as “software value-add” to the hardware accessory itself.

With iPhone 3.0, this changes.

Soon, a medical device manufacturer can build a blood pressure gauge accessory and associated software application that plugs into your iPhone or iPod touch and tracks your blood pressure over time, comparing it to a network of people with similar age/body/health types to give you a relative Wellness Score and underlying data in real time.

Could it be fashioned into an enabling engine for a Healthy Living Movement or a National Health Monitoring Service (ANALOG: Nielsen for Health)?

Similarly, a universal remote vendor can build a hardware accessory that generates the necessary signals to allow you to control your home entertainment center, home alarm AND interactive programming guide in one.

And why couldn’t some vendor build police enforcement agencies a handheld fingerprinting and optical scanning device that captures biometric data, cross-comparing the acquired information with a real-time central database?

I am just pulling a few different examples out of the air, but across the medical, sports, automobile, controller, data acquisition, playback, entertainment and finance segments, it sure feels like the accessories play for iPhone OS 3.0 is going to render the $2B iPod accessory number laughably small in comparison.

What is compelling is that this opens the door to all sort of interesting hardware innovations that, oh by the way, have built-in leverage across a large installed base (30M devices) and a potent developer ecosystem (25,000 applications, 800M downloads).

Bringing the Old Back to the New

I want to close by underlining a comment made by Woz that has been a cornerstone of my thinking throughout my entrepreneurial career.

When you solve the “right problem” a whole mess of unexpected advantages and upside surprises fall right into your lap.  Amen to that.

Related Posts:

1. ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy
2. iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems: On Recipes for Successful Developer Platforms
3. “Right Here Now” services: weaving a real-time web around status
4. iPhone 2.0: What it Means to be Mobile
5. What it Means to be a “Social” Media Center: Boxee, Apple TV and Square Connect

First off, let me begin with the end.  The fact that Apple is stepping on the gas pedal and pushing 3.0 NOW, while the new kids on the block (read: Android and Palm Pre) are barely 1.0 suggests that they have learned the lessons taught them (oh so painfully) by Microsoft in the PC wars; namely, that he who wins the hearts and minds of developers, wins the war.

Secondly, I am going to call today’s event a “block the kick” announcement.

What’s a block the kick?  It is an effort to do such a good job of persuading your core constituency (in this case, developers, consumers, carriers) that any perceived momentum of the competition pales in comparison to your own, thereby blocking the competition’s nascent momentum in its infancy.

This explains the “Why Now?” aspect of the announcement, inasmuch as it’s not like the iPhone/iPod touch (feature quibbles aside) is losing the game in any way, shape or form.

In fact, regardless of the metric that you choose to measure Apple’s success in this realm (developers, downloads, dollars, margins or consumer engagement), the platform engine and ecosystem was already humming on all cylinders.

To put a bow around this one, today was the first time they broke out the combined device footprint of iPhone + iPod touch units, designating the bucket “multi-touch handhelds,” no doubt in anticipation of releasing other form factors, and in recognition that the iPhone Platform naming schema occludes the import and momentum of iPod touch devices.

In any event, the iPhone + iPod touch bucket of multi-touch handhelds is now 30 million units strong, generating over 800 million apps downloaded to date, a serious growth rate over the 500 million downloads reported just a few weeks ago.

Hence, today’s event is more about running up the score before the competition finds its footing, a footing that is HUGELY dependent upon developer attention, something that I blogged about yesterday in, ‘iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems.’

Also, note that while the BETA version of iPhone 3.0 SDK is available today, the actual 3.0 version of iPhone OS will ship this summer. It is free for iPhone 3G owners, and $9.95 for iPod touch owners.

With that as a backdrop, let me spotlight the key announcements for developers and consumers, and why they are a big deal:

UPDATED FUNCTIONALITY FOR DEVELOPERS

1. Multi-Tier Pricing Support within App Store: Developers will be able to partition free, premium, super premium tiers within apps (e.g., purchase the next 10 levels, add advanced weaponry, etc.).  This is great news for developers, who now have the economic and systemic wherewithal to experiment and segment their product offerings without creating N different download variants of the application, as well as maintaining the instant gratification element of “buy, download and enjoy” that is so powerful in the platform.  Example: you mean that if I had a rocket launcher I can just blow off the door versus scaling the wall, and it only costs 99 cents to grab it?  I am SO there.
2. Proprietary “Accessory” Support within the Platform: Developers will now be able to create apps that work directly with their proprietary accessories, which is something that was previously not supported. Examples given: an FM transmitter extension with an app for changing stations; a blood pressure gauge with app for tracking, organizing, charting blood pressure data.
3. Exposing Maps Functionality via an API:  This will enable developers to map-ify apps down to street level views (e.g., embed proprietary mapping functionality within the application), and create sophisticated navigation apps for things like turn-by-turn directions, although in the latter case Apple did not license this functionality from Google so the developer would have to provide their own maps.  The best way to look at this one is that as powerful as Google Map APIs have proven to be for third party sites on the web, this could be equally so for enabling a multitude of custom mobile applications.
4. Discovery and Locative Services: Apple is adding Bonjour-based discovery for the “within the same room” crowd, enabling social gaming apps, without the overhead of Wi-Fi; they are also opening up rich GPS APIs, although per my blog on “Right Here Now” services, I wish that they were embracing Google’s Latitude locative service.
5. Push Notification: This is way later than the September ‘08 timeframe previously announced, but then again, asynchronous messaging is incredibly complex once scale, concurrency, message queuing, battery constraints and multi-carrier support are factored in.  Hence, my knee jerk is that I am glad that they are taking the time to (hopefully) get it right.  This is a critical feature to enabling event-driven apps like IM or the aforementioned Right Here Now services, where the designated app may not be running all the time.  Features supported in the service include: ability to push badges, text, and sounds. It will be supported in all 80 countries where the iPhone is available.
6. Media API Enhancements:  Apple is adding a new API for enabling applications that stream audio/video; an API for in-game voice/audio; and another API for enabling applications that access the iPod library.  These enhancements open the door to TV 2.0 apps, social gaming where audio communications are involved and applications that leverage your media library. This last one is so huge – Apple has previously treated iPod media libraries as a castle separated by a moat, that I am going to hold my excitement until I see the details.  For example, can apps transparently access/launch songs within the proprietary app itself or do they have to externally launch?

UPDATED FUNCTIONALITY FOR CONSUMERS

1. Cut/Copy/Paste: It arrives before my grandchildren do (my kids are barely out of diapers so sarcasm underscored).  Long overdue so nothing to add.
2. New Messages App: It supports MMS, meaning that you can send files, such as contact cards, audio files, locations, pictures, etc.
3. New Voice Memos App: This supports the built-in microphone, and allows you to edit, trim and share your voice memos. Not sure if any APIs are exposed to enable apps where “social shout outs” are supported.

Needless to say, the focus today is on the developer, who will in turn, ratchet up the goodness for the consumer. That said, thank you Apple for finally adding Copy/Paste.

Related Posts:

1. iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems: On Recipes for Successful Developer Platforms.
2. “Right Here Now” services: weaving a real-time web around status
3. iPhone 2.0: What it Means to be Mobile
4. Apple’s Mobile Gaming Gold Rush: why the iPhone/iPod touch is a legitimate threat to the handheld gaming console establishment.
5. Guest Post for GigaOM - Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best

According to the prognosticators, Google Android is “destined” to overtake the iPhone by 2012, and Palm Pre, which hasn’t even shipped yet, is already being touted as a “compelling alternative” to iPhone.

Plus, now that Apple’s App Store is nearing a $1B business pace just nine months after launching, the competition (Google, Palm, RIM, Microsoft, Nokia) is so totally getting themselves one of them App Store “thingys.”

But can the competition outflank Apple, and what is an App Store anyway?

Let’s start with what it is not.  An App Store is not simply an e-wallet or marketplace that you bolt on to your (pick one):

1. Hardware device business;
2. Open source smartphone software play;
3. Next generation mobile service provider.

Sure, it includes elements of the above, but fundamentally, a cash register ringing App Store is the manifestation, not the root cause, of having built a thriving developer platform and “ecosystem.”

So what is the root cause?  Number one, is having a good toolset (known as a software developers kit, or SDK) that is compelling to developers.  Why is this integral?  Because it’s the developers who ultimately make or break a platform by embracing it (or not).

If your eyes are glazing over, it’s understandable, but know this: executing a tools and ecosystem initiative is REALLY hard because there are a lot of pieces that have to go right for the platform to take root.  But when you get it right, it’s a game changer.

In fact, it is unarguably one of the top 2-3 reasons that Microsoft became the PC gorilla in the desktop computing wars.  They built a thriving developer ecosystem, and Apple didn’t (or at least not on a par with Microsoft).

In the mobile realm, this implies a platform that is synchronized across hardware, software and service layers. This synchronization is necessary to deliver a superior user experience, which is what consumers now expect post iPhone (I cover this topic in more detail in my guest post for GigaOM, ‘Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness Might Not Be Best’).

As a result, for the competition, who may only control one or two of these pieces (e.g., hardware and system software but not the actual mobile service, or in the case of Android, software only), the reality is that this means that they will be solving a different problem than Apple’s end-to-end solution, which integrates these disparate layers and then makes them extensible and programmable via the iPhone SDK.

And let’s be clear, regardless of the metric that you choose to measure Apple’s success in this realm (developers, downloads, dollars, margins or consumer engagement), the platform engine and ecosystem is unquestionably humming on all cylinders.

Beyond the $1B business momentum for App Store; AND beyond the fact that iPhone has already emerged as the number two smartphone maker (behind only Nokia/Symbian, whose market position is at best, tenuous); AND beyond the fact that the device unit numbers don’t even include iPod touches (which run virtually the identical software, sans the phone); AND beyond the fact that there are over 25,000 applications available right now on iPhone/iPod touch (yielding over 500 million downloads to date), there is one “unfair advantage” I haven’t even mentioned.

That is the iTunes media/content piece of Apple’s strategy, which no one else offers, which in itself is over 65M users strong, which has made Apple the number one seller of music on the planet (larger than Wal-Mart) and which integrates into the same user experience, workflow and marketplace function set as App Store.

So, as a developer, who can ride on top of the iTunes media freight train; write applications that reach into one device and device software form-factor across all global carriers that sell the iPhone; and reach the carrier-free segment vis-à-vis the iPod touch, that is a lot of leverage to build upon.

Two parting thoughts. One is that the bar (for the competition) is about to get even higher, as on Tuesday, March 17 Apple will be holding a developer event to preview the 3.0 version of iPhone software.

Will it provide visibility into the next hardware refresh of the iPhone and iPod touch?  Will it be the point when they introduce new form factors of devices powered by the platform, such as a tablet/netbook sized iPod Touch HD?  Perhaps it’s the moment, when they will begin supercharging Apple TV with the iPhone’s platform and ecosystem goodness.

Or maybe, it’s something entirely different.  What if Apple decided to reinvent the digital camera as a smart, connected, programmable device?  It would certainly sync up with some of the features they have recently baked into iLife, such as facial recognition and geocoding of photos.

Finally, when you listen to the analysts prognosticating the good, bad and ugly of Apple as an investment, keep in the back of your mind that the financial market really hasn’t a clue on the economic and competitive impact of the App Store.  When they finally figure that one out, I expect Apple’s stock to see a positive pop.

The bigger deal is that I don’t believe that most of the competition really has a firm grasp on what App Store means from a platform perspective.

Now, that’s a story that is yet to be written.

Related Posts:

1. iPhone 2.0: What it Means to be Mobile
2. 65 Million Reasons to be bullish on Apple
3. Apple’s Mobile Gaming Gold Rush
4. Guest Post for GigaOM - Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best
5. Mobility Lives! The iPhone SDK Looks Awesome

I just had an AHA moment.

Fred Wilson of A VC wrote an intriguing post, ‘Hasn’t It Always Been About Status?’   In it, he asserts that the “status update” has become the ultimate social gesture (think: Twitter tweets, Facebook status updates, LinkedIn updates).

I read this post when it originally ran, and pretty much agreed with Fred’s points, but then moved on.  Intuitive, but not earth shattering.  Or so I thought.

But then, I activated a feature within Facebook that allowed my Twitter tweets to update my Facebook status automatically, in the process notifying everyone in my social network.

(Ironically enough, this one feature add materially increased the utility value for me of Facebook, which has done a good job of finding the balance between being an optimized, integrated walled garden and an open platform.)

That was the AHA moment when I started to see how you could bi-furcate a personal, brand or community messaging strategy between global broadcasts and targeted narrowcasts, and how all sorts of new status clients will emerge to make this process manageable.

Reduction as a Powerful Generator of Focused Activity

In Wilson’s post, he presents a three-legged stool to explain both the import and destiny of status updating.

On one leg is the premise (articulated by Joshua Schachter) that reducing services to the simplest user experience possible is a powerful generator of focused activity.

Why?  It’s the antidote to the truism that when you raise the bar a half inch, you lose 90% of the audience.

On the second leg is the status message itself, a construct that is at once completely ad hoc and at the same time gaining structure (think: handles, transformers and payloads).

Owing in large part to Twitter’s exposition of rich APIs, we are seeing all sorts of interesting service integrations (e.g., the above Facebook example and video tweeting services, such as Twiddeo, an effort by my company, vSocial), plus client side application innovation across Mac, Blackberry, iPhone, iPod touch and PC device environments.

This is the third leg of the stool, and Wilson concludes that the emergence of status as the ultimate social gesture is destined to be “very good for third party Twitter clients who will now be able to become status clients.”

He concludes that “we are going to see continued innovation in and around the status message; (namely because) we can use filtering, semantics, identity, social graphs, and a host of other important technologies to weave a real-time web around status.”

I think that he is right, and to frame this one, the rest of the post focuses on one such innovation example.

Right Here Now Services: Status Meets Location with Context

Form follows function.  A few weeks back, my friend (and former business partner) Steve Lee, who runs product management on Google Mobile Maps, took me through a demo of their new locative status service, Latitude.

He showed me how they had thought through things like visibility control and privacy (they did a REALLY good job here – kudos!), and even plugged in status updating.

The basic idea behind Latitude is two fold.  One is that most people don’t use GPS, and besides it’s deeply inefficient from a power utilization perspective.  Battery life is everything on mobile devices.

Two is that because of this, mechanisms to share location status with family and friends are unreliable, not to mention, lacking in privacy controls.

With Latitude, Google has come up with a systematized approach to making location visibility work both effortlessly and securely so you can share your locative status in real-time with those that matter in your social network, across cellular and Wi-Fi networks, in a carrier independent and battery efficient fashion.

Now, imagine Status and Location as social application ingredients that can be combined together to create new application compounds using additional ingredients, like People, Places, Localities, Times, Topics and Events.

The composite that results is what I call “Right Here Now” services.

Here are some examples:

1. You are hanging out near South of Market (in San Francisco) on a Saturday night and you want to see if any friends from school (or work) are nearby and want to grab a beer.
2. You are listening to a compelling speaker at a trade show and in parallel, kibitzing virtually with others in the room (and those who couldn’t be there but are engaged nonetheless).
3. You are watching the Lakers play the Celtics on TNT, high-fiving with other Laker fans and trash-talking with Celts fans who are also watching the event, some in their living rooms, others at sports bars, still others physically at the game.
4. You just heard about a disaster in Anytown, USA, and want to reach out to people physically located right now where the disaster happened to get news from ground zero.
5. Or, as pathetic as it sounds, you are single, looking to mingle and doing what my friend calls the “lookup and hookup,” which of course brings new meaning to the (twitter) term Direct Message.

Similarly, it is easy to see how such mechanisms might become tune-able to filter down communication channels based on delimiters such as specific interests, trust, and even thresholds, such as audience size and “friend of a friend” degrees of separation.

The Medium Truly is the Message

Marshall McLuhan famously once said that, “The Medium is the Message,” suggesting that the medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.

In the case of status update messages, they are becoming a medium in their own right, increasingly containing much more informational goodness than simple text.

Specifically, they are gaining structured actions that allow you to compress long URLs into  TinyURLs/Bit.lys; handles to enable auto-recognition of links to pictures, songs, videos and other media; categorization support so that you can add those you are following to groups; save favorite items of interest; and to archive referenced links for offline browsing, which is ideal for mobile/mobility devices.

Moreover, status clients are gaining search and trending functions, and newfangled status overlay services, like StockTwits, are building their own smart codes using hashtags (#NAME) and other symbols to identify things like stock symbols ($AAPL) and to frame recurring conversational topics of interest (#Watchmen).

Today, a lot of this nascent structure is ad hoc, which has the benefit of being organic and community defined, and thus, authentic. Plus it sticks to Schachter’s axiom about simple user experiences generating lots of focused activity.

But what it doesn’t provide is a reliable, predictable framing mechanism for easily plugging into conversational threads and persisting contexts beyond the HERE and NOW.

But, that is a topic for another day.  Rome wasn’t built in a single day.

Related Posts:

1. Twitter-Nomics: Structured Tweets (and a Business Model for Twitter).
2. Envisioning the Social Map-lication: An application that systematically connect the dots between me, my content and my network.
3. vSocial launches Twiddeo:  Twitter meets video, and vice-versa.
4. Why Openness May Not Be Best: Android versus iPhone (a Guest Post I wrote for GigaOM).
5. Mega brands, online communities and “three walled” gardens

Ponder the golden age of the advertising business for a moment, and what comes to mind are images of Madison Avenue creative types brainstorming, pitching and crafting high production value campaigns that leverage broadcast and print distribution media to reach a pliable, somewhat homogeneous audience.

But that era, lovingly thought of as Advertising 1.0, is slowly, irrevocably facing death by a thousand cuts, as advertisers no longer can justify economics predicated on the logic that “I know half my advertising dollars are wasted - I just don’t know which half” and consumers increasingly are processing ads as the mental in-box equivalent of spam, and filtering them out.

By the same token, Advertising 2.0, the so-called Google-ification of the ad business, is a paper tiger that goes too far in the other direction.

While Advertising 2.0 ads have the benefit of being performance-based (meaning that you get what you pay for in terms of only paying when a consumer actually clicks), what they lack are satisfying definitions of what constitutes “performance” coupled with the limited context and undifferentiated actions they offered up.  Clicks do not equal conversions without context.

What is needed is a 3.0 advertising model that looks more like direct mail in the sense that it provides a clear call to action, some basis for urgency, specific engagement parameters, relevant metrics of success around those same parameters and a transparent ROI model.

One 3.0 approach, known as a Social Media Marketing Promotion, starts with the concept of initiating an earnest online “event” with your constituency base; namely, some participatory reason for company and customer to have a structured conversation by providing a customized microsite “sand box” for consumers to plug in and engage.

The goodness of this approach is that you can rapidly build campaigns targeted at both Brand Advertising and Direct Response campaign outcome goals.

If brand advertising is the goal, then engagement parameters such as uploads, plays, shares, ratings, embedding, etc. are the metrics that matter and campaign goals should be defined accordingly.

If on the other hand, the goal is direct response, then metrics should be focused on actual leads — how many people click on the call to action, how many register, request info and the like.

So who’s embracing this approach?  Major brands (and their interactive agencies) such as Chevy, Vespa, Fosters Lager, US Army, TheKnot, Hallmark, UPS and Boston Acoustics, to name a few.

(disclaimer: my company, vSocial, is an industry leader in the social media marketing promotions space).

Related Links:

1. Social Media: Breadcrumbs and Conversations: provides a well-formed construct for thinking about how social media works.
2. Vespa GoGreen Campaign and Interactive Agencies: specific examples of different campaigns in action.
3. Is Advertising Science or Art?: An exploration of the concepts in Claude Hopkins seminal read, “Scientific Advertising.”  Argues simple that advertising is measured by its effectiveness in generating sales.  Period.
4. Don’t subordinate your Brand: on strategies to avoid losing control of your brand while embracing the managed chaos of social media.