We fought it. We resisted. But now we’ve capitulated to the twitter tsunami and have ‘twitterized’ digitalmissive. During the process, though, we’ve noticed something – twitter seems to ‘bounce’ a lot (network-speak for short sporadic outages).

Not surprising, given the numbers: Nielsen has February year-over-year twitter usage growth at 1,374%. That’s well over a factor of 10.

Amazing – and that’s not counting the countless tweets that will now be coming from the new and improved digitalmissive….

In the meantime, will short-term outages contribute to a backlash against the service?

And hey don’t forget to tweet this article – if the twitter’s up at the time.


You have the operating system.  You have your web browser – maybe it’s Firefox or some other extensible browser running half a dozen or more add-ons.  Maybe (like me) you have the Thunderbird email client, also with several add-ons installed.  Then there’s iTunes, Acrobat, Flash, Office – not to mention all the apps you’ve installed on your iPhone.  All in, you could easily have a dozen or more pieces of software, all regularly ‘phoning home’ for updates and alerting you to install them  – it all gets to be a little much at times, doesn’t it?
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Last week on a panel discussion in New York, ABC’s Albert Cheng described how his network was syndicating its content on YouTube – to paraphrase Mr. Cheng, “we supply them with meta data for our shows, but the actual ABC streams themselves still originate from our servers at ABC.”
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By most measures, the White House’s first online town hall meeting was a smashing success.

A whooping 104,081 email submissions and 3.6 million votes later, today, the US irreversibly gained a whole new level of citizen participation.

To that point, the White House actually created a namesake post exactly for that purpose.

What should come next, in my mind, would be to ensure that this new-found form of political dialog marketing will continue to be exactly that – an ongoing, productive dialog to and fro the electorate and the elected.

To that point, anyone in digital media building and growing a brand online knows, focused quality discussion across the social graph is not as easy as it sounds.

After all, the Web’s bull horn capabilities are very much a two-way street. And media outlets everywhere are likely eager to pick up on any disgruntled citizen that felt s/he didn’t get a proper response.

So beware White House, from now on be prepared to handle your incoming emails with great care.

It’s all about keeping the conversation going.

I recently attended my first conference by live webcast – Media Summit New York.  Streaming was handled by scribemedia, which did a very nice job of it.  I wasn’t able to sample every panel because they were only shooting in one of the two session rooms, but it turns out there was something about “tele-attending” this conference that almost made up for that…

First, I’ll admit it – while I find the technology to be valuable in certain situations,  I’m by no means out there on the evangelical front lines of social networking (in fact, it’s only recently that we’ve twitter-enabled ourselves here at digitalmissive.com).

As a bit of a skeptic to begin with, I’ve also been a little ambivalent towards the combination of social networking and long-form premium internet video.  I’ve just felt there wasn’t a huge value-add there; that lean-back television viewing is by its nature a primarily passive pastime, and that the average viewer would not care to chat and text while watching their favorite show form the couch – and to the extent internet video is all about the ability to view content non-synchronously, real-time chatting about a show in progress isn’t really possible anyway.

But that was before I had the  experience of chatting and streaming during that first Media Summit panel – compared to sitting there silently in a live audience with perhaps one chance to interact briefly during the Q&A, watching the stream while having the option to freely exchange thoughts and opinions with my fellow cyber-audience members was really exciting.  I almost felt myself wondering if I would actually prefer watching the live stream to being there in person – just for the chatting alone.

Overall,  though, of course the advantages to attending these events in person trumps the live chat advantage – but how ironic, that attendance at panel discussions on the potential disruptive nature of internet video could end up being affected by …internet video.

So, mea culpa.  I get it.  Social networking and video can be cool – especially for events such as conferences.  Back at home on the next generation of internet-enabled televisions, it could be great, too – for sports, politics, and maybe American Idol.

But great enough to make implementing a keyboard-like interface?  I’m still not sure…

A quick update on politicians zooming in on social software for added grab attention. 

The President’s staff just announced its first virtual town hall meeting.

Right from the East Room of the White House, President Obama will respond to citizen emails.

Clearly – despite (presumably) some form of prior email filtering – the new administration continues to be anything but shy about using the wide-open Web for added dialog with its electorate. 

And then uses traditional media pundits to get talked about for days on end.

Of course, this being yet another step in the ongoing democratization of information, just wait until half of Congress will be holding similar online events. 

Or your governor will send you email invites to his virtual town hall gig.

On the Web, social software is ubiquitous.

Everyone can do it. 

The world is flat. 

Terrific! Do engage.

I’ve written before about a good experience I had in my past life as a network/IT consultant deploying Wyse thin clients for a small business client with several remote locations spread across the country and a central MS terminal server (“it’s good to be thin“).

A quick update: IBM has just signed a deal to deploy Wyse thin clients running the new Wyse 6.3 operating system to its Global Technology Services clients using VM Ware or Citrix application servers.  One of the improvements in the 6.3 OS: the client is smart enough to recognize CPU-intensive graphics and media, and transfer (and/or cache) data for processing on the local processor: it’s all about identifying which aspects of the application would be most likely to annoy a user if they were delayed by network performance issues (in a way, the new Wyse thin client is getting slightly less thin).

As network performance improves and vendors optimize the hardware for as crisp a user experience as possible, the advantages of thin computing (ease of maintenance, security, and lower power consumption, to name a few) will only become more alluring.  It turned out to be a pretty good idea a few years ago for me, I think it’s even a better idea now.

I attended a Boxee meetup/beta announcement event here in New York last night.

Boxee, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is the small New York-based startup behind a “media browser” application that has received a lot of attention lately, despite being still in alpha testing.  Optimized for a 10 ft. lean-back internet video experience, the app can be installed on an Apple TV – or you can connect that spare Mac Mini you have laying around the house to your television and install it there.

Either way, this is precisely the kind of solution that’s needed for internet video to evolve beyond the solitary dorm-room/workplace short-form diversion it currently is to a true home entertainment medium.

The profoundly disruptive implications of such a scenario were not lost on Hulu owners News Corp. (Fox/Paramount) and NBCU, who decided to deny access from the Boxee client a few weeks ago, just as the app’s ability to provide a compelling Hulu experience on the television was becoming more widely known.  This started of a series of back-and-forth technical maneuvers between the two companies: Hulu first started refusing any connections originating from Boxee rather than from standard web browsers.   In response, Boxee quickly implemented a workaround solution, instead accessing Hulu streams via the site’s public RSS feed, only to have Hulu implement a block on all Boxee RSS subscription requests a day or two later.   And on it goes – Boxee tweaks their RSS reader implementation to get through, Hulu tweaks their RSS feed implementation to deny it…  It’s gotten to the point that recent Boxee releases include a status message in the upper right corner, alerting users to whether the Hulu service happens to be available at that particular moment.

It was interesting last night, then, as Boxee CEO Avner Ronen slipped in the following item while listing the feature set of Boxee’s upcoming beta release: Boxee will now include, as Ronen put it, a fully Mozilla (i.e. FireFox)-compliant browser.  Although not explicitly stated, the implication is that Hulu will no longer be able to identify Boxee and block it. In other words, when you select Hulu content on the next Boxee beta, the software will first connect to the Hulu web page rather than the stream itself, and will appear to Hulu as simply yet another instance of Firefox on yet another computer.   Boxee will then automatically display the stream in full screen mode.

In general, there was no shortage of Hulu-related catcalls from the assembled faithful throughout last night’s event – so I found it interesting that these two or three sentences failed to generate much immediate crowd reaction, especially since Mozilla compliance is both a major new feature and the strategy behind Boxee’s next round of maneuvers to maintain access to Hulu.

One has to give Boxee credit: the tiny (12 person) company is going up against News Corp. and (indirectly) NBCU owner General Electric – yet they are not going away.  In fact, Boxee appears more determined than ever to keep forcing Hulu’s hand, leaving America’s preeminent premium web video streaming service with no choice other than to continue having to do (as Hulu itself puts it) “a hard thing” – to  block access to users depending on what software they’re using – or to put it more accurately, depending on where (the desk or the couch) that software is being used.

Although it met with a similarly underwhelming audience response at the time, the other announcement worth noting consisted of one literally one sentence: “Look for Boxee to announce major content partnerships in 2009.“  Boxee has already partnered with some major content owners (CBS, CNN, and Netflix, to name a few), so it will be interesting to see who’s next.   Probably not Disney, due to their close relationship with Hulu competitor Apple/iTunes – but maybe Viacom (Comedy Central/MTV, etc)?

One thing is clear: Boxee will continue to be a fascinating company to watch in 2009.

Barring any unforeseen problems with the due diligence and final negotiations, we’re soon going to be hearing all about a deal struck for IBM to acquire Sun.

Sun’s Business
Software: Sun has been a troubled company for a few years now, but will always be admired for giving us Java, the pioneering object-oriented/virtual machine-managed programming language that’s proven itself particularly well-suited for the internet (and upon which many aspects of Microsoft’s competing .Net Framework are modeled).  Sun also recently acquired the very popular open source mySQL database platform (much as the open source Java platform competes against the proprietary .Net Framework, MySQL competes against Microsoft’s proprietary SQL Server).
Hardware: Sun has a going concern in tape storage (yes, tape is still widely used for backing up large and relatively static data), and with its Solaris flavor of Unix, claims roughly a third of the Unix server market.

Why it Makes Sense

• Sun and Big Blue are both distinguished by their common commitment to open source software: Sun administers Java through the Java Community Process, and IBM has used (and been a champion of) open source software for several years now.  However, while Sun has always had difficulty monetizing Java, IBM has the good fortune of having a thriving (and application-hungry) global services and consulting business in place – and so will almost certainly have better luck making some money off the Java programming language than Sun has had (Sun grossed only $200M from Java during 2008, a less than 1% increase over 2007).
• It’s important to note that IBM is already in the Java business – along with major competitors SAP and Oracle, Big Blue sells Java-based “middleware”.  In short, middleware is the software plumbing required to glue other enterprise software apps together (often in a web and/or transactional applications).  So although Java is open source, if IBM were to assume stewardship of the language, it would give its WebShere middleware products at least a perceived leg up on the Java middleware competition.
• Maybe most importantly, consider this: according to a recent BusinessWeek podcast, fully two thirds of American corporate credit is now rated as junk.  Even given the current macro-economic climate, I have a hard time believing such a sobering statistic – but in these credit-starved times, if Company A has some cash on hand, it might be a good time to pull the trigger and acquire weaker Company B: short-term, Company A will be negotiating from a position of strength, and longer-term, it will leave itself well-positioned for the turn-around.  With a market cap of $124B and an annual cash flow of $12B,  IBM is Company A: more than able cover the estimated $6.5-$8B deal for Company B (Sun) in cash.

Antitrust?
Software: It should be relatively smooth sailing: the very fact that Java is open source should help insulate IBM from any challenges by Microsoft or IBM’s middleware competitors (it should be noted, though, that not all is not bliss in the open source community: the non-profit Apache Foundation is currently in a longstanding dispute with Sun over licensing of Apache’s “Harmony” Java implementation).
Hardware: This could be an issue.  IBM and Sun are already the two leading tape storage players, and the Unix server market is currently split roughly equally between Sun, IBM, and HP.  It’s therefore pretty easy to imagine HP making a compelling antitrust argument against a combined IBM/Sun holding two thirds of the Unix server market – or any number of smaller companies arguing against a combined IBM/Sun dominating the tape storage market.


In short…
In one form or another, I think this deal will go through – it just makes too much sense.  I do expect a bumpy antitrust ride, though – whether IBM gets all of Sun for the $6.5-$8B or whether the hardware businesses are spun off and IBM picks up only Java and MySql for less remains to be seen…

A few weeks I was struck by the unusual sight of a YouTube video embedded on a Yahoo! sports page.  It appears that as video streams are increasingly syndicated across multiple outlets, we’re seeing more signs that video stream hosting and video stream aggregating are developing into two complementary but independent businesses.

YouTube is moving from a core competency in hosting user-generated content into the premium content marketplace via the rapidly growing number of YouTube Channel partnerships.  The business models and monetization processes are still a bit of a work in progress as YouTube explores how much system integration is appropriate and YouTube’s content-owning partners seek a comfort level with how much content to syndicate.  But what is clear is that as YouTube offers more licensed and copyrighted content on its Channel pages, and (as mentioned above) syndicates its hosted streams to often competing destination sites (such as Yahoo), we are seeing the company’s hosting and aggregating business models branch off from each another.


Take ABC/Disney: if you go directly to youtube.com/abc, you’ll find the YouTube ABC Television Channel.  However, it’s still largely a placeholder page, with only limited content available from the Jimmy Kimmel show – and if you didn’t happen to already know the URL and had to search the YouTube site for an “ABC Channel”, you wouldn’t get there at all: instead, you’d get to a public broadcasting station from Australia that happens to be named ABC.  That’s right – the search returns no mention of ABC/Disney whatsoever – clearly, YouTube and ABC are taking it slow here…

There’s also the issue of physical asset control – speaking on a panel the other day, ABC’s Albert Cheng acknowledged that any ABC/Disney content streaming from YouTube is actually being hosted from the ABC/Disney servers.  In other words, rather than host the data and the stream it locally at YouTube, the content is merely pulled in from an external data center and wrapped in a Youtube ‘skin’.  Since the ABC streams still use the YouTube Flash player, this is all transparent to the user, but nevertheless, in this case YouTube is merely serving as an aggregator.


Now let’s look at CBS: games from this year’s NCAA  Men’s Basketball Tournament are being streamed live on the YouTube CBS/March Madness channel.  As with ABC, these streams are hosted externally by the content owner (CBS) and are also available for streaming from the network’s own site.  This year, however, streams of live games are being delivered via the Microsoft Silverlight format rather than YouTube’s streaming format of choice, Adobe Flash – a coup for Silverlight, and a first for YouTube (users will have to download and install the Silverlight player if they haven’t already done so). As can be seen from the screenshot at right, to the user accustomed to the familiar look and feel of YouTube’s Flash player, this a much more CBS-branded experieince.

In general, syndication makes a lot of sense: content owners tend to be more comfortable holding on to and hosting their own assets, and if a given partner has their own streaming infrastructure already implemented, there’s little point in reinventing the wheel.   Furthermore, live streaming of events such as the NCAA games is especially demanding, and Silverlight has already proven itself as a very capable live platform during last summer’s Beijing Olympics.

All well and good – but for streaming video to make it to television hardware, these technologies will have to migrate to chipsets.  Adobe already has a standalone version of Flash optimized for use in embedded devices, and the next verison of Silverlight (Silverlight 3, just entering beta testing) will be able to run outside the browser (it’s not known yet if a similar lightweight version of Silverlight for embedded devices is also planned, but I would guess that’s a strong possibility).

Stay tuned…