Today’s keynote though was unlike the previous ones. While updates to iOS5 were definitely not trivial, they felt more evolutionary than revolutionary, lacking any real “whoa” moments (iike the one I had when Google announced Android’s Accessory Device Kit and Android@home at GoogleIO this year). Worse still, most of the updates seemed more co-opted than invented. Ideas of Notification Systems and “Cloud AppStore” seemed to have been taken directly from Android and a bunch of other features were taken directly from apps already on the iOS platform like mentioned in this NYTimes article

This once again prompted conversations on the whole idea of building a business on someone else’s platform, a conversation that keeps coming up all the time (recently with Twitter and other such players). I have had a bunch of thoughts on this so I thought I’d share

Revisiting a platform’s need for APIs

Creating and running a developer API is a fair amount of strain on any company’s resources and also calls for a realization that at some level they will be giving up some control on the user experience (and may be potential revenue) from their product. Companies that do realize the need for an API do it for one core reason: increase the diversity of the interfaces to the end users. Its a very biological-evolutionary tactic to stave off potential extinction and find the “fittest” application for the core audience. At the minimum it may allow a part of the long tail of your audience to interact more with your service, but at best may make you discover a better way to serve your core audience. Ideas on the latter end of the spectrum tend to get absorbed into the core product either through buyouts or blatant rip offs.

Platform evolution and the death of the idea germinator:

The gut reaction when the platform absorbs the idea that was germinated by some app on their platform is to start counting down to the app’s inescapable demise. Historically though, these apps live or die based on the following factors:

• The platform’s seriousness in owning that feature
• The percent overlap of the feature set
• The market size and diversity

If the platform is really serious about being the only solution for that problem, the  app developer is shit out of luck. This is what happened with Microsoft and IE vs Netscape. IE won out because MS was determined to let it be the only way to get to the internet. Same story (kinda) why OpenFient decided to accelerate its plans for Android when Apple announced Game Center.  For some apps, Apple may not be as determined to own that behavior, but rather have that enabled for its entire audience (when they are determined to own that behavior, the competitive apps get rejected from the AppStore). The seriousness also comes into question on the updates on version 1.1 or 2 of the product. Will Apple have a team dedicated to improving Reading Lists or the Todo App? Probably not, its been checked off as a feature and will be on a lot of marketing materials but may not evolve as fast as the third party apps (think of the updates on the Notes/Weather/Stocks apps for example)

Percent overlap of the feature set is also an good metric to look at. Thats what pushed Konfabulator off OSX when dashboard widgets were announced. With an app like Instapaper for example, does more than reading lists, it also lets me get to them from any other platform and other browsers. Readability on the other hand overlaps a lot more significantly.

Market size is of course relevant, but more than size, diversity and size of the long tail is a big deal. Todo apps for example are an infinite market because almost no-one agrees with the other on which app works for them. The platform can only target the big head there and cannot add any complexity (specially if you are known for that). This allows app makers to compete for the long tail

The Good News:

There is some benefit to a platform making a play in your space as Instapaper developer Marco Arment notes on his blog. First of all it justifies that space as mainstream and not a fringe/power-user behavior. Marco feels that Apple’s move will only make more people move to Instapaper as they get used to the idea of deferred reading but may find Apple’s implementation lacking.

Just as a reference, check out this graph of Facebook’s entry into the geo-location space with their Places product and its impact on Foursquare:

All the publicity doesn’t hurt either.

Conclusion:

It will be interesting to see how Apple’s new apps will impact the existing players there. What I did find a little disappointing today was the lack of anything really “new”. All the features mentioned seemed to come to par with features I already use on my iPhone and Android (My personal phone is an Android I love and I carry and iPhone 4 for work). Whats interesting to me is that iPhone and Android are almost coming to a point where they are so totally similar to each other in every way, that the only significant difference between them may be philosophy and programming language. It will be interesting to see if a closed curated system is better or worse than an open one in the long run.

My immediate reaction was the “I can do it over a weekend” developer instinct. But in this case it has been tried before and failed (see Status.net and the Twitter clones like Pownce that came out when Fail Whales were a regular feature of the platform). So this time instead of starting a new project that I would probably leave half done as I found the next shiny object I tried to analyze why Twitter succeeded and if it had indeed reached a tipping point where it just was important enough that it just could not be replaced.

I have had quite a few conversations around it as well. Tom Boutell and I shared some ideas (over Twitter, hah!) and he wrote an excellent proposal to replace Twitter. I agree with a lot of points there but have some rather different thoughts of my own,

1) How is Twitter different from WordPress
Theoretically it isn’t, and yet psychologically it is. My blog goes weeks (months?) without an update and yet I am extremely vocal on Twitter every day. I have often been tempted to just post my thought on my blog and forward it to Twitter (enough blogs and Tumblrs do that). But I feel Twitter is to WordPress like Instagram is to Flickr. They both capture transient thoughts that may have no value over a longer period. Occasionally interesting links are shared but thats it. I almost never go through my Twitter history. They are less formal and so immediate. I have a friend who composes blog posts for a couple of weeks since they seem so permanent that she doesn’t want to get it wrong, but Tweets are casual. I don’t think a simple install of WordPress would cut it.

2) We should do it because its Open / Federated
Unfortunately no-one cares about that, something that I am sure Status.net found out. Open is not enough reason for me to get off something that works, and is theoretically free. The only way an open system can succeed is if it brings new capabilities to the system. And open systems do that often. But a direct clone of Twitter is pretty useless.

3) Give me what Twitter gives
A Twitter federated and open replacement will have to:

• Require no installation for the casual user and an easy installation for anyone wishing to be a node
• Give me a permanent URL that I can share with my friends.
• Allow me to discover new users and be discovered
• Route messages to my “inbox”

4) Concentrate on what Twitter does poorly
Actually there is a lot here, and the only way a new system can succeed by fixing some of this:

• Aggregate conversation around a shared item/link. Replies right now are a pain in the ass to track.
• Be extendible. One of the things I see a lot of is the “vertical twitters” or “The Twitter for …(design / entrepreneurs / programmers, etc). So allow the data model that is a “tweet” to be extendible. For example, I should be able to add a poll as a Tweet or something like that.
• Allow groups: Right now there is no way to create a quick group and send a message to 4-5 people without having to direct message them individually
• Implement annotations: Twitter introduced this concept but has never executed on it. There is a lot of value here. For example, if I want to see what people are talking about the movie “Milk” I dont really want to see the dairy results. Similarly if I dont care for my friends’ FourSquare updates, I can only do a filter on a client like Tweetdeck using some String pattern (“checked in to”). But what if I am only interested in a friend’s tweets on programming but not his interest in photography. While hashtags could be used, most people don’t add them since it takes away from their 140 character limit.

Case study: BelugaPods
As an case study I’d like to talk about BelugaPods, a mobile app that I fell in love with and wish more apps were done so well. Beluga is a group messaging app that allows you to message multiple users and keep the conversations within a “pod”. Very handy when you are trying to organize group events. But the cool thing is that Beluga starts with the premise that your friends are not on the app. Messages to non Beluga users are sent as SMS but a clear value is shown by using the Beluga app (the conversation grouping). Thereby the application is usable when your friends aren’t in the system but excellent when they are.

I have a few ideas on implementation but they aren’t baked in enough yet to add to the post. Maybe I’ll follow up this one with those ideas…if I am not distracted by the next new thing .