I received a note from Andy Gilbertson, one of the developers behind Parallel Kingdom, a location-based mobile massively multiplayer (or MMO) game that uses your GPS location to place you in a virtual world atop the real world. The game seems like an obvious winner for the iPhone, but the team has been struggling to get it past Apple's app review policies.
Gilbertson's travails with the iPhone application acceptance process illustrates why Apple's gating of applications is a troubling reality for developers--and for consumers. And while it's understandable to have a gating mechanism in place, if Apple wants to remain at the top of the mobile application space, it so heavily dominates, the company needs to commit more resources to not just the application review process, but in communicating with developers. As of my last e-mail exchange with Gilbertson, Apple had not responded for more than six days. My call to App Store PR has gone unreturned for about 18 hours as of this post.
Apple's acceptance policies can be shockingly difficult to navigate, so much so that some have marveled at the fact that an ecosystem could build up at all.The fact that iPhone applications are written in Objective C, a previously uncommon programming language, is in and of itself a show-stopper for many developers, but that obviously hasn't stopped development.
Earlier today Ars Technica wrote about several prominent developer including Facebook's Joe Hewitt, Second Gear's Justin Williams, and longtime Mac software developer Rogue Amoeba, all of whom recently "decided that enough is enough" and that they would abandon iPhone development efforts. And while each cites different reasons, the underlying thread is that they've had enough of waiting for Apple to distribute their apps, an instantaneous effort on the Internet.
While restrictive or complex policies are unlikely to stop the iPhone juggernaut, they can be very painful reminders of what would happen if we regress 15 years to the unfortunate walled gardens of AOL. Tim O'Reilly reminded us of the risk of the closed Web recently, commenting that "anyone can put up a Web site, 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."
It's unlikely that a few developers falling off of the iPhone train will have a dramatic effect on the growth of the market, but this kind of unhappiness can easily lead to a backlash. The big question is if another mobile platform can take the place of the iPhone.
Android has arguably the best chance, but it currently struggles due to immaturity of its own application ecosystem. Nonetheless, there is a huge revenue opportunity for an open-Web approach to mobile applications. It remains to be seen if Android can live up to the hype and not fall into the same trappings as the App Store. For all of Apple's sins in how they run that business, it's undeniable that it remains hugely successful.
Twitter has quickly become a cultural phenomenon among the technorati and celebrity set who, for whatever reason, want to share their lives with their followers. And while a new study suggests that the majority of tweets are pointless babble, there is clearly value somewhere or else people would have dropped it months ago.
That's not to suggest that microblogging is guaranteed to be successful, and certainly not guaranteed to be lucrative, even for Twitter. With no clear revenue model and ever-increasing expectations, the monetization of Twitter remains one of Silicon Valley's favorite conversation topics.
Regardless, the service has introduced a new way to communicate that is unlikely to disappear overnight. As part of the microblogging evolution, Slate's Farhad Manjoo contends that Twitter itself needs to die. And he might be right, at least in the sense that for microblogging to become something bigger media properties and open standards need to find their way into the mix.
If Twitter worked more like e-mail or the Web--a system managed by different entities that were connected by common Web protocols--a hit like last week's wouldn't be crippling. A denial-of-service attack would have brought down some people's status updates, but Twitter would still work for most of the world.
The basic idea is that Twitter-like services should become more like RSS (Really Simple Syndication), an idea which not surprisingly comes from RSS co-creator Dave Winer. And while RSS is not the exact analogy as it's not real-time nor is it geared toward request/response scenarios, it is the model for disseminating information across a vast array of Internet-connected resources.
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It's clear that Yahoo is struggling against Google, and it's clear that Microsoft wants nothing more than to be important in the online services world. But the combination of these two behemoths, neither of whom have been particularly innovative with technology or customer acquisition of late, is the next AOL/Time Warner debacle.
Does anyone think that the merger of AOL and Time Warner was a success? Does the marriage of two companies that have no clear strategies ever make sense?
Microsoft hasn't proven that it can take advantage of this scale of web property and has wasted a huge amount of time and dollars with all the Live.com junk. Yes, MS should move into new markets and look to the future but Yahoo is a massive undertaking with a completely different culture.
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