The smartphone is the cigar!

You know what's cool?

Well, yes, a billion fucking dollars is pretty cool.

What else is cool, apparently, is women live tweeting and otherwise live updating childbirth:

A new survey of more than 1,000 pregnant women conducted by American Baby magazine [reveals that] fifty-one percent of respondents planned to record the birth -- as it takes place -- through social media, with 42% planning to post regular Facebook updates and 9% planning to tweet about the experience.

American Baby executive editor Laura Kalehoff points out that many of the women surveyed haven't known an adult life without social networking.

"The millennial mom went through college with Facebook," Kalehoff says. "They're accustomed to communicating that way, and it feels very natural to share your pregnancy and labor with everyone."

The women surveyed ranged in age from 18 to 49, with the majority being 18 to 29. (Forty percent were 18 to 24 and 25% were 25 to 29.)

Witnesses live tweet a couple's break-up. You tell yourself you won't read it, but then you do.

Via The Next Web.

You have read Farhad Manjoo's piece on Google+ haven't you? No? OMG! I'm so embarrassed for you. Everbody's read it!

To wit:

The real test of Google’s social network is what people do after they join. As far as anyone can tell, they aren’t doing a whole lot. Traffic-analysis firms have consistently reported Google+’s traffic to be declining from its early peak. Even Google’s own executives seem to have gotten bored by the site. After several public posts in the summer, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin dropped off the site in the fall; they only started posting once more when bloggers began pointing out their absence. Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman and former CEO, posted his first public message when Steve Jobs died. That was three months after the social network went live.

That launch-first, fix-it-later strategy has worked marvelously for Google in the past. Gmail didn’t match all of Microsoft Outlook’s features from the beginning—it didn’t even have a delete button—but the stuff it did have (lots of storage and fast search) was so compelling that people were willing to stick with it until it became the best email program in existence. In the same way, I switched to Chrome because it was faster than any other browser I’ve ever used—and I stuck with it even though it lacked add-ons or the ability to bookmark many tabs at once. (It has since added those features.)

But a social network isn’t a product; it’s a place. Like a bar or a club, a social network needs a critical mass of people to be successful—the more people it attracts, the more people it attracts. Google couldn’t have possibly built every one of Facebook’s features into its new service when it launched, but to make up for its deficits, it ought to have let users experiment more freely with the site. That freewheeling attitude is precisely how Twitter—the only other social network to successfully take on Facebook in the last few years—got so big. 

Tell us what you think, Brian!

Meh.

Coincidentally, or not, I actually ventured over to Google+ just the other day. I noticed my Gmail account, which I suppose is who signed me up to + in the first place, was all botherin me n shit over people adding me or sending me stuff.

I knew virtually (heh) no one. It was confusing -- which is absolute fucking death for a social network that dreams big, even with all Google's resources at the ready -- and could come up with *zero* reasons for ever returning.

So, yeah, Google+ is dead to me.

Though if there were simple seamless methods of creating circles to send out restricted content, such as to 'paid' members of the Smartphone Wars, that would certainly be something. Google will likely never do this because Google believes all (your) information should be free (to them). 

Likewise, if it was actually easy for me to set up and market regular and ad-hoc video chats with 3-15 people at the same time, at any time, I would probably find clever ways of using that.

There are definitely salvageable pieces. But, really, just as with Google Checkout, say, there's already more and better solutions out there. Facebook and Twitter the two most obvious. 

Google+ is, as the author states above, a 'place'. Only, Google really has zero interest in operating a place. They just want your name down on the list. So they can direct market to you. As long as that remains true, and with Larry Page at the helm it will remain true, then Google will continue to fuck up social. 

And if I'm wrong...I'm still probably right. Hence the linkage with Windows Phone. You see that new Nokia? Any of the Samsung Windows Phone phones? Not bad, not bad at all. And, yes, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Still, it's hard to see how one so far behind can ever truly catch up, at least, not when going round the same track.

I love Twitter. Use it everyday. Since way back in 2009, when the cool people in Silicon Valley were predicting Twitter's demise -- cause, you know, it was overrated and insular and so yesterday -- I had Twitter near the very top in my Technology Rankings. They remain there still.

Something called the New York Magazine has a great article on Twitter. Some quotes:

Behind the double doors, computer engineers, some 250 of them, Ph.D.’s from MIT and Stanford and Caltech, are busy trying to make order of the 200 million tweets a day, cascades of text messages from McCain, President Obama, and the pope; Justin Bieber and the Pakistani who heard U.S. commandos raid Osama bin Laden’s house; Kanye West and Hugo Chávez and the man who pretends to be Nick Nolte all day. Back there, in an attempt to solve the inherent paradoxes at the core of Twitter’s ambitions, computer algorithms are being developed to classify and assign values to every single tweet in the ever-chattering Rube Goldberg machine they created five years ago.

On computer monitors on floor three, they can watch TPS for an event spike like commodities on a trading desk. The freak earthquake in Virginia in August reached 5,500 TPS, a number released to the press as a significant barometer of impact: “More tweets than Osama bin Laden,” said the London Telegraph.

That compares to 5,530 TPS for the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Or 6,436 TPS for the 2011 BET Awards, and 5,531 for the NBA Finals. In August, the new Twitter record was set: 8,868 TPS for Beyoncé’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards.

“People describe Twitter as a global consciousness."

The ambition, and some of the rhetoric, is ­Gutenberg-size, though instead of ­Bibles, there’s Beyoncé. “There are nearly 7 billion people on this planet,” says Jack Dorsey, the company’s co-founder and original genius. “And we are building Twitter for all of them. They evolve, and so do we.”

Is that big enough? I don't think so. 

Why only Twitter for people? After all, those short, sharp, rarely shocking tweets per seconds by millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, soon possibly billions of persons are, frankly, limiting.

Why isn't my television tweeting? My home dehumidifier? The hybrid engine of my Honda? Why isn't my avatar, the one I use to buy possibly stolen merchandise via eBay, the one that is deliberately designed to *not* look like me, given his own Twitter?

One Twitter per person? That is so yesterday.

What I think is a cool experiment by the Seattle Police department. I hope this takes hold as I believe it will provide citizens a better understanding of what is happening around them; which should empower them. Via Springwise:

A recent experiment to engage with the public saw the Seattle Police Department take an unusual approach, by tweeting emergency calls and revealing to followers “a day in the life of the Seattle Police” via Twitter.Over a 12 hour period nearly all emergency calls — except those relating to domestic violence, child abuse or sexual assault which were deemed too sensitive — were tweeted at an average of 40 tweets per hour, totaling 478 by the end of the day.

Police spokesman, Sean Whitcomb, said that the department was trying to find new ways to engage with the public, and encourages SPD Twitter followers to show interest in emergency calls, and hear what the police are telling news reporters. The exercise was met with a mixed response, with some followers annoyed when apparently trivial and mundane tweets clogged their Twitter accounts, while others commended it for being “cool”. As a follow up, the city police have also launched a “tweet-along”, giving followers the chance to “ride virtual shot-gun with officers” as they send Twitter updates on every call they respond to.

Shopping, advertising, buying, selling are all on the cusp of radical change in process, form and design. The merger of real-time, the mobile web, smartphones, social media and infinitely scalable databases storing information on every product and every seller and every coupon will make this so.

I've written several times already that the iPad is the world's biggest store. As millions of us buy these (and soon, the Amazon Tablet, which the company must offer), we can buy, try, design, view, compare, have our avatar sample and in all other ways find a product or build a product and purchase that product. The iPad is a storefront. Think of it like that. To the world.

Oh, yeah, it's also a core Apple product leading to the purchase of all manner of digital content.

Tablets are different, in form and function, then smartphones. Our smartphones are always with us, always on, and enable real-time connection between location (physical) and data (virtual). With the growth of social media, these three vectors, crossing the physical, the digital and the social converge upon that which I have not developed a term for: call it, hyperlocal space-time. You are right here, right now, with all the information of the web and your friends collapsing into your smartphone, readily available to you.

This new reality, my friend, will lead to amazing innovation and likely trillions of dollars spent on getting YOU to BUY NOW HERE or YOU BUY THERE NOW, with appeals thrown in from friends, from those you follow, with a real-time, personalized 'story' on how the purchase will make you better.

With the iPhone, the iPad, iTunes, App Store and now Twitter, few copmanies are set up to take advantage of this new reality than Apple. Problem for them, of course, is they have no idea how to run an advertising platform, and they pretty much suck at building a workable recommendation engine. And they have no search engine. I mean, let's say you walk past a product in an aisle in anystore USA, and your smartphone knows you need/want a particular product, and you can be bombarded with deals and groupons, and you tap your social network to help you decide, and maybe point your smartphone at the item to get specs and have it automatically call up competing products, better prices, alternatives -- or 'score' why you should buy this thing. Or not. We are very quickly headed to that world. 

Sounds like something tailor-made for Google.

But, the combination of Apple and Twitter offer a viable alternative. And with Twitter baked into iOS 5, and Twitter's CEO talking about commerce, look for another new market for both Apple and Twitter to move into.

During a keynote interview at Fortune BrainstormTech in Aspen, [Twitter CEO Dick] Costolo was pressed about his company's business model. After discussing its various advertising options -- including its plans to eventually offer self-serve ads -- he mentioned how conference organizers and sports teams had used Twitter to find buyers for unsold inventory. For example, the San Diego Chargers were able to quickly sell around 1,000 tickets to a game that otherwise would have been blacked out on local television. Twitter itself didn't make any money on those transactions, but may look to do so in the future.

"There's a commerce opportunity there for us to take advantage of if we want," Costolo said. "How can we remove friction from the process?" He declined to explain exactly how Twitter might remove that friction -- or even that a plan was in place -- but did suggest that the Chargers could have sold their tickets even more efficiently were buyers not forced to visit an entirely different website to make their purchase.

In 2009, I began a TECHNOLOGY RANKINGS matrix. Twitter was one of the first rated, and one of the highest rated in fact. I noted that Twitter was optimized for mobile -- almost.

In light of Twitter being baked into iOS 5, I decided to revise their score and have added +1 to MOBILE and +1 to SOCIAL.

Thought you might like to know.

What with "experts" telling us that you enable, incite, support, cause and grow revolutions. I figured maybe you could do something about all that killing.