Don’t build your business round Twitter. They may pull the plug on you.

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From Dave Winer.

today Twitter pulled the switch on two high volume Twitter clients, UberTwitter, the leading Blackberry Twitter client, and Twidroyd, which was the leading client on Android until Twitter shipped their own. Both are part of the newly formed conglomeration of Twitter client software in a $17.5 million tech/media company called UberMedia founded by Bill Gross.

I used to boast how Twitter was creating a coral reef which would support a thriving and diverse ecosystem. That was then, but now they’re running a stalag or gulag (a Russian variety of stalag). We don't know what Bill Gross and/or his team of developers did to piss off Twitter, which is itself a problem (the not knowing).

From ridiculous to essential: the history of Twitter

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My Observer piece about Twitter.

“When a true genius appears in the world”, wrote Jonathan Swift, “you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him”. Thus it was in July 2006 when Twitter appeared. It was a “microblogging” service that allowed one to broadcast one’s thoughts to the world, on one condition: that they should be expressible in not more than 140 characters.

I thought it was a work of genius the first moment I laid eyes on it.

But most normal people, and not a few of my friends, thought otherwise…

Copyright madness and Rooney’s goal

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Last night I was so entranced by Wayne Rooney’s astonishing goal against Manchester City that I embedded a YouTube video clip of it (from a Dutch TV broadcast, judging by the commentary) in a blog post. Clearly, the goal had become a meme, spreading across the Web like that famous clip of Susan Boyle, the singer from nowhere who entranced TV viewers.

You can guess what’s happened to the Rooney clip, can’t you? (Check the post if you’re in any doubt.)

Understanding Steve

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This morning’s Observer column.

Watching Jobs in action, I've always had the feeling that there's something eerily familiar about him. But it wasn't until I read a new book, The Master Switch, by Columbia law professor Tim Wu, that the penny dropped. The book chronicles the history of the major communications industries of the 20th century and finds that pivotal moments in their evolution came when an entrepreneur arrived to offer consumers higher quality, production values and/or greater ease of use than were being delivered by the incumbents…

In a nutshell

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Today’s Financial Times finally gets round to an obituary of Daniel Bell and quotes his description of himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture”. Reading it, I was struck by the realisation that it’s probably also a good description of me. Sigh.

Waiting for Fuji

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Every photographer I know seems to be waiting for the Fuji x100 to be launched (it’s due in March, apparently). Not sure why people are so excited about it, but here are some guesses: the viewfinder technology is interesting — combining Leica-type brightline optical viewfinder with a superimposable digital read-out; and Fuji make pretty good lenses. It has a prime non-interchangeable 23mm lens which, when corrected for the sensor size, works out at 35mm effective focal length. And it will cost $1,000 in the US — which, needless to say, UK dealers will translate as £1,000.

Now comes the surprising bit. yesterday Fuji released a gallery of sample images taken with the new camera. And, guess what? They’re utterly banal.