if connected

Today we heard about the latest additions to Apple’s product empire. Today, we saw the latest extensions of the ecosystem that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop referred to in his eloquent burning platform memo:-

“Apple disrupted the market by redefining the smartphone and attracting developers to a closed, but very powerful ecosystem.”

He was right that this is more than a fight between individual products like mobile handsets.

“The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.”

But ecosystem is far too weak a word. It implies that all a company like Apple, Microsoft or Google must do is to find a fertile field with favourable weather and let their product seeds grow. If that were enough, Google would not be struggling to foster more than a handful of Android tablet apps, and Apple wouldn’t be sitting on over 90,000 iPad-optimised apps. The difference in app quantity and quality would be much narrower.

Today at WWDC we see how the Apple ecosystem is run. It has a leader, a philosophy, a business model, a model of customer identity. All of these things are critical for success. Switching back to the fertile field metaphor: Apple adds a lot more to the ecosystem than simply choosing suitable environmental conditions for software and hardware to prosper. And, those extra ingredients are why Elop is wrong, or at least not sufficiently visionary in his memo. This is a far greater clash than one between ecosystems. More later when the fuss over WWDC has died down a little.

This post was originally published on my Forrester blog.

Vodafone has just launched a major new initiative called Vodafone 360 (release, with the new 360.com website to follow). Key points:

• Integration with social networks for an online address book and content sharing.
• Combination mobile handset + 360.com cloud service strategy.
• Single sign-on for customers or non-Vodafone customers. 360.com website available to both.
• Deep handset integration: two new Linux LIMO handsets with “full fat” experience (made by Samsung). Lesser version pre-loaded onto a number of Symbian Series 60 handsets, downloads and other versions available for around 100 handsets.
• Also includes an App store, new mobile web portal, music service, and maps service.

I’m working on a quicktake report. But this is such a major initiative with wide ranging scope, that I’m extremely curious in what others think? Specifically:

• How well positioned are operators to implement a social strategy with such deep handset integration, compared with handset makers, or the Internet social networks themselves?
• Was Nokia’s OVI initiative a lightning rod that distracted many from other handset maker initiatives in this space? (Like Motorola’s Motoblur, HTC Sense, Google & Android, Microsoft Myphone, or Apple’s MobileMe?)
• Is 360 a better umbrella name than “Vodafone Live!” ?
• Thoughts on how well 360 fits with Vodafone’s new corporate tag line, “Power to you” ?

Comment below! I’m here and will reply as appropriate.

Why do I blog so much more here compared with other blogs? Simple: It’s much more convenient as the WordPress mobile tools are superior.

Take the respective platform’s iPhone support as an example: All three blogging platforms offer iPhone apps. But only the WordPress app allows editing of published posts, comment moderation, and the creation or editing of static pages.

Typepad, only offers post creation as does the iPhone Livejournal app. I find that I often wish to amend or add to published posts. I’ve also discovered that on mobile phones it’s easier to hit ‘publish’ by mistake. Or, to be unsure if a post has published successfully due to the vagaries of mobile phone networks. In both situations, being able to edit published posts overcomes the issue. On any important blog I find that lack of ability to edit published posts unacceptable as it leads to error-ridden mobile blog posts staying live until I am back near a PC and able to fix them.

WordPress also has richer post creation options: It has full support for category selection and tags; draft posts can be stored online as well as locally. Storing a draft on the phone enables offline support, and allows the quick storage of posts with large photo attachments, that can be later published when there’s a fast 3G connection or WiFi available. Typepad only has limited local draft support and doesn’t work with the categories in my experience.

On other platforms, WordPress also seems better supported. I’ve found a competent, although unofficial, app for Android in wpToGo, but nothing good for the others.

WordPress:

Typepad:

Livejournal:

Foxmarks bookmarks sync
This is the killer feature for me and the reason I’m going to stay loyal to Firefox for now: Foxmarks delivers reliable and secure sync of bookmarks across multiple computers whatever OS they are running. In a recent version there’s an option for users to define whether each computer is ‘work or ‘home’ and then sync a different set of bookmark folders with each type of machine. Foxmarks stores a copy of all the bookmarks either on the Foxmarks server or one a user specfies. The advantage of syncing with Foxmarks own server is that the ‘my foxmarks’ website allows users to log in and access their bookmarks from any web browser, for example using a shared computer in a cafe.

Add bookmark here 2 (Windows only)
I really miss this when I’m not using Windows. Puts an ‘add bookmark’ item into each folder in the your bookmarks. So, to add a bookmark you just navigate your folders, as if you were choosing to load an existing bookmark, then pick the appropriate add button when you’ve navigated into the right folder.

Openbook (Windows only)
This causes the ‘add bookmark’ dialog to appear with the folder tree extended. Handy. Although it’s largely, but not entirely, superceded if you have the ‘add bookmark here’ extension. Again I really miss this when I’m not on Windows, especially on the Mac version of Firefox.

Tiny menu (Windows only)
This is a fantastic extension for use on laptops (especially) or any machines that are low on vertical screen space. It collapses the entire menu to a single word with a hierarchical sub menu. However, there is a downside: Once installed, you need to manually configure the space to the right of the word ‘Menu’ with whatever buttons you desire (back, forward etc) and then hide the standard ‘navigation’ toolbar.

Tab preview
Adds mini previews of each tab as the mouse hovers over the tab’s name. IMO this is especially useful if there are a lot of tabs open.

Adblock Plus
I used to use the original Adblock, but found that it interfered with Flash working on some websites, especially movie trailer sites for some reason.

Cute menu crystal svg
Pure eye candy. I suppose you could argue that the icons next to menu items improve usability….

Web developer toolbar
…what it says. I especially like the ability to fiddle with what CSS elements are active.

Pdf download
Offers options for how to handle pdfs when they’re left clicked.

Tab Mix Plus
Offers customisation of the way tabs work. On Firefox 3 it’s less essential but still has some nice features.

Others that I have installed, but don’t use very often:-

Downloadthemall
Useful download manager but I use it occasionally and not all of the time: my main use is to grab multiple things for download from a single web page without a lot of manual clicking.

Copy plain text
Does what it says via the right click context menu.

IE tab
This isn’t as useful as it appears. The goal is to enable incompatible websites to be opened within the firefox UI. In reality, the only problematic site I’ve come across in recent years, a UK stockbroker, crashes in this too!

IE view
I find this more useful: it adds an ‘open in IE’ link to the right click menu.

Chatzilla
An IRC client

Streetmap

Freetranslate

Earlier today Gmail stopped working, for most people, for about four hours.

It’s not the end of everything, as numerous things I’ve read today argue. It doesn’t blow apart ‘cloud computing’ or putting faith in other companies or other people. Computers break. Parts of the Internet fail. Even phones seem less reliable now. There’s nothing new here. Anyone that relies upon just one digital service, or device, will enjoy painful cold turkey sometime soon.

But what is different now, is how many ways we all have to do something. If our main phone goes down, we reach for our mobile. If twitter dies, then it’s back to Facebook, email, IM or the best option yet: Friendfeed. If one email address stops working, most people reach for another: The main pain with email failing is that incoming messages sent to the broken account can’t be read until that system — Gmail here — comes back up.

I use Gmail as a fallback to my work email because it is so versatile, Gmail has many alternative ways of access: I had few problems during the outage earlier as I access Gmail via IMAP on my PC, and on my iPhone, as well as using the web browser interface. So, I could read stored messages fine. Unlike Hotmail and Yahoo! mail, Google makes access to Gmail easy from regular Internet-standard PC/Mac/handheld/phone email software, complete with full folder management.

But, to take advantage people need to set up their phone or PC email software, and ideally in advance before panic has hit.

Thinking about the so-called cloud services, all the best ones work this way: remote access via a browser plus local sync for speed, fallback when the cloud rains, and for offline use, when the Internet isn’t available like on a plane.

What is it that makes one app outstanding? What is it that deliver a better experience than clicking a link to a mobile website? It’s not the home screen icon as it’s easy to place bookmarks onto an iPhone home screen and in fact half of the icons on my first page are indeed web bookmarks.

• Offer an offline experience. Too often I’m in an area with a 2g signal or no signal at all. Bookmarks are useless. But an application that stores information locally on the phone and so just works truly anywhere anytime — even without coverage — is outstanding. Automatic sync is the ideal experience, but it has to work completely reliably: Sync that mangles data is worse than useless.
• Are fast to respond to screen taps. Jumping from one web page to another always results in a delay. On the desktop clever use of plug-ins and javascript combine with low broadband ping times to overcome this issue. On a mobile, network responsiveness is much slower and even the iPhone’s Safari browser is lacking. Storing content locally enables both a really speedy experience as well as offline working.
• Tie into handset hardware functions like GPS or speedy 3D graphics. Native apps still have close handset integration to themselves.
• Make me smile. Seriously. So many iPhone apps have a real sense of fun about them, even dull utilities. It doesn’t have to be the app itself, other updates from an apps’ developer may write to me with a human voice.
• Are designed for use on the move. Apps need to remember state without the user needing to hit ‘save’ or navigating to a particular point in the UI. A phone call could come in at any time. The app needs to be able to be interrupted on an instant’s notice. Fast app loading must be a given.
• Works with my other websites and existing data on day one. Apps that force me instantly to switch everything just don’t get tested out. They need to work with what I’m already committed too. Over time, I may be prepared to take the time to migrate data.
• Are free or have free trial/lite versions. I don’t care how good the reviews are. Unless there’s some free way of trying something out I’m unlikely to play with an app. For me, even a 59 pence charge is an extra barrier too far for testing something out on top of the time to download and install.
• Are loved. Apps that are regularly updated and improved tend to endear themselves to me. I love the feeling of enjoying improvements for free.

So, what characteristics am I missing?

After yesterday’s post, Recession reliability of the cloud, I’ve realised I was too narrow in my fears. Today Google, has closed or ceased further development on a number of its products, including: Jaiku, Google Notebook, Google video and a number of others.

It’s not just failing firms closing cloud services that we need to worry about. We need to spot which firms will retrench and cut back on the number of experimental and free offerings.

It’s the recession resilience of individual products that matters.