Robert Scoble brought to the attention of his Buzz followers a new service called Chum.ly which has been around for a little while but is now really starting to take shape.

There is no doubt that Twitter and Facebook hold the dominant positions in the social web but they can co-exist quite happily as they cater to different markets; other true micro-blogging services just couldn’t compete with Twitter not because they weren’t as good but because they didn’t have enough differentiating features to tempt users away. Creating an account elsewhere is easy, persuading your social circle to do the same and rebuild your network elsewhere is not.

Friendfeed was a geeks paradise providing extensive aggregation and allowing for in depth conversations without the restrictions of 140 chracaters. It unfortunately lost steam due to the buyout by Facebook and little (if anything) has changed since. Personally, I see Google Buzz as a direct replacement for Friendfeed. As I have said before, the feeling at Buzz is very similar to Friendfeed in its early days and this type of site – especially with the resources that Google can potentially throw at it – can also survive as, again, it serves a different demographic from the “big two”. It is even preferred if Buzzers do not stream their tweets as the two communities are disctinct and serve different purposes.

Queue Chum.ly

Chum.ly is described by Scoble as a “next-generation microblogging service” but I envisage it really as a direct competitor for Buzz. With the functionality on offer it goes beyond the simple status update and becomes more of a “discussion community”. Again you are not restricted to the 140 character limit elsewhere so can go in depth. The inteface and user experience is currently in its infancy but the core of functionality is already there and is working well.

Chum.ly already has some nice features to differentiate itself from the competiton. I like the way draft posts are handled; not only are they held within a separate “folder” but also retained in situ in your timeline so that you can see them in the context with which you were writing them, surrounded by other posts. In fact “in context” plays a big part on the site. Replies and comments can be seen “in context” where the whole conversation they relate to is displayed in a separate timeline – although a “top-down” view would be nice so that it is easier to read the thread chronologically.

Welcoming

The developers of Chum.ly are an incredibly welcoming lot who are always on the watch for questions you may have about the service and even keener to hear your feedback. They are also very willing to explain why certain features work as they do and, perhaps, not as you might have expected them to. Google may have the vast resource pool but the guys at Chum.ly have an obvious, and infectious, enthusiasm which can go an incredibly long way.

Will Chum.ly be looking to compete with the likes of Twitter and Facebook or will it be aiming to find that niche that remains to be effectively filled by Buzz? Personally I think it is better suited to the latter. There is an emphasis on integration with the likes of Twitter but you have more control over how that integration operates which can only be a good thing.

I think there are good things ahead for Chum.ly and, with the right direction, it could quickly become a major player.

Ever since spending three and a half years doing outsourced support for Microsoft I had always been a “softie” at heart – that much exposure can be akin to brain-washing and we always used to joke that I had an MS barcode on the back of my head. This attitude was very noticeable in that the original “Randomelements :: Blog” was self hosted on one version of Sharepoint or another (wow did it really go back to 2004?)

It was only natural, therefore, to move to the Windows Mobile platform as my smartphone of choice – starting with the Orange SPV550 and moving through a few other phones and OS iterations. Coming from that background I am obviously used to being able to install apps from anywhere so I resisted moving to the iPhone on a point of principal – the closed system with all applications needing to go via the App Store just seemed an unnatural barrier which you shouldn’t need to rely on jailbreaking to get around.

There is not doubt that the iPhone (and now the upcoming version 4) was a gamer changer and a great device but one which didn’t fit my needs or way of doing things. When my HTC Touch Dual finally died (after many, many flashes of custom ROMs) I spent a year with the Nokia XM5800 which, in all fairness, is a great phone but a bit bulky in the pocket so, the time came to move on – Gravity by @janole, however, is an absolute MUST for anyone with a supported S60 device.

Step up Android

I’ll admit that I’m late to the party as far as Android is concerned but maybe that’s for the best. I’ve entered the fold with the OS at v2.1 so never experienced life without multi-touch or the app drawer; instead I have the great looking Sense UI and a very stable, mature operating system at my disposal.

In a way the HTC Sense UI is almost like a homecoming having used TouchFlo/Manilla on Windows Mobile so my new HTC Desire was instantly familiar straight out of the box (OOTB).

Android v iPhone

With the inpending arrival of the iPhone 4, the debate over whether iOS or Android is better has been raging just as furiously as the Mac v PC argument ever did. Nowhere has this been highlighted better than Robert Scoble’s post on Buzz. Robert has been extoling the virues of the Android OOTB experience: “all my contacts, apps, calendar items, and other things automatically synched without hooking it up to anything” but (despite using a gmail account for years) having all of my details in Outlook I did not experience this.

As you would expect, the integration with the key Google applications is pretty much flawless and all achieved by just entering your GMail account details as part of the device setup. Even those apps in beta are seamlessly linked to your GMail account – take Google Listen as a great example.

I’m a big @scottsigler fan (an original junkie) so setting up his podcast in listen was my first priority; after doing so I was surprised, nay, delighted to find that Listen had automatically added it to a “Listen Subscriptions” section in Google Reader. How cool is that?

All change

It is this flawless integration that has prompted me to change the way I do things. I have converted all of my contacts to Google Contacts and – wait for it – completely dumped Outlook as my email client; I just don’t need it any more. Sorry Microsoft!

It really is something to say that a phone has altered my behaviour but there it is. There are a few holes such as the lack of a native file manager but the Android Market is beginning to flourish and is populated with numerous, good quality, free applications to fill these gaps.

Android is here to stay and not just make up the numbers.

Image by scarygami

After Twitter experienced a third outage in less than two weeks – this time due to the “failed enhancement of a new approach to timeline caching” we are left asking ”is it a case of too much too quickly?”

No public service of this magnitude should be expected to be without issues but the recent multiple outages are starting to become a cause for concern amongst social media types. Twitter has a history of having infrastructure issues and the current problems are becoming reminiscent of the torrid time experienced last summer. It currently seems that every time Twitter implements a new feature something else breaks.

Trust

Last year, it took Twitter a long time to re-establish trust in the service after a summer of the Fail Whale. At the time many users were considering leaving and never returning – the feeling that the service could no longer be relied upon was that great with many feeling that they could no longer justify investing their time in something that would just let them down.

If Twitter wants to attract advertisers and become a viable platform for both promoted tweets and for selling spots in trending topics then they need to retain trust and prove that they are stable and that we are not heading back to another summer like last year. No-one wants to risk investing in an advertising platform that will not give a decent ROI due to service down time. A failure to get it right first time will almost certainly kill Twitter’s chances of being given a second bite at the cherry.

What next?

Twitter needs to be completely open and honest about the issues they have been experiencing. This is one area where they do, at least, have the edge over some other services. They are normally pretty quick with an admission that they screwed up – honesty goes a long way but they also need to show that they are learning from their mistakes.

They also need to publicly demonstrate the steps they are taking to increase both capacity and resilience, not just to meet current needs but to also future proof the service considering the current rate of growth and the potential for further impacts due to new functionality.

Finally, Twitter has to demonstrate effective, intelligent decision making; there has been a issue in the past with Twitter’s ability to handle the load from large events – well, they don’t come much bigger than the World Cup. Is it wise to roll out new features during such a time when you have already been exhibiting problems coping?

Too big to fail?

Twitter is being quite aggressive with updates and feature rollouts of late, perhaps a more softly, softly approach might be in order for a while. Implement one thing at a time and let it bed down for a while before thinking about the next thing.

As the other contenders and pretenders fell by the wayside (identi.ca, Plurk etc.) Twitter became the de facto standard for micro-blogging and short status updates. Celebrities reveal their inner most (ofttimes vacuous) thoughts, election campaigns have been staged and fought, and global corporates have been brought to task. Just like the banks Twitter has become too big to fail and, as a company, needs to do everything it can to prevent that from happening.

Standford Smith over at Pushing Social suggested a number of steps to get smaller blogs recognised, and maybe even pushed, by the “Super Influencers.” As he stated in a comment he “realized that most people don’t even do the basics” when it comes to networking and getting themselves out there.

He advocated targetting successful bloggers and his tips included reading their blogs to learn their post style and attending conferences where they are speaking. While, at their root, they were common sense tips I took issue with the way they were presented: becoming what he calls a true fan.

Doing your research is a must but I’m not sure I would couch it in the terms “Memorize the Song Lyrics”; listening to someone talk at a conference can be beneficial but “Attend Every Concert”? I think not. In my comment at the time I referred to the post – somewhat tongue in cheek – as “A social stalker’s charter.”

Discussion & Debate

Steven Hodson, interestingly, wrote of Social Media the day after I made my comment:

It has become a swampland of branding , buzzwords, and self-gratifying back-slapping. The fact is people don’t want to hear dissenting or differing viewpoints that attack their favorite social media totems

He went on to say that if you weren’t willing to “big up” the current social superstars then you will remain anonymous. Whilst I agree with his initial sentiment to a degree I believe that you don’t have to be sycophantic to exert influence.

The social web has – over time – lost most of the initial impetus; there has been a shift in mindset since the halcyon days of the early adopters striving to understand where social media would take us – everyone is now very much accepting of the status quo. The social web has achieved ubiquity (which is what we were all striving for) but now seems to have stagnated. Everyone is thinking ‘how can I use what I have’ rather than ‘how can I get more’ – the thought leaders are now just followers and it seems many of the original ideas have died.

The discussions and debates have been largely replaced with how to crib sheets and social media bibles – my way or the highway, but we need to get back to questioning the current position instead of trying to become clones of the so called experts. Instead, finding our own voices and exploring all other avenues.

Au contraire

You don’t have to be beligerent and disagree out of spite – we all have our opinions. It is the differences which make our social discourse interesting, valuable and fruitful. Even if you may disagree you still need an indepth knowledge of that with which you disagree in order to be able to understand it and better present your own argument. A contrary position is not necessarily a derogatory or aggressive one but, merely, a different opinion.

Social types and bloggers positively encourage comment and must welcome contrary standpoints. Why? They make us either re-affirm our position by having to argue our case or even to persuade us that we were wrong; we must not be afraid to admit this whether we are small time or a six figure blogger.

While we all like to have our egos stroked from time to time the Super Influencers can, just as readily, promote the little by way of intelligent discourse and a back and forth exchange even if you do not see eye to eye.

We do not discover unless we question.

Image by Johnny Grim.