Kenneth Chang has written a wonderful story on how Phoenix Lander team is using Twitter.

Dave posted about this development yesterday on Tuesday. Followers take off has been rapid.

I am glad this news demonstrates how new technology is helping NASA connect with younger audience. NASA looks cool and Twitter looks useful to the mainstream.

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Trying to understand evolving signals around silent web. Web which we users leave behind when we share our profile data, friends information and information related to transactional experience.  I think something significant is just around the corner. These signals are coming up in memes such as Implicit Web, Atomization of conversations, Interface for telling and news feeds.

First the idea of Implicit Web, which is a fancy name for a model where systems and online services act on your digital information without explicitly asking for your interaction. Josh Kopelman, First Round VC,  has really amplified core ideas of Implicit Web. He used simple use case to demonstrate how systems are now silently working on our data and creating opportunities for smart orchestrations.

Implicit Web trend received unanimous nod at recent Churchill Club discussion -

Later on Josh expanded on Implicit Web theme by giving examples of “atomization of conversation” meme.

• Why call someone and tell them you're coming to town?  They've seen it on Dopplr. 
• Want to tell someone about your recent trip to England?  Don't bother, they've seen the pictures on Flickr. 
• No need to call me and ask whether the new movie I just saw is any good — you've seen my review on Flickster. 
• Want to know what music I'm listening to right now? — check out iLike.
• Is someone you know suffering from an illness or injury? — stay connected and informed (and offer support) at their Carepage.
  
• Did your friend just open a bottle of wine?  You can stay up to date on what they like (and don't) by following their CellarTracker reviews.
  
• And if that didn't cover it, don't worry, you probably saw it in my Facebook Status updates or Twitter feed.

Online services leveraging user information and then feeding value-addition back in user's social context is what results in atomization of  conversations. Status distribution in lifestreaming format but all acting on the data pool of implicit web. User A saying to User B, just give me your feed and I will know what you are up to!

There are two ends to this. Machine enhanced conversations consumed by my social network and my own intent as smartly captured by new tools.

This discrete transformation of our intent is what is really interesting. Though this drags us into semantic territory. Beauty of this transformation is that it's riding on our natural motivations (What are you doing?) and does not require major format/tag surgery.  It's happening right now under the banner of 140 constraint in Twitter, search-for-interestingness motivation for picture tagging in Flickr or SEO motivation to make sure that the gist of your expression is captured in your blog post title. There are many more examples like that.

What has really expedited the trend towards atomization of conversation is this new input interface, which is greatly influenced by mobile handset constraints.

Interface of constraint, which Cliff Gerrish calls it Interface for telling, is where we are going to see Implicit Web getting most of it’s innovation. I think Cliff's description is by far the best one I have seen in recent time.  This new interface of constraint is really the one which is ensuring best capturing of intent at the entry point. Commonplace expressions like "this restaurant sucks" released from iPhone triggers a chain of event and engages my complete social network. My friends get to see my expression in different contexts - Facebook news feed, Yelp restaurant review, Twitter status, picture in MessageDance so on and so forth. 

Interface of constraint is the starting point of implicit web and this constraint is a business rule which translates user's intent in a flurry of conversations. This is a very significant development and this puts systems like Twitter at the center of next generation computing architecture.  As Adam Green , CEO of Grazr, puts it Twitter is the IBM punchcard of the 21st century.

Implicit web, atomization of conversations, interface for telling and constraint-based read/write designs are all linked. Apply this new understanding in every social applications out there and you will see opportunity for refactoring lot of existing designs, I think that's where you will see, in next 2-3 years, many new startups to come in and create new values. That's where entrepreneurs step in

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More here.

Do you think 3 to 5 years down the road, we will still be using “Social Network” label to define online social activities?

Headline is too strong I think. This article, written by one of my favorite blogger Sramana Mitra, is apparently too high-level. Looks like some editor did a hack job to insert generalizations to make it more appealing to mainstream audience. I am surprised by lack of analysis in this particular post. This is surprising to me as I am a big fan of her strategy posts on her own blog.

I have been on both sides of outsourcing equation, enjoyed hands-on experience and know where it succeeds (or sucks!). Let me try to use my experience to counter broad generalizations made in Forbes article.

Jobs that are low value-added and easily automatable should and will disappear over the next decade.

There are jobs which appear/disappear in every economy. Definition of what constitutes “low value-added” also changes every now and then. Decade is a long time for any company to ignore stock market pressure. Labor-arbitrage element of outsourcing might see slow-down but to say that all these companies do is a low value-added task is a wide brushstroke. Market will pressure these companies to extend labor-arbitrage benefits to more structured and automated-driven labor-arbitrage designs ( Innovative tools in much-ridiculed call center industry is one example. Front end of call center is a fodder for Colbert show but back-end is seeing interesting tools and processes. )

My prediction is as more business functions get “social”, companies will need more manual processes to manage things. Take a simple example of community management. Take a combine toll of Myspace, Facebook, Digg, GetSatisfaction, Yelp, and Techmeme (and not to talk about thousands of niche community sites) on your business bottom line. How are companies going to “man” these destinations to manage their sales and marketing function. I doubt anybody can completely “automate” this task in near future. New jobs will get created here and they will require more people. That’s just one example of how each industry cycle creates new jobs.

However, the reality is that wages are rising in India. The cost advantage for offshoring to India used to be at least 1:6. Today, it is at best 1:3. Attrition is scary

Attrition is really scary. It has hurt us in the past. Cost/margin squeeze will continue just as it will continue for Google or Microsoft. It’s a business cycle phenomena. Blame Schumpeter for that. In outsourcing context, attrition problem goes beyond IT industry, it’s as much a cultural problem. Pavan Verma’s excellent book will give more clue on the attrition problem.

SaaS impact is very interesting. As Sramana mentioned in her previous post. Zoho can beat Salesforce with nearly 1/3rd cost advantage. Combining Amazon EC2/S3 infrastructure with other emerging cloud services, infrastructure part of SaaS will eventually become a commodity. Not very long ago this infrastructure building used to be high value-add activity. Very soon all these offshore companies (not just Indian but rest of the countries as well) will start leveraging SaaS architecture to move into business function. KPO is one example. Companies like GridStone, Amba Research and Zyme Solutions are good examples of next generation outsourcing models.

Attrition is going to make lure of starting outsourcing business in India less appealing. Which is a good thing as other sectors will get well deserved attention.

Yet, India, for all its glory, is still the world’s back office. India’s tech industry is a “services” industry. The Indians don’t do the thinking. The customers do. India executes.

As a result, India has not learned to invent technology products of its own. Barring a few exceptions, the huge amount of venture capital chasing India finds it difficult to be deployed. There is way too much money, way too few deals. Instead, tech-sector VCs are now diverting capital to retail, real estate, hotels and other non-tech sectors.

Broad generalization? Outside Silicon Valley and in some parts of Seattle, Boston (and Israel), world of high tech innovation is just that - world of exceptions! Venture capital business is largely risk capital and it’s still centered around cultures which promote and reward risks. Venture capital deals in India are mostly late stage business deals. One can say they are more like private equity deals. Next generation VCs will see opportunity in emerging cloud architecture economics and find new bets to place.

I am not blindly defending outsourcing industry and I think fear of “creative destruction” should be more prominent . Right now there is lot of complacency. Few months ago I had commented that outsourcing is not right for every company and not many people were happy with that article.

Outsourcing business model is long due for overhaul but to say that they are heading for a cliff is a big stretch. Reality is lot more boring and headline won’t be very attractive. I will keep checking Sramana’s blog for detailed analysis on same topics.

There are tons of literature on why companies go for M&A, this old dot-com era HBS paper outlines leading motivations. If you play these motivations on RPV (resources-processes-values) framework then long term answers can be found. I guess it’s easy to place bets on long term (short term has higher emotional element!). So what are the possible long term trends here -

Enterprise and consumer market separation is not that straight forward anymore. Market has to be redefined, before any competitive barrier strategy can go into implementation. Somewhere down the road enterprise architecture will overlap with cloud computing architecture, and that’s where massive value shift will happen. Or is it already happening?

Media sector has emerged as the net technology play. You cannot think of having any media entity without first figuring out the technical blueprint. Is Google a technology company or a media company?

Battle for developer platform will move to mobile and media verticals.

These three trends are the reason why Microsoft is going after Yahoo. Yahoo gives them traffic, media expertise and good properties to extend into developer market. Google is smart and they are scared now. Timing is not good for them.

Scoble has a well thought out post on this same topic. I like his analysis but I think he is giving too much credit to Google. He writes:

Google doesn’t mind this deal going through at all. Google knows they will be able to outrun a “Microhoo.”

I don’t think that is true. Google’s biggest currency is their stock option. With Microsoft going after Google’s fat margins, they run the risk of spending time to “manage” stock price fluctuations. That will hurt their culture and that will be a huge damage.

Scoble’s point about email is off the mark. Email is still the killer app. His point -

Email is not where the money is. Google knows this. So, who cares that Microsoft and Yahoo have a monopoly there? There’s only one way to make money with the 600 million who are on either Microsoft’s Hotmail or Yahoo’s email: get them to join other services where there ARE ways to make money. Danny Sullivan told me that this deal is all about search. He’s right. But you gotta be able to get those 600 million people to not just use your email, but come over and use your search. Google is trying to slow down these teams from doing that. But Google knows that even if Microsoft and Yahoo join email and do a pretty decent job of integrating search into there that Google will still see more growth in both email and search than Microsoft and Yahoo together will see. Why? Have you compared Google’s offerings to the others? I have (I am a Hotmail user). Even though I am locked into Hotmail cause my email address is all over the Web I’d rather be on Gmail and Google’s offerings are better integrated and better designed.

There are several trends making email a factor in the Microsoft/Yahoo transaction-

There is still a very strong motivation to start daily information consumption cycle with email (yes sometimes before morning leak!). Any idea how much money Google makes every time you open Gmail? Nobody wakes up in the morning to go and hit Google for search. There is no motivation there. Email brings motivation.

Also users read their email slowly (read more attention to whatever ad you might have on sidebars) , whereas on search pages/content sites we all become scroll monkeys. This is an important distinction and will become important as marketers draw user attention graph and place their budget accordingly.

Without email, there will be less motivation for making search queries. Same as first point. If my motivation and context is not overlapping, I will generate less queries. Less search queries for Google means bad news.

As I said in the beginning, big companies are complex and things they do are more complex.

There will be lot of point counter point between Google and Microsoft. I am keeping my eye on two things here - how this will play out on Google stock and also impact on the overall startup funding climate.

Email hasn’t changed significantly in years. As I’ve written previously, there’s a huge opportunity in building a next generation address book. (Doc Searls calls this Vendor Relationship Management. I prefer the term Personal Relationship Management.) I want tools that augment my ability to remember, manage, and communicate with all the people I deal with every day, in both personal and business contexts.

If Microsoft does consummate this merger (and I understand from the scuttlebutt that Yahoo! does consider it a hostile takeover), the surest way NOT to profit from it is by focusing on the areas where Google is already the strongest. Microsoft needs to invest in the future of applications where Microsoft and Yahoo! are strongest, and where there is significant opportunity for innovation. Email and other messaging platforms meet these criteria.

Email is a simple tool which everybody understands. Big companies go for volume play in whatever initiatives they undertake. That’s another reason why smart money will stay away from concept-of-the-week (read Google Social Graph API - I am keeping it next to Google Base API, Search API and Open Social API!) and focus more on volume play based on real adoption. When it comes to volume play, email is still the king!

Twitter ecosystem is a best example of that model and if you want to see the future of software development then just follow Twitter. Robust API, hundreds of clients, open attitude (as against open source - too many colors there!) and in general good karma. All people talk about is the lack of stability in Twitter infrastructure, but bigger story around extensive third party application support. Are we seeing next generation infrastructure in the way Twitter is evolving? Shaky, error-prone in the begining but serving the non-consumption market? Classic Christensen case study? Who knows? I like what I am seeing in Twitter ecosystem.

LiveSide’s quote by Ray Ozzie is in some ways defining Twitter’s (accidentally, I doubt they planned it) evolving messaging architecture -

“The operating system as it would be designed for today’s multi-PC, multi-device, work anywhere, web-based world. Enabling you to login using any of your service-based or enterprise identities. Deploying software automatically and as appropriate to all your devices, and roaming application data and settings. Permitting seamless access to storage across all your PCs, devices, servers and the web”

At MessageDance we are obsessed about connecting email messages with emerging cloud architecture in new ways. That includes adhoc store-and-forward transient persistence as well. For example if Twitter goes down ( they have a planned maintenance window later in the evening), you can still use Twitter from MessageDance! If you are using Twitter via MessageDance (more details here), you can configure all your tweets to be stored in MessageDance during Twitter downtime. Next time Twitter comes back online, MessageDance will publish your posts to Twitter. We restore your Twittering experience.

I believe we will see more and more of this model where all API users share the responsibility of ensuring consistent user experience across cloud. Tribler looks very interesting as a startup pursuing this vision.