So, I’ve not got round to posting for a little while as I’ve been heading back up to Uni in Leeds and getting into the swing of lectures; plus nothing has hugely caught my attention in the tech world since my post on Google Voice.

I’m now well into the swing of my 3rd year lectures, which cover a wide range of subjects within CS, including Parallel Scientific Computing, Natural Language Processing, Visualization, ‘Big Problems’ and Distributed Systems.  It’s the Distributed Systems angle that I’m thinking about now, having read this post on TC about Twitter.  This guy’s idea is that Twitter should take a new direction and become a service rather than just a site.  He uses that analogy of email and MS Exchange, which apparently makes $2 Billion+ in revenue for Microsoft.  So organisations would be able to license the Twitter technology on their own hosting/servers and have more control over it and, crucially, be responsible themselves for its up-time.

I’ve thought through this, and I think it could work quite well for Twitter, if they could make it work.  I’ve always had reservations about Twitters long term potential.  They have had problems with downtime, there is a lot of spam throughout the network and a lot of people just don’t ‘get it’.  So while a number of companies have some  great success stories (Dell recently announced they had generated several million $s of profit through the site) this could all be based on some of the hype that currently surrounds Twitter, and may well not be sustainable.  Plus, they’re vulnerable to another site/service becoming the ‘latest thing’ (or doing what they do better), a bit like MySpace and Facebook. Don’t get me wrong though, Twitter may still turn out to be very successful (a number of investors will be hoping so, having made investments reportedly valuing the business at $1 Billion) but I think they have work to do and they really need to move forward, sort out the bugs/downtime etc and become more than just ‘a site’.  Decentralisation, as described in the post, may well be part of this, assuming businesses are happy to pay – we’ll just have to wait and see.

I’ve been reading up on the arguments between Google and Apple over Apple’s decision to reject the Google Voice application.  The latest on the story is well documented on other sites (eg here) so I won’t repeat it all in detail.

Basically Apple control every application that can be installed on the iPhone, through their App Store.  Google released an application that makes Google Voice available on the iPhone and submitted it to the App Store.  Apple have now rejected it (allegedly because it replicates core iPhone technology; because it may cut into their market perhaps?) and Google have complained to the FCC.

Apple and Google have both filed their responses to the FCC and this is where it starts getting more messy.  Apple have claimed they did not reject the application, but just haven’t got round to approving it.  Google have claimed the opposite, that the application has been rejected, and they have proof.  And it seems likely that Google are right, as the company behind another similar product have published proof that their application was also rejected.

So it remains to be seen what will happen.  I’m also not sure that Apple’s control over which applications can be installed on an iPhone is a good thing.  I don’t think that Microsoft would get away with controlling what we install on our computers so why should Apple be able to control what we install on our phones?  And if it turns out they have lied to the FCC, there may be more trouble brewing.