Author: Marshall Kirkpatrick

The U.S. Library of Congress announced this morning via its official Twitter account that it will be acquiring the entire archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. In addition to a massive printed collection, the Library already has an extensive collection of other digital assets. The Library of Congress is the biggest library in the world.

The Library does extensive work with data format standards, the semantic Web and other platforms for outside analysis. The addition of Twitter into the organization’s offerings could foster an enormous amount of academic research. From a new kind of historical record to an unprecedented opportunity for discovering patterns of social interaction, this is big.

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When the Library of Congress was founded in the year 1800, publishing was very expensive and relatively few people did it. Today, thanks to blogs, YouTube, Facebook and certainly Twitter it’s a new world. Publishing is far faster, easier and more accessible today than at any point in human history. That might seem obvious, but on a day like today it’s worth thinking about some more.

For now there are more questions than answers with regards to this Library of Congress Twitter news. Will the archive include friend/follower connection data? Will it be usable for commercial purposes? Will there be a Web interface for searching it, and will that change the face of Twitter search for good? Is there any way that the much larger archive of Facebook data could be submitted to the same body for analysis of the same kind?

These kinds of large data sets are poised to become one of the most important resources the Internet creates. As Kenneth Cukier wrote in The Economist’s recent Special Report on Big Data, “Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour.”

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said today that there are 105 million registered users on the service. How will those users feel about their tweets being archived for posterity? Will non-U.S. users be included (it is a U.S. based company) and object? Lots of questions remain.

There’s no word from Twitter itself about this news but we expect details to become public during the Chirp developers conference starting in just a few minutes. Update: Twitter HQ just told us that a blog post about this news is forthcoming.

It’s hard to imagine a more significant milepost in social media’s early march toward becoming an essential component of our social experience.

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Google today launched a video creation tool called Search Stories. It’s a very lightweight little Flash tool to put together a little YouTube video of a number of search queries set to music. It’s mildly amusing but not really useful.

If you’ve seen LMGTFY (You haven’t? Well, LMGTFY) this is just like it, but with less snark and more apparent effort to engage users. I’m trying to have a sense of humor about it, but it’s hard. See my handy-work below. On the spectrum of sophistication among read/write publishing innovations, this one will help define the spread.

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Google’s explanatory video below. Note that you can’t really make anything like this using the tool. It’s a cute video, though.

Chirp , Twitter’s big developer conference, begins tomorrow in San Francisco but if you can’t make it, you can still see all the big announcements, hot debates and whatever else might happen streaming live on the web thanks to Justin.tv.

As tech investor Chris Dixon said on Twitter this morning, the Twitter drama that’s unfolding is fascinating because it’s a struggle between a product that wants to be an open protocol and a company that wants a return on more than $100 million in venture financing. You might find that drama interesting, or you might just be excited to see cool stuff get announced. Either way, it’s great news that the rest of the world will get to watch live online.

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Bookmark the Chirp Live page on Twitter or on Justin.tv (for chat). The event begins at 9 am PST tomorrow.

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Why do people care how Twitter will make money? “We won’t know where we, the users, fit in — until they tell us how they’re going to make money,” Dave Winer wrote a year ago this week, “And when they tell us, we may not like it.” That’s one reason why people care how Twitter makes money.

Whether you’re a person concerned that the popular social network you’re investing your time and energy in might monetize in an anti-social way, or you’re a skeptic who refuses to believe that the world-changing potential of Twitter is real until it proves itself economically viable – you probably heard that Twitter announced tonight it’s got a plan for advertisements. You can breathe a sigh of relief; the plan is downright boring, just as it should be.

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Advertisements will begin in search, with keywords being bid on and a single advertisement appearing with frequency dependent on its performance. Then the ads will be extended to 3rd party applications like TweetDeck and others. It’s unclear who will use it, Tweetie got bought by Twitter last week and Twitterific has its own ads, but other apps will come and go, hopefully given the option (not the requirement) to show Twitter ads to their users.

Finally, ads will begin to appear on Twitter.com, tailored to the interests of users, as easily observed by their messages published and received.

This is great: it’s relatively non-invasive, nothing too crazy, nothing terribly exploitive. Some people who insist on reading every Tweet in their stream will probably be annoyed once they find ads in it, but there are already lots of unofficial ads being published on Twitter and maybe this will break those people of the habit of obsessing over every little message.

This is surely not the intention behind the plan, Twitter HQ itself is full of people who spend time carefully pruning their streams. Twitter’s new head of PR Sean Garrett, for example, quit following NBC’s @newmediajim and media analyst Shelly Palmer last week, something it’s hard to imagine him doing for any reason other than concern about signal-to-noise ratio and an unhealthy concern with reading every one of the Tweets in his stream.

But the point is this: it appears that no baby animals will be hurt in the making of the Twitter.

Along with the big search deals with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, and the forthcoming availability of power Commercial Accounts, Twitter seems to have found relatively non-violent ways to monetize. As long as the firehose of user activity data is in fact made more widely available and not kept from small innovators, and as long as regular accounts aren’t handicapped in order to make commercial accounts more appealing – then these three plans together look pretty good.

It’s not banner ads, it’s not sales of data to direct marketers, it’s not licensing access to Direct Messages to the CIA. Twitter is at its best when it keeps things simple, when it stays out of the way and acts like a dumb, if textured, pipe. Put a contextual ad up to keep the lights on, what do I care?

It’s entirely predictable, shouldn’t hurt too much and might even work. As Liz Gannes said so well in her headline at Gigaom tonight: “The Twitter Ad Model Revealed (What Were You Expecting, a Pony?)”

Update: Twitter’s Biz Stone posted to the company’s blog about this at one minute after midnight. He didn’t say much that was new but he did title the post “Hello World,” implying that this is in some ways the real beginning for Twitter.

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Before tonight there were probably 30 to 50 teams making a serious play to build the best mobile client for Twitter. Tonight one of those teams was annointed the official selection of Twitter itself and its leader at least is now a millionaire.

People are saying that the acquisition of Tweetie by Twitter is bad news for the ecosystem of 3rd party developers that made Twitter so much more useful for millions of people. In truth though, those odds were pretty good for all of them. Tonight’s news demonstrates again that independent developers can code their way into cash, equity and a job at one of the hottest startups on the web. That bodes well for those of us who love to use the software built by all of them, too.

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Tweetie developer Loren Brichter is just 4 years out of college. He graduated from Tufts in 2006 and got a job doing embedded graphics and iPhone development for Apple through July, 2007. That month, the iPhone 3G was released and that year Time Magazine named it the invention of the year. After more than a year of development Tweetie was launched in November, 2008. Less than 18 months later Brichter and Twitter announced tonight that Tweetie has been acquired and will become “Twitter for iPhone.”

Between cash and equity, Brichter must be a millionaire on paper at least. Brichter’s one employee is Ash Ponders, who is in Spain and isn’t saying anything on Twitter tonight. These guys built a service that won the big contest. If there were (and this is generous) 50 viable mobile Twitter clients – do you really think any of them launched this kind of business expecting better odds than that?

There are a number of other companies that could have become the official mobile app for Twitter but at this stage of the game Tweetie was an obvious choice. It loads fast, is relatively feature rich, is attractively designed and has proven popular with users.

Tweetie offers an attractive and simple desktop Twitter client, but was most valued for its iPhone version. Its strongest competitors were Twitterific, Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Twitterific is beautiful and perhaps a viable ad-supported small business but is too complicated to be appreciated by all but power users. (It’s great on the iPad though.) Seesmic is strong on the smaller Android platform and is extending beyond Twitter alone.

Tweetdeck is the most powerful 3rd party Twitter app but it has higher aspirations, is exploring development of sophisticated Artificial Intelligence, is more complex than mainstream users need and is most likely to be bought by an enterprise, media or financial services company – not Twitter itself.

Tweetie is the everyperson’s Twitter app. Twitter is chronically confusing for mainstream users, something the company has been trying desperately to change. If you are looking for a simple, attractive Twitter app for casual use then Tweetie on the desktop works great. When you’re on a mobile phone, that’s really all you ever need. In his blog post tonight Loren Brichter mentioned “simplifying the Twitter experience.” That’s something Twitter needs and something he’s very qualified to help do.

There is still a place for other, more complex, Twitter apps. Media companies around the world (including this one) are finding Tweetdeck invaluable in carefully parsing the stream of Tweets for high-value nuggets. Seesmic is believed to be working closely with Microsoft in order to bring social media stream reading to all kinds of different platforms.

But tonight one of the many Twitter apps hit it big. That’s good news for app developers in general and for the users who would use their software. Go ahead and build a client for a major social network. Odds are it won’t prove a viable business, but if you were risk averse then building a Twitter client startup is probably the last thing on earth you’d do anyway. The fairy tale came true for one of these companies. That’s reason enough for many more developers to build many more innovative apps in the future.

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The long-closed nature of Apple’s iPhone OS ecosystem is coming to a head with the addition of major new restrictions on developers. If there ever was a time when the Android world had a chance to out-innovate Apple, this could be it.

Each day this week, developers have pointed out another indignity Apple’s legal framework subjects them to. Could this be the pressure that gets resolved by the rise of a compelling Android offering? It seems like a long shot.

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People creating applications on the iPhone and iPad platform are apparently no longer allowed to build in development environments abstracted from the preferred form of code, 3rd party analytics services are believed to be no longer allowed to track use of apps, Apple has baked in its own advertising platform and the essential requirement of winning Apple’s permission to deploy apps on its platform is feeling more onerous every day.  

At the same time, no one else has come close to building a User Experience that can rival the iPhone and iPad.  If someone could, a grand battle could emerge.  Instead, right now it’s looking ugly. On the positive side, the number of Android applications is growing faster and faster.

The Anguish

Prominant iPhone developer Dan Grigsby articulated today what could become an increasingly common sentiment in a goodbye post announcing the closure of his popular iPhone development blog Mobile Orchard:

Ask permission environments crush creativity and innovation. In healthy environments, when would-be innovators/creators identify opportunities the only thing that stands between the idea and its realization is work. In the iPhone OS environment when you see an opportunity, you put in work first, ask Apple’s permission and then, only after gaining their approval, your idea can be realized.

I’ve always worked at the edge; it’s where the interesting opportunities live. None of the startup I’ve created would have been possible in an ask permission environment…. I won’t work in this ask-permission environment any longer.

As Google’s Chris Messina put it well in some poignant speculation this afternoon, “It occurs to me that Apple is crossing a chasm. To where, I don’t know. But its early proponents seem to be being left behind.”

Another Perspective: Despite Its Problems, Apple’s Ecosystem Remains the Best

Raven Zachary, President of leading iPhone development shop Small Society, offers another perspective.

Android needs a better OS before we’d even begin to see iPhone developers leave. I didn’t fall in love with iPhone OS due to the elegance of Apple’s legal terms. It’s the platform that I fell in love with. It’s the best mobile platform out there, and while I appreciate the analysis by the community and the hard questions being asked, I remain committed to the iPhone platform.

Of course the most probable outcome of all this is that most developers will stay where the users, the money and the best user experience are. Some will be unhappy and some will leave – but probably not enough for consumers to notice.

If only someone could build an Android device that rivaled Apple’s hardware, and if the issues with different versions of Android across devices could be fixed, if the Android OS was just betteer – then there would be an incredible opportunity to lure away developers and finally get more users drawn to their applications. The iPad is really incredible though and there are a whole lot of very big “ifs” in play.

An effective challenge by Android sure feels like a long-shot right now, doesn’t it?

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Apple unveiled the 4.0 version of the iPhone operating system yesterday and a big part of the announcement was about a new advertising platform called iAd. Apple will soon provide an easy way for app developers to put advertisements in their mobile apps and keep 60% of the revenue.

Tech financial analysts are going bonkers over the news, with one headline-grabbing prediction putting the opportunity at $4.67 billion per year for Apple. Why? Because the platform has the potential to change online advertising like nothing else has in a long time.

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Cullen Wilson offers this explanation on the Austin Startup Blog:

The reason iAd has a chance to change how users interact with ads is simple: The fear and unknown of clicking on an ad is gone. Apple is throwing its brand behind an entire ad network to create the perception that if you trust Apple, you can trust these ads too! Worried about installing malware from clicking on that ad? Hate that ads open up a new window? No problem, Apple has solved this by keeping these ads within the app itself and vetting all of the ads on their network.

iAd reminds me of two ad networks I’m already a fan of, The Deck and Fusion Ads. Their ads are well designed, they advertise in applications I use and love, and they vet everyone on the network before accepting them. If you’ve ever used the free Twitter clients Tweetie or Twitterrific, you’ve seen these ads.

If Apple can convince its users that it’s safe to click anything with the iAd logo they will have single handedly changed the perception users have of ads, resulting in more clicks and more money made by both Apple and developers.

They will have done this by taking advantage of a closed system, their own brand, and a platform that their users already love (the app store).

The iPad is clearly changing peoples’ experience with computing – take one out around non-geeks and you’ll see strangers clamor to get their hands on it. But if Apple can transform mobile advertising from an annoyance to a trusted, appealing experience – that would be huge. The iAd platform could impact advertising more than the iPad impacts computing. It may very well generate more revenue, too.

Wilson points out that though many people complain about the closed nature of the App Store, this is the other side of the coin and is worth considering. One question I have about this is how scalable vetting such a huge ad platform could be. Where there’s money to be printed, there must be money to pay ad examiners, though.

If the platform can prove effective and make app building all the more financially viable, then we as users can cheer for a new world of apps that will be built in the future. If Apple can deliver a high-quality experience on the iAd platform, then we as users can cheer for a less grating experience than a wild west of mobile advertising would likely deliver. There is something a little frightening about Apple’s end-to-end control over the platform though, isn’t there?

What do you think about iAd? Do you think it will be effective? Revolutionary? Do you think it’s fair?

Discuss

Link blogs, light blogs, blogs on the side; found treasures and half-formed thoughts – it turns out that many members of the ReadWriteWeb team are also publishing on Posterous, Tumblr and other casual blogging platforms.

These are the places you can learn about the people behind the news and analysis here at ReadWriteWeb. Where you can find cool little videos and images that we want to share but that don’t cross the thresh-hold for full-scale RWW blogging. Publishing and reading on these platforms is a lot of fun. We’ve listed some of the fun blogs published by members of our team below. We’d love for our readers to share links to your sites like this if you have them.

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Richard MacManus, our Founder and Editor, writes about his travels outside his home in New Zealand, music, books and art using the Soup.io platform at VelvetsFan.com.

I, Marshall Kirkpatrick, maintain a Posterous blog at Marshallk.posterous.com. I post a lot from my phone there, I post images and random thoughts about life in Portland, Oregon, my chickens and the tech news industry.

Morning writer in Florida Sarah Perez uses Tumblr at sarahintampa.tumblr.com to post “random pictures, videos and infographics I come across on the web,” she says.

Portland based morning news writer Frederic Lardinois scored the cool domain DishWasherOnMars and uses it to post “stuff I don’t get to blog about and that I want to share with my Twitter followers.”

Morning news writer Mike Melanson records his experiences as a hyper-mobile blogger in Austin, Texas on his Posterous blog.

RWW’s webmaster Jared Smith shares “(hopefully) useful tidbits about Web development, UX, and other geeky pursuits” on his Posterous from Charleston, South Carolina.

Portland based Enterprise and ReadWriteCloud writer Alex Williams uses Tumblr at AlexHWilliams.com. “Hazard is my middle name,” he says and he’s not kidding, it really is. He calls it “my place to feed my personal interests.”

Production Editor Abraham Hyatt is in Portland, too and publishes “just your run-of-the-mill photo blog” on his Posterous.

Eugene, Oregon based research team member and ReadWriteStart contributor Audrey Watters uses Posterous too. She says it’s “where I post my ideas too long for twitter and too malformed for my blog.”

Portland-based Justin Houk, a member of the research team here as well, calls GeoPDX.net his “say anything, speak my mind, and voices in my head blog.”

How about you, dear readers? Where is the ReadWriteWeb community posting their found items, fleeting thoughts and other curated digital ephemera? We’d love to know, so share your link in comments below. We’d love to know what these services mean to you, too.

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Location based social network Gowalla quietly released a big new feature today: real-time PubSubHubbub feeds for check-ins by people and at locations. Hello, mashups and 3rd party apps of the future!

In addition to being real-time and easy to access, Gowalla’s new feeds are also marked-up with the beginnings of the widely used Activity Streams format. Put all of this together and Gowalla to Google Buzz is one obvious connection, but the possibilities are endless.

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For comparison, much larger competitor FourSquare offers private user-specific RSS feeds, which are slower and much more limited. It also offers powerful analytics for business owners about who checks in at their venue. The relative value of both systems for developers is debatable, but Gowalla’s new feature is clearly very nice.

These new Atom feeds from Gowalla can be remixed by anyone, though – not just developers. For example, I plan to run the feeds from a few coffee shops down the street from my house through an alert service so I can know who’s hanging out in the neighborhood.

I expect we’ll find out even more about what could be done with these feeds once they are officially announced. The Hub page says the feature is delivered by Superfeedr, so presumably the feeds will grow more sophisticated as Superfeedr continues to add new features as well.

Mashups artists make the coolest things possible. If you like listening to music on Pandora, why not share your favorite songs with your Twitter friends as well? Dora.fm is a mashup of Pandora, Twitter and link-shortener Bit.ly built by Isaac Salier-Hellendag.

This is just one of many mashups built using the Bit.ly Application Programming Interface, which recently saw a substantial upgrade.

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Local business review site Yelp held a press phone call this morning to discuss major changes it’s making to its site and business. Faced with class action lawsuits by business owners alleging they’ve been extorted by Yelp, the service has decided to make filtered-out reviews publicly visible and has removed the option for advertisers to push their favorite review to the top of their business’s page.

Did Yelp just cry Uncle? Is this the beginning of the end for its most important revenue stream, as some have argued? Here’s what we found most interesting about the call today.

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Yelp Gets Hit Hard With Questionable Reviews

Surprise, surprise – there are a lot of people out there who appear to be trying to game Yelp. This morning the company added a link at the bottom of each business’s page to “filtered reviews.” Those are the ones that the Yelp algorithm determined weren’t trustworthy enough to display on the site. They used to just disappear into a mysterious black hole, something many people found suspicious. Now you can look at them, and most of the time you can see why the reviews were yanked. There are a lot of them, too.

CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said he hoped exposing these buried reviews would put to rest the “myth” that the company buries positive reviews if companies don’t buy advertising and will give site users a chance to see the “unique challenge we face.”

Did Yelp Just Kill The Golden Goose?

Some critics have alleged that the ability to put favorite reviews on top of the page was the most compelling thing Yelp had to offer advertisers. The new video slideshows aren’t nearly as compelling as highlighting the good news and pushing down the bad news, they say.

Stoppelman offered a relatively convincing response to that when we asked him about it. He said that search placement is actually the biggest thing advertisers are paying for. “Favorite reviews” have limited draw, he said, because the site’s natural Yelp Sort algorithm already displays reviews with a businesses’s average rating or better at the top of the page automatically. He also said that round tables of business owners across multiple cities identified video advertising as the best possible substitute for the feature. Consider me convinced.

Complainers Are Just Complaining

Are businesses that complain about Yelp just upset that Stoppelman has built such a compelling site they feel obligated to advertise there, we asked? The Yelp CEO said in response that many small businesses are used to advertising in the newspaper and on radio and that the traditional local advertising market has been disrupted by Yelp. “Yelp represents a shift in the local business landscape,” Stoppelman said. “When those shifts happen, you’ll see some people lose out and then they’ll register their complaints.”

Do Yelp sales people pressure local business owners into advertising on the site? Do they wield the relative placement of positive and negative reviews like a weapon? It’s hard to know what goes on in those conversations, but there are certainly countless business owners who are accustomed to paying for pure positivity in the form of traditional advertising and for whom the presence or risk of negative feedback on a site like Yelp is alarming to the core. As Craigslist founder Craig Newmark said in a blog post today, “By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power.” That’s where Yelp operates and it represents a change in the world.

Yelp’s changes today seem like wise ones to me. This kind of transparency is likely to be helpful as the world of local business becomes more complicated thanks to the internet.

Discuss

“It’s not about the value of the task, it’s about the value of me not having to do it, or even think about it anymore.” That’s how Ted Roden describes Fancy Hands, his new side project that provides virtual personal assistants in the cloud for a low monthly fee.

Need an appointment made for you? Research done on Fantasy Baseball players you might want to draft onto your team? Roden has hired more than 100 people based in the US and England who can perform almost any quick, legal task for you, within minutes, at any hour day or night. You can send them 15 emails with task requests per month for a $30 fee. An algorithm sorts the tasks and routes each one to the most appropriate person.

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Roden says the people he’s hired include retired lawyers, actors waiting with time to spare before going on camera and former employees of competitor ChaCha. He wrote a program to sift through piles of applications and plans on using the company’s own service providers to select new hires in the future as well.

Roden himself has a day job in the R&D department of the New York Times. He’s a creative dynamo whose energy spills out in side projects like the visually compelling social bookmarking service EnjoysThin.gs and an O’Reilly book about building real-time websites, due out this Summer. Previously, he was the 2nd full-time programmer at art-video portal Vimeo.

Roden says he built Fancy Hands because he wanted to build something big. He calls it that just because it was the filename for his first bit of code, a tradition across all his projects. He’s bootstrapping it himself “and my wife says it’s ok,” he says.

Casting The Tasks

Fancy Hands is easy for customers to use. I asked the service to find where in town I could buy a “sweater bag” to run sweaters through the washing machine and got a great response, complete with multiple options online and a personal recommendation, within an hour. I asked for links to reviews of iPad RSS reading applications and the first response I got was terrible. I emailed back complaining and the person on the other end sent me back something even worse. Then Roden noticed and reassigned the request to someone who filled it beautifully.

Roden says that for now he’s doing the quality control himself and generally well after the tasks have been completed. He’s got a complex series of tubes and pulleys rigged up to sort tasks, though. He calls it “the eHarmony of Getting Things Done.”

In that way it’s a little reminiscent of Aardvark, the social search startup that began as a human bucket brigade behind a facade of technology and ended up a complex web of computer science that Google acquired this Winter for millions of dollars.

At its core Fancy Hands is people, though. And the people are paid by the task. Roden has created a system that ranks tasks by complexity and rewards assistants with higher pay when they complete harder tasks. Once they reach a particular pay grade, all their tasks become better paying, thus incentivizing them to dive in to harder and harder work.

The people behind the scenes are often surprisingly enthusiastic. Roden says that compared to other, similar systems, Fancy Hands is more affordable, competitive on speed and often surprisingly superior in quality of results. At least at launch, the people he’s hired seem relatively interested in the project and the work.

This afternoon I asked Fancy Hands to make me an appointment with “Bob’s Heating System Repair” and gave it my own phone number to call, just to see how it went down. I answered my next inbound call with “hello, Bob’s heating repair, this is Bob.” And went through a few minutes of appointment conversation before telling the virtual assistant what I was really doing. I think he felt a little bit toyed with, but he was very professional before and after I disclosed my true identity.

He said he had interacted just a little bit with Ted and that he was very interested to see what kind of research he would be tasked with doing. He was very cautious about telling me anything specific about what the system was like on his end because “we’re a brand new company, just starting.” I thought it was charming that one of the 100 people hired to do tasks for a fee felt so closely associated with the business.

These Hands Are Fancy

People familiar with this kind of “human powered micro-outsourcing” will no doubt be familiar with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. All kinds of businesses bid for Turk users to perform rapid little tasks that require just a touch of human intelligence. Spammers pay Turkers to leave spammy spam around the web, podcasters pay Turkers to transcribe tiny fragments of audio files, businesses like Citysearch and Yelp pay Turkers to confirm changes to local business listings submitted by users. It’s a big business, a platform that other businesses are being built on top of.

These services can be taken too far, of course. Author Tim Ferriss famously paid a team of assistants to pretend to be him on dating websites. They vetted women for intelligence and appearance before scheduling a day full of short first dates all in a row. That’s just dishonest, an interpersonal crime of convenience.

There’s something both more and less human about what Fancy Hands is doing, though. Its algorithmic task sorting could become very complex but the people on both ends are more invested, too. Roden says his model of $30 for 15 tasks per month makes people stop and ponder whether a task is really one they want to expend part of their monthly subscription on. There’s something intriguing about that.

For himself, Ted Roden has a simple rule for using the system he built. “If I think about anything twice, I just put it into Fancy Hands,” he says. It will be interesting to see how often his customers think about Fancy Hands and whether enough of them will renew their subscriptions to make this a sustainable service. If nothing else, this mix of human and machine is thought provoking, and perhaps prescient, in the way it strategically blends the online and offline worlds.

Photo by Justin Ouellette.

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The iPad makes a perfect coffee table book and photo browser but a new application called Art Authority sends the touchscreen interface back through centuries of humanity’s finest imagery.

Built by 1980’s Apple engineer Alan Oppenheimer, Art Authority (iTunes link, $9.99) is a beautiful way to get some art education and ponder the human condition while flipping through more than 40,000 historic works of art on your iPad. Oppenheimer calls the app a public domain and web art browser. It makes good use of Wikipedia, has a great breadth of Western art and is the kind of app that just makes sense for this platform.

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The app isn’t perfect, Oppenheimer reminds us almost no one has developed iPad apps on a real iPad yet, but it’s pretty good and will presumably get better. If you need a guaranteed 100% crash-free experience for viewing Van Gogh and Botticelli in your lap, you may want to wait a while on this app. It’s not a big deal, though. The resolution of the art ranges from fabulous and sharp to a little disappointing, but is generally satisfactory.

Some additional settings would be nice; like the ability to change the duration of caption overlays and to save favorite artists and images in the app for later enjoyment. Artists from outside the Western world and a better sculpture section would be great, too.

The iPad’s interface is just big enough and just sharp enough, and these images are just clear enough, that it can be frustrating to be so close and yet so far away from the art. It certainly isn’t the same as standing in front of the great paintings of the world – but let’s not fool ourselves: browsing the world’s museums in your lap is an experience unlike any other and is not to be missed. Personal computing has come a long way in a hurry if our expectations can be higher still for a whirl-wind tour of centuries of human expression. You’ll definitely get more than $10 worth of art appreciation and personal growth out of this app as it is already.

Discuss

Google and 45 other organizations have sent a public letter to President Barack Obama calling for federal support for technology and education that would give consumers access to information about their energy consumption and give companies the ability to build applications on top of that information.

Google, AT&T, General Electric, Intel, The Climate Group and the Natural Resources Defense Council and others will hold an event tomorrow titled “Power in Numbers: Unleashing Innovation in Home Energy Use.”

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“By giving people the ability to monitor and manage their energy consumption, for instance, via their computers, phones or other devices,” the group wrote in its letter to the President, “we can unleash the forces of innovation in homes and businesses.”

Substantial challenges stand in the way of widespread smart-grid innovation. We highlighted a write-up by green tech reporter Katie Fehrenbacher last year that discussed the foot dragging going on in the world of local utility providers. (Why Smart Grids Could Be Slow to Beat Web 2.0) Fehrenbacher argued that utility companies don’t get it, are afraid of the costs, and are thus unlikely to offer the kind of “real time” data delivery that could serve as a foundation for eye-opening innovation like we’ve seen from the networked world of the Internet.

Fehrenbacher wrote last year.

Many people (myself included) have painted a picture of how the consumer piece of the smart grid could develop into a real-time, two-way communication network that looks a lot like the Internet. In that world, consumers would be able to see variable pricing change in real time, while smart meters and energy management devices read and visualize energy consumption data every second, leading to changes in consumer behavior. The ultimate vision of that landscape is that real-time energy data unleashes innovations and applications that we haven’t yet thought of, which will deliver substantial behavior changes.
Well, that’s the outcome for which entrepreneurs and innovators are hoping. The reality is that the consumer piece of the smart grid will look very different for many years to come.

Perhaps a large coalition of organizations can prompt meaningful government support that will engage with these and other obstacles to energy data innovation.

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The first version of the iPad doesn’t support app multi-tasking but a Portugese firm called ElasticFiction has won Apple’s approval to sell a split screen browser that will allow users to listen to music and watch videos while browsing other web pages by placing two browser screens side by side each other at the same time.

Called SplitBrowser (iTunes link), the app will play MP3 files and HTML5 videos and sells for $1.99. Check out the screencast below and imagine what you could do with two browser windows open at once on the iPad.

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It’s little innovations like this that will deliver experiences that are hard to forecast before the launch of this big new touchscreen interface.

As Doc Searls wrote this morning:

The iPad will arrive in the market with an advantage no other completely new computing device for the mass market has ever enjoyed: the ability to run a 100,000-app portfolio that’s already developed, in this case for the iPhone. Unless the iPad is an outright lemon, this alone should assure its success.

Take that same developer platform and give it a new interface like the iPad’s, though, and you’ll see apps get developed that wouldn’t have made sense on the iPhone. Like a split screen browser.

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When people talk about managing communities in this new online world, one name is mentioned more often and with more respect than any other: Heather Champ of Flickr. Today Champ announced that after nearly 5 years and more than 4 billion photos uploaded, she is leaving Flickr to start a community management consultancy called Fertile Medium.

Flickr went from a Canadian social gaming company in 2004 to a photo sharing service to a Yahoo! acquisition in 2005. 3 years ago next month, Yahoo! shut down its giant Yahoo! Photos service and moved everyone over to Flickr instead.

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Champ put her work in perspective on a blog post that included the following:

“How do you take a community the size of small town to the size of a nation? How do you grow a site that began in one region and make it truly global by adding languages and localizing in what’s now 25 countries? How do you apply a content filtering system to a living site to ensure that members can be respectful of one another but still share the greatest variety of content? These are some of the big hairy challenges.”

Just as most of Yahoo! has, Flickr has seen budget challenges as well. A substantial number of the Flickr team members were laid off one year ago this month.

Facebook has long been larger and now sees almost an entire Flickr’s-worth of photos (3 billion) uploaded to that social network every month. As Facebook pushes its users more and more public with their content, it would be well served by paying attention to what Champ did at Flickr. The succinct and oft-learned from community guidelines at Flickr are among the work that Champ says she has been most proud of.

Those challenges were experienced at Flickr in some of the earliest days of what’s now called “social media” and Champ helped forge best practices that have served as a foundation for communities all over the web ever since.

Photo by Beth Kanter.

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The latest in the wave of special iPad versions of your favorite apps? Gmail. Built on the year-old HTML5 Gmail web app for the iPhone, the Gmail for iPad sports a double column display and looks great with whole threads unfurled. “Tablets like the iPad give us even more room to innovate,” the Gmail team said today.

We look forward to using other Google Apps on the iPad, too. Sometimes little things like far more screen real estate and touchscreen interactivity aren’t so little at all.

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We expect to see some fundamental interface and user experience innovations come out of this new way to use apps. Even subtle changes like Gmail’s looks exciting, though.

The use of HTML5 by web apps, which supports local caching of data for fast access, will take the mobile web or native app debate to a whole new level on the iPad.

See also: Lifehaker on how to change your browser user agent to iPad and get this interface on any other computer.

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I waited for a year to get an iPhone, and I lost out on a year’s worth of opportunities to use one as a result. I have one now and I still marvel at it almost every time I touch it. I expect to have a similar experience with the iPad – so I’m not going to wait. I want a full touchscreen, app-rich experience now.

The iPad may be better for content consumption than creation, but I’m not ashamed to say I like to consume content with a good portion of my time. (Thanks for reading this blog I write on for a living, by the way, content consumers!) The experience may be better in a year, but I’m willing to pay for 70% of the ideal functionality today instead of getting nothing for a year. Here’s what I’m excited to use it for.

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This post is part of a pro/con series written with ReadWriteWeb’s Mike Melanson. Click here to read his counter-point article iPad Schmipad: Who Needs Another Device?

I just flew across the country twice in two days. I had a great time reading content I saved on Instapaper on my phone and paying a couple of games of a great little baseball app. Both of those are going to be way cooler on a full iPad screen. Gaming is going to be incredible – and there’s going to be a whole lot of games.

I look forward to using Tweetdeck on the iPad, the big touch screen is going to be great for the multi-column display of groups of Tweets.

Mind mapping on the iPad is going to be great: dragging around nodes of related thoughts, visualizing interconnected concepts. Outlining ideas, dragging items from section to section and then emailing the outlines to computer in OPML format. Give me multitasking soon so I can listen to Pandora while doing that and I’ll be even more excited.

Do I look forward to seeing newspapers and magazines compete for my attention with their iPad apps? Oh yes, I sure do. My new favorite hyper-local news website Everyblock Portland is going to feel like such a futuristic news rag on a tablet that I might ask my dog to bring it to me in his mouth some mornings while I drink coffee.

Is it perfect? No, the iPad obviously has serious shortcomings. The fact that it can’t be tweaked and hacked is a serious (if expected) disappointment. If it was my only computer, I’d probably turn into a slovenly, uncreative shell of a human being (except for the web access). But it’s not going to be my only computer. It’s just going to be another awesome computer in my house.

And I’m not going to wait to have the kinds of experiences I’ll be able to have with an iPad. Life’s too short, I’m getting an iPad sooner than later.

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