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If today’s Internet worked the way it was originally designed, where content took whatever route seemed most convenient at the time to reach its destination, there’s a good chance we’d already be in a state of gridlock today. As it turns out, global-scale load balancing has already been well under way for several years, with companies like Akamai providing edge caching services that move copies of frequently accessed content from a high-volume server geographically closer to the clients that access it.

Now, Google wants the entire Internet to be capable of implementing a concept that could make similar services to Akamai’s feasible on smaller scales everywhere. Earlier this week, the company announced it had submitted a formal proposal to the Internet Engineering Task Force, that would enable authoritative nameservers — the principal directories in the Domain Name Server system — to ascertain more clearly where the request for a resolved address is coming from. That way, Google says, the DNS server can craft a response that can be more directly and expressly routed to its recipient. As it stands now, recursive resolvers — the DNS entities that more often directly face the public — tend to forward requests to nameservers using their own geography, rather than that of the original client.

This is not at all the same thing as caching content, but it could have a very similar impact: The information in a geographically-centered DNS resolution could theoretically be used to help load-balance the Internet, to build a more direct route for the content being requested from the servers whose names have been resolved.

“To find the best reply for a given query, most nameservers use the IP address of the incoming query to attempt to establish the location of the end user,” begins Google’s proposal to the IETF. “Most users today, however, do not query the Authoritative Nameserver directly. Instead, queries are relayed by Recursive Resolvers operated by their ISP or third parties. When the Recursive Resolver does not use an IP address that appears to be topologically close to the end user, the results returned by those Authoritative Nameservers will be at best sub-optimal. This draft proposes a DNS protocol extension to enable Authoritative Nameservers to return answers based on the network address of the actual client, by allowing Recursive Resolvers to include it in queries.” 

It’s an appealing proposition, and the way Google has phrased it to the IETF, it would not be a privacy violation for the client: Requests passed on to name servers would be required to mask the more granular portions of their sources’ IP addresses to some extent, probably just so the response centers around the client’s network center rather than his location on a map. 

But it could also end up being very lucrative for Google anyway, whose own mapping services — especially to the extent we’re now seeing them tested in Google’s first branded phone, the Nexus One — definitely want to know where you are. Already last month, the company launched its free public DNS server, with the altruistically stated aim of resolving the world’s DNS addresses faster. If the IETF adopts Google’s proposal, Google would have one of the authoritative nameservers capable of gleaning DNS requesters general locations, even as they’re passed up the chain by recursive resolvers. 

Google states it will not leverage such a service to serve clients advertising, and there’s good reason to believe that if the IETF implemented it as Google proposes, it couldn’t do so if it tried. However, with Google also a prominent content server, it would have a much better idea of the geographic locations from which high-volume requests are produced. That’s very valuable information for a worldwide entity that could create services that compete against Akamai — or, more accurately, that seek to render what Akamai and competitive services perform, obsolete. 

What’s more, Google has grown very interested of late in the notion of providing more end-to-end Internet service — a notion that improved service, improved routing, and an improved client Web browser collectively could result in a visibly superior Web experience for users. Last November, the team behind the Chromium platform (which supports Google’s Chrome browser) announced their involvement in an experimental replacement transport protocol for HTTP, called SPDY (“speedy”). Boiled down, SPDY requires fewer TCP connections to achieve the same amount of transport. 

SPDY is one of the protocols that could conceivably benefit from improved packet forwarding — a potential side-effect of Google’s own servers making use of the information it gleans from the new DNS approach it proposed to the IETF this week. A very quiet amendment to Google’s SPDY page includes a presentation to Google’s researchers by Chromium contributor Mike Belshe (PDF available here). Although much of the presentation file’s content is categorical rather than descriptive, it’s clear that Belshe made an argument in favor of joining SPDY research with packet forwarding, directly citing a passage from Internet Community RFC 2914, “Congestion Control Principles,” that spoke of the congestion problem the early Net faced during the pre-Akamai era: 

The Internet protocol architecture is based on a connectionless end-to-end packet service using the IP protocol. The advantages of its connectionless design, flexibility and robustness, have been amply demonstrated. However, these advantages are not without cost: Careful design is required to provide good service under heavy load. In fact, lack of attention to the dynamics of packet forwarding can result in severe service degradation or ‘Internet meltdown.’ This phenomenon was first observed during the early growth phase of the Internet of the mid 1980s [RFC896], and is technically called ‘congestion collapse.’”

It’s fair to presume that an organization of Google’s immense scale, were it able to pull this off, would create a kind of de facto “net-non-neutral” scenario, where all the tools involved in the scheme would be open for anyone to use, but only Google would be able to connect all the dots to make them work.

Mission: Assemble a full-HD video camera setup that can fit into a carry-on bag with a total weight under 6 pounds.

Deadline: SXSW Interactive Conference and Festival, March 12.

At the end of 2009, I was challenged to put together a video camera rig that was as light and portable as possible, that could still produce “Web-broadcast-quality” video. The weight limit was between 5.5 and 6 pounds, or the weight of a 15-inch Macbook Pro, and it had to be able to fit entirely (tripod and all) into my usual carry-on luggage: a Timbuk3 messenger bag. 

Why? Because it’s just not enough to be a simple reporter these days. If you really want to excel in online media, you have to be a one-man, multi-format wellspring of content. If you’re a self-employed news blogger or indie journalist, your livelihood depends on being able to put up compelling new content every day. It could be traditional 8-12 paragraph news stories, it could be video clips, it could be audio podcasts, it could be photo streams, tweets, or even status updates. 

If you’re not producing something, people are not clicking. So it behooves the modern journalist on location to have all the devices which could help create this content. 

Fortunately, we’re at a point where we can reproduce high quality imagery with smartphones like the iPhone 3G S or tiny pocket camcorders like the Flip Mino or the Sony Bloggie, which is quite blatantly marketed to the amateur content producer. With tools like these, amateurs can assemble a pretty solid rig with only a little money, or hobbyists can set up one that’s unbelievably portable, so that’s where I began. 

Sometimes I am embarrassingly geeky, and this project brought out my worst right away. To begin, I drafted up a mental player character sheet that listed all the important attributes of my ideal setup, which included image quality, audio quality, depth of feature set, portability, cost, and so forth. The idea was to get a camera with a maximum portability ranking, understanding that certain other areas would suffer due to the size limitations. These areas would then be improved by other elements of the rig. Sort of like Questor the elf in Gauntlet, he’s got the weakest weapon, but he is by far the fastest runner. 

So as the centerpiece of the rig, I chose the Kodak Zi8. With a weight of only 6 ounces and a body almost exactly the same size as the old Treo 650, it can fit into a hip pocket easily. Though it’s a little bigger than some of the Flip cameras available now, the Zi8 can capture 1920 x 1080 30 fps, 1280 x 720 (60 or 30 fps) or WVGA video, has 4x digital zoom, face recognition, electronic image stabilization, and the killer feature…a 3.5mm stereo input jack. 

It’s hard to believe, but the Zi8 is the only pocket camcorder right now to have that mic jack. With it, you can replace the weak omnidirectional built-in mic with a high-quality shotgun mic so the camera can “hear” exactly what it is looking at, or you can attach a wireless Lavaliere so you can close-mic your subjects. It is absolutely the main reason I chose this camera. 

To quote Mike Figgis, director of Leaving Las Vegas and Cold Creek Manor, “The power of sound to put an audience in a certain psychological state is vastly undervalued.” This applies even to the humble YouTube video; if the sound is bad, it really rubs the viewers the wrong way. 

So what did I do? I paired the tiny Zi8 with a rather large Rode VideoMic on a $16 handheld bracket from Best Buy. Yes, the combination of a regular-sized mic and pocket-sized camera makes everyone do a double take, but the results are extremely good, and the whole unit weighs just barely over two pounds. With the Quantaray QSX Digipro 100 tripod (which is unfortunately now discontinued) it still weighs under four pounds. 

I took the work-in-progress camera rig to CES 2010 to test it out, and aside from being stopped to explain what I was doing with this “mutant camcorder” the camera and mic proved to be an excellent combination. Here’s a video that I took at the unveiling of the Sprint Overdrive filmed at 1280 x 720, 60 frames per second. 

For shots like those in the video above, the setup is flawless. Handheld shooting is also an excellent experience, but there are a number of issues that must be attended to if you really want a high quality video to come out of the little Zi8, which I’ll go through on the next page. 

Next: Getting flawless videos from a tiny camera…

Since early Friday morning, as hundreds of commenters on T-Mobile’s and Google’s support forums are reporting, 3G data connectivity service has been completely unavailable — for some, since approximately 4:30 am Eastern Time this morning, but for a great many more users beginning at 10:00 am. Some users in recent minutes are reporting service restored, although indications from both forums are that service can come back and go away again.

Users attempting to connect to the Internet are apparently being greeted with this message: “To connect to the Internet with the device you are using, you’ll need a webConnect data plan.” At least one customer, speaking with T-Mobile customer support this morning, was informed that he appeared to have been enrolled on the wrong data plan — specifically, one for the T-Mobile G1, not the Nexus One. If that’s the case for other customers as well, the problem could lie in T-Mobile’s database, which could be telling Nexus One users they’re not qualified to connect. Another customer reports having been told by a support rep at HTC (the phone’s manufacturer, where customers reportedly received the best service for the first outage) that T-Mobile is investigating its N1 customer databases.

Once again, the outage is not complete — some users nationwide report full 3G connectivity.

Some customers report being concerned that the problem may be caused by an over-the-air software update that Google promised last Tuesday, for possible release some time within the week. However, neither Google nor T-Mobile have indicated such a release actually happened. That OTA release would address an apparent bug affecting Nexus One phones with a particular firmware version, which was only loaded onto some phones. That firmware is what’s generally believed to have caused phones to flip between 2G and 3G service seemingly at random.

“Our engineers have uncovered specific cases for which a software fix should improve connectivity to 3G for some users,” stated Rafi, the self-described “Google Employee / Doofus Maximus” manning the company’s Nexus One support forum. “We are testing this fix now, initial results are positive, and if everything progresses as planned, we will provide an over-the-air software update to your phone in the next week or so. It may be, however, that users are experiencing problems as a result of being on the edge or outside of 3G coverage, which a product fix cannot address.”

At least one T-Mobile customer has finally been pushed past the breaking point: “I’m so-o-o past disappointed right now,” writes nikelife. “This is like the zillionth problem I’ve had with this phone. It soft resets all the time, 3G is intermittent, T-Mobile shuts my phone all the way off because I’m texting ‘a lot,’ and now I get no data and I have e-mails I have to get when I step away from work today. This is horrible.”

I’ve been awfully hard on Apple’s iPad, criticalness that I really should consider, for a surprising reason. With iPad, Apple took the approach that I recommended nearly a year ago. Microsoft’s current, catchy PC operating system marketing campaign ends with some consumer asserting: “Windows 7 was my idea.” Perhaps I should claim that “Apple iPad was my idea.”

Some background: In early 2009, as the economy sucked growth from the PC market, netebook sales surged and Windows OEMs slashed prices, there were many calls by Wall Street analysts and pundits for Apple to release a netbook and to slash Mac prices. I opposed both ideas in several blog posts. I’ve called netbooks a menace, because they suck margins out of the PC market without offering much value to the computer manufacturer or netbook buyer. Meanwhile, Mac price cuts made no sense to me, even as more analysts called for them. Apple has established a premium brand that price cuts would jeopardize, all while reducing margins and offering little other business benefit. Apple had long priced against itself rather than against Windows PCs, which has been a successful strategy. Why change it?

To me, the call for an Apple netbook and for lower prices made sense in a different way: Rather than move Macs and their prices down, Apple should move iPhone/iPod touch up in price and size — that’s what I recommended in several blog posts to be excerpted in a few paragraphs. The idea: For Apple to fill the middle pricing gap — between $399 iPhone and $999 Macbook — with an iPhone OS-based device that also provided access to App Store.

That’s what Apple is doing with iPad, which price ranges from $499 to $829. Apple now offers portable computers — and that’s how I classify iPhone, iPod touch and iPad along with Macs — ranging from $99 to $2,499. From a pricing strategy perspective, iPad is a brilliant product, because it fills the gap between between iPhone/iPod touch and Macbook without price cuts or risk to the Mac’s premium brand status. Microsoft and its Windows PC partners should be very concerned about this pricing development, but more on that topic after a few excerpts from past blog posts. 

iPhone/iPod touch as the Better Netbook 

In March 2009, at Apple Watch, I posted: “Apple, Don’t Buy into Netbook Hype.” I wrote: 

From branding, logistics, pricing and market differentiating perspectives, a bulked-up iPhone or iPod touch makes more sense than a Mac netbook [e.g., mini-notebok, as analysts refer to it]. That’s what Apple should do, and the existing netbook market shows the way. Mini-notebooks aren’t just small and cheap, they’re subsidized by carriers, just like smartphones. The carrier model, with 3G data plans, is already in place. Apple should push it upmarket from iPhone and even iPod touch rather than take MacBook down market…

Suddenly, the differences between smartphones and multitouch mini-notebooks could blur really fast. Apple will have to work harder to differentiate iPhone and iPod from carrier-subsidized touchscreen mini-notebook/smartphone hybrids running Windows 7. Apple’s biggest asset is the App Store, which would be helluva enticing if made available on a mini-notebook/smartphone hybrid…

Apple is better positioned to extend the smartphone/portable media player market upwards, rather than pull the notebook market downwards. Marketing 101, guys: People will spend more for perceived value. If you offer them more for a lower price, they’ll forever resist paying more. Upsell is almost always better than downsell. So, Apple shouldn’t buy into netbook hype. Apple should redefine it.

What I suggested is exactly what Apple is doing with iPad. Not that I can really lay claim to the idea. It’s cheeky for me to take credit, but product development takes awhile. Surely someone at Apple was working on something like iPad long before I blogged the above paragraphs. 

A month later, in another Apple Watch post looking at Mac retail sales, I strongly recommended against Mac price cuts analysts had recommended to better compete with netbooks: 

If I were running Apple, I would resist the temptation to cut prices. As I explained a few paragraphs ago, Apple is performing pretty well compared with Apple a year ago. The company is better off losing market share to protect fundamentals. Market share declines will have people like me wagging accusing fingers that Apple will go down. So what? It’s better for Apple to sell fewer Macs for much more than a few more Macs for much less.

In December 2009 Betanews post, “10 things Apple did right in 2009,” I praised Apple’s strategy of cutting prices at the high-end, while resisting lower entry prices below $999: 

While Windows PC competitors slashed computer prices — and so their margins and profits — Apple held above-$1,000 pricing firm for iMac, Macbook Pro and Mac Pro. The higher pricing surely didn’t seem to hurt Mac sales, which were strong all year. Meanwhile, low-cost netbooks sapped Windows PC margins and profits. Apple did right by lowering prices at the high end, which simply opened up more sales over $1,000, where Apple has more than 90-percent revenue share for computers sold at U.S. retail, according to NPD.

The Brilliance that is iPad 

My blog posts sometimes seem quite contradictory. For a month, I’ve been nothing less than brutally hard on Apple’s tablet. Two reasons for seeming contradictions: 1) I sometimes purposely write provocative posts to incite debate. 2) I keep an open mind, looking at tech products and their supporting business strategies from different viewpoints — meaning my opinion changes. Yesterday, I offered up “12 reasons why I won’t buy an Apple iPad.” On that my post, my position remains firm. But iPad means something else when examined from a different viewpoint, which is what today’s post is about. I’m not the iPad’s target market, and that’s where lies the product’s brilliance. 

During Wednesday’s iPad launch keynote, Apple CEO Steve Jobs spoke about iPad fitting between smartphone and laptop. Geeks haven’t reacted well to this; iPad is a compromise device, in terms of functionality overlap with the smartphone below and laptop above — while replacing neither. But geeks aren’t the target market, either (we share that in common). Jobs is first and foremost a marketer. From a marketing perspective — looking at Apple computing products as a range of features and prices — iPad fills a gaping hole in the Mac product line between the aforementioned $399 and $999. 

Suddenly, the cheapest, functional Mac portable is $499, or half what it was on Monday. Consumers who wanted a Mac but couldn’t afford one can get one for under 500 bucks. The average consumer doesn’t care about the operating system, whether iPhone OS 3.2 or Snow Leopard. Mac wannabes will care more about what the device can do for them. Apple has packed most of the basic, most appealing functions of the Mac portable — including iWork — into iPad. The pundits evaluating iPad as an ebook reader first should look at the device as ebook reader second or third — or even last. The iPad is a portable Mac first, which is the real emphasis behind the device’s Website (Give it a real look). 

On Wednesday, I blogged that “Apple’s iPad does absolutely nothing to advance the tablet category.” I was wrong. Apple instead did what I recommended about the netbook category: “Redefine it.” The iPad is a netbook — the cheapest Mac portable (discounting iPhone and iPod touch, of course) — and it only costs $499. From that perspective, iPad is a brilliantly conceived device and one sure to eventually have mass-market appeal. 

My cranky, geek iPad sniping aside (in previous blog posts), Apple is rightly thinking about the mass market and how to offer a Mac across all price points and range of features. It’s brilliant marketing that looks at the totality of what Apple should offer customers rather than to simply respond to competing products, strategies or pricing. Apple’s marketing brilliance here is something I should praise, whether or not it was my idea.

One of the principal factors behind Facebook’s revision of its privacy policies has been said to be a formal complaint filed by the office of Canada’s Privacy Commissioner last July. That complaint alleged that the leading social network failed to properly disclose to its users the extent to which it could use personally identifiable information, including sharing that information with partners and advertisers. The following month, Facebook agreed to implement changes.

Those changes led to last December’s overhaul of the Facebook privacy system, which many now consider to be more of a giveaway than ever before. With the guise of clear and straightforward explanation, users are now being asked to accept default settings that expressly give Facebook permission to share personal information with partners, and are even told that in the absence of such permission, there are ways in which it could be shared anyway.

That’s prompted a second formal complaint from the Privacy Commission, announced Wednesday. As a spokesperson from Comm. Jennifer Stoddart’s office told Betanews this morning, this second complaint could be the next step in attaining a federal court ruling that would force Facebook to implement more a more protective approach to private data, at least for users in Canada.

The text of the complaint itself, like that of complaints in other matters sent by European Commissioners to businesses worldwide, remains confidential at this time. But the gist of the complaint, we’re told, is that Canadians are complaining that the social network doesn’t appear to be concerned about the safety and privacy of its users. 

A statement from Assistant Commissioner Elizabeth Denham Wednesday is about as close as what we’re going to see for now: “The individual’s complaint mirrors some of the concerns that our Office has heard and expressed to Facebook in recent months. Some Facebook users are disappointed by certain changes being made to the site ??” changes that were supposed to strengthen their privacy and the protection of their personal information.” 

Denham was the author of the original report to Parliament last July on its findings in the original Facebook matter, and could figure prominently in the debate to come. Her first report alleged privacy violations in several areas where Facebook’s policy wasn’t being forthcoming about what it was actually doing. For example, individuals leaving the service who wished to “Delete Account,” thinking they were removing their personal information from Facebook’s servers, weren’t being told that information wasn’t really being deleted at all — just deactivated. 

The report indicated that Facebook responded that it had thoroughly explained its privacy options at that time to all its users. That may be the case, Denham responded, but they needed to be in the right place: “I am of the view that, for ease of reference by interested users,” she wrote, “privacy-related matters should be explained in the organization’s privacy policy, regardless of where else they may be explained.” 

Facebook security was one of the main topics of Betanews’ December 17, 2009 podcast, which includes excerpts from Facebook’s recorded security policy explanation to users.

Another issue in the original complaint concerned the fact that Facebook apps have a way, through the API, to query not only users’ data but the data of their friends, and their friends of friends — a fact that hasn’t actually changed even now, just made more transparent. 

“Facebook maintains that, through its privacy settings, users have an extensive ability to choose whether or not they will interact with any particular Facebook application, and to block any particular application and opt out of all Facebook applications in a simple way. However true this statement may be in theory, I would note that users’ ‘ability to choose’ would depend on their being knowledgeable about developers’ practice of accessing and using third-party information when friends add applications. I would also note that the only way users can control the exposure of their personal information to application developers when their friends and fellow network members add applications, is either to opt out of all applications altogether or to block specific applications. Moreover, the latter option would effectively require them to guess which of the more than 350,000 applications their friends and fellow network members are likely to add,” the Assistant Privacy Commissioner wrote. 

The Commissioner’s Office’s next course of action, the spokesperson told Betanews, is to issue a full investigative report to Parliament, which we can expect to come from Dunham, and which may contain much of the same blunt language we heard before. But this time around, Comm. Stoddart may opt to file an appeal with Canada’s Federal Court, which (unlike the EU) can enforce the findings of that report. Such a step was not taken after Facebook said last August that it would comply with the Privacy Office’s first set of recommendations.

Online retailer Amazon.com had quite a year. Yesterday, the company reported a 42% year-over-year increase in fourth quarter net sales, and a 71% increase in net income. For the full year 2009, Amazon’s net sales increased 28% to $24.51 billion, and its net income increased 40% to $902 million.

This increase in profits and revenue is attributable to a number of factors, among them were the drop in price for its EC2 and S3 cloud services in October, for the November acquisition of Zappos.com, and of course, the launch of the Kindle 2 in the beginning of 2009.

Amazon tends to keep its Kindle-related sales figures a secret, so there is no concrete proof that the Kindle has meaningfully contributed to Amazon’s gains. However, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos gave an hint at the device’s performance in yesterday’s earnings call.

“Millions of people now own Kindles, and Kindle owners read…a lot,” Bezos remarked. “When we have both editions, we sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books. This is year-to-date and includes only paid books — free Kindle books would make the number even higher. It’s been an exciting 27 months.”

Some have predicted that the e-book market still has as long as five years to go before it reaches maturity; but if Amazon’s e-book business is already 60% of the size of its physical book business, the Kindle platform could be mature before the rest of the e-book market even gets going.

This is because the Kindle platform includes more than just Amazon’s three Kindle-branded e-readers, it also includes the popular iPhone/iPod Touch app and desktop PC Kindle Reader software. With these, users can download Kindle books without having to buy the dedicated hardware.

Even so, Bezos’ claim that there are “millions” of Kindle owners is the first statement from Amazon giving even a vague size of the userbase, and it could turn out that Amazon is exceeding expectations. TechCrunch, a site that has long been determined to find out how many Kindles are really out there estimated today that as many as 3 million units have been sold thus far.

Those who say there are no decent Twitter apps for Android simply haven’t found the right one. When the Android Market first opened, you could sign in, watch the handful of new apps being uploaded every day, and generally know everything that was available on the platform. There really were only a couple of Twitter clients.

But now that the Market has been revised, and there are more than 25,000 apps by the last unofficial count from Androlib, there are plenty of Android Twitter clients to choose from.

Frequently, they’ll differentiate themselves by highlighting a unique feature that users can latch onto. Twitspeak, for example, uses Android’s Text-to-Speech engine to read tweets aloud. Swift claims to be the “fastest, leanest Twitter app with the most features per KB.” XeekuTweets Pro claims to be the only Twitter app that supports the (854×480) WVGA of the Droid and Nexus One. Loquacious, meanwhile, uses the simple approach of offering a UI with “no turquoise anywhere!”

Though there are more than twenty full Twitter clients available on the Android platform, only a couple of apps continue to dominate the space. Twidroid, one of the first Android Twitter apps, is frequently featured as a must-have app for the platform, and is a suggested download from Verizon. Seesmic is somewhat newer than Twidroid and is one of Google’s top six featured apps along with Pandora, Facebook, and YouTube in the Nexus One campaign

Today, another new Android Twitter client launched, called TweetCaster from Handmark. This one has been in a limited beta for the last couple of weeks and has already received high praise. After using Seesmic on my G1 and Twidroid on my Droid for the last few months, I thought I’d give Tweetcaster a spin today. Rather than give you the whole story first, I’ll cut to the punchline and tell you that I have deleted Twidroid.

Because TweetCaster is free, there are ads for other Handmark software (specifically, the $9.99 Zagat to Go app). In fact, the ads are the first thing that load when you start the app, and though they’re simple banners across the bottom of the screen, they’re quite prominent. Fortunately, they can be X’ed off. But every time you switch screens — from your timeline to your mentions, for example — the banner comes back. An ad-free “Pro” version of TweetCaster can be downloaded for $4.99.

Why did I delete Twidroid? The main reason is that Twidroid is bloated and TweetCaster is not. The free version of Twidroid does not have all the features that TweetCaster has and yet it still weighs in at a whopping 5.24 MB. For those of you who are unaccustomed to Android apps, that is huge. The largest of Android’s applications on either of my devices is the Browser, and that’s 7.84 MB. By comparison, TweetCaster is 1.63 MB.

The freeware Twidroid lacks multi-account support, bit.ly URL shortening, video posts, lists of followers, and location-based searches. TweetCaster supports multiple accounts, lists, threaded conversations, URL shortening from bit.ly or is.gd, has automatic image hosting from either twitpic or yfrog, and offers location-based filtering.

So it’s got the features I need right there, it’s lighter than Twidroid, and the interface is big and easy to navigate. Unfortunately, TweetCaster has a kind of goofy cartoon look to the interface and you can only see about four tweets on-screen at a time when in “normal” size. The sizes actually only go up from normal, you can’t make it any smaller. I prefer the clean design used in Seesmic where there are fewer onscreen icons and you can see more tweets in the main window.

Ultimately, the reason why TweetCaster replaced Twidroid and not Seesmic for me was that both come close to offering the perfect layout, but neither one actually delivers perfection. Ideally, in addition to the buttons for Timeline, Mentions, and Direct Messages which are standard in both, there need to be buttons for “Refresh” and “Compose” on the main screen.

Seesmic has Refresh on its home screen, but you have to hit your phone’s menu key to find the Compose button. Likewise, TweetCaster has a Compose button, but you have to hit Menu to find Refresh. This is unfortunate because the Refresh button could have easily been put in the spot where “favorite tweets” currently lives.

The bottom line: TweetCaster is free, relatively lightweight, and feature-rich. The interface has a little room for improvement, but the presentation of retweets and threaded conversations is very nice. It’s a surefire Twidroid replacement at the least.

The original reason for Microsoft Office’s existence was to provide retailers with an incentive to move product that wasn’t moving. The bundle created a discount deal that enabled the momentum behind Excel, which was hot, to help push Word, which was not. It had hardly a tenth of the sales volume of WordPerfect, and Word was a product that retailers had to actively work to sell. This was at a time when software consumed shelf space in stores and was sold like automobiles — a time which is now essentially gone.

The idea that Office could be a platform came later, with Microsoft’s realization — albeit a late one, and a hard sell for a lot of us outside the company to have made — that there was more to this multitasking thing than linked and embedded objects. I was a very early believer in the ideal that an application could be customized to suit the functions, requirements, and even tastes of the businesses that use it. I’m proud to say I’ve had more than just a voice in helping to bring that reality about. It would be a false statement for me to say I predicted this from my seat on the sidelines and it came about; I got off the sidelines, took my tools with me, and worked to bring it about.

My wife and I have been very, very active beta testers of the forthcoming Office 2010, in recent days concentrating on Outlook. History will reveal that Outlook was never my most favorite Office component. Early on, I was skeptical about it even being included with the bundle, wary of Microsoft’s consistently irritating tendency to duct-tape one product onto another and call the result a “platform-by-extension.” It started out slow and bulky. But it bothered me that so few companies ever dared to compete against Outlook once it started being seen as fused into Office; only in recent days has Mozilla been able to cultivate Thunderbird into a fully feature-competitive alternative.

What I can say from tinkering with Outlook 2010 is that somebody at Microsoft gets it. Regardless of where we work, how we get to work, how much work we do when we work, or whom with work with, all of our workplaces are becoming more like virtual offices than physical ones. We’re supported by the structure of our business connections with one another, as much as by steel beams and concrete. Geography is not the barricade to production that it used to be.

As Outlook matures, it’s providing information workers with newer and more efficient ways to get together with one another, to share tools and not just data, actually becoming the conference room, rather than just a way to notify folks to come to the conference room. But the direction of Outlook’s maturity helps cast a light on where the rest of Office is going as well. Unlike anything I’ve seen that purports to be its competition, or future competition, or slightly categorically similar, Office components are being developed now with the understanding that they are the interconnected conduits through which documents move, rather than the separated silos from which documents are manufactured.

A look at the calendar sharing feature from the public beta of Outlook 2010, which is reliant upon Microsoft Exchange.

So my counter-argument to anyone who thinks Office is obsolete as a platform is that they should experiment with the product not in an enclave, in the separate enclaves where, it seems to me, Google’s developers think we live and work, but in a business full of people who do things.

I don’t want to make the mistake of saying that simply because I use Office myself, and expect to continue using it for the foreseeable future, you must therefore use it as well, and thus we all must use it, and consequently, Office’s place in the workforce is secure. If there is anything I see already in front of the horizon, preparing to change Microsoft’s best-laid plans, it is a force it hasn’t had to feel in some time: competition. With the rapid evolution of tools, it is becoming easier for smaller development crews to produce more innovative alternatives.

That said, I’ve yet to see a whole lot of people doing it, which concerns me. All things being equal and open, you’d think there would be a lot of good ideas out there by now. But things in reality are rarely both equal and open at the same time. If I were to approach an investor today with the single best concept for an applications package to dethrone Microsoft Office, I would laughingly be told to go back to my basement and write my little blog.

Where there tends to be obsolescence with respect to Microsoft Office is in the work processes of many of the businesses that rely upon it. We’re all welcome to watch Microsoft’s marketing videos of spritely folks making easy work out of connecting with one another and exchanging data like cheerleaders in a parade line hurling batons at one another. But the business practices of too many workplaces today are so entrenched in what worked ten years ago and even 25 years ago, that it is their failure to evolve in kind that may be more of a drag on Office’s evolution than Microsoft’s failure to perform or innovate. There are record-keeping and data sharing features that have been part of Excel for over a decade now, that companies are always shocked, shocked to discover once they’re finally pointed out to them…and yet they continue to save data in single rows of long tables in individual sheets in Excel, and cut-and-paste revisions of textual documents from one template to another to another to another in Word. Why, oh why, dear Microsoft, can’t you make it easier for us to do what we do?

Complaining about the lack of change with anything — applications, handsets, PCs, music, hairstyles, government — can become dangerous in itself. Whining breeds whining.

I foresee the following very realistic possibility: There will be an application that enables me to graphically describe the elements of my business, to assemble them in a working model, and to run simulations on the economic stability of that model, all using graphical tools gleaned from the realm of illustration programs. It will go by the name “Excel.” I will compose a series of documents on how best to use this product. I’ll be able to study several drafts sequentially, along a timeline, with animations showing where I made changes, and notes I left to myself as to why. I’ll see editors’ suggestions for alterations as they come in, and I’ll be able to accept them at will. The tool for my composition will be called “Word.” And I will communicate that composition in progress with my fellow colleagues who will help me to produce and publish it. And we all will be using “Outlook.”

That is, unless anyone else has some brilliant ideas. I’m not being sarcastic here. Everything I’ve ever seen from the open source community, from competitors such as Corel, and elsewhere, insist on maintaining the silo-centric model of document production that looked obsolete to me way back in Office XP’s time. Every competitor tries to be a different flavor of Office, when Office is effectively already done. It’s like trying to invent another cola, when what the world needs is a real refresher course in innovation. If Microsoft Office were truly to become obsolete, there’s a good chance that, in the face of no original, game-changing competition from elsewhere, few would ever know it.

A year after global recession sapped Microsoft sales and the company announced its first-ever massive layoffs, real signs of recovery can be seen. The holiday quarter was as good to Microsoft as could be expected, given how much sales are dependent on large businesses — the majority of which are still tightfisted with IT spending or are renewing licenses for fewer seats because of layoffs.

“We reported record revenue and record profits,” Peter Klein, Microsoft’s new CFO, asserted during a conference call this afternoon. He praised consumer sales, particularly for Windows 7 PCs. But Klein warned that “we have not seen a return of enterprise spending growth.”

The quarter’s results are a bit complicated. Because of technology discount upgrade guarantees for Windows 7, Microsoft carried forward $1.71 billion from previous quarters. Still, even without the deferred revenue, Windows 7 had a great holiday sales quarter.

For fiscal 2010 second quarter, Microsoft reported revenue of $19.02 billion, for a 14 percent year-over-year increase. Operating income: $8.51 billion, up 43 percent. Net income: $6.66 billion, or 74 cents a share. Net income rose by 60 percent and earnings per share by 57 percent year over year. However, Microsoft reported these results including the aforementioned carryover. Without it, Microsoft revenue would have been $17.31 billion or 60 cents a share. 

For about a year, Microsoft provided no guidance to Wall Street analysts, so there is none for fiscal Q2. Analysts average consensus was $17.9 billion and 59 cents earnings per share. Revenue estimates ranged from $15.91 billion to $19.18 billion. 

Q2 2010 Revenue by Division 

• Windows & Windows Live: $6.9 billion, up 70 percent from $4.06 billion a year earlier.
• Server & Tools: $3.8 billion, up 2 percent from $3.76 billion a year earlier.
• Business: $4.75 billion, down 3 percent from $4.88 billion a year earlier.
• Online Services Business: $581 million, down 5 percent from $609 million a year earlier.
• Entertainment & Devices: $2.9 billion, down 11 percent from $3.26 billion a year earlier.

Big question for this quarter: What about Windows 7? The answer is surprisingly complex. Fiscal first quarter was Microsoft’s best sales period ever for Windows license sales — the majority to OEMs stocking the channel for holiday 2009. Would Microsoft sustain the momentum in fiscal Q2? Apparently it did. In a statement, Microsoft CFO Kevin Turner, called fiscal Q2 another “record quarter for Windows units.” The company claims more than 60 million Windows license shipments through end of the quarter. 

The really good news came about two weeks ago from Gartner and IDC, which reported that PC sales were much stronger than expected during fourth calendar quarter (which corresponds to Microsoft’s fiscal second). Better still: Mac market share dropped dramatically, as sales for several PC manufacturers surged. 

Worldwide PC shipments rose 15.2 percent year over year, according to IDC, and 22.1 percent, according to Gartner. IDC put US PC shipments up 24 percent year over year and Gartner 26.5 percent. After years of market share gains, Apple dramatically dropped, presumably with Windows 7 sapping Mac sales momentum. Gartner put Apple’s US share at 7.5 percent, down from 8.8 percent in fiscal Q4 2009 and 7.7 percent in fiscal Q1 2009. Both analyst firms ranked Apple fifth in US market share, a one-rank decline below Toshiba. While Mac shipments grew a respectable 31 percent, according to IDC, HP shipments grew by 45.1 percent and Toshiba by a stunning 71.5 percent. 

Q2 2010 Income by Division 

• Windows & Windows Live: $5.4 billion, up 99 percent from $2.7 billion a year earlier.
• Server & Tools: $1.5 billion, up 8 percent from $1.38 billion a year earlier.
• Business: $3.01 billion, flat with $3.02 billion a year earlier.
• Online Services Business: Loss of $466 million, down 46 percent from $320 million loss a year earlier.
• Entertainment & Devices: $375 million, up 188 percent from $130 million loss a year earlier.

Segment by Segment Results 

Microsoft reports revenue and earnings results for five divisons: Windows & Windows Live, Server & Tools, Business, Online Services and Entertainment & Devices. 

Windows & Windows Live. Revenue rose 70 percent year over year and income by 99 percent, bolster by $1.71 billion carried over from earlier quarters, as part of Microsoft’s upgrade guarantee program. The division derives about 80 percent of its revenue from license sales to PC OEMs. OEM revenue increased by $2.3 billion or 72 percent when including recognized deferred revenue. Without it, OEM revenue grow by a more modest 21 percent, or by $664 million. Microsoft estimates worldwide PC shipments grew 15 percent to 17 percent during fiscal Q2. 

Server & Tools. The division is most insulated against economic maladies, because 50 percent of revenues comes from contractual volume-licensing agreements — that’s a decline of 5 percent from fiscal first quarter. Because of corporate layoffs, Microsoft is seeing customers renewing license contracts at lower levels. The division’s revenue grew just 2 percent year over year, while operating income grew by 8 percent. 

Business. Next to Windows, Microsoft’s other cash cow division reported revenue declines of 3 percent and flat income (really slightly down) year over year. Consumer revenue increased $95 million, or 12 percent, which Microsoft largely credited to increased PC sales. However, commercial Office 2007 sales declined, which isn’t surprising. Microsoft is beta testing Office 2010, which launches within about six months. 

Online Services Business. The division’s loss widened, with ad sales in decline — starkly contrasting with results from Google, which reported solid earnings for the same quarter. The majority of the Online Services division’s sales come from advertising, which fell 2 percent, or $11 million, year over year to $516 million. 

Entertainment & Devices. Xbox 360 and console game sales declined by $295 million, or 12 percent, year over year. Microsoft shipped 6.2 million consoles during the quarter.

It’s almost embarrassing…Correct that, it’s big time embarrassing, for me to read some of the public’s response to yesterday’s announcement of the Apple iPad.

Yes, we know that the name is thematically close to a certain feminine hygiene product. No, we don’t need to read the obvious over and over in the comments section of every tech and mainstream Web site, blog, Facebook page, Twitter stream, and (gee, thanks, Brian Williams) nightly newscast. We get it. It may have been funny when we were in the second grade, but now that we’re all supposedly adults, it strikes me as needlessly juvenile.

The world already thinks that geeks live in their mothers’ basements and emerge into the real world only when their carefully managed stashes of snack cakes and Mountain Dew run low. This isn’t going to help erase the stereotypes anytime soon.

Missing the point

The fact that so much of the harsh criticism seems to focus on the name suggests not everyone fully understands why Apple is unique among manufacturers in its ability to grab and keep our attention. It isn’t, and never was, about the hardware.

While Apple is exceptionally adept at leveraging the latest principles of industrial design to create products that elegantly fit into our day-to-day lives, its experience with the iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad reinforce its belief that great hardware can only get you so far. Eventually, someone else will introduce a competing device that looks better, has a more compelling feature set, massages those features together more effectively, does so at a more affordable price point, and makes anything that came before it look like yesterday’s news. If you’re banking on the sexiness of the device itself (which pretty much describes most hardware-focused vendors these days) you’re missing the big picture.

So let’s stop whining about what wasn’t included in iPad v1.0, shall we? Because things like memory card slots and a USB jack can easily be added to v2.0 or 3.0. Apple never gives away the store with the first release of a product: You’d think we would have all learned from the iPhone experience, which was introduced with glaring hardware gaps (lack of 3G, anyone?) that have since been largely addressed. Indeed, three years since it was first announced, complaints about the iPhone’s hardware capabilities are almost inaudible. The App Store gets all the bouquets and brickbats these days, as it should. Because the device is little more than a channel to bigger and more lucrative things for Apple and its carrier/developer partners.

So if it isn’t the hardware, then what is it? From where I sit, the glue that keeps it all together once the newness of the physical device has worn off is the surrounding ecosystem. The iBooks Store now that now joins the iTunes and App Store ecosystems promises to do for book publishers what iTunes did for the music industry. Apple’s masterstroke lies in how it extended an already successful platform, giving itself a natural head start that one can imagine has already sent Google’s Android team scraping the cupboards for a very different type of tablet.

It’s all potential for publishing

Is Apple’s new offering fully baked yet? For book publishers, not even close. So far Apple’s got deals with only book five companies, and availability of both the device and the software/content distribution landscape that surrounds it will be US-only for now.

But the potential is there for all of us to recognize once we stop trading moronic jokes about the name.

Also still firmly in the potential pile is the iPad’s capability to transform the newspaper and magazine industries. I was impressed with the brief demo delivered by The New York Times because it showed, however fleetingly, the possibilities inherent in transitioning a traditional paper into tablet form. It isn’t enough to dump the paper-based version into an electronic device, and yesterday’s demo reinforced that the Times and Apple get that. From what little we saw from the Gray Lady this week, there’s at least some value-add there, and I look forward to trying it out on my kitchen table sometime soon.

Despite the promise, the business model that would, indeed should, surround it was nowhere to be seen yesterday. There was no mention of other publications, no sign of this becoming an open platform that’ll be made easily available to other publishers, no mention of a subscription model that would make it a no-brainer for readers to finally make the switch from paper to screen. And please don’t tell me you read it for free on the Web…we all know that experience is ridiculously lame.

I’ll forgive the omissions because Apple needs to leave a little in reserve to allow for future growth. What matters here is that Apple will in all likelihood become the first vendor to successfully sell tablets in a market sector where other vendors have gone to die for the past 15 years. And while the juveniles among us mock its name, it becomes increasingly apparent that there has been a need for in-between, tablet-like devices like this all along, but no one’s figured out the secret sauce that will get mainstream consumers to buy in.

Because laptops suck

If we’re being brutally frank, laptops and desktops are great at getting work done but lousy tools for exploring content. We’ve held on to our paper-based subscriptions and physical books for as long as we have because the tech revolution has failed to offer us a compelling alternative. While everyone else has been trying to sell modified laptops or tweaked smartphones to fill in this middle ground of sorts, the iPad finally gets close enough to the usability mark — with the obvious exception of balancing the thing on your lap for an entire two-hour movie — to get the tablet party started in earnest.

The iPad won’t replace netbooks, laptops, or any other device in our personal and business inventory, so I won’t waste anyone’s time drawing comparisons. Because it’s a net new category, it’ll be a tougher sell to post-recessionary consumers wary of adding yet another costly doodad to their lives. But once we look past the childish jokes about its name, we’ll be able to focus on how Apple’s growing ecosystem could potentially change the way we acquire and consume all forms of content. That, more than any slick piece of hardware, is the big story here.