[Garak takes a drink of root beer]
Quark: What do you think?
Garak: It’s vile.
Quark: I know. It’s so bubbly and cloying and happy.
Garak: Just like the Federation.
Quark: And you know what’s really frightening? If you drink enough of it, you begin to like it.
Garak: It’s insidious.
Quark: Just like the Federation.

- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Way of the Warrior (S4 E01) (and here’s the video)

For a long time, I’ve been quite anti-Google. I’m certain this comes from loyalty to Inktomi, where I used to work once upon a time. In time, it was strengthened due to my dislike of the number of people who joined the cult. Google released and/or acquired a lot of cool apps: maps, Earth, calendar, mail, gears … the list is virtually endless. It could be argued that this was for the benefit of the technology-using community as a whole, but to me it seemed like an incessant grab for geek mindshare.

Eventually, people started to catch on that Google are potentially a very scary organisation. After all, they know what you research on the internet, what you read online, who you send mails to, who you meet with and why. In fact, they probably know as much about you as any given organisation possibly could, and you gave them permission!

However, many months and years of bombardment with applications and the need to be a part of the software community has meant that it is now virtually impossible for me to function without using Google’s tools. They have started to suck the resistance out of me - I’m becoming accustomed to the root beer (or the Kool-Aid, to mix metaphors).

The scariest thing was when I tried out Google Reader, and people had already shared 51 news articles with me, assuming all along that I used it. Gah! I’ve made myself paranoid all over again, just by writing this post. Time to block google.com cookies again.

They break out the infrastructure and make it P2P. This could shift the responsibility for uptime to others and allow them to host their own options for advertising or value-added services. Maybe even license the software out so there are a bazillion twitter servers out there. This would be the method by which Twitter could sneak up and murder Instant Messaging in it’s sleep. I tweeted recently that Twitter was not Broadcast IM. But, of course, it is.

Reminds me a bit of Zed’s UTU project.

To speak to some of the other points that mj makes (and bear in mind I’m only a recent Twitter user), I think that Twitter could monetise easily enough. There is definitely a stigma against running adverts on your website - I know I don’t do it on any of the sites that I run, even though I know I would make some money. But consider the sorts of users who use Twitter a lot - they are the same sorts of people who are happy to pay $10-$25 for an app to allow them to use Twitter more easily.

Twitter haven’t charged anything for their API or the right to use their service as a platform for making money, which no doubt has earned them a lot of kudos and is probably another reason for the large uptake. I’m certain that a portion of those people who use their service every day, n times a day, would be willing to pay that $10-$25 for improved services. I think mj is right with things like being able to add pictures, having URLs automatically “tinied”, being able to make their own look and feel to posts and so forth. Would it make enough?

I don’t know how many users Twitter has, but I’m willing to be that all of the active ones fall squarely in “Early Adopter” (if you subscribe to the Crossing the Chasm metaphor). In using the Twitter site, I’ve been a bit underwhelmed by it’s functionality. Keep the free service, improve it gradually, but innovate like crazy in a pay-for service.

One possible ego-stroking mechanism. Make it such that you must be on the pay-for service if you have more than 100 people following you.

None of them are particularly spectacular, but I felt I should let people know a bit about what I’ve been working on. I’m also working on a website for a Cyprus property investment company, which should be done in the next couple of weeks.

1. Off-the-shelf e-commerce engine
2. Open-source e-commerce engine
3. Build your own

So, it seems you’ve got three options (anyone think of a 4th?). Of course within each of these options there are any number of competing solutions, especially in “build your own”, where you could potentially use any language, web server, etc.

I think with any software developer, the preference is to build one’s own. That way you get ultimate flexibility and intimate understanding of the code, which makes it easier to expand and customise. The downside is that you have more work up-front in order to get running.

Off-the-shelf (i.e. commercial) software tends to have a lot of features that your accountant and fulfillment department would like, and often gives you the ability to customise using one of a few popular languages or their own pseudo-language. The real advantage is that you can have a store quickly, or so you might think. Often, shoe-horning your data into their proprietary and closed-source format makes this option longer and more expensive than building it yourself.

All of which leaves open-source engines. You can be up and running quickly (like with commercial apps) but you have access to the source code if you decide you need to change things the way you want them. Potential downsides are lack of support and lack of particular features you might need (e.g. a particular payment gateway).

So, which would you choose?

This morning I received a phishing attempt for a Merrill Lynch trading account - ironic considering I work for one of their competitors (in my day job). So I clicked on it and it brought me here. If you’re using Firefox 2.0, the screen will go dark and you’ll get a big message warning you this is a phishing site. That didn’t happen this morning, so I reported it (which is horribly simple: while at the site go to the Help menu and select “Report Web Forgery …”. I set ReloadEvery to work, and within about an hour the site was now tagged.

The downside of this is that the people who report these sites use Firefox and know what a phishing site looks like anyway, but the people who need the phishing protection use that other browser.