Apple’s Twitter Omission
Apple has profiled Twitter on its web-site. As you might expect, there’s lot of quotes from Twitter people saying how amazing the Mac. Apple also has some things to say about Twitter. For example – Apple says,
Twitter was built using software tools like Ruby on Rails, which is provided as part of Mac OS X
However, Apple forgot to say that for the meat of its systems, Twitter is actually moving increasingly to Scala – a language built on the Java platform. Why? Because the Twitter folks believe that the Ruby platform isn’t up to the job. So much for Java being some “heavy-weight ball and chain that no-one uses” (as Steve Jobs once famously said) 
Asam Bashir wrote:
We’re trying to be nice about Java so Java developers don’t start crying because Oracle is thinking about shutting down Java development.
iPhone OS has a massive Web market share compared to Java ME, what does that say about people using Java ME enabled devices?
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/05/01/ipod_touch_web_share_triples_as_windows_reaches_new_low.html
Posted 03 May 2009 at 3:22 pm ¶
simon wrote:
LOL @ “massive” – oh yeah – 0.55% market share (iPhone Safari) is huge
Clearly, 0.07% market share (Java ME-based browsers e.g. Opera Mini) is even worse!
I don’t think all this says anything about people. Rather, it says that – browsing the web on a mobile phone is currently a second-class experience compared to using a regular computer. The key problems are:
1) Screens on mobile phones aren’t big enough for a great web browsing experience
2) CPUs on phones aren’t powerful enough to render web pages fast enough
Problem 1) is a challenge to deal with using current technology. Problem 2), however, is not so hard to tackle.
It’ll be interesting to see how the next iPhone stacks up against, say, the Palm Pre, when it comes to the speed of the CPU. It will also be interesting to see if Apple thinks it’s worth address Problem 1) by releasing a larger form factor touch device…
Posted 04 May 2009 at 9:52 am ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
Not sure why Apple would want to buy Twitter, maybe just worth it for the publicity or some underlying plans for expansion of the MobileMe cloud.
Large form factor touch device might make interesting competitor in the ebook space. A large form factor device seems certain, all the video editing features in iPhone 3.0 will scale up to larger screen, Quicktime in Snow Leopard looks very interesting and certainly changes promoted by requirements of touch driven interfaces. June will be very interesting and should see Jobs at his best with a whole bunch of game changing devices to present…
Posted 06 May 2009 at 3:22 am ¶
simon wrote:
There’s an increasing number of rumors of Apple considering doing acquisitions. For example, there’s some chatter about Apple acquiring Electronic Arts, too.
I guess the point is – Apple has a pile of cash; and they might be thinking there are better things to do (i.e. get a better return) with $20B than simply keeping it in the bank.
Posted 06 May 2009 at 4:47 pm ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
Yes, but Apple doesn’t normally buy companies it doesn’t need. EA is an understandable acquisition as Apple prepares to tackle the gaming market more aggressively, and it is uniquely positioned for future developments in the area using in-house built SoCs which should start rolling out of Cupertino next year.
Twitter is more intriguing, it’s not so obvious where Apple would want to take it. Maybe the back-end of the iPhone services for messaging and twitter are technologically equivalent so Apple either thinks it has a better way of doing it from it’s cloud, or that the twitter backend is useful to Apple at the moment and offers a cheaper way of expanding the iPhone backend services.
Posted 06 May 2009 at 11:31 pm ¶
simon wrote:
Yes – Twitter is intriguing. One way to think about Apple’s business strategy is: “It’s all about iPhone”
So, one question is – could Twitter drive more iPhone sales? Either in its current form, or in a future iteration…
Posted 07 May 2009 at 12:31 pm ¶
Asam Bashir wrote:
Twitter could be considered the evolutionary decedent of SMS, and an evolutionary descendent of visual voicemail would be something like AudioBoo, currently being backed by Amazon. These are technologies of interest to Apple as it has to work on similar technology for iPhone and products.
Posted 08 May 2009 at 2:47 am ¶
Jon wrote:
Go go Apple! Crank up that reality distortion field generator to full power!
Posted 31 Jul 2009 at 7:32 pm ¶