When I first wrote about Swoopo back in 2008 I found it abhorrent. It was, in short, a form of gambling masquerading as an auction site. You paid for bids – the more bids you bought the better the chance that you’d be able to pay a reduced price for a certain item. The real money came from the suckers who ran up the price. All those previous bids, at $1, were junked in the process.

They called it entertainment shopping. Now, however, I call it dead.

The company filed for bankruptcy in Germany on the 23rd and although the site appears to be down due to “technical difficulties,” I think the difficulties are more financial. Technologizer has found that the company is finding a liquidator to divest its assets and all bidders with current balances with the company are SOLwoopo.

Some of Swoopo’s competitors are still around (I feel I must refrain from linking to them except in excoriation and so I’ll avoid that here) but hopefully they will suffer the same fate. Fools and their money, as they say, are soon parted. It becomes immoral when the ones doing the parting have stacked the deck in their absolute favor.

Editor's note: Guest author Semil Shah is an entrepreneur interested in digital media, consumer Internet, and social networks.  He is based in Palo Alto and you can follow him on twitter @semilshah.

On Thursday, I used Yobongo all day, which helped me find a new lunch spot, run into an old friend, and meet a Yobongo co-founder. That afternoon, I thought it would be a good time to write about the new group and mobile messaging wars for TechCrunch. A few hours later, Color Labs launched, to put it mildly. And, as I was editing this post on Friday night, Disco appeared, the new group messaging client from Google. Along with SxSW and the NCAA basketball tournament, this is surely March Madness.

What does this explosion in mobile social apps mean. We're witnessing an entirely new class of companies that are being built primarily for the mobile phone and tablet experience, not PCs or laptops. These companies are using basic social activities and leveraging smartphone capabilities to provide consumers with cooler features in exchange for the chance to construct more intimate networks. Just within the last year, larger forces like Facebook and Foursquare have released new mobile features to allow users to combine check-ins with location-based picture-sharing. Perhaps messaging, broadly defined, is converging toward more context-specific communications that leverage and combine bits of information our mobile devices already are aware of.

Only within the last year have things started to really gather steam. The first wave of these apps leveraged the mobile device's camera, which produced apps like Instagram, PicPlz, and Path, services that combined the basic social activity of snapping and sharing pictures to build a different kind of pyramid and, perhaps, a different kind of network. Location services have done the same with GPS sensors. Videosharing has proved tougher, though companies like uStream and SocialCam show promise. SoundCloud enables users to capture and share sounds from their daily lives, and IntoNow recognizes audio waves from television shows and movies (and maybe commercials?), like Shazam, to connect users around favorites shows. The accelerometer has been leveraged by Bump Technologies' sharing service, and Apple, which has already entered living rooms with Apple TV and designs for convergence, may turn the phone into a joystick.

Simultaneously, others began building mobile messaging applications, some with social ambitions in mind. These new tools enable more intimate communication platforms, as users continue to fight for Inbox Zero and doggy-paddle within the huge Facebook ocean.  As Dave McClure argues, Facebook doesn't "get intimacy." Today's dominant social networks are established enough to provide authentication, but are too big to offer granularity. In the mobile messaging world, these are the short text messages we send to our companions, buddies, classmates, kids, and our parents that never reach the level of a status update or tweet. No company better captured the mood around this intimacy tension than Beluga, whose users were anthropomorphically transformed into "pods" of whales, dancing across oceans in search of new waters. Of course, Beluga was then harpooned by Facebook.

It's early days for this new class of mobile messaging upstarts. Currently, the space is organized around four types of activity: group chat, SMS replacements, randomized/localized discovery, and relays. In the "group chat" category, there's GroupMe (SMS group messaging with push), Fast Society (geared to young, ephemeral groups), Rabbly (anchored through Facebook connect), Whatsapp (free SMS with multimedia), among others. Those designed to supplant SMS with group functionality are Kik, textPlus, and the aforementioned Beluga. A new Y Combinator company Convore recently launched a new take on real-time Internet relay chatting around interests. There are also international successes, most notably SMSGupShup from India. These companies acquire network effects through people that users already know.

On the other side, there are services built around the notion of acquiring new networks through more random connections. Perhaps the most controversial applications are those that enable discovery and chat with new people, or strangers (the "Chatroullete Derivatives") such as MessageParty (YC alum), Matt Hunter's company TextSlide (featured in the The New York Times), Yobongo, and of course, Color Labs. Most of us have already either connected or reconnected with all the folks we know online, and the next evolution is for services to help us discover new connections. This element of discovery drives these services to help us build smaller networks around our core groups of friends and family, or to build newer networks with folks we don't know yet but who have similar interests or location patterns. While using Yobongo for an entire day during slack time between meetings, there was something primal and immediate about the experience, filling the niche for hyper-local communication that Twitter is too big to cater to. This isn't to say Yobongo or others will succeed, but they are pushing the boundaries in this arena, and I suspect we'll see more incarnations of this concept for some time to come.

Mobile and group messaging is attractive to investors, entrepreneurs, and users alike. If designed well, they could leverage network effects to amplify participation and enable the application of proven revenue models. This is a new class of social company, built entirely with mobility in mind from Day One. They are designed within a post-PC/laptop mindset. These companies will begin by drafting behind the lead cars in the social networking race. The most recent entrant into this red ocean — Color Labs — may have just made the waters a bit more red. We oftentimes take for granted that all of the established social networks will persist over time and satisfy most of our needs. Some realize building seamless, easy-to-use systems will create significant value for larger players because they weren't originally built with mobility in mind. And some will perhaps break through and create their own lasting social experience.

Photo credit: Flickr/kidperez

Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable

Blogs. We all read them to get a sense of what is going on in the world, peeling back layers of the old world in which media was too scripted.

By definition, if you are reading this you read blogs. But should you actually write one if you’re a startup, an industry figure (lawyer, banker) or VC? Absolutely.

This is a post to help you figure out why you should write and what you should talk about.

1. Why
If you care about accessing customers, reaching an audience, communicating your vision, influencing people in your industry, marketing your services or just plain engaging in a dialog with others in your industry a blog is a great way to achieve this.

People often ask me why I started blogging. It really started simply enough. I was meeting regularly with entrepreneurs and offering (for better or for worse) advice on how to run a startup and how to raise venture capital from my experience in doing so at two companies. I was having the same conversations over-and-over again (JFDI, Don’t Roll Out the Red Carpet when Employees are on the Way Out the Door, Don’t Drink Your Own Kool Aid, etc) and I figured I might as well just write them up and make them available for future people who might be interested. I never really expected a big audience or ever thought about it.

I had been reading Brad Feld’s blog & Fred Wilson’s blog for a couple of years and found them very helpful to my thinking so I honestly just thought I was giving back to the community.

The results have been both unexpected and astounding. Within 2 years I was getting 400,000 views / month and had been voted the 2nd most respected VC in the country by an independent survey of entrepreneurs, The Funded and sentiment analysis. I know that I have not yet earned these kudos based on investment returns (although my partners have. GRP Partners last fund is the single best performing VC fund in the US (prequin data) for its vintage year). But it speaks volumes to what people want from our industry:

• transparency
• accessibility
• authenticity
• thought leadership
• advice

2. What

You wouldn’t. You shouldn’t.

Not only would it be less authentic but if you’re a startup it’s not immediately clear that other startup CEOs are your target market. They’re mine because I’m a VC. I care about having a steady stream of talented startup people who want to raise money thinking that they should talk to me in addition to the top others whom they’re targeting.

3. Where

You need a blog. Duh. If you’re a company and if hanging it off of your company website makes sense for the link traffic – go for it. If you’re head of marketing at a company and keeping a more generalized blog (in addition to your company blog) so that you can influence brands & agencies – it can be separate.

I chose for my blog to be independent of my firm, GRP Partners.  The reason is that I wanted to be free to say what I was thinking independently of my partners. My views don’t always represent theirs and vice-versa even though we’re pretty like-minded (we’ve worked together for 10+ years).  I chose a title that represented a brand that I wanted to emphasize – Both Sides of the Table. I chose it because I thought it would represent who I am – mostly an entrepreneur but somebody with investment chops. I wanted to differentiate.

So. People keep asking me, “why would you write on TechCrunch?” I guess I would have thought it was obvious. Apparently not. People say, “aren’t you driving traffic away from your own blog?”

Facts:

• I don’t really care about total page views or uniques other than as a measure of whether I’m improving. I don’t sell ads.
• I DO care about “share of mind,” which means that I want fish in the pond where the people whom I want to speak with hang out. I know a certain number hit my blog. But I’m not so arrogant (or successful) as to think they come all the time. So I take my show on the road. If I can write about a topic for which I’m passionate about and double or triple the number of people who read it – that’s gold dust. That’s why I never stopped anybody from taking my feed and republishing.
• As it happens, since I began writing at TechCrunch my viewership has continued to go up, not down. I always publish on my own blog the day after it runs on TC. I want the historical post there. A large number of readers on my site get it from Feedburner or newsletter feed.
• I also get a lot of inbound links from writing here. I try to make any inbound links to my blog authentic to the story. But each story has driven 1,000′s of views.
• The majority of my traffic still comes from Twitter. TC posts = more Twitter followers = more conversion when I do write on my own blog = more Feedburner / newsletter subs = more traffic. It’s an ecosystem. Simple.

So once you have a blog, a voice and a small following – don’t be shy about writing some guest posts for target blogs. Remember – for you that’s likely not TC – it’s the place your community hangs out.

4. How

Be authentic. Don’t try to sound too smart or too funny.  Just be yourself.  People will see who you are in your words.  If you try to make everything too perfect you’ll never hit publish.  If you try to sound too intelligent you’ll likely be boring as shit.  Most blogs are.  I hate reading blow hards who try to sound like they’re smarter than the rest of us. Be open and transparent.  Get inside your reader’s minds.  Try to think about what they would want to know from you.  In fact, ask them!

Don’t be offensive – it’s never worth it to offend great masses of people.  But that doesn’t mean sitting on the fence.  I have a point of view and I’m sure sometimes it rankles.  But I try to be respectful about it.  Sitting on the fence on all issues is also pretty boring.  And don’t blog drunk.  Or at least don’t hit publish ;-) Mostly, have fun.  If you can’t do that you won’t last very long.

How do I get started? First, you’ll need a platform.  I use WordPress.  Some people swear by SquareSpace. There are the new tools like Tumblr and Posterous.  I’ve played with both and they’re pretty cool. They’re more light weight and easier to use. Importantly, they’re more social. It’s much easier to build an audience in social blogging platforms the way you do in Twitter or Facebook.  T

hen  you need to decide whether to use the “hosted” version or the “installed” version.  At least that’s true in WordPress.  The advantage of the hosted version is that it’s easier to get started.  The disadvantage is that you can’t install a lot of additional tools that use Javascript. I started with the hosted version and then migrated to an installed version so I could use Google Analytics and some other products.

You then need a URL.  It’s true you can be something like msuster.typepad.com but that’s kind of lame so I wouldn’t recommend it.  Just get a real URL.  I think it’s important to think about what image you want to portray when you pick your URL name.  It doesn’t need to be short.  You’re not trying to build a consumer website.  My website is a pretty long URL but people manage to find it.  Much of my traffic is through referring websites and/or social media. Some search. What are YOU trying to convey?  What will be your unique positioning?  Don’t just write a carbon copy of what somebody else is doing.  That’s boring.

So I wrote a post, now what? Don’t blow your load on your first post.  Slice it up enough to do many posts.  I think most blogs are between 600-1000 words / post.  Once you’re written a few posts don’t try to make the flood gates open at once.  Slowly build your audience.  Make it organic.  If you write good content and consistently you’ll build an audience over time.

The number one thing that kills 95% of blogs is that they do 5 or 6 posts in rapid succession and then peter out. It’s lame to go to a blog where this happens. And then 8 months later they do the obligatory post saying, “OK, I’m going to be more committed to blogging now!” and then another 4 months go by. If you’re really not going to write that often at least don’t put dates on your posts.

But if you write good stuff, but in an effort and keep going – it’s a marathon – you will see results over time.

How do I build an audience? If you build it, will they come? No. A blog post is just like a product. First it needs to be good. And then you need to market it. It doesn’t just happen. You should be subtle about how you market it, but market it nonetheless. If you’re too squeamish to ask for help in promoting it or to do so yourself then you’ll never build an audience (you’ll also likely not make it as an entrepreneur. Sorry. But that’s true.)

The obvious starting point is to email a few friends and let them know you have a new blog.  Don’t be overbearing – just an email saying, “wanted to let you know about my new blog.”  I also recommend you put a link to it under your email signature (in a color other than black).  You also should have it be what your Twitter bio links to.

Every time I write a post I send it out on Twitter.  I try to send out the Twitter link when more people are online.  Over time I’ve found out that I get better clicks at 8.30-9.30am Mon-Fri so that’s when I Tweet a lot of my stuff.  I’ll frequently send two Tweets – East Coast & West Coast. If you want to know why I’ve outlined it here.  Not everybody sees the first one.  Social media is ephemeral.

Because I’ve built my Twitter following slowly but steadily and authentically over time I get very high click-through rates (and thus a high Klout score – currently 74). I get about 4% CTR (click-through rate) on every Tweet in the AM) and it’s actually higher because if I assume only 33% of my followers on online the CTR is closer to 12%.  Interestingly if I had sent one Tweet at 5.30am (to get East Coast time) and another at 8.30am I get 4% CTR both times. So it’s hard to argue you shouldn’t Tweet twice if you have a geographically distributed following.

How do I know my stats? I use awe.sm (disclosure, I’m an investor) which is the best tool I know of for tracking: each individual share behavior (it creates unique URLs for each Tweet) plus it also separates out Tweets from Facebook shares, from “Retweets” that come from somebody clicking on my blog, etc. It also tracks who Tweeted the link so you will know who your most influential social followers are.

Make sure your blog has Tweetmeme or similar to make it easier for readers to Retweet.  Also, make sure to sign up with Feedburner.  That way people who want to get your blog by RSS and/or email can do so. Make sure your blog also has a Follow Me on Twitter button so people who find you can easily follow you.

5. When

People often ask how I blog so much and don’t think they can do it themselves. If you write about something for which you’re both knowledgeable and passionate I’ll bet you can pump out more than you think.

I usually blog at 10pm or on airplane flights. I never blog at work. Like you, I don’t have the time. I have board meetings, company pitches, internal partner meetings, etc. Hell, I often can’t even get to email during the day. So it comes out of TV time, which means I’m not missing anything. Occasionally if I really want to blog and I have a date or too much work I just set my alarm for 5.30am. Yup. It’s not that hard if you make a commitment to it.

What would it mean to you and your business if you could: increase your inbound traffic, enhance your company & personal brand, meet new influential people who suddenly know who you are. If you want these things they are available to you for the cost of some time & effort.

If you plan out what you want to write about in advance (create topics then to headings to structure your article. You’ll notice on this one I started with mine … Why, What, Where, How and then I later added When & What Next) then it’s really about writing.  Structure helps enormously.  If you need some help with the creative process read this.

I write for about 45 minutes to an hour in the first pass.  I usually then re-read, edit, spell check and add links.  This usually takes another 20-30 minutes.  I then always add an image.  I think this is a nice touch.  Just staring at text is a bit boring and I find that the image can add humor and/or drive people in.

6. What Next?

Then there’s comments.  You HAVE TO respond to comments.  Do yourself a favor and install Disqus. It makes a huge difference in driving a comment community.  If you want the details on why I covered it here.

First, it’s the most fun part of blogging.  It’s addicting like Twitter.  It’s where you exchange ideas with other people.  It’s where your community gets to know you.  It’s where you build loyalty and relationships.  I have met many people in person who were first commenters on my blog.  I find it frustrating if I leave comments on somebody’s blog and they never respond.  If somebody found your blog and took the time to comment then they’re like a customer who should be cherished. Responses to them are like customer retention. It’s also where you’ll learn. People will tell you when you’re full of shit.

Appendix: Traffic Hacks:

• Commenting on other blogs – you need to comment on other people’s blogs.  First, it is a place where your comment will often link back to your blog where it can drive traffic.  Occasionally, and not overtly, and only if relevant you can provide a comment with a link back to an article in your blog.  Don’t do this often, don’t be blatant and make sure it’s relevant.
• Linking to other blogs – For example, many people know that I love VentureHacks because it’s a great resource for entrepreneurs and I think that Babak Nivi is a star.  Notice I’ve linked to his website.  If he tracks his blog (which I’m sure he does) he’ll see this link.  If he has a Google Alert on his name (everyone does) then he’ll also get that.  Don’t be over the top gushing and creepy.  Be subtle.  Don’t overtly tell everyone you link to, “I linked to you, check out my article!”  Assume that over time if you write compelling content they’ll eventually check you out.
• Covering relevant people in your blog in an authentic way – If your blog covers topics in your industry it’s likely that you’ll be able to write about some people and companies that you want to be aware of your blog.  Don’t Tweet @ them telling them you covered them. Don’t email them saying you covered them. Just talk about their company. If you write good articles over time and do this often enough people will notice.
• Tweet support - What I did in the early days was to enlist Tweet support.  I would occasionally ask people that I was close with to retweet my posts.  I tried to mix it up in order to not ask the same people often.  I would send out emails with the Tweet text already written so that they just had to cut-and-paste.  As my blog started getting authentic traffic I stopped asking for this help very often.
• Guest authoring – Once you have a bit of credibility as a writer a great strategy to drive traffic is to write guest posts for relevant bloggers in your sphere of influence.   If you run BakeSpace and blog about food why not contact some of the local food blogs and see whether you could submit guest articles.  Most people are delighted to have the free content.  In return all you ask for are links back to your blog and to your Twitter account.  Slowly and surely these will add users, of which some will come back on a regular basis.

Editor's note: The following guest post is by bestselling author and former venture capitalist Peter Sims.  His next book is Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries. He can be found on Twitter @petersims.

In his recent article on TechCrunch, "Engineering vs. Liberal Arts: Who's Right—Bill or Steve?," Vivek Wadhwa sparked a national debate about education that raises important questions for us all.

If you haven't read the article yet, Wadhwa, a professor at Berkeley and Duke University, surveyed 652 chief executive officers and heads of product engineering at 502 U.S. technology companies and found that only 37% held engineering or computer technology degrees, and just 2% held mathematics degrees.  The rest had a wide range of degrees, from business to the humanities.

Yet in industry and education circles, STEM – teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – has gained cult-like status as the primary solution to our national innovation challenges. Earlier this year, President Obama announced a $250 million public-private initiative to recruit and train 10,000 more STEM teachers.  Bill Gates is one of the leading proponents of STEM while, as Wadhwa notes, implying that other educational investments, such as the liberal arts, should be curtailed.

But while investment in STEM is critical, it alone neglects the development of the types of skills that actually lead to discovery, creativity, and innovation.

So, for instance, when comedian Chris Rock performs on HBO, the work is widely considered brilliantly creative, yet his routines, as with all stand-up comedians, are the output of what he has learned from thousands of little bets in small clubs, nearly all of which initially fail.  (As Stanford Professor Bob Sutton notes, writers for The Onion, known for its hilarious headlines, propose roughly six hundred possibilities for eighteen headlines each week, a 3 percent success rate.)  Rock must persistently tinker using an iterative approach to discover and develop fresh material.  And the cycle repeats, day in, day out.

Similarly, as I described in my last TC guest post, despite the myths, most successful entrepreneurs don't begin with brilliant ideas, they discover them.

It's an approach that can be learned and taught, but rarely is in today's schools.

That's because our educational system emphasizes spoon-feeding us knowledge, such as scientific tables or historical information, and then testing us in order to measure how much we've retained about that body of knowledge, rather than teaching us how to create knowledge.

Utilizing existing knowledge works perfectly well for many situations, but not when doing something new, creative, or original.

We are given very little opportunity, for instance, to perform our own original experiments, and there is also little or no margin for failure or mistakes.  We are judged primarily on getting answers right.  There is much less emphasis on developing our creative thinking abilities, our abilities to let our minds run imaginatively and to discover things on our own.

This must change.

In an extensive, six-year study about the way creative business executives think, Professors Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of INSEAD, surveyed over three thousand executives and interviewed five hundred people who had either started innovative companies or invented new products, including the likes of Steve Jobs, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and VMware's Diane Greene.

They found several "discovery skills" that distinguished the innovators from the non-innovators, including experimenting, observing, questioning, and networking with people from diverse backgrounds. As Gregersen summed up their findings: "You might summarize all of the skills we've noted in one word: 'inquisitiveness.'"

When Barbara Walters interviewed Larry Page and Sergei Brin, rather than crediting their computer science degrees as the driving factor behind their success, they pointed to their early Montessori education.  (The Montessori learning method, founded by Maria Montessori, emphasizes self-directed learning, tinkering, and discovery, particularly for young children.)  "We both went to Montessori school," Page said, "And I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated, questioning what's going on in the world, doing things a little bit differently."

These findings raise critical questions for us all. Specifically, what is the purpose of education?  Is it to convey knowledge, as the current system is weighted, or it to inspire and nurture the ability to constantly learn?

Even though it's too late for most of us to attend Montessori, we can change the way we've been trained to think.  That begins in small, achievable ways, with increased experimentation and inquisitiveness.  Those who work with Jeff Bezos, for example, find his ability to ask "why not?" or "what if?" as much as "why?" to be one of his most advantageous qualities.  That's why, borrowing a phrase from Ryan Jacoby, an associate partner atIDEO: questions are the new answers.

“Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard to Las Vegas…” – Hunter S. Thompson

31,000 feet on Delta flight 133 from New York to San Francisco, sandwiched between a rotund bald man and a skinny French kid in a checked shirt. I feel like the cheesy filling in an unsettlingly turbulent quiche.

Still, sub-prime conditions or no, I have a column to write: I pop open my laptop and fire up a clean browser window.

As a technology columnist, my craft can be distilled as follows: identify the week’s hot-button topic, Google what other commentators are saying about it, pick a side, argue the opposite, get paid, don’t read the comments. Piece of cake, right?

And this week, the first two of those steps has been made particularly easy. For the past few days, my fellow tech writers have been working themselves into a bubbling froth about the Valley’s latest app du jour: Color.

Some have been shocked — shocked! – at the level of investment that Bill Nguyen’s team has received for – what? a social-mobile-photo-sharing trifle – $41m!; Others have rushed to the company’s defense, accusing critics of playa hating and other such ungentlemanly conduct.

So on which side do my sympathies lie?

Uh…

Um..

Oh God.

Ok, let’s not panic. Indecision happens to the best of us. Maybe if I break the story down into its essential elements it might kick-start my brain into forming an opinion.

A new mobile app has launched, having been invented by some smart people with a track record of building successful things. Some rich people have funded it with money they can easily afford to lose. The sum total of their investment is significantly less than Hollywood risks every day on movies like ‘Road Trip IV’ and ‘The Devil Still Wears Prada’. Near-field social networking is a neat and timely idea, and it might possibly break out beyond the twenty seven TechCrunch and Hacker News-reading West Coast hipsters currently embracing it with the same vim and vigour with which they hailed the advent of Instafuckinggram. Still, even best case scenario for Color, cancer remains uncured and new mice remain untrapped.

This isn’t good, this isn’t good at all.

Ok, I’m over-thinking. Just because every fiber of my psychological being is telling me that the launch of Color is less remarkable than my being caught in surprise rainstorm or finding a shiny penny on the street doesn’t mean I can’t fake it. Hell, many’s the time I’ve written 10,000 passable words on the unalloyed thrill of finding a shiny penny on the street. I’ll just tack on a list of easy jokes and call the job a good ‘un.

Being a Brit, I can express an amusing opinion about Color’s name: to act as faux-outraged as I do about ‘Aluminum’, ‘Cilantro’ and ‘Eggplant’. “I mean, it was bad enough when I had to Americanise – sorry, Americanize – my spelling in order to write HTML, now I have to do it to share pictures of my penis with total strangers in a coffee shop.”

Ugh.

(It’s not just me who’s struggling to find humo(u)r in Color. You saw the fake Color.xxx deck that did the rounds — mocking the fact that we’ve seen all of this stuff – mobile! social! sharing! photos! – before. But what should have been a nicely observed piece of satire actually fell flat after the first couple of slides. Why? Because we’ve seen those jokes before too. Even joking about Silicon Valley cliches has become a cliche.)

And yet, and yet…

The truth is, I’m all too aware that my response to Color – or rather my inability to craft one – is really just another symptom of something else. And it’s a problem not with the app, but with me.

This time a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my growing fatigue with the Valley and my proportionally increased enthusiasm at what’s going on elsewhere in the world. I also noted, with no small amount of envy, that Mike has moved to Seattle and Sarah continues to spend much of her time travelling in emerging markets. Yet still, after spending a fun couple of days in New York, here I am: back on a plane to San Francisco, ready to dig even further in to my rut.

Enough.

It’s time for me to hit the road again; to get out of San Francisco – for a while at least – to have some ridiculous adventures and rediscover a world without 941xx zip codes. I leave at the end of next week. My first stop will be Las Vegas where I’ll spend the entire month of April (and a few days of May) staying a single night in each of the 33 hotels on the Vegas strip. In addition to my twice-weekly TechCrunch posts, I’ll be writing a daily diary of the trip, and my inevitable descent into madness, for the mothership Huffington Post.

After Vegas, I’m heading back to London for a couple of weeks to promote my new book. Then I’ll hop back to New York for TechCrunch Disrupt before exploring some of what the rest of the East Coast has to offer.

And after that… I don’t know. Maybe I’ll head back to San Francisco, re-invigorated and ready to jump back into the Silicon Valley biosphere. Or maybe I’ll move to Morocco and live in a wifi-enabled Caidal tent. It’s really too early to tell.

What I do know is that the next few weeks should give me the head-space I need to separate the Valley’s wheat from its chaff and to force myself out of this rut that’s causing me to unfairly lump every new Palo Alto product launch into one homogeneous ball of “meh”.

Who knows, maybe by the time I next land in San Francisco, I’ll be reinvigorated enough to have formed an opinion about Color.

Nah, not really.

I mean, seriously, who gives a shit?

See you in Vegas!

Many people (including myself) were a bit disappointed that Apple didn’t devote any time during the iPad 2 unveiling to talking about iOS 5, the next major revamp of the software. But there may be a very good reason for that: it’s not coming anytime soon. In fact, the plan right now is to wait to launch iOS 5 until the fall, we’ve heard from two solid sources.

If our sources are right, this would break the pattern of Apple unveiling the latest iOS iteration in the early spring, leading up to a summer launch alongside new iPhone hardware. The spring timetable usually reserved for an iOS roadmap event is why some were hoping Apple may just rope the details into the iPad 2 event. When that didn’t happen, rumors quickly spread that there may be another event in April to talk iOS 5 (and MobileMe). But it’s looking like that will not be the case this year.

But it’s not all bad news. Here’s what we’re hearing right now:

• iOS 5 will launch in the fall and will be a major revamp of the OS.
• It could well be previewed at WWDC, it just won’t be released then.
• The iOS 5 launch is also likely to coincide with the release of a new type of iPad, which we previously reported on.
• The new iOS will be heavily built around the cloud, and we could see several new services launch from Apple that take advantage of this.
• Yes, one of those is very likely a “music locker” service. There is also a fall launch aim for this, during Apple’s annual music-themed event.
• But much of the cloud stuff will first be talked about at WWDC, Apple’s developer event which will take place in June.
• One of the new cloud service elements is likely a location service that focuses on finding friends and family members.
• As we said yesterday, OS X Lion is still on pace for a summer release — some of the new cloud components are likely to be baked into it as well.

So the next obvious question is where does this leave the iPhone 5? Again, the standard model for Apple has been to release a new iPhone alongside the new iOS version. We haven’t heard anything specifically about the iPhone with this news, but I would guess that it’s still on track for a WWDC unveiling and release shortly thereafter. If that’s the case, it will just be released with a version of iOS 4.X.

That’s all for now, more to come in the coming weeks, I’m sure.

[photo: flickr/vsz]

This week’s Gillmor Gang started off with a bunch of no-shows from Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble. Don’t know what happened to Mike, but @scobleizer was sandbagged by a rehearsal request for Ted X, whatever that is. So we hunkered down with Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and John Taschek for a rousing trouncing of the vanishing television windowing system, as performed by NetFlix, Showtime, and various Mad Men.

Showtime is mad because Netflix is closing in on its 20 million subscribers. Mad Men are mad because AMC can’t close a deal for a fifth season without promising a sixth. Android is mad because it can’t get no respect from anyone but @kevinmarks, and I’m mad about the iPad 2. As in nuts. Ce n’est pas un app.

Google is still hard at work on their social strategy. You know it, I know it, we all know it. What it will actually be, remains to be seen. But there are clues related to it that have started to appear.

The first was the redesign of the toolbar. While Google claimed it doesn’t directly point to the social strategy (even though it looks exactly like the verified +1 leaks we’ve seen), it is a first step. The second was the revamping of profile pages. Also nothing particularly social about it, but again, related to the overall strategy. And now we’re seeing something else: a unification of profiles across Google properties. And a big push for all of them to be public.

As The Next Web spotted a couple weeks ago, Google quietly announced that it would be deleting Google Profiles that weren’t public starting in July. Here’s the wording:

The purpose of Google Profiles is to enable you to manage your online identity. Today, nearly all Google Profiles are public. We believe that using Google Profiles to help people find and connect with you online is how the product is best used. Private profiles don't allow this, so we have decided to require all profiles to be public.

Keep in mind that your full name is the only required information that will be displayed on your profile; you'll be able to edit or remove any other information that you don't want to share.

If you currently have a private profile but you do not wish to make your profile public, you can delete your profile. Or, you can simply do nothing. All private profiles will be deleted after July 31, 2011.

And that’s important because other Google properties are also being woven into these profiles. Yesterday, the following note was left in the Google Groups message board:

Google Groups-specific profiles will no longer be supported. Instead, you will be able to use the new Google Groups to (optionally) link your new and improved Google profile with your groups. Starting July 1st 2011, you will not be able to make changes to your Groups profile. Your profile information will be available for export from your profile page until November 1st 2011. This change will not affect the nicknames you might have chosen for yourself to participate in groups. It will only affect the custom profile fields, such as your photo, location, and occupation.

This type of unification will also take place across other Google properties as well, we hear. It’s a part of a broader effort to bring Google’s properties closer together, and allow for more social activities, is our understanding.

But as we laid out a couple weeks ago, don’t look for a massive launch of something being billed as a “Facebook-killer” (not that anyone besides the press would label it as such anyway). Instead, expect smaller social features across Google properties to appear once the unification is more complete. Judging from the timelines of the changes above, this could be late summer or even later.

Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Closed.

I’ve never liked Google’s use of the word “open” to describe the Android operating system. On one hand, the “openness” has led to situations where carriers can more easily screw consumers. On the other hand, their system is really only “open” when it’s convenient to be. Wanna include Google’s services on your Android device? Sure, sign this partnership agreement. Wanna check in code for Android? Do you work at Google? No. Well then you’ll have to wait. Open.

But still, every chance they get, we hear from Google how open Android is, as if it’s the perfect answer to every question. How are you going to compete with Apple? Open. How are you going to keep the carriers in check? Open. How are you going to make money from Android? Open. Why is the Android experience sub-par? Open.

And then there’s the news that broke this week. Google, of “open” fame, is delaying the release of the source code for the latest version of Android, Honeycomb, Bloomberg BusinessWeek first reported. Why? So they can work on it and refine it. Behind closed doors. Open.

First of all, the fact that code has to be released at all says just about all you need to know about Google’s “open” claim. Facebook developer Joe Hewitt (formerly of Mozilla — an actual proponent of open) ripped Google a new one for this and other bastardizations of the word “open” last year.

His point wasn’t that Google’s model for Android is bad — it’s simply that the use of the term “open” is BS. And this latest development further emphasizes that. The real value of “open” to Google is as a marketing term.

Is Android more “open” than iOS is? Yes. But the way Google has been throwing around the word is in absolute terms. It has been ”open” (them) versus “closed” (Apple). That’s simply not true. And in that context, being “more” open is like being “kind of ” pregnant.

That’s not to say there aren’t benefits of being more open — there absolutely are. But as Google will have to admit now, there are also clearly benefits to being more closed as well. As is the case with nearly everything, the situation is not so black and white.

So how long will Android be closed for? That’s not clear. Bloomberg cites Google as saying “at least for the foreseeable future” — which sounds sort of promising. But later in the article they note: “The delay will probably be several months.” Ugh.

It’s important to note that this won’t have an impact on some of the Android Honeycomb tablets already in the pipeline. Obviously, the first of those, the Xoom, is already out there in the wild. And more are coming shortly. But these will only be from Google partners, the big guys like HTC, Samsung, and Motorola. Anyone else hoping to tinker with Honeycomb and build their own tablets will have to wait. Again, likely for months.

In announcing the delays, Google is also admitting that they took a “shortcut” as Android lead Andy Rubin puts it. “We didn’t want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable,” he tells Bloomberg.

Why such a tight schedule? Well it’s never specifically mentioned, but you should be able to put two and two together — “two” being the keyword: iPad 2. Google clearly wanted to get the first Honeycomb tablet out before the iPad 2 came along and took over the tablet party once again.

So was it worth the rush? If you read the initial reviews or talk to people who have used the Xoom extensively (like Jason), the answer is pretty clearly “no”. And given the backlash Google is now facing over the closing of their “open” platform, the answer is even more clearly “no”.

But again, this is actually the right thing to do. If Google doesn’t lock down the Android source code and refine it, the end result is likely to be pretty messy. It would lead to a bunch of products that range from mediocre to bad to awful. And if Google really hopes for Android to compete with the iPad, they can’t have that.

I just hope we aren’t sitting in the audience at Google I/O this coming May hearing all about the epic battle of “open” versus “closed” once again. It sounds good — until you have to contradict yourself.

Case in point:

@Arubin
Andy Rubin

the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"

October 18, 2010 11:21 pm via webRetweetReply

[photo: flickr/Monica's Dad]