Blog by Paul Golding

No point in rehashing all the coverage of Chirp, as I have been tweeting live from the event - what else? You can read my stream, or scan the coverage on the #chirp stream (or the #chirpqa back channel).

Just a note here to convey my impressions of the event and to describe my hack.

During the warm-up music, they played Pearl Jam - some old school rock. To me, it summed up the whole event at an emotional level. I recall seeing Pearl Jam backing in their early days. It was their first London gig at the Brixton Academy. The "early days" is the sentiment here. It was one of those gigs that you could say (years later) - "I was there, at their first gig." It was during the early history of grunge about to go mainstream. (The pre-history was lost on UK-ers who couldn't attend the earlier gigs of the Sonic Youth era.)

Ditto the feeling for Chirp, the first ever Twitter developers event. It feels as though this is a special event at the beginning of history. What history is that? The transition of the web to the real-time web, or the "streaming web."

I've been a Twitter user (on and off) since it's earliest days on the radar. I picked it up via a friend who knew that I was working at the time on a site called Thumbcrowd, which was intended to be a text-message group-share service, Twitter-like. With no funding and not a chance, I ditched it.

I can only look with excitement and awe of what these guys are doing. The platform and the ecosystem around Twitter is, to use the fave adjective of the day "awesome." (Although the new verb of the day, which must surely adorn any "streaming web" biz plan is 'Curate.' I'll leave you to discover its meaning in this context.)

This is surely an ecosystem that is here to stay - and about to explode. It will evolve at a rate of knots. Some of the new API announcements from Twitter, like @anywhere and the User Streams are going to blow an even bigger hole in the net. Check out the new Twitter developer site for details.

The announcement, at last, of a business model, is also interesting. Lots of questions about promoted tweets and whether or not the concept of "tweet resonance" is the new secret sauce of search. Who knows? The Twitter execs certainly didn't seem to know. But it seems they're in no rush. Their ambitions are for 1 BILLION users. With that kind of ambition and the talent that they seem to possess, it's not an unlikely target.

Moving on to my hack...

It's a simple idea, but something I had been dying to try. 

I have a US number that I rent from Twilio. For the hack, I connected it to a backend that scans my tweets and uses them to control the call. I can DM a tweet to the Twitter account associated with the number and the content of the tweet will be used as the voice announcement upon answering (using text-to-speech).

If I append the hashtag #call, then it means that I'm available to take the call, in which case the announcement will play out, followed by "connect you..." and then a call forward to my mobile. If I'm not available (leave off the hashtag), then it forwards to a voicemail (to email) service (which also includes speech to text).

It seems like the obvious thing to do. After all, if Twitter is all about "my status," then that's what I want to use to control comms. It just seems more natural.

If I miss a call, I get a direct message to tell me the caller ID, so I could phone back if I wish. I had also been thinking to use this to initiate an immediate IM chat online (like one of those Livechat services), but that's for another time.

I'm around at day 2 for anyone who wants a demo.

The phrase "Smart Pipe" is an oxymoron, which is a word I love because it says "moron" on the tin - and it's generally morons who promote such nonsensical ideas.

I mean, give me a break. A pipe is a pipe is a pipe. In the real world, what would a smart pipe look like? What would it do? Is it like a hose pipe with a high IQ?

When people use this term, it's just a lame attempt to validate something that doesn't actually exist. If it did exist, then prove it! Show me, Mr Smarty Pipe what you can do....

I'm waiting (last x years)....

Didn't think so.

I've had a GSM phone since they were launched. Heck, I helped design and launch parts of GSM and have the patents to prove it. I was a customer of Vodafone for eons. I would have probably remained so, had it not been for the iPhone. Oh - because Vodafone are so bloody great? Nope. Because who cares?....

They didn't. When I left, not a peep - after 10 years as a loyal customer - going up to 15 contracts with them back in the day of running my own mobile software company before it got screwed between one big company and another over a patent dispute.

Let me boil it down a bit.

I have been running the O2 Incubator program. It was my idea. It's not about smart pipes. It's about smart people. One clutch of bright developers met with me in O2 Media's swanky new Soho offices (nice enough that I might just switch to advertising and use the word "edgy" as my uber-adjective - and thanks to my brother Vince for making up the word "disedginess," which he warned me to avoid.) 

One of the developers told me how many hours I slept and when they were likely to be. In other words, he knew my sleep patterns. Pretty cool, although he was slightly off. But when we discussed why, we figured there was probably a way to improve the algorithm. (I would have been even more impressed if it had figured out that I suffer from insomnia, but I think that's do-able too.)

"And how long did it take to write the code to figure out sleep patterns from the net?" I asked.

"I think I started at 5...," turning to his mate, "Was it five?"
Mate: "Yeah, I think it was about 5..."
"And I had finished by about 10..."

Initially, I thought he must have meant "the 5th" and finished on "the 10th," as in "of March," or something. Five days. Not shabby. Then again, maybe he meant his 10th Red Bull. He didn't. He meant it took him five hours. Within five hours he had written some software to go figure out people's sleep patterns based on what they do on the web.

Smart people can do smart things in incredibly small amounts of time.

And that's what matters. Smart pipes, if they do indeed exist (which they don't) are not going to emerge from dumb pipes. Generally speaking, operators fail to escape the laws of entropy. So, dumb isn't about to morph into smart any time soon. The opportunities are there: The brands, the customers, the assets, the golden "billing relationship," and all that other stuff.... except, that is, the people.

It's not that the people aren't smart. They're just the wrong sort of smart.
And I'm probably no smarter...

But those guys with the code and the sleep patterns... they are smart. And there are others like them, like the smart guys I'm working with to create the #Blue service for O2. I didn't even give them a spec. Heck, they knew what to build without me even telling them (did they use that algorithm to figure out my app habits?)

And that's the issue with all this "Web 2.0" stuff and BIG DATA, and every other such meme, pattern and trend on the internet. It's a language, a way of thinking - and even a way of being. There are certain cultural norms in the internet world that just don't exist elsewhere, least of all in a business predicated on building a pipe. Not to underestimate the skill and resources required to build infrastructure, but it's the cathedral, not the self-organizing bazaar.

Marc Andreesen said it well, as featured in my visual tale of BIG DATA and operators, when he said:



The smart bit of the smart pipe, which doesn't exist, is rapidly building up on in the internet, which is what I was trying to say in my pitch at MWC -- skip straight to the last slide for this point. The new "infrastructure" of connected services is self-assembling on the internet. To operate in this world, operators need to become internet companies. OK, the "become" bit is the problem. They can't.

People who build pipes don't get this stuff. It's not their fault. They're good at what they do. Web platform people are good at what they do too - and this is the new infrastructure. It's a software one. It's being built as operators watch.

Get some smart internet people. Figure out how to standardize some of this "connected services - or contextual - infrastructure" stuff and take the power back. It's never too late to innovate.