Ross Mayfield's Weblog

The Web is Back

This morning SlideShare launched a complete rewrite from Flash to HTML5, and a new mobile web app. You would think that as the world's largest social content network, with 60M monthly unique visitors (you too can be unique) this would be a big deal. Here's Liz Gannes from All Things Digital:

SlideShare Does Biggest Redesign Ever… But It’s Invisible!

Presentation-sharing service SlideShare today joins the HTML5 craze, and will transition its largely Flash-dependent site out of Flash into HTML5, making it significantly faster and able to be accessed by iOS devices. Multiple executives at SlideShare described this as their biggest project undertaken to date — but said users can expect the site’s appearance to change little, if at all.

That is the entirety of Liz's post. A classic. Love it.

But I think there are two important points here for entrepreneurs. The role of rewrites and, more importantly, the web is back.

Slideshare is html5 now

View more presentations from Amit Ranjan

Pivot 2.0

I am so very tired of the word pivot. Yes, entrepreneurs need to change course when things aren't working. But a better definition of entrepreneurship is experimentation at the margin. You take your hypothesis and prototype and make small moves at the boundary of what you know and do.

The hardest move in many cases is a rewrite. Scrapping old code for new. Chosing to redo old features instead of developing new ones. Investing in better architecture over fresh paint.

What makes it especially hard is customers are more likely to pay for new features. Markets for startups are asymmetric, with your buyer having less information about your product's current and future state and the viability of your temporary organization. The only time buyers care about your architecture is when it fails so badly they will cancel on you. So you can't just listen to customers on this one, you have to listen to yourself.

One of the worst decisions I ever made was telling Sun they couldn't fund a rewrite in Java and delay our market entry by another six months, so we could keep the first six months of Perl. Longer story, that one.

In this case, the decision was easier -- listen to Steve Jobs. Steve decided to kill off Flash. Which, if you are written in Flash, kindof sucks.

Still it wasn't an easy decision. Five years ago the only viable way to build SlideShare was Flash. Today it still works, but doesn't on iOS. This year we developed Zipcast, which was made in-part possible by HTML5, which wasn't possible five years ago. This year the team made the very hard call to forgoe new feature development and do a 100% rewrite to HTML5. Read CTO & Co-founder Jon Boutelle's post on how the team did it.

As we got into the project we learned we could make SlideShare 30% faster, reduce page load by 40%, retain document fidelity in the conversion and redendering process, and consolidate on a single platform. The web.

The Web is Back

HTML5 is largely a marketing term, but it represents the evolution of HTML, Javascript and CSS standards which are now adopted by every modern browser. Thanks, in-part, to the marketing term Ajax coined by the same guy who had just coined Blog, innovation flourished in that term Web 2.0. 

Now I don't think we are at the beginning of such a platform shift on the web. The real platform shift is people, and how their behavior with the web is changing at mainstream scale. But there are new things you can do, like how Pusher uses HTML5 Websockets for real time messaging. And more importantly, HTML5 is a more than viable platform for mobile apps like SlideShare.

Yesterday Marshall Kirkpatrick blogged: Firefox Creator Says the Web is Dead Meat; Android Creator Disagrees. Joe Hewitt argues that web technologies need an owner to compete with the curated app store model. This goes against core principles of the web (nobody owns it, everybody can use it and anybody can improve it), but those are more under attack by governments than standards bodies that move slowly.

The Web is the Biggest App Store

I really don't see entrepreneurs heading towards iOS or Android for innovation sake, more for the distribution opportunity. And when they do, they face the hard decision of developing on multiple platforms that made software such a pain in the ass before the web. Let alone potential revenue share.

And I don't think the web needs an app store, let alone an owner. Putting your app in a store only gives you distribution through the owner's model of curation. On the web, you market your app by giving back to the web. Sharing information and links that benefits the web's structure.

Think of your startup as a band and your app as music. The real distribution opportunity isn't happening in app stores. It's when your music is shared as a social object by people. And increasingly in seamless ways like Facebook's latest Spotify integration (yes, proprietary P2P, its a metaphor). You want your app to to be sharable across the social web in a way where people can engage with it in less than 2 seconds, not in over 2 minutes after downloading.

Five years out I'd bet on the web being the most successful mobile platform thanks to improvements to come, and its more organic distribution opportunities.

 

Socialtext Mobile Social Software

Today at 9/9/09 9am EDT, Socialtext released Socialtext Mobile. Here is the blog post, press release, and coverage:

Mashable: Socialtext Mobile: Business Activity Streams On the Go
by Barb Dybwad, September 9, 2009
"If you’re one of the many enterprise (and increasingly, small business) users of Socialtext, you’ll be excited about today’s Socialtext Mobile beta launch news. If you’re in the market for an Enterprise 2.0 solution for your business, there’s even more reason to get Socialtext on your roadmap."

Venture Beat: Socialtext builds mobile web apps for collaboration
by Anthony Ha, September 9, 2009
"Socialtext President and co-founder Ross Mayfield says the mobile version of Socialtext should includes almost all the features found on its downloadable application Socialtext Desktop — namely, you’ll be able to read colleagues’ Twitter-style comments and post your own comments in Socialtext Signals, follow co-workers’ activity streams, view their profiles, and also read and edit content in Socialtext’s wiki workspaces."

TechCrunch: Socialtext Launches Mobile Version Of Twitter-Like Collaboration Platform
by Leena Rao, September 9, 2009
"Via a Blackberry, iPhone or Android, users can see and post to their company’s Twitter-like message stream and access their company’s Socialtext Workspace, an enterprise-ready wiki. The platform’s SocialCalc collaborative spreadsheet offering is also accessible via the mobile interface."

eWeek Socialtext Releases Mobile Web App for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android
by Clint Boulton, September 9, 2009
"The lightweight Web app works on Apple's iPhone, Research In Motion BlackBerry smartphones and Android smartphones, allowing users to access Socialtext's Twitter-like Signals microblogging tool and browse through users' activities, content and contacts. Users can then access a contact's virtual business card by clicking to e-mail or call the contact from their smartphone."

InternetNews: Socialtext Mobile Delivers Broader Access
by David Needle, September 9, 2009
"Users won't have to do any extra configuration to use the mobile version. Socialtext Mobile automatically detects when you log in from a mobile phone and serves up an optimized mobile application."

ReadWriteWeb Socialtext Goes Mobile But Forgoes an App
by Steven Walling, September 9, 2009
"Rather than a native application tailored to the iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android, Socialtext chose to create mobile browser version that is cross-platform by default. The site will detect when you're logging on through a mobile device and redirect you to a subdomain with a custom UI, which was built to reflect the desktop version of Socialtext."

Twitter for Africa and Good Governance

Today I co-facilitated a session on Governance with Daniel Kaufmann, the Director, Governance and Anti-Corruption World Bank Institute.  In his post before the session, he distinguishes between e-government and m-government:

...But e-government, focused on government services, has under-emphasized broader aspects of governance, particularly those where citizens and institutions outside of government play a key role.  People have not been at the center of e-government, and e-government applications have often been static and immobile, relying on IT infrastructure which is out of reach for most locations and citizens in developing countries.

But the good news is that recently a dynamic IT-revolution has been afoot,  placing the citizen center stage.   It is m-governance, or ‘Governance-on-the-Go’ (GonGo), with the focus on (mobile) governance rather than only on government.  ’GonGo’ is enabling open, fluid and interactive ways for people to relate with each other and with institutions, including civil society and NGOs, the private sector, media, parliaments, and also public institutions.

Daniel frames the opportunity to put people in governance through mobility, and for good reason.  Africa has 20% mobile penetration and 80% of the population has access to the network through those with mobile devices.  This bridging function is common in the developing world and has its own design considerations (see Genevive Bell's research). 

Daniel went so far in the session to suggest there may be a Twitter for governance for the 3rd World (he also said there was really four worlds).  Picture open source identi.ca with a specialize mobile interface.  Not just as a tool for communication across citizen networks, or flash mobs, but for governments to communicate internally and with citizens.

I'll try recap the session in another post.

Mobile Enterprise 2.0

Stephen Johnston, my old friend and customer at Nokia, has an extensive post on mobility and Enterprise 2.0.  He provides an overview of the category, survey of existing developments, case for Nokia to participate and builds an argument for open and collaborative development.  Of course, I'll just extract the section on wikis and collective intelligence:

Amazon is often held up as the first example of a service provider that lets users benefit from collective intelligence through their collaborative filtering engine. So, why would this not also work in areas other than books? For example, "intelligent" CRM software could scan the salesperson's customer responses, and suggests appropriate product offerings based on large numbers of other interactions, potentially also outside the company. (Actually, maybe it does already, it’s been a while since I worked in the industry). Most sales people are inherently mobile, and providing lightweight usable tools that expose this collective intelligence at the right time and in the right context, could be a very valuable offering to mobile users.

Wikis are great at capturing user-created intelligence and are rapidly becoming mainstream in the enterprise space, but if you’ve ever tried using one of today’s wikis from your mobile, you’ll appreciate the inherent problems here. Socialtext have been making moves in this regard, but here is a standard chicken-and-egg problem – limited demand resulting in limited development time, begetting limited offerings. UI and synchronization are the key issues to solve. As noted above, services requring smart and big browsers face an uphill struggle on the mobile. Today’s wikis often suggest side-by-side version control review, and require a big screen to see the differences. Synchronization is a key conceptual challenge with mobile, since they generally are not always on. Wikis rely on having one version of the truth – two people making changes to the same item when offline then syncing later makes would vex Schrödinger himself.

Today project managers in Nokia that I work with will generally just create an empty wiki space as they start a new project. This example is being played out across the corporate landscape, and could well disrupt collaboration applications that are built on the assumption that the designers – cut off from the action – know what’s right for each project. Here Nokia’s interests are well aligned with the wiki companies and web services companies in general – do away with the need for a PC and keep the smarts in the cloud. Once bottom up “architectures of participation” are in place, powerful learnings can then be harnessed - enterprise-focused social networking tools (Ryze, Tribe, LinkedIn) are able to unearth links, activities and dependencies around the organization which traditional hierarchies and organizational structures miss.

There are plenty of ways that mobiles could be used as both in-the-field data gatherers, providing relelvant context, or being the mobile manager’s tool of choice for viewing and interacting with the wisdom of the crowds who have gone before.

If you haven't tried Miki the mobile wiki, log on with your Socialtext hosted credentials at http://mi.ki with your mobile web browser.

Status Contests and Attention Aggregators

I find myself updating my status, or answering the question "what are you doing?" across Twitter, Jaiku, Plazes and Facebook.  This is made easier through clients like Twitterific, Juhu, Plazer and some Facebook hacks that are less attractive.  I'm using these clients for more than updating status easily, however.  They are a new kind of attention aggregator -- bringing the status or lifestreams of my social networks to me in real time.

They are pretty cool tools, if you haven't tried them.  For Twitter, having a client fits my laptop-oriented daily use, so I can mostly turn the mobile client off (text "off" to 40404, and "on" when you are roaming around) and subscribe to a larger social network.  For Jaiku, having a client brings continuous partial presence to my laptop, that is far richer because people are lifestreaming (adding feeds from other tools like blogs to enrich their presence).  For Plazes, the Plazer has always let me share my location, but now it is richer with status sharing and a reverse-chronological view of your network.  Facebook will surely have a better client soon as part of their quest to be the social operating system, and hopefully incorporate your Mini-feed.

But all this client development seems like one-offs, status service providers have stayed out of development perhaps wisely, and there is ample room for innovation.  As is usually the case, we've been here before -- a lack of standardization and cooperation yields less and leaves room for a large service provider to monopolize.

I don't think we want to wait for Google, Yahoo or Microsoft to provide a status and lifestream integrated user experience that flows through clients, let alone browsers or operating systems.  I do think this will happen as status services fill a valuable niche in our demand for social interaction, let alone being a new command line for web services.

Compare where we are to how RSS and Atom provided common standards for developers to innovate.  There was a time where almost every graduate CS student would write a news aggregator for fun and new startups proliferated.  Adriaan Tijsseling leveraged Atom from the earliest versions to create client blog editor, Ecto, and went beyond the Flickr Uploader to also offer aggregation with 1001.  Some, like Newsgator, plunged deep into clients across operating systems, email clients and mobile clients to let you work across them.  But the result isn't the case where one vendor, could own publishing, syndication and reading including clients.  We have a healthy marketecture that continues to innovate.

There is a new kind of aggregator, for more real time attention, that needs to be build to work across status services.  I'm not sure if it will be built into existing news aggregators, if existing status clients will evolve into them, or it will be something new.  I just know it is coming.  It will leverage status service providers and Lifestreaming you find in services like Dandelife and Jaiku.  You will be able to edit your status and perhaps more, like location to Plazes or a blog entry.  Maybe it will be built on Apollo or Google Gears, maybe a Firefox extension or a mobile version on WidSets.  But it won't happen too soon.

The problem is, while the REST APIs are easy to work with, they aren't standardizing.  Maybe they will converge on using the Atom Publishing Protocol.  Maybe they can work out a way to let you write your status once, publish everywhere, and remove dupes when aggregating.

Jaiku Tips the Tuna?

Did Jaiku tip the tuna yesterday?  Leo Laporte  jumped ship from Twitter to Jaiku, his 4,000 followers followed.  The Twitter herd debated platforms, has herds do when chosing to migrate.  Suddenly the story was Twitter vs. Jaiku and Jaiku team dealt with digesting a big chocolate Easter Bunny.

Let me provide some context first.  I was exposed to Jaiku at Aula in Helsinki last June.  From my notes:

Jyri Engeström and Mika Raento on social peripheral vision.  Phones are designed with the assumption that you know who you want to call before you do.  You need to process social signals before using the device.  Jaiku, their startup is looking to augment basic functions of a phone by pasting onto it what is happening on the internet.  If you can't find anyone in your contact book, you can search a directory made of everyone's contacts. Calendars let you share future events to let you plan together.  The demo shows very rich profiles based on phone usage (automatic data) and more social signals (more manual) -- which provides a different form of Presence.  In usage, people still call regardless of presence, but when someone doesn't answer, you leverage the presence to understand why. Integrated IM is more convenient than SMS, and includes group messaging.

Since then, Twittr came on the scene and Jakiu's web interface got a major upgrade.  It's important to understand the significant differences between the two services, their design thinking and strengths.  Joi Ito:

Looks like a bunch of people are trying out Jaiku after "tasting" co-presence with Twitter. To me, Jaiku, which existed before Twitter, is a bunch of Helsinki mobile jocks getting into the Web 2.0 of it all whereas Twitter is the Web 2.0 crowd "getting" co-presence...

Jaiku comes from a "presence" background allowing bluetooth proximity, phone idle time, ringer mode and other things to trigger state changes - the messaging came later. Twitter, on the other hand, is primarily messaging, which as we all know, is just a flexible and manual vector for presence information.

To understand where Jaiku is coming from, I encourage you to read this interview with co-founder Jyri Engeström and his post on social peripheral vision (the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your friends, family, and colleagues).

  Twitter on paper 
  Originally uploaded by jack dorsey.

In digging around for some of the thinking behind Twitter, I found Jack Dorsey's napkin design for Twitter:

from a note circa Jan 2006.

casual awareness.
"what are you up to?"

multiple entry point to set status
- web
- email
- phone
- sms
- im

multiple ways to "subscribe" to status
- web
- email
- phone
- sms
- im

3 aspects
- set status
- timeline (collaborative)
- configuration

The interesting thing is that I found it on Jack's Jaiku page where he had included his Flickr stream as part of his presence.  For a long time I've wanted the Xfire for social software, and today Jaiku provides this kind of persistent presence.

Jaiku lets you incorporate feeds from your blog, bookmarks, photos, location -- and Twitter if that is where you prefer to post status.  Every post of any kind becomes an object for conversation, through comments.  This works easily in the web UI, but it also works in the Nokia mobile client because presence isn't overwhelming. Presence is something you can glance at, not an SMS interruption. 

Unfortunately today this requires a Nokia phone, but they are working on a Java version that also specifically supports commenting (kind of like Radar.net, more on that later).  People coming from Twitter won't expect the ability to add their attention breadcrumbs to their attention stream (developers will) and will probably expect something they can adopt on their mobile easily.  In the US, this is a significant barrier (Sidenote: fuck you Cingular.  Making me change calling plans to switch SIM cards from my Blackberry and claiming the handset wont work because you don't sell it even though it runs the same software is an easy way to lose me as a customer, as if I had alternatives.).  Jaiku isn't ready to Tip the Tuna until their next mobile client comes out. 

But until then I'd expect a lot of people to use the web version as an attention pool.  Posting to Jaiku via Twitter is a no-brainer and I'd hope you can do the opposite without loops and dupes soon.  Rafe asked the right question:           Is it possible Twitter and Jaiku will end up sharing users, instead of hoarding them like the IM services did early on? I responded: systems of record are being replaced by systems of discovery. 

In other words, in the first web I would worry about which service I would commit my social network, presence and persistence to.  But services are increasingly making data discoverable and discovering data from other services.  We used to worry about transporting our FOAF relationships, but then I think we realized that each tool is different and being able compose a different social network was a virtue (not just because of faceted identity, but that different tools need different filters and the social network is the filter).

UPDATE: This post was written in haste before going out for Easter.  Jaiku released their API and developer site.  I forgot to highlight Marko Ahtisaari's why I use Jaiku:

1. Silent sociality - checking up on what my friends are up to when convenient, and posting my own state knowing that I won't be disturbing others (unless they have explicitly asked to be alerted).

2. Small-group sociality - Jaiku is not about celebrity. I'm interested in sharing state with a small group I'm nearly always in contact with, what Mimi Ito has called full-time intimate community.

3. Mobile sociality - Jaiku was designed with the mobile "living phonebook" interface in mind. SMS alerts crowding the inbox of one of the few working personal and functional communication channels is not my idea of improving communication. I use the SMS-in posting to Jaiku when I'm using my Nokia 8800 and with my N70 I use the Jaiku phonebook.

4. Background sociality - Jaiku allows me to integrate other online identities and feeds (including delicious, flickr and any RSS) into my single jaiku presence feed. This is done in a way that doesn't confuse these background posts with my explicit state messages.

Rafe posts about adding your Twitter to Jaiku.  And I wanted to add one last thing.  If you aren't trying it with a mobile client, you can't get the real experience.

The Wikinomics Playbook

UPDATE: An interesting related project by Penguin Books is A Million Penguins, letting anyone edit a book to be published.  The wiki is down at the moment, but PaidContent notes it began with “It had snowed, and was now raining. Gritty slush covered the pavement. Sharp crystals of snow decorated grass.”  Reuters notes the challenge is finding “believable fictional voice” within the mass collaboration.  This was a big challenge for group editing of the Wired Wiki story.

The last chapter of Don Tapscott's new book, Wikinomics, invites readers to write it: “Join us in peer producing the definitive guide to the twenty-first-century corporation on www.wikinomics.com.”  Today we launched a Socialtext wiki for the Wikinomics Playbook, where people can not only learn about the power of mass collaboration, but participate in it.  The book is already one of the fastest selling business titles and is an excellent primer on how models of collaboration are unfolding from open source to blogging to wikis in the enterprise to enable people to participate in the economy like never before.

The second to last chapter is about enterprise wikis.  Half of it discusses how Best Buy is using a wiki knowledge-base for the Geek Squad.  The other half is an interview with yours truly and shares some of Socialtext's success stories. The first chapter is available online as a pdf.

 

This is a great example of how a book can be augmented with a wiki, as most books are out of date by the time they are published, never quite finished and have the potential for participation. Last month we helped Larry Lessig share the entire Code 2.0 book in a wiki.  I expect that soon such commons-peer production, a wiki for every book, will be common.

SuiteTwo Launched: Enterprise 2.0 in a Box

A small dream of mine came true today.  We've been preaching an ecosystem of tools for some time now.  We've helped customers stitch them together in interesting ways.  In fact, Andrew McAfee's original article on Enterprise 2.0 was borne from observing what was happening in one of our customers and projecting into the future.  Well, future happens fast.

Looking back, look what I blogged just before the first Web 2.0 conference:

I'm providing a workshop on Enterprise Social Software with Socialtext Customer Mike Pusateri from Disney.  You might recall his great presentation at the at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Confererence in February. Mike and his team are leading the way with how they are using lightweight web-native tools as a platform for productivity. Not just how they use Socialtext for project communication, but how they stitch it together Moveable Type and Newsgator for an ecosystem of tools with RSS.

That was then, this is now. This morning I provided a workship on Enterprise 2.0.

Today we announced SuiteTwo, The Enterprise 2.0 Suite powered by Intel.  Intel is distributing the Best of Breed wiki (Socialtext), blog (Six Apart), Feed Aggregation (Newsgator) and Feed Publishing (SimpleFeed), supported by Spikesource, through its channels including Dell, NEC, Ingram, Novell and Red Hat.

This fulfills Andrew McAfee's vision of Enterprise 2.0.  In a box.  Made simple for Small-to-Mid-sized Enterprises.  Extensible because we've all supported open APIs.  Enterprise 2.0 is freeform social software adapted for organizations.  SuiteTwo is the first offering to realize the SLATES paradigm:

SLATES = Search | Links | Authorship | Tags | Extensions | Signals

In the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, McAfee went further to distinguish this Network IT (NIT) from Functional IT and Enterprise IT:

As the DrKW example illustrates, NIT’s principal capabilities include the following:

• Facilitating collaboration. Network technologies allow employees to work together but don’t define who should work with whom or what projects employees should work on. At DrKW, ad hoc teams have formed because employees read one another’s blogs. These teams have used the wiki to accomplish tasks, and they have disbanded without orders from senior executives.

• Allowing expressions of judgment. NITs are egalitarian technologies that let people express opinions. DrKW employees use blogs to voice their views about everything from open-source software to interest rate movements.

• Fostering emergence. “Emergence” is the appearance of high-level patterns or information because of low-level interactions. These patterns are useful because they allow managers to compare how work is done with how it’s supposed to be done. Emergence is also valuable for users. For instance, employees can easily search and navigate DrKW’s blogs and wiki for trends and data even though nobody is in charge of making them easy to use.

...Employees exploit older NITs such as e-mail and instant messaging on their own, but business leaders have a role to play in exploiting newer technologies like blogs and wikis. They can help sustain and increase the use of complements to make the technology continually more effective, primarily by guiding users. Darren Leonard, a managing director in the global equity derivatives business at Dresdner Kleinwort, recalls how he got his colleagues to use the company’s wiki: “First, if a wiki has no structure, it’s perceived not as an opportunity but as anarchy, and our people have no time for anarchy. I went back to my initial pages and rewrote them to be a lot more directive. For example, I made a page with the agenda for an upcoming meeting and asked people to add to it. Second, wikis have to be clearly better than other ways of collaborating. There have to be uses [for them] that demonstrate their power. One of these uses came prior to a special senior management meeting where we could bring questions from our groups and get them answered. I put up a page…asking my [team members] what questions they wanted me to ask on their behalf. People used the page to post questions, edit them, and discuss which ones were the most important and why. That really accelerated wiki use. Finally, old habits are hard to break. The tendency is for people to keep using e-mail because that’s what they know....I have to [tell them], ‘I’m not reading e-mails on this topic. Use the wiki’ or ‘Everyone’s assignments are on this page—use the same page to report on progress.’”

Lead users and enterprises already work this way today.  Only they do so without usable efficiency.  Integrated single sign-on, search and tag cloud are just the beginning.  One click subscription to a page, blog post, search query, report, weblog and wiki make feeds usable (unlike today's user experience, when they click on an orange icon and think their browser is broken).  Rapidly form groups, draft together on a wiki page, publish to a blog and track results. 

Beyond making such tasks efficient, the benefits to productivity, discovering emergent intelligence and high-engagement marketing are significant.  Very soon a user will wake up in the morning, log in to SuiteTwo, immediately recognize something emerging.  With the top blog posts telling her what the company is talking about, the top wiki pages showing her what people are working on, top posts from the outside that her company is subscribed to and the feedback from what they are publishing
-- something will emerge.  She recognizes the opportunity, pulls on the social fabric and easily forms a diverse group of experts.  They follow new feeds and generates others while working with a little productive friction.  They develop a plan and draft a new offering in the wiki.  They publish to a public blog and track where it goes. The feedback loops continue, she goes home for the day and the organization is bound to adapt again.

This isn't your Dad's enterprise, but one you will be working with soon.

Plazes Goes Mobile

Took a break in Mexico this weekend, literally locking my cell phone in a safe and not bringing my laptop with me.  Still catching up, but I had lunch with Felix from Plazes today (disclosure: advisor) who told me I could have tagged the location while being safe with the new Mobile client.  The world is getting granular.

Also on the MoSoSo front, I added Twttr to the top right of my blog for those interested in the messaging of the mundane.

Twttr

Prepare to be spammed globally.  Twttr just launched, a mobile social software app for SMSing your social network developed by Odeo.  It's slightly simpler than Dodgeball, not location centric and a bit more viral.  Biz Stone calls it present-tense blogging. Ev notes you might want to upgrade your SMS plan and they are working on compatibility outside the US.  To me its reply-to-all baked in your phone.

If they support MMS and let me send a photo to twttr and CC flickr, it will be a killer app.  But for now, put my SMS' in a sidebar widget or give me feeds I can splice.

Yes, I am a twtt.