Efrain Ribeiro's Profile

“We want to (offer) not just books, but we wanted to provide travel tools and become a travel platform,” said Matt Goldberg, who took over as the chief executive of Lonely Planet. He was previously the senior vice president, Digital Strategy & Operations, at Wall Street Journal Digital. Goldberg contends that in order to succeed in the new digital and mobile world, one can’t approach these new opportunities as a publisher. “We have to think and behave like a digital media company,” he added, and not like a traditional publisher.

For instance, instead of simply repurposing its travel guides for the iPhone, the company took all the content, made it searchable, and enhanced it by embedding maps. It also made all the information geo-aware so as to capitalize on the GPS capabilities of the iPhone, Google phones, and soon the Palm Pre. In less than a month, Goldberg said, Lonely Planet has seen “hundreds of thousands” of downloads of its 20 city guides and several other products. The company is working with Palm and Nokia to develop special offerings for those devices.

The company tries to tailor its offerings so that they capitalize on a platform’s special hardware capabilities. “On Android-based devices, we can leverage the built-in compass to help you find things pretty quickly and help you get somewhere fast,” said Matthew Cashmore, who has a very dot-com title of Innovation Ecosystem Manager at Lonely Planet.”The information just pops up on your screen.”

Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed (sorry MySpace) are in a dead heat race to make the most of the rapidly approaching real time web. Each offers their own, unique package of connectivity and information based on different ideas about how to foster organic human interaction and generate sustainable business growth. Even Google has joined the pack as more and more people use Twitter and Facebook to find information or news rather than search engines.

Yet as anyone who dabbles in social media will tell you, connectivity and access to information are no longer the problem. In fact, information overload is fast becoming an issue.

As real time communication becomes a reality, social media will be recast as curation. That means the very same Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed we now use to get information will be reframed as filters.

Yet it’s not a knock out competition. Right now we each choose Facebook, Twitter or Friendfeed depending on our preference for how we like to connect with others and information. In exactly the same way, these social networks - and others that aren’t even created yet - will provide of spectrum of choices for how we like to filter information. Our considerations will be the same as ever - how much connectivity we want, our tolerance for exposing our private lives, our comfort level with technology and time constraints.

I tried to explain that Twitter is the most visible manifestation of three major trends on the web that should be viewed together:





1. The web is transitioning from mere interactivity to a more dynamic, real-time web where read-write functions are heading towards balanced synchronicity. The real-time web, as I have argued in the past, is the next logical step in the Internet’s evolution. (read)
2. The complete disaggregation of the web in parallel with the slow decline of the destination web. (read)
3. More and more people are publishing more and more “social objects” and sharing them online. That data deluge is creating a new kind of search opportunity. (read)





Twitter essentially embodies those macro trends but hides them behind the elegant simplicity of 140 characters. Twitter, in fact, is not just a company — instead it has become a verb — and in the process, actually represents a certain way of doing things

And now we are seeing yet another subtle change in people’s behavior and how content is discovered online. It is happening because of three major reasons, as I’ve detailed in previous posts:

1. The web is transitioning from mere interactivity to a more dynamic, real-time web where read-write functions are heading towards balanced synchronicity. The real-time web, as I have argued in the past, is the next logical step in the Internet’s evolution. (read)

2. The complete disaggregation of the web in parallel with the slow decline of the destination web. (read)

3. More and more people are publishing more and more “social objects” and sharing them online. That data deluge is creating a new kind of search opportunity. (read)

When I first met Dave Winer, he explained to me the concept of “river of news” — where stories would flow as a river and you would dip in and drink what you could. It made absolute sense — after all, as bandwidth (and connectivity) grew, we would be using the web more, including sharing more and more objects. A few years later, the guys at 30 Boxes showed off a time line that essentially aggregated the life of my entire “social network.” As they say, the future always takes a little longer to arrive. In 2009, it has. These trends are showing up as Facebook’s status feed or Twitter streams. John Borthwick of Betaworks defines the stream as:

…a real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of, and whether we participate in them or simply observe, we are  a part of this flow. Overload isn’t a problem anymore since we have no choice but to acknowledge that we can’t wade through all this information.

Twitter traffic is growing by more that 1,000 percent a year, with some pundits estimating the company’s value at up to $1 billion. Monetization remains the sticking point. And while the Twitter folks themselves have yet to present a formal commercial model, plenty of smaller players (even the dogs) are vying to use the service to turn a buck.

There are literally hundreds of new ventures looking to take advantage of Twitter’s API — nicknamed Twisinesses (how cute is that?). But even the most popular among them are still finding it difficult to make a living. To weigh the challenges and opportunities in the space, here’s a who’s who of some of the most promising Twitter enterprises to date: