The current king of microblogging is Twitter. Unfortunately for Twitter users, technical issues plague the service. It’s frequently down or overloaded. Every time a world event takes place, everyone puts in their two cents, which leads to the site being unavailable. Sometimes these chaos events take place at seemingly random times.

On the outside it would appear to be an issue of scalability. For instance, one person with a thousand followers posts one update, that update must then be queried by all of those users. Presumably these updates don’t happen all at the same time but as usage increases so does the strain on the system.

From the Twitter Developer Blog:

Twitter is, fundamentally, a messaging system. Twitter was not architected as a messaging system, however. For expediency’s sake, Twitter was built with technologies and practices that are more appropriate to a content management system. Over the last year and a half we’ve tried to make our system behave like a messaging system as much as possible, but that’s introduced a great deal of complexity and unpredictability. When we’re in crisis mode, adding more instrumentation to help us navigate the web of interdependencies in our current architecture is often our primary recourse. This is, clearly, not optimal.

The problem for the community is that since they’ve spent so much time gathering friends on the site they cannot easily migrate to another service. There are contenders waiting to supplant Twitter though. Laconica is a distributed open-source microblogging system. Laconica has the ability to push updates from one server to another thus making server to server updates possible. This approach makes it possible to follow people across any number of servers. An example of this is Identi.ca. Since the Laconica system uses OpenID all installations will authenticate users in exactly the same way. One username and password across the board. OpenID is a very robust set of technologies and one which many major services already support, you probably already have one and don’t even know it.

* Identi.ca and the Power of Microbranded Communities
* Identi.ca Will Succeed Because Its Technology is Viral

Another open-source microblogging tool OpenMicroBlogger.

Finally… an apple store in Fort Worth.

The new Apple store opened at 10 a.m. Saturday in the old Gap location at the Fort Worth retail center on University Drive to a line of more than 200 excited Macfans.

Daily deadlines did in the newspaper industry.

VALLEYWAG: 5 ways the newspapers botched the Web

The pressure of getting to press, the long-practiced art of doom-and-gloom headline writing, the flinchiness of easily spooked editors all made it impossible for ink-stained wretches to look farther into the future than the next edition.

I believe there is a little truth to this statement. The daily pace of the news is intense and it’s hard to maintain a focused vision for the future when the news is always happening.

Many daily paper publications are being dragged into the future. The primary problem facing all of them is finding the balance between slowly accepting shrinking circulation and being at the very edge of that ever shrinking bubble and migrating to a purely internet presence. News organizations need to maintain a connection to their community so that when there is no longer a paper reminder of who produces the news on their doorstep, the community is still aware of the source for quality news and information. A transition to a low-overhead increasingly web based presence will happen fast or many of these publications won’t get the chance to make it happen. The other problem with paper news is that once printed and delivered is yesterdays news, it’s not relevant to the news-now, news-everywhere crowd.

The area of concern for me, as an infrequent news website reader, is quality. I’m concerned when I am overwhelmed with advertisements and have trouble navigating. I most often visit news sites which are simple, clean looking, and informative. They should be simple to navigate, be friendly to mobile browsers and should offer feeds. I don’t even care if there are high quality advertisements within the feeds if they are relevant. I want more community, which is something generic news portals don’t have. Take a site like Digg for instance, it should be instantly apparent what is important to people right now. What Digg lacks is quality, generally because the content is 99.999 percent generated by its users. I’m not saying another Digg is what is needed but certainly there is a trend towards social networking, dynamic content based on an individuals preferences.

* The Slashdot community ponders this article.

The 3G iPhone looks like a pretty amazing piece of technology. Apple has managed to fix all of the things I didn’t like about the first incarnation. The most amazing thing about the iPhone 3G is how Apple will gain mind share and market share from the millions of people who are likely to get one. The reason they’ll gain so much is the thing which bites a lot of people who a low up-front cost. Though some have complained about the increased data plan costs, most who take issue fail to understand that 3G provides real broadband network connectivity. The value of the service has inceased.

The real value though is in the potential of the platform in the form of applications. When you compare what Apple has done in just two years for the mobile telephone market and contrast against a platform like windows mobile, there is no contest as to which company is on top of their game.

It’s almost as if they build their products because it fills some developers personal need versus building a “product” for the express purpose of making money. This is a strategy that I really admire because so far it tends to produce really interesting stuff.

With that said, hopefully the line will not be long.

Update:

I finally managed to get an iPhone. After having spent two days with it I’m very impressed. The only minor issue is battery life, probably because I’ve been using wifi quite often. The application store is incredible but since there are many competing applications it’s hard to know which one is the best. I’ve yet to find a good source of high quality iPhone application reviews. Some applications also don’t disclose information such as third party servers involved in communication, for instance some chat applications proxy certain requests between you and the destination. It’s amazing to me that this device is so far ahead of anything else on the market and in some cases the horizon. It makes every other phone look rather shabby by comparison.

I’ve been watching the olympics. It is apparent that something about the Chinese women’s team doesn’t add up.

Just nine months before the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government’s news agency, Xinhua, reported that gymnast He Kexin was 13, which would have made her ineligible to be on the team that won a gold medal this week.