It may seem it is always Twitter, Twitter, Twitter but Twitter at least how Steve uses it is not “Twitter” but a powerful tool or key piece in assembling the VRM Project/Ideal/World.

The old Chinese Proverb, “May you live in interesting times”, is often interpreted as a curse. Steve will continue to push for (our) understating of these interesting times and we ignore him at our peril. Now is the time where “the user is in charge”, let’s not fuck it up.

The conclusion I see, and the ONLY reason twitter means anything at all, is not that it is a huge step backwards, as was noted in a comment above. Rather, it’s the present day virtual reality Reaching back to the physical, and trying to connect it. Twitter represents one of the beginnings of the Real-Time Web.

In (slightly more) layman’s terms Steve is suggesting that Live Groups will be an API that allows us to define groups of people and assign permissions for those groups to access portions of our data on Mesh. You can see the seeds of these fruits at http://consent.live.com

-Jamie

If Twitter ever turns XMPP back on along with the ‘track’ feature, I’d suggest some of you folks give it a try. Or not. But really, if you don’t care for his writing, skip it. Why take the time to write a comment that’s nothing more than an effort to trash someone?

For a minute I thought I was on Digg.

1) crack
2) speed

or just wasted off his ass?

“On Microsoft’s side, Twitter needs to end the rivalry between Exchange and SQL Server on the delivery side, and (to be blunt about it) put Office and Windows in their place down the stack.”

You’re talking gibberish and (to be blunt about it) embarrassing yourself. Indeed, the article is so bad that it reads as if you accidentally posted a rough draft rather than the final revision. Really, this isn’t publication quality work.

Mike, this is an inflection point for TechCrunch. You’ve just inked an amazing deal with the Washington Post and allowing substandard posts like this to tarnish your brand could really do some damage. You may want to consider establishing a stricter review process to avoid having overly biased or unfinished posts like this one see the light of day.

Twitter is showing that even with 4 smart developers, experience counts in building high-scale communication services - if you don’t have it, your site will melt under unexpected loads.

I can believe Google has the know-how to do these things right. Amazon is climbing that experience ladder too. But Microsoft seems only now to be getting in the game. This will be interesting to watch.

Reading it now doesn’t help, unfortunately. Their could be a really interesting thesis here, but it feels like I’ve been handed random paragraphs from a much longer article. Key concepts aren’t explained even in passing (”80-20 to 20-80″?). Many connections drawn aren’t supported enough to make them even mildly persuasive (e.g., Microsoft Mesh to virtualization).

So Steve, whatever your point was here, I don’t think you conveyed it. I’m sure it worked in your head, but it’s not working in print. And jumping in to tell the readers that they’re the ones at fault isn’t helping.

The problem is not that Gillmor is “different”. The problem is that what Steve does is start with a stream of consciousness containing a very weak point, and fill it with embellishments and inside references to the point where it becomes a brain teaser for fellow pundits.

Most people (yes even TC readers) don’t have time to decipher this, however it could still be a fun distraction if it contained any real insight. I was really trying until he brought up Twitter. Now I don’t follow a lot of tech news because I’m too busy building technology, but suggesting Twitter is in any way disruptive for the likes of Microsoft and Google seems just utterly bizarre. First you have to assume that Twitter is going to find some use among normal people, which I think is still quite a leap, and not something on which to base theories of Microsoft doom.

I think it’s time for an editorial here about the idea that Twitter is just a fad and actually doesn’t provide enough value to be sustainable as a business. I don’t necessarily believe that, but it’d be a good starting point for a return to sanity around here.