I’m quite a fan of speech typing software, which I’m using right now, so I was very interested when my colleague Ralf Haller blogged recently about his experiences using Google’s voice recognition for search on his iPhone, which seemed to cope pretty well with everyday words but was rather challenged by place names etc. I just came across another review in the Dallas Morning News of Google’s and Vlingo’s competing speech typing software for the iPhone (and in Vlingo’s case, Blackberry):

Pros: Very accurate for speakers with American accents in quiet places. Easy to use. Reduce the need for typing.

Cons: Struggle with background noise and non-American accents. Don’t work for SMS or e-mail on iPhone.

Bottom line: Breakthrough applications that will change the way you use your iPhone or BlackBerry. Download immediately.

These products are clearly maturing nicely. However, according to the BBC, they’re going to be blown out of the water before year end by a small British company based in Hereford, who are planning to offer the world’s first ‘fully accurate’ totally voice-controlled phone. The BBC video shows a presenter standing in a rather low-tech looking factory holding a prototype of the Zumba, a small, very plain looking box, with a kind of a flat clip that is looped over the ear, speaking text to the user, and transmitting voice replies to be converted to text by the Zumba server (which the company claims to be 100% secure). “Whatever happens, this is very exciting tech indeed!” comments the dialaphone blog, and even The Register gave it a straightfaced report. Wired, however, is less convinced, put off not only by the “100% accurate, 100% secure” tag, but also by the fact that the company would not let the presenter actually test a prototype for “security reasons”:

Is your snake-oil sense a-tinglin’? It should be. This video further charts the descent of the Beeb from an internationally respected and neutral reporting machine into a populist tabloid of a TV company.

Ouch!

I’ve actually been using MacSpeech (which is based on Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking engine) to write most of this post. Oddly enough, the only words it’s really struggled with was “nuances” — it refused to give me the option of a capital letter and an apostrophe — and Zumba (for obvious enough reasons). I cut and paste URLs using a mouse, I have to confess, but even so, I’m pretty impressed with the performance of this software. It doesn’t enable me to produce a mountain of prose at breakneck speed. But that’s because I just don’t think that fast — this thing is way faster than my typing speed.

Given that I had to train MacSpeech for about 15 minutes so that it can recognize my speech patterns, that they recommend processor speed of a least 1GHz and a 1Gb of RAM, and that the support folders also require over 1Gb of hard disk space, you can understand why getting this sort of thing to work on a mobile phone is something of a challenge, and why I tend to agree with Wired’s view of the Zumba phone!

With the end of the year almost here, iand a number of recent stories, now seems like a good time to take stock of what’s happening on the social web. A mini news-roundup:

1. Facebook recently tried to buy to Twitter, perhaps just before their own valuation fell too far, but for that or other reasons, Twitter held out.
2. Facebook Connect service was launched, immediately followed by a competitive open-source solution from Google, called Friend Connect, supported by MySpace and others. Bot services extend users’ web personae and logins across participating sites.
3. Browser plugins support Google’s favoured OpenID website login system, and are offered as an integral part of Flock, the ’social web browser’.

I don’t want to go in-depth on these - links are to ars technica’s

excellent coverage. But they don’t name what I think is the elephant in the room, the iPhone, and other smartphones and small portables. I think 2009 will be an important year for them, recession or not. Laptops and desktops are essentially for work, and businesses and private users properly want to separate work and personal activities. The mobile phone is anyway right at the heart of interpersonal communication anyway and now offers better keyboards, screen resolution and apps. Mobile computing for business travellers is also pretty easy now on these devices. So for one thing I think both Google, Facebook and MySpace could become a little less dominant.

So this is a time of experimentation with a lot of new potential players creating apps, and brand loyalty is less of an issue when crossing platforms, so plenty of developments are possible, e.g:

1. Social networks are used more to organize the web experience and integrate it with users social experience more.
2. Location-based apps are increasingly players in both social networking and search functions.
3. Smaller screens create opportunities for a less complicated news aggregator than Google’s igoogle page, for example.
4. The browser and home page may become less crucial because of how apps are accessed on smartphones.
5. Aggregators of social networking sites, plus systems like OpenID, mean it is easy to have multiple memberships.
6. Twitter will continue to do well because of their minimalism.

OpenID and Friend Connect might also create opportunities for business social networking apps, though people will probably use them with caution at first for security and reputation reasons. Hard to see anyone getting ahead of Twitter’s combination of usability, flexibility, and discretion over how open to be, and Twitter groups could be key to directing traffic - functioning like a bunch of loose social networks and a dynamic news and views portal at the same time. Facebook might wish they had been able to grab them while they could.

What do the blogosphere, Wikipedia, and Apache have in common? Basically, huge influence, a great deal of collaboration, and dependence on free work supplied by amateurs. In Apache’s case this has created a huge degree of reliability, and in Wikipedia the more science-based topics are usually very authoritative, too. Even in the blog vs traditional media debate it’s now widely recognized that the comment and response system and immunity to commercial pressures compensate for a relative lack of infrastructure. The news world has in fact reached a point of interdependency.

Now, a lot of the more authoritative blogs are done on a professional basis, but the ecosystem in which they operate is one in which amateur or semi-professional bloggers predominate. This ‘mixed economy’ model is also the basis of the profit in the Open Source movement — companies can use Open Source profitably by using part Open Source, part proprietary software.

So how does this mixed professional and amateur, commercial and free environment affect the way you conduct online PR and marketing?

1. It’s important not to make too big a distinction between amateurs and professionals. Professional is not better, commercial is not more reliable, so hierarchical thinking of this kind can be counter-productive. Mutual respect is the watchword.

2. It’s not all about money. The fact there is so much good discussion in blogs, that Wikipedia is now so reliable, and that the open source movement has produced so much reliable software proves that a lot can be done without money. But it can’t be done without trustworthiness and reliable information. Web presence comes with being a provider of information - not a tit-for-tat process of buying favours but one of becoming a participator. The investment is time and energy.

So perhaps the model companies should use for such participation is Google’s ‘We offer our engineers ‘20-percent time‘ so that they’re free to work on what they’re really passionate about’, but in this case the free time is for participation.

Om reported on May 21that Twitter had finally got hold of its $15 million second round, with a valuation said to be $80 million. Past backer USV is said to have contributed, as well as an unnamed main investor rumoured to be Spark Capital of Boston.

But no one seems to be any clearer about its business model. One commentator, Joseph Weisenthal at the Washington Post, suggests that the money is just buying time - plus a few servers to help with their notorious reliability problems. But this may not be enough. A recent post on the company’s blog states that the root of the problem is unknown - something made clearer by Nik Cubrilovic at TechCrunch.

So what is Google doing all this time? If there is some really serious work to be done on scaling and on the business model, you can be pretty sure that they will be doing it with the Jaiku microblogging service they acquired last year. The money will help Twitter for now, but unless they can start generating real revenue soon, they will be trying for a third round within the foreseeable future, and wasting a lot of time in the bargain. Could this end up as another Netscape vs. Explorer?

Over 25 years ago I spent half of my gap year (between school and university) working on a building site as a plasterer’s labourer. Hard work but a lot of fun. My boss - a veteran plasterer known - I still have no idea why - as ‘Chap’ (or ‘Chappy’ to his best mates) - would introduce his musings on the world by sighing and asking ‘So, what’s it all about, Ade?’. I’m not in touch with him now, and in fact he’s probably not around any more, but I would love to be able to show him this list of the 75 million answers, courtesy of Google, retrieved in the blink of an eye:

I think that more or less sums it up (especially if you’re a gifted, asthmatic victim of internet fraud). And, strangely, not an adult site on the front page. Courtesy of Google, but ultimately of course of the World Wide Web, whose birth - when its intellectual property was released to the world was 30 April 15 years ago.

I thought I would have a look at a slightly more serious side of the Web’s general usefulness. At university, I had real problems trying to complete a couple of essays about the history of science. It sounds simple enough to find and compare different sources and commentators, but the relevant works (in English) were often unobtainable. Trying to come to independent, balanced conclusions about the what exactly various individuals thought about the world hundreds, or thousands, of years ago was hard. For a lot of work (at University College. London) I used their library resource computer network, called EUCLID to find sources. It made me think then that in another twenty years students would be typing in natural language questions and getting all the sources they needed.

How did the Web perform (again, using Google)? This time, two blinks, 2000 results. And again, no adult sites. Add wikipedia to this list (including the discussion page) and this is far better than I was able to manage at the time. My conclusion - maturing nicely. Just how good is it going to get when the semantic web finally arrives? I think I’ll try these searches when it turns 20.