TECHNOLOGY REPORT

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg is talking about the state of the platform  here at the final morning session of WordCamp San Francisco.

History lesson:  Mullenweg’s coding journey began with a patch for b2  content management system which led him and co-founder Mike Little to pull the best features of various blogging systems into the platform now known as WordPress.

Mullenweg credits the open source model for much of his success building the WordPress empire.

WordPress Growing:  11 million downloads, 58 million posts, 22 *billion* pageviews. 4.9 billion spams killed by Akismet, up only slightly from last year.

Matt’s Blog is here.

Although this is a blogging conference I’m hearing some excellent SEO advice from Google’s Matt Cutts and global adventure blogger Tim Ferris.  Matt will be posting details from his talk over at MattCutts.com/blog/

Tim Ferris is a popular author and global vagabond who experiments with many aspects of his blog

Mullenweg: 2009 has twice last year’s attendance.

I’m here at the beautiful Mission Bay Center of UCSF along with a growing crowd of WordPress bloggers for the second annual WordCamp San Francisco. WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg will be speaking along with Matt Cutts from Google and several other blogging and tech luminaries: http://2009.sf.wordcamp.org/speakers/

WordPress remains in my view the best CMS for a variety of reasons including ease of use, robust features, the amazing core team at WordPress, and a growing development community. Blogger is simpler to set up and use but lacks the rich feature set of WordPress.

Reporting:  Joe Hunkins

Here at the first major Twitter conference it’s surprising to hear a very sharp, leading technology watcher so profoundly misunderstand the significance of Twitter, but it’s happening right now in real time.

Jeremiah Owyang, no stranger to Twitter, is using what I’m pretty sure is mostly canned presentation to explain to the enthusiastic Twitter audience that they are mistaken to see Twitter as singularly significant. He’s certainly right that Twitter is not the only social media game in town and that it’s still smaller than Facebook, but I think he’s missing the significance of the trend here. Twitter is growing faster than any major application in history, it already has widespread mainstream and celebrity adoption across most demographic groups, and it is evolving an ecosystem noted more for how it shares Twitter functionality freely with everybody than how it seeks to be proprietary.

Sure, Twitter is currently far more significant as a sociological phenomenon than as a big business tool. Perhaps Jeremiah’s big business focus is getting in the way here, but the global public conservation has begun in a powerful way and Twitter – more than any other application – is the key to accessing that conversation and participating.

Hmm – I’m live blogging this right now during his presentation and he’s changed his tune a bit to (correctly) suggest many of the ways Twitter is now used by companies to engage with customers. I’m wildly guessing the first part of the presentation was created before the rise of Twitter?

Dear @jowyang, Twitter is not over hyped.

Update:  I had a brief chat with Jeremiah and Stowe Boyd (who had also tweeted his disagreement with the “overhyped” tag on Twitter.   Owyang noted correctly that many new tech tools come out swinging with a lot of buzz and are labelled “the next big thing” only to land on the dustpile of obscurity or become only marginally significant after a few years.  But as somebody noted during that talk Twitter is about human innovation, not technological innovation and thus is more likely to withstand the test of time.

Important but unknown data points make the calculations somewhat unreliable, but for me the growth rate combined with the large current size and easy capitalization suggests Twitter has already become something of a mainstream standard that *cannot* die a quick death and is very unlikely to die a slow one.   We needed a standard for chit chatting across the web in the global conversation spawned by the advent of the social web.   Although it’s not clear why Twitter is winning this game I think it’s almost clear that they will be the big winner, and since they are sharing the wealth so generously I don’t see how anybody is likely to unseat them.   Facebook and Myspace can continue to thrive as private social tools and Google can thrive as the search of choice.  Ebay will remain the main US auction space for some time.   This still leaves a massive market in which Twitter can continue to provide the key standards and infrastructure for the global conversation.

Jason Calacanis is no stranger to successful internet companies and even though he has no direct financial connection to Twitter (to my knowledge), he’s very bullish on Twitter’s prospects to make a *lot* of money as Twitter traffic and growth explode online.

Jason is right to tell people to ignore today’s Wall Street Journal article suggesting Twitter’s lack of revenue is a sign of weakness. Almost to the contrary Twitter is correctly building a loyal following of Twitter “Friends and Followers”, many of whom would not participate if the commercial elements were too overwhelming. Google did this masterfully with search with a lean, user friendly interface. After people became loyal and even addicted to Google search they turned on the revenue spigots and Google became the key online player within just a few years.

Calacanis is noting how simply “turning on” various possible advertising features at Twitter would instantly lead to millions in revenue – he said “hundreds of millions” but one should be skeptical of that level of optimism given the challenges Facebook has had despite their huge level of traffic and participation.

Calacanis is so optimistic about Twitter he’s convinced it will be worth more than Facebook eventually, and feels that it’s now worth about a billion based on the implied valuations of the venture capital.

From the official Twitter 140 Conference Schedule

Alex Payne Keynote: The Business Value of the Twitter API

Scores of businesses are utilizing the rich and dynamic data set provided by The Twitter API in ways that improve customer experience, enhance product development, increase visibility, and provide bottom-line profits. In his keynote, Alex Payne will provide several real-world examples of how the Twitter API is delivering results for organizations large and small.

Best Practices Panel: I am a Twitter God(dess) and So Can You
Panelists: iJustine, Tara Hunt, Dave Peck Moderator: Steve Broback

The Twitterati are masters at gaining followers, driving conversation, and assimilating the tsunami of commentary and links that stream to them on a daily basis. In this session, our panel of experts will discuss what strategies, tactics, and tools have taken them to the top of the twitosphere.

Writing Tweets that get attention and retweeted * Services and utilities you can’t live without * Smart followership — knowing who (and how many) to follow * The best devices and software for mobile posting * Timing your Tweets

What Makes a Great Twitter App?
Panelists: Loren Brichter, Britt Selvitelle, Dom Sagolla, Moderator: Sudha Jamthe

At the core of Twitter’s popularity is it’s utter simplicity. Building on top of that functionality while retaining the ease of use and visual appeal of Twitter itself is no easy task. This panel, including both external developers and one of Twitter’s own user experience players, will talk about the design and functionality choices they made, how they worked with the API to streamline them, and how you can apply these concepts to your own applications.

Purpose-driven user interface design * Managing system resources * The limitations of mobile devices * Working with the 100-call hourly API limit

How Twitter Will Make A Billion, and How You Can Make a Million
Jason Calacanis

Jason Calacanis has a proven track record for spotting and embracing winning Web technologies — and profiting from them. As the founder of Weblogs Inc, (launched in 2003) he was among the first to make millions from blogging as a business. Marrying “community” with search may be all the rage in 2009, but Jason had a business plan for that (Mahalo) back in 2006. That’s also the year he started Tweeting.

In this lively (and debate-provoking) keynote Jason will detail from an outsider’s perspective how the Twitter platform will be monetized by its founders, and how publishers, marketers, and developers can make their own fortunes from the service.

Twitter Strategies: Real-World Success Stories
Panelists: Jeff Pester, Bryan Rhoads, Warren Whitlock, Justin Kan

Signing up for Twitter is simple, but using it effectively as a business tool can be complex. How do you turn a service that lets you share messages in 140-character bursts into a valuable business asset? We’ve assembled a team of business innovators who are doing just that. Learn how you can use the same strategies they’re using to grow your audience, your influence, and your bottom line.

Supporting customers while courting shoppers * Contributing vs. messaging * Timing your tweets * Bringing value to the conversation * Gestures that bring positive responses * Essential tools and services

Visualizing Twitter
Panelists: Damon Cortesi, Jeff Katz, Dan Zarella Moderator: Steve Broback

With tens of millions of tweets generated daily, the data Twitter generates can be overwhelming. To capture true meaning, filtering and visualization are essential. Luckily, many innovative and powerful tools and techniques exist to turn text and numbers into pixels, vectors, and movement.

In this session, our panel of experts will share some of their favorite visualizations along with the code and service architectures that drive them.

Fast and easy online services * Code templates * Flash vs Javascript vs Silverlight * Techniques for interactivity

Twitter Goes Mainstream: What are the Issues and How Will They Be Resolved?
Panelists: Jennifer Leggio, Jonathan Matkowsky, Richard Brewer-Hay

No technology or platform can go from zero to 12 million users in three years without experiencing a myriad of challenges, and Twitter is no exception. This session will examine some of the pressing concerns facing Twitter, their users, and the developer community. We’ll drill down on what aspects of these issues most affect those in the commercial arena, while debating potential solutions.

Security and authorization * Name squatting * Scaling concerns * Pay per tweet and spam * Buying followers * What happens if Twitter gets acquired? * SEC concerns: will it take the soul out of tweeting? * Oprah and Ashton: the beginning of the end?

Technology Report will be live blogging the Twitter 140 Conference in Mountain View California and WordCamp San Francisco on Saturday May 30th.

*The two day Twitter event starts Tuesday May 26th*

This is only the second WordCamp San Francisco and promises excellent insider insights from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Google’s top blogger Matt Cutts who has been using the WordPress blogging format for several years.

This is the first major Twitter conference *ever* and is sure to bring a lot of interesting people and companies to the Computer Science Museum in Mountain View.

Hope to see you there in person or here at Technology Report’s live coverage of these events.

Reporting:  Joe Hunkins

Early hype suggesting that new search engine Wolfram Alpha could be a possible “Google Killer” quickly shifted to a focus on Wolfram’s new approach to search, which they call “computational”.     Although Technology-Report had early access to the program it is now open to all here:  http://www.wolframalpha.com

Although I’ve only spent a short time looking for inspiration at Wolfram Alpha, I’d have to say I could not find any answers where I felt Wolfram would beat out a Google search combined with some quick scans of the listed resources.     Wolfram’s promise was to deliver “the answer” to complicated questions but it seems to work well only for the kinds of information it appears they have already sliced and diced into packages, and I’m not clear it even beats out a Wikipedia entry when searching for data like states or countries where a packaged approach to the information is best.

A quick comparison of Wolfram’s answer to “New York” vs Google’s vs Wikipedia’s

In a case like this I’d argue Wikipedia is the clear winner, giving the user extensive information and links to more.   Google second with good lists, and Wolfram a distant third with very limited information given the wealth of data online.

For students creating notes (or papers to hand in!) Wolfram may provide some great tools with its unique organization schema, but for most internet researchers and browsers I think Google has nothing to worry about here at all.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos unveiled the new large format Kindle today, the Kindle DX.   The DX appears to be a very impressive device that brings the elegant reading capabilities of the smaller kindle to a much larger screen that will be more friendly to newspapers and textbooks – the two reading items that appear to be Amazon’s target market for this brand new entry into the electronic reader fray:

As a past skeptic of how the smaller Kindle could find the market needed to be a big success I’m certainly impressed, but also wondering about the economic viability.   At $489 for the new Kindle with at best only modest discounts for newspaper subscriptions I have to remain somewhat skeptical this can take off, although one can see a potentialy large library market since devices like this may make it easier for libraries and schools to manage subscriptions, textbooks, updates, etc.

Gizmodo’s got more on the specs and the launch.