On Friday, the HTC EVO, powered by Google's Android operating system, finally went on sale. As you know, I have been using the device, courtesy of Google I/O for the last few weeks. First I started using it exclusively, and later, I reported on my experience.

Tonight, Chris Saad (@chrissaad) and I talked about how the mobile landscape is changing with the rise of Android and the near-term arrival of iPhone OS 4 and a new iPhone device from Apple at the Worldwide Developers' Conference this week. Chris, seeing many mixed reviews of the EVO in particular, especially when it came to battery life, has not yet made the plunge, but I promised that if he did, he wouldn't regret it. In fact, I am having a hard time seeing myself return to the iPhone platform - barring something amazing. This probably violates my Apple fanboy contract, but that's what's happening.

This and all other EdgeTheory conversations can be found on the dedicated ET Conversations site.

Listen to the full recording below:

One year ago today, I shared with you the story of my friend Drew Olanoff's battle with Hodgkins Lymphoma, and his choice to take cancer head-on with a site and cause, Blame Drew's Cancer. The idea moved from novelty to phenomenon, as tens of thousands of people took to Twitter and other Web outlets to blame Drew's cancer for everything. With Drew's cancer in remission and his chemo treatments in the past, it's not time to forget about blaming cancer, but it is time to stop blaming Drew. Starting today, a new Web site at http://blamecancer.com/ has launched, to continue the fight against cancer, which took nearly 600,000 lives, in the US alone, in 2009.

The site and new cause, Blame Cancer, extends a year-long fight that has seen high-profile involvement from charities including Lance Armstrong's LiveStrong, and support from The Price Is Right's Drew Carey, who famously bid six to seven figures of support, in exchange for Drew Olanoff's @drew Twitter account. Like the previous campaigns, Blame Cancer will be run in partnership with new foundations and charities who are more than willing to lend their brand, their time and their money to support the fight against the disease.



The first to step up is VeggieGrill, who approached Drew, saying they wanted to do something to support the cause. Details will arrive in coming weeks, but the process of "donation by action" that Drew promoted in round one is going to be proven again in round two.

"Blame Drew's Cancer became part of the vernacular so it's not a novelty," Drew Olanoff said this morning. "I want that to stop, but I want people to just blame cancer. Whenever something sucky happens, I want people to blame cancer, in real life, on Twitter, on the Internet, on Facebook, and that's it."

Drew says that BlameCancer.com is going to be an anchor site for this movement of donation by action, and promises that this will "live forever" - powered only by the words of the masses who want to give Cancer a kick in the shins.

"With BlameDrew'sCancer, we raised a bunch of money and a bunch of awareness, which was key," Drew said. "It was unique. It was not cookie cutter. You had to think of something, and people did - well over 25,000 people."

To Blame Cancer for whatever is driving you nuts today, simply add the hashtag #blamecancer to any tweets you put on Twitter or "Blame Cancer" wherever you are - on the Web or off. All tweets that have the #blamecancer hashtag are counted and displayed on BlameCancer.com. I #BlameCancer for my father, aunt, and countless others in my family and friends' families for having to battle the disease. It's time to make cancer history starting with being a part of Web history.

Forget about the idea that early adopters are always first at everything. Sometimes it takes some of us a little bit longer to find utility in products or services that others get right away. Twitter was an obvious initial miss for me. I held out for a long time - by my standards - swearing first that I would never use it, and then finally giving in after getting some good feedback from peers who were finding value.

Now, nearly 30 months later, and 5,000 tweets later, the milestone I'll hit once this blog hits the service via FeedBurner, Twitter has become a powerful force. Even those people who are not on the service, or using it as often as many of us are, have at least heard of it, or know people on it. The assumption now is that everybody has a Twitter account, in the same way as we believe everybody has an e-mail address. News breaks on Twitter. People break on Twitter. And it has become the go-to source for real-time feedback from a massive audience. Maybe Twitter doesn't cure cancer, but it turns out, it can help - as we learned with #blamedrewscancer... and it sure doesn't cause cancer, no matter how frequently you update, or what client you prefer.


5,000 tweets sounds like a lot to me. That's almost 6 per day, or one every 4+ hours around the clock for 2 1/2 years, scattered almost exclusively between 8 a.m. in the morning and 2 at night, if TweetStats tells the truth. With 140 characters to play with, that's 700,000 characters of wiggle room. But as we once discussed with a Twitter Noise ratio I made up, one's pace can depend on their personal preferences, their choices to share links or engage in conversation, or what social networks make sense for them. I know, for example, that many Twitter-centric folks long since left 5,000 and 10,000 or even 20,000 and 50,000 tweets in the dust. @chrisbrogan sports nearly 70,000 while @parislemon is approaching 14,000 and the legendary @queenofspain is going to cross 85,000 before the month is out. So I must not be too noisy amid such elite company.


Twitter, for all its ups and downs with infrastructure strains and developer changes, through the company's maturation, has become an important player for many different things. Its limitations have been rebranded as simplicity, and what used to be a geek mecca is as much home to celebrities, teens and marketing as anything else. That's the problem with a nice neighborhood, everyone moves in and the ads go up. But the crowds have brought relevance. With worldwide growth and use in many different markets for many things, one can practically assume someone is twittering most events, in the same way one can safely assume that any scene of interest is being videotaped. The world is being recorded, and the world is being tweeted.


My comparatively slow approach to Twitter contrasted with some of my peers continues thanks to my own internal checks against noise. I still use Twitter primarily for distributing links from the blog and others I think may be relevant to followers. I set up a dedicated account at @lgstream for even more shares, without drowning my feed. I try to keep idle chat to a minimum, engaging on Google Buzz, FriendFeed and Facebook for some, and using Twitter DMs in other cases. I don't know if I'll ever make Twitter a place where I want to drop in and stay a while. I am absolutely glad it's there, and recognize its significant utility, but it still doesn't feel like a destination to me - instead, a powerful, increasingly critical utility.


By the time I hit 10,000 tweets, I expect Twitter will be dramatically different again from where it is now. As the company may have approached 200 employees, it could be at 1,000 or more by that time. It might be a public company, and the service could be dramatically different. Maybe popular clients like TweetDeck, Seesmic and Brizzly will be purchased by other brand names, or by Twitter themselves, like Tweetie was. But Twitter looks not only here to stay, but to play a big role in how this generation communicates. It may be through 140 characters at a time, including @Replies and short URLs, but it's what we've got.

Here's to filling your stream with another 5,000 useful tweets. You can find me at @louisgray.

Steve Jobs, unfiltered, seems to be the most attractive interview in the tech world, bar none. That's why his opening up at AllThingsD last night continues to make waves in the tech news world, as his every word is dissected, repeated and spun. The extremely quotable Jobs dropped a number of interesting insights and remarkable candidness for the leader of the technology industry's largest company, and arguably one of the most successful, with legions of loyal customers, and a similar number of would-be competitors. One of his most remarkable quotes regarded the challenge of supporting high quality content, and an editorial press, contrasted with what he saw as a descent into a "nation of bloggers".

Rather than react in an emotional way, pounding out paragraphs to pooh-pooh Jobs' dismissiveness of an entire craft - of which I am obviously part - one has to understand his perspective, and how Apple is impacted by the world of blogs, to see how he could come to his conclusions.

In a world when many many businesses are becoming more open, sharing short updates on Twitter, single paragraph announcements and events on Facebook, and regular posts from thought leaders and executives through blogging, Apple seems to be on the outside looking in. They are notable for their continued closed approach, one built on secrets and surprise. Of late, Steve Jobs has opened up a bit, acting as a one man social media machine with e-mails to customers and bloggers, and penning longer notes on the Apple.com Web site, like that on Flash from last month. But Apple not only doesn't really need to participate in this world, but honestly has not seen much benefit from the army of Mac bloggers. It's no surprise that Steve has the opinions he does about bloggers, and the company needs them less than many others do.

The funny thing about Steve Jobs is he's been doing this for a long time. He was on the cover of Time and Fortune, BusinessWeek and Newsweek decades before the first blogs. His return to Apple in 1997 came as the Internet was ascending, but the term blogging was practically unknown. This was two years before Ev Williams and team started their blogging software at Pyra Labs, and two years before Brad Fitzpatrick started LiveJournal. In his time at Apple, Steve Jobs and his team has never really suffered for a lack of news. The mainstream media, from the aforementioned press to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and others, have been available to review the company's products, to report on their news, and to dissect the company's typically rosy financial results.

Meanwhile, for the most part, Apple and Mac coverage on blogs can be divided into three camps - Apple fans, Apple haters and Apple rumor seekers.

Those who love the company and its products are almost mythical in their obsessions and loyalty. Those who hate Apple are similarly entrenched, if not always as vocal. And those who are constantly seeking to undermine Steve and Apple's launch schedule and product roadmap have expanded from a once-niche industry to something much more mainstream. And in many cases, Apple has had to take aim against blogs to protect their positions.

Apple's conflicts with bloggers have been well documented. Apple sued anonymous posters on AppleInsider for leaking product photos, including the G4 Cube, before their time. Apple sued the then anonymous author of Think Secret, for discussion of an unlaunched product, called "Asteroid", a new audio interface for GarageBand users. And of course, most recently, Gawker Media paid to gain access to a prototype next generation iPhone which may or may not have been stolen. And yes, Apple is going after those guys too. (This doesn't even go into his latest e-mail trading with Ryan Tate at Valleywag, a coworker of mine from a decade-plus ago.)

As far as Apple is concerned, in contrast to what they see as professional and respectable coverage of their products in the still much read mainstream media, the bloggers have really been nothing but trouble, with the drawbacks and amateur approach outweighing any potential benefits from consistent fandom selwehere. The Macintosh rumors industry, which I have largely ignored of late, is in constant flow, since Mac OS Rumors kicked it off in the mid nineties, and it's no wonder why Apple has taken this approach to not trust the industry as a whole.

Can one separate the term "blogger" from one who blogs, and not feel like Apple and Steve Jobs are slamming an entire informal industry? Of course. There are absolutely some very well written, professional, editorially focused blog networks out there. There are a lot of individual bloggers who do a great job expressing their thoughts on Apple and many other companies. But for one of the world's best Marketers, blogs are little help at all. Of course Steve Jobs wouldn't want the nation to "descend" into one full of "bloggers" who target his company with falsehoods and borderline criminal activity. Of course he would like to control the message and keep the element of surprise.

Steve's comments don't mean that Apple wants sites like The Unofficial Apple Weblog and The Apple Blog to go away, but Steve is calling for decorum that he just isn't exposed to. Steve Jobs and Apple don't need bloggers. They have operated above the fray, and are calling for something better than what they have seen - something that delivers them value.