Chris Dixon on the increasingly popular notion that startups are working on features instead of big ideas:

One thing these critics need to be careful about is that, as Clay Christensen has long argued, many important new inventions start out looking like toys. 

He argues that Twitter is a great example of this, which it is. 5 years ago, the consensus of many — particularly those in the tech blogosphere — was that Twitter was just about the dumbest thing ever invented. Today, it’s a fundamental communication protocol for hundreds of millions around the world.

I’d go even further — back to the founding of Apple. At the time, people considered personal computers to be niche of the market at best, a toy at worst. 

Apple is now worth $600 billion dollars and has fundamentally changed the world a few times over the past 35 years.

Hell, this guy thought the iPhone was little more than a toy just 5 years ago.

Oddly, this seems to always want to breakdown into a hardware versus software argument. Which is silly.

Things that change the world tend to sneak up on us all. If they were obvious enough to be immediately recognizable, everyone would be working on them. You have to start somewhere. 

Twitter has drafted up what they’re calling the Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA). With it, the company is promising to only use their patents as the actual inventor intended — read: defensively, not offensively.

More specifically:

The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.

Excellent news. Twitter is promising to implement the IPA later this year and says that it will apply to all their patents past and present. Yes, this means things like Loren Brichter’s pull-to-refresh (which he’s excited about).

Hopefully other startups large and small will follow Twitter’s lead here. It would be really excellent if larger companies (*cough* Yahoo *cough*) did as well, but it’s hard to see that happening given the current state of things. This is a movement that will have to start from the ground up.

Big time kudos to Twitter for this.

Twitter, April Fools Day was yesterday.

What’s most interesting to me is that I’ve had the exact same feelings as Dustin Curtis has had at points in my own life. And I have a feeling that many others have as well. Which is why both Twitter and Path work. (And interestingly enough, both had to overcome a ton of early skepticism.)

And yes, I have the same feeling about Highlight. (I haven’t yet tried out Glassmap, but I certainly will now). It was one of those initial gut feelings. Which is exactly why we invested. And why we did in Path as well. And why we would have in Twitter if CrunchFund existed back then.

Promoted Tweets — read: ads — are coming to the Twitter mobile client streams. I suspect the initial reaction will be: “Great! Another reason to use TweetBot!”

But I actually don’t view this as a negative thing. Twitter is a service that many of us use and love for hours on end every single day. It’s a great service. But like any great service, if it’s to stick around, it needs to make money. I don’t begrudge them trying to do that.

They’ve been experimenting with various ways to do this, and apparently the Promoted Suite of products is working well enough that they’re now expanding it to the mobile experiences. In fact, a Promoted Tweet was the most retweeted Tweet last year.

It’s interesting that Twitter only gets paid when a user takes an action (retweet, reply, etc) on these Tweets. In other words, they’re cost-per-action not cost-per-impression. Again, a good choice because it will naturally lead to higher quality Tweet Ads (or retweet-bait, I suppose). 

And hey, at least it’s not the DickBar.

Sarah Lacy talking about Google+ on PandoDaily:

We simply don’t need another social network, no matter how great your circles are or how badly Larry Page wants to have one. 

Agreed. The problem, which Google really, truly does not seem to understand is that at the end of the day, they’re solving a problem which has already been solved. They may think it hasn’t, but it has.

It’s the same problem Bing faces in search against Google. It’s a fine product, but in order to get people to use it, it has to be far better than the incumbent. Bing isn’t, so it will never beat Google (despite Google’s best efforts to back that thang up). Google+ isn’t, so it will never beat Facebook (or Twitter, for that matter).

But Google is trying to cheat this system. By shoving Google+ in our faces, they think that they can make their product catch on without the need to be above and beyond better than the incumbent.

I think we’ll see that this approach still won’t work. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter work because they evolved based on how users were naturally using them. Google+ is trying to make the users evolve to fit into the network they created. It’s unnatural.

I’ve been testing out Tweetbot for iPad for a few weeks now, it’s brilliant. Well worth the $2.99 price. If you’re in any way a Twitter power user, this is the client to get.

And I say that as a huge fan of Twitter’s official client for iPad. My concern is that, like the iPhone version, it will soon be “upgraded” — which, in many of our eyes, has unfortunately meant “made worse”.

On that topic, Tweetbot has unleashed a one-two punch today and also unveiled Tweetbot 2.0 for iPhone (also $2.99 as a separate app from the iPad version, but the upgrade from version 1 is free). I’ve also had the chance to try that out for a few weeks, and it’s my go-to Twitter client on the device now. It’s in my dock.

For full reviews of both, be sure to check out Federico Viticci’s takes on Macstories. Here’s his review of Tweetbot 2.0 for iPhone. And his review of Tweetbot for iPad.