Twitter sent some shock waves through the technology community with a blog post on Friday that talked about its plans for the future, and suggested that those plans don’t necessarily involve third-party services and apps. Although the company phrased its statement as a move designed to standardize the experience for Twitter users, developers and others in the broader Twitter ecosystem clearly took the post as a warning shot across the bow — especially since the company simultaneously shut down a cross-posting partnership it had with LinkedIn . It seems clear that Twitter wants to control the network as tightly as possible so that it can monetize it more easily, but doing so also comes with substantial risks.

In his blog post, consumer product manager Michael Sippey talked a lot about the introduction of features such as “expanded tweets,” which show more information from providers like GigaOM and the New York Times when a link is included in a tweet. He said the company wants to broaden that program to more publishers, as well as giving them tools to display expanded tweets and other features on their sites — but he also made it obvious that developers who stray outside of the lines are taking a big risk:

[W]e’ve already begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners, for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.

Twitter has burned the ecosystem before

These comments set off warning bells for a number of developers, who said they were concerned that Twitter was going to crack down on any third-party app or service. One developer on Hacker News said that in his view, Twitter was trying to shut down third-party services so that they could “inflict a homogenized, boring, monoculture on their user base [that] they can monetize, which will make the experience progressively worse.” Said Turntable.fm developer Jonathan Kupferman:

Twitter seems to be mercilessly killing all developer apps of any interest businessinsider.com/twitter-linked… Light the match, hello #burningplatform

—
Jonathan Kupferman (@jkupferman) June 29, 2012

This isn’t the first time that Twitter has upset the developer community by throwing its weight around. In 2011, there was widespread criticism of the service for the way it issued new rules around use of the Twitter API — and also the way it behaved towards those who crossed the line by shutting off their access without even a warning, as it did in the case of entrepreneur Bill Gross and his Ubermedia network. At the time, one critic accused the company of “nuking” the Twitter ecosystem.

The company also came under fire in 2010 for the way it handled relations with third-party developers after it bought an app called Tweetie. Hunch founder Chris Dixon said Twitter was “acting like a drunk guy with an Uzi” by telling developers not to bother developing Twitter apps, and a number of companies and investors that had been putting money and time into the Twitter ecosystem stopped doing so. So some of the negative reaction to Sippey’s post stems from being burned twice already.

Some observers have argued that Twitter is just doing what it has to do in order to control its network and build a sustainable business, and that third-party developers don’t have any right to expect favorable treatment, since they are piggybacking on its API and resources. Longtime Twitter users, however, say the service’s behavior is a betrayal of all of the other services and apps that helped generate most of the goodwill it is now busy monetizing. As John Abell of Reuters pointed out on Friday, much of the value that users find in Twitter comes from the way it connects to other services.

Twitter's value is its integration with other networks. Cutting them off is like being on the wrong side of history. allthingsd.com/20120629/twitt…

—
John C Abell (@johncabell) June 30, 2012

Anti-user moves torpedoed both MySpace and Digg

And there is a very real risk to this kind of aggressive focus on control and monetization, as a commenter on Hacker News pointed out: restricting the ways that users can access and display their tweets, whether through strict API rules or moves like the LinkedIn shutdown, could irritate the user base that Twitter is relying on to click ads and do all the other things it is planning around monetization. Ultimately, the company could ruin the experience that made Twitter so compelling in the first place, in the same way that MySpace and Digg did.

There are plenty of reasons why MySpace failed, including the conflicting desires of a giant corporate owner like News Corp., but it also started to hemorrhage users because it focused more on monetization through ads and other elements than it did on maintaining a good experience for users. Digg did something similar — in an attempt to build a bigger company and leverage its user base for profit, it added a whole range of “services” and features that were designed mainly to appeal to corporate customers and advertisers. The end result was a wholesale desertion of Digg for other communities like Reddit.

Twitter has a tiger by the tail — it has an active user base in the hundreds of millions, it has become an almost indispensable tool for both news junkies and the media (although this carries risks as well) and it is starting to see some favorable responses to its ad model. But it is also a community, where the users provide the vast majority of the content that is being monetized, and while screwing around with that relationship may appear to make short-term financial sense, it could end in disaster.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Rosaura Ochoa and See-ming Lee

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The energy storage problem

Back in 2009, Fyke — a mechanical engineer out of MIT who has both cleantech venture investing and entrepreneurial experience — started tinkering with how to tackle the problem of energy storage. The power grid currently utilizes very little energy storage technology and constantly has to balance supply and demand in real time — that makes it pretty inefficient. In addition, with the development of clean power like solar and wind, which only generate power at certain times of the day, there will need to be a lot more energy storage technologies used to smooth out the intermittent generation.

One of the most widely-embraced forms of energy storage by utilities is currently pumped hydro, where energy is used to pump water up a hill and then when energy is needed, the water is released to flow back down the hill. This is one of the cheapest forms of energy storage — far cheaper than big battery farms that can store energy. The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) says that there is at least 127,000 MW of pumped hydro energy storage projects globally, and pumped hydro makes up a whopping 99 percent of the world’s energy storage technologies.

However, pumped hydro technology has a few of its own issues. One is that it can only be done in very specific locations that have both a certain level of elevation and also reservoirs for the water. Another problem is these locations can take years to permit and cite. Lastly, pumped hydro is not all that flexible when it comes to being able to provide quick bursts of power to the grid to help it run more smoothly, called frequency regulation, because water flows can be difficult to stop and reverse quickly.

The drop dead simple idea

Fyke’s idea, which he worked on with the help of Idealab investor and inventor Bill Gross, was what if a technology was modeled off of pumped hydro, but used a motor and a cheap solid material instead of a liquid so that the system could be built in more locations and could also react quickly? The result is the hyper simple system that is Energy Cache’s intellectual property and the first of its kind system for energy storage in the world: a system of buckets on a line that picks up gravel at the bottom of a hill, and moves the gravel to the top of the hill; when the process is reversed the gravel moves back down the hill and powers a generator to produce energy.

Nat Goldhaber, Managing Director at Claremont Creek Ventures, which participated in a seed round in Energy Cache, described the idea as “such a simple solution for such an intractable problem.” When I asked him if the tech is the most “out there” investment he has backed, he said yes.

Fyke says the benefits of using gravel is that it can behave like both a liquid and a solid when moving it and it is also incredibly cheap. The system can be built in many more places than pumped hydro, says Fyke, because each line is twenty feet wide and doesn’t need a reservoir to run. Unlike pumped hydro, the system is also meant to be able to be scaled up, from a couple lines to some day hundreds of lines for a utility-scale project.

Energy Cache is adopting gear from the mining and ski lift industries to build the systems, which will make the projects really low cost, and so that “we don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” says Fyke. A scaled up project could eventually cost 40 percent less than pumped hydro, says Fyke.

Fyke says that the system could also potentially generate more revenue than pumped hydro, because the motorized system can respond immediately to a utility’s command and the lines could be tweaked to move fast or slow to deliver power when the utility needs it. The amount of weight on the line (or pounds of gravel in the buckets) could be tiered to deliver the most efficient system for the customer.

Early stage

Energy Cache has built a 50 kW prototype of its gravel bucket system in Irwindale, Calif. (see video). The team, which has less than 10 employees, has largely been quiet to date because they were waiting for the prototype to get built. To get the prototype constructed, the company raised money from Clarement Creek Ventures, Idealab and Bill Gates.

Goldhaber says he invested in the company after seeing Fyke’s demo project of buckets and gravel in a garage. Bill Gross brought in both Goldhaber and fellow energy innovation enthusiast Bill Gates.

The next step is for Energy Cache to build a larger scale demonstration project that will roughly be the size of one commercial line, and potentially could be sized between 500 kW and 1 MW. Fyke says that one line will probably be “sub 1 MW,” though the company hasn’t yet decided the exact size of the standard line yet. After that demo line is built, the company will then be looking to raise project financing to have its first commercial project built, perhaps in as little as three years.

Fyke says Energy Cache is already in discussions with grid operators in deregulated markets like ERCOT in Texas, PJM, and California ISO in California. Power producers and utilities will be the end customers for Energy Cache, but the grid operators will be the gate keepers to the early market of selling energy storage.

The efficiencies in the system still need to be proven out at a large scale, and all areas of friction need to be eliminated where possible. Systems with a lot of moving parts tend to lose efficiency as more parts are added. And it remains to be seen if the efficiency levels can be maintained for a larger 1 MW system.

Potential for change

However, if the system works as planned, this could be “a very big deal,” says Goldhaber. The solution could be a cheap, modular, more flexible way to solve the energy storage problem using currently available standard parts and gear.

Last year the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) predicted that 2011 and 2012 would be turning points for the grid energy storage market in the U.S., because companies that have collectively received more than $250 million in federal stimulus funding are expected to complete research and development work and move into field trial stages in the U.S. The Department of Energy has provided loans and grants to a multitude of storage tech developers and utilities for R&D and pilot projects (including this list of tech developers receiving ARPA-E grants).

Will the long held problem of energy storage finally be solved by gravel, buckets, a ski lift?

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Ski lift storage has been one of those topics discussed in the hallways of energy storage conferences for years. Someone was out there, the conversation went, that wanted to use a solar- or wind-powered ski lift apparatus as a pump. It would pump gravel or water up a hill during sunny periods. At night or during peak power emergencies, the gravel or water could be released. The system essentially artificially supplies the elevation that nature left out.

Such a system could even harvest regenerative power on the way down. It’s part of a segment I call macro or terrestrial storage, i.e. large mechanical devices that store power through the power of geography and gravity. Bright Energy Storage Technologies, for instance, wants to put giant plastic bags shaped like sea cucumbers connected to air hoses in the ocean. Seawater will contain and pressurize the water for free. It sounds strange, but the device could deliver power for 2.5 to 6 cents a kilowatt-hour, say the backers of the technology.

Research and project management company Escovale Consultancy Services talks about using a 100 million ton stone in a cavern to pressurize water,  similar to an idea being pursued by Gravity Power.  Think Stonehenge for the grid.

Then there are the micro-macro storage ideas: SustainX (compressing air in large tanks with water vapor), Isentropic (big tanks of hot gravel) and LightSail Energy (founded by an entrepreneur who entered college at age twelve.)

I scribbled down the name of the ski lift guys once at the Energy Storage Association conference in 2011, but I subsequently needed a paper towel and lost it forever.

Energy Cache

So who is that company? I am going to guess it is Energy Cache. Energy Cache wants to create a solar-powered pump for delivering materials to the top of mountains that can be released to produce energy. Here is one of their patents — note that one of the inventors is Bill Gross, the energetic dervish behind Idealab.

Claremont Creek Ventures is an investor and Idealab lists the company on its site. Gates himself wrote about the company in 2011 on his own blog.

Here’s a video of how the system works:

It’s an interesting idea, but one with many caveats. Terrestrial storage isn’t cheap. Compressed air energy storage, pumping megawatts of air into underground caves, has been around since the 1970s, but only a few trial systems have been built. Big projects take a lot of cash, and almost anything — geological surprises, changing world economics — can go wrong in the ten to fifteen years it can take to complete a project.

Environmental review can bottle up projects for years. Gridflex Energy has talked about building multi-megawatt hydro storage systems in Hawaii — the ocean would act as a free reservoir — and large systems in Montana. But good luck getting through the review process.

Some of the energy ideas from Idealab have stalled on the way to commercialization. Energy Innovations, a startup building concentrated solar photovoltaic technology, has reportedly put itself up for sale after struggling. Idealab also invested in Aptera, the three-wheeled electric car. The lightweight material Aptera used to build its car was fantastic — the car didn’t do so well.

Image courtesy of Andrew Miesem, Flickr creative commons and Energy Cache.

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UberMedia CEO Bill Gross — who is launching his new content-based social network, Chime.in, today at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco — wants to make it perfectly clear that he isn’t out to kill Twitter or Facebook or Google+, as some people (including us) have suggested. The serial entrepreneur said in an interview on Monday that he is an avid user of all three services. So then why start Chime.in at all? Gross says that despite their various strengths, all three existing networks still have a major “signal-to-noise” problem that his new service can help solve, and that it will help content creators monetize their content at the same time. What follows is an edited version of our interview.

Mathew Ingram: Bill, what was the impetus for you creating Chime, and what problem are you trying to solve?

Gross: I am a huge fan of social media — I think it is the connective tissue for everybody to share information across the planet, and it’s very disruptive for publishing in particular. But existing social networks have two problems: relevance and monetization. There’s a signal-to-noise problem, and there’s no way to monetize that attention unless you send them to your website. What we’ve created is a new interest-based network — I don’t think it competes with existing social networks.

Ingram: Can you tell us a bit more about how it works?

Gross: The fundamental unit of conversation in this new network is called a “chime,” and it is 250 characters and an image. You can also tag it with interests or topics, and we also do semantic tagging if you don’t want to add tags. We also have an API that allows developers to extend the range of things that can be included in a chime, so you can run an auction inside a chime — you can actually do e-commerce right within the platform, so if you have two tickets for the game you can sell them right there. We are opening up those abilities to developers, which I think will be a big driver of monetization.

Ingram: You mentioned the signal-to-noise problem. How does Chime handle that?

Gross: You can see what we call a “chime-line” on your page, which you can sort by time or by the number of “likes” or the number of comments. That way, the good stuff rises to the top. One of the problems with Twitter is that there is no way for me to filter my tweetstream by the most thoughtful or the most interesting, so that’s what we are trying to do with Chime. You can also follow people — but instead of just following everything, you can do what we call a “selective follow,” and choose just the topics you want to follow in their stream. So with Robert Scoble, I might want to follow his tech posts but not the ones about his day at the beach, so I can choose to do that.

Ingram: But don’t existing networks like Facebook and Google+ let you sort and filter too?

Gross: I have about 400 people I connect with on Facebook, mostly people I work with and friends, and I have about the same number on Twitter, which I use mostly as a news source, and there’s a need for that — it’s real-time and text only. So where do I go for information about solar energy? I’m not going to go to my Facebook friends, because they don’t really know that much about it. And if I search in Twitter all I will get is things related to a hashtag and some of it is going to be spam, etc. But with Chime I can make a solar-energy community and invite people to talk about that, and it still has all the social-media tools connected to it that I’m used to.

Ingram: Doesn’t Google+ Circles allow you to filter content and followers to achieve that?

Gross: I’m an avid Google+ user, and I know that we’re not going to be able to compete with Google — we’re not trying to do that. We want to focus more on niches of interest. When it comes to Circles, that filters the outbound content, so you can choose who to send things to, but it doesn’t really let you filter the inbound content — so you can’t go and just look at a subset of the content that comes from a person, the way you can with Chime.

Ingram: What about using Twitter lists to get the kind of content you want?

Gross: Look at my Twitter feed — I have carefully curated a group of about 400 people that I am interested in, but I still put up with some stuff that I don’t care about in their streams. It would be more efficient if I could filter out some of that, and also listen to others who I don’t know who have thoughts on a specific topic. And as you follow more and more people, whether on Twitter or Google+, that signal-to-noise problem just gets worse. When Google+ first opened up it was great, but now there are so many people using it — it’s not that it’s bad, it’s just not as good.

Ingram: And where does the monetization aspect of Chime come in?

Gross: We allow anyone — individuals, celebrities, brands — to create a rich-media page and monetize that themselves. So if someone wants to sell ads on their page, the real estate adjacent to that content is his, and 100 percent of the revenue from those ad sales goes to him. If he wants us to sell the ads for him, then it’s a 50-percent revenue share. In almost every other form of publishing there is the ability to monetize the content, and we are bringing that ability to social media. Some of our partners like E Online are very excited about that, because they get all the engagement that they don’t get on their websites.

Ingram: Why is monetization of content so important to Chime?

Gross: I think the only way we are going to have good communities is if someone puts work into them — and the only way someone is going to do that is either because it’s a labor of love or because there is an economic incentive. So we are trying to help give them that. And if people create great communities then that will draw people to the network.

Ingram: There are already so many giant social networks — aren’t you asking a lot to get people to use Chime as well?

Gross: I think we are going to take time away not from Facebook or Google+ but from inefficient web browsing — the 10 minutes I spend looking around for information about solar energy and don’t find anything, that’s what we are trying to replace. If I do a search and look at the results, it’s the 10 sites that did SEO the hardest to try and get higher in Google’s results. The difference is in my system if someone wants to set up a community about that topic, they have all the social tools to spread the word about their content instead of just doing SEO. In some ways, it’s like the old chat rooms or CompuServe, but updated for mobile and social sharing. But I really think we are creating a new beast.

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Entrepreneur Bill Gross is already famous in technology circles for developing the search-related keyword advertising model that Google has since made billions by perfecting. Now, he is launching a content-focused social network called Chime.in that will compete not just with Google’s new social platform Google+ but with Twitter and Facebook too, and link-sharing sites like Reddit and Digg as well. Does the world need another social platform for sharing content? Gross says that it does, and that his connections with content companies will help Chime.in succeed — but the odds are stacked against him.

Gross may be well known to some as the guy who created the first version of Ad Words, which he did at a company called GoTo — later renamed Overture, and eventually acquired by Yahoo for $1.6 billion in 2003. More recently, however, he has become infamous for his somewhat tense relationship with Twitter. First, the real-time information network shut down Gross’s attempts to monetize tweets through advertising, then when his company started acquiring Twitter clients like Twidroyd and UberTwitter, it shut off several of his apps for bad behavior.

To add insult to injury, Gross reportedly tried to buy the Twitter app Tweetdeck, only to have Twitter buy the company instead. There were even reports that UberMedia planned to start a competitor to Twitter, although Gross denied these reports at the time.

Chime.in may not be a direct competitor to Twitter, but it is clearly a shot across the bow. According to the support pages for the service (which have since been taken offline), it will allow users to post to Twitter or Facebook or Google+ as well as to the Chime.in network, and is therefore not competitive but “additive to the ecosystem.” But it seems obvious that Gross wants to appeal to users of these other networks who feel overwhelmed by the amount of content and want to focus their interests more clearly — and he wants to appeal to content producers as well, and offer them a better home for their content than Twitter, and a share in the ad revenue.

Gross said that the service, which hasn’t launched yet (an iPhone app that made it into the U.S. store appears to have since been pulled) is meant to help users focus on following topics rather than people, as a way of filtering through the noise coming from social networks. Of course, each of Chime.in’s competitors also have a way of doing this — Twitter and Facebook have lists and Google has “Circles” — and it’s not clear why anyone would choose Chime’s approach instead. The service will also provide not just a stream but dedicated webpages devoted to content, which Gross said would appeal to publishers, and the company has invited entertainment companies such as Universal Pictures, Bravo TV and Disney to take part.

Content relationships may get Gross and Chime.in the attention of publishers, but with some users complaining that they lack the time for even one new network like Google+, how much chance does Chime.in stand of drawing a large user base? Content from mainstream publishers also wasn’t much help to Digg after an ill-fated relaunch last year, much of which was devoted to making it easy for publishers to post their content to the network. That may have appealed to content companies, but it didn’t appeal to very many users, and Digg wound up rolling back almost all of its redesign.

But the biggest hurdle for Chime.in is the simple fact that Facebook now has 800 million users and Twitter has 200 million or so, with Google+ in the 50 million range. Useful features aren’t always enough for a social network to flourish, especially when there is so much competition. In the end, even if you build it they might not come.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user See-ming Lee

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The Utah company’s solar thermal technology uses a parabolic dish of mirrors to concentrate sunlight to heat and expand helium inside a heat exchanger to cause a piston in an engine to run back and forth. That motion then drives an alternator to produce electricity. This type of technology is generally called a Stirling engine.

Stirling engines have long been thought of as a promising technology to build solar farms, but the matchup has yet to become as popular as other types of solar thermal technologies, and at least one company has struggled to get its stirling engines built into a commercial solar project.

California regulators approved two Stirling solar projects using technology from Stirling Energy Systems totaling 1372.5 MW last year, but their developer, Tessera Solar (sister company to Stirling Energy Systems), subsequently sold them to different buyers when it couldn’t line up the financing to build them (Southern California Edison canceled its contract with one of the projects). Since then, one of the new buyers, K Road Power, has planned to use Stirling engines only for a small portion of its project while the second buyer, AES Solar Power, has said it will use solar panels instead. San Diego Gas & Electric told us it canceled the contract to buy power from the AES’s project in spring this year.

Like other solar thermal technology developers, Infinia is marketing its technology as suitable for not just solar electricity generation but also for combined heat-and-power generation. The system harvests the waste heat from electricity generation, and that heat can have a variety of uses, from heating a building to running industrial operations. Solar thermal technology developers such as Abengoa Solar and BrightSource Energy have carried out projects where the steam generated by the sun’s heat is used for cooking, showers and laundry at a federal prison and for extracting oil from wells.

Infinia raised $32 million in debt and options last year, according to another SEC filing, and another $50 million in equity before that. Investors include Equus Total Return, GLG Partners, Khosla Ventures, Bill Gross’s Idealab and Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital.

But like Stirling Energy Systems, Infinia has seemed to also hit a few bumps in the road. Infinia began laying off employees at its previous headquarters in Washington state a few months back in order to move to Utah. The company’s CEO, Mike Ward, who came on board earlier this year, told a local newspaper, the Tri-CityHerald, that the move was to “accelerate from our R&D roots into a world-class solar generator company with geographically consolidated operations.”

However, Infinia has several installations and new customers in India. Infinia completed the first commercial installation of its technology earlier this year, reported the Tri-City Herald. The city and Infinia broke ground on a 45Kw project last year, but Infinia declined to say whether the project has been completed as planned.  Infinia also has installed a 9 KW system that was built on the rooftop of Belen’s City Hall in New Mexico.

In addition, Infinia recently sold 10 MW of its engines to solar developers in India. The deal in India involves a $30 million loan from the federal Ex-Im Bank to Dalmia Solar Power. Dalmia plans to develop the project and sell the electricity to NTPC Vidyut Vyapar Nigam, a subsidiary of the National Thermal Power Corp.

Image courtesy of Inifina 

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There are more rumors making the rounds about Twitter acquiring the TweetDeck client, with TechCrunch and Reuters both saying they have confirmed a deal that is expected to be announced within days, a followup to an earlier report by the Wall Street Journal that the two were in talks. One of the big question marks, should such a deal actually occur, is whether Twitter will keep TweetDeck alive or euthanize it — but if it does decide to kill the app, the company could arguably do further damage to the already tense relationship it has with third-party developers.

One of the obvious motives for acquiring TweetDeck, as we’ve written before, is to keep it out of the hands of UberMedia — the Bill Gross startup that has had a contentious relationship with Twitter since it was first created last year, in part because the company made it clear that it wanted to set up a competing advertising model and possibly a complete alternative network to Twitter. UberMedia was also said to be in talks with TweetDeck, but those expired without any resolution. Preventing Gross from acquiring the company, and bringing those users into the Twitter family, could justify the $50 million that Twitter is reportedly offering.

One of the arguments for killing TweetDeck is that since Twitter just wants to keep it away from UberMedia, then shutting it down is a logical next step, since it isn’t really a strategic acquisition. Although the app is favored by a number of power users, some have argued that Twitter is really focused on its broad user base — most of whom either use the Twitter website or mobile apps — and therefore it doesn’t have any interest in TweetDeck.

While both of those things may be true, I think Twitter would be wrong to kill TweetDeck, for a number of reasons. One is pretty straightforward: if an app is used by your most hard-core power customers, including a bunch of large corporations and media outlets. Why risk irritating those users? It doesn’t make any sense. It would cost Twitter very little to simply keep TweetDeck running for those that want to use it, and try to migrate them to other clients over time if it decides to do that. And spending $50 million just to kill something seems like a pretty dumb use of the money Twitter has raised from VCs, especially for a company that isn’t even close to being profitable.

Then there’s the impact on Twitter’s relationship with third-party developers and its “ecosystem,” which I took a look at for a recent GigaOM Pro report (subscription required). At the moment, the information network is currently caught between its past — in which it encouraged anyone and everyone to develop apps using its API, with very few restrictions on what they could do — and its future, which involves controlling its network and access to that network, for business reasons. To put it bluntly, Twitter has to come up with a business that justifies the billions of dollars it is theoretically worth on the private market after raising $200 million in venture capital.

The problem is that many of the moves it has made — shutting down UberMedia’s apps, tightening its restrictions on the API, telling people not to bother making new clients, and so on — have not just ruffled feathers in the developer community but made some seriously question their relationship with the company. That isn’t something to be taken lightly. And while buying TweetDeck might look like a payoff for developer Iain Dodsworth and his team, shutting it down will make it look like Twitter is willing to bulldoze whatever it wants in order to maintain its control over the ecosystem.

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user Umberto Rotundo

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According to a CNN report, startup UberMedia is working on building a network that could potentially compete with Twitter. We’ve written in the past about how UberMedia has been on a collision course with the social network, in part because of its attempts to compete with Twitter. But could a Twitter competitor really fly? UberMedia is arguably the most well-funded of all those who’ve tried to build such a thing (apart from Google, of course), and there would be some clear benefits to having multiple players. But the odds are stacked against UberMedia, just as they are stacked against anyone who wants to take on an incumbent social network.

The CNN report, which is reportedly based on “several sources who have been briefed on the plans,” says UberMedia is proposing a network which would appeal to more users by solving some of the problems associated with Twitter — such as the difficulty new users face in learning the service and the 140-character limit.

Focusing on Twitter’s lack of immediate appeal to new users isn’t a new idea. Twitter executives like former CEO Evan Williams and Co-founder Jack Dorsey have admitted the “on-boarding” process of educating new users takes too long, and the value of the network is not immediately obvious. The company has been working on ways of improving that by targeting users’ interests more directly, and helping them discover people who are worth following.

The idea that 140-character messages are a flaw in Twitter, however, is one sign UberMedia’s alternative network might be on the wrong track (if CNN is correct about that being a focus). Some apps have tried to expand the length, including Tweetdeck, which posts longer updates to its own auto-created webpages for users through a service called Deck.ly, and is in acquisition talks with UberMedia. The shortness of Twitter messages might seem like a limitation, but in reality, the 140-character limit is probably one of the key factors in Twitter’s success.

Not only was that limit similar to the limit on cellphone text messages, which made it seem more familiar (particularly to younger and mobile users), but it also forced users to post short thoughts and comments — and links — rather than long, blog-style posts. Removing that limit would arguably do more to ruin one of the strengths of the network than it would to improve it.

That said, however, the idea of having a Twitter competitor has many benefits, which we have written about before. Among other things, it would help lessen the dangers of relying on a single proprietary network for what has become an increasingly important way of distributing information: one so important it has played a central role in revolutions in the Middle East and elsewhere. Although proposals for an alternate network or a more open standard started when Twitter was experiencing large amounts of downtime, there would also be obvious benefits to having an alternative when governments start trying to compel networks like Twitter to turn over information on their users.

There have been a number of attempts to create alternatives to Twitter, or more open networks that inter-operate with it — including Status.net. That service, which is open source, allows anyone to run their own micro-blogging software and publish content both to Twitter and other networks. The biggest problem, one that has also plagued proposed alternatives to Facebook like Diaspora, is the gravitational force known as the “network effect.” Once users have become devoted to a specific service, it is very difficult to get them to switch, even when the network has flaws — something that became obvious when Twitter continued to grow rapidly in 2009, even as it was suffering from repeated outages and downtime.

Can Bill Gross beat these odds with whatever he is trying to build at UberMedia? He certainly has the resources to take a shot at it — with $17.5 million in funding from backers such as Accel Partners and Index Ventures — although we know from past events that Twitter isn’t going to make it easy for him, and neither is the network effect. In the long run, Gross is fighting an uphill battle that may have a worthwhile goal, but could ultimately be impossible to win.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

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Birthdays are a natural time for reflection, even if you’re only five years old, which is the age Twitter officially turned today. It may not seem like much, but that’s about 35 in Internet years, which means the company is close to being middle-aged — and Twitter has definitely been struggling with some mid-life challenges lately. Another much-hyped web startup is also facing some middle-age sag: Digg turned six in December and has been struggling after a failed redesign and the departure of founder Kevin Rose. And Digg’s decline from pioneering Web 2.0 service to social media also-ran contains some lessons for its younger peers.

In some ways, it’s hard to believe that Twitter has been around for five years. Launched by Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone as a side project within Evan Williams’ company Odeo — which was later shut down, with Williams taking over from Dorsey as CEO of Twitter, in a move that caused some bad blood — Twitter didn’t seem like much when it first launched, even to a die-hard web junkie like Om. Like most users, I thought the service was fairly useless when I joined in early 2007, and I spent months wondering what I was supposed to do with it before a critical mass of interesting people joined and value started to emerge.

Twitter’s status as a powerful real-time news platform didn’t really become clear until it was used to transmit updates about the forest fires in California in 2007 and during an earthquake in China in 2008. Gradually, people started to see it as something other than just a way of talking about what you were having for lunch — and when Janis Krums posted a picture of a plane crash-landing in the Hudson in 2009, the reality of Twitter started to go mainstream.

Every subsequent event, from the earthquake in Haiti to the recent uprisings in the Middle East, has reinforced the idea that the service dramatically lowers the barriers to entry for publishing, as Williams put it last year.

More than anything else, however, Twitter has become a platform for community — whether it’s a community of people interested in revolutions in the Middle East, or a community that is obsessed with the latest product release from Apple, or a community that wants to know what Charlie Sheen is doing right now. And one of the hallmarks of a social service like Twitter and Facebook is that the more people use it to connect with each other, the more they feel like they own it to some extent — and that feeling is what Twitter is currently fighting as it tries to mature as a company and as a business.

You can see that in the outraged responses to the recent Quick Bar fiasco, and to the shutting down of third-party clients like Bill Gross’s UberMedia — which has been trying to develop its own competing monetization strategy for the social network — and to the rollout of services such as Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends. As I’ve argued before, users have grown so used to seeing Twitter as a utility that every move the company makes to add money-making layers is seen as an affront in some sense, like someone invited you to a party at their house and now is asking you to settle up your bar bill.

Although the two services are different in many ways, Digg has also been struggling with the same kinds of issues. And some of those struggles are directly related to Twitter, since Digg’s link-sharing features — which were once a pioneering example of what some called Web 2.0 — have been largely superseded by the growth of Twitter and Facebook. But Digg has also rolled out its own poorly-received design features: the service launched Digg v4 last August and the new design was roundly criticized as unstable and (more importantly) a breach of faith with the traditional Digg community. The site’s traffic plummeted, the new CEO rolled back most of the new features and laid off almost 40 percent of the staff, and founder Kevin Rose is moving on to start a new venture.

So what are the lessons that Digg has to teach Twitter? One is that even pioneering services, whose founders appear on the covers of leading business magazines, can be overtaken by events, and by other services that don’t even exist yet. Yes, it’s true that Twitter is supposedly worth $10 billion, and is much larger than Digg ever was. But that lesson still applies (as MySpace is well aware). It’s easy to grow complacent and inward-looking, and thereby miss the warning signs of declining growth, or be too slow to react.

The other lesson is that the core of a social network is the community of users — and in Twitter’s case, the community of developers or ecosystem that has grown up around the service as well.

Alienating either or both of those groups is a very risky strategy, as Digg has discovered since it unilaterally rolled out its unwelcome series of changes with little or no discussion with users. The hard-boiled approach that Twitter is taking could pay off for the company if it succeeds in building features that bring in revenue, but at the same time those changes in attitude could ruin the sense of community that has made the network so powerful, and that is something that would be very difficult — if not impossible — to recapture. So happy birthday, Twitter, and welcome to middle age.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Will Clayton

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This type of industry already uses standard boilers, traditionally powered by natural gas. Thermata CEO Brad Hines said recently at the Cleantech Forum that the market for industrial heat via boilers is already a $26 billion business in the U.S. Thermata’s plan is to install heliostats (big mirrors) on the roof of a factory. The heliostats concentrate sunlight onto a receiver on top of an adjacent tower, which in turn powers the boiler to produce steam.

Hines said he thinks Thermata can produce steam in this way at a cost of $4.60 per MBTU compared to average prices for natural gas-powered steam, which can cost between $6 and $10 per MBTU. Beyond being lower cost, the process has far fewer carbon emissions.

However, you can probably already guess that it’s a complicated and expensive proposition to convince an industrial plant owner to commission the construction of one of these solar-power steam systems. It’s a separate tower, and then they have to connect the tower to the existing boiler and also install the solar tech on the roof. But Hines says even with the upfront cost, the pay-back period is two years for potential customers.

So far Thermata has a partnership with boiler and receiver maker Aalborg CSP, and has the benefit of the experience developed in the solar thermal incubation lab of Idealab. Hines was the founding CEO of concentrating solar photovoltaic startup Soliant Energy, and was VP of engineering for Idealab’s CPV startup Energy Innovations. Before that, he worked in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab for 14 years.

Hines said that the company has been backed by $500,000 in funds from Idealab and is looking for another $600,000 from investors to build its first pilot system by 2012. Competitors include Sopogy, Chromasun, Heliodynamics and Cogenra.

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