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...bigger idea here is that WebOS is designed to simulate the Web itself. In fact, anyone who can build a website can write applications for this platform, which is why Rubinstein expects a flood of Pre apps shortly. "The user environment in WebOS is a website," Rubinstein says. That's a powerful hook, especially if you believe that the Web will continue to grow relentlessly...
Finally, the user interface is especially cool and does something I've never before seen on a smart phone: it can run a dozen applications simultaneously. Each app is represented by a virtual card after it launches; switching between programs is as easy as leafing through the cards. To close an app, you simply flick it away...
...This is not just a matter of people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of grouping a topic or event by the "hashtag" - #hackedu or #inauguration - was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base (as was the convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol). The ability to search a live stream of tweets was developed by another start-up altogether, Summize, which Twitter purchased last year. (Full disclosure: I am an adviser to one of the minority investors...
...User Innovation The rapid-fire innovation we're seeing around Twitter is not new, of course. Facebook, whose audience is still several times as large as Twitter's, went from being a way to scope out the most attractive college freshmen to the Social Operating System of the Internet, supporting a vast ecosystem of new applications created by major media companies, individual hackers, game creators, political groups and charities. The Apple iPhone's long-term competitive advantage may well prove to be the more than 15,000 new applications that have been developed for the device, expanding its functionality...
...There are several varieties of this kind of innovation, and they go by different technical names. MIT professor Eric von Hippel calls one "end-user innovation," in which consumers actively modify a product to adapt it to their needs. In its short life, Twitter has been a hothouse of end-user innovation: the hashtag; searching; its 11,000 third-party applications; all those creative new uses of Twitter - some of them banal, some of them spam and some of them sublime. Think about the community invention of the @ reply. It took a service that was essentially a series of isolated...