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Over on TechCrunch there is an article by Digg founder Kevin Rose. He talks about how to gain followers, and lots of them (at the time of the article he had over 88,000 followers behind only President Obama).

Maybe I am missing the point of the article, but isn’t social media just that “social”? How social can you really get with 88,000 people?

A Twitter Rock Concert

It’s like a rock concert where 25-50 lucky people get a back stage pass to interact with the band personally and the other 87,950 are a mix of catching good sound and visual (front row) to seeing dots bouncing on a stage and a horrible audio mix bouncing off the rafters (nose bleed section!).

What interaction is there at the concert outside the first row or to those who get the occasional high five from the singer, or the few that get the mic held out to them during a chorus? A bunch of yelling and screaming from 87,950 that you cannot discern a single voice from.

How many @replies are missed from crowd like that on Twitter?

Enough that it takes the term social out of the equation I would think.

If we look at basic web usage, any decent web developer, designer and web site owner has always understood that a high number of visitors is always a good thing. However, a lower number of quality visitors is even better. We also know that quality content that is of interest to visitors is what gains more visitors, more shares and more visibility. If you can gain a high number of quality visitors, then that’s the best.

I kind of think Twitter follows that same basic principle….follow quality and produce quality. The numbers will come about on their own to the proper mix if you have done it right.

Social Is About Quality Interaction

Think of it this way – the 87,950 people at our rock concert that have the potential to scream (in this case Tweet) back are trying to gain the attention of one person, attention that is already being gained and utilized by a small few. At what point is one person so overloaded, especially with all the interactions so many already have online and offline, that they just get glazed over and only pay attention to the backstage pass people, and those in their front row? They may create quality for many, may even get a bit of quality from few but the rest is garbled screaming coming from the crowd – ignored.

Another analogy? Sure. Ok. What if say, Dell or Wal-Mart started a Twitter account for the sole purpose of getting as much exposure and as many followers as possible? People would be outraged and would call it for what it was – a disrespect for the medium used and a disrespect for those that either one of the two entities wish to “communicate with”. You can be for sure that the communication “given” would be much more than what either of the two “received”, which makes it very one sided…..and who likes a one sided conversation?

That’s not quality at all in the social web world we have at our hands right now. Remember, there have been numerous rock bands that really weren’t that great that were able to sell out arenas. They aren’t around anymore, are they? I didn’t think so.

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Mozilla is adding support for multiprocess browsing to Firefox. The feature, which is already found in Google Chrome, will improve the stability and security of Mozilla’s browser. Ars takes a look at the current status of the implementation and at an early demo that shows a page rendering in a separate process.

Mozilla has launched a new project called Electrolysis that aims to bring multiprocess browsing to Firefox. According to Mozilla, splitting up the page rendering workload into multiple processes will improve the browser’s performance, security, and stability. The developers have already assembled a prototype that renders a page in a separate process from the interface shell in which it is displayed.

Mozilla has explored the possibility of adopting a multiprocessing approach for Firefox in the past, but the idea didn’t gain serious traction in the Firefox developer community until it was implemented by Google and Microsoft in their respective web browsers. Google’s Chrome browser uses a separate process for each page, an architectural approach that facilitates much more effective security sandboxing and prevents page-specific rendering glitches from crashing the entire browser. Chrome even includes a process manager tool that can be used to see the status and resource consumption of each page.

Adapting Firefox to make it support multiprocess browsing will not be an easy task. Many fundamental components of the browser’s underlying infrastructure will have to be modified in order to accommodate the transition. This will partly involve using interprocess communication (IPC) to expose shared pieces of the browser to the individual tab processes. This is somewhat complicated, but you can get a clearer picture of how it will work by looking at some of Mozilla’s design documents. A particularly illuminating example is theoverview of how Firefox’s image loading and caching mechanisms will be made to work with multiprocess browsing.

The browser currently has a single image loading component that is shared between tabs. To make it work for multiprocess browsing, one approach would be to simply instantiate a separate image loader in each tab process. In order to avoid redundancy, Mozilla’s documentation explains, an alternate solution that might potentially be more effective would be to have a central image caching and loading service that makes image content accessible to the tab processes via IPC. It could be further optimized by using shared memory to to make the decoded image data accessible to the tabs, thus avoiding the IPC bottleneck for the heaviest aspect of the operation.

Last month, developer Chris Jones published a screencast which demonstrates a simple prototype that renders page content in a separate process outside of the main browser process. He shows that the page rendering process can be terminated independently of the browser, meaning that a page-specific crash would take down only the page and not the entire browser.

“Notice that only the ‘content’ disappears when the page crashes; the user interface itself keeps running as if nothing happened. This is a big step forward,” he wrote in a blog entry about the demo. “With Firefox protected from buggy pages and plugins, more fun is possible. This video shows me pressing a ‘Recover’ button that relaunches the page that just crashed. There are many more possibilities for recovering from these errors, and I’m excited to see what our user interface folks cook up.”

Jones says that his prototype represents the work that the Electrolysis developers have done to meet the requirements specified by “phase I” of Mozilla’s multiprocess roadmap. To bootstrap the development of the IPC system, Mozilla is using some code from Chromium, the open source development version of Google’s browser. The developers are contemplating the possibility of replacing existing Firefox components, such as the browser’s network stack, with additional code from Chromium.

The experimental development work that is being done by various contributors on the Electrolysis project wasrecently consolidated into a single version control repository. The developers hope to have nightly builds ready for developer testing soon, but they caution that it will not yet work on Mac OS X. They are looking for volunteer Mac developers to participate in the project.

Electrolysis is going to be a truly enormous project. It’s not clear yet if it will be ready in time for the next release of Firefox, which is codenamed Namaroka. The work on Electrolysis will be done parallel to Namaroka development, so it will not impede other plans to improve the browser. The early Electrolysis prototype and other parts that have been implemented so far are highly impressive. The project is off to a very promising start and has the potential to bring a lot of value to the Firefox browser and its users.

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Today saw the announcement of some very big news, the forthcoming release of Google’s OS and I could not be more excited. Secretly, its something I’ve wanted for quite some time; an open source, fast, lightweight and secure OS with the web and Google’s services (of which I use all) as its backbone.

The move by Google is sure to leave Apple and Microsoft shaking in their boots, and quite frankly, I’m certain this is the beginning of the end for Ubuntu & co. What I’d like to focus on here however is Apple, a company which just weeks ago I couldn’t see myself ever abandoning, and who had convinced me that beauty, elegance and reliability were my top priorities when it came to an operating system.

Since the increasing development and improvement of Google Apps (and web apps as a whole), the increased speed of Chrome, the release of Android and now, the Google OS. I’m left torn. Nearly everything I currently do is online, and I’d say approximately 80% involves Google Apps. I realise, your average non-geek Joe is a long long way from this, but I’ve never been more convinced that in time – everyone will use the web, an online word processor/spreadsheet etc.. (probably Google Docs) to work just as many have used windows and office for so long.

Commitment to Google Apps

My current commitment to Google Apps (until something better comes along of course) has left me frequently day-dreaming. Entertaining ideas of what it would be like to truly incorporate all my primary web services into an operating system designed to really make sure they work as best as they possibly can. An operating system so reliable, smooth, fast and secure that using the web would feel local.

My day-dreams came true today, and it means I’m left wondering what Apple can bring to the table between now and Google’s OS release, aside from a gorgeous UI and decent hardware that will pumped about Apple again. After two years with the iPhone I’m already considering abandoning the device for an Android phone, primarily because of its integration with Google’s applications. Android has a local Gmail client, maps is fully featured, everything is pushed, email, contacts and calendar events…its all slick and its all built in.

The point is this…

As long as Google and web applications continue to improve at the rate they are, Apple is the only company I can see with potential to retain its current user base, but to do it, they’re going to have to start thinking far more Google-like. Apple’s propriety strategy, I believe, is an advantage, but Google’s offerings are increasingly more attractive a proposition and unless Apple rethink their local OS strategy (as I’m sure they will by the way), this is the beginning of an era of Google dominance, the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

The company is slowly but surely taking over every aspect of our lives from email (a backbone to nearly all our lives), to how we work, video and photosharing, how we maintain voice communication, the operating system our phone runs on…for some its scary, for me… I’m excited. And for now at least, the one company I want to see step up to Google’s surge in dominance is Apple, and I predict they will, but its not going to be easy.

Although, I am writing Microsoft’s long term consumer market off now, and saying loud and clear that the future is Google vs. Apple. Robert Scoble has just posted on Friendfeed: “Why did Google announce Chrome OS this week? Well, of course, Microsoft has a big announcement coming on Monday (I’m embargoed).” So you never know, I could of course be very very wrong and Microsoft might just have a few tricks up its sleeve, one might work..I doubt it.

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