Jeff Bezos pushes “competition” for Kindle hardware

As I’ve argued before, I think the Kindle’s success will be in providing a format and momentum for distributing books electronically — not in selling Amazon’s actual hardware devices, which I’d wager will never gain iPod-like market penetration. (I think it’ll lose out to multifunction devices like the mythical Apple tablet and to cell phones like the iPhone and Palm Pre.)

Now it appears Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is betting on something similar, promising a conference audience that he was happy to give his hardware people “competition” by putting Kindle-format books on “other mobile devices and other computing devices” at the same price as on the Kindle itself. As Gizmodo puts it, “either Bezos has something mysterious up his sleeve, or he’s come to terms with the fact that the Kindle — and indeed every dedicated e-reader — is essentially a stopgap device, awkwardly carrying out its single, simple task until something more versatile comes along.”

On the format front, Amazon is facing renewed competition, as it should when it’s taking a ridiculous 70 percent of revenue. But I have a lot more faith in the Kindle format beating out rivals than the kludgy Kindle device doing the same. Meanwhile, for newspapers counting on the Kindle as an economic savior, get ready for the same sort of platform-agnostic commoditization that drives content prices to zero.

Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded

Like newsgroups in the early 1980s, Twitter was probably the most fun before everybody piled on. Once everyone goes there, as Yogi Berra expressed so memorably (in the utterance which headlines this post), the early adopters move on.

In the case of Twitter, as Jason Baer points out at Social Media Today, new users are moving on, as well: most of them never Tweet, never follow, and are never followed. Baer takes Twitter to task for providing a terrible new user experience. Or rather, for not providing one at all — just sign up, and then you’re on your own to figure out how to find friends, how to deal with a sub-par search function, what all the lingo and abbreviations mean, which third party add-ons to use, and so on. Baer concludes: “@ev @biz Make it easier for people who aren’t geeks to love you. Thanks. Please RT.”