Structure08 is well underway and going well. A couple of good places to follow the flow, including Summize.

Also, check out my twittering here, and Sam's here.

This time last year mobile devices seemed really stale ... it had been years since meaningful change. There were lots of promises and rumors of good stuff to come, yet actual new devices all seemed to be hardly any different at all from the tired ones you held in your hand.

I'll admit that when MarkSu first blogged about building a scalable Twitter / Twitter client about a year ago (he kept going with his second, third, and fourth posts) I just started laughing, because like Stephen Forte I just couldn't figure why anyone would care.

I read Robert Scoble's post on "noise in the net" with morbid curiousity today. It's a pretty interesting post, really. Seriously.

Oh, the glorious noise! Everyone loves beating me up for causing the noise. No, I am not the cause. I pass it along. You should see my inbound streams. Every second or two a new Twitter is aimed at me. Every few seconds, a new blog post comes into Google Reader. Every few seconds, a new thing on FriendFeed.

Scoble then goes on to give a few ideas on how to get past the noise and make some sense out of it all. The suggestions are OK, but not really great. They're really more thoughtlets than anything useful.

If you're at JavaOne this week make sure to stop by and check out the Appistry booth ... and register to win one of TWO MacBook Airs. I saw them at the office and it kind of bugged me, to tell you the truth, PARTICULARLY since I can't win one of them!

Almost lost in all of the twittering about Twitter's twubbles last week (sorry CrazyBob, couldn't resist that one!), was the unintentionally quiet announcement of the "Spring Application Platform" (more official posts here and here from springsource).

In the past week+ the whole business about Twitter scalability & reliability came to a head.

Yet, despite infrastructure that is visibly "hitting the wall", now it appears that the company is gaining interest in a funding round at a decent valuation (maybe even signed one, but more on that later).

How is this possible?

I think the answer to this is that

Alistair Croll has an interesting post where he argues that, for all intents and purposes, source code is irrelevant - the new valuable commodity is app tone.

... In the software-as-a-service world ... source code becomes irrelevant. If someone offered us the schematics to a telephone, we wouldn’t care. We don’t want to know how to make a phone. We want a dial tone. When it comes to IT, we want app tone.

As another way of saying people want apps to work, this could make sense. But irrelevant? That's just silly.

That both the music and software businesses are going through profound changes is, maybe ... the understatement of the year. Pretty much of a Capt. Obvious statement.

Like any changes of that magnitude there is a fair amount of uncertainty, along with normally sane people working up histrionic firestorms.

A couple of weeks ago I was talking with a group of (primarily) engineering students about how our need for scale is forcing all sorts of changes in our industry ... some technological, some economic, some social / cultural, and so on.

As engineers the temptation is to focus on the technological changes, which is good so far as it goes ... but there is so much more.

For example, think about the differences between the first bubble and now. For my money the single biggest difference is that now there are some pretty successful economic models in place ... ways to monetize crowds, to actually reward investors for taking risk to build an enterprise.