Tapbots announced Wednesday that Netbot, their App.net client for iPhone and iPad, is now free “for an unspecified period of time.”

The Tapbots App.net post announcing the Netbot sale says it’s “[I]n order to spur adoption of App.Net.”

Netbot was born out of Tapbots’ beloved Twitter client, Tweetbot, and anyone who uses that app will quickly get used to Netbot. For those who haven’t used Tweetbot, just trust that Tapbots is a top-shelf iOS shop and makes apps that feel good and make sense. If you’ve wanted to try out App.net, this is the app with which to do it.

In fact, it was when Tapbots announced their App.net client that much of the tech world started to take App.net seriously. App.net is betting that a paid-for social infrastructure will give rise to a vast field of great apps that have sustainable businesses. That plan needs buy-in from big-name developers.

When Tapbots joined the service, things got interesting. The app caused a huge spike in attention when it first appeared for $4.99. But App.net’s adoption hasn’t been as swift as the Tapbots duo, programmer Paul Haddad and designer Mark Jardine, had hoped. As Haddad confirmed on Twitter, going free means that Tapbots stands to make more money from the App.net Developer Incentive Program, which doles out over $20,000 per month to ADN developers based on user satisfaction ratings. That must be a better deal than app sales at this point.

Yahoo announced in a Friday afternoon blog post that it’s killing seven products from its line of consumer offerings.

The doomed products include Yahoo’s BlackBerry app and Sports IQ. The BlackBerry app will still be available to users who have already downloaded it, but support for it will cease. The Yahoo Message Boards website is also set for shuttering, although users will still be able to access message boards for individual properties such as Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Finance. Yahoo avatars will no longer be supported either, while the Yahoo Clues beta product, Yahoo App Search and Yahoo Updates API round out the list of casualties.

All the changes take effect April 1, except for the Yahoo Updates API, which will stick around until April 16.

“Ultimately, we’re making these changes in an effort to sharpen our focus,” Jay Rossiter, Yahoo’s executive vice president for platforms, wrote in the blog post announcing the changes. “By continuing to hone in on our core products and experiences, we’ll be able to make our existing products the very best they can be.”

Why the schadenfreude, you might ask? Why take delight at the misfortune of others? Well, let me be clear. I have endless compassion for the brilliant engineers at Twitter. They’ve built something unbelievably powerful, and it’s a testament to their talents that it runs at all. But I think the human users who spin the wheels of that real-time interruption machine could use a break every once in a while.

When Twitter is down, it’s like a Snow Day on the Internet.

I understand that most people can and do use Twitter by choice. That’s a very good thing. As an intentional hobby, Twitter is immensely valuable. Just dipping into the stream can provide an hour’s or a day’s worth of news, humor and even friendship, if you keep your Twitter feed tidy enough. “Twitter is my rosary,” my word-hero Erin Kissane once said.

The only thing worse than dealing with haters of your company or product is not having any at all. The product without haters is destined for ignominy and failure. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that your product’s success is positively correlated with the volume of venom directed at it.
But first, let’s define a “hater.”

There’s valid criticism, and then there’s hate. A hater, according to Urban Dictionary, feasts upon schadenfreude: “A person that simply cannot be happy for another person’s success. So rather than be happy they make a point of exposing a flaw in that person.” Jealousy factors heavily into a hater’s temperament.

• Quality
• Entertainment
• Interesting
• Amazing
• Twitter
• Facebook

Yes, jealousy. After all, no one hates a loser. That company with 1% market share? No one bothers to expend energy trashing it. Not seriously, anyway.

Any illusions that marketers have gotten this whole social media thing down pat will be blown away by the latest findings from Technorati Media’s 2013 Digital Influence Report, which suggests that for everything the media spends across social platforms, the most desired influencers aren’t even being reached.

The new report points out a huge disconnect: only 11% of corporate social media budgets are devoted to advertising on blogs and influencer sites. But fully 86% of the influencers these corporate brands are trying to reach are using blogs as their primary publishing platform.

Brands And Advertisers: It’s All About Facebook

The mismatch is pretty clear in Technorati Media’s report. Typically, just 10% of the total digital marketing budget is devoted to a social ad strategy. Of that slice of the pie, 57% gets tossed at Facebook ad buys, 13% at YouTube and another 13% at Twitter’s sponsored tweets. Just 6% is spent on influencers and 5% on blogs.

Books were my best friends, when I was growing up. I read all the time, but wrote little. It wasn’t until I hit my teens that I began to write regularly for fun. None of it was very good, but I had, thanks to countless hours between book covers, learned a little something about structure, grammar, even spelling. This made me a better-than-average writer for my age and someone who peppered his conversations with big words (mostly because I loved the sound of them).

My teenage children read less than I did when I was their age. The two of them spend hours on their phones, ingesting viral content or chatting on Facebook, while I spent my time with books and TV.

Despite the generational shift in reading habits, my children are above average writers (although this could be because their parents have writing backgrounds). I’m actually surprised their writing isn’t worse.

Mobile devices have become the world’s steady companions that we take anywhere and use everywhere. A recent forecast by McKinsey & Company estimates that by 2014, 1.7 billion mobile devices will be accessing the Internet – and a steady diet of online content. Widespread smartphone and tablet adoption is giving birth to a new ecosystem of mobile apps. Apple with its iTunes App Store is currently the gold-standard of the mobile experience, and it enables distribution to millions of users. In early 2013, Apple announced that users had downloaded an astounding 40 billion apps from its App Store, with almost half of that total logged in the last year.

The rollout of smart mobile apps yields numerous benefits not only to consumers but also for the enterprise. Mobile apps for business must offer the expected, Apple-easy download experience, but the enterprise requires quite a bit more for apps to be successful and risk-free. Many companies are struggling to manage the proliferation of mobile apps and connect to business content.

Here are seven critical areas for enterprises to address as apps multiply through the mobile enterprise ecosystem.

1. Not Point Products: Using An Enterprise Mobility Platform

The basic foundation of the mobile enterprise begins with deployment of the devices – employee and corporate-owned — along with a portfolio of productivity apps. The goal is simple: The user downloads an app and starts using it. All onboarding, app registration and bootstrapping is done by the enterprise mobility platform — the server strings, logon information or certificates are pushed to the user’s device automatically.

2. Configuration: Based On Roles And Responsibility

Deployment and configuration policies have to go hand-in-hand. Ultimately, enterprise workers want to be able to use any device and any app, accessing content without any roadblocks. Ideally, if an employee has an iPhone or Android phone provided to them, they will immediately have the secured content and correct business apps configured based on their roles and responsibilities (finance, HR, sales, etc.).

3. Deployment: Cloud vs. On Premise

Enterprises have a choice of where they get content and apps. They can come from the cloud, be stored on premise, or in some hybrid combination. This piece of the mobile equation doesn’t have a correct answer, but IT has to remain keenly aware where each component of mobile content resides and (most importantly) who has authorized access.

4. Beyond MDM: Managing Devices, Apps, Content And Things

IT must maintain control over how mobile devices access corporate information: At the very least, IT has to be able to turn off the device, content or app if the mobile hardware is lost or stolen. A key component of that is creating lockable configuration and security policies. Mobile Device Management (MDM) software helps IT centrally manage, secure and deploy mobile data, applications and devices, including tablets and phones. The journey continues beyond MDM to Mobile App Mgmt (MAM), Mobile Content Mgmt (MCM) and eventually takes you on the journey to securing not just devices but every machine in the Internet of Things.

5. Security: At Every Stage In The Lifecycle

A Symantec study calculated that the average annual cost of mobile breaches for an enterprise business was $429,000. Security has to be part of the fabric of mobile throughout the enterprise. It must be integrated into the initial mobile strategy – and into each subsequent stage in the mobile lifecycle. It must be nimble and designed for the post-PC era of mobile computing.

6. Interoperability: Take A Cross-Platform Approach

In a mobile enterprise, all devices, apps and cloud services need to recognize each other and be able to share content. As we deal with a combination of HTML-based mobile-Web apps and device-native apps, three key factors contribute to interoperability.

First is cross-platform support. Most enterprises will have to cater to Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows and BlackBerry.

The second factor is backend connectivity: While all mobile users will run Tripit, for example, against the same hosted backend, your enterprise apps needs to run against your company’s backend systems. For example, a customer relationship management (CRM) app needs to access your customers in your CRM system. A Leave Request app has to run against your own enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Third, enterprise apps must adhere to your company’s information technology security standards. Employees will access your corporate data from the open Internet, and you need to safeguard your business data.

7. Mobile Apps: Buy And/Or Develop Your Own

Mobility starts with the app creator, which could be an individual developer, a customer who wants to develop an app, a partner or an internal development team. Many larger organizations will benefit by designing their own apps for mobile-enabled business processes. These mobile solutions can tap into different applications and workflow tools using dashboards to monitor everything from sales to the health of the entire business in real time.