One of the things that bothers me about Apple, a company that rebuilt and established itself as one of the great innovators in the industry, is the silence. They don’t blog, they stay away from tech conferences, and yet, there they are, building the products everyone uses. Everyone loves the underdog – until the underdog becomes the market leader and loses touch with its audience. Not a lot of people like that.

There are companies that pull off being close to their audience, and Apple should follow their lead. I’m thinking about companies like Amazon or Zappos, who are great examples of customer care, and whose CEOs have been out there, talking publicly about what makes them (and their companies) tick.

Here’s the deal about Apple – I bet they’ll keep making great products because leadership (executive and design) know what people want, mostly by following the rule of building what they need for themselves. But by not engaging in the global conversation about their brand and their products, they’re losing the passionate users (hat tip to Kathy Sierra).

Not that the users are not there anymore – they’re still buying the mac and the iPad, subscribing to MobileMe and waiting for updates from WWDC -, they’re just not as happy to talk about how much they love this company, because they don’t get any love back. Just as in romantic life, relationships where only one party gives are set to fail. Lets hope Apple “gets it” in time.

See also John Battelle’s open letter to Apple.

It seems like something is conspiring against Shift this year. A bunch of speakers got caught in airport shuffle due to the icelandic vulcano that erupted, and I can’t make it down to Lisbon in time for my talk later this afternoon either.

As a way to compensate those who were going to see me speak, I’m going to record audio of my talk and post the transcript – it’s a long, but hopefully exciting talk on entrepreneurship and hitting homeruns on your own. For now, however, here are the contents of the very last slide I prepared for today’s speech – a quote from “A Waking Life”, by Richard Linklater:

“Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore. It’s not dead it’s just that it’s been forgotten, removed from our language. Nobody teaches it so nobody knows it exists. The dreamer is banished to obscurity. Well, I’m trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming, every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds. Our planet is facing the greatest problems it’s ever faced, ever. So whatever you do, don’t be bored, this is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive.”

Enjoy the conference, take the time to meet inspiring individuals (there’s quite a few attending), and I hope you wake up on monday feeling energized and ready to do something new. Wish I could be there with you guys.

Everyone’s talking about Twitter these days and some of the updates they announced at Chirp – their developer conference. Om Malik had a pretty good opinion piece on Twitter’s real concern being Facebook – not developers – and I’d say he’s spot on. But I would also add that the Twitter vs Facebook battle he alludes to is already over, and Facebook wins.

Mind you, I’m much more of a fan of Twitter than I am of Facebook. The novelty of 140 character updates got me to sign-up from the very beginning, but it is that constraint that will ultimately leave it in the shadow of the social-sharing monster Facebook has become. There’s just more value in being able to share anything.

The guys at Twitter know they’re behind because of the very thing that makes them unique, and that’s why they keep launching new features to enrich tweets – mentions, retweets, geolocation, and now annotations. They’re basically keeping the facade of the 140 character limit, but behind the “micro” in microblogging lies a lot of semantic meaning. Is this enough, however? That is clearly up for discussion.

The sweet-spot for social sharing

My gut tells me that the sweet spot for a sharing-centric social network (one where the social object is anything, lies somewhere between what Twitter and Facebook are today. Facebook needs to be leaner, cut some of the app crap and focus on delivering the right experience for people who want to share their lives with their friends. Twitter on the other hand, needs to enrich their experience. They’re certainly not limited to what SMSs can handle anymore (they gave up on that idea as soon as their growth became a real “issue“).

I guess we’ll see how things roll out in the next few months. In the words of Chris Dixon, “I can’t remember the last time the tech world was so interesting.” True story.