The Gillmor Gang talked with Google Chrome’s Group Product Manager Brian Rakowski and Tech Lead Ben Goodger. The conversation focused mostly on the open source fundamentals of the new browser project. Rakowski and Goodger have both been with the project since its inception two years ago, and seemed focused more on the deeper goals of improving and extending the security, robustness, and application framing capabilities of the browser client.

Less important were the need to rush out Mac and Linux clients; Sergey Brin had suggested earlier that the Mac client could come as soon as two months from now, but Rakowski and Goodger refused to be pinned down, citing six months as doable but “no promises.” As to building a competitive Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework to rival Flash and Silverlight, the engineers punted back to the WebKit community while supporting the general notion of open standards development as the underlying strategy for richer browser experiences.

Both rejected the notion that data is collected or sent to Google for use in Google advertising or other products. “All the communication occurs between your browser and the sites you are visiting, Rakowski assured us. “There are a couple of features in Chrome that help you get where you want to go, and those features use Google servers to try to give you information about which pages you want to go to.” He acknowledged that in that case Google servers have to return some information to to your computer, but that they can easily be disabled.

One other note of speculation about sharing code between Chrome and Android: Since Chrome development has focused on Windows, the Mac, and Linux, any code would have to be duplicated rather than shared on the Android platform. And while they are focusing now on the core Chrome platform, there are plans for exposing an extension API to kickstart something akin to the many Firefox extensions available.

The least surprising thing about Google’s Chrome browser announcement was the reaction from most of the media that this was an attack on Microsoft. Google founders Sergey and Larry were both present at the press event, with Page apparently the more engaged on a regular basis with the project for the last two years. But Brin took most of the strategic questions and painted a different picture from the notion that the browser was a new OS and an attack on Internet Explorer and its still-dominant market share on the PC.

Not that I innately believe every message coming from the Google chiefs; often the nuance of their answers carries more weight than the bullet points. And the bile many of us detect regarding Microsoft comes in large doses from CEO Eric Schmidt, who still has not fully flushed the years of struggle with Redmond at Sun and Novell from his system. Page’s responses were somewhat careful and subtly guarded, but Brin seems at ease with the press in ways that are both disarming and also frequently instructive.

When Brin answers the questions about the new OS, he smiles as if to say, yeah, sure it’s the new OS but that’s not why we’re doing it. The words come out, “No it’s not the OS, it’s the engine of the (new) OS.” Page delivers the Schmidt lines since Eric is not in the room: “The more we speed up the browser, the more time you have to search more, badda bing badda boom.” The media, defused, tries weakly with the You’re killing Firefox play; no, we’re not, we’re using Firefox stuff and continuing to support them. That actually makes sense, since Chrome is not about share but about driving the innovation cycle.

Here’s where the Microsoft angle starts to show through. Brin responds to a loopback to the Borg story by saying he would be thrilled if Microsoft used Chrome under an IE 9 skin. Of course, the room chuckled as glances out the window revealed no airborne pigs. Brin then nailed the wiggle room shut by suggesting he’d be just as happy if Microsoft copied the whole damn thing and raised the bar accordingly. Badda boom badda bing.

Listen to Sergey’s responses to the Apple and Silverlight questions in the clip below, then you tell me whether this comes from a hatred of Microsoft or the strategic move to extend the driver’s seat role that FIrefox commandeered for the last three versions of Gekko. This seems much more like a partnering with Microsoft, or at least the parts of Microsoft who own Mesh and Silverlight. In fact, the moment is surprisingly reminiscent of a time when Microsoft used the Mac as its own playground to seed Office iterations on the premier client for content creation.

If Silverlight can play comfortably in Chrome, with a nod toward Moonlight to fill in the Linux blank, then Chrome becomes the junction point between Mesh and App Engine. Mesh apps can take advantage of the tab sandboxes as easily as Flash did in the demos, giving Mesh a container within a container to be stitched together across processes with Mesh pubsub. As the Chromium Developer Documentation says, “In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application.”

Hard to swallow? Brin says the Mac version should be ready in two months, and requests that we do our part to prod his dev team along. That dovetails quite nicely with the PDC at the end of October, and gives Ray Ozzie both the incentive and the pressure necessary to keep Mesh open. The tail is doing a good job of wagging the dog.

Twitter is winning and most of its competitors remain in denial. In spite of almost 5 months of unavailability of its most viral service, Twitter remains the platform of choice for most users. FriendFeed remains a hybrid of conversations and semi-realtime aggregator, capturing most of the energy of Google Reader as a citation engine but stubbornly refusing to allow its metadata to flow back into Twitter and other real time engines.

Facebook has freshened up its UI and allowed us to personalize the news stream to vaguely emulate Twitter. And Jaiku appears to have made the leap to App Engine and could resurface momentarily, only to remind us why Twitter won that one in the first place. Jaiku was always the erector set that could do anything, but who has the time to do anything these days? Better to do what we can do, and let the winners expand their offerings.

Supporters of the open source Laconica project and its flagship Identi.ca see the platform as a challenger to Twitter’s dominance, but the reality is that Twitter is winning that battle. Most thought leaders continue to broadcast on Twitter, and mainstream media outlets such as CNN reinforce that choice by publicizing Twitter users when they engage around the political debate. The marketing aspects of Twitter serve as a powerful factor in keeping the so-called A-List from migrating. The missing real time features are much less important than maintaining and/or accelerating personal brands. Most would rather wait until track and other two-way services are restored or introduced on the dominant platform.

Twitter is winning not because it has managed its success well but because its competitors have bungled the counterattack. No service has stepped up to offer even the semblance of an alternative to Twitter’s value proposition, that being a digital soapbox on which to debate the ideas, events, and emotions that course through the place formerly known as the blogosphere. In an oddly ironic way, FriendFeed and Identi.ca have siphoned off the most vocal critics of Twitter’s failures and kept them occupied long enough for Twitter to recover.

For their part, Identi.ca and FriendFeed proponents have gone from anger to despair to revolutionary fervor to silence as users offer muted reassurance while at the same time wandering “aimlessly” back to Mother Twitter. FriendFeed’s strategy of cultivating a new A-List has largely succeeded, but micro-blogging depends more on a personalized A-List then a generalized one. Ultimately, a unified inbox is more valuable than an elite one.

Identi.ca suffers from its inability to partition its forces into discrete entities that can survive downtime by others. The politics of open source contribution vie with the benign dictator leader role, where a natural and understandable inclination to incorporate as much of the feature set into the platform core conflicts with the need to maintain incentives for participation by a wider, more scalable pool of talent.

Unfortunately, understanding the need to limit one’s own power to aggregate even broader power is a skill that must emanate from the center, rather than be forced from the edges. The founding fathers somehow conspired to achieve a set of checks and balances that kept this elusive source of power alive across a broad coalition of conflicting egos, methodologies, philosophies, and agendas. Such a unifying higher purpose seems absent from the current situation.

Certainly Twitter has no such motivation for seeding the community. To the contrary, the company has violated the spirit of its users’ contract with the service by shutting down our ability to communicate in realtime with the people with whom we’ve established relationships in the Twitter cloud. We accepted the explanation that the service was withdrawn for technical reasons, but not the lack of one for what are clearly business reasons.

It’s easy to see why Twitter’s stance is problematic, but without a realistic alternative most people will just suck it up and wait. Identi.ca’s open source zeal has attracted a band of committed adventurers, but developing a credible alternative so far has lacked that unifying higher purpose that harnesses not just the open source model but one that Twitter and other commercial vendors themselves can endorse or at least accommodate.

I’m placing my bet on a three branches of government approach, where Twitter is one, Identi.ca/Laconica another, and the third is an aggregation layer of microblogging service output upon which track, bridging, and other interactive services are rendered. For now, I expect nothing from Twitter other than continued silence about track and IM services. If I’m wrong about that, all’s the better, as Twitter will then join the larger community based on whatever business model it presents for access to realtime data.

By separating the task of supplying track services over XMPP from the Laconica core, Identi.ca and other Laconica instances can use less onerous transports to push public streams to the third branch. This should also encourage more Laconica instances as well as other open and commercial micro-blogging platforms, thereby distributing the load across smaller clouds that can continue to use PHP as a rapid leveraging tool for fan out.

The same will hold true for the third branch, where services such as IdentiSpy, Gnip, Twhirl, and other larger players can leverage EC2, App Engine, and Mesh to compete and perhaps collaborate to push XMPP services to a broad range of clients and communities. Conceivably this could include Twitter, but
for now the goal is to achieve reliable uptime for open track and related realtime services regardless of the originating source.

Accordingly, tomorrow we will announce the date for the first BearHug Camp, at which I will further delineate the architecture of this three branch approach, including a new Laconica instance which will serve as a reference node, and a group of participating developers and users who are committed to a realistic alternative to Twitter’s current strategy.

BearHug Camp will be live streamed in its entirety by Leo Laporte over his TWiT-TV network. We’re using a scholarship/tuition plan to make sure we get a good cross-section of the community into the room. Scholarships will be awarded based on need, both on applicants’ part and ours to get the right mix in the room. I will exert whatever leverage I can to minimize vendor pitches and filibustering by any and all parties. Or we can just let Twitter win.

Comcast’s decision to cap monthy broadband usage at 250GB is being decried as the end of the Internet as we know it. Maybe so, but it can also be seen as the dawn of the Streaming Era. As the Olympics drew to a close with big numbers - 75.5 million streams (NBCOlympics.com), 40 million (BBC), another 130 million from the European Broadcasting Union, and 100 million Chinese viewers - the networks were already moving on by serving the Democratic National Convention in HD. CBS offered an after-convention netcast with Katie Couric, and CNN promoted “full and complete” streaming coverage of all speeches.

The Comcast move seems more focused on the politics of the FCC decision to rule out Comcast’s filtering of P2P traffic. But BitTorrent and other such traffic is all about downloading, not streaming, and the advent of new look-ahead streaming capabilities in Silverlight suggest that streaming can accommodate DVR-like functionality that makes the value proposition of “owning” the data on a local drive much less important.

It used to be that having physical control of entertainment and other software was critical to the user experience. Record and film companies kept accelerating the quality levels of their products to stay ahead of the pirates and the growing ability of consumers to capture and archive content off the radio and television networks. But as broadband became more available as competition between telcos, cable, and satellite increased, sharing of MP3s and DVR time-shifting had an oddly counter-intuitive impact.

First, the Netflix strategy made renting movies a less onerous process, with no late fees and a large catalogue to choose from. When Blockbuster and Hollywood Video adopted similar MVP programs, the cable and satellite companies were forced to counter-attack with on-demand offerings that were even easier to acquire and in fact were spooled from servers rather than downloaded to home machines.

This, of course, is the same shift software has undergone from shrinkwrap to service, from Outlook to Gmail, Office to Google Apps, and from the hard drive to the cloud. In effect, productivity apps are now streamed to and the data from the user. With the data stored redundantly in the cloud, we are more comfortable with a streaming situation than with the former illusion that we “owned” our data locally.

Once the user has undergone this reworking of trust, devices such as the iPhone and the Slingbox have extended the notion of streaming to the car, the hotel room, to a friend’s house, anywhere. Podcasts are still an efficient way to transfer data via iTunes to the iPhone or iPod, but with 3G beginning to make its way into AT&T service areas, soon streaming will rival satellite and terrresterial radio on the go. And the Slingbox methodology of pulling HD from home to a laptop will be adopted by iPhone users for music via bluetooth to car systems.

The shift seems to be from ultimate quality to ultimate utility, to fit the data into the time available to consume it. Streaming content is far more efficient than downloading, since you don’t need to cache all the material you don’t get around to seeing. And the growth of social networks means more and more of us will start taking advantage of streaming devices to establish relationships with friends to “share” information outside of the reach of DRM.

Once the underground streaming economy reaches a critical mass, media companies will reach some form of accommodation. Whether it takes the form of advertising supported models or the emergence of viral talent going “direct” to consumers, the end result will be the Net-based delivery of high value content under user control. Comcast’s cap will be seen not as the start of a decline but rather the flowering of the Golden Age of Streaming.

Qik has announced that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have joined their growing list of investors, and taken seats on the board of advisors along with previous investors Marc Benioff, George Garrick, Arjun Gupta, Andreessen, and Horowitz.

Qik is a mobile video casting service that sees competition from Kyte, Flixwagon, and Livecast. To get a feel for the services we ran a test here at TechCrunch comparing Qik, Kyte, and Flixwagon, ignoring Livecast because we couldn’t get it to install correctly. In the end we determined that Kyte and Qik were the clear leaders in the space, giving the edge to Kyte for its superior audio quality.

What’s surprising is that Qik has been able to compete with Kyte without significant venture funding. Kyte on the other hand is sitting on nearly $25 million in venture capital. This suggests that Qik has found a relatively cheap way to outsource their bandwidth, whether they are hosting their streaming service in the cloud or using their own servers. It is a prime example of how start-ups can use web 2.0 technology to get off the ground, and start to build once they gain momentum.

Kyte is also backed by Nokia, which raises questions about how hard the company wants to open up options for viewing and recording via other phones, most importantly the iPhone. In fact, Qik has already released an unauthorized version of its software that will allow iPhone video recording on a jail-broken device, and is rumored to be readying a way to view Qik streams on the iPhone.

Dell tossed its hat into the cloud computing ring last night, or more precisely declared its having done so about 2 years ago with a group providing optimized storage, server, and data center solutions for its top 50 customers. At a press briefing high above San Francisco on the 52nd floor, Dell officials suggested they are moving to the cloud and places in the technology stack where customers are pulling them.

For a company that acknowledges it is not about software and one not as visibly aggressive about R & D as competitors Sun, IBM, and HP, Dell has nonetheless attracted some high profile customers or “partners” as the announcement about the event indicated. Facebook VP of Technical Operations Jonathan Heiliger was careful not to position Facebook as aligned only with Dell, but by the end of this video he made it clear Dell is offering hardware that fits into Facebook’s plans for rapidly prototyping and delivering new features to an audience of 100 million users.

Today HP announced the closing of a $13.9 billion acquisition of Electronic Data Systems Corp, ending the process that officially began in May.

Under the terms of the deal HP payed $25 per share in cash, and will set up a new business group titled EDS, an HP company. HP hopes the purchase will better enable them to grapple with market leader IBM, who currently owns over double HP’s market share. The companies will combine to provide outsourcing, application development, consulting, and integration services to a variety of industries.

Both firms provide a variety of services geared to help companies run their networks, manage data, and process information, so expanding their reach should prove beneficial for HP. However in the past few years EDS has undergone significant reconstruction to improve profitability. They have lower margins than HP and have been growing at a slower pace, which could make the acquisition a liability if these trends are more than temporary.

HP may have also been enticed by the cloud computing possibilities associated with EDS’s many data centers stationed around the world. Cloud computing would drastically change the margins and potential market opportunities for consulting and outsourcing services, and allow HP to utilize EDS is much larger ways. HP has stated that they expect the deal to turn profitable by 2010.

Last week on The Gillmor Gang and this weekend on TWiT, the subject of the sorry state of the music business came up and in particular the notion of “Free Internet Radio.” Part of the discussion was triggered by a threat (plea?) by the founder of the Pandora music service to shut down. Pandora employs an ingenuous strategy based on something called the Music Genome Project, which breaks down recordings into some 400 individual characteristics, then uses these elements to predict what new music the listener might like based on what he or she found compelling in the original song.

Pandora uses this strategy to recommend new music, but it also attempts to skirt the draconian licensing and now price infrastructure of the music cartel, by only playing a proscribed number of songs by a single artist within a defined time. Gang and TWiT listener Mike Lerch quoted from the DMCA regulations to wit:

In any three-hour period, you should not intentionally program more than three songs (and not more than two songs in a row) from the same recording; you should not intentionally program more than four songs (and not more than three songs in a row) from the same recording artist or anthology/box set.

The net result is that if I input The Beatles as the representative music I’d like to hear, I get three or four Beatle songs followed by a not-so-Magical Mystery Tour of every Beatle clone that has come since the last notes faded on the rooftop in London almost 40 years ago. Leo Laporte and others on both shows (and many listeners, from the feedback I’ve gotten so far), are good with that tradeoff, finding new music at a compelling rate. Pandora’s complaint is that they’re being priced out of existence by the accelerating tax imposed by legislation that not surprisingly favors broadcast and even satellite services with plenty of lobbying muscle.

While I certainly sympathize with Pandora’s (and the Internet radio community’s) dilemma in general, a startup built on a business model designed to work within a system designed to frustrate the listener’s ability to hear what they want to leaves little sympathy from me when the squeeze is further tightened. There’s no big secret here: the cartel wants to keep prices high ans their archives shut to the Internet, and attempts to play ball with them to perpetuate that stand off are politically naive and counter productive. Rather than encourage the production of new music, the net effect is to sanctify the chasm artists, producers, and yes, companies have to cross to reach a Net-coherent new model.

As I suggested on the Gang, a better idea would be to adopt a strategy of hitting the cartel where it hurts, by establishing a Free Radio tip jar. Building on an idea Doc Searls has envisioned in his role at Harvard’s Berkman Law, create a fund to accept contributions from listeners of whatever source - brodcast, sattelite, Internet radio, BitTorrent, whatever - to recognize music. It’s similar to the public radio and television pitch drives, but instead targetted at the artists directly, not as a gift via the subscription. This fund would, when sufficiently large enough to have an impact, be donated directly to the artists for distribution at their discretion. That could include splitting it with the record company, or even the distribution chain including the very radio outlets that are choking the business. But here the artist decides.

If Pandora is serious about closing down, perhaps they should seed the tip jar with the next few months revenue and then get back in the very powerful business of being on the listener’s side, helping find new music instead of propping up the cartel by going along. As a registry of new music, they could use the behavioral signature of their listeners to chart popularity of this new music and give them a new Top Forty for the Tip Jar. And in the process, turn their slogan from a pitch to a call to arms - Free Internet Radio.

Several news organizations, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Dow Jones, have recently demanded that the Intel-AMD anti-trust case records be unsealed. Though the move suggests that critical information may have been withheld from the public, neither AMD or Intel have expressed any problem with further inquiry into case documents.

This is the latest in the anti-trust case AMD filed against Intel in June 2005. AMD’s case is backed primarily by allegations that Intel K.K. offered rebates to Japanese PC makers on the condition that they limit purchases of AMD and Transmeta chips. Intel has denied allegations, and played off the case as a desperation move by AMD.

The two companies have a history of competitive bickering, dating back to when AMD made a living reconfiguring chips they licensed from other companies. In the early 90’s AMD licensed x86 processor designs from Intel for the 8086 and 80286 chips. However, when the 386 model was released Intel refused to provide designs, and later sued AMD for allegedly copying low level microcode within the CPU. Since then AMD has proven itself to be Intel’s biggest competitor, but has always been a very distant second place in the market.

It’s difficult to take anything from the most recent case because it is unclear who is in the right. If it be Intel, then it could be seen as indication that AMD has not met growth expectations, or is trying to shield itself from being pushed out of the market. However if AMD’s claims hold it can be assumed that they have done something to threaten Intel’s formidable presence in the space. The case is expected to go to trial in 2010.

With just the weekend between now and the start of the major party conventions, the amazing thing about the New Media is just how little it has impacted so far on the story. No major leaks about the vice presidential nominations, no blogger unmaskings of damaging revelations about the candidates at the top of the ticket, no shaky video of loose talk or surrogates jockeying for position.

Is is possible that the campaigns have learned how to contain the new viral media, or is something else going on? With Twitter, Qik, FriendFeed, and other social media platforms now in place and largely battle-tested for the coming storm of pre-baked circuses, why is the news so tightly controlled by the traditional networks?

Perhaps the nature of the underlying story of this election undercuts the technology equation. With a disruptive candidate like Barack Obama, people are looking to the media for less, rather than more drama. The shiny object fascination with radical technology change has given way to a more pragmatic mood, where iPhones have become commonplace and the rapid spread of information throughout the day and on the move has let the mainstream media play more to its traditional strengths as not just aggregators but synthesists of the news.

Real time bursts of information over Twitter and IM have changed how we react to events; the edge professionals have with insider notification is being smoothed out and delivered as a service to consumers via intermediaries who give away the data for the ongoing relationship. We use Facebook and other social hubs as early warning systems, insurance against being out of the loop when breaking information makes a difference in how you do your job or finding one.

Ironically, the very ubiquity of cameras, recorders, texting, and the rest of the *Phone tools has made it both mandatory and easier to keep things secret. Just today, a story broke ruling Sam Nunn out as a potential Obama running mate because he’s been spotted overseas with an itinerary that makes it unlikely he would be available for Saturday’s presumed announcement in the Midwest. Not only can Nunn be tracked easily for the next few days, but the same goes for all of the short listers, which means that keeping any information closely held to the last minute and releasing it simultaneously to the media via IM and email insures security.

The flattening of the information hierarchy has implications for the technology industry that go well beyond its marketing in the media. Social media platforms are competing for key roles in the new government, as evidenced by Google’s and Microsoft’s deals with each party for convention IT. Once the parties are over and the campaign bears down on November, the infrastructures put in place over the next two weeks will be used to coordinate the state organizations and feed back into the electoral college command centers where the election will be decided.

The result will look familiar on the surface, with the traditional swing states and voter groups oscillating as Election Day approaches. But what will be profoundly different is that this election and the events leading up to it will be the most recorded in history. Like a gigantic EKG, the clicks and packets that emanate out of each campaign will be gathered, mapped, and played back in close to real time, then analyzed and revised to look for fluctuations in the right or wrong direction.

Here is where the difference between search and track will prove pivotal. Search produces analysis after the fact, while track produces interactions that change the events themselves. As social hubs perform for the “cameras” over the next weeks, the efficiencies of those with real time synergies will likely outperform more historical views of the resulting data. Those micro-communities more adept at conversational politics will do better faster, and may in fact tip the election in much the same way Obama’s teams tipped the nomination process via the caucuses.

And in December, the playback of this data will prove decisive in who gets the jobs in the next administration, both in Washington and across the new Congress. While we may not see the obvious signature of the social media revolution in scoops and headlines, it will be hard to miss in the rear view mirror.