I thought for grins I would drop back for the first time in a month and write on an old style computer. I keep reaching for that lever in the upper left — it’s called a carriage return to add a new line. No I don’t do that, although the MacBook Air keyboard feels like a typewriter compared to the virtual iPad one or even the dockable hardware one.

I didn’t go to last week’s Web 2 Expo but enjoyed the coverage of what seemed to be an engaging series of panels here on TechCrunch. One headline jumped out at me though, where Tim O’Reilly said something about how Apple (Steve Jobs) doesn’t understand the importance of Web services. Evidently MobileMe’s cost as a service disqualifies Apple from cluefullness.

Well, I disagree. Not that I haven’t resisted the call of MobileMe until now for a version of the same logic. Why pay for access to services Google is providing for free (storage, etc.), or the Blackberry with its push email? And certainly Android as practiced by Nexus One provides a glowing recommendation for the kind of realtime orchestration of multiple services that makes the iPhone and now the iPad feel like a return to Windows 2.0. You know, the one before they finally reinvented multitasking.

But there I am at the Apple store last week trying to buy an Apple case for the iPad 3G (sorry, sold out, better go online, no idea when it’ll be available) and I call an audible at the line of scrimmage and buy MobileMe because it is discounted to new iPad owners within the first 2 weeks. I’ve been carrying the box around in a case all week with no time to install it, but because it provides at least some plausible cloud services I’m betting it will ease the wait for iOS 4 and multitasking, not to mention giving me an insight into Apple’s real Web plans.

Because Tim O’Reilly gets things right a huge percentage of the time, I’ll pause a minute here and check his logic. Before I do, a little story. I was speaking at Phil Windley’s Kinetyx Impact conference and fellow keynoter Jon Udell and I were kibitzing backstage or whatever the hallway we were in. Jon mentioned something about something that happened 2 years ago, and I thought to myself, no way, easily 5 years ago. I said as much and Jon looked me straight in the eye and said, nope 2 years.

Now Jon Udell is my go-to guy for the answer about anything, so I had to make a calculation: do I drop it knowing full well he’s wrong or keep disagreeing. I was almost ready to change my opinion about something I actually knew the right answer to, but something wouldn’t let me let it go. Not his expression, which was emphatic, a little bored that I was still arguing, etc. All the right signals that he was right. So I kept after it a couple more times until he said, yeah it was 5 years.

You mean you were just blatantly making that up, I asked, incredulous. Yep, he grinned, I learned it from you. Oh great. So when Jason Kincaid says Tim O’Reilly says Steve Jobs is trying to build a fundamental challenge to the Web, I have to be careful. Like so many others, Tim frames this battle for control of the next metaphor as Apple v. Google for the Internet Operating System. Google gets the network, while Apple gets monetization. Throw in Microsoft and Facebook; the forces of closed may choke off the Web.

Whatever, the reason I don’t buy that the iPad or Objective C is a challenge to the Web is that a) the Web is doing quite well thank you, and b) Google isn’t free. In fact, I just overran my Gmail Golden Goose storage limit and now I’m paying a healthy percentage of what MobileMe charges to keep my entire life online since Gmail launched available to me moving forward. And I’d gladly pay Apple whatever it takes to get Flash off the network, instead of listening to Google rationalize their inclusion of Flash in Android as a service of openness to users.

The more that open standards gurus decry the Apple strategy of actually giving people what they want, the more I question the logic that somehow evil is being perpetrated. O’Reilly doesn’t claim heroes and villains in his excellent 2-part overview, but elsewhere the idea that there might be some competition for actual users seems to elude many. “Facebook gone rogue,” “Time for an Open Alternative,” Dave Winer on his Never-Ending Twitter Redistribution Tour. All credible if you ignore actual customers.

Sadly, people like winners. They like it when success leads to more cool stuff, as Facebook is doing with its APIs and dropped caching restrictions. A quick glance today at the Facebook stream reveals a compact and somewhat interesting flow of FriendFeed-like citations. In the absence of real competition for streamtime, I can begin to see the outline of a reason to frequent the Facebook whole, particularly if it is interleaved with Twitter and some trackable metadata. Seesmic might do the trick, but time is on Facebook’s side as the stream slows down and quality will out.

Already I’ve spent more time on this computer than I planned, and I’m missing my iPad and its inexorable lure into the terrible land of manicured lawns and repressive rules like “don’t mess with our take down of the carriers” and “can you wait for multitasking until it actually doesn’t take down the 9 hours of battery which is why you’re moving all your portfolio into the AppStore.” Watching ABC iPad hits mushroom in the millions as CBS promises H.264 in time for the fall season, what part of an on-demand realtime video network do we not want?

No doubt that Android is moving fast, and contributing mightily to the energy of the stream. But can we stop calling winners and losers before we actually see the new content that is boiling out of the disruption. This is the moment before Sgt. Pepper, when Good Vibrations was exploding with the possibilities of that most recent intersection of technology and inspiration. Brian Wilson drove McCartney, who drove Lennon, who drove Harrison, who together drove Hendrix, and around the block again. Where will it go? God only knows.

The Gillmor Gang — Mike Arrington, Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, and Kevin Marks. Recorded live Friday, May 14, 2010.

Facebook took over the Gillmor Gang this week like it threatens to do the Web. Danny Sullivan represented those who fear the unadulterated market power of the social giant. He pressed FriendFeed co-founder and now Facebook platform chief Bret Taylor on the Pandora and Microsoft deals, which push user data to “partners” without user opt in. Taylor said these were carefully defined contracts that respected user privacy.

Robert Scoble represented the happy user, listening to friend-seeded recommendations on Pandora. Andrew Keen represented his own peculiar subset of clueless netizens, entertaining us with a stylized version of Facebook’s onboarding interrogation: Who are you? What’s your favorite cereal? What constitutes an invasion of privacy? Taylor batted the gambit away, only to have Sullivan loop around to it later and give Keen’s schtick more credibility than I thought possible.

All in all, a fun exercise that stayed away from the shrill quality of the underlying debate. It’s always amusing to see Google evangelists look with horror at Facebook exercising its social muscle, and Microsoft engineer Dare Obasanjo backing the Revenge of the Semantic Web as propelled by Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol. Much has been made of the varying degrees of authenticity of these open standards gurus turned partisans, but David Recordon (now of Facebook) won the round with his “Sure, some things Facebook launched are more “open” than others” setup.

All of which suggests that no one and everyone is to be believed. Interestingly, like the debate over the iPad (bad, bad, bad… I’ll take two), the less “open” others Recordon mentions are being debated on pages that sport shiny new Facebook Like buttons at the top. And even as the partisans mount and unmount their soapboxes, others are busy taking ground by minimizing the differences between the dominant strategies. Already Twitter engineers are exploring building annotations on top of the Facebook structures, while PubSubHubbub moves toward JSON support. Like sausage making, the ugly process may actually be working.

It’s taken this long to attempt to write something on the iPad. I took some notes at Google’s Atmosphere event just to try out the system, but quickly discovered that the newly realtimed Google Docs were only available in read only mode. A Google PR guy told me they were waiting on a “real browser” before rolling the tool out to iPad users sometime later this year. I ended up in gmail draft mode.

By now I’ve gotten the fundamental message, which is that Apple is rebuilding the Mac from the ground, or rather the pocket, up. The AppStore debuted with iPhone and iPad apps mushed together; now they are segregated as the iPad specific tools build out. The iPhone OS 4 announcements made clear that multitasking was the bedrock of the new OS, with the concurrent processes opening the door to sharing data between various services in realtime i.e. the network. Micromessages, popups, alerts, some kind of cross-app communication that makes realtime aware applications possible.

I’d be more frustrated if I didn’t have so much fun with the damn thing. I figured typing would be slower and more prone to mistakes, but it turns out that my pseudo touch typing “skills”, a hybrid of hunt and peck and awkward work-arounds, are somewhat easier to use in virtual mode than expected. Granted, reaching for the apostrophe involves going to the number screen and then annoyingly having to click back to the qwerty screen. I can only hope the billions of complaints will reach Cupertino ears before the next update.q

But we have a little secret as iPadders that will carry us through: we are part of a process that will get us to some oddly shared consensus complete with learned gestures that reboot our approach to the task of creating ideas. So much has been made of the focus on consuming that we miss the speed with which the new metaphors are taking root. Replacing a word, for example. I tap the word ignore in the previous sentence and type miss. Tap again and I’m back. I can’t quite remember what the old way was, but this new way is fast, fun, and a promotion for new tools in the pipeline.

In fact, it may be sooner than we think. If the OS was built to learn about these quirks or repeated fumbles we make such as the afore-mentioned apostrophe tap dance, couldn’t the software learn to go to some plan b where it offers a sort of learned macro that can be ratified by use. Or a macro that capitalizes Plan B for that matter.

Of course, I’ll still get the keyboard dock peripheral because it helps speed the transition to the atomization of the MacBook Air into its component parts. Already I’ve seen iPads pop up in corporate settings (it doesn’t hurt that my new Boss is over the iPad moon) and why not have a more enterprise mode that is engaged when these new peripherals are plugged in to the dock bus. A secret club of iPadders who’ve crossed over into the world of virtual touch on steroids. Isn’t that the Apple model anyway? Prescient elitism?

Google of course is doing everything it can to play along, keeping the pressure on Flash with YouTube while hand waving about ChromeOS and then validating the iPhone/iPad model by committing to Android as its tablet OS. Chrome the browser is busy destabilizing Firefox just in time for Mozilla antipathy toward H.264 not to mean a damn thing. It all couldn’t look more coordinated if we didn’t know better, which of course we don’t.

That’s because the lure of reinventing our tools is the same thing that causes my daughter to rearrange her room every month or so when she needs an excuse to not clean it up or do her homework. But it goes deeper than simple diversion; we’re really looking to step back and find the place where our intuition and what I assume meditation or yoga brings us. A place where we can find our center and look beyond the momentary and into the reasons why we work where and with whom we do.

Computing has always been a personal thing for me, in many respects taking the baton from the role music played at an earlier time in our history. It’s thrilling precisely because the boundaries can suddenly give way to unexpected delights, power, opportunity, and yes, the fleeting concept of a future we can invest in. As I sit here on the couch typing these virtual notes, something about the rhythm and even the orchestration of technologies — the sound of the virtual key clicking, the effortless autocorrect of spelling, even the fact that for a little while I’m not being interrupted by the relentless realtime alerts that multitasking allows all of this renders a feeling of purposeful calm that feels new and valuable. All the more because it’s unexpected.

And as it unfolds, I file away notes about improvements and ticket items for the kind of learning smarts that must come next. Where Google pushes forward, with its server side tools building one on another to create ever more compelling scenarios, that’s where the iPad needs to go. It will be OK for Jobs’ insistence on the apps being the platform, because once multitasking is enabled the strategy will be seamless and invisible to the user. That is, except for the superior battery and performance wins that it will then be Google’s turn to clone. And back and forth it will go.

Editor’s note: This is my first weekly (or so) column on TechCrunch(IT) since I started my new job at salesforce.com.

Only 8 more shopping days to be completely wrong about the iPad. By this time a week from tomorrow, those of us who are confident that the iPad will be the same sort of enormous disruptive event will be busy enjoying the birth of a new millennium. Everybody else will just have to buy a clue.

Is this about whether the tablet is a viable form factor? No, it’s about the percentage of time that the iPad and its brethren in waiting will suck away from existing media. Right now, that means the iPhone, laptops, desktops, TV, paper, and fireplaces (real or synthetic logs or gas.) In percentages diverted, that’s 25%, 45%, 75%, 20%, 60%, and 4%. That’s in Month 1.

Month 2 will see an all-out running of the bulls, as publishers stampede into the marketplace with 2nd generation refactoring of their core data. The multimedia scaffolds of Month 1 will have done nothing other than establish an incumbents list, with little additional value attached to inline video from newspapers or analyst content being thrown over the wall in violation of the core value proposition. The cable news channels are already in turmoil because the cable and satellite big boys are reluctant (read: completely against as in Republicans and health care reform) to allow destabilization of their basic cable rationale for existence. If Comcast won’t let Netflix a la carte them to death, neither will CNN or CNBC.

Once Month 2 shows up with the beginnings of the real new wave, the majors will switch from value add to value transfer. The pole position won by the Wall Street Journal, NY Times, and selected social pubs (Vanity Fairish hybrids like Rolling Stone meets Wired) will translate from a fashion show to a metadata farm, where the iPad’s ability to capture the gesture stream in association with the social networks creates a pool of data with which to train the content developers into the new model. That is, not interactive but socially aware swarming and its signatures. Once there are enough unique cross-over streams of related data, the bidding can commence.

This realtime market of social pooling metadata will produce a form of virtual value exchange, where the most attuned members of the audience (those with particularly acute sensitivity to social graph authority and a kind of viral leapfrogging talent) will achieve a new form of rank and the ability to shower their clouds with whuffie dust. In the absence of these metric collectors, these signals are disconnected from an economic return; the iPad releases the pent up energy in 8 days.

By the middle of Month 2, we will already see the first appearance of a major class of winners. The often-cited salvation of the various media industries will in fact already be discounted, as incumbents rush to clone and stave off the weakest of the clueful. Things will look relatively the same on the surface, but those embedded in the iPad stream will develop ways of communicating with the new leaders. Today we see them as names like Foursquare and gestures like checking in; 40 days from now the rain will lift and we’ll depart from the Ark with a virgin lexicon that will be Greek to those not fluent in the speed of this disruption.

For now, listen carefully to those who dissect the iPad as in competition with anything that came before. We’re in a rapid period of evolution, where the iPhone has spawned clones that are already easier to use than the original. The Nexus One may be buggier and more random in terms of touch responsiveness, but its resizing of text and real estate makes these aging eyes gravitate to it for absorbing extended texts. The iPad will pull cycles from the laptop and the phone factor with equal weight, and the resultant Month 2 apps and content will accelerate that seepage.

Once text has developed enough impressions and gestures to suggest what works better than the other, we will reach the point where choices will need to be made as the window of opportunity closes. The winnowing process will be quicker and more brutal than expected, as those with more staying power and strategies for consistent value will survive and build barriers difficult to erode. The analogy of the record business will play itself out on the iPad shelf: with enough discretionary buying power for 6 albums a month, it will really only be 2 slots left once GaGa and Fergie and whoever grab the center of the market. And the new artists who come up through the lower slots will eventually take over the top of the charts. Eventually as in Month 3 and 4.

To our children, the iPad is how they expect this to work. My 9 year old plays Avril Levigne and Beethoven on the keyboard as though they are contemporaries, and they sound like it. This is so not about saving the newspapers, because they’re in no danger of anything other than hubris and arrogance. The iPad doesn’t care how you got there, it only cares about what’s coming next. No matter what today’s paper says, tomorrow’s will get better because it can’t get no worse.

It’s understandable that perfectly intelligent people question the power of the iPad. After all, the iPhone was nowhere’s near as disruptive… oh wait. What if we look back in a few months and realize that the iPad is not a big iPhone but that the iPhone was a little iPad? Oh wait. That the newspaper was the daily version of the realtime one. That you pay for the liner notes and get the music for free. Oh wait. For 8 days.

Microsoft’s stealth Windows replacement WebOS turned the corner today with the announcement of Windows Phone developer tools. Mention Silverlight on the Gillmor Gang as I did Friday, and Google evangelists Chris Messina and Brett Slatkin did a living Blue Screen of Death. But Nexus One and Android success not only validates the race with Apple, it brings Microsoft into third place in the smart phone race. As Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur told me prior to his appearance at the MIX2010 keynote, shipping a plug-in architecture for Silverlight gives him an instant onramp to Windows, Mac, and mobile.

Scott Guthrie leads off. With no PDC this year, MIX has taken on the tone of the premier Microsoft developer conference.

Silverlight approaching 60% penetration, up from 45% at the PDC last December.
The Olympics player has been open sourced.
Visual Studio reved to support Silverlight 4.
Free Expression Blend 4 upgrade to Silverlight 4.

Silverlight 4 ships next month.

Joe Belfiore takes over to announce the development platform for Window Phone 7 series devices. What’s immediately interesting is how similar WIndows Phone is to Android. The three experiences may be more similar than Apple wants them to be, but the time spent learning Android pays off more quickly wtih Windows Phone than iPhone. Even differences become less intimidating because of the transition through Android.

Not surprisingly, what’s not shown is any tools for porting Windows Phone apps to iPhone or Android. I wouldn’t expect the latter, but given Adobe’s noise about Flash-to-i(Pad)Phone, the former is surely in the works. Microsoft is giving away all the dev tools for WP7 development, and Seesmic’s demo underlines how fast the ecosystem could be built with Microsoft at the head of the stack. Of course, no one sees it this way ecept a small number of analysts and developers who recognize Redmond’s core strengths and weakness from the stretched-to-the-margins Google play. That leaves Apple.

An interesting firefight broke out over the weekend as Google engineer DeWitt Clinton defended Google data policies in Buzz and related “open” standards. Those who remember the politics of RSS and the games companies played around its buildout would recognize a number of the names and tactics of the current positioning. Closed comment threads, insinuations, calls to action — only the names of the bigcos are shifting, and not all that much either.

The latest wrinkle is to describe developer acceptance as the key measurement of open standards. As Clinton and fellow Google evangelists fan out across the realtime stream’s version of the Sunday talk shows, they’re having to argue the borginess of Facebook versus Google. C’mon guys, get serious. Google has the gorilla crown going away.

Think of the breadth and depth of Google’s strategy: own every product category and decorate each with their own metadata. Gmail, done. Apps, done enough. Chrome. OS, Android, Nexus. Now Buzz. What folks who argue against the Google tax don’t understand is that this isn’t going to happen if…. It’s done, banked, in the books, check cashed, burger eaten. Every time a Buzz gets distributed, the addition of key voices from this and previous eras solidifies the new metadata type as the social graph ripples spread.

It doesn’t matter how immature Buzz is compared to other systems; in fact, it just makes the resultant Buzzes on the subject all the more canonical. No matter how long it takes for these systems to converge, each object will have its own metadata stamp. From here on out, Buzz stamps are getting licked and posted in increasingly significant numbers. The big companies behind these moves have learned a lot from the pioneers of RSS and open source, as well as the bigco strategies of Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle/Sun.

But Google has taken all the previous strategies and combined them into one relentless juggernaut: create the data and let the process fall into place around it. It would be cynical to suggest that Google was somehow behind the open standards players who started the ball rolling, but clearly the two groups scratched each other’s backs along the way. Perhaps the key melting pot for this buildout was the Internet Identity Workshop, where key players from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook first got together openly.

Facebook seems to have the most to gain by adoption of the various open standards. It mutes the argument that the social media giant is a closed, proprietary system by pushing the discussion to its Adsense-like Facebook Connect. This in turn fueled the idea that Facebook’s huge developer community makes adopting the Facebook API’s a more logical choice than Google forcing their own set. DeWitt Clinton simply ignored the suggestion.

He also doesn’t touch the suggestion that Dave Winer’s RSS and RSS Cloud be supported. This is a mistake, by the way. Noise from Atom mainstays about how Atom is better architected and more robust aside, the best way to marginalize RSS is to implement it and move on. It will be interesting to watch whether Clinton will continue to stonewall, or pass the ball to someone with more clout and willingness to think strategically and act tactically.

It’s likely Buzz has already survived, riding shotgun with the Nexus One release as Google executes on several different fields simultaneously. The Android code is infuriatingly unstable, but the overriding message is one of rapid innovation and aggressive challenge to Apple’s one-thought invulnerable crown. Nothing suggests that Steve Jobs will slow down or be anything but invigorated by the competition, but Google’s strength in cloud computing will take some catching up for Apple.

In the context of the imminent iPad release, Buzz will have a big new stage to finance the next round of improvements. While FriendFeed fans await more rational filtering and UI tweaks, the biggest bang for Google’s buck will be to double down on the email integration. Scorned as a privacy invasion, the built-in integration of relevant Buzzes lets me keep the noise down by only commenting on threads I want to track. The Clinton debates serve as a handy promotional campaign while we wait for the iPad to make additional forays.

For its part, Facebook would do well to adopt a more open stance on Buzz. With plenty of bona fide standards cred on the line, Facebook has been pretty well locked down since Buzz shipped. Perhaps the strategy is to go the big media route with IPO talk, but the silence over the FriendFeed acquisition is disingenuous, particularly given the founders’ willingness to share and learn from customers and the addicted press. Buzz’s weaknesses highlight why the company bought FriendFeed, and not in a flattering way.

Salesforce remains the wildcard, with Chatter suggesting a subscription model for micromessaging that flies in the face of Marc Andreesen’s conversation with Erick Schonfeld. We’ll know soon, because Chatter has plenty of room to maneuver in the absence of a Microsoft strategy for realtime. The window won’t stay open forever, however. But Benioff has been underestimated for years, and never more so than with Chatter.

So prepare yourself for a few weeks of jawboning about the new reality, as Buzz continues to fire more and more objects into the stream, creating more and more metadata as those objects are consumed, ignored, threaded into Twitter and FriendFeed chats, and in general recalling the late great days when all this stuff was invented, bearhugged, and muzzled. Buzz suggests there’s life in the old strategies, even when the shoe has moved to the other foot.

Lady Gaga blared from the speakers as my 16 year old daughter drove away from the house. I didn’t want to like Lady Gaga, but her duet with Elton John at the Grammys changed everything. She seemed to draw strength with every traded verse, turning his phrasing to her advantage, his blues to her power. This was not a generational shift, but a reach across the eras.

Now there was my little girl moving out of sight with her precious cargo, our youngest daughter, on the way to school and beyond. For a second we glanced at each other with a nervous giggle, then drank in a day with new eyes. A day where the world prepares for the coming of the iPad. A day where health care reform was debated and both Democrats and Republicans were coaxed out of hiding.

Whatever you think of the merits of the positions, the debate in Washington was good for both parties. Republicans came prepared, with a clever mixture of partisan politics and pragmatic courage to avoid crossing the line from talking points to personal insults and worse. For their part, the Democrats let Obama carry the ball, getting away with it because of his skill and command of the details but finally showing the passion that fuels their cause if it is to prevail.

The media was less impressive, with Fox Business News the only cable feed that stayed with most of the live coverage. MSNBC and CNN seem to have switched roles in the year-long debate, moving away to talking heads on the former to blather on repetitively before bailing altogether for the Olympics, while capturing more of the underlying dynamics on the latter. I finally gave up switching to stay with the event and watched the rest on the MacBook Air via CSPAN. Next stop, the iPad.

The tech agenda seems similarly polarized, what with Buzz this and Facebook patents that. But I get the strong feeling that no one has yet succeeded in smoking out the real work that needs to be done in the few short weeks before the iPad arrives. There’s a lot of phony outrage about Apple and Google soaking Techmeme, as though big companies with aggressive agendas is something new and more fearsome because of the scale at which net giants operate.

But I keep coming back to my daughter driving off to greet the day. At some point we have to just hand over the keys and strike out in the new day. We shouldn’t be so worried about demagogues in corporate boardrooms when we face them every day in our aggregators from every nook and cranny. Trading one clever pitchman for another does nothing to solve our problems, nor does it speak to the opportunities that lurk.

It seems we haven’t learned what it’s like to be a child in parent’s clothing. We pretend we are adults while doing whatever we can to shift the burden of choices to circumstances, class, timing, and history. We search for signs of strength and chinks in the armor where we can attack and slingshot ahead. We sneer at the callous while coveting their power.

The iPad is so difficult to handicap, say the daily newsbytes: you’re no iPhone, they maintain. But after missing the signals about the iPhone, then Twitter, then realtime, then Nexus One, we shouldn’t mistake the new device’s deficiencies for what will be unleashed over the new platform. Look through the new eyes of the initiate, where the open road holds limitless possibilities.

So much of the social media stream is meant to be routed rather than absorbed, pushed to an expanding circle of tidal pools for decoration with our behavior. Even the latest entrant, Buzz, holds promise in its naive ready-to-be-enhanced template. It’s surprisingly free of constraints at this early stage, ready to be hooked in and out of the stream and shared with other systems more and less tuned to this new public thoroughfare.

Right now we’re floundering in the tyranny of middle age, thinking we know what blogging and tweeting and social graph are all about while at the same time already tiring of the glut of mediocrity and the lack of inspiration. The young and the old know better, flush with an appreciation of the time before them to celebrate or squander. The understanding that whatever words come next are to be laid out like diamonds in a row, subject only to the value they represent or create.

We so quickly calcify our latest inventions in the rush to quantify them, not letting the rhythm and rhyme continue to build. We cash our chips in too early, playing it safe when the world could end at any second. All the while, the detectives caution us that the moment is not profound, that the results are already in or fixed, that we should not hope for too much lest we fall even shorter for dreaming. It’s a shallow way to live, pretty much not at all.

I was talking with an old friend last night, about a musician who I once thought disliked me. No, my friend said, everybody disliked me, especially me. It was a shallow way to live, and I stand guilty as charged then and even now. But that’s no excuse to not understand a series of really good ideas that have been building for a while now. Just think how everything can change when viewed through the lenses of the young and old.

Try predicting the iPad will fail. Explain to me how we don’t want to lean back and paddle calmly through the stream, pausing to sip at a wise post, sample a live event, sit in as our friends debate an issue of the day, enjoy a laugh, serve a customer with intelligence and care, put the whole thing down with a feeling of satisfaction and the delight of looking forward to coming back for more in good time.

Explain to me how this can’t produce a better quality of work, a better kind of listening, a better balance of silence and impact, the chance for real progress instead of flacid soundbytes and endless posturing. Isn’t that a lot to expect from just another shiny new object you say? Sure, but it’s not the technology that I’m betting on, it’s what rides on the cushion of air that I expect to be great. It’s a magic carpet we’re building on, and if we just look at it through the eyes of a brand new day, we’re sure to invent things that will in turn drive the next wave of devices.

On March 9, a new Jimi Hendrix album will ship. The artist lived to release just 3 records, famous for just 4 years. But he took his success and plowed it into a recording studio, where he spent the last year of his life in a constant state of experimentation and exploration. The Hendrix estate estimates they have a decade’s worth of material to release. Today you can buy a digital recorder that does much of what Hendrix’s studio could do for $200 on Craig’s List.

As Saul Hansell says on this week’s Gillmor Gang, “If we’re not willing to make big, bold mistakes, we’re never going to accomplish anything.” Hansell has left the New York Times after 15 years to join the latest incarnation of AOL, what Andrew Keen jokes sounds like a startup, “a huge company that clearly doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up.” Hansell takes it as a compliment; Keen says it’s not meant to be.

Living with realtime will be an adventure for some, a terror for others. But for our children, who don’t know enough to be scared, and those of us who can recognize something special even when we don’t understand precisely why, the iPad is a big deal because it looks just like what we imagined the future would be.

If there’s anyone who has the inside track on Buzz and all things social media related, it’s TechCrunch super-reporter MG Siegler. He’s waited two weeks to weigh in on Buzz good bad and ugly, and it turns out that Buzz is FriendFeed — or will be. In the interests of setting the record straight, let me set the record straight.

1. Buzz is not FriendFeed. If it were, it would be being used by a vanishingly small minority of social media experts who have no life. Instead, it is being used by millions of privacy-invaded geniuses who apparently either have had the intelligence to understand that they get what they click for (understanding the meaning of Yes, I’m clicking here for a service I am being offered for free) or are just hopelessly trapped in a bigco system where they have no rights and can only just keep clicking in hopes of finding the way out.

2. If Buzz is going to become FriendFeed, only with real friends, then Google has some secret ability to turn an overly complex non-viral site into a massive multiplayer gaming system disguised as an extension to email. Wait, we call that Brizzly. Failing the secret stuff, just following the playbook already laid out in detail by FriendFeed seems guaranteed to produce a community of Scoble hiders, er, muters, at such massive scale that it will take more (hu)man-years of work than went into building all the useless Twitter lists.

3. Buzz is not FriendFeed because project manager Buzz Jackson denies ever looking at FriendFeed because Google is busy getting feedback from users who didn’t know the product existed until 2 weeks ago. That leaves internal testing, which if you accept the premise that small is ugly and huge is beautiful would mandate ignoring the most sophisticated testing suite so far, namely FriendFeed. Of course, it’s total bullshit that Buzz hasn’t looked at FriendFeed. Just not enough, according to MG.

4. This small is ugly theory of disruption suggests that only massive organisms can effect change. Like the iPhone for example, which was such a resource-hungry project that Apple had to slow down the release of the next version of OS/X to build the iPhone OS out. Or that Google had to invest in a browser, an OS, and a cloud app suite in order to catch up and present an alternative that in turn would ratify the superduper phone as the dominant platform around which everything revolves.

Except that the iPhone rode the back of broadband adoption and open source development of Web-based libraries of Javascript that emerged from Microsoft’s failed attempt at locking out a Web-based version of Exchange from cannibalizing Office during the Y2K collaboration wars. The workaround leveraged by Outlook Web Access was Ajax, and it gave the WHATWG the power to stub out IE and propel Firefox forward as a cross-platform alternative OS. Chrome and its OS cousin are simply instantiations of this platform. So small is apparently ugly except when it starts the whole fire in the first place.

5. If FriendFeed is ugly, therefore, it’s because it has no users and therefore has lost its battle for existence. If that were true, then Buzz will have to morph away from being FriendFeed in order to escape the curse of complexity, or the various labels that add up to looking down the nose at sophisticated (or enterprise) users of the infostream. Twitter is random, so mining Twitter is like panning for fools gold. Twitter, meet Benioff.

But if Buzz proves anything so far, it’s that nobody seems to have figured out how to solve all these next-stage problems any better than the FriendFeed designers. OK, who’s done any better? MG hasn’t mentioned anything that comes close to encouraging me to download any other Twitter client, although I just downloaded Seismic for Android while I was looking for Skype and not finding it. Given that we’re on the cusp of craving lists for Buzz, I’m not wasting any more of my ignoring time on Twitter lists, thereby not needing to upgrade Tweetie on my iPhone.

6. Meanwhile on the political front, the battle rages between Dave Winer, the personal savior of us from ourselves and our inability to ignore flashy shiny social media trinkets, and Dave Winer, the author and campaign manager of RSS 3.0 as told to him by PuSH architects Fitzpatrick and Slatkin. So far it’s a dead heat, where our naivete about the pernicious use of open standards by bigcos or those who work there is assuaged by our lack of concern for the 12 sites that use RSSCloud. Far be it from these Silicon Valley geniuses to write some sort of PuSH WordPress patch to pick up these folks. Oh wait….

7. So we wait in some sort of horrible limbo/hell for Buzz to become FriendFeed or Facebook to clone Buzz by inventing its own Gmail and bolting FriendFeed back on. The only problem is that Microsoft already bought Yahoo to do that and might make another such “offer” to Facebook that Zuckerberg might not want to refuse. Never mind the sticky details that Yahoo is still “a separate company” or that MIcrosoft doesn’t need to buy 400 million users. A Silverlight Office would immediately have a huge social graph to bungle privacy with.

8. Remember Twitter? Nope, me neither.

9. Bonus thing to ponder while waiting in limbo/hell: which platform will work best with the iPad, Buzz, FriendFeed, or Silverlight Office? It’s a trick question, because FriendFeed is the only real product at the moment, which is T minus 30 days. Let’s say I’m sitting on my couch (see this week’s Gillmor Gang for couch discussion) and watching the river flow. Dave Winer and Dare Obasanjo float by with anti-Google slime: Winer pointing at a Valleywag smear about Eric Schmidt that I glance at to check the date (today) and then veer off to find a hand sanitizer, and a more thoughtful polemic on Lifehacker from Obasanjo that continues Dare’s theme that Google abuses open. I give this one a 20 second skim and maybe park for further ignoring later.

Next I check email (oh wait, that means any Buzz’s directed erroneously at me as well as FriendFeed discussions I’m tracking privately.) I bounce over to Silverlight Office/Chatter/Yammer and check what’s up at the office, then catch up on New York Times, TechCrunch, Wall Street Journal, sample the interactive liner notes of the new David Sanborn record playing in the background, and keep an eye on news alerts before the White house press briefing direct feed lights up. The flow settles in to a pleasant stroll of stored value interspersed with intermittent propaganda, random news/press releases, and ancient grudge fights about seemingly nothing but really core features of the new iPad OS.

10. FriendFeed is the OS we use to manage Buzz until it is borged. For no other reason that Buzz provides million of constant reasons why we need the social graph filtering and uber-location gestures that inform and cultivate realtime conversations. Nexus One is the closest thing to the iPad for now, and will then become the glue between iPad sessions. Twitter becomes a familiar child actor we watch playing with the kids while we talk politics and sports with cigars and brandy.

Imagine a slider: slide all the way to the left, it’s Buzz. In the middle, it’s Salesforce Chatter, all the way to the right, Silverlight Office. The iPad is your console, your concierge to the new rebooted media services. In this new post-beta world, applications are works in progress, not good or bad, finished or broken. Companies are bought not for features or people but as brushes in an emerging palette. Obasanjo calls Buzz a poorly implemented FriendFeed clone. I read about it in FriendFeed, and the fix in Buzz.

Salesforce CEO and Chairman Marc Benioff unveiled the company’s realtime micromessaging technology as it went into a private beta with 100 customers. The press event featured a rather unique sketch of the company’s vision of the near future of enterprise realtime by Benioff, followed by several quick demos of the product’s capabilities as leveraged by several partners.

Interestingly, Benioff’s meta view of what he called Cloud 2 and what we call realtime seemed almost a reverie in contrast to the demos, which illustrated in a few short dives into the Salesforce architecture how deeply Chatter is already embedded in the platform. The messaging around this new Collaboration platform was if anything underplayed next to the reality, that Chatter completely transforms the business process layer.

Salesforce already has decoupled rapid development and deployment from the exigencies of hardware and on-premise software management. Now, with Chatter, customers and developers (read partners) can bootstrap new realtime techniques that take advantage of the flattening of business heirarchies and the tendency for small businesses and startups to distribute work around a fluid workforce where key players wear multiple hats.

It seems almost too simple an insight, that the speed with which Salesforce is innovating is exponentially growing with each new layer of its stack. The so-called collaboration layer launched today is potentially far more than just a competitor to Sharepoint and Lotus Notes, but also the harbinger of new application strategies that may launch new businesses out of their own realtime designs and problem-solving.

In conversation later with Benioff, it’s clear that he sees Salesforce in a strong position to not just compete, but move up and out of the SFA beginnings of the company and into a period of rapid growth. With Google talking aggressively about moving Buzz to the enterprise, the question for customers is how long they can afford to wait for the search giant to catch up to what Benioff already is deploying.

Benioff’s job is to pay close attention to Google’s strategy of using Buzz to drive ubiquity around various emerging open formats and consensus around the value of such consumer data as supportive of enterprise business process flows. He also has to rapidly add Android to his iPhone and Blackberry clients. I came out of today’s low key messaging with a much greater sense of the speed with which Salesforce is putting the foot to the pedal. Letting the demos do the talking is something new for Benioff, and a powerful buy signal.

Well, lookee here, it’s Google with a FriendFeed clone just in time to ask the musical question: If FriendFeed sucks so much, why on earth is Google doing a for-profit version of it? While the privacy crisis rages on around our inboxes, Google has blasted yet another microstream out into direct symbiosis with Twitter. Yes, that is exactly what FriendFeed did back in the days it was just an aggregator.

Later came the realtime chat, and then Wave, and then Google Realtime Search, all with that annoying realtime updating of the stream that caused so many of us to run for the Easy Hills. This stuff is so hard to understand that we’ve endured months of explanation by Facebook, a buy out of FriendFeed to silence the disturbing noise, and of course Twitter lists. How many times did we think about lists this week, except to note that there are not any in Buzz.

It’s been 4 or 5 days now, and even though Google PR has earned its keep managing the privacy missteps, we haven’t heard apologies from the CEO or founders like Zuckerberg pumped out around Beacon and whatever the next stumble was. What’s weird is I can’t remember much more than some Terms of Service that had to be rolled back. It may seem unfair, but Google has waited long enough to benefit from user fatigue about any of these issues.

Actually, I can’t remember why we care about this at all. It mystifies me that Marc Benioff is investing Salesforce cycles in this social stream, or why Buzz will be followed as soon as possible with an enterprise version. Looking at the Buzz flow, the only useful stuff is about Buzz futures; at some point all the FriendFeed features will be reimplemented and then the conversation will atrophy and move to a professional advertising QVC channel model. You’ll know the resulting content will be professionally produced because the rest of us will be sick of the whole thing.

My favorite part was the Google program manager’s response to a question about the return of Track (we’re always looking for good ideas, whatever that Track thing might be). Buzz really doesn’t need Track at all because there is absolutely no rational architecture to add value to. Basing a social graph on email is like Adobe supporting HTML5. Or trying to decipher which parts of this article are meant to be believed. Let me explain:

Email is the one thing that we actually believe computers can do well. We spend (used to) 75% + of our time processing it, reacting to it, storing it, subpoenaing it, shredding it, waking up in the middle of the night in a panic about it. When IM came along, we treated it like a hobby, something we did while not doing other important things like email. We aren’t sure how well computers do IM, and trust texting more because it’s tied to our phone and credit card.

The rest of the time after email and recess (IM) is spent on so-called browsing. Browsing began as a way of exploring, but email and IM quickly turned it into call and response. Here’s a URL, click on it. Read it until you’ve either absorbed the information or decided you’ve gotten the gist of it. If you like what you read, reward the source of the click direction. If not, look for someone to follow those orders and pay them to keep that away from you while you find better clicks or better people with better clicks.

Better people with better clicks require better pay for access to their clickstreams. Better pay comes in one of two ways, either more money or less time spent figuring out what better means at any moment. Typically, more money comes from going faster and smarter. Smarter comes from knowing what to look for, and faster comes from throwing out what isn’t worth finding before you waste the time finding out there’s nothing there. Smarter is a commodity in technology, but having the intuition to move on is rare.

FriendFeed emerged to harvest the social signals of exclusion, filtering based on the intuition of what parts of what streams added up to something not necessarily expected but likely to appear. Although the market focused on the competition with Twitter, the architects focused on the second order effects of the system. As FriendFeed became more and more efficient, it closed in on the value propositions of email and IM.

When email, IM, and FriendFeed intersect, we are compelled to make strategic decisions about our information flow. The first thing I tried to do with Buzz was send a private message, or in other words, replace email and IM. For now you have to create a private group on one (or none), which means it’s easier to stay with IM and its ephemeral quality or email and its additional decision tree of to’s, cc’s and bcc’s. Net: I’ll wait until they adopt FriendFeed groups and direct messages.

Groups enable a hybrid of public and private that Buzz only suggests but does not yet deliver. By establishing targets for collaboration and registering people, you avoid the constant decision-making about who sees what and in what proximity to others. Realtime conversations can be public or private, absorbing IM for many tasks and creating filtering opportunities based not on keywords but social vetting. Buzz will inevitably adopt FriendFeed tools, starting with a mapping of the social cloud and a Trackable alert mechanism to preserve discovery and harness the wisdom of overlapping friend filters.

Can Google figure out how to perpetuate FriendFeed as a broadly adopted mainstream system. Honestly, who cares? They’ve been running it internally across the company for six months, and unlike Wave have succeeded in integrating it with their Office product without a technical glitch. And if I’m reading the conversation with Sergey Brin correctly, part of the reason they’ve been successful in that integration is because they’re using Buzz. That’s why they’re hot to trot this puppy into the enterprise; they already know it works.

Far from being dead, FriendFeed just got a clean bill of health from Buzz. First, there’s the amazing mobile app and Nexus One integration, which can and will be ported directly to the iPad on Day One. Hybrid HTML 5 and H.264 stream virtualization will combine to create a core class of cross-platform media apps. As Ray Ozzie predicted, we will see rapid convergence across all the major platforms. Blame FriendFeed.

The privacy crisis will be sorted out by comparing the value of the FriendFeed cloud to Twitter lists and Gmail/Greader harvesting. Then the overlapping groups will be meshed together with API-driven import/export utilities that normalize the social dynamics of the competing systems. Parenthetically, this will give Facebook/FriendFeed integration a kick in the ass, with the promised stream splicing and bridging intelligence orchestrated to let the main systems dedupe the flow across the bus. Blame FriendFeed.

And, yes, we will see the return of Track, as we learn to stand on each others’ shoulders and take advantage of the smarts of realtime filtering based not on our Track modeling but the successful Tracking of our peers and their peers. In realtime, news is a commodity, but in reducing the friction of discovery and tying social relevance to the time not wasted on the trivial, we carve out the time to spend more wisely. If Google won’t do Track, maybe Benioff will. And I’ll blame FriendFeed.

Rumors of the death of Flash are greatly exaggerated, says Jeremy Allaire in a TechCrunch guest post. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch touts the ability to update the millions of Flash-powered devices over the network. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz resigns in realtime over Twitter. Nexus One updates the Android OS in realtime when I switch it on this morning. The iPad arrives in March.

Here’s another couple: Netflix streaming is now available on PlayStation, Wii, and Xbox, over Silverlight on Macs and PCs, and via 48% of its customers in the fourth quarter. The company expects 66% will stream by mid-2011, and added a record 1 million new subscribers Q4 for a total of 12 million. And this: Microsoft has released a Silverlight 4 beta client for Facebook on Windows and OS/X, with background notification, a grid UI for status updates, photo and video uploading and device access, and netbook/tablet support.

Each datapoint by itself suggests valid reasons why Flash will endure for many years on a majority of machines. Huge support among gaming developers, 75% penetration on the Web, and soon a foothold on every major phone but the iPhone/iPad. But taken together, Flash faces forces beyond its ability to cope. Whether it’s Silverlight choking off Flex/Air in the enterprise or Apple and Google scraping the cream of the developer community off the top, Adobe is being squeezed into a corner from which it can only escape by losing control of its platform.

Using HTML 5 as a rallying cry serves Google’s marketing and developer evangelism strategies, but its impact on Flash is minimal until the iPad ships. For iPhone users, it took two upgrades for the marketplace to provide a work-around with H.264, but once that was in place with YouTube it brought Ustream and other players in. At about the same time, FriendFeed enabled realtime streaming chat. Suddenly, integrated realtime streaming experiences could be leveraged to target valuable communities.

Whether it’s a Facebooked version of these technologies over Silverlight or a native iPhone/iPad version via decompiling and H.264 streaming, by March we will have multiple versions of essentially the same content running on PCs, Macs, i*’s, and Nexus One. Coupled with Netflix device expansion, holdout services such as Hulu will have to move quickly to avoid a stream of hemorrhaging customers away from what is no longer a unique offering. Watching how fast book publishers like Macmillan and Amazon have rejiggered their relationships to accommodate the iPad realities, can the networks (other than Disney/Pixar/Apple/ABC) be far behind?

Google released the Nexus One not yet a month ago, and already have provided an over the air update to the OS that enables major new features, most significantly a pinch zoom mechanism that eliminates the lion’s share of the utility gap with Web browsing. Given the higher resolution and therefore real estate of the screen, the N1 becomes an attractive alternative for catching up on the Web first thing in the morning or on the move. Indeed, it also suggests Kindle for Android would be virally received.

Extrapolate from that to the launch of the iPad and rumors that over the air updates and other data may be available when the device ships, it’s not hard to imagine both the appearance of an iPad-like competitor via Google and a dramatic acceleration in iterative leapfrogging of features. In other words, major site/app two-tracking of Flash/HTML streaming versions. If the New York Times is serious about being on the iPad’s gateway screen, a Flash-free version of its site is a minor investment relative to the value of being an incumbent or default service.

Push those dynamics out along the content supply chain and it doesn’t take an Adobe CTO long to figure out Flash tools must be quickly reengineered to accommodate both versions of these new sites and apps. Microsoft is already way ahead with its SIlverlight/IIS Media Server/Visual Studio pipeline, ready to spray H.264 streams into iPad web-based applications and subsequently native apps where the content providers maintain the relationship with customers. As Walt Mossberg said in conversation with Mike Arrington and David Carr on Charlie Rose, customers don’t care about formats.

The open standards argument currently championed by Mozilla, that H.264 is a proprietary technology with a looming cost trigger, is similarly irrelevant to customers, who will never notice where along the road to their browsers the licensing fees are absorbed. Most likely, it will be buried in the additional $5 for each book download that the iPad has moved back into the publisher’s accounts, or the delta between the iPad WiFi version and the fully loaded 3G ($329 to start.) Or we’ll simply pay extra for early release on the iPad, then a bit less on the Gpad, and so on, like the way films are metered out across cable, on demand, DVD/BlueRay.

Even there, the speed with which these models are accomodating the realtime Pads is daunting for Adobe. Even as the Academy ups the number of Best Picture nominees, many of the more independently produced films are already available on Comcast on-demand the same day as DVD. Streaming is quickly becoming the gold standard in the queue, and Flash-based venues are fragmenting across mobile and gaming devices. Oops, there goes that gamer dev advantage.

That’s where Jonathan Schwartz and Twitter figure in. Like Flash, Java has tremendous traction and the ability to act as an attention/gesture recorder for developer and customer behavior in realtime. And like Flash, Java is locked out of the iPhone and iPad. Interestingly, Google has already effectively minimized Java on Android by using Google Web Toolkit to spray Java code through Javascript onto Android devices. By spending big dollars and resources on the V8 engine to accelerate Javascript performance, Google started an arms race with Firefox and finally Microsoft to close the gap.

Inevitably, the dynamics of this new race for the middle, the sweet spot of RIA ubiquity, has more to do with the money to be made at the output end of the pipeline. Microsoft has Xbox and Silverlight, Google has its ad revenue, YouTube dominance, and growing Android Market, and Apple its gold-plated innovation chain and credit card access to the addicted customer base. Adobe? Like Sun, they have the developers, the reach, the realtime updating, everything but the fuel to drive the aggressive customer base that will pay through the nose for rapid progress. They want their iTV.

The Gillmor Gang — Andrew Keen, Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, and Robert Scoble — talk smack about Flash. Recorded live Friday, February 5, 2010.

Jonathan Schwartz deserves better. Sure, he’s got a rich payout from his years at Sun. Sure, he’s leaving because Ellison doesn’t need anybody explaining why the cloud is a good thing. Sure, there are a lot of hurting people who can use Jonathan as an easy target for what’s become of the dot in dot.com.

But what Jonathan did for Sun, and the rest of the industry, was to twist the conventional wisdom of the enterprise into a new shape now being leveraged by a host of successful players. Jonathan somehow got that ubiquity in the consumer space would translate into platform power. The rising tide of the social network has its roots in many of the things Jonathan was saying long before it was popular or even wise politically.

Probably nobody could have pulled off what Jonathan was tasked to do. At Oracle’s absorbathon last week, Larry Ellison reiterated his nothing-new-here cloud bashing while actually affirming the investments Schwartz made in consolidating the best of breed system solutions Oracle will use to go after weakened competitors like SAP who looked the other way as Salesforce expanded.

The rumblings at the end were that Jonathan couldn’t close the IBM deal, forcing McNeally to quick-punt to Ellison. But Ellison’s analysis of the Sun assets shows that most if not all of the value Schwartz claimed in the financial community will be reflected in revenue from Day One, that keeping Java away from IBM will turn out to be a hugely valuable investment, and that a nuanced use of MySQL as a customer-facing sales tool for the SMB market will stave off the growth of any other open source database.

As the smoke clears from this epic consolidation, what’s left are the explosive pairing of Apple and Google in the new mobile architecture, predicted by Schwartz with his relelntless observation that devices go to free. With Oracle/Sun now positioned as the fuel for the virtualization layer of the cloud, the big freakin’ webtone switch of this era, the iPad Era launches a race to spread the gospel of the financial community infrastructure across the micromessage bus and its media partners.

Jonathan Schwartz was brought in to finesse the transition from the Good Old Days to the Good New Days, and he’ll deserve to harvest irreplaceable time with his young family. It will be interesting to see him return, because he has little need to reinvent himself given his early and prescient take on what is now transpiring.

Fear of iPad is now beginning to circulate with increasing velocity. It seems folks are realizing that regardless of how many things were left off the machine, it still will be bought by virtually everybody on the planet who cares about tech and its show business arm, social media. That means it’s going to be a huge galactic success. That in turn means we have to be very afraid of Uncle Steve owning our data.

Dave Winer suggests this in his second of two posts in a row. Of course, Dave alternates between decrying the locked trunk aspects of the system’s design and crying wolf about the end result when all these mistakes end up as a raging success. In fact, Dave may have hit on an unintended truth in all of this debunking. Namely, it’s what’s been left out that really defines the iPad.

Take Flash. Please. When Jobs quarantined it on the iPhone, we all felt it was a tactical thing, more political than technical. Of course, it’s never been technical, even now when it’s kept off the iPad because it is responsible for such a great percentage of crashes in Safari or whatever. Actually, Flash is being kept off the iPlatform because It Sucks. Google’s HTML 5 liturgy is another contiguous example of how to sell the same message, but enquiring minds still want to know why we need a plug-in from a company that makes its real money from Photoshop.

The Adobe guys are terrific engineers who’ve built a wonderful ecosystem off of a hole in the Arctic Circle of computing called cross-platform ubiquity. But what happens when the OS sucks in the functionality of such a play, as Windows did to Symantec with desktop replacements, compression, and various system management utilities? Oh, and security (remember Bill Gates’ parting push to protect us from the network.) Most recently I heard from Symantec in the form of a Facebook giveaway or some such. And Google now produces software, services, browsers, and OS under the same plan. They can afford it; Adobe can’t.

So it comes down to this: if a site hosts Flash, they are making the same choice WordPerfect made in building an OS/2 version instead of a Windows one. This was when Microsoft was finally getting Windows up above the radiation layer of DOS, where WordPerfect had a stranglehold on the word processing market. IBM’s version of the nextgen OS was superior in many technical ways, but Microsoft had more money than God and they threw it at IBM and its DOS legacy stakeholders like Google did with Office a generation later.

There are certainly good arguments to be made for why Flash has legs, but unfortunately for those who make them they’re bucking Apple and its faux competitor Google. When you click on a YouTube icon in the browser, it launches on Flash. When you click on it in iPlatform it launches on HTML5, or rather the only part Flash cares about. YouTube owns most of the video market, so the user experience is that YouTube works everywhere. User bets on YouTube. They don’t care about HTML 5 or Flash, they want to see the movie, thanks goodbye.

Same with multitasking. Music evidently plays in the background with photos. Remember cut and paste on iPhone 1? No. With iPhone OS 3.0 they fixed that. Remember no video streaming? They fixed that. Didn’t have to buy a new one to fix that stuff, only to upgrade the speed and wait out AT&T’s buildout. Multitasking? Who knows whether we’ll even have to wait past the 3G iPad launch or even care, since we do most of our work inside multi-tabbed browsers. In other words, virtualize multitasking on the server side.

No USB. It’s going to be Christmas in July for the peripheral manufacturers plugging into the charging connector. No camera? If my iPhone can send clips to the Ustream site where they are automagically rendered in H.264 for live streaming, then maybe they can make their way into the Pad over WiFi or god forbid Bluetooth. Or a little clip-on at the top of the screen. The MacBook AIr is being componetized while undergoing an OS transplant. Goodbye Flash, no really. They’ll be able to hang on the way Microsoft demoed Silverlight video streaming down to the iPhone. The portability layer moves to the dev tools.

When we look at Google we think Cloud, but what’s really surprising is how we don’t notice how Cloud Apple has become. The magic of streaming has found its home with this device and the ones to quickly follow. Nothing is left out; it’s been moved to the Cloud where the bits are assembled and streamed back down. If there was anything left out of the iPad announcement, it was a better way of communicating how powerful this platform is and is becoming. No wonder developers are already complaining about only having 90 days to write the first wave of software. Contrary to what Dave Winer warns, they’re more afraid of being left out than locked in.

The Gillmor Gang on the iPad, with Nicholas Carr, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, and Kevin Marks. Recorded live Thursday, January 28, 2009.

We’ve only got a few days to go before Steve Jobs tells us what we’re spending our money on this year. From all the leaks and positioning announcements, it appears we’re being pushed into the Pay Zone. The NY Times, the top four or five TV shows, the embargo-free bestseller. The bet is we’ll pay for same-day-as access to discretionary consumption of media. I think he’s right. But is that as big a bang as the iPhone?

In and of itself, the tApplet does not change the world or even our corner of the world. But just as with the disruption triggered by the iPhone, this new disruption will move beyond the carriers and into the center of the creative core of the netertainment and information industries. In turn, this new wave of video, music, and text will quickly overturn some of the major stakeholders and rewrite how we spend our time at work and play.

It’s hard to think far enough back to remember how we used to use our computer time before realtime stole onto the stage. Back before my MacBook Air, which turned every other computer in the place into an appliance: the MacBook Pro for rendering video, the iMac for Web site design, the PC for nothing. Back when software was something I paid for, music something I shopped for, television something I set a timer for.

The MacBook Air’s disruption was the strategic removal of an internal CD/DVD drive. It declared independence from physical media, and bootstrapped existing devices to serve as feed machines for the rare need to rip a CD or backup a file for sneakernet. USB drives quickly eliminated even that requirement, and the move to cloud services sealed the deal.

Streaming media rushed quickly into the vacuum of tangible media. Once the location of the actual bits was made irrelevant by look-ahead caching, we quickly learned to validate those services which allowed us to share pointers to the material rather than the downloadable enclosures. Identity online became the control point for micropayments, and the incentive for providing behavior and social signals in return for discounts and sponsored bundling. WiFi became the razor, and the streams the blades.

In effect, we are now selling our gestures into the stream hoping to build up enough credit to buy these new devices as they reach the intersection of battery life, broadband, and social filtering. The overt and implicit affinity groups are the nodes in this realtime auction, harvesting the most elegant and intuitive of their tribe to finance access to the streams most relevant and informative of the next day’s work. Like dreams, these affinity surges work through the underlying themes, fears, yearning, and hopes we share.

Literally, what this means is a renaissance of the kind felt in the Sixties, when music, film, and political discourse conspired in a furnace of creativity. Today these devices are mere portals into this next wave, important only because of what they help to make possible. The iPhone’s genius was in combining the elements to produce a device capable of accelerating use of the network in realtime, to signal the arrival, the existence, of valuable things. Virtualized, homogenized into streams, predicatively cached to preserve the illusion of stability, voice activated to teach the network who we are.

Google has emerged as a great validator not just of the cloud model but the inspiration of the Jobs model: that we can imagine our way into the future we can only glimpse at any given moment. With the iPhone it was brain dead obvious that if the idea could be instantiated, the economic forces could be harnessed to improve the experience as more desired it. The more Apple and Google and Amazon succeed, the more they need to compete with their own success to survive and prosper.

Three machines: the Kindle, the Nexus One, the Apple tablet. Each offers something essential to the power of the creatives who will fuel this disruption. The Kindle is simple, cheap, battery frugal. The Nexus One is multi-tasking, cloud-fueled, realtime empowered. The Apple machine bridges the media across the digital shoals, most likely straddling the intersection of the creative arts now floundering in late night wars, 360 deals, and the great archives we’ve lost the right to share. These are the pre-existing conditions, just before another Golden Age is upon us.

The Gillmor Gang — Andrew Keen, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Sam Whitmore, Dan Farber, and Kevin Marks — on the Tablet Wars. Recorded live, Friday, January 22, 2010.

The dominoes are falling fast in the wake of NBC Universal’s decision to ax its experiment with late night in prime time. What seemed a simple revolt by local affiliate stations may spell the beginning of a complete reworking of mainstream media around the emerging realtime architecture of Twitter.

RSS and its podcasting offspring triggered a process of democratization that offered users a way of aggregating news and entertainment under their own control. Most media outlets constrained such access to their programming, but YouTube gave users a way to flout the law and Google a way to look the other way while shows like The Daily Show and copyrighted musical performances were made available over the net. As with Napster, free as in media morphed over time to iTunes, the Kindle, and soon the iTablet.

The disconnect between broadcasting audiences and the economic underpinnings of prime and post-prime time has reached the boiling point. Now that Twitter and its gesture-based Follow architecture has reached a critical mass, audiences can set alerts to notify them of breaking news, analysis, and commentary. If available, these nuggets of information can be played off in realtime and shared with targeted micro-communities while the information is at its most valuable. Unfortunately for local broadcast stations, this destroys a substantial portion of their revenue, much as craigslist eats newspaper classifieds’ lunch.

Follow the money and it’s streaming away from a scheduled architecture to a DVRed and eventually on-demand personalized portal. On the desktop Silverlight is leveraged by Netflix to move that disruptor (see boarded-up Hollywood Video stores) from FedEx to Instant access over the Net. On the iPhone/Nexus platform, Ustream streams realtime events over the cracked-open 3G network. How can the local news compete with an interactive identity wand that lets you download an app in seconds moments after you are told about it via your aggregator filter router?

Once the affiliates said No, the house of cards collapsed. NBC faces the same stupid choice they made when they opted for the middle-of-the-road Leno over the real Carson heir Letterman. By reinstalling Leno after the news, they roll the clock back 7 months (really 6 years) and create a monster called Conan that will destroy what’s left of the Tonight Show heritage. A Fox show will spawn a Late Night Fox show, and suddenly we go from 4 shows to 6. Talk show glut favors a new power alignment around micro-communities, where Letterman and his even funnier followup Ferguson will split the newer audience with Conan and leave Leno with a less and less valuable (and mostly asleep) audience.

Interestingly, CBS has used this opportunity to post Letterman material about the crisis on YouTube, thereby promoting their funnier shows and signaling a move to on-demand. Already CBS makes its Evening News broadcast available on-demand; will the rest of its live shows be far behind? And remember Comcast’s On Demand Online version, which provides all of its on-demand content online at no additional cost. Plug a Mac Mini into your HDMI port and you’re off to the races. This will quickly start making lotso money for the networks with micro-community strategies, which in turn will tip other networks into alignment.

Also note Google’s marketing model for Nexus: no money on advertising local or network, but clickable pitches first in search and soon in Gmail, GApps, Maps, Google Voice, and so on. Hello, future. Same thing will happen in Late Night, where YouTube “breaking news” excerpts will give way to impulse buys (look at how iTunes carved up albums into dollar-a-pop singles) and then to bundling, aka the new networks. With Nexus One and the iPhone converging in disruption of the broadcast model, producers will begin to flow where the incremental pools of money live. These YouTube excerpts not only promote the parent shows but the new bundled streams that alert us.

That’s why Conan told NBC to take a hike: enough already of pandering to Leno’s watered down silent majority. They don’t want him, never did, and besides it’s no longer 11:30 anymore but what time it’s released to the network on-demand that counts. As Twitter sentiment filters across the country and time zones, more and more of us will start choosing which show to rack up based on implicit gestures from our affinities. As advertisers rush to reach these socially-cultivated audiences, the networks (studios?) will more to an on-demand model where shows are made available almost as soon as they pixelate the bleeps. Oh wait, maybe they’ll make bleep-free versions available as adult on-demand.

Once these dynamics settle in, we’ll be voting for not just the new late night schedule but prime time as well, which many of us have already started doing with DVRing House and watching Heroes with the kids, or preferably sampling the on-demand version when alerted. The conventions of 11:30 will not fade, just as waking up to the Today Show will continue to flourish. But inevitably attempts at splitting the baby like NBC tried with Leno and Conan will accelerate the decline of one-size-fits-all broadcasting and reward competitors with a free gift of material with which to market the new realtime platform.

In the age of Twitter, no one can keep a secret. That’s clear from the announcements about the Gphone, the iSlate, and the likely fact that nothing will happen at CES. Comdex has been dead for years, Oracle conferences feature endless rehashes by Scott McNealy about the Sun merger, and in general most trade shows have been denuded of any real news.

That leaves product announcements by the vendors themselves, timed to fit around the old event schedule but in fact disrupt the news flow that normally used to be captured in large multi-vendor settings. But these announcements have begun to focus around hardware devices (phones) that require a supply chain, lead time, and partners. Apple used to be mostly successful at keeping the lid on the hardware part of the equation, choosing its suppliers based as much on security as the commodity parts that help maintain a firewall by need-to-know silos.

But where the process has really broken down from an IP perspective is with the partners. And particularly the media, which has a stake in its survival on top of these devices. So we see a clearly endorsed leak that Apple will ship a tablet in March, as a result of meetings with media folks about supporting the platform. Of course they want to support the platform; the Kindle has already iTuned up the book business and YouTube the video pipeline.

It’s equally important for all concerned that Google succeed with Android and Nexus One; today’s rollout confirms how cleverly this is being played with the media. Not the pixel-stained wretches who seemed oddly more impressed than their content will let on. They are of course secretly very happy that a real competition is engaged. Apple the gatekeeper stories have been milked to death, and no one really cares what Motorola or Nokia has up their sleeve. No, the story is Apple v. Google with a twist.

The twist is that it’s actually not a competition but a mutual tag teaming of our social services. The key demo today was the voice control of tweets enabled across server side resolution engines. Every single input field on the Nexus One is voice-enabled. Sure, the voice enabled search linked up to the voice-prompted GPS service finances the new device, assuming it can be integrated into bluetooth for hands-free driving. That used to cost $99 for TomTom. But hands-free tweeting over bluetooth is huge, no matter what the anti-social media morons think.

Nexus One creates a viable pool of users trained on a gesture pattern similar enough to the iPhone to be absorbed with perhaps 5 minutes of use. Voice email as absorbed into the micro-message bus creates a huge transaction-ready set of customers who can trade access to their so-called private streams in return for discounts, special offers, and so on — provided the vendors play by the rules. Those rules are not to violate the user’s sense of propriety in the use of their private communications.

Gmail has succeeded because it established a sense of respect for our private communications while at the same time providing context-sensitive information that could be useful. Those links can be scary if you happen to notice how intelligently they are generated based on parsing of your private thoughts and business communications. Yet we understand that Google understands where the fourth wall is, where they can go right up to but not over.

Now look at the Nexus gesture stream and marvel: not just the text or the audio converted to text, but the time, screen location, zoom level, what objects and information gets shared, ignored, and so on. The map of these behaviors is incredibly rich — like turning our interests and intentions into a rich kind of braille where our fingers approximate what we are thinking in the moments in between transactions. Remember, each device is tagged to a credit card. It turns just about everything we do into a Kindle experience, as long as we feel compensated for visibility into the gesture stream.

Talking in a personal way to a public audience was the disruption that Twitter engendered. The voice-tweet tool gives us a mechanism that will work just as well across micro-communities, whether inside the Chatter firewall or cross-domain in a FriendFeed conversation. And the text processing can be used in several ways, to enhance voice mail as Google Voice and Ribbit do, and most importantly as a filtering mechanism to determine dynamically who sees what in the message stream. This is a huge disruption that Apple will have to scramble to meet, and another reason why the tablet will be so important when it appears.

Nexus One may seem like me-too, just like the iSlate will be called tablet take two. But in fact we’re seeing voice replace the keyboard on the phone, which in turn creates a vacuum on the desk/laptop for the iScreen to fill. Once we trust the conversion of voice to tweets, we’ll use private tweets to replace email. Once we trust the filters to deliver us the most actionable information in our windows of opportunity, we will also select the media services that best leverage the new platform. Once we make those decisions, the content produced for the astronauts will attract the settlers. And that’s a secret the media won’t be able to keep for more than a few seconds.

Marc Benioff commented on Facebook about Erick Schonfeld’s list of important technologies of the coming year, pleased that Erick thought Salesforce Chatter was going to be a big deal. I agree: Chatter is likely to become a key differentiator in the contest for momentum in cloud computing. Up until now, Twitter and Facebook have had the game all to themselves, with Google content to experiment with Wave and Microsoft busy launching Azure.

Chatter will inevitably go right at the heart of Microsoft’s Sharepoint strategy, which has some serious legs now that the company has wired Visual Studio up to it on the development front and Silverlight on the display side. With Windows Mobile 2010 and Silverlight Mobile still officially unannounced, Chatter has an interesting opportunity for the next three months or so to slipstream alongside Nexus One and Android. This gives Benioff plenty of red meat on the marketing front, but behind the scenes the real target is Twitter.

Chatter was pitched as a Facebook clone, and the more Facebook tweaks their status model the more it begins to look like FriendFeed on steroids. By tagging me in his Erick status update, I received not only Marc’s message but the replies of others in an email thread which pointed me back to a FriendFeedy conversation thread. So far Twitter has resisted harnessing its reply_id capability for conversations, leaving the field wide open for third party clients to (so far) pick up the ball. Robert Scoble was promoting one FriendFeed killer the other day that might go there with a promised UI overhaul, but my bet is on Facebook morphing quicker.

So now we get Facebook and Facebook Connect operating as a stalking horse for establishing an identity map that Chatter can do a LinkedIn party on. For each civilian identity, Chatter offers an extended professional identity with tools to cross-index among enterprises and their internal taxonomies. It’s like taking Twitter lists and harnessing them across affinity groups inside and across companies, leaving Twitter and its clients to carving up the customer end of the transactions. But guess where the carrots lie for those customers? The MinorityReport location-aware enterprises that have realtime deals just waiting to be pitched to those who register for stream offers.

CRM is the logical clearing house for these relationships, as long as care is taken to establish trust and authenticity at the intersection of public and private networks. I’ve often felt Facebook makes too much of the difficulty of transitioning its cloud to the apparently more open Twitter stream. With Chatter, that responsibility shifts to the Facebook Connect channel and the credibility of businesses seeking to engage with the social marketplace.

We’ve already seen the impact of service industries such as food and live entertainment (Yelp, FourSquare, etc.) Next may well be the media companies, once the tools of the trade ship over the next few months. Chatter’s application updates are a huge opportunity for the record companies to stave off a further collapse; same goes for the products formerly known as magazines. Just because the mainstream media is glomming onto Twitter as a realtime DVR index doesn’t mean private streams can’t be nailed up and distributed interactively by newmedia publishers with much higher signal to noise and the yield that comes from mining authority.

Salesforce has consistently outperformed the expectations of its competitors, not so much by some magical formula as by understanding the principles of bootstrapping pioneered by an early group of engineers and standards politcos. Google’s success at decoupling Office from our private lives has now rendered the opportunity to remake the business relationships from the inside out. Chatter can instantiate customer relationships based on what gestures we send to signal streams of our willingness to sip and save.

Chatter is not without challenges; figuring out the intersection of Twitter and Facebook will not come easily. But if Benioff continues to do what he has been doing now for the ten years of the Web Services revolution — correctly marrying a strong sense of what technologies will stick and foster consumer acceptance with the opportunities to disrupt slow moving competitors from his past — he and his company will continue to prosper.

The RSS-is-not-dead-it’s just-Twitter Lobby is finally getting the point. As Dave Winer, Anil Dash, Stowe Boyd, Fred Wilson, and whoever else thinks the time for the Bum’s Rush is upon us are proclaiming, the Open Twitter API can save the world from onecompanyitis. In five words: Bearhug Twitter and feed them PB&J until they explode. I know that’s 9 words, but in this upside down argument, it’s really 5 invented in 2001 with just 4 small one-time-only updates.

Only one small problem: Twitter killed RSS, not the other way around. Twitter didn’t do RSS some big favor by extracting the vast majority of citations away from Google Reader and its victims in the RSS aggregator wars. Twitter rolled through downtown URLville and right over every social media platform including Facebook with one simple premise. Hi, how you doin’? You are what you tweet. The next big thing since Gmail. Please put down your lunchbox and take a number.

Today URLs flow through Twitter. Ideas ship on Twitter. Software is built on Twitter. Fine: the Open RSS API means we can now write to a standard interface that lets Twitter clients become carriers for blogs, conversations, comments, podcasts, and all sorts of unaffiliated competitors. Except that’s hogwash. The time for bearhugging Twitter to the ground vanished when Facebook realized it had to clone Twitter or lose control of the social graph. Once FriendFeed created a realtime conversational data type, the race was under way to codify Twitter and extend it before Twitter absorbed the capability. Neither has happened yet, but once either company reaches that goal, there is no need for a social revolution.

This is not the IM Wars all over again. This is not Do No Evil 2.0. Twitter has produced a great service that transcends the politics of the moment, just as Gmail eviscerated email as we knew it. What part of Yum, Good do we fail to understand is bad for us? It’s a simple and inviolate contract: you do something useful and I’ll give you my data. How do they make money with that? Don’t care, they’ll think of something. If everybody likes it, you got yourself a lock on the market.

This is why the Gphone materializing is just as good for Apple as Google, and therefore all of us. Competition drives innovation, and it also drives duopolies, as Jason correctly noted on this week’s Gillmor Gang. Twitter has already created a duopoly, by proffering a public model with exceptional filtering characteristics that neatly validates Facebook’s private identity model. The power is not in a single API unification but rather an economic duopoly at the intersection of the two social platforms.

Why is the Gphone powerful? Because it leverages price supports to drive the cost of the device toward zero for the user. Google can afford to lower the smartphone entry point to match the iPhone, and in so doing set up a competitive environment where social applications can flourish equally well across both platforms. Those broadband social applications (using hybrid development tools across ChromeOS and Silverlight) provide a second wave of price supports in the form of marketing and transactional revenue. 1% of everything that moves is plenty of a business model for Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and the rest of the global economy to boot.

This doesn’t mean that there’s no room for the little guy, the small developer, the open source aesthetic, the impulse to contribute to the community. It just means that painting these companies as evil or controlling or untrustworthy begins to say more about the motives of those who attack them. Of course Twitter can be disingenuous when they remove services for “technical” reasons only to sell them off to Microsoft and Google for millions of dollars when they rebuild their infrastructure. But did that slow down adoption of the service or the proliferation of third party apps? Is Facebook slowing down as it tramples privacy?

No and no. Twitter continues to build out its dominant social array of overlapping follow clouds. Lists and firewalled retweets may keep Scoble and others busy, but until realtime conversation is enabled, Twitter will be valuable mostly for its ubiquity and trigger mechanism for dynamic filtering. Facebook is testing Twitter posting, which when implemented will become the laboratory for FriendFeed style aggregation and realtime chat. Put simply, Facebook will become the hybrid of both models, forcing Twitter to enable threading to contain the damage to its authority model.

We’re seeing a realtime negotiation between these two leaders of the social revolution, with Benioff, Ozzie, Jobs, and LarrynSergey waiting patiently just off camera. It’s a good time for the Open Twitter API guys to declare victory, but it would be nice if they stopped sliming the socialcos and bigcos who get it just as much.