Today I got a call from my sister about our other sister. When the phone rings from one family member to another, and it’s not birthday season, it’s always bad news. Our other sister, because that’s how we always called her, was dead. She was the adopted daughter of our father’s third marriage, and she was a very unhappy, angry person who the rest of us had a hard time liking, or even caring about.

At various times I’ve felt guilty about my attitude toward her, not wishing ill of someone who had such a hard time with life. But honestly, in the end she could be downright mean and nasty. Eventually I grew hardened and suspicious, resentful of her attempts to brush aside years of similar behavior with others of her siblings. I feel bad about her sad life, but that’s about all I can muster.

As this played out this afternoon, so did a quarrel between two friends on the network. The trigger, but not the root, of this was the demise of the Gillmor Gang some weeks ago. In the aftermath of that event, the realtime world of FriendFeed and to some extent Twitter seemed caught in an ugly spiral of what Mike Arrington calls mob behavior. I share Mike’s alarm at this wave of off-the-cuff vitriol, even as I continue to be at least partially blamed for the drama that swirled around our show.

I’ve tried to stay out of the controversy, other than to speak my mind during the attempt at talking through the incident in a restarted show. I even took my show’s archives down as a way of indicating how strongly I felt about the tone with which many people spoke about members of the cast and myself. I’ve enjoyed producing the show through its many incarnations and participants, and have felt for the weeks since then that something would have to change before we could return to our sessions. Today’s continued vitriol over Mike’s attempts to frame the seriousness of the issue don’t bode well.

I’m 60 years old and have always felt proud of what I’ve tried to do in my career as a journalist, filmmaker, producer, and whatever my role in the Gang could be called. I take my work seriously, and have always tried to take others’ seriously as well. Sometimes I am guilty of hyperbole and failed attempts at humor; I don’t suffer slights and insinuations with the best of grace, and stumble far more than those whose work I admire and attempt to match. I most often err on the side of silence, hoping to say nothing with as much or more impact as wading in.

We need to fix this problem, whether it’s called realtime or social media, or whatever. We need to recognize that words mean something, and those that are thrown casually or viciously carry the same force as weapons. As a community, we must begin to own that responsibility, to make it clear that disagreement can be expressed without name calling, that fighting for innovation and progress does not excuse ugliness and slander, that we live in a world where news travels fast and emotions faster. We need to own our words, and we need to help each other to understand when we go too far.

I can understand when people make mistakes, when their passion gets the better of them. But saying nothing while people heap scorn and ugliness on others needs to stop. We must learn to separate argument from personal attacks. No one is immune from this criticism. I have failed at this regularly, even as I pretty it up with humor and caustic silence. It’s easy to want an eye for an eye, but we have to start somewhere to break the cycle. If that means I need to say what I mean instead of waiting for others, so be it.

When I got off the call with my sister, I told her that even though I didn’t want to admit it, the bad news could have been a lot worse. I wished my other sister no ill will, but thank god it wasn’t any of the others. I have to live with that feeling about myself, that sometimes things go too far and there’s no turning back. If I’ve gone too far down that road with any of you, I apologize. Let’s try and work toward less of this ugliness, and failing that, figure out a way to share in a community of people who respect some sort of rules about discourse.

A few posts ago Dave Winer continues his criticism of Twitter’s 140 character limit. Never mind that Dave aggressively supported cloning Twitter’s APIs and character limit in the Bearhug days when Twitter needed the support. Never mind that things have changed now and apparently Twitter is too big for our own good.

Dave’s back and forth is part of a grand old tradition, where new facts obviate old ones and alliances switch to account for new alignments. In Twitter’s case, the early instability and the high stakes involved made for a great deal of passion and attendant posturing. We all took it personally (well, I did) when Twitter removed key features that favored serendipity and discovery. Until then, we felt the new space Twitter opened up was like the Old West, expanding outward without sense of limit or control.

It wasn’t that Track was the most useful part of the service. It was more that it represented the horizon, the frontier, the lack of boundaries. Taking it away hardened the service into its fundamental structure, the familiar limits of space and time, the tenuous constructs of “friend” and “follow” rather than the surprise of the unfamiliar appearing suddenly with fresh ideas and humor. Before Track went away, we never knew what would happen next; afterward, we knew enough to not anticipate.

In a similar way, 140 characters felt less like a limitation and more like an invitation to be surprised at how much you could squeeze into the frame. Like perspective in a painting, or echo in a recording, the creative use of limitations helped us overcome gravity and imagine more than we could “see.” Supporting the limits became a creative validation of the surprise that Twitter has always been. How many events and ideas must we share before we get over that surprise, that once again Twitter has exceeded expectations?

140 characters brought us url shorteners, the key to this new self-compressing and auto-expanding universe. Our software is now compensating for the microURL opacity, unpacking these links and harvesting the metadata they carry to aid indexing of the gestures they contain. Once again, the apparent limitations of the shorteners (gas station on every corner, lurking potential runaway code, mom and pop businesses closing down and orphaning links) are creating investment opportunities and entrepreneurial enclaves.

It’s a little like the present wrapped in a series of enclosed boxes, where the joke of what’s in the big box is replaced by the joke of how small something can get before it is even more valuable. Twitter continues to confound the experts, even those who are getting rich with and around it. That’s because the real value of Twitter is the one thing that will remain secret — its ability to delight. It’s not for Ev or Biz or even Fred or Marc to own. It doesn’t matter what it’s called either.

In a way, it’s been a blessing that Track has remained locked away in the Tower. It’s given us continued license to dream of what could be when it inevitably returns. We watch as FriendFeed explores the realtime conversations Track first alerted us to. We note Facebook’s timorous steps with the Everyone button, today’s realtime chat alliance with uStream, the media musings about a Facebook Search that would produce higher value targeted results. We even see iPhone 3.0 search reach back from the device to Google servers for results. It’s all Track on the way back.

Will we still have dreams when Track returns? Yes, just like we will have dreams when 140 characters doesn’t go away. Is 140 characters enough room to say we need more? Well, then, we’re good.

How long will it take for the market to capitulate to the rise of Twitter? You’d think with Oprah and Iran and whatever the next micro-event will become, the so-called pundits of old and new media would stop beating the dead horse of Twitter vulnerability. Certainly they’ve mostly slowed down, overwhelmed by the daily startups, the late night jokes, and the mainstream Macarena over the service.

But still there’s this undercurrent of calling the next Twitter, which of course would vanish if Twitter was verified as the current victor. Instead, we hear that 140 characters is too few, that centralization is good, or bad, or useful but transitional, that realtime is too fast, too hard, impossible to keep up with, that business models are here, never coming, etc. The Twitter industry apparently depends on this chatter to continue to smooth out the flow between celebrity and parochial events.

So let’s see how things would play out if we all agreed Twitter is dominant and will not be defeated by any competitor in ts new space, just like we’ve all agreed Google search continues to dominate. Bing’s good effort only reinforces Google’s invulnerability, and you could make the case that Facebook’s recent usernames and reported default Everyone newstream moves do the same for Twitter. A few diehards posit Identica as a viable competitor, and FriendFeed continues to grow despite its founders’ rejection of their product as a direct competitor.

The central question is whether Twitter is a fundamental service of the new realtime network. The answer is yes. So why does the churn continue over competition for that role? Is it to maintain some rationale for deal flow in the Valley or the larger venture space? Despite a steady drumbeat of new entrants in the client and sub-service ecosystem, the dollars flowing are still relatively small. Partly that’s because cloud computing has made investment more of a marketing than a technology buy.

No, the excitement over realtime is real, and transcends the investment dynamics. It’s more of a classic shift from one era to the next, where we’ll look back in short order (a year at the most) and see the moment this became something more than the story of a company. Looked at through the 20-20 lense of hindsight, that moment may be imminent.

What more do we need to know? The explosive viral nature of Twitter URL citations has upended the television networks. YouTube video of the death of a young Iranian woman spread worldwide over Twitter within seconds, completely outside the mainstream media networks and the control of any government or corporation. Twitter executives responded to pleas from concerned users by canceling maintenance downtime during crucial moments in the Iranian demonstrations. The use of realtime transcended the politics of the technology.

The technology also took a big step forward with the release of iPhone 3GS. Its improved camera, autofocus, onboard editing and YouTube auto upload mandate the proliferation of realtime news and communications. Realtime streaming from events and “Breaking Links” for on demand news will quickly become the way we stay informed. Commentary will flow around aggregations of these streams to provide context and debate. The mainstream networks will not fight this; they will use the same tools, and in the process become indistinguishable from the bloggers they’ve borrowed from.

This is not a slow process. It’s explosive in its ferocity. The Breaking News stories today in the New York TImes iPhone app were dominated by the Iran coverage. Here the newspaper of record provided deep context for the realtime news network, not competing but collaborating with the new model. The pressure on the cable networks to reengage will grow enormously over the next few weeks, as MSNBC and CNN try and provide some intermediation between realtime Twitter news and the TImes’ and BBC’s deep bench.

This is not a story of old versus new. This is the moment when it becomes obvious to a broad audience with enormous buying power that the means of creation and distribution are now open at a level where most anyone can reach a defined audience. These micro audiences are small in number but vast in their overlapping circles of influence. Twitter follow clouds ripple outward via retweets and FriendFeed and Facebook Likes, reaching 2 or 3 degrees of separation in seconds, 6 in minutes. The daily news shows are reruns. The cable networks are Best Of replays endlessly recycling, the Hourly Show.

For months we’ve been experimenting with realtime streaming, realtime chatting, realtime aggregation, realtime filtering. Not everything is in place, but enough for those who see no choice but to engage with the speed of the times. It’s scary to watch how powerful these tools are, what potential they have for misuse or worse. The communities that are forming around realtime technology need to accept both the promise and the threat of this moment. In a realtime world we all live in glass houses, and it’s our job to take care of the garden as if it was our own. Which it is.

I’m trying to remember what it was like before software went away. Seems like a long time ago, and yet very immediate. It’s like the Steinberg New Yorker cover: the West Side Drive, the Hudson, New Jersey, the Rockies, Big Sur. One day we thought in the context of applications, the next in downloads, and now in updates. There is no single application, just iterative features flowing in realtime across social networks.

It of course is all software, just like Office and Notes and links and RSS aren’t really dead. But to some of us, the deltas between the updates are what we notice, not the interfaces or the algorithms or the constructs we think of as spreadsheet or maps or OS. Instead, we admire the evolution of the fabric, the back and forth of competitors catching up and falling behind each other. It’s a different model from the heyday of new this, new that, Best Of, and Top Tens.

What are the ten best things we can do today with our computers? Try as I might, it keeps collapsing into one thing: Discover. IM, yeah that’s cool; I can reach out to someone across time zone and distance with a click or two. Effortless and utilitarian, grab a second of attention or share a gossip or two. Less social pressure than an email (if you want to get a letter, send one) and an adequate replacement for the phone. Voice becomes something you save things for, enough items to make the exchange time-worthy.

One to many is the next phase, the ping-pong Twitter gambits, the FriendFeed Rolling Thunder revues, the video swarms that combine the immediacy with the excitement of the frontier. Volatile as hell, you betcha. The constant drumbeat of explanation only ephemerally covering the nervous stabs at finding some comfort level without destroying the vibrancy. Serious business indeed, whatever the disclaimers.

Funny how we push back against the subtle, when all we crave is the deltas, not the big shifts. We are terrified of the rollercoaster of innovation, but too little of the hint of it drives us into depression and anger. It’s a balance we can only monitor by indirection, through the absence of indications to the contrary. The only thing we’re sure of is what it isn’t.

I don’t miss the software like I thought I would. Truth be told, I like the space opened up by ignoring the different takes on the same idea, the sleight of hand designed to reach critical mass before it’s noticed, the politics of religion and the religion of not invented here. Even the standards guys are humbled by the easy rolling swell of the waves of iteration. The intersection of multicore, broadband, and XML has produced a platform so broad and malleable that the lawyers are unable to keep up or track of where the value is moving.

In one of the interviews for his new record (?) Bob Dylan talks about how he and his band use mathematics to drive what they are doing. The discussion references the changing rhythm patterns of the constantly reworked songs of the Bard’s canon. But his answer is not precisely mysterious but confident in its transparency. And yet, somehow, he preserves the room to create without the meth-fueled exhilaration of the hunt with which he brought his early work forward. I come nowhere near his clarity but that doesn’t mean I’m not onto something.

Discovering is something worth nurturing, whether it’s by searching or listening or running silent and deep. My top ten is really 30 or so, constantly shifting and lapping and taking fiery pit stops, but always in balance in their aggregate instantiation of the stream. As new tools develop to honor this turbulence, we will briefly see them as software, then watch them blend into the delta flow.

With the Gillmor Gang shut down, I’ve been shifting my attention to the Realtime Stream CrunchUp Eric Schonfeld and I are hosting July 10 at the Fox Theater in Redwood City. Growing interest from startups, bigcos, open standards developers, and investors augurs for a valuable event. I hope you’ll join us.

Some of the areas we expect to see explored include, obviously, Twitter, its ecosystem of third party developers and products, and the reactions of and interactions with other social media platforms. Facebook’s namespace rollout of the past few days is just one of the ripple effects of Twitter’s surge. Others include FriendFeed’s realtime services, live video streaming and low cost digital production, Google’s Wave project, smartphone platform strategies, Robert Scoble’s Building 43 community, and the battle for control of the center of the Web OS desktop.

Stringing these technologies and brands together highlights both how early and how late we are in this cycle of renewed innovation. Just a few short months ago, we were debating if Twitter would survive, whether Facebook would open up, why Google and Microsoft would see realtime as anything more than a distraction, and the eternal where’s the money. Today, the answers to those questions are clear: Yes, As quickly as possible, Because they have no other real competition than each other, and Right where it’s always been — the enterprise.

With Oracle swallowing Sun, the enterprise dynamics have swung hard to right, past cloud computing, and directly into the mobile identity landrush. It’s easy to pigeonhole smart phones as the latest version of Studio 54 society politics, but in fact our identities are being consolidated around the SIM chip, with our social graph around the Follow/Track architecture of Twitter and its subsidiaries. Today the switching costs from device to device are substantial, but Apple’s aggressive deployment of the iPhone and AppStore application divide are doing to the carriers what widgets did to Yahoo.

The razor blades are winning, gaining ground, and inexorably blacktopping the differences between service plans, mobile browsing, location-based services, and social graph (affinity) marketing. It’s a language the carriers understand: revenue per user divided by cost of customer acquisition. Feature comparisons between devices are not the defining metric for where the market will flow. Neither are broadband buildout, developer lock-in, or any other measure of value — except realtime elasticity.

If you look at realtime access as the most valuable asset we control, our phone number is at the top of the priority list. Starting from the bottom, Facebook lets us be pinged by semi-strangers without surrendering email address, symmetrical follow provides direct messaging assent on Twitter, IM and SMS we use to determine permission for realtime voice access. The interrupt moves from soft to hard, from intermittent to constant. The more complete, the more valuable. People guard their privacy. Smartphones allow the full panoply of options at all times. Now we guard our protocols like we used to guard our devices.

Abstractions such as Mesh and Gmail/Gchat/Gvideo are the new platforms, the new Office/OS hybrid. Realtime takes away the distinction between operating system and application services. To the iPhone customer, the device is simply an enabler of the new OS services that stream down to whatever client the user can afford; the most advanced services unlocked by the latest device are the upsell not so much for the device as the tariff negotiated with the carriers.

Put another way, I’m not paying 5 or 6 hundred bucks for video recording, I’m paying it for the (eventual) streaming video conferencing provided via the AppStore. I’m investing in pointing my phone at the Hot Chili Kit shelf at the Safeway and saying, “This one?” And soon I’m betting the Hot Chili Kit is going to look at my phone and say, “How about 10% off, Steve?” and “Oh, by the way, Steve, don’t forget the buns and you’re out of bacon, right TIna?” And the more Steve and Tina’s there are the faster these services arrive, which keeps us engaged and subsidized enough to keep the flow going.

At a macro level, the smart phone is setting up a widget platform across the Safeways and Targets and WalMarts that will be highly disruptive of their customer lock. They will not let this go lightly, just as the carriers are bending to Apple’s will one by one and then service by service and probably never device by device. The Pre and the G2 don’t have to match Apple to play in this game, but only Apple can run the table on the carriers. Whoever controls the ground game is likely to win. The ground game is user behavior. By moving the ball in realtime, in video, in a good enough latency to allow an adequate simulation of face to face interaction between charging stations, will take a bite about travel, entertainment, social gestures, political control. The Blackberry won the election.

In Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan talks about reading Kerouac:

Kerouac moves so fast with his words. No ambiguity. It was very emblematic of the time. You grabbed a hold of the train, hopped on and went along with him, hanging on for dear life. I think that’s what affected me more than whatever he was writing about.

Buried in the Realtime dialogue will be that notion of the hell-bent-for-leather nature of the social stream, that this is no way to spend our lives like rats pushing buttons for more pellets. Certainly I stop from time to time and wonder about my seemingly endless fascination with these machines and pulses of alleged information. It often seems so ephemeral, with a saccharine aftertaste and the bloated feeling of too many potato chips. But that’s not the sum of it, or even the meat of it. More and more I seek refuge from the stream, even as I crave its rushing waters. As Dylan sings:

Admitting life is hard, without you near me

Today there was no reality distortion field. Just a reality field. You want video. Here it is. You want devs to have video. Here it is. You want to edit video in place without loading Quicktime Pro or even knowing what it is. Here it is. You want the video menu and nav tools to disapper. They’re gone. You want them back. Here they are.

You want a way to find your iPhone if you put it on silent to turn off all the noise and then your cat pushed it into the cracks of the sofa. Buy MobileMe, go to the page, look at the map, click ring and it overrides silent. Never had reason one to get MobileMe, but this Marriage Saver option is definitely almost worth a hundred bucks a year. If one developer bootstraps MobileMe for some value and I download that app, I’m almost in. And you can sell it to your wife as a way of checking where you are.

Oh, you like the Pre. Here’s the 3G for 99 bucks. Thanks for the three days, Palm. And how about the G2 having no headphone jack. Apple doesn’t even have to win with this kind of competition. Seriously, who is the guy at Google who didn’t step up and flag that at the meeting? But guess what, Apple is winning anyway. The biggest laugh the whole morning was what wasn’t said, when Phil Schiller announced tethering on 22 carrier partners in 42 countries. Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it, didn’t even have to say no AT&T. Big laugh.

Apple has the carriers on the run. You can see the vise tightening as AT&T gets closer to the reup time on the exclusive deal. With Pre and G2 already out there, it won’t take long for them to almost catch up on other carriers, and then… oh how about 99 bucks for a 3G with 1 billion Appstore downloads. Who’s kidding who here. Hell, Apple has the browsers on the run too. HTML 5, 2X to 3X the speed in Safari, HTTP audio and video streaming. I think I saw RSS on the screen in the upper row third from the left of 1000 features.

Peer to peer auto-find no peering over bluetooth. The kids playing p2p backgammon in the back seat. TomTom GPS car kit with big speaker and look-ahead video preview. Honk your horn and unlock the car with ZipCar. The iPhone is the tip of the iceberg, our universal remote control with new features and updates literally streaming down in realtime.

As we sat there, it seemed so the new normal, not frenzied but almost Spockian logical: the new phone, the 1000 APIs, the Snow Leopard fit and finish, the MacBook Air for $1499 and 700 off the SSD price. The 7-hour lithium polymer batteries with a thousand recharges, well past the MacBook Pro lifetime. And the OS upgrade price 29 bucks, 49 family pack. A stream of inevitability, conquering the airplane, the car, the kids, the media, even our understanding of what constitutes the technology platform.

Suddenly, the shape of things to come is the shape of what’s here now. The iPhone is the client, the MacBook (they’re all Pro) the server, and you can bring it into the office and plug into the corporate Exchange server with one click. Never has the fear of Apple holding developers or users hostage been so overstated. Apple’s rigorous march forward and its deep understanding of what the market will want next is not only keeping them ahead of the competition but building the markets they will own tomorrow. They’re like Willie Mays and the basket catch, making the hard stuff look easy. The market may have bounced down a bit on the Jobs no-show, but Steve and company — and the smiling developers — know better.

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie faced down two hardball questions in a Q & A wrap to a conversation with Wired editor Steven Levy at the Churchill Club. On one, a much anticipated question about Google’s new realtime collaboration tool Wave, Ozzie had put a lot of thought into the answer. He praised the small startup project as only he could, as a clone of the Groove software he sold to Microsoft while joining the company and taking the CSA reins from Bill Gates.

But he also critiqued the Google effort as “anti-Web”, suggesting the project took on such a hard problem that its complexity might curb its adoption. Nonetheless, he seemed to relish learning from Google’s effort, positioning Live Mesh as a simpler reworking of Groove in the context of integration into the Microsoft OS. For a Silicon Valley audience who probably has paid little notice to Mesh, Ozzie’s careful dissection may spark some deeper attention as Wave exits its early pilot stages and grapples with integration into Google Apps.

The other hardball was more in keeping with the wonky nature of the conversation, which ranged from a deep dive into the Windows prospects for netbooks to a peek behind the politics of Microsoft’s transition into the Cloud. It was a straightforward question about whether Microsoft would support HTML 5 in Internet Explorer,. After a sly jibe at competitors talking about “modern browsers” and saying he had nothing specific to announce, he slapped a screamer back up the middle: “I think you can expect us to do the right thing.”

Ozzie knows this is the line in the sand Google is trying to draw with Wave, Chrome, and Android: that open standards will force Microsoft to comply with standards-based technologies that will reduce IE’s control of the browser landscape. Yet throughout his Valley sojourn, Ozzie reflected a confidence that doing things what he called the Web way would work out just fine for Microsoft. He batted away one question about netbooks moving away from Windows by suggesting 83% of the market worked for him, and for the first time went beyond his standard praise for Amazon’s cloud play by questioning how far it would scale.

In that context, doing the right thing was meant more for his internal audience in Redmond. The G-word seems to roll off Ozzie’s tongue more easily than CEO Steve Ballmer’s and certainly any comment from Bill Gates while he was in charge. With Windows 7 battened down and Azure on track for rollout this year, Ozzie seems confident he’s weathered the storms of internal politics sufficiently to slough off a dramatic challenge at the center of the desktop from Wave and its HTML 5 stalking horse as worthy competition that he and Microsoft can learn a lot from.

The “anti-Web” complexity comment may come off a little paternalistic at first glance, much as Dave Winer has taken discussions about the future arc of RSS more personally than perceptively. But Wave does highlight the deep thinking and roadwork Ozzie has done with Notes, Groove, and now Mesh, and sets the stage for a fascinating struggle over the next six months. Doing the right thing with HTML 5 will be Ozzie’s Nixon going to China moment, but in giving Google the win on the browser, he also takes some ground internally that may pay off somewhere not so far down the road with a Silverlight-based Office on Netbooks. In baseball terms, Ozzie is walking HTML 5 and pitching to Twitter Reader.

Scott McNealy’s reappearance at JavaOne for the first time in the years since he handed control to Jonathan Schwartz had the feeling of a swan song. But there was also a steely purpose to his gate and demeanor, as he dismissed Schwartz with a hearty handclasp for his stewardship and extracted the slide clicker from his grasp with a note of baton-passing. The camera didn’t even follow Jonathan offstage; he just wasn’t there anymore.

Then it was on to incoming owner Larry Ellison, who Scott framed with a few setup remarks about what he called a merger before engaging Ellison in the only Q&A allowed under the terms of the pre-acquisition interregnum. It was all about Java, of course, neatly sidestepping the hardware plans and focusing instead on Sun’s latest Microsoft counterattack, JavaFX. Ellison positioned the Silverlight/Flash clone as the development environment for netbooks and an AJAX-less version of OpenOffice. This was in odd counterpoint to Google’s Android strategy, which is spreading from phones to Acer netbooks while leveraging Google Web Toolkit to write Java apps that compile into Javascript code.

At Google I/O Google engineering chief Vic Gunodtra — who leads similar duties after managing Microsoft developer strategies — outlined an integrated strategy that incorporates GWT and the open source Eclipse IDE as a way of moving rapidly away from proprietary code to an HTML 5 platform built on “modern” browsers that already run on Chrome and FireFox. Ellison seems to be suggesting JavaFX as a way of capturing those same Java developers Google is squiring, though JavaFX is not supported by Eclipse but only by Sun’s NetBeans environment.

Though Ellison cited his “friends” at Google, the sentiment echoed the “merger” talk McNealy was pitching until he carefully handed his new boss a signal flag that the two straddled as Scott translated the letters as J A V A. Whether you buy the good news that Sun’s and Oracle’s R&D budget is between $4 and 5 billion annually, it will be interesting to see whether Ellison’s nod toward the mobile desktop and a new front against Office is serious. With Microsoft’s Dan’l Lewin and Steven Martin keynoting Thursday’s session, Oracle and Ellison may be fighting the last war and giving Google room to consolidate around a strategy that marginalizes Java as a programming language, keeps Java off the iPhone, and creates a three-front war that allows Microsoft to slipstream Silverlight into a netbook Office play.

Google Wave may be a big deal for Google, but it’s an even bigger deal for Microsoft. It forces Redmond to step up at the very time it would rather run silent and deep. Correct that: those owners of the crown jewels who’ve guided the aircraft carrier for decades would rather ignore the impact of these two brothers and a product manager who moved Down Under to build what may well be Google’s realtime core.

Windows may be more protected from the Wave than Office, which must now confront not just a new feature set but a disruptive route-around of the core document formats. When Lars, Jens, and Stephanie demonstrated a Wave extension that provided robot-scraping grammar-checking in realtime, they put the lie to the common wisdom that Office was invulnerable to the Web. And in the process, they changed the monetization model for Office as well.

What happens when Wave applications store not just the deltas between document actions but the actions we take in response to incoming information? Let’s say the micromessaging stream reports some event that suggests a shift in interest rates, which in turn is noticed by a robot on guard for relevant changes to your financial position and assets. This in turn triggers a message that is sent to your broker, or a transaction commitment to buy at a certain level, or a pushed reminder to click yes to authorize the purchase of flowers for Mother’s Day, etc.

In Wave-ese, robots are Trackers. And in Track-ese, sharing those gestures is a monetization engine of unparalleled efficiency and value creation. Instead of thinking of your value as being generated by what you say or type, think of it as a stream of content, context, impressions, lack of gestures, and other high value information that those who’ve learned enough about you value access to that stream. Add the cumulative streams of the overlapping clouds emanating from your center — the ripples of those you follow and those that follow those you follow — and you have the next generation of discovery, a meta-search.

What follows is an appstore for gesture streams, with data supporting the predictive nature of the best of those streams. Today’s complaints about too many tweets and rush hour data storms are the early signs of markets for efficient triage of information. The payload/URL construct will lead to new versions of Google and other Readers that absorb and replace the RSS reader with dynamic socially-filtered robots that present only the most targeted information. In effect, Wave robots will be dynamic instantiations of socially-tuned rules engines, drawing on the services of Wave extensions to add processing and rendering to the output stream.

The new media will emerge from this primordial soup in short order, squeezed under pressure from accumulated information glut into the oil that the social engine runs on. How-To’s will become a combination of instructions and tests of how well the tasks are completed. These hybrid stories/tutorials will use the feedback loop to tune themselves for greater effectiveness, and the broader success of marketing those products among the social cloud will lower the price while increasing revenue and features. This is the feedback loop Bill Gates and company exploited in the Windows generation.

How the new Windows absorbs the old one is Microsoft’s dilemma, and also an enormous opportunity handed to Ray Ozzie and his team by Wave. Wave’s delta-driven XML streams are directly descended from the Groove architecture, and Live Mesh can be seen as a similar reboot of its parent as part of Windows 7 and Live. In effect, both companies are now at roughly the same place in integrating realtime into the respective architectures. Like Wave, Mesh started as a small skunkworks project and is now being integrated into the shipping OS under Windows chief Steven Sinofsky. Sergey Brin was equally clear about Wave’s trajectory inside Google.

Microsoft has great momentum and the firewall of inertia in the enterprise. Office is buttressed at many institutional levels, governmental, corporate, and legal. But once dynamic documents proliferate and business gets done increasingly across corporate domains, the traditional document types must adapt or corrode and disintegrate. Here again, the Wave robots look like cute R2D2s for finding the latest sales and Craigslist freeware, but enterprise extensions will start taking off once Wave gets the Apps green light. A dynamic document that hits iPhone, Gphone, and netbook in realtime will go viral with the same speed it rolls out of the various appstores.

Put simply, the Office team has no choice but to accelerate its move to the cloud. First place they have to jump is at the center of the desktop, with a micromessaging app. Can Outlook be reworked quickly enough to counter a Wave Reader? See how the mind is focused when you compare the two timelines? Google Reader reworked may not be quick enough for some of us trackheads, but all it has to do is beat the Exchange team. Unless a Manhattan Project is formed that works with a realtime micromessaging version of Bing to produce a rich Silverlight-based client with — yes, HTML 5 support in the very markets IE can’t currently support.

Crazy sounding, isn’t it. Right now the best browser for Windows and netbooks could be Chrome/FireFox, and what better way to stay in the game until a Silverlight/IE hybrid provides a direct competitor/complement to Wave/Chrome. Microsoft can compete with Visual Studio against Google Web Toolkit, and its army of .Net developers can port their enterprise apps to Silverlight and add realtime extensions. If they don’t, they’ll move to Wave and its greener realtime pastures. This is the language Microsoft understands: developers, developers, developers.

Not since Apple stunned a developer/media crowd by giving away free iSight video cameras has a company gone to the heart of what Jonathan Schwartz calls the tendency of not just software but hardware to trend to free. Google’s giveaway of 4,000 Android phones and 30 days of 3G answers the musical question: is that an Android phone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

Google’s HTML 5 pitch got a whole lot more interesting when developers realized the company was moving into the kind of viral marketing Apple seemed to own until recently. The App Store has created an always-on version of the developer evangelism connection, and we’ll see how effective Google is in building on the momentum created by the phone toolkit. The iPhone 3.0 release continues to keep Apple ahead in lining developer pockets with money through increased monetization scenarios. Now the differentiator will come on the media side of the equation.

Google has maintained good relationships with both mainstream and blogger press, but free phones will need to be backed up with the only coin media respects, namely access. Tim O’Reilly released a wrap-up post that quoted several of the keynoters before they actually delivered those remarks. Scoops are scoops, but this takes the concept of live blogging a step further. But that kind of media sequencing is not how Apple turned the press into a subsidiary.

Instead, they did it by capturing the imagination of the bit-stained wretches. As users, we’ve accepted years of incremental development - the long evolution of Windows from a band-aid on top of DOS to NT to something indistinguishable from most of OS/10. Then the browser - from a crippled container firewalled off from Office to an iteratively updated application framework that, with HTML 5, makes Java an irrelevant stub on the desktop and Flash in big trouble on the phone. Today’s free phone is the razor for creating the HTML 5 habit, and video is the nicotine.

Battery life will continue to be the great leveler here, but even that bolsters the free phone as a backup when the iPhone dies, or vice versa. As planes adopt WiFi, I’ll use my MacBook Air as a charging station, and switch between the smaller devices for as much of the communications time as I can lay off. Streaming video servers will become the gas stations of the near future, parking enough bits to finesse the look-ahead of new video as it hits the network, perhaps caching your favorite sites or follows based on your and your affinity cloud’s behavior.

Though much is made of open versus closed in the messaging around these technologies, in fact these are all very savvy serious commercial players. All is not exactly as it seems. Google challenges Apple, but releases advanced versions of Gmail on the iPhone to build demand for that type of app as it proliferates across the other platforms. Chrome is the overt browser play, but Firefox is the stalking horse through which Google seeds the broader market. Microsoft may seem to be the odd man out, but there is ample room for Redmond to adopt enough of the HTML 5 characteristics as to make staying with Windows Mobile attractive to the larger audience. Again, Java… look out. Nokia too.

I was hoping to get down to the 140 Twitter conference today in Mountain View, but FriendFeed proved too efficient at carving up today’s developments in realtime. Robert Scoble’s live microblogging suggests Twitter is feeling the heat from Facebook and FriendFeed, but the Track report was murky, with no chance of rain anytime soon.

Track is coming back, but not from Twitter anytime soon. It’s coming from FriendFeed, and it’s coming in weeks not months. Track is realtime search of the present, not the past, and FriendFeed has most of the ingredients already in place. You can monitor the flow of various users (essentially the Group function Twitter has been talking about and various clients have been providing) in a realtime flow. A new AIR-based notification service acts in concert with the main flow, allowing you to monitor incoming while moving back in time to catch up.

FriendFeed’s realtime search already provides immediate filtering around keywords, but because it’s not yet realtime in display it doesn’t allow conversations to spring up between people outside of existing conversation threads. Once the conversation is engaged, the interface updates immediately in context, enabling the kinds of swarms that have grown around Gillmor Gang recording sessions. But finding these swarms requires an overt search or the serendipity of a Tweet. As I said, a realtime stream of such a search will be available within weeks.

The next step is to enable users to effectively splice Track streams in with the main flow, or specific groups, or even multiple filters. That will come soon but not at the same time, though the two technologies are apparently proceeding on parallel tracks, pardon the expression. While some services have already delivered something similar to this, they are leveraging the Twitter search functionality along with its much larger cloud, attendant scaling issues, varying business relationships, and rate limiting. FriendFeed Track is a superset of those Twitter subservices, failing as other services do when Twitter stumbles but offering a constant realtime conversation regardless.

Track solves several problems in this hybrid world of cross-cloud communications, making it irrelevant what version of @reply functionality is in place by tracking usernames as a replacement for following mass numbers of people. FriendFeed conversations encourage discovery of new participants by including anyone regardless of subscription status, and Tracking lets you discover conversations of interest outside of your existing threads. Stream splicing closes the loop by interleaving both kinds of discovery, most likely with some form of visual cue to indicate what the context is.

Blending streams and Track also provides some aid to the problem of disconnected FriendFeed conversations, first by alerting you to the existence of those threads by Track and then by encouraging the participants to consolidate around one or several. It’s conceivable that a Track filter with several thread IDs would make it seem like one conversation regardless of the originating streams, and that kind of view will grow popular and perhaps encourage FriendFeed to create intelligent filtering features attuned to the popularity for such mults.

As Twitter’s leaders have suggested, the service’s rapid growth is a double-edged sword. It may be that the company has been able to regroup by crippling features that don’t work at Oprah scale, but it’s another story to revamp the architecture sufficient to match what FriendFeed can do with Track plus splicing, or other capabilities such as a more granular Like at the comment level. It’s comparable to Microsoft’s dilemma with Windows, where moving its huge installed base into the future that’s been carved out by OS/10 is gated by the size and downlevel constraints of its target machines and peripherals.

It would be a mistake to underestimate Twitter’s team and find comfort in their difficulties with transparency and developer trust. The company clearly understands where nimble competitors such as FriendFeed and well-funded engines such as Facebook and Google are ahead in flexibility and resources respectively. Like Twitter, these companies are not in the market for acquisition. Each company’s customers may overlap, but in important ways they have specific strengths that protect them from each other. And together, they appear less vulnerable to a Microsoft counterattack or one or the other pulling out of the pack.

With these forces in counterbalance, FriendFeed remains in a very powerful position to define the leading edge of the realtime platform. Whether this will result in the kind of hyper-growth of the others is up in the air, but what is not is the effect FriendFeed’s success has and will have on its competitors. By offering a better, more efficient experience for power users, Twitter is encouraged to keep itself open enough to keep its third parties from leaving. If they were to start drifting, it would accelerate Facebook’s investment in a similar open platform as well as provide Google more time to rework RSS properties like Google Reader, Feedburner, and YouTube as stream-ready.

By next week we’ll know where Apple is going with the iPhone platform, with pressure from the G1 and the Pre potentially forcing the 3G hole open a bit more. Already, it’s easier to stream video to the phone in lieu of syncing via enclosures. Perhaps Apple will expand iTunes to accept Twitter urls as direct links to stream content, keeping control of the pipeline for its installed base while going realtime with a behavioral contract with users. Amazon may do the same with the Kindle. Microsoft stands ready with Silverlight and its IIS Media Services on top of Azure.

In the weeks since I published my Ode to RSS, I’ve seen a rapid shift in understanding about the nature and speed of this transition. Even if we factor out the disagreements over the degree of the upheaval, we’re still looking at a wave of innovation and public engagement unlike anything we’ve seen in years. As I type these words, an Evan Williams snapshot of backstage at the D conference flashes on my screen, followed by Dan Farber’s quote about Rupert Murdoch calling a “huge turning point for media and the world” followed by Dave Winer saying that “In the end, whether Ev, Biz, Jack, Bijan and Fred like it or not, Twitter is going to belong to the people, not the celebs.”

And yet, here I am on this newfangled CB radio of the future, watching and interacting with the stream as it plays out on the elegance of the MacBook Air. The littlest player and the biggest, the In crowd and the outliers, the old and the new, all acting in a collaboration that rewards us with a box seat in the Big Show that is the realtime moment.

While we continue to debate the Death of RSS, another more interesting battle is taking place inside the walls of some important companies about the shape of the new realtime network. Though Google has seemed to capture the imagination of the Valley and the respect of Microsoft, it is Redmond where the impact of realtime is most sharply felt.

Google’s 20 percent project has finally reached official mainstream status: Google Apps, Gmail/Chat/Reader, and its attendant Open Social constructs are sufficiently mature to garner structural attention within the search giant. Loss leaders including Android/Chrome and YouTube are about to pivot from bottomless pits to viral attention farms. YouTube in particular is poised to capture the lion’s share of realtime video as it becomes the hard drive for the Twitter DVR.

How a virtualized media network transforms our usage patterns is already understood by the networks and their more aggressive forward scouts such as the New York Times. Many see this period as the death of the newspaper, but watching how the Times and Murdoch’s Journal are crushing the second tier of almost-but-not-quite national publications suggests the papers are girding for battle not with each other but with the cable networks. It may look like a collapse, but who better to compete with for the attention of news-hungry desktop and mobile users.

These are the same users who’ve been fleeing RSS for Twitter in recent weeks as the message bus gets clogged with old-media marketing crud and Brittany trivia. Users still want their gossip and such, but they want it prioritized behind any significant realtime information that can help them save/keep/find revenue and outlast Depression 2.0. It’s not that RSS has suddenly stopped working; it’s just that realtime is faster, and it increasingly is using custom transports that are more socially attuned. The results of an affinity cloud increasingly trump other notification engines.

With high priority signals clamoring for position at the center of the desk/phone top, those networks with pole position will push out the rest. If it’s video, it’s YouTube. For that matter, if it’s audio, it’s YouTube. Podcasts? Sorry. Streaming notified over the realtime bus. H.264 across the iPhone and Silverlight. The rest will follow. Notice for the first time I include a Microsoft pole position. Google builds the standard, Microsoft ratifies it.

Microsoft must move quickly in this environment to align with winners in the message bus prioritization queue. I’m not talking here about Silverlight v. Flash adoption; that’s marketing blocking and tackling while waiting for the viral events that fuel the rollout, what John Borthwick calls bursts and what Ray Ozzie discovered in the swarm accelerator he called Groove. We don’t know what those swarm events will be, but we know what they look like when they materialize. And those technologies that accelerate swarms will also proliferate, and in the process overwhelm and dominate the attention of developers, innovators, entrepreneurs, money, and the media.

Swarm technologies thrive on the extended efficiency of social properties. Take links, for example. Swarm technologies depend on speed and economy of gestures, or actions. If I have to choose between a static link that appears embedded in a document and a dynamic link emanating from a tweet, I’ll choose the combined authority of the original author plus the tweeter (who I’ve followed or tracked). Likes or retweets accelerate the swarm further with additive or iterative influence. This is why Twitter’s @reply attack strikes at the heart of idea discovery too. A link to someone not followed from cross-talk with someone I do follow is a strong signal of potential value. The cross-talk may seem diffused, but users will migrate to tools that let them make the most efficient assessment of value.

If Microsoft wants to engage with realtime prioritization, what assets does it have? Office, for one. If we follow the logic of swarm economics, it’s not a contest between Office Live and Office Dead, but between Office Static and Office Dynamic. Since Office 2010 is already in BitTorrent release, there’s not a lot of time to jump into the stream. Where is the entry point? A quick look at Google will tell an interesting tale:

Email? Gmail didn’t incorporate Google Reader, because RSS is static not in design but in contrast to realtime streams. Instead, they integrated chat over XMPP, which was then bootstrapped by Twitter for 2 way Track until it was withdrawn from circulation. By tracking my user name (stevegillmor without the @ sign) I set up a notification point for anyone to signal that I might be interested in a link, whether to a post or a person). These dynamic links quickly stole my attention because they were weighted with social gravity, not to mention the rest of the context and metadata embedded in the message.

I won’t examine the rest of Google’s Office because we already have the answer in the preceding sentence. The stream of social gravity, layered with context (the message) and (perhaps encrypted) metadata via the URL shortener gateway, becomes the rich center of the desktop and beyond. Google’s recent experiments with context switching and synchronization between desktop and mobile device can be seen as dynamic link conversion at their core. A search for a restaurant before leaving home is wrapped as clickable phone number or on-deman map while fumbling at a traffic light.

Microsoft has some significant skin in this dynamic on-demand link game, what with Mesh now a part of the Windows/Windows Live core. Silverlight is the wild card here, politically charged with its implications for a cross-platform Office. It’s also the likeliest host for a dynamic link hub utilizing Mesh’s social constructs and Azure’s scalable back end. On the media side, Microsoft competes with Apple and Amazon with the Kindle platform for the deep but frightened pockets of the record, movie, book, and magazine businesses. Look for those industries to collapse into one, starting with newspapers and magazines blurring into dynamic books. Imagine a FriendFeed realtime chat appearing inside a manuscript as it reacts to realtime events.

A quick check of the calendar reveals how quickly this will happen. Windows 7, Azure, and a mindshare edition of Office will ship by November. Track will reappear first on FriendFeed, then Facebook, and probably simultaneously in Twitter. Microclients will unpack dynamic links and present them for consumption and contribution, updating those dynamic links with contextual social gestures that will hit the prioritization engines and synthesize swarms. It’s gonna be a hot summer.

Yesterday’s rollback of Twitter @replies and subsequent shift to technical explanations has predictably riled the Statusphere. But beneath the frustration and pushback is the suspicion that neither celebrity spamming nor scaling problems are at the root of the changes. Regardless of the outcome, Twitter is risking more than might seem apparent based on user and third party developer complaints.

As Twitter becomes more fundamental to the realtime revolution, the company is being forced to act like the common carrier utility it has inherited. Even though Twitter has lobotomized many of its realtime features, other services such as FriendFeed have picked up the ball and kept Twitter realtime operational for all intents and purposes. Twitter’s gating of the firehouse (whether due to instability or business concerns) has only served to encourage FriendFeed users to route around latency by using the native realtime swarms that are now commonplace with the redesign.

The @reply changes also underline the more powerful FriendFeed analogs such as Like that, combined with the bridging tools to Twitter, produce threaded conversations complete with pointers back to the source with a single click. This kind of overloaded metadata outside the 140 character window illustrates the direction Twitter is having trouble moving to even as it tweaks its static interface by abandoning user options. The underlying risk: training users to exploit other tools during “outages” that are being marketed over Twitter in the realtime they can’t manage.

Google’s search announcements suggest a go-slow approach to realtime that may offer Twitter some breathing room. But the intersection between Google’s support for microformats and the open stack work on activity streams may produce rapid consolidation around a more unified micromessage stream ripe for Track and filtering. From the outsider’s (everybody) perspective, what Twitter does or does not do with @reply visibility will be meaningless except as a form of feature limiting inside the Twitter cloud.

It’s possible Twitter is trying to control cross-cloud communications by tying @replies to bi-directional following in a Facebook-like blockade that can then be extended to outside services under cover of celebrity spam. But if that were at the core of this, the pressure to deliver Track would only increase as a way of filtering the resultant Scoble-like flow. And anyone who tired of waiting would just use FriendFeed as a realtime client like we already are, and simply not care one whit about Twitter’s shifting sands. It’s no accident that FriendFeed threads quickly wound through the issue while the hashtag workaround on Twitter made a lot of noise but produced only a single response from Evan Williams and the technical excuse of the next morning.

Indeed, as I write Twitter is down for maintenance, and for those of us who rely on the existence of the realtime network, it makes perfect sense to use FriendFeed links as a way to minimize disruptions by individual nodes. As we build out a failover version of the Statusphere, those services who use aggregation to maintain connections during outages of whatever motive or duration will prosper. That’s what Twitter should recognize as its greatest challenge: the use of the service to amplify its shortcomings.

It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift.

I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.

Of course, my friends use RSS, or they used to. Pretty much every blog has an RSS feed, and aggregators like TechMeme spider RSS feeds as well as the original pages on the sites. I’ve wired up TCIT, the Gillmor Gang feed, and my YouTube feed on my FriendFeed, but that’s FriendFeed using RSS, not me. I believe FriendFeed outputs RSS, but I don’t use it.

RSS changed the way we processed information, by turning search into push and content into people. Before RSS, I patrolled the Web for news. Information didn’t exist until I found it. RSS let me identify people likely to write interesting things, and soon I stopped looking and switched to receiving. In this world, partial feeds were irritating, taking me out of my new pristine think tank and back to the hunt and peck methodology. Once back on the site, the goal was to keep me there, or link to partner sites.

This disconnect drove me away from partial feeds and toward the new owners of the blogosphere — the deep information space of those feeds that respected the reader container. From NetNewsWire on the Mac to Bloglines to Google Reader, I swam in the brisk waters of the RSS river, only returning to the classic Web from links embedded in posts or email newsletters. The fulltexters won, and in the process, sowed the seeds of RSS’s decline.

As fulltexting carved out a large percentage of the value of the day’s news, navigating outside the comfortable walls of RSS required some additional value proposition. Comments were that attractor, and particularly the active threads where the readers could interact with the authors. The result: The Statusphere. And in reaction, the need for social management of the ecosystem.

Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed - whatever they grew from, they morphed into a realtime CMS for the emerging media. Twitter, not RSS, became the early warning system for new content. Facebook, not RSS, became the social Rolodex for events, casual introductions to RSS’ lifeblood, the people behind the feeds. FriendFeed, not RSS, captured the commentsphere. RSS got locked out of its own party.

Today, RSS is a shell of its former self, casually subsumed as the transport for 140+ content into the social stream. There, RSS items are fed into aggregators and husked for their behavioral signals, packaged as Tweets and sold for pennies on the whuffie dollar. The mainstream media, once cowed by the fulltexters, now masquerades as blog sites and competes for shortened URLs alongside the bloggers they deride under their breath.

I thought I’d miss RSS once Twitter took over, remembering how powerful a wave of innovation it triggered. Certainly it’s still here, burned into the circuits of the network, the memes coursing through its veins. But in the age of abundance it fostered, the core value has shifted from inspiration to the inspired, to the people behind the ideas.

The race for realtime is already won. Like the long shot in the Kentucky Derby, realtime has swept past the field as though the rest were sleep-walking. Realtime is the time for artists, for interpreting the stream and sending deeply nuanced signals with humor, music, respect for the dialogue but none for the chattering of the false debates of the cable networks.

This is the world RSS created. Now it needs to gracefully step back, blend into the scenery and find a new home in the rich depth we are looking for amid the noise. Decrying the tumult of realtime is a fool’s errand; it’s like complaining life is short. Instead, as Dylan said:

May your hands always be busy,
May your feet always be swift,
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift.
May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young.

Ever since Leo Laporte enabled a foldback loop on the video feed coming from his TwiT studios, the Gillmor Gang has hit a new sweet spot in the Adventures of Realtime. Prior to the foldback loop, we were still back in the Nightline days of staring blankly into the camera and pretending to see what Ted Koppel’s expression was. Harry Shearer of the Credibility Gap and more recently the Simpsons immortalized these Warholian head shots in a ground-breaking show we co-produced at Caroline’s in the Eighties.

When we started recording the Gang live on Twit.TV, the only way to get a sense of the continuity was to monitor the outbound BitGravity client and its delay of somewhere between 5 and 8 seconds. It’s a lot like spacewalking in slow motion; you see expressions float by that sometimes are the opposite of what you expected.

Of course, this is the same reason why Twitter’s Track feature was so valuable, and also why it was withdrawn and remains unavailable: the conversations you have in realtime have a feedback loop that produces a synthesis of collaborating minds unequaled in today’s virtual reality. Latency is the enemy of closure, the march through countervailing positions to the discovery of new people and ideas that add something to the accumulated context of the information stream.

We all know the problem, manifested earliest in school classrooms where the darting hands of “pick me” reveal the next question as coming from some earlier context far removed from where the subject has moved. Twitter realtime is one way, one to many in each direction. You can point the conversation at a subject domain via hashtags, or at several users with @replies (now @mentions). But hashtags form swarms that are vulnerable to noise, with management issues slowing down realtime to the point where it’s not worth it.

Track, unlike search, requires no management. Hits are pushed to you as alerts, or integrated into realtime flows if that functionality is available. Realtime critics accurately portray constant monitoring as unscalable, but we don’t sit waiting for the phone to ring in order to utilize its realtime technology. The real issue is that anyone can potentially interrupt you with a call, most commonly at dinner or at the moment when you finally negotiate a single show the whole family can watch and are running out of time before the youngest’s bedtime even if you fast forward through all the commercials.

How you control the interrupts is a function of filtering — determining the balance between discovery and ROI. Most solutions today involve topic filtering, but as we move into the age of gestural permissions, it’s people filtering that presents the highest return. Anonymity of content generation destroys the value of conversations, but harnessing the gestures of the anonymous produces much of the value proposition minus the privacy tax imposed by weak social contracts.

In the short time that FriendFeed realtime conversations have been enabled, the relative credibility of aggregated identity has fostered much greater signal to noise. Given that most users use their real names or a common pseudonym to sign onto multiple services, FriendFeed’s aggregation of these feeds encourages the identity owner to take more care overall to avoid polluting a blog feed with random hostile tweets or Likes of material that might offend users of other media.

Best of the Day threads are morphing from Scoble-centric to swarm-centric, as the concentric overlapping circles of realtime comments are expanding the discussions about realtime and in the process expanding the swarm to branch out into using realtime on emerging subject matter. That’s not to say that Scoble is losing traction, but rather that his advanced usage models are now becoming more understood and therefore merged into the mainstream.

Twitter backlash is not having much of an effect on FriendFeed dynamics, nor is the Facebook baiting working all that well either. While critics of Facebook’s opening of its stream to the beginnings of realtime complain that caching limitations prevent the kinds of public streams that Twitter provides, users are really waiting for what feels like one single sign-on across the clouds they are using. That’s what Plaxo’s McCrea and Smarr demonstrated at the Facebook event, and it comes amazingly close to what the enterprise calls a single throat to choke.

That;s why the argument that Facebook can’t provide comparable value to the Twitter public stream is only valid if you accept the notion that that’s what we want. In fact, what we want is the ability to be notified when something of interest has occurred, and then translate that notification into the ability to communicate with the resultant swarm around the affinity group that has similar interests. Does Twitter play in this? Certainly. As a trigger for the conversation, often.

Does Facebook? If it is the identity provider at the head of the chain, yes. Does Facebook slow down the discovery and acquisition of people and ideas? Currently, a little, as when comments replying to comments in the Facebook stream are not available outside (in other words, not released with an Everyone classification). In realtime clients such as Seesmic Desktop. you can see both Twitter and Facebook messages and comments, and respond in kind in what feels like realtime. The limitations: Twitter rate limiting of roundtripping and Track services, and no approved Everyone stream data beyond the 24 hour caching limit.

It appears that Facebook is more concerned with FriendFeed than they are with Twitter. The caching limits make it impossible to aggregate Facebook data on FriendFeed servers past 24 hours. But remember: it’s the user that wants the realtime services, and the user is in one of two modes - monitoring or catching up. Seesmic already provides the first mode. If Facebook stands at the head of the identity chain, it solves the second mode. If you want to go back more than 24 hours in a search, hand the request back off to Facebook and reintegrate it in realtime back into the FriendFeed results.

Here’s where Track wins again. If a message shows up in realtime (i.e. in the caching phase), it’s an opportunity to switch the conversation over to a stream that has no caching limitation. The Track triggers a process where the conversation flow is reversed, through the conversation hub (FriendFeed) and then back out to Twitter and Facebook for completeness. It’s not the Full Monty of realtime, but it’s the high value discovery that captures the lion’s share of the ROI. Inevitably, the message embargo will evaporate, most likely with the Everyone designation freeing those messages from the cache.

Like the old Abbott and Costello routine, slowly but surely, step by step, inch by inch, we are escaping the bounds of latency and having fun in realtime.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting Facebook will open up most if not all of their user-contributed data to developers at a developer event tomorrow. This has been long expected and will likely trigger a wave of third-party integration of Facebook streams with other popular feeds, most notably that of Twitter.

Should players such as Seesmic Desktop and FriendFeed roll out an integrated service, we will be a major step closer to a single stream of realtime events. This in turn will rapidly accelerate a convergence around micromessaging similar to the one around email when it achieved a critical mass following AOL’s opening up of the limited educational and government mail systems to average users.

Already the emotional reaction to the possibility of a swine flu pandemic has pushed Facebook back into the spotlight as people contact their family and friends over the private/public channel. While trying to track down a friend I missed chatting with this weekend at a live performance, someone used Facebook chat to ask what I thought about a Flu Emergency preparation list he’d compiled. Events were moving so fast that he published it before I could respond, but the tools will prove superior to Twitter direct messages, which have been intermittent in recent days according to some reports.

While Twitter has tremendous advantages for newbies, the depth of Facebook and FriendFeed is more and more valuable as we rely on these networks for fail-over instant communications. FriendFeed’s realtime direct messages will likely be duplicated in short order by Facebook, and the opportunity for meshing Facebook and Twitter together will prove irresistible to the hot Twitter client market, what with Tweetie for the Mac synchronizing with its leading iPhone app.

The debate on the network is between Dave WIner, who sees a thousand Twitters, and Jason Calacanis who says Twitter is dialtone. Tomorrow’s announcement suggests something between those two views, with a single aggregated feed managed by two or more of the players in a distributed cross-licensing model. Twitter will continue to own the celebrity growth, but those who look to harness this realtime platform for business and personal networking will quickly adopt the more powerful tools now available at FriendFeed and coming online from Facebook and perhaps Google.

It was flying CEOs all over the stage at VMware’s vSphere rollout Tuesday in Palo Alto. Though the first thing you see these days as you enter is the Cloud word emblazoned on the gateway sign, today’s event was more like “We’re all about the stuff that will make up the cloud real soon now.”

That’s not to say that VMware’s massive upgrade of its virtualization technologies is trivial or unimportant to keeping VMware ahead of Microsoft’s freeware attack. It’s just that calling it a Cloud OS or the foundation of a “private cloud” is the reason so many tech leaders danced on and off the stage.

The first to accept a glad hand from VMware boss Paul Maritz was Cisco counterpart John Chambers, followed closely by Intel SVP Pat Gelsinger, Michael Dell, and EMC CEO and VMware Chairman Joe Tucci. The message was consistent: virtualization can now handle anything that used to be thrown at Big Iron, from compute cycles to big network switches to storage. The cream of the Valley and server vendors from Dell to HP - well, you get the picture. Virtualization is ready to take on the big boys.

But as Maritz and CTO Stephen Herrod viscerally demonstrated in a series of odd flourishes to the huzzahs of the assembled VMware blue shirted multitudes on the lawn outside, just who the big boys are is in play. One demo used some Men in Black Secret Service poseurs charged with protecting the President’s Blackberry to show how resources could be taken offline without disrupting the flow of messages from Dick Cheney, current staffers, and even the White House dog.

Video showed an Olympic torch-like rushing past cheering blue shirts around the world, with a perhaps unintended message being VMware and its partners are middle relay runners with Big Cloud waiting for the handoff when their strategies mature. And of course there was the elephant in the room, a Sun Fire receiving a handwritten sign with IBM crossed out and Oracle added. For a group of industry captains celebrating a serious leap in the power of virtualization, the parochial atmosphere jarred.

Perhaps it was the toppling of Sun in such swift order that sent a shiver up these tough guys’ spines. Talking after the event with the small companies who will build out these private clouds for customers, the sense was that VMware has extracted the best of what the Valley can offer and provided a rational bridge to the broader cloud future. But just as no questions were allowed at the Oracle/Sun analyst call the day before, a promised media conference with John Chambers was abruptly canceled, and Dell literally ran away from one reporter toward the parking lot.

I like talking about Twitter. I have no problem with Oprah getting hip to Twitter. I have no problem with being left off the Suggested List. I have no problem with Twitter having dropped Track and slowed the micromessaging era until it became totally obvious that Twitter is a transcendent shift in the fabric of the network. All the rest is noise.

That’s because of people like the guys who are building out FriendFeed. There have been many such folks in the history of the network. Some have contributed ideas that routed around proprietary roadblocks. Some have used broad market force to mandate standards that led to impregnable empires built on economies of scale that in turn spawned disruptors of that hegemony. But today requires a combination of all these models, a blend of market power, independence, and crucially, the ability to work with your competitors in ways that allow both to grow.

FriendFeed appears to have the ability to sustain itself to the point where it can achieve its functional goals. Those goals, if its founders are to be believed, are to foster a suite of tools for managing the rich flow of metadata orbiting content objects on the information network. It’s not an open source project, but rather an open goal project. The bootstrap is in creating the synergies necessary to observe the results of realtime conversation and its output.

With the release of FriendFeed’s realtime tools and the imminent addition of Track (realtime search alerting) two weeks ago, the most observable result has been the monitoring of Twitter’s explosive growth in mainstream media. Although many of the former uber-followed tech stars have lost ground in relation to the bloated Hollywood effect of Twitter’s Suggested List and the gaming it incented, the rest of the rank and file have seen steady growth, ranging from one or two a day for newbies to 10 or 20 for more established technologists, journalists, and marketers.

FriendFeed realtime swarms around shows such as TWiT and FFundercats continue to expand, with downloads and streaming users growing aggressively as millions start participating in the Twitter information flow. While we don’t precisely know the pragmatic value or usage patterns of these swarms, we know enough to realize that learning by doing is a hedge against being passed by as the race for traction in the new media markets accelerates.

Although some see this as a battle of entrenched media versus the forces of transparency, the reality is much more nuanced. For one, the notion that gifts of attention should be taxed at some set value is unworkable. Did John Lennon receive unfair wealth because he was the Smart One, and was Paul McCartney disadvantaged because he was in Lennon’s shadow? Did The Beatles become colossal because Brian Epstein put them in suits and sucked up to the Queen? Did the Stones become great by pissing off the Queen? Popular culture has its own rules, its own operating system, its own arc of innovation, consolidation, and glorious decay.

For another, realtime has interesting characteristics that smooth out the hype curve on both ends. If people ignore the pressure of submitting to the realtime feedback loop, they lose authority rather than preserve it. Those that stand and engage in realtime are perceived as more transparent, more relaxed, less conflicted, and less scripted. JFK’s press conferences were the first realtime television events in the political process, and to this day they are electrifying to watch. Watching Dylan in a sea of lighters at Madison Square Garden intoning, “Even the President of the United States must stand naked…”

Once we get past the novelty of the realtime swarms around events, we begin to see the actual flow of realtime in the now, not about an event but the event itself. As the new comment folds in, you begin to see the body politic’s rhythm, the interval between comments, the ones that get picked, the ones that don’t. You begin to see the intelligence of the swarm at work, separating the brand management from the passionate, rewarding the humor with silence to let the gems resonate. The swarms of silence.

It’s not easy to hold your fire, or speak when you’re afraid of not being perfect. The realtime conversation has been attacked as creating an opportunity for thoughtless bravado and chattering of the mind, but more often than not the evidence points in the other direction. Particularly in an identity-focused environment like FriendFeed, the nasty stuff is muted by concern for reputation - hiding and liking are not necessarily weighted in the service’s core algorithms but the cumulative effect is visceral.

For now, FriendFeed has limited tools for sensing presence and aggregating distributed conversations. Ironically, @replies on Twitter are more useful for initiating a communication, though FriendFeed direct messages promise to improve cross-domain visibility. What comes next is the buildout of the rich middle of the realtime experience, where Twitter’s broadcast model breaks down and IM and email prove too siloed.

Track, of course is the foundation of such commerce, a distributed series of freeways where affinity services can be sampled, meshed, and decoupled. This is the intersection of social cloud computing, an elastic virtual town hall where the efficiency of social gestures, their transparency and pragmatism, produce high-value communication. It’s there already for the observing, even with just two weeks of probing. Best of all, the assholes who say this is much ado about nothing are reluctant to venture into the realtime arena. See you on the Funway.

The realtime lashback has been surprisingly tame given the emotional challenges it presents. FriendFeed’s decision to double down on realtime streaming of text has had several primary effects: increased usage, swarming behavior around live events, and pushback from some who fled Twitter to FriendFeed in search of more contemplative dialogue.

What happens when a realtime conversation is possible? We already know the answer: IM. We are gently queried for permission to engage, and with social contract in hand we answer questions, catch up from where we last left off, and negotiate the outline of our next meeting. Attempts at hanging around on either end are met with increased irritation masked by politeness, until finally a rapid-fire l8r kthxbye cya dance wears out any remaining welcome.

But realtime swarms have new dynamics, not readily understood or guided by agreed-upon ground rules. Where IRCs and attached video chats hew to explicit or implicit boundaries, realtime threads need their own rationale for existence to get much beyond the IM formula. For some, a debate is hung off of a blog post or podcast, with representatives of the pro and con perspectives managing the conversation flow. For others, the “post” is a statement of thesis, a challenge to engage. When oldtimers criticize these threads as nothing new, they’re usually right.

Why, then, are so many of us so energized by this frontier? First, we are tired of RSS, tired of the mediocrity of the good-enough flow of half-facts and pseudo insight. Yes, I’m tired of my own bullshit, but only of my inability to adequately describe what’s in front of us. Normally I expect the pragmatic enterprise crowd to laboriously explain why this is all too early, not ready for prime time, not yet taken in by adults and layered into real tools with ROI dripping from the design.

There’s plenty of that being served up. But this time around the consultants are pulling their punches, careful not to get too negative too early for fear Marc Benioff will build some stupid Twitter rationale into his next marketing blitz. Social media is the front end for cloud computing, and in a time of low employment massaging the social graph is an excellent way of foraging in the workforce for talent. Too conservative, IT matters again. Too aggressive, hard to distinguish an analyst from a blogger.

The cloud manifesto gambit exposed, the platform players were forced out of the lab earlier than expected. Google’s AppEngine launched a preview edition of its Java framework, drawing fire from Sun’s open source guru Simon Phipps for forking with an incomplete toolkit. Similarly, Microsoft is retooling its Azure database interfaces to be less of a toy and more in line with its developer expectations, slowing its progress at a critical stage of the on-demand/on-premises pitch.

Lost in these returns to the marketing wars of lore - Don’t mess with the Java Community Process and Beware the XML Industrial Complex - is the new Black of Open v. Closed. Facebook and Salesforce are proving it doesn’t matter what you bring to the Social Cloud, only what you can make of it. Results are all that matters.

Realtime is now a fact, and as such, the capability transcends the politics and religion of the various participants. New data types are being born that encapsulate partisan showboating and wrap the debate in more pragmatic bursts of micro-conversation. It’s a hybrid of email, IM, and blogging, with the goal moving past branding to setting and maintaining policy. Whichever cloud enables rapid prototyping and deployment of these micro-conversations will have significant momentum as the Twitter noise rages on across the media.

FriendFeed may not be simple or viral in the oldmedia (pre-realtime) context, but it has most and will soon have all of the tools to model the new data type. What Robert Scoble calls metadata is indeed more richly aggregated in the service than other clouds, but both Facebook and Twitter are grappling with rapidly escalating infrastructure costs that push them toward broadcast models and away from harvesting the power of small, agile communities.

The realtime feedback loop changes the conversation in important ways, by harnessing a group of minds that can inject themselves immediately and swarm around an idea or a debate and help move it to some hybrid consensus. This quality of evolution and resolution has the additional property of pulling focus from the individual brands to the underlying dynamic that has attracted those voices. The metadata produced in these micro-conversations has a unique signature.

The arguments for and against realtime are valid, but no amount of hockey stick growth by Twitter or carpet bombing by Facebook will change the fact that micro-conversations and their rich metadata are injecting a new and highly charged economic imperative into the online equation. Many see this as a battle for the next search, where instead of topics we hunt people. If it were that simple, Google or Microsoft would cut Ev, Biz, and Jack a check and be done with it.

But that hasn’t happened yet, because a new data type means new metadata we haven’t thought about yet. Perhaps somebody has figured it out and is keeping it to themselves. Or perhaps the FriendFeeders need the help of the very micro-community they’ve empowered with realtime, filtering, and track. Separate from that is whether they can harvest that power and avoid being stripped of their invention, or whether Twitter can stuff the genie back in the bottle.

On Friday the FriendFeed founders Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit debuted a radical redesign of the product for about 15 journalists, technologists, and Robert Scoble. We were asked not to discuss the details until Monday morning at 9AM Pacific. I’ve been playing with the beta for the last few hours and have already come to several conclusions about what this means for the social media community and by extension enterprise computing.

First, the disruption occurring around the realtime universal message bus invented by Twitter has now spread much more widely than commonly anticipated. Twitter’s breakout in the mainstream media hints at the speed with which this technology is moving, as does Dave WIner’s fascination with harnessing Twitter while at the same time questioning the validity of a single commercial company’s dominance of the space.

Some analysts have suggested that Twitter has moved past and consumed RSS at the center of the information machine. As newspapers and other print vehicles appear to collapse, the common concerns expressed about the permanent loss and funding of the fourth estate ignore the rise of a superclass of information creation. What some call the fallow ego-driven spew of the Warholian elites is more likely to be seen in the rear view mirror as something more akin to body painting and ultimately jazz.

Without directly violating the embargo, what FriendFeed 2.0 suggests is the capture of the sense of the moment. Like a Kennedy press conference or the incredible rhythm trills of Lennon on the roof in Get Back, we’re seeing something electric and tangible appearing out of nothing. I dive in and swim in the current, swooping from swirl to eddy, then into direct communication and back to the world I’ve left behind for a moment. It still takes several moves to accomplish a single task, but the handwriting is on the wall and the time is near when we can pick up where we left off months ago.

What’s exhilirating is that the vague assumptions, arrogant exploits, twinkling of an ephemeral joke, they all are being ratified in a swirl of innovation that is dazzling in its ability to masquerade as superficial and childish. How strange it is to see major corporations act like teenagers while jousting for position in the transition. The dynamics of cloud computing have unleashed a paroxysm of hardball for control of the big freakin’ webtone switch, with the phrase’s inventor reportedly facing off against his successor to protect his legacy.

Whether the drama is real or window dressing for a nuts and bolts takeover is not so much the point, just as tweeting was never about what you’re doing for breakfast. What’s more truthful is that moment when someone has that flash of insight and dives through the wormhole to the moment when the like-minded take it for a ride. Like a comedy preview, when the laughs fall in the right places and the audience syncs up with the story and is carried away, so too does this realtime message bus become an irresistible force of nature.

We’re seeing a new Beatles emerging in this new morning of creativity, a series of devices and software constructs that empower us with both the personal meaning of our lives and the intuitive combinations of serendipity and found material and the sturdiness that only rigorous practice brings. The ideas and sculpture, the rendering of this supple brine, we’ll stand in awe of it as it is polished to a sparkling sheen. This is not a beta period, though each element is maturing rapidly. It’s a wave of Sully’s guiding each ship to a safe landing.

This embargo is a gift, letting us feel the raised lettering on the white cover, pouring over the vibrant dissolution of one era and the brisk tart smell of the air as we start the day. What a delicious feeling, the sense of limitless possibilities even as we know everything will end only to begin again. Over and over, we hear the same wondrous realization, that building has this incredible stage where you get something roughed out and then stand back and let it tell you what it might be.

Bill O’Reilly has the last word on Twitter for today. He thinks the Twitterati is crushing talk radio, by sucking up all our listener time. He thinks that’s bad; I hope he’s right and it drives Rush out of business. It won’t drive The View out of business if Barbara Walters has a say; she regularly tries to shut down the Twitversation.

We’re becoming a nation divided along the Twitter faultline, forced to declare which side we’re on. This morning I felt a jolt and reached for my iPhone to check in with my wife on the highway. She immediately asked whether it was on Twitter, and by the time I checked 10 seconds later there was three screens of earthquake tweets. Jeremiah Owyang was on the phone talking to someone in San Jose who felt it five seconds before it reached Jeremiah in the Valley. How long will it be before we’ll see an app tied to the accelerometer that registers each temblor into a realtime grid to track the pattern?

Tonight I read that Twitter has changed replies to mentions, mapping more accurately to the use of the @ sign anywhere in the Tweet. This morning Bit.ly received a $2 million round for its url-shortening/data harvesting service. Not slowly but very surely the 140 character landscape is being carved up and sold off at auction. Tim O’Reilly’s VC arm led the Bit.ly round, yet another marker of the attention economy carved up into discrete chunks.

Now that the VCs have corralled the @ signs and the URLs, what remains? The body of the text, the domain of Track and its wannabes. Glam Media’s Tinker is one such parlay, virtualizing keywords into event clouds and then distributing them via widgets around the Twitter nervous system. TweetDeck gives you yet another column for targeted searches, and who knows what we’ll see soon from FriendFeed and then Facebook.

When Bill and Tim O’Reilly converge, you know we’re at a twitting point, where the metadata orbiting the message stream is more valuable than the initial data itself. The recent Cloud Manifesto brouhaha underlines the tactics and deceptions of the players as significantly more important than the words of the original document. When we understand our metadata, our attention breadcrumbs, our gestures can and are being harvested, syndicated, and metered back to us, will we one more time leave it to the professionals to steal all our money and our childrens’ future?

Something tells us it may be different this time. It’s not that we’re smarter or more willing to do the hard work of paying attention. It’s not going to be easy to harness this out-of-control stage coach as it barrels down the trail on the way out of Dodge. There’s still plenty of anger, about too much Twitter, about our roles as consumers and the apparent lack of a connection to our jobs that pay for our room and board. Are we supposed to save or spend? Read or write? Eat or be eaten?

No, we’re no more clueful than we were a Tweet ago. Nick Carr will still have plenty of opportunity to mine the ineptitude of our crowd sourcing, the pathetic noise of our social mediocrity. But what the pundits don’t know is something we do: the more we are challenged about the value of our intuitive meanderings, the more we know how lucrative they are becoming. Over and over again, these systems are bending to our will, ill-defined, untamed, irrational, whatever.

It’s precisely this kind of civil disobedience that is our real job. On the Gillmor Gang this weekend, we argued about whether Darwinian brute force was appropriate, or whether we should just sit back and leave the driving to others. Is it rude to not believe the patronizing platitudes of IBM as they try and stuff the Manifesto down our throats? How beautiful was it when Amazon said, ever so politely, thanks but no thanks: We’ll just continue to rock around the clock on this cloud thing, and oh by the way, eat our dust.

These Amazon guys ain’t afraid of nobody. Not Microsoft, not Google, certainly not SAP and Sun and Cisco all busy puttying up a nice complexity firewall to slow the kids down. So we ultimately see the real work being those folks - Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Amazon - who aren’t signing. They prefer to keep tweeting, keep connecting, not locking us in to complex derivatives it will take trillions to unravel.

You probably couldn’t find two more different people sharing the same name than the O’Reillys. But they both understand how powerful the Twitting Point is. One is the classic negative gesturer: when Bill buys, I sell. The other is going public as a lead investor while maintaining his role as a publisher and event producer, thereby sending the significant message that transparency can validate complex business relationships without conflicts of interest. Again, the metadata speaks louder than the details of the individual perceptions.

We will still suffer the arrows of the change-phobic for some time. But it was only a few short years ago when the notion that markets are conversations was revolutionary, or that Superman had to use a phonebooth to change the world. Today we each are broadcast networks: Bill O’Reilly said that. The new Marshall McLuhan. Go figure.

Microsoft’s Steven Martin has ironically blown the whistle on an attempt at an “open” coalition that freezes out certain companies. Ironic in that Microsoft and IBM played this game years ago with the WS-I, an industry standards group that pointedly stonewalled Sun Microsystems’ involvement before caving under media pressure.

In a Google Groups post Introducing the Open Cloud Manifesto, Rueven Cohen describes an effort involving “several of the largest technology companies and organizations” to “draw a line in the sand.”

We are still working on the first version of the manifesto which will be
published Monday, March 30th with a goal of being ratified by the greater
cloud community. Given the nature of this document we have attempted to be
as inclusive as possible inviting most of the major names in technology to
participate in the initial draft. The intention of this first draft is to
act as a line in the sand, a starting point for others to get involved.
That being said this manifesto is not specifically targeting any one company
or industry but instead is intended to engage a dialogue on the
opportunities and benefits of fostering an open cloud ideology for everyone.

As inclusive as possible? Not targeted at any one company? Engage in a dialogue? What a load of crap that is. It’s the same back room cigar-smoke-filled scam of the good old days when Web Services first began its inexorable move to reshape computing. More than anything, the attempt to lock out Microsoft seems destined to backfire on those who are running this operation. The best way of pinning the tail on this donkey is to try and get quotes on the record from the possible partners in this effort. Is Google participating? No comment so far. Amazon? Apparently not. IBM? Bob Sutor, what say you?

If cloud computing follows the dynamics of the social media buildout, it’s likely we’ll see an Open Social-like alliance of vendors around an open architecture. Unfortunately for the Microsoft haters, Redmond has built considerable momentum on its own around open fundamentals for Silverlight, Live Mesh, and the incipient Azure Services. The analogy that may serve best is Facebook’s Connect, where the company stumbled earlier, adjusted and optimized, then rolled out changes to its core portal strategy that leverage the social graph API and UI tools while attacking at the heart of the monetization model pioneered by Twitter.

That’s likely what is threatening the Manifesto crowd, the difficulty of locking Microsoft out of an open relationship with users when they themselves demonstrate a disregard for the rules they are in the process of attempting to forge and then shove down Martin’s throat. Even in these early days of cross-cloud standards, the pay as you go fundamental of the Cloud changes this from a religious to a pragmatic discussion: how do we do this and what does it cost?

Microsoft understands it have no choice this time in being open; it also understands that being open in the Cloud is good business. The Manifestos get that too, and are trying to write some rules that Microsoft can’t sign, in secret, and then - do what? Those who favor being closed to being open in furtherance of being open somewhere down the road undercut their credibility.

By shining a light on this, Martin and Microsoft may have ensured that future meetings will be open for all participation. It’s going to be hard for Google or IBM or whoever else thought this was a good idea to stand up and take credit for it. The war over WS-I was long, ugly, and ultimately a loser for those who started it. Have another cigar, Reuven.

Dare Obasanjo writes about Facebook’s news feed redesign and decides it is a big mistake. He’s backed by some 94% of users responding to a Facebook application poll, and cites internal gossip that Mark Zuckerberg thinks user feedback is irrelevant. I think Dare is premature in this assessment.

First of all, Facebook is not copying Twitter; it’s copying FriendFeed, who originally copied Twitter. Where Obasanjo describes two different models - phone book and micromessaging - there already are three, including personalized aggregation or what I will call the micro-portal. Facebook already had part of the last functionality, so its opening of the micromessaging stream consolidates all three legs of the tripod.

In doing so, Facebook is counting on the same relative inertia that Twitter has so carefully cultivated. The calculation is that 175 million people are less likely to move away from something than they are to wait and see what is going to happen. Twitter decided they could stonewall third parties once a critical mass was reached, parrying attempts to build competitive subservices by slowing down API access. Today’s Twitter to FriendFeed delay: a reported 40 minutes.

Why would Facebook users leave? They’d have to have a reason, another better service that provides what they apparently feel is lost by the news stream reworking. Certainly not Twitter, the counter-metaphor that is allegedly causing the trouble. Then who? MySpace? Open Social? Windows Live? Why? The problem with Dare’s thesis is that there’s no motivation to leave something that continues to provide the fundamental service, phone book, The devil you know…

Assuming inertia is not the same thing as discounting the concerns of users. This realtime landrush has captivated millions and encouraged a fundamental shift from blogging and print-based media to a swarming vestigial soup of emotion, information, and complete bullshit that is impossible to ignore. Put simply, what Facebook and Twitter are trying to tame is a wave of innovation with an impact not unlike that the 30 second TV ad triggered.

Before the 30-second spot, companies were known by their names: British Telecom, Federal Express, Kentucky Fried Chicken. Afterwards, the names were literally changed to their contractions: BT, FedEx, KFC. Speed became the brand. The cable news networks turned the news cycle into the news stream. With the DVR, the content became the commercial, with product placement compressing seconds into microsecond glimpses in fast forward.

The microstream behaves according to a set of rules not of its choosing but defined by its users. The twin coordinates of follow and track are the immutables: who do you care about and how can you be signaled. Once you open the channel, you make a decision about flow - a signal to noise algorithm that can only be fine-tuned if the calculation of value is responsive to changing events. Track is dynamic, the magic elixir that converts the normal into the exceptional.

Look around. Everywhere you hear the wail of those beleaguered by the microstream, helpless in the face of having to choose between giving up or being overwhelmed. What would we have given to have anticipated the collapse of the world economy, the few valuable signals that would have gotten us out while the getting was good? The value of information is in its timeliness, wrapped in the context of behavior by those we have learned to trust for their instincts, insights, courage, and humor in the face of the obvious.

Whoever conquers Track will be like those who made music and pictures come out of thin air, coursing over invisible wires and virtual rabbit ears. The big networks emerged out of that soup, and to this day they remain powerful beacons. Now the social media clouds are forming, and they have no choice but to confront and conquer the microstream.

Facebook has no choice but to unleash the flow, and they have the horses to deliver Track in the near term. Once that occurs, Twitter will have to choose to stand pat and wait out the confusion, or deliver a commercial Track of their own. What Dare Obasanjo describes as a fact:

On Twitter, users explicitly decide as part of following someone that they want all of the person’s tweets in their stream. In fact, this is the only feature of the relationship on Twitter.

is more likely a factoid, an assumption of intent based on what the creators of a service decided. In fact, Twitter was a side project of a podcasting service, and Track was a late-night coding experiment that users turned into what is likely the company’s business model.

Following someone for all their tweets is just one part of the equation. Tracking them for interaction signals is also important, as are realtime conversations archived to a common container. We’ve all seen the advantages of a single stream of information, whether it’s email and then IM as Gmail pioneered, or email and IM and micromessages as is being pioneered right now. If you listen carefully to Ev Williams’ comments on Charlie Rose recently, you’ll see he and his team understand this.

Facebook does too, and its decision to carefully unbundle some of its feature set from its walled garden approach should not be underestimated, as I believe Dare does. It’s a matter of numbers, in this case how many will drop off or materially change how they use Facebook in ways that will reduce the service’s momentum. Facebook Connect continues to accelerate in the marketplace, expanding the leverage of the firewalled social graph around the network.

For the advanced user, an open Facebook stream and Track delivers Twitter track for free. What Twitter is now doing to a smaller competitor (FriendFeed) will not play as well with its bigger rival. Imagine what a marketing bonanza for Facebook Pages would occur if contests that depend on realtime entries (like the 30th caller to a radio station) were off limits to Twitter users whose tweets are delayed by 4 minutes, let alone 40.

Obasanjo makes much of the difference between Twitter’s intended stream and Facebook’s accidental one:

The fact that you got a news feed was kind of a side effect of filling out your virtual rolodex but it was cool because you got the highlights of what were going on in the lives of your friends and family. There is a legitimate problem that you weren’t getting the full gist of everything your 120 contacts (average number of Facebook friends) were doing online but it would clearly lead to information overload to get up to the minute updates about the breakfast habits of some guy who sat next to you in middle school.

Information overload. Side Effect. Some guy from middle school. Track solves all these problems, for each and every cloud. Please stand by. We are experiencing technical difficulties, but we’ll be right back

A heavy news week has seen substantive improvements to the iPhone and Silverlight platforms, a Sun buyout rumor, Sun and Cisco weighing in to the Cloud expansion, and continued reverberations from Facebook’s full frontal assault on Twitter and the realtime stream. Any one of these stories would have sufficient legs by itself, but the combined jolts to the system add up to something bigger.

Apple’s iPhone 3.0 software announcements won’t ship until summer, but the implications for developers have already fostered some counter-shots across Apple’s bow from both Google and Microsoft. Steve Ballmer pigeonholes the iPhone as a $500 device with a ceiling of a small section of the worldwide market, with devices in the $200 range a broad Microsoft opportunity, while Android fans laud Google App integration and the lack of developer roadblocks as signs of a coup in progress.

But Apple has an iron grip on its lead in the market and an even surer understanding of what it will take to retain its dominant role in mobile computing. The 3.0 upgrade plugs virtually all the holes in the architecture, with Spotlight search across all apps the last feature that allowed Blackberry users to fight on. We can continue to complain about AppStore embargoes on video and VoIP over 3G, but Push Notification splits the baby for the developer market without capsizing the battery drain of background processing.

Indeed, virtually every iPhone application category shows significant signs of breaking out with the combined feature set. What Apple understands is the symbiotic relationship between media and carrier, with Apple the mediator and market maker. The New York Times app is now close to replacing the print edition from a usability perspective, and the ability to upsell extended features via on-demand subscriptions provides a rationale for the company to give away the store today.

Microsoft’s support for H.264 video in Silverlight 3 goes a long way toward ratifying the codec popularized by YouTube as the base video format of the Web. Much as Apple has locked down the avenues for competitors to make inroads on the heart of the elite mobile market, Microsoft is moving aggressively with Silverlight to establish a cross-OS platform on the desktop. Silverlight 3 is moving so fast there will be only one beta before release perhaps as early as the summer but certainly well in time for the PDC in November where Ballmer promises the Azure cloud will ship.

Scott Guthrie’s Mix ‘09 keynote showed dramatic progress in developer tools for SIlverlight, essentially moving Windows development tools for desktop apps into the Silverlight environment. Silverlight’s new out-of-browser feature further blurs the distinction between a Windows app and a cross-platform (read Mac) app, as does deep linking to automate search engine optimization. Like Apple, Microsoft is using its deep platform control and investment in API tooling to stay open enough provide credible alternatives to open stack strategies.

Sun’s open strategy may not have had an obvious effect on the struggling company’s bottom line, but its R&D investments appears to have attracted IBM in much the same way that Yahoo’s vulnerability encouraged Microsoft to try and acquire that other beleaguered Valley property. Sun’s moves in storage may also have triggered Cisco’s jump into the server market, as both companies try to consolidate their assets quickly under a Cloud umbrella. When Microsoft can deliver what used to be called the Biztalk enterprise message bus as a RESTian Azure service hooked up to AppEngine and Facebook, you can see why Sun may be the first of a series of dominoes falling that may end at Oracle’s doorstep.

Of course, a cloud service bus can carry an activity stream, so Facebook’s Everyone opening of its tweetstream means that Twitter’s “control” of track is soon to be commoditized. Realtime search of the cloud message bus can now be accomplished (during Azure’s CTP phase) for free, and shortly afterward by any of the growing number of cloud players at a price that will likely approach zero as the stream is given away as a come-on for SLAs, security, and geolocation services.

Facebook is deadly serious here, like Apple and Microsoft giving users enough control of the services they need to bootstrap today in return for eventual allegiance to the code bases and tools they use to get there quickly. As Twitter goes from being the arbiter of access to an equal or perhaps weaker partner in monetizing the social cloud, the pressure to be acquired will accelerate.

For Microsoft, who needs a game changer in search, social search in realtime may prove sufficiently attractive at a time when a Twitter-esque service could be slapped into Azure with a minimum of effort. What better way to market the Azure cloud while finding the 15 or 20% search share where Google has no realtime clout? The last time I tried it, it took 10 minutes and then 2 hours for Google to index a Tweet. Why, you could even keep calling it Live Search.

Dave Winer joins a long list of unhappy Twitterers including Leo Laporte, Robert Scoble, and new media stars who’ve not yet translated to the mainstream media hot list. Winer already has earned 20,000 followers the old fashioned way, and mostly he’s not pleased at having that number dwarfed within hours by inclusion of the Twitter favored list.

He, Scoble, and others suggest this awarding of Twitter Whuffie, or Twuffie is in fact a cash gift, one that by extending this logic should be declared on the next tax return. Certainly it’s good for business when 100,000 followers show up. Or is it? Let’s pretend this is a game show, and follow the implications of such a gift.

On a game show, if you win a new car you have several choices. You can drive it away, knowing that you have to pay taxes on the list price. If you have a comparable car already, you can sell that car to pay the taxes, or sell the gift and pocket the difference. Regardless of what you do, the value of the car drops to the actual change in your net worth. And in a down market for cars, the relationship between the list price and the book value (or the even lower market value) may be minimal.

Now to Twuffie. Let’s say that the list price is 100,000 F’s, the original (book price) was 20,000, and the market price is… what? If Winer, Scoble, Laporte, and Calacanis were each declared winners, what would happen to the 50 other people who would want in as a result? Would a silver and bronze award be meted out? If so, how would this affect the book price, which by all logic should remain the same as it was prior to the award?

So we have a previously stable book price and no way to trade that price to establish a market price. You can’t sell Dave Winer’s accumulated experience, political chops, and technologist rank to someone else, nor transfer ScobleRank to anyone else except his new employer, whoever that will turn out to be this weekend at 3PM Pacific on the Gillmor Gang.

In fact, flooding the market with artificial Twuffie does little more than slightly downgrade the value of 100,000 F’s. If you can’t buy into the earlier market, how does the juiced market change anything. To understand why this is not a real market, we have to understand what 100,000 followers means more than 20,000 real ones.

First, followers are not eyeballs except for the first few posts. If we zoom in on one of those 100,000, they have approximately 150-200 maximum people they can handle without Track, which as we know doesn’t exist. In effect, they have a few different quotas they have to manage, one of which is the Twuffie group. If they have 4 groups to juggle - say, Twuffies, Realies, Newsies, and Bizies - that’s about 40 or 50 in each.

We’ll leave the first two for last and start with the Newsies: there aren’t 40 of them, more like 20, and they are verbose. I love the New York TImes, but I don’t read every article or even one in 10, and if it’s a heavy news day the duplicates with competitors like the Journal and CNN start piling up fast. Noisy and bursty. Bizies are similar - like the Newsies but sourced directly from the newsmakers - Microsoft, Google, Apple, the Techmeme flow, the broadcast networks, the Cartel. It’s gossip triangulated for business strategic purposes. Maybe 30 of them, but hard to manage at that flow.

The Realies are the guys that do the real filtering of the first two categories, which is why they’ve built a solid audience based on ROI. You follow them, they produce good to excellent signal to noise ratio, and the Follow size tracks the real market value of the information. Here’s where you make up the difference between the allotment of the first two categories and what you actually use, maybe a surplus of 50 or more. Add that to your 40 or 50 and you’ve got a nice round 100. These guys pick their shots, so it’s less noisy and more valuable than any other group.

Finally, our Twuffies. If they were already Realies, they gain new customers for their proven services. They don’t get noisier, just more are made aware of them. If they are celebrities, they have to learn the business of not spamming and overwhelming the pipeline. If they are Newszies or Bizies, they’re not helped by being on the list because their business is siloed volume and they are pissing on their shoes unless they are really good at what they do on Twitter, in which case they’re already Realies.

The net outcome of the Suggested List is the increased pressure for Track services. Large populations of newbies will be drowning in a marketing swamp with no time or tools to parse the stream. Once the Twuffies stabilize, Newbies will have to find services to separate the wheat from the chaff, and inevitably they will show up at the Realies’ door with hat in hand begging for scraps of triage wisdom.

The Twuffies will soon want to be associated with Realies, preferably ones not on the List, to trade on their Twustworthiness. The Twuffies and the Twusties need each other, the former more than the latter.