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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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And given the time it takes to make chess moves even in this realtime world, we can guess they’re not talking about today but rather about tomorrow. The time between today and tomorrow has compressed, but the cycles it takes to produce hardware and ramp carrier buildout mandate iterative development as the only way to move forward rapidly. One thing building on the last, anticipating the next, maintaining and extending core advantages while opening up newer ones.

The iPad/Android/Silverlight agendas share many elements and surprisingly few differences. Since Ray Ozzie’s Disruption Memo 5 years ago this month, Microsoft has moved from a landlocked desktop company to one poised to launch its most profitable application suite in the Cloud. Silverlight is now the application development environment for most of Microsoft platforms including mobile, TV, and Web.

If you think 5 years is not a very long time, how about 3 years since Apple announced the iPhone. With the release of the iPad, Apple has in effect done something very similar to Silverlight in moving a considerable part of its development architecture to the new iPhone/iPad OS. The arguments about Flash that so captivated us a few weeks ago seem so irrelevant now that site after site caves to H.264. Google’s odd recommitting to Flash in Chrome the browser may be sold as a pragmatic acknowledgment of the existing Flash base, but it’s got more similarity to the Office team swallowing its pride as Silverlight marches forward across the OS Formerly Known as Windows.

Scratch the surface of the weekend’s I Hate the iPad, And So Must You meme and you’re really looking at the remnants of a view of the computing universe that positions open versus closed instead of two approaches busy nurturing each other along. It’s way beyond strange bedfellows, with Microsoft way out front in guarding online privacy and Apple continuing to leverage their investments in Web Kit and other open source technologies (read OS/10), while Google supports Adobe and its proprietary hairball at the very moment media properties are running away from it.

In fact, it’s a lot like the argument over the iPad (Flash, USB, multitasking): right, I’ll take two. Open technologies are used to advance the ball, then intermingled with closed technologies (the entire Google back end) to produce massive wealth and leverage. If you haven’t been listening to Steve Ballmer recently (he doesn’t get headlines for having Starbucks these days) you may not have heard that Microsoft is all in on the Cloud. Office is soon to ship for the Cloud, just as Ozzie insisted would have to happen 5 years ago. Will they destroy Google Apps? Hell, no. But will Windows Phone get share? Just ask Nokia or Palm what they think.

The polemicists insist the iPad is a consumption platform. Sure it is, but does that mean it’s not a creative one? Hell, no. First get out of the way of the stampede of app developers and then make that case. No camera; I got stinking cameras on my iPad Nano as Scoble likes to call it, on my Nexus One, on several Flip cams, on the MacBook Air, on and on. Can I do realtime video conferencing on any phone right now? No, so why is that a limitation of the iPad? It’s coming, as is multitasking and universal bus adapters and everything except Flash which we don’t need.

In fact, every site that supports no Flash is one more advertisement and network effect multiplier for the new platform, a little reward each day or few hours that says: yes, you made the right decision, and no, you’re not going to regret it. Each app download confirms more of the same thing, that how we interact with these machines is in play, and that the only thing worse than the new OS is having to go back to everything we’re already sick of.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the MacBook Air as I sit here typing, but sure as sure can be I’ll be migrating to the keyboard dock the next time I take a trip to Starbucks. Bluetooth will become the virtual hub for creatives, with the corresponding battery drain distributed in a handy accessory. At some point, I’ll start leaving the Air home. It’s easier to invest in the new architecture; it’s a Clunkers for iPads program. iPadCare. I’m all in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Steve Gillmor: So, we’re here with Scott Guthrie, who the last time — well, the first time I saw you was at an offsite with Eric Rudder about 10 years ago.

Scott Guthrie: That was a long time ago.

Steve Gillmor: Yeah, and you were just — I don’t even think that — you were showing the ASP.NET development plug-in, wasn’t even part of Visual Studio at that point, and now you’ve basically taken over everything.

Scott Guthrie: Well, maybe not everything, but –

Steve Gillmor: But, I mean, you know, going from that sort of — I mean, don’t you sometimes think about how — were you aware of what the potential of that particular strategy and that plug-in was at the time?

Scott Guthrie: Well, you know, it’s been fun — I mean, it’s been a fun ride the last couple of years in terms of we’ve seen as .NET’s matured, both on the server but also on the client, and with things like Silverlight, and then seeing Visual Studio really evolve the way it has. You know, where we’re at today with VS 2010, .NET 4, Silverlight 4, and ASP.NET compared to where we were 10 years ago, it does seem sometimes like a different world.

You know, the nice thing, there’s a lot of continuity over the last 10 years, and so the same code that worked 10 years ago still works today. To some extent I think we often think of it just sort of how do we fill in the story and how do we kind of continue to open up new opportunities.

I think today, especially with what we showed with the Windows Phone 7, you know, I think we got a lot of people excited about the possibilities that are provided with that, and it’s great that you can use Silverlight and .NET and the same set of skills and the same tools that you already know to target it.

You know, I think we wowed a lot of people that — with not just the, oh, I can use the same APIs for productivity but also the apps we showed I think people, you know, some people commented, you know, I want to reach out and lick them they looked so good. Hopefully that’s a testament to kind of what you can build and get people excited about.

Steve Gillmor: Well, the time, the speed of development is one of the things that you were pointing out. I was particularly impressed, surprisingly so, I must admit, with how Seesmic seemed to be sort of the heart of the demos. In its showing how you can go, Loic [Le Meur] made an investment in the Windows client, and then backwards leveraged it into the Silverlight client, and then opened up three platforms as a result. That’s pretty spectacular I thought.

Scott Guthrie: Yeah, I think what we’re trying to do — I mean, ultimately what we’re trying to do is how do we enable developers to be successful on our platform using our tools, and a lot of the focus we’ve had around Silverlight has been primarily around consumer and then also last year more also in the business space where I think we’ve reached a tipping point where the value for companies being able to build an app and sell it or be able to make money is suddenly very compelling.

And I think both what Loic showed with Seesmic and then I think also the eBay app that was shown, that we’re really excited about, it was a great example of people are choosing it, because, wow, I can build an experience that my customers love, I can hit multiple devices, it runs on the PC and it can run on the Mac, it can run in the phone, and the user experience isn’t kind of a lowest common denominator but it’s kind of a wow experience on all the platforms.

You know, I think you’re going to see more and more developers get excited by that. If ultimately developers can build cool apps and make money off of them, you tend to get them interested.

Steve Gillmor: Yeah. I want to go back just for one more second to the original target. To me it’s ironic that ASP.NET was basically a runtime that came out of extending — I may be oversimplifying it here, but I’m going to try it anyway — that came out of extending the AJAX model, if you will, which was sort of born out of a desire to try and extend Exchange Web Services or Outlook Web Services and that whole timeframe. At some point, you and people at that time who were higher up than you were at the time, you’re pretty high up now, somebody made a decision that this was not just a hack but that this was something that you were going to basically turn the whole OS over to over time.

Scott Guthrie: Well, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, part of what we’ve tried to do with .NET from the beginning was how can you build kind of this runtime that was multiple languages, that allowed you to build all types of apps, server apps, client apps, mobile apps, and be able to get a rich development tool experience around them, and a lot of the original ASP.NET predated kind of AJAX, but a lot of our kind of focus –

Steve Gillmor: But it came out of that same sort of point in time where this was almost pre .NET as a matter of fact, wasn’t it?

Scott Guthrie: Well, ASP itself shipped with .NET for the first time, but we’ve kind of — we certainly have been focused on how do you build great apps, and we’ve tried to be very scenario focused both on the server with ASP.NET and obviously on the client as well, and tried to really work with customers and partners to figure out kind of, okay, what are the unique opportunities, what are the things that you’d find really compelling.

The great thing about an event like MIX is the fact that you get a chance not just to present to people, but more importantly get feedback, and walk the halls –

Steve Gillmor: What’s the feedback been?

Scott Guthrie: As far as today it’s been great.

Steve Gillmor: But specifically. I mean, what are the things that are interesting to you about the feedback that you’ve gotten so far?

Scott Guthrie: I think — I think the thing that’s been probably the most gratifying to hear this week so far has been just the number of people that have moved from an evaluation phase to an actual I’m using it phase. So, it always amazes me when I talk to often enterprise customers, and really before Silverlight 4 we didn’t target enterprise business apps as our primary audience, and it’s amazing to hear a large company that sometimes might be conservative in their technology things say, oh, we’ve moved way past evaluating, we’re actually –

Steve Gillmor: But the trusted aspect of the new –

Scott Guthrie: Yeah, the out of browser capabilities, and the ability to kind of reach outside the sandbox, we’re just starting to see a lot of companies start to adopt that. They like the fact that it’s easy to deploy, they like the capabilities, and it’s great having people come up to me during the event and say, hey, I want to show you a demo of something I built, and this is not just sort of like a little simple thing, these are big apps that people have built.

And I think Loic onstage with Seesmic, that’s not just a client for listening to Twitter or Facebook. You know, he’s built a whole ecosystem around that.

And likewise I think the eBay app that’s going to go live shortly is a great example of a really rich app that is going to be touched by millions of people.

So, that’s the thing that’s most gratifying here, and I think it’s still early, it’s only been a couple hours since the keynote, but I think the feedback on the phone work that we showed has been phenomenal.

Steve Gillmor: Let’s pin down a couple things. I detected a slight messaging, the lack of some words around the phone implementation. Is that Silverlight 4?

Scott Guthrie: That’s a good question. No, it is Silverlight. So, it isn’t Silverlight light or Silverlight something else. It is Silverlight.

Steve Gillmor: Right, well, you said that onstage.

Scott Guthrie: Yeah, right now the bits that we ship today have all the features of Silverlight 3, and about half the features of Silverlight 4 are already in it. So, once Silverlight 4 ships, we’ll then go ahead and obviously put the rest of the features in.

Steve Gillmor: So, you mean in a month we’ll see an upgrade to –

Scott Guthrie: It probably won’t be in a month but it won’t be too far off.

Steve Gillmor: But you’re not really committing to when the phone is going to be shipping anyway, right?

Scott Guthrie: We’re not right now committing to when the phone ships, but certainly with each update of the phone it will have the most recent version of Silverlight.

Steve Gillmor: And is Silverlight used in the marketplace?

Scott Guthrie: The marketplace app, I’m not actually sure if it uses Silverlight or not. You can certainly put Silverlight apps as opposed to XNA apps in the marketplace. In fact, it’s the only type of app you can put in the marketplace.

In terms of the video we showed, I don’t know exactly what the marketplace team used to build that, but they might have used Silverlight. I’m not 100 percent sure.

Certainly some of the applets that are included are built with Silverlight, and pretty much all of the — every app that we showed today in the keynote, with the exception of the games, was all Silverlight. So, the Netflix app, the Associated Press app, the diary app, Four Square, Seesmic, Shazam, Major League Soccer, the cannon demo and the Marionette app, those were all built in Silverlight.

Steve Gillmor: So, why is there this sort of fork between XNA and Silverlight? What’s that about?

Scott Guthrie: I wouldn’t have said it — I wouldn’t say it’s a fork. You can use the same language. XNA is built on .NET. So, you can use C#, you’d be able to use VB for both of them.

Kind of the UI mechanics of a game, in particular kind of a high performance 3D game, are typically different than what an application has. It’s much more about being able to create composite assets and be able to kind of quickly draw them to the screen. You will see the ability to have apps that use both Silverlight and XNA UI within them in the not-too-distant future.

But, yeah, there’s a huge ecosystem built up around XNA, and likewise around Silverlight, and so we want to make sure both work great. We typically think it’s a fairly straightforward decision as to whether you use one or the other. If you’re building an app, it’s Silverlight. If it’s a casual game, then, yeah, you could write it in either Silverlight or XNA.

Steve Gillmor: Can you load one into the other?

Scott Guthrie: Not with today’s build, but that is something that we’ll enable in the near future. And so you could have some UI built with Silverlight and some with XNA.

Steve Gillmor: So, for the free apps, development apps that you’re releasing today, that Expression and Visual Studio, you can build in one and then move it to the other project, right?

Scott Guthrie: Yeah. So, we announced today that we’re shipping Visual Studio 2010 for Windows Phone development Express for free, and then also the Expression Blend for phone also for free. And that’s not just for today but free forever.

And what’s nice about them is one is more focused on developers, one is more focused on both designers and what we call interactive developers. They share the same project system. So, if you create a project in one, you can open the other and vice versa, and you can actually have both tools open and working in the same –

Steve Gillmor: And they’ll stay synched?

Scott Guthrie: Yeah. Yep.

Steve Gillmor: And they don’t go out of synch in one direction?

Scott Guthrie: No. You can even have them both in the same source control project, and you can even have them both literally opening the same project at the same time, and just flip between them. So, they’ve really been designed to kind of work well together.

Yeah, the nice thing is I think people, basically the reactions of the audience were pretty pumped up after seeing my coding demo and then John’s blend demo, and I think maybe we got credibility immediately after that of like, okay, these are the richest mobile development tools out there, and then be able to announce, oh, by the way, we’re making them free, I think took a lot of people by surprise.

Steve Gillmor: All right, so that’s a good lead into this line of questioning. And you may consult your attorney if you’d like.

I don’t know if it was actually shown, but I was shown the night before the demo at PDC, I think Brian Goldfarb showed me the ability to be able to create something using the IIS Media Server. This was the new build of it, or at least it was new at the time, and be able to click a checkbox and be able to send it to the iPhone.

It seems to me, based on the fact that you’ve released these incredible powerful tools, that you have an opportunity to get at the head of the development chain for applications that not only will run on the Windows phone system, but also on the iPhone. There’s a fair amount of black helicopter strategy that would have to be discussed in order to figure out how you would get the UI to come over, not just the ability to be able to push video. But in general, I mean, you showed Netflix, you showed applications that export video. Does it seem interesting to you to do something — the analogy would be what Adobe has done in announcing — I don’t know if they’ve actually shipped anything, but announcing basically a recompiler or a converter for creating Flash apps and then moving them over to the iPhone. Of course, they have to because Apple won’t put their runtime — as far as I know, they won’t put your runtime on it either on the iPhone. Is that true, number one?

Scott Guthrie: Well, yeah, there’s a couple different aspects. I mean, one is that we showed it at the PDC last November, and that we’ll ship later this year is the ability for our streaming server to basically stream in a format that the iPhone natively consumes. So, that means you can build a Web page with a video tag on the iPhone, point it at a URL on our server, and we can automatically — it’s called (trans-moxing ?) our Smooth Streaming video format to the one that plays in the Apple player. So, you can get a very seamless video player right in your Web page. And if you go to www.iis.net/iphone with your iPhone today you can try it out and actually see it working.

And what’s nice about that is it doesn’t require any custom software to be installed on the iPhone, it just works out of the box.

Steve Gillmor: It leverages the H.264 codec.

Scott Guthrie: Yeah, both the H.264 codec and then also the built-in streaming support that Apple supports.

And so, yes, you will definitely see us continue to ship that, and that means that you can encode your streams once, play them on a Mac, a PC, using Silverlight on the desktop, you can play it on an iPhone, and obviously, like we showed in the keynote today, you can play it on a Windows Phone 7 device.

We also today shipped Silverlight for Symbian, which is for Nokia-based devices, and so you can also stream that to Nokia phones.

Steve Gillmor: Well, I find that less interesting than other possible ports like Android.

Scott Guthrie: Well, it’s nice to ship bits. Those bits are available for download now, so you can use them.

In terms of say iPhone specific –

Steve Gillmor: In terms of like a UI recompiler.

Scott Guthrie: I think it’s still a little early in the mobile space. I think one of the things that would be interesting to see, and I think we showed this a lot today, and I think Apple has shown it successfully in the past, is, you know, especially for a consumer device having a UI that performs consistently with a consistent set of metaphors is important. And I think Joe really demonstrated that in his talks and in the apps that we showed where they look the same, they feel the same, and specifically with something like Windows Phone 7 there’s just a notion of motion and fluidity that if you look at other phones, you even look at previous versions of Windows Phones in particular, but you look at Android, you look at other devices, they don’t work that way.

Likewise I think the iPhone has been very successful in terms of having a common set of controls and metaphors to program against. We’ll have to see whether or not if you have an app that looks different than the rest of that, you can certainly port it, but it would be interesting to see kind of what consumers think about that. Forget app stores and things like that, but just sort of if it feels out of place, do people care about it?

There is a way today on the iPhone to use it in a product called Mono Touch that Novell builds, where you can use .NET for all your logic, and then they support the ability to have — to use the standard Apple controls and the standard interface –

Steve Gillmor: Right, which is Miguel [de Icaza]‘s project.

Scott Guthrie: Yeah, Miguel’s project.

And so we’ve seen a lot of customers be very successful with that. And so certainly with the announcements we’ve made today you could absolutely reuse the same logic of your app in the iPhone and Windows Mobile Phone 7, and have them different skinned.

Right now we don’t have any plans or anything to announce in terms of Silverlight running on that particular device. Instead we’re spending all of our time really focusing — not all of it but really focusing hard on how do we enable you to build these kind of next generation Windows Phone apps that really take advantage of a lot of the new interface and the hardware acceleration that we showed off. If other people, you know, like Miguel’s project, want to be able to enable that kind of portability, that’s great.

Steve Gillmor: But there wouldn’t be any kind of plug-in into Visual Studio, which would allow you to take advantage of all the work that you’ve done in terms of a Silverlight development environment?

Scott Guthrie: Well, we certainly have our plug-in that works for both Windows Phone 7 and Nokia devices. We don’t right now have any plug-ins or plans that we’ve announced in terms of others, but certainly Visual Studio itself is very pluggable, so anyone could build that plug-in. But right now in terms of what we’re shipping this week, it’s focused pretty much on Windows Phone 7.

Steve Gillmor: Forgive me if I’ve misremembered this, but isn’t there an Eclipse plug-in as well?

Scott Guthrie: Yeah, there’s a full Eclipse tooling support for Silverlight that another company has done, and it’s free. And I think it works both on the PC and the Mac, and so you get standard — I think it’s a design surface, Intellisense and debugging support, all with the Silverlight.

So, yeah, certainly we’re not making any statement around you need to exclusively use VS –

Steve Gillmor: But why not, since it’s free and extremely powerful?

Scott Guthrie: Yeah, I’d love everyone to say I just want to use VS but –

Steve Gillmor: But it doesn’t run on the Mac, right? That’s only a Windows –

Scott Guthrie: Correct, yeah. I mean, Visual Studio today or Visual Studio only works on Windows.

Steve Gillmor: Any plans for Visual Studio built on Silverlight?

Scott Guthrie: No. No, not right now. The new VS 2010 is built on WPF, which is sort of Silverlight’s big brother, so to speak, and shares the same programming model as Silverlight. And I think we’re getting really great feedback now on the VS 2010 RC, be shipping that next month. And so that’s allowed us to do a lot more within the IDE. We don’t have any plans to rebuild VS on top of Silverlight. You know, we’re pretty happy with the version we have that works on WPF.

The nice thing is because the code between Silverlight and WPF is highly portable, we are able to move features around that way, but in terms of what VS 2010 supports, it’s a pretty rich app that really takes full advantage of WPF.

Steve Gillmor: Well, at the PDC we had a lunch with Ray and Bob in which someone asked the question about why don’t you rename WPF, and Ray sort of under his breath said, sure, just call it Silverlight. And Bob looked at him like, you know, this might be a little soon for that was the kind of expression. But I think that it speaks to how far — you call WPF the big brother, but increasingly it’s difficult to tell where one leaves off and the other begins, and what you really have with Silverlight increasingly is a Web operating system.

Scott Guthrie: It’s certainly our — you know, when we first announced Silverlight, kind of the positioning of it and then also just the technical details of it, we’ve kind of wanted to make sure it wasn’t different than WPF, it was going to be a subset of WPF, but we wanted to make sure it wasn’t a different subset. And each release of both WPF and Silverlight, you know, any new feature we added into Silverlight we made sure was in WPF, and likewise the new features we added in WPF we brought into Silverlight.

So, you have definitely seen these kind of technically converge, which is a good thing, and –

Steve Gillmor: And when you add the phone into the mix, and when you bring those two up, the phone and the Windows and Mac Silverlight versions up to the same code base — not the same code, but effectively Silverlight 4, as you said, will happen shortly, that’s going to tend to again start to minimize the differences between and OS that’s designed for the desktop and the much broader audience that’s now emerging.

Scott Guthrie: Yeah, and I think Loic kind of really — what he’s doing with Seesmic is just a great example of that where at the end of the day it really is for developers the two things that get them excited are — well, three things — one, can I build it, build a really exciting app that’s cool. Two, can I make money from that app, whether it’s advertising, whether it’s subscription, whether it’s purchasing. And three, how easy or painful is it to build those?

I think Seesmic is a great example of they’re able to build incredibly cool apps really, really fast, reuse the code across multiple devices, and ultimately are going to be able to monetize that really well.

So, I think there’s going to be a lot more success stories like Seesmic that we’re going to be able to point to in the months and years ahead. You know what’s great about attending MIX is you start to hear about these stories, you know, some big, some small, and it’s fun to see.

Steve Gillmor: All right, so last question. If you had some time with Steve, and I’m sure you do from time to time, Steve Ballmer, what would you say to them about what’s gone right here, and how that might affect decisions made in the future, like, for example, moving toward a version of Office on Silverlight, et cetera?

Scott Guthrie: Well, I think the things that we showed today, you know, I think the thing that when you step back and look at today, I think what we showed in the keynote, you know, I think we showed to some extent two or three things that were kind of profound. One was just how kind of how you can marshal a bunch of resources from around the company to really build something that is greater than the sum of the parts in the sense of we showed off Zune integration, we showed off Silverlight integration with dev tools targeting our phone platform, we showed off Xbox integration so that the games could integrate with Xbox avatars and gamer tags and achievement points, we showed off Outlook and e-mail access and calendaring access with a whole bunch of cool features on the phone. This is all about the phone.

And just you go down the litany of the number of scenarios that I think were unique that we were able to kind of connect in a way that consumers really like, and the number of kind of divisions and different groups that we were able to kind of collaborate on to build this kind of experience, and I think that is a — it might look easy sometimes but getting that many teams all aligned around a common vision and something that consumers really love, you know, I think is a great testament.

I think the other thing that I’d say that I feel like went really well was just people were excited. You know, the number of people who told me I want that phone, you know, is pretty cool, and I think the work that the Windows Phone team has done over the last year, some of the work that my team has helped with in terms of Silverlight and the tooling from it, you know, it’s kind of fun to feel like we’re really pushing the envelope in terms of not just what we’ve done in the past but more importantly from the phone industry in general.

And there’s still a lot more work to do. I definitely would not call it done. But it’s exciting to be able to ship the tools today and put them in hopefully millions of developers’ hands and see what they build with it, because I think there’s a lot of power there, there’s a lot of interconnected scenarios that provide huge opportunities for developers everywhere to light up, and I think consumers are going to love it.

Steve Gillmor: But you didn’t answer my question about Silverlight Office.

Scott Guthrie: Well, the new version of Office, 14 –

Steve Gillmor: It uses it a little bit.

Scott Guthrie: Yeah, it does use Silverlight, yeah.

Steve Gillmor: Do you think that it would be good to say to Steve, you know, we need to be more aggressive with this?

Scott Guthrie: Well, you know, in general I’d say I think the most important thing — and again I think the thing that we showed a little bit today is how do you make sure you’re consumer focused and scenario focused, because ultimately the things that get people excited, and frankly the things that sell products are if you can demonstrate value and uniqueness and get people excited. So, you know, I selfishly think, hey, Silverlight lets you do that, and for a variety of cool scenarios.

Steve Gillmor: What would a scenario be around Office?

Scott Guthrie: Well, I mean, I think some of the things that they’ve done with the Office Web companions in terms of light-up. You know, there’s the PowerPoint support or whether it’s the Word editing support. Ultimately my mom or my sister doesn’t really care what it’s implemented in, but the fact that that app is richer than what she might be able to see somewhere else is compelling.

I think likewise today — you know, Joe I think did a good job. We kind of went back and forth in rehearsals of how much does he call out the technology. In his segment he really focused on the user experience. The user experience, the users don’t care what it’s written in, they care that the motion is fluid, the UI is slick, there’s no jerkiness, it’s just smooth, crystal clear, polished.

Steve Gillmor: But the impact, the cumulative impact of seeing how those user experiences can be developed with an intuitive tool, that’s very impressive I would –

Scott Guthrie: Yeah, and certainly the technology does matter, but the thing I think we’ve learned, and we’re going to make sure we stay focused on is, okay, what’s the end user value, what’s the scenario that’s really going to make people go, I want that. To the extent which, you know, you use Silverlight to do that or you use HTML or you use Win32 or you use COBOL, pick whatever technology –

Steve Gillmor: Yeah, I’m going to bet more on the Silverlight than the COBOL.

Scott Guthrie: Yeah, certainly that’s where we’re investing, but –

Steve Gillmor: I want that COBOL phone. (Laughter.)

Scott Guthrie: That will sell well.

But that’s kind of really where we’re focusing on is how do we just nail that scenario, and really get people, the end users excited with it, and I think that was the nice thing about the day’s demos. You know, people more than just knowing like, ooh, Smooth Streaming is enabled on the phone with Silverlight. If you showed Netflix, and you say, oh wow, look, here’s a prototype where I can do instant watch streaming, that’s cool. Oh, I can do Four Square. Okay, I can do that in other platforms, but look, the map is integrated directly within the application, and it’s all seamless and I don’t have to navigate. Or the AP app in terms of gliding through lists of data and seeing the story with photographs in the background and Swivel 3D for the photos. You know, that’s the thing that I think gets people excited, and the fact that it’s really easy to build all those things and that all those apps were built in under three weeks, that’s the thing that will get the developers here excited, but I think it’s important to make sure you keep the consumer first in the center whenever you’re trying to build a client.

Steve Gillmor: Well, you did a nice job of summarizing the keynote today.

Scott Guthrie: I tried, yeah.

Steve Gillmor: Thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it.

Scott Guthrie: Cool. Thanks, Steve.

[Transcript courtesy Waggener Edstrom]

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

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

Silverlight 4 ships next month.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Remember Twitter? Nope, me neither.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jerry Seinfeld’s role inside the HBO show hewed to Curb’s central premise: that the “actors” improvise rather than read scripted lines. The situations are prepared, but not the actual interplay. In so doing, the onus shifts from the writer to the performer. For Larry David, whose persona and comic style is to set up some premise and then toy with his victims the way our cats play with a mole in the bathtub, this produces an expected effect of comic competence but not brilliance.

Comic actors fare reasonably well in this laboratory, especially well when they are playing themselves as do the Seinfeld cast. Comic actors as they are, they find their attitude as “themselves” then riff off of their characters to inform the elements of their essence. Kramer once again rockets through Jerry’s door as if suspended in mid-air, while the others lock in as though ten minutes, not years, have passed. At this point, the experiment is already successful. Now the question: what to do with it?

Slowly the surprising answer emerges with Seinfeld himself, never the most convincing actor as much as the exacting Chief Technology Officer of Comedy. His performance, now as then, on the show within the show is acceptable, a kind of George Burns turn that sets the stage for the action that swirls around him. But then there’s the revelation, as Seinfeld the improviser in the “real” reunion scenes achieves this incredible smile-glint limber comic feel that transcends everything he’s done both on the show and in stand-up. His interrogation of Larry’s endless bullshit is miraculous in its relentless massaging of a revolutionary comic platform.

These scenes, and they emerge subtly over the course of the season’s episodes, are so inspired that they make the job of making the reunion show itself hold up almost trivial. Of course, everything from the sets to the cameos by Newman and the read-through and the sub-plots involving the Curb regulars, it’s all blended together perfectly. But rising above that is Seinfeld with this gleam in his eye as he realizes (in a documentary feature about the filming) that something has been invented that moves ahead rather than just honor the past.

It’s as though The Beatles reformed somehow and it worked, although a good case can be made that Abbey Road was just that. Watching Mick Jagger duet with Bono on a U2 song at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert is another example of this magic, as he transforms a blues balled into something that hangs timeless in midair. Avatar in 3D is yet another gathering of technology and creative force that reaches an unexpected grace in even the simplest moments. So many glimpses beyond the usual in any year are the mark of something fundamental going on.

Despite the noise of those who disparage social media while trying to milk it, the network keeps expanding as if in the aftermath of some Big Bang we are so close to we can’t perceive it directly. Is it really so difficult to recognize how completely realtime devices have altered how we live? The brilliance of Avatar is the underlying message that if we can model how advanced reality will look and feel, we are essentially creating it at that moment. The computing devices used to render those scenes are soon to be reduced to silicon and rendered on hardware directly, thereby making science fiction science fact.

But the thrill of technology in and of itself does not begin to speak to the power of the network. Realtime is just a word to represent the visceral charge we get by seeing the needle dance when we post and someone responds. There’s a joy in collaboration, the moment when something more basic and common to the players infuses the work with a sense of something bigger than ourselves. The nod of oh, you saw that too. The eyes going cold with anger or distant with resignation. The boundaries of friendship torn away to reveal a simple energy where even the tumult is less important than the struggle to retain whatever friendship is or has been.

The idea of the iSlate or whatever the Kindle has unleashed is a good one, perhaps a game-changer for the people who make stuff to read, watch, and listen to. For us as the entertained, it is probably an iterative point along the march to the location-aware router that matches the screen to the environment and the content to the affinity-based priorities of our filters. John Borthwick’s analysis/hunches about the economic factors on the Gillmor Gang is informed with experience, leverage, and an awareness of the ongoing conversation about these issues.

During the show, I usually don’t have time to monitor the chat room, leaving that to scan later. When Mike Arrington switched topics to Avatar, a few grumbles surfaced from those who think movies, politics, or anything but hardcore API talk is a mistake. The question of what the show is or is trying to accomplish has always been difficult to answer, but with the convergence of computer, phone, and tablet now underway, the answer has never been more interesting. Everybody is asking the same question: VCs, app developers, once-relevant leaders of the technology revolution, even Dave Winer. Is this show biz or no biz, it’s getting boiled down to.

Borthwick wears a number of these hats simultaneously, so it’s great fun to ask him the same old questions and see what happens. Is RSS dead? No, it’s just moved into the background. Does it have an economic model? No, Twitter doesn’t have an economic model. How do you establish the authority model that Bit.ly uses to rank relevance and quality output? You’ll need to watch the show or at least that part to get the nuances of his answers. But what comes through in realtime 3D is that some of us are very excited about what these surfaces are enabling. As we wind down to the last hours of this dreadful enthralling year, let’s give thanks to the men and women who struggle to humanize technology and have some fun doing it.

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2009 has been a challenging year, particularly on a human level. Personally, I’ve seen friendships turn to dust as the economic crisis grinds the once-carefree impulses of the realtime Web into marketing and posturing. As someone who writes columns and produces the Gillmor Gang, certainly we all are guilty of these crimes. What I saw as a declaration of the obvious (RSS is dead) continues to roil the conversation, but the damage to a longstanding friendship with Dave Winer seems substantial. Perhaps the friendship that founders on disagreement is not the loss it once might have been.

On the plus side, the massive success of social media and its drivers has rendered moot the criticism that these issues and personalities are not worthy of the enterprise or indeed any serious pursuit of one’s time. As a product of the Sixties, if anything the connection between industry and my passion for technology, the arts, and comedy has become so pervasive that I would be virtually unrecognizable to myself from that era. I have become my father, mother, cop, and judge even as I struggle to make the mortgage and ease my kids into the unknowable future. Tech feels to me like the sessions for some potentially great record, or the noodlings of some robotic drum machine.

I haven’t seen the Lizard movie yet, but from afar it seems more on the side of science fantasy than fiction. I’m sure I’m wrong, but for now I’ll preserve that standoffish pose I took with Twitter and Facebook and the Kindle — knowing full well I’d soon join the stumbling herd but glad to pass the time today pushing more familiar buttons. As the stream floats by, the usual persists: open v. closed, tablet rumors, is realtime real, and so on. OK, I’ll bite:

If Apple really launches a tablet in late January, the growing wisdom is that such a device will roll up Kindle, AppleTV, and iTunes into an on-demand realtime streaming service/platform. Given the machinations of book publishers seeking to break the back of Amazon’s lock on the book stream, coupled with Comcast’s bundling of Web-on-demand with its triple play services, it seems logical that Apple would try and jump in before its competitors become too powerful. As with the mobile space, a tablet would need price supports to take off and hold ground.

The social platforms hold valuable cards (identity, affinity clouds, content gateways) but face commoditization and the threat of fragmentation of the realtime market by threatened incumbents (Murdoch, Microsoft, Google.) Since it’s more difficult to predict success, how about anticipating failure. The list of question marks has grown in 2009, including Nokia, Palm, the record companies, just about everybody too boring to talk about. When Scoble says talking about something is dead means it’s not interesting anymore, he’s wrong about what is being said but right about what interesting means. Namely, interesting as in can this help us survive or medicate us while the clueful move in to take over.

Looked at through this lense, what does Google Wave portend? Is it a rewrite of Gmail/Gchat with extensions into Google Office? Or is it a connecting technology to Android devices and tablets that forms the basis of a hybrid realtime OS with all of the opportunities of impulse transactions? If so, how do the media frames of the recent past fit into that fabric? Movies seem the least efficient just in terms of time cost and lack of repeatability relative to music and realtime news. Books would seem imperiled for similar reasons, but don’t underestimate the grounding aspect of relatively stable pools of information, nor the tendency of periodicals to blend into new forms that are more booklike in effect while preserving the dynamics of social filtering.

This sense of calm underlying the maelstrom that is realtime media is at the heart of what Wave represents, whether it gets there first or iteratively. Once people become addicted to the stream, the economics trend toward systems that allow parachuting in and out without breaking concentration or the appearance of it for the benefit of spouses, bosses, and cops at traffic intersections. Last night a friend told us about getting a ticket for failing to be aware of what was happening in front of him during a turn he was making. How dare the cop think he could get inside our minds and know what we’re thinking or indeed not thinking? The judge told him to shut up and pay the fine.

Will ChromeOS have more of an impact than Nexus One this coming year? I doubt it, not because Chrome won’t gobble mind share in significant if not voluminous quarters, but because Nexus One is so important as a driver of impulse economics. No matter how quickly we see realtime impacting on the economy now, once the Kindle psychology moves into the mainstream Web experience the momentum in terms of dynamic pricing will make search seem like slow motion. The implications of FourSquare are much more about the dynamic provisioning of offers as we (micro-communities) move through time and space than who’s Mayor and who’s in the room.

On the Gillmor Gang we wandered into a discussion (well, the chat seemed more like a meetup at the Place de la Concorde) about personalized aggregation. While some suggested the ReTweet cloud would get there first, I tend to side with the application of gestures to editorial views as I’ve assumed TechMeme has done since Day One. The nature and speed of those gestures may have accelerated, but the power of overlapping clouds of micro-communities has yet to be seriously challenged. That doesn’t mean we’ve actually seen this strategy built out at any consequential level, but Nexus One and whatever Apple is launching will produce a data wave of such economic force as to make Black Friday seem like a steam engine.

Inevitably, the conversation rotates back to the white hat/black hat discussion of the Open Web, with its hardcoded simplification of a much more interesting (Robert) circumstance. Luckily, those back-and-forth “no, you are” debates run out of steam and atrophy, while innovation, humor, and the music of the times draw people together in a feeling of micro-community that not only feels better but is producing a tidal wave of economic equity for its users. The Kindle effect is hidden in its avoidance of the backlight, marrying the calm of reflection with the speed of insight. It will indeed be interesting to see how this builds out. 2010 is already well underway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In any case, I won’t reveal what was said by Googlers because I want to be invited back next year. Also because they didn’t say anything that contradicts anything they’ve said publicly or that I’ve made up out of whole cloth. In fact, what I can talk about is what I said. Here’s a digest of that stream:

It seems that the WebOS contest for the hearts and minds for developers is settling out as one between ChromeOS and Silverlight. In my mind, ChromeOS is Chrome, and now that it’s on the Mac I care. Chrome therefore subsumes FireFox, Safari, and eventually Android, regardless of what has been said about the difficulty (or not) of having one OS span the desktop and mobile devices. I can’t tell you when Googlers will release Chrome Extensions but a spokesperson pointed out Google has publicly stated the project is open source, which suggests you could look up the answer to this and many questions. Indeed MG has made a career out of doing this.

So when Extensions ship, I will move off of Firefox within minutes, not because I have any extensions other than PowerTwitter but because I wait for enough stability and market force to make moving a conservative bet. And the main thing I’m waiting for above all else is Silverlight compatibility. I can’t say what Googlers said about this, but my thought is that if they can support the crap Adobe AIR hairball, they can support Silverlight. My bet is they will or already do.

I can’t say what Googlers said about HTML 5, but I said it would take 2 or 3 years before it got close to production, that in the meantime Apple and YouTube were forcing a standard around H.264, that Moonlight decompiling strategies coupled with the Silverlight to iPhone bridge demoed (almost) at PDC will provide a sufficient porting path to normalize the difference between iPhone and Android development, and that whatever the (n)on-existent Google phone looks like, it will produce a 2-horse market within a year. I can’t say how Googlers responded to my theory, but if someone were to use this as an argument for the iPhone being in trouble they’d be wrong.

That’s because (as I told the Googlers) nothing about Android or the nPhone mandates that Apple will stand still. Indeed, a strong Google phone or tablet or both frees Apple to ride right through the hole created by competition and drive the carriers further into a reactive postion. You can already see this happening as Apple approves Ustream, Qik, and even downstream video recording apps in swift succession. Once Verizon is filleted by either Google or Apple or both later this new year, it’s a battle for infrastructure to support the new Kindleized mobile marketplace, with the dueling AppStores providing DisneyBucks (Admobs or something like it) as payola for chart position. I kid the old record companies because they’re dead.

Speaking of the Kindle, it’s instructive to note how the book companies are trying the same stall that ultimately killed the record cartel, slowing down the release of some e-titles until they’ve milked the airport crowd. Meanwhile, Comcast is within minutes if not already releasing its on-demand access to premium content, and Netflix over Silverlight is spurring MacMini sales hooked up to sub-$700 1080 HD screens. We’re in mop up mode here, and the less-is-more design model of matching the quality of content with delivery mechanism is tipping the marketplace from downloading to streaming and built-in to bluetooth. As I told the Googlers, the marketplace won’t wait for HTML5, so HTML5 will have to come to them. I can’t say …

As the evening wound down, I talked with several Googlers about data portability and the Google stranglehold in search. I can’t say what they said, but I said I’m not worried about storing all my data in Gmail because it’s a lot safer than on my hardrive or not backed up as it always turns out to be. As to the Facebook issues regarding privacy and the difficulty of protecting digital breadcrumbs from winding up in someone’s unintended stuffing, I doubt the ability to constrain the leaking of private data and instead suggested Google would eventually be held responsible for surfacing inappropriate data at the top of its searches. In fact, what I am looking for are self-service tools that let me submit requests for redacting search results around the publishing of private data.

I can’t say what the Googlers think, but my bet is that this counter filtering will produce a new responsibility for data vendors, placing the onus on the search publishers to be responsible for what private data is made widely available when the appropriate IP owners (parents and individuals) have registered a social DMCA notice. As I told the Googlers, users (us) don’t care where the data is actually stored, only how it is being published and to who. I also predicted this technology will become a valuable part of competitive search offerings.

Perhaps the Googlers will surface some of their opinions on these subjects in the coming days, but even if they remain to be mined from open source archives the general thrust of the conversation is moving forward inevitably, beyond closed v. open and toward a pragmatic mix of both worlds. That’s why Silverlight is so viral in its evolution, moving in the past few months from a radical challenge to a conservative fundamental. Just as with ChromeOS, we still hear caveats and shadings about the disruptive qualities of these WebOS strategies, but simultaneously the boundaries between these two seemingly different paradigms are blurring to the point of disappearing.

The social layer is now the unifying driver of both platforms, and those industries, whether enterprise, media, or mobile, are being pushed into a single fabric. The realtime feedback loop retrieves gestures of interest and lack of it to the filtering server where it is compared to others with similar affinities and discounts applied based on the likelihood of accepting those offers. This builds on the Google Adsense model and its economies of scale around advertiser volume, but the social graph produces rich hubs of affinity which produce greater return. Swarm ranking trumps broader audiences when the tools to harvest more implicit affinities are available directly to the producers of the new products made viable.

But that’s just what I said. The other side of the conversation was at least as interesting. For now, this will have to be like one of Bob Newhart’s famous phone monologues, where you only hear Bob’s side of the call. Like the famous 8 foot invisible rabbit Harvey, after awhile you start to see and hear him just fine, thank you.

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What’s odd about this is that most observers consider FriendFeed a failure, too complicated and user-unfriendly to compete with Twitter or Facebook. If Twitter believed that to be the case, why would they endeavor to kill it? And if it were not a failure? Then Twitter is trying to kill it for a good reason. That reason: FriendFeed exposes the impossible task of owning all access to its users’ data. Does Microsoft or Google or IBM own your email? Does Gmail apply rate limiting to POP3 and IMAP?

So the reason Twitter is killing FriendFeed is because they think they can get away with it. And they will, as far as it goes, as long as the third party vendors orbiting Twitter validate the idea that Twitter owns the data. That, of course, means Facebook has to go along with it. Playing ball with Twitter command and control doesn’t make sense unless Facebook likes the idea of doing the same thing with “their” own stream. Well, maybe so. That leaves two obvious alternatives.

The first is Google Wave, which offers much of the realtime conversational technology FriendFeed rebooted around, minus a way of deploying this stream publicly. The Wave team seems to be somewhat adrift in the conversion of private Waves to public streams, running into scaling issues with Wave bots that don’t seem to effectively handle a publishing process (if I understood the recent briefing correctly.) But if Waves can gain traction around events and become integrated with Gmail as Paul Buchheit recently predicted, then an enterprising Wave developer might write a bot that captures Tweets as they are entered or received by Twitter and siphons them into the Wave repository in near realtime.

Note that this doesn’t presume access to Google’s version of the firehose. As with Microsoft, no one has publicly described the terms of service, including whether either licensee can allow third (or fourth) parties to derive services such as Track from their copy of the stream, or indeed how long they can archive tweets if at all. But that doesn’t preclude a Wave developer from leveraging each user’s polling rights just like any third party Twitter app or, even simpler, warehousing the stream before it enters the Twitter stream. Placing this initiative at the Wave bot developer level also engages an App Store-like critical mass that may prove significant in the early buildout of Wave momentum. Destroying the false premise that Twitter owns the data to begin with is an added bonus. Or it will smoke out some details of the Google/Twitter licensing deal.

The same could be true of Microsoft’s deal for the firehose, but here, as with Google, Twitter may not want to risk flaunting ownership of a stream that can so easily be cloned for its enterprise value. And as easily as you can say RSS is dead, Salesforce Chatter enters the picture. Here’s one player Twitter can’t just laugh off. First of all, it’s not Twitter but Facebook Benioff is cloning, and a future Facebook at that, one where the Everyone status will be built out as a (pardon the expression) public option. This free cross-Web Chatter stream will challenge Facebook’s transitional issues from private to public, given that Salesforce’s cloud can immediately scale up to the allegedly onerous task of providing personalized Track on demand.

It’s likely this pressure can be turned to good use by Facebook, unencumbered as they are by any licensing deal with Twitter. Instead, a Chatter alliance with the Facebook Everyone cloud puts Salesforce in the interesting position of managing a public stream with Google Apps support, which eventually could mean Wave integration. Where this might break first is in media publishing, as Benioff noted at the CrunchUp. Twitter’s leverage over its third party developers could be diluted significantly once Salesforce offers monetization paths for its Force.com developers. So much so that this may call Twitter’s bluff with FriendFeed.

But FriendFeed has always been more of a tactical takedown of Twitter than an actual competitor, a stalking horse for just the kind of attack Twitter seems most afraid of. No wonder the speed with which Twitter is introducing metadata traps to lock down the IP before a significant cloud emerges to challenge its inevitability. Lists, retweets, location — they’re all based on raising the rate limiting hammer to discourage heading for the exits. It’s not that retweets reduce the functionality of the trail of overlapping social circles, it’s that they lock them behind the Wall.

By aligning first with Facebook and adopting Twitter’s look and feel but not its metadata wall, Chatter developers are less threatened by a Twitter embargo in realtime. Benioff doesn’t need Twitter’s realtime conversation if he can build out Facebook’s, by retaining Facebook Connect control of the private stream while accelerating the Everyone status cloud and co-mingling it with Chatter + public notification and Wave bot integration. Add Silverlight to iPhone streaming to Moonlight recompiling, and developers have a powerful porting path that will quickly populate the Chatter Store.

Strange bedfellows indeed, but that’s the risk Twitter is taking in cutting off FriendFeed’s oxygen. Crushing a weak opponent’s windpipe does little to consolidate your advantages, but it leaves an indelible impression in those potential partners who are calculating a complex algorithm of time to market, stream access, platform elasticity, and user trust. But when you add a platform (Salesforce) which has continued to stay ahead of expectations while mining the social wave, the balance of power shifts dramatically. When you see Seesmic CEO Loic LeMeur walk out on stage at the Microsoft PDC with a Silverlight demo he bootstrapped in 2 weeks, ditto.

I don’t expect anyone from Twitter to answer the simple question of when will Twitter give FriendFeed the same access they provide other third party client vendors. For now, it’s frustrating to not see the flow of Twitter messages in realtime, but over time we’ll build tools on top of FriendFeed to take such embargoed messages private. Once inside FriendFeed, the realtime conversations that result are just the kind of high value threads Chatter will support, Wave will accelerate, and Silverlight will transport. Keep up the good work, Twitter.

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