I went to a birthday party this weekend where I ran into a Facebook guy, a smart guy who asked me to go off the record. In fact, the whole party was supposed to be off the record. So I ignored the off the record part by insisting that I already knew the thing I was being told, and then I told him on the record what I thought was about to happen for Facebook. This being my usual m.o. which is to insist on not being NDAed except for things I don’t really want to talk about anyway, like the next version of Office.

That way, I can just make up what I want to have happen, never breaking any confidence and yet at the same time painting as plausible picture of assumed reality that it is hard to deny or in fact slow down. So here’s what I told the Facebook guy: the company has at most 3 months window to absorb FriendFeed and open the Everyone News Feed, and if that’s true (again, making all this up) then the messaging about how that’s going to work must begin immediately, like in two weeks. Then I went home and saw MG Siegler’s post and Scoble’s remake of Frenzy on FriendFeed.

OK, so I was off by two weeks. The noise about the death of FriendFeed is already off the charts, and the proof is in the lack of rejoinder from the FriendFeed team. As in: of course FriendFeed is not dead, and here’s what we’re going to do to remake Facebook in the next few weeks. Actually, that is indeed the message from Twitter, what with Lists and ReTweets and the return of Track just as soon as, well, sometime next year or so. No need for FriendFeed real soon now, because these Lists will soon be carved up and meshed together into an authority stream by the 3rd party developers.

Siegler nails the one provable negative about FriendFeed Facebook edition which is the lack of any innovation moving forward. The one thing the FriendFeeders didn’t get in under the wire before the money arrived was stream splicing, the ability to mesh together lists into an authority stream. Is that coming soon from Twitter either? Nope. So the antidote to FriendFeed stasis is Twitter right up until stream splicing is enabled… by who? As of right now, that would be via the FriendFeed APIs. If Siegler/Scobler are right, the danger of doing that is iterating on a dead API.

Here’s where the FriendFeed is dead rumor falls apart. OK, you’re Facebook and you’ve just spent $50 million or actually $15 million plus NetWhuffie stock. Now we sell the deal as a talent buy, which of course it is because the talent built the damn thing. We put Brett Taylor in charge of the platform (API) and Paul Buchheit in charge of something else he hasn’t said yet. So Taylor can still deliver stream splicing, just not in the FriendFeed context. Buchheit, the Gmail guy, now what do we do with him….

Remember, where were the FriendFeed guys when the clock was stopped. They were streamlining not just the API but the architecture of what used to be rooms and what was now groups. Subsumed into that construct was the wonderful Imaginary Friend notion, another way of saying how do we capture individual streams and normalize personal and group communications. Meanwhile, RSS is dying and with it readers of same, and we begin to see seedlings like Threadsy and Brizzly popping up to address the vacuum. Can we assume the Gmail guy might be in a good position to noodle down on this, particularly given the Google Wave fork under way across town?

Obligatory Beatle analogy: I’ve spent the last few weeks partying on the Beatles Mono Mixes, in particular the period that began with Rubber Soul, followed by Revolver, and then jumped ahead to the White Album and its companion Part II, also known as Abbey Road. In just two years, the group transformed themselves from lovable moptops into four individuals who wrote music to avoid board meetings with accountants (Something) and seers who mixed Tibetan chants with backwards tape loops (Tomorrow Never Knows.) At the time it seemed like a lifetime, but in mono as they blended this stuff together it takes on a sense of purpose and inevitability that belies the official storyline.

In effect, with Abbey Road they tied up the loose ends of the White Album’s API and architecture, injected the realtime nature of Revolver and the betrayal of Norwegian Wood, and sold the company to EMI on the promise of new records from a group that had already broken up. Listening to the mixes and reveling in the deconstruction of Beatles RockBand, you can see how intricate their alchemy became during those brief two years, and how valuable it would become for the ages. As David Crosby said recently of a CSN project to do cover versions of favorites, when it came to the Beatles, they’d work up one or another from memory and then give up after listening to the original.

This then is what Facebook bought, or rather invested in: the best work and that yet to come from this group of engineers, strategists, and explorers of realtime. It’s easy to forget how completely wrongheaded it was to attack the realtime experience, how to this day Wave is reviled as an unbridled solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. What are people afraid of to fuel this alleged stampede for the exits, particularly given that there is no credible replacement for many of its most addictive features? The very hysteria of the charge, a cry for no one, a love that should have lasted years.

More likely is that we’ll see a healthy battle for the legacy of FriendFeed between Facebook, Twitter, and Google. First will be the conversational flow, still a pathetic hack in Twitter, possible in Facebook only with a fast (three month) Everyone newstream rollout with 2 way Twitter/Everyone stream sync. Never mind the Web site; this has to come from the API, complete with granular tools for filtering the flow by data type and guaranteed RSS-hubbed delivery. Facebook must invest quickly in stream splicing to make filtering useful, and Twitter Lists give them the room to build it while no such tools exist on the Twitter side.

Second, if there is a second after that first takedown, is splicing email and personal FB data into the stream, through a combination of intelligent push into email for filtered stream data for mobile clients and harvesting of the Twitter follow and List social graph as an open directory outside Twitter’s control. Google has a play here with Gmail, but they need to drive here with Wave taking a backup role rather than the other way around. Buchheit is the key here, regardless of who does it, and Twitter’s lock on direct messages needs to be factored in in the Facebook sync planning, something that didn’t survive the cut in the FriendFeed lockdown.

Yoko didn’t break up the Beatles. The Beatles did. FriendFeed isn’t dead. It’s just getting started. And the walrus is Paul.

Now that Google Wave is trickling out into the water supply, I’ve been sucked into “playing” with it alongside FriendFeed, Yammer, Skype, and email. Erick Schonfeld insists on discussing a project we’re readying, and unfortunately I’m able to sign in from my iPhone. The FriendFeed direct message interface is not exposed on the iPhone version, and Skype makes me feel stupid for entering a ping and then watching my battery indicator drop while waiting for some signs of life. In this environment Wave suddenly is acceptably lousy.

I’m down at Oracle’s OpenWorld event, which lands like Normandy on Howard Street with a massive tent that this year has proved helpful in the rainstorm hitting full force. The occasion was Salesforce boss Marc Benioff’s quasi-keynote in a small theater just off the main Moscone hub. I caught up with Marc after the presentation at the Salesforce booth, a massive presence punctuated by a giveaway of two SmartCars or equivalent. As Marc suggested, they were one of three exciting things at this year’s conference.

The first was the strange Scott McNealy/Larry Ellsion co-keynote on Sunday night, a delayed-on-account-of the-EU swan song by McNealy that picked up midsentence from his first take at JavaOne in June. Jonathan Schwartz was nowhere to be seen, though his number 2 John Fowler was given a visible role in the proceedings. Scott seemed determined to thread the needle of continuity with the old Sun vibe, but even Ellison’s rosy words of support for MySQL and IBM badmouthing in favor of Sun hardware did little to alter the truth that Sun survives only in its products but not the ideas that might have been coming.

Ellison made it clear in recent days that he’s still stuck on his who-cares-about-cloud-computing schtick, but Benioff for one thinks he’s missing the obvious. While Oracle allowed Salesforce to team up with Michael Dell in this little alternate conference within a conference, Benioff seemed happy to promote being right about the cloud in the midst of the lion’s den. From my vantage point at the back of the theater, there was a small hemorrhage of attendees when Facebook/Twitter integration with its Call Center and CRM services were demoed. But if 10% left, that meant 90% got a message 180 degrees from the show-wide Oracle Fusion meme, Marc’s third exciting theme.

So it will go with Google Wave, as it begins to penetrate the legacy environements of Gmail, Gchat, and Apps. Right now it’s a red-haired step child of both the cloud and the stream, pretty much useless in both courts. The more that user feedback intrudes, the more Wave will devolve to an email clone. But if Google resists that impulse, something big is likely to happen. This is not about user experience; it’s a war for control of the Google realtime platform, and the central mechansim to slow down Facebook and Twitter. As such, they need to fail, and fail fast — and then start integrating with or absorbing Gmail and Apps.

They can look no further than Yammer for tips; the Twitter enterprise clone has rapidly expanded its rich clients on the desktop and the iPhone to provide push notification at a precisely the time we need it. In particular the iPhone app is suddenly more useful than email, with new messages indicated on the icon as they are received (42 at the moment) and direct messages popping up in a Push notification. Email has too much flow and not enough filtering to avoid constant interruptions by needy PR and the like, and forget about Twitter or even FriendFeed in their current firehose status.

Wave could grab this away from Yammer with little trouble, but the big problem is one of focus. The prize is stream control, the metering of stream dynamics and some sort of pass-off to a stream feed that can be consumed after the high order Yammer-type business flow is absorbed. For now, Wave can co-exist with FriendFeed/Facebook, and ignore Twitter and email. That leaves Skype and Google Docs traffic, which suggests that Gmail and Gchat integrate Waves as a new datatype to be launched into once pressing messages are triaged.

A strategy begins to emerge: high priority messages, Wave document discussion, stream maintenance, and email/presence monitoring. Using the Oracle/Cloud example, start pilot cloud projects, task IT with building hybrid on-premise “private/public” clouds, then negotiate with hosting and virtualization layers as M&A activity drives the move to cloud consolidation.

Wave sucks in its implementation, in its stonewalling of our need for priority stream filtering, in its confusion about its entry point into Google, or vice versa. But that will get sorted out by brute force, more likely by Facebook and FriendFeed integration, and whatever Twitter can buy in house to avoid cannibalization by Track invaders from their increasingly quarantined thrid party vendors. And Microsoft and Apple loom to mop up if Google slips too much or dithers too long, which probably means they won’t Wave may suck, but it won’t matter for long.

For months now we’ve been wondering when Microsoft was going to start making moves in the social media space. Rumors of talks with Twitter have been swirling at all levels of the company, but now a subtle re-org may shed light on what Microsoft might do internally to shore up its presence in the RealTime Wave. Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has announced the formation of Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs, a new group led by general manager Lili Cheng. FUSE Labs is being seeded with a range of related talent and software by combining much of Lili’s Creative Systems Group with Rich Media Labs and Startup Labs in Cambridge, MA. In the past, she’s been able to move social technologies from the labs into product.

In an internal memo, Ozzie talks about the growing vortex of social media and realtime:

For many years, technology-based ‘social’ innovations have been most commonly viewed through the lenses of communications and collaboration: messaging, chat, calls, meetings, conferences, co-editing, document sharing, collaboration, multiplayer gaming and the like.

More recently, many factors have begun to transform all that which is ‘social’: the ever-present, high-bandwidth internet both wired and wireless; the ease of connecting people; the dramatic rise in digital cameras, camera phones and ‘app-capable’ phones; net-connected game consoles & TVs; and so on.

Myriad scenarios involving the notion of ‘social’ have now gone far beyond communications and collaboration and are transforming experiences that are key to our customers and key to our business, in leisure & entertainment; productivity & teamwork; experiences extending how we use the OS itself.

The three groups being combined have concrete skills and code in areas where ‘social’ meets sharing; where ‘social’ meets real-time; where ‘social’ meets media; where ‘social’ meets search; where ‘social’ meets the cloud plus three screens and a world of devices.

FUSE Labs will bring more coherence and capability to those advanced development projects where they’re already actively collaborating with product groups to help them succeed with ‘leapfrog’ efforts. Working closely with MSR and across our divisions, the lab will prioritize efforts where its capabilities can be applied to areas where the company’s extant missions, structures, tempo or risk might otherwise cause us to miss a material threat or opportunity.

Cheng, who will report directly to Ozzie, moves from Microsoft Research (MSR) and her Creative Systems team, which most recently produced Kodu, which teaches kids how to create games and stories on the Xbox. Previously, Cheng was in the Windows division where she managed the User Experience teams for Windows Vista. Before that, she ran the Social Computing Group within MSR, which developed projects such as Wallop and VChat. Cheng first joined Microsoft in 1995 as part of the Virtual Worlds Group within MSR.

Reading between the lines, Cheng’s ability to surface technology from the labs has now been focused on more immediate concerns. This mirrors Microsoft’s success with Bing, which has emerged with many MSR features as part of its well-received search engine. Most recently, some of the Visual Search features debuted at TechCrunch 50 take advantage of Silverlight deep zoom technologies. It’s not a stretch to assume that these features will be laced throughout whatever social media constructs might as Office Web Apps hit the beta streets later this year.
Cheng will retain most of her original team from Redmond while traveling to Cambridge to consolidate the other teams. Kostas Mallios, general manager of the Rich Media Lab, will continue to report to Ozzie and take on business development responsibilities assisting the incubations within Ozzie’s org. Reed Sturtevant, managing director of the Startup Labs in Cambridge, MA, has decided to pursue interests outside Microsoft.

Photo credit: Flickr/Joi Ito

AT&T’s decision to allow VoIP onto the iPhone changes the balance of power in the communications industry. The move underlines Apple’s dominant position as the prime mover in converting the phone into the core identity container on the network. As Mike Arrington intuited, number portability via Google Voice was worth more than the Apple device, at least for the political purpose of calling the issue to the floor.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the relationship between Google and Apple, but far more important than that cleanup operation will be the effect on other identity firefights. In particular, the SideWiki conflagration, otherwise known as Hey, Get Off My Lawn, threatens to alter our perceptions of what constitutes the basic unit of Internet communications.

If the most recent era of Net value has been dominated by the architecture of Page Rank, SideWiki and other realtime intermingled services including Google Wave, FriendFeed, Disqus, and Echo are just the first cuts at an atomized page that bases its content according to the identity of the viewer. Today, the look and feel of the “page” is determined by the viewer’s profile, which identifies the groups, communications channels, aggregated services, and “friends” they belong to. At its simplest, a browser detect delivers an iPhone interface to those users. At its more complex, FriendFeed filters content based on social data from many of these profile sources.

But SideWiki, PubSubHubbub, and Google Wave seem much more intimidating because of their actual or virtual support by a dominant player. What might seem acceptable writ small (realtime discussions attached to streaming video services on FriendFeed) suddenly appears threatening when viewed through the lens of Google patronage. Never mind that these so-called BigCo strategies are laced with open technologies, standards, and evangelists hired away from the open source community. It’s still a modern day Medici who rules with a benevolent velvet fist.

That of course provides an opening for the so-called Decentralization crowd, who argue that size does matter and that Google can’t be trusted any more than Microsoft or Apple was or is. Only a small band of new patriots can employ the open techniques. If a company starts small and then achieves mass (Twitter) then the analysis needs adjustment. At some point, these startups turn from being the good guys to the bad guys. Of course, the idea is that you should trust the new guys now that the old new guys have something to lose.

This is one of the problems with the success of RSS and, to some degree, podcasting. They appeared to be revolutionary in their disruption, but in fact tended to reinforce the medias they supposedly replaced as they gained traction. While we were busy enjoying the excitement of penetrating the closed walls of the media club, we conveniently overlooked how the winnowing process of the hunt would look a whole lot like the show business we were trying to break into.

The business model (or lack of it) that we accepted as the opportunity cost of getting in the game proved less acceptable once we were inside the circle. Debates about with or because did nothing to change the reality that in a world of unfettered access the index became the barrier. And when the index shifted to a more immediate and simpler technology (Twitter) the money flowed with it and away from the technologies that opened the door. The same thing happened with the carriers.

The iPhone brought down the wall of voice by transferring the index from the phone number to the URL and the new identity. As Web usage grew, the need for more powerful filters drove the increased value of our social addresses, making voice less significant as the gatekeeper to our attention. Twitter quickly gathered momentum by aggregating IM, email, blogging, and rich media under a single apparent transport, and its follow and track tools proved more fine grained and precise than the legacy alternatives. From there, it was only a short hop to money flowing into those priority lists as they became the new gatekeepers.

SIdeWiki appears to be a hijacking of the so-called original content of the blog post, but perhaps that’s looking at what’s happening through the other end of the telescope. In fact, SideWiki and Wave and Twitter are where the index is, and the posts are looking more and more like comments on the stream. Of course, that raises the specter of lock out by market force, and signals the attacks on the SUL, Google’s scale, and Apple’s Walled Garden.

But success at disrupting this grand conspiracy of size — VoIP coming to the iPhone — does not mean failure even for the so-called vanquished. In fact, the big will get a lot bigger, as Google and Apple have now been blessed by government pressure to provide the fruits of an effective alliance without the threat of antitrust action. That’ll teach ‘em. And SIdeWiki will be pushed to provide some form of control for page “owners” that will likely involve some available identity system to white- or blacklist offensive comments. Oh wait, we can use the Gmail contacts and mandate Google social constructs as part of the solution. Cool, no more clumsy backwards engineering of the Gmail social graph. The government insists.

It leaves us to ponder the rationale of rssCLoud and other attempts to foil the BigCos. Is there going to be a decentralized core of adoption that will blunt Twitter/PubSubHubbub/FriendFeed or SideWiki/Wave/Chrome’s control of our data? History doesn’t suggest that outcome. I think people are making a fundamental judgment about the framing of open v. closed. Steve Jobs bet that our desire for control of our identity would trump the hiccups along the way to that reality, and AT&T is validating it for what it is, good business.

The iPhone continues to show how a hybrid of open and closed has staying power with the voters. As long as it delivers increased opportunity, nobody really cares how it works. Faced with a shortened URL that requires a leap of faith, we opt for a social cloud that over time produces a good result based on the power of our peer relationships. The tools that give us the choice of modeling trust relationships will do better. Over time, we and our friends will gain more from faith in our harnessing of identity than fear of its dangers.

Google Wave is roiling the collaboration space as it moves out of the sandbox and into a wider beta. The ripples are being felt by vendors ranging from IBM to Cisco and even Google itself. IBM is challenging Google Apps with an iNotes offering undercutting on price (as well as features, as Google quickly points out.) Cisco is buying small business videoconferencing assets to bolster its Telepresence technology at the high end, and jettisoning IBM Sametime in favor of its WebEx tools.

While Google and many analysts see the iNotes move as a direct challenge to Gmail’s recent instability, the likelier motivation for IBM is Microsoft’s inroads with its Exchange Online product. Redmond may be months away from rolling out Azure, but the on-demand versions of Exchange, Shaepoint, and then Office Web Apps are going to hurt IBM where it counts. Why not attack the weaker target in Google’s consumer/corporate hybrid product to change the subject, Big Blue figures.

Meanwhile Wave continues to make people nervous about where email is going anyway. Wave remains a relatively siloed project inside Google, with its realtime constructs more on the bleeding edge than practical solutions for the problem of managing the growing information stream. Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed signaled the power of the micromessaging trend, and attacks on Wave’s experimental UI and metaphor belie the extent to which email is threatened.

Since Twitter went mainstream in the last year, micromessaging threads have become the main carrier of realtime news. Trending topics may seem the fundamental index, but information at the actionable level is carried in a smaller stream managed largely by retweets and overlapping follow clouds. A cascading series of Likes in the Friendfeed/Facebook nomenclature is far more efficient than other mechanisms, including email newsletters and RSS syndication.

This new brand of news is more CNBC than MSNBC. It’s based on a “what’s in it for me” dynamic, which prioritizes the flow based on business implications first, followed by political and social impact. The Letterman story spread on Twitter and Friendfeed once the show aired on the East Coast, giving viewers the heads up to tune in to the show on the Pacific run. The morning shows ran with it as the lead. The underlying reason for the position at the top of the news cycle: the potential impact on Letterman’s contract at a time when Leno’s move to primetime has changed viewing numbers in CBS’s favor for the first time.

Leno’s show is doing quite well with its reworked talk show formula, which can be recorded and consumed in cherry-picked segments. It won’t take long for these microstream swarms to be packaged via realtime alerts, mostly because the microcommunities formerly known as the broadcast audience are under increased pressure to consume more efficiently. Comcast’s move to buy NBC comes after their success in shifting recording to on-demand; it’s a small stretch to adopt that model of server side recording for a netwrok they control. The studios will need to bend to the new model or risk the same squeeze Steve Jobs performed on the carriers with the iPhone.

Email, like RSS, is being supplanted by socially-filtered microbytes reassembled under user control at the client. The SideWiki argument is the stalking horse for this wave of transformation, as users increasingly paint what used to be known as a page with dynamic inline updates of information they’ve told information providers they are willing to incorporate. The end game for email is the understanding that public and private streams are only delineated by the social contours of each granular element of the flow. It suggests the modern update of the phrase For Your Eyes Only.

The Beatles Rock Band game is now in its third day here at Abbey Road West, and so far it’s getting better all the time. As social media, it’s the off the charts monetization winner Wall Street is beginning to think Twitter and Facebook are becoming. As my wife keeps saying, it’s got real Beatles songs, not some cover band. How cool is that?

BRB is an extension of the Beatles Love mashup, where producers George and son Giles Martin went back to the basic tracks and transferred them to digital for remix. This is as distinguished from the new remastered mono and stereo catalog, where only the final mixdowns were brought up to date with modern analog-to-digital techniques. The Beatles recorded on two and then four tracks up until the White Album, bouncing down preliminary mixes and overdubbing additional parts as they went.

The Love mixes built on a technique explored during the production of the Anthology series and fleshed out with the remixing of the Yellow Submarine record. Laying all the original pieces onto a digital checkerboard, the Abbey Road engineers could recreate the original mixes with individual control over many more elements of the recordings. Love expanded on that by literally deconstructing the various elements and intermingling them with other tracks, as in the layering of the Tomorrow Never Knows drum track under Within You Without You’s Indian percussion.

With this digital map already assembled, Giles Martin could turn his attention to the Rock Band game, compositing guitars and harmonies while adding live effects and studio chatter to create yet another mashup, this one a fascinating illusion of being in the studio or in concert with some degree of input in the mix. Of course, the game opts for scoring the closeness to the actual reality you come with vocals, guitar, and most powerfully, drums. The actual music remains Beatles, but you have the feeling of getting inside the music.

Ringo comes through in the way his bandmates saw him, the actual spark of the thing that became Beatles only when he joined the group. The recordings have always reflected the alchemy of the four members and George Martin, who handled many of the keyboard parts as the group’s palette expanded in the studio. But Ringo’s parts, as reflected by the dumbed down notes you sync with, underline how much the drummer shaped the variety of feels of the group’s enormously productive output.

What emerges is a kind of dynamic blueprint that threads through the band’s history, regardless of the period (touring, studio, early, splintering, the end) and almost in spite of the differences in song writing and production. The Beatles throughout their career benefited from this kind of stylized fundamentals, fitting their “real” personalities into their film and studio images and creating a new hybrid that expanded both identities into a newer one.

So too do Twitter and Facebook and other social media experiences, fusing the twin streams of public and private persona. Much is made of the falseness of the online you, but the reality is that the combination of digital gestures and individual desires, thoughts, ideas, and emotions is something we’ve only perceived indirectly through artists in novels, paintings, and music. Social media may be an imperfect label, but the synthesis is as real as the elements pre-aggregation.

The mono remasters are bundled in a separate collection, running from the beginning through the White Album. After that, only a Yellow Submarine soundtrack with several “throwaways”, the Let It Be “live” recordings massacred by Phil Spector as the band fell apart, and the final Abbey Road were left to be mixed in stereo. But for most of its life, the group and producer recorded and mixed in mono, an earlier predictor of the power of 140 characters.

The Beatles Rock Band remixes suggest the rest of the catalog will be rendered in new versions that take advantage of technology to get inside the music, not subverting the original mono intent but allowing us to explore the brilliance of these collaborations. Musical anthropologists will be able to take apart the harmonies and build new ones, discover our great treasures in new ways, and share them with our children here and across the net. Calling this a game is misleading only because it is so much fun.

Of course, there will always be those who posture about the authenticity of these experiences. McCartney has the most authority here, saying the game is fun but actually making the records was more so. But playing along with Ringo in even this most elemental and simulated way reminded me of similar moments in my past playing drums with the “real” Richard Manuel on a snowy night in the Catskills. Beatles Rock Band is not the same as being there, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. Beep beep yeah!

With Windows 7 shipping in less than a month, we’re sure to smell a whiff of the Microsoft of old from the Pacific Northwest. After years of dropped balls and transitions from the Gates era to whatever we’re now in, Steve Ballmer should have plenty to feel good about. Steve Sinofsky has completed his personal reworking from Office chief to Windows czar, and the new OS arrives just in time to crest with the netbook wave.

On the Office front, the O2010 tech preview is in a classic Microsoft holding pattern, waiting to touch down next year in the wake of the new Windows release. Microsoft marketing managers still won’t answer the simple question (What are the features NOT available in the Web Apps?) They’re glad to rationalize the answer as: we’re providing the features Web users want. The real answer continues to lie in the politics of the transition from disk to Web.

What is new is that Powerpoint and Excel the Web versions can now function with somewhat greater fidelity than Google App’s competitor. Compare them to the desktop versions, you’re in the old political weeds. Compare it to Google, not bad. SkyDrive starts to look like an interesting service, if only (and importantly) as a reason to get a Windows Live ID and 25 gigs of free storage.

I find the desktop/Web Apps comparison a cul de sac Microsoft will do well to get away from as fast as possible. The central message for nextgen realtime apps is that Office Web Apps are soon to be highly competitive with the alternatives. The collaboration features alone are so basic that my fundamental question is whether the desktop apps support them in realtime, not the other way around. Word is still not baked and seems to continue to suffer from oldthink strangleholds, but if the first wave gets some traction with realtimers it may tip things our way before ship date.

The other mixed messaging is of course Silverlight. It’s easy to wonder whether Microsoft really gets what they have going here, but the underlying answer is yes, with the political caveat. Reports of a recent internal meeting were devoid of mentions of Silverlight, with the usual Bill-era science projects around Walls and other esoteric research fantasies taking up most of the troop rallying.

Nonetheless, Silverlight is the most strategic part of the new Microsoft message, that Redmond services will catch, match, and exceed existing competitor platforms. If you count the Windows 7 launch as the left side of the timeline and the PDC launch of Windows Azure a month later as the right, Silverlight is the connective tissue that drives the new hybrid platform.

With Windows battened down and Office Web Apps in the evangelism stage, Microsoft is competing primarily with Google’s notion of radical disruption financed by advertising. Coming as it does from the enterprise IT stronghold of corporate hegemony, Windows and Office adoption collides with the new monetization challenge because of the lack of a legitimate user contract for behavioral data. We’ve known all along that Microsoft could see what we do on the desktop, but they haven’t got our permission to do anything with it.

By contrast, Google and other Web services require that attention farming to do anything, and offerings like Gmail remind us of how our text is being tracked even as they reassure us that that data is only being used anonymously as part of the larger algorithms behind the Google engine. Microsoft’s investment in the Web Apps is in fact the establishment of a user contractual rationale that will pay off with its forthcoming competitive offerings.

Those offerings will not be in the desktop space, however. They will be in the Silverlight engine, mixing the richness Google struggles to reach with HTML 5 with the monetization of attention and, increasingly, gestures mined from socially-aware microcommunities. Don’t let that jargon scare you; it just means Facebook/Twitter 2-or-3 degrees of separation harvesting of the recommendations of people whose recommendations in aggregate are much more efficient than the current search haystack models.

SIlverlight neatly manages the intersection of the desktop circa October with the cloud circa November, and is missing only the orchestration of realtime layer that, pardon the expression, meshes incoming alerts with the behaviorally-filtered authoritative stream. Today, I watch alerts bubble up in an Adobe Air FriendFeed app, sitting atop Gmail, Yammer, and stream aggregation tools. Tomorrow? Silverlight is the only answer this year, and Steve Ballmer must know it.

The good news for those who think this may work strategically but not politically is that Office Web Apps is close enough to provide cover for an aggressive framework built on Silverlight to go after the social crowd. Facebook is within 90 days of an API that can subsume the FriendFeed core, and there are very few things you can’t do today with a combination of Javascript and Silverlight to provide a useful console for managing social flow.

There are at least several projects under way but unannounced that could signal Microsoft cluefullness, but even if an internal project hooked up SIlverlight with, say, Facebook, it would still be messaged as “we’re a platform company providing opportunities for developers”. But Office Web Apps and SkyDrive will need to drive home a Now proposition to have some impact on Google’s aura of inevitability.

Here’s where Bing becomes significant. These guys are kicking ass. They are innovating and pushing out babies faster than the Scobles, and show no signs of slowing down. Does Silverlight have a play in future Bing expansion. Yes. Does the iterative success of a reasonably independent unit inside Redmond provide political cover for similar ground gained by a social unit. Yes.

The key is to compete not with the desktop guys but with Google directly. Office Web Apps stand a good chance of smoking Google Apps in the short term, by competing directly on price and adding features (Silverlight) Google can’t touch. Like Bing, invest in the intelligence of the back end and the editorial layer of services that pry mindshare loose or at least into consideration. My 8 year old daughter talked to me last night about Binging something; I made her repeat it to be sure.

Bing. Social media. Silverlight. SkyDrive. Benioff’s Salesforce is pushing the enterprise envelope with the Google stack, but what does that do for Microsoft but open the eyes of its dominant channel. While we all look at the deltas between Office Desktop and Web, the real disruption may be the extent to which the enterprise is being swallowed by social media.

If virtualization effectively abstracts out the back end hardware and software boundaries, the end result is a new value chain where access to institutional and user data is parsed across business lines, where software “suites” are organically grown and spliced together across social boundaries. Social media IS the enterprise. Bing. Bing. Ballmer’s Silver Hammer.

When Cnet blows the whistle on social media, via Sean Parker of Napster fame, it’s time to break out the wallet and double down on that very same “immature” social media. We’re standing at the gaping maw of the biggest gold rush in many cycles, and the refs have just called a TV time out to allow us to regroup.

Certainly we’ve seen altogether way too much social community constructs at just the moment when we can’t stomach another additional stream entering the firehose. We’re fed up with authority algorithms, freemium models, top ten lost Twitter features, and bogus realtime protocol wars. It’s fine by most of us if it turns out Dave Winer invented everything that could or will be thought of back in 2001.

But calling the moment when the startup market matures is like giving your 16-year old the keys to the new car. No matter how sure we are that we’ve seen the last good idea and that’s it’s now all about sensible implementations around direct monetization, we’re absolutely sure of nothing of the kind. That’s because the very notion of maturity is a strong buy signal for the next stupid idea that’s about to spring up and conquer the world. Calling the bottom is easy; calling the top is hard.

Are we at the top just because our heads are exploding at the sound of the rain of stupid startup names that crescendo at TC50 and other industry events. This TC50 was the first one where I immediately deleted the name of the company from my awareness and never looked back. The only one I still remember (other than Bing which is now Old Stupid and therefore exempt) is Threadsy, and that’s because I love the thing, even though I doubt I’ll ever use it.

Now that’s an interesting data point for me, coming as it does after signing up for Twitter and Facebook at the insistence of Ross Mayfield and Gabe Rivera respectively and then promptly forgot about it for years. So I actually think the Threadsly experience will probably be highly successful precisely because I have no idea how or why I would use it. My idea of solving the Inbox crisis is to try and make the stream so informative I can skim email in seconds because I already know about everything there.

Similarly, looking at the cloud surrounding a person’s identity is a really cool trick, and one big reason why Threadsy is a two-trick pony. If I were trying to figure out authority or reputation, this would be a great pushbutton way of doing it, and the fact that the app is pulling all this social stuff together with some degree of coherence is a plus for the demo. But the real reason I like it is because of what it will do rather that what is currently does.

Just as Twitter emerged because of the intersection of a user-demanded function (Track) and its Follow social graph modeling, so might Threadsy emerge from the intersection of the death of email and RSS and its social whuffie modeling. It’s always instructive to remember that most big startups only take shape in the second wave of their existence, after the early rounds separate them from the pack and the talent congeals around the disruptions that emerge on the margins. Mint’s Intuit exit served more to validate the TC50 model than it did to signal the maturity of a social market that is barely at the breakout point.

It’s easy to call a top when Facebook goes revenue positive, but what it really says is that Facebook is now at the point where it can put pressure on Twitter to put up or shut up. By that I mean that they have had no pressure whatsoever to actually compete up til now, what with a virtually indestructible momentum that was only enhanced by the Fail Wail. But now, with FriendFeed driving the API strategy of the Everyone status of the open Facebook opportunity, Twitter has to put their A-Team on the floor. They’ll do just fine, by the way, as Dick Costolo demonstrated from the TC50 Peanut Gallery.

Notice how he didn’t see that much in Threadsly, questioning how easy it isn’t to monetize clients or some such. I could feel invisible fingers reaching into my wallet (not altogether an unpleasant experience strangely). Wait, that must mean there’s money in my wallet, or some on the way. Hmmm, that might mean that social media has some end game we haven’t yet seen. Uh huh.

All told, TC50 was a power shot at the notion of a frozen market, a clear signal that we’re finding out what we’re going to do when we grow up. Of course, we look a lot like our parents in the process, but that’s just something to deal with along with the mortgage and car payments.

Maturity can mean many things — responsibility, stability, success — but none of those things rule out the wild side of the realtime moment. Drama can come in many shapes and sizes, and this drama is gathering steam. When they ship AnyClip, you can look it up. As Margo Channing said in All About Eve: Fasten your seatbelts… it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

It’s been quite a while (May) since I wrote a post about the then-less-obvious move away from RSS toward micromessaging. The observation that Twitter’s rapid growth was supplanting the use of RSS as a reading mechanism — in my case abandoning Google Reader in favor of FriendFeed — was met with emotional attacks from RSS’s prime mover, Dave Winer. Knowing from first hand experience in supporting Winer throughout the rise of RSS, I certainly was not caught unawares by the vehemence of the reaction, even as it became more and more personal.

What did surprise me was Winer’s rapid reworking of RSS into a “cloud” enabled solution, even as he continued to argue with such intensity that a centralized service (Twitter) could not sustain itself. In other words, RSS is not being replaced because it can’t be, but in any case it can already do everything the new message bus can. It’s certainly the best case to be made, but it has a weakness best illustrated by observation:

Twitter is winning. The stream is faster. Faster will increasingly win the hearts and minds of those who value speed when all other metrics are commoditized. In the history of technology, doing more faster creates economies of value, which in turn accelerate adoption. The most obvious example: RSS. A technology that has always been difficult to explain nonetheless emerged and spread rapidly to the point today where it dominates the ways information is spread over the network.

Nothing is more pervasive in the network than RSS. It’s the technology that turned the Web into a DVR. We interact with it every day more than any other tool at our disposal. Whether we perceive it that way or not, we do. RSS changed our relationship with information, from hunter to partner. It also changed the way we process that information, the way we create it, and the way we deal with overload.

In a way, it’s the polar ice caps melting that finally hipped us to the obvious. Those glorious days at the wheel of our youth, the sky expanding in front of us to the horizon, the feeling of unlimited power as we stepped on the accelerator. We knew in the exhilaration of the moment the special cost of that freedom, that now was our time and that someday we would need to accept the pull of gravity.

Part of the lure of the open road is outrunning fear. Time traveling. Beating the odds. The odds are Twitter won’t go away, won’t collapse, won’t drag its thrid party cloud into a black hole and vanish. It doesn’t even matter whether it’s called Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, or Microsoft. Just like the Internet, the reality of this thing built on top of RSS is that it is bigger than its parts, its companies, its parts. Each node may be centralized but in aggregate it’s the opposite.

If that’s true, attacking a popular service for its failings in business, ethics, or any lack of “openness” does little to slow it down and perhaps the opposite. It’s not a matter of politics, it’s just sheer numbers. People voting with their feet. The arguments about long form versus noisy tweets, or built-in versus external URL shorteners, or RSS versus Twitter. They beg the observation: people like Twitter, they get their information first from the stream, and they need to figure out how to manage the flow.

Is there any magic to bring to bear on managing the flow? Yes, that’s why Twitter is so central. [Editor's note: When I say Twitter read FriendFeed.] Twitter’s Follow cloud, combined with Track, enables an authoritative filter into the flow that extracts a high percentage of the aggregate consensus of that group into a manageable stream. How that manifests itself in its delivery to the screen is what the great software battle of the moment is all about. Which device or devices we use can be interesting to argue about, but they’re all really iPhones in one shape or another. Oh sorry, couldn’t help it.

The raging against the RSS, or Office, or Links is Dead meme — I get that it hurts feelings, annoys VCs, leads to RTBS (RealTime Block Syndrome). But no amount of shooting the messenger (another metaphor) will change the fundamental point I’m making: that RSS has triggered a new wave of innovation that will inevitably build out from where RSS has stalled and eventually create a similar disruption of what it produces. Everybody look up at the sky and smile. Click.

Today’s Gmail outage illustrates just how tolerant the new realtime architecture is to individual service failure. The initial surprise at the comprehensive nature of the flatlining may have caused some significant degree of marketing damage, my bet is that the end result will be a boost to the service’s popularity, and with it, realtime services including Twitter and FriendFeed.

For my part, moving over to FriendFeed direct messaging and private groups immediately took the outage offline for the work I was doing. The fact that traffic slowed dramatically on Gmail (IMAP and POP were still up) meant there was little to miss or catch up on. My iPhone let me know that I was missing very little, and FriendFeed aggregated both the Twitter flow that documented the extent of the outage as well as the message and blog traffic that explained the outage’s contours.

Within minutes it became clear how little I now depend on email in general. TechCrunch’s internal traffic is over Yammer, and FriendFeed’s realtime chat function has already scooped up most of the collaborative chatter. In recent weeks we’ve been readying a service to be released alongside the return of live video streaming of the Gillmor Gang, and the development team switched over to private groups (what used to be called rooms) a few days ago. Email continues to be a valuable source of one-to-one messaging in near realtime, but the collaborative filtering of social graph-based alerts is slowly but surely taking over from RSS readers.

Taken from a 10-thousand foot view provided by the outage, Gmail becomes a critical service that can be patched around with just a few key services, nailing up direct messaging and private groups configured to send email alerts of the resultant rerouted messages back to email when the outage is over. After 5 minutes or so, the problem went away from an operational perspective. Twitter outages have been more disruptive for their impact on information flow, and Google has learned valuable lessons which will reduce the likelihood of the current event significantly. We didn’t dodge a bullet as much as catch it in our teeth.

Watching Teddy Kennedy’s wake and funeral over the past few days has been a sad but wonderful lesson in the value of public service. By public service I mean the motive variously referred to as empathy, generosity, fairness, and other such terms demonized as liberalism by the new and to some extent old right wing. The Senator’s life consumed not only those labels but the full arc of a career among the people. And in doing so, he now offers a template for success in a polarized era, at a time when hard decisions are finally coming down to a vote.

Chief among his insights was the relentless pursuit of compromise as an art of war. His Republican friends spoke emotionally and graciously, but with strong doses of resistance to the famed Kennedy charm. They recognized him as a formidable opponent who could only be tamed, or at least harnessed, by finding common ground on which they could stand with him. If it was a win for them, they reasoned, I’ll gladly go along for the Kennedy ride. Not to say they didn’t enjoy the camaraderie, the chance to escape the dark hole of the sanctimonious extremists, the true spirit of enterprise that lurks in any politician’s heart. Kennedy gave them the running room to merge into the consensus of the times.

We all underestimated Teddy. From the Left, we were endlessly surprised when he championed the causes his brother Jack delineated but never had the political strength to produce. When Bobby was killed, nothing tore at our weary defeated souls like Teddy’s eulogy, which used the same tones and fierce despair Bobby used in Dr. King’s death. When he anointed Obama as the next brother, he casually let it be known first as Caroline’s idea. The master’s touch, from someone we always felt was a weaker version of the sons, fourth in line to the throne.

Now he’s gone, and we tremble at the thought there are no adults left to see us through. No matter how beaten up Obama gets, he retains double the popularity of the opposition. The cover of the latest Rolling Stone, with its year-long investigation of why the Beatles broke up (Yoko, for god’s sake), asks the musical question along the top: Is Healthcare Reform Doomed? What would Teddy say to that, we wonder. A quick journey to FriendFeed for the answer.

FriendFeed is the last remnant of the ‘09 campaign. The realtime debate between left and right has calcified most other places into Death Panels versus whatever the Left is selling, oh I know, the Public option. For me, Death Panels is actually a legitimate argument, not for its factual basis (none) but for the same kind of appreciation Republicans saw Kennedy — a good frame of a fundamental fear. Just because it comes down on the wrong side of the argument detracts nothing from either its power or its usefulness in the debate.

What Kennedy understood was the power of the model, regardless of the details or even the wins and losses of the struggle. To get a foe to argue not about the issue but about the implementation was an instant and comprehensive victory, and a quick look at Kennedy’s issues shows he won them going away. FriendFeed won the realtime argument the second it launched real-time chat. And when ugly commentary surfaced about Teddy, it bubbled to the top and prompted some direct and unambiguous responses. One retort, and then silence when the tone remained strident and harsh.

What people miss with realtime is the deep change it produces in the arc of the conversation. Some decry realtime as too fast, as prone to snap decisions and 140-character cartoon oversimplifications of complex thoughts. These distinctions — RSS is long and detailed, Twitter is bursty and noisy — are political planks, not facts. They serve the implementations and the economics of the discussion, not the underlying art of war. Realtime already won the war; now we wait to have it explained to us, and carved out of compromise and perseverance.

When people attack FriendFeed for going away, I’ll see Teddy’s smile. When they attack Facebook for being closed, it’ll be tougher but still, Teddy’s smile. When Rolling Stone questions heathcare’s health, I’ll see it as evidence of Obama’s caucus troops going back to the well, energizing their troops with something akin but not yet fully engaged with Death Panels and town halls. The best thing we have going for us is no matter how much we think heath care reform sucks, it sucks less than the alternative.

Teddy’s death gave us something we’ve waited a long time for, a coda to the deaths of brothers, Beatles, and God herself. As the dusk shrouded Arlington and wrapped us all in our reveries, we could each conjure our own version of the future. At one point Chris Matthews complained about how President Obama wasn’t at the burial, and Olbermann countered by saying the eulogy was enough. Surprisingly, Matthews withdrew his comment, something he never does. I smiled Teddy’s smile.

Watching our fearless leader’s journey into AndroidWorld has been fantastically entertaining, as Mike’s mission to bring Google Voice to the iPhone is presented as a move to the free open Google voice device hoedown. Entertaining mostly because if the real truth were revealed, we would understand how Machiavellian this “revolution” really is, and how Arrington, Google, and Apple are locked in a conspiracy to oust the real villain of the era, the Dumb Pipe.

Strip away the religious fervor of the Arrington plan — the tyranny of the AppStore, the inability to crush your iPhone battery into rubble by running endlessly mesmerizing apps, the frustration with the speed of the massive disruption of social space triggered by the iPhone’s invention — strip the arguments away and you might glimpse the true reality of what’s going on. Namely, that Apple is conspiring with Google to force the FCC to “force” Apple to, regrettably, open the door to VoIP and the Universal Inbox.

Why did Apple let Google in in the first place, with YouTube, Gmail, and Maps? Because the alliance served Apple incredibly well in bringing an intuitive composite interface to the exciting new world of a real Web-aware phone. But the deal served a much larger purpose, to prod AT&T and by extension the rest of the carriers to move to flat data pricing and support for alternatives to the blockades erected against Flash, tethering, SMS, and other revenue safe zones “respected” by Apple’s political design structures.

In each case, Apple could sit back and wait for the market to get noisy about the restrictions, let Google carry the ball forward against the carriers, and then eventually cave in to the “realities” of the marketplace. If anyone noticed that it might appear to be in both Google’s and Apple’s best interest to squeeze the carriers into compliance, then all that would need to be done to avoid the appearance of a counter-cartel would be to resign a board seat or two, make a lot of noise for the benefit of an FCC who is desperate to have any role before VoIP demolishes their seat at the table, and tease the digerati avant-garde with cool services to the point where they can’t live without their 2010 fix.

Let’s get real about this Google Voice thing. It’s totally the wave of the future, a future invented by Apple via the iPhone and then handed off to Google and eventually Microsoft for shrinkwrapping. It’s easy to forget how pathetic things were before the iPhone, how we endured crappy cell service and endlessly stupid Web 1.0 stillborn services while we struggled to move from modems to DSL to shared cable to Edge to “3G” to realtime social media. Each level of service required the jujitsu and compromises of the previous era to pry open the running room to make the next corner turn. Jobs is no more the bad guy today than whoever will take Google’s place as the “revolutionary” next week.

The old saw is that you need to invent your enemy if they don’t exist, and nowhere is that more true in the realtime era. Watching Twitter struggle to stay ahead of its audience as it competes with Facebook for realtime services reminds us that doing this stuff is hard the first time but gets easier as the market rises to commoditize the disruption. It’s no accident that FriendFeed was co-designed by the Gmail designer, who leverages the emergence of a user base as a tool to drive wider adoption when the platform is more ready for them.

Arrington’s struggle to live in the future is our struggle of the near future, but it will be a lot easier for us as a result of his squeaky wheel. But let’s not kid ourselves: if Mike gets his way and Apple “caves” on Google Voice, he’ll dump the G2 only long enough to find a new leap ahead to accelerate. The good news for him and us is that we need just a very few such acquiescences to get to the point where the Dumb Pipes will blend seamlessly into a single platform. Of course, then we’ll all get iPhones anyway because they’ll run Google’s superior apps and all the AppStore offerings without conditions. Because the Dumb Pipes would have to be invented if they didn’t already exist.

The news that some loser URL shortener is closing down does not prove anything other than that those who promoted it with their links better have gotten something out of the deal already. It’s all part of the usual pony ride that starts with excitement about the possibilities and ends in recriminations about the winners controlling the market. Now Dave Winer is calling for an end to what he calls “at best a temporary workaround for a limit Twitter shouldn’t have.” So here are the facts:

Twitter came out of nowhere and dominated the information space by constraining the canvas to 140 characters. The URL became the application trigger, the wormhole through which we could leap back into the existing macrocosm of blogs, software, and services. URL shorteners then, and now, are the mechanism by which we send data to and from the message bus. Whether these URLs are controlled by a private or public group is entirely inconsequential, because whoever controls the flow of that data has an advantage over everyone else who doesn’t.

Twitter and other apparent control points have both power and limits. Twitter’s power is the constraint of the wormhole; its weakness is the assent of its users and third party developers. If users and apps can move from one to several wormholes, their leverage accelerates dramatically. How can this be accomplished with Twitter’s dominance? By piggybacking URL transforms on top of the gatekeeper’s single point of control. By establishing another (or several) URL transform sites that large or influential numbers of links flows through.

In order to reach that critical mass, the purveyors of these URL transformers must establish credibility in the marketplace of return on investment. In making assessments about technology, it’s vital to assess not only the value of the innovation but its chances of survival in the arc of its moment. In that crucible, arguments against market scale, open versus commercial, and so on are largely moot. Whether some person or some community has “control” is only relevant to whether we think it will be successful in its goals and therefore be a factor in how the network develops.

Let’s say we have two transformers in operation. They both operate in similar fashion, taking Bit.ly links and repackaging them in unique and proprietary ways. The end result: you click on the hybrid links and they uncompress in one, two, or potentially endless permutations. As Adam Bosworth once said about XML, its alleged verbosity is trumped by Moore’s Law. So too are transforms. In effect, the speed of the uber transform server is the gating factor, or put another way, the latency you don’t notice you is not a problem.

So now we have competing uber transformer chains of shortened or otherwise enhanced metadata firehoses. As they develop audiences with interesting characteristics — authority, realtime velocity, reach, etc. — they begin to establish a micro-community power base that can encourage mergers, acquisition by platforms, and the emergence of market standards. It does no good to rail against this or that bigco conspiracy; in a transformer ecology, Twitter or Bit.ly or any one service isolates themselves by not talking to the uber layer. The water will flow around those disruptions, so it’s unprofitable to pursue them.

It’s more likely that Twitter and Borthwick will play along rather than constrict the straw through which the firehose currently flows. Hybrid transforms can quickly cherry pick the valuable streams, as many are using FriendFeed as the uber Twitter API. If URL aggregators emerge now to wrap uber layers across the weaker URL shortener populations, it will be difficult for Bit.ly or Twitter or both to mop up and retain an effective monopoly. Even if it’s only a matter of time before URL shortening is absorbed at the OS level, buying up real estate is certainly a smart strategy if only as a hedge against the eventual consolidation.

But just as the iPhone will continue to overturn the market fundamentals by constraining its application space, so too will those who control the URL transform space continue to drive the realtime expansion. It’s not a religious argument but a pragmatic one, and no amount of pigeonholing or posturing about unfair good old boy arrangements will obscure the opportunity for the hybrid transformers to seed the emerging market. The first one in will be the second, and all we need to break the stranglehold that really doesn’t exist.

With Twitter down this morning and reports of failure all over the social Web, I figured FriendFeed would be up, if denuded by the Twitter outage. Well, sorta. In fact, FriendFeed searches are down. How the hell does a denial of service attack plague reach into the coolest service no-one will ever use, as former user Mike Arrington once put it. Is the realtime Web screeching to a halt on purpose, did rssCloud have something to do with making things too really simple, or what? For now, I’ll Blame FriendFeed.

As long as FriendFeed keeps rolling out updates to realtime, FriendFeediots like myself are smug in our uber view that no matter what happens to the rest of the Web, regardless of whether Google buys a patent-safe video codec for HTML 5, not caring whether Apple and AT&T collude to keep Google Voice out of the carrier business, not worried about whether the Sun/Oracle deal is held up for months, etc. — no matter what, FriendFeed will solve all of my social media problems before anybody else does.

Now search is back up, so I really should stop worrying. After all, one of the advantages of being small is that your problems are relatively smaller. Even as the normal realtime chatter resumes — Scoble at some Boulder startup event, someone asking how to import Twitter replies, Drudge headlines Twitter outage, Facebook “transport errors”, Leo Laporte says no Windows Weekly because Paul is in Paris and can’t get a decent connection — I still can’t get past the reality that when Twitter farts, FriendFeed becomes a complete and total gasbag. After months of innovation, revamped APIs, advanced realtime features, and Scoble pruning his Twitter follows because FriendFeed’s cloud is more manageable, FriendFeed is still a parasite on a pimple on Twitter’s ass.

Of course, I don’t feel better even now. Blaming FriendFeed doesn’t reduce my own guilt. Endlessly promoting the advantages of realtime, the ephemeral return of Track, playing Laconica and Facebook and FriendFeed off in a pathetic attempt at coaxing a response out of Twitter, goading Dave Winer into overhauling RSS. None of it in any way meaningful, when it all still comes down to whether Twitter is up or down. For all of FriendFeed’s power, it still is best at being a Twitter client. Albeit a Twitter client that is modeling the transition of micromessaging to an enterprise class backbone.

Alright, now I’m beginning to shake this off. Stream splicing is still to be released in the next 30 days, I’m told. The PubSubHubbubGlubglub integration with Google Reader is lightning fast. The RSS is better than Twitter argument thread is humming. Scoble is being attacked for starting a Twitter unfollow trend. Breathing deeper now, it’s all good. Get back to work, Arrington says less Yammering, more posting. I Blame FriendFeed.

OK. Did Microsoft just absorb Yahoo for zero additional cost beyond its oft-stated plans to spend some 10-15% of its budget on search per year? Did Apple really stifle innovation with its carrier-friendly App Store rules? And what’s common to both companies’ developer strategies? Yes, no, a lot.

Working backwards, Apple and Microsoft offer their developer communities their favorite incentive — money. Seven million .Net developers come out of the Yahoo deal stronger than ever, with very few public comments from Yahooers hoping to move over to Microsoft like the ones that drowned out the proposed buyout phase of this deal. Back then, it was all about the complexity of integration of the Valley stack with .Net, and how ridiculous it was to think Yahoo engineers would work for or even with the Redmond crowd.

But the Yahoo deal was never about Microsoft. It was about Google cleaning Yahoo’s clock, leaving it vulnerable to the takeover that’s been happening in slow motion ever since. The original deal was tied to a timetable designed to clear the Bush administration before it left office, and no one seemed to recognize how serious Ballmer was when that deadline expired. Given the trouble Google had with its subsequent deal with Yahoo, you might have a little more respect for Ballmer’s counting of the cards in the first phase. Now, with Google out of the antitrust argument and in effect validating the rationale for the new deal, Ballmer is sitting pretty.

With Yahoo out of the search business, a two-horse race provides incentive for an attack on Google’s realtime challenges. It’s not so much that they don’t understand the stakes, but as with Google’s undercutting of Microsoft revenue streams, Microsoft doesn’t have to defeat Google in order to profit from a healthier competition for the efficiency of click-throughs. Just as television advertising is distributed across a four-network market regardless of NBC’s or CBS’s current status, so too will efficient results work across a 70-30 split. What does make a difference are the Web properties that house the ads, and that’s where social media and its follow clouds can make a big difference.

Here’s where the comparison with Apple and its developer cloud begins to resonate. Every time we hear the outrage of an unfairly damaged App Store victim, our first inclination is to think there’s some fundamental flaw in the relationship between Apple and its third party developers. The argument: Apple’s arbitrary limits are designed to protect AT&T from applications that subvert their revenue model, and/or Apple from losing its leverage obtained through the exclusive deal. It’s a complex series of checks and balances — subsidized device prices to spur dominant market share, all-you-can-eat access, and the use of onboard WiFi to keep the pressure on for further concessions.

The best comparison is one with Twitter and its third parties — rate limits and shifting favoritism with developers based on allegiance for a few select winners. The models cross over with Tweetie, which not only enriched its developer and investors but established a poster child for how to play ball and win in both the iPhone and social cloud spaces. Contrast that with the unhappy video developers who tread too close to the firewall between excessive 3G saturation and the more constrained 3GS upload model, and most developers will overlook the losers and dream of hitting the App Store lottery. It’s not really a matter of rules but rather timing: what won’t work today inevitably will work at some point when bandwidth can survive the new usage pattern.

So the answer to App Store rate limiting stifling developers is no, and it points a way to the Microsoft opportunity that grows out of the slow-rolling Yahoo dismantling. With Bartz focusing on high value media plays, .Net and Yahoo transplant developers will start looking for an iPhone-like platform to get comfortable with in the horse race with Google. That platform is Silverlight, which offers advanced realtime rich media features coupled with access to the Microsoft advertising platform. Interestingly, Silverlight and the iPhone share some powerful characteristics — H.264 support, on and offline application models, and streaming deployment of both media and application update code tied to an iterative transactive micropayments fabric. And the keyword: money.

Google, on the other hand, will be watched carefully as it attempts to hurdle the application barrier Apple is defining with the Google Voice slapdown, as well as deal with the difficulty of integrating Google Wave with its apps or vice versa. At some point, Microsoft will have to decide how long they can protect their enterprise control of Office at the cost of losing the global consumer market of the next generation. They may realize a Silverlight socially aware Office for the consumer space (netbooks, XBox, and down into Windows Mobile) can jumpstart a Silverlight App Store before Google has a chance to react. Selling that for a bargain price (free) to the Yahoo crowd will look like the next logical step in the Yahoo takeover, and make the increasingly sweeter pill a lot easier to swallow.

Sandwiched neatly between the RealTime is God and RealTime Who Needs It crowds is a new group that embraces both positions while moving forward rapidly. These folks include Brett Slatkin of the PubSubHubub effort and Dave Winer of rssCloud.org. Slatkin and fellow conspirator Brad Fitzpatrick demoed the PSHBB architecture at the RealTime Stream Crunchup, and Winer quickly jumped in with his own implementation.

While Winer attacked PSHBB as a Google (and TechCrunch) conspiracy, the rhetoric seemed mostly in service of his own plans for a decentralized open platform not controlled by bigcos. The charges don’t make sense — PSHBB is not a Google effort but rather one started by Fitzpatrick and Slatkin on their own — and like Winer’s, proposed and delivered as an open architecture that can be spread across multiple players. In other words, they’re saying the same thing.

Digging deeper, it could be that Winer’s concern is that adoption by Google or other platform players will create a bandwagon effect that could lock out smaller independent developers. There’s certainly some truth to that dynamic, as PSHBB is already running in a number of cooperating platform implementations including FeedBurner, WordPress, and even FriendFeed, where Slatkin is active in tracking user issues. But ironically, by offering a competing framework, Winer takes away the argument of unfairness. If developers and publishers want to adopt one platform over another because it’s got more mainstream adoption, they’re free to do so. In the past, Winer has been the beneficiary of just such choices, with RSS 2.0 proliferating in no small part due to support from Microsoft on the platform side and the New York Times on the publishing side.

Both PSHBB and rssCloud sidestep the issue of whether RSS is on the decline, preferring to co-opt whatever momentum the technology has into the swarming viral nature of the realtime micromessaging disruption. Whether there’s consensus about the underlying value of the new platform, there’s no denying the uptake and attendant opportunities for gaining mind and perhaps market share of the new wave of approaches to managing the stream. If that were not the case, why would PSHBB be gaining adoption and Winer be spending time on his own cloud? Our own experience in managing the CrunchUp suggests an explosive market for startups; we spent most of the last few weeks trying to fit people into panels and demos that had already expanded to the breaking point.

If realtime is simply the latest buzzword, a placeholder for getting attention and perhaps venture money until the next buzzword comes along, then we’d expect to see some slowdown in those realtime projects that are out at the bleeding edge. Facebook certainly seems to have stopped short of a realtime updating stream, though I’m seeing more Facebook messages appearing in aggregate tools such as Seesmic and FriendFeed. But mostly I’ve seen complaints about intermittent slow updating from Twitter and an apparent move to a one-hour pinging of new WordPress items in the latest update. In other words, speed wins even if no one has yet figured out how to manage that speed efficiently.

Then there’s WiFi on planes, where I bet we’ll soon see numbers reflecting the impact on what airlines we choose. If realtime is now the new normal in publishing, then losing a working day to a cross-country flight is no longer viable. With price discounts for mobile access, the *Phone becomes the easy way to keep in touch with short, bursty messages the simplest way of managing the infostream. And the fundamental result: the URL payload becomes the lingua franca of the message bus.

It’s here where the damage is being done to RSS as a transport. As micromessage citation grows in importance, the sheer number of Web pages cited begins to overwhelm the RSS payloads. In recent days, Google Reader Likes have been added in an attempt to map some sort of social graph to the consumption of RSS items, but it’s still unreachable except from within the Reader UI. The trend moves away from RSS items and toward the original pages, which for publishers means a much greater opportunity for cross-linking, advertising, engagement, and analytics.

Podcasting is similarly disemboweled, given the ease with which YouTube videos are streamed to all always-on devices. It’s easy to decry Google market force here, but it’s no accident that Microsoft’s IIS Media Server now supports H.264 as does Silverlight cross-platform. I believe Silverlight becomes the default NetBook media server, based not on enclosures but rather streaming. We’re already seeing popular podcasts such as Leo Laporte’s TWiT gaining large realtime audiences as the number of streaming services proliferates. It’s only partially random that Twitter emerged out of the ashes of a podcasting service.

One argument against this future is that it tends to rely on centralized storage and a gated cloud of services. Winer personalizes this to the notion of TwitterCorp, that no single company should control this uber stream, that they won’t be able to, that if they could it would be a bad thing. He has a point, but whether rssCloud will solve this problem is not clear. He’s using Amazon EC2 and the open source Identica project for parts of his platform, both services provided by commercial companies.

In his rssCloud Roadmap, Winer asks us to think of rssCloud as Loosely coupled 140-character networks, and his goal “to instantaneously flow 140-character messages around, with metadata, including links, tags, enclosures, and whatever else (it’s as open architecture as RSS 2.0 is).” I’ll quote with interleaved commentary:

A network that works alongside Twitter, but outside the control of a company. You can be confident that no company will control it because it is being started by a person, not a company. Even if I wanted to crush you, I couldn’t. Even if I wanted to control all the users’ data, I can’t — since most of it won’t flow through my servers.

I’m not convinced there is much of a distinction between services offered by an individual or a company; they both can be “controlled” to the extent that users offer their data up. Perhaps the caveat of “most” lessens that control but to that extent the remainder of the data flowing through Winer’s servers would be the sum of his control.

Re Google’s PubSubHubBub, their goal appears to flow updates of blog posts in association with Feedburner. This is a good goal. I hope to help them get RSS compatibility into it. If your goal is to optimize the polling of existing RSS or Atom feeds, you can use the rssCloud network, but that’s not something I want to get involved in personally. My interested is in the micro-blogging application, at least at the outset.

Again, characterizing PubSubHubBub as “Google’s” is inaccurate. He offers to help provide RSS compatibility, and suggests that while rssCLoud can be used to optimize polling of RSS feeds, he’s personally only interested in the micro-blogging application for now. He’s surely threading the needle here, but how that will help spread adoption of his solution depends on the degree to which his solution appears more open and counter to the TwitterCorp threat he sees.

As with RSS, it is always a mistake to underestimate the power Winer’s bearhugging of technology can muster. But the context in which RSS emerged has as many differences as similarities with today’s circumstances. In particular, RSS was supported by two kinds of media — the emerging blogosphere and, eventually, the mainstream media. Today, these two medias have merged, primarily as a result of RSS and its democratic impact. It’s as though the New York State Thruway suddenly smashed all of its toll booths and allowed free travel. The impact was seismic, like the Guttenberg press. Shelf space became infinite.

That revolution took time and luck and plenty of political pressure to gain enough momentum. By contrast, Twitter bootstrapped RSS, broadband, social dynamics, and the combined medias. What took several years with RSS has taken a fraction of that time precisely because RSS proved you could tip markets without the dominance of bigcos. In effect, RSS proved we don’t need to fear the locked trunk, at least not in the classical way it’s been defined. How do we defend ourselves against bigcos like Google and Microsoft from using RSS tactics themselves?

At the Fortune conference in Pasadena today, Michael Arrington reported Twitter’s Biz Stone responding to a question about Discovery as saying “they need to assign weight to users or specific Tweets to do a better job of surfacing Tweets.” Inherent in the comment are the tools of control: “assign weight” and “surfacing Tweets.” These words imply ownership of the stream, just as Page Rank became the control point of authority in the search era.

Here’s Ray Ozzie on the same point:

I think it’s going to impact search, because the nature of search ranking is based on — at least classically is based on looking at what’s relevant by what it’s linked to, and if a lot of the links are moving from more static media into more dynamic media —

Me: Oh, so you agree with my thesis.

Ozzie: Yeah.

Me: Excellent.

Ozzie: Yeah. I don’t know to what degree the ranking will be impacted in that realm, but I think that’s a fairly important thing. And the Tweet itself is more or less the anchor text of the link and so on.

But wait, here’s Microsoft talking about how disruptive the stream will be, and it’s a littleco talking about controlling the high ground. Can Twitter establish control of the message stream to the point where no other stream can produce efficient filtered results to users? Again, Ozzie:

[W]hat I learned in the Groove experience is that if you have lots of things that notify things, the user wants to suddenly aggregate them and tune which ones they want high bandwidth instant notification and which ones they only want to occur every once in a while. So, having messages go through something where they can say, okay, I’m going to have all of these different classes of messages, move these classes into this bucket, these into this bucket, notify these on my phone, these somewhere else, it’s useful for the user….

[A]s humans we have these issues. And certain of the events, certain classes of the events we want to treat, as Dave [Winer] says, like a river where you don’t really care if you miss something. It’s where you’re not trying to keep up every little thing. Maybe it’s an amusement, maybe it’s just a background activity.

Some types of events you just want to see them. You just don’t want to miss even a single one in this big flood of notifications. And so we just need better tools.

It stands to reason that the more endpoints, the better the chance of no single company controlling the stream. Today Twitter talks like a bigco, but in a world of streams, they must compete on the quality of their discovery model, compete on how they “assign weight,” compete on how they “surface Tweets” to their cloud of third party clients and analytic engines.

Viewed in this context, PSHBB promises to bring Feedburner feeds, Google Reader shares and Likes, and various smaller RSS clouds such as WordPress up to speed and into the weighting and surfacing game. The coalition also benefits from bridges to services such as FriendFeed that Winer has eschewed because they have offered solutions such as SUP. rssCloud certainly serves as a reminder of the underlying values of simplicity, transparency, developer independence, and user control, but then again that’s what PubSubHubBub is selling too.

The data from the Apple earnings call illustrates the difficult time RSS will have staving off micromessaging. Most telling was the turf the iPhone took out of iPod sales. Every one of those iPhone sales, no matter whether they are the new 3GS or the $100 3G model, reduce the reasons for syncing to a Windows or Mac box in order to bring down podcasts.

As realtime accelerates, streaming text and media services are much easier to leverage than slower ones such as RSS readers. Given the Flash blockade on the iPhone and Google’s YouTube support for H.264, those services that make it easier to click directly on breaking news are rising in usage. At its simplest level, if I see a Flash icon, I avoid that service more and more. If I see a YouTube icon, I come back more and more, whether it’s on the iPhone or not.

YouTube’s branding puts a lot of wood behind the realtime arrow as a result. iPhone access via iTunes is gated at 10MB on 3G, so ironically it underlines the streaming angle if you doubleclick the item again and the file begins streaming to you in realtime. Gradually users are being trained that if you want to hear something when you become aware of it, it better be hosted in MP3 or on YouTube. The iPod’s lack of a radio may not be the determinant in iPhone growth at its expense, but the outcome is still moving away from downloading and toward streaming.

What may be more fundamental even than speed is the two-way interactive nature of the realtime experience. FriendFeed conversations have a certain dynamism missing from Twitter calls and responses. While it may not be obvious today, when FriendFeed streams aggregate both Track and your Follow cloud, the resulting service can signal you when triggers are fired and you can respond accordingly. Streaming media has a similar capability, where your actions around the media can be transmitted back to the Follow/Track engine in realtime.

Those composite signals contain much more fidelity and metadata than previous elements of the stream, and like H.264 will create swarms around both content and production of the parent streams. In effect, the immediacy and feedback loops of these realtime streams will provide increased value that will accelerate the clients that enable them. Desktop systems that play along will achieve momentum as well. Flash will suffer, Silverlight will not. It’s the beginnings of a Betamax/VHS argument, and we know how that turned out.

I know Robert Scoble thinks Office is still not dead, but his excitement about the Office 2010 tech preview should be taken with a large grain of salt. Of course, it was fun to be treated to an old-media style press barnstorm of the flogosphere, and the bells and whistles — poof, don’t need Photoshop, nor iMovie neither, and how about those browser features, cool — certainly will play well in the enterprise. But you need a passport, pardon the expression, to determine what web features are allowed from app to app. Sorry, Web User, you are in a Word document and do not have permission to collaborate in the browser. What a pile of “Our customers don’t want that feature” that is.

If that was the only thing separating Office 2010 from the brass ring currently reserved for Windows 7, Microsoft could call it a good day’s work and relax. O2010 certainly does provide some pressure points for Google Apps to ponder, but the one thing that would really sting Google’s hide is apparently nowhere to be seen. Silverlight Office is still MIA, and that’s no surprise. After all, we’re not supposed to realize SIlverlight is already the new Office. Once micromessaging apps appear in Silverlight, we’ll wake up like we are about realtime.

With Silverlight 3.0 released, 6 million .Net developers can now port their code to Silverlight and embed their apps on the desktop. That’s the WIndows/Mac desktop. As Servers and Tools chief Bob Muglia told me a few weeks ago (video coming soon), Novell’s Moonlight Linux project is closing the delta between Silverlight releases. But look at the dynamics of the Twitter client market, where Adobe AIR apps broke out of the pack early (Twhirl, TweetDeck), and you’ll see why Silverlight 3 will capture a healthy segment of the Office clone market.

Just as Seesmic Desktop’s new web client consolidates rich features with server side personalization, so too does O2010 start down the same road with Office. But not on the Mac, where ironically (no, its not ironic) all the media lives. So as much as I admire the tough love Microsoft is showing for Office-is-dead, they are priming the pump for collab-Office functionality that works cross-platform with richness. As much as Google wants to sell us HTML 5, they are stuck figuring out how to pay for H.264 while HTML 5 goes begging for a patent trapless video codec.

Meanwhile, video is going berserk on the network, thanks to the iPhone 3GS and live streaming video. YouTube is perfectly positioned as a repository, with H.264 working seamlessly on the iPhone and in Silverlight 3. It’s the real standard, but not in HTML 5. In effect, Silverlight is the analog container to iPhone 3 OS. On the phone, H.264. On the desktop, H.264. In Google land, it’s still Flash on the desktop. A minor speed bump, but a bump none the less.

What will Silverlight Office have? Well, for one, it will have O2010, the web apps. Embedded in the Silverlight container. Think that enterprisey .Net developers aren’t going to write bridging code to add realtime collaboration features to extend the quarantined O2010 desktop functions back in? Who’s gonna stop them? Microsoft trying to slow down third party apps will make Twitter rate-limiting look warm and cuddly. What happens when Zoho or even the Google Apps enterprise teams start writing connectors to the quarantined features of the 0210 web inmates.

ANd then the hole so big we’ll all be driving trucks through: the micro-messaging apps that will suck the lifeblood out of email and IM just like they’re doing to RSS. When the pubsubhubub boys get through with their march across Google Reader, Feedburner, SUP, WordPress, TypePad, and every other ping server still creaking along, it won’t make much sense to have yet another version of content stripped of business model, comments, and analytics. At that point, Silverlight Office will officially be uncrated, upsold like iPhone 3.0 game updates, and autoupdated to all who want to live in the future today.

Steve Ballmer had it right when he said developers, developers, developers. That’s why Bob Muglia owns Silverlight as part of his Servers and Tools charter, and that’s why he answered the SIlverlight Office questions this way:

What I think you’ll see over time is major parts of Microsoft applications beginning to incorporate Silverlight into their experience. If you look at, for example, the Web companions that Office is doing, they do use Silverlight in a variety of instances. So, we’re seeing that being used there. We’ll begin to see Bing and MSN and our online properties begin to adopt Silverlight inside the set of things that they do. We already see some of that in a limited form in Windows Live.

In other words, yes. Silverlight Office just went into Tech Preview. And just as Google Wave was released early to get it into the hands of developers, so too is O2010 getting Silverlight Office into the hands of .Net developers. Developers who can make money right now extending O2010 Web edition with Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and other social streams. Makes you wonder why Hailstorm architect Mark Lucovsky left Google to join VMWare and former Softie Paul Mauritz. Maybe he doesn’t feel like waiting around for HTML5. Or Office 2020 either.

The best news in years for Microsoft just hit the wires. Remember way back when Microsoft was under the threat of a breakup in the anti-trust days? Bill Gates famously pointed out Microsoft had no such thing as a monopoly, because (this was pre-Google) some company could come along at any moment and change the dynamics of the environment.

Soon he was proven exactly correct, as Google emerged with a browser-based Ajax-fueled broadband-harnessed realtime platform. Once this platform produced advertising network effects, the upstart company had all the ingredients to mount an attack on the inevitability of Microsoft. But what most saw as a direct attack on Microsoft actually produced more pain for other players. While Microsoft used the time to advance strongly in the enterprise server market, Sun lost control of its hardware leverage as Google built its realtime monetization engine on top of Linux.

Apple used the same window to move from its niche hardware and OS platforms to Intel and OS/10, grabbing the leadership in the mobile market and transferring its application base to a browser plus services approach. Did this harm Microsoft? Not really — it gave Redmond an OS target to compete against rather than against itself, and the time to migrate to a Web-based OS strategy that will show its current evolution this Friday with the release of Silverlight 3.

So now comes Chrome OS and what makes you think this puts any real hurt on Microsoft’s business. Mind share, media perception, even some developer erosion (although I doubt it.) Sure, the atmospherics are strong. After all, Google is in the advertising business. And although Chrome hasn’t produced real market share yet, it will start accelerating once the Mac version ships and all of us technocrats start loving on it full time. No, all of this is good news for Google. But bad news for Microsoft? Don’t think so.

WHere does it impact revenue anytime soon? Nowhere except in the enterprise, where it will increase IT’s need to sell into a strong Windows channel. Google will continue to garner occasional wins for Apps, which will largely serve to promote collaboration features coming in Office 2010. And oh yes SIlverlight, with its realtime streaming architecture, integrated adserver metrics, and oh maybe, a Silverlight based social center of the new desktop, which as Marc Benioff tells me is really the new center of the network.

Chrome OS couldn’t be a better driver for HTML5, for Silverlight, for AppEngine, for Azure, for Gphone/iPhone (forget the Pre), for Silverlight Mobile, and so on. Back and forth, as Google buys time to work with Apple and force H.264 back into HTML 5, while Microsoft buys time to build a SIlverlight Office around the micromessaging Trojan Horse. We’ll look back in the second half of 2010 when Chrome OS ships and see the midtier between Android and Windows filled with a realtime net-OS and two huge winners. As Bob Dylan says, It’s All Good. Only problem then is how to break up GoogleSoft. Good luck with that.

I’ve been filming segments with various folks in preparation for TechCrunch’s Realtime Stream CrunchUp this coming Friday. One of these conversations took place last Thursday in the wake of FriendFeed’s announcement of what they call Realtime Search and what I call the return of Track. Paul Buchheit and his co-founder Bret Taylor have been on numerous editions of the Gillmor Gang talking about FriendFeed’s adventures in realtime, and since Bret will represent the startup at Friday’s event, I filmed Paul.

There’s always been a lot of pushback about the significance of Track, just as there used to be similar downplaying or pigeonholing about other transformative technologies such as RSS. In particular, Track started as an afterthought by a Twitter engineer that he coded in just a few hours. It was used initially by SMS fans to keep track of incoming messages of interest on cell phones, a reasonable proposition in the early days when Twitter’s flow was emergent and the dynamics of major news events still outside the scope of the service.

But for some of us who never really “got” Twitter until its social cloud started becoming more useful than other services, Track became the only way to interact in realtime when messages came in from points unknown. This quality of serendipity or discovery, combined with a realtime IM feed that allowed upstream messages in the same window, significantly expanded Twitter from a one to many broadcast service to a communications service rivaling not only the host IM service I used (GTalk) but also email and the remnants of collaboration tools built out around the Y2K period.

This capability was both shortlived and politically charged, highlighting as it did the tenuous nature of the relationship between Twitter and its third party developers. As stability collapsed, Twitter kept stripping out all but the core functionality, and both Track and IM fell by the wayside. Over time, it became clear that Twitter’s crown jewels were in fact Track and access to the full firehose of messages. Attempts to revive Track by independent developers were rate limited to the point where the roundtrip communications aspect was effectively locked out.

It could be (and is) argued that Twitter has now brought Track back via various API services, including at least three levels of flow. Some third party services have even been given access to the full stream, but that access is based on private relationships and could be altered or terminated based on Twitter business objectives. Certainly there is no current open process whereby developers can get unfettered access. Also, Twitter’s focus on mainstream brands in some of the API levels tilts discovery away from less well-known identities and toward those promoted by the much-maligned Suggested User Lists.

As a communications medium, this is akin to some phone numbers not working when called or more precisely, 911 calls not being heard on a variety of local phone systems in a national grid. While I see no problem with SULs or any other ranking systems, the lack of an open playing field as an alternative encourages the talk of a private company “owning” the micromessage bus. I don’t buy that one either — no one forces us to post messages to Twitter and they have every right to the fruits of the service they’ve created — but talk of Track being back as either an API to be leveraged by third parties or opaque business relationships not available to all comers is the talk of those willing to accept take it or leave it terms.

It’s not that companies haven’t the right to get what they can get for their assets, it’s that I have little confidence in a third party ecosystem where the keeper of the crown jewels can summarily gate or shut out those services without notice or rationale. As an example, in editing video for the CrunchUp, I went looking for a great utility I’d last used several years ago for converting between various formats and resolutions. Clicking the icon produced an upgrade requestor that announced the company had ceased operation and recommended a procedure to back up the last version.

With Apple’s upgraded iMovie that accepts most of the camcorder formats and simple tools for uploading to the dominant YouTube, the interchange tools of the legacy app are really not required. I imagine that may well have provided the impetus for the company discontinuing development. In the same way, with no confidence in Twitter providing equal access to the firehose without the chance it would be shut down or incorporated into Twitter or some favored partner if successful, the motivation for playing along is diminished.

That’s one of the reasons FriendFeed, along with Facebook to some extent and even Twitter itself, represent better bets than others. Even before Thursday’s announcements, FriendFeed’s realtime comments architecture has allowed exactly the kind of realtime communications possible when Track was initially available on Twitter. FriendFeed has demonstrated a rigorous commitment to openness in its API strategies, a financial strategy that does not require short term monetization (largely self-funded by Buchheit), and an aggressive pursuit of realtime services such as Track and stream splicing. As you’ll hear on our conversation, I tease Paul about the timing on fleshing things out, but behind the humor is the fact that the company has come thorugh repeatedly on their roadmap and promises.

It’s not clear whether Facebook has further to go down the realtime road in the near future, but already the move toward opening the newsstream to the Everyone designation is fostering a larger footprint in open micromessaging traffic. And of course there’s nothing to prevent Twitter from restoring Track themselves should either or both competitors prove successful with their versions of Track. FriendFeed’s forthcoming stream splicing and realtime APIs will make open Track available to both FriendFeed users and third parties.

FriendFeed’s open widgets and APIs may encourage Twitter to punish its third parties for working with the smaller service. But doing so risks drawing Facebook in with its enormous scale and its search tools, not to mention Microsoft and perhaps Google when Wave becomes more integrated into or around the Google Apps. Alternatively, Twitter can consolidate its growing scale and open more or all of its cloud to Track, minimizing the rationale for average users to move to what some call a too-complex interface.

Whatever the outcome, FriendFeed’s realtime services will within weeks provide a discoverable communications platform that should concentrate the cream of high value microcommunities on the service and in cooperating third parties. As Paul and I discuss, the tools for maintaining realtime value while allowing the community to police itself are top priorities for the service. Private groups allow conversations to be curated by the group, leaving dissenters a healthy role either within community structures or in those of their own design.

The intersection of realtime video and realtime Track will prove an immensely powerful platform. The experiments Leo Laporte and the Gillmor Gang participated in may be over, but if anything the pace will quicken in the coming months as more of these services become available openly. In the meantime, Friday’s CrunchUp will underline the speed with which Realtime is transforming the Net. Enjoy our conversation as an appetizer.

Here’s the full transcript of the interview via the Simulscribe API:

Steve Gillmor: Okay. So Track is back, right?

Paul Buchheit: Well, we’ve launched (Real-Time Search?), so I don’t know if that qualifies as Track or not but it’s very exciting for us because it lets you see the results stream in such instantly as soon as someone puts the new entry or comment that matches your query, it’ll appear instantly in all of the browsers of all of the people watching that search around the world.

Steve Gillmor: So, what is your understanding of what Track is?

Paul Buchheit: So, I’m… I think maybe that people have different ideas of what it means. So we think of it in terms of a couple of different features. So the real types are those that we have launched today. And, you can look at the searches all so you can embed it somewhere and updates instantly as it happens. It isn’t… If I post a new comment and it matches someone’s query, like they’re searching for Gmail or something like that, it will appear in their browser with less than a second. So it becomes almost like chat because it’s so instantaneous, so you can see those conversations occur at Real-Time. What we’re planning to do next will be just… at least a few more weeks still, is actually enable you to subscribe to those searches in the same way that it’ll allow you to subscribe to any other feed and that includes notification options such as Email, IM notifier. So for example, you know, I could do a search for people mentioning my name like an (Excelsior Polo Bagg?), things that have, let’s say more than one comment, that I could actually have that, let’s say, go to IM when that happens. And then, you know, if my phone is set up with IM, I could actually get that off my phone…

Paul Buchheit: In an instant someone mentions my name, which could be kind of fun. Obviously that’s somewhat (frivolous?) in this case. But, if you’re… If you have a product that you’re monitoring closely or a brand that you’re… Your job is to stay on top of, that can be very useful.

Steve Gillmor: Now, are you going to start decorating these searches with advertisement?

Paul Buchheit: Ah, not currently. We have no advertising plans right now.

Steve Gillmor: Well, I mean that would seem to be a logical extension of this technology…

Paul Buchheit: Yeah, this search has been proven to be a fairly good space but it’s just isn’t our priority right now, we’re focused on building out the product and adding this great features like the ability to subscribe to searches.

Steve Gillmor: What about the… I mean, obviously IM also flows that same stream into, let’s say, G-chat where it is archived…

Paul Buchheit: Right…

Steve Gillmor: Inside of G-Mail. So that’s the advantage that we’ve been waiting for, in quite a while for.
Paul Buchheit: Right.

Steve Gillmor: What about the ability to, what I would call feed splicing, to be able to splice this stream of data along with the home feed…

Paul Buchheit: Right exactly. So that will be what is enabled by subscribing it. So for example, I could do a search for (Tech and Friendfeed?), you know, for whenever those two terms appear together. And then actually subscribe to that search and say, I want that search, anything that matches that search to appear in my home feed or maybe I want to put it into one of my friend list and in that way, you know, I don’t have to go do that search every day, it’ll actually just appear along with all of the updates from my friends.

Steve Gillmor: Right. And then you can subscribe to… How can you get that… That composite feed out of the system?

Paul Buchheit: Well, when we launched it, it has the embedding feature so you can put that on a blog or wherever else…

Paul Buchheit: The ability to export this composite feeds, as you call them, is possible by the API or it will be very soon. But, another feature that we’d like to add… I don’t know exactly where this is available. Is that group can also likewise subscribe to Feed. So for example if you have a group that’s called, you know just (Friendfeed?) fan or something that they wanna do a particular search to pull in more content for their group, they can automatically subscribe to the group to that feed so that everything matching that search automatically appears in the group and people have a discussion there.

Steve Gillmor: So the group is the new term for what used to be called rooms.

Paul Buchheit: Exactly.

Steve Gillmor: All right. And then, so you could, you can also approach to turn those rooms private, so you can… And how does direct messaging, intersects with this?

Paul Buchheit: Well, direct messages are also searchable so, you know, search works with direct messaging and I don’t think that there’s, I don’t think that there’s too many other intersections between the two features

Steve Gillmor: So, in other words, the people that have visibility into private rooms would be able to essentially have a custom servers that became available to them as part of their overall usage.

Paul Buchheit: Right. Right. Right. So addition to be able to pull it into, in RSS Feeds or someone’s blog or something like that, they can also just pull in the searchers all in real time, so that, you know everything that matches that is going to come into the room.

Steve Gillmor: And, so you say that the API will be available shortly for this?

Paul Buchheit: Yeah. We’re working on an entirely new revision of the API that we hope will, significantly simplify development of (Friendfeed apps?) and we have internally kind of a (data?) version of it and we’re hoping to get out at least to maybe to a few people next week and so it should be released to everyone in within a few weeks. That will make available in every feature that we have today. So our current version 1API is missing a few other features that were introduced for the (Friendfeed?) design like, direct messages for example, and also obviously real time search, but those features will all be available in the (APIV2?).

Steve Gillmor: All right. How about the ability to, create rooms to create… Well, I’m sorry, groups, is that going to be available as part of the API or you had another…

Paul Buchheit: You know that’s the question I, I have to double check the docs. I think that may not be in there yet, so we can certainly add it.

Steve Gillmor: Right. I mean from a technical perspective, I mean there was some issue regarding, not being able to, I mean it’s sort of recursive issue with having RSS feeds coming from…

Paul Buchheit: Right…

Steve Gillmor: Coming from (Friendfeed?)…

Paul Buchheit: We don’t import RSS feeds back into (Friendfeed?) because that creates loops in the system which is a problem. And so, what we will allow you to do is actually just subscribe, explicitly support that feature of subscribing to another feed instead of going by RSS, in that way our system can automatically detect and manage those loops and prevent them from being a problem.

Steve Gillmor: So, when is that gonna happen?

Paul Buchheit: I don’t really have a date yet for that. But it’s a feature that I want myself very much so, hopefully…

Steve Gillmor: What would you want if this is featured too and…

Paul Buchheit: Yeah, I know. You know these things are always, it’s a little more, a little more subtle that you might think

Steve Gillmor: More than a week?

Paul Buchhheit: More than a week.

Steve Gillmor: Less than a year?

Paul Buchheit: Less than a year.

Steve Gillmor: Less than a month?

Paul Buchheit: I’m not sure if it’s more or less than a month.

Steve Gillmor: Okay. So now we know it’s at least a month and maybe 2 months?

Paul Buchheit: It’s probably right.

Steve Gillmor: Okay.

Steve Gillmor: Let’s shift gears a little bit to the sort of overall, you know, we’re doing this conference in 10 days and on real time, the real time stream. I guess you certainly now qualify on pretty much all grounds for, you know, a significant place in that build (down?) of the architecture. So, how do you think things are going in real time, and do you think that it’s, you know, flash in the pan, it’s just this year’s peer-to-peer or what?

Paul Buchheit: You know what, I think this is a fairly fundamental trend. You know, a lot of people have asked this question, like is it real time? You know, why does anyone want real time? But, the way I view it, it’s the original form of communication, you know. Real time is how people worked for hundreds of thousands of years, since language was invented. When we have a discussion, it’s in real time. It’s not, like, I say something and then tomorrow I hear your response. And so I think it’s just a more efficient way to communicate with the people. It’s a more natural way, and I expect that it will become more popular.

Steve Gillmor: But it also has the tendency, you know, as you might guarantee this, discuss the famously with our struggle. It has a tendency to create or accelerate potentially, the so-called mob aspects of communities. You know, shoot first and think later or not at all, that kind of thing. I’m not sure I agree with the overall premise, but I certainly agree that we can see this kind of behavior materializing.

Paul Buchheit: Certainly, certainly. Yeah. Anything that enables people to connect and coordinate more effectively is inevitably going enable them to do, to use that power for good or evil. But that’s just, you know, the same thing as true as with, let’s say a cellphone is now. Groups can coordinate much better and all the criminals have their cellphones. The freedom of assembly isn’t always going to be a, I guess a positive thing in everyone’s view.

Steve Gillmor: All right. So, what do you do about that?

Paul Buchheit: You know, a lot of it just comes down to giving people more tools to control their experience. So, one of the features we’ve talking about is, for example, you know, just letting people control whether they have comments on their entries, for example, if I just don’t want them, or limit who can comment. So, you know, if I don’t want the whole world commenting or maybe if a conversation is just going on for too long, and I just want to shut it down, you know, those kinds of features that I think maybe helpful to add, certainly even on my own I’ve had some… Yesterday, I posted some video, and then now it’s kind of drifted off into the world of 9/11 conspiracies, and so if I had that feature, I’ll probably just shut it off.

Steve Gillmor: And so, that sort of gives rise to blacklists and that kind of stuff.

Paul Buchheit: Sure. Well, we already have the ability to block users. So, you know, if there is someone who’s harassing you or is causing a lot of trouble, you can block them and they’re then unable to view or comment on your entries.

Steve Gillmor: Right, you know, that’s a little bit draconian for what we’re talking about here, which is more, you know, managing a conversation, as opposed to just making a, you know, binary on/off. So, you haven’t thought much about that?

Paul Buchheit: Well, I mean, I think that’s maybe not quite as big of an issue as… It’s been talked about quite a bit. But just in my… My users are friend. It’s pretty rare that the conversation gets to the point where I’d want to kill it because, I think it’s… there’s occasionally something that’s very inflammatory or very, just a problematic topic comes up. But, you know, that’s a very small fraction of the conversations. Most conversations never venture into that…

Steve Gillmor: Yeah. But again, I’m not really talking about killing a conversation, but rather, providing tools so that the community can manage it. For example, there are some people who, I just won’t comment in their streams because they have demonstrated, you know, propensity for editing things that they’ve said previously which orphans the comments that are in reaction to it, things like that. So, there’s a certain kind of self-management that users go through. But there’s… The tools are not fine-grained in terms of being able to suggest to somebody, you know, I’m gonna, you know, mute you for a little while here because, you know, you made your point. And I’d like you to move on. And if you don’t move on, then I’ll block you.

Paul Buchheit: Right.

Steve Gillmor: Or something like that, I’m not suggesting that this is your problem right now. But the passion that real-time engenders is definitely something that has a quality to itself that we haven’t seen elsewhere.

Paul Buchheit: Right, right. Yeah. I mean, I think there is still some unsolved issues there. I don’t know. I don’t know what all the answers are, but there’s also… I think we’ve learned that it’s, you know, important to keep a lot of these things relatively simple. So you have to be careful about adding too many of the different features. Because there is a, you know, a tendency to…for every problem that comes up I can think of, there are kind of 3 different things that might address it. But actually making it, you know, creating those features, maintaining them and then effectively communicating them to users, what their purpose is, what the right time to use them is.

Paul Buchheit: What the interface is and what it really means is can be a little bit of a challenge at times.

Steve Gillmor: What about… I lost it. Something about… It’s a feature I’ve asked you about on a direct message several times with no response, which is…what about commenting, being able to comment directly in-line. In other words, more, you know, threaded comments.

Paul Buchheit: Like a nested, nested comments.

Steve Gillmor: Yeah I, I’m not necessarily if, you know, if there was some sort of nomenclature for doing this, or some sort of signal where you could, you know, basically go in and say…you know for example, I liked this comment rather than I like…

Paul Buchheit: Commentary.

Steve Gillmor: That’s the example that we’re saying

Paul Buchheit: That’s actually like a great example of something that I think we all like to feature maybe, maybe me more than others even. But it’s just a matter of… we haven’t come up with the (UI?) yet that we’re all happy with. But, on the back-end, we’ve actually made a change, probably a month ago which is invisible to everyone but enables that feature among other things, the way that we store and manage comments was moved over to a more general purpose infrastructure so we can…

Paul Buchheit: …We can more easily implement that feature.

Steve Gillmor: And, you know, so is the answer that the (UI?), you’re not happy with the (UI?) yet?

Paul Buchheit: Yeah, the answer is that it’s largely held up just on figuring out the (U.I.?) that we’re all happy with. We now have, technically, you know, no reason that we can’t very easily add it. But it’s just a matter of figuring out the (U.I.?) that we’re happy with, and that, you know, won’t make the page too complex. You know, we don’t want to have smiley faces on every single line, for example. And so, we just have to work out what the right interface is for that. But, that’s actually true overall with comments that we’re going to need to spend, I think, a little bit of time looking at them and figuring out how to add maybe a little more richness to the comments. Because, you know, for example last week, we launched the feature where you can attach files to an entry. So, if you want, like a Word document, or just a text file, or whatever it is, you can attach it to an entry. Well, you know, logically, you should be able to do the same thing with the comment as well, right. You know, if someone has some other revision of it that they want to attach, that should be easy to do. And so, we don’t currently support that, but it’s kind of a logical feature to have, and something I think people would like to have. But again, we would have to make sure we can come up with a (U.I.?) that’s still lightweight, so it doesn’t become… You know, part of the reason the comments work is because it’s so easy to leave a comment. It’s just a little box like I.M. So, working out the right (U.I.?) so that it doesn’t become too heavyweight to just too much to manage is really the challenge there.

Steve Gillmor: So, we’re talking less than a day, more than a day and less than a decade?

Paul Buchheit: Yes. Yes, unfortunately, (U.I.?) problems turn out to be the hardest thing in many cases, because it’s a much more subjective thing than a lot of the technology. You know technology, if I read a piece of code, either works or it doesn’t work. But, the user interface… I might come up with something that I really like, but, you know, someone else on the team thinks it’s awful, or likewise, they might come up with something they love but I think is horrendous. And so, generally, as a team, we don’t typically release a feature unless we’re all, like, at least moderately happy with it. Because, you know, once you put something out there, it becomes a lot of times difficult to change it, because even if only 20% of your users like it and a lot of them kind of… It takes away from the experience. Those 20% will be very upset if you change the feature in a dramatic way.

Paul Buchheit: So.

Steve Gillmor: So, more than a month and less than a month and a half?

Paul Buchheit: I don’t know. I would like to have it very soon. But, I…

Steve Gillmor: The reason I…

Paul Buchheit: Yeah. We don’t… We work out a fairly short schedule so it’s very difficult of for me to give anything other than like these extremely crude guesses that it’s something that we’re interested in doing, but, at this time, we have just like a couple of features that we launch real time search, and our next thing in that front is that we want to do maybe to just subscribe to the searches, so that’s definitely the next step there. We’d want to get out the next version of the API. We just did themes, so we wanted to do a couple more things on themes. We wanted to enable people to theme their groups, for example, so that they can have like a more, kind of a brand experience there, and also just to launch a few more themes that are kind of on the. But beyond that, the next step is essentially we do this process probably once every two months where we just all get together and go through essentially all of the ideas that we have or that people have suggested and figure out what we think is the next step for the next couple of months. And so, I think we’re doing that, maybe next week. So, I don’t actually have, none of us actually knows the answer to this questions, because haven’t gone through that process.

Steve Gillmor: Well, I mean you know, now that you brought Track back, pretty much, it sort of begs these other questions. So, you, you know, this is the bed that you’re making and you have to lie on it. There’s going to be more pressure for you to innovate here.

Paul Buchheit: Yeah. I mean, I certainly agree though, with the idea of, like, the liking comments of pointing out the best comments. Because there is a lot, you know, really the best content (online?) feed is in the comments a lot of times, and so to be able to highlight the best ones is…

Steve Gillmor: Right. And I use and others use likes as a method of broadcasting over Twitter and other, you know, micro-message networks. So it, you know, it’s a way of not only telling people about something that’s going on, but also you know, through the (FFTILI Link?) pointed them back in to what is going on, but, you know, so much of the time this goes to this whole crowd, you know, behavior issue. You know, when you say I really liked when you like the post on the Holocaust. It’s like, you know, I don’t like the Holocaust.

Paul Buchheit: Yeah. Yeah. I did a little post on this once on FriendFeed where I did a screenshot of like, this is how you interpret it. We just kept the word short. And it said… I…the link…changed the link text from like to, I like that you have chosen to share this entry with us, which is, you know, more, in the spirit of it, is I liked that you shared it with us, not necessarily, I like the Holocaust, or I like, you know, whatever the tragedy of the day is.
Steve Gillmor: Have you seen any kind of reaction on the part of other, you know, developers in the marketplace to your (adventures?) in real time?

Paul Buchheit: I think it’s definitely raised people’s awareness of the feature, and you know, it’s hard to (tease?) a part to exactly, you know, what people’s motivations are, but there’s certainly a lot of interest in real time right now. There’s… We’ve had a number of people who contact us about getting access to real time data. They’re interested in the forthcoming real-time APIs. So, there’s definitely…definitely something that people are working on and there have been, you know, a few of these real-time search engines and (laws?) just in the last couple of week, though I think their definition of real time search is different from ours.

Steve Gillmor: Yeah, it’s real time according to however, what level of service that Twitter provides.

Paul Buchheit: Right. I mean, there is this real time meaning that is searching recent data where there is (.55) is actually literally instant, or, like, within, you know, within a second, as soon as something happens, it actually just pops out to your browser right there, so I think that’s fairly unique at this point. But I’m sure others will follow.

Steve Gillmor: You know, we’ve talked about this a little bit in the past, but the impact wave, you know, how do you see this being responded to? I mean, Facebook seems to have sort of moved in that direction and sort of backed away from it a little bit at this point

Paul Buchheit: With their (UI?)?

Steve Gillmor: Yeah.

Paul Buchheit: Yeah. I mean, but Facebook obviously has different constraints with, you know, a couple of hundred million users, and it’s… You have to move a little more carefully because people are all at different places in terms of technology and expectations and usage. And of course, they have a product that’s just tremendously successful, so you always have to be careful when you have something that successful. You don’t somehow break it because this sort of horrible truth about all successful products is that no one is quite sure why they are successful as they are, so you have to be careful you don’t accidentally, like, step on the goose that laid the golden egg. And so, as always, you know, start up soon in smaller operations or?? you’re able to to move a little faster and just take more risks.

Steve Gillmor: All right, just a couple of, sort of, check-offs here… We’re at the conference where they’re having a demonstration from the (PubSubHubbub?) folks, Brad Fitzpatrick and his partner-in-crime, who’s name I have forgotten at the moment, Brett…

Paul Buchheit: His last name is escaping me.

Steve Gillmor: Yes. Me, too. And, you know, basically the thrust of that is to, you know, bring RSS up to real time, essentially. And, as we’ve talked about, this is more complimentary than competitive with your SUP functionality.

Paul Buchheit: Right. They both have, I think, fairly similar goals, which is to be able to make RSS more real time by adding in the notification element. So, in traditional RSS, you just have to check back every hour or however often you want to track it. And so, that means most of the time there’s nothing there, and when there is, there is some latency of (potentially?) an hour or how often you’re checking. And so, both PubSub Hubbub and…

Steve Gillmor: Let’s call it RSS Hub.

Paul Buchheit: Yeah…and (3.39) are trying to solve this problem, and… But it is absolutely, I think, complimentary. At least it has some potential to be complimentary. The Hub product does this with a call back mechanism where you register interest and then they’ll actually ping you with the feed updates, which is actually, I think, a much easier way to consume the data, because as… Let’s see, writing a little app, it’s much easier to make an (HEP?) call and get that update. The purpose of SUP was to make it very easy for publisher sites that have large number of feeds to just expose that update information. So, you know, it’s literally something that (4.20), (SUP Support?), and, you know, just a small amount of time. And it works for private feeds, for example. So, let’s say, you don’t want to expose your URLs, you don’t want to broadcast them to someone else, SUP can still work for that, because it uses opaque identifiers for each feed, which means, you know, you can just pick, like, a random number and so, someone on the outside can’t tell anything. It doesn’t expose any information. So, a number of services use these secret URLs, like, Google Reader is one example where the URLs are actually secret. And also, sometimes, there are some services, even if the URLs aren’t secret, they still may not want to just emit the activity information for the sake of private users. So, you know, Twitter, for example, has private users, has this FriendFeed. And so, SUP is a great way for those publishers to very easily expose the update information. So, for example, YouTube has actually added (SUP Support?) a couple of weeks back. And, so, I think in my view of kind of, I think, the ideal combination is for the Hub product to actually also support (SUP?), because the two work well together. So, for example, if they added (SUP Support?), any publisher could subscribe to a feed that supported Sub using the (PubSub?) feature and so they would then get a call back from them and then (PubSub?) would monitor the SUP.

Steve Gillmor: Yeah. Is there something you can do to support them as well?

Paul Buchheit: Yeah. I think, unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to read all of their spec and everything yet, but it’s something that we want to look at more, just seeing if, for example, any feed that supports their system of call backs, we could just automatically hook in to get those call backs as well so we can update it quickly. So, we are, you know, not tied to anyone, (protocol?). We’re happy to get updates by whatever means possible. You know, SUP, we launched last September, I think, or at least we announced last September, but we’ve actually been using, for example, the ping service, the blog pings, Weblogs.com, also Google Blog Search has one. We’ve been doing that since February of 2008. So, we’ve been actually been already using those preexisting ping servers long before we came up with (SUP?). And we’re happy to find any other source of update information we can get. So, it isn’t one versus the other. Any place that we can get information

Steve Gillmor: No. It’s just the (7.01) moving to real time that’s going to expose, you know, the longer latencies of things like RSS going into your systems so, it’d be good to, you know, use this opportunity of the real time, the emergence of real time to clean up the, you know, the varying latencies on the network..All right, well, any final words about the dawn of real time for our conference?

Paul Buchheit: It’s exciting that everyone give our search a try, and let’s just know what they think.

Steve Gillmor: Thanks, Paul.

Paul Buchheit: All right. Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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