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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Since Gmail’s birth in 2004, Google has steadily built a powerful cloud-based email platform that’s chock full of innovative features including offline access, chat, search, mobile access and more. Google saw the opportunity to integrate Gmail and apps, like docs and calendar features, into the enterprise space and rolled out premier editions of Apps catering to the business community. Today, Google announced that it has struck a partnership with Valeo, an automotive components manufacturer, to deploy Google Apps on the company’s entire global workforce, which totals about 30,000 internet-using employees.

“The cost savings and innovation made possible by cloud computing help businesses better respond to a global and mobile workforce – especially in today’s difficult economic environment,” said Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise. “We’re thrilled Valeo has selected Google.

Google says more than a million businesses and ten million users are implementing the Google Apps suite currently but to date, the Valeo partnership is the largest single enterprise deployment. Genentech may be the second largest, with 20,000 users. Valeo is moving to the cloud with the support of technology consulting firm Capgemini.

When Google Apps first launched in 2006, it was free. Since then Google introduced a new model, where the free Google Apps account could be used by 50 users and the premier edition of the service, which as more storage and an uptime guarantee, costs $50 per user.

Google Apps is not directly competitive to MS Office (Google Apps is cloud based), but could be disruptive to Microsoft’s office suite, especially as Google continues to adds features to its own suite and builds on real-time collaborative features Office still doesn’t have.

Google has given us 10 free tickets for TechCrunchIT readers to attend for the upcoming Google I/O developer event on May 27-28 in San Francisco.

Google I/O will be held at the Moscone Center and will cover the following topics: the Android, App Engine, Chrome, GWT, and AJAX APIs, with a special focus on the enterprise. Last year’s event saw one of the first demonstrations of Google’s Android mobile phone OS, as well as the public launch of App Engine. Google also handed out T-shirts cleverly meant to spell out “Google IO” in binary, except they actually said Google KO.

Tickets are usually $400 each; but we are giving ten free tickets away to readers who give us the best answer to this question:

Does Google have a real-time strategy and if so, how is it going to compete against Twitter and Facebook in the real-time wars given the recent death of RSS?

Please submit your answer in comments and TCIT editor Steve Gillmor will pick out the ten best answers (be sure to use your real Email address).

Google and Salesforce.com have teamed up to let non-profits which use Salesforce’s CRM access Google Earth to put partners, volunteers, and donors on an easy to read map. Google says that the application is a mash-up of the new Google Earth browser plug-in and geocoding APIs that will map and display the location of items in a CRM in Google Earth. Salesforce says that more than 4,000 “social change organizations” use Salesforce currently.

Here is a video showing how the app works:

Google and Salesforce say that when designing the app, they wanted to implement maps for account and non account objects, such as the opportunities or custom objects found in the Salesforce CRM application. So they designed a custom object to hold location information. This object can then be linked to any other object in the non-profits’ system, such as an opportunity to assist a village in Africa, which is called the Geo-Location object. Within the app you can input the location information of the object or the app can lookup and store that for you.

This is a pretty nifty feature and a good example of cross-cloud integration between two cloud-based applications. Although its only being rolled out for the CRM used for non-profits currently, the hope is that this feature will be extended to all of Salesforce’s CRMs soon.

Last week, Google hosted an “Efficient Data Center Summit” with leaders from the IT sector to discuss best practices for improving data center efficiency, whole also saving money. Here’s what Google had to say in its blog post about the summit:

“Saving electricity and water is not just good for the environment, it makes good business sense too. Being ‘green’ reduces operating costs and can keep our industry competitive; it is the economic advantage that makes efficiency truly sustainable.”

Google has a pretty interesting set of slides about how to maintain sustainable data centers. The slides say that e-waste is a growing problem and the best practices to combat this are the 4 R’s: 4 R’s: Reduce, reuse, repair, recycle. Google says that 68% of the company’s retired server material is re-purposed (internally or externally). Google also highlighted water management as data centers as another part of the sustainability solution. Google says that currently two of the company’s data centers are 100% self-sufficient for process cooling water by utilizing treated waste water. They expect that by the end of 2010, Google will be 80% self-sufficient for all of their data center water consumption. Google also said that they have been able to reduce their data facility energy use by 85%.

Google’s initiative is pretty cool and it’s especially great that they are taking the lead to spread the word about the benefits of green, efficient data centers. As Google states, being sustainable and efficient in data operations not only is good for the Earth but it also saves money for IT businesses.

Here’s a video tour of the data center:

This guest post is written by Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering for Google’s mobile and developer products. (Prior to Google, he spent 15 years at Microsoft, most recently as their GM of Platform Evangelism.) Vic credits his now-7-year-old with forecasting the importance of mobile data access, and now carries at least 4 phones at all times. Fortunately, he had two kids before adopting the possibly-prophylactic habit.

---

Focus on the mobile user, and all else will follow

Simpler data, better browsers, and a smoother experience

Today the mobile industry finds itself in a unique position to do right by its users:

Worldwide phone penetration continues to climb at a break-neck pace, with over 4 billion mobile subscribers at last count.¹ (In comparison, the PC industry is forecasted to see its sharpest unit decline in history.²) Prevailing economic conditions will accelerate this trend, as users consolidate pricey communication services into cost-effective, all-in-one mobile devices.³ And for the first time ever, half of all new connections to the internet will come from a phone in 2009.⁴

Google’s mobile traffic reflects these milestones — having quintupled since 2007⁵ — and it underscores users’ appetite for mobile data services. But as a community of operators, device manufacturers and software providers, we continue to get in their way. In short, and as a general rule, we make it too costly, too unfamiliar, and too difficult to do anything beyond voice calls.

In reply I offer up three suggestions: simpler data plans, better web browsers, and a smoother on-device experience. And in each case I’ll use Google traffic numbers as a proxy for total internet usage and user happiness.

Disclaimer: As a Google employee using internal data to carry the weight of this article, I owe it to the reader to lay bare my economic incentives: the company I work for has a financial interest in the broad and sweeping adoption of the Internet-as-we-know-it. Indeed, more internet users leads to increased web usage, which often leads to more Google searches and downstream ad clicks. I use Google data because it’s what I know best, and because it reinforces my industry-facing remarks, but make no mistake: I’m fundamentally interested in what’s good for the mobile internet. It just so happens that this is also good for Google. With that said, I hope you’ll find value in the words and data that follow.

Flat is the new phat

Consider MetroPCS, a regional carrier in the United States with just over 5 million subscribers on their 2.5G CDMA network. Over the past year, their Google search volume grew over 2.5x more quickly than another global carrier with 10 times as many users, and a 3G network.⁶

Metro’s “secret” is a free month of web access at signup, with the option of flat-rate, unlimited data thereafter.⁷ As a result nearly half of Metro’s subscribers use the web on a regular basis. (It’s also worth mentioning that MetroPCS was recently recognized for excellence in customer satisfaction.⁸)

In contrast, many operators subject users to a labyrinthine set of data options, from pay-as-you-go to daily caps with significant overage charges. Now, can you imagine paying your at-home internet provider for every page load? Or needing to know the size of a website before visiting it? Or managing your monthly download quota across your entire household? It’s simply not practical, and it’s all the same internet, so why do we treat mobile users as second-class citizens? Case and point: my colleague’s January phone bill contained 27 pages of itemized data charges, spelled out in excruciating detail.⁹

Unless we declare flat the new phat — and soon — I fear Occam will do something terrible with his razor.

They want it all, they want it now

Users “get” the web, and they’ve known for over 10 years that the browser is the thing that takes you there. Likewise, more and more of today’s killer applications are the Amazons and Facebooks of the world, not software that you download to a local machine. So it should come as no surprise that mobile users want phones (and browsers) that put a fully-featured internet in their pocket.

For example: the availability of a modern web browser explains why iPhone and Android users — just 13% of the high-end market¹⁰ — represent nearly 50% of Google’s smartphone traffic worldwide.¹¹

Similarly, users of the T-Mobile G1 and its newer WebKit browser search Google 20 times more often than Nokia Series 60 users.¹²

Both data indicate that it’s about usage — not just units — and this trend will continue unabated with more efficient JavaScript engines, and more sophisticated HTML5-compliant browsers.

The simple truth is that mobile users have wanted fast and full web access all along. Consider two quick facts about Google search behavior: the “tail” of PC and iPhone queries is significantly longer than that of feature phone queries;

and the gap in query diversity between desktop and high-end mobile devices is shrinking.¹³ People want all the world’s information on their most personal of personal computers, and we need to offer browsers that scratch this quintessential itch.

“One web will triumph.”¹⁴ Users want all of it. And they want it now.

Friction is fugly

In the early days of mobile search, customer feedback was clear: “I can’t find Google on my phone.” And in hindsight it makes sense: unintuitive device menus and preference panes mandated 20+ mind-numbing clicks just to locate portal content¹⁵ — nevermind “off net” sites like Google. This Frankenstein’s monster of OEM, carrier, and 3rd party software made it impossible to discover — much less enjoy — mobile data services, and showed a complete disregard for users’ on-device experience.

Thanks to an influx of smarter phones, many mobile users can now reach 3rd party software with a single tap or click. And in Google’s case, this desktop-like experience increases search traffic by many orders of multitude.¹⁶ Why? Because it provides a frictionless onramp to search results. Likewise, and prior to its v5.0 release in February 2009, Google Earth saw more activations on the day of its iPhone launch than any other day in the product’s history. Why? Because the iPhone’s App Store and on-screen layout make it easy to find, try and access mobile data services.

And herein lies the rub: users appreciate well-written software, but ease of use and on-device navigability are critical preconditions for usage. (After all, if you hide a tree in a forest, who cares whether someone hears it fall? Chances are they’ll never find it anyway.) The proliferation of app stores is a positive step in this direction, as are efforts on the part of OEMs to give developers unfettered access to low-level functionality.

We have to surprise and delight users with fast and fluid interfaces. Friction is just fugly.

- Sent from my Android phone, with a WebKit browser and an unlimited data plan

---

1. ITU, 2009
2. Gartner, 2009
3. comScore, 2008
4. eMarketer, 2008 and 2009
5. Google internal
6. Google internal
7. MetroPCS, 2009
8. J.D. Power, 2008
9. January phone bill, redacted
10. Canalys, 2008
11. Google internal
12. Google internal
13. “Computers and iPhones and Mobile Phones, oh my!”, 2009
14. Opera, 2008
15. http://www.biz-lib.com/products/ZMOMX.html
16. Google internal

My TechCrunch internship has ended, and for my final TechCrunchIT post, I wanted to connect the dots I see within the enterprise space. Thanks for the wonderful time.

When Writely and Zoho Writer launched three years ago, some quickly predicted the end for Microsoft Office. It seemed so obvious: free beats paid, ubiquitous access beats the device-centric, thick-client model.

But IT departments worry about security, Excel junkies remain skeptical of reduced functionality, and airline travelers are only now getting in-flight broadband. Given enough time, these problems will be solved.In the meantime, Microsoft isn’t a dunce. Once the lumbering Redmond giant shifts to a SaaS model and monetizes at the edges, these online clones of Microsoft Office will become commodities. Do you
prefer vanilla or chocolate frosting… Google or Microsoft?

Office documents are dead.

Not because Zoho Office and Google Docs are free. But because when office suites went online, they grabbed hold of the content creation method and promptly tipped it on its side. Writing a document shifted from multiple, one-shot drafts to a single draft with multiple revisions. Online office suites killed the static document model–and file formats. (Perhaps even toolbelt office suites.)

Historically, technology goes mainstream by solving a specific problem. Word processors replaced typewriters because they could fix typos. Dropbox removed worries about my hard drive failing. Online FAQ’s replace help files. Google Docs frees me to work from any browser.

Once mainstream, new technology shifts from facilitating work-flow to rewiring the process. I used Google Docs for several months before realizing the power to co-write. Instead of copy/paste, three of us worked on a single document from separate computers. (Lotus Notes pioneered this functionality twenty years ago, but it required Notes on each machine.)

Suddenly corporate wikis are maintained by users, links to Dropbox replace e-mail attachments, and the idea of a static document is dead.Slideshare is a classic example. What began as an online repository for slidedecks–a souped-up FTP for PowerPoint–is now a destination site. For now, the metadata–tags, favorites, comments, views, downloads, etc–sits on top of a static slideshow. But how long until Slideshare adds editing capability? Then I leave a comment by altering the wording, removing a non-Presentation Zen image there, adding an entire slide here.

When Slideshare spawned its own storytelling meme, “Meet Henry,” users made modified clones of the original slideshow to suit their needs. What if they could alter the original? The line between data and metadata could get very blurry. (The ensuing copyright nightmares are beyond the scope of this post.)

No matter which side of the firewall, it’s a living document–Rashmi from Slideshare told me: “Lots of companies use SlideShare privacy options for sharing and to embed into their intranets… we cannot dig
into it (for privacy reasons)–but one of our large referrers is Microsoft.”

Similarly, wiki’s are morphing from solving today’s problems into tomorrow’s new way to create, aggregate, and filter content. According to Chris Yeh, PBwiki has a long-term vision, “to be the really simple glue across an enterprise. By adding context on top of specific buckets–Salesforce, e-mail, documents, etc–wiki’s become a powerful form of enterprise search.”

Slideshare, wiki’s, SaaS office suites–what happens when they’re integrated? (Already you can view Google Docs from PBwiki and Slideshare from SocialText.)

After the inevitable confusion, the oil and water of new technology and old workflow will coalesce into a new perspective on information. Realtime collaboration will kill the static document model. The line between documents will feel artificial–much like a database view merely constrains the output. When the community can create metadata, “Word documents” become “a print-view” of the wiki
page”–perhaps excluding comments, or maybe limiting them to only comments from the marketing team within the past week. (Prezi is already rewriting the rules on UI and interaction.)

For Microsoft, using “.doc”, “.xls”, and “.ppt” in the same sentence as “floppy” and “AOL” is a frightening prospect. And yet maybe it shouldn’t be. If you can’t dominate a platform, the next best thing is making sure your competitors can’t win either. When files become generic, platform ownership is impossible–examples include .html, .txt, and .jpg.

RIP .doc, .xls, and .ppt. You’ll be missed.

This guest post is written by Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate for OpenSocial at Google. Over the last 20 years he has alternated between giant companies and founding startups – BBC, The UK MultiMedia Corporation, Apple QuickTime, Technorati and now Google. He is one of the driving forces behind microformats.org and advisor to the Open Rights Group. He wants you to remember that URLs are people too, and his URL is http://epeus.blogspot.com.

In this Q&A-style post, Kevin delves into the standards that make up the emerging open social stack (OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, and OpenSocial), looking at the infrastructure problems they address, and exploring some of the live implementations, including Plaxo and Google Friend Connect.

---

Q: We keep hearing that “Google wants to make the web more social.” What does that mean?

Everything on the web is more interesting when it takes place with friends. Today’s social networking sites, are the online contexts where you and your friends go to be social, and the time we spend on them shows the attraction.

But the model of going to a single website to interact with other people is changing. In the future, we expect everything on the web will become more social, augmenting the many things you already do on the web. Whether you’re shopping, deciding what to read, or researching a topic, knowing what your friends, or family, or the people you respect think about that product, book, or source of information is a vital part of the web.

I call this the “social cloud,” meaning that “social” will be integrated with the web so that you don’t think about it anymore. Charlene Li calls this same idea “social networks become like air.” The web itself is like this — following links seems like second nature to us because we know a URL can take us anywhere. Social isn’t there yet, but that’s the highest level goal of the OpenSocial project — to make interacting with people a natural part of how we use the web

Q: What are the hurdles to the web becoming more social today?

For every website to become social, each site needs to know something about you and who your friends are.

How do they solve this now? By asking you to fill out a form and by spamming all your friends. For many people, that’s enough of a deterrent that they will simply leave the site. For others, there is no value to providing personal information to yet another site, so they lie. If you’re forced to enter a zip code, you tell them 90210 or 12345, and websites end up puzzled by how many users they have in Beverley Hills and Schenectady.

Then, once you’ve done the whole registration “song and dance” (submit your email address to the site, login to your email, check the spam folder, then click a link to go back to the site), you still have to find all of your friends on that site and establish those relationships again each time you join a new site.

This model doesn’t scale because users end up only joining a small number of sites, and it doesn’t help the web as a whole become more social when most sites have inaccurate information about their members. We need open standards to enable the exchange of this kind of information.

Q: How do OpenSocial and open standards help?

There are three main components to social activity on the web — people, friends, and activities.

Representing people has several aspects. First, there is the notion of identity. Email addresses are one way to identify people on the web, but as social networks have become increasingly popular, personal profiles (and the unique URLs that go with them) have emerged as a common way for people to find and connect with one another. OpenID is the standard that lets you prove to other websites that you own such a URL, thus letting you link your online identities.

Then, to represent people more fully within OpenSocial, we started looking for things that social sites have in common. We talked to many social networking sites, looked at their data structures, and found that they were actually very similar. Under the hood, most of these sites had names, photographs, addresses, phone numbers, preferences. Based on these commonalities, we defined a model for representing people. This model is expressed in the Portable Contacts standard, which is also used in OpenSocial for people and friends.

What makes these sites different from each other to their users are the communities of people who inhabit them. You’re happy to share information with people you know and trust, so long as you’re confident the website won’t share that information with anyone else. The most successful social sites, therefore, become trusted custodians of your social data.

This brings us to the second component of social activity: friends. Once we can represent people, we need a model for who your friends are and which friends can see what information about you. Within a site, this is straightforward because the site is in control, but in order for the whole web to become more social, there must be a way to share this information between websites. That’s OAuth.

Today, if a site wants to know who you’re friends with on a social site, it will often ask you for your user name and password. The site will then login to the social site with your user name, pretending to be you, look at the webpages there, and pull the data out. The problem is that by handing over your credentials, you’re also giving the site full access to everything in your social account, relying on faith that it will only do what you want it to do. But what if you accidentally give this information to a malicious site? What if the user interface is confusing and you accidentally let a site send out emails to your whole address book?

By contrast, OAuth lets you grant permission for very specific tasks. You may let another site see all your profile data or just your name and image. You may let it see all the people you know or just a subset – your family or colleagues. Additionally, OAuth lets the social site know that a request is being made on behalf of a specific user, so if the social site reveals different information to different people, that can be taken into account, e.g. if you share your photos with some friends but not others. As the web becomes increasingly social, having an standard protocol to express this from website to website is very important.

The last piece of this social web is activities — what you and your friends are doing around the web. Leisa Reichelt calls this “ambient intimacy,” the idea that you care little about the activities of strangers, but you’re very interested in the activities of people you know. What is more, with your close friends, you care what they had for lunch, how they’re feeling, and what they’re thinking. This flow of phatic information makes social sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Seesmic, Picasa, et al., enormously attractive — they feed a basic human desire to know about others.

The challenge with sharing activities is that it can’t be a chore. This is why OpenSocial allows any application to generate an activity and provides a way to send those activities from one place to another. The social networking site can then filter those activities in a way that makes sense for their users.

When these events flow from one place to another, everyone is better off. If I can bring the information I have invested in a social networking site elsewhere, to say, a Bay Area biking website, when I post a comment like “I just rode this trail, here’s a photograph from the summit,” the site can feed that information back to the network, where my friends who are also interested in cycling can click over to the biking website. Additionally, other bikers on the website can see me, recognize that we share an interest, and establish a relationship within that context. Social networks get richer information, the cycling site spreads through friendship networks, and users get the benefit of being able to control what they share with whom.

Q: We’ve also heard that Google wants to open up the social web. What does that mean?

When I talk about OpenSocial and “we,” it’s important to remember that OpenSocial isn’t a Google project. OpenSocial is an industry-wide standards effort. From the beginning, we worked with many other groups to put this together and to form an independent foundation. All of the standards work is public, and it is very much an open dialog.

We also don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so OpenSocial uses existing standards whenever possible. The OAuth standard and Portable Contacts are both examples of this. The person specification in OpenSocial is the same as the Portable Contacts standard, which was developed in parallel. This allows people to use only those components that they need, while still being compatible with the entire OpenSocial specification.

We’re looking for interoperability not just with shared standards, but also with shared code, and so the community has also built open source implementations. For example, the core social networking server for Google is Shindig, an Apache open source project with both Java and PHP implementations that is used by many of the large social networking sites.

This is important because these standards have applicability beyond just social networking sites. They work for personal dashboard sites like MyAOL, MyYahoo, and iGoogle, as well as sites that are not purely social but are still designed around people — e.g. LinkedIn, Xing, and Viadeo. Their primary focus is on business, but having a standard model for people and for activities is still useful. Similarly, Portable Contacts maps well to other sites with people lists, such as webmail, and the open source gadget standard has been broadly adopted by different companies.

Q: What efforts are underway to make it easy for people and websites to use these standards?

For more websites to become social, they need to be able to connect to this infrastructure. While we have defined the REST APIs and are providing client libraries to access them, there is still a lot of integration work that needs to happen in order for websites to adopt these standards. As these roll out across more social sites, the rest of the web gets even more value from calling them.

There was a great example of this recently, where Plaxo demonstrated how they saw a 92% update rate using OpenID, OAuth and Contacts API to let users and their contacts onboard in one step rather than by asking for passwords and scraping.

Ning approached this integration problem by making it easy for anyone to create a social network for a specific group of users — church groups, soccer teams, any interest group – even the OpenSocial community itself. Their adoption of OpenSocial means that many more niche social networks will be able to use these social applications.

Another example is Google Friend Connect, which is designed to let any website become a social website as easily as adding Google Maps. Just add a small amount of Javascript and couple of pages, and suddenly users are able to sign in to the site, interact with each other, and comment. Friend Connect runs code on our servers to connect these open standards — OpenID for login, Portable Contacts and OAuth for connecting your friend lists from many sites, and OpenSocial for creating applications. Additionally, you can send your activities back to your social networks, using OAuth and activity streams.

Q: What can we expect to see more of in the coming weeks and months?

I’ve talked about this at several different layers — the aspirations and barriers to them, as well as the implementations that we have seen.

At the moment, OpenSocial is deployed to sites representing over 700M users around the world and this is growing consistently.

Friend Connect is running on tens of thousands of websites, drawing more users and more connections every day.

As more sites start to implement these open APIs to allow connections between sites, these virtuous cycles will become more obvious and we’ll start to see a second degree of growth in connections between sites, not just within sites.

I also expect to see a slight transition within the application space from apps for individuals to apps for groups. With Ning and Friend Connect, we see groups of people associated around an idea or a website. As developers start to see this, I expect we’ll should see some exciting applications that are deployed across websites and a strong movement towards the pervasive web sociality that is the high-level goal of OpenSocial.

The future of OpenSocial isn’t a fixed roadmap, it is an open mailing list where future specification changes are discussed, with working examples expected. Among the topics currently being debated are realtime chat , an Albums API to share users’ photos and other media, and a virtual currency model for Application developers.

As the consensus around these composable, open standards grows, and more and more sites implement them, we are making the web pervasively social for everyone online.

Marc Benioff has an uncanny sense of how to stitch together the multitude of social media and Web service resources that dominate the technology space. While many of the audience decry the notion of the enterprise applicability of these tools, Benioff and Salesforce think they’re on the way to what he calls “the next billion dollar opportunity” on top of this realtime platform.

On stage at Salesforce’s announcement of its Service Cloud, vendors like Google, Facebook, Plantronics, and even the Obama/Biden transition team are solving business problems with existing services. Salesforce spaces these announcements out over time at about one every two months. Sometimes the progress seems substantial, other times more incremental. Stitched together into a CRM service spanning Google Search, social media communities, and best practices databases, the net result delivers real value at just the time corporations are looking for leapfrog technology.

Benioff has always understood the marketing value of talking the Web services talk, the Web 2.0 walk, the social media move away from the public portal to the enterprise service fabric. But what is even more strategic is his ability to orchestrate those same promises of the future into leading edge value propositions that he can upsell as part of the multi-tenant architecture. Somehow, Salesforce has used Web technologies to turn liabilities into assets, from a site that provides user-managed reports on uptime to a Salesforce to Salesforce private channel between subscribing companies — a kind of Sam’s Club for data.

Oddly, Salesforce’s successes don’t undercut its competitors, at least not directly. Benioff touts connectors to Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine to extend the Force.com offerings, all the while enhancing developer allegiance with a form of incentivised buy in instead of lock in. Although Benioff loves bashing Microsoft, the time will soon come when Azure will interoperate. And watch Microsoft build connectors in the opposite direction to make switching costs a marginal part of the investment in the Cloud.

It may seem like a strange choice to latch onto the “conversation” brand well after that Cluetrain seems to have left the station, but Benioff understands the power of delivering on the science fiction of the last rev of disruption. In the process, he sells the next set of iterative announcements, overlapping them with customer wins and the slow build of coordinated endpoints and the harnessing of Web standards. Salesforce has moved beyond the failed promise of code reuse to the provable premise of platform reuse.