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.

There’s going to be a moment in the near future where FriendFeed needs to deliver realtime search over IM. In a response to Robert Scoble yesterday, Paul Buchheit indicated track or something like it would be high on the list of things to commit to in the next round of improvements to the system. After a series of realtime services and API extensions late last year, FriendFeed has slowed its feature release pattern in favor of incremental improvements to its user interface.

The reasons for a realtime search mechanism can be debated, but what will be unavoidable is the implications of not moving forward for both FriendFeed and Twitter. The market for micromessaging may appear to be growing, what with major media outlets signing on and blogger firestorms about the value to individual brands dominating the holiday slowdown of so-called “real” news. But in fact, the Twitter bandwagon has propped up only the least significant part of the micromessaging wave.

The tip of the iceberg, Twitter’s marketing power or FriendFeed’s “conversation”, has not yet reached the kind of ubiquity micromessengers expect and not so secretly count on. The ROI on managing a Twitter Follow community produces reasonable economies of scale for only a very few. The Scobles must maintain their clouds regardless of the effort expended, while the up and comers are getting squeezed on FriendFeed by noisier folks willing to marginalize the threads with noise. People like Tim O’Reilly apparently avoid the comments and likes, and as a result the domain itself.

The disconnect and inequity of the current environment is substantially due to the lack of Track, which smooths out the signal to noise cycle by providing a realtime actionable opportunity that can be mined after the fact as “content.” Filtering built on top of Track will help tamp down spam and bot strategies, and it will also produce a set of favored filters that will both curate the flow and keep it open to new talent.

The small window of time when Track first emerged was not enough to evangelize its powers to the general audience, and obfuscation by vendors and entrenched interests kept the lid on for the second half of the year. But FriendFeed’s investments in realtime took the baton from Evan Prodromou and the open source Laconica project and made it clear that at least three business models are orbiting the realtime micromessaging opportunity.

In historical terms, we’re seeing a battle for control of the core realtime ping server. How long this post will take to reach RSS will illustrate how the major platform vendor in RSS is handling its responsibility as the major player. With its purchase of FeedBurner and recent rolloever of FeedBurner URLs to its own domain, Google has experienced some significant latency in syncing new posts to its dominant RSS feeds. This post, when published via WordPress, is made available to Feedburner within seconds. Yet most posts I’ve published in the last several weeks have averaged over two hours before they propagate to the RSS audience of Google Reader, FriendFeed, Twitter, and beyond.

TechCrunch engineers have implemented an auto ping service to try and fix the problem, but Google’s stated policy is to provide replication within 30 minutes. Whatever the case, and whether or not we’re correctly implementing a ping or not, the notion that blog posts are effectively removed from a realtime audience which is increasingly dominant is mindbogglingly stupid. Some even suggest there are competitive reasons for this lack of a strategy, but I can’t quite construct a convincing rationale for it to date. However, I will throw out the apparent fact that Google makes much more from Web pages than they do from RSS pages.

Inevitably, FriendFeed will roll out Track, and so will Twitter in short order, perhaps even sooner than FriendFeed’s smaller team can prioritize it. Until then, we will continue to model our Twitter cloud in FriendFeed constructs, make do with a lack of filtering tools to constrain the friend-of-a-friend overspill, and look to other players (Microsoft in particular) to compete directly with Feedburner at the RSS routing layer. There is no reason why RSS can’t be an effective protocol at the realtime layer, and FriendFeed’s growing arsenal of features is both a roadmap and a toolkit for the transition.

Note: I am publishing this post at 3:31PM Pacific time.

Update: 5:01PM No RSS.

Update: 5:52PM Still broken.

Update: Finally hit RSS at 6:17PM.

On the Gillmor Gang yesterday, I ended the show with my pick for most important story of 2009, the release of Chrome for the Mac. Here’s why:

Chrome represents the leading edge of Google’s development platform for its version of the Web OS. Once Gears is embedded in a Mac client, Gmail Labs can start writing directly to the rich media store as it begins to build out across Google properties. This effectively levels the playing field with Mesh/Silverlight and takes a considerable chunk out out of Sun, Adobe, and Amazon Web Services at the developer level.

Having Google and Microsoft at a level platform above these other players also gives Apple considerable sway in maintaining a chokehold on the mobile device market. By enabling Gmail Labs services on the iPhone, Apple will provide AT&T and therefore the G1 carriers a revenue model for migrating carrier-controlled services to a new rich media paradigm over micromessaging and a rich media message bus.

The revenue will come from subsidized subscription affinity services, carried on top of the iPhone 3G Internet radio platform and streaming video news services. These affinitycasts will gain significant market share among realtime audiences, whose early signals will be highly predictive of the valuable swarming behavior so critical to surviving recessionary pressures. In a shrinking market, those nodes that raise targetable market share will skim the cream off the top before the commodity brokers can get to the suite spot in the market. It’s an interactive successor to the upfront market.

How Microsoft performs in this next period will tell the tale for the next major event in the technology marketplace. Those that look to a Yahoo absorption are really betting on what comes as a result of that move. Personally, I don’t think Yahoo as an entity matters one whit, but as a platform on which to roll out Silverlight Office, quite a bit. In many ways, Yahoo is like Lotus was pre-Y2K, when the email transition from DOS and Unix to Windows and Internet protocols was being waged between Microsoft, Netscape, and Lotus.

The most significant battle of that war was the integration of ccMail into Notes, which provided a rationale for Netscape to consolidate its suite of servers/acquisitions into a collaboration suite. In turn, Lotus pivoted to Interent protocols by layering an available IBM Web server on top of Notes to create Domino. Microsoft countered with the renegade Exchange team briefly wrestling Internet access to the file system away from the SQL Server team during an Internet Information Server option pack update to NT.

Though the coup was shortlived, when the SQL Server team regained control the resultant power shift in Redmond was consolidated under the rubric of .Net where it has remained to this day. The technologies underlying Outlook Web Access and its attendant APIs spawned client and server constituencies tha dominate today’s Web OS: AJAX on the client and ASP.Net on the server. Firefox ratified Ajax and the standards stub that reduced Internet Explorer to a subservient position in browser development, and Scott Guthrie rode ASP.Net to control of what is now the Silverlight platform.

These two power bases - controlled by Google and Microsoft - are being synchronized and ultimately merged into what from the developer perspective will be a single model. Chrome on the Mac gives a crucial audience - the new media - the tools it needs to deeply integrate the new technology base into the delivery systems of their content. The various cloud services can be rendered virtually identically across both Mesh/Silverlight and GLabs/Gears, and the differences will be largely a leapfrog update away from parity.

What’s more complex and difficult for the key audiences to absorb is the new landscape in which these players will operate. Those who persist in the notion of religious bragging rights - whether the new black of the “open stack” or whatever the old guard at Microsoft will exploit to try and FUD the new direction - will be driven out of contention. Those developers who architect their products to allow easy and automated switching between these and satellite platforms will survive and prosper when the inevitable threshold of enough money washed away produces economic stability for the hardy.

If the timing of the Chrome Mac client remains March, it will be coincident with Microsoft’s Mix ‘09 conference, where it would make sense for Silverlight to be optimized for Chrome and the MacBook Air crowd. If you use the old record business as an analogy, we’re looking at the moment in ‘66 when Rubber Soul and Revolver created the album market, which in turn allowed FM radio to replace Top 40 radio and overwhelm the media business. The creative drove the container, the massive redistribution of power that to most of us looked like the era of the singer/songwriter.

In 2008 Neil Young showed up onstage at JavaOne and DreamForce, talking about his decades-long Archives and green car projects respectively. 40-something years ago, Young wrote and recorded Ohio live with Crosby, Stills, and Nash - the track was on the radio and in the channel within 48 hours. Then it was Ahmet Ertegun and Warners, today it’s Benioff and Schwartz and Microsoft and Google.

Back then, I was one of those idiots who circled the Pentagon during the March on Washington. We all joined hands and chanted in an attempt to levitate the Pentagon. Of course it didn’t work, but I have to admit it: for a brief few seconds I opened my eyes and looked around to see if it did. When Chrome for the Mac ships, I’ll do that again.

The competition for the next wave of enterprise computing has heated up since Microsoft announced its Windows Azure strategy a month ago. While the jury is out in some quarters about Microsoft’s ability to actually deliver the reliability, security, and even the interoperability that is promised, the timetable has accelerated the plans of competitors and forced some to define themselves in terms of the cloud at a dangerous moment.

Sun Microsystems has been under particular pressure to realign; analysts and even Sun employees such as Tim Bray have been outspoken in their pleas for Sun’s executive team to jettison unprofitable ventures in favor of some kind of cloud strategy. CEO Jonathan Schwartz has hinted in recent months of some wood behind what Sun calls its Grid effort, and will this week roll out Sun’s JavaFX 1.0 front end technology to compete with Flash/Air and Silverlight.

JavaFX could be one of the casualties if Sun decides to pare technologies along with the 18% of its employees it’s trimming. Other cuts might include the NetBeans development environment, which has kept pace with or even bettered Eclipse in quality but not in uptake, and OpenOffice, the free Office replacement. Unfortunately for Sun, Google Docs has stolen some of the strategic thunder with an on-demand product from a company that can afford it.

Google is feeling some pressure as well, as its odd messaging around a Gmail Video chat plug-in reveals. Though the company has made a big deal about only supporting open Web technologies, they have much less to say about the use of proprietary technologies in the video plug-in. Coming at the same time that CEO Eric Schmidt attacks Azure as a way “to gain enough share in cloud computing to force other people to use its standards,” the use of Flash and the reluctance to answer direct questions about it seem disingenuous, something Google has steered clear of as it builds out its own standards such as Chrome and Android.

Schmidt’s attack also suggests that Google has assessed Microsoft’s cloud effort and found it substantial enough to warrant a political rather than technical challenge. Yet the video plug-in also implies an attempt to improve the “rich” aspects of its Ajax framework as online versions of Office reach beta in the next year. Ironically, Microsoft’s Live Mesh/Silverlight combo will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux (via Novell’s Moonlight port), while no Linux plug-in has been announced for the video code.

Apple’s cloudish efforts may get a boost when the company releases its Push notification technology, allowing a rumored over the air MobileMe synchup with Notes. Not only would that bring in the rest of the enterprise email world, it would also deliver the necessary infrastructure for iPhone developers to release useful micromessaging clients. Qik.com’s new support for transcoded iPhone-compatible versions of Qik videos would fit nicely in such clients, bypassing Flash and Silverlight in the process and blunting pressure from Android. Without Google’s Web religion and with a burgeoning revenue model, Apple can afford to move to the cloud at its own pace.

At a time when startups are tamped down to survival mode, the cloud seems the province of the wealthy. By betting early and building just ahead of the startup market, Amazon has joined the gorillas at the table. Sun remains a player if only because the various acquisition or breakup scenarios seem more unlikely. And Jonathan Schwartz’ ability to dance with Microsoft when he needs it may come in handy as Azure nears the marketplace. Somebody will provide the big freaking Webtone switch for these cloud data centers, and storage is the new black.

Google and Microsoft are alone at the top of the pyramid. The usual caveats don’t hold much water when looked at objectively. For a company pigeon-holed as making it up as they go along with no cross team coordination, the Google desktop is an organic work in progress with new components and management tools emerging week by week. Building out via XMPP from the Gmail hub is allowing users to orchestrate realtime services into a consumable stream and reliable archives available cross-client.

The rogue video plug-in may violate Google’s messaging, but the first time you nail up a video chat with someone on a PC from your Mac, you’ll know something substantial has occurred. In a world where the console real estate is measured in pixels, I’m still running Skype as a legacy app but switching whenever I see the telltale camera icon in Gchat. With calendar, docs, mail, XMPP, video, and audio all on one screen, the momentum is considerable.

For its part, Microsoft is no longer at war with itself. That may have been the only way to manage the company in the face of no opposition, but for the first time Redmond is competing more with Google and to a lesser extent, Amazon, than between versions of Windows or Office. The Google console may lack persistence and offline aspects, but the video plug-in signals a much more pragmatic approach than many have expected. By the same token, Microsoft is far less encumbered with its response to Google’s attack than we thought before Azure was revealed.

That’s because users don’t perceive Microsoft as the dominant force in computing any more. When I open Gmail, I’m conditioned to expect the latest addition. The more time I spend in the realtime world, the more I look to solutions that will fit into the environment I have chosen. When micromessaging proves too fragmented for XMPP, I add the Twhirl Air client to present a more alert-driven version of the various feeds. In other words, my usage reaches a point where more professional tools are necessary, and I integrate RIA capabilities to finesse the transition.

But what happens next? For now, it’s unlikely I’ll switch off the Gmail desktop. There’s no competitive Ajax client, but I have no special allegiance to Air should a more robust Silverlight client emerge. My iPhone could care less where the back end lives that synchs via the new Push notification engine, so I can choose between Mesh and whatever Google releases to compete with XMPP on the desktop. Google has to compete not only with Microsoft but Apple in that arena; I’d love to integrate GCal and missing features of Gmail on the iPhone, but not until Push is released will it happen, and perhaps not quickly even then.

Micromessaging is not the only area where Microsoft can make inroads, but it’s easily the most significant because of the requirement for open standards. Even though those are still unsettled, Microsoft has carefully mandated open access to its platform and has no wiggle room out of that contract given its Borg baggage. Interestingly, Google has opened a hole into the Gmail console with the ability to add widgets. Imagine Office Online docs available on the Gmail console, or a Twitter feed that interleaves docs and appointments from both stores.

The intersection of social media and the cloud will drive most of this strategic realignment. The argument that cloud computing will fail because we won’t trust our bits outside our direct control ignores two truths: the economics outweigh the potential liabilities, and we have no idea where our data is in any case. The more valuable our cloud data becomes, the less likely we will be to complain about unauthorized access. The more social graph data is baked into these information sharing transactions, the more valuable the shared data will become.

Google’s release of its Gmail Video service is noteworthy for several reasons. It is integrated into the Gmail console, adding voice and video services to the realtime console that is being built out around XMPP. It is remarkably easy to use; Dan Farber just called to test the service and I popped the window out and continued chatting with him while returning to this post. Several alerts on Yammer and Friendfeed’s realtime IM competed briefly in other chat windows. Oh, and Google just added about a quarter of its version of Silverlight to my MacBook Air. Call it Silverlite.

If I hadn’t already installed the new service yesterday to get an advanced look, Farber’s call this morning would have prompted me to download and install a 2MB plugin. The code works with Intel Macs and Vista or XP, and so far only on Firefox and Safari (with some install issues) on the Mac. So by installing the plugin, I’ve basically added a significant part of Google’s multimedia services to this machine. It’s not Flash either. It’s cross-platform, it’s RIA code, it’s not Flash. Am I making my point?

[Note: Flash is used along with proprietary code. More as Google clarifies.]

Couple this with all the new doodads Gmail has added in recent weeks via Gmail Labs: tools to float the IM panel on the opposite side of the Gmail window, widgets to integrate Google Calendar and Docs, and drag and drop functionality to rearrange all these modules on the page. The calendar object is particularly useful, because not only does it display coming events for multiple calendars in a simple scrolling interface, but it lets you add events from within Gmail. In effect, it roundtrips the experience in a way that promotes more and more usage. It’s lock-in by choice, and it threatens Microsoft at its very core.

The 2MB plugin is perhaps even more insidious. Who knows what services it adds that the growing grid of Gmail tools can access. What if Gmail Labs offers a video annotation service, or a podcast recording module, or a collaborative screen sharing capability, or a micromessaging console, or a group meeting organizer/live blogging console, or… These are enterprise apps, popping up on demand or as upsells to what is rapidly becoming a serious Office competitor. And what part of the 2MB can run on Android? This last one will drive Apple nuts, and likely force Silverlight onto the iPhone to boot.

This is Cloud Office, folks, and all you need is a reasonably new machine. It’s also iterative deployment, where 3G delivers a realtime, intelligent caching media fabric that disrupts terrestrial radio, cable television, and the Hollywood studio system. With the 2MB down payment, Google can continue to add code multiplexed with content, streaming additional upgrades and services along with alerts, conversations, and appointment requests. Advertising will morph from selling a product to being part of the product.

By blurring the boundary between Ajax and RIA, Google has found a way to grow into the Mesh that Microsoft is close to delivering from IT outward. In many ways, this strategy is supportive of the new Microsoft as much as it is disruptive of the old. Just as Microsoft can’t be stopped from executing on its cloud strategy in the enterprise, neither can Google from its base in the user cloud. Where the two platforms meet in the middle looks a lot like a hybrid of iTunes and Office.

Salesforce’s DreamForce developer conference opens Monday morning with the announcement of a new Force.com Sites service. Sites is a new business for Salesforce, potentially extending the thousands of Force.com applications by pushing application data to the Web over Salesforce servers. The new service leverages Force.com’s VisualForce UI construction tools as well as Force.com’s logic, security, integration, and customization services.

While this is more a point upgrade to the platform in terms of revenue and customer acquisition than a major transition, it does signal the willingness to expand Force.com’s cloud into hybrid applications that span both internal enterprise customers and the customers of those applications. In doing so, Salesforce becomes even more of a channel for larger cloud players such as Google and Amazon, and even Microsoft to the extent that Force.com developers are free to integrate services such as Mesh and even Silverlight.

Although Marc Benioff dismisses such an alliance, he’ll have to work fast to expand Force.com outward as Microsoft comes after him from the outside in. Fertile ground may lie in harnessing Google apps and realtime services to populate Sites-enabled applications with smart information services based on targeted user behavior derived from Gmail, Google Reader, IM, and micromessaging. Salesforce can provide tomorrow’s Azure services today while using fear of Microsoft overwhelming the industry again to encourage Google and other RIA cloud players such as Adobe to federate around Salesforce as a rallying point for the enterprise.