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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that Facebook has jumped into the activity stream, how long will it be before major platform vendors do the same? Google seems strangely quiet except for a few retracted comments from Eric Schmidt about Twitter being a poor man’s email. Speaking of poor man’s email (aren’t we all these days) Microsoft has taken a huge chunk out of Notes engagements with its on-demand Exchange Online product. But so far, no direct attacks on Twitter et al.

The Facebook announcements seem most threatening to FriendFeed, at least from a feature perspective. In recent weeks, Facebook has sprouted a number of FriendFeed constructs – Likes and Comments the most obvious. In a few cases, the new tools go a step beyond FriendFeed by making it easier to post rich media types. But there’s a catch in this ease of use, namely the Roach Motel-ian question of whether the data ever comes out.

The Facebook premise remains intact for the moment – that the visibility of data is tied directly to the social graph. As a competitive assault on Twitter, this stands a chance of working: Twitter is as closed outbound as Facebook. Both companies make the same noise about protecting users from unfettered access to user content. Twitter doesn’t tie it to a Twitter Connect the way Facebook does, but they use rate limiting and obfuscation about Track (realtime search services) to keep the data scoped to users’ Follow clouds.

No matter how fast Facebook opens the stream, at some point they have to allow the data to travel into the river and down to the sea. In doing so, they would cross the chasm so many see as daunting, the one from a walled garden to a feel-good Internet freedom approach. Never mind that we still see no music business emerging from such an emancipation, no federated open source micromessaging model, no media disruption, no free lunch.

That doesn’t mean disruptive business models will or are or have emerged. The App Store may be our first glimpse of the Phoenix formerly known as the newspaper business. Amazon’s Kindle/iPhone app is the harbinger of the music business salvation, when the Gang of Four realizes they can give away the music if they license the liner notes. Right now the iPhone/Kindle platform is a hardware-dongled version of what Live Mesh will soon spread across the the majority of devices.

This is analoguous to the late great print magazine, where editorial decisions and advertising dynamics create a portable container for information. The Kindle by itself suffers from being tethered to the long form of books and deeper analysis, but if you add the iPhone as a way of integrating Web media and upselling updates and breaking news, you achieve something similar to the purpose if not the actuality of the previous magazine era.

In this mashup, the stream becomes more central, but it also introduces the bifurcation of publishing and messaging. We spend a lot of time hemming and hawing about Twitter/Facebook business models, but here we have Amazon apparently giving away Kindle sales to the iPhone population. Do we have to own the Kindle to download and consume the books? No. Do we have to pay subscriptions for Web content? No. What gives?

What emerges is a new magazine model, where aggregators provide efficiency and editors context for the combination of static and dynamic information flows. It’s a new kind of album format, not the quick bursts of hit singles but the loosely-bound orchestration of themes and releationship that informed Blonde on Blonde, Revolver, and Electric Ladyland. The iPhone becomes the razor blade, the Kindle the razor.

If that’s true, look for the razor to be subsidized. Look for the stream to be subsidized. Let’s say Facebook and Twitter keep control of the outbound data, tying it to permissions either from the social graph or in Twitter’s case, the business alliances with a group of favored developers who share the 60 requests an hour allowed to each customer.

In the Facebook example, the user must do the work of in effect creating their own magazine, structuring Friend Lists and filters to produce an efficient stream. Of course, that is exactly why magazines emerged, to proxy that service to specific groups. In the Twitter example, the company becomes the publisher, creating the kind of channel conflict that has challenged most tech companies with the conspicuous exception (so far) of Google.

The net result of Twitter’s strategy – playing favorites with developers who protect a business model that hasn’t been clearly vetted with customers who aren’t identified yet – is that Facebook actually has an opening to provide publishers with a new store front that isn’t shrouded in mixed signals. This is Facebook we’re talking about – Beacon, TOS, yadda yadda – suddenly wearing the white hat by comparison. Wow. They should be paying Twitter the $500 million just for being the Washington Generals.

But Facebook has a big problem with the volume and weak typing of its notion of friendship. Zuckerberg’s blog post aptly illustrates this with an endless stream of fweets that takes some 30 seconds to load the page. For all of Facebook’s cloning of FriendFeed, they have no way of providing what Twitter used to create a much more valuable social graph: Track.

Where Facebook’s new strategy allows constrained Friend Lists for realtime updates and unlimited Follows of publishers, Track allows users to maintain an asymmetrical balance with both specificity and unanticipated messaging. We get the best of both worlds, realtime messaging and social graph-aware editorial context – and with Track comes the filtering tools we need to reduce broadcast noise.

Can Facebook do this given its fundamental security by social graph model? Can Twitter do this without undermining its simpler value proposition and forcing the company to make the case that it owns the data it’s collected and can control its spread across the network via its third parties? Recent rumblings about applying Creative Commons licenses to incoming content have to be sending shivers up Ev and Biz’s spines.

Meanwhile, FriendFeed continues to provide unfettered access to its engine and increasingly powerful tools to model the kind of filtering Facebook users will need to employ to reduce the flow of the new stream. Already data is flowing slowly (~30 minutes at times) from Twitter to FriendFeed, while virtually immediate in the other direction. If observers like Marc Canter and David Recordon are right, FriendFeeders might benefit from Facebook opening up its outbound update stream at realtime speeds to encourage people to multiplex Twitter posts into Facebook and then to FriendFeed.

Whoever solves the problem of freeing the stream while protecting the user’s right to be in control of an efficient digest will surely plug into the Kindle/iPhone Mesh or whatever competes with it. For now, let’s call that publication Feeder’s Digest.

It’s not the famous Web 3.0 the semantic crowd has been lobbying for for years. It’s not the next big thing or even the next little thing, or whatever the Times touted when it went nuts for micromessaging today. It’s Web 2.2, and it stands for incremental improvements that, oh by the way, add up to a big leap.

I’m branding this as an homage to the latest iPhone OS 2.2 upgrade, which surfaced a few days ago with limited fanfare centering mostly around new walking and public transportation views in Maps and improved memory and stability. But the new realtime podcast support is a very big deal even in its carrier-crippled limitations. Apple has opened the doorway to free audio and video content direct to the iPhone over both WiFi and radio, leveling the playing field for these media types with the rest of the Web.

In order to protect AT&T from saturation of its 3G network, podcasts greater than 10MB will be queued for downloading the next time you enter WiFi range. You still have to use iTunes on the Mac or PC to subscribe to a show feed and automatically download each episode, but everything else is now open including streaming over 3G. I streamed this week’s Gillmor Gang, which runs a bit over an hour while on the road; it downloaded as soon as I got close enough to my house to switch to WiFi.

The Gang began just before podcasting became popular, and soon averaged double the downloads of streaming users. Of course, the iPhone and its radio access to the Web didn’t exist back then; hence the name podcasting. Direct downloading opened a small crack in the wall with the iTunes WiFi store, allowing direct purchase of songs over WiFi. Even 2.2 still won’t work with 3G, and of course streaming is not an option.

The election campaign brought new popularity to podcasting, as first Keith Olbermann and then Rachel Maddow made their MSNBC political shows available for download. I couldn’t stream Maddow’s video show over 3G but it displayed fine once downloaded, though videos from YouTube stream without issues. President-elect Obama has already started releasing his weekly Saturday addresses on YouTube, and promises press conferences and interactive Q&A’s over the Net.

Coupled with reports of a SlingBox-like iPhone Store approved application, YouTube Live’s streamcast via Akamai, and parallel development on Android phones, there’s plenty of incentive for Apple to keep open an avenue for realtime media. But where will this disruption spread next?

Many observers, and some platform vendors, believe Flash is the gateway drug for realtime streaming video. The logic goes that Apple’s refusal to open the iPhone to Flash will eventually help Android or even a Silverlight-enabled Windows Mobile break free and allow those devices to pass iPhone in adoption and developer buyin. But the rapid rise of micromessaging suggests another outcome. If Apple allows enough flexibility via direct downloading and streaming to shift the cost of live video and audio to a subsidized advertising model, then users will stay put.

Specifically, Apple has opened the architecture to allow the reboot of podcasting through its gated iTunes index. It’s logical that some set of API constructs that emulate direct downloading, streaming, and text linking will be made available to developers to allow them to link these capabilities into a single user experience. Apple could charge for such applications, or make available a version of the API for such controller applications that in turn sells user behavioral data to advertisers or even send interactive offers to iPhone users in return for such “free” services.

In this possible future, micromessaging becomes the controller for realtime rich media streaming. FriendFeed already aggregates my various channels, sending announcements of new posts (or podcasts) over the bridge to Twitter and any other service in the chain. If behavior from my Follow cloud suggests I might want notification of some stream and I’m in WiFi range, I can initiate a stream while the program downloads in the background.

If I’m traveling out of range, the micromessaging service can order the news based on my current schedule and mix streaming and downloading to fit the consumption window. Think about it: which radio service makes more sense, what we have today or one that mines the thoughts, citations, and behavior of hundreds of followed peers and tracked alerts? Services such as Live Mesh are designed to mine just such social data to optimize media and information based on location, business imperatives, and strategic triage of realtime information.

Apple’s move may turn out to be just a hint of things to come, or it may signal Steve Jobs’ sense that the timing is right for money to be made in the free zone of podcasting. As Jason Calacanis said on this week’s Gillmor Gang (around 1 hr 4 minutes in), if he was running Microsoft, he’d make a click ad network free for the first quarter million dollars that a publisher makes, and give every advertiser coming in on the first million dollars they spend an extra 200,000 and do that 10,000 times with all the best advertisers in the world.

Or write an iPhone app that uses GPS data combined with streaming and download playback data to connect the virtual and physical worlds at the time of potential purchase. Say you’re running low on gas, and the sponsor of the Gillmor Gang offers a 5 cent discount per gallon less at his station on the corner you’re at. Say you’re planning to watch a certain show tonight but your affinity group says forget it by bailing 5 minute in. Say you authorize access to that data in return for free popcorn at the movie you went to instead.

Both Jason’s and the latter strategy strike at Google’s potential weakness. Microsoft can buy their way in to challenge the black box of Google’s ad engine, while the iPhone’s Free zone can harness the unique power of a person’s affinity group to more efficiently find the most appropriate answer to a specific user’s question. It’s the locus of a gesture-based economy, where advertisers must align with a user’s requirements in order to get his or her attention.

The promise of podcasting was to provide an avenue for expression free of the tyranny of broadcast mediocrity. The promise of micromessaging was to create an open, living, breathing index to the realtime Web. The promise of the iPhone was to release us from the grip of the cartels and free our data to our own devices. We’re close enough to taste it now, and it’s giving us something fun to talk about again.

Android is the new highly-anticipated “open source” mobile platform that is currently under development at Google. There are a high expectations of Android as the first viable open source based mobile platform and a viable competitor to the dominance of Symbian, Microsoft and now Apple. Android is based on Linux and developers can write applications in managed code that use the Google Android SDK, which is developed in Java.

Initially with the Android SDK, there were three ways that a developer could communicate with other services or devices. The first was through text messaging with SMS (or MMS), with HTTP (or the secure variant) or with XMPP, the open messaging protocol. This list has since been struck down to two and a half options, with the XMPP implementation with Android being replaced with a more generic GTalk client library. This means that all real-time communication on Android not using SMS or HTTP must pass through the Gtalk servers.

The initial XMPP implementation was provided via the Smack library, an XMPP implementation developed by Jive Software. Developers started complaining back in January of this year that the implementation had been changed, and that it wasn’t adequate for implementing messaging services on Android. Google has since responded and the official line now is that a more specific library for GTalk is more than adequate, and they also claim that full XMPP isn’t very good for mobile anyway.

Android started as an idealistic open source platform, with a large number of hardware manufacturers lined up supporting it. It is now becoming just a Google platform for mobile, as forcing Gtalk on developers has a chain effect of enforcing Google ID’s on users and all communication to pass through Google servers. Developers are becoming increasingly frustrated by first denying Android SDK updates to some and now by closing up and deciding what can and can’t be done on the platform. Instead of being an open platform, they seem to want to funnel everything through Google services.

As one commentor on the developer thread said, what is next? GHTTP, GSMS etc? Google sucked up credibility by claiming to be the open platform alternative for mobile, but they are burning that credibility up at a fantastic rate with the decisions they are making.

Geeks and enthusiasts wearing WordPress t-shirts, using laptops covered in Data Portability, Microformats and RSS stickers lined up enthusiastically on Friday to purchase a device that is completely proprietary, controlled and wrapped in DRM. The irony was lost on some as they ran home, docked their new devices into a proprietary media player and downloaded closed source applications wrapped in DRM.

I am referring to the new iPhone – and the new Apple iPhone SDK that allows developers to build ‘native’ applications. The announcement was greeted with a web-wide standing ovation, especially from the developer community. The same community who demand all from Microsoft, feel gifted and special when Apple give them an inch of rope. When Microsoft introduced DRM into Media Player it was bad bad bad – and it wasn’t even mandatory, it simply allowed content owners a way to distribute and sell content from anywhere.

Apple has wrapped the iPhone SDK in enough licensing, security controls and right management that it would make the Microsoft Active Desktop team blush. The phone and platform that is certain to soon take second spot behind Symbian in the smart phone market is also the most restricted and closed. Applications can only be installed from a single source, iTunes, and open source applications and distribution is near impossible. How do you install an iPhone application without iTunes? Where are the community advocates arguing for a standard interface, openess and free code?

What is more worrying is what the next move could be. Now that there is an AppStore with applications in iTunes, why wouldn’t Apple move next to distribute all applications through iTunes – both desktop and mobile? There is no reason for them not to – the response to AppStore has been so enthusiastic that it is almost assured that you will start seeing desktop apps distributed in the same way. As soon as users are ground into looking at everything through iTunes, distribution of software in the traditional manner would be near impossible. Apple would become the gatekeeper, and both developers and users will enthusiastically pay the toll in exchange for pretty devices with pretty applications.

Apple has a very strong following in the open source community, and I can no longer understand it nor justify my own support (I am writing this on a Macbook). They built OS X on FreeBSD (a project I have enthusiastically supported, contributed to and been a user of for 10 years or more), they built Safari on KHTML, and are now using libraries such as SproutCore in MobileMe. They have taken open source and everything it built and leveraged it to get to market faster – yet they have now, with iTunes and the new SDK, built a layer on top of it that excludes others. For Apple, open source is great when it furthers their own goals, but not when using it with Apple software where it may further the goals of others.

The solution is simple. If you truly believe in open standards, open source and the good that it has created, then don’t accept it. The spirit of open source was about building on the work of others in a transparent fashion, as the gains further the common good of all. Despite not taking over the desktop market, the philosophy and its resultants have destroyed the old enterprise market and many others. Open source and standards keep Microsoft and other big companies on their toes, the movement as a whole and the philosophy is very real. The solution isn’t to adopt new licenses to try and prevent this, as it results in the mess that is GPL v 3.

It should be very possible to attach a simple BSD license to code, and if a large company utilizes the effort from others in a way that is unacceptable – the market should be able to sort that out, we simply wont buy it. The community needs to do more than just wear their support for openess and standards on their sleeves (and on their laptops). The problem with Apple is that the blind demand is driven by a distorted reality, so those same developers who poured thousands of hours into the BSD kernel now turn around and purchase an iPhone running that code, but it is now tied up in DRM, licenses and restrictions placed there by others.

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