TechCrunch just broke the news.
We will give more details about this news today on the Gillmor Gang. That show starts at 3 p.m. Pacific Time. Join us live at http://live.twit.tv or listen to the Gillmor Gang once the recording is up for more. I’ll also be on Ustream’s “Live from the Belmont at SXSW” channel tonight after 7 p.m. Pacific Time too.
When Rackspace told me they were hiring my producer, Rocky, and wanted to hire me too, to build a new kind of community it brought back thoughts of when I was at Microsoft working with Jeff, Charles, Lenn, and a cast of others on Channel 9. That was just a few weeks ago. Since then I’ve been on a whirlwind tour so I could study a bunch of different businesses. I visited a radio station. Facebook. A lonely startup up in Bellingham, Washington that’s now broadcasting live video on the Internet about themselves. Cisco. A coworking facility outside of Seattle which is where iPhone app developer Shazam is located. And quite a few others.
When I was getting a tour of KSCO, a 10,000-watt radio station in Santa Cruz, CA, owner Michael Zwerling showed me the transmission equipment. The brands on that equipment are long forgotten, if you ever knew them, but those companies were vital to pushing our culture and our ability to communicate further.
When I walked into the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver on this tour, and saw tons of people on TweetDeck, I knew we were in the middle of yet another radical shift that would be felt for years into the future (it was this same conference where I first noticed how important the Firefox browser and other social services like Flickr, which was developed in Vancouver, would become back five years ago).
It is pretty clear that the transmission equipment of the modern age is cloud computing. Whether you study Facebook, or Salesforce, or Amazon, you can see the tectonic shifts that are underway in our industry. Look at 12seconds.tv, a small company in Santa Cruz, for instance, just a few miles from those old radio transmission towers, and you see how they are using cloud bursting technology. One of their videos gets popular? Their algorithms move that video over to Amazon and move all the traffic over to Amazon too. This lets them host on their own very inexpensive equipment but protect their service from traffic spikes that occassionally happen.
But forget about the cloud for a moment. Everywhere I look I see other shifts in how we think of the Internet.
Google Latitude showed me that a new kind of location-based service is coming that will get millions of users in just a few days and will lay the bed for a new kind of interaction with your friends and with businesses near you.
Facebook is exploding, seeing 700,000 new users per day. I call Facebook “the velcro” of the Internet because it has so many little hooks to get you involved in that community. I sat next to Randi Zuckerberg at the World Economic Forum as she could ask Facebook’s users a question and get back tens of thousands of responses in just a minute or two. What is happening there is real and is changing everything.
I look at new video communities like Seesmic, that let me interact with people in real time using my webcam. I can post video of a building burning down just as well as just me ranting and raving.
Blogs, too, continue to change and shift. New commenting engines like Disqus or JS-Kit are changing how we can hook up our separate communities together.
Finally we see what’s happening on Twitter and friendfeed and it’s clear that this new world is building the equivilent of a world-wide talk show.
Add all these things up and they got me excited about doing something new.
That new thing is called Building 43.
Why “Building 43?” Well, if you visit Google’s campus, you’ll see that the building that houses their “master plan” is Building 43 (several of its founders sit in building 43 there too). Microsoft has a building 43, too, which is where many of the developers on Windows and other things sit. I always thought that was funny that both companies had a building 43. When I asked friendfeed and Twitter for interesting building 43 stories,
http://friendfeed.com/e/1c9e5999-47ed-4e35-b4ba-e66aea424ad8/I-m-collecting-
stories-about-Microsoft-and-Google/ I learned that Google’s numbering system predates it back to when SGI had its headquarters there.
Our “Building 43,” though, is not a place. It’s not even a website. It’s a decentralized community for people fanatical about the Internet. You’ll find us on Facebook, on Twitter, on friendfeed, on Ning, and lots of other places too.
“What about your videos, Scoble?”
You’ll see me continue my videos with companies and people who are fanatical about the Internet. But you’ll also find we’re focusing our cameras on people who build Internet experiences and learn more about how they did it rather than just what they did like I’ve done for the past few years. This is getting back to my roots as well, where I like learning how to build things.
Building 43 will be a lot more than just my videos, though. It’s a community, which means it’s not about me. It’s about you and what you’re trying to build. That will become clearer as we turn on rooms in building 43.
“Why Rackspace?”
When I first met the Rackspace team (they were one of the first interviews I did at Fast Company) I came back and said “Rackspace is one of my favorite companies.” http://robertscobleizer.com/2008/04/09/my-favorite-company-rackspace/
That’s because they were building their headquarters in a “bad” part of town and had a vision of revitalizing the neighborhood. We are taking that same spirit to the Internet during this tough economic time. By showing more people how to build businesses and have fun on the Internet we’re going to all win.
Rackspace is also one of the few companies in the world that has touchpoints with thousands of other companies. That’s important because I can study how the Internet is changing live and, thanks to these relationships, we can present to you how these sites were built and how you can build the same features into your own business sites and blogs.
So what is “building 43?” We are on the Gillmor Gang where we talked more about what we’re building. You should listen to that and visit http://www.building43.com and sign up to be notified when we turn on the full site.
