UPDATE: Over on Quora we’ve been discussing the iPad vs. Motorola Xoom in far more detail than here. You might want to read that post there, to get a more nuanced view of what the competition is really like.

So, now that I’ve seen the iPad 2, see my short video above, or go and watch all the videos over on Apple’s website or view the pages of content poured into blogs over on Techmeme.

We now know what the choice is:

1. Apple iPad 2. Has apps. 65,000 of them.
2. Motorola Xoom. Has no apps. Oh, sorry. 16. At least no apps designed for the large format. Designing an app that works on a smart phone isn’t the same as designing one that works on a large screen. Most of the apps I’ve “stretched” really suck compared to their iPad equivalents.
3. HP TouchPad. Has no apps. Heck, it isn’t even shipping yet.
4. RIM PlayBook. Has no apps. Heck, it isn’t even shipping yet.

No apps, no sale.

It really is that simple.

OK, OK, I know some of you think hardware matters. It doesn’t, but if it did, Apple’s hardware is nicer designed. Just look at the back of the new iPad. All one piece. The Xoom is two separate pieces. Think that doesn’t matter? Look at the back of my Motorola. It looks like crap already and it’s only two weeks old. Plus, the on/off button is in a weird place. I keep hitting it when trying to read on it in bed.

The screen resolution? It doesn’t matter if you don’t have any apps. Yeah, Motorola has 20% more resolution. Pull up a web browser. Does it matter? Not really. I can’t see the difference other than the screen is a little wider form factor than the iPad’s. That’s nice, but will it sell units? No. Apps matter more.

The sound capabilities? Those don’t matter if you don’t have any apps.

The battery life? Well Apple is better here than the Xoom or other devices. Battery life matters more to me and many others than a slight screen resolution increase.

What about HP’s TouchPad? I like it a lot. It’s nicer designed than the Motorola Xoom. It should be, it was designed by a few people who used to work for Steve Jobs at Apple. If the HP were out nine months ago it would have been a great device to buy and compare to the iPad. Their OS and multitasking metaphor really is awesome, albeit might be a bit slower here and there (we’ll see when we actually get one). A few major problems: 1. It isn’t shipping. Probably won’t be until June. 2. It has no apps. No apps no sale.

Move on to the RIM PlayBook. It didn’t score with users as well as the Motorola Xoom and it doesn’t have Google and its Android ecosystem behind it. So, I can’t see anyway that it will come in higher than #3. This means that developers won’t develop apps for it. No apps, no sale.

Anyone else out there? No.

So, how is this next year going to play out? Google needs to hit it out of the park at its iO event this spring and needs to convince developers that Android’s Tablet strategy matters. Google can easily consolidate the #2 space and next year they can eat away at Apple’s app lead.

It’s sad, too. I really like the hardware that HP, RIM, and Motorola, amongst others, have done. I just can’t recommend you buy any of those others.

No apps, no sale.

iPad wins big time.

Oh, and if you disagree with me and think specs and speeds matter more than apps, go check out Engadget’s comparison chart.

UPDATE: the keynote of Steve Jobs showing off the iPad from this morning is now live.

In two weeks SXSW is coming. You know, “spring break for geeks.” All through town will be tons of parties.

But how do you find good parties nearby?

Even better, can you find good events and parties for your friends to attend back at home after SXSW is over?

Hurricane Party has the answer. It is an iPhone app that helps you do everything from getting your friends together after work to making a bigger event happen.

Here Rene Pinnell talks us through it.

UPDATE: Hurricane Party hasn’t been released by Apple yet. That’s expected to happen by this weekend.

Techcrunch today changed from Disqus comments, like the ones I use on my blog, to Facebook comments. That decision was discussed on Techcrunch, including by me (see the comments).

They are hated by a lot of people, see the comments on this Techcrunch post, but I really love them.

Why? The quality of the comments went up 1000%. More on that in a second.

Plus, everytime I comment now I can shove that answer over to Facebook, which brings them more readers since most of their potential growth will come from Facebook.

So, why has the quality of the comments gone up?

1. Much less anonymity. I really hate anonymity. In 10 years of blogging I can only remember a few really great comments done by someone anonymous. But, anonymous people are far more likely to try to destroy the conversation and not be constructive. Even when they are constructively critical, you don’t know where they are coming from or who they are. The simple addition of a real name onto their comments makes their critique much more useful and interesting and more likely to be listened to, in my experience.

Think about it for a second. If someone anonymous says “your post sucks because it didn’t consider xyz point.” Now, what if Tim O’Reilly said it? Or Bill Gates? Are you more likely or less likely to listen to the feedback? Is it more or likely to lead to better conversation?

2. A provable social graph. On Facebook there are quite a few Bill Gates. Lots of people love to impersonate him. But I can pick the real one out because the real one has certain people in his social graph (his friends are people who match who his real life friends are). This means impersonators are easily thrown out of the system.

3. The font is smaller and more compact, so I can see more comments in one stream.

Anyway, for now, I’m sticking with Disqus. I’m watching Techcrunch’s experiment. Over on Quora Techcrunch’s MG Siegler explained more about why they switched.

What do you think? Would switching to Facebook help or hurt here?

This post was republished, in part, from Rackspace’s Building43.

Rob Glaser got known by starting Real Networks so we wondered what he was going to do next. Here it is. He joined up with CEO Rob Williams, who used to be on the Netmeeting team at Microsoft. In other words he’s been doing collaborative real time video software for a long time (Netmeeting was hot in 1995/1996). In this conversation we cover a lot of videoconferencing history and what’s changed since Netmeeting.

While video conferencing via the web has been around since the 1990s, the concept hasn’t kept pace with the radical changes in social interactions made possible by services such as Facebook. SocialEyes is changing that with a new tool that introduces video into the Facebook experience.

“The way that people collaborate now in the age of social networks is very, very different than the way they used to,” explains Rob Williams, CEO of SocialEyes. “SocialEyes is a social video product that lets people connect with their Facebook friends in much more dynamic and powerful ways than they have before and to go beyond their Facebook friends to connect with people who have a shared interest or passion…both in real-time and asynchronously.”

SocialEyes is a free service and works directly within your browser using Flash. You can have multiple video conversations going on at once in separate windows, and if you want to combine conversations, the software has tools to connect windows and create ad hoc group meetings.

By associating with Facebook, SocialEyes has an enormous potential pool of users, and the goal is to make it easy for each of them to use the service. “One of the very powerful things we do with SocialEyes,” says Williams, “is rollout something that works across every [Facebook] user–500 million users around the world–with essentially no software download.”

UPDATE: GigaOm covered SocialEyes too. More coverage is on Techmeme.

More info:

SocialEyes web site: http://www.socialeyes.com/
SocialEyes on Twitter: http://twitter.com/socialeyes
SocialEyes profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/socialeyes

Back in 2006 I wrote my “best practices” for business cards. That advice hasn’t changed much but the technology behind business cards and business networking sure has. To see just how see the Building43 interview with Hashable’s CEO. Folks over on Quora expect Hashable will be one of the most popular apps at SXSW in 2011.

But as cool as Hashable, or Bump, or similar apps are going to be, most of us will still use paper cards. Damn luddites!

But that doesn’t mean your paper card can’t be geeky! At SXSW this year two companies sent me versions of “geek cards” that they are pushing. You see those two cards in the photo attached to this post.

Who made these? Two companies:

1. Paperlinks.
2. AvaKard.

Yes, both of these are using standard QR codes, so you can scan them with any app but with Paperlinks you can use their iPhone app, which works really well. Shows you all sorts of detail that I can change. You can even get to my Quora page just by scanning my card.

Overall I like Paperlinks better. Partly because I’m just not sold on non-standard-sized cards. Makes it easier to lose and scan and stuff like that. Plus I like the iPhone app they made.

I do like having a photo on a card, though, makes it easier to remember who handed you the card, and where. I also like that Avakards uses a SXSW-specific URL. Paperlinks, in its defense, shows you “I met you at SXSW” which is very useful when you end up mixing up your cards with all of those that you got elsewhere. They are always fun to look back at too.

But, what about you? Are you ready for SXSW? Do you have YOUR geek cards ready to hand out?

By the way, you can scan the cards above using QR code software or Paperlinks’ iPhone app. It even works in the photo above.

One last thing, be careful when handing these cards around. Your corporate bosses might not like you using non-standard cards. In fact I’ll find these hard to use because they don’t even say Rackspace on them. Or, if I did use them I’d also hand you a Rackspace card, too, so you’d know my official work info. But these are fun ways to network with the geeks at SXSW who will be trying all sorts of new mobile apps to network.

Dear Google: yes, I know you are pissing off lots of businesses that today aren’t listed as high. CNN Money covers their plight.

I wanted to say “thank you.”

Why? In nearly every search I tried today results are better than they used to be.

Not many people look out for the users in today’s world when so many big businesses are pushing the other way.

I’ve been running lots of searches for things like “San Francisco hotels downtown” and overall your results today are less spammy, have more “real” hotels and fewer intermediaries, and have better results than they used to. Plus, they have fewer ads and fewer of these intermediaries than your biggest competitor, Bing.

Yes, I’m watching Techmeme and seeing the businesses that are hurting. Quora has a very good list of such.

But I just wanted to say “thank you” for trying to do something about the resultsets that are growing less and less useful because more and more sites were getting low-quality content into the result sets.

By the way, these changes don’t help bloggers but I don’t care. I’m a user of Google first and the results have definitely improved lately. I just searched for “Motorola Xoom iPad” and see that my blog is nowhere to be found, but the reprint on Business Insider is on the first page. Definitely Google is much more biased to big brands now than it was eight years ago (eight years ago bloggers were able to be seen much higher than brands).