Over the next several months I hope to have videos from all the folks who are trying to become your start page (and unseat MyYahoo, or Google’s IG, or Microsoft’s Live from your browser’s default starting point).

First up is PageFlakes. Dan Cohen, CEO of PageFlakes, sat down with me to talk about the space. Cool stuff. How will you decide on your home page? What’s your favorite place to start the day out?

I got both a demo and an interview. Dan worked at Google and has lots of interesting things to say about the space.

DEMO of PageFlakes:

INTERVIEW with Dan Cohen, CEO of PageFlakes.

Ted Leung is an open source developer (he works on Mitch Kapor’s Chandler project) and he warns that Adobe wants to be the Microsoft of the Web with its Apollo and Flex platforms. He doesn’t want to give control of his work to yet another single vendor.
The problem is he admits he doesn’t see much alternative other than hoping that Adobe opens up its platforms. I actually think that would be very smart of Adobe to do. The revenue for Adobe is in the toolset anyway. Do most people use a free Photoshop competitor like GIMP? No, most of us shell out hundreds of bucks for every version of Photoshop. So, the value here isn’t in the platform (other than the ego and brand building value of owning it) but rather the value is in the toolset that you can build on top of it.

This is actually one thing that developers tell me they like about Sun Microsystems’ direction with Java. By opening that up developers feel better about it as a platform (and can help fix things and improve it).

One thing I thought was missing from the Adobe Engage event earlier this week was an understanding of just how powerful community involvement in a platform could be. None of the apps demonstrated any open source thinking on behalf of the Adobe teams. It sure would be nice for Adobe to think about that. Thanks Ted for bringing that up!

I’m trying not to write much about politics cause that’s not really what we’re all here for. But I do still watch lots of political blogs on both the right and left side of the American fence for insights that I can bring into the corporate world that I usually talk with. Here’s one, in Salon, by Lindsay Beyerstein on why she refused to blog for John Edwards.

The learning here is interesting. How might you apply that thinking to your corporate blog team?

A few things:

1) Listen to advice when given by someone who you want to hire anyway.
2) An organization’s “brand” is made up by all its participants. Microsoft is more than Bill Gates. The sins of the participants will be used against all.
3) The no-asshole rule should apply. Hint: people around you might judge who is an asshole differently than you do. (by the way, that rule in my head comes from a good book called “the No Asshole Rule,” here’s a video by its author who is a Stanford Professor). Now, I piss off people as much as the next guy, but this rule should be considered, particularly in political organizations.

In reading my 1,331 RSS items (as reported by Google Reader) today I found one by Scott Barnes where he noted that Ryan Stewart, who covers the rich Internet application space better than most anyone, noted that Microsoft was ahead in terms of developer workflow.

Absolutely.

You only need to watch the Sparkle video I did in September 2005 to see why (that was the code name for the product that became Expression Blend).

Yesterday, listening to the Adobe team, I was in a state of deja vu. Yeah, part of it was I was really tired, but the other part is that they were trying to articulate the workflow changes that are coming as clearly as Manuel Clement and John Gossman did in that video.

Adobe came close, but didn’t match it.

The problem is it doesn’t matter. If you care about cross-platform (and if you are a Web developer, you do) you’ll put up with a workflow that isn’t quite as nice.

And if you’re a developer for a Windows only shop, you’ll be praising Microsoft for making your life easier.

Personally, I’m glad I’m not at Microsoft anymore trying to get Web developers to try out Expression. Why? Just come and visit 10 startups with me, and you’ll see why.

Macintoshes are showing up everywhere. WPF/E and Expression and the fun workflow that Manuel and John show off won’t matter one bit if you develop Web sites on a Mac.

Everyone who works at Google is hoping Microsoft actually uses the technology described in this patent (it removes items from the left, or organic search, if someone also advertises that item).

Why is that Google’s wet dream? Because it would instantly get noticed and would decrease its relevancy, especially among influentials who would tell the world about it.

If I were working at Google I’d say a little prayer before I go to sleep tonight thinking that some committee at Microsoft was really so stupid.

You might know Dow Jones. They own the Wall Street Journal. So, it’s not everyday that I get to sit down with an executive vice president from there. And, wow, what an impressive person. I almost said “impressive woman” but you don’t get to the top of Dow Jones without being impressive all the way around and Clare Hart does not disappoint.

She was CEO of Factiva before Dow Jones bought that enterprise search engine. Which gives you some idea of what we mostly talked about. We talk about Dow Jones and search.

Factiva is used by lots of companies for search (I used it at Microsoft and it gave me a lot better results for corporate searches than Google or Live.com did). We talk about why that is, and which companies are best customers for Factiva.

She thought it was fun that I just setup a camera in the middle of our offices and have a chat without a camera crew and without lights or makeup or any of that that usually surround main stream media.

It was an interesting conversation (about 36 minutes) on a number of different topics, from Google, to blogs, to enterprise search.

I have a new way for rating how cool a demo is.

How many keystrokes per second can I count? You know, tap, tap, tap, tap on keyboards.

Virtual Ubiquity is on stage right now showing off a killer Word Processor that works online. Teaches Microsoft quite a few lessons. Will be out in May.

All done in Adobe stuff and it just takes online apps a whole step forward in what I’ll expect to see from now on.

I’m sure there’ll be tons of words written about this shortly.

But. my takeaway is how excited the keyboard tapping is. Sounds like the hail that was hitting our windows last night. Tap, tap, tap.

Ahh, Ray Ozzie spoke at a Goldman Sachs conference this morning. Todd Bishop of Seattle PI has the details. Key quote from Todd’s report? “There were no obvious bombshells, or surprise announcements, but people interested in where the company is headed will no doubt be analyzing his comments for indications and clues.”

I did scour his comments for anything interesting. I didn’t find anything except a hint (if you turn your screen sideways and read between the characters) that he’s going to hook whatever he’s working on into the entertainment world that Microsoft has built. Translation: look for Live.com to use Xbox Live’s points system. They were talking about doing that back before I left Microsoft. That would be a great idea, but we need to see the implementation.

I wonder how many more speeches Ray is going to give where he doesn’t send some stronger gestures about what Microsoft is going to actually do in the Internet space? To me, each speech is a wasted opportunity. Guess we gotta wait for Mix07.

John Dowdell is keeping a list of links of people who say something interesting about the Adobe Engage event I’m at.

Good posts so far?

Tim O’Reilly on creating engaged users.
David Berlind of ZDNet on Microsoft vs. Adobe and Adobe’s timeline.
Jeff Barr (Web services evangelist at Amazon) has a mind-map of Kevin Lynch’s talk, among other notes.

Heheh, funny, I just saw a demo that looked just like this one on Mike Harsh’s blog (his is done in Microsoft’s WPF, the one I saw was done in Adobe Apollo). It shows, though, some of the new UI aesthetics that are coming your way from lots of application developers.