The folks over at NewTeeVee just announced its new conference schedule for a conference about NewTeeVee.

I find it severely lacking.

First, why feature Joost? They haven’t proven that they’ll survive in this new TV marketplace. I’m willing to bet that Justin.tv or Kyte.tv will have 10x the traffic in a year than Joost. Even TechCrunch is growing bearish on Joost’s future. Why is Joost going to have trouble? Because they wanted to replace TV and the TV networks will NEVER give Joost their best stuff.

But let’s face it, it’s still a YouTube world online. What will change that?

So, what else is missing at a discussion of new TV stuff?

1. Best practices of old on new. The best example of oldTV coming to newTV is what ABC.com is doing. Ever watch Lost over there? I have and it’s the best stuff out there. They are using technology from Move Networks. That stuff blows away Joost. To me THAT is “new TV.”
2. The best advertising technology I’ve seen is CastFire. I don’t see them on the program. I do see Brightroll. That’s good, I have a 24-minute interview with the founder on my show. Nexidia showed me a bleeding edge technology that’s already bringing new kinds of contextual ads to several TV stations’ local news shows.
3. The biggest innovator in streaming media is Chris Pirillo. The way he uses chat. His sponsorships. And the way he uses YouTube is very innovative yet he isn’t on the program.
4. Codec comparisons: DivX has some of the best codecs out there. It also has a set top box that I’m playing with and its Stage6 community is pretty neat. DivX’s CEO was on my show at CES earlier this year. Adobe is doing a bunch of work. So are other folks. Can we see a shootout? Or techniques to get the sharpest picture online?
5. Apple? No, they have nothing to do with “new TV” right? Well, I haven’t been able to get them on my show either, but Rocky uses Apple’s FinalCutPro to edit my show.
6. Adobe? I see one guy on there as part of a panel discussion. Are we going to learn anything in a panel?: No, we won’t. But the folks who bring us Flash deserve a lot more than a panel slot. Not to mention they have a video editor, Premiere. Oh, and my video with the engineering team behind Flex/Flash talking about its architecture got hundreds of thousands of views.
7. Microsoft? They want to get market share away from Adobe. I see Dan’l Lewin there, but you do realize he isn’t a technical guy and he hasn’t built any video or done any video on the Net, right? He was a co-founder of NeXT, though. Maybe that’s the closest to Steve Jobs you could get.
8. Rocketboom? They just shipped an iPhone app. They have the best distribution system I’ve seen for an independent video blog. Andrew is still doing innovative stuff. Where’s he?
9. Blognation? (Or ANY blog network other than GigaOm?) They are about to put video bloggers in dozens of countries. But not gonna be at NewTeeVee I guess. And because they are a competitive thing to GigaOm they get locked out the same way that PodTech gets locked out. If I ran a conference I’d invite my competitors to speak. Why? Cause my first responsibility as a conference planner is to the people who come. See Eric Norlin’s video for more on planning a great conference.
10. USVP? They invested in several video ventures (including PodTech, Zannel, and National Banana). Not gonna be there and they should be. Heck, let’s get out of stuff that’d help me out. Last night I had dinner with Stewart Alsop. He’s an investor in Justin.tv. Why isn’t he on the VC panel? Justin is doing the most innovative stuff in the streaming video space.
11. Tracking and uploading? TubeMogul, for instance, showed me how they can let video bloggers upload to multiple sites and track their results. Compete.com’s CTO was on my show too. I wish someone would do a session on new ways to demonstrate audience engagement and size and all that.
12. New ways to tell video stories? YourTrumanShow showed me how, for instance.
13. Mixing 3D world’s with video? I don’t see that either. But Scenecaster has a way to do that. So does Second Life. More on the way. I’d love to hear the latest and see what Eric Rice and friends are up to.
14. Why not a session on video vs. audio? There’s a lot of interest there and it sure would be interesting to see if BlogTalkRadio could make a case for audio. You noticed my son’s first sounds on the Internet were audio only, not a video, even though I had lots of video gear there. Heck, I sure could learn something about getting better audio quality.
15. Facebook? MySpace? LinkedIn? Plaxo? Facebook is one of the hottest video sites on the Internet yet I see nothing about it. That’s really lame and missing where a TON of “new TV” action is happening.
16. Building a social network around your video site? Magnify, Ning, and Broadband Mechanics might have something to say about that. In fact, Magnify shows off a great “new TV” site to me. Ning showed me their stuff too. So does BlogTronix, which has a system that lets companies build sites very similar to the Channel 9 one at Microsoft. Ning will be at the conference but, again, only on a panel. That’s not the help that people need — they need demos of what’s possible, not more talk.
17. Legal issues with new TV. How do you get rights to music, other people’s videos? What’s the rules around fair use?
18. Mobile video? On my show Buzzwire showed off its solution. Also, Radar.net showed me a way to share videos with your friends from your mobile phones. Kyte.tv’s CEO is on a panel discussion but I doubt they’ll do a demonstration of how that works. It really is mind-blowing what you can do on a cell phone now.
19. Streaming video? Ustream came on my show to demonstrate what it’s doing. Veodia is aimed at big companies with a better quality streaming video.
20. Mashups? YouTube is now showing videos on top of Google Earth. Plazes is giving us location-based presence. What could we do with that?
21. Film sites. Jaman is very impressive, for instance.
22. Webcasting? IVT showed me its solution. So did Adobe with its Connect service.
23. New kinds of Web experiences that’ll have an impact on how video is used. Zude got my “demo of the year” mark and demonstrates new ways to use video online. Mixercast is a cool way to mashup video, pictures, and other stuff too.
24. New hardware gadgets for video producers? Drobo showed me a new hard drive system, for instance, that we’re using at PodTech and love. I’ve been testing out tons of the latest gear including a Nokia N95 with Kyte.tv and a new Nikon pocket camera that has wifi built in. Heck, get Ryan Block of Engadget to come out and show off the latest gear. That dude has a ton of gadgets in his house and he always knows what’s good and what’s not.
25. Real Networks? Do they have a shot at sticking around? They came on my show to demonstrate its new player which lets you save from YouTube.
26. Search and Discovery. MeeVee demoed its search engine. Blinkx CEO came on my show to talk about it (then later took his company to an IPO). Dabble’s founder/CEO showed me its cool search portal and community for video. Stumbleupon came on my show to demonstrate its cool video discovery service.
27. Why don’t I see anything on Windows Media Center? TV Tonic showed me a killer system that’s getting lots of traffic for video bloggers.
28. Video greeting cards? Smilebox showed me theirs.
29. Video email? EyeJot showed me how to do it.
30. Bleeding edge ways to use video cameras? Get Andy Wilson from Microsoft Research to come down. He showed me a system that was wild.
31. Ways to make money with your “new TV?” Edgeio showed me a classified ad system that a few video bloggers are using to bring in some extra cash.
32. Splashcast has been seeing massive growth through its Facebook application. They came on my show a few months ago to demonstrate its widget and media distribution network.
33. What’s the future of home entertainment systems? Seagate showed me its version at CES. I just interviewed MediaMaster too (mostly music right now, but video someday soon) and they have a very awesome service. Videos of that coming soon.
34. Screencasting for fun and profit. Don McAllister, who publishes screencastsonline.com, came on my show to talk about how he does it.
35. Google? They do this thing called YouTube. You might have heard of it. Marc Lucovsky showed me how to “bling my blog” with a video bar, too.
36. Video education? Winnov showed me an innovative system for universities to use.
37. Loic Le Meur’s Seesmic (here’s me talking about it). If you really want to be known as “NewTeeVee” you gotta have them on the schedule.
38. Zannel. I interviewed them this week and they are competing with Seesmic and Kyte.tv.
39. UPDATE: I totally forgot Bittorrent. A guy I know downloads all of his TV shows via Bittorrent (and movies and music too). I’m sure he’s not alone so a conference like this should discuss that and what the industry should do for or against it.
40. Serving an international audience. Look at the new Pop!Tech videos. They have subtitles with eight languages in them. That really rocks. But what do you need to do if you want to serve China and keep your videos from getting censored? How about transcriptions so that search engines can work better? Etc.

$500 for this? Damn, maybe I should start charging for my show! I give you a TON more content for free! :-)

Heck, we can even meet over on my newfangled Kyte.tv channel and have a live chat. With audio, video, AND good old text, even!

Oh, and keep in mind I +HATE+ panel discussions. They look great on the Web site, or in a brochure (that’s why I added them to my conferences when I planned them). But you rarely learn anything you can take away and apply to your keyboard. I was just on a panel discussion too at the recent Facebook conference and, while it was entertaining (a good fight on a panel is one way they can be redeeming) I watched the video and didn’t see anything anyone would have learned from it.

UPDATE: Om and I had a nice talk this morning and he’s severely constrained by time (this is a one-day conference). More on that conversation hopefully later in next week.

If you were doing a conference on “new TV” what would you put on it?

I’m talking with Andrew Zolli. He is the currator of the highly-regarded Pop!Tech conference, coming up next week.

Some things they are just announcing:

1. Pop!Casts. Really cool little video snippets. Includes “embedded ability to create open source subtitles in 100 languages.” You can subtitle as much as you like of a particular video. There are already eight videos translated to eight languages. “The data behind it is even more interesting than this.” I’m playing with this right now and it’s f***ing awesome. You can switch back and forth between english and a bunch of other languages. It compiles a new video when you add a new language. Unbelieveable. Done by Dotsub.com, which has other videos. Why YouTube doesn’t do this? Here’s the English versions of the eight videos (play them and in the player you can switch back and forth between the other languages). Zolli says this
2. Pop!Tech carbon offset initiative. Last year they invested an amount to offset the amount of carbon dioxide generated by the attendees in attending PopTech — that turned into a project with (solar electric light fund self.org) where they are replacing diesel generators with solar generators. This year with eBay they are coming up with a new Web site (exclusively announced here) http://www.ebay.com/poptech where they picked three projects that are doing social development work in several communities in the 2/3rds world (Brazil, Nicaragua, and Africa). They used to call that the “developing world” but now we call that the majority world or the 2/3rds world.
3. National Geographic Photo Camp: they are outfitting several kids from poor countries with cameras and they’ll capture the event and share their photos (they also are paying for National Geographic photographers to teach several of these kids how to be professional photographers in their communities).
4. Mobile empowerment is a big theme. Nokia will show off Mosh. Peer-to-peer sharing platform. Subscribe to packages of content that are peer produced on your device. Pop!Tech is doing a bunch of talks and the participants will interview each other using mobile devices, etc.
5. All on stage content will be shared live at poptech.org/live and will start at 9 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday. Unlike other events of this caliber (TED and Davos) they broadcast all their content live to the world, which really is great.

Thanks to Seagate for giving all speakers a free hard drive. The speakers at this event aren’t paid, so that really is great. Thanks to Buzz Bruggeman who arranged this interview. I’ll do a separate interview with Andrew after the conference is over.

I wish I were going.

Dave Winer wants a T-shirt.

Me, I’d like to let you keep the $100 per iPhone you so generously are going to give me and other early adopters who bought the iPhone.

Here’s what I’d like for my $300.

I’d like an iPhone where software developers can go to town and play.

I’d like an SDK. A real one. One where we can build apps that talk to the accelerometer in the iPhone. One where we can install apps like the very cool Google Maps or Yahoo Finance apps that are on the iPhone’s home screen.

I’d like Flash. SVG. Java. So software developers can build apps like my very cool Kyte.tv mobile app that lets me answer chat from my Nokia phone, or upload video.

I’d like you to turn on the camera so that I can record some video.

I’d like to buy some video games. Like those over on Kongregate.

I think that’s all worth $100 per iPhone. I’d rather have all these things than have a gift certificate.

Thank you. But since I don’t have any of this stuff I’ll take the $100.

Nokia has a bunch of new devices that I want to try. I have both an iPhone and a Nokia N95. I am keeping track of how often I pick up either device. The iPhone is winning. Bigtime.

Did the new Nokia devices fix the problem the iPhone pointed out: that its software is unthrilling?

Based on first reports and videos I’ve seen today: no.

That said, Nokia’s hardware is much more advanced than the iPhone. Better cameras, GPSs, replaceable batteries, more open so you can choose your carriers, etc.

What do you think?

You’ve heard about it on TechMeme.

But here’s a video demo. I have a real video demo of Vtap coming out in about a week. This is killer stuff and works on a variety of cell phones — they demoed it to me on Windows Mobile, some Nokia phones, and the iPhone. Coming September 10th. I’ll let you know when the full interview and demo are up.

We’re about to watch a HD-DVD movie so I thought I’d bang out a little post about Kyte vs. PodTech, since that’s what I’ve been playing with lately.

Why mention the HD-DVD? Well, I am happy that I picked HD-DVD as my home format since today DreamWorks and Paramount said they’d support that format exclusively. I remember when Chris Coulter argued with me about this, saying the movie studios would go exclusively Blue-ray. I love it when he turns out to be wrong. It doesn’t happen that often.

Anyway, that takes me to what I’ve been doing at work. Playing with video. Heck, it’s my job.

UPDATE: Adobe just announced a new Flash player that lets you play H.264 files. Richard MacManus has the details on that announcement. Since Flash is used by both PodTech and Kyte (and many other video distributors like YouTube and Blip) this will probably have a big impact on the future of video on the Web. UPDATE2: Ryan Stewart links to the best reports on this topic and talks about what it means. Anyway, back to the comparison of Podtech vs. Kyte.

So, I did this interview a week ago in Seattle with Elliot Soloway. He’s the teacher who had Larry Page in his classroom. This is probably my best interview, at least according to my email. You really responded to this one, which is about how to improve the educational system. Anyway, today we put up the other recording of this interview and you get to see how I record my Kyte.tv shows. Which leads me to the point of this post:

Here’s a good place to compare Kyte.tv with PodTech.net.

First, here’s Soloway’s interview on PodTech. And here it is on Kyte. Actually the Kyte one was split into two parts cause you can’t put more than 20 minutes up on it. So here’s the second part.

The first thing you’ll notice is that you really can’t compare Kyte to PodTech. It’s like comparing Apples to Oranges. But why let that stand in the way? Heheh.

CAN YOU UPLOAD?

PodTech: no.
Kyte: yes.

This is an important distinction. Kyte is participatory while PodTech is solely a media distribution system. Do note that you can upload your own video to my Kyte channel, or you can open your own. Click “Produce on this Channel” to record your own video and start a conversation with me.

CAN YOU CHAT?

PodTech: no.
Kyte: yes.

Kyte’s real magic is in the chat room. It’s open 24 hours a day and you can say anything you want. But unlike the chat room on other places like on Justin.tv or Ustream.tv, you can not just type text, but can record audio and video to the chat room too. This is a HUGE reason why I am using Kyte instead of Ustream or Justin.tv.

CAN YOU WATCH ON APPLE TV/IPHONE/MEDIA CENTER/IPOD/ZUNE?

PodTech: yes.
Kyte: no.

A lot of you who watch my show do it by subscribing to my RSS feed and downloading my show in MPG4 format to your various devices. Since Kyte is Flash based and my show on PodTech is both Flash and MPG4 based you can only view PodTech stuff on your devices.

WHICH ONE IS BETTER QUALITY?

PodTech is, by far. Why? Because Rocky (my editor) brings my video into Final Cut Pro in near HD quality levels, edits it there, and then exports it to MPG4. This process takes a LOT longer than Kyte, but results in MUCH higher quality that you can see if you watch both videos. Oh, if you want to watch my ScobleShow videos in the best quality possible, you’ll want to download them. Look for the little “Download this” video. The “Video” file (here’s the one for Elliot Soloway’s interview) is much better quality than the one that plays in the player that’s embedded above.

WHICH ONE WORKS ON MY NOKIA N95?

Both do, but with Kyte you can also upload your own videos and you can chat. PodTech looks better, though, due to the higher quality compression and techniques that we use.

WHICH PLAYER LOOKS NICER ON YOUR BLOG?

Well, I think the Kyte one looks sort of goofy. They are redesigning it, Kyte’s CEO told me today. But for now PodTech wins.

CAN YOU USE EITHER ON FACEBOOK?

PodTech: No.
Kyte: Yes.

Kyte’s Facebook integration is quite nice. Gives you the exact same stuff that their Web client gives you. And integrates into your mini-feed on your profile page so your visitors know when you’ve done a new Kyte video.

CAN YOU UPLOAD WITHIN FIVE MINUTES OF FINISHING A RECORDING?

PodTech: No.
Kyte: Yes.

Remember yesterday when I was recording the HP Garage? That video was available for you to watch within five minutes of me hitting “stop” on the recorder. The same video on PodTech? Will take hours. Why? I have to hook my camera up to my computer. I have to rewind the tape. That takes a few minutes. Then I have to open up Final Cut Pro on my Mac. Then I have to hit record, which starts the tape playing. Now I have to wait an hour, if I recorded for an hour. Now I need to edit. PodTech puts a couple of things onto the beginning and ending of a video. Even if I don’t do any other editing that process still takes a few minutes. Now I need to save/export/compress the video. That takes more than an hour. Sometimes more than two hours. Even on a really expensive Mac Pro with lots of RAM and the fastest hard drives and processors available. So, fastest possible turnaround time for PodTech is more than two hours and probably more. Kyte? Less than five minutes. Just hit “stop.” Write a headline. Write a few tags. Hit “broadcast.” If you’re on a fast network it goes even faster. Often I’m up and running within one minute of hitting “stop.”

WHAT ABOUT CONTROL FOR ADVERTISERS

PodTech: yes.
Kyte: no.

This is a major reason to build your own media distribution system like we have at PodTech. Inserting an advertisement? Possible on PodTech but not easily doable on Kyte. Keeping track of every little referer? Possible on PodTech, but Kyte gives very little detail and what it does give you is open to the public to see (like you can tell how many people are watching now, how many referering URLs there are).

CAN YOU USE IT ON A MOBILE PHONE

PodTech: you can watch, not share.
Kyte: yes (but only on some phones, iPhones, for instance, can’t record video).

This is the reason I kept my Nokia N95. If you load the Kyte mobile app you can upload video, watch video, participate in the chat (using text/audio/or video) and more.

CAN YOU EMBED EITHER ON WORDPRESS.COM?

PodTech: yes.
Kyte: yes.

Embedding stuff makes it more likely other bloggers will use it because it doesn’t require sending your users off to another site. Lately I’ve noticed that bloggers are being selfish with their traffic and are linking to things a lot less often.

CONCLUSION

I’ll continue using both, but thought you’d find the comparison interesting because Kyte just got funded by Nokia and is doing some of the most interesting stuff out there.

I love Kyte and will keep using it for the reasons above. I’m still on blog vacation, so maybe at a future time I’ll compare Kyte to YouTube and the really nice Facebook video app, among others.

What do you think? Which video system is getting your attention? Why?

Any others out there that should get my attention?

OK, Maryam, let’s start the movie now. Who wants some popcorn? Yummy!

Today Buzz took me over to see Steve Ball (he runs the audio and other media teams at Microsoft). Steve let me hold his new daughter. You can see her in this Kyte video that I shot with my Nokia N95 (which is why the video is a bit small and blurry).

Holding someone who is 19 days old is a cathartic experience. She is especially precious. I looked at her and asked myself “how am I making her world better?”

Then I thought about Maryam and Patrick, my son and partner in all things geeky, and Milan, our new son who’ll be here real soon. I haven’t been the best parent I could be. The best husband I could be.

Tonight I looked over my Twitters and blogs. They are angry. Confrontational. Disturbed. Hurt. Dismayed.

Those are not words to describe someone in a state of mind to improve the world. Part of it is so many people are making stuff up about me and/or my employer without any care as to my feelings or the truth that I’ve got to get some distance. Over the weekend a variety of people said I had quit my job. Then another “A-list” blogger said I had been fired. Neither are true. Much of what I read over on that Silicon Valley gossip site lately isn’t true and they have demonstrated over and over that they really don’t care about the truth. It really depresses me cause I thought blogging would be a tool for humans to get smarter, not stupider. Depression isn’t fun.

So, I’m going to try something else for a while.

Add to that the fact that I’ve learned more by having a conversation with an IBM lawyer for 30 minutes than I’ve learned from the average blog lately. Heck, I look at TechMeme and see articles about Glam. A copy of Digg. Instructions for leaking your own TV show on the Net.

Glam?!? Bubble?

This isn’t what gets me excited. In our book Naked Conversations I wrote that a good blog is “authoritative and passionate.” Truth is that when I looked at Steve Ball’s baby I realized I’ve been neither. I’d rather go hang out with someone who is building something interesting.

I’ll be back blogging when I can add value again. My video show at http://www.scobleshow.com will go on (I have a ton of great videos coming this week) and I might do a Kyte video or two since I’m doing R&D there for PodTech. I’ve been having a ball with videos in both places lately and you’ve probably noticed that the quality of the videos is going up. I can’t wait for you to see the vid I filmed with Marc Canter at Gnomedex.

Anyway, have a great week and while I’m not blogging I’d love it if you left some ideas on things you’d like me to learn for when I get back.

I had about 250 people in my Kyte.tv chat room. I think Engadget said they had something like 40,000 unique visitors in an hour. Now you know why Peter Rojas gets the big bucks.

But I am a newbie at this press conference thing. I didn’t understand why Engadget sat in the back. Isn’t up front the place to be?

No.

The folks in the back could take pictures. Up front Apple PR people were telling me “no pictures.”

So, I did what I could.

I sent some video to my Kyte channel before we went in. I shot that with my Nokia N95. I have the Kyte app on it and it uploads video within a few seconds. Really great.

Once inside I found no wifi I could use so I plugged in my EVDO. Ran great. So far so good.

During the keynote I couldn’t really get photos off because PR was giving me the evil eye.

So, I resorted to text chat. You can go back and look at the chat.

One thing is that TechMeme will never link to video, streamed or otherwise, so if you’re hoping to get on TechMeme and you’re at a hot news event you better have at least one person live blogging it. To get noticed, though, you’re going to have to do something better than Engadget does. For me that means you’ll need to have a team covering events like this. One person blogging. One person taking pictures and pushing them up to Flickr. One person videoing and pushing those up. And one person chatting with all the peeps. Oh, and doing marketing during the event. Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, etc.

In other words the single blogger or journalist doesn’t have a chance. If you can get a team to photo/video/chat/market/and blog all at the same time then you’ll be able to attract an audience and stay relevant to the conversation.

Some things I’ll do myself next time. 1) Bring more batteries for my laptop. 2) Bring an ultra small camera on a bendable neck so I could sneak it in between people and position it well. 3) Band together with other people so that we can split up tasks and have someone at home wrap them all up.

Oh, and Steve Jobs granted interviews to people with notepads after the event but wouldn’t let himself be videoed. So, be flexible. If you can’t get one kind of interview done, switch to another kind.

But, seriously, when you are competing with 200 of the world’s best press you have to find an angle that no one else sees. I’m not sure I got up to that level today, but the people in the chat seemed appreciative that I was chatting live during the event.

Anyway, that’s all from Apple. Now back to work on other stuff.

Yeah, you can go over to Engadget or Gizmodo or some Apple-oriented blog (MacSurfer is my favorite because it links to anything that moves in the Apple space).

I’m sure they’ll all do an awesome job of covering tomorrow’s Apple press conference with text, pictures, video, and analysis. It starts at about 10 a.m.

But I’m going to take a different trail. I’m going to use my Kyte.tv channel. I’ll be answering the chat there live. And posting video and audio and other things.

What’s cool about that? Well, you can post videos to my channel! And the live chat there can include audio, text, or video. I’ll be reporting from my Mac and maybe my cell phone (do you think it’d be rude to pull out a Nokia during an Apple press conference? Heh! I guess that’s one way to make the point that the iPhone really needs video capabilities to be considered a great phone).

Oh, and Hugh Macleod will be happy to know that my Mac has a Microsoft blue monster on it. So, the blue monster is going to Apple. Ahh, the fun!

Who is that in the picture above? New York Times tech journalist David Pogue. He wrote a book on the iPhone titled the missing manual.

I wasn’t the one who recognized David to tell the truth. He was having lunch at Bucks when my son recognized him (my son says that Pogue did the best iPhone video). My son is really the one who should go tomorrow. He knows more about Apple than most Apple employees do. He’ll be watching from PodTech’s offices. I’m sure he’ll give us some reactions too.

Well, I’ve been taking a lot of shots in the past few weeks for always covering the latest shiny social object. You know, first it was Twitter. Then Jaiku. Then Facebook. Pownce. On and on.

The critics say that either I’m late to the game, like with Facebook, or that I’m just too scattered and not looking for real value. Or that I don’t stay on one thing long enough to learn it well and add real value to my writings.

Fair enough. Although one thing I’d like to clear up. When I yammer on endlessly about Facebook that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped using any of the others. Twitter, for instance, is just a constant part of my life now.

Anyway, last night I was at the Facebook party aka “Lunch 2.0.” I met Mark Zuckerberg and his sister, Randi, and a ton of Facebook employees and executives. It is one of those parties that in about five years we’ll all be looking back on as a major inflection point in the valley. I stayed until the very end. In fact, even after the party ended a small group of us hang outside of Facebook’s offices and kept talking about what is going to happen in social networking.

One of the guys was John McCrea, vice president of marketing for Plaxo.

He told me that on Monday Plaxo i sgoing to turn on a new version. Ahh, a new “shiny social object.”

But then he explained why we should care: Plaxo is going to open up a new social network that’s both open as well as controllable. Translation: Plaxo is making a play for Facebook.

First, let’s go back to Facebook. Why does everyone say it’s a “walled garden?” Because you can’t get to data stored on Facebook unless you’re a Facebook member. Two days ago I did a video for Chris Pirillo on Facebook. Chris instantly got excited and wanted to share that with his blog’s readers. But he couldn’t. That video is locked inside Facebook’s walled garden. If you don’t have a key (a Facebook account) you can’t see it.

John told me that on Monday Plaxo will come out with a social network that gets rid of the walled garden.

Why did I say a couple of weeks ago that Facebook is a “data roach motel?” Because I can put all sorts of information about myself into Facebook (I could, for instance, tell you that I like “Daft Punk.” But, do I own that data? Can I get it out of Facebook? No).

John told me that on Monday Plaxo will come out with a social network that lets me own my own data and take it out of Plaxo and put it on other social networks.

Finally, I’ve been getting a few complaints about what I’ve been doing with Facebook. By turning Facebook into a professional networking tool I’m causing problems for people who saw it as a social tool to keep in touch with their college friends. See, Facebook for the first three years of its existence was mostly a tool for college kids to pass photos and other funny things around. Now, if you have photos of your frat party at college do you really want your new boss and coworkers to see those? Probably not.

But Facebook isn’t controllable. You can’t really have two groups of friends. One group that sees your drunken college frat photos and another group that sees you making presentations to your board of directors.

John told me that on Monday Plaxo will come out with a social network that lets me control which groups of friends (or family) that can see certain items.

OK, sounds like Plaxo is going to kill Facebook and bring down Facebook’s value by a few billion dollars. The bubble 2.0 will end. Zuckerberg will drag his tail away from the valley defeated. Etc etc etc. Right?

It’s not going to happen. Here’s why. It’s too late and the walled garden will keep people locked in.

Huh?

Sorry, Facebook already has momentum and a coolness about it that Plaxo doesn’t exude. I don’t really know how to explain the coolness without sounding really idiotic and goofy. That’s part of the 20-something vibe that Facebook has going for it right now. Oh, here’s a photo of me looking at the artwork in the Facebook offices. That might explain a little bit about it. There’s lots of other photos from the event last night here.

But it’s there and can’t be ignored. If John could explain to me how he’s going to get the world’s college students to look away from Facebook and toward something else maybe I’d go along with this “more open and controllable” Plaxo. My head is telling me that Plaxo is the way to go but my emotion tells me that Facebook is more fun.

The other thing is that BECAUSE of Facebook’s “closed” nature I’m not likely to leave it anytime soon. Why? Because if Facebook has 10% more content than the other networks do (which it will have because of the momentum that Facebook has today) that the more “open” networks will always seem lame in comparison.

But, on Monday I’ll try out the new Plaxo. I’m into “shiny social objects” and will report to you the pros and the cons. The problem, though, is that even if I get really excited about it my email is demonstrating that many of the world won’t be listening and won’t care.

What do you think?

After I get up this morning I’ll film a video explaining more of my thoughts and I’ll put that on my Kyte channel. For now Nokia’s CTO left me a little message there. I’ll do more stuff from the Always On conference today.