Online all the time. Yeah!

Great way to start the weekend. Have a good one!

I spent a great hour with blogging and social networking pioneers Six Apart. We talk about the future of Moveable Type, Vox, Live Journal, and Type Pad.

With who? Six Apart’s CEO, Chris Alden, and VP of Products, Michael Sippey, and Engineer David Recordon.

If you can’t handle the hour of all this social media goodness, well, Rocky went and did an Editor’s Choice which is only six minutes long. Yeah for editing! Someday I’ll tell you the short videos only increase my traffic 30%, but every percent counts, doesn’t it? :-)

Don’t know who Six Apart is? They are one of the oldest blog companies. Started by Ben and Mena Trott, who just had a new kid themselves (congrats). They make Moveable Type, Vox, TypePad, LiveJournal, and a few other things. Inventors of trackbacks, among other things too. So, it’s worth hearing what they are up to and spending an hour with them.

Kara! Kara! Kara!

Kara Swisher SSSSSOOOOO nails what is wrong with the application developers who are trying to make money over on Facebook.

The other night I was on a panel at the Graphing Social Patterns conference where I helped judge a bunch of Facebook apps.

With each one I asked myself “would I install this?”

The answer with almost all of them is: no. The sad fact, though, is that most people WILL install the stupider apps.

The winners? Three were great, one was really lame.

The Game, by Robert Fan
Judge-O-Rama by Chris Heald
Visual Bookshelf, by Aaron Battalion
Resume, by Joe Suh

Let’s throw out the lame one, the Game, which is a lewd “Hot or Not” app. The others were pretty interesting, though. The Resume app lets you integrate LinkedIn stuff into your Facebook profile. I’m not a fan of LinkedIn, but this app was well done for those of you who are.

If you read books Visual Bookshelf is an awesome way to share your bookshelf with others. Definitely shows a lot of thought and goes way beyond the stupider types of apps.

I have a long list of apps waiting for me. Some are interesting like file sharing, but most are pretty toyish kinds of apps.

I’m really looking forward to the second wave of apps that really do something interesting with the social network of people I’ve added to my Facebook account.

Another problem that Kara doesn’t touch upon is that a lot of these apps simply don’t scale and break for people with thousands of friends.

Looking forward to seeing if Facebook apps improve at the SNAP Summit in San Francisco on October 26.

Oh, and here’s Steve Broback talking about his Facebook Conference, Web Community Forum, up in Seattle on December 5-6, on a walk recently near my house.

Oh #2: Kyte.tv has a new look. I’m going over there today to talk about the changes that are coming to Kyte.tv over the next few weeks. I’m not sure I like this new look. How about you?

UPDATE: I used my Nikon S51C pocket camera to film this video. But Kyte wouldn’t let me upload the high resolution version (said that it was bigger than 50MB, which it couldn’t accept), so you get the small version which makes the player look lame. I’ll push Kyte to increase the limit so we can do more interesting videos.

I’m already getting sick of all the talk that the Jaiku acquisition by Google means the death of Twitter. Of course where is this talk happening? Twitter! Heh.

Tim O’Reilly put it right: Jaiku’s strength wasn’t as a competitor to Twitter at all. It was the mobile presence and aggregation features that I liked over on Jaiku. Jaiku has a mobile client, in particular, that’s really great.

The more troubling thing is that Google acquires companies and then we never hear about these companies again. Will that happen to Jaiku? I hope not.

As Jonathan Davies says, Jaiku’s other strength is in aggregating RSS feeds into one place. Interesting that Google is building a very strong position in the RSS ecosystem with Google Reader and Feedburner and now Jaiku. Interesting, will Google use its RSS position against Facebook? We’ll see come November 5.

Imagine if Google made a more open social networking tool than Facebook all via RSS feeds? Stick that into your RSS feed reader and smoke it!

Anyway, I’ve had a Jaiku account for a while and like it. Hope to see what they do next.

I was talking with a Google employee last night at the Graphing Social Media conference.

Aside: why are there more Google employees there than Facebook ones? I think Facebook’s attitude toward the community is saying volumes to all of us.

Anyway, he asked me to guess which Google service had the most page views every day.

Is it search? No.
Blogger? No.
Google Maps? No.
Picasa? No.

So, what is it?

Orkut.

Orkut?

Yeah. Now do you get why they just bought Jaiku?

Now do you get why the world is going to pay attention to what Google releases on November 5?

Yeah!

Facebook has real competition coming. Competition they haven’t yet faced.

It’s going to be an interesting period to watch them go at it.

I have 552 reasons to hate Facebook. I sure wish they would let me add more than 5,000 friends. If Google doesn’t have such a stupid limit that’ll get me to check it out, at minimum (I can’t add any more friends on Facebook).

A few months ago I interviewed the Jaiku founders. I found them to be very smart. This is a good purchase for Google. Add it onto their new social network that’s coming (Orkut 2.0) and Google just made a major move against Facebook.

Loic Le Meur’s new company, Seesmic, was given raves by Mike Arrington this morning.

That drew out Luca Filigheddu who asked whether Arrington was talking about his service, Hictu. Now Hictu had remained off of my radar screen until he made that comment so off I went to check it out.

First of all, notice the difference in launch strategies used by these two guys. Loic has been visiting a whole series of bloggers and showing off his software. Asking for advice. Doing videos where he doesn’t feature himself, but features the blogger he’s visiting. This is HUGELY smart. It’s PR that takes advantage of our egos — in a good way. I have good feelings about Loic because of how he launched his company. It’s the smartest launch I’ve seen in a while and not very expensive.

Also note that he moved to San Francisco to start his company. Why did he do that? Well, because most of the top journalists and tech bloggers are within an hour of San Francisco. So are tons of the world’s top developers and marketers and business people (not all, but enough of a concentration that Loic noticed it all the way from Paris). Smart #2.

But back to the point of this post: bootstrapping.

Why did I call Seesmic “video Twitter?” Because it actually uses Twitter and builds on top of it. Hictu doesn’t do that. I don’t see any of my friends on Hictu, while I see anyone who posts a video in Twitter in Seesmic.

That’s brilliant and is why, I think, Arrington was so addicted all weekend long.

Also, why am I more addicted to Twitter than the prettier (and more capable Pownce)? Look no further than Seesmic (and Dave Winer’s TwitterGram and FlickrGram). Among others. The API is bringing us really cool new services that aren’t possible on Pownce.

Seesmic IS addicting. I saw that immediately when Loic showed it to me. Sorry Hictu.

I sure wish companies would stop building new social networks and start bootstrapping on top of existing ones.

Over the weekend I saw the New York Times article about how college users of Facebook were laughing at those of us who are, um, “older.”

Scott Karp jumped in and cheered on that point of view and says “…the issue is that so many “adults” fell for Facebook’s ploy to convince them that they should adopt a toy built for college kids as a platform for their professional networking objectives.”

Ahh, but I was at Sun Microsystems in a meeting with some of their folks and some folks from Dow Jones. Interesting facts: more than 10% of Sun’s employees are on Facebook already (keep in mind that most of that growth started after the app platform was released just a few months ago). Same with Siemens. Same with Microsoft. And nearly every company I search Facebook for has thousands of employees: Lockheed Martin, which is where my dad worked for 30 years, has 3,700 employees on Facebook already.

Fred Stutzman puts the punctuation on these two articles, along with another one by Fred Vogelstein, with a post of his own titled “Opposing Opinions of Facebook.”

So, why the disconnect?

Well, first there’s some myths of business networking:

Myth One: that business networking needs to be cold and dispassionate.
Myth Two: that business networking never includes personal stuff like religion, sports, politics, or your favorite TV show or book.
Myth Three: that business requires a “networking” affordance.
Myth Four: that business requires getting rid of the college kids and their frat parties.

All of these are totally false. But lots of people believe them to be true, which is why we’ll see more articles like the one in the New York Times on Friday.

How will we know that the discovery phase of Social Networking is over? When we stop seeing these kinds of stupid rifts. Do we argue about whether it’s young or old or cool or smart to use a business card? No, I had them in college. I have them now. Never even thought of arguing about that. Someday we’ll just use Facebook and we’ll all get along. Until then, phhhhhhhhbbbbbttttttt to all you college students who think I’m ruining Facebook!

A few years ago I wrote to Microsoft’s leadership and asked them why they weren’t involved in the new Web 2.0 space. I got an answer back that was about 2,000 words long and included the words “business value” 13 times. Translation: Microsoft’s leadership thought that Web 2.0 and social software like Flickr didn’t have business value and was too much of a potential fad to invest in.

Glad to see that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, is consistent. Notes that Geocities lost most of its value after being acquired by Yahoo and says “it had most of what Facebook has.” Let’s come back to that point in a second.

The thing is that Ballmer has bought into the advertising hype too. I remember when Microsoft’s President, Kevin Johnson, came to our group when I worked at Microsoft and explained that the advertising industry is 10x the size of the software industry and that he was going to steer Microsoft more into an advertising-driven business rather than just one that made its revenues from selling software. Translation: Microsoft was going to compete more with Google, Yahoo, and other companies going after the advertising pie.

Don’t miss this quote. It’s demonstrates everything that is wrong with Microsoft’s approach:

“There can’t be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of people could write in a couple of years. That’s for sure,” Ballmer said.

When I worked at Microsoft I heard this over and over and over again from various engineers and program managers who STILL haven’t competed effectively with WordPress, Flickr, Skype, YouTube, or any of the other things over the years I’ve heard this “we can build that in a few weeks” kind of arrogant attitude attached to.

But, remember eBay? Remember how dozens of competitors tried to get into the eBay space? (and still are?)

Why aren’t they succeeding? Because eBay is NOT about the technology. It’s about the community and unless you have something that’ll convince the buyers and sellers all to switch all at one moment you’ll never be able to take eBay’s market away. Translation: it’s too late and eBay has huge defensibility around its business because people won’t move away from it even if you demonstrate 5x better technology.

Same with Facebook. I’m not moving away from it. Why? I have 5,000 reasons why (and another 500 already who want to be included in my Facebook network). Unless you can convince them all to move I’m not moving. This is why LinkedIn isn’t going to disappear anytime soon, even though I like Facebook’s approach a lot better. It’s also why MySpace isn’t going anywhere. My son says his friends are all on MySpace. My brother’s bar is on MySpace. They aren’t moving no matter how hard I evangelize Facebook.

Which gets us back to Ballmer’s quotes.

First, let’s share this one: “I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people,” Mr Ballmer told Times Online yesterday.

I’m 42. Hardly young. And Facebook is appealing a lot to people in my social network and age group lately (and so is Twitter and other social tools like Pownce, LinkedIn, and sites that use social groups like Yelp, Flickr, Upcoming.org). I guess Ballmer missed that. This is what happens when Microsoft executives don’t get outside of their ivory towers very often. Steve, you really need to go to any tech industry conference and hang out in the hallways. Don’t come to San Francisco, you won’t believe anything you hear here anyway. But go to, say, LeWeb3 in Paris and hear what they say about social networks. You’ll probably hear Bebo. Facebook. And a few others. From even the old folks. Last night I was at a National Geographic event and lots of people were talking about Facebook.

Here’s another quote:

Mr Ballmer also noted that sites such as Geocities, an online community that was bought for $3 billion by Yahoo! in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, “had most of what Facebook has.”

Oh, boy. No way, no how.

First of all, I never joined Geocities. It never had utility for me. It was a place to build free Web sites. I found it had all the disadvantages to me that MySpace has and NONE of the advantages of Facebook. It was NOT a social network that exerted the kind of social pressure on me to join the way that Facebook did. I tried to ignore Facebook for years. Same with MySpace. But people I kept meeting kept begging me to join. Kevin Rose, when we had dinner, told me I was blowing it by not being on Facebook. That NEVER happened with Geocities.

Also, Facebook is now a business card collection. A rolodex. That has real utility that’ll keep me using it long after it joins the “old fad bin.”

Oh, and anytime people say “this thing is a fad?” I think of blogging. Lots of people told me that when I started it too. It wasn’t. Neither is Facebook.

But all this makes me think that Ballmer is trying to send signals to Zuckerberg (Facebook’s CEO) that the price is too high and that this is just a negotiating ploy. Nice one! But it doesn’t give me confidence that Microsoft is going to figure out Web 2.0 or social networking strategies anytime soon.

It also makes me realize that Ballmer has no clue about the future of advertising. If he did he’d be talking about how Facebook’s ability to concentrate people into buckets in a new way should be copied and studied. That’s where Facebook’s real advertising value is and Microsoft hasn’t demonstrated ANY ability to see that yet. Of course, Facebook itself hasn’t shipped its advertising platform that’ll demonstrate its vision there either, but I hear it’s coming.

Will Microsoft get a clue before Facebook gets an entrenched advertising platform going?

Ballmer proved with Google and with these quotes today: no.

Let’s leave Halo 3 out of this, for now.

Yesterday Hugh Macleod wrote up his thoughts on Microsoft.

He puts out a theory that Microsoft would be more loved if it told a better story.

I’ve been studying my own reactions to Microsoft lately and I think it’s a lot deeper than that.

I have a REASON to love Microsoft. It propelled my career into a whole nother level. But lately even that hasn’t been enough.

I’ve been asking myself why?

To me it comes down to expectations. Microsoft is like the genius child who has rich and smart parents. Society holds huge expections for such people. If they don’t succeed the story is it’s a child who hasn’t lived up to his/her potential.

Microsoft is much the same way.

We see Google having fun with docs and spreadsheets.

We see Facebook and Plaxo and LinkedIn (not to mention Ning and Broadband Mechanics) having fun with social networking.

We see Flickr, Zooomr (one developer!), SmugMug, Photobucket, and a raft of others having fun with photography.

We see Apple having fun with all sorts of stuff.

We see Amazon having fun with datacenters.

And on, and on.

But where is the kid who has rich and smart parents? Yeah, Microsoft brought us the “Demo of the Year” last year: Photosynth. But what you didn’t read on TechCrunch is that it takes up to nine hours to process one set of images so, while it is a killer demo, it won’t be a product you and I can use anytime soon.

This week we learned that Google is struggling to stay relevant to the new conversation: one that was taken over this year by Facebook. But what is Microsoft doing to stay relevant? It’s like Microsoft has decided to go and spend the inheritance and not do any more work to stay on the bleeding edge. This is a much less interesting Microsoft than it was back in the 1990s, where it seemed every week Microsoft would announce something new and interesting. I remember being a subscriber to eWeek and other trade magazines and it was a rare week that Microsoft didn’t have the most important story. (TechMeme has taken over that role, and this summer how often have we seen Microsoft at the top of TechMeme? Not very often.

This week I learned another Microsoft employee is leaving to start his own company. This guy has asked me to keep it quiet until he can let all his managers know, but he’s someone who is liked and trusted both in Silicon Valley and up in Redmond. He’s a connector. An innovator. A guy who wants to SHIP innovative products.

These kinds of people keep leaving Microsoft because they see it isn’t living up to its potential and is frustrating to work inside of. It’s more fun to go join a small startup, or even one that’s fairly well along its path, like Facebook (everytime I go to Facebook I see more of the people I used to work with).

It’s been more than a year now since I left Microsoft. I really expected Ray Ozzie to come out and do lots of cool stuff for the Internet. But what did we get? A new design on live.com? Please.

The interesting thing is that Microsoft’s bench is so deep that even with the people they’ve lost over the years there still are huge numbers of amazing people working there and they still have advantages that no other company has. Deep, deep pockets. Massive numbers of customers. Profits that keep arriving everyday. A salesforce that’s well run and has its fingers in almost every country in the world.

So, back to Hugh’s post. Microsoft needs a new story. If I were on the management team I’d be looking hard at the Bungie team, the folks who brought us Halo 3.

What did they do right?

1. They stayed away from Microsoft’s politics. They work in a small ex-hardware store in Kirkland, Washington, USA. About 10 miles from the main campus.
2. They kept their own identity. They have their own security. No Microsoft signs outside. A very different feel internally (much more akin to Facebook than how the Office team works together). Each team works in open seating, focused around little pods where everyone can see everyone else and work with them.
3. They put their artists and designers front and center and obviously listen to them. The Windows team, however, fights with their artists and designers.
4. They keep the story up front and center. They work across the group to make sure they deliver that story everywhere. Translation: employees know what the story is, how to communicate it (or when not to), and they have great PR teams who work to make sure that story is shared with everyone.
5. The product thrills almost on every level. Hey, sounds like an iPhone!

The problem is that Bungie is a small exception in a sea of Microsoft.

Changing this company’s public story is going to prove very difficult. Maybe that’s why Hugh drew Microsoft a “Blue Monster” instead of something a little more friendly.

I’m sure some of my friends at Microsoft will misread this and think I’m “a hater.” You can think that if you want. It is intellectually lazy, though.

It’s interesting that since leaving Microsoft only Kevin Schofield (he’s one of the great connectors the company has over in Microsoft Research) has really done a good job of reaching out to me and tried to tell me a “new Microsoft” story.

One thing I did at Microsoft was reach out to the haters and see if I could tell them a new story.

So, I’m game. On Monday night I’ll be at the Halo 3 launch party. I’ll be looking to show my video camera a new Microsoft story.

But until I find it so far it just seems like that rich and smart kid who hasn’t lived up to the potential that we all see in her.

Am I missing something?

Mike Arrington says that Google has been showing around a new social networking tool that’s aimed at competing with Facebook.

Why is Google so concerned by Facebook?

Easy, Google is the world’s best intention concentration engine.

Think about it. If you intend to do something, like buy a car, where are you going to go? Google!

And, aren’t you concentrated into a community of other people who also intend to buy a car? Yes!

Name another system that does a better job of concentrating intention the way that Google does. I can’t.

Well, until Facebook came along.

Now Facebook has several ways to track intention. They have a great set of groups that you can join. If you were intending to do something, like buy a car, wouldn’t you want to talk with other people who’ve bought the car you’re looking at? Absolutely.

Did you know that if you click an interest that someone has put in that you can see all the other members on Facebook who also have that interest?

That’s a concentration effect that Google doesn’t have.

Or, do a search for “Saturn Aura.” I find a bunch of groups by Saturn car owners. That’s another way that people are concentrated.

Anyway, all this concentration of people into groups really pisses off Google. Why? Because THAT is what advertisers BUY on Google!

Google was getting used to having the only advertising story where some company like General Motors could buy audiences that were concentrated into little buckets. Now Facebook is coming on strong and, so, Google needed to jump in with an alternative.

Can’t wait to see it.