Anyone remember Friendster? It was an early entrant into the social networking scene. If they had done their work right they SHOULD have been a much bigger player than they are now.

Why aren’t they?

1. They didn’t take care of PR and didn’t take care of bloggers. Hmmm, Facebook is doing exactly the same thing. Several people at the dinner tonight noted that Facebook hasn’t responded to claims that Facebook’s employees are spying on data that the public doesn’t have access to. And that’s just one PR complaint.
2. They kicked people out that they didn’t like. Hmmm, Facebook is doing exactly the same thing.
3. They didn’t respond to new competitors who took away their coolness. Facebook? They are about to meet their biggest competition yet.

Last night I was at a dinner for Hugh Macleod and Oren Michaels. There was talk of an earthquake. No, not the 5.6 one centered near San Jose. The fact that Google is about to jump into the social networking world. TechCrunch caused the shockwave of the year with that one.

One name that’s on the Google announcement, Plaxo, tells me that Google is looking to build a “social graph” that’s open and doesn’t have walls keeping developers from playing. They are looking to “Friendster” Facebook.

Add into this last week’s little “Vic Gundotra” dinner and I’m already seeing a trend: Google is going full bore after influentials, bloggers, and other “new media” developers who need a social network as part of their efforts to remain competitive.

Think about it. Nearly every cool Web property lately has a social network. Upcoming.org, Flickr, Yelp, Channel 9, etc. All have their own proprietary social networks.

Look at MySpace and Facebook. Both don’t solve that problem.

Will Google? And, by helping out Web 2.0 developers and other influentials (Facebook calls them “whales”) will Google cut off Facebook’s PR air supply (which is proving quite lucrative)?

Those are things I’m going to focus on for the next few days.

Some things we still need answers on:

1. Is this new Google social network really fun to use like Facebook is?
2. Does it beat Facebook’s aesthetics?
3. Can the social graph be componetized so that I could add a social network to my blog, for instance?
4. Does the development platform beat Facebook’s? (Can I see which apps my friends have loaded, is the key question).
5. Does it build a really open social graph?
6. If Google does match Facebook’s utility (really easy: just clone the hell out of it but give the “whales” more than 5,000 friends. I’ve talked with many celebrities and businesses and they say 5,000 simply isn’t enough which is why many of them are forced to stay on MySpace) do they allow new kinds of social ads?

It’s going to be an interesting next month getting around to all these companies again and seeing what they plan to do.

The artist, Hugh Macleod, who came up with the Blue Monster for Microsoft visited Facebook’s headquarters today and I filmed him. If you haven’t been here for long you might not realize that I love Hugh’s cartoons and have for years.

This is “micromedia.” Very short video.

I loved his thoughts on social objects so today when we went to Facebook I noted that he’s a social object producer and it was interesting that he was visiting the social graph producer.

He ended up saying “Zuckerberg, you just watch out.”

I also have a video of Hugh working his Twitter. Off camera we talked about his thoughts on advertising and its role in decommodifying things.

Heh.

Oh, NBC’s new Hula video distribution scheme is getting lots of notice over on TechMeme. I don’t know why I mention that here. I put a couple of the best articles on my link blog, but there’s a lot better stuff to read about on my link blog than the HulaHype. Look for the travel API article by ProgrammableWeb, for instance.

Does your school block sites like MySpace or Facebook? I was hanging out with Maryam’s family and friends tonight and the kids started comparing ways to get around the system. Of course I turned on my cell phone’s video camera, which immediately got everyone but Patrick to be quiet. He gives up the goods.

Tips? Add a period to the end of URLs, so www.facebook.com becomes www.facebook.com. — the kids say that often works. So does visiting international versions of your favorite sites.

Me? I just turn on my cell phone’s wireless data system (I have a Verizon Wireless card) and say hell with IT folks who try to keep you from doing what you want to do. But if you’re a 13-year-old kid that isn’t economically possible.

Do note how astute they are in sharing information. I bet this same conversation is going on between lots of people tonight. How about in China? Iran? Saudi Arabia? You bet!

I gotta have a talk with Patrick about the porn thing, though. It’s not easy being a parent in these times. Clamp down too hard and they just won’t tell you the truth (lots of Patrick’s friends tell me their parents have no clue what they are doing online).

The last couple of days have been interesting.

Thursday ended with an interesting dinner with Google’s PR team and my old boss, Vic Gundotra, who now is an executive at Google.

At the dinner he announced that Google was “gearing up” for releasing a raft of open technologies which would be gifted to Web developers. Much like Google Gears is. Dan Farber was at the dinner too and wrote up a lengthy post on the details and what this all means.

But, this post isn’t named “Micromedia” for nothing.

Here’s a bunch of short videos (since so many of you claim you like short videos) for you to watch.

Earlier this week we went to the CTIA show and met several cool companies (many more to come next week, these are just the first three).

1. Utterz. I tried to hate it at first. Do we really need something else to come along that looks like a blog but that lets you call your blog with your cell phone and leave some audio there? Do we need another Twitter competitor? Turns out we do, and I underestimated this service. Eric Rice slapped me over on Twitter several times for that. I redeemed myself by interviewing one of Utterz’ founders. I’ll call Utterz a “micromedia community service” for now until I have a chance to drink some great wine and come up with a better name. Five minutes long.
2. I get too focused on Silicon Valley’s tech hipness, but Edioma has a fun service that helps Spanish-speaking people learn English. Larry Upton, an executive there, tells me why that matters and gives me a demo. Five minutes.
3. I’m preparing to go to Paris in December with Milan and Maryam for the LeWeb3 Conference. So, anyone who shows me cool travel services will catch my attention. WorldMate is such a service and Eyran Blumberg, VP there, showed me how the service might help me out on my travels. Seven minutes long.

But those are my official “ScobleShow” things. How about over on my Kyte.tv channel?

1. Milan Scoble smiling at his older half brother Patrick. Hey, that brightens my day, hope it does you too.
2. Facebook, on November 6, will announce Social Ads — the AllFacebook Blog has the details. Here’s my thoughts on what those will be.
3. Last night, after I picked Patrick up in Santa Rosa (Patrick lives with his mom up in Petaluma, which is across the Golden Gate Bridge) we talked about what we were going to do on the way home: pick up our copy of Leopard.
4. Patrick celebrates getting to level 70 in World of Warcraft. I have no idea what he is saying anymore. I need a parent’s guide to WoW.
5. Here’s what it looks like inside the San Francisco Apple Store last night buying Leopard. Of course getting INTO the Apple store should have counted for hazard pay — we had to cross through thousands of bicycle riders who were doing the usual “Critical Mass” protest against cars by riding their bikes through traffic and generally causing mayhem.
6. At the Apple store last night Loic Le Meur was there too (founder of Seesmic). So I get him on video inside the Apple store.

All those videos were done using my Nokia N95 cell phone. I love that thing and Kyte.tv’s service, because I can get video to you within minutes of me filming it.

Anyway, after we got home we switched to Seesmic and installed Leopard.

1. Loading OSX Leopard. “Goodbye Tiger,” Patrick says. We also talked about how we met Lynn Fox, director of PR at Apple.
2. Leopard almost finished installing (it took Patrick about 45 minutes).
3. Patrick’s first boot into Leopard.
4. “A reflection on the freaking dock,” Patrick says in his first impression of Leopard.
5. A really cool feature is Webclips. You can highlight a piece of a Web page and then make a widget out of it. Patrick demonstrates. Milan cries. Heh.
6. @geraldb28 Twittered us last night and said “wannt do some screen sharing?” This video is what resulted.

What’s really fun is that on Seesmic, Utterz, and Kyte there’s TONS of micromedia being produced.

Will anyone watch? Wrong question: for most of this it’s about the conversation that happens and the communication we can do with each other.

I got a TV station in my pocket. What are you going to do with yours?

Last night I was hanging around at the Ritz near my house. That’s where Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo spoke yesterday, and where the Right Media conference is going on right now.

I talked with several people who didn’t want to go on the record, but who are executives at Microsoft’s competitors. They told me to “watch out for Brian McAndrews, former CEO of aQuantive.”

That’s the company that sold recently to Microsoft for a very large sum of money (around $6 billion).

They say he now is working for Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft and is expected to make major moves on Microsoft’s behalf to get Microsoft a major position into the advertising industry.

So, what’s the rumor this morning? Microsoft wins the Facebook bid.

If this is all true, then Steve Ballmer’s promise to buy 50 companies in the advertising and Web 2.0 spaces in the next year is off to a roaring start.

Since I don’t think Steve Ballmer understands the advertising world, it sure looks like someone else is behind this move. I’d love to interview Brian McAndrews.

UPDATE: if this rumor is true, it means big revenues for Facebook. Microsoft has a world-class advertising sales team. I bet they could promise more revenues than Google could, particularly because Microsoft’s sales team is much more focused on banner advertising than Google’s team is.

UPDATE2: Microsoft’s Hank Vigil was in Palo Alto yesterday, so maybe he’s behind this. Me?

Venture Beat’s Chris Morrison has an excellent writeup on the event space sites that are out there. I’d love to see more shootouts like this one. There’s simply too much stuff to try in this industry and having people tear into a category and rate them really helps us all.

That said, I’ve looked into the event space too and I’ve found that Upcoming.org is WAY AHEAD for tech geeks. It’s not even close between Upcoming.org and everyone else. I’ve found that Upcoming.org has easily 10x more tech geek participation than other sites and has more complete listings of tech events, too. Just check out my calendar and compare to anyone else’s tech event calendar.

Keep in mind, though, that other sites are ahead in other genres like music and politics. But I really only care about technology stuff and in the industry I care about you gotta join Upcoming.org and you gotta put your events into Upcoming.org if you want the best people to come.

I agree with Chris that Eventful is ahead of the others in lots of other ways too.

Oh, and Chris left one huge site off: Facebook. They actually have more events, and more geek participation, but since everything is behind the garden wall I can’t link to it so I can see how Chris left Facebook’s events off. That said, I’d list my event on all these sites, but especially on Facebook and on Upcoming.org.

If you haven’t yet joined in an event site, why not?

BluePulse, today, released a bunch of new features for its social network.

But why is this social network gaining millions of users when Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc are out there already and are very entrenched?

Because they focused on a smaller niche. Their social network is ONLY for mobile phones.

I love this company and its service.

Want to get up to date on the mobile industry and hear all about BluePulse? You know what to do.

Venture Wire has the facts on BluePulse’s announcement today. Blognation has other details.

Oh, and BluePulse is yet another best-of-breed companies that came from Australia. What are they putting in the water there?

Oh #2: this video, with CEO Ben Keighran, was filmed in YouTube’s original offices. Is this going to turn out to be a “lucky office?” We’ll see.

There’s a ton of chatter on Twitter about the fires. One thing that caught my attention is the scope of the fires. This Google Map mashup demonstrates how many places are burning.

Rodney Rumford’s Facebook Reviews site is down because of the fires too.

More on Google News.

My thoughts are with everyone affected.

I love the Lunch 2.0 movement. Every few days there’s a different Lunch 2.0 event around the world. Today was one at Oracle’s headquarters. These are great events to network at and see some new stuff (Oracle was showing off how it is Web 2.0-izing some of its Enterprise-focused stuff and privately I got a demo of how Oracle is building its own internal social network which is very cool).

Anyway, here’s some quick videos I shot at the lunch.

1. Matt Galligan told me about his company, Socialthing, which will aggregate all sorts of friends networks. Alpha coming later in October, public release expected later this year. He called it a “digital life manager” and compared it to Jaiku.
2. Justin Kestelyn gave me a little tidbit of why Oracle was hosting Lunch 2.0. His blog with reports on the event is here.
3. Dominik Grolimund of Wua.la shows me this very cool Peer-to-Peer online storage service. I’m going to try this one out. He’s visiting Silicon Valley from Switzerland.
4. Jeremiah Owyang just came back from Hong Kong and explains Cyworld’s homepi to us. Rich Mangalang, of Oracle, was showing us their internal social network (sort of like Facebook, but only for Oracle employees). He wasn’t able to demonstrate it on camera, unfortunately.

Everytime I go to a Lunch 2.0 event I meet interesting people and learn a lot. Why don’t you come next time?

Watch my Kyte channel tonight. I’m headed to the Showstoppers CTIA event where I’ll find you some cool mobile gadgets and post them up instantly as long as there is some bandwidth.

So, I was standing in the middle of the lobby — I have a badge, but didn’t use it cause the hallway was so awesome. I met Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the Mouse, among many other cool things. I asked him if he’d seen anything cool. Said “no.” Then I turned on the camera and he wouldn’t answer me. Heh.

Anyway, a group of MySpace executives met me in the hallway and said they don’t limit people to 5,000 friends.

I didn’t get their names, but anyway, we talked about the new MySpace platform that’s coming soon.

They told me that their platform will show you a lot more information about each application before you install it. Unlike Facebook.

Anyway, great place to network. How often do you see Dave Winer and Doug Engelbart together?

Here’s a video I shot of SmugMug CEO, Don MacAskill, who has a shirt that shows whether there are wifi signals in the area or not. It rocks.

Here’s the lobby shot when I first got there. We also interviewed the NewsGator guys (really great feed service for enterprises — the longer video will be up in a couple of weeks).