Scott Hanselman is one of the most talented “programmer bloggers” out there. He’s been pretty heavy on Microsoft stuff for years, which is fine cause there’s millions of developers who care about .NET and all that which is in Microsoft’s ecosystem.

Today he announced he’s going to Microsoft to work for Scott Guthrie. People who work inside Microsoft tell me Scott’s organization is one that really is rocking and rolling (I saw that for myself over the years — Guthrie is one of those people who, when you meet him, makes you feel good about where Microsoft is going).

Anyway, this post would be fine if it ended up at just “congrats to Scott and Scott.”

But there’s more to this story.

Hanselman works with my brother up in Portland and he works with another guy I’ve known since the early 1990s: Phil Weber. Both were at the blogger dinner. I’ve known Hanselman since the 1990s when I helped plan Visual Basic Insiders’ Technical Summits too.

It’s a small world and getting smaller.

Microsoft just got another great guy. Reminds me again of Don Box, Chris Sells, and so many others who are working over in building 42. Can’t wait to hear more about what they are all working on. I’m already subscribed to Hanselman’s blog, so I’m sure that’ll be a good place for info about what that wild crew is working on.

About a week ago there were only about 200 of my Facebook friends who were sharing feeds on Google Reader. Today about 900 are, out of about 3,600 total. You know what changed.

This app has already helped me find some great new feeds. It’s interesting to see what you all are reading and sharing through Google Reader.

That app has gotten a lot better in the past week too, so I wonder what the numbers will be a week from now?

By the way, I’ve removed some apps from my Facebook Profile to make my profile even more useful to you.

What makes Facebook more useful than other social networks? The application platform and you have to look no further than the Google Reader Shared Items Application to see why.

UPDATE: hmmm, now I know why Microsoft was rumored to be buying Facebook. Turns out there’s already more than 17,000 employees on Facebook (that’s out of 70,000 employees).

The world’s biggest technology company. No, it’s not Microsoft. It’s still IBM.

And my first IBM interview starts with Drew Clark, co-founder of IBM Venture Capital and one of IBM’s top strategists.

We spend an hour together talking about a range of things. Not just IBM stuff either. It’s Drew Clark unedited.

I have the best job in the world. I get to have conversations with interesting people like Drew and I get paid for it.

Thank you to Seagate for sponsoring my show, which enables me to do stuff like this (congrats on reporting good financial results, too).

I’ll bet a lot of people at Microsoft watch this video…

Oh, this guy is damn smart. We talk about everything from Eclipse to Nuclear Power and a bunch of things in between.

If you haven’t been over to TechMeme (still my favorite tech news site) in the past two weeks you might have missed that I’m not the only one talking about Facebook.

Since I’m now the official “newest shiny object reporter” I was asking myself “what’s the next shiny object that will get me to switch my attention away from Facebook?”

Could it come from LinkedIn? Nah, they aren’t even playing the same game anymore. Their management team doesn’t understand developers, doesn’t have the cool culture or cool app platform that Facebook has, and it’s doubtful they’ll regain the high ground in the identity space. Plaxo? Nah, not a cool brand name and their shot is to sit down with Mark Zuckerberg and become the “Switzerland” for your Facebook data. Actually that’d be pretty brilliant for both Facebook and Plaxo to do, the new Plaxo really is a nice way to get your contact data from one app (Outlook) to the next (I’d like to move my contacts into Facebook and back out to Outlook again). Don’t ignore Plaxo, though, lots of people have been praising it lately for its moves into OpenID.

Is it Microsoft? Doubtful. Most of us still don’t really like the idea of Bill Gates storing all of our contact data and, anyway, even the coolest thing at Microsoft (Xbox) is having quality troubles, so not likely. Could Ray Ozzie pull a rabbit out of his hat? Maybe, but doubtful. There’s too much inertia at Microsoft that would keep them from building the kind of platform that would get me to shut up about Facebook.

Yahoo? Maybe, especially if Jerry stays focused on it. But they already have 250 million users on their email. That’s going to prove just as difficult a thing to deal with for Yahoo as it is for Microsoft. In other words, they’ll probably do something to make their users happy, but not disruptive enough to get me to shut up about Facebook.

So, what in the industry are we all forgetting about? Who has a platform that, if reengineered could all of a sudden pop up and make us all shut up about Facebook?

If you live in Brazil you know what it is. The thing I’m thinking about has a monopoly share of the social networking market in Brazil.

“Scoble, stop teasing me, what is it?”

Orkut.

Now, hear me out. I know Orkut is ugly. It doesn’t look like a Facebook killer. I agree. I signed in again this week just to see if anything is happening there. It’s not yet. But all the basics are there.

So, what kind of wine was I drinking to come up with this long rant? Some good Washington stuff (Reininger). But don’t hold that against me. Heheh.

Anyway, why could Orkut come back and get us all to shut up about Facebook? Do you remember who owns Orkut? Yeah, those evil kids over at Google.

Now, why is that important? Well, for one, most of the early adopters I know are on Gmail. I’m on it too, even though I keep my crusty old Hotmail account. Google has the best mobile app on my mobile phone too. Maps, if you’re on the iPhone, but if you’re on Nokia the Mobile Google app suite is really great. Lots of you, I know, are on iGoogle, which looks a little bit like Facebook’s profile page. Lots of you are using other things from Google. Picasa, for instance. Or customized Google searches. Or Google Reader. All of which would really benefit from having a Google Identity System.

So, could Google redesign Orkut, make it nice looking and functional (one of Facebook’s greatest attributes) which would appeal to people like me who are looking for the next shiny thing to use functional identity system and application delivery platform that gets everyone excited.

I don’t see anyone else who could get us all to shut up about Facebook. Do you?

Mark Colombo, VP of electronic channels and strategic marketing at FedEx, just gave a speech at the Internet Strategy Forum in Portland, Oregon. He took quite a bit of heated questioning from the audience because he came out strongly as being anti-blog and anti-participation in online communities. Lots of people came up to me after Mark was done and asked what I thought, because he basically was saying that FedEx has chosen to not participate in online communities, rather relying on their brand to speak for the company.

One guy in the audience told Mark that he could get better Google results if they would turn on a blog. Mark disagreed. Maybe the audience guy had a point. When I do a search for shipping on Google I see that UPS is far higher on the list than FedEx is.

But, I don’t get defensive anymore when execs tell audiences they don’t want their companies to blog. Huh?

I see it as an advertising opportunity. At some point FedEx will do something that they want us all to know about. Now, other, more enlightened companies might just call up 40 bloggers and write something on their exec’s Facebook page, which would help spread the news. In my own keynote I told how I told 15 people a year ago that I was leaving Microsoft and that turned into 50 million media impressions (according to Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft’s PR firm). But there’s lots of companies like FedEx. Apple and Target are two others that I can think of. They’ll just buy lots of advertising and have to hire expensive PR firms to get the word out.

Heck, if every company participated in online conversations there’d be no business opportunities for content guys like me.

I’m having PodTech’s sales team give Mark a call.

UPDATE: Mark does monitor online communities, even though he mostly chooses not to have FedEx participate. He told us there’s a Flickr group where photographers pay attention to the “hidden” arrow in the FedEx logo.

OK, I keep seeing notes from people who are tired of my iPhone and Facebook yammering.

So, it’s time to put up or shut up.

What is more important happening right now? I’m looking at TechMeme and other feeds. I just met with a ton of VCs, execs, journalists like Wired’s Fred Vogelstein, etc (that’s him in the photo on this post) and there’s nothing that excites/generates conversation like Facebook and iPhone. Nothing.

If you got something that is exciting you more, I’d sure like to hear about it.

Oh, don’t take Fred’s picture as an anti-Facebook statement. He’s working on an article for Wired about Facebook.

Kara Swisher, tech columnist for the Wall Street Journal, told me at dinner (and I see she told everyone on her blog) that today she met with Facebook’s “money guy” and that she came away impressed.

Translation: Expect to hear a lot more Facebook news. Unless you got something more interesting for us all to pay attention to. Microsoft? Google? Yahoo? Helllllllloooooooo.

UPDATE: Dave McClure has a good post about all that’s happening in Facebook land.

I have a personal policy of not investing in companies in the tech industry (I own some Microsoft stock, but that’s just cause I’m too lazy to sell it) but if I did I’d be buying some Yahoo tonight.

I met several employees, including Jeff Weiner, executive vice president, and they were more upbeat about the company’s prospects than I’ve seen from Yahooians in years.

Now, you might say that’s their job, but I’ve been around the block a few times and I think it’s all due to one thing: Jerry Yang is back.

In fact, a few of them whispered that big things are getting done and that it’s nice to have a founder who’s a CEO again.

Let me translate that to what they wouldn’t say: the place was run by consensus before and now has a guy who can get s**t done back in charge.

It might not translate into anything that Wall Street will like this quarter or next, but I like the new attitude. Will it translate into products and services we all like? Or an advertising platform that makes tons of money and has advertisers happy?

That we’ll keep a watch on for.

And, yes, I know they didn’t report very spectacular earnings today. But we expected that, didn’t we? After all, a CEO doesn’t leave if the trains are all running on time.

Larry Dignan, over on ZDNet, has a report about how Jerry Yang is promising a strategic plan in the next 100 days.

First of all, think I’m the only one going gung-ho about Facebook? You’re nuts.

ReadWriteWeb is doing a week of nothing but Facebook.

I added a few more apps to my Facebook profile in the past day. My favorite application continues to be that Google Reader Shared Items one. It demonstrates the best value add that’s out there. It does something that could only be done on Facebook and with Facebook’s platform. Plus he’s been adding a new feature every day or so. Today he added groups to that app and it already is beating TechMeme on speed. I knew that when you study people’s reading behaviors that a new Digg or a new TechMeme is not only possible, but will bring something new to the table.

Anyway, back to my thesis. One of the things I found on the Google Reader facebook application was this post by Fred Wilson, A VC in NYC. In that post he tells why he believes Facebook won’t sell to anyone and if it did it’d get screwed up.

Now I used to advocate for all sorts of companies selling to Microsoft. Why? Well, for one, I thought it was smart for Microsoft to do. It would keep Microsoft part of the new Internet conversation and would bring some badly-needed fresh stream of ideas to its search team.

Now that I’m a Facebook nut case I am starting to care about what happens to Facebook and where it goes long term. I keep hearing that Microsoft is going to buy Facebook. That thought is starting to bum me out. Why? Microsoft doesn’t deserve Facebook.

Why do I say that? Well, Microsoft has remained on the sidelines in the new social services space for far too long. They haven’t bought best-of-breed anything in social software. Not in blogging. Not in photosharing. Not in bookmarking. Not in wiki’ing. Not in live search. Nothing. Not one best-of-breed company purchased.

So, they have no track record that would demonstrate that someone at Microsoft in leadership there “gets it.”

I’m sure they have lots of money to start throwing around, if they wanted to. It’s pretty obvious to me and most of the smart people in the tech industry that Facebook has value. You can argue about whether it’s $2 billion or $10 billion, but it clearly has value that lots of companies would love to have inhouse.

I personally hope it goes somewhere that the leadership will CARE about owning it, feeding it, and taking care of it. To me that means going someplace that has bought other social services. My top choice? Yahoo. Then Google. Yahoo has made a few mistakes with Flickr and its other services, for instance, but they are minor ones. For the most part they haven’t messed with those services after they bought them.

Microsoft has NO track record of buying best of breed social services on the Web and leaving them alone to mature.

The problem is that Microsoft has the money. They can outbid anyone. But I don’t think they deserve Facebook.

I vote for IPO since Yahoo isn’t able to put enough money on the table to close the deal. Readers over on Fred’s blog post say that Facebook should stay private.

What would you do if you ran Facebook?

A friend of mine who is famous on the Internet, er, Chris Pirillo, just asked me to support Ron Paul. He’s not the only one. I’ve been hearing a lot of hype about Ron Paul. So, I went to Ron Paul’s Web site and looked at his issues stances to see if I could get why Ron is getting so much hype from some bloggers and see if Ron is really someone who deserves my support (so far I’ve been a bit partial to John Edwards cause I’ve heard him speak several times and think he’s the best of the field so far — at Microsoft I met Hillary Clinton too and she’s really smart too).

I don’t get Ron Paul’s hype. His issues page is devoid of substance on issues that really effect most of us. He focuses on the divisive issues of immigration and abortion (great “wedge” issues) but doesn’t say a single word about the issues that are already driving the presidential campaign: our war strategy, our energy/global warming strategy, our health care strategy, etc. Not a single word is on his issues page about those issues.

He has Pirillo all excited because he comes out tough on fiscal policy. The problem is this policy will NEVER get enacted due to political realities in this country. I remember back when I was a conservative Christian that I bought into this kind of belief system (lots of people believe that you should run a more libertarian-focused fiscal policy and Ron Paul lays that out very well). It’s a nice theory, but getting it enacted is really tough (impossible) and right now our country is in a total fiscal mess because of the war spending that we’ve done (which makes cutting back spending even more impossible than usual). Reduce taxes in the next eight years? If you believe that’s possible you’re smoking some good dope — yet politicans like Ron Paul will tell you that’s what we should do because they know at least 5% of us will bite on that (and usually more, I saw Ronald Reagan use that to great effect). That’d be like Maryam telling me “hey, we should reduce the amount of money we send in for our mortgage every month.” Not gonna happen but we keep believing that’s possible in politics over, and over, and over. And we get idiots as leaders as a result.

Let’s compare Ron Paul to Hillary Clinton’s page (she’s largely seen as the front runner on the Democratic side). Her issues page is more detailed and speaks directly to our #1 issue: ending the war. Ron Paul doesn’t say anything about what he’d specifically do if he were President on this issue on his page (he might have said something somewhere else, but I’m looking at his issues page, which is where he SHOULD say what he’s going to do as President). Yet he talks about abortion which really doesn’t affect most of us the way this damn war does or the way that our energy policy does (I’ve never had an abortion, but my gas prices keep going up).

Barack Obama takes that issue on head on too as does John Edwards. In fact, all three Democratic candidates are doing a MUCH better job on their Web sites and on social media sites than Ron Paul is.

So why, again, is Ron Paul getting support from bloggers? I don’t get it. This guy doesn’t even deserve to be hyped up if he isn’t going to take a stance on the tough issues of the day. Immigration and abortion and fiscal conservatism are NOT the big issues facing us.

What about his stance on Global Warming? He doesn’t have a single word about it on his issue page. What about rebuilding Louisiana? Not a single word. Fixing the health care system? Not a single word. I believe all three of the Democratic candidates believe we’ll need to nationalize health care. That’ll cost money. Yet Ron Paul wants to pull more money out of government and “give back to the people.” I’ve heard this line before. It doesn’t work.

But, then, this is the world that brought us Paris Hilton and George Bush, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when bloggers hype up someone who isn’t willing to talk about the REAL issues of the day.

Count me out.

I’ve noticed a ton of Silverlight information coming through Ryan Stewart’s Google Reader link blog. He just gave us the stats on how much.

That’s really smart because Ryan is proving that he’s being an authority on the marketplace and not just a corporate shill for Adobe. Smart blogging because it inserts Ryan into the conversation. Why? Because is it more fun to have a conversation with someone who only presents one side of the story or someone who knows all sides of the story and can explain the pros and cons.

When I was on the Adobe bus earlier this week I experienced that first hand. I got a lot less “pro Adobe” talk than I expected to hear on the bus. Both Ryan and Adobe execs actually spent quite a bit of time praising Silverlight to me and telling me what they thought Microsoft did right.

Think that doesn’t work well with developers? Go back and listen to the Jay Smooth video I just posted. Take “churches” out and replace that with “tech companies.” Take “rap music” out and replace that with “developer tools.” Finally, take “kids” out and replace that with “developers.”

The same conversation techniques that Jay Smooth learned on the streets and in the music business works with developers. By not being afraid of Microsoft Adobe has demonstrated a lot more confidence than I’ve seen it exhibit previously. Kudos.

Turn it around now: is there anyone who’s expert on the pros of Adobe’s Flash/Flex/Apollo at Microsoft? Anyone we can go to to have a conversation with?

Who is Microsoft’s Ryan Stewart? Why don’t they have one? Heck, why doesn’t every company have one?