When I first met Hadi Partovi and his team he was on the floor of his Seattle startup putting together an air conditioner. We joked about what it takes to make a successful startup (I told him I was thinking of leaving Microsoft) and that being the head of a startup means getting your hands dirty doing weird jobs like setting up airconditioners so your team can keep working. That was just about a year ago. I already knew that Hadi was brilliant. Why? The folks who worked for him at Microsoft (Steve Rider and Sanaz Ahari) told me so. He was the one who put together the skunkworks start.com team which later became live.com. Unfortunately Microsoft couldn’t keep Hadi happy, so he left and started iLike with his brother, Ali. A bunch of smart engineers from Microsoft and other places came along too (Rider left to join the team there).

In that first meeting, and a video interview with Ali since then I don’t remember them ever talking about Facebook. I don’t know if it wasn’t on their radar screen, or what, but I don’t think that a year ago they ever expected that Facebook would turn into the platform it has and that they would be the top player on top of that platform. I’d love to know the story of how they decided to change their business into a Facebook-focused one.

It doesn’t really matter why or how, though, because about a year later, they are the hottest startup around and are signing up 300,000 new people a day. That’s just absolutely incredible. I don’t know of a faster growing startup in terms of signing people up.

If you read my link blog you’ve already seen these blogs and a few others talking about Facebook’s success, but definitely don’t miss the one by Marc Andreessen where he digs into the pros and cons of the Facebook platform.

People don’t believe me when I say Microsoft’s font rendering technology is better than Apple’s. At least they didn’t until now:

Jeff Atwood, of Coding Horror, shows the difference between IE and Safari running on Windows. Guess what, those fonts are the same on Macs too. I don’t like reading on the Mac as much as I like reading on Windows because of this.

Safari is fast, though, and has a UI that fits in with iTunes.

Oh, I’m in the Westin pool. Reading feeds in the pool is SSSOOO tough! Heheh.

Of course the blogosphere and professional journalist are going nuts about the new Safari over on TechMeme. Since they are going nuts about the pros and cons I’ll just sit back and enjoy sitting in the pool and let the pros argue it out.

The blogosphere is going full tilt on a privacy report that says that Google is worst in its approach to privacy.

Danny Sullivan has the best response I see. I was hoping this report was more factual than it looks cause we need to have a real conversation about privacy. If you read the privacy report you should read Danny’s blow-by-blow response to it.

That said, Google’s PR is really stinky. Google isn’t paying attention to what normal people think of it anymore and it’s getting a bad reputation because of that. I heard it slammed over and over again for street-level views on Google Maps and no one from Google responded in most of the mainstream talk shows I heard talking about it. They should have a full-court “feel good” initiative where they have normal everyday citizens come in and meet the engineers, and look at the privacy issues.

Google’s PR is focused on the wrong things and isn’t warm and fuzzy and with big companies who are taking over our online data they need to have a warm and fuzzy feel.

Who runs Google PR? Why isn’t he or she blogging? Frank Shaw, the guy who runs PR for much of Microsoft at Waggener Edstrom is blogging and shows up to lots of events so we know who to call, or who to link to and wait for an answer. The fact that I don’t even know who to link to on this post demonstrates that Google PR is being out hustled by its competitors. This report demonstrates that in a big way.

Bad PR is a predictor of government action. Everyday Americans are getting very nervous about Google. They aren’t getting good messages from Google. No transparency. Tons of secrecy. No warm and fuzzy meetings with Google about privacy. No one responding to talk radio, which, if it didn’t have Paris Hilton to pull talk show hosts off of the Google story was getting seriously slammed.

First thing that Google should do? Put up a damn YouTube video! Search “Google Privacy Policy” on YouTube and do you find anyone from Google talking about its privacy policy? Why not? (Not that Microsoft is any better, but Google should be out front and leading here).

UPDATE: I actually did find a video from Google’s Rajen Sheth talking about its privacy policy (he’s responsible for the development and management of enterprise products at Google).

Here’s Microsoft’s privacy center and Google’s privacy center pages (first results for “Microsoft Privacy Policy” and “Google Privacy Policy” on Google).

UPDATE 2: Google’s own blog search engine demonstrates that Google is losing the PR war on this one. Danny Sullivan’s voice is nearly alone out there in defending Google.

UPDATE 3: to see just how badly Google is doing on blogs tonight, let’s look at the latest posts from just the past hour’s results:

• Google rated bottom for privacy.
• Shelley Powers: “What’s particularly scary, and I think the report mentions this, is that Google can’t understand why we’re concerned.”
• BungaTech: “So, what does the company that promises to “never be evil” have to say for themselves? Not a whole lot: Nicole Wong, Google’s general counsel explains that the company stands behind its users and is sticking to their aggressive privacy strategy.”
• Tainted Kernel: In terms of privacy … Google fails.
• InfoWorld: “Google executives were not immediately available to comment on the report’s findings.”
• Tess McBride: “Is somebody watching me? It’s probably Google… .”
  
• Scott Cleland: “Why Privacy is a competitive issue in FTC’s Google-DoubleClick merger review.”
  

What do you think?

Oh, and how should corporations fight the perceptions that come out in text? Go into video IMMEDIATELY! Get conversational. Take open public questions and answer them in chat or in Twitter or in Facebook or in blog comments or in YouTube comments (best yet, all the above). Appoint a team to answer questions 24 hours a day until the story dies down (and even then make sure you watch blog search engines to see if they start getting talked about again). Make sure every blogger knows where you’re hanging out and where to link for the best information.

Can you tell I’m hanging out with a bunch of PR professionals right now?

Google Reader tells me today: From your 684 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 32,879 items, and shared 1,693 items.

Out of those, here’s my top 35 feeds that I’ve put on my link blog, so these are my real favorite blogs out of the 684 technology industry blogs I’m currently reading.

1. Mashable! (items shared: 93)
2. Planet Intertwingly. (61)
3. TechCrunch . (60)
4. MSDN Blogs (which has more than 3,000 Microsoft employees blogging on it). (41)
5. GigaOM Network. (46)
6. Read/WriteWeb. (25)
7. Media 2.0 Workgroup. (24)
8. Wired’s Epicenter. (22)
9. Lifehacker. (22)
10. AppScout. (19)
11. Vecosys. (19)
12. MAKE Magazine blog. (17)
13. VentureBeat. (17)
14. 901am. (15)
15. Adobe Blogs (lots of Adobe bloggers). (15)
16. Engadget. (15)
17. Gizmodo. (15)
18. NewTeeVee. (15)
    
19. PaidContent. (15)
20. StartupSquad. (15)
21. Beet.TV. (13)
22. O’Reilly Radar. (12)
23. Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang — he works with me. (12)
24. Boing Boing. (11)
25. CrunchGear. (11)
26. Digg/Technology. (11)
27. dzone.com. — links for developers. (11)
28. Google Blogoscoped. (11)
29. Thomas Hawk, photographer. (11)
30. Andy Beal’s Search and Internet Marketing. (10)
31. Loren Feldman’s 1938 Media — funny videos. (9)
32. Dare Obasanjo, dev at Microsoft. (9)
33. Ryan Stewart’s Rich Internet App Blog. (9)
34. Geeksugar. (9)
35. Google Maps Mania. (9)

Congrats to everyone on this list, you are the top of the top.

What are your favorite tech blogs?
Any that aren’t on my list? I’ll put up the list every few months or so.

Microsoft, why couldn’t YOU do what Ask just shipped tonight?

A ton of bloggers are talking about the new Ask. I linked to the best of those posts over on my link blog. I gotta get some sleep. More on this tomorrow.

If you do a search on a blogger’s name, you’ll see his/her current blog at top. Really neat. It’s slower than Google, though. Photos show up on searches too. This competition is nice to see cause it’ll push Google to go further with its search too.

What do you think?

Mashable reviewed Zooomr vs. Flickr today. Good review and covers the differences. Mashable wrote: “Zooomr is an impressive effort for a two-man team.” One thing the review didn’t cover is internationalization. Zooomr is ahead of Flickr there, many of its fans are outside the US. We’re so English-centric here in the blogosphere sometimes.

But, that all said, Zooomr has some significant challenges ahead of it. And that’s being kind to “significant.”

Disclaimer: Kristopher and Thomas are friends of mine. I don’t have any financial interest in Zooomr.

Why do we still care about Zooomr?

After all, any other Web 2.0 business that had been down for two weeks would just have been written off. One reason we still care is because Zooomr did pretty well over their two-weeks of hell (they were down for two weeks) by staying visible thanks to live video streaming on UStream.tv.

I can only speak for myself, but I love David vs. Goliath stories. And today Flickr is the one with all the cool branding and many of, if not most of, the coolest photographers. If you get some bloggers together they rarely talk about any other photo sharing site. Even Yahoo’s other photo service, that had more photos, was shuttered in preference to Flickr. It is the Goliath to Zooomr’s David. It +is+ amazing that a single developer got this far.

It’s romantic to know that Zooomr is really only one 19-year-old developer going against, um, Yahoo and CNET and MySpace.

There’s one problem with all of this: Zooomr is getting too good FEATURES WISE. It is starting to attract an audience and that audience means that Zooomr needs to move from an experiment phase to a real professionally-run business. Or, it needs to admit to itself that it can’t be run as a professional business and Kristopher needs to shut it down gracefully and go be gainfully employed elsewhere (he’s VERY employable at this point).

Even today, after being down for two weeks, it’s getting written up on many of the best blogs and is getting some decent reviews. Go back and read Mashable. Zooomr actually won in a few categories and is opening up a new business model: selling photographs for sub-$100 prices.

Flickr is still my favorite photosharing site and Zooomr is still a LONG ways away from gaining trust, not to mention gaining the necessary features to really be considered a top-tier service in the photo sharing game.

I can instantly think of thousands of pictures taken every weekend that’ll be attractive to a Zooomr business plan: wedding photography. When Maryam and I got married the photographer wanted to charge $20 for prints. Sounds like an interesting idea to take to the Web. There’s lots of photographers who are getting Digital SLRs (hundreds of thousands are sold every year worldwide) and many of these photographers are getting good enough to sell their photography online. Especially if you get lucky and get a news event or a celebrity in your lens.

But here’s the rub: Zooomr doesn’t yet have a real datacenter. If it’s really going to grow dramatically they are going to need to have someone running the datacenter and they are going to need big bucks to give a serious effort in the datacenter.

This is why Flickr sold out to Yahoo in the first place: keeping these services running professionally needs to be done by someone with a wee bit more experience than a 19-year-old. Brilliant as he may be. Kristopher himself realizes that, especially given that Zooomr’s datacenter is now inside Zoho’s datacenter (they have millions of dollars of equipment) which is inside a bigger datacenter that’s dominated by racks of Google’s computers (Zooomr’s few servers are surrounded on all four sides by stacks of Google racks).

Zoho just bought a new system made by Rackable that cost around $400,000 in order to compete (stay always up, and always give fast response times). Data center equipment is NOT cheap.

And we’re not even talking about the salaries (Kristopher and Thomas need to pay rent, buy food, etc.) and all the other costs of running a business.

So, why can Guy Kawasaki build a Web 2.0 site with just $12,000 and Zooomr needs a lot more? Well, a few reasons.

1) Zooomr has real value, real community, real users and a real business plan (selling photos could bring in some decent revenues, even though my VC friends are pretty darn skeptical and point to Getty and Corbis as examples of photo selling sites that don’t make much profit).
2) Truemors only has to deal with tiny text files. Get 100,000 users on that and you can run off of a tiny server. Maybe even a co-hosted server (my blog, for instance, is hosted along with more than a million other bloggers). Zooomr’s customers, on the other hand, regularly upload files that are more than 10MB PER IMAGE!! Huge in comparison.
3) Zooomr has tons of competition to compare it to. If it isn’t as fast, or faster, than Photobucket, Flickr, Smugmug, etc. you all will know it and will avoid the service. Heck, me too! Being fast and reliable requires a professionally-run datacenter (and excellence in other parts of the business too).

So, what now? Well, it’s been a nice experiment so far. They have quite a bit of love from the community. Which is why they got some free servers and help from a variety of companies (thank you Zoho!). But, that love isn’t going to extend to the next level necessarily (although it sure would be smart for a big company to use them as a testbed and show what the future of datacenters might look like — imagine if Sun Microsystems or Dell demonstrated its newest computers and showed how much more efficient a startup would be if it chose to use its computers rather than someone else. But that’s really not something I’d bet on happening, I think it’s time for Kris and Thomas to go to Sand Hill Road and explain how they are going to make a real business out of Zooomr).

My advice? You have something like 56 days of free loan on that Sun Microsystems equipment. Make that your deadline. Keep Zooomr up, but spend your days working on a business plan (there should be lots of people who can help out there) and go to Sand Hill Road and get some funding.

One other thought I had: I wish I had the faith in doing the impossible like Kristopher has. He was really down in a deep hole the past two weeks — friends of mine told me that lesser people would have cracked and given up. I saw him off camera and he was really in a tough spot. I told him about when I was in a deep hole in my life and I just tried to make each day a little better than the last. Jeff Sandquist and Lenn Pryor used to tell us on Channel 9 “inch-by-inch.” He really has impressed me by getting the service back up. He could have cried “Uncle” and gone to work for a big company and collected a paycheck like the rest of us but he stuck it out and got those servers back online. The lessons he learned the past two weeks will prove very valuable to him later in life. I hope I live long enough to see him get the success I think is ahead of him.

That brings me to this speech, which is how I’ll end this up. It’s one that Jeff (my boss at Microsoft) used to play for us when it looked like we weren’t going to get our way, or things weren’t getting done. Dave Winer has sent this to me a few times too over the past eight years. Kristopher and Thomas: this is your video. Go for it! We’re cheering. Just remember, 56 days and counting…

I haven’t seen many comparisons yet of the new Mashup Editors so Jay Neely’s stuck out when he told me about it today. He compares Yahoo Pipes to Microsoft’s PopFly and also does an early analysis of Google’s Mashup Editor.

How about you? Have you tried any of the new RSS Mashup Editors? What do you think of them?

On Thursday I was talking with Mark Lucovsky at Google and he was explaining why Google’s Mashup Editor doesn’t yet have the flashy UI that PopFly has. He reminded me of my experience with FrontPage and how that frustrated me everytime I hit a limitation of its editor. I’d drop into HTML, try to change things, and then the code would change or I’d be frustrated because it wouldn’t let me do what I wanted. Lucovsky says that’s why the Google Mashup Editor team hasn’t done a flashy UI yet. It’s the philosophy of the Google teams: to make sure you’ll always be able to do what you want to do and then put the purty UI onto it later to make it easier to use.

Sounds interesting, but wonder what the real devs who are playing with these tools are thinking? Of course I can already hear what Lucovsky is thinking: what are the new devs who are 14 to 20 thinking?

Man, the story about the cat in the window on Google’s new Street Level photography is getting TONS of mainstream press play. Even Ronn Owens on KGO Radio (usually known as a middle-of-the-road calming voice) was furious about the new feature yesterday.

I always thought that Google would get bad PR over some sort of privacy issue, but this? This is the WRONG issue for privacy folks to be worried about. Truth is this isn’t nearly as bad as some of the stuff that advertisers are doing or are thinking of doing with their databases. Let’s go down the supermarket aisle. What does buying a Coke say about you? Not much, right? Well, what if you buy tampons? Doesn’t the marketing world know a little more about you now? How about when you buy AC/DC off of iTunes? Or when you go into 7/11 and buy some condoms? What about when you go to Amazon and buy a book about how to create a great resume? How about when you watch Oprah on TV?

And on and on. What these companies will do with those databases (and the inferences they’ll make about who I am) worries me a lot more than whether you can see the front of my house and/or whether or not I have a cat in the window. Already our anti-terrorist folks are using such databases to figure out who might be a threat to society. Just go into a store and buy three tons of fertilizer and rent a truck and see what happens to you.

But, back to the issue. Truth is Amazon did street side photography more than a year ago (they’ve since taken down A9 maps). Then Microsoft did it on its Virtual Earth site. Heck, Microsoft didn’t just do street side in exactly the same way that Google is doing now, but flew a plane over major cities. Here’s a video I did with Microsoft’s street side mapping team. What if the drug agency was using that photography to find your rooftop marijuana plants? Or, if you were sunbathing naked?

Why no uproar about those things?

Ahh, FOG. Fear Of Google.

Thanks for protecting my privacy. Now, what about the patterning software that marketers are working on to figure out what kind of person I am based on my purchases?

I know why the media (including many bloggers) isn’t worried about THAT. It’s too hard to explain in two minutes. Instead they focus on a cat in a Window. Got it.

At least now Microsofties can’t complain that they are being held to a higher standard than Google is.

Oh, and does anyone find any irony in the fact that Mary Kalin-Casey dislikes Google taking a picture of her cat from the street but invited a New York Times photographer into her house to take even more pictures? Can anyone spell hypocrite?

It’s funny who you run into at Google Developer Day. Today I met Anand Iyer. He’s a Microsoft evangelist in Silicon Valley and he’s been empowered to help startups out, like Zooomr, if they have troubles. I love that he put his phone number on his blog and said to call anytime.

Thomas Hawk and Kristopher Tate are in the Zoho datacenter. You can watch them here. Sun Microsystems also is sending over a loaner server with 42 terabytes of storage. All to help Zooomr get back up and running. Thomas Hawk left a long comment with an update on Zooomr’s situation. Don’t know who Zoho is? I interviewed them a couple weeks ago and their evangelist, Raju, is the one who’s helping Zooomr out.

Sometimes Silicon Valley bums me out with all the greed and talk about getting great valuations and all that. It’s nice to see companies help get customer data back up and live.