Neowin comes through, as usual: Windows Vista RC1 Available to the Masses. Off to download. I miss the good old days when you had to download Windows 95 betas via a 28.8 kbps modem. Ahh, the youth today. So spoiled.

I bet that over on the Millenium Campus at Microsoft (which is where the Xbox was developed) they are having smiles on their faces tonight.

Why? Cause Sony announced today (thanks HD Beat) that they are slipping the launch of PS3 in Europe to March and they are limiting the number of units for US and Japan to 500,000. That sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t, not during Christmas.

Both moves virtually guarantee that Xbox will see sizeable market share gains over the next nine months. I wonder how many games will be developed with such limited numbers available?

I remember when Christopher Coulter gave me crap about Xbox 360 and said that Sony would eat its lunch. Not looking so good for Sony lately.

TechMeme has a lot more on this.

OK, OK, I tried to avoid the whole Facebook thing. After all, I’m not a college student so don’t really think it applies to me but their community is in the middle of a major revolt.

The Facebook team has shown very little astuteness about how to deal with communities, though.

Having your CEO to tell people to “calm down” (as reported on TechCrunch, actually on their own blog) ain’t the way to get people to stop throwing molotov cocktails through your front window.

When the users talk, you should listen. And listening is hard sometimes.

Other notable discussion of this issue:

Jack Schofield in the Guardian Unlimited, writes “Facebook’s giant blunder.”

Mark Canter takes Facebook’s side (but explains that Facebook should cry Uncle and listen to its users) in a post titled “Facebook gets dissed by its users for providing coolio new features.”

Kristin Maverick, who writes the BitePR blog, penned this headline: Facebook rightfully earns the name Stalkerbook with new features.

And, of course, there are more, many more, posts over on TechMeme.

Drew Meyers is reporting that in just 30 minutes tonight that more than 20,000 people joined the protest page.

This doesn’t seem to be something small or containable.

What should Facebook do?

1) Get out of text. Use video to talk with your community. Video is better than text because it is more human, more connecting, and more likely to get links. Also, you can make your case much better to the community in video than in text. But, basically, I’d recommend giving them what they want. The feedback is so overwhelming that you need to turn off the new features by default and add more granularity to the tracking behavior.

2) Build a community group with a good cross-section of your users. That you can talk with in a small room. Include both “Z list” and “A list” and a few inbetween too in this group. Make it as diverse as you can. Include people from around the world. PAY THEM to fly into meet with you. Then have them ask your development teams what they are doing on their behalf. Video that to the world live and encourage them to blog and podcast whatever they want to the world. Demonstrate that you’re humble, listening, and able to make decisions on their behalf right there and then.

3) Open up your company to real, interactive, blogging. Demonstrate you are listening. Listen. Listen. Listen. If you don’t know what I mean by that, open up Google Blog Search or Technorati. Type “Facebook” into there. Then start writing on your blog where you link to EVERYONE who has something nasty to say about you and answer their questions honestly and openly. Word on the street is that Facebook is a very conservative company internally when it comes to blogging. Now is the time to open that up and get everyone to make a human connection to your users.

4) Engage with bloggers. Directly. In their comments. I’m seeing way too many blogs without ANY comment from Facebook employees, especially the negative ones. Don’t just talk with TechCrunch and Scoble and other “A listers.” Get out to EVERYONE if you want to turn this around.

Good luck, you’re gonna need it. You’re in for a wild ride.

I’m interviewing Sun Microsystems’ CEO, Jonathan Schwartz tomorrow afternoon. Instead of coming up with my usual stupid questions I thought “why not have my readers interview him?”

By the way, isn’t his blog the best executive communication out there?

So, what would you like to ask Jonathan? Include your name and I’ll read it on my new show when it starts later in September.

Michael Gartenberg isn’t the only one wondering what’s coming next week from Apple. Patrick is going nuts watching the Apple rumor sites like crazy. New iPod? New cell phone? New laptops? New movie service?

I can see just an endless stream of dollars going out of my wallet and into Steve Jobs’ bank account. That’s what happens when my son gets excited. Heheh.

The news simply keeps getting worse in the HP case. Now California’s attorney general issued subpoenas Wednesday in an investigation of whether laws were broken when private investigators, hired by Hewlett-Packard’s board chairwoman, secretly obtained phone records of board members to see who leaked confidential information. Thanks to Therese Poletti and Michele Chandler of the San Jose Mercury News for reporting this.

Key quote:

“I have no settled view as to whether or not the chairwoman’s acts were illegal, but I do think they were colossally stupid,” Bill Lockyer told the Mercury News in an interview. “We’ll have to wait until the investigation concludes to determine whether they were felony stupid or not.”

Two companies are in trouble. One, HP. One, Ford.

But look at how Ford is handing its trouble. With video. With candor. With transparency. This is investor relations for the YouTube generation. I’ve been watching Ford’s bold moves video blog and I wanted to hate it. But, it’s turning me. And, even if it doesn’t turn the market (it probably won’t, it’s not aimed at the total market, just at the investors, employees, influentials who will need to keep the faith if a company in trouble is ever going to turn around) it is definitely getting noticed and talked about inside corporate boardrooms and here in Silicon Valley.

How did HP handle it? Well, you can go over to Google News, just like I did and see. No video. No candor. No accountability. Nothing other than an official press announcement without a press conference.

Kudos to Ford. I’m rooting for you.

Oh, and my Ford Focus hit 30,000 miles without a single problem. It’s a wonderful car. Make more like that and you’ll find your troubles going away and your brand increasing in quality.

I’m reading a bunch of blogs about HP’s board and, man, does it get worse and worse.

Check this out: testimony in front of the U.S. House of Representatives by HP’s Scott Taylor, Chief Privacy Officer. What did he tell them? “First and foremost is that privacy is actually a core value at HP. As a company, HP is 100 percent committed to excellence in consumer and employee privacy…”

Now compare that to what Patricia Dunn, chairwoman at HP apparently did. Lying. Breaking the law. And invading people’s privacy.

If Patricia Dunn is ever hired to a company I’m working for I’m instantly quitting. She should be fired. Instantly. Without cause. Without a severance check. Without ANYTHING. (She should listen to Paul Kedrosky, who calls on her to resign, and save HP and its shareholders from this trouble).

HP, do you have no shame?

Hewlett and Packard are twisting in their graves tonight. What a shame. Whatever happened to “the HP way?” It died today.

UPDATE: congrats again to Tom Perkins, the guy who walked out in disgust. The letter he sent to HP’s board is now online.

UPDATE 2: Dave Taylor, who worked at HP with both Hewlett and Packard, gives us the historical context behind why this can be traced back to Carly Fiorina’s time running HP. The Washington Post also reports that HP is saying that the “leaker” also leaked info leading up to Carly’s firing.

Weird, on Sunday Pradeep Sethi emailed me this cool video about Halfmoon Bay coffeehouses (all the stuff you see is real near our new home).

Then today the San Jose Mercury News has an article on TurnHere, the company who is doing a ton of these cool videos.

Funny enough how did I learn about this? My RSS feed? No. My email? No. Digg? No. Someone left a copy of the dead trees version on a coffee table in the office. Heheh, I guess that’s justice, huh?

Anyway, nice videos about cool places.

I might have to take back what I said about Vista. Even more people are IM’ing me saying they love RC1 of Vista.

Click on the box to get to a Vista thread on Channel 9.

A friend came over on Saturday and had a laptop full of movies. He said he had bought the DVDs and just ripped them to his hard drive so he could watch random movies while sitting in a plane, or whatnot. One of the movies was “Gandhi.” What a wonderful movie. Anyway, I hooked the laptop up to my HDTV screen and watched it there. Other than being small (Sony’s HDTV doesn’t play 1280×1024 full screen for some reason, I gotta figure out if there’s some way to force it to be full screen) it was wonderful.

I wonder how many other people are doing that, though?

What prompted my post? This article by the Associated Press that says that most people won’t watch long things online. I think that’ll change over time as more of us get laptops with better screens and as more of us get screens at home that a computer can hook up to (most Windows Vista computers will be capable of playing video to an XBox 360, which is how I will watch, say, Ze Frank, next year).

Speaking of which, is there any way to play Quicktime movies full screen?

UPDATE: here’s the long video I’m watching now. It’s Ze Frank speaking at TED. What can I say? I’m an edge case. Just don’t call me that!

This one is wild (top story on MSNBC right now, it’s an article from Newsweek).

The basics: a director at HP leaks something to the press. A chairwoman gets pissed. Starts spying on home phone records and other stuff. Alledgedly catches leaker*. Then causes backlash because of her methods. Causes other board member to resign. The leaker was asked to resign (he’s still serving, cause he refused, saying that’s the role of shareholders). And the SEC is involved cause the reason the board member’s resignation wasn’t disclosed promptly or properly.

Me? Damn. I don’t know who to pick on in this one. The leaker isn’t nice and wasn’t smart (lesson: if you’re gonna leak, don’t do it with your own cell phone — didn’t this guy know about Skype and Gmail?)

The methods to find this person are over the line, though. If I found out my employer were using that kind of method I’d be looking over my shoulder and finding another job. I don’t want to work for the KGB. Even worse? The methods used to get the phone records involved lying to the phone company (which is against the law).

How far HP has fallen since the days of Hewlett and Packard. It’s sad.

*=the guy involved claims he wasn’t the leaker, but resigned just to protest the methods being used.

No winners here in my book. What about in yours?

UPDATE: Actually, the winner is Tom Perkins, the VC who quit the board in disgust. I totally agree with TechDirt on that one.

HP, do you have any honor?

As long as you guys keep linking to me I’m happy that someone is paying you to post. Heheheh!

Speaking of which, if you wanna get paid to blog there’s a lot better way to do THAT than get paid a few bucks to post. I know of a few companies right now hiring bloggers. I don’t even have to link to them. I bet that within a few minutes someone will post a link to the sites that are listing jobs for bloggers.

For everyone else: PayPerPost is paying people to link to me and make fun of me. Damn, why didn’t I think of that?

Get the new Skype 2.6 beta and join in with the SkypeCast. We already have six people on the cast. UPDATE: the test was a success. We had about a dozen people online and the quality was great. A great way to get a group of people together and talk about something.

One problem, though, was people entering who didn’t have headsets. Sometimes we’d get some weird feedback. Easily solved by muting them, but a bit frustrating. Also the interface could be improved a bit for asking questions via text so you don’t have to disturb the main chat.

It’s amazing this is free.

One thing I wish was for a “record this session” button so that I could record what we talked about and point you at that. Sorry, no recording of this one exists. Next time I’ll get my podcasting device out and record it, but next time I’ll have something to talk about.

Hey, speaking of which, next Tuesday Apple is having a special announcement and PodTech will be there, so maybe we should all get together next week after the announcement and get together and talk about it (no, I’m not gonna give you my predictions again. I’ve been burned by Apple once already).

Do you remember Microsoft FrontPage? I do. I was a user of that back before Microsoft owned it (back when it was Vermeer FrontPage). No tool introduced in the 1990s brought about such contentious debates (most serious Web developers avoided it and held their noses with disdain, mostly cause it was famous for changing your HTML that you hand coded).

Me, I didn’t mind that it changed my HTML. I didn’t want to write HTML anyway. I thought the Web should work like Microsoft Word. Why the hell did we need to write all these little codes like <p> and <h3> and <i>?

That’s the way the Web was back in the good old days. You opened up your editor (NotePad) and typed in HTML by hand. Yes, today such a thing seems incredibly stupid (but you can still try it, in WordPress there’s a little button marked “HTML” — click it and then you too can experience what developing Web sites in 1994 was like).

Anyway, I tried all the Web editing tools and found FrontPage was the most interesting because it joined a decent editor with a server that could add cool things to your Web site and take them further than most of us could just by coding by hand.

Anyway, that all explains the past of Microsoft’s newest Web editor, Expression. Microsoft is running away from its FrontPage brand because it was so damaged by the impression that it wasn’t a “serious” Web development tool. I just saw over on Aaron Brethorst’s blog that beta 1 of that has shipped.

Expression, on the other hand, is definitely a serious tool, I got a demo of this before I left Microsoft and it’s quite impressive. One problem, though. I think that the way to publish to the Web is to use a blogging tool like Wordpress or Moveable Type, or use a content management tool like Drupal. In such a world Expression doesn’t seem to fit in very well.

But maybe I’m wrong. What do you think? Are you even going to try it? Why or why not?

UPDATE: Aaron just wrote me and said that even with tools like Wordpress and Drupal you still need an editor to design the templates and that Expression fits in well here. That’s an awesome point. I’m downloading now.

Windows Vista’s UX designer, Lili Cheng, is on PodTech with John Furrier. Lili is also the designer who worked on Wallop when she worked at Microsoft Research.

Actually, she didn’t design much of Windows Vista’s UX. I should have John fix that. She came pretty late into the product so only got small fingerprints on Vista. You’ll see most of her work in the next OS that Microsoft produces.

UX stands for “user experience.” In the old days we called that the user interface team, but its scope has grown from just the stuff you see on the screen to other things that are deeper.

Jennifer Jones, a coworker of mine, interviewed me about corporate blogging and all that. Which earned it this nice comment by Nick Reynolds: “A must-listen for anyone hoping to market their business on the web.”

Frothy!

PS: I didn’t write that headline.

Interesting, Skype comes out with a new version (2.5) with a bunch of new features and it isn’t on TechMeme. UPDATE: I’m just lame and late to the party. Oh well, I have the new stuff now, wanna try it out?

New features? Call phones more easily, send SMS messages, share contact details with your group, view and call Outlook contacts. But the biggie is better Skypecasts support that’s in the beta of 2.6.

How about trying it out tonight at 7 p.m. Pacific Time? My Skype name? RobertScoble.

No, Don Dodge, I don’t read newspapers or magazines anymore either.

Funny, with Tristan, the intern at Wikia, we had a long discussion about RSS and newspapers and such. I told him that I don’t read newspapers anymore, having replaced that almost wholly with RSS aggregator usage. Oh, and sites like Digg and TechMeme. He said he didn’t read TechMeme. I don’t start my day without it.

Yes, I live in a bubble. So, don’t bother taunting me with that.

The thing is I notice that traffic on TechMeme keeps going up. It’s on a doubling curve. How long will it double? Yes, Dare, I want a personal memetracker too.

I’m here with Tristan Harris, intern at Wikia, and Gil Penchina, CEO at Wikia.

What’s Wikia? Well, it’s a sister company to Wikipedia. Gil says they have the same parents, founder of both is Jimmy Wales. It’s basically a great place to launch a Wiki around a cause. You know, like StarWars. Or, politics. Religion. Or, even, Rocketboom, who has a wiki there.

What’s different from JotSpot? Well, they don’t charge. But they aren’t aimed at enterprises. No spreadsheet tool embedded here, like JotSpot has. No, their entire mission is to get people who care about something to open up a wiki. No hate or porn sites allowed.

Gil showed me their traffic graph and it’s headed up with a slope steeper than KT22 at Squaw Valley. Steep. All without spending more than $6 on marketing (he said they paid $5 to get Google’s Analytics package which also costs them $.05 a month and that that investment had brought them tens of thousands of visitors. Now that’s a great ROPI (Return on Pennies Invested).

Anyway, yet another cool Wiki company. For my show I’m looking for a Wiki service and this one went to the top of the list because of the philosophy behind the company that I learned about from Gil and Tristan.

How did I meet Tristan, by the way? He goes to Stanford. So do the interns who work at PodTech — they are part of the Mayfield Scholars program which, I’m learning, is an important network in Silicon Valley. Treat your interns well!!! They tend to tell the truth about how good your company is because they don’t have a long-term attachment. Tristan was praising Wikia to me, so I guess they are doing all right!

Update: one good use of Wikia is the World Wikia Wiki, which is a travel wiki. You can find hotels with WiFi and a lot more there.