Disruption.

That’s what just happened.

Google and MySpace just dropped a major bomb on Facebook: they are joining forces to build a new social networking application platform that overnight will be considered the standard.

Chris, CEO of MySpace, about why open approach.

Joe from Flixter denotes why this is SO HUGE: his app will run anywhere that the OpenSocial platform is running. Plaxo. Ning. NewsGator. MySpace. No rewriting of apps.

One thing. Those apps now will run everywhere BUT Facebook.

I spent a lot of time recently catching up on NewsGator. If you’re interested in the RSS world and what’s going on you should check out these two videos. In them they explain how Newsgator is making moves into the Enterprise. You can see how the approach here differs from Bloglines, who was on my show yesterday.

There are two videos.

1. A demo of the new Enterprise-focused synchronization system. Five minutes.
2. A discussion of NewsGator’s moves into the Enterprise. 21 minutes.

I included the demo on this post here, but in the interview you’ll hear RSS reading trends inside corporations. NewsGator’s stance here is unique and hearing from them about how companies are using RSS is interesting. Jeremiah Owyang, social media analyst at Forrester should check this out. We talk at length about what NewsGator’s new integration with Microsoft’s Sharepoint means and how it can be used.

NewsGator includes a variety of feed readers including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and the various NewsGator clients. They’ve really built a system that goes way beyond what any other feed reading system does.

I love the new Mahalo Daily done by Veronica Belmont. Well, I like the trailer, at least. Oh, and yes, my show is long, boring, and I’m fat and nerdy compared to Veronica.

But at least I’ll have Newsgator on my show at midnight. Great consolation prize. :-)

Even better, my show got on the SXSW blog. How cool is THAT!?! Why? We give away Austin’s BBQ secrets. Now THAT should have been on Mahalo!

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).

This is the big news I talked about the other day. Microsoft is partnering with Atlassian and Newsgator. Richard MacManus has the details.

Funny story: Atlassian is an enterprise wiki used all over the place. It’s built on Java.

Atlassian’s role in this? They are building a Sharepoint connector. Why do that? After all, Sharepoint has its own wiki service?

Cause Atlassian’s is better and Microsoft’s customers were asking it to support Atlassian’s.

Anyway, I’ll have a video up with Atlassian talking about this in a few minutes.

UPDATE: Here’s Atlassian’s blog talking about the connector.

UPDATE2: Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText, reminds people that his wiki product was partnered into Sharepoint last year.

A few people have been asking me to try out Bloglines (which just got a nice update) and NewsGator (which also just got a nice update).

Both of these are very capable news readers. Both of them arguably have some things that are a lot better than Google Reader. So what do I say when people want me to switch my reader away from Google Reader?

I answer “it’s too late.”

Why?

I have about 7,200 reasons. All in my link blog. (UPDATE: earlier I said I had 300,000 readsons, but I’ve gone through about 300,000 items to find about 7,200 items).

Oh, and a few more rumored to be on the way.

Anyway, for the past year now I’ve been reading tons of feeds (I’m up to 832 now) and I’ve been putting about 600 posts a month into my link blog.

That is turning into an awesome database for doing research on. Especially now that I have search. Here’s some tips on how to use search for my link blog.

It has almost no noise, just much of the best blogging that’s been done over the past year in the technology field. But, whenever I think about moving feeds to a new reader I start thinking of that database and start thinking about the value it has to me as a way to search back on what caught my eye over the past year.

I’m locked into Google. Big time.

What keeps you locked into your feed reader?

Oh, here’s some other interesting numbers about Google Reader.

iPhone apps keep coming out of the woodwork. I still like MockDock the best as an application launcher, but wonder which app launcher you like the best if you have an iPhone?

Anyway, Newsgator came out with a iPhone feed reader. Search Engine Land has a whole bunch of apps.

Bloglines released a new version of its RSS reader for iPhones too.

Oh, and Mark Lucovsky said that so many blogs wrote about the Google Search engine for iPhone that I wrote about yesterday that he needed an iPhone version of Google’s Blog Search engine to track them all.

OK, Patrick and me have visited hundreds of Web pages on the iPhone. You should have seen us at Target today where we were buying new jeans cause Patrick ripped his waiting in line for the iPhone. “Can I visit Facebook?” “Hey, give me my iPhone back.” Generally I like reading on this device. It’s a lot better than my Nokia on most Web pages. Most people will recognize instantly why when they first get shown an iPhone: it’s the same Web that you see on your desktop Web browser, not a colorless text-focused “mobile version.”

There ARE problems with the iPhone and the Web, to be sure. For instance when you first visit a Web page it’s totally unreadable so you need to double-tap on a part of the page to get it zoomed in enough to read it. When showing people the device yesterday many people didn’t understand how to double-tap. So the iCult reeducation begins.

I notice that both Patrick and me also do the “manual zoom” too. You know, put both of your fingers onto the Web page, er iPhone’s screen, and spread them apart which will zoom in even more.

There’s a few problems, though. When you double-tap it takes you into the column you’re double-tapping on. That’s great. But then you start using your finger to drag down the column so you can read it. But it’s way too sensitive. Going up and down is fun, but it’s very easy to move off of the column so that the screen shows half of one column of text and half of another. That slows down reading time.

Also we’re now back to all the readability problems that plague the “normal Web.” Someone put dark text on a dark background? Ala MySpace pages? Even harder to read on the iPhone, particularly if you’re in bright sunlight trying to read Web pages.

Anyway, there’s one kind of page that REALLY sucks: one that forces you to see its mobile version.

Keep in mind I LOVE Google Reader on the desktop.

How about you? What about surfing the Web on the iPhone is frustrating you?

Oh, and I have verified. No Flash, no Java, no Silverlight, no Adobe PDF. UPDATE: PDFs are supported, don’t know why I thought I couldn’t look at those.

UPDATE: I was visiting http://reader.google.com which was redirecting to the Mobile Version. But George said I just needed to visit http://www.google.com/reader/view/ , which works great!

So, I take it all back. Weird.

I just switched my life over to a 17-inch MacBookPro. Don’t worry Microsoft fans. I still have Vista and Office 2007 loaded too.

I asked the 2500+ people following me on Twitter what their ideas were for me to load up and in just the first minute got dozens of suggestions. Here’s some of the first:

@kirkmarple says “Vista.” Heh, already got it loaded. With both BootCamp and Parallels.
@rpechler says “start with iUseThis.”
@davewiner says “audio recorder, brain dead simple MP3 recorder and azureus, bittorrent client”
@endacrowley says “transmit by panic software for ftping, aperture for more advanced photography, adium for chat and twitteriffic for Twitter).”
@cbee says “Transmit, Onyx, iClip, WhatSize, DeskTopple, Typeit4me.”
@CamonZ says “optimized binary of firefox for Mac.”
@MHJohnston says “Quicksilver.”
@FANLESS says “icecoffee, menumeters, copypaste & Growl, all found via http://www.macupdate.com.”
@davewiner says “graphicconverterpro - paint program.”
@matthendry says “Triple Boot via BootCamp.”
@DonMacAskill says “AdiumX, NeoOffice, Yojimbo, Spanning Sync, Missing Sync (if you use a SmartPhone or Windows Mobile), iTerm, Twitterrific.
@johncruz says “You better get twitterrific.”
@pierre says “LaunchBar is a must if you prefer keyboard to mouse.”
@derrickpeters says “‘tickr‘ for flickr.” (now replaced by Slide).
@cbee says “Amadeus and/or Audacity, Wiretap Pro, Flip4Mac, File Juicer, Pipette.”
@autodidactus says “Where do we start, Scoble? Twitterific, VLC, WireTap Pro, Transmit, Adium.”
@autodidactus says “I’ve found myself quite hooked on Monocle lately.”
@lightandshadow says “Letterbox, plugin for Mail.app.”
@joshowens says “perian.org — a nice codec pack for all those lovely bittorrent TV shows, etc.
@edwardsterkin says “seismac.”
@tuz says “Appzapper for uninstalling, Colloquy for IRC if you do that, NetNewsWire for free reading, write room for uninterrupted writing.”
@edwardsterkin says “VoiceCandy.”
@R2C13 says “I like pathfinder.”
@edwardsterkin says “ChatFX.”
@parislemon says “Definitely have to check out delicious library to organize your media: http://www.delicious-monster.com/“
@kevinrailsback says “Synergy.”
@tuz says “Disco for a light weight burner, Paparazzi for screenshotting entire Web pages to jpeg or pdf, transmission for torrents.”
@bigwebguy says “virtuedesktops (at least until leopard spaces).”
@kevinrailsback says “Desktopple (hides all the icons/files on your desktop for a clean look).”
@MHJohnston says “Growl is also a good bet for notifications- ties into a lot of apps.”
@rpechler says “my ‘must have’ Mac apps.”
@derrickpeters says “Sailing Clicker turns phone into remote for computer and a second vote for Growl.”
@jaseone says “TextMate is the best text editor out there.”

This is all in the first 10 minutes on Twitter. Lots of very passionate people hanging out on Twitter lately. Oh, and can you pick the SmugMug CEO out of the list above?

What about you? What utilities or apps or services do you think every Mac user should load?

I’ve been watching Attensa for a while. They are competing with Newsgator over RSS in the Enterprise (both companies make news aggregators that plug into Outlook, and both are working on strategies to go after big-company users because they are seeing more and more RSS users in big companies).

Either way, it’s useful to get a look at what they are doing (hopefully I’ll sit down with Newsgator soon, but here’s Attensa’s Scott Niesen talking with me and demoing Attensa.)

Hey, was that a new swooshy ScobleShow logo? Why yes it is! Damn, my new editor, Rocky Barbanica, is a hot dog! (This is his first video that he’s edited and already he’s making me look better. I like this guy!)

INTERVIEW:

DEMO: