Yesterday I visited Hi5 and when I was there Paul Lindner, the architect, handed me a Webvan pen. He’s holding the pen in this video. We talked at length about what’s going on in social networking (they are signing up 100,000 new members a DAY, which is about half the growth rate of Facebook but still very phenomenal). Anyway, he handed me the pen to remind me to always look beyond the hype. Webvan, if you don’t remember, was a famous online grocery service that blew through millions of dollars back in the heady days of the late 1990s.

It’s a pen I’ll always treasure and it’s sitting here reminding me to look deeper at the companies I report on. My more in depth interview with Hi5’s CTO will be up next week.

Sorry I’ve been a bit absent this week. I overbooked myself. I’m speaking at Streaming Media West in a couple of hours. Plus I’ve been getting a steady stream of videos up on ScobleShow (check out TapTu there, a new mobile search engine that, in our little test, blew away Google).

And, of course, I’m still digging through lots of feeds for my link blog. I see that the Google Reader team added some new features which I’ll try out later.

Yuri Ammosov, who lives in Moscow, Russia, and works in the Russian Ministry of Economics demonstrates why Russians aren’t cool.

1. He isn’t using an iPhone.
2. He isn’t using Facebook.
3. He’s reading blogs.
4. He’s running Russian RSS-reading software.
5. He reads Engadget, B5 Media, and TechCrunch.
6. He’s running Windows Mobile.

So yesterday. So uncool.

Just kidding.

Seriously, I spent a while with Yuri today and you should watch out for him and his band of Russian entrepreneurs. They are doing very cool things and I was jealous of the feed reader and the new interface he showed me on his Windows Mobile smart phone.

Now do you understand why Google announced Open Social and Android? I sure do.

There’s a lot of Russians who are going to buy cell phones and join a social network in the next 18 months. What will THEY be running? Will they think YOU are uncool for what YOU are running?

Longer interview coming soon on ScobleShow.com.

Here’s a 20-minute video where Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester Research’s new social media senior analyst, discusses with me Facebook and MySpace’s new ad platforms. He was briefed by both companies and has the best analysis out there right now.

Oh, and he invents a new word “fansumer.” Listen to the video and tell us whether you’re a fansumer of a brand. Oh, and my brother’s bar is on MySpace. We’ll play around with MySpace’s new hyper-targetted ads and see if they work.

Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester’s new social media analyst, has the best analysis I’ve seen of what Facebook and MySpace’s new ad platforms mean. TechMeme has the live blogging news from Facebook’s announcement.

I’m sitting with Jeremiah right now and we’ll be doing a video about this topic shortly on Kyte.tv.

I just spent an hour decompressing with Marc Canter about all the Open Social and Facebook stuff along with a TON of coverage of how the Social Media space is shaking out (I call it the Social Media Starfish).

He runs Broadband Mechanics, which makes social networks for a variety of businesses around the world including the Times of India and the Sacramento Kings basketball team. He doesn’t call them social networks, by the way, preferring to call them “DLAs” or “Digital Lifestyle Aggregators.”

Anyway, everytime I have a chat with him I learn a ton. Here’s an hour’s worth of Marc, in three pieces.

Part I, where we discuss Facebook and Open Social.
Part II, where we discuss Open Social’s impact on his business.
Part III, where we just continue the theme.

I’ll try to pull out the key things he taught me, but wanted to get these up ASAP.

Thanks so much to Darren Barefoot for making a much nicer version of the Social Media Starfish and saying nice things about my explanation behind it.

In other social media news, Jeremiah Owyang explains Open Social for your executives. Jeremiah is really becoming the leading expert on social media. I saw him at the Nokia event yesterday and he’s certainly seeing everything that’s moving on the starfish.

TechCrunch and others are reporting that Google and MySpace are joining forces on the open social platform that Google has developed.

Let’s just say this is HUGE and totally validates what I said in my social media starfish talk yesterday.

UPDATE: I’m at Google right now in the press conference and this is confirmed.

I’m sitting in a press conference with TechCrunch, BusinessWeek, Forbes, and many other press.

More in a few minutes.

UPDATE: Chris DeWolfe, CEO of MySpace, says “This will create the new defacto standard.”

Every morning I sign onto Upcoming.org to see what events my friends tell me are important. If I think an event is important to include in my calendar I tell Upcoming “I’m Watching.” If I am attending, it knows that and you can see that on my calendar.

Today I’m attending two events.

First I’m going to Nokia for the Mobile Mash-Up 2007. I have no idea what they are going to show off but so many startups lately have been talking to me about mobile that this should be an interesting event. Nokia has a fairly large R&D group in Silicon Valley, so it’ll be fun to meet them again.

Second, I’m moderating a panel discussion about new media at Swissnex in San Francisco. It’s unfortunate timing for this event because everyone else will be at the Google event where they’ll be celebrating their new social networking suite of services. But, that’s OK — we’ll read about that on Twitter and have something to talk about. It’s interesting to meet with entrepreneurs from around the world (this event focuses on the Swiss) and I always learn something at those.

Why don’t you join us today?

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.

PayPerPost is the company that Mike Arrington founder of TechCrunch (and me) love to hate. But today there’s reports that they are rebranding the advertising network to “izea.”

They are focusing less on gaming Google (since Google has rejiggered page rank anyway to penalize pay-per-link streams) and more on being an advertising agency for the social media starfish.

Wonderful. But here’s the rub: I expect Facebook or Google to start sharing revenues with bloggers and social media freaks like me in a new way. Real soon now.

Since Google’s ad salespeople are going to get the brands I like and trust (like BMW, Procter and Gamble, etc) I’m far more likely to go with an ad network from them or Facebook than one that wants me to peddle stuff I’ve never heard of.

Translation: Ted’s company is interesting to watch cause he pisses off lots of A listers but I’m still not sure he’s really going to build something disruptive. A company doesn’t change its name if it’s loved.