TechCrunch has the skinny behind the new SmugMug. I’ll have a video up soon (hopefully today, although since I’m in London might be next week sometime) that shows off this new UI. It’s stunning and puts SmugMug squarely at the front of the photo sharing sites.

Actually, I got it wrong. SmugMug calls it “SmugMungous.” Wait until you see the demo going across two 30-inch monitors. The UI here BLOWS AWAY all the other photo sharing sites. Hopefully more Web 2.0 companies will follow their lead and build scalable UI’s.

Oh, and they have a new iPhone version out too.

UPDATE: Here’s the video, which is a tour of SmugMug where we see a bunch of stuff. The demo of the new SmugMug starts at about 11:42.

Anyone remember Friendster? It was an early entrant into the social networking scene. If they had done their work right they SHOULD have been a much bigger player than they are now.

Why aren’t they?

1. They didn’t take care of PR and didn’t take care of bloggers. Hmmm, Facebook is doing exactly the same thing. Several people at the dinner tonight noted that Facebook hasn’t responded to claims that Facebook’s employees are spying on data that the public doesn’t have access to. And that’s just one PR complaint.
2. They kicked people out that they didn’t like. Hmmm, Facebook is doing exactly the same thing.
3. They didn’t respond to new competitors who took away their coolness. Facebook? They are about to meet their biggest competition yet.

Last night I was at a dinner for Hugh Macleod and Oren Michaels. There was talk of an earthquake. No, not the 5.6 one centered near San Jose. The fact that Google is about to jump into the social networking world. TechCrunch caused the shockwave of the year with that one.

One name that’s on the Google announcement, Plaxo, tells me that Google is looking to build a “social graph” that’s open and doesn’t have walls keeping developers from playing. They are looking to “Friendster” Facebook.

Add into this last week’s little “Vic Gundotra” dinner and I’m already seeing a trend: Google is going full bore after influentials, bloggers, and other “new media” developers who need a social network as part of their efforts to remain competitive.

Think about it. Nearly every cool Web property lately has a social network. Upcoming.org, Flickr, Yelp, Channel 9, etc. All have their own proprietary social networks.

Look at MySpace and Facebook. Both don’t solve that problem.

Will Google? And, by helping out Web 2.0 developers and other influentials (Facebook calls them “whales”) will Google cut off Facebook’s PR air supply (which is proving quite lucrative)?

Those are things I’m going to focus on for the next few days.

Some things we still need answers on:

1. Is this new Google social network really fun to use like Facebook is?
2. Does it beat Facebook’s aesthetics?
3. Can the social graph be componetized so that I could add a social network to my blog, for instance?
4. Does the development platform beat Facebook’s? (Can I see which apps my friends have loaded, is the key question).
5. Does it build a really open social graph?
6. If Google does match Facebook’s utility (really easy: just clone the hell out of it but give the “whales” more than 5,000 friends. I’ve talked with many celebrities and businesses and they say 5,000 simply isn’t enough which is why many of them are forced to stay on MySpace) do they allow new kinds of social ads?

It’s going to be an interesting next month getting around to all these companies again and seeing what they plan to do.

Get drunk.
Get sober.

Last night I was hanging around at the Ritz near my house. That’s where Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo spoke yesterday, and where the Right Media conference is going on right now.

I talked with several people who didn’t want to go on the record, but who are executives at Microsoft’s competitors. They told me to “watch out for Brian McAndrews, former CEO of aQuantive.”

That’s the company that sold recently to Microsoft for a very large sum of money (around $6 billion).

They say he now is working for Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft and is expected to make major moves on Microsoft’s behalf to get Microsoft a major position into the advertising industry.

So, what’s the rumor this morning? Microsoft wins the Facebook bid.

If this is all true, then Steve Ballmer’s promise to buy 50 companies in the advertising and Web 2.0 spaces in the next year is off to a roaring start.

Since I don’t think Steve Ballmer understands the advertising world, it sure looks like someone else is behind this move. I’d love to interview Brian McAndrews.

UPDATE: if this rumor is true, it means big revenues for Facebook. Microsoft has a world-class advertising sales team. I bet they could promise more revenues than Google could, particularly because Microsoft’s sales team is much more focused on banner advertising than Google’s team is.

UPDATE2: Microsoft’s Hank Vigil was in Palo Alto yesterday, so maybe he’s behind this. Me?

I love the Lunch 2.0 movement. Every few days there’s a different Lunch 2.0 event around the world. Today was one at Oracle’s headquarters. These are great events to network at and see some new stuff (Oracle was showing off how it is Web 2.0-izing some of its Enterprise-focused stuff and privately I got a demo of how Oracle is building its own internal social network which is very cool).

Anyway, here’s some quick videos I shot at the lunch.

1. Matt Galligan told me about his company, Socialthing, which will aggregate all sorts of friends networks. Alpha coming later in October, public release expected later this year. He called it a “digital life manager” and compared it to Jaiku.
2. Justin Kestelyn gave me a little tidbit of why Oracle was hosting Lunch 2.0. His blog with reports on the event is here.
3. Dominik Grolimund of Wua.la shows me this very cool Peer-to-Peer online storage service. I’m going to try this one out. He’s visiting Silicon Valley from Switzerland.
4. Jeremiah Owyang just came back from Hong Kong and explains Cyworld’s homepi to us. Rich Mangalang, of Oracle, was showing us their internal social network (sort of like Facebook, but only for Oracle employees). He wasn’t able to demonstrate it on camera, unfortunately.

Everytime I go to a Lunch 2.0 event I meet interesting people and learn a lot. Why don’t you come next time?

Watch my Kyte channel tonight. I’m headed to the Showstoppers CTIA event where I’ll find you some cool mobile gadgets and post them up instantly as long as there is some bandwidth.

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).

UPDATE: BlogNation ’s David Feng, who lives in Beijing, says this story is false and that search engines are NOT being blocked. I just talked with Sam Sethi in London and he says to watch this story for more info.

Wow, China blocks all search engines.

NASDAQ should delist Baidu immediately in retaliation, if this is true. The USA should pull out of the Olympics next year. China is counting on that to make a ton of great PR and make China look like a world leader (which it is, but things like this set it way back in my mind). We shouldn’t enable the American media to be used with the Olympics if this turns out to be true.

I’m going to the Web 2.0 Summit today. I imagine this will be the topic of conversation. If it’s not, it immediately should be on stage and out in the hallways.

Thank you to Duncan Riley of TechCrunch for staying on top of this story.

This is a reminder that China is a communist country where the people aren’t really allowed to own things and where businesses don’t really need to play fair.

It’s ironic because many of Google/Yahoo/Microsoft’s best employees are Chinese (all three have big operations in China and Google hired away one of the most famous Chinese employees from Microsoft, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee. So famous that I hear football stadiums get filled when he speaks). These companies are so dependent on these workers that they aren’t willing to pull out and punish the Chinese for actions like these.

Translation: the Chinese get to have their cake (our money coming over for everything from toys to paying their top software researchers) as well as eat it too (keep our brands and technology out of the country). I wonder what Rebecca MacKinnon will say about this. She’s a journalist that’s covered China for a very long time.

Also will be interesting to see what Global Voices Online will say about this. They track Internet censorship and business disruptions around the world.

It’s important to note that some people, in TechCrunch’s comments, are saying that this isn’t going on across the board.

What do you think? If you’re in China, what are you seeing?

By the way, I’ve really got to compliment TechMeme. Some times it looks pretty lame, but over the past three days I’ve dug through more than 10,500 posts according to Google Reader and it’s really hard to find legitimate news that belongs on TechMeme that isn’t already there. Gabe Rivera has built something that does have real value, even if once in a while something stupid gets up there too.

Evan Williams, on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit talking about how constraining software services brings goodness, said he wants to know what a social network with only 10 members would be like.

Hey, social software that Scoble won’t use! Heheh, I can hear thousands of people saying “I want THAT!”

Seriously, don’t we already have this? It’s called a family. That’s one thing I can’t add more members to very quickly. :-)

Rafe Needleman is Twittering from the Web 2.0 Summit. Rafe started the Webware blog too, which is mondo good.

Mark Zuckerberg won’t tell you his favorite Facebook application (Charlene Li just asked him on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit) but I will. It’s Feedheads (just was renamed from Google Reader Shared Items App). Louis Gray has the details.

If every app were as well done as this one Kara Swisher wouldn’t be able to call Facebook apps “toys.”

You all should spend some time understanding what this app does. It’s deep and uses the social graph in a way that I haven’t seen any other app do.