So Google is using a lot of new terms with its OpenSocial platform. So, what is a “container?”

A “container” is something that hosts apps built for this new platform. So, MySpace is a container. Bebo is a container. Eventually even my blog could be a container.

Google just announced that Bebo is now onboard.

Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Facebook is being surrounded.

When Shel Israel co-authored Naked Conversations with me we interviewed about 180 companies about how they were using blogs and how that usage was changing their business.

Today I’m watching companies and political candidates and seeing a new trend that I’ve written up as the “Social Media Starfish.” I just did two videos, one that defined the social media starfish and all of its “legs” and another that explains how Google is going to disrupt many pieces of that starfish tomorrow with its Open Social announcement tomorrow.

Some things in text. What are the legs of the social media starfish?

1. Blogs.
2. Photos. Flickr. Smugmug. Zooomr. Photobucket. Facebook. Et al.
3. Videos. YouTube. Kyte. Seesmic. Facebook. Blip. DivX. Etc.
4. Personal social networks. Facebook. BluePulse. MySpace. Hi5. Plaxo. LinkedIn. Bebo. Etc.
5. Events (face to face kind). Upcoming. Eventful. Zvents. Facebook. Meetup. Etc.
6. Email. Integration through Bacn.
7. White label social networks. Ning. Broadband Mechanics. Etc.
8. Wikis. Twiki. Wetpaint. PBWiki. Atlassian. SocialText. Etc.
9. Audio. Podcasting networks. BlogTalkRadio. Utterz. Twittergram. Etc.
10. Microblogs. Twitter. Pownce. Jaiku. Utterz. Tumblr. FriendFeed. Etc.
11. SMS. Services that let organizations build SMS into their social media starfishes. John Edwards is one example.
12. Collaborative tools. Zoho. Zimbra. Google’s docs and spreadsheets. Etc.

It’ll be interesting to see how deeply Google will disrupt the Social Media Starfish tomorrow.

What do you think?

Here’s the two videos:

Part I of Naked Conversations 2.0: defining the social media starfish. 22 minutes.
Part II of Naked Conversations 2.0: how Google will disrupt the social media starfish tomorrow. 18 minutes.

A few years ago I wrote to Microsoft’s leadership and asked them why they weren’t involved in the new Web 2.0 space. I got an answer back that was about 2,000 words long and included the words “business value” 13 times. Translation: Microsoft’s leadership thought that Web 2.0 and social software like Flickr didn’t have business value and was too much of a potential fad to invest in.

Glad to see that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO, is consistent. Notes that Geocities lost most of its value after being acquired by Yahoo and says “it had most of what Facebook has.” Let’s come back to that point in a second.

The thing is that Ballmer has bought into the advertising hype too. I remember when Microsoft’s President, Kevin Johnson, came to our group when I worked at Microsoft and explained that the advertising industry is 10x the size of the software industry and that he was going to steer Microsoft more into an advertising-driven business rather than just one that made its revenues from selling software. Translation: Microsoft was going to compete more with Google, Yahoo, and other companies going after the advertising pie.

Don’t miss this quote. It’s demonstrates everything that is wrong with Microsoft’s approach:

“There can’t be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of people could write in a couple of years. That’s for sure,” Ballmer said.

When I worked at Microsoft I heard this over and over and over again from various engineers and program managers who STILL haven’t competed effectively with WordPress, Flickr, Skype, YouTube, or any of the other things over the years I’ve heard this “we can build that in a few weeks” kind of arrogant attitude attached to.

But, remember eBay? Remember how dozens of competitors tried to get into the eBay space? (and still are?)

Why aren’t they succeeding? Because eBay is NOT about the technology. It’s about the community and unless you have something that’ll convince the buyers and sellers all to switch all at one moment you’ll never be able to take eBay’s market away. Translation: it’s too late and eBay has huge defensibility around its business because people won’t move away from it even if you demonstrate 5x better technology.

Same with Facebook. I’m not moving away from it. Why? I have 5,000 reasons why (and another 500 already who want to be included in my Facebook network). Unless you can convince them all to move I’m not moving. This is why LinkedIn isn’t going to disappear anytime soon, even though I like Facebook’s approach a lot better. It’s also why MySpace isn’t going anywhere. My son says his friends are all on MySpace. My brother’s bar is on MySpace. They aren’t moving no matter how hard I evangelize Facebook.

Which gets us back to Ballmer’s quotes.

First, let’s share this one: “I think these things [social networks] are going to have some legs, and yet there’s a faddishness, a faddish nature about anything that basically appeals to younger people,” Mr Ballmer told Times Online yesterday.

I’m 42. Hardly young. And Facebook is appealing a lot to people in my social network and age group lately (and so is Twitter and other social tools like Pownce, LinkedIn, and sites that use social groups like Yelp, Flickr, Upcoming.org). I guess Ballmer missed that. This is what happens when Microsoft executives don’t get outside of their ivory towers very often. Steve, you really need to go to any tech industry conference and hang out in the hallways. Don’t come to San Francisco, you won’t believe anything you hear here anyway. But go to, say, LeWeb3 in Paris and hear what they say about social networks. You’ll probably hear Bebo. Facebook. And a few others. From even the old folks. Last night I was at a National Geographic event and lots of people were talking about Facebook.

Here’s another quote:

Mr Ballmer also noted that sites such as Geocities, an online community that was bought for $3 billion by Yahoo! in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, “had most of what Facebook has.”

Oh, boy. No way, no how.

First of all, I never joined Geocities. It never had utility for me. It was a place to build free Web sites. I found it had all the disadvantages to me that MySpace has and NONE of the advantages of Facebook. It was NOT a social network that exerted the kind of social pressure on me to join the way that Facebook did. I tried to ignore Facebook for years. Same with MySpace. But people I kept meeting kept begging me to join. Kevin Rose, when we had dinner, told me I was blowing it by not being on Facebook. That NEVER happened with Geocities.

Also, Facebook is now a business card collection. A rolodex. That has real utility that’ll keep me using it long after it joins the “old fad bin.”

Oh, and anytime people say “this thing is a fad?” I think of blogging. Lots of people told me that when I started it too. It wasn’t. Neither is Facebook.

But all this makes me think that Ballmer is trying to send signals to Zuckerberg (Facebook’s CEO) that the price is too high and that this is just a negotiating ploy. Nice one! But it doesn’t give me confidence that Microsoft is going to figure out Web 2.0 or social networking strategies anytime soon.

It also makes me realize that Ballmer has no clue about the future of advertising. If he did he’d be talking about how Facebook’s ability to concentrate people into buckets in a new way should be copied and studied. That’s where Facebook’s real advertising value is and Microsoft hasn’t demonstrated ANY ability to see that yet. Of course, Facebook itself hasn’t shipped its advertising platform that’ll demonstrate its vision there either, but I hear it’s coming.

Will Microsoft get a clue before Facebook gets an entrenched advertising platform going?

Ballmer proved with Google and with these quotes today: no.

Aaarrgghhh, I left my cell phone at home by accident. Maryam is mad cause she can’t call me (neither can you, sorry). But there’s always Twitter. Here at SJC (we’re in the airport on the “nerd bird” as Irina Slutsky calls it) there’s geeks sitting on the floor Twittering each other. The Google Blogger team is here too (just saw Eric Case in line). Ahh, it’s going to be fun.

Oh, just got a new Photowalking up (this time another part of Stanford Linear Accelerator — tour guide is Bebo White, one of the team that built the first US Web site). Just visit ScobleShow to find the two videos. It already got Slashdotted.

Anyway, in just the past few days hundreds have joined Twitter and I now have 1004 followers. You can follow TwitterClub, ScobleStyle on my “with friends” page.

See ya Wednesday. In the meantime you can watch my Twitter account.

Everytime I am with Thomas Hawk I grow more fond of his skills. Here’s just a small number of photos we shot in about an hour yesterday. Bebo White gave us part II of the Stanford Linear Accelerator tour. Part III will happen on April 20th. Here’s me shooting Bebo. What does the world’s longest building look like? This!

One thing I picked up about Thomas: he loves little grungy things. Put him in front of a water cooling tower that’s been running for decades and he could spend hours just shooting the goo-covered pipes. They are the goo that helped win three Nobel Prizes for Physics.

Next week at Northern Voice I’m gonna be blessed with hanging out with Kris Krug. He’s another gifted photographer. Hopefully we can get a Photowalk together there. Oh, and Northern Voice is almost sold out. So, if you wanna be there, you better get your ticket tonight.

UPDATE: here’s Thomas Hawk’s writeup of the tour.

Today was a lot of fun. Got a tour of master Swiss watch maker Franck Muller. Cheapest watch? About $20,000. Most expensive? A million. Whew. Elton John supposedly owns more than 100 of these watches. Watching them build these watches was like going back in time. No pun intended. One watch has more than 1,000 pieces. I can’t imagine building these buy hand.

Anyway, I have another tour up on ScobleShow. This one is of Stanford Linear Accelerator’s computer team. These guys built the first US Web site. I have three separate videos up:

1) A talk with the team (includes Tim Berners-Lee’s PR guy who didn’t understand what Tim was saying when he came in one day and said “I think I’ve done something interesting.”). These guys are freaking smart.
2) A meeting with Paul Kunz who built the first US Web site. He didn’t think it was that big a deal. How do we know that? Cause he assigned the task to someone else (who didn’t get the job done).
3) Bebo White gave Shel and me a tour of the visitor center and a lesson in particle physics (surprising what they found when they were building it).

Funny enough we ran out of time to actually get a look at the accelerator. Bebo is meeting us later this month to finish the tour.

Hope you enjoy these. The Stanford Linear Accerator is one of the longest buildings in the world. If you visit Silicon Valley you’ll probably drive over it and if you come and pitch a VC here for money on Sand Hill Road you’ll be sitting right next to it.

Shel Israel came along on the tour we got earlier this week of the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) with Bebo White, one of the members of the team that built the first US Web site, and he wrote it up.

If you’ve visited Silicon Valley and drove down freeway 280 you’ve actually driven over SLAC. It’s that really long building in Menlo Park right near Sand Hill Road (if you’ve pitched a VC there, you’ve been within a few hundred yards of the two-mile-long building that sits on top of the accelerator).

It’ll take me a while to get the video up. I have a ton of videos in the can, so it’s scheduled to run Feb. 7th.

Speaking of stuff that’s been in the can for a while is my Intel 45 nanometer fab tour. That’ll be up tonight along with some Intel news.

Thanks Shel for writing up our tour and taking some pictures. Oh, and can’t wait to get the rest of the tour (it was so interesting that we ran out of time and out of tape).

One lasting impression: I’ve felt far smaller all week. Partly because of the intellects of the people we met. Partly because of what they are studying (forces and particles that haven’t been produced, or at least measured, since the creation of our universe). Partly because of the history of this place and the scale. It’s interesting that we need to build two-mile-long buildings to study things we can’t even see.

Thanks to Bebo White for arranging this tour. It had a profound effect on my life and I’ll never forget it. Sitting at the feet of Paul F. Kunz, author of the first Web site in the United States, was like sitting in church. It was a special moment. I love that he didn’t think the Web was that big a deal. Even assigned someone else to build the first US Web site. Remember, these are physicists who were more excited about smashing particles and studying what happens.

I’m thinking we should do a photowalking tour of SLAC. Would you like to go on a tour?

UPDATE: Wikipedia says that SLAC is the longest straight object in the world.

I just had an evil thought. In every Apple store there’s several computers setup where you can get on the Internet, play around, basically do everything you want.

What if Apple were logging everything you do and studying that for marketing information? After all, they would be able to predict what Web 2.0 sites were getting popular before anyone else.

But, even if you don’t log what’s going on, just watching over the shoulders of people tells you a lot about what people do on their computers. I just took a quick tour of the store here and saw Friendster, 123 Greetings, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, some sort of Oracle email app, Google maps, and Yahoo messenger being used.

UPDATE: On second tour I saw two different people using Bebo. I never have used that before. Looks like a nice blogging/social networking tool. Lots of people are using Google and Yahoo to search for travel sites. I saw both Travelocity and Expedia up on screens. Three people here are using MySpace. One guy is surfing YouTube.

I bet if I stayed here all day I’d get a pretty good read on what people are actually using.

If I were planning a new Web product I’d send teams of people to Apple stores all over the world to do market research and just hang out in the stores and watch what people do on their computers.

I'm a sucker for geek baby photos. Famous Irish IT geek, Tom Raftery's second son was born yesterday, but Tom didn't post photos yet! Hey, every baby deserves his or her own Flickr channel! Heheh. Congrats Tom and Pilar! (We had a fun time with them in Cork, Ireland, last year).

While we're talking about all things social and Irish, Tom also reports that Social Media company Bebo just got $15 million in funding.