Last night I was on a fun game show yesterday at the NewTeeVee conference, with a bunch of people who’ve created some of my favorite media sites. Aside: the conference was a lot better than I expected, congrats to Om and Liz Gannes for a great show. Andy Plesser took some video behind the scenes. Here’s the shows that were on stage yesterday during the game show: Break a Leg. Mahalo Daily. Goodnight Burbank. Wallstrip. Epic-FU. Justin.tv. Galacticast. Diggnation. Geek Entertainment TV.

What’s in common with all these?

They are all cheap baaaahhhhssssttttaaaardddds. Er, cheap shows to produce. I mean really, one show is two guys who drink beer while talking about what’s on Digg.com.

After reading through my feeds I realize that this trend continues even outside of these shows.

What’s hot on the feeds today? This video:

It’s done by a writer for the daily show talking about the Hollywood writer’s strike. Notice something? No studio. No expensive talent. No expensive camera. No expensive lights. No expensive microphones or makeup artists.

But it’s freaking attention grabbing and very viral.

Let’s keep going on our tour of fun cheap videos.

One of my favorite songs is Daft Punk’s Harder Bodies Faster Stronger.

Notice something? Cheap to create! A pen. An idea. A cheap camera. Two girls (who really are great in this video). Some music.

Let’s keep going. iLike’s Ali Partovi had a fun time with U2’s Bono. They filmed this little video. It’s going supernova. No cost media. Ali’s not a video guy. Oh, someday I’ll tell you about when he had to take away a tape I made at the recent iLike party. But only if you buy me a beer.

Anyway, let’s bring this all around. Read/Write Web talks about how the VC’s don’t see a way to make money in this business.

I think we’re all stupid if we think we can’t make money in this industry. Maybe we’re focusing too much on building expensive studios, buying expensive cameras, and all that. I’m as guilty as anyone here, but I look back at my best shows and they are pretty inexpensive to create too.

Heck, go back and watch the first video in this series again. And again. Until you get it.

There’s money in being a cheap video baaahhhhssstttaaarrrrdddd! :-)

Oh, and James Cridland you didn’t need to point out that Veronica Belmont’s videos are “so, so much better” than mine are.

Tell me something I don’t know! :-)

Hmmm, I used the words “social graph” in this interview with Randi Zuckerberg, director of business development at Facebook.

Dave Winer, yesterday, said that anyone who uses that term sounds like a monkey.

She gave her definition of Social Graph at about 14:39. Everyone who is talking about this should listen to this part of the interview.

I disagree with Dave Winer. The Social Graph is NOT my social network.

My Social Network is my friends list.

But the Social Graph shows a LOT more than that.

For instance, did you know you can see everyone who is into skiing on Facebook?

Did you know you can see everyone who is into Daft Punk?

Those people are NOT in my social network. But they are part of the social graph that you can study on Facebook.

Interesting how we have disagreements about language.

So, what would you call what you can see in Facebook? It isn’t just my social network, though. Try again.

Well, I’ve been taking a lot of shots in the past few weeks for always covering the latest shiny social object. You know, first it was Twitter. Then Jaiku. Then Facebook. Pownce. On and on.

The critics say that either I’m late to the game, like with Facebook, or that I’m just too scattered and not looking for real value. Or that I don’t stay on one thing long enough to learn it well and add real value to my writings.

Fair enough. Although one thing I’d like to clear up. When I yammer on endlessly about Facebook that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped using any of the others. Twitter, for instance, is just a constant part of my life now.

Anyway, last night I was at the Facebook party aka “Lunch 2.0.” I met Mark Zuckerberg and his sister, Randi, and a ton of Facebook employees and executives. It is one of those parties that in about five years we’ll all be looking back on as a major inflection point in the valley. I stayed until the very end. In fact, even after the party ended a small group of us hang outside of Facebook’s offices and kept talking about what is going to happen in social networking.

One of the guys was John McCrea, vice president of marketing for Plaxo.

He told me that on Monday Plaxo i sgoing to turn on a new version. Ahh, a new “shiny social object.”

But then he explained why we should care: Plaxo is going to open up a new social network that’s both open as well as controllable. Translation: Plaxo is making a play for Facebook.

First, let’s go back to Facebook. Why does everyone say it’s a “walled garden?” Because you can’t get to data stored on Facebook unless you’re a Facebook member. Two days ago I did a video for Chris Pirillo on Facebook. Chris instantly got excited and wanted to share that with his blog’s readers. But he couldn’t. That video is locked inside Facebook’s walled garden. If you don’t have a key (a Facebook account) you can’t see it.

John told me that on Monday Plaxo will come out with a social network that gets rid of the walled garden.

Why did I say a couple of weeks ago that Facebook is a “data roach motel?” Because I can put all sorts of information about myself into Facebook (I could, for instance, tell you that I like “Daft Punk.” But, do I own that data? Can I get it out of Facebook? No).

John told me that on Monday Plaxo will come out with a social network that lets me own my own data and take it out of Plaxo and put it on other social networks.

Finally, I’ve been getting a few complaints about what I’ve been doing with Facebook. By turning Facebook into a professional networking tool I’m causing problems for people who saw it as a social tool to keep in touch with their college friends. See, Facebook for the first three years of its existence was mostly a tool for college kids to pass photos and other funny things around. Now, if you have photos of your frat party at college do you really want your new boss and coworkers to see those? Probably not.

But Facebook isn’t controllable. You can’t really have two groups of friends. One group that sees your drunken college frat photos and another group that sees you making presentations to your board of directors.

John told me that on Monday Plaxo will come out with a social network that lets me control which groups of friends (or family) that can see certain items.

OK, sounds like Plaxo is going to kill Facebook and bring down Facebook’s value by a few billion dollars. The bubble 2.0 will end. Zuckerberg will drag his tail away from the valley defeated. Etc etc etc. Right?

It’s not going to happen. Here’s why. It’s too late and the walled garden will keep people locked in.

Huh?

Sorry, Facebook already has momentum and a coolness about it that Plaxo doesn’t exude. I don’t really know how to explain the coolness without sounding really idiotic and goofy. That’s part of the 20-something vibe that Facebook has going for it right now. Oh, here’s a photo of me looking at the artwork in the Facebook offices. That might explain a little bit about it. There’s lots of other photos from the event last night here.

But it’s there and can’t be ignored. If John could explain to me how he’s going to get the world’s college students to look away from Facebook and toward something else maybe I’d go along with this “more open and controllable” Plaxo. My head is telling me that Plaxo is the way to go but my emotion tells me that Facebook is more fun.

The other thing is that BECAUSE of Facebook’s “closed” nature I’m not likely to leave it anytime soon. Why? Because if Facebook has 10% more content than the other networks do (which it will have because of the momentum that Facebook has today) that the more “open” networks will always seem lame in comparison.

But, on Monday I’ll try out the new Plaxo. I’m into “shiny social objects” and will report to you the pros and the cons. The problem, though, is that even if I get really excited about it my email is demonstrating that many of the world won’t be listening and won’t care.

What do you think?

After I get up this morning I’ll film a video explaining more of my thoughts and I’ll put that on my Kyte channel. For now Nokia’s CTO left me a little message there. I’ll do more stuff from the Always On conference today.