I still remember Dan Balz’ words to me as I flew on John Edwards’ plane sitting next to him last December. He’s a long-time journalist who covers politics for the Washington Post. I asked him if he had a theory of who would win the campaign. He warned me off of such delusions, and told me that campaigns always surprise him. I’ve watched recently as Hillary Clinton has struggled in the polls and politico Dick Morris and Eileen McGann have some interesting conversation about why. That got me to think about Dan and wonder what he’d be telling me if I sat next to him now.

We’re about to go into the really interesting months: a bunch of primaries come up in January and February. Watching Memeorandum (TechMeme’s sister site that focuses on politics and regular news) is going to get much more interesing than it is today.

I thought Hillary had it all but locked up, but now I’m not so sure. What do you think?

In other political news, did you know that Iranian President has a blog? That’s funny cause he censors blogs of his own citizens.

So, I’m watching the Android video and talking with my friends who are developers. Man, I thought my videos were boring, this one takes the cake.

Steve Jobs does NOT have to worry about losing his job to the folks from Google.

I didn’t see ONE feature that will get normal people to switch from the iPhone. This comes across like something developers developed for other developers without thought of how they were going to build a movement.

How do we know this developer API is uninspired? They are bribing developers with $10 million in prize money.

Compare to the iPhone. Steve Jobs treats developers like crap. Doesn’t give them an SDK. Makes them hack the phones simply to load apps. And they create hundreds of apps anyway. Now, Apple is getting is act together. Early next year an SDK is coming. So now developers will have both sexy hardware, a sexy OS (under iPhone is OSX, an OS that’s been in wide use for years now), AND a well-thought-out SDK.

But, here’s why Android is getting received with a yawn from me:

1. It was released without a personal approach. When Steve Jobs brings out new stuff he does it in front of people. Not in a cold video (as much as I love video it doesn’t inspire the way sitting in an audience does and getting to put my own hands on it).
2. This stuff is still vaporware. No phones are available with it. At Microsoft I learned DO NOT TRUST THINGS THAT THEY WON’T SHOW ME WORKING. Remember Longhorn? Er, Vista? The first time I saw it was largely in a format like this — it looked cool but it wasn’t running anywhere and they wouldn’t let me play with the cool demos. I’ll never make that mistake again. If you want my support for your platform I need to be able to use it and show it to my friends.
3. The UI looks confused. Too many metaphors. One reason the iPhone does so well is because the UI is fairly consistent. Fun, even. How do I know this? My ex-wife hates technology and she bought one and loves it. I try to imagine her getting a Google Android phone and getting very frustrated with a mixture of drop-down menus, clicking metaphors, and touch metaphors. At some point she’ll give it back and go back to the iPhone, which only presents a touch metaphor.
4. No real “love” for developers. Heck, I don’t know of a single developer who has had his/her hands on Android. And all we get is this cold video that just doesn’t inspire me to believe in the future of the platform. I know Dave Winer didn’t feel the love from the Open Social “campfire” event, but at least there we heard from quite a few third-party developers. That made me believe in the platform because I knew that they had already gotten at least SOME third-party developers on board. Heck, remember Facebook? Go back and see when I got excited by Facebook. It was two weeks after the F8 platform announcement. Why then? Because I saw that iLike got six million users in two weeks and was staying up. So, that communicated two things to me: 1. that the platform attracted interesting developers. 2. that Facebook was well enough architected to stay up, even under pretty dramatic load. Android is a LONG way from demonstrating either of these things to the market.
5. Google needs to get atomic videos. On an announcement like this there shouldn’t have been one long video, but rather 50 small ones, each demonstrating a separate API. Developers today are busy. Fully employed. They want easy to understand instructions for how to integrate platform stuff into their stuff. It’s amazing that Google itself doesn’t understand how its own search engine works. If it did, they would see the advantage of creating lots of video, not just one (because then they would be more likely to get found for a variety of search terms, not just a few — it’s one reason I create at least a video every day and it’s paid off very well for me). I’m giving Vic Gundotra the same advice — his long Open Social “campfire video” should have been cut up into the atoms that made up that video. Sure, put the long complete video up too (the molecule) but cut it up. Yes, yes, I know, I don’t take my own advice but then I have an excuse: it costs money, er time, to edit video and I don’t have a lot of it. Google doesn’t have that excuse.
6. Google’s PR comes across as “only caring about big bangs.” Last week I was in the Open Social press conference. Everyone else in the room worked for a big-name media outlet. Business Week. Wall Street Journal. Los Angeles Times. CNET. Barrons. etc. etc. Even TechCrunch was relegated to a phone-based seat and wasn’t in the room. That tells me that Google’s PR doesn’t get the value of small people. In fact, if you were tracking the mentions of that press call you’d have seen my use of Twitter during it got mentioned many times on blogs. Google’s PR didn’t seem to even understand why Twitter was important. They also kept me from using my video camera during the press call (the only reason I got video is cause I carried a cell phone with me — they asked me to leave my professional camera out in the car). Compare that to presidential candidate John Edwards who let me film, even on his plane during “off times.” And he has a Twitter account too.
7. It looks too much like a poor copy of the iPhone. They didn’t talk about ONE thing that the iPhone doesn’t do. Where’s the car integration? Why didn’t they focus a LOT on GPS, or video creation, or something else the iPhone doesn’t do. Do we really want to spin a Google earth map? Really? That doesn’t turn me on. Showing me Kyte.tv working on this thing would turn me on — that’s something the iPhone doesn’t do. Showing me killer podcasting-creation features would turn me on. That’s something the iPhone doesn’t do well. Instead we get some video game that we all played 10 years ago. Yawn. OK, OK, I know Android plays Quake and the iPhone doesn’t. But, come on, we all know a game API is coming for the iPhone and is that really going to get a lot of people to buy Android?

Anyway, so far I’m disappointed in Android. Maybe they’ll get it together, but until then I’ll remember the Russian Government official’s cell phone. He’s running Windows Mobile. Why? Cause developers in his community are building stuff for it. I’ll keep checking in with him to see if Android has gotten any traction.

Are you sensing that Google is just not very good at technology evangelism? After all, look at how successful Google has been outside of search. It hasn’t really had a good home run that we can point to outside of that. I think that’s because Google is coming across as too arrogant, too interested in only “important developers and people,” and doesn’t understand how to pitch end users and developers at the same time (developers only really come after end users do anyway, look again at the iPhone).

But what do I know, I’m just a blogger, right?

UPDATE: Patrick, on TwitterGram, says “it looks like a ripoff of the iPhone.”

UPDATE2: other responses are rolling in from around the Internet. Engadget. GigaOm.

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.

So, what was Barak so passionate about this morning? Well, his firm creates market conversations. One of the ones that got big PR was the Ray Hopewood campaign.

He’s running for president and is making fun of us technology bloggers at the same time.

I think it’s brilliant.

What is it?

There’s a small company, BigFix, that does enterprise software. All its competitors have billions of dollars. They don’t.

So, how do they get noticed in a sea of clutter? In a world where 700 companies want Mike Arrington to pay attention to them?

Do they do the usual stuff?

No, they create a funny presidential campaign that gets national airplay.

How did they do it? They were brave. Created a campaign that didn’t have a hard sell. Didn’t have a strong tie back to the company funding it.

Did it work? Yes, bigtime Barak says.

The campaign is funny and takes swipes even at me. The videoblogger is named “Robert Scziport” and Barak said he got the idea, at least in part, for the campaign after watching me report from John Edwards’ plane when he announced he was running for president.

Dan Farber, Steve Gillmor, Andrew Keen, Keith Teare and I are watching the presidential YouTube/CNN debates together. Watch us live as we react. Where are we? At Mike Arrington’s house (he’s not here, but Heather, TechCrunch’s CEO is here). We’re filming for Gillmor’s Bad Sinatra.

UPDATE: John Edwards is streaming live on Ustream.tv.

I’m seeing Justin.tv cameras pop up all over the place (he’s handing them out to a number of people I’ve met lately). I bet that at this week’s TechCrunch party you’ll be able to watch at least 10 streams from people walking around.

Tomorrow John Edwards will be on Ustream after the CNN debates, Jeremiah Owyang announces. I wonder who’ll get more traffic? John Edwards or Chris Pirillo who also has a streaming video show?

A friend of mine who is famous on the Internet, er, Chris Pirillo, just asked me to support Ron Paul. He’s not the only one. I’ve been hearing a lot of hype about Ron Paul. So, I went to Ron Paul’s Web site and looked at his issues stances to see if I could get why Ron is getting so much hype from some bloggers and see if Ron is really someone who deserves my support (so far I’ve been a bit partial to John Edwards cause I’ve heard him speak several times and think he’s the best of the field so far — at Microsoft I met Hillary Clinton too and she’s really smart too).

I don’t get Ron Paul’s hype. His issues page is devoid of substance on issues that really effect most of us. He focuses on the divisive issues of immigration and abortion (great “wedge” issues) but doesn’t say a single word about the issues that are already driving the presidential campaign: our war strategy, our energy/global warming strategy, our health care strategy, etc. Not a single word is on his issues page about those issues.

He has Pirillo all excited because he comes out tough on fiscal policy. The problem is this policy will NEVER get enacted due to political realities in this country. I remember back when I was a conservative Christian that I bought into this kind of belief system (lots of people believe that you should run a more libertarian-focused fiscal policy and Ron Paul lays that out very well). It’s a nice theory, but getting it enacted is really tough (impossible) and right now our country is in a total fiscal mess because of the war spending that we’ve done (which makes cutting back spending even more impossible than usual). Reduce taxes in the next eight years? If you believe that’s possible you’re smoking some good dope — yet politicans like Ron Paul will tell you that’s what we should do because they know at least 5% of us will bite on that (and usually more, I saw Ronald Reagan use that to great effect). That’d be like Maryam telling me “hey, we should reduce the amount of money we send in for our mortgage every month.” Not gonna happen but we keep believing that’s possible in politics over, and over, and over. And we get idiots as leaders as a result.

Let’s compare Ron Paul to Hillary Clinton’s page (she’s largely seen as the front runner on the Democratic side). Her issues page is more detailed and speaks directly to our #1 issue: ending the war. Ron Paul doesn’t say anything about what he’d specifically do if he were President on this issue on his page (he might have said something somewhere else, but I’m looking at his issues page, which is where he SHOULD say what he’s going to do as President). Yet he talks about abortion which really doesn’t affect most of us the way this damn war does or the way that our energy policy does (I’ve never had an abortion, but my gas prices keep going up).

Barack Obama takes that issue on head on too as does John Edwards. In fact, all three Democratic candidates are doing a MUCH better job on their Web sites and on social media sites than Ron Paul is.

So why, again, is Ron Paul getting support from bloggers? I don’t get it. This guy doesn’t even deserve to be hyped up if he isn’t going to take a stance on the tough issues of the day. Immigration and abortion and fiscal conservatism are NOT the big issues facing us.

What about his stance on Global Warming? He doesn’t have a single word about it on his issue page. What about rebuilding Louisiana? Not a single word. Fixing the health care system? Not a single word. I believe all three of the Democratic candidates believe we’ll need to nationalize health care. That’ll cost money. Yet Ron Paul wants to pull more money out of government and “give back to the people.” I’ve heard this line before. It doesn’t work.

But, then, this is the world that brought us Paris Hilton and George Bush, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when bloggers hype up someone who isn’t willing to talk about the REAL issues of the day.

Count me out.

Tara Hunt has some good (and bad) travel advice. I TOTALLY disagree with her about timing, though (her times are too short to be safe). Here’s why:

1) Many airlines won’t let your bags on if you don’t get to the counter 45 minutes before your flight takes off. I learned that one the hard way when we got to the counter with 42 minutes left and were delayed, which ended up costing us $300 due to a layover in Chicago that we hadn’t planned on before.
2) Most airlines won’t let you on the plane if you don’t get to the gate 10 minutes before your flight takes off. I learned that once at Alaska Airlines when I got to the gate with eight minutes to go. There’s nothing worse than looking at the plane you’re supposed to be on sitting right in front of your face and having the gate agent tell you she can’t let you on, even though you got there eight minutes before it was supposed to take off.
3) Security lines can often be more than 30 minutes — in Atlanta this week I waited 45 minutes in the line. At Oakland I’ve waited an hour in that line.
4) Getting to the ticket counter can occasionally take 45 minutes or longer, especially in heavy travel conditions. Due to lines, understaffed counters, or computer troubles. Remember when I was flying to see John Edwards? I waited in line more than two hours and still hadn’t got to the ticket counter (extreme condition because Southwest in Oakland was all screwed up that morning).

The thing is this all varies by airport. San Francisco and Seattle are usually pretty good (although SF can see lots of delays if there’s fog and/or weather). Oakland, really bad (only if you’re on Southwest, otherwise it’s actually pretty good). Atlanta? Horrid.

Anyway, the new rule we recommend? 1:30 for any domestic flight and three hours for any international flight. If you can add more, do. There’s nothing more stressful than seeing a super long security line or, worse, being caught in traffic on the way to the airport knowing you are about to miss the only flight of the day.

Keep in mind that we often break these rules which is exactly why I have this advice (we’ve gotten caught too short a few too many times). In Atlanta last week I was at the airport four hours before my flight took off so I had absolutely no stress (since getting EVDO I don’t care about sitting in airports anymore cause I can get a lot of work done). The thing is you can often get to the counter 50 minutes before your flight and be just fine (but even if this works nine out of 10 times, the 10th time might really cost you).

If you’re carrying your bags on you can even often push it and get there just 33 minutes ahead of time (29, though, and the ticket machines won’t let you print out a ticket and you’ll have to wait in line, which will probably make you late). In many airports that’ll work eight out of 10 times. Not odds I’d want you to bet on and is ALWAYS stressful, even if you make the flight. That brings me to something else, print out your boarding passes at home, especially if you only have carryon bags. That will let you skip the counter altogether and then you’ll only have to worry about the security line.

Some other things I’d add to Tara’s list? Have your airlines phone numbers saved on your phone, or written down somewhere. If you get caught on the freeway on the way to the airport (it happens, sometimes there’s an accident that’ll close all lanes) it’ll reduce your stress to know your options. Once we were caught in such a traffic jam and learned our plane was running two hours late by calling.

I wouldn’t travel anymore without EVDO either. It’s so nice to be able to get onto the Internet without worrying about finding a Wifi hot spot (airports often don’t have complete coverage and if they do many charge you $7 to $12 to get on, at least in the United States). Check Wikipedia about the airports you’re visiting, though. Often you’ll learn something about the airport and the airports with free Wifi will often be mentioned on Wikipedia.

If you’re flying to places you’re unfamiliar with, triple check your tickets and make sure you KNOW where you’re going. We almost went to Genova instead of Geneva and are just lucky my aunt checked our tickets before we got on the train.

I learned something else this week. If someone else is booking your flights (which often happens if you work in a company and other people are making your travel plans) make sure you look at the tickets before you approve them. I didn’t realize there was a stop in Phoenix and if I had known that I would have gotten a non-stop (they were available, but would have required a small change to my schedule).

Anything else I can think of to help you travel? If you’re a woman traveling alone you should check out Tango Diva (they have a man issue on the home page right now). Heck, I can’t help plugging Tango Diva. The founder lives a few houses away from me and she’s going out to breakfast with us in the morning.

One of my hobbies lately that I usually keep off of my blog is talking with people about politics. Why? Because it usually is a good topic when you meet people who could care less about what Twitter is, or what Silverlight will do, or what the latest gadget is.

Anyway, here in Cancun I’ve been spending the afternoon sitting in the pool and meeting people. It’s amazing how many people have brought up John Edwards’ $400 haircut.

Consensus? That it demonstrates a lack of judgment and an unconcern for how this would play with voters. Neither are good messages to send and they sure aren’t playing well with people in the Cancun pool.

How would I handle this if I were running Edward’s campaign? Put video of the haircut (or his next one) up on YouTube and interview the stylist for why his/her prices are so high. I’m sure John doesn’t think this is important to do, would rather discuss issues of more importance like how we get out of the war, but this is hurting his campaign far more than anything else he’s done lately.

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?