We were sitting in the hall in front of the Special Needs Nursery. Dave Winer, Patrick, and me. Dave and Patrick had their Macs open and were taking advantage of the free Wifi to blog and upload another picture (we were waiting for Milan cause Maryam and friends were visiting and we can only have a visitor or two into see him at one time).

Anyway, a group of surgeons walked by and one saw the Macs and said:

“Mac guys, I love it. Do you have the new iLife?”

Now THAT is what I call evangelism.

Dave turned to Patrick and said “that was a Silicon Valley moment.”

******

Another moment? We took off from the hospital for a little while and got lunch and then visited the Apple store. Patrick bought iWork (he already has Microsoft Office but says iWork is a lot better for his reports and such). Dave got a MacMini. At the Apple store two people recognized me. One was from New York. The other from Amsterdam. UPDATE: That’s them in the picture.

The Amsterdam visitor was Hans Veldhuizen, founder and president of Novatunes (he told us he’s building a new kind of music service that’ll be shipped later this year). He’s here to attend the TechCrunch 40 conference and saw Dave Twittering that he was in the Apple store (there’s a LOT more people Twittering than you might think). Stephanie Agresta is a consultant and told us she just joined forces with the Conversation Group. Small world, cause I know a few people involved in this new social media consultancy. Giovanni, one of the partners, is who introduced me and Podtech to Seagate. They are already doing work for SAP, so will be very interesting to watch and see how they get more companies involved in the social networks.

++++++

A moment in Milan’s life: I’ve been looking at all the technology used inside the nursery to monitor babies and such. The coolest thing I’ve seen so far is the ABM, or Auditory Brainstem Response test. Milan was asleep during his. Two little headphones play sounds into his ears and two electrodes on his head detected responses. He passed fine. but I just thought that was the coolest piece of tech. I’d love to meet the person/team who came up with this. Milan never even woke up for the test. Imagine if you were alive 100 years ago and took a time travel machine to today. Would you recognize anything in this world? Probably not.

Today Patrick and Dave were asking themselves what kind of computer Milan will have when he’s 13 years old (Patrick is 13, so is interested in such things).

I answered it’d have 4 terrabytes of RAM and 1,000 terrabytes of hard disk space. Patrick looked amazed and said something like there’s no way that such a computer would happen so quickly.

I told him that when he was born, back in January of 1994 the Web browser had barely been invented (Netscape incorporated that year) and that Windows 95 hadn’t yet shipped. The average computer back then had something like 16 megabytes of RAM (not gigs, megs) and a 40 megabyte hard drive (really cool computers had 32 megs of RAM and an 120 meg hard drive. I didn’t think we’d have a computer in our hands that would have a lot more memory than that and would be on the Internet 24/7 to boot.

What an amazing time to be alive. If we dream for a moment about 13 years from now, what do you see?

How about a mouse that works off of your brainwaves? How about a computer 10x more powerful than an iPhone that’s embedded onto your glasses? How about a petabyte hard drive? Or a printer that you could fit in your wallet so you could hand out pictures of your kids to friends who wanted them? I’ll be honest, I’m scared by the thought of embedding a computer into my body, but we’ll definitely see those. I’ve already met people who have RFID tags in their hands, which is mighty weird today but might become commonplace over the next decade or so. Imagine buying Starbucks just by waving your hand over the counter and not needing to carry credit cards. Oh, that’s another change that’s happened since Patrick is alive. Now almost every store and restaurant takes credit cards (at least in Silicon Valley). I remember when I got nasty stares at Starbucks for trying to use a credit card instead of paying cash.

+++++

A pile of gifts arrived yesterday from lots of my friends (both “real” and “online”). We really appreciate that and we’re going to make a donation in kind to help out kids less fortunate than us.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the “lottery of life” lately. Everytime I hear that damn helicopter come into the trauma center I think about the fact that someone is in a world of hurt while I’m the luckiest guy in the world.

On Wednesday, when we were in the testing center we encountered a pregnant woman who was sobbing, being consoled by her relatives. Obviously she had gotten some bad news of some kind. I can’t get her out of my mind. I’m so lucky. Patrick is such a great kid. Milan is so healthy and happy and wonderful and Maryam is just the best person I could wish for. Why did I get such a great family when she, obviously, got some really tragic news?

It’s so random, the lottery of life. A friend of mine knows an extremely rich woman up in Seattle. She has adopted a little girl from China. She told my friend “this little girl had to be abandoned to win the lottery.” I’ve been thinking about that, too. It’s so sad that there’s kids out there who aren’t loved the way Milan is being loved.

I’m thinking back to when I met Paul Singer, senior vice president and CIO at Target. He wears a pin that says “Adopt.” Great people make the kind of impression on you that last years, even though you only meet them once for a few minutes. I wish I was 1/10th the human being that Paul is.

Walking through the hospital and seeing the Packard name, along with tons of Silicon Valley famous people, on a wall remembering those who donated major money to build one of the world’s great teaching hospitals, it makes me remember what great leaders Silicon Valley has been fortunate to have pass through and there are no bigger than the Packards. They did things that make life better for all of us, both in times of need (hospitals) as well as places to take our kids (the Monterey Bay Aquarium, one of the world’s best, was started by their daughter).

I want to interview more of people like that: people who aren’t just out to make another dollar, but who are making the world a better place through their actions.

Do you know of someone like that in the tech industry? Give me a call or drop me an email (er, a Twitter, or a Facebook message). We need more tech industry moments like those.

Started out this morning having coffee with Dave Davison. One of the most interesting investors in Silicon Valley. That dude knows stuff (was CEO of a few Silicon Valley companies). And people. Told me about things I’ve only been telling a small group of people.

Then over to Stanford to brainstorm about a project I’m working on with them — all using Facebook to plan it out.

Finally tonight a writer for Fast Company was here to pick my brain about social networking.

Oh, and my video with Rock You, one of the hottest application developers for social networks is now up. If you’re building a Facebook app you’ll want to hear how these guys make money and some of the lessons they’ve learned.

Don’t miss this. RockYou’s apps get 150 million views a day. You read that right. A day.

In the video he covers a lot of ground about why Facebook is the hottest application platform for developers to play on today and he talks about how they got 15 million users in three months on that platform.

There’s something else. Oh, yeah. I can’t accept anymore Facebook friends. Got my full quota of 5,000 friends and Facebook isn’t allowing me to add any more. I’m sure you’ll see them sold on eBay soon. For at least a dime. I bet I’ll read that on Valleywag soon.

Now I’m headed home for some real social networking of the family kind. Our new baby is due “any day” (official date: September 12). You’ll read that on Twitter first. Especially now that Jott.com lets me call up with my cell phone and send text messages to Twitter.

Hope your day was as social as mine.

I am still thinking a lot about David Boschmans lately. He was our gracious host in Belgium when we visited in December of 2005. Spent a lot of time driving Maryam and me around and hosting dinners and having us speak at Microsoft and other places. Proudly talked about his new family (he has a two-year-old daughter, he was so proud of her). Shared more than one beer with us and was clearly liked and trusted by lots of geeks in Belgium. Here’s a picture of me with David.

Two weeks ago he died unexpectedly in his sleep. He was 32.

His death hit me and Maryam hard. Harder than other tragedies in the tech world have hit me lately.

It gets down to who is a “real friend” and who is an “online friend.” David was an online friend who turned real over beers in Brussels.

He also reminded me that every day is a gift. I’ve had 10 more years of those gifts than he’s had. He did a lot in his short time here.

I look around the Web and see the love for David from around the world. Tom Raftery, Ireland’s top tech blogger, wrote about him. Roy Osherove, one of my favorite bloggers in Israel, did a video for him.

If you search Google for his name you’ll see page after page of people who were touched by David. Nathan Weinberg links to lots of the best stuff about David.

Anyway, what are you doing with today? That’s what David keeps asking me.

Today I’m thinking about a guy who took a few days out of his life to make sure we had a good time in a foreign land. He had a new daughter at home and, I’m sure, plenty of better things to do. The memories of him are among my most prized possessions. Worth more to me than an iPhone or an HDTV. It’s why I love traveling the world and hanging out with geeks.

I’m honored to have shared a beer with him and he definitely left a void in the tech world that won’t easily be filled. Thank you David!

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.

Tonight Dave Winer linked to Nik Cubrilovic’s blog where he was talking about Twitter vs. Pownce. More on that in a second. I was reading on my Nokia N95. When I got there the page was completely black. Or at least the content area was. So, I called over Patrick and said “give me your iPhone.” I think I might even have said “please.” But that’s unimportant here.

He handed it over and I quickly tapped in Nik’s URL and visited his Web page. Looked great on the iPhone. Even the fonts looked better.

See, this is why I say the iPhone is better than the Nokia for MOST PEOPLE.

Later I saw Eric Rice talking about his own Nokia vs. iPhone debate. See, I have a feeling that Eric would actually LOVE a Nokia N95 over an iPhone. Why? Cause Eric is a geek. Geekier than me, even. And he’s also a content developer. A much better one than I am. Yeah, he uses different tools than I do to create content (I’ve mostly seen his work in Second Life) but he stands out of a crowd. Most people don’t create content. Most people don’t really care whether their phone has a GPS or a video camera. Most people DO want their Web pages to render decently, though.

Even on the camera front I had to reboot my Nokia several times today. See, my camera runs out of memory after opening and closing too many apps. So my camera refuses to load on the Nokia. I have yet to see that behavior on the iPhone.

Eric has it right in his post above. It’s not how many features you have. It’s how many of those features thrill you. My Nokia rarely thrills. Look at the picture above. That’s Family Guy playing. Patrick downloaded it from YouTube. It is an experience that thrills. Thrills in a way that my small screen on my Nokia rarely does.

I take it back. There is one time my Nokia thrills. When I get home and look at my photos. They remind me I had a good day and they are almost as good a quality as my Nikon pocket camera. Yet I have it with me.

And that’s why Eric Rice might really love the Nokia N95 but most everyone else would hate it.

Oh, one other thing. My battery died. Sigh. So unthrilling.

Tom Foremski, aka “Silicon Valley Watcher,” started a new show today called “TechOne.” First show is a fun look at how Silicon Valley reacted to iPhone launch.

Seen in this video is Jamis MacNiven, the guy who owns Bucks, the famous (Jamis says infamous) eatery in Woodside where lots of deals are done (Netscape was incorporated there). He’s talking with Valerie, who works at PodTech.

Oh, also seen is a small snippet of the nighttime conversation I had with Bill Atkinson, member of the original Mac team. Stick this in your iPhone.

Lots more over on PodTech including video from the Mercury News about Spock, the hot new social search engine.

Anyway, welcome Tom to the PodTech family. Glad to have you aboard!

Tonight I was driving home from a family party with Patrick. We were listening to KGO Radio. AM-810. It’s the best rated talk station in the San Francisco area (and is among the best rated station in the world). Its signal can be heard from Alaska to Mexico. The show we were listening to was Bill Wattenburg.

Two ads on KGO caught my ear. The first was an ad for Pat Vitucci and AIG, here’s a list of some of KGO’s advertisers. It was read live by Bill Wattenburg. He endorsed Pat’s seminar.

The second was by Leo Laporte, who came on and endorsed GoToMyPC in his own voice.

I’ve heard Leo endorse other products on KGO recently too in advertisements, including a security dongle (Kevin Mitnick also did such an endorsement).

KGO Radio is owned by Disney Corporation.

These two examples of advertisements are FAR further along the endorsement line than what was done by Federated Media. The ads that caused the TechMeme outcry were NOT endorsements at all, but were just bloggers talking about an advertising slogan and even then weren’t told what to say.

But the ads on KGO radio go FAR further. Most of the ads that hosts on KGO read are from a script. It’s pretty clear that the company is paying those ad readers to say specific things.

Now, I know Leo is pretty high integrity guy. I doubt he’d do an ad for a product he really hated, but would he really endorse GoToMyPC if he weren’t being paid? Might he endorse a different technique? Or teach people how to do such a thing without a commercial product? I’ve listened to Leo a lot (I used to help run his chat room back when he was a host himself on KGO radio back in the mid 1990s) and I could see him teaching people how to do it themselves without buying a third-party product to let you remotely access your files.

One thing, though, all these ads are totally disclosed. It’s very clear they are paid advertisements and are separate from the editorial copy. It’s very clear that Leo is getting paid to take these editorial stances.

But, still, why isn’t everyone yelling and screaming about these kinds of ads on professional media (this is one of the world’s top radio stations, owned by a huge multi-national corporation)?

Here’s why? Beating up on Disney won’t get you any links. Won’t get you on TechMeme. Won’t insert you into a conversation. Won’t build your traffic.

In fact, Leo is so popular and credible that beating up on him might cause a major blowback the way that beating up on Macs usually gets you hundreds of angry commenters (ask John Dvorak about that one).

Now you know why Valleywag is still pushing this story front and center (even Larry Page, cofounder of Google, arriving at FooCamp in a helicopter couldn’t push this story off of the front page over there).

Translation: there’s lots of professional endorsing that’s been going on for years (this isn’t new). As long as it’s disclosed I don’t see the problem with it.

On the other hand, Jeff Jarvis has a major problem with these kinds of advertisements. I respect Jeff’s stance but don’t think Jeff’s stance will be followed by everyone.

For me, I will disclose when I’m doing stuff for money. I’m not going to be as pure as Jeff Jarvis is, sorry, but when I’m not I’ll let you know so you can make up your own mind about what I’m saying.

UPDATE: Leo Laporte explained why he does radio endorsements in my comments and that he won’t endorse a product that he doesn’t already use (and has turned down requests for endorsements from other companies because of that). I believe him when he says this, too, because I’ve seen him turn down advertising and sponsorship opportunities.

I just got an email that told me my blog is lame lately and that I haven’t been updating it the way I should.

The emailer is right.

But I’ve been doing research and building relationships and hanging out at conferences. Shoot me. If my blog is lame, go read TechMeme. There’s lots of bloggers taking up the slack here.

Anyway, here’s some things I’ve been doing.

1. Loading more videos into ScobleShow. Just this week there’s five new interviews. Some good stuff there, including a guy who started a social network and convinced 20% of the people in his town of Burlington, Vermont, to join in! (Interview was done from Google’s New York googleplex too) and a new presentation tool that makes far better PowerPoint presentations.
2. Spending a lot of time on Facebook. Researching the latest stuff takes time and adding 500 new contacts this week alone takes time.
3. Ignoring email. I have more than 1,000 emails. If you’ve sent me one, I am not answering it. This week at least. Sorry.
4. Trying to read feeds. I haven’t gotten to many feeds this week, but I still get to them as often as I can — in the past month I’ve shared more than 1,600 items.
5. Spoke at two different conferences, Supernova and Virtual Goods Summit.
6. Loaded new photos up on Flickr. Including one of Kevin, above. He’s one of the early investors in Facebook.
7. Spent some time on Twitter.
8. Spent some time on Jaiku.
9. Spent some time on Kyte.tv.
10. Went to three evening events this week.
11. Was interviewed by three media outlets.
12. Worked on a Fast Company column due today (not finished with that).
13. Going Photowalking tonight.

Add into that family and chores and stuff like that.

Anyway, yeah, I have focused a bit less on the blog lately. Come leave a video over on my Kyte channel and tell me how lame my blog has gotten lately. It might motivate me to write a killer post about how Facebook is ruining the world or something like that! :-)

I’ve really been bitten by the Facebook/Twitter/Kyte/Jaiku bug. Stephanie Booth, everyone’s favorite Swiss blogger, met me tonight at the Jaiku party (that’s Jaiku’s PR guy, Neil Vineberg holding the Jaiku poster) and said I had to add Dopplr to my bag of tricks (it keeps track of where you, and your friends, are). Forget Dopplr right now, because most of you haven’t yet experienced many of these five services that help you share your presence and other things about what you’re doing, or what you’re thinking about with other people.

Why am I using these services nearly every hour of my waking life? Because they are being talked about and I want to learn what is making people so passionate — nearly everyone in the industry I meet either loves these things or despises them. It seems that every conversation lately is about one of these five services and how they’re potentially changing how we communicate with each other. Translation: there’s a lot of hype here and we’re trying to figure out what they are good for and whether the hype is justified. In my opinion: it is.

I’m not sure what we should call this group of apps. Presence updaters? Microbloggers? Social networkers?

I totally grok why Facebook is quickly becoming the most important social network and presence updater on the Web. If you get added to my Facebook Friends list (it’s easy, just ask) you’ll see that it aggregates a whole bunch of things onto one page. My Kyte videos are there. My Twitter tweets are there. My shared items, er link blog, from Google Reader is there. And a lot more. Plus you can visit any one of my nearly 500 friends and see all their stuff.

So, let’s quickly look at pros and cons of each of these services. First, read Dare Obasanjo’s post on why Facebook is bigger than Blogging to give you a look at his opinion of why these things are getting more attention lately than blogging is.

TWITTER+++++++++++++++++++

Pros of Twitter: It’s the lightest weight of all five of these services. It has the fewest features, but that’s what I like about it. It just provides a constant stream of updates from my friends. I use an app called Twitterrific on my Mac. It’s like an IM service there. I also use Twitter’s Mobile app on my phone to enter Twitter posts (we call them “Tweets”) from the road. Twitter does one thing and one thing well: let me enter messages from IM clients, the Web, a mobile app on my phone, or from other applications via its API and it brings me back my friends’ Tweets efficiently and quickly. Its API brings me tons of apps like my favorite TwitterVision (putting that on screen during conferences always gets ooohhhs and aaaahhhhhs — most people in the world don’t have any clue that something like Twitter exists). So far Twitter has far superior contact handling to its closest competitor, Jaiku, too. That’s one reason why I haven’t switched over to Jaiku yet. I can’t even see if someone has added me as a contact on Jaiku and I can’t add everyone who has added me into my own contact list (something I CAN do on Twitter).

Cons of Twitter: Because it only lets you do one thing — write 140-characters — Twitter gets a LOT of noise. At least it’s noise to someone who looks at my Twitter for the first time. For instance, right now Christian Burns wrote “No really, my arm is killing me.” Now that might seem like noise to someone who doesn’t know Christian. And it is. But, I like hearing such things from my friends. Gives me something to talk about when we get together next time. “How’s that arm doing, Christian?” tells him that I care about him and was paying attention to his Tweets. But it does get old, particularly if you’re like me and you added way too many people into your Twitter contact list. The Twitter service has also been pretty slow. It still takes WAY too long for the Twitter Web site to load up. It’s probably 100 times slower, on average, than a Google page. They need to improve that A LOT to get to Facebook levels. So far it looks like there’s a few hundred thousand people on Twitter. That’s about 10 times as many as Jaiku, but a small pimple on the 25 million that are on Facebook (and Facebook has far less than MySpace).

JAIKU++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Pros: Shows replies to a specific message. I like that sometimes, other times it adds more complexity than Twitter. I like the speed of Jaiku better than Twitter, particularly on the Web app. Part of that might be that I have 4,000+ contacts on Twitter, which is probably slowing down my page load times. The design of Jaiku is nicer than Twitter, too, overall. The mobile app has more features. For instance, if you meet another Jaiku user who has Bluetooth enabled phone it’ll tell you there’s someone new in your vicinity. Jaiku also aggregates messages and RSS feeds and photos from other services. For instance, if you visit my Jaiku page you’ll see my Twitters, my Flickr photos, my Google Reader’s shared items, my blog posts, and more. Adds more complexity than Twitter, but makes it a more useful service too. Particularly for someone who wants a one-page place to show their family everything they are up to.

Cons: the mobile app needs some power-management work. When I use it on my Nokia the battery gets sucked in a few hours (Kyte’s app has the same problem) so I have to be careful to only use the Jaiku mobile app when I have plenty of power, or access to my charger. They say they are working on this. Jaiku’s contact manager needs a lot of work, too. They say that’s on the roadmap, but right now Twitter is way ahead. I also like the Twitter Facebook application better than the Jaiku one.

KYTE.TV+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Pros: Lets me use video, photos, and chat to communicate with all of you. Last night I put up a little video that I filmed with Patrick using nothing but the camera in my Macintosh. Very fast (the fastest way to get video up on the Internet that I know of) and there was an instant audience there to talk about it. Plus, you see the same video no matter where you see my Kyte. Have Kyte’s mobile phone app? You see it there. You’ll also see the exact same thing at the same time on Facebook. Or on my blog (if Wordpress let me put the widget here).

Cons: Isn’t a microblogging service like Twitter or Jaiku. So, if all you want to do is tell your friends you had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, you probably will be better off with one of those two services. The UI is a bit confusing. Once you see it used you realize it’s pretty easy, but quick, sign in and figure out how to open a channel and upload a video. It needs too much handholding.

FACEBOOK++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Pros: has the “updatedness” of Twitter and Jaiku but has a ton of other stuff too. Much better contact management than others. The only service that lets third party developers plug in applications. The best “home page” of the group (aka your profile page). Has a Twitter-like feature too, but that’s not its strength.

Cons: if all you want is a way to tell your friends what you’re up to without all the extras Twitter is better for you. I use both. Adding everyone who is following you as a friend is easier on Twitter (much easier, actually).

PLAXO++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Come back on Monday cause I have a lot more to say about Plaxo after they come out with their new stuff.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Conclusions: if you held a gun to my head and made me choose only one of these services I’d pick Facebook. Especially if I already didn’t have a blog as a platform to communicate with other people. But, there’s a lot of value in all of these, particularly in Kyte.tv because it lets me add video and chat to Facebook and in Twitter, because I have a lightweight way to communicate with other people. I like all of these services, though, for different reasons and will continue using them all.

What’s missing from this list? LinkedIn is the biggest. I have to add that to my toolbag. I also have to try Dopplr. The Radar.net folks showed me a new client they are working on that I’ll have to try out too.

What about you? What’s keeping you from joining in on these services? Do you see any business uses? (I do, will try to write up my thoughts on those).

One of the guys, David Sacks who was CTO, who started PayPal has spun out and started another company. This one aimed, Geni, at helping you to document and share your family tree.

I have an interview with David and a demo too (I’m embedding the demo here).