…who thought I belonged on this panel discussion tonight of smart media people who’ve done a lot more in their careers than me?

My prediction? There will be another new iPhone in 2008 and it will have a video camera and an open SDK.

Yeah, I’m not taking too many risks there am I? Heheh.

It’ll be interesting to see what kinds of predictions this panel, which includes journalists from BusinessWeek, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, makes. PodTech is filming it, so will have the video up in the next few days.

My other prediction? That I’ll be the stupidest one on this panel. I’ll try to keep up.

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.

The news business is totally commoditized. Don’t believe me? Look at TechMeme this morning. It’s all about Google’s Android mobile platform announcements. All the time. Whew.

Instead of trying to compete with the news crews who have written endlessly I just went to Peets, got myself an iced latte, and filed this report from my cell phone.

Oh, don’t expect to see much about this on my link blog, either. There’s too much discussion about it so far.

My two cents?

1. How come there’s no talk about building devices that integrate better into automobiles? I think Microsoft is WAY ahead here.
2. This is a platform, not a hardware device. Andy Rubin, on the call, said that we should expect 1,000 GPhones.
3. There wasn’t much specific about how this platform beats other operating systems like Symbian and Microsoft’s. Big selling point for Android? It’s open source. Will that lead to end user innovations? We’ll see. So far I haven’t heard anything that’ll make me sell my iPhone on eBay.
4. I like Google’s strategy of giving stuff away to developers. It’s the right strategy, but like with last week’s Open Social announcements by Google there are a LOT of unanswered questions. I guess we’ll see how good this OS is when the Android SDK comes out next week.
5. I hope we really see some innovative new devices like a great podcasting phone, or great integration into your car’s environment. But those kinds of fun things are going to be off in the future and Google seems to want to be a platform player, and seems to be avoiding going up the stack for now. We’ll see if that holds out over the next few years (I suspect it won’t).

Anyway, fun Monday morning.

How news spreads…

Dave Winer just called me and said Apple is coming out with an iPhone SDK next year.

How did he know? It’s on Twitter. Not on TechMeme.

MacNN has the story. I just got up, so more to come after I clear my head.

What will this enable? Tons more apps like what Mike Cannon-Brookes (CEO of Atlassian) is showing me here.

My reaction: wonderful news.

UPDATE: as of about 10 a.m. it’s now on TechMeme. Interesting, I’ve seen this behavior several times before that news will break over on Twitter about an hour before it’ll get on TechMeme.

UPDATE 2: at about 10:45 a.m. it moved to the top of TechMeme. I just read my feeds and the story broke somewhere around 8 a.m. this morning.

Dave Winer wants a T-shirt.

Me, I’d like to let you keep the $100 per iPhone you so generously are going to give me and other early adopters who bought the iPhone.

Here’s what I’d like for my $300.

I’d like an iPhone where software developers can go to town and play.

I’d like an SDK. A real one. One where we can build apps that talk to the accelerometer in the iPhone. One where we can install apps like the very cool Google Maps or Yahoo Finance apps that are on the iPhone’s home screen.

I’d like Flash. SVG. Java. So software developers can build apps like my very cool Kyte.tv mobile app that lets me answer chat from my Nokia phone, or upload video.

I’d like you to turn on the camera so that I can record some video.

I’d like to buy some video games. Like those over on Kongregate.

I think that’s all worth $100 per iPhone. I’d rather have all these things than have a gift certificate.

Thank you. But since I don’t have any of this stuff I’ll take the $100.

Will iPhone Dev Camp be the hottest event of the year? Well, we waited in line to buy it, now we gotta figure out how to write JavaScript and HTML for it. Inside dig at the lack of an SDK. But I think I’ll try to bring Patrick by to film some video. He’s still over the top excited about the iPhone. Maybe this will get him to get interested in programming a bit. Anyway, it’s this weekend at Adobe Systems in San Francisco and looks like it’ll be attended by TONS of great developers.

Oh, and I hope each one of the approximately 300 attendees walks up to an Adobe employee and asks them “how’s Flash for the iPhone coming?”

I hear that many employees are sick of getting asked that. I wonder why? Heheh. I’ve also heard from tons of people that the answer is still the same and still as consistent and fast. Anyway, this is looking like a darn interesting event.

UPDATE: I just learned that no NDA will be needed this weekend.