I just spent an hour decompressing with Marc Canter about all the Open Social and Facebook stuff along with a TON of coverage of how the Social Media space is shaking out (I call it the Social Media Starfish).

He runs Broadband Mechanics, which makes social networks for a variety of businesses around the world including the Times of India and the Sacramento Kings basketball team. He doesn’t call them social networks, by the way, preferring to call them “DLAs” or “Digital Lifestyle Aggregators.”

Anyway, everytime I have a chat with him I learn a ton. Here’s an hour’s worth of Marc, in three pieces.

Part I, where we discuss Facebook and Open Social.
Part II, where we discuss Open Social’s impact on his business.
Part III, where we just continue the theme.

I’ll try to pull out the key things he taught me, but wanted to get these up ASAP.

So, this morning, what has changed from yesterday? Well, for one, every single company involved in the Open Social initiative is sending me press releases. Marc Canter, founder of Broadband Mechanics, is coming over later to talk. I’ll put him on Kyte or Seesmic or something and do another Twitter storm. He should be here between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m.

Anyway, Don Dodge made the point that all of us in the blogosphere are saying that Facebook is dead. Now, last night I read thousands of posts and put some of the best ones onto my link blog. I only saw one guy say that Facebook is dead. So, I don’t know where Don Dodge gets his facts. But, that never stopped bloggers, right? Facts, schmacts, as long as they make a good story we’ll pay attention to them.

I tell ya, the more I understand “the new blogging world” the more I want to create a fake identity and just make stuff up about people.

But, instead, I’m going to crawl back into my little walled garden.

Why am I going back to Facebook? Don Dodge is right that until the Open Social world provides some real end-user “goodness” that we’ll just stay inside the walled garden of Facebook. Here’s why I am staying inside Facebook for now.

1. It’s faster. I played on Plaxo last night and it’s slow to add new users. Frustratingly slow.
2. It’s prettier. I like Facebook’s UI better than MySpace or Plaxo or Ning or any of the others who signed onto the Open Social platform.
3. It’s here today. Yes, some Open Social things are shipping tonight (Plaxo, for instance, deserves credit for getting theirs done ASAP). Notice that when Facebook did its F8 event it had tons of apps SHIPPING at the time of the announcement. How many containers are shipping Open Social apps today? MySpace is a couple of months away, the execs told me yesterday.
4. FeedHeads. It’s the best Facebook app out there. Ironically it uses Google’s Reader. But Google didn’t fly Mario (the developer of that app) into the announcement and I haven’t seen him port his app yet. Now, remember, there are thousands of “Mario’s.” Until they all port their apps to Open Social I ain’t moving. Scrabulous is one of the best Facebook apps. Are they moving? Until they all move there’s no way I can leave Facebook.
5. My 5,000 friends. Yeah, I’m mad that I can’t have more friends, but look at the lockin of my friends’ network. I’m not moving ANYWHERE until all my friends ALSO MOVE. That’s going to be daunting.
6. In the next two months Facebook will announce SocialAds and revenue sharing for those ads. From what I’m hearing what they are announcing is pretty exciting too. If Facebook is PAYING ME to stay on Facebook do you think I’m going to move to Google?
7. Video messages. I’m doing a video conversation right now with Teresa up in Seattle. Until other systems do that I ain’t leaving.
8. Events. The event calendar inside Facebook rocks and is already the biggest event site on the Internet. Bigger, even, than Upcoming.org (which is actually a better event calendar than Facebook).
9. Videos. The way I can discover videos inside Facebook is addictive and compelling. I haven’t seen any Open Social member show me anything that blows that away.
10. The defacto rolodex. Facebook presents people’s information to me in a way that reminds me a lot of my business card collection. But with benefits. So far it’s FAR more advanced than anything else out there (although Plaxo is really close and I love how Plaxo integrates my contacts into Outlook and other places).

So, what are your reasons for staying in the walled garden?

Saran Chari is on my video channel talking about what today’s announcement with MySpace and Google means to developers like Flixter (they make a popular Facebook application).

I recorded this today after the Google/MySpace press conference.

I asked “does it let you build the same kinds of apps you build on Facebook?”

Answer “absolutely.”

I ask about limitations that he sees.

I used my cell phone to record a very short interview with Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, and MySpace’s CEO, Chris DeWolfe, about what this announcement means today.

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.

Last night I was hanging out with a small group of people when Shel Israel told us “there was just an earthquake.” His wife had called him and he happened to pick up the phone. I instantly looked at my phone and saw Maryam had already called me. Turned out that 80% of the people at the table had the same experience — that a wife or significant other had called them and checked in.

But what was fascinating was what happened next: we all went to Twitter where the earthquake was causing its own “Twitterquake.” Damn, were the posts flowing fast. What a lot of people on Twitter realized was there was MUCH BETTER information flowing through Twitter than on any other media. Quickly we realized no one was hurt, no real damage had been done, so we went back to our dinner.

In San Francisco most of us at the dinner didn’t feel it. I immediately left a TwitterGram, so that everyone would hear our voice and understand that nothing happened where we were.

But the more interesting thing was that I was standing next to Gabe Rivera, the founder of TechMeme/Memeorandum, as this was all going down. He predicted, accurately, that the earthquake wouldn’t make it onto TechMeme. He told us that the only way it’d show up is if it started affecting something in technology. He did keep nervously look at his cell phone to make sure that TechMeme wasn’t displaying anything about it.

We did talk at the table, though, that how we get news has dramatically changed. First of all, the word-of-mouth network was the fastest out there. Loved ones are going to probably tell you news like this before anyone else. Twitter is damn fast, too. Beats the USGS Web site with data. And that’s saying something because the USGS sites report quakes within minutes.

Lots of chatter on Twitter discussed that Google News, CNN, and other mainstream outlets weren’t reporting the news. The local newspaper wrote a story, but this demonstrated how inadequate local journalism is: Twitter had far more information than this story had and had it FAR faster and thanks to things like Twitter, Flickr, Kyte.tv, Seesmic, Twittergram, and Utterz, we can cover the story with micromedia in a way that the San jose Mercury News simply hasn’t gotten a clue about.

Well, that’s the Twitterquake wrap up. Anything from your point of view that we should discuss regarding the changes in how we get our news?

Oh, during the quake we didn’t lose power, didn’t lose cell phones, and didn’t lose access to Twitter. During a really big quake there will be lots of infrastructure down, but SOMEONE will be able to get messages out and that’ll really be interesting to watch how information gets shared if, say, all of San Francisco isn’t able to communicate with the Internet.

UPDATE: Mike Doeff was tracking Twitter for every mention of the Quake. Wow, thanks for doing that!

Steve Ball runs the audio team at Microsoft. Buzz and I were comparing notes the other day of all the people we’ve met at Microsoft. We both agree that Steve’s our favorite guy and the guy who we’d most like to hang out with.

I think this video explains why without even trying. He’s creative. Nice. Soft spoken. Never says a bad word about people (even when I know they’ve given him cause).

This video is NOT an interview. It’s just him playing guitar to his daughter — he’s quite an accomplished guitarist and he’s studied with some of the greats (Robert Fripp, for instance). I’ve played this dozens of times over the past few months since I recorded it and it just makes me happy. His daughter is an angel baby. Can’t wait to go to Seattle again to meet up.

You’ve seen Hugh Macleod’s cartoons that he draws on the backs of business cards.

Well, I filmed him drawing my next business card. They’ll be ready in a week or two.

We talk about how he came up with his little characters and such. He also talks about how he came up with the Blue Monster. Among other things.

I filmed this with my cell phone in the Palo Alto Taxis (a hamburger joint) so it’s a bit noisy.

IP Democracy has a headline that says “Web Video is Neither Cheap Nor Easy.” Based on a theme coming out of the New Video Summit.

Oh, really?
Check this out. It’s so easy I did it while on the freeway. And so cheap it cost me nothing.

My video was in response to a lunch I had with a producer who makes big-screen TV — works for one of the big three TV networks. She admitted to me that they were struggling to come up with ways to remain relevant in the world where audiences are shifting from watching TV to spending time online.

I noticed that her crew was very expensive: an audio guy, a video guy, talent, a producer, and really expensive cameras which make my cell phone look totally lame.

But she recognized that my cell phone had media power. She wouldn’t let me turn on my cell phone and film her.

The artist, Hugh Macleod, who came up with the Blue Monster for Microsoft visited Facebook’s headquarters today and I filmed him. If you haven’t been here for long you might not realize that I love Hugh’s cartoons and have for years.

This is “micromedia.” Very short video.

I loved his thoughts on social objects so today when we went to Facebook I noted that he’s a social object producer and it was interesting that he was visiting the social graph producer.

He ended up saying “Zuckerberg, you just watch out.”

I also have a video of Hugh working his Twitter. Off camera we talked about his thoughts on advertising and its role in decommodifying things.

Heh.

Oh, NBC’s new Hula video distribution scheme is getting lots of notice over on TechMeme. I don’t know why I mention that here. I put a couple of the best articles on my link blog, but there’s a lot better stuff to read about on my link blog than the HulaHype. Look for the travel API article by ProgrammableWeb, for instance.