Will Google “Friendster” Facebook?

Anyone remember Friendster? It was an early entrant into the social networking scene. If they had done their work right they SHOULD have been a much bigger player than they are now.

Why aren’t they?

1. They didn’t take care of PR and didn’t take care of bloggers. Hmmm, Facebook is doing exactly the same thing. Several people at the dinner tonight noted that Facebook hasn’t responded to claims that Facebook’s employees are spying on data that the public doesn’t have access to. And that’s just one PR complaint.
2. They kicked people out that they didn’t like. Hmmm, Facebook is doing exactly the same thing.
3. They didn’t respond to new competitors who took away their coolness. Facebook? They are about to meet their biggest competition yet.

Last night I was at a dinner for Hugh Macleod and Oren Michaels. There was talk of an earthquake. No, not the 5.6 one centered near San Jose. The fact that Google is about to jump into the social networking world. TechCrunch caused the shockwave of the year with that one.

One name that’s on the Google announcement, Plaxo, tells me that Google is looking to build a “social graph” that’s open and doesn’t have walls keeping developers from playing. They are looking to “Friendster” Facebook.

Add into this last week’s little “Vic Gundotra” dinner and I’m already seeing a trend: Google is going full bore after influentials, bloggers, and other “new media” developers who need a social network as part of their efforts to remain competitive.

Think about it. Nearly every cool Web property lately has a social network. Upcoming.org, Flickr, Yelp, Channel 9, etc. All have their own proprietary social networks.

Look at MySpace and Facebook. Both don’t solve that problem.

Will Google? And, by helping out Web 2.0 developers and other influentials (Facebook calls them “whales”) will Google cut off Facebook’s PR air supply (which is proving quite lucrative)?

Those are things I’m going to focus on for the next few days.

Some things we still need answers on:

1. Is this new Google social network really fun to use like Facebook is?
2. Does it beat Facebook’s aesthetics?
3. Can the social graph be componetized so that I could add a social network to my blog, for instance?
4. Does the development platform beat Facebook’s? (Can I see which apps my friends have loaded, is the key question).
5. Does it build a really open social graph?
6. If Google does match Facebook’s utility (really easy: just clone the hell out of it but give the “whales” more than 5,000 friends. I’ve talked with many celebrities and businesses and they say 5,000 simply isn’t enough which is why many of them are forced to stay on MySpace) do they allow new kinds of social ads?

It’s going to be an interesting next month getting around to all these companies again and seeing what they plan to do.

Hugh Macleod drawing my next business card

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.

Blue monster visits Facebook

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.

Crawling around the Social Media Starfish, er, reading feeds

So, I was reading feeds and just ran across Fred Wilson’s A VC blog (he’s a famous VC who lives in New York City and invests in a bunch of stuff that we use everyday). He posts that his favorite post was a picture done by the founder of Vimeo. Asks what does that say? About blogging?

It says to me that we’re all weird creatures and that we like weird stuff. Including a founder lying in bed pondering the future.

I put it on my link blog. Why? Cause I liked it too.

Translation: there’s something deeper going on on blogs.

1. Blogs have lost their humanity. Their weirdness. Instead we’ve become vehicles to announce new products and initiatives on.
2. We’ve gotten too caught up in the TechMeme games.
3. We’re bored. The interesting stuff is happening off blogs. This afternoon, for instance, I’m meeting Hugh Macleod and we’re just going to hang out in Palo Alto and have fun. Meet at the Apple store at 3 p.m. on University Ave.
4. Creative stuff and ideas and questions are getting spread out all over the place.

Anyway, hope you’re having a good weekend.

I’ve just put a bunch of stuff up on my link blog, including a report of what we were doing at Nokia on Thursday. Hey, there’s that Social Media Starfish again! Look for “NRC Palo Alto” or “Active Words” in the link blog and you’ll see the starfish.

Speaking of which, if you want to see just the headlines of my link blog, they are reposted over on Fast Company Magazine’s site and also on my Twitter feed for @scobleslinkblog.

There’s a lot of great stuff on my link blog. Joi Ito recommends PhotoPhlow. Fake Steve Jobs gives some interviews there. Microsoft’s Listas is discussed. B5 Media has a post about me being on its advisory board. Louis Gray talks about his love of FriendFeed. And on and on.

Why don’t you subscribe to the feed of my link blog?

Why doesn’t Microsoft get the love?

Let’s leave Halo 3 out of this, for now.

Yesterday Hugh Macleod wrote up his thoughts on Microsoft.

He puts out a theory that Microsoft would be more loved if it told a better story.

I’ve been studying my own reactions to Microsoft lately and I think it’s a lot deeper than that.

I have a REASON to love Microsoft. It propelled my career into a whole nother level. But lately even that hasn’t been enough.

I’ve been asking myself why?

To me it comes down to expectations. Microsoft is like the genius child who has rich and smart parents. Society holds huge expections for such people. If they don’t succeed the story is it’s a child who hasn’t lived up to his/her potential.

Microsoft is much the same way.

We see Google having fun with docs and spreadsheets.

We see Facebook and Plaxo and LinkedIn (not to mention Ning and Broadband Mechanics) having fun with social networking.

We see Flickr, Zooomr (one developer!), SmugMug, Photobucket, and a raft of others having fun with photography.

We see Apple having fun with all sorts of stuff.

We see Amazon having fun with datacenters.

And on, and on.

But where is the kid who has rich and smart parents? Yeah, Microsoft brought us the “Demo of the Year” last year: Photosynth. But what you didn’t read on TechCrunch is that it takes up to nine hours to process one set of images so, while it is a killer demo, it won’t be a product you and I can use anytime soon.

This week we learned that Google is struggling to stay relevant to the new conversation: one that was taken over this year by Facebook. But what is Microsoft doing to stay relevant? It’s like Microsoft has decided to go and spend the inheritance and not do any more work to stay on the bleeding edge. This is a much less interesting Microsoft than it was back in the 1990s, where it seemed every week Microsoft would announce something new and interesting. I remember being a subscriber to eWeek and other trade magazines and it was a rare week that Microsoft didn’t have the most important story. (TechMeme has taken over that role, and this summer how often have we seen Microsoft at the top of TechMeme? Not very often.

This week I learned another Microsoft employee is leaving to start his own company. This guy has asked me to keep it quiet until he can let all his managers know, but he’s someone who is liked and trusted both in Silicon Valley and up in Redmond. He’s a connector. An innovator. A guy who wants to SHIP innovative products.

These kinds of people keep leaving Microsoft because they see it isn’t living up to its potential and is frustrating to work inside of. It’s more fun to go join a small startup, or even one that’s fairly well along its path, like Facebook (everytime I go to Facebook I see more of the people I used to work with).

It’s been more than a year now since I left Microsoft. I really expected Ray Ozzie to come out and do lots of cool stuff for the Internet. But what did we get? A new design on live.com? Please.

The interesting thing is that Microsoft’s bench is so deep that even with the people they’ve lost over the years there still are huge numbers of amazing people working there and they still have advantages that no other company has. Deep, deep pockets. Massive numbers of customers. Profits that keep arriving everyday. A salesforce that’s well run and has its fingers in almost every country in the world.

So, back to Hugh’s post. Microsoft needs a new story. If I were on the management team I’d be looking hard at the Bungie team, the folks who brought us Halo 3.

What did they do right?

1. They stayed away from Microsoft’s politics. They work in a small ex-hardware store in Kirkland, Washington, USA. About 10 miles from the main campus.
2. They kept their own identity. They have their own security. No Microsoft signs outside. A very different feel internally (much more akin to Facebook than how the Office team works together). Each team works in open seating, focused around little pods where everyone can see everyone else and work with them.
3. They put their artists and designers front and center and obviously listen to them. The Windows team, however, fights with their artists and designers.
4. They keep the story up front and center. They work across the group to make sure they deliver that story everywhere. Translation: employees know what the story is, how to communicate it (or when not to), and they have great PR teams who work to make sure that story is shared with everyone.
5. The product thrills almost on every level. Hey, sounds like an iPhone!

The problem is that Bungie is a small exception in a sea of Microsoft.

Changing this company’s public story is going to prove very difficult. Maybe that’s why Hugh drew Microsoft a “Blue Monster” instead of something a little more friendly.

I’m sure some of my friends at Microsoft will misread this and think I’m “a hater.” You can think that if you want. It is intellectually lazy, though.

It’s interesting that since leaving Microsoft only Kevin Schofield (he’s one of the great connectors the company has over in Microsoft Research) has really done a good job of reaching out to me and tried to tell me a “new Microsoft” story.

One thing I did at Microsoft was reach out to the haters and see if I could tell them a new story.

So, I’m game. On Monday night I’ll be at the Halo 3 launch party. I’ll be looking to show my video camera a new Microsoft story.

But until I find it so far it just seems like that rich and smart kid who hasn’t lived up to the potential that we all see in her.

Am I missing something?

Apple press conference (the blue monster goes to Cupertino)

Yeah, you can go over to Engadget or Gizmodo or some Apple-oriented blog (MacSurfer is my favorite because it links to anything that moves in the Apple space).

I’m sure they’ll all do an awesome job of covering tomorrow’s Apple press conference with text, pictures, video, and analysis. It starts at about 10 a.m.

But I’m going to take a different trail. I’m going to use my Kyte.tv channel. I’ll be answering the chat there live. And posting video and audio and other things.

What’s cool about that? Well, you can post videos to my channel! And the live chat there can include audio, text, or video. I’ll be reporting from my Mac and maybe my cell phone (do you think it’d be rude to pull out a Nokia during an Apple press conference? Heh! I guess that’s one way to make the point that the iPhone really needs video capabilities to be considered a great phone).

Oh, and Hugh Macleod will be happy to know that my Mac has a Microsoft blue monster on it. So, the blue monster is going to Apple. Ahh, the fun!

Who is that in the picture above? New York Times tech journalist David Pogue. He wrote a book on the iPhone titled the missing manual.

I wasn’t the one who recognized David to tell the truth. He was having lunch at Bucks when my son recognized him (my son says that Pogue did the best iPhone video). My son is really the one who should go tomorrow. He knows more about Apple than most Apple employees do. He’ll be watching from PodTech’s offices. I’m sure he’ll give us some reactions too.

Stickers needed for my new Mac

Hugh Macleod has an astute eye. He saw that I have one of his drawings (Microsoft’s Blue Monster) on my laptop.

I notice he didn’t catch that I have a Google sticker right underneath that one which says “Go Code.”

You can watch marketers battle right on my laptop.

Speaking of which, I need more stickers. Who has some good tech industry stickers?

Comics, is there any way to make a business here?

Another friend, Dawn Douglass, has been pitching a business for comic artists and those editorial cartoonists that I used to read on the editorial page of the newspaper. She wants to help newspapers (and the cartoonists who are rapidly getting laid off because newspapers are firing staffs) find a new revenue stream. She came up with the concept of the cartoons on this post, too.

I sat through a pitch she gave to a Sand Hill VC (got turned down) and saw first hand how tough it is to raise capital and start a business. It’s hype to say that it’s easy, even in today’s world where a lot IS getting funded. Last Friday I had lunch with Paul Matteucci, who is a partner at USVP. He told me they looked at about 300 businesses over the past year and funded less than 10.

Anyway, Dawn thinks she can make a business out of charging people for using cartoons. I think that might work in some limited situations (I’d be happy to pay $10 a month to be able to use cartoons like the one below on my blog) but I’m a weirdo, as Jason Calacanis told Loic Lemeur in a podcast about his new search engine.

Truth is, advertising is still the best choice for a new business like this. But how to do it? Google’s AdSense usually around only $.50 to $2.50 CPM (payment per thousand page views). Getting 1,000 people to visit your site is actually pretty tough as any Z list blogger will tell you and that’ll only get you $.50 in advertising. So, the numbers of people you have to get to visit your site to build a business is daunting. Cartoonists, she tells me, aren’t willing to do it for free. They want to get paid up front. That’s going to prove difficult.

I keep pointing her to Hugh Macleod who DOES give his cartoons away for free. He got so popular that now companies are willing to pay for him to draw cartoons for them. To me that’s the way to build a business, it seems. Give away something for free to get people to come and buy something else from you. But, we can talk about that another time.

She reminds me a lot of Zooomr’s founder. Idealistic and doesn’t exactly speak the language that the VC’s in the valley speak (they like to see Web 2.0 business plans that have a good chance to get to 10 million users in three years, with a good monetization strategy). I like that idealism of helping people move their work online and get paid for it (Zooomr is going to let people sell photos too). The VC’s, though, are skeptical. One I talked with yesterday about Zooomr said that Corbis and Getty hadn’t made much money selling photos, so he doesn’t think that a new model will be viable. I disagreed, pointing out that there were tons of wedding photographers who could never sell their wares on those bigger sites. But, anyway, demonstrates just how tough it is for some entrepreneurs to get funded.

Would you be willing to pay for cartoons? Especially to put on your blog, Facebook, MySpace, etc? If so, how much?

Off for the weekend … Google Developer Day update

I’m off for the Memorial Day weekend. If you’re in South Lake Tahoe, say hi!

Chris Ulbrich at Google’s Global Communications and Public Affairs office just emailed and said that while Google Developer Day on Thursday, May 31, is, indeed sold out, which, he says, they are sorry about (they even increased the size/numbers of the venues — in San Jose alone they have 1,000 people) they are going to stream all the sessions on the Developer Day site. Here’s the details from Chris:

“We’ll webcast all sessions from Mountain View, starting at 10:00 a.m. PDT with a keynote by Google vice-president of engineering Jeff Huber. We’ll also webcast the main London sessions, including the keynote by open source programs manager Chris DiBona and geospatial technologist Ed Parsons at 12:00 p.m. BST. In addition, we’ll have a YouTube channel with recorded videos of Developer Day sessions from around the world. “

Thanks to Hugh Macleod for the fun cartoon. Hope you have a great weekend, see you on Tuesday!

Meet the “Learning Lunatic”

Last night at the blogger dinner we held for Hugh Macleod a guy, Steli Efti, came up to me and said it was his first day in the United States and said he appreciated being allowed to come to our dinner. I asked him what he was doing and learned that he had come to Silicon Valley to learn about the valley, and to try to build his dream: a new kind of online school, calls it a SuperCool School. He bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco, sold all his stuff and is just trying to learn and meet people and make something happen here.

I found him interesting because it’s the same kind of impulse that, I’m sure, got people to come to San Francisco in the 1850s. They heard there was gold in them thar hills and they were gonna come here and dig it out. Only this guy was here for a lot more altruistic of reasons: he understood that in his hometown of Stuttgart, Germany there isn’t that many geeks to talk ideas with.

Anyway, I don’t think his ideas are thought out enough to really present, but I find him interesting enough to introduce to you.

He’s on Twitter, is looking to meet interesting people in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. He also is paying $100 a night to stay in a hotel and he’s hoping to find cheaper housing so he can stay in California a little longer on his funds. If you are looking for a short-term roommate, drop him a line.

I love meeting dreamers and crazy people who have ideas that they want to change the world. Funny, I took him to see the HP garage, where Silicon Valley started and there was a busload of Japanese tourists there. I wish him luck and he’ll be interesting to follow either way.

Some people I’m hoping he meets eventually are Christian Long and Ewan McIntosh, both of whom are people trying to change the educational system. Funny enough they aren’t in San Francisco.

We had a good laugh over being on Twitter, though. It’ll be interesting to see who adds him as a friend on Twitter.