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.

More details on Open Social was just released here.

In the video here is Vic Gundotra, vice president at Google, who gave a little talk to developers last night — they demo how to build an Open Social application. Vic told me last week that he’s planning a whole raft of CampFires where they’ll bring out a bunch of new developer-focused technologies.

UPDATE: In this video a raft of developers show off what they’ve built on top of Open Social.

Vic is the guy who hired me at Microsoft and it’s fun to watch him build a developer network at Google now.

Some things I’d like to see in future CampFires?

1. Do the videos live and streaming.
2. Open up the discussion to microblogging tools like Twitter and Pownce. Today I brought people into the Google press conference via Twitter and it really rocked. Here’s reactions from around the web from Rob Lagesse. From James D. Kirk. From Jay Meattle, who calls Twitter the next generation of journalism. From ZDNet’s Michael Krigsman, who called this “the hidden OpenSocial press conference.”

Microsoft’s Kevin Schofield (he is an executive who works at Microsoft Research) confirmed today that China is redirecting traffic from Google and Microsoft’s search engines to Chinese Baidu.

Quote? “That really sucks.”

So, the conversation in the hallway here at the Nokia conference that I’m now at is “what will Yahoo and Microsoft do?” Followed quickly by “what will Facebook do?” Or, “is Zuckerberg scared?”

During the last panel, which funny enough was about developers and social networks, they asked the audience which social networks people used. Facebook? Nearly every hand went up. MySpace? 1/3rd of the hands went up? The rest? Very few hands went up.

So, Facebook is STILL in the driver’s seat. Or, as Erick Schonfield says over on TechCrunch: “Not so fast Mike.”

What is the best answer for what Zuckerberg will do that I’ve heard? “Embrace and extend.” Facebook should come out and say “we’re supporting Open Social too.” But then they should say “but we have a new ‘version 2.0′ platform to announce today that goes a LOT further than Open Social goes.”

That would take all the wind out of these sails.

As to Yahoo and Microsoft? Well, I talked with an executive from Yahoo today and he said he had nothing to announce. Translation: we have no clue. If they had a clue they would have had all guns blazing today. Now their choice is to join up. The industry support is too strong behind Open Social. Or, they could make a deal with Facebook on their “embrace and extend” strategy.

What will Microsoft do? Who cares. They bought the inventory on Facebook. They are safe for now by NOT having a developer strategy. I think that’s stupid long term, but heck, my Microsoft stock is going up so who cares?

Words are heating up between Mozilla’s Brendan Eich (he’s the chief technical officer at Mozilla Corporation, the folks who bring us Firefox) and Microsoft’s Chris Wilson in the debate over the proposed ECMAScript 4th Edition. We haven’t heard the last of this and it’s interesting to see this play out in the public square. I’m scheduled to do some interviews already with Mozilla. Would love to have more to cover this issue more completely. I first reported on this friction on my blog last night and some of the comments there have been interesting.

UPDATE: I should have given credit to Ric of OpenAjax for starting this off and helping me see the conflict brewing here.

I spent a lot of time recently catching up on NewsGator. If you’re interested in the RSS world and what’s going on you should check out these two videos. In them they explain how Newsgator is making moves into the Enterprise. You can see how the approach here differs from Bloglines, who was on my show yesterday.

There are two videos.

1. A demo of the new Enterprise-focused synchronization system. Five minutes.
2. A discussion of NewsGator’s moves into the Enterprise. 21 minutes.

I included the demo on this post here, but in the interview you’ll hear RSS reading trends inside corporations. NewsGator’s stance here is unique and hearing from them about how companies are using RSS is interesting. Jeremiah Owyang, social media analyst at Forrester should check this out. We talk at length about what NewsGator’s new integration with Microsoft’s Sharepoint means and how it can be used.

NewsGator includes a variety of feed readers including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and the various NewsGator clients. They’ve really built a system that goes way beyond what any other feed reading system does.

I’ve been getting lots of emails and calls on this, so I know that at least some developers care about the proposal for a new ECMAScript titled the ES4 proposal (PDF). I am still trying to figure out which side to take in this, but from what I’ve been able to learn there are a few sides to this.

1. Mozilla and other browser manufacturers who are trying to push a new version of JavaScript (er, ECMAScript) through the system.
2. Microsoft, who those browser companies see as dragging its feet. Chris Wilson, architect on the Internet Explorer team gives his side of the story. He also wrote a post on the IE team blog. I’ll just link to Chris Wilson’s stuff because he links to plenty of stuff on the other side so you can get up to date on what’s going on.
3. Web developers, who are scared that they are going to have to support yet another version of JavaScript and test their sites on yet another platform.

Where do you find yourself?

Google, last week, told me it was about to announce a ton of things for developers that would be based around JavaScript and CSS. I wonder what it thinks about this conversation?

I’d love to have developers on my show who can explain both sides of this argument to me and also explain what the new JavaScript will do for the Web and for end users, since that’s really who I care about. I don’t have a dog in this fight, so would love to give both sides equal time to explain what’s going on. Anyone game?

UPDATE: Brendan Eich, head of Mozilla, writes back to Chris Wilson about this issue.

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.

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.

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?