This is an Apple ad:

Done by Apple. More on that later.

So, last night I was out to dinner with a bunch of smart people. Folks who run their own companies. Folks who have helped many companies get started. Tech companies.

Of course people started talking about my Apple problems. Everyone at the table is a Macintosh user. What was fun is that at one point people started telling me about the problems they have had with their Macs. Many with far more serious problems than I have had.

I tried to turn on my video camera. They all instantly shut up and said “no video.”

Why not?

I dug a little more. It was because they all blamed themselves for the problems of their Macs and I think they also bought into the “Apple cult” which says that if you use a Mac you must be cool. Heck, look at that ad again. Who is cool? Not the PC user.

Now THAT is “brand promise.”

We believe Apple’s marketing so deeply that we aren’t willing to question it.

And then there’s something else. Apple has an ARMY of people who are anonymous who will come and call you every name in the book. I know. They hit yesterday here. I deleted them all, but, dozens, if not hundreds, of comments calling me every name in the book.

They hit over on Andy Beal’s site too. He got tired and just closed the comment thread over there.

The common thing about most of these comments is that it’s MY FAULT that my Apple machine is having trouble.

See, on my Windows machine I’m willing to accept this. After all, I know that Microsoft can’t really test every combination of hardware out there. My Windows machines can take dozens, if not hundreds, of different video cards, sound cards, hard drives, memory configurations, etc. The thing is on my Mac I didn’t load any third-party RAM — Apple’s brand promise is that you never will need to open your box to customize it. Heck, the iPhone goes further. You CAN’T customize it and if you try you have to “break” into it. I’ve never opened the box, or tried to do some weird stuff. I’m even pretty protective about what I load on this system. Why? Cause my world has moved to the Internet and browser-based apps. No need to install tons of software like I used to on my Windows boxes.

I watch that video over and over again and I get really pissed.

Pissed enough to say “screw you Apple” all over again.

Some of you (hi Fake Steve Jobs) misunderstood my point about Apple PR’s not wanting to give me free or loaner hardware. See, I know Apple sends free or loaner hardware to certain journalists. But only those it deems “important.” Steven Levy. Walt Mossberg. Those types. They got iPhones two weeks before those of us who were “unimportant” could BUY them in the stores.

The point isn’t that I want free (er loaned) hardware. It’s that Apple uses that free hardware to MANUFACTURE the “myth” of Apple as being great, and good, and “cool.” Also, if these guys want to get more free or loaner Apple hardware before the rest of us they need to make sure not to point out too many flaws in it. Yeah, they can point out a few, but they know they got picked because they generally write pro-Apple stuff. It’s a reason why I don’t want free stuff and why I waited in line to be among the first in the Valley to have my own iPhone.

Again. Brand promise of Apple. Only those who will give Apple a fair shake will get the goods. When Fake Steve Jobs says I’ll never get invited to another Apple press conference again he isn’t too far from the truth! Retribution is a bitch.

UPDATE: That’s not totally fair on my part. I know these journalists will report when they are sent something that doesn’t do what it promises. I need to correct this post. The journalists don’t get free products that they get to keep (most of the times). They do send them back. I’m sorry to the journalists who I made this point about. Walt Mossberg has an ethics statement where he talks about this.

UPDATE 2: Ryan Block, who writes for Engadget, has a good set of replies to my claims above.

It’s the brand promise of Apple. You will have to BUY your Apple after those “famous journalists” get to use one for free for two weeks and you vil like it. Oh, and you’ll beg to be let into a Steve Jobs keynote because you vil want to sit at the feet of Jobs and drool on the floor like the idiot blogger you are.

Just remember the brand promise of Apple, OK?

1. If your machine behaves badly it’s your fault.
2. Any idiot can use an Apple machine (that’s what they tell you before you buy one) but if your machine crashes then you must be a “genius” to fix it (they have bars at stores now where you can “borrow” a genius, but only after waiting in line — my son twice has been turned away from genius bars because they were too busy and was told to “come back tomorrow at 10 a.m.”). Oh, and if you are having problems at 10 p.m., and dare tell people on your blog about your problems you’ll get tons of abuse back “how DARE you be an Apple user and not know you needed to flash your PRAM.” Translation: any idiot can use a Mac, but not really.
3. If you dare complain about the brand promise you’ll get pounced on by hoardes of annonymous astroturfing Apple FanBois.
4. If you don’t get the brand promise of Apple don’t attempt to point out that the ads are ridiculous. Instead, just leave the cult and go back to using that “inferior” machine you used to use.
5. Check out my new Mac, with its cool brushed metal surface and the light-up Apple logo.
6. If you use an Apple machine you will be as cool as Kevin Rose.

Baratunde has it right when he says “I hate the smugness of Apple.”

Oh, and to the guy who says I’m a Microsoft shill. You better check your facts there. Over the past year I’ve spent more than $10,000 on Apple products of MY OWN MONEY and if you include the machines I’ve bought for PodTech, I’ve spent more than $20,000. Not to mention my son and I spent two days in line waiting for our iPhones. Now if THAT is what you call “shilling for Microsoft” I wonder what “shilling for Apple would look like?”

I guess I just am not cool enough to like my Mac. I’m back on my Sony Vaio, which has never crashed the way my Mac did the other night. It also never has needed to have its memory and graphics controller replaced the way my Mac did. And its USB ports work, unlike those on my son’s computer. But it decidedly isn’t cool.

It doesn’t come with the brand promise of Apple.

Oh, and back to that ad at the top of my blog? Have you ever met the PR guy for Microsoft? That’s Frank Shaw. A really nice guy. He even has a blog (idiot! — Apple hires all the “cool” PR people and they never will do a blog) Who does PR for Apple? Katie Cotton. She’s a LOT closer to the PR lady in that video above, which is TOTALLY ironic — watch this video again and compare to the ad above. Brilliant marketing.

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.

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.

Mark Zuckerberg won’t tell you his favorite Facebook application (Charlene Li just asked him on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit) but I will. It’s Feedheads (just was renamed from Google Reader Shared Items App). Louis Gray has the details.

If every app were as well done as this one Kara Swisher wouldn’t be able to call Facebook apps “toys.”

You all should spend some time understanding what this app does. It’s deep and uses the social graph in a way that I haven’t seen any other app do.

I’m talking with Andrew Zolli. He is the currator of the highly-regarded Pop!Tech conference, coming up next week.

Some things they are just announcing:

1. Pop!Casts. Really cool little video snippets. Includes “embedded ability to create open source subtitles in 100 languages.” You can subtitle as much as you like of a particular video. There are already eight videos translated to eight languages. “The data behind it is even more interesting than this.” I’m playing with this right now and it’s f***ing awesome. You can switch back and forth between english and a bunch of other languages. It compiles a new video when you add a new language. Unbelieveable. Done by Dotsub.com, which has other videos. Why YouTube doesn’t do this? Here’s the English versions of the eight videos (play them and in the player you can switch back and forth between the other languages). Zolli says this
2. Pop!Tech carbon offset initiative. Last year they invested an amount to offset the amount of carbon dioxide generated by the attendees in attending PopTech — that turned into a project with (solar electric light fund self.org) where they are replacing diesel generators with solar generators. This year with eBay they are coming up with a new Web site (exclusively announced here) http://www.ebay.com/poptech where they picked three projects that are doing social development work in several communities in the 2/3rds world (Brazil, Nicaragua, and Africa). They used to call that the “developing world” but now we call that the majority world or the 2/3rds world.
3. National Geographic Photo Camp: they are outfitting several kids from poor countries with cameras and they’ll capture the event and share their photos (they also are paying for National Geographic photographers to teach several of these kids how to be professional photographers in their communities).
4. Mobile empowerment is a big theme. Nokia will show off Mosh. Peer-to-peer sharing platform. Subscribe to packages of content that are peer produced on your device. Pop!Tech is doing a bunch of talks and the participants will interview each other using mobile devices, etc.
5. All on stage content will be shared live at poptech.org/live and will start at 9 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday. Unlike other events of this caliber (TED and Davos) they broadcast all their content live to the world, which really is great.

Thanks to Seagate for giving all speakers a free hard drive. The speakers at this event aren’t paid, so that really is great. Thanks to Buzz Bruggeman who arranged this interview. I’ll do a separate interview with Andrew after the conference is over.

I wish I were going.

At the Graphing Social Patterns conference there was a guy who said that Facebook was worth $100 billion. He was properly derided, in my view, by most of the people at the conference.

But, one of his arguments was “would you have said that Google wasn’t going to be worth $100 billion back in 1999?” Yeah, I probably would have said you were smoking good crack if you told me that back then.

Problem is that if you said that back then you would actually have been right.

Now, in eight years will Facebook be worth $100 billion?

Well, let’s go back and study the conditions that caused Google to get there.

1. They shipped a real ad platform that opened up a new kind of advertising: contextual advertising.
2. Search turned out to be one of the best ways to concentrate people with intent to do something together. Think about it. If you search for, say, baby strollers, aren’t you being concentrated into a pool of other people who are looking for baby strollers? That’s what made Google’s ad platform so potent. Does Facebook concentrate people who have intent to do something together? Not as clearly.
3. Microsoft and other major players left them alone. Ballmer admitted to the company employees in a meeting I attended that he had made a mistake by ignoring Google. His belief probably was that Google would never be a $100 million company, much less one with a $194 billion market cap.

So, will these three things happen for Facebook?

No. #3 definitely won’t. Already there are tons of companies jumping into Facebook’s waters.
#2? We don’t yet know if that will play out. I think it might. Many other people who are far smarter than me don’t think so.
#1? Yes, that one will definitely happen.

Translation: I agree with Henry Blodgett (damn, never thought I’d say that) that Mark Zuckerberg should take any money being offered to him at a $15 billion valuation. Yeah, the planets might align for Facebook to get to a higher valuation but there are very real risks that it won’t.

On the other hand, Zuckerberg has turned down such advice to “sell out” before and so far he’s been right. Is he still right? I wouldn’t be making that bet.

Kara! Kara! Kara!

Kara Swisher SSSSSOOOOO nails what is wrong with the application developers who are trying to make money over on Facebook.

The other night I was on a panel at the Graphing Social Patterns conference where I helped judge a bunch of Facebook apps.

With each one I asked myself “would I install this?”

The answer with almost all of them is: no. The sad fact, though, is that most people WILL install the stupider apps.

The winners? Three were great, one was really lame.

The Game, by Robert Fan
Judge-O-Rama by Chris Heald
Visual Bookshelf, by Aaron Battalion
Resume, by Joe Suh

Let’s throw out the lame one, the Game, which is a lewd “Hot or Not” app. The others were pretty interesting, though. The Resume app lets you integrate LinkedIn stuff into your Facebook profile. I’m not a fan of LinkedIn, but this app was well done for those of you who are.

If you read books Visual Bookshelf is an awesome way to share your bookshelf with others. Definitely shows a lot of thought and goes way beyond the stupider types of apps.

I have a long list of apps waiting for me. Some are interesting like file sharing, but most are pretty toyish kinds of apps.

I’m really looking forward to the second wave of apps that really do something interesting with the social network of people I’ve added to my Facebook account.

Another problem that Kara doesn’t touch upon is that a lot of these apps simply don’t scale and break for people with thousands of friends.

Looking forward to seeing if Facebook apps improve at the SNAP Summit in San Francisco on October 26.

Oh, and here’s Steve Broback talking about his Facebook Conference, Web Community Forum, up in Seattle on December 5-6, on a walk recently near my house.

Oh #2: Kyte.tv has a new look. I’m going over there today to talk about the changes that are coming to Kyte.tv over the next few weeks. I’m not sure I like this new look. How about you?

UPDATE: I used my Nikon S51C pocket camera to film this video. But Kyte wouldn’t let me upload the high resolution version (said that it was bigger than 50MB, which it couldn’t accept), so you get the small version which makes the player look lame. I’ll push Kyte to increase the limit so we can do more interesting videos.

Damn, what happens when you’re on a panel with Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis? You have to fight just to find a place to get a word in edgewise! I’ve been getting lots of notes from people who says that this was the best panel at the Graphing Social Media conference. I don’t know about THAT but it was pretty entertaining at parts. Especially when Mike told security to remove a guy who thought Facebook was worth $100 billion.

I was talking with a Google employee last night at the Graphing Social Media conference.

Aside: why are there more Google employees there than Facebook ones? I think Facebook’s attitude toward the community is saying volumes to all of us.

Anyway, he asked me to guess which Google service had the most page views every day.

Is it search? No.
Blogger? No.
Google Maps? No.
Picasa? No.

So, what is it?

Orkut.

Orkut?

Yeah. Now do you get why they just bought Jaiku?

Now do you get why the world is going to pay attention to what Google releases on November 5?

Yeah!

Facebook has real competition coming. Competition they haven’t yet faced.

It’s going to be an interesting period to watch them go at it.

I have 552 reasons to hate Facebook. I sure wish they would let me add more than 5,000 friends. If Google doesn’t have such a stupid limit that’ll get me to check it out, at minimum (I can’t add any more friends on Facebook).

A few months ago I interviewed the Jaiku founders. I found them to be very smart. This is a good purchase for Google. Add it onto their new social network that’s coming (Orkut 2.0) and Google just made a major move against Facebook.

Steve Clayton writes a post titled “Some Microsoft balance. At last.”

In the meantime Google breaks through 600 and MSFT is still stuck under 30 (I own stock in MSFT and not Google so my “balance” is out of whack. Heh.).

Anyway, Steve, one thing you SHOULD have pointed to was the new Microsoft Health Vault. That’s a legitimate place where Microsoft kicked Google’s behind by being first. That site could really use some SEO, though. Whoever wrote the title tag for that page should be sent to Danny Sullivan’s school for a while to learn what mistakes he/she made and how to correct them (it is hard to find this page on Google, believe it or not).

I see even TechCrunch gave Microsoft props for being first out of the gate. I wonder why Steve didn’t make a bigger deal about this?

Later today I have an interview with a doctor at Stanford’s Children’s Hospital who works in the IT department there and we talk more about these kinds of health services and how they might be used. I love my job, I get to hang out with so many smart people and I get paid for it! I pinch myself again.

Anyway, enough Microsoft balance for today. I’m off to Dave’s Facebook conference now that I’m all balanced up.

UPDATE: my interview with the Stanford doctor is now up.