InfoMobile has a video of the new Jaiku client coming next week for Nokia mobile phones. That looks pretty rocking. Jaiku is a competitor of Twitter and this looks a lot nicer than Twitter’s mobile app.

Yesterday I was sicker than a dog. I haven’t been that sick since I was in China in 1995. I was a pitiful sight. Just curled up in bed and could barely move. You know I’m sick when I don’t even turn on the laptop.

But, as I started to get better I was playing with my Nokia N95 phone — mostly cause Maryam kept calling me to make sure I was still alive. Many of the mobile apps really have some major holes. It’s like the authors of them don’t really use their cell phones with their own apps.

Twitter’s Mobile App, for instance, doesn’t let me click on URLs that are included in posts. I’m going to try Tiny Twitter to see if it’s better (Java required, so won’t work on your fancy new iPhone).
Google’s Mobile Reader isn’t even close to the desktop version. No river of news, no sharing, no keyboard shortcuts that I can figure out.

On the other hand, Google’s mobile search really is nice. Especially after you customize it for a while and add things like stocks, weather, and your favorite news sources.

And Google Mobile Maps rocks. I look at it everytime I’m about to get into my car because it shows live traffic data for the San Francisco area. Except I can’t figure out how to make it use the GPS device in my Nokia.

You can tell that Kyte.tv was designed by a young startup that gets mobile phones. It’s a little complicated to use and figure out what it’s for, though.

Shozu rocks on mobile phones except that once in a while photos and video don’t get uploaded so I have to open the app up and make sure that things got sent up OK. I can’t figure out why that happens.

I haven’t tried out Radar.net yet, but that’s next on my list.

Anyway, I’m staying home today. I’m also going to take some time off of reading feeds. I’ll be honest, I’m addicted to feeds and I’m not getting my work done, so gotta get off of those for a while.

What do you think about mobile apps? Which ones do you love and hate?

UPDATE: Jaiku has a new mobile version coming next week. Gotta get that and try it out.

The blogosphere is going full tilt on a privacy report that says that Google is worst in its approach to privacy.

Danny Sullivan has the best response I see. I was hoping this report was more factual than it looks cause we need to have a real conversation about privacy. If you read the privacy report you should read Danny’s blow-by-blow response to it.

That said, Google’s PR is really stinky. Google isn’t paying attention to what normal people think of it anymore and it’s getting a bad reputation because of that. I heard it slammed over and over again for street-level views on Google Maps and no one from Google responded in most of the mainstream talk shows I heard talking about it. They should have a full-court “feel good” initiative where they have normal everyday citizens come in and meet the engineers, and look at the privacy issues.

Google’s PR is focused on the wrong things and isn’t warm and fuzzy and with big companies who are taking over our online data they need to have a warm and fuzzy feel.

Who runs Google PR? Why isn’t he or she blogging? Frank Shaw, the guy who runs PR for much of Microsoft at Waggener Edstrom is blogging and shows up to lots of events so we know who to call, or who to link to and wait for an answer. The fact that I don’t even know who to link to on this post demonstrates that Google PR is being out hustled by its competitors. This report demonstrates that in a big way.

Bad PR is a predictor of government action. Everyday Americans are getting very nervous about Google. They aren’t getting good messages from Google. No transparency. Tons of secrecy. No warm and fuzzy meetings with Google about privacy. No one responding to talk radio, which, if it didn’t have Paris Hilton to pull talk show hosts off of the Google story was getting seriously slammed.

First thing that Google should do? Put up a damn YouTube video! Search “Google Privacy Policy” on YouTube and do you find anyone from Google talking about its privacy policy? Why not? (Not that Microsoft is any better, but Google should be out front and leading here).

UPDATE: I actually did find a video from Google’s Rajen Sheth talking about its privacy policy (he’s responsible for the development and management of enterprise products at Google).

Here’s Microsoft’s privacy center and Google’s privacy center pages (first results for “Microsoft Privacy Policy” and “Google Privacy Policy” on Google).

UPDATE 2: Google’s own blog search engine demonstrates that Google is losing the PR war on this one. Danny Sullivan’s voice is nearly alone out there in defending Google.

UPDATE 3: to see just how badly Google is doing on blogs tonight, let’s look at the latest posts from just the past hour’s results:

• Google rated bottom for privacy.
• Shelley Powers: “What’s particularly scary, and I think the report mentions this, is that Google can’t understand why we’re concerned.”
• BungaTech: “So, what does the company that promises to “never be evil” have to say for themselves? Not a whole lot: Nicole Wong, Google’s general counsel explains that the company stands behind its users and is sticking to their aggressive privacy strategy.”
• Tainted Kernel: In terms of privacy … Google fails.
• InfoWorld: “Google executives were not immediately available to comment on the report’s findings.”
• Tess McBride: “Is somebody watching me? It’s probably Google… .”
  
• Scott Cleland: “Why Privacy is a competitive issue in FTC’s Google-DoubleClick merger review.”
  

What do you think?

Oh, and how should corporations fight the perceptions that come out in text? Go into video IMMEDIATELY! Get conversational. Take open public questions and answer them in chat or in Twitter or in Facebook or in blog comments or in YouTube comments (best yet, all the above). Appoint a team to answer questions 24 hours a day until the story dies down (and even then make sure you watch blog search engines to see if they start getting talked about again). Make sure every blogger knows where you’re hanging out and where to link for the best information.

Can you tell I’m hanging out with a bunch of PR professionals right now?

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?

Robert Cringley writes a provocative post about Google’s 20% time and that it’ll cause problems in the future as employees get frustrated that their ideas aren’t getting implemented.

I think he underestimates what’s going on inside Google.

First, did you know that every employee has access to the source code? All of it? I don’t know of any other company of Google’s size that gives every employee access to every source code asset. For developers this is like being in the coolest sandbox in the world.

So, an employee could build a pretty darn interesting system on his/her 20% time and get buy in from the people involved. Say you wanted to build a Digg-like system for Google Reader? Well, you don’t need permission to build it. Just build it, then show it to the Google Reader team. If they like it, then they could turn it on.

Now, what if they don’t like it? Well, what, you gonna go outside and do that? No way. Google has lockin on interesting ideas that you could come up with. Forget the legal lockin too. What’s the real secret sauce over at Google? Is it your idea? No.

It’s the infrastructure!

The datacenters, the fiber, all that. Look at the troubles Technorati had earlier this week. Or that Twitter had over the past two months.

Getting your idea to work (and to be integrated with something that’d bring you large amounts of traffic) will not be easy outside the walls of Google.

Yesterday I had lunch with a VC and he said they are seeing remarkably few Googlers quitting and/or starting new companies.

My friends at Google are unhireable. Why? Cause they are happy and engaged in the mission of doing Google’s work. So, Cringley’s caution might turn out right long term. But not this year. And that built in sandbox is going to prove pretty resilient and is something that Cringley didn’t seem to take into account.

My Vpod.tv rocks.

Where do I find this stuff? Twitter. Shoot me.

Oh, it’s in French. But my browser is playing a video full screen. Why can’t YouTube do this?

Tons of really great analysis is up on my link blog of the Facebook stuff. Plus a ton of other great blogs.

Is Facebook worth the hype? Consider that in the past three weeks more people have joined Facebook than are on Second Life. Second Life has been around for years and got a ton of hype because it makes cool images to put into other media.

Even on Twitter there’s been a ton of posts tonight about folks playing with joining Facebook and Twitter.

Translation: yes.

Sometimes first impressions are better than they appear on a more measured look. Technorati is down right now and was for quite a while. UPDATE: It’s back up now. Why am I writing this? I don’t remember that Google’s Blogsearch EVER having been down (I use both quite often).

Why does Google’s main search have such a strong position in my head? It’s always fast and it always is up. I can remember only two times in the past eight years when I couldn’t get Google to come back and it almost always comes back really fast.

I bet there are more than a few people trying to get to Technorati right now cause of all the new discussion about its new design and features. Yet they are getting an ugly error message.

At least when Twitter was down recently there was some humor in its error message — pictures of cats poking around inside a server with a funny headline.

Engtech says goodbye to Technorati too.

I’m sorry for getting all hyped up. Last night Technorati looked very cool and it impressed me. That first impression has been getting worse and worse all day long.

I remember how Microsoft gathered market share in the 1980s and 1990s: they just executed well enough and waited for their competitors to stumble.

I hope Technorati will be back tomorrow. I was trying to do a more in-depth review of the new Technorati.

But first on my quality checklist is “are you always up and always fast?” How about yours?

I’ve had onstage conversations with Andrew Keen twice in the past week. He’s the author of “Cult of the Amateur,” a polemic about how bad the Internet (and particularly blogs, who he writes are written by “monkeys”) is making nearly everything suck. This is a marketing strategy wrapped in the clothing of a book. Brilliant one too, as I’ve written before.

I hate writing about it cause I’m playing into his publisher’s hands. If I say “don’t buy it, it’s a crappy book” many of you will rush out and buy it just so you can see what I’m talking about. So, I won’t say that. Go and buy it. Make Andrew rich! That way he’ll be a professional author and we can all then write a polemic about that. Heheh.

Anyway, Dan Farber reports on the Sunday debate. So does Scott Roseberg. So does Renee Blodget.

Actually, for being such a polemic, it did engender some interesting conversations at both events.

Well, that’s enough from “your monkey.”

Oh, wait, it’s time to drive John Welch nuts with my evening’s post of my link blog’s headlines! Heheh. If you don’t want to wade through page after page of full text items on my link blog, just the headlines and links to items are on the Twitter Feed for my Link blog here.

1. Facebook Platform: The Road to IPO?
2. Pandora bringing Internet Radio to Cell Phones
3. Google CEO on Education: Google Search is key
4. VMIX to Power Traditional Media Social Networking Components
5. Follow Up To My Sky Is Falling Post
6. Will DRM-free tunes turbocharge music sales?
7. Interview: Howard Rheingold
8. Interview: David Weinberger
9. Memo to Entrepreneurs: Advertising isn’t a strong business model
10. Rocky
11. Sonos announces new bundle, Pandora integration
12. your library is delicious
13. Netvibes Revisited
14. Pandora Goes Mobile, and Sonos, and More
15. What thoughts should I think?
16. Rootly Relaunces: Design Much Improved
17. Google Calls for Real-Time Spectrum Allocation
18. Seventeen year Cicadas and other stuff
19. Justin.TV Network Launches: More Shows to Come
20. The West Coast Whining Continues … AD NAUSEUM
21. You Have the Choice
22. World of Warcraft Patch 2.1.0 Out Now
23. DigitalKatie — getting her SecondLife
24. No-Frills Videos 101
25. Scoble’s Malaise and Arrington’s Wish for a Downturn usher in a new Silicon Valley Phase
26. Being John Heinricy
27. Maker Faire Video
28. May 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, SIlverlight, WPF, and .NET
29. The Unblogosphere
30. How Microsoft beats Google in ad agency battle
31. 7+7 Reasons Why GOogle Buying FeedBurner is a Match Made in Heaven and Hell
32. Resource hunt heating up
33. Adobe and Microsoft’s Different Approaches to the Development Platform
34. The Future of Ask.com: Search? How About Advertising
35. The Web as Enterprise Productivity Tool
36. Kill the Cash Cow Before Your Competitors Do. Really?
37. Why I Don’t Like Video — My Brain is a Mini-Google, Yours is Too
38. Silicon Valley BUZZ Dilemma
39. GMail Attachments Double to 20MB
40. Roundups: EcoModo - The Best of TreeHugger
41. Every good domain is taken. Here’s why
42. Down and Out on the Internet
43. A community launch: Zooomr Mark III
44. Launch: Zoho Notebook beta launches
45. Maker Faire videos!
46. World Golf Tour launches, worth a round
47. The Sad State of Online Advertising
48. Five principles of blogging
49. Yet more on Panorama
50. Could Ask.com Ever Topple Google? Wait, Let Me Stop Laughing First
51. Authenticity in Social Media
52. Video search company, Blinkx, blows bubble with IPO
53. How to Get Out of Your Funk A-Listers: Stop Thinking About Money
54. Begginer’s Mind for the A List Blogger
55. Live Innovation Journalism Conference Notes: Private equity is biggest threat to journalism in Silicon Valley
56. TweetVolume Shows How Many Times Your Name is On Twitter
57. Apps I’m trying out
58. Second Brain: Organizing Your Information Chaos
59. Tribler Combines YouTube, BitTorrent, and Last.fm
60. CDN Sector Heats up with Level 3 in the Game
61. Keith Thompson: Totally Off the Grid
62. Pandora Still Hates Foreigners, But is Now on Sprint and Sonos
63. Your Invited to a Stanford symposium: How will we pay for the journalism we need?
64. Photojournalism: American Diversity Project
65. Not All Notebooks are Created Equal
66. Message to Michael: Just Say, Well, No.
67. Google Maps Mania links for 2007-05-22
68. Why Microsoft will Never Succeed In Search
69. On2 buys Finnish mobile video company
70. How to Download YouTube videos
71. Sun’s Schwartz Pledges to Use Patents to Protect Red Hat and Ubuntu
72. No more fun in the Valley
73. Another Way to Blog
74. N95 Chronicles: Real Rhapsody (almost) Rocks
75. Five crucial things the Linux community doesn’t understand about the average computer user
76. Dreamliner: Boeing 787LEGO-like Building Begins, Kicks Airbus’ Nuts
77. Watercam: Sanyo Xacti E1, World’s First Waterproof Camcorder
78. Like, Totally WIred
79. Research: Future of Online Advertising
80. Broadband Enterprises’ Digital Upfront
81. Mashup Summit

Why are there some train pictures (old steam engine) on my link blog tonight? Cause I love old trains. Shoot me.

Skip over the first page of stuff and go for the meat. The tech blogs continue amazing me with the quality of info and opinions. Oh, heck, I just posted some photos of a B-17 that’s been buzzing Silicon Valley, too. I love reading blogs. I learn a lot, get experiences I’d never be able to have, get the latest tech news, and keep in touch with my friends.

Some other headlines on items on my link blog from just the past 24 hours?

1. CBS Does Indeed Scoop Up Wallstrip
2. Overview of the Identity Landscape
3. Little Guys Care
4. CBS Acquires Wallstrip: You Can Make Money from Blogging!!!
5. Dan Pink: writer, presenter, mensch
6. Google Launches Hot Trends (Sorta)
7. Rumblings above
8. Silverlight resources post by ScottGu
9. Journalists Made for AdSense Publishers, and Regression to the Mean of Content QUality
10. Blog spam is annoying
11. Site News
12. Google Cleaning House?
13. UP 844 and SP 4449 - The Dalles to Tacoma
14. YouTube Bollywood Channel
15. Collaborative Film Making with Your Broadcaster
16. SlideBurner
17. Google and Yahoo included in TechCrunch20 Cabal
18. Maker Faire on Video Via Rocketboom
19. Roundups: Maker Faire Roundup — Look At All the Fun!
20. Wordpress.com crosses 1 million
21. Lessig and the Pirate Bay
22. Bob Brewin on embracing more languages, JavaFX, Spring, and the future of Solaris
23. The Ultimate Online Video Source
24. Full Feeds vs. Partial Feeds
25. Trends of Online Mapping Portals
26. NewsFlash! — Amazon has DMR Free MP3s
27. Magnify.net Growing Fast with 1.2M Videos
28. MySpace Still Dominating Social Networks with 80% of Visits
29. Microsoft’s open source saga
30. Playogg.org: A website dedicated to promoting Ogg music format
31. Donald — Need a job?
32. Channel 4 Radio Station for Second Life
33. Microsoft’s reorg: All about Google, IBM and Apple?
34. Exploiting Silverlight with PopFly
35. Totally Geeky or Geek Chic? Lego Robotics
36. One Laptop Per Child and the Cry Babbies
37. Zooomr Mark III: New Features, Better Look
38. Is Scoble Really Blocked in China?
39. Metrics Driven Party Planner — MyPunchbowl
40. Second Life rolling out WindLight Atmospheric Rendering
41. Popular Flash Journalism tips
42. Valleywag Thinks My Old Posts are Breaking News
43. Ravi Venketesan, Chairman of Microsoft India
44. Ten Reasons the World Needs Patent Covenants
45. MindTouch Powers AmplifySD’s Music Community
46. The Travel Channel Acquires Travel Blog for Editorial Content
47. Zooomr Mark III
48. Josh Gliddon sees some Silverlight
49. TechCrunch on Zooomr Mark III
50. JavaScript: The Lingua Franca of the Web
51. The Complete Small Business Solution — The Potential of a Google/Salesforce Alliance
52. Let Your Readers Do the Selling For You
53. Seattle Times blog on Microsoft, and aligning around opportunities
54. How big will the mobile ad biz be? Depends on who you ask
55. Understanding Adobe’s Apollo
56. IBM: Dominating the SOA market
57. ABC.com Readings Online HD Shows with “Streamlettes” from Move Networks
58. Dell Announces Tablet Latitude
59. Etags? I’ve never even heard of eTags!
60. The Rapid Rise of the West Coast Media Industry
61. Censoring Free Media (Or…Fighting Letters to the Editor)
62. Apple Investor News Goes Live (Apple 2.0)
63. Zoho Notebook looks good
64. Project readOn Offers Captions for Any Video
65. Wink Adds Twitter to its Search
66. Shopalize Launches Twitter for Shoppers
67. Marketing and Twitter
68. I don’t think that blogging is one of “my things”
69. Why Genetic Medicine is Tricky
70. O’Reilly Radar > San Francisco Chronicle layoffs
71. The Media Interview
72. SnapLogic seeks to simplify data integration
73. Best New Mashups: Charity, Digg, Running
74. Convergence Time?
75. My Start-Up Life Ships
76. Video: BBC Interview (Teenagers, Facebook)
77. The Always on Society
78. A conversation with Allen Wirfs-Brock about the history of Smalltalk and the future of dynamic languages
79. Tips for Building Online Communities
80. Mesh networks for the wireless masses, courtesy of Meraki
81. Vikram Maden Sums up WinHEC News
82. Going Private: Alltel for $27.5 billion
83. Google Coop Embeds Gadgets in Search Results
84. Marketing Voices interviews Biz Stone of Twitter
85. Watch: Plazes to move into Twitter and Jaiku space
86. IBM Sensors Link Real World and Virtual World
87. Hawaii Court to Decide if a Blogger is a Journalist
88. Alex Reisner’s cabinet of statistical wonders
89. Males between the ages of 18-24 more likely to download podcasts via iTunes
90. Zlio Cut Off by Amazon
91. Cathedral & Bazaar on All Time Best Business Book List
92. Google Denies Content Re-Use Deal with UK News Publishers
93. Tasty Flash bits: Milk, missives, and grins
94. The technology of OLPC’s hundred dollar laptop
95. Behind Yahoo’s New Map Design
96. Be truthful or be exposed
97. Making sense of Presence and Micro-blogging

Whew! The biggest things that happened today? New Zooomr. Zoho Notebook shipped, Yahoo shipped a new Map Design (this thing rocks). This seems like a lot of items, but in just the past 24 hours I’ve read through 1,128 items. Why do I tell you this? Cause I know it drives John Welch nuts. Heheh.

Thomas Hawk, who is the CEO of Zooomr, tells a story about being woken up in the middle of the night to go fix something and get that service back online. Good read to remind you that being an entrepreneur isn’t all that glamourous sometimes. What’s amazing is that he met me that morning, made lots of great images, and didn’t say anything to me about being up all night the night before.

Me? My plane still hasn’t arrived. High winds are keeping the flights out at SFO. So, I’m on the floor at gate 22 doing email and reading feeds and all that. UPDATE: plane is loading. See what you’re missing over on Twitter? Heheh.

Here’s some headlines from my link blog:

• Personal vs. Professional Software Development
• Student co-developers head banging music maker
• Helprin on copyright is copywrong
• Read/Write Web Blog Network Launches with last100.com
• Microsoft to support Chinese document standard
• Another Study Claiming Click Fraud is Happening More than we Think
• Woz preaches the magic of electronics and computers
• Mary Jo Foley: Ten lessons the Xbox Team can teach the rest of Microsoft
• Dreaming in Code
• Newspapers need to go hyper-local to survive
• Where’s the Marketing?
• Did Microsoft go lose its head over aQuantive?
• Long player
• How does Windows Vista Rate?
• Popular Mechanics cranks out another ten HDTV myths
• MS, advertising
• Missing the Point Department
• FreeCulture’s annual summit, Harvard, May 26
• Al Gore’s Office Rocks
• The “Great HD Shoot Out” review picks the Canon HV20 as top HD camcorder
• Adobe Digital Editions out of beta next month?
• Has Google News Capitulated to Newspapers?
• Geni: the Social Network for the rest of us?
• Video Call Recording and Capture (Skype)
• The Value of Aggregating Content
• Pat Helland 2.0 rejoins Microsoft
• Jaiku vs. Twitter
• Coming soon from Cupertino: theft-proof Macs, iPhones, iPods
• Advertising is the Tech Sector
• Is Microsoft losing the Alpha Geeks?
• Maker Faire Video Report

Just a little reading for your evening. I scoured through 863 items to find these, according to Google News.

OK, you know Maryam and I are having a kid in September, right? A boy. Yippeee. But what happens when you decide to bring another life into the world? Well, beyond another 100,000 Flickr images (which is probably how many images this kid will have on Flickr, if Thomas Hawk has anything to say about it) what else happens?

Easy. A lot of money moves from my wallet to somewhere else. Now, I know how to use Google, right? Google monetizes the last click in a complex chain. But how am I, or Maryam, going to be influenced on our choices? Say, for instance, diapers? I just did a search for diapers on Google and found only one brand name I recognize: Huggies. How did that damn name get hammered into my brain? Advertising.

Which gets me back to why I’m writing this post: let’s say you’re a Diaper company who has a better product than Huggies. How will you get word out? Advertising.

But, who will decide where you advertise? Ad agencies, influentials, business leaders inside your company, executives, customer research types, who else?

Which gets me to Friday’s acquisition, by Microsoft, of aQuantive. To Kevin Kelleher at GigaOm that seems totally ridiculous. At first it did to me too, except I’ve been doing a bit more looking at who aQuantive employs: a whole lot of people who decide, or at minimum influence, where big companies will advertise.

At the Forbes Online retreat a couple of weekends back I heard over and over from various speakers that they expect a lot of advertising money (billions, they told me) will be moved in the next five years from TV and print to online.

Who will decide where the dollars be spent? A good portion of it will be by folks who are working at aQuantive right now.

Will they all of a sudden influence their clients to spend more money with Microsoft properties than Google or Yahoo ones?

Hey, what if Microsoft bought Facebook? Did Microsoft just cut off some of Google’s air supply? Maybe this is a traditional Microsoft/Ballmer move? The problem is it’ll only work if Microsoft has a legitimately good set of audiences to advertise to. My friends in the advertising business aren’t that stupid, they’ll do their homework and will move their money away from aQuantive if they start getting stupid advice.

But, what if Microsoft started buying things like Facebook, TechMeme, Automattic, Twitter, Technorati, LinkedIn, Federated Media? They have enough money to sweep all of these things up, even at today’s inflated prices. And don’t miss what Microsoft already has: some of the Internet’s biggest audiences. About 200 million people used Hotmail in the past 30 days, for instance.

The thing is, how will the advertising industry reach me? I’m not watching much TV anymore. I’m not reading things on dead trees much anymore. I’m online. My wallet is waiting to be emptied. Who’ll be the first one to tell me about a new kind of diaper? A new kind of camera? A new kind of crib? A new kind of clothing? A new way to child-proof my home? A new financial instrument so this kid can go to college? A new kind of food for children? Etc, etc, etc.

I’m not watching old-style ads anymore. So, where are these new style of ads?

Anyway, will aQuantive prove brilliant or stupid? Depends on the ads, I guess. What do you think?

Microsoft has just released “Popfly.” This tool, and community, lets you build a TwitterVision in literally a few minutes (mashup various stuff from various Web services like Twitter, Flickr, Virtual Earth, etc). When I first saw this demoed a few months ago the Microsoftie who showed it to me literally built TwitterVision in two minutes right in front of me without writing code. TwitterVision’s inventor told me he took four hours to do the same thing. Lets someone who isn’t a coder (like me) mashup various Web services easily and quickly. This is a “small” thing from Microsoft. It isn’t going to get professional developers hot and bothered (at least I don’t think) but it is another piece of a Web strategy. If Microsoft released 10 small things like this then we’d start thinking that they “get” the Web again. What do you think?

Oh, and don’t think it’s just for TwitterVision clones, either. It’ll be interesting to see what people do with this. Start with the Overview page to see what it does.

This was the “small” thing I expected Microsoft to release at Mix.

See ya at Katz Deli in New York today at about noon. My cell? 425-205-1921. Remember to save Saturday for Maker’s Faire too in San Mateo, California. We’re doing a Photowalking there.

Speaking of events, there’s a ton of videos from when I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco up on ScobleShow.com. My favorite of those videos? Zude. One problem, though. They didn’t think their service was going to be that popular. They went into beta one day and promptly got overloaded. If you watch the video you’ll see I was very excited about it and knew it’d be a hit (it was the coolest thing I saw at the Web 2.0 Expo).

I don’t get this. The word of mouth network is now so efficient that I knew they’d probably have about a million people hit it on the first day. They didn’t believe that. Companies that don’t plan for extreme scale issues are gonna really look lame from now on. Even Twitter continues having troubles. I couldn’t get into Twitter many times this week.

I just did a quick read through all my feeds and, boy, are people down on Guy Kawasaki’s “Truemors” site. Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests says that celebrity is how it might succeed.

Indeed, it’s because Guy Kawasaki was involved that I checked it out in the first place.

My reaction? I agree with Shelley Powers when she says: “What is [Truemors]? It’s the site that made Twitter look good, by comparison.”

Of course, there’s no such thing as bad PR on the blogosphere. Well, except silence. That’s the most damning thing of all.

I totally agree with Dave Winer’s post about Twitter being about the users, not the technology. I didn’t join Twitter because it was cool technology. Second Life +might+ be able to make that claim, but not Twitter. I joined Twitter because my friends were on it and were joining it at a very quick rate. B. Mann seems to think that someone could build a Twitter clone in Jabber.

He’s talking like a lot of engineers at Microsoft (and other companies, truth be told) would talk “my team could build that in 10 days.” That all might be true but you’ll never get the users to come and try your thing out. Also, correct me if I’m wrong but Jabber is an IM system. Twitter is closer to a blog service, where the posting length has been limited to 140 characters and the home page is an RSS aggregation of your friends posts. Yeah, there’s an SMS component (it’s not why I joined Twitter — I don’t use Twitter from my cell phone and really don’t care that you can). Yeah, there’s an IM component (it’s not why I joined Twitter — I don’t use Twitter from an IM client and really don’t care that you can).

It’s interesting that B. Mann wants to build a new Twitter. One that’s better engineered, ostensibly. Hey, I’m all for that too. But he forgets that it’s not the engineering that got me to join Twitter in the first place: it’s my friends.

Maybe we need to engineer better friends before we talk about engineering a better Twitter. Heheh.

Oh, and if you haven’t yet joined Twitter, my account is Twitter.com/Scobleizer.

Om Malik has a list of Twitter Tools. That’s another thing you’d need to recreate — all the little things that have been already created on top of Twitter.

There’s also a belief that I keep reading that Twitter is only a Silicon Valley “fan boy” kind of thing. That’s TOTALLY NOT TRUE. Watch TwitterVision for a few minutes and you’ll see an evenly-dispersed group of people all over the world.

Dave Troy does it again. First he came up with TwitterVision. Now he has FlickrVision. You post a photo to Flickr, and geoencode it (Flickr lets you add images to maps) and then it’ll show up on FlickrVision.

Adrian Sutton saw I invited everyone to the Marriott and showed up. He’s a Java-using developer from Australia and was visiting for the JavaOne conference last week. Actually he’s a senior software engineer at Ephox. I love Twitter and it always amazes me when people show up because they see me Twittering about something.

Anyway, he told Tom and I that he was very impressed with JavaFX and what he saw at JavaOne this week. Although he doesn’t think JavaFX is a Flash killer. He thinks it is something else, but something that software developers will find useful.

Funny, I was wearing a Microsoft Silverlight hat that Jeff Sandquist gave me. On the elevator on the way down some guy gave me a dirty look and pulled out a Java hat and put it on. Ahh, this is how geek religions are displayed and fought.

The guy was John Penrose, principal architect in the enterprise group at Cablevision. After we had a laugh about the hat we talked briefly. He said he was very impressed with JavaFX and said the demos were absolutely killer, especially the mobile ones.

Reading the blog’s reactions to JavaFX (on Google’s blog search) (and same search on Technorati) it seems most of them are very positive. How about you? What do you think?

Apple store employee Arnold just came up to me. Said “cool shirt.”

What does my shirt say? “Wearing my Twitter shirt.”

Heck, Twitter gets me respect at the Apple store.

Aside: I almost posted his Twitter address but I’d probably get him fired cause Apple PR is so uptight about such things.

Tom and I are going to the Marriott to enjoy the fireworks show. You’re welcome to join us. Top floor!