Let’s see.

Apple II? Didn’t have switches on the front.
Macintosh? No tape drive. No cursor keys.
Next? No disk drive.
iMac? No floppy drive.
iPod? No on/off button.
iPhone? No keyboard.

Where did I get this from? Tom Conrad, CTO of Pandora. He used to work at Apple. He tells me he asks himself what he should remove from his products to make them simpler. One thing he did on Pandora? Made the UI much smaller than a typical Web page. People asked him to add features. He said “they don’t fit.”

He thinks Twitter is successful because it got rid of a ton of features — he compared it to Google’s Dodgeball, which had more features but not as much buzz.

What feature will Steve Jobs kill next? How about you, which feature are you getting rid of to make your product/service/store/business simpler?

Louis Gray asks if leading bloggers are getting “blog fatigue?”

It’s worse than that. I’m just really tired — I’ve spread myself too thin in too many different directions. A new kid on the way is staring me in the face, too. So is my email. Everytime I sit down to do an email two more come in. It’s really amazing. The other day I answered a ton of email on the plane (I’m far more productive on the plane, no Twitter is there to interrupt me) and when I reconnected about 1.5x as many as I answered came back! Hint: the answer to email overload is not to answer any email. Yikes.

Tim Ferriss’ book, the 4-hour Workweek, is getting me to look at my life differently. I already do some of what he suggests but the book really is a great way to evaluate what you’re doing. Even if the book is full of stuff you’ll never use, it does get you to sit down and look at life differently. The book is great, I’ve already recommended it to several people and it sure does challenge you to make sure you’re moving your life in a direction that’s good for you, not just for everyone else.

Anyway, might explain why I’m leaving shortly to go to San Francisco to attend the KFOG Kaboom concert and Fireworks show. I’m meeting Pandora’s CTO, Tom Conrad, at the Apple store at 3 p.m. then we’re headed over to the concert after that. Meet you at the front gate at 5 p.m. if you wanna do a photowalking kind of thing. Bring your tripod and a cable release if you want to take photos of the fireworks.

The other thing is that my link blog, my video show, and my Twitter account have taken up a lot of slack. Instead of linking to a ton of stuff here, I just link to it over on my link blog. And Twitter is more fun. More interactive. I get answers back immediately. There’s not the pressure to be erudite there (no trolls).

Some other things going on? My back has been hurting for a long time, and it’s getting harder to sit still to blog and I haven’t been exercising lately, I’ve been traveling too much, and I haven’t been paying enough attention to my friends. So, something in my life has gotta give, especially with a kid on the way.

UPDATE: Maryam has some friends over for lunch and they didn’t know any of the KFOG Kaboom musicians so off to YouTube we went. Here’s who we’ll be listening to: Kenny Wayne Shepherd; Ozomatli; and Guster.

Valleywag today compares Facebook vs. Linked In. I’ve been thinking about the same thing lately. I have hundreds of emails waiting to be answered (I answered a bunch yesterday, but it just caused MORE email to come back in so now I’m behind again — thankfully I’ll be offline in a plane headed to a BEA event in Atlanta so I’ll have lots of time to answer emails). But a good portion of those emails include invitations from Facebook and Linked In. Last week I met an executive in Facebook and they are adding a million new users every week (which represents about 3.3% growth every week — extremely rapid growth, in other words).

Facebook already turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo. Why did they do that? Because they know that the advertising market is heating up. MySpace sold for less than that, but in a deal with Google alone got all that money back and more. Facebook is sitting on a gold mine.

I don’t like Linked In (high profile bloggers who put their email and cell phone number on their blog don’t need to join reputation networks to get jobs and other stuff) but I must admit that it is rocking and rolling and speeding up in adoption, not slowing down. I’m very impressed by the job (and the quality of people they’ve gotten to join their system).

My LinkedIn and Facebook requests are not just from people I don’t know. CEOs, CTOs, etc from tons of companies are joining both. Kevin Rose and I had dinner a few days back and he personally begged me to join Facebook. I still haven’t, cause I need fewer things in my life, not more. Twitter dramatically took down my productivity (I’ve been spending less time there trying to get things done) and until I have no emails in my inbox I can’t join new things. But I can stand back and admit my awe of what they’ve done in the marketplace.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook goes public or gets sold for more than $3 billion. They are sitting on a gold mine.

“But Scoble, what if they turn out to be like PointCast?” That’s what several people have asked me when we’ve talked about this. Well, I was on PointCast for two weeks early on. I quit it fast because it tried to lock me in and wouldn’t let me link to articles on it and wouldn’t let me copy text from it. That caused me to start badmouthing it to my friends.

Facebook doesn’t have those problems. All I see is positive growth for it. Linked In does get some negative feelings cause of the email stream it causes, but that’s pretty easily solvable and sure hasn’t slowed down its growth the way I thought it might.

Do you agree or disagree?

I was just reading Kottke’s comparison about Blogger vs. Twitter growth. He points out that Twitter took off on November 21, 2006 (Twitter’s growth curve started going straight up on that day, when compared with Blogger). Hmmm, what’s the date on my post where I first talked about Twitter again? Yeah, November 20, 2006.

The other inflection point? March 11, 2007. I again wrote about Twitter in early March. When was that? March 5, 2007.

Now, what you don’t see is that I am just good at seeing doubling effects. That’s why I read so many feeds. So when something is about to get important I’ll run to the front of the parade and act like I’m leading the parade. Heheh.

Really, the high growth in March was due to Leo Laporte talking about it on his show.

One of my hobbies lately that I usually keep off of my blog is talking with people about politics. Why? Because it usually is a good topic when you meet people who could care less about what Twitter is, or what Silverlight will do, or what the latest gadget is.

Anyway, here in Cancun I’ve been spending the afternoon sitting in the pool and meeting people. It’s amazing how many people have brought up John Edwards’ $400 haircut.

Consensus? That it demonstrates a lack of judgment and an unconcern for how this would play with voters. Neither are good messages to send and they sure aren’t playing well with people in the Cancun pool.

How would I handle this if I were running Edward’s campaign? Put video of the haircut (or his next one) up on YouTube and interview the stylist for why his/her prices are so high. I’m sure John doesn’t think this is important to do, would rather discuss issues of more importance like how we get out of the war, but this is hurting his campaign far more than anything else he’s done lately.

I’m sitting in Dallas waiting for a flight to Cancun. Oh, wait, this isn’t Twitter. Sorry about that.

Anyway, in SFO while waiting in the line to get to American Airlines counter a guy turned around and said “Thanks for doing those Adobe videos.” He was Aaron Pedersen, Interactive Architect at DHAP Digital. He’s working on a bunch of Web sites for Scion all with Adobe’s Flex.

Some things I learned from him:

1) It was the first time he’d heard of me.
2) Found me after Ajaxian linked to my videos.
3) Said my video did more for his understanding of the architecture of Flex/Flash than anything else on the Internet.
4) He’s looking into Silverlight but thinks he’ll stick with Flex for now because of the ubiquity and because it’s something he and his team knows and understands.
5) Is excited that Adobe open sourced Flex.

Disclosure: Adobe sponsors PodTech to do a variety of podcasts, but my show isn’t sponsored by them and my compensation isn’t tied to any sponsorship. Neither Microsoft nor Adobe paid me to either write about, video them, or had prior restraint on any of my work. My interview with Scott Guthrie at Microsoft wasn’t paid for either (PodTech paid all my expenses to go down to Las Vegas).

This is why I love having Seagate as a sponsor. If it weren’t for them I couldn’t do any of this work and they’ve been a dream sponsor.
Either way, I told him that I thought Silverlight is something he should look into because it’s very impressive.

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.

This morning I was on NPR’s OnPoint radio show, along with several others talking about Twitter, including Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO. You can listen in, if you have Real Networks’ player. It’s a balanced look at Twitter, includes those who think it’s a lame service to those who think it’s world-changing.

I loved how Jack answered one caller who said that Twitter reminded him of the borg: “Twitter is best when you limit it to your circle of friends. If your circle of friends is the borg then you’re going to have some issues potentially.”

Hey, I’m an egotistical baaahhhhsssttttaaarrrdddd. My business relies on getting invites to companies to video the latest cool stuff. Thanks to Oracle’s Justin Kestelyn for working to get me an invite.

But if I really was honest with Oracle I’d tell them not to invite asshats like me. That’s not how you’ll really get noticed on the Internet. First of all, I don’t have credibility with the audiences that you really want to reach. When was the last time I’ve been inside a data center?

Second. If you really want to change a company’s PR, start at the bottom of the stack. Find the bloggers we don’t yet know who are writing about Oracle. Go for diversity. Link, link, link often! Bring them in to meet Larry Ellison and your management teams. But even better, let them talk with the engineers building your products.

Let them video, audio, blog, MySpace, wiki, Twitter — whatever they want. But, resist the big-company PR impulse to only invite those who are perceived to be at the top of the A list. You’ll add value by discovering unknown people and bringing them in. Oh, and if you’d like me along to video too, I’ll be happy to show up.

I’m hearing a ton of rumors of what’s coming to Mix07 next week in Las Vegas. I’ll be there Monday. Feel free to throw a piece of fruit as you head into the hall. I’ll be doing hallway cam out with Loren Heiny.

Anyway, here’s what we MIGHT see. How about you, what do you think Microsoft will show off?

1. An Amazon S3 competitor. “Ve have more datacenter knowledge than Amazon.”
2. Ruby on Rails and PHP running on .NET. Will it make Twitter scale?
3. Microsoft will announce an open source initiative. After all, why else would William Hurley be speaking there? Although likening Mix to a BarCamp made me gag. BarCamps are free, and aren’t centrally planned. No journalists need to beg to be let into them.
4. Ray Ozzie will use these terms at least two times during his keynote interview: HD. API. Widget. Decentralized Web. RSS. Silverlight. ASP.NET. Streaming video. DRM. Services. Ecosystem. Xbox. Media Center. Cross platform.
5. Mike Arrington will pitch TechCrunch 20, his new conference for new product demos, at least once. Bonus points if he mentions it three times.
6. Someone will point out that ABC TV isn’t using either Adobe or Microsoft video technology.
7. At least three companies will say they weren’t paid by Microsoft to build their apps and demonstrate them on stage.

So, what about you? Are you expecting anything new?

Jeremy Zawodny, Esther Dyson, Mike Arrington, and me are on a panel this week talking about Web 2.0. I guess Charles River Venture partners didn’t get the memo that I’m irrelevant to Web 2.0. Whatever that means.

Which leads me to Jeremy’s post. He’s trying to define what Web 2.0 means.

To me?

Web 1.0 was about pages. URLs.
Web 2.0 was about users. Adding them onto corporate pages. Wikis. Blogs. Myspaces.
Web 3.0 is about getting rid of pages altogether. Being able to make the Web YOU want or need. Is Twitter a page? Or a post? Or an SMS? A graph? Or a map display?

But, maybe this is just undefinable. Which means panel discussions about it are always interesting. Or should be, especially when you have an irrelevant asshat on the panel like me.

I turned on Google History. I’ve gotta admit, that really freaks me out to see all my surfing behavior tracked and displayed in my face. Google knows a lot about me and if I had access to your history I’d be able to surmise a lot about you. That’s my theory, anyway. What do you think about Google History? Does it make you think differently of Google? Why?

But, thinking about all this attention data that advertisers would love to get their hands on, what’s amazing is that I’ve told the Web that we’re expecting to have a child in September and I still haven’t gotten any ads for cribs, strollers, clothing, food, cameras, or anything else yet. I’m really surprised that I haven’t gotten more emails or Twitters or comments telling me about all things parental. People at work say that that industry kicks in after you have the kid. That’s a bad move. I’m looking to buy a new camera now. A new crib now. New clothes for Maryam now. And lots of other things before we have the kid.

And wait until the advertising industry understands just what Twitterment is. If I were a marketer working at Procter and Gamble this is what I’d be studying.

Alfred Thompson, who works for Microsoft, basically says I’m not welcome at Mix: Why Scoble is irrelevant in the world of Web 2.0.

Ahh, yes, ye olde “you must be a developer to understand anything on stage at Mix” argument.

Oh, but wait a second.

I just looked at the speaker list. Andrew Rashbass is on stage. He’s Publisher of the Economist magazine. Is he a developer? Why is Microsoft putting him on stage?

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch is on stage too. I wonder if Alfred thinks Mike is irrelevant to Web 2.0? Last time I checked Mike is a former lawyer.

Last year Tim O’Reilly was on stage. I wonder if Alfred thinks Tim is irrelevant to Web 2.0? Last time I checked Tim is a book publisher and, now, a venture capitalist.

Oh, also on the Mix stage is Tom Bodkin, assistant managing editor of the New York Times.

But, Alfred Thompson is right. What I +write+ about Microsoft stuff might be irrelevant, particularly to the developer audience that Microsoft is trying to reach but he must have forgotten my day job: to search out new technologies with my video camera to report on them.

I guess I’m to blame cause I haven’t put my demographics up of my audiences but there’s lots of developers who are watching my videos.

Adobe’s Apollo team recognizes that, which is why I got a personal invite to come over and talk with the Apollo team.

In the video, embedded here, you learn what the new APIs are in Apollo (at about minute 22:00). Oh, but wait, a non-developer couldn’t have asked THAT question, could he? I followed up with at least half a dozen questions about APIs and what Apollo enables for developers. Yet Alfred thinks he wouldn’t learn ANYTHING technical from my work. Interesting.

Not to mention I’ve interviewed more than 200 people since I’ve left Microsoft — a very large percentage of whom are CEOs or CTOs working in the Web 2.0 industry. Nah, not relevant to Microsoft or its developers, right?

It’s interesting that Microsoft doesn’t see people who make media for technologists as important. I guess Alfred assumes everyone who cares will watch Channel 9 or 10. And I say “Microsoft” because this seems to be a common theme tonight of dissing journalists in public who report on Microsoft’s doings.

Oh well, either way, I’ll be out in the lobby with my video camera interviewing DEVELOPERS and bringing them to you and their opinions of Microsoft’s latest technologies.

It’s funny. Microsoft certainly seemed to like it when I did that when I worked there. But now that I’m not a blue badge anymore I’m irrelevant to the Web 2.0 world. Hmmmm.

Irony: Alfred says he hasn’t written code for 13 years. Welcome to the irrelevant Alfred! I do read his blog for the entertainment value too, I must admit! Ahhh, maybe this is why Google is beating Microsoft in search and other things on the Internet.

Shhhhhh. I’ve learned from several companies that they are getting paid to build apps for Microsoft and I know of several people at Mix who are getting paid to come attend. I wonder if anyone will disclose what they are getting paid?

UPDATE: If I worked on Channel 10, a Microsoft-owned channel (done by the evangelism team that puts on Mix, by the way — their offices are literally right next to each other, which makes it extra funny) I’d be pissed at Alfred. After all, the two video hosts there aren’t developers and they just tried to teach us what a mashup was by interviewing a Microsoft developer. I guess they are irrelevant too. I wonder if they’ll get a free ticket to Mix?

UPDATE2: Robbie van der Blom cracked me up with his Twitter remark: “@scobleizer, wasn’t Microsoft irrelevant to web2.0???”

Ahh, just in time to start talking about Web 3.0. I’m glad I’m not going to get tagged with Web 2.0 ownership. Alfred can have THAT!

If you haven’t been reading my link blog you’ve been missing some really great blogging. Here’s some highlights.

Ryan Stewart wrote a great post on how and when of Adobe and Microsoft’s Rich Internet Application technologies.
TechCrunch announces Kyte, new video distribution network.
Podcasting News discusses a new report that shows media player owners are listening to less radio.
Coding Horror asks what is our responsibility during the current dotcom bubble?
Lifehacker links to OpenDNS feature that lets you browse the Web with keyboard shortcuts.
Stan Schroeder links to Chris Pirillo who exposes a security issue with Web calendars, particularly Google Calendar. Are you exposing your passwords without thinking about it?
Steve Makofsky says Microsoft’s Silverlight isn’t giving his Mac any love so he’s going to stay away from it.

That’s only a small portion of the cool stuff that I’ve shared on my link blog. Most of which is not available on either Digg or TechMeme.

Oh, and if you only want the headlines, NateTrue put my link blog on Twitter, so you can friend that account and see my link blog items come into your Twitter account.

For the past six months I’ve been reading about 30,000 items a month and sharing somewhere around 1,600 items.

At PodCast hotel today Eric Rice (aka “spin” on Twitter) told me that Jesse Malthus died in a car wreck a couple of days ago. He was a very talented 17 year old who build lots of stuff in Second Life and was well known.

He friended me on Twitter a few weeks ago. That made it a lot more personal to me for some reason. Second Life Insider wrote a memorial to him.

So tragic to lose a life so young and with so much promise.

So, I’m about to leave for San Francisco to attend the Digg party and I just visited Upcoming.org (this is the best place I’ve found to find geek events around the world to attend). Sure enough the Digg party is on the home page. But what else is there? A new design. Pretty nice!

No, I’m not going to Twitter from the party. But I’m sure someone will. 600 geeks and freaks are expected to attend.

The two guys who started Dodgeball leave in a hissy fit. Google bought Dodgeball in mid-2005.

Dodgeball was the pre-cursor to Twitter and Jaiku (albeit a bit more focused on just cell phones than either of those newer services are). Last summer it was the rage with many of the San Francisco cool kids, er, influencers. I remember Irina and Eddie using it almost non stop on our trip to Montana.

So, why didn’t Google get it enough to give these two more resources? Easy. Same reason I couldn’t convince Microsoft to buy Flickr before Yahoo did.

It’s a small thing. A stupid thing. A lame thing.

Big companies have trouble grokking small things like Dodgeball. Heck, how many of you have called Twitter “really lame” in the past two months? Tons!

More evidence that Google is having difficulty getting small things? I heard a rumor that Google executive Marissa Mayer almost killed the Google Reader team because she didn’t think it would get popular. Feed readers are still “small things.” Seeing business value in them is difficult.

It seems that management is trying to get a handle on the chaos that is Google but in doing so is removing some of what made Google attractive to entrepreneurial developers.

What are you hearing from your Google friends?

Oh, Microsoft didn’t let Adobe have all the NAB fun. Here’s Beet.TV with Microsoft’s Forest Key who announces a new media player strategy for Microsoft too (based around its WPF/E technology). Here’s Adobe’s announcements on Google News and here’s Microsoft’s news, also on Google News.

So, here’s why this is important:

1) Microsoft doesn’t want to lose more market share to the future YouTube’s.
2) Adobe has more distribution than WPF/E has so far (Flash is on nearly everything and is the technology behind most of today’s popular video sites). It’s hoping to use that distribution to sell a series of servers.
3) Adobe’s development tools are more cross-platform than Microsoft’s are and are hoping its new media player keeps the Microsoft side of the fence from looking very attractive (Apple today announced that it has sold 800,000 copies of Final Cut Pro — those media developers aren’t very likely to jump on Microsoft’s bandwagon).
4) Microsoft’s technology is flashier (no pun intended) but isn’t proven in the marketplace yet. Yeah, Microsoft has pulled out some big guns that are saying they are supporting its new technology.
5) Microsoft has a HUGE lead over Adobe in HDTV. That’s going to be where Microsoft will get a lot of traction and where Adobe is still chasing Microsoft’s tail. Will that lead matter, though? Not to ABC.com. It already has all of ABC’s TV shows online in a near-HDTV format and player (based on Move Networks) and doesn’t need either Adobe or Microsoft’s stuff. Same with Joost, which is getting to be very popular if my Twitter friends are a good judge of things. Same with Stage6.divx.com. No Adobe or Microsoft stuff in either of those. So, really both Microsoft and Adobe are losing marketshare to other HDTV distribution and display technologies.

What do you think? How does Adobe’s and Microsoft’s announcements change the marketplace?

DaveTroy, the author of TwitterVision, reports that his Twitter followers has doubled in just the past few hours. Explains why Twitter remains slow for me. Speaking of which, last week there was an interesting conversation between the guy who authored Ruby on Rails and one of the main developers of Twitter (Twitter is built on Rails). A week ago I visited Twitter’s development team and one of the developers told me that they didn’t try to overbuild its system for scale and that now they are going back, looking for performance problems, and building the system to scale up. Sounds smart to me, even though for users it’s proving a bit slow right now. Dealing with such scaling has got to be a daunting challenge. How many teams can say their user base doubled in the past 24 hours?

UPDATE: Steven Hodson chimes in with a “blogosphere reality check” and says we’re all living in a bubble: “The reality is though that outside of our little insular world of blogs and co-presence what we do has no importance.” My answer? Why is Steven blogging then? Ahh, he’s just as narcissistic as the rest of us! The narcissists talking to other narcissists. Hmm.

If you’re sick of my narcissism, just read my link blog. I try to filter out the noise and just present great posts there (out of 622 blogs read). Oh, but, if you really are a Twitter freak you can read my link blog on Twitter. Heheh.

Chris Pirillo calls all these new video streaming things like Ustream.tv and Stickcam and the microblogs like Jaiku, Twitter the “narcissystem.”

Matthew Ingram asks “Is there such a thing as too much information?” and “is this the future?”

Oh, don’t worry Justin is safe — for now. I’m not going to broadcast every minute of my life. But I bet more people will try it, especially since Justin.tv got a lot of PR over its first month (he was on Nightline, Today Show, among other TV shows, and on the front page of San Francisco’s biggest newspaper).

One major downside? Both of these trends make me far less productive than I was before. So, I don’t see a lot of people doing these things long term. But, they are fun to play with. To me it’s just amazing that I can broadcast video to the world. At one point yesterday I was talking with Pat in Ireland. He was watching us driving along a freeway in California. What a weird world.

If you want to join the narcissystem, boring as it might be, Jeremiah Owyang has a bunch of pictures showing how it’s done. It sure isn’t as hard as writing a scalable system in Ruby on Rails!