Marc's Voice

Who said Google isn’t a devil company?

So I was sitting here trying to figure out who is evil, who has our best interests in mind and who we can trust.  Afterall Facebook is a company you love to love and then you hate them.  Apple is a company I’ve hated for years - yet many people love them.

Its hard to find people who like Microsoft, but they do employ allot of people in the Seattle area, so I’m sure somebody there likes them.   I myself also hate my former company Macromedia.  But I love Tejava ice tea - made by Crystal Geyser.

So we all have our favs and devil companies we hate.

I then look at my browser - and I see this stock price:

3 weeks left to go - and kiss this year “Adios!”

My virtual Blue Beenie hat is on.

DataPortability.com looks coolio. I’ve asked if I can contribute as well.

How long did it take for this to finally happen? Fox is going to leverage it’s MySpace Ad Network across all it’s media properties. And if those ‘hyper-targeted’ ads actually work - prepare for Fox’s profits to double.

Social networking craze - really? Cash in - NO! Say it’s not true!

Social Media making an impact. Retails communities are the backbone and foundation of eCommerce 2.0. Let the customers decide and request and opinionate. Who else matters?

Which leads to an interesting post by David Rosenberg on Webware: “MySpace hyper-targeting versus FacebookBeacon: which is creeper?”

Ongoing jostling on Facebook. I have this old friend who keeps poking me after I poke her back. Its almost sexual. Isn’t that really called cuddling or jostling on the dance floor of life?

Fred Wilson brings up a good point - hard economic times builds stronger companies. I totally agree. That’s why Broadband Mechanics is still waving our freak flag! We’re stronger than ever - we might even go raise some cash to compete with Ning’s $44M
Coolio new Time.com site from Brightcove

Iotum, Sutree, IPTV Guide, HotPads, MySHC Community (that’s Sear’s Holding Company - yes SEARS)

Quick clarification - Alex Iskold is NOT an employee of Read/Write - but simply writes for them, while being CEO of AdaptiveBlue. Meanwhile I play CEO in the Soap Opera called life, while being Mimi and Lucy’s daddy (and also Aryeh, Aron and Jacob’s ‘dude‘.)

Go out and kick some ass - Doc

Whenever Doc creates a major post - he gets all sorts of feedback. So I’ve learned to wait a day before responding - and sure ‘nuf a whole bunch of stuff explodes around Doc’s post. And since Jason Calacanis used my name (and even mispelled it) I feel even more obligated to weigh in on Doc’s treatise. So let me just say this:

1. I really dig the notion of creating our own rules. That’s what the DataSharingSummit was all about, what our ‘Bill of Rights for Users of Social Media” is and what the new DataPortability.com site is all about. No reason to sit around complaining and doing nothing - we need to stand on the mountain top and start YELLING.

2. I also agree that the hogs will get butchered. That’s why I KNEW that Facebook would open up the world of social networking - even if they only went 98% of the way. And that’s why Google raised the bar even further. And it doesn’t end there. Open is the new black.

3. Users will always win in the end. Know why? Cause it’s our money we’re spending. You’d think these ‘marketeers would figure that out.

4. Zuckerberg is right - the times they are a changing. The only issue is ‘on who’s terms’ and who benefits? Its funny how Facebook keeps doing coolio new stuff, but gets it wrong in the final 2%. I wonder if that the VCs influence?  I bet it is. I bet Jim Breyer and Peter Thiel think they’re SO SMART - manipulating poor little Mark.  He’s got that smirk on his face(book) for some reason. So is 98% innovation more important than no innovation at all?

5. I’m not too uptight at whether MoveOn.org gets involved or not. We need help. But it is kind of weird that orgs like TechNet or EFF don’t. Isn’t that what they’re supposed to be doing? Where’s Cory Doctorow and Joi Ito when we need them? Larry Lessig should be drafting class action lawsuits.

7. Doc has a great pro-active effort - called VRM. Kaliya Hamlin, Doc and others run these IIW uncamps. We’re not sitting still - we’re creating our own rules. Now the trick is to get anybody to listen.

8. Remember AttentionTrust.org? What happened to that?

Shopping Day blogging

I think we should officially name this day “Shopping Day“.  Entire industries and research groups live to analyze today’s commerce results and use today’s ‘behavior patterns and financial results” as a litmus for the rest of each season’s Holiday “results”.  The whole thing is reduced to money and “God bless them for it.”

So for today’s Shopping Day blogging….

Facebook’s Beacon - REVEALED

I can just see Chris Messina sitting around all day long - grabbing screen shots of different user interfaces for usage flows,  design patterns, best practices support of open standards, etc.  Thanks Joe!

See!  It pays to be open. Not sure how Plaxo makes money off of that - but who cares!  It makes for GREAT copy!  Congrats ot Joseph and John and everyone at Plaxo!

Branded social networks becoming a common feature in ad campaigns

Visualizing Social Software Best Practices: three approaches

Kiosks - where meatspace meets cyberspace.  Blockbusters can become an important link in the chain connecting the TechCrunch 50k down the learning curve/behavior changing pyramid of the mainstream world.  Lots and lots of kiosks.  Everywhere - but certainly in all those Blockbuster’s locations.

DJ Spooky Digital Africa remix 

I also wonder - where is Ray Ozzie in all this.

Internet Identity Workshop - Dec. 3-5 2007 Mountain View, CA

What I’d really like Gina to tell us - of the 125k Ning networks, how many have: more than 10 people, more than 50 people, more than 150 people and of each of these categories - how many page views they’re getting - per network.  Just bragging about 125k networks - doesn’t really mean anything.  Come on Gina!

Portable Social Networks - - for who?

I’d pay to hear Jaron Lanier and Cory Doctorow go at it.   Throw in Alan Kay, Ted Nelson and Mitch Kapor and it could be a real party.  Stewart Alsop could MC.  Dave Winer’s paying for drinks.

I also was wondering my each sees-bit-twit didn’t have a permalink. It’s not blogging without a permalink.  But it took recent investor - Dave Winer - to wake them up.  Thanks Dave!

Its great to see Herr Godhead The Web-miester Mr. T B-L weigh in and quote Brad and David.  It’s all about the social graph now - long live the social graph.  Tim seems to be up on what’s up - and what we’ve been trying to do - so you can’t call him ’sleeping’ - and there’s really nothing really wrong with anything he says - so “RIGHT ON to Tim - is what I say!”  Tims influence may have waned, but he sure knows how to pontificate about eras.  With the best of them!

Meanwhile Stowe Boyd spews hatred on the term social graph and the semantic web in general.  I’m not too uptight about either - as long as we can all sing Kum Buy Yah together.  Who cares what its called - Stowe?  Just as long as we can mesh everything together - which seems to be what Tim B-L is saying.  Stowe should just ignore Tim’s FOAF plugging and the rdf-aspect of his red pilling popping discourse and appreciate that this old geezer is still rapping the rap and bringing the message to the people - like any self respecting visionary.

Speaking of Stowe - he found some interesting spam. 

Great to see Leonard Brody get some press 

This guy Boris - who Om has as a guest columnist is smoking crack.  In an enterprise kind of way.  This is what bums me out about having too much money around. It attracts opinions like this.  Please just go away.  There really is a world beyond Google, Amazon, Salesforce, Sun and Akamai.  I really kind of feel sorry for this guy - and I wonder what Cisco, EA, Microsoft, AOL, Facebook, NetFlix, MySpace, SlingBox, Bebo, TMZ, hi5, LinkedIn, Flickr and a 1,000 other clouds think of him.  Its this sort of crap shoot - make stupid investments to shoot for “it all” or nothing - that makes VCs what they are.

I agree that Yahoo’s execution has been disappointing - but I don’t think it’s as much about who they’ve BEEN hiring - as much as who’s been there forever and who just needs to leave and let the new guard take over.

L.A. ContentNext mixer in LaLa - Dec. 4th 

Lucas Gonze come sup from LaLa to speak about portable playlists - Dec. 11th = SF 

OpenDRM is snake-Oil = SyncTV 

Onaswarm, Live Documents, MyM, MyCRMcareer, WebRadioPlayer widget, Social Actions, MyNetworkValue, Synthasite, Afero
Sony is still charging developers for a Playstation SDK/development system.  You’d think they’d get a clue and PAY people to develop.

Happy Birthday to danah boyd and Linda Chan.

I tried to get Sue Decker’s kids ot play with mine - at the BrickHouse open house.  But then Lucy fell off the South Park jungle gym - almost falling into broken glass in the crack-head infested former home of the web.  So we never got our kids together.  Oh well.

Sorry Dave - Dec. 7th - I’ll be in Milan, but I’ll see you in Paris on the 10th.

Give OpenSocial a chance

So here we are, the busiest shopping day of the year and yet talking about OpenSocial is still on our radars.

I was asked by Kaliya Hamlin to make it to the next IIW (Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View Dec 3-5 ) as the Google and OpenSocial folks will be out in full force - bringing their message to the Identity Wonks.  These are exactly the folks who predicted the type of identity espionage and thievery that Facebook is displaying with “Beacon” - and they’re pretty dam sure Google is the devil as well.

So Kaliya thought my own, unique sense of “cutting through the bullshit” might be useful at the IIW - but unfortunately I can’t be there.) I’ll be off actually building user-centric identity systems - rather than talking about them.)  But Kaliya knows we’ll be supporting OpenSocial, as we did OpenID last year and oAuth soon - as well.  And we support any attempt at gaurading user’s rights and making sure they can control their data.

So what everyone is hoping to hear from Google is why they are NOT the devils and what they have to say about Facebook’s “Beacon”.

Thinking about this - I’ve recently stumbled upon Alex Iskold’s Thanksgiving post where he declares “that OpenSocial really matters” and folks like Doc Searls and Dave Winer disagreed (in a comment) are saying “that OpenSocial is just a marketing ploy - or ALSO a marketing ploy”.

Its too bad that Google had to be so petty and try and one-up Facebook’s Ads announcements with the timing of the OpenSocial announcements - but “Hey!  Ads are their family jewels - so why not attack Facebook’s Achilles Heel AND one-up them?  This is busienss afterall?”

But the issue of whether OpenSocial is open ENOUGH clearly occludes the issue of “can we trust Google” or “is OpenSocial an OPEN platform that is NOT controlled by Google.” That will be the issues that need to be answered - at the IIW.

I for one hope that they make a good showing, as Patrick Chanezon will be on my panel the next week in Paris - and I’ll be asking him many of the same questions.

“Why should we trust Google?”

“What about all the missing features and functions from OpenSocial?”

“When will Google implement OpenSocial is Google products OTHER than Orkut and iGoogle?”

“What about bringing social to software? (eg. other than SNS and dashboards?)  What about OpenSocial in the  Google Search page rank?  Or in Maps, GMail or Reader?  This is what I’m excited about!

So we can be pessimistic and declare Google the enemy - or we can give them a chance - just as we’re hoping that Mr. Zuckerberg will “do the right thang!“

Basting thoughts on the Turkey of life - blogging

The hypocrisy of Facebook is being disclosed. How can you on one hand hide behind the shroud of privacy - while MoveOn and others complain of privacy violations? What’s wrong with this picture?

Me on the DishyMix podcast show with Susan Bratton - it was fun.

Nov. 26th mashup* in London

Joi Ito shares with us what it’s like to be Japanese - and then the happy dog makes it all go away! 

Steve Polyak reports it took him :05 to set up PeopleAggregator.  LAMP baby - all the way.

Congrats to Roland and Boris on their semi-liquid event. I wonder if the Raincity people know of the limitations of the GPL.
Hewlett-Packard seems to be doing pretty good - now that they’ve gotten rid of Carly! 

Ben Metcalfe is now advising MySpace and working with Seesmic - too.   Congrats dude.

Fred Wilson is proud to be a VC - and he should be. He’s made a lot of money off of it.

They’re doing business in India.  I’ll be there in December - starting a ’soft launch’ of the project we’ve been working on all year.

I really like this guy Alex Iskold - that Richard MacManus has working for Read/Write. Here’s a great post on Hyperlocal stuff. 

CafeMom is rocking 

Dance Jam: dance contests and events as business model.  Coolio!  I agree with Rafe on this one.  And it gives M.C. Hammer a comeback path. I’m all in favor of Phoenix rising scenarios.  I bet he’ll watch his money this time around.

Where do I sign up for the Open Web Awards?

Jonathan Peterson has a flog blog - and a whole lot of crap - aggregated together. On Facebook.

Legendary Berkeley Radio Station Fires Legendary Talk Show Host 

LOTS of corps are blocking MySpace and Facebook now. I guess they want their workers to work.

Save, Show, Sync and Share your personal media at home 

Now that Arrington and Winer are investors in Sessmic - does that make up for Mark Pincus? 

Driving up the coast to Eureka

We’re up in Eureka, CA right now.  We droive up the coast and took a few shots to share with you.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Morning

Garden

Coast

\

Tree - a big tree - 2,400 years old

Recipe Blogging - Thanksgiving stuffing

APOLOGIES to all my kosher peeps - including my son Aryeh and Bobby Orbach. This recipe includes pork.

THANKSGIVING Stuffing:

1 ib. ground pork

4 large onions

a whole bunch of brown mushrooms

10 garlic pieces

some carrots, orange peppers, celery

a whole bunch of brussel sprouts

walnuts, raisins, apricots

off the shelf ’stuffing’ (bread croûtons - spiced or unspiced - doesn’t matter) - cubes or shake

butter

salt and pepper

something to add a ‘hint‘ of - I used balsamic vinegar this year, cumin last year - you get the idea.

Saute each ingredient separately in butter - placing the results into a large bowl. Add garlic, salt and pepper to each batch.

Once everything’s been cooked, add the dressing, raisins, walnuts and apricots. You could even add some sliced Apples (I by-passed that this year.)

Stuff the bird and keep what’s left over and simply bake that - for >1:00.

This is what’s called a ’savory dressing’. It’s almost impossible to fuck up. Squirtsome Turkey juice on the extra stuffing - to get that ‘flavor’ going on.

Enjoy and think about ‘open social networking‘ as you’re eating it. Especially when you encounter one of those Brussel Sprouts. Think - mmmmm - this is “Facebook”. Then when you hit a walnut, think “MySpace”. And the raisins; well those are all those “small, distributed, vertical niche social networks”. Then as the whole thing just coalesces into this sublime Thanksgiving holiday goop (with the gravy, meat, steamed veggies and some sort of potato) - think “ah - a metaphor for life.”

Dressing is like life - you just have to get the mix right.

I dedicate this recipe to all the micro-content search engines which will one day provide this recipe to anyone who types in “Thanksgiving Stuffing recipe”. And let’s not forget those NEW kind of Web 2.0 recipe services - for us foodies!

How quickly things change

NBC just picked up Quarterlife - which was airing on MySpace. Why? Cause of the Writer’s strike.

One week OpenSocial is the next greastest thing since sliced bread, the next week - it’s just a widget platform. And Facebook goes from being vilified, closed eveil empire - to - raising the bar once again and changing the face of the ORIGINAL evil empire - advertising!

The extrapolation that email is the next great social networking battlefield. I point out how foolish this is, yet on second glance - this is EXACTLY what “bringing social to software” is. See! Even I can be wrong!

Everybody shies away from Porno and Adult entertainment - until of course a $1B acquisition happens. Then all of a sudden - its a great business model.

VC Fred Wilson appears to be supporting Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordan’s notions of a meta-social graph - controlled by the end-user. That’s all fine and dandy - but will Fred put his VC money behind his beliefs? That one we’ll have to wait and see. Fred acknowledges that this whole industry is like some sort of baseball game, with each subsequent move by each startup affecting the later innings - as much as the actions of the big players. But at the same time - Fred seems to only look as far as his face and flips companies for profit - cause - well cause Fred is a VC. That’s not what George Steinbrenner does.

The point of this post is that there are several ways to look at actions and movements in this industry. You can be monitor these 20 something brats who get lucky, manipulate the industry and make a bunch of older guys very jealous. Or you can try and track the evolution of innovation, our digital lifestyles, corporate behavior patterns and the relationship between customers and vendors. These notions may have something to do with each other, but rarely are they directly connected.

Its all about money - unfortunately and altruistic matters are relegated to the hell hole known as ‘non-profits’. Doing good and changing the world might be a great subject over cocktails, or get yah into heaven but it doesn’t pay the rent or feed your kids.

YouTube showed that viral, UGC vidos are fun - but also pointed out that anybody can record a TV show and put it on-line. That was great for YouTube - but once a legitimate company bought it (Google) they’ve kicked out all the recorded shows - and thus much of what made YouTube useful.)

The Music industry can bitch and moan about Apple’s monopolistic tendencies - but they cancel their deals with iTunes NOT to provide us better service or more choices -but to RAISE the prices!

The on-going rush of innovation can’t be stopped - but it seems it HAS to be monetized to be innovation. Even Wikipedia couldn’t be left alone - to ’simply’ provide a multi-language open encyclopedia. No! It’s model had to be turned into some sort of for-profit, social something or other.

So the next time you THINK something is innovative or coolio - just wait and see who exploits it and profits from it - before you KNOW that its become real innovation. Take that and put it into your visionary pipe and smoke it.

Maybe Email IS a social graph

I posted a retort to Fred Wilson almost giddy extrapolation of the numbers of email systems out there today and how they dwarf the existing social networks - in terms of size of the ’so-called’ social graphs. I called it “Why email and IM systems ain’t social networks” (don’t you just LOVE my candid use of vernacular?
In my retort I attack the notion that just cause these email systems have huge numbers, that does NOT make them a social network. We shouldn’t treat humans like cattle which do what we want them to do. We have to realize that humans are migratory beasts and are going to continue to migrate to the compelling experiences du jour.

However - in my haste to retort, what I missed was that there’s something else going on here - a sub-text trend which I’d like to connect to my meme of ‘bringing social to software‘.

You see what Fred gets right - and he’s backs it up in a comment he left to me - is that email is ALL about people. Connecting to people, communicating with people and keeping track of your ‘peeps’. So the trend that Saul Hansell wrote about (so-called InBox 2.0), which Marshall Kirkpatrick followed up on and which Fred Wilson - and many others flogged about as well - is in fact partially true - if you take it in the context of:

- all software is about people - in one sense or other

- email CERTAINLY is about people

- social features (friending, groups, personal pages, widgets) are becoming the norm

- and social features will spread to all forms of software; Intranets, productivity software, eCommerce, legacy apps - EVERYTHING - so why not email as well?

One thing I certainly do believe is that people feeds, and keeping track of certain people via RSS - is going to be a huge trend. I’ve been pitching that for years - and it took Facebook’s News Feeds, FriendFeed and Yahoo’s new plans to put this idea into vogue. That’s coolio - doesn’t matter where it comes from - as long as it becomes the norm.

Looking back - I think Fred’s emphasis on the SIZE of email and IM systems as being the #1 reason why they’re competing with social networks - was just a VC talking from his VC POV.

The essence of this - is that people connecting to people is at the core of what we all mean by social networking - and that list of relationships (eg. social graphs) is the new battlefield.

But we’ve known that for a while - right? Ever since we created the People’s DNS. Thanks Joel!

That’s why the IM wars were waged. That’s why the social networking wars are waging today. And that’s why we ain’t done yet with wars - cause that’s what humans do - right? They fight for their beliefs.