The Gillmor Gang - Dan Farber, Saul Hansell, Marc Canter, Dana Gardner, Hugh MacLeod, Sam Whitmore, Robert Scoble, Robert W. Anderson, and Mike Vizard - welcome Seesmic and Twhirl’s Loic Le Meur. Recorded Friday, May 2, 2008.

Transcript

Le Meur: My neck is completely blocked since I got in a small accident and I took some drugs that put me asleep and put me in a weird state like I smoked something, so if I’m weird it’s normal.

Gillmor: Well that’s true. You are weird and it is normal.

Le Meur: I know. Well it will be even more than normal.

Gillmor: Well you haven’t been on the Gillmor Gang or you would know that this is the show and you just started it.

Le Meur: Oh right? Well…

Le Meur: Oh, you started it. All right, well hello everybody then.

Gillmor: So happy birthday to Dave Weiner and I hope he takes it personally.

Scoble: He did and he wrote me an email and said, “Would you say birthday wishes in the email”. He’s a little mad that I used all my FriendFeed friends to say happy birthday to him.

Gillmor: Yeah, well all we can do is hope that he turns the corner on this but everybody has their right to pick their friends, just not other people’s friends.

Scoble: So what else is going on?

Gillmor: Who’s there?

Gardner: It’s Dana Gardner. Good morning.

Gillmor: Hey Dana, how are you doing?

Gardner: This is like the slowest morning I’ve seen on FriendFeed all week, or three weeks at least. It’s like everyone is waiting for Microsoft to buy Yahoo or something.

Gillmor: Do you think they are going to buy them?

Gardner: I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it but it’s not a good outcome either way. It’s better for both parties if the deal goes through, so I guess I’m hoping it goes through.

Hansell: If you were Ballmer or anybody, would you do that?

Gillmor: We are starting the show.

Gardner: I would not have done it, but that’s me.

Gillmor: Now what’s the question again, Saul?

Hansell: If you are Steve Ballmer and you had Microsoft’s hand, would you buy Yahoo?

Gillmor: Absolutely. <pause> Oh you want more?

Canter: I agree.

Gillmor: Yeah, I think that Yahoo is a sitting duck right now but it has tremendous assets and they will be successfully invigorated by Live Mesh. Scoble, you wrote something about early adopters and Live Mesh?

Scoble: The problem is it’s uninstallable. Last night I was having trouble with Skype and I started uninstalling things and one of the things I uninstalled was Live Mesh. And one of the ten things fixed my Skype problems. So now I don’t know what to put back on. <laughter>. I’ll put Live Mesh back on but that’s the problem of this installed software world – if you want to get people to install software you are working against this beast called Windows.

Gillmor: First of all I haven’t used Windows in three years so I don’t have that problem. I’m sure that there will be problems with the Mac footprint on OSX just because if you are going to talk to the hardware you gotta to talk to the hardware. So I don’t understand what that has to do with Live Mesh other than a virtualized device.

Scoble: The problem is if you are an early adopter you start installing everything under the sun and your system gets slower and slow and you start having crashes and you don’t know what caused it so you just remove everything or even better, you do what you do at Microsoft, you just reinstall Windows and start fresh with a fresh install and then you start loading stuff back in.

Gillmor: Or you do what I did which is to uninstall Windows and install OSX.

Scoble: <laughs> Well that’s true but have you gotten anywhere on a Mac yet or are you just playing in the Web browser?

Gillmor: I’m just playing with it [Live Mesh] in the Web browser and that’s the concept right now but it’s a very powerful one.

Scoble: That’s a great answer to my problem – well Mac runs in the browser so you are having problems with Windows and stuff so you just run it in the browser.

Gillmor: Right, that’s why Silverlight is the end game.

Le Meur: Sorry to interrupt. Seeing from the feedback on Twitter right now people [are saying] our uStream is down. I don’t know if anybody can fix it.

Gillmor: Tina, is uStream down?

Gillmor: So it’ll be back up in a second.

Gillmor: Ok thank you. Saul, what do you think?

Hansell: Mesh – I haven’t tried it, although a billion people are doing synching applications and there’s got to be more to it than that.

Gillmor: There’s a lot more to it than that. But I’m back to your question which was about Yahoo.

Hansell: I would do it if I felt like I was conformable with who was going to run it and I would probably more likely – I mean I think if I’m Ballmer I think the deal I like better is selling all of my Internet media assets to Yahoo, taking a stake to have control, but keeping it an independent company in that business and then focus my business on enterprise software stuff and making them more separate than together. That would probably be what I would do if I knew who would run it, which I don’t.

?: That’s pretty brilliant actually. That would fix a lot of the problems with Microsoft which is some of the strategy taxes and some of the flowness – you know you split it off as a separate company – I think that’s really interesting. I doubt Microsoft would do that.

Hansell: Anybody who signed up on Windows Live Search has to be disqualified from making this decision because you were confusing protecting your own software business with an Internet business and you can’t win that innovator’s dilemma. Period and we are done with that and we know that already.

?: What we are really buying is a great brand in Yahoo to fix their branding issue which is Live. Nobody, and I’ve asked dozens of people at conferences over the last two weeks about what they think about Live and they go, “I don’t understand what it stands for, what it is, or what is Live? I’ve never even tried it.” I keep hearing these kinds of terms, but yet when people hear Yahoo they have really specific answers immediately like “That’s where I get my email, where I get my news, or have my start page.” I get very specific answers when I ask about Yahoo but when I ask about Live I don’t get any good, specific answer, which tells me it’s a brand in ruin, it’s just a hurt brand.

Scoble: Is whatever business Yahoo is in and Google is in which is this combination of web-based media properties and applications (the email, portally things) plus the advertising network business, is that more like tech businesses that tend to monopolies and maybe commerce businesses (eBay tended to a monopoly, lots of other things – the users wanted to be one), or is it more like media businesses where the market is happy to have Times and News Week and US News where there are oligopolies. And if you really think that whatever Google is a natural oligopoly, you want to be number two, and if you think it’s a monopoly, spending $50 billion to try and be number two is like spending a lot of money ten years ago to try to be the second largest auction site – it’s a waste of all your time and energy.

Gillmor: But do you really think that’s what they are trying to do?

Scoble: Do I think that Microsoft is trying to be number two?

Gillmor: I don’t think they are trying to be number two.

Scoble: You have to be able to be a viable number two on your way to being a number one.

Gillmor: I don’t think they are trying to be number one or number two. I think they are trying to unleash their device monopoly on the Internet space.

Scoble: You don’t need 50 billion dollars. What Yahoo!’s got could do just that. Ballmer says in the Journal today that he sees this as competing in the advertising business, which I take him for his word for.

Gillmor: Of course, among other things, it is to compete in the advertising business. We’ve argued this before, and I’m a minority among people agreeing with me. As far as I’m concerned, this is a reboot of the advertising economic model.

Scoble: A rebuke of what?

Gillmor: The advertising economic model of the networks. Moving from a large scale broadcast model to moving toward a targeted, attention model that is what is going on here.

Scoble: That’s been the landscape, and so in that world an advertising network, a search engine, a tools for publishers… there is a business that Google is the leader in feeding tools into that economy, and I agree with you that in that world Microsoft wants to have search advertising tools and all the other things that profit from that decentralized economy.

Gillmor: That’s right…

Scoble: So a technology business with network effects, I would worry if I were Ballmer about how hard it’s going to be to displace the network that is now in the center of it.

Gillmor: They don’t need to displace it. They need to insert themselves into it. That’s what Mesh is about. Mesh is about putting out the antenna in the way that other tech companies that have solved these [not discernable]

[Scoble is going over Devil’s Slide]

Gillmor: Since Robert is gone, so Mesh is basically a device that is supposed to harvest as much as the attention signals as possible on the network. They don’t need to be an either/or situation – they will lose if it is. They need to be part of the service factor that allows collaboration service applications at the surface level. It’s a granular move and it’s not a winner take all scenario.

?: So regardless whether business Microsoft moves to with Yahoo!, it’s the organization with the most meta data on the most users. It’s not just about winning. It’s not like one company wins. One company in the Internet auction business, in the assistant commerce business, will not keep winning since their will be a whole new way to supplant them. You could say someone is going to do this, that, specialized auctions. You never know. The network effect has something where eBay has had just an incredible run. It’s still viable, and you say that a network just like on eBay is a benefit for all the buyers and all the sellers, there might be a benefit for publishers and sellers to be on the network. I’m not saying it’s guaranteed, but I think there’s some chance that it’s not to be dismissed lightly

Gillmor: Do you agree with me?

?: I’m not agreeing. I’m not sure it’s obvious that Microsoft can just say “Mesh is a new business” because too much of the 50 billion dollars going to buy Yahoo! is not going to compete head on with Google.

Gillmor: I don’t dispute that there are many opportunities to whittle down to size the Google lead, just like Google has used their docs, etc. to whittle down; you know, among other things – the price – of Microsoft office.

Gardner: I’m not sure if we took Google Docs off the market, that you could say Microsoft’s profits would go up.

Gillmor: Do you think that in one year maximum, that we’ll see a Silverlight office build, that will obviously be dumbed down, with some corporate features dumbed down. I bet you a whole ten bucks, and you’ll lose.

Gardner: Of course, some of the future is that. I mean, why wouldn’t they, you’d have to create a construction and you need to make a product. I would bet you that sales of Outlook has been significantly affected by webmail (broadly defined). You know lots of people who basically live in Gmail or Yahoo! Mail instead of Outlook.

Gillmor: I mean, absolutely, and I think Scoble said that their Office trial edition ran out, and they don’t care… they have replacements for it on the network. They are done. I mean, that’s not a small, you know, effect. When it migrates to the enterprise, it’s going to be a huge effect.

Gardner: Yahoo! gives them solutions, but obviously they will win or lose on that. They have a running shot at the Office online, so if they can build the World’s best Silverlight, and there’s little reason to believe they can’t, they should be able to let them win the lion’s share of that business.

Gillmor: So, if you take Silverlight and Office – both ends of the spectrum – and the Silverlight spectrum includes Twitter, which is the messaging hub of what Exchange Server and SharePoint and those other things report to be, but already exist; but, if you take those things at the opposite poles and put Mesh in the middle, you have an Internet operating system that is already defensive of the proposition it creates. It’s already basically going down the turns that we’re talking about.

Farber: Mesh becomes the sticky party, but following your data and your sign-on and your preferences…

Gillmor: It’s the phone company. It’s the middle, it’s the switching mechanisms.

Farber: And when you’ve got people into that, you’ve locked them.

Gillmor: You’re not locking them. You’re giving the user an opportunity because it allows you to orchestrate their devices so the data moves with you. So you can synchronize multiple devices.

?: So they still need to be sticky?

Gillmor: I don’t know what sticky means. If you have all the signals that are significant for your so-called gestures – metadata – are being recorded to other places by the mesh. If a user can aggregate their own signals and then license them and parse them out, then we have another generation of an advertising economy which is based coming from the individual and not from the cloud.

?: So we might say the terminology is sticky.

Farber: I think Mark Canter is on the call.

Canter: Yea!

Farber: It’s not about Microsoft’s Mesh, it’s our Mesh and it’s more than just Microsoft is trying to do and I think in that sense it’s very sticky and very powerful as we all think of it as something not sitting in the Microsoft file but something we’re all building out.

Vizard: That’s an interesting point because I was just moderating a panel 100 local CEOs and they are already trying to figure out how to put together.

Gillmor: That’s Mike Vizard, not Dan Farber, by the way…

Vizard: Right, so, I think, you know, what is going to be the next level of abstraction that would allow them to unite private and public clouds to kind of create their own mesh.

Canter: Exactly, and this is another way to look at the MS purchase of Yahoo!: The OS approach to so different than Live Mesh that it allows the new Micro-hoo to cover their bases… and Microsoft is going to have chips in every game. Whether they’ve won two or three games or lose them, they will be either one, two, or three in every single platform and that is why you buy MS stock… The big play for the future, and by them owning you get the brand. Yahoo!: A Microsoft company.

Gillmor: I’d like to welcome our special guests today, Loic Le Meur.

Le Meur: Thank you for having me.

Gillmor: Thanks for coming on this show. You have several companies. I’m going to let you tell me the important one.

Le Meur: I only have one company, which is called seismic. Recently acquired a company called Twhirl and I also have the conference call on the Web. We had 2000 people in 37 countries last year, that’s the end of the piece.

Gillmor: Loic, you and I had some great conversations for 3-4 hours, and as you know I think that Twhirl is certainly as important as what you’re doing in the video space.

Le Meur: Well, let me put it this way, we are creating a video conversation and I think it has never been done. I believe it will take some time for people to get used to it. We have like a long term debt, which I don’t see a reason why the conversation that we have enjoyed in social software should not have. So, it’s more of a long term and I really believe we will please our investors. So, going back to your question, we decided to acquire Twhirl a few weeks ago because it’s a move in the direction that is very important to integrate Tweet and other segments friendfeed, and you’ll be able to Twittle. It’ll all be optional. It’s a very important tool on my desktop and I know, Steve, you use it.

Gillmor: Yea, I think Twitter is a dominant force on the network.

Gardner: What is Twitter dominant on? As defined by…? Cause talking to people who know someday on this call?

Gillmor: Well, are we going to get into the grandma attacks, or do you just want me to play out what I’m talking about? Thanks… So, I just want to unpack a couple of things. One thing he said that slipped by is that Twhirl is an AIR client – an Adobe technology that requires, but if I get too technical, Mark Canter will correct me (and you’re welcome to, of course), but it’s essentially a competitor to what Silverlight represents on the Microsoft platform. In fact, do you have any announcements as to what you might be doing with Silverlight in terms of Twhirl?

Le Meur: Yea, we don’t have an announcement on Twhirl, but we have a partnership with Microsoft where seesmic will be the first mobile client on Silverlight, which should be launched in May. It’s a partnership that started in Mixx in Vegas. Microsoft helped us and created with a company called Tequila-Rapido in France, a mobile client for Seesmic which, entirely on Silverlight, lets you record a video, friend someone, and get a reply entirely on mobile. Given this partnership, we’re busy talking about Twhirl as well, on Silverlight, but I have no announcement to make right now.

Gillmor: My point would be that there’s a need for a so-called rich Internet application, what I would call services plus software rather than Microsoft’s software plus services, that seems to be emerging. It’s emerging around a very lightweight application that uses text and links. Those links, however, are launch pads for broadcast or other types of media– video, audio, text, etc. So to answer Saul’s question in a roundabout way, for me, Twitter has become the gateway to the network for me. It is the early bird that catches the worm. Right now, 30-50% of the links that I click on during the day are generated by a Twitter announcement. Certainly not from RSS or Google Reader, and the RSS aggregation model has been subsumed as a stack-level service. It is the service most facing the user right now, albeit in a small early-adopter way; this is a fundamental reboot of the way we use computers, and it will spread.

Le Meur: I must admit that most of my online time is on Twitter, and it’s moving away from Google Reader and others, because my friends are feeding me the important news. If it’s important it will come from my friends, which is a quote that people have used already. We saw it yesterday– it was down for a few hours, and I was really missing something.

Scoble: I agree with you. It’s taken over my reading behavior in a big way. I’m still reading Google Reader, you’ll see that come through FriendFeed. I’m now getting signals from the network, about what’s interesting to pay attention to, and its faster and more interesting than what I used to get off of TechMeme, and certainly more interesting than what I used to get off Google Reader, and there’s not that expectation that I’m going to read all. A lot of people say they hate Google Reader because they feel bad when they don’t read every single last post that comes through their feed.

Hansell: If there isn’t a Reader, and a TechMeme, what are you going to know what to point to? It’s an enhancement, not a replacement right?

Gillmor: TechMeme is an aggregation of signals that suggest authority and interest. So is Twitter.

Hansell: They’re completely different architectures because there’s a fundamental elitism that may be useful in TechMeme, right?

Gillmor: This is ironic that the New York Times is talking about elitism.

Hansell: In potentially a good way, right? There’s an argument that says if you’re committed enough to having something to say that you have a blog, you actually should get more votes than if you’re on Digg or Twitter, and those are different architectures, too, from each other. So the algorithm that says that based on people who are committed to following a subject matter, here’s what they’re bubbling up. It’s a little slower, not that much slower actually; it has a ranking function as opposed to Twitter where everybody assembles their own network of people, of your friends and the people you’re following; you’re just sort of following a stream. I don’t use it at all.

Gardner: I think Saul is suggesting a direction that Twitter might go in, too. What if Twitter were able to allow you to group things, or have some filters? When you’re following hundreds and hundreds of people, that has to be managed to.

Hansell: It’s also a question of what you’re using it for. The interesting thing about Twitter, like blogging, is you’re mixing, sort of, I’m observing the world and talking about personal stuff as well. My take on Twitter, being that the main thing is “what are you dong right now”, it was a replacement for and a slight improvement over the Facebook News Feed. I have, and I think it’s widely underused, the Facebook Firefox toolbar, installed, which pops up every time a friend changes a News Feed item. It’s an alternative to Twitter. My instinct is my friends are already on Facebook, and I don’t want to replicate my name space. Twitter is something Facebook should do. There’s no reason for Twitter to exist, if Facebook was doing its job right. You only want one set of friends.

Gillmor: And this is another reason for why Live Mesh will be powerful. It’ll allow you to pipe between services and effectively get what you just talked about.

Hansell: I’d bet on Facebook or Google more than Microsoft in terms of being able to make that happen.

Gillmor: I’m not going to argue the point, because you certainly have a lot of data on your side. I will suggest, that the way I look at Mesh, is not what’s going to get adoption, is what’s going to stop it, and I don’t see anything stopping it.

Hansell: Except nobody uses it!

Gillmor: I don’t see anything stopping Mesh.

Gardner: You need to explain what you see Mesh doing. It’s platform-agnostic, at some point. So what is it doing?

Gillmor: It’s harnessing the network capabilities for the user, under the user’s control, to do whatever the user wants to do. What I want to do is to have a reliable Twitter which has multimedia types that are attached to it but not part of it. I want to be able to use the signals that come off of Google Reader through an application like newsgang.net or others that do the same thing.

Gardner: You’ve already lost me. Still trying to parse this Rube Golberg contraption you’re talking about.

Gillmor: There’ll be a transcript of the show and you’ll be able to read it. Dave Winer pioneered the use of scripting technologies to basically allow users to be able to wire together, under semi-automated control, their patterns, what they do during the day, and to be able to use the computer as a semi-intelligent device to be able to take care of business for them while they’re doing other things.

Hansell: Who actually does anything like that? Nobody.

Gillmor: Why did Yahoo! release Yahoo! Pipes? Because nobody is interested?

Hansell: That’s tech marketing. All that stuff comes out of the marketing budget.

Gillmor: That may be true, but I’m using Yahoo! Pipes.

Hansell: That’s because you’re a developer. There’s a business in creating developer tools.

Gillmor: The difference between somebody who’s a developer and a power user has shrunk, every since Visual Basic first let you teach yourself how to program.

Hansell: That’s not true, though. I’m a power user and not a developer, and I find that it is harder and harder to program things at my level, because you can’t write macros in Word anymore.

Gillmor: You’re programming Facebook?

Hansell: A little bit, yeah. It’s nice to have power users, and it helps create buzz and there are occasionally things that come out of that community that can really help.

Scoble: You guys are totally missing the point. Developer platforms let you build new kinds of apps. Do we talk this way about the Win32 API? When it came out, it enabled a whole range of new kinds of apps. AIR brought me Twhirl; it didn’t exist a year ago. I’m using that and getting great enjoyment out of that. Mesh is going to bring me a new kind of app that can’t exist today.

Hansell: Microsoft does actually have some competency in creating platforms for developers. If you say Mesh with Silverlight is not going to be a consumer app, but is going to enable people to develop consumer apps, then that’s a strategy that hangs together.

Gillmor: Of course that’s what we’re saying. People use these types of applications that are created. Our guest today is Loic Le Meur, who started in the video business and all of a sudden bought into a rich Internet application extension of Twitter. What is he doing? Is he on drugs, yes, he said he’s on drugs because he’s got a bad neck. Other than that, there’s a reason why he’s doing what he’s doing. What are you doing Loic? Why would you spend even a small amount of time on this diversion from your main business, unless you thought that it was probably fundamental at some level?

Le Meur: We were about to build an AIR client for Seesmic as well, because I believe that people will use video if we make it super simple to use– if it’s on your desktop and you don’t have to go anywhere, then you’re likely to use it more. I started talking to Twhirl; I approached Marco Kaiser, the creator of Twhirl, through Twitter. I asked if he would be interested in integrating with Seesmic, and he said yes, and we started talking and I found two frustrations from him, which I immediately understand. He wanted to work full-time on Twhirl, because it’s his passion and he was doing some other projects which were not that interesting, and so he joined full-time, and now Twhirl is part of Seesmic.

The two reasons, to answer your point– the first one is to make video simpler and we need an integrated experience. You can leave a comment on FriendFeed or star something on FriendFeed through Twhirl. The second reason, now coming to what’s more important for you, is that as a Twitter user, I feel that we should use it better. One of the things which is missing right now is the track function, which you can’t get on anything else than GTalk.

This is an announcement for you on the show, Steve, that we’re adding XMPP to Twhirl, which I think is very important. It’s mostly driven by the fact that we love Twitter, and what we do is very complementary. So we’ll have XMPP on Seesmic and Twhirl. For the people who may not understand what it is exactly—basically, it will allow you, through Twhirl, to get updates live pushed to you without having Twhirl go through the Twitter API and check on the delay you’ve decided. It will allow to you push unlimited updates, because right now on the Twitter API, for those of you who are sometimes surprised that you can’t tweet anymore, there’s a limitation on the API, if you tweet too much, it blocks you.

Gillmor: Yeah..It shows you .. An hour. Ok let me unpack a couple things you said. Number 1 you’ve got two technologies here.

Le Meur: By the way that’s the way I look if you’re on extreme with my neck brace.

Gillmor: You’ve got two technologies that are apparently unconnected. One is video comments which TechCrunch has started to use and I think the GillmorGang site on TechCrunch will be using that as well. And then you’ve got Twitter or Twhirl as a front end for Twitter. Now what would those two things have in common? Well the biggest problem and I’m speaking for you and I think you’ll agree with me, the biggest problem with video comments is getting people to do it.

Le Meur: Absolutely, it’s more of a control thing than and technical problem.

Gillmor: Exactly. If you have a conversation that is ongoing on a network that is pretty much wide open and not only wide open but viewed by a large open segment of the population in terms of these micro communities that grow up on who you follow and who follows you and who you track, which is something we will get into more and more as there are competitors like Google and GTalk are doing with Twitter which you just announced you’re about to build. The track technology is more ubiquitous. You’re going to have more free ranging discoverable conversations where somebody, anybody on a network can type in and basically say something and join a conversation. At that point the potential for video comment escalates enormously.

Le Meur: So if you think about the brand. I like this example, it just happened to me, I did not check and now I’m doing it anymore. I pick a hotel, it’s like a trippy story but its fun I think, I picked a hotel in Amsterdam, I was in transit there and I followed the advice of a travel agent telling me just go to a Hilton Amsterdam. Instead of asking my Twitter friends, I have many Dutch friends there, they would have told me not to go there and it really, really sucked. It was like 350 Euros, $500 bucks a night and it was just terrible. So what I did was that I put up a video of that and I Twittered about it, saying this was a total rip-off. In 10 minutes one of my forwards was connected to the marketing department at Hilton, then forwarded the video to him, that forwarded the video to I think the hotel manager. And that shows the power that Hilton should track their name on Twitter and many brands and all the brands will do that and after that we’ll be doing it on Technorati and on Google Reader or on Google Doc’s or something. But I think this is much more powerful as its instant feedback from your customers, from the word of mouth. And I want it on my Desktop which is what I am saying right? Right now the only way you can get it is through GTalk or the IP on the Twitter side which most people use Twitter differently. And so I want it on Twhirl and obviously on the mobile as well. I want to know what people are saying about brands that we represent.

Anderson: I think there is too much focus on the brand. First of all in the last half an hour you got me to uninstall Google Talk thanks to things, the new live update, cause that’s the one thing I liked about Google Talk over Twhirl is that I could watch the conversation going on live and not miss any Tweets even though I’m following a huge number of people. The second thing is this is going to let a new kind of advertising come out that isn’t advertising. It’s me telling people what I think and that’s the same way about everybody else. And I can create a site or experience around something [inaudible]. Look at Gary Wineheart did with WineLibrary TV. If I watch that show I’m not buying wine from anybody else Google, EBay, Amazon, they can’t get me as a customer because I have such a strong relationship with him now by watching his show and understanding his passion and his credibility on wine that I’m going to buy whatever he tells me to and I’m going to buy it from him and I would even pay a couple of more bucks per bottle.

Le Meur: I just want to correct you on one thing, that we are adding xmpt now so expect it in about 3 weeks. I realize you’re excited about it and me too I can’t wait but right now. But I picked my restaurant tonight with friends by asking on twitter where should I go with my friends.

Anderson: Yep I do the same thing, in fact now I vet software companies that way. I go to Twitter and I ask people what do you think between Zoho and Google Doc’s and Spreadsheets, which one do you think is better? Within a minute I get 50 or 100 answers back and I can categorize them, a guy sent me 5 votes for Zoho and 25 votes for Google Doc’s Spreadsheets and I can use that design a new service for my readers that uses the power of the crowd. They’ve been [beep in] by my event calendar on Upcoming.org, I have 600 people reporting to me the best events in the industry. I can use that to say that for instance tomorrows Maker fair in the Bay area is going to be hugely successful because there are 700 people who have said they’re going to that.

Le Meur: You’re a bit frustrated like I am when I get just for asking my friends where I should go to a restaurant for tonight. I get about 50 replies. Either direct messages or public messages and I’m sure for you it’s also difficult to track them because then you have to go back and archive them and it’s difficult. So this is why we need another experience and this is why we are working on that with Twhirl. So I think we will add much richer feedback, like when you get replies from your friends it’s very important because they took the time read it because it’s you, because they like you, and because you want to share so much.

Anderson: I totally agree, archives on Twitter are pretty much lost. I’ve asked questions like which screen saver should I use and I had hundreds of replies, that was only 6 or 7 weeks ago. And the replies were really rich and really good and really detailed and a lot of those people gave me links over to their blogs where they wrote reviews. Some people even sent videos and other people from the companies themselves sent me where I could try a trial version or where I could download their latest stuff and all of that is lost, gone, unless I’m on at that time and blogged it or put in some other form. I’m really hoping that services understand how to pull stuff out of Twitter that has value of stuff like that and put it in a database where people can pull it back out.

Le Meur: So exactly what we’re doing, think about PollDaddy for example with service that help you do polls, so they have a Twitter.Polldaddy.com. But I was discussing with Faber and the thing is he said people don’t delete much because people don’t know it’s there. So we’re adding these types of services to Twhirl, where you want to poll which services your friends like better, you’ll have it right there from a button on Twhirl.

Anderson: yeah this is one reason I like FriendFeed better because when I Twitter something like that, a question, the Twitter responses are hard to read. First of all because you have to watch my inbound Twitter Feed which is really noisy and finding the 50 good answers between all the noise is extremely tough for most people.

Le Meur: Exactly.

Anderson: But the second thing is that it’s not threaded, it’s not grouped, and say hey just look at this single URL and see all the responses. What FriendFeed does very very well is that it puts it into a thread and it groups it and it keeps it separate from all the noise, so that I can email that whole group over to you and tell you look at what people just said about this topic.

Le Meur: Absolutely.

Canter: Can I ask you guys a question?

Anderson: Sure.

Canter: How concerned are you when Twitter goes down?

Le Meur: Very.

Anderson: Very.

Canter: And what are you doing about it?

Anderson: I’m supporting FriendFeed and other services that sort of duplicate that technology, that behavior and every time I see Twitter go down I see more and more people switching over to FriendFeed which has not gone down at all since I’ve been using it.

Le Meur: I fully agree and I really like Twitter and my friends Evan and Jack. The thing is that FriendFeed does not have the mobile component and I’m sure they’re probably working on that but that’s really a missing part. But the good news for Twitter is that I can have my Twitter anywhere I am. It’s growing in me in an amazing way. I had this coincidence happened to me and I twitter that. Then I received 20 replies to my phone. People were offering help and that was amazing. I feel like surrounded by friends all the time. So mobile component is very very important which we also you know think about with Twhirl as well of course.

Canter: So, you embrace lock in, you love it?

Gillmor: I don’t buy the idea that this is lock in Mark. I am sorry.

Canter: That is what happens when Twitter goes down.

Gillmor: When the user votes for their feeds about something that is not lock in.

Gillmor: I am sorry one at a time.

MacLeod: I have a question for Loic. Hi Loic, this is Hugh MacLeod.

Le Meur: Hi Hugh. How are you? It is good to have you.

MacLeod: Sorry. I am late. Does little part of you kind a wish that you own Twitter? Like you bought it cheap like two years ago?

Le Meur: No. There is something that I learned in few companies that I have created, is to remain extremely focused. That is actually something that Twitter is demonstrating right now. They are very focused on making it work. Well, FriendFeed is focused on integrating services. Well, we are very very focused on video conversation. Yes, I like Twitter so much. You know, I am having unified experience with Twitter, Friendfeed and Seesmic on my desktop.

Canter: Except when it goes down.

Le Meur: Except when it goes down. Yeah. And when it goes down, we ship to something else.

V1: Yeah. That is the point. How Twitter do we think that there is going to be? They are rewriting Twitter right now using a different language. There are half a dozen startups like Twitter in different languages.

Gillmor: But, it is not about competitive small micro-companies. It is about the model perpetuating itself and achieving a stability that allows to be used in the enterprise. And that is what is going to happen.

V1: I agree that there is a model there. But I am just saying that there might be multiple implementations of a model.

Hansell: Hey Steve. How do you imagine somebody who has been in……side is going to want to implement Twitter in a company.

Gillmor: Well. Live Mesh demos that were given to few of us privately and that some of people attending web 2.0 are included a Twitter info pump. Why would Microsoft other than what you call brand marketing be showing that kind of information?

Hansell: I am wondering that chemical division of GE and I need to worry make my workers more productive. I have given them email; I may or may not have given them IM. What exactly about the broadcast nature of Twitter is going to make me want to implement that for cooperation?

V2: Hey Steve, let me answer that question.

Gillmor: Please

V2: Let’s say I have 15 sales people. And I need to keep track of what they are dealing all day long. Do I want to get a phone call from 15 people? That is a huge waste of time. Do I want to get an email that nobody can see? Each of them can’t see how fast each other out. That is unproductive. I want something like Twitter where people are reporting all day long. Hey I am about to go General Motors, anybody knows anybody knows anything or is there anybody else that I should see after I am done. And as a result, my team becomes more and more productive. And more combined more communicated. I am sitting here with Rocky and we are having some communication troubles. Where do those communication problems come from? You know it is so hard to communicate with each other.

Hansell I don’t dispute that there are certain problems every now and then that are chat room structure which is what that is in terms of structure. It is sometimes useful, but sometimes …. And there are a lot of email that you can sort, store, it is immediate but you only look it up when you feel like it as opposed to the interruptive nature of IM and Twitter. I am not sure if this is a massive solution. I think it is a niche solution for certain cases where simultaneity is important.

X: There is going to be a single standard approach because like this morning…I spent a day with SAP and talking about integration of blackberries, running SAP application on blackberry device.

Gillmor: What would they want to be doing that for?

X: That is all well and fine. But the point is that is single solution between blackberry and SAP. And I have got hundreds of enterprise applications. Ultimately when I get to these mobile devices in this level of integration, I want to have some kind of standard way of doing that across multiple applications not just one of implementations. That is why something like Twitter gives me a message pump. And you have seen message pumps in many ways for years. But something that is more accessible, lightweight and industry type of standard would be interesting to people.

Gillmor: Now, I just want to answer one aspect of Saul’s question which is basically how is the scale? And how does it scale to enterprise? I will give you an example of why it will. First of all take look at the history of IM…… supplanting email for corporate communication. Lotus has been selling that stuff for years. Secondly, we are starting to experience around the track mechanism. We haven’t got enough time to go this in detail. But, I have been talking about this for a few weeks. We are starting to see some gateway of the track model.

Canter: What do you mean by track model?

Gillmor: The ability that lower …………to XMPP gateways. The ability to over an XMPP real time flow of Twitter messages. Right now only available through Gtalk. It is part of gmail. When you have that kind of capability, typical usage patter is to take a look at …….……actually, the ability to essentially interfere with a very very powerful mechanism for discovery in Twitter environment. But say, I track my own name, and there are people who follow me, there are people I follow. That is one mechanism for discovery. It is not a very efficient one. It is essentially facebook kind social graph kind of cosmology. If you track on your name, for example, or some sort of a key word that is particularly important, assuming you can sculpt it so that bringing all sorts of other stuff that you don’t want to…..People who mention your name, they can use this as a signal that they want to talk with you. They can also be seen as a signal of the people are talking about you or what you are talking about. So, there is a lot of value in there from enterprise intelligence mechanism. So, this is not a small feature that currently only available for consumers. But when applications like T. or others start to manifest themselves, it is going to become a big business. That is how lotus emerged. So, one of the things that we are going to be doing here is if you take a look at trying to filter track, you suddenly have tools to in real time be able to change what is being viewed from the whole network to a small micro community. That is business model. You do not need to be watching this you know fire hose stream of information. In a way it is impossible to consume.

Gardner: So Steve, if these micro communities are a major value here, what’s going to present same time, a lower product or Microsoft with its IM from just bolting this on to their internal IM system so why would you need Twitter in that case if it’s for internal use or micro communities?

Gillmor: If we’re talking about how does Twitter make money, that’s a different conversation, I’m talking about the Twitter functionality as Vizard just talked about. It makes sense that there are going to be other companies leveraging this. The credibility of the ultimate brand, the one closest to the users eyeballs, is everything in this marketplace. That’s why the Yahoo deal is so significant because there’s such a large cloud of people who are in play here…that, Microsoft can do everything it wants to, a forced buyout, etc. at the end of the day if they don’t retain credibility with their users, if they don’t keep their platform open in a fundamental way that Google, for the most part, is doing, they will not gain anything out of that transaction other than a tremendous switching cost and a nightmare. Now if you flip that around and they are successful in keeping an open, transparent platform, and I advise you to go look at what they’re saying about Mesh.

Gardner: Right. I’m not arguing with you on that. It’s likely that we’re going to see Twitter functionality occur in the enterprise first in the IM infrastructure using buddy lists and extending them more community based, open social activity…

Gillmor: If there’s no reason to switch then no one switches. This is the couch potato model that the TV networks have used extremely efficiently for many years.

Gardner: So doesn’t it make sense for Twitter to have sort of a gateway with these internal IM systems?

Gillmor: Of course. And that’s going to come from those companies and from so called add-on products like what Loic is doing.

Gardner: So what information do you have about a gateway, who’s going to be the third party?

Gillmor: We’re talking to the guy who is the first example of it right now. Ask him any question you want.

Le Meur: Well for example, the I follow the replies to me in public like most people do. It’s very easy to expand that as Steve pointed out. Because you can just start writing more and everyone tracking that will start showing that. For example I have a bot talking to me, I don’t know what it is, it’s kind of stupid but it says hi Loic how are you today, you can tell it’s a bot. this is the first versions of spam using this. And I want it filtered. So that’s something we’re thinking about as well. And adding XMPP to it will allow you to filter that. Another way to think about filtering is I’m adding…Scoble are you still there? No he is gone. So he’s always talking about adding those 20,000 people on twitter. Getting one update every second. I added 6000. And it’s great because I can hear everybody talking because that’s what I want, it’s very exciting. But when Steve says something, I want to be notified in a better way. Out of 6000 people there are many people you want to get notified better. That’s something we’re fixing, getting groups of friends. There are many many ideas we can think of and we’re thinking about those.

Canter: Loic, you’ve got the resources and the ability to create parallel systems so that’s how the web works. You don’t rely just upon Twitter. You can have parallel systems with a DNS backbone to connect these infrastructures together so that not all your balls are in Evan Williams’ vice.

Scoble: that’s exactly what Twirl’s doing. They’ve already accepted Twirl and Friendfeed. So if Twitter goes down Friendfeed is still there and vice versa. So there’s already some redundancy coming into the infrastructure through these tools that are starting to hook up the various aggregators and messaging systems that are coming out.

Le Meur: And you can already bounce us through Twill and we’re adding Jaiku which was acquired by Google. So we’re adding that redundancy.

Gardner: Can you see it coming where Twhirl becomes a bigger business than Seesmic?

Gillmor: Back to where we were yesterday about 4 hours into the conversation.

Le Meur: I don’t know about that. I’m not building a Twitter competitor.

Gillmor: He has investors in his video business so take that with a grain of salt.

Scoble: Do you think you’re gonna rename Twhirl to the Seesmic client because I’m already spending much more time with Twhirl than I ever will with Seesmic, even though… we should talk about video comments. I think that’s one of the most brilliant things you’ve done recently, I’m seeing these video comments showing up all over the web. But I still have a much stronger brand usage of Twhirl than I ever will with Seesmic cuz it’s in my face all day long. Do you ever think you’re going to rename Twhirl to the Seesmic client?

Le Meur: There are 2 questions you’ve expressed here. One, I have no intention to rename Twhirl into Seesmic. I have also sold products for companies and I know how frustrating it is to dominate them. I love Twhirl as much as you do and the reason we acquired it is to invest a lot in it. Anything we do is optional: you don’t want to use Friendfeed you don’t want to use Seesmic in Twhirl, fine. You can still have your full experience, you choose. Two, about the video comments, thank you. We see a lot of traffic on those and again Twhirl…we’re about to release as well over both platforms a videoconference plugin. And what we’re focusing on right now is to take Seesmic as a platform, which has a very rich API, we are introducing a video recording API, to anywhere our users want to take it. You will see video comments on blogs, media properties. You can already see the video comments on Friendfeed, I’m sure you’ve noticed that. Very soon you will be able to reply to those video comments right from where you are. So like Friendfeed for example. Just to comment on your video comments comment. Seesmic is a long-term play. I think about very very broad. Think about the rise of newspapers, radio and TV. Very different media. The reason we decided to focus so much on video with Seesmic, is just that I don’t buy that there won’t be a huge worldwide talk show that puts us all together in the near term. I agree, I also use text much more than video. I’m not saying video will replace everything, that would be wrong. But what you see on TV today, all these conversations that are one to many unfortunately because the medium doesn’t allow this to happen, will be huge as well on the web but will take 3 -5 years and we will see the video conversations. Why? Because the feelings you get from video conversations, you can feel the gestures. Somebody says something on Seespeak you know if it’s honest or not. I love that comment because you know so much from video. We have people getting friendships on Seespeak. People from Japan, Josh from Iraq talking to people here in the US or in Europe and I have never seen that before. Yes it’s small, I think it will be huge, I may be totally wrong. We will see and it’s going to take time for sure. I agree that text is much bigger for now, but video will be big as well. Now our challenge, and I’d love your advice on this, is that viewing or replying to a video takes more time. We need to put metadata so that you know what’s in the video before clicking it, tags and so on. That’s the challenge, getting people used to that. Talking to a webcam is not natural. But blogging was not natural five years ago either, and now everyone knows what it is. And two is about meta-data and tagging and getting them very, very well described as much as possible so we know what’s in there before clicking on it.

PERSON 2: Can I ask you a question about that? You keep saying fine, but a video is not natural. Why do you believe that there is a business, you could say blogging wasn’t natural, but blogging, people have been writing for years and blogging is just a particularly efficient format you could say for getting people to write in public. People have not been conversing by little video clips, why do you think there’s much demand.

Le Meur: Well, just by looking at the way we communicate all day long, you know I enjoy watching and now because in the USA I don’t know which one to watch. Like in France, I was really enjoying watching some talk shows. For example, during the political race last year, we had the presidential race, it was very interesting to see people debating on video and you don’t get that in newspaper. So I don’t see a reason why it shouldn’t happen on the web. I mean, we, I think this social software huge phenomenon that we are all experimenting in and being actors in, has just begun, and what’s happening is that we give a voice to everybody. Now think about video just for a second. What’s happened in blogging and social software, it’s a many won’t come back to that, you are the experts. Anybody can participate in the conversation, and get into that. Now look at video, my take is that YouTube and all the video companies which are there, mostly enable the long-term so anybody can post, which is great, it’s fantastic, it’s a huge achievement and you can see the success of YouTube. But it’s not the conversation, it’s not interactive, uStream is a little bit of that, but it’s one too many, because we are streaming right now, I can see Steve in front of me, but people are chatting in text, so there is no video conversation per say here, and I love uStream, I’m just trying too…. Yahoo! Live you can get four people, I think, six people, I think in video at the same time. So it’s a trial this conversation, but the reason why we launched I think is totally for use, like video comments, is because anybody should be able to express themselves. Why I think it’s gonna be huge, because I just don’t see a reason why this won’t happen. I mean, TV has yet to change, nothing has changed on TV since (unclear).

UNKNOWN: What in video is culturally accepted or used by other people is capturing experiences. I just drove over the Golden Gate bridge, and I know there are a lot of people with video cameras filming their experiences. You know, while they are being tourists in San Francisco. I have certainly noticed that about myself, if I’m at a concert, I love to video it. Or if I’m at at a museum, I went to the (unclear) after I attended your conference last year, and we videoed that. And Rocky is here and saying he likes to video the Shark’s games when he goes and watches sporting events. You have seem me do this with my cam.

Scoble: I guess I think, you were, I mean clearly we have a lot, there’s a curve where people do a lot more video that ever. Right, because it is so much easier, it’s part of the conversation. It’s part of the cultural way we discuss. But video, still, just because it is a tiny bit harder and will always be at least a tiny bit harder than tapping down words is a little production. We are giving the creative…

Le Meur: I disagree with this because you are right, and I’ll let you finish of course, I’m just sorry for interrupting, but clicking on the red button and recording yourself, clicking on the stop button and its there… It’s much, much easier for many people than typing a blog post of 10 lines.

Scoble: Absolutely, in fact, on my cell phone I can start a video in two clicks. It takes twelve clicks to make a phone call. So when I show people the power of that, they all of a sudden get if. There is no friction to publishing video anymore and getting video over to your friends. (interruption). Go ahead.

Le Meur: Sorry, Scoble, Robert, I’m cutting you, keep going.

Scoble: I’m just saying, you know, I want people at the Justice concert, that MySpace held a few weeks ago, and I saw dozens of cell phone video cameras in the audience and it’s so easy know to call up your friends and say hey, checkout where I am, and go to this web site like (inaudible) or Quick, or (inaudible), and then turn on your video camera and have them watching live.

UNKNOWN: Can I ask you a question? I don’t disagree with your basic premise here and it certainly hasn’t played out, but we’ve had webcam conversations and people have been video conferencing for a long time, and certainly people do it, but it has not taken off the way the percentage of IM conversations in relation to video is still pretty small, why?

Le Meur: Why, because bandwidth was not there, because there were not enough webcams or camera enabled phones, and now you know, all the Mac’s have them, Dell is doing it, Sony is doing webcams, so that is a second reason, number of webcams and number of camera enabled phones. Now we need more bandwidth on the phones to do it. I think the third reason is that cultural thing, I mean, really its not natural, but once you get into it, I mean, I love seeing my best friend’s videos, they are all over the world, pretty much like you because we’re living in this web thing. And I love to see them, especially as I am European, I left and I love to see them when they show up in video.

Scoble: You keep saying my best friends videos, I’m making a distinction here between produced video, even if it’s just the most casual.. you know, “I went to the Golden Gate Bridge.” and filmed something and I’m sending my favorite clip to you, and conversation, and I would have bet people would have wanted to do a conversation, but I’m just not sure we’re seeing it. The only people in the world who’s doing both kinds of videos on FastCompany.tv I’m doing cell phone video with Quik, which I think is totally different than what you understood it. You don’t upload a clip anymore, you just turn on your cell phone and it’s live. You don’t have to do anything anymore, it’s just there. That totally changes your experience with video, that you used to think about video. I just drove across the bridge and I see all these people with camcorders, they’re never gonna share that with anyone because it’s tape and you’re never going to convert that tape into digital and stream up on the blog.

Le Meur: Robert, there’s something else to it, which is what we’re focusing on. Is the (inaudible) it’s difficult for me to say, my French accent, but we think we’re use part of it, which that for me is actually pointing at, but think about live, versus asynchronous, and think about tech, right and again I think we should take out geek glasses and for most people, I take it and its my bet that it will be much easier to do quick video than typing a ten line text or post somewhere. But coming back to what I’m saying, if you think about Facebook. Facebook just added live text-chat, so think about this as their live option. They just added it. So on Facebook I have and four thousand or so friends, and when I login I always have hundreds live. And if we only had live, on Facebook, like chat, I could only talk to 200. If you now have the standard Facebook experience with is asynchronous, you send a message, you join a group, install an application. But here, you can talk to four and a half-thousand friends. That’s exactly what I’m doing with (phiznick?). If you use it (interruption).

Scoble: I have to go in a second, but I want to say, the asynchronous is what I still sorta feel like Twitter is only a minority of the application, but I’m going to throw that out, because I have to go pick up my kids from school. But anyway, this was a lot of fun, from my point of video, so I’m signing out.

Le Meur: Thanks, but I think the asynchronous video has yet to happen, and that’s where we’re focusing. The great news is that you can do it whenever you like, and leave a comment on TechCrunch and I hope soon on Scobalizer, and get your replies from all around the world, and that live is great, but I think that asynchronous video is fantastic because it’s anytime, anywhere, with anybody.

UNKNOWN: I think I’m still waiting for the mobile client for (inaudible), a (inaudible) has it pretty close, the mobile component where I can film the video and then people around the world can send in video comments back to me, audio or text. And then I can do another video or respond. I can’t do that with (inaudible company) on my cell phone, and that’s very frustrating.

Le Meur: I know, and I’m sorry, but listen, we’re building our mobile client right now, but the reason we have started by the web, is that the web is much bigger, in terms of webcam installed base and bandwidth, users of course, than mobile. I think focusing on the mobile video only is a big mistake, because it is really, really really tiny. Talk to me about video being tiny on the web, on the conversation….

Scoble: If you go to a concert look at how many people held up their phone, capturing that concert on video. You are going to see a whole new thing, an experience oriented kind of conversation. When you enable my conversation from my cell phone I am going to bring you to Yosemite, or to a really nice museum and have a conversation or to dinner with me and I can get you a conversation that Seesmic is locked out of now.

Le Meur: I will get you that Robert. Give me a month or two. But we are not there yet. When you stream your videos they are great, but this is only one way. You can get text comments. My goal is to enable many to many as much as we have it on text and blogs and so on.

Anderson: You have been talking mostly about comments, which seem to be shorter as opposed to what Robert Scoble talks about, which is endless amounts of video. Can you respond to that? Are you talking about shorter things that you can more easily engage with or are you talking about people uploading their entire vacation video to your site.

Le Meur: I am only focusing on conversation. Youtube is great to share videos of your vacation. We are not building a youtube competitor. I am very very focused on conversation. To give you some feedback, we have one video posted every minute on Seesmic, even though we have not launched the main site yet. By the way I saw people asking for invites. If you go to Techcrunch and sign up to the invite, your password will work on Seesmic.

Scoble: Is there a limitation of length of the video?

Le Meur: Well there is a 5-minute limitation. The average is about 1 and a half minutes, which is very interesting. Which is why we are called the video twitter, which I like as an image. People just come and leave a quick comment. They say hi and participate in a conversation and then they leave. Pierre Omidiyar the founder of eBay, who is a regular, has posted something like 50 videos. He is asking me to limit time to one minute. I do not think that we will do that. However, he has a great suggestion. Any video that is 1 minute and a half make it distinctive, so I know if I do not have time I will check only those.

Scoble: In general my videos are short. Sometime they do get long because I am in an experience that is magical. Lat week I filmed Ansell Adams’ son talking to me about the history of Yosemite. And that needs longer than a minute I am sorry.

Anderson: I did not mean that you are doing something wrong. But with the vision of people crossing the bridge with their video cameras. You know how vacation videos can be. I am comparing that approach with something more like comments.

Le Meur: So you need both. I have my super edited 5 min video on loic.tv and there is a market for that. I think we do not have to put everything in one format. I think we will have very long vacation videos, which are not edited which are boring to everyone except your family and that is fine. You will have video comments and I am sure you will love to have video comments from your friends and you can get only get 10 comments. If you see your friends who you have not seen for a year you do not need 100, you need only 2 or 3 to make you happy. Then we will have 2 minutes video conversations, which look like a talk show on TV, where you only talk for 2 minutes. That will create a conversation that you have never seen before. This is what we are experimenting right now. I have seen on politics, or when Benazir Bhutto was on fire for me this was a tipping point of a future. I may be totally wrong. All the channels have the same stock images of Benazir Bhutto so you could switch on CBS, CNN, whereas on Seesmic you have people from 25 countries talking about it and that is something we have not seen before.

Scoble: We will have different video for different things. I think your comment about the family is right now. So many people think I am only doing videos for big audience. When I put up my baby video on flick I put it up for my family to watch. Other people watch it to. You have to separate different usage models for different things. If I am at a concert I just want to talk to my son and talk to him and say I am at a U2 concert and I am in the front row and you are not. I do not care if there is a huge audience for that.

Gillmor: All this is well and good but there is only a limited amount of time to absorb information and efficiency of information will trump the richness of the feed. That is why twitter is so successful as it has very little to do with the bandwidth consumed or the nature of rich media. It has everything to do with attaching the authority or relevance of social networks to the information.

Le Meur: You will take one and a half hour to see a very good movie in a theater. You switch on the TV now and then and you will be there and following something else not too well. If you really want to talk to somebody and have feedback on something, writing in 140 characters or in a blog post is more difficult than getting a five minute video of that person. Our challenge is to get you to choose to know when it is important or not. We have already got amazing feedback on that.

Gillmor: It is not an either or situation but to suggest this is a panacea whether it is a short comment or a long Scoble video misses the point. I will give you an example that the signaling mechanism is more important than the actual content. In this campaign for the presidency, there have been numerous times in the recent week because of the shrillness of the major media networks with regards to the Reverend Wright stuff I basically stopped watching these talking heads. They are basically just trying to sell advertising. That is fundamentally what this is. The best way to shut down that kind of noise is to find out who is sponsoring those shows, and then not buying their product. The point that I am suggesting is that I have been able to, on numerous occasions, in recent weeks be pointed on twitter at a video, most of the time on youtube, that comes up. Instead of the bullshit it gives me the direct source. When Obama threw the Reverend under the bus finally, I watched a 20-minute video and the 20 minutes was compelling. I would have watched an hour and a half press conference if it was available to me at that point. It is not about time, it is about interest. It is about authority. That is why Loic I think your video comments is going to work. I had not seen them till yesterday at your office. There is something about a conversation that breaks out when two people, who I have never heard of or been interested in, and one person says something and I think that is interesting and then someone else come back and comments on that. It is mesmerizing. If I am not interested I in the topic I will not look at it in the first place, but if it is important, and if the metadata surrounding that video can be transmitted so you can understand where this idea is coming from, and why you might be interested in watching it. That is a powerful network and it will dominate everything.

Le Meur: I fully agree. It is just about my passion. I want know more I want to listen to an hour and a half of Scoble, which generally is torture but in this case I want to listen to it.

Gillmor: I just want to go round the table once before we wrap up. Sam Whitmore are you still there. Do you have any comments?

Whitmore: Interesting discussion. Beyond the medium itself of video? I live in the world of moderate and high value content. That is my bias. I think that, like the video of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, that was a great example of something that is super high value content that can only be produced. If the dialogue can be focused on the highest-level value then you would not get into does twitter suck, do all these other products sucks, is really the wrong question. I would just stay with the highest value content.

Gardner: If we can manage to give people the dial to turn up the modality or turn it down based on their interests that is a big benefit. So we are not going to predict what information what format for what user. We want power to the user. There are times they want it to be full blast, maybe HD there are other instances they want to do a twitter or a quick text message and they should have that alternative. It is giving the dial to the user, and it sounds like that is what we are up to.

Canter: Well I love to hear about Robert and cross the bridge, Loics acquisitions but I want to remind us all we are part of this insular eco-chamber. There is a discussion about the difference between early and later adopters. Microsoft represents the late adopters. It represents the body of the computer world out in the real world. Although Google’s brand is beginning to be known still everyone uses Microsoft software. Combining Microsoft with Yahoo is an incredible opportunity. Whatever Microsoft does, Google is going to trump them. It is good to have 2 or 3 of each one of these options out there, so we can stay alive and build on this open mesh.

Gillmor: Any thoughts Gabe Rivera.

Rivera: No thoughts.

Vizard: Everything sounds great and we are all acting like it has never been done before. In small little spaces a lot has already been done, but what we are talking about is the level of scale is unprecedented. Are people going to do this and on what scale? People are already doing this in all kinds of ways. Whether I am calling my friends and asking them on the phone what is the best restaurant or I am using Twitter, it is still the same action. I am sharing data inside an application from lotus, or a cross application model it is still the same activity. It is just a matter of scale.

Gillmor: Loic I want to thank you for accepting this interrogation.

Le Meur: Thank you for having me. It was a great great conversation.

Gillmor: I hope that this has been recorded by Jerry. I am not sure if this is recorded or not. This is Steve Gillmor and the Gillmor Gang and I want to thank everyone who showed up and especially those who didn’t.

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