Rob La Gesse, Michael Markman, Debi Jones, Adam Marquart, Bruce Lerner, Karoli Kuns, Matt Terenzio, and Francine Hardaway plus Jerry Schuman and the UstreamGangers. Recorded Monday, May 12, 2008.

[music]

Le Meur: Hi, Steve.

Gillmor: Who’s that?

Le Meur: Loic.

Gillmor: Hi, Loic. How are you?

Le Meur: Very good. And you?

Gillmor: I’m well, thanks. Trying to survive the shitstorm on TechCrunch’s comments area.

Canter: Hi, I’m here now.

Gillmor: Who’s that?

Canter: Marc.

Gillmor: Hey, Marc. How are you?

Canter: Pretty hectic. I still haven’t posted this post yet, so I’m going to do this right now as we speak, on all the current goings on.

Gillmor: All right, so tell people what you’re talking about?

Canter: I’m actually lumping Microsoft’s Live Contacts strategy along with Google, Facebook and MySpace, and trying to typify all four approaches by saying that though they’re basically trying to reinvent “open,” each of them have their own angle of how to keep the users’ data on their servers while being as open as they can.

They’re using kind of widget approach of sending out the tentacles from the octopus but keeping all the users’ data on their machines. It’s fascinating to watch.

Gillmor: What do you mean “reinvent” open? I don’t know that anybody has invented open yet.

Canter: Well, there you go. On one side you could argue that we’re being too esoteric and too idealistic in our demands for users’ data to be under the control of the user. But on the other side, I guess we’ve got no choice, right? They get to define how they’re “open” and so we’ve got to live with it.

Gillmor: OK. So basically we have to live with it.

Canter: The thing about building the Open Mesh is that you have to live with what’s out there. And so there’ll always be this compromise balance between what we want and what we get.

Gillmor: OK, so what do you want?

Canter: What do I want? First of all, the post is called “The Religion of Bringing Social to Software.” The idea here is that the way that the distributed mesh, the Open Mesh, will work, is that there are lots of these giant behemoths, and they are going to keep the users’ data on their machines. And there will be lots and lots of small to medium, smaller-sized companies that will also want to connect together.

So in this world of the big guys and the small guys, the individual users should be able to control and move their data around. So all these announcements and steps that are happening are good things, it’s just that the evolutionary path will eventually get to the point where we won’t be able to get full control over out data the way we want it.

Gillmor: OK. Loic?

Le Meur: Yeah?

Gillmor: Any comments?

Le Meur: Not really, honestly. Waiting for Marc’s post. [laughs]

Canter: It just got put up, Loic.

Le Meur: All right.

Canter: And I do use a little bit of French in it.

Le Meur: As you were talking, I was trying to understand what is the “shitstorm” that Steve was talking on the posts on TechCrunch.

Gillmor: Oh, no, I figure that — please don’t divert to my particular problem.

Le Meur: All right.

Gillmor: OK. Dana Gardner, you here?

Gardner: Yeah. Hello, Steve.

Gillmor: What’s going on?

Gardner: I’m interested in looking at EDS and HP matching up, potentially hearing this announced tomorrow. Usually when you see rumors announced in the “Wall Street Journal” at about the close of market, that’s a pretty good indicator that it’s a near done deal.

Gillmor: Why do we care about that?

Gardner: We care about that because it’s another indicator that software and hardware and the licensing model around selling them is on the way out. And it’s more important to have services, transformation agents, the ability to outsource, work with clients about some mixture of hybrid cloud and on-premises IT.

So it’s really about a big shift in IT away from just purely buying software and setting up packaged applications and running them, into rethinking IT from the get-go. HP buying EDS is showing that they need to transform themselves in order to take part in that.

Gillmor: All right. So, Marc Canter, do you see any relationship between that and what you’re talking about?

Canter: Absolutely. This is an incredible situation where the basic economics — it’s not just about reading eyeballs and lots of page clicks. Throughout the enterprise world, they’re starting to see the power of people working together and collaborating.

So if EDS is going to go and install social networks on all these sites, then they’re going to put them on HP hardware with the HP billing system. It’s just like a full top-to-bottom stack approach. Which is exactly what Cisco is doing as well, by the way. [00:05:13]

Gillmor: Cliff Gerrish, welcome:

Gerrish: Hi, how are you doing?

Gillmor: I’m going good. I’ve invited Cliff on the show today because he had a superlative post that evidently was immune to the shit that I was attacked about, because of my obstinately opaque writing style.

Gardner: Don’t people understand Gonzo journalism when they see it?

Gillmor: No. This isn’t about me. It’s about the fact that somehow Cliff avoided the crap and succeeded in getting on TechMeme at the top of the charts, repurposing the Gillmor Gang from Thursday and Friday, which I think is exciting.

Gardner: I just think that you’re a bit of an acquired taste stylistically, Steve.

Gillmor: Like I said, Dana. I don’t give a shit about me here. I’m talking to Cliff about what he was talking about. And by the way, my name is spelled G-I-L-L-M-O-R.

Gardner: OK.

Gillmor: That’s for you, Streamer83873. Thank you.

[laughter]

Gillmor: OK. So, Cliff, can you summarize what you were saying and why you think it was so successful?

Gerrish: You know, I don’t really have a clue why it was successful, other than perhaps the things that were talked about on the Thursday and Friday Gang shows were things that a lot of people care about.

What I tried to do was kind of bring those threads forward and try and expose the motives behind each of the pieces of what we were seeing. The base thing was, we need to make Twitter more reliable, perhaps by decentralizing it. And it turns out there’s a lot of agendas around that very concept.

Whether it’s breaking up the monopoly of Twitter as a political and technical entity, decentralizing it to increase the reliability, rebuilding it elsewhere on Open Standards, understanding how to create an optimum mix of information flow within Twitter, federating Twitter stream with other streams, that sort of stuff.

I think the interesting thing, though, is when you talk about trying to rebuild Twitter, you have to start to actually understand what it is. And I think that’s where maybe what a little bit of what I wrote opened up some new ground in terms of exposing track [...]

Gillmor: Somebody is being a little bit squidgelly with the phone. So could you repeat the last thing you said? It was hard to hear.

Gerrish: Sure. Just that the one thing I think I may have exposed so that people could sort of understand what’s going on with the idea of “track” and how that’s different than “follow” and being open to being “followed.” And create sort of a different social graph underneath the information stream that you get through Twitter.

[interference]

Gillmor: OK. [laughs]

Canter: Sounds fine to me.

Gillmor: OK, this has been Steve with the Gillmor Gang.

Gerrish: Excellent. Are we done?

Gillmor: It was the final word. [laughs] Seriously. If Cliff is right that this was important stuff to talk about and people responded to it, what has that got to do with this? We’re in the middle of a perfect storm of social media applications and frameworks, intersecting, colliding, competing with each other.

And it’s my thesis, of course, that Twitter is the most dominant of all of these. That, of course, is an obnoxious attitude which has gotten me a great deal of bullshit for the last three days.

So either Cliff has succeeded in somehow expressing something that I have been trying to express in a more coherent and cogent fashion, and what Marc is talking about has some relationship to that or there’s nothing to talk about. [00:10:01]

Canter: Steve, let me ask you this. If Google builds up on their servers a full social graph to Brad Fitzpatrick’s API, and they continue to build up the infrastructure from — think of it as the Web OS — and they have this critical mass of all these names, so then they decide to offer a Twitter infrastructure kind of thing.

What does that do to Twitter? Do you think that that continues on?

Gillmor: First of all, I’ve had some issues with Google about the so-called privacy violations in their gaming of the reverse-engineered social graph in the past. And they’ve, to their credit, been very response in the past month and a half. We’re meeting with them at 6:00 today to talk further about this.

Le Meur: Are you talking to them about Google Friend Connect too, Steve?

Gillmor: About the Google what? Yes. No, I’m down there for the Google Friend Connect campfire thing at 7:00. I believe it’s 7:00. But I’m meeting first with an old friend from Lotus IBM Notes Domino days, who just popped up at Google. And also Kevin Marks.

So I don’t know why he is where he is, but I got an email from him over the weekend. I get a feeling that there’s a new section here that’s going to be very interesting.

The point I’m making about Google — about this kind of fear of Google, that I think you’re experiencing. Right, Marc?

Canter: Yeah.

Gillmor: Is they — I’m on Twitter. I have no reason to leave Twitter. Why would I want to go?

Canter: What I’m saying is that as each of these platforms develop their own base of users — I mean, dude, I don’t care how big Evan Williams is, Google can be 10 times bigger. So then there’s going to be a whole Twitter universe over there.

Gillmor: It’s the voters that are in charge, not the…

Canter: That’s all I’m saying, dude. And then what happens when Microsoft comes along and they do their own universe?

Gillmor: But these things aren’t — pardon the expression — orthogonal to each other. They’re complementary. Mesh is complementary to what Google and Twitter are doing.

Canter: OK. So that’s the landscape that I want to paint. That’s the picture that I want to paint, that as powerful as Twitter gets, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, MySpace, will all each create their own.

Gillmor: No.

Gerrish: No, I think that’s wrong.

Gillmor: Good. Explain why that’s wrong.

Gerrish: OK. And this is the New York City metaphor. It’s that Twitter is New York City. They people live there. You can build another city that looks just like it in Mountian View, but it’s not New York City.

They don’t have the users. You have to build a community. Google is a machine. They’re not really good with people, they’re good with algorithms.

Gillmor: Twitter is good with people.

Gardner: You can use the New York analogy another way. You could lift up Manhattan up and replace the subways and the sewer lines and the water lines and get a better system and then drop it back down on top, and that would be nice too.

With Twitter, you could drop this on top of Google’s cloud infrastructure and get perhaps the best of both worlds.

Gerrish: You could. But I think that’s the point, though. And that’s why I say Twitter is rhizomatic.

Gillmor: What was the word you just used?

Gerrish: Rhizomatic, meaning that it works like a rhizome. It can be a piece of Google inside of Google. It can link to Google and become a part of Google. Google doesn’t need to replace it. It can live inside of Mesh. It lives inside of Twirl. It lives inside of Summize. 75% of its traffic is all API-based.

It’s mostly underground. There’s very little that is really exposed as Twitter. So why compete with it. Why not just have it?

Canter: OK, so can I respond to that?

Gillmor: Please.

Canter: So here’s what I’m saying. There is a thing called CyWorld in Korea. There’s a thing called Mixi in Japan. There’s a big world around the world, and each of them talk in their own language and in their own way of communicating. OK?

Now if we just lumped all the English-speakers together, you’d still have a tremendous place that’s a lot bigger than New York City. So Google is going to leverage what they’re doing — and Yahoo and MySpace are going to leverage what they’re doing. MySpace is going to get all the high school graduates. Microsoft is going to get all those people who don’t even know that there is another company besides Microsoft.

It’s a big world out there, and the Twitter stuff will grow. But to say that Twitter is the only thing, is to say that — you’re in the echo chamber. [00:15:13]

Gerrish: No, that’s not what I’m saying.

Le Meur: Loic here. I would just like to weigh in on what Marc just said. I was in a European gathering of entrepreneurs for the last four days, and very few are actually on Twitter. And the people I’ve met have launched like a FriendFeed-like in Latin America — I’m sorry — or a Facebook-like in Europe.

And they are not on the same tools as Silicone Valley is. And no on is talking about Twitter. So I think it’s very highly likely that those regions of the world, like Marc has just said, will use something else which will be very similar but not Twitter.

Gillmor: I think that that may be true today. However, I think that the experience of the past with Microsoft, for example, around Visual Basic — I mean there are a lot of programming development environments, but Visual Basic won. And it was then succeeded by, if you think so, by Java, which was then succeeded by essentially the kind of Web development that we see today with Ajax. Which was, in fact, a route around of Visual Basic by other people inside of Microsoft to try to avoid cannibalizing Office.

So the human mind gravitates toward standards. Not standards in terms of W3C, but standards in terms of ease of use, the perception of the existence of the platform for a long enough that they can make money off it or they can enjoy it for whatever purposes that a large amount of people will move towards something. It’s a Beetle car metric.

Le Meur: Steve, if I may add something here. It’s also turning to a culture. If you think about one of the last phenomena — which is blogging — and I spent the last three or four years to promote it in Europe. It works very, very well in Southern Europe, like the Latin countries — Spain, Italy, and France it’s big.

And it is nothing in Germany or in Northern Europe, like it has not even started. So I would really, really doubt that Twitter — not Twitter, but…

Gillmor: I’m still trying to make the point here that there’s going to be essentially something that creates and enhances and extends its market for it.

I’m going to ask people in the chat room to stop talking to me about a headset. Once I get a microphone in place which gives me some good audio as opposed to the crappy headsets I’ve been using — and I’ve used the Plantronics and it sucked. I’m not going to change them on this phone. I don’t care what it looks like; the sound is what’s important. OK? Thank you.

Gardner: I have to agree with you, Steve. The headsets really stink. I’ve tried all of them.

Gillmor: Yeah. I mean, I’d love it if they worked. I’ve spent $100 so far and come up with bullshit.

Le Meur: It gives you a great ’70s…

[laughter]

Gillmor: No, we’re going back — let me continue what I’m trying to say here, Loic. Which is that I don’t care that nobody’s talking about Twitter right now in Europe or anywhere else. What we’re doing with Twitter is going to morph out and is going to become fundamental. That’s my absolute, total belief.

I may be wrong about that, but I doubt it. So let’s say that I’m right about it for the sake of discussion, since this is the Gillmor Gang.

Gardner: OK, Steve, can I respond?

Gillmor: No, I’m not done yet. So assuming that it morphs out, and let’s say Evan and Jack — or whoever those people are at Twitter — make some alliances with other networks that fit with their business purposes and basically start to extend or skin or use Twirl, for example, as a bridging mechanism across different networks, like FriendFeed, etcetera.

That’s what’s going to happen. So the question of whether or not this is an early adopter phenomenon is really irrelevant to what we’re talking about here. There’s a fundamental power that’s going on here, which is a real-time, trackable gateway for communications among disconnected frameworks, parties, operating systems, everything. [00:20:04]

And it is something that will be adopted and leveraged by Google, Microsoft and hopefully what Marc Canter’s talking about with the Open Mesh. That might be a system.

Canter: OK. And what I’m saying is that you’re right with all the great new ideas and innovation, and the platform, the APIs, that’s all great stuff. And Loic’s platform is leveraging that as well. Multiple platforms that Loic has.

All that Loic and I are saying is that the likelihood of it all being run on Evan Williams’ servers is slight. And so in that inevitability of an Open Mesh world, we have to figure out ways to interconnect these things together. It’s the same discussion that Jabber solved. It’s connecting AIM to MSN Messenger and Yahoo. It’s the same discussion all over again.

Gillmor: OK. But what Cliff wrote defines within the concepts that we are both agreeing on, which is: is this all going to be on Evan’s servers or even Jabber’s servers? No. I don’t know what Microsoft Live Mesh is running on, and I don’t really care.

What I don know is that the architecture that they are proposing is one that incorporates both transparency and the leveraging of devices and the abstraction of devices around the system. The only difficulty that I have right now with Twitter is that I don’t get the same experience on multiple devices.

Once I do, I have no reason to shift. I’m not going to shift. I don’t thing that anybody else who is using this is going to shift away from it. If the cooperating partners of this alliance provide the connectivity — as you’re talking about, Marc — between these things, I’m not going to change. There is not reason to change.

Gardner: But there’s a bit more to it, Steve, in terms not of just Twitter being able to maintain its own scaling and performance, but if you put this on a better infrastructure, you can add more services. For example, location services, a GPS…

Gillmor: They’re already available. I already have location services. What I don’t have right now are the two APIs. I have an iPhone. It already has location services that are sort of ginned together out of cell towers and WiFi routers.

Gardner: Right. But what I’m talking about is if Twitter can take advantage of those…

Gillmor: That’s what I just said. That is not a problem of a single vendor, it’s is a problem of the Mesh. It is something that can be orchestrated with the current tools. It will be orchestrated with the tools.

Gardner: It will be orchestrated, but will it be orchestrated better across multiple infrastructure clouds and support services rather than just on a single…

Gillmor: Yes. Yes. Of course it will.

Gardner: So we’re in a agreement. What I’m saying is there’s an interesting opportunity here to bring yet more services to the Twitter functionality…

Gillmor: No. There’s no interesting opportunity here. That’s what we’re doing here. Dana, can you press *4 once?

Gardner: Got you.

Gillmor: OK. We keep talking about this as though this is going to happen at some point. We keep talking about this as though we’re afraid of the market force and clout of the various vendors. That somehow they’re going to tip this over and Evan is going to sell, and all of the sudden we’re going to be locked into the trunk, to use Dave Weiner’s phrase.

I just think that’s bullshit. And I think that Cliff has outlined a number of reasons why, like the New York metaphor. Do you want to weigh in here, Cliff?

Gerrish: Well, yeah, I do agree. It’s something that we talked about yesterday. That this other layer of things that people want may not come from Twitter and may actually come from things like Twirl. Where additional layers of service and filtering and all of these things can be done sort of on the client end.

Gillmor: And they are done by. Right now, the most important feature of Twitter, in my opinion, is Tiny URL or Snarl.

Gerrish: Right, yeah.

Gillmor: Because that’s the launch pad, that’s the by reference pointer into the entire multimedia cloud. We don’t need to enhance that. We just need to have containers — AKA “the browser, ” the screen — that understands signals that tell it the location on screen that we want to place the information. [00:25:13]

I spend most of my time dragging out windows so that I’ve got my Twitter stream through GTalk on the left of my screen and I’ve got the picture of me and Cliff and the chat room in the middle of the screen. I’ve run out of real estate, and there are three or four other streams that I would like to be able to watch simultaneously.

When somebody comes up with that interface, with and API that talks into that interface, we’re done. This IS the next generation of the operating system.

Canter: Where you can freely intermix modules that do the same function, right?

Gillmor: Correct.

Canter: And that’s what I define as the Open Mesh. Those are the UI objects, the reusable objects, of the Open Mesh.

Gillmor: That’s fine. I may or may not agree with the politics of how that’s implemented, but the format and the infrastructure, totally.

Gardner: And so Steve, do we get to this brave new world strictly through Twitter and open APIs, with Twitter remaining its own organization or company, or does there need to be more formal relationship changes, partnerships, revenue sharing, and/or an outright acquisition to make this happen?

Gillmor: I don’t know whether Twitter is immune to acquisition. I would hope it is.

Gardner: Because there is that nasty question about commercialization and revenue and profits.

Gillmor: I’m sure Steve Ballmer has figured out how to make money on this stuff. I’m not worried about that. I’m sure that Google has figured out how to do it.

Canter: But don’t be naive to think that Evan isn’t just holding out for a higher price. Come on.

Gillmor: I think he wants to be a billionaire, and I want him to be a billionaire because if he has enough clout — it’s like in the record business. When David Geffen held out with Geffen Records and succeeded in basically taking over Warner Brothers Records, ultimately which morphed into Time-Warner, which morphed into whatever he now controls, which included DreamForce, I believe, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

There’s a tipping point where the new players become the old players. And we need that kind of thing in this culture, because right now it’s controlled by Gates and the Google twins and some other people in the media business who are desperately trying to figure out how to stave this off.

Canter: But unless he can show a monetization model, at some point the funny money just doesn’t keep going.

Gillmor: I don’t buy that. We keep looking for Zuckerburg’s business model, and I think he’s doing just fine, thank you. The money is coming to the party. We can sit here if you want to and we can talk about where the money’s coming from.

But I honestly don’t believe that there is any doubt that Twitter’s monetization model will be successful. The other thing that Cliff said, which I fundamentally agree with, and I’d rather he say it than me, but I’m going to paraphrase it.

The fundamental of the track function strongly indicates the inability of the so-called decentralization model to take hold. In other words, everything actually comes down to who controls the track function. And right now Twitter controls it.

Gerrish: Yeah. That’s the issue of filtering the full stream.

Gillmor: That’s right.

Gerrish: For every word in it as it comes in.

Loic le Meur: Well, it doesn’t have to be Twitter controlling. Why couldn’t anybody build a search engine? There are a few already.

Gillmor: Why couldn’t anybody build another Google?

Gardner: You could if you could have access to the same data.

Gillmor: Exactly.

Gardner: But the queries would still have to be run on that data.

Gillmor: And all the historical data that you are running it against, the algorithms that are built based on the historical data, you don’t have access to that. So how are you going to duplicate that cloud?

Isn’t that what Microsoft’s problem is? [00:30:03]

Le Meur: Well, that’s a good point. The talk from the last two shows is that the data is already in different places right, like FriendFeed and others. So it’s not that really Twitter controls the data, it’s already everywhere, right?

Gardner: It’s not the live data though. It’s not the tic-by-tic data. That’s the 15-minute delayed data.

Gillmor: The people elect the president. The people elect the president. The people elect Twitter.

Le Meur: No, I know and this is why we are building XMPP in Twirl.

Gillmor: Right.

Le Meur: What I am saying is that it is available, right?

Steve: You’re building XMPP in Twirl to more directly, in real time or enough real-time to be useful, to be able to access the track function inside of the Twitter core.

Le Meur: Absolutely. As live as we can get from the XMPP server.

Gillmor: OK. So that’s where the money is. That’s what Twitter controls. They will continue to control it until they sell it. If they sell it.

Le Meur: Well, clearly in the chat room that is exactly what we are doing. The track on Twirl will be enabled as soon as we have the XMPP on it.

Gillmor: Right, and I think that will accelerate the meshing of a number of servers, including yours, FriendFeed and others that I expect to have the same strategy.

Gardner: You know, Loic, that’s where you can start to build in all the services that people want. If they want to turn off Robert Scoble for half an hour because they don’t care what he’s saying or they want to turn off South by Southwest because they’re not there, that can be that can be filtered at the Twirl level.

Le Meur: Absolutely. I also see a number of people who ask us to build group functions from Twirl. Right now actually I have two Twitter accounts. I have one, which is my main one and the other one where I follow very few people just because I want to make sure I don’t miss Tweets from them.

We could do that obviously on Twirl directly where you would say, “OK, I really care about those 10 people. Ping me or even make a noise whenever they update.

The others - I still want to see them but not as fast.

Gillmor: Sure, then you would only need one identity, right?

Le Meur: Exactly.

Gardner: The client would take care of that. Yeah.

Gillmor: Right, so -

Gerrish: There is so much that can be built out at that level. That’s what’s very interesting about it.

It’s a comment that Fred Wilson left, I think on Dave Weiner’s comments on my post, which said maybe Twitter is what it is right now, that it’s not going to be anything more, which I thought was interesting coming from him.

Gillmor: Well, I think that’s a very sophisticated analysis of the situation because what more do you need than complete control of the attention of the user?

Gerrish: You need what Loic is going to provide.

Gillmor: Those are extensions. That is making it easier to use.

Gerrish: Exactly. Exactly.

Gillmor: That’s not changing the fundamental.

Gerrish: No it’s not.

Gillmor: The idea of continuous parsal attention with all the props to Linda Stone, is absolute nonsense. Those of us from the ’60s know that you can’t pay attention to one thing alone multiple things.

Canter: Hear, hear.

Gillmor: Exactly. You’re going to keep proving it, right, Marc?

Canter: That’s right. I’m here to make it so eventually I just look at the white wall and chant, “Ohm.” I’ll be at one with everything, with it and without it.

Gillmor: That’s a good song.

Gerrish: But I think that’s the key though, that you need the stuff to do the extensions with, right? And Twitter is the real stuff. That is the stream you want to extend.

You could extend Jaiku. That’s what Google has. But who is working on that?

Gillmor: Nobody.

Gerrish: And you could extend Pownce. Who’s doing that? Nobody.

Gillmor: Nobody.

Gerrish: The fact of the matter is Twitter is already in Facebook. If you want to look at Twitter in Facebook you can. If you want to write to Twitter from Facebook you can.

Farber: I’m sorry. I’d like to see Twitter take over a lot of what we see for forums and chat rooms. It does a much better job. That other stuff is kludgy and different for each organization. You have to sign in. You have to go through a wall climbing process. [00:35:06]

But if Twitter can just replace that you’ve got your social fabric, you can bring people in and out. I think it’s got a great opportunity to be the best horizontally applied chat room and group community bulletin board kind of effect.

Gillmor: OK. Now YouStreamer85845 says, “Twitter instead of chat rooms and forums - that’s just a stupid statement.”

I don’t think it’s a stupid statement.

Gerrish: Thanks, Steve.

Gillmor: I’m just trying to engage whoever this person is. First of all, get a real identity, so that you can join this and be a part of this as opposed to — they are totally different but complementary.

That may be true. But if the user ends up using Twitter 100% of the time and doesn’t use any of these other channels, then maybe you’re not right. The same argument was made about discussion groups as being much better than blogs.

That may be true, and certainly there are a lot of developers who use discussion groups all the time, because it’s a very efficient way of being able to work through coding ideas etc. On the other hand, I haven’t used a discussion group for the last 10 years.

Gardner: Yeah, since you left the gate, right? For the well?

Gillmor: I started on Fidonet for god sakes.

Gardner: Right, right.

Gillmor: That looked a lot like what we are seeing now on Twitter.

Gerrish: Yeah, I’m not saying we are going to replace these private ones, the ones that you’re going to want to archive like some of the Mac Help Desk kinds of functions. But there are a lot of things that -

Gillmor: No, I am saying that we are going to replace it. What Loic just said is exactly right, which is if you adopt track filtering, you can create virtual discussion groups out of this stream.

Gerrish: Yeah.

Gillmor: There is no reason to have multiple interfaces to something that works.

Gerrish: Yeah.

Le Meur: Actually you could even do private groups.

Gillmor: Of course you can.

Le Meur: By enabling everybody and bring it into a D-something, as a direct message. And then you do private groups.

Gillmor: I don’t agree with that scenario because I think that direct messages are overloaded inside of Twitter. But I do think that once there is an affinity group model for Twitter, then you can basically do what Robert Anderson and I modeled in terms of Gesture Bank and be able to create communications that are sculpted to affinity groups.

At that point what you don’t know, you don’t know about. And you can back that up with SSH or SSL or whatever the hell that is.

Gardner: I would be really curious to find out what Ray Ozzie thinks about Twitter because Groove attempted to do a number of these things and did it very well. But it kept it closed. It kept it inside of the small, collaborative…

Gillmor: If you want to see what Ray Ozzie thinks about this, go look at Mesh. This is exactly the reboot that he has done. It’s not an accident that all of the demos that they gave to us privately and in public forums of this included, as the primary example, a Twitter demo.

Gardner: So let’s get Ray on the show and talk about the continuum of Groove through Mesh, including things like Twitter. It would be really great to hear his impressions.

Gillmor: Well, Ray is going to be on the show hopefully in the near future. But I’m not going to ask him to stroll down memory lane like what they did at Web 2.0 with Mark Andresen. I mean, let’s talk about what is going on right now.

Gardner: Yeah, but he has this vision with Groove clearly, that involved a lot of these things that have exploded with Twitter. So it’s not memory lane, it’s really the return to this notion that it is still alive, but perhaps more so than ever. You don’t want to go back and talk to 30 minutes about it. I think he was on to this quite before almost anyone else.

Gillmor: Right. If you go read what he wrote and has said about the swarming, for example, while he was still doing Groove. This is the swarm — we are looking at it right now.

Gardner: That’s my point.

Gillmor: I agree with that. Dan Farber was supposed to join us. I don’t know where he is. Tina, can you give him a call?

Gardner: Hey, Steve, I’ve got to drop off. It was real good chatting with you.

Gillmor: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: Take care now.

Gillmor: So, Marc, where are we on the paranoia of the big vendor? [00:39:55]

Canter: See, I buy your picture. I understand the heavy-duty ramifications of what you are saying, and I just want to make sure that there is a French network, and a Chinese and a Japanese one. After that, the English-speaking people will require that they need more than one. We will figure that out.

But even just to mesh in with different languages, to mesh in with different ecommerce systems, to mesh in with different sets of graphs, you need the principles of the mesh. In one sense, Evan Williams is creating another kind of walled garden, and God bless him for it.

In RSS, just give us the way to gateway, we can do all those great stuff. But, the principles of the user controlling their data, what the open mesh has to be, are still there. We are going to see the pragmatic unfolding of this over the next years, as entrepreneurs figure out where the beef is.

Unless someone is writing a track to Evan Williams, I would give it to Fred Wilson, can continue to write him a track, subsidize this thing for ever. But at some point, he will need a way to make the money to pay the bills.

Gillmor: Marc, I don’t understand what part of what I said before is not cutting through here, which is, if they own track and nobody else has it, and they have the cloud, don’t you think that somebody is going to want to pay a lot of money for that? Or at least license it? And if they license it, instead of buying it, don’t you think that that’s going to create a revenue model for the company similar to the one that Google has around…

Canter: So then the question is, when that happens, do they let Loic stay in business? That’s all. That’s the whole point here. At some point, the foot drops, and at some point Loic gets fraught.

Gillmor: I don’t buy that. Here is why I don’t buy that. As you pointed out a number of times, there is every reason why any number of vendors can produce an identical service to Twitter.

Canter: OK.

Gillmor: OK. So the only reason, the only bulletproofing that Twitter has for avoiding that possibility, is to never shut off the ability for companies like Seismic with Twirl, or other companies, to be able to leverage the realtime fundamentals of this network.

If they did, we would all walk across the tracks to the other service, and we would be done with these guys.

Canter: Now we are going to the psychology of lock-in, and how effective it is, and when it changes, and what are the factors that scare people away. We have seen humans migrate from Friendster — we thought the game was over. We thought Friendster owned everything.

Gillmor: I didn’t.

Canter: Then everything is in MySpace, and then Facebook.

Gillmor: You know, Marc, you are talking about history that I didn’t participate in. I am talking about this history. It is real simple. If Google doesn’t solve their problem in terms of backward engineering of social graphs, which I believe they are in the process of solving right now, then I will leave as soon as there is an alternative.

There will be an alternative in the near future, I believe around Mesh, which is going to create a whole series of alternatives away from anybody who has captured a cloud of users, that threatens to try and monetize it through a lock-in strategy. There is a lock-in here, which is access to Track.

Canter: OK. So that is the power base. Now we have identified that. And as you said, at some point in the future, unless Fred Wilson wants to keep underwriting the cost of those servers, at some point cash has to flow in the front door.

Gillmor: I totally disagree with you. Already there is a licensing model that will easily keep the cash necessary to keep this beast alive, that’s available. It’s already there. You want to choose this? I will take 2% of your revenue.

Twirl — they build out something that works great. At some point there will be a conversation, which is, “Hey, you are making money hand over fist. OK, we want some of it.” At some point that’s the oath we made.

Canter: So you are assuming that as long as the pricing is reasonable, then it will be fine. If they get greedy though, they will blow it.

Gillmor: Look at what happened with Microsoft. How did Microsoft achieve its hegemony? By creating an Office suite and bundling everything together and charging too much for it? Hell, no. They virtually gave it away. [00:45:10]

Dan Farber, welcome.

Farber: Good afternoon. Hi there.

Gillmor: We are in a post-Twitter-is-God conversation.

Farber: OK. Well, I can understand your pain, then.

Canter: And Dan, are you going to the campfire tonight too?

Farber: I will not be going, but I will be represented by Mr. Steven Shenklin.

Canter: All right.

Gillmor: OK. So, Dan, what do you see as going on here in this mashup of what Marc calls a bunch of elephants dancing around the notion of open?

Farber: Well, I think it’s very clear, and I am sure Marc has it right, which is you have big social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, understanding that they can’t do walled garden. So they are tentatively allowing people to have some form of portability, though exactly what it is, how much control they have, remains to be seen.

And then Google today, did an end-run on both of them. And the end-run is basically to say, “Well, you may have tens of millions of people in your social networks, but there are a billion other people out there who are part of a social network, and we are going to go farm them.”

Canter: Right.

Farber: And they are farming them under the guise of saying we are just using existing pseudo-standards, like OS10 and OpenID and OpenSocial, which is not really a standard, but they hope to make it some de facto kind of thing. It is very smart — I really admire what they are doing.

And they are just talking about sprinkling salt across the web to create a social networking fabric, if they can get thousands and millions of sites to play along.

How does that lead to more openness? Well, it is better than nothing. I like what Google is saying at least, which is the whole point is to protect people’s privacy and to allow them to only dish out or accept what they want, in terms of how they control their content.

So, I think that this notion that, oh, let’s have this grand unification, where everyone is praying to one God of social networking, and there will only be one standard and whatever. Well, I think Google has taken existing standards and managed to do something. If you wait to boil the ocean, nothing is ever going to happen.

Canter: In a lot of ways it is the next generation of social network. They are redefining where the value is.

Farber: Well, it is like saying, “How about if you just did Ning, but you just said, here, put these snippets of code on your site. We won’t charge you anything. You don’t have to come in to our fence. All you have to do is recognize that Google is going to get more data.”

Gillmor: I am not sure that I have heard yet how they are going to establish user contracts.

Farber: What’s a user contract?

Gillmor: The relationship between the user and the data that the user generates.

Farber: Well, I think that remains to be seen. People are talking about their using iFrame instead of going directly.

Canter: Yeah, I think that’s more of a hack because they needed to get something on quickly, which is what they did with those in Social 1.0.

This has been coming for a while and probably when they heard about Facebook connect and data availability, they very quickly decided, “OK. We are going to push this all Live now. We are going to push Live.”

Farber: I agree. I think they pushed out Live before its time.

Canter: Right.

Farber: Because first of all it’s only a few sample sites. Nobody can do anything and they have to be approved by Google to actually use the codes. So it’s actually quite premature and I think to some degree driven by the announcements last week from Facebook and MySpace.

Although I did talk to David Glaser probably a month ago, actually it was March three I talked to Glaser. He told me, “Yeah, if you put OID and OpenID and things like OpenSocial together, you basically have this next step fabric.” It’s not like they didn’t know about this.

Gillmor: In your post, I think it was your post Dan, he suggested that these announcements weren’t just dreamed up in the last three days.

Farber: Yeah, he did say that. But I think that as Marc was just alluding to, it was probably accelerated by these other companies coming out.

Gillmor: Yeah, maybe. My take on it is if we go back to the initial days of Gmail, they have exhibited this kind of a posture from day one. [00:50:03]

They break something out. They get certain early adopters and developers and some influencers to adopt it. Then they let it percolate. Then they let it get marketed out into a larger group, which they call “friends.”

Canter: Right.

Gillmor: And all of a sudden they’ve got a reasonable…

Canter: That’s right. That’s exactly what they did with OpenSocial. They rushed it out because they wanted to create some thud on Facebook ads. So they are doing the same thing again.

Gillmor: I don’t agree. I think that OpenSocial — I totally agree with you that that was all thud and that their feet were held to the fire by various people who took a look at that and tracked how it was evolving and were they actually getting anywhere as quickly as they suggested that they were.

But this effort I think — I’ve had conversations with them where they have explained to me how their open technologies intersect and interrelate. Believe me, there is a lot of moving parts here that do not interrelate. They are spending most of their time right now trying to stitch this together into some sort of reasonable service fabric.

So they have got a lot of work to do here. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t do what they do with Gchat for example. We all talk about the market share of AIM and Yahoo. Remember Yahoo?

Canter: Yeah.

Gillmor: What happened to Yahoo? Their market share in terms of IM and Microsoft’s as well is huge. But the market share of Gchat in terms of the Twitter gateway is pretty much 100% right now.

So they have got their hands in extremely viral positions. I expect that what they are announcing today is going to be built out rather quickly with the people that they think they need to get to in order to start the snowball rolling.

Canter: All right. So Steve, what I would like to ask all of you to do is to go check out what Dave Marin wrote up about Facebook Connect. In there he talks about the notion of dynamic privacy.

It’s the first time I have ever heard succinctly from a specific platform vendor to even come close to understanding the realities of what’s going on in the world of the control, the access and the issues in this area. So to me, I did not see that from Google.

Now the fact that they called this the word Connect - we are going to be talking about connecting Connect to Connect.

Gillmor: Well first of all, Marc, why don’t you expand on what dynamic privacy means because it sounds interesting.

Canter: All right. Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m going to jump to his page right now because I have got it in my post. Let me just read what he says.

“As the user moves around the open Web, the privacy settings will follow them, ensuring that the user’s information and privacy rules are always up-to-date.For example, if the user changes their profile picture, removes a friend connection, this will automatically be updated in the external website. These are just a few of the steps.”

So that’s the notion of — and then he says, “We are into data portability. But it’s more than just data portability. There are all these other issues.”

So I don’t hear any of these other people standing up…

Gillmor: Hang on for a second, hang on. Hang on.

Canter: All right. All right.

Gillmor: So basically what you’re saying is that it’s got a built-in feedback loop.

Canter: Well, it’s certainly not a dumb widget or an iFrame.

Gillmor: OK.

Canter: You know what I’m saying?

Gillmor: So again, when Gmail first came out, its major feature was that it had five or two GB of storage for free, which compared to the marketplace at that time - I believe MSN mail or Hotmail was 200 megs and you had to pay for it.

I think Yahoo followed shortly thereafter. But because of Google’s clever use of a micro-community they were never able to catch up to Google’s expanding server file in terms of offering the same service.

Canter: All right.

Gillmor: OK. So you talk about the iFrame. Yeah, that is a hack. Is it a hack that is going to be there in two months, three months, six months? No.

Canter: But the principle here is that we all learn from each other. This is something new. I would like to ask everybody to go check out what Dave Marin wrote. It was really brilliant stuff.

There is a dynamic privacy. These people are smart. They are constantly innovating. What I am challenged with is how I connect that to Google, to MySpace and Microsoft. That’s all I care about. I just want to work with everybody and sing “Kumbaya.” [00:55:05]

Gillmor: Yeah, we are in violent agreement here about that. What I am saying to you is that you can see it right here, right now, I don’t have the fear of Facebook that a lot of people have.

This call, not this one, but the News Gang call is now operating pretty much 100% of the time on a Facebook application. Now that doesn’t mean that we have to rely on this. There are people like Doug Searls who just won’t use it.

So I have convinced these people to be able to create a gateway that we can use that routes around Facebook. That doesn’t mean however that Facebook is a useless piece of shit. In fact it’s foie gras for me as they start to make more granular tools available to be able to exploit it, is becoming all the more important.

Now that doesn’t mean that Google is going to be forever shut out of this. As Facebook and other clouds start to use these things more efficiently and offer services that are more valuable, we will see how quickly Google adapts to it.

Canter: Right.

Gillmor: I think it will be very fast.

Canter: And then the interchange of the data and verbs and actions that can happen between these worlds and routing signals around — these are all the battlefields that we’ll be working out.

Last week and this week we have moved these open mantras so much further. When these big guys recognize that this is where it’s at. It definitely helps us all.

Gillmor: Dan?

Farber: I think it’s all positive. This is kind of unexpected, where you have all these companies that compete with each other actually being forced in some ways over the last couple of years by people like Marc to really address this issue of that the net should be more open and free.

And so they are taking some steps and it’s mostly press releases right now. But as I said before, it’s better than nothing, which is what we had before or just people nodding their heads as opposed to actually trying to implement something.

While it’s not the holy grail, we do see this notion that social is being baked into the core of the Web. It’s just not clear how we get to the point where there are a lot of hurdles jump over to get all the different ways to do it to work together.

Gillmor: Steve Shapiro, hang up please if you are bored. What else?

Farber: What else? Did you talk about your post, your blood/brain connection post?

Gillmor: No, because everybody hates it.

Farber: They all hate it, I know. You know why?

Gillmor: Yeah, I do. Why do you think?

Farber: Well no, I’d like to hear from you first.

Gillmor: Because in the middle of it there is this impenetrable paragraph, which pisses everybody off.

Farber: Yeah.

Gillmor: That is the part of which I am proudest.

Canter: Is URL routed to the chat place?

Gillmor: No thanks.

Canter: Aw, dude.

Gillmor: It’s on TechCrunch. You’ve heard it.

Canter: OK. I’ll have to go back. I’ve been busy. I’ve got a company to run here.

Gillmor: Me too. Tina says she’ll do it. I just had to read the worst crapstorm in history yesterday from all the idiots that have no better things to do than to talk about how bored they are with what they’re doing.

Gardner: You know my point of view on this.

Gillmor: Well, I don’t. Because you said that you posted something and then you said that somebody had deleted it, which I doubt.

Gardner: Well, I don’t know. It just didn’t show up there.

Gillmor: So repost it.

Gardner: My thinking is, first of all, people don’t read for pleasure that much any more. And the 140 character limit is starting to limit people’s ability to process and consume information that’s any more dense. And you must admit that you write some dense posts that cause people to think.

Gillmor: If you cut it up into 140 characters it would still be dense.

Gardner: That’s what I think you should do. I think you should just Twitter it 140 characters at a time and then people will get it and consume it more.

Gillmor: Yeah, they’ll get it. They’ll decide it’s noisy and then they’ll un-follow me.

Gardner: It couldn’t be any worse than Scoble.

Gillmor: I think Scoble’s terrific.

Gardner: Oh, I think he’s terrific. But the torrent, it’s very difficult to digest. Because it’s not just Scoble, it’s your 100 or 50 or 10 or 1,000 other friends too. So everyone’s competing for your attention, which forces people to really eliminate or to gloss over.[01:00:12]

And I think generally people are so habituated to reading very short, digestible chunks that they just don’t know how to read something that acquires more attention.

Gillmor: No, I don’t think that’s true. I think they just don’t want to read it.

Gardner: Well, that may be the case, then. You should stop writing it, because you’re just filling space with something that people don’t want to consume.

Gillmor: I’m pretty pleased with that fact that — I mean, I get to write something that is so reviled that the next person, like Cliff Gerrish… Cliff, aren’t you please with the reaction to your article?

Gerrish: Surprised, but yes, pleased.

Gillmor: OK.

Gerrish: Pleased that it created conversation.

Gillmor: And so basically even though you wrote that after I wrote the post that I put up, I put it up after your post.

Gerrish: When did you write your post?

Gillmor: I wrote it the night before. You wrote it around 1:00 in the morning and I was writing around 11:00 at night. So the point I’m trying to make is that it’s a lot easier for people to be able to find somebody who can get to the point faster than I can. It creates a sort of an opportunity for the same ideas, expressed better, to get a wider publication.

Gerrish: Yeah, but I think the whole thing about that is I was really responding something that — I hadn’t read your post yet — but the shows, the Thursday and Friday shows. And then also the things you’ve been talking about for a long time.

Gillmor: Yeah, I understand that. But you’ve done that a number of times. I’ve seen you do this, where you — I mean, you were hipper to what was going on with News Gang than I was and than Tina was. We saw the posts where you summarized what was going on here and how it had been birthed out of Jason Calicanis Twittering about something. It’s all about Twitter, obviously.

It’s not like these are original thoughts, it’s just that there a need, it seems to me, to sound the alarm. I mean, “The Russians are coming,” or whatever it is. We have to be able to prepare the ground for the kind of wholesale transformation that Marc is talking about and that Dan is resonating off of.

Gerrish: And I guess all I’m saying is, if you don’t write that dense post, I don’t write the post that I write.

Gillmor: No, that’s not true. You wrote it before I wrote. You wrote it because you resonated off this conversational format, not because of anything I wrote. My point is that I don’t feel bad about being reviled about what I wrote because inevitably it leads to people saying, “That guy’s an idiot, but this guy said it better.”

[laughter]

Gillmor: Then the ideas get popularized and they get pushed out. That’s fantastic.

Gardner: Just don’t tell them it’s the same ideas.

Gillmor: OK, I won’t. So, Dan.

Farber: Yes.

Gillmor: Where are you off to? You’re off to New York, right? Or Boston?

Farber: Boston this time.

Gillmor: OK. And what’s happening on campus in the next few days or weeks that you’re looking forward to?

Farber: The next few weeks. Well, it’s a busy rest of the month. Next week I’m going to the Berkman Center forum on the future of the Internet at Harvard, where I’ll run into our old frined Doc Searls.

Gillmor: And Dave Weiner.

Farber: Weinberger. And Dave Weiner will be there too. Good. And then at the end of the month the famous D Conference, put on by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

Gillmor: This is where you get to leverage your mainstream media study.

Farber: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Where hopefully we’ll see some interaction between Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and Jerry Yang. And Sue Decker.

Gillmor: Why, is that who’s been announced?

Farber: Well, they’re all going to be there. I’m not sure if they will be there totally at the same time, but I think so.

Gillmor: Well, maybe Steve Jobs will be there announcing the 3G iPhone, right?

Farber: I don’t think he’s on the list this year. So he’s probably busy creating his next device. [01:05:07]

Canter: But you’ll have Zuckerberg.

Farber: And Zuckerberg is probably there, yeah. So it’ll be fun. And the good thing about D besides it’s good schmoozing and you feel like you’re special because you’re there with all of that glitterati and digerati, but Kara and Walt actually do really good interviews.

Typically you go to these events and the rule of thumb is, we’ll invite these big industry executives, but don’t piss them off. Whereas Walt and Kara, they go right for it.

Gillmor: Oh, come on, they don’t piss them off. I’m sure they tell them exactly what they’re going to ask.

Farber: Well, they may, I don’t know. But they certainly ask different questions.

Gillmor: If they were going to piss them off, they wouldn’t be there and talking to them.

Farber: Well, I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure. Some of them aren’t afraid to go out and answer questions and deal with tougher questions. And these are professionals. What are you talking about? You ask Steve Ballmer, “Why didn’t you buy Yahoo? What was going on?” You can probe him on it. It’s very hard to make him stumble and fall on his face.

Gillmor: OK. So that’s D. And then we’re in the summer and that’s about it, huh?

Farber: Well, in the summer there’s a few other things. But the summertime is the time for us to kick back a little bit.

Gillmor: Really.

Farber: Yeah.

Gillmor: OK. Well, I’m pretty excited about this announcement by Google tonight. I think it’s going to tip over a lot of rocks and we’re going to see some ants coming out in great force and moving around, sucking up users for the Twitter core.

Canter: All right.

Farber: The Twitter core.

Gillmor: Yeah. Track wins, and Twitter is dominant. The rest of these little midgets like Microsoft and Yahoo and Google are also-rans.

Canter: All right. Sounds like a deal.

Farber: Sound like a plan.

Gillmor: Thanks, everybody who showed up and especially those who didn’t. I’m Steve Gillmor, this has been the Gillmor Gang. Thank you, Loic.

Le Meur: Thank you. Bye, Steven and everybody.

Gillmor: Thank you, Cliff.

Gerrish: Thanks.

Gillmor: Thanks Dan. Thanks, Dana and Mark. Of course, this is Steve Gillmor, bye-bye.

[music]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 12:12 am and is filed under News Gang. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.