Karoli Kuns, Michael Markman, Rob La Gesse, Francine Hardaway, Debi Jones, Bruce Lerner, Aron Michalski, Matt Terenzio, and Jerry Schuman and the UstreamGangers. Recorded Tuesday, May 13, 2008.

[music]

Searls: Hey.

Gillmor: Hey.

Searls: Is for horses. So what’s the topic?

Gillmor: The topic is that we have nothing to say and nobody cares.

[laughter]

Searls: Which is more important? We’ll cover that one first. I’ll just be silent, and that’ll take care of it right there.

Gillmor: Oh, you mean you’re voting for “nobody cares” or that “we have nothing to say”?

Searls: I’m looking for a twofer is we can get that.

Gillmor: Well, you can’t. Because clearly you don’t care.

[laughter]

Searls: I care, I just don’t know if I care enough to find out what I care about. Maybe that would be it. I don’t know.

Gillmor: Alex [..] says this is Attention Deficit Theater.

Searls: Yes. It is. It is. I can’t find any, so that must be it. If we had some, then we wouldn’t have a deficit. But maybe we can work together to overcome the deficit. Maybe attention is fungible. I think you worked on that once, didn’t you?

Gillmor: No, that was Tim O’Reilly.

Searls: Oh, OK. Are they still attending to that, or are they giving it a continuous partial, or eventual attention.

Gillmor: No, that’s Linda Stone. The secret partial eventual attention. I think that’s it.

Searls: Yeah, that would be it. That way you can kind of get off track at any point, and then never arrive, but still think that you’re getting there. That would be good. I’m passing a pay phone. Just letting you now there are a few of those still around.

Gillmor: Really? Where are you at?

Searls: I’m at the corner of Everett and Mass Ave. in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Vizard: Hey, I know where that is.

Gillmor: That’s Mike Vizard, too. Cool.

Searls: Mike Vizard, hey!

Vizard: How are you doing?

Searls: Yo. You sound like you’re from here.

Vizard: I know. I went to school up there.

Searls: Oh, you did. Excellent. Harvard or Tufts or one of those?

Vizard: I went to Boston University.

Searls: Boston University.

Vizard: I was on the wrong side of the river.

Scoble: Hello, Steve, Doc, and everybody.

Gillmor: Who’s that?

Searls: Even within Harvard there’s this thing about the river. I was at this little event at Harvard the other day and this guy says, “Yeah, I don’t get to this side of the river very often.” And I’m from out of town and I’m thinking, “What river?” [laughs] “Oh, that one, yeah. I’ve been over that, yeah.”

Vizard: The Charles.

Searls: The Charles, yeah.

Scoble: Robert Scoble here.

LeMeur: This is Loic, just saying hi for everybody. I can’t stay one hour, but I will stay a little bit just to say hi if you like.

Gillmor: You’re going to give us a little of the French stylings?

LeMeur: Exactly. I know you like my French accent, so I’m back.

Searls: Can we start with — I with there was a thing called FriendBleed, and all it does is it sheds friends. So you go there to lose friends.

Gillmor: A social app?

Searls: It’s sort of anti-social, or semi-social.

Gillmor: Semi-social.

Searls: Semi-social. Socially poorly adjusted or something. Listen, you get to hear the robot in the bus.

LeMeur: You’re saying I’m poorly socially adapted? Is that what you’re saying? You know, the French don’t like that. Be careful.

Searls: I don’t want to piss you off.

[laughter]

Searls: You’re a big guy. And you’re fit now, which is worse. Yeah, I’m in a bus now, so when you hear robotic sounds or somebody announcing streets, you’ll know what that is.

Gillmor: So what are you doing up there in Cambridge today, Doc?

Searls: I was just at a meeting at the Berkman Center, which is where I work here. And we’re preparing for our “Berkman at 10″ set of events in celebration because we’re 10 years old. And that’s happening basically the next three days.

So I was those and now I’m on the bus going back to my house, where I’ll pick up my care and go pick up my kid from school.

Gillmor: What are the celebrations going to entail?

Searls: A lot of people talking about a lot of stuff. It’s like I’m speaking too loudly, everybody on the bus is looking at me. So I have to drop my voice. On a cell phone you tend to speak loudly because people are far away. But, anyway.

Gillmor: And also because you think they’re old and can’t hear you. In my case.

Searls: [laughs] And those are the people looking at me, actually, so I guess they can. Yeah, in my case too.

Gillmor: So you’re embarrassed? [00:04:53]

Searls: No, I can’t do that. That’s been removed. It’s a vestigial organ, the embarrassment gland, whatever that is. Yeah, to show that I’m not easily embarrassed, I’m actually wearing one of those clamps on my head with a boom microphone in front of my face, which make me look like somebody who’s operating something remotely.

I think it would be cooler to look like an agent from “The Matrix,” but I’m not that hip.

Gillmor: How is your health?

Searls: It’s good. It’s good. I have thinner blood now, so I’ll die of something else besides a blood clot. And I’m getting more exercise by doing things like taking the bus. [laughs] And I beat my kid at basketball yesterday, which is pretty cool. I actually played a little soccer, moved a soccer ball from one end of the field to the other, and scored a goal against nobody, which is pretty cool. I haven’t done that in a long time.

Vizard: So, Doc, why did I get an invite from Reunions.com from you the other day?

Searls: Ah. Because I was he stupidest person who got scammed by Reunion.com. They are really evil. They are really evil and bad. Somehow they think something when you just — somebody credible who I hadn’t seen in a while sent me an email saying, “Reuinon.com [..]”

So I went there and signed in. Basically, “Sign here.” “Put your name here, and your email address will be notified.” And somehow it got everybody in my Gmail mailbox. Not in my own more commonly email box. That would have been thousands of people, but it was a few dozen from my Gmail.

Gillmor: Like the Gillmor Gang, which seems like…

Searls: All you guys got it?

Gillmor: Yeah. I figured, well, Doc, I can’t get him into Facebook with an armed guard. So I figured this must be a really important secret organization, so of course I didn’t click on it.

Searls: Yeah. I got lots of notes from people saying, “Wow, this is a scam,” not knowing the reason they got the note from me was because I got scammed. But, yeah. They are bad. I’m only bad one time there, but they’re bad all the time. So they need to be shot, or something.

Gillmor: You’re usually not this intense about people.

Searls: [laughs] Actually I did once say that I didn’t believe in the death penalty except for spammers. So it’s consistent with that, I think. Because that’s pretty spammy. I don’t want to really kill the, I just want them to be buried in false email addresses or printouts of everything they’ve ever sent to anybody.

Scoble: Or they just have to get all that spam come to them in their personal email box, right?

Searls: Yeah, yeah. Have some sort of redirected denial of spamming attack on them. Apparently they’ve been doing shit for a while. If you look up Reunions.com on the Net, it’s like they’re shameless. They’ve been doing this kind of shit for years. There’s one bunch of complaints about how they — for people who actually paid them money for something or other — and decided to not pay them anymore, they continued to have their credit cards docked for payments or something like that.

So that was like a year or two ago. They’ve been at this for a while. They’re one of those companies where it’s policy. It’s sort of like Google’s doppelganger: “Be Evil.”

Scoble: All right. Let me throw some quick spam data your way so you can just know exactly how much you should hate these folks. I have this report here from these guys at Comtouch, that monitor all this stuff, and they’re saying that spam level were 60-90% of all email throughout the quarter and that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 355, 000 zombies activated each day for the purpose of malicious activity.

So I guess we’re losing this war, one way or another.

Searls: Yeah, yeah.

Gillmor: But we’re not losing this war as long as we get rid of email.

Searls: Right. That’s not going to happen. But I have to say…

Gillmor: You’re sure?

Searls: In defense of what Nick Carr said about utilities, and utilities being able to scale in ways that smaller outfits and individuals cannot, I launder my mail through Gmail. And that gets rid of most of the spam. Not all of it, but most of it. [00:10:11]

Gillmor: And I launder it through never using it unless I have to and using Twitter instead.

Searls: Yeah.

Scoble: But not all things are always going to work. There’s some piece today out on one of these universities talking about the spam hole inside of Gmail that they expect people to start exploiting any day now.

Searls: Wow.

Gillmor: Well, as soon as they start exploiting it, then there will be a lot of data which will shut it down. That’s the nice thing about Gmail, is that it’s a [...] organization. I mean, isn’t that the way basically the filter works?

Searls: I don’t think so. I don’t know.

Gillmor: Well, I’m well known for not knowing what I’m talking about, but interestingly it always turns out that I’m right. So I don’t know how we put that together.

Searls: I don’t know. And it is interesting. We need these utilities and at the same time, they’re all mono-cultures. So being mono-cultures, they can be exploited. On the other hand, you get efficiencies that only come with scale. So it’s a two-for-one.

Gillmor: So what are you saying exactly?

Searls: What am I saying?

Gillmor: Exactly.

Searls: I’m saying that we need these big utilities because there are things that only they can do, and on the other hand, there’s a Faustian bargain with them because they become mono-cultures that can be exploited. That’s Botany 201, right there.

Gillmor: So we’re just basically screwed.

Searls: You’re eventually screwed, not basically. It’s downstream. It’s like attention.

Gillmor: No, but seriously, Doc. This is the post “Cluetrain” era, so what are you saying?

Searls: [laughs] I’m just saying what I told you I said already. You know what it is? It’s all OK. That’s basically what it comes down to.

Gillmor: [laughs]

Searls: It’s all OK. That’s basically what it comes down to. Or you can just say, “Life sucks and then you die.” Which is another way of looking at the same thing. But in the meantime, it’s all OK.

Gillmor: All right.

Searls: Or as Bill Hicks put it, “It’s just a ride.”

Gillmor: Explain who Bill Hicks is for the unwashed.

Searls: OK, it’s very easy. You go to You Tube and you look up Bill Hicks. Speaking of You Tube, by the way — and Mike, if you’re in Boston maybe you saw this as well — Hiawatha Grey had a piece about our local congressman or senator, Markey, who had the brilliant idea that we should force You Tube to use closed captioning because it’s actually just television.

And somebody from WCBH coming along and saying, “Yeah, it is just TV. And we say it is, so we really should have closed captioning on there, and we need a federal law saying so.”

Scoble: This is Robert. I’m actually shocked that nobody in the video business has been sued through the Disabilities Act yet, because If you own a business, you have to put in a bathroom large enough for a wheelchair, and if you don’t, you’re going to get sued. And I’m shocked that nobody in the video business has been sued for not putting captions on their videos yet.

Searls: [...] bill in Congress. Not putting plumbing in their videos, that’s a good idea. We need a federal law for that.

Gillmor: I think people will be sued on some videos for putting captions on.

[laughter]

Searls: Yeah, there you go. Well, they should probably put them on, but just do them reverse, like how it says “ambulance” on the front, so you can only see them in the mirror or something.

Gillmor: There’s a comment on Twitter from Debbie Jones, who was just on News Gang, and she says something to the effect of: there’s 20 minutes of her life that she’ll never get back.

[laughter]

Scoble: There’s 20 minutes I won’t get back either.

Searls: That’s not true, you can play it over and over again.

Scoble: When I was in Israel somebody said they like listening to the Gillmor Gang and I said, “Why? It’s a bunch of nothingness.” And she said, “That’s why I like it.”

Searls: We’re here to help. I think we should have all LOLCat translated not only into English but also into Hebrew.

Gillmor: OK, now explain what LOLCat means, because I’ve tried to avoid understanding that. [00:15:02]

Searls: It’s the laughing language of cats. That’s what it is. LOLCat. Laughing out loud cat language. It’s a pidgin, but actually more like a feline English. If it was pidgin English, the cats would eat the pidgin, I guess. But it’s a distorted English that cats speak in captions on I Can Has Cheezburger, which is a blog of extreme popularity now. It’s very, very funny. Some are very, very funny. Most of them suck.

Scoble: Did you see the latest video meme to go viral is the treadmill kittens. And it’s two kittens on this treadmill and the owner keeps turning it faster and faster and they keep running on the treadmill. It’s pretty cute. [laughs]

Searls: Oh, that’s great.

Gillmor: That sounds like the Laughing Baby. Have you seen that one?

Scoble: Something like that. I put the feature request into FriendFeed to let me delete any post that has “treadmill kittens” in it, because I’ve seen it about 60, 000 times come through FriendFeed already.

Vizard: Isn’t that kind of like the page view/get publishing model, right there?

Scoble: Totally.

[laughter]

Scoble: The number one WordPress blog for a long time was I Can Has Cheezburger.

Searls: I Can Has Cheezburger. I found out about I Can Has Cheezburger when it passed me in Technorati popularity about a year and a half ago. And it was down in the thousands somewhere. As I was dropping, it was rising.

Gillmor: All right, maybe I’m dense…

LeMeur: Sorry to leave you guys. It was good talking to you.

Gillmor: OK, Loic. Thank you for monitoring this communication.

LeMeur: [laughs] Thanks. Exactly.

Scoble: How come Loic has a much deeper voice than the rest of us?

Searls: Who does?

Scoble: He has a better microphone or something. He has this really rich, deep voice. It sounds like he’s in a studio or something.

Gillmor: It’s the neck brace squeezing his larynx.

Vizard: He’s not really in France, he’s just a guy pretending to have a French accent, but he’s in a cube next to me.

Searls: Have we lost Loic yet?

Gillmor: No, he had to go. I didn’t realize that he was actually coming. But he graced us with his presence for a few minutes. Now, I don’t understand what “has cats” or “cheezburger” means. Can you explain this?

Searls: It’s like explaining a joke, Steve. If you have to explain, there’s no point.

Gillmor: At least you can explain why it has some significance for some population.

Searls: Yeah.

Scoble: I’ll take that on, Doc, if you don’t want it.

Gillmor: Go ahead.

Scoble: In journalism school, when we were doing photography assignments they said, “If you can’t take pictures of real news, take pictures of babies or pets, because they’ll get you more readership than anything else out there.” And this is just the latest version of that. It’s cute photos with funny saying underneath them.

Gillmor: So what is the h-a-z? What does “haz” mean?

Scoble: It doesn’t mean anything. It was a picture of a cat on top of a cheeseburger and somebody said, “I Can Has Cheezburger.” They made up a saying that this cat was thinking. And there’s this whole language about what cats are thinking when they’re doing funny things.

Gillmor: That reminds me of, what was the cartoon? Something in “Playboy,” a picture of a dog with a thought bubble. The dog is saying “I love you, I love you, I love you,” and another picture of the cat, and the cat is thinking nothing.

Searls: Nothing. That was Robert Kliban, one of the most brilliant cartoonists. It’s what people say and what cats hear, and what people say and what dogs hear. All the dog heard was his own name.

Gillmor: Alex Bellinger says he can’t quite believe the Gillmor gang is taking about LOLCat.

[laughter]

Gillmor: As with decentralizing Twitter, I’m attempting to squeeze out all possible intelligence around subjects so that they go away.

Scoble: Do they really want us to talk about Google Friend Connect?

Gillmor: I’d like to. What did you think, Robert?

Scoble: It’s yet another Google service for developers. I think it’s pretty interesting because it’s a social network to every other website that does not already have a social network on it. [00:20:01]

Gillmor: Even the ones that do!

Scoble: Now, the next step is to put these social networks together. That’s what I’m really waiting for. We talked to the guys who making Plaxo, and Facebook was there last night. There was a bunch of people there from the social media industry. They say the next step is to actually join these social networks together so that upcoming, in theory, you can mark friends and contacts you already have on a Google network, say on Orkut, and Orkut can get smarter about the friends that you have on Facebook and hook these systems together.

Last night’s announcement was just about componentizing the Google Friends network, which is basically the underpinnings of Orkut and making it possible for that business to be put on your blogs, on your website, on your corporate site or other places. It takes away some of Ning’s “special thoughts,” but it gives developers yet another competitor to choose from when they need to put friends or social graphs into the site.

Searls: I think Open Social might be going corporate. Enterprise guys are talking about using Open Social as a protocol to link social networking applications back inside the enterprise for stuff like enterprise content management systems, ARP apps, and all kinds of fun stuff.

Gillmor: They didn’t show anything, but one of the LinkedIn folks was talking about how they’re value adding Friend Connect into LinkedIn. I thought that was essentially what you’re talking about, Mike.

Vizard: There’s these mainstream type of applications, these “Document them” type of applications. You have all these users that are using corporate applications and they hate the corporate application front end. Some of the theory is that “Gee, if we can actually create these lightweight applications on social networks that people want to use, they might actually get some use out of the data in these corporate applications that people hate the front end of.”

Gillmor: Right. So, while everybody is yelling at me about how I say that Twitter is an enterprised app because it’s bullshit, along comes Google to prove the point.

Scoble: Yeah. Steve, Yesterday I saw this new startup called Equals. I have a video up on my blog, and they showed me the system that actually does make Twitter an enterprise app. Here’s a use case, just a little tiny piece of a demo they showed me. You get off the plane — you land in New York because you’re going to New York like I am next week — and.

Twitter is available for phone calls.

Their system then reconfigures itself so that anybody who calls in gets pushed automatically to my phone call. If I get back on the plane and say that I am not available for phone calls to the Twitter address, it automatically will throw you into voice mail or some other system to let you communicate with me, but not on the phone.

I might go to Skype for instance, turn on Skype and then tell the system I’m available for Skype calls, and it’ll reconfigure the system to take your cell phone call. Instead of throwing it to my cell phone, it’ll throw it straight to the Skype bridge-way and put it to my Skype machine, which I might be using. I have my headset on and I want to talk to you on Skype.

This is really useful for travelers who go to Europe, because cell phones are ridiculously expensive. I just got hit with a $300 roaming charge. Now I’m going to be able to use Equals to signal to the world how I want to be communicated with, and that’s really interesting.

Vizard: That makes Twitter the ultimate presence manager for all of these different enterprise communications.

Gillmor: Jim Posener in the chat, “I didn’t read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s story, but you suggested that he has pretty strong things to say. Can you just type a couple of the strong things in the chat so that we can bring that into the conversation?”

Robert, I don’t agree with you about the end game here being about some sort of wiring up of all these different social networks. That will not happen. What I do think will happen is that Friend Connect is essentially a driver for large-scale adoption of OpenID and [..] I think the significance of that is that OpenID, you have to go through a lot of work to be able to register for OpenID.[00:25:16]

They’ve reduced the barrier to that a little bit, but the more interesting sites adopt this Friend Connect technology, the more people are going to say “Oh, OK. I saw that before. I was interested in doing that. Now I realize that there’s enough critical mass that I can just do the work at the beginning once, and then from then on I’m in.”

I think over the next month or so that’s going to drive a significant cloud of people who are using OpenID as an alternative.

Scoble: That I do agree with. I don’t think we have an argument there. I only explained about 1/10th of the Equals demo. About four more tenths are focused around on social networks. They’re working on integrating their social networks into the system so for instance, we were just talking about white listings, why can’t you bring all your friends into your email system and use that as a white list?

And then anybody who emails you from one of those email addresses through one of those social networks gets through right away, where the spam is held in a bucket to be checked for later.

Gillmor: OK. I’ve been reading what Jim Posner pasted in, about Marshall Kirkpatrick’s points. I’m summarizing, so forgive me, Marshall, if I trivialize what you’re saying. He complained about the iFrame implementation of the service. Which from everything that I’ve discussed with the program manager — who is a guy from the old Lotus Domino and Quickplay states — iFrame is the transitional tool along the way to the build-out of some of these authentication technologies.

Which will make it easier to be able to do this in a more secure way. If that’s the criticism, that’s a valid point. The other implication here is a sort of locked box. They’re going around these so-called “data portability” efforts, and as with a number of these kinds of alleged Open Standards confluences, I don’t know who declared data portability Pope any more than any of these other companies.

These are all political agendas, whether large vendors or small vendors. They all are going to beat the marketplace traction.

Searls: OpenID, what company is that a political agenda of?

Gillmor: I don’t think OpenID is the political agenda, I think OpenID has successfully transitioned across the — pardon the expression –, blood-brain barrier to starting to get both community and big vendors as adopters. So I think it’s going to be a big success. That’s what I think the significance of Friend Connect is. It’s going to largely endow OpenID with enough momentum and traction that Microsoft’s going to have to come in. But I don’t think it was a big deal.

Searls: In the sense that Cardspace already looks toward OpenID, but Cardspace is incompatible with OpenID. They’re meeting this week at Internet Editing World with the Higgins people and the Opus people and the others to make all that shit work together.

Gillmor: The work that you started, Doc, with Wembley and Kim Cameron at Microsoft, and all the rest of the people who started to come in; Chris Mussina, etcetera, that work is starting to jump out.

Searls: We started at the Gillmor Gang, I might add. Gillmor Gang on December 31st, 2004.

Gillmor: Yeah, exactly. What we have here is a major player, Google, coming in with technologies that while they may be pursuing the so called reverse engineering of a social graph, aka Open Social, at the same time they’re validating and accelerating the adoption of open standards. So, this is huge.

Searls: Absolutely. I think that is the case. There may be other agendas, but I don’t think so. I think the hackers working on it are not thinking to dominate the world, but rather to help out. At least the ones that I know. Whether there’s an agenda higher up might be another matter. Down lower level I don’t think that’s it. [00:30:04]

Gillmor: Just from a practical perspective I think that that augers extremely well. I would point out, from another question that’s in the chat room, this vector completely includes Microsoft Mesh plan. There is no reason whatsoever why Mesh can’t exist contiguously with what Google is doing in this space. In fact, I think they complement each other.

Searls: I would hope they would. I don’t understand either one of them very well so far. I’m genuinely willing to grant a little more open-ness to Google than to Microsoft, but I know what very good people at Microsoft are doing. I give both of them the benefit of the doubt at this point. By the way, I went silent when I was on the bus. I had so many people staring at me because I was talking.

The public address system on the bus is so loud, nobody minds that. But if somebody’s talking, they’re like “Oh my God, you shouldn’t talk, this is a bus.”

Gillmor: Right. They were looking for their block mechanism but they couldn’t find it.

Searls: Yes, I think so. So I ended up just walking to the front of the bus and standing there until I got off. I’m back at my house now. Not that you care, or it matters. I’m just bookmarking a trivial, irrelevant fact.

Gillmor: We started with nobody caring.

Scoble: It’s like a real life Twitter conversation.

Searls: Exactly, I hate that.

Gillmor: Mike Vizard, anything you wanted to add?

Vizard: The only thing I wanted to add is take a look around at the new legislation coming down the pike here from the government that’s going to be a help to us. The government’s got a bill in front of Congress that just passed, apparently, where they’re going to monitor all these violations of our intellectual property. It actually calls for the creation of a White House position for an intellectual properties czar, and the formation of an intellectual properties enforcement division to cover not only copyright and all things related to technology, but anything related to any kind of intellectual property. Seems to be called the “Pro-IP Act” and I’m just a little bit scared about whose going to decide what is intellectual property and what isn’t, and what will be enforced on that.

Searls: There’s another piece in the “Financial Times” today about how we’re spending less than 1% of the federal budget on anything having to do with infrastructure where it was 10% or something, at least 10% of the defense budget in the ’50s on dams and roads and bridges and the rest of it. That’s one more way to be non-competitive in the world. It’s great.

Vizard: It’s kind of weird because the House has it’s version, the Senate has it’s version, and the Justice Department apparently doesn’t like this idea. Go figure.

Searls: Good for them. Good for them.

Scoble:[...] along with another blogger and we’re are going to go meet with our congresspeople. We’d love your help in these kinds of issues. Something the social value and tech industry should care about when we go there.

Gillmor: I’d love to give them some help in clearing out their desks.

[laughter]

Scoble: Have to wait till November for that.

Gillmor: I don’t think so. With real estate, it’s going to be a real estate crisis in Washington if Obama wins.

Searls: I sure hope so. You mean the real estate crisis in the sense that the bureaucracy will swell?

Gillmor: In the sense that all those people are going to lose their shirts on the insane housing price, and so the market will be very hot starting in say, September.

Searls: Interesting thought.

Gillmor: What do you think about the possibility that the secretary of Twitter will be Colin Powell.

Searls: I don’t know if that would happen, but aside from that it sounds cool enough.

Gillmor: Who would you like to appoint as secretary of Twitter?

Searls: Robert. That way he would change the subject to something that’s cooler.

Scoble: LOLCats!

Searls: To translate all government documents into LOLCat and then back.

Gillmor: Tom Gorillo — I don’t know how to pronounce your name — but he suggests Jason Calicanis as secretary of Twitter. [00:35:02]

Searls: Oh, geez. He’s secretary of himself, isn’t he?

Gillmor: Now that’s a ringing endorsement.

[laughter]

Scoble: But every third communication would have an ad in it.

Gillmor: Yes. “Brought to you by audible.com, I’m John Dvorak.” I can’t even do Jason doing it. OK, are we going to make this a short one, folks?

Searls: I get short because the battery’s dead and I’ve got to go.

Scoble: I’d rather talk about HP buying EDS.

Gillmor: I don’t give a shit about that, do you?

Scoble: Then it’s a short one!

Gillmor: I don’t give a shit. Mike, what do you think?

Vizard: I think some day it will matter, but it won’t matter in the short term. It’ll take them years to digest it, and there’s all this nonsense about this being a move towards cloud computing. It’s more about HP versus IBM and IGF and traditional outsourcing. I don’t think there’s anything more fancy to that other than the fact that most of the money may be made on services, and that’s where they need to go.

Searls: I agree.

Gillmor: While those guys are trying to merge, Google is building up the infrastructure to take it over.

Vizard: I think those are two completely different conversations. What they’re after are the applications that a large company builds, somebody like Java. They’re 10 years old and they’re all full of spaghetti code, but they’re never going to run in a big Cloud, but they can be outsourced to a dedicated server.

Gillmor: Meanwhile, Google is going in and opportunistically taking over small affinity groups across the network and basically turning them into revenue engines.

Vizard: Yes, and that’s, as you would say, orthogonal.

Gillmor: You think it’s orthogonal if they scrape away 90 cents out of a dollar? You think what’s left over is going to be meaningful?

Vizard: There’s different dollars.

Gillmor: OK. Maybe you can explain what you mean by that, because I think the Friend Connect is going to turn out to be disconnect in a very short amount of time, as you already pointed out.

Scoble: You think all those departmental apps that have been written inside all those big companies will be converted to Friend Connect? I don’t see that.

Gillmor: Well, that’s what Mike just said. About half an hour ago, you said, that they are wiring up social media applications to enterprise solutions.

Vizard: Yeah, they will get connected, but they are not going to get converted. There is a big difference.

Gillmor: I don’t get it. Are you saying that XML is not going to be viral and may turn to suck away the code?

Vizard: I am saying that accounting application that mid-Joe Fortune 5000 company has been running for the last 10 years is not going in the cloud anytime soon. But it could be outsourced to EDS to run more efficiently, but that doesn’t make it part of the cloud.

Gillmor: Well, if you listened to the debate between Marc Zenioff and Hasso Platner, Platner didn’t exactly get the best of that argument.

Vizard: Didn’t mean he was wrong. I think he was out-hustled by Joel Gere’s marketing activity.

Gillmor: We can always say that about Marc right up onto the point where he is right.

Searls: Yeah, but they are still making an ad hominem argument either way. So here is an idea of a good business for HP or somebody else to be in, and probably Google undertaking it too, which is take these utility services like S3 and EC2, sell it to the phone companies that have empty buildings where switches used to be. To get low latency of such storage and other backend services, that can beat Amazon at its own game. Because Amazon is going to be doing higher latency, unless Amazon wants to be in that business.

Vizard: Yeah, I think Amazon will be in that business. I think if I’ve got a brand new application, that’s a pretty good idea, but I don’t think that’s going to work for the millions and billions of lines of existing code that we are going to have too.

Searls: The real shift is going to be, and you have characterized it beautifully. I was remembering, Mike, actually the first time we met, you probably dont remember this, because it was a PR flag at the time, and kind of cringing inside my suit. I think it was Digital World or something.

Vizard: Digital Review, back in the day.

Searls: Digital Review, and I think I hustling [...] shit, whatever that was. Yeah, Digital Review, which is no Digital, which became part of Compaq, became part of HP, and seeing a lot of water under the bridge. Anyway, just sort of an interesting data point there.

Vizard: All right. Well, I am going to go now that Doc made me feel really old. [00:40:02]

[laughter]

Vizard: That’s good. I got to go.

Gillmor: All right, thanks, Mike.

Vizard: All right, bye-bye.

Gillmor: Now that he is gone, he is completely wrong.

Searls: About what?

Gillmor: About the idea that these social apps aren’t going to take over the enterprise in very, very short order. What is Salesforce? What is salesforce.com? What is it? It’s the front that web services sits together into a series of business processes that are normalized across some basic functions for small and medium sized business. Right?

Searls: Yeah!

Gillmor: OK. So if you have a bunch of disconnected virtualized companies that are strung together across the network, using the network as basically one large website, then what is the value proposition if that is sold against million dollar installations of ERP software, which increasingly are going to be sucking in and absorbing the data that is being collected by these micro clouds?

Searls: I think best case is that the big ERP systems aren’t really ready for that. They are not ready for that role.

Gillmor: Exactly. That’s what happened with SAP. They said they are 18 months away. Two years ago they said they were four years away. Now, they say they are 18 months away. Then a couple of weeks ago, they come out and say, well, we can’t make that schedule, we are still three years away.

It’s like the — what’s that tunnel in Boston?

Searls: The “Big Dig,” except it got done.

Gillmor: It got done?

Searls: Got done, yeah. That’s great. I came just in time. It’s all done and all it’s work is done.

Gillmor: You are kidding? You can cut through the tunnel from Logan…

Searls: There’s two tunnels from Logan. And I have never been in a traffic jam in the tunnel, I should add.

Gillmor: OK. Then you’re right. I give up.

[laughter]

Searls: I will ask him to do a run.

Gillmor: I won’t talk about Twitter anymore. Everybody else is right, I am wrong.

Searls: I won’t talk about anything anymore, because I have to get off the phone.

Gillmor: Alright, Doc, you have turned this into a attention deficit disorder relapse theater.

Searls: It’s an easy job. Somebody has got to do it.

Gillmor: OK. Thanks again. Have a good time.

Searls: I will. See you.

Scoble: Well, who is left here? Me and Steve. Who else?

Gillmor: Nobody, except everybody on the chat room, which are all saying intelligent things, as opposed to what we’re doing.

Scoble: So, what are they saying?

Gillmor: Chat rolled.

Scoble: [laughs] I thought you said they were saying intelligent things.

Gillmor: Well, the thing is that what everybody, I hope, will start to realize is that all of this is going to be in the transcript, and at some point we will be able to refer back to this and see whether or not I am right or everybody else is right.

Scoble: [...] you’re always right.

Gillmor: So far I’m batting close t.400, which ain’t so bad.

Scoble: Yeah.

Gillmor: But, some poison pill says, “Small companies in the States will not invest in Salesforce.”

Scoble: They already have. I don’t know what planet he is living in. Have you looked at Salesforce’s financial results lately?

Gillmor: SalesForce is a stalking horse for the kind of architecture that Google just announced yesterday. The real question, as always, is, who is going to stop them? And that’s what you said to me in the parking lot last night, Robert. They are unstoppable, right?

Scoble: Who’s going to stop Google? Yeah, I don’t see anybody really stepping up to the plate. Facebook has certainly gotten a recharging on what’s Google is going to do, and it will be interesting to see what they do over the next few months.

Gillmor: I disagree with that. I think that Facebook is a natural partner of Friend Connect.

Scoble: I hope so.

Gillmor: Well, they demonstrated it.

Scoble: Yeah.

Gillmor: I mean, how does that work? Somebody who is a rocket scientist can explain to us, over the next couple of days, what exactly is going on there, when they were cherry-picking from the Facebook social cloud.

Scoble: They were using Facebook API. Dave Moore explained it to me after the event.

Gillmor: We will put it into the transcript. So what happens there? [00:45:00]

Scoble: Google used Facebook’s API, looked at social graph data, and pulled it out and pulled it into Google’s Friend Connect.

Gillmor: OK. So what good is that?

Scoble: So far it is about 50% good, because you have to be able to go the other way too, and go from Facebook and open up to Google’s API and suck all the friends out of Google’s API, and put them into Facebook.

And if we have that, we have systems that can get smarter about the friends that you have.

Gillmor: I think that’s a misnomer. What do I actually need to accomplish? Why do I need to go and suck so called “friends” out of the Google API? Why don’t I just decide on my own where I want to store that data?

Scoble: Keep in mind you are not the one in control. If Annie, as the Cookie Company was showing off last night, Annie decides which friends network she is going to use and integrate into her website. At least right now, maybe at some point in the future, she will put some JavaScript in and it will give users a choice of the friend network that they want to use to incorporate into their lifestyle.

Right now, Annie makes the choice for us. So she might pick Google’s Friend Connect. My website that’s on trucking might have Facebook’s friend network. What’s going to be interesting is when those two sites are able to suck each others friends off and get smarter about who is on those friend networks.

Gillmor: That isn’t going to look good on the transcript, what you just said.

Scoble: All right. You know [laughs]

Gillmor: Replay it in your mind.

Scoble: Yeah, OK.

Gillmor: “Suck each other off,” I think you said?

Scoble: OK. [laughs]

Gillmor: Suck each others friends off, yeah.

Scoble: [laughs]

Gillmor: So we know what you meant, but that’s going to get you blocked, Robert.

Scoble: It’ll get all of us blocked in China. We’ll find a different metaphor.

Gillmor: I don’t agree with you, though. It seems to me, what is the value proposition going in, that the site owner goes in and uses one of those social networks? First of all, there may well be a limitation today, and we can certainly ask this question about, can you choose different friends from different social networks and aggregate them into one group of friends that you display on your website?

Scoble: Not as what Google was showing last night, but I’ve seen a demo of a company coming soon that has a toolbar that does exactly that. That aggregates all your friends from LinkedIn, Facebook and what not, and does it in a way that gets around the terms of service of all these systems. You may get kicked off for trying to use a pre-release version of Plaxo.

Gillmor: But it seems that the fundamental issue is user control of their profile data, right?

Scoble: Sort of, yes.

Gillmor: When you went out as an agent of Plaxo and raped and pillaged your social friends, I did not see any warm fuzzy feelings about what you were doing. You of course I loved, but what you were doing I hated. The user needs to be in charge. If the user has the ability to be able to release to the various strategies that seem to be called “connect,” where the data is stored on the originating service. But it is made available to cooperating applications that can talk to each other on websites and can be used by customers or users who have allowed each of those Clouds to be able to participate.

If you have an aggregation of those clouds that the user endows successfully, you don’t need to have data portability because you’ve got user portability, which is a much more fundamental issue.

Scoble: OK, I think we’re heading there but we’re not there yet.

Gillmor: I didn’t see anything last night that forbade that.

Scoble: I didn’t either. I didn’t see the APIs that really were that clean, and also I didn’t see the Facebook or any other system than Orkut has agreed to participate in this linking system yet. This Friend Connect system. [00:50:27]

Gillmor: There are two comments in the chat group. Folknology says “The iFrame acts as the social graph condom.” I think that’s a good way of putting it. J-Nathan says “This is why the Facebook Connect platform is superior. Privacy settings/custom friends list are maintained across any site that uses the API.” My point would be that these are all political platforms.

They are going to be voted on in the marketplace over the next few months, and my guess is that the aggregators, namely the Chris Saads of the world, are going to basically read the tea leaves of what is more successful. We’ll hear from Marc Canter about what he feels that he doesn’t need to come back to the room and yell about, that we’re going to achieve a consensus in relatively short order.

Scoble: Yes. I’d agree with that.

Gillmor: We’re a lot closer than people realize.

Scoble: I think we’re very close, and I think the next few months are going to be very interesting. I think also as people build out these systems and really understand what we’ve just got; Equals is one of them; Synfeed is doing it manually but I can’t wait for a world where my upcoming friend network gets smarter as people friend me on Twitter or friend me on Flickr or friend me on Facebook. Can’t wait for that world.

Gillmor: To just answer the question that was thrown out in the chat room a little while ago, “How does Twitter benefit from Friend Connect?” Imagine the world where the infrastructure of the browser is written to, you can call them iFrames today, but eventually they’re going to be essentially in memory constructs that refresh the page and display various feeds of information at various locations on the screen.

So that you can orchestrate the screen into a console that gives you as much information as you can find about from the sources that you’re interested in. That is the platform of the Internet Operating System, and we just saw significant elements of those tools enabled.

Scoble: Yesterday I also saw something called Zombie, which is a plugin for Outlook which gives you a sense of what you could do if this stuff was really open. When I click on an email from Steve Gilmore, it shows me all sorts of stuff that Steve has done around the network. That’s one way Twitter gets a lot smarter.

I click on Steve Gillmor and Twitter, and if he’s participating in these expanded networks with upcoming Flickr, Facebook and whatnot, all of a sudden all of his other things that he’s doing in these social networks appears to me and I can say “Oh, he just updated some photos on Facebook. Oh, he just updated a restaurant review on Yelp. Oh, he has 13 new friends on Yelp and he just put a travel itinerary into Doppler,” and so on and so forth.

I think these systems when they hook together are going to get a lot smarter and a lot more interesting. We’re seeing just the case of that with FriendFeed. That’s why I’m so excited about FriendFeed and I keep raving about it. People don’t understand why. It’s just a taste.

Gillmor: That’s not just FriendFeed. We’re seeing it from Toro, we’re seeing it fundamentally from Twitter. Because Twitter is the main concourse through which all this information is flowing. As soon as we free XMPP from the grip of only one company, which is minutes away, at that point all we have to do. Last night, Kevin Marks showed me a Summize, that’s with a “Z” page open. It shows the top real time.

You have to go click page refresh in order to see that it was coming in at the same speed as the GTalk gateway. I think that we can find some of the brains out there to figure out how to do an auto page refresh. 00:55:02]

I’m really kidding, because that’s not the way you do it. The point is we’re already where we need to be. We’ve already got at least two vendors either in the throes or actually having released these products.

I will have Kevin on the show, but right now I’ve got him pinned down around the privacy issue, and he will only be on the show when he delivers Google Reader privacy dislocations, which we are well on track to do shortly.

Scoble: Excellent.

Gillmor: All right, this is Steve Gillmor. This has been Gillmor Gang for Tuesday, May 13th. I want to thank everybody who showed up and especially those who didn’t. We’ll see you again tomorrow. Thanks again, bye-bye.

[music]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 5:51 pm 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.