The Gillmor Gang meshes with NewsGang - Mike Vizard, Robert Scoble, Francine Hardaway, Matt Terenzio, Rob La Gesse, and Jerry Schuman and the UstreamGangers. Recorded Tuesday, May 27, 2008.

[music]

Gillmor: Hi, this is Steve Gillmor. Welcome to Gillmor Gang. It’s going to be an abbreviated edition. We’re experiencing some issues related to people traveling; a lot of people are going to the D Conference. And we had to abruptly end News Gang, which was recording at 2:05 in order to break into this one. So I’m going to see if I can bring back by unmuting some of the people who were on that call. Hang on a second.

Francine, are you there?

Hardaway: I am.

Gillmor: OK. Excellent. So, we’ve got Mike Vizard and Francine Hardaway.

Vizard: Hello, how are you doing?

Hardaway: Hi, Mike. I read your stuff.

Vizard: Well, thank you.

Gillmor: Francine, you need to turn down the video, or something. You’re hearing the echo.

Hardaway: OK, I’ve done it.

Gillmor: So, Mike, what’s going on in the technology world right now?

Vizard: There seems to be some questions about how Google — if we’re all moving in this direction — handles security, because it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of transparency into their processes. And as more businesses start to look that way, they’re starting to ask some harder questions.

Google are kind of — at least my opinion of it — needs to be a little clearer about how it deals with patches at a routine level to major security outbreaks, and what the level of exposure. Because they’re asking people to trust the cloud, as it were, but people don’t like to trust magic, they want to know what their doing. And there isn’t a lot of visibility.

Gillmor: OK.

Vizard: And then the second part of that equation is that there also seems to be some issues with hackers are hacking sites and using botnets and a variety of data mining tools to do that, and then they’re posting that on their own sites, which aren’t very secure. And then Google is caching that data and so it’s becoming visible to people doing search queries.

And so now we have an issue where Google, because it’s so efficient in what it does and searchers are being somewhat careless with the data they’re stealing, that now everybody that has their data stolen has to worry about it becoming indexed and searchable.

Gillmor: OK. We’ve also got Robe La Gesse and Matt Terenzio on the call.

Hardaway: That’s actually pretty scary, Mike.

Vizard: Yeah, it is. I think Google can address it, I just think they’re going to have to be a little more aggressive about finding out what hackers are doing with data, and kind of identifying those sites where data is stolen.

And then on the front side of it, they just need to be a little clearer about what they’re doing from an internal security perspective. Because folks want to be able to audit all that stuff and say if this and say, “Hey, this is real or not real and what’s my liability?”

Gillmor: So how is this actually impacting on security when you’re dealing with a free application to people that are using over the network, or is this Google Apps, I know they’re providing some kind of guarantee that they’re violating.

Vizard: No, I don’t think they’re violating the guarantee yet, but they’re asking corporations to use Google Apps, and then people are also starting to use Google Apps in smaller businesses, so they’re just starting to ask the question: “Hey, how does this work and what are you doing?”

It just seems to be an area where Google hasn’t been, I guess maybe they’re too busy, but they haven’t been all that forthcoming yet.

Hardaway: Well, I work with small business all the time, and the biggest fear that they have — especially the ones that are not technology related — is exactly that. The stealing of data. So if there’s one press-worthy incident, that’ll end the possibility for Google Apps in small business.

Vizard: Yeah. I would say that Microsoft would have the same problems when it delivers its service. The good news is that people are talking about it at this level, which means they’re past the awareness stage and now they’re into consideration. And as part of that, they’re starting to ask some questions, and that kind of ups the ante in terms of what they’re expecting from these companies.

Hardaway: You know, I actually think there was always — in fact, what I see the most of is fear online, in people who are not technically savvy. Tremendous fear of identity theft and the stealing of data. So I think they were always aware of it. I think that the technology companies were very busy trying to convince people that everybody’s data was fine online.

Vizard: And I guess, Google is having a developer event this week, and maybe they’ll address that to developers in terms of how to make their own applications more secure. But on this whole front — and not picking on Google specifically — but developers in general, there’s an old saying that goes: developers have three choices, they can add features, they can add performance, or they can add security, but they can’t add all three at the same time. So security usually becomes the short shrift.

If we’re going to have this Web in the cloud kind of model for applications, I think there’s going to be a lot o more pressure on developers across the board to answer the security part of the equation.

Gillmor: I think it’s a phony issue. I think the salesforce is out in front of this, and it’s about cloud computing, and by the time it actually reaches the kind of small businesses that are really going to be starting to make noise that it’s going to be pretty bullet-proofed.

Terenzio: Mike, Google can’t actually take the stance that it’s up to developers to keep things secure as far as creating these apps. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not anything against developers, it’s just not realistic, is it?

Vizard: No. I think developers in the first place start — they’ve got to build it into the application. But Google’s got to certify that and test that and kind of say, “Hey, this is going to stand up.” And at some point you can bet your business on that.

I know Google Apps is free, but they do charge people for custom versions of Google Apps, and people will — if you start extending the entire software to service model — you’re going to have these issues. And I don’t think they’re insurmountable, but I think they’re common.

Gillmor: OK, what else?

Vizard: I don’t know, what did you read today? That was pretty much my day.

Gillmor: I’m reading something from the “L.A. Times” that came up in my Gillmor vanity feed, but I’m not here. So I think that the article originally had something that mentioned me and I was taken out. So I evolved to the A-list and back to Z in minutes.

Vizard: That sounds like a digital black helicopter job came and took you away. Is that what happened?

Gillmor: Something like that. It’s about “Twitter Rage and Other Signs You’re Losing It,” by Jessica Guinn. I’m not sure how you pronounce Guinn.

Hardaway: Well, you could have been in it. That sounds like an article you could have been in.

Gillmor: I think I was in it, because it came up in reference to — I have a vanity feed that says “Gillmor” and this isn’t my brother that they’re talking aobut, because he’s only recently clueless about Twitter.

Hardaway: [laughs] He doesn’t Tweet much.

Terenzio: So you were pruned.

Gillmor: I think so. It’s not clear to me.

Vizard: Were you raging for or against Twitter? What were you raging on?

Gillmor: I wrote a post called “Blame FriendFeed.” Which was, of course, brilliant in conception and execution.

Vizard: And then what.

Hardaway: And then the world descended on him.

Gillmor: Yeah. No, actually it was…

Terenzio: And then you got the usual 80/20 split, with 80% of the people disagreeing and 20% agreeing?

Gillmor: No. It actually was almost completely the other way, which has encouraged me to stop writing on TechCrunch because part of the thrill was being hated universally, and now people are taking it seriously, which only took about three weeks. So I’m not sure what to do next.

Vizard: Well, that just means that you’re behind the curve, Steve. If everybody’s agreeing with you.

Gillmor: That would be my point, Mike.

Vizard: [laughs]

Gillmor: Mike Vizard is the guy that hired me at InfoWorld.

Hardaway: Oh, I remember InfoWorld, and the two of you guys from InfoWorld.

Gillmor: Yeah. It was the Golden Age.

Terenzio: I used to go straight to the inside back cover.

Gillmor: That’s exactly it.

Vizard: The things you could order.

[laughter]

Hardaway: The stuff you could order. Right. The job leads. [laughs]

Terenzio: I was looking for the toys.

Vizard: That’s all well and fine, but then you had to go right by that column on the first page inside cover to get to the back cover for Steve.

Gillmor: No, no, no. The rule was you go to the back cover, because when — what was that guy’s name?

Vizard: Stuart Allsop.

Gillmor: Stuart Allsop. Right. Stuart Allsop perfected the back page move. And then you went right to the front page and then you went into the feature section or you looked at the news. That’s kind of what we do these days.

Hardaway: Well, I was such a jerk that I was trying to learn, so I just read it from front to back.

Vizard: There are actually studies that show half the people read things front to back, and the other half actually look at the table of contents. And then there’s 10% that start in the back.

La Gesse: I’m in that 10%.

Vizard: I’m in that 10%, because I grew up reading the “Daily News,” so you had to start with the sports page in the back.

Terenzio: What’s the back cover of Twitter?

Gillmor: There is no back cover.

La Gesse: It’s a dead bird.

Gillmor: There is no cover. There’s no cover. Twitter is broken. Irretrievably.

Vizard: That is the back cover of Twitter. You use it, you read it, and the last story is always how it’s broken.

La Gesse: But it is kind of interesting, I’ve been playing a game — I run Twirl — and I’ve been watching, when Twitter dies on my client, the last post that’s on the top of Twirl ends up…

Hardaway: Stays there.

La Gesse: Getting a lot of eyeball time. It may be there for like an hour.

Hardaway: Right. Exactly.

Vizard: Maybe a gaming theory about getting the last post before it comes crashing down.

La Gesse: Well, that’s what I’m looking into. How I can make it crash on my terms.

Hardaway: If they’ve solved the database crashing problem, why is it crashing now?

La Gesse: Because they haven’t solved the database crashing problem.

Gillmor: Because the problem is that Track doesn’t work, and they’re desperately trying to figure out how to be able to implement it so it does work.

Hardaway: Is Track what they turned off to make the rest of it work?

Gillmor: They turned off IM.

La Gesse: They turned off more than that. They severely limited the API.

Gillmor: Yeah, but fundamentally they turned of the XMPP stream, and they probably never will turn it back on again. Even though they say they’re going to.

Vizard: So for all the noise about Ruby on Rails, does that have anything to do with this or no?

Gillmor: No.

Terenzio: I don’t think so.

La Gesse: I don’t think so either. The only people who are really blaming Ruby on Rails are Java developers.

Gillmor: And they’ve stopped doing that. They’ve started to blame Robert Scoble and Leo Laporte now.

La Gesse: Right.

Gillmor: I mean, that’s why I blamed FriendFeed, just to basically change the subject. It was more effective than I expected.

Now here’s another story from the same Gillmor thing, from ReadWriteWeb: Facebook will be the mainstream of everything. And I’m not in that one either. So somebody is going around systematically publishing my name and then removing it.

Vizard: They’re just playing on your usual paranoid tendency. We all got together…

Hardaway: But they want you to talk about some different things on the Gillmor. And this is their way. They figure if they put it in the vanity feed, you’ll talk about it. And it’s working.

Gillmor: It really is more than a coincidence that this is going on. I don’t understand it.

Hardaway: No, I agree.

Gillmor: Is says “Google New Alert for Gillmor, ” and then there are these two stories.

La Gesse: Does your Wikipedia entry still exist, or is somebody systematically trying to erase that?

Gillmor: God, I hope so.

Vizard: Or is somebody trying to leverage your name, because somebody’s got some kind of algorithm for searching content on Twitter, and so they find your name and then they find the story. So it’s kind of like a…

Gillmor: This isn’t about Twitter, it’s about…

Vizard: It’s a spam-baiter.

Gillmor: No, I don’t think so. It’s very bizarre. OK, I’ve got nothing.

Hardaway: What else is in your vanity feed?

Gillmor: I told you. Usually stories that mention me or…

Hardaway: But do any of them still have your name in them today?

Gillmor: That’s a good point.

Hardaway: Or are those the only two alerts that…

Gillmor: Let me go back and look at the last one. I mean, I really hesitate to do this because if in fact its’ gone from there, I’m going to be very afraid.

Hardaway: Then you’re going to think you don’t exist.

Gillmor: I think it’s Calcanis. Maybe it’s Dave Weiner who’s doing this.

Hardaway: Oh, it’s got to be Dave Weiner.

Gillmor: I’m sure.

Hardaway: Calcanis is very benign.

Vizard: Hey, Steve, look in the mirror and see if you’re kind of physically fading away.

Hardaway: [laughs] Exactly.

Gillmor: Am I still on the picture here?

Hardaway: [laughs] Exactly.

[laughter]

Gillmor: This is the most pathetic Gillmor Gang in history.

Hardaway: Thank you so much.

Gillmor: No, I don’t mean because of you, believe me.

Terenzio: He means me. The next step for the Twitter client has to be something that scales gracefully. If XMPP goes down, then it uses the API. If the API goes down, then it kind of stores it in a queue. But maybe still somehow makes it look like, to the end user, that things are coming in at a certain level but just a little slower.

Gillmor: You’re being way more optimistic than you should be.

Terenzio: [laughs] Oh, no.

Hardaway: You know, the discussion in the chat room is fascinating.

Gillmor: I don’t think Twitter’s ever going to come back. No, seriously.

Hardaway: If you look at the conversation in the chat room…

Terenzio: There’s a lot of people saying that.

Hardaway: The chat room in very interesting.

Gillmor: I think I just uncovered that the Track feature is unsupportable, and therefore if they don’t come back with Track, then I will sign off and never return.

La Gesse: It’s not unsupportable. It’s unsupportable on their platform.

Gillmor: No. I think it’s unsupportable.

La Gesse: No, I don’t. I’ve looked at it. I don’t think it’s unsupportable at all.

Gillmor: I don’t think that computer technology can handle Scoble.

[laughter]

La Gesse: No, it can’t.

Hardaway: Are you watching the chat room, Steve? It’s a great conversation.

Gillmor: Yes. It’s much better than the show.

Hardaway: That’s what I’m saying. I think we ought to interact with the people in the chat room, because the people in the chat room are saying that Twitter’s problems have to do with database design and with…

Gillmor: That’s Clinton spin. It has nothing to do with database design.

Hardaway: But then, who’s the guy who came to Twitter from SQL just to rebuild Track?

Gillmor: To rebuild Track? I don’t know.

La Gesse: He didn’t come to rebuild Track, he came to rebuild the messaging infrastructure in between the Live Apps and the database.

Hardaway: OK.

La Gesse: That’s where Twitter is significantly broken right now. This is just me based upon what I know in looking at the API and various apps, but it appears that getting Track into Twitter isn’t the big deal, it’s spitting it back out that’s killing them.

Because basically, they built a toy two years ago and then they tried to scale it. Now they’re having to go back and build an actual application, and that takes a long time.

Terenzio: But, Rob, that’s more common than you seem to make it sound. WordPress was a toy, and I know that it’s nothing to scale WordPress. Twitter had a much tougher time ahead of them. But just the fact that they don’t have enough engineers working on the problem. I don’t know, I think they could be doing more, is all I’m saying.

La Gesse: Oh, absolutely, they can. And I think with $15 million they’re going to do a lot more. But I don’t see how they’re going to change the model.

Gillmor: No. That’s a drop in the bucket. They’re not going to be able to fix this. They’re going to try to band-aid this to get around the fact that what’s really breaking this is that Track is unsupportable above, like, 30 users. Once they cop to that…

La Gesse: That’s not true, Steve.

Gillmor: Oh, you want to bet?

La Gesse: Yeah. I’ll bet you that Track is supportable above 30 users.

Terenzio: They were having problems before 30 users were using Track.

Gillmor: I’ll show you where Track is supportable over 30 users. Go to Gmail. Gmail is a much harder problem than this. On the other hand, Google did not roll out Gmail out of the box, they rolled it out with 1,000 users, and then 10,000, and then 100,000. And where are they now, about six million, something like that?

Hardaway: OK, that’s where Twitter makes their mistake.

Gillmor: But it took them three years to get there. It took them three years and a whole server infrastructure that they are now continuing to build out, which is the largest server farm on the planet. So this isn’t going to…

La Gesse: And a whole system of re-architecture at each one of those junctures. I guarantee you they went through that.

Gillmor: I’m sure that’s true over and over again. But we’re talking about a massive effort that’s fueled by an incredible amount of revenue. $50 million will disappear in a puff of smoke. These guys are not going to be able to do this.

Vizard: So wait, I don’t understand. Why can’t they do it, and B) if they can’t do it, you’re not going to use Twitter anymore.

Gillmor: Oh, absolutely. I will be gone from Twitter in a heartbeat if they don’t reinstate Track. The only reason that this is remotely interesting is because it allows you to not have to follow the universe of people.

La Gesse: And it makes Twitter infinitely searchable from your desktop, which is one of the things I like best about Track. Everything I track goes right to my Gmail account, and I can search it and find it almost before I think about it.

That’s critical. If Twitter comes back in any way, shape or form that does not include Track, I’m with Steve. Now its AIM.

Gillmor: There will be people — that’s why I say Jaiku will have a tremendous marketing effort behind it if this continues to flounder. I mean, these guys have got about three weeks before there’s going to be a serious — I mean, FriendFeed is so not the issue. FriendFeed is a derivative service of Twitter.

Vizard: So why don’t you think they’re going to be able to fix Track then?

Gillmor: I think what they’re trying to do right now is to band-aid it. They’ve stripped the application down to its most lightweight set of features. The only problem with it is it is not disruptive or viral at the state that it is now.

So they have to go back to where they already were, or they’re going to be vulnerable to a large cloud. There are two large clouds that are vying for this cloud right now. One of them is Microsoft with Mesh, and the other is Google with their current infrastructure.

Terenzio: Yeah, I agree with that. Those are the two important services of the future, at least for the foreseeable….

Gillmor: The future.

Terenzio: Well, the ones that I know about right now. I mean, there are services that could certainly arise. But I’ve always said, there’s really only two or three things that you do on the Internet, and that’s post stuff or content, or read content. You’re writing, reading, putting and deleting content. That’s basically what the Web is.

And if you can synchronize those across a distributed platform, you’ve got everything you need, in my opinion. At least unless you’re talking about Second Life, or something, and that’s another world. No pun intended.

Gillmor: It’s simpler than that, and it’s also much more political and immediate than what you’re talking about. The simple question is whether or not any of the existing services can provide the base functionality of Twitter. Now the answer to that one is that FriendFeed can — I’m talking about the base functionality minus the Track capability.

Now I want to remind you that nobody agrees with me except possibly Rob.

Hardaway: I though Twitter was great before I even knew how to use Track.

Gillmor: Well, that’s fine.

Hardaway: What I see is that…

Gillmor: The problem with that, Francine, is that that functionality is easily clonable. And that’s why so many people talk about FriendFeed as being what I don’t call it. What I’ve called it is a parasite service, and I’m just trying to be funny there. The fact is, it’s easy to bring in and create an alternate carrier for these types of small messages.

What’s not so easy it to create a hybrid between the so-called social graph part of the application, which is the follow architecture, and the Track architecture. Twitter has gotten some of it right, and some of it has been unsupportable, for example, the whole “at reply” infrastructure has been — it’s misunderstood. So you have three or four different sets of use cases, so you don’t know as a producer of information, you don’t know who is going to see what you’re doing, and it’s very difficult to target people.

And if you move all of the infrastructure for communicating to small affinity groups to the Track mechanism, then you’ve got the same problem completely out of control, which is what I believe is what’s happening right now.

So I think what we’ve been seeing so far is these random crises that have been emerging on the total platform, which now it’s been reduced to basically defaulting to the lowest common denominator. We’re not seeing a whole lot of instability any more, we’re also not seeing any kind of performance or disruptive technology.

The closest thing to it is Summize, that is what Jim Posner’s suggesting. But what Jim is saying is that Track does not allow filtering. We had Blaine Cook on the Show. We had Bob Lee from Google, among others, who suggested that filtering is something that is actually supportable even at the client level.

So the issues that we’re confronting here are a massive core that is in real time scouring through and spidering through information that’s coming in in close to real time, and then being able to spread that out across a multiple affinity cloud. And the only thing that I’m aware off that actually does this in anything approaching real time is Gmail.

Terenzio: I agree with you except for, isn’t Gmail missing the one feature of — where do you write public messages in Gmail? Where do I write my public messages?

Gillmor: That’s not a true statement. On a trivial level, the shared items, RSS feeds, are public messages.

Terenzio: OK. I apologize. Not having used that.

Gillmor: They have the technology to be able to support, between Gmail and Google Reader, they have the technology to support this application. What they don’t have right now is the ability to utilize the social graph information that’s coming off their network, because they don’t have a contract with users that’s acceptable to users to be able to make that transition. There’s nothing that will be more successful at forking that then the collapse of Twitter as a track application.

There will be a small number of people who will make this move, but the second that somebody else provides this service — essentially the same service — so that we don’t have to relearn. It’s like when Blackberry, the command shortcuts for the Blackberry, some of them have moved to the iPhone already and they will persist across different devices. The same thing has to happen with Twitter. So, this is a serious point to them.

Vizard: So, let me see if I can break that down into some small concepts I can understand. Is it possible for Google to take — assuming that it creates a contract with the user, which seems to me relatively straightforward — then why doesn’t Google just create the equivalent of Track and between that and RSS and Gmail, since we’re already using Gmail as a Twitter filter, essentially, then why are we going to need Twitter if Google gets its act together and adds back and do it.?

Gillmor: Well, first of all, when this change happens, it’s not going to be precipitous, it’s going to be something that was already being built out. I don’t think that Google has shown any indication of building that out. The only crowd that I think is showing some indication of this is the Mesh team, not so much because of their little demos that they’ve done, but basically, the infrastructure, once they have some way of being able to support what they call “affinity groups.”

In other words, not just the infrastructure of an individual’s identity, but the infrastructure of related individuals. In other words, probably not a social graph application. Then, you’re going to see a… I have to take this call, so somebody pick up on that thought. Robert, you want to talk? Robert? I’ll be right back, I’ve got to take this call.

Terenzio: I didn’t know there was a Robert on this call. Well, Rob, you know more about Microsoft technology than me, but doesn’t Mesh also add this layer, this object layer, so that like the streams are more than just text? The stream could be anything, so it’s like combining Twitter, Flickr, and any possible type of Internet object of a sort and turning that into feeds so that a stream — it’s kind of like going at it from a different angle.

La Gesse: Well, yeah. I mean, basically, that’s true. First off, none of us on this call know what Mesh really is or what it’s going to be. It’s going to be a lot more than what we see today. But it is true that you could take any active stream and pipe it into the Mesh and then have a client that looks at that incoming data and does something with it.

But could you rebuild Twitter that way? I don’t think so. I mean, the amount of messaging that Twitter does every minute is pretty phenomenal and building that infrastructure across the distributed network, in my opinion, really requires a distributed client, like a P2P solution.

Vizard: And now, just to be clear here on the Twitter side, right? Steve is a minority of, say, one-and-a-half that thinks that Twitter can’t protect this tracking function?

Hardaway: Would it be fixed if it becomes decentralized? Dave Weiner’s been saying it should be decentralized forever.

Terenzio: I don’t particularly understand why some people are… I mean, I understand that decentralization is not something that’s really reasonable that it’s going to happen. I mean, we’re using a company’s service and decentralization might not happen even if the grassroots want it to. But what I don’t understand is why some people think that decentralization won’t help.

Email works and it could be pretty instinct, and there’s thousands and thousands of email servers out there.

Gillmor: Yeah, but that’s bullshit. That’s bullshit. The whole notion of decentralization, after the fact, when technology is controlled by is ridiculous.

Terenzio: I said that. You missed the beginning. I said it. I didn’t think it was reasonable to believe that that would happen. I’m just saying the people who stay tech… Somebod brought it up, I don’t know these things. [laughs]

Vizard: There is a series of standards out there that do work from web services to identity management that are essentially not vendor-specific and when you look at them all, they’re some version of a federated model. So, why not develop with that?

Gillmor: Because it isn’t going to happen right now. Messaging infrastructure was built up over a long period of time. We’re not talking about a long period of time, we’re talking about something, this application which emerged all of a sudden and which people are gravitating to in record numbers, sufficient to be able to break it to the point where it’s now on its knees.

Vizard: Which is an argument, possibly, for the reason why it needs to be federated.

Gillmor: Down the road maybe, but I can give you a lot of other arguments for why it won’t happen. Like, for example, Twitter is in the driver’s seat right now. The question is, is whether or not they’re going to use the small amount of time they have to be able to move the Track architecture to a platform which can sustain it or are they going to get absorbed by one of the major vendors and how long is that going to take?

If it’s absorbed by one of the major vendors, then the chances of this becoming an infrastructure that’s supported by decentralization are zero. So, I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Vizard: Longer term, though, it can still happen as the “standards bodies” get together and drive their usual curve towards mediocrity and everybody meets in the middle on something that….

Gillmor: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that will be driven by the introduction of Mesh and its ability to be able to clone and erase the differences between two similar architectures, which is what its biggest strength is.

Terenzio: But standards are made by use, not by committees and there’s no committees that are going to, I don’t think, make this happen. What’s going to happen is that people get sick of Twitter and Twitter loses a big part of its core. And then, there’s another core of users big enough to compete against that and now, you have two camps, so you have something that was like AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Instant Messenger and MSN. And then those three decide, “Well, we don’t want to connect with each other, but we’re just going to try and keep our market share.”

And then, somebody comes along like Google and says, “Well, we’re going to use XMBP and keep it slightly open.” And they open up a crack, the same way that Apple opens up a crack by allowing different content unto an iPod or unto an iPhone. And when that crack is there, then the water starts to roll in.

But still, even with instant messanger, we haven’t gotten there. There’s still different silos of instant messenger, but they may be moving towards that.

Gillmor: I think that’s the key.

Hardaway: So, it could be Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce and then Google now owns JQ so they create the crack? No? Yes? Possible.?

Gillmor: The reason that Twitter is as important as it is, is because there has been no unification of IM. There is no unification of IM.

Terenzio: Yes, you’re right. There is no unification of IM.

Gillmor: Right, and there won’t be.

Gillmor: And there won’t be.

Vizard: But there’s enough unification to be functional. You can still compete. You can still talk to somebody across a platform.

Gillmor: The use case of Twitter that is most common is that people begin by seeing it as a toy, then they start to use it for what they consider to be public communications. Then they start to realize that if they maintain a small follow field that they can essentially be hidden in plain sight.

Then they start saying things, or being so verbose, that people get sick of them and un-follow, at which point they have a private channel and then they use direct messaging for the rest of it. And all of the sudden they’re using Twitter for the lion’s share of their instant messaging capabilities as well. That is the consolidation of the instant messaging network.

Vizard: I think that path will move along. I think there’s de facto standards, right? One vendor comes out and does something that everybody uses then quickly after that there’s an ad hoc set of standards where there’s a bunch of companies in the same space that kind of have agreed to work together on some level. Then some years later there’s a standards body that officially put a rubber stamp on it.

Gillmor: Well, yeah, but we’re not talking about the standards bodies here. The standards bodies are so far after the fact these days that it doesn’t matter.

Vizard: But I would argue that the ad hoc set of standards that would be put together by multiple vendors is probably going to get here sooner than later.

Gillmor: And it’s called Twitter.

Vizard: No, I think Twitter is still in the de facto standards sense.

Gillmor: No, I don’t agree. Twitter is the market force application that people will understand, when the smoke clears, as the market force ad hoc standard that is emerging as we speak.

Terenzio: If they can get their act together.

Gillmor: The fact that Twitter is going down all the time is because the adoption curve is ahead of their ability to keep up with it.

Vizard: I don’t know. I might look at that as a nostalgic Stanley Steamer in the age of combustion engines. We’ll see what comes down the pike next.

La Gesse: But the difference here is, the combustion engine and the Stanley Steamer both ran on the same rail with the same spacing between the tracks. And what will happen, if there is ever a Twitter replacement, is it will ride the same rails.

Gillmor: Of course it will. It will have identical — people will not care. I’m not looking for something that has more capabilities and 173 characters. This model works. It works just fine. There’s a reason it was built on top of SMS, even if I never use SMS, which I usually don’t. The fact is that it gives us a carrier channel for a fail over which can be used for business operations and for national emergencies.

This is a very powerful network which has emerged almost completely untouched by the major vendors. Now it’s their turn. It’s gotten to the point where the application is unsupportable, unless it is housed inside of at least one, and probably two, infrastructures.

The Mesh demos showed this application.

Vizard: I don’t know. I have a lot of relatives that can’t clear their throat in under 200 characters, so I would say their might be room for more characters.

Scoble: This is Robert Scoble, by the way. Not if you want to have that Mesh compatibility, which during major disasters is going to be important. During Katrina, SMS was the only thing that stayed up. During the earthquake in China certain sections stayed up on SMS. So having SMS compatibility is important.

La Gesse: But, Robert, can’t you just replace SMS with directed email to that actual cell phone device. That will still be up.

Scoble: Nope. Not during Katrina. In Katrina, Ernie the Attorney was only able to get SMS messages out. No data, no voice. Only SMS data.

La Gesse: I’m not saying that he could connect to the Internet. But generally, in my experience anyway, even with power outages, if somebody directs an email to the email address of my device — not to my Google email — but to the email address of my device at att.whatever, it comes through.

Scoble: It wasn’t coming through during Katrina, because the only way we could talk to Ernie the Attorney was through SMS.

Terenzio: I do just want to say that I don’t understand, if people want something, they’re going to get it on the Internet. If they have to do an end-around and use a client that connects to multiple services, they will. And eventually…

Hardaway: What does that have to do with IM?

Terenzio: What I don’t understand in the long run — I’m on Steve’s side when I say Twitter is more important than people think. But what I don’t understand is how in the world a silo will be a silo in the future, when we’ve seen time and time again that silos want to be broken.

And though he’s got a point that it hasn’t happened with instant messaging, I just think…

Scoble: If you look at eBay, eBay is a silo that hasn’t been broken. Amazon is a silo that hasn’t been broken. I don’t think that’s really true that silos want to be broken up.

Gillmor: So you’re agreeing with me?

Scoble: I totally am agreeing with you, yeah.

Gillmor: OK, good.

Scoble: Based on the last 20 minutes of conversation.

Terenzio: But in that model, eBay or whatever, there’s multiple silos that have some ad hoc way of interacting with each other.

Gillmor: But you know what? You know what this stuff is? It’s called XML.

Terenzio: Yeah.

Gillmor: It already is interacting with other systems. RSS is an XML derivative. It’s not rocket science.

Scoble: When I watch Steve Gillmor talking on Twitter, I always see that stuff show up in FriendFeed in about 10 seconds, not the nine minutes that Gillmor says it does.

Gillmor: It depends upon whether or not it’s even allowed to come in. And when it is, I’m not going to argue with you about the 10 minutes, I’ve already got you down to two minutes, and then what is it? 10 seconds? 10 seconds is too slow.

[laughter]

Hardaway: Oh, Steve.

Gillmor: This is an instantaneous, real-time technology. I’m not going to argue with you about that. We’re talking about whether Twitter’s going to get stomped if it doesn’t come back with Track in the next, say, three weeks. What do you think about that?

Scoble: One interesting things about the search engine on FriendFeed is that it indexes instantly. Go to FriendFeed and on some comment — well, I know Steve Gillmor won’t go to FriendFeed, but when I play with it…

Gillmor: Why are you making this about FriendFeed? What we’re talking about here…

Scoble: I want to explain how magical the search engine is there and how they aren’t putting in Track over there. You can put a word in a comment and then go to the search engine and search on that word, and it will pull up that comment.

Gillmor: Track is not search. Track is something that you put in place and as these items appear on the network they are pushed at you so that you can respond in real time.

Scoble: And guess what? It behaves like that on FriendFeed already. It doesn’t push to an IM client yet. But watch when they turn on XMPP. I would be highly surprised if they didn’t do that with the search engine.

Gillmor: It’s not going to do that with the Twitter install base, because the Twitter install base is at the moment shut out from that access.

Scoble: Right. But they’re quickly getting moved over to FriendFeed.

Gillmor: No, I don’t think so. What you’re suggesting is that for the so-called high value Tweeters that that’s getting moved over. The large majority of people who say something that I’m interested in or that shows up on my track thing, I never heard of them and neither did you.

This is a global sort that’s based on the core Twitter engine being exposed and then being distributed via XMPP. That’s not going to be transferred over to FriendFeed or any other service in the immediate future. The political issue…

La Gesse: But the long tail doesn’t want FriendFeed. The long tail wants Twitter. They want Twitter, they….

Gillmor: It’s not about that. This is not an argument about FriendFeed. We’re going to have that argument on Friday when the guys who are doing FriendFeed are going to be on the Gang. What we’re talking about today, despite Robert’s insistence on changing the subject, is about whether or not there is a window of opportunity for, I believe, two players. One of them is Microsoft and the other is Google.

Now, I don’t know whether they have the forces in hand to be able to grasp this opportunity. But let’s say that it becomes clear over the next, say, three weeks, that Twitter is incapable of turning Track back on.

Hardaway: Then I bet it’s going to be Google.

Gillmor: I don’t know. I think Google’s got their hands full.

Vizard: I think it will be everybody. At some point or another, it’s going to have some….

Gillmor: Yeah, but we’re not talking about some point or another. The question is whether or not — is there going to be a service that’s going to be able to provide the same functionality as Twitter so people can move over to it.

Scoble: Steve, that’s two separate things. First of all, is Twitter going to come back up? I believe it is. I believe it’s being run by professionals now. And the fact that they’re finally communicating and also being able to turn on and off different pieces of the system tells me there’s finally a professional in charge of development over there.

Gillmor: Yeah. I don’t disagree with you, but I think the jury is completely out, as far as I’m concerned, as to whether they’re going to be able to turn on the only distinguishable function of Twitter that means anything beyond what everybody else has cloned already.

Scoble: Absolutely. Now, if they don’t turn it back on, can Summize do what you need it to do or do you need access to the core database internally?

Gillmor: Well, that’s an interesting question. First of all, Summize appears to be maybe two, three seconds. The problem is they’ve been up and down today just as Twirl has because Twitter has been…

Hardaway: They’re dependent on Twitter.

Gillmor: That’s right.

Scoble: So, that comes back to my point. FriendFeed search engines does let you globally search on FriendFeed, but….

Gillmor: Again, let’s abstract this beyond FriendFeed because I think you’ve FriendFeed on the brain, Robert.

La Gesse: Guys, the issue here is really the APIs and it’s the APIs that are really equipped….

Gillmor: No, it’s not the APIs. There is this political… Rob, look, Rob, I understand what you are saying, but I don’t have…

La Gesse: I haven’t said it yet.

Gillmor: Well, you’ve been saying it on the network now for about three weeks. Let me just say what I think the problem is, which is that Twitter has expanded a lot of good will to get to where they are today. They are in a very vulnerable position now because if they don’t turn Track back on, they’re going to lose a significant part of their value proposition.

At that point, it is easy for Summize or FriendFeed or a combination of those two and maybe Twirl and others, to be able to provide a service that essentially does the same thing that Twitter does minus the track function. At that point, it becomes an issue of how do you suck the social graph out of Twitter.

Scoble: And I’ve been saying already that FriendFeed inside FriendFeed has already duplicated a lot of the track functions. All we need is XMPP to push those maps to back up the track clients.

Gillmor: Now, you’re still missing the point. What Twitter controls, until they surrender it, either by lack of credibility — which is going to be a difficult thing for them to lose, in spite of their current problems — or through them licensing or just basically stopping the uplift of their social graph as represented through Track.

Scoble: Yeah.

Gillmor: Not the social graph of follows because that is awfully trivial to be able to duplicate. That’s what FriendFeed has duplicated. They have not, however, duplicated the size of the audience or the user patterns of real-time usage. It has not gotten close to it. The interface doesn’t work in that model. Summize is a lot closer to it.

I’ve been experimenting with it over the last few days in combination with the web client and the Twirl client. You can get a reasonable capability here, but only for one keyword. So, it’s already a pathetic version of what Track does.

La Gesse: And it actually takes a lot of work.

Hardaway: It’s way too effortful, right. Most people won’t even bother.

Gillmor: Of course. All right. So, the problem with the FriendFeed idea is that that requires the acquiescence on the part of Twitter to their core service, which there is no reason that I can think of for them to release.

Scoble: Yeah.

Gillmor: All right. That’s why this is going to be a very, very dicey game of chicken over the next weeks. Either they’re going to get transparent about what’s really going on with Track as a way of keeping us invested in them or they’re going to lose this. And if they lose it, then it becomes a matter of which of these two large players is going to be able to come in first.

La Gesse: Actually, Steve, I think what you would see would be a third-party player who’s already been playing in the space for quite some time and they will become part of one of those two large players you’re talking about. But at some point…

Gillmor: I’m sure that they’ll be a part of it, but honestly, I don’t think — I mean, Jaiku has the “advantage” of already having been absorbed by Google. There is some degree of suspicion on the part of some people that they are further down this road than people realize.

Vizard: I mean, didn’t we just have a whole show talking about how the nature of Twitter is such that the big silos can’t possibly deliver this service because it has to come from an independent service and now we’re saying it can be a big company going forward.

Gillmor: No. I said if you get to a situation where they cannot produce Track on an efficient or even doable, reliable service, which is… The problem with Track is that originally, there were only like 20 people that were using it.

Scoble: Yeah, Steve, I got to run. I got another interview to go to.

Gillmor: OK, Robert.

Scoble: Yeah, I’ll try to make it on Friday. See you!

Gillmor: OK.

Vizard: I got to go to, it’s East Coast dinner time.

Hardaway: Dinner time!

Gillmor: Just to finish the thought, once the Track functionality was exposed to enough of a vital audience to create the kind of Twitter swarms that Track is enabling, it was, I think, just a matter of time before it became the one thing that they would not easily be able to keep up and running.

Now, I may be wrong about this and I sure would be glad if that’s the case, but if I’m not wrong about this, then it’s going to create a situation where the lowest common denominator of these types of services are much more easily clonable, which is where the big vendors can come in.

Vizard: So, I want everybody on this call that thinks that Steve is wrong to send out a Twitter message saying that if Steve is wrong, to show that the system will break. OK?

Hardaway: [laughs]

Vizard: I got to go. The system is broke.

Gillmor: All right, Mike. Thanks!

Vizard: Bye!

Hardaway: All right, bye!

La Gesse: So, there’s so much more I could say on this subject, Steve, but I can’t say anything more on this subject. So there.

Gillmor: Well, I know that you’ve been spending a lot of time in engineering on this, as have a number of people who aren’t raising their hands to say anything about it. What I’m saying to you is that once we get to a breakpoint, which we may be near here, it is not going to be the obvious folks like FriendFeed or even the ones like Twirl or even the ones like Jaiku that are going to be able to pull this off.

The question is going to be whether or not, as you suggest, there is going to be some piggybacking on some existing service and some sort of an ad hoc relationship push-through where people feel that there’s enough of a reason to expend some energy in migrating. And it may well be mediated and organized and even controlled by Twitter itself.

La Gesse: So, right now, the energy to expend to move my whole social graph from Twitter to another Twitter-like client takes two things. I have to enter my Twitter credentials and I have to click “Submit” and my entire social graph is now relocated to another, I would say, Twitter clone.

Gillmor: Yeah, but you’re oversimplifying what the actual reality is. There are very few, if any, sites existing that duplicate — and I don’t mean provide some of the functionality of — duplicate the Twitter model.

La Gesse: Right. No, I understand that and I think you’re hearing me talking about a Twitter client and I’m not. Twitter will be replaced or corrected by Twitter by building a new infrastructure that includes support for track, XMPP and the API. Whoever does that, whether it’s Twitter or some third party, they won’t give a crap about the client. That’s not their business anymore. Their business is the infrastructure.

Gillmor: No, I disagree. I think it’s a two-part or a three-part problem. They have an early adopter crowd that is absolutely critical to them. They have to handle the Scoble/Calcanis/Laporte/TechCrunch situation. They have to handle that or else, then, they won’t get any kind of critical mass.

So, what Scoble is trying to force, Scoble is trying to force that into FriendFeed. The problem with FriendFeed is that it was built on the principle of innovating above and beyond what Twitter did. This is not about innovating, this is about cloning.

La Gesse: Right.

Gillmor: And the one group that I’ve already seen with a working Twitter clone is Mesh.

La Gesse: Yup! I saw that video too.

Gillmor: I’m not talking about the video. I’m talking about what the fundamentals of the Mesh architecture are. They abstract out identity from data, from so-called news. It’s like a modeled view controller architecture for Twitter. That is significantly strategic at this moment. Whoever wins in the short term, Microsoft is going to win in the longer term.

La Gesse: Well, I’m not going to disagree with that. But I don’t think it will be Microsoft that you see that builds this clone. I think it will be someone else that Microsoft partners with or acquires.

Gillmor: Whatever! To me, that’s an irrelevant distinction. What we’re talking about here is providing an infrastructure and the support system for a group of core users and general users and the internals in an open infrastructure that will allow multiple vendors to play.

That is a difficult thing for Microsoft to do. There’s this classic interview of Steve Sinofsky, who controls Windows now, on GE Net or on news.com, where he just underlines how clueless one half of Microsoft is and how desperately they are clinging to an old model of how they release information and who they’re talking to about what.

So, there’s a tremendous war that’s breaking out at Microsoft right now. That war is going to be over anywhere from three to six weeks. We don’t know who’s going to win.

La Gesse: But Microsoft has the risk takers and risk adverse and the risk adverse is the old school and….

Gillmor: The risk adverse are the ones who are the risk takers in this model. That’s what they’re going to come to the conclusion about. That’s what’s going to happen over the next few weeks and two- month period. This is going to crescendo around the Olympics when Silverlight gets enough traction to be able to be the target client for these types of solutions that you’re talking about.

Hardaway: Well, I think it’s pretty far from that now.

Gillmor: I don’t think so. I think that’s the way that people who think that May 31st is an important date for the presidential nominations are thinking.

Hardaway: [laughs] People are telling me that Silverlight….

Gillmor: I think the analogy is really important, Francine. I think people are misunderstanding the degree to which these decisions are being made at a very high level inside these companies. Tomorrow is the Google Developers Conference, the first one of its kind.

Hardaway: Right.

Gillmor: It’s a big deal. This is the kind of thing that Microsoft dominated for years. The PC — what do they used to call that? They still have it.

Hardaway: No, I know. But it’s just my comment to you is that I know two people fairly well who have worked with Silverlight. One launched his business on it and has now retreated to Flash.

Gillmor: Look, I can understand completely the ground-level issues of this technology. But I’m talking about there, are approximately 10 people in charge of Microsoft. Five of them are going to lose power in the next two months. This is a cataclysmic collision that’s going on here.

La Gesse: And three months from now, you will not see Flash on a Microsoft website.

Gillmor: It doesn’t matter.

Hardaway: Well, that’s interesting, but….

Gillmor: I don’t agree with that statement at all. I think that…

Hardaway: I just want you to know that my daughter developed a website for investor-related usability part of a website, for investor relations at Microsoft and they had to use Flash.

Gillmor: Look, Francine, let me just say to both of you that the issue as stated by Bill Gates about three months ago in a financial investors meeting was it doesn’t matter whether it’s Flash or Silverlight. That’s because their runtimes are so small and easy to download, within seconds, on most machines and connections these days, that the ubiquity of an experience that would work on either platform makes which of those two platforms — makes it irrelevant.

Hardaway: Now, that, I would believe because my….

Gillmor: Well, that’s what Bill Gates said. Now, when Bill Gates gets to the point of saying something like that, there is a deep penetration across these two silos inside Microsoft of understanding that, whether the groups are going to, as they fight for control over the in a few weeks, whether they are going to stick with that kind of unification –a sort of Obama/Clinton ticket — or whether they are going to fight it out and then be basically brought to the understanding that this is the case. That is going to just be a matter of time. But that will be the denouement of the situation.

And SilverLight is just the target or a target of the implementation. It has some advantages such as the fact that it works on the Mac that are going to allow it to appeal to the type of critical small core follow audience that we were talking about. They will be players in that.

La Gesse: And the Olympics are a significant advantage as well.

Gillmor: Absolutely, absolutely. And the political conventions are another huge advantage. There will be deployments, not coincidentally the Republicans with Google technology, the Democrats with Microsoft technology. These two platforms are going to roll out and be in the public space.

And from that point on, they are going to basically have deployed on millions of desktops, both systems. At that point, the architecture that is in the middle, which is the messaging communications infrastructure, which is what Twitter is, will become apparent. That is where we are right now.

La Gesse: I agree. And that is why earlier I said I think that building a solid fundamental platform that clones Twitter is what somebody is going to do. Whoever wins, they are going to do that.

Gillmor: They are not going to be able to clone the core functionality of the platform. They have to make a deal with Twitter.

La Gesse: Or they have to build an abstraction layer for the API.

Gillmor: It will take three times as long if they do that.

La Gesse: Oh I agree, and Twitter…

Gillmor: It won’t work because Twitter…

La Gesse: Twitter is an $80 million valuation. I mean that’s an easy buy.

Gillmor: It is not so much to buy it as to get — it’s the customer base. This is the same thing as the Yahoo deal. If it had gone through or if it will go through, in pieces, which is probably what will happen, they are not buying the programmers, they are not buying the developers, they are buying the audience.

La Gesse: They are buying the eyeballs.

Gillmor: No, not eyeballs. Eyeballs represent a one-way in type of marketplace.

Hardaway: They are buying the interactivity.

La Gesse: [...] from my ex-wife, Steve.

Gillmor: What?

Hardaway: They are buying the interactivity.

Gillmor: Correct. And that is why as much as they want to talk about FriendFeed being the solution. In my opinion, FriendFeed is Twitter. There is no distinction between the two, because if Twitter goes off so does FriendFeed. You know, they can have their conversations and they are all silo conversations, so what? It is not a critical mass, it isn’t a viral adoption curve.

The amount of services that people who are invested in social media have different identities on and willing those up, it is a useful service for a certain number of verym very intensive computer users, who has either — like Robert Scoble — figured out how to be able to turn that into a job or by people who enjoy screwing around with stuff.

It is not a viral audience such as the Twitter audiences. Twitter is not a small application. It’s a huge application that will have uses in every business and home in the world. It’s just a matter of whether or not Twitter can maintain enough leverage to be able to avoid getting cannibalized right now by the major vendors, which I believe they will be able to do. But they are going to enter a very, very turbulent period where they have to essentially pick some partners who can get there fastest.

La Gesse: Right. And they need to talk more with their users and they are getting better at that.

Gillmor: Well…

Hardaway: And that varies day to day.

Gillmor: Sorry?

Hardaway: That varies from day to day. Some days they are good, some days…

Gillmor: We’ll see how they respond to this conversation, for example, because I have the best of hopes for these guys. These are good people and they are smart people and I don’t mean just Twitter, I mean FriendFeed, all these guys, they are smart, honest people. And we’re in good shape on that score, but if they make the mistake of trying to kid a kidder, they’re going to be in serious trouble.

And they really need to be able to come out and say what is going on here with Track because if they don’t, then people will start asking that question. And there will be people who will attack this as they have me: “Get a life; you’re an old man, why are you wasting your life on these kinds of things?” I don’t think it is a waste of our lives to be talking about something that is potentially so important and which…

Hardaway: I don’t think anything that involves human communications and facilitates them is a waste of time.

Gillmor: Right, I am just telling you that I have gotten attacked on TechCrunch and the fairly visible space in my writing style makes me vulnerable to personal attacks, but you know, I have been focusing on…

La Gesse: Yeah, the personal attacks are from people who read but don’t think, so…

Hardaway: Yeah.

Gillmor: It is not that. Those people are reacting so virulently because this is extremely emotional and charged. On some level, they know that this is not a trivial issue and that this is not just the echo chamber talking here. It really isn’t.

La Gesse: Yeah.

Terenzio: The point is actually though that there is going to be more than two. For some time now, there is going to be three or four silos of this type of situation where Twitter has been…

Gillmor: The more silos, the least power that they have. People look…

Terenzio: Well, I didn’t say a lot, I said three or three or four.

Gillmor: People look for stability. They look for people to bet on, people…

Terenzio: Somebody mentioned Xbox in the chat room. From my point of view, that’s a silo that may get merged into Mesh of course but that is a Twitter like…

Gillmor: Those arguments about breaking up, Jim Posner started talking about breaking up Microsoft and those arguments, I think, are fighting the last war. That is not what is going on here. You may see some sort of architecture. I mean, to me Office and Windows have already been broken up. They have been captured by Mesh.

Mesh is a much more powerful model than either of those two things and it can abstract out the hardware, which means that the whole problem with Vista and Windows 7.0, namely the driver population becomes abstracted below the level of the machinery. And that is something where we — I mean you have to go read this alleged interview with Sinofsky just to see the absolute inability. They are so terrified.

I mean the reporter asked the question of Sinofsky about what is the relationship between Windows 7.0 and Windows Live. And you can see him running away before the question was even out of the mouth of the reporter. They just won’t talk about it, because this fight is reaching a crescendo right now.

And the notion that these groups who are losing or gaining significant power inside a large, very unmanageable organization, that that’s going to split along the lines of the groups that are being deprecated, I just don’t think that’s what’s going to happen.

What’s going to happen is that there’s going to be a way for the company to survive and prosper and everything else. And it’s going to be a massive game of musical chairs as people try and rush the existing chairs inside the new infrastructure.

And it’s not about Office anymore, it’s about the business groups and the communications groups. This is been underway for a long time. It started in Y2K with the Exchange team leapfrogging ahead of the operating system by about six months. And developing what became known as Outlook Web Access. Or was started as Outlook Web Access and then became a web-based approach to the file system.

That file system was then recaptured by the SQL Server team. And that lasted for about a year and a half unti.NET came along which basically broke up those two groups and put them under a single management. And since then there’s been this fight at the architectural level to integrat.NET and its infrastructure back into Windows. Which has been extremely difficult to do.

And you know, that’s what happened with Longhorn was the eventual collapse of the ability of changing the file system to a new more unified model. Now luckily for Microsoft, we’re at a point in time where the underlying operating system, although super-important, is not going to be where the marketing of their technologies is. It’s going to be at the abstraction layer above that.

La Gesse: In the browser.

Gillmor: Well, or the browser — in the same way that Netscape and Andresen reorganized what was known as the interface into a visualization of the Internet. The Mesh takes that and reverses it. And everything that falls under the visualization layer is now being reorganized.

So the browser is basically just the shell for the new web operating system. Which is how do you connect, how do you move the data around? Windows development has changed with the emergence of ASP.NET — which is Scott Guthrie’s baby — has turned into a thin layer of XAML, XML controlling UI. And the rest of it underneath hood is being controlled at a different level.

And if you add the capability in Mesh of providing social graph infrastructure via XML, which is what the Mesh architecture is. They’re all RSS and Atom feeds basically. Then you can break down and atomize — pardon the expression — the basic internals of the business processes. Along with the UI, along with the social interactions and the people cloud that provides this next generation of search.

Which is what Track is, it’s people search. It’s not idea search, it’s not keywords. And that’s the reboot that we’re going through and right now the two players that have a real handle — which is I believe complementary — are Google and Microsoft.

Terenzio: I think the conversation here worked in getting through to Twitter. According to Jerry, they’re updating their private plans at a secret location after hearing your…

Gillmor: Yeah, bullocks. It’s not about what I’m saying. It’s about what we’re all saying and how we’re all sitting around waiting for certain things to come back. All I’m trying to say is don’t kid a kidder. If you don’t bring Track back, I’m gone.

La Gesse: “And you’re dead.”

Gillmor: No, they’re not dead. They know that they can’t do this and if they can do it they better come out and say that they’re going to do it and that I am an idiot. But you know, I have one small advantage which is that I always try to talk to people who are a lot smarter than me and ask them the same question that I’m asking Twitter.

And so far I haven’t heard anybody suggest that I don’t know what I’m talking about here. And that’s usually an interesting tell about what’s going on. So I don’t think it’s easy. I mean, that’s what Blaine Cook basically said. And while he was saying that it was easy he was… [noise] Exactly.

And I don’t demonize Blaine Cook. I think that he’s a good engineer who’s had some really good ideas, along with a bunch of other people, that have far outmatched their ability to react. But the good news is that there’s a lot of people who have been throwing a lot of technology and a lot of brain power and a lot of resources at Google at this problem, and now Microsoft is coming in as well. And I think between the two of them that this is going to happen very rapidly.

In the meantime we just go, I’m just going to go back and look at Summize and see — my bet is that the whole thing is not working right now. I haven’t seen anything from Twirl in about an hour.

Hardaway: Twitter, the Web’s working.

Gillmor: Yeah, but the Web’s working as long as you sit there like a rabbit. Or like a mouse hitting the button for a pellet. Because there’s no second page.

Hardaway: Yes. I understand that. That’s what I’ve been doing.

La Gesse: And you have to manually refresh and I mean, it’s just not a good experience.

Hardaway: It’s a pain in the ass, right. I agree. I’m doing it though.

Gillmor: Well, somebody pointed out to me that Summize — that there’s some code — a Firefox plugin — that will do an auto refresh for Summize. I think that’s what they were telling me.

La Gesse: Right. And that’s fine as long as the API is alive.

Gillmor: Yeah, we’re going in circles here.

La Gesse: Yeah, we are.

Gillmor: I’m not saying that this is a solution to anything. What I am saying is that when something breaks and you have to… If you break your leg and you have to get around, you start to learn what it is that you need to do to do that.

And that subset of functionality — that you figure out that you can get away with to be able to continue your life while you’re waiting for things to get better — that turns out to be the closest thing to a use case for the next generation of the software. So when we’re complaining here, we’re also essentially building another use case scenario for what is going to win.

La Gesse: I hope somebody’s listening.

Gillmor: Well, I hope that only a few people are listening. This is Steve Gillmor, this has been a composite Gillmor Gang and NewsGang Live. The first one in history. I want to thank everybody who showed up, and especially those who didn’t. Thanks to Jerry Schuman as always for his incredible work and we’ll see you again tomorrow. Bye-bye.

[music]

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